Part II
Partial Eclipse of the
Biblical Understanding of Sin
in which it is shown how the specifically biblical conception of sin has often been partly obscured by the intrusion into Christian thinking of the two pagan versions.
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CHAPTER VI
SIN MISCONCEIVED AS BREAKING RULES
By the works of the law shall no flesh be accounted righteous. - Galatians 2:16
The principal alternatives to the Christian conception of sin fall under two headings, to be discussed in this and the succeeding chapter. The first defines sin primarily as the breaking of rules, while the second regards it as due to some constituent element of human existence as such. Though each can be so stated as to express a fraction of the biblical view, they both do it more violence than justice. The unfinished task of Christian theology is to disentangle itself from these two alien versions of sin and to challenge them with the distinctive biblical one.
Two decisive turning points in the history of Christian thought were brought to a head over the question of whether or not sin could be exhaustively defined as the breaking of rules. These were the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth century, and the historic controversy between St. Augustine and the British monk Pelagius at the turn of the fourth century. The latter contended that sin was the failure to live up to moral laws. God had made perfectly clear through the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount what was required of man and how he ought to use his freedom. If he would, man could discipline himself to obey these rules and thereby earn God’s favor and assistance in the perfection of his moral nature. It is at once evident that Pelagius’s doctrines are still very much alive today. The man in the street, whether nominally a Christian or not, is apt to regard Christianity as essentially a kind of moralism. The difference between Christians and non-Christians appears to him to depend simply on whether one thinks that on the whole this system of “do’s” and “don’t’s” benefits society or, with Dr. Kinsey, that its restrictions are irrelevant and harmful in the twentieth century.
The fundamental issue between biblical Christianity and any sort of moralism concerns the nature of God and consequently of the true fulfillment of human freedom. The real issue can only be joined when the implicit “theologies” underlying the respective conceptions of sin are brought into the open. The moralist’s god is either a mythological lawgiver or an equally mythical “rational principle” projected
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onto the heavens and requiring human conformity. The biblical God, on the other hand, is Someone - a mighty personality before whose judgment the powerful tremble and whose love far transcends the quibbling calculation of quid pro quo. The favor of such a God is not for sale. If done from the wrong motive, no amount of good works can appease his wrath or purchase his love. He is dissatisfied with all such works until they are motivated by agape. His love embraces the total person and not just his deeds.
If this is the kind of God with whom man must reckon, then to define sin as the failure to perform certain good works is to mistake the symptom for its underlying cause. Sin is rather any orientation of the heart which destroys agape, and “bad works” simply its visible manifestation. To denounce them is no remedy at all. It only obscures, and may even aggravate, the real problem. If, however, these undesirable symptoms could be forgiven, the individual might experience a reorientation of the heart which alone could transform them.
But this is a very big “if,” and it was too much for Pelagius. It meant that the individual did not have it in his power to save himself by his own effort alone. For love is a bilateral relation. One can neither establish agape nor achieve forgiveness by a unilateral act of will. This is the point at which the moralist will always balk. One may readily acknowledge that he is at least partly motivated by a genuinely Christian concern. He fears lest the denial of the efficacy of individual effort undercut two of the foundation stones of Christianity: its heightened sense of personal responsibility and its powerful moral incentive. Without these the common man is at the mercy (as he is today) of the sophisticated pagan philosophies of doubt, drift, and defeat.
THE HARDHEARTEDNESS OF MORALISM
Nevertheless, moralism of whatever sort, no matter how elevated, exerts a deadly effect upon the human spirit. It not only falls dismally short of the biblical understanding of righteousness, but actively inhibits and destroys agape, and does so precisely at the point which Pelagius considered the great asset of his position. The very ethical incentive for which he fought can actually become the most effective hardener of hearts. By ensnaring the individual in a morbid preoccupation with his own moral balance sheet, the very pursuit
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of goodness betrays him into a relentless scrupulosity. He becomes a veritable miser of the spirit, rendered more incapable of love with each halfpenny virtue that is jealously added to his hoard. Instead of regarding his neighbor with love, he too often sees every man as a potential competitor for righteousness toward whom he must at all costs establish himself as “holier than thou.”
Competition for virtue, even more than competition for money, dries up the springs of sympathy and compassion. The lovelessness of the moralist has become proverbial in much of the world’s great literature. In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Javert’s passion for legal justice drives him to the lifelong persecution of one whose nobility of character stands in ironic contrast to his technical guilt before the law. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh contains a vivid description of how emotional rigor mortis settles down upon a marriage governed by the letter of the law:
……. after they had been married some twenty years Christina had somewhat fallen from her original perfection in money matters. She had got gradually in arrears during many successive quarters, till she had contracted a sort of domestic national debt, amounting to between seven and eight pounds. Theobald at length felt that a remonstrance had become imperative, and took advantage of his silver wedding day to inform Christina that her indebtedness was cancelled, and at the same time to beg that she would endeavor henceforth to equalize her expenditures and her income. She burst into tears of love and gratitude and assured him that he was the best and most generous of men, and never during the remainder of her married life was she a single shilling behind-hand.l
The story acquires a touch of pathos from the fact that both parties imagined that this blighted relationship was love. It also illustrates how the legalist’s crusade for absolute justice turns out to be a campaign for psychological dominion over his neighbor. Whoever can be persuaded to take him seriously is automatically pitted against insuperable odds-for who has any right against the flaming sword of justice?
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter exposes the way in which the mask of virtue can provide the perfect disguise for unlovely motives. It discloses the secret gratification with which the Puritan denounces immorality and the vindictiveness with which he demands the miscreant’s hide. Modern psychiatry reinforces biblical insights when it discovers the reason why the moralist takes such
1Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (New York: Literary Classics Book Club, n.d.), p. 70.
