ABSTRACT: The doctrine of sin is frequently ignored in the secular West, replaced by self-confidence and therapeutic models of self-help. Many churches, though not ignoring sin, nevertheless treat it superficially, as if sin were a problem only of behavior and not also of thought and desire. In a biblical understanding, however, sin is the moral heart-sickness at the center of our rebellion against God. When recovered, the doctrine has significant implications for personal discipleship and preaching, challenging pastors to uphold the glory of God’s holiness and boldly proclaim the good news of his grace.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Pierce Taylor Hibbs (ThM, Westminster Theological Seminary), Senior Writer & Director of Content for Westminster Media, to help Christians recover the doctrine of sin.
What might it be like if the whole world slowly forgot the continent of North America? Ships set sail from the coasts of Europe and Africa, aiming to wander through the blue until they run ashore on Asia or Australia, but a titanic landmass keeps getting in the way. It isn’t on any of their maps. It makes no sense. The Atlantic should continue — but it doesn’t. Amnesia brings all travelers to reckon with the immovable truth.
It’s a bizarre scenario, but it happens regularly in the realm of dogma. We get theological amnesia; doctrines of the faith just slip off our radar. In our cultural moment, it’s happening with the core doctrine of sin, and we’re only just beginning to see the chaos and panic of gobsmacked travelers in the West. Let me explain what I mean, what seems to be happening, and how pastors and church leaders might respond.
‘Loss of the Consciousness of Sin’
In his classic Christianity & Liberalism, penned in 1923, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) wrote about the “loss of the consciousness of sin.” Before his very eyes, one of the primary doctrines of Christian faith — a continent of belief — was being left behind, forgotten, cast aside. What took its place? A strange opposite: confidence. Machen wrote,
Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness. . . . Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world’s evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world’s good; no help is needed from outside the world.1
That final clause should give every Christian pause: No help is needed from outside the world. That captures the crippling amnesia of the secular West. What do we need to address the evils of the day? No God. No Savior. No Spirit. No revelation. Just . . . us. Thus commenced the forgetting of a continent.
Why did this happen? There is no simple answer. Machen thought that WWI had something to do with it. “In time of war,” he wrote, “our attention is called so exclusively to the sins of other people that we are sometimes inclined to forget our own sins.”2 True. We can stare at darkness long enough that we seem bright in contrast. But Machen knew that the answer went deeper. He saw the change in the previous 75 years in Western culture. And he defined it as the silent “substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life.”3 Paganism, he said, is “that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. . . . Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.”4
Put in the plain language our neighbors might use, “We’re not that bad. We all have good things to live for and good things to chase. Let’s focus on them.” Each time this sentiment takes over in a human heart, another piece of the continent of sin disappears from view, leaving those who still talk about sin sounding outdated, detached, and even mythical.
There is now widespread amnesia about one of the biggest continents of human experience. But, of course, that doesn’t mean the continent has gone anywhere. Sin stays. Ships just run aground on its shores in defiance and call it something else. The day sin disappeared is really just the day men closed their eyes.
Of course, orthodox Christians have tried to retain their historical map, knowing how tightly linked the doctrine of sin is to other core beliefs (the doctrines of God, Christ, salvation, and sanctification, for example). While the wider Western world left behind their consciousness of sin, Bible-reading Christians held on to the concept. But even they have not been immune to the continental disappearance in the broader culture. In some ways, they have reduced the size of the continent. They have made sin less than what it truly is.
Almost a hundred years after Machen’s observation, the biblical counselor David Powlison lamented what he called “a Pelagian view of sin” within Christianity. By this he meant that many Christians viewed sin only as willed actions. Sin was simply “something wrong you do.”5 But is sin limited to outward action? Can you transgress God’s law in your thoughts? Yes, Jesus was clear on that (Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:21). Can you transgress God’s law in your desires? Yes, Paul was clear on that (Colossians 3:5; Galatians 5:16), and so was James (1:14–15). At the very least, then, sin involves not just actions but thoughts and desires. Sin is not merely “something wrong you do.” It is something inside you.
Defining Sin
So, what is sin? There are some questions that bring us to the edge of mystery and yet demand a definition. That’s what we have here. Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), summarizing the work of many faithful theologians, concluded that sin is moral heart-sickness. Sin is not a “thing” (substance) that exists on its own in conflict with God’s goodness, fighting for prominence in a sort of yin-yang battle for balance. Rather, sin is a negation introduced into God’s good creation by creatures.
Sin is “a deprivation of that which man, in order to be truly human, ought to have; and it is at the same time the introduction of a defect or inadequacy which is not proper to man.”6 In other words, sin takes something good away from us and actively introduces defects and distortions. Just as cancer both destroys tissue and multiplies abnormal cell growth, sin kills holy motivations and compounds unholy ones. Unlike cancer, sin is not a substance, a thing we can examine and measure with a microscope. It is a nothingness that eats away at us until we are so weak that we cave in on ourselves.
Scripture confirms this description and gives us many concrete and colorful depictions to help us understand sin. Some are direct and others are indirect. “Sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4) — that’s direct. Sin is a failure to imitate God (Ephesians 4:22–24) — that’s indirect. Vern Poythress points out over a dozen other ways Scripture portrays sin: slavery to evil (John 8:34; Romans 6:17), lack of fellowship with God (Romans 5:10), lovelessness (Ma