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pleasure in pointing the guilty finger. The intensity of his gratification reflects either the measure of his own inner hostility or the strength of his secret desire for the forbidden fruit which he condemns, while his show of outrage serves to hide this embarrassing fact from both himself and the world.
The Bible illustrates the cruelty of legalism through the medium of dramatic narrative, such as the account of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11). Since the law required that she be stoned, her accusers sought to put Jesus in the position of either defying the law or acquiescing in her execution. But they reckoned without his observation, “He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery” (Matthew 5:28), and were consequently confounded by the quiet reply, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” As they departed in silence, their own vindictiveness is contrasted with the attitude of Christ:
Woman, where are they? Doth no man condemn thee? And she said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn thee. Go thy way, and from henceforth sin no more.
Jesus emphatically does not condone adultery or in any way minimize the significance of specific, concrete breaches of conduct. “Go and sin no more.” But these acts are set in a context in which, upon a change of heart by the individual (repentance), the last word need not be retribution, but redemption. In his own words, “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” (John 3:17.)
THE HYPOCRISY OF MORALISM
This episode illustrates how moralism leads not only to hardheartedness but also to hypocrisy. Good works divorced from the motives behind them can become a highly perfected instrument for blinding oneself and deceiving others. A psychiatrist pricks up his ears on learning that his patient showers the members of his family with presents. It need not necessarily be so, but this may represent an attempt to compensate by external means for what money can never restore: broken and resentful emotional relations. In the same way any good work may be done from an ulterior motive. A financier’s contribution to charity may be made simply for the sake of reputation; a diplomat’s banquet may be intended to appease or ingratiate; a parent’s self-denial may be exploited to induce in the child a hopeless sense
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of infinite indebtedness. These abuses are encouraged wherever good works are made into an end in themselves. The motives behind them being thereby exempt from criticism, they can operate without detection. As a contemporary writer puts it, “The cry of unselfishness often comes from those who, under the pretense of active philanthropy, are busily engaged in the violent, aggressive, dominating assertion of self, who, while they profess and perhaps believe that they are giving their lives to the service of others, are really using others in great part for their own glory.”2 The most eloquent exposé of the moralist, however, is again to be found in the Bible:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanliness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Matthew 23:25-28.)
The reason why Jesus sought the company of harlots, winebibbers, and sinners was not that he approved their ways. But, since they were not desperate to prove their own virtue, they still retained the two qualities without which no one can hear him. They could be honest with themselves, and they still had a heart.
THE TYRANNY OF MORALISM
The superiority of the biblical view of sin to the moralistic can be established on purely philosophical grounds. The main line of the argument is laid down by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians. These recent Christian converts had already begun to lapse back into a religion of legal observances, in the vain attempts to subject agape to calculated control by individual effort. More concerned to expunge this error than to qualify each remark against misconstruction by future theologians, St. Paul shows how the moralist is really in contradiction with himself. Although his concern is to emphasize and preserve human freedom, his method of doing so has the opposite effect. When the “good life” is conceived as rigid obedience to an external law, the individual’s freedom is forfeited. Such a life is
2Gamaliel Bradford, Saints and Sinners (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1932), p. 118.
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analogous to elections under a totalitarian regime, in which everybody may cast a ballot but is subject to penalty for not voting the official line. As long as liberty is merely the freedom to knuckle under to an external authority, then rebellion will always appear the greater freedom.3
Hence St. Paul is at pains to distinguish Christianity from any “law of commandment contained in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15). “By the works of the law shall no flesh be accounted righteous” (Galatians 2:16), not simply because the law does not happen to be sufficiently just, or rigorous, or scientific, but because subordination to any law is a “yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1).
In the last analysis, the moralist’s conception of perfection entails the enslavement of freedom. It is perfectly illustrated by the famous remark of Thomas Huxley, “If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the author.”4 In Huxley’s heaven there would indeed be no “deviationists,” but neither would there be any fun. It would be a kingdom of mechanical men whose freedom had been exchanged for reflexes perfectly conditioned to respond negatively to the stimulus of “naughty” and positively to that of “nice.”
Such an existence could scarcely be called “living.” If man really is a free agent, then a situation which stifled his freedom would more appropriately be called “death.” St. Paul is therefore quite consistent in concluding that any “righteousness of works” is a veritable living death: “If there had been a law given which could make alive, verily righteousness would have been of the law” (Galatians 3:21). Or, in his more familiar words, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Or again, “For freedom did Christ set us free [from the law]” (Galatians 5:1).
It must be acknowledged, of course, that historically the Church has unfortunately often followed the example of the Galatians. It has often concentrated upon the letter at the expense of the spirit and emphasized external actions for their own sake, whether teetotaling, or contributions to charity, or regular church attendance. At a time when the so-called “personality sciences” are discovering how
3This point is made by the contemporary psychiatrist, Th. Bovet, in his Die Angst Vor Dem Lebendigen Gott (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1948), p. 63.
4Cited by Joseph Wood Krutch, op. cit., p. 60.
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damaging rigid moralism can be, a “Christianity” which absolutized such petty observances would be derelict on two counts: Instead of recognizing in these sciences simply the experimental confirmation of biblical insight, it would be cast in the role of die-hard defender of an untenable moral code. And it would fail society in its hour of need. For although science does help to pry men loose from a strait-jacket morality, it also sets in motion the corrosion of all ethical standards. Such an emergency high-lights the uniqueness of the biblical alternative. It, too, transcends legalism, but without becoming cynical. It both avoids the abuses of rigorism and provides a heightened ethical incentive. The fulfillment of freedom, which both moralist and relativist are seeking, agape establishes in fact.