Sin is out of control. This is to say, sin has a certain kind of negative agency, it acts and does things and lords over and has control. As we say in the confession of sin that opens our worship each week, “We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
The trouble with sin talk, one of the primary reasons perhaps progressive Christians in general avoid sin talk, lies in the first misunderstanding common among many Christian communities, that somehow we are in control of sin, masters of it, so that when individuals sin, it was a temporary loss of control. They’re responsible for the moral failings and should have done better.
Or even worse, sin talk functions as a kind of social control. Certain groups or individuals are “the sinners” engaging in lifestyle choices outside the pure practices of the faithful community. The threat of eternal punishment for sin is dangled over these communities, and so sin talk is instrumentalized to keep people in line.
On the other hand, sin talk remains in Christian faith communities, even in communities who have become aware that some things named “sin” are best no longer named as such because it is so clearly apparent that there is this thing called “sin” and it has so much power over us.
Just look at the war in Ukraine right now. Just look at situations of domestic abuse. Just learn from those of us who are addicts. There are truly things we wish we wouldn’t do that we do, and we almost feel compelled or trapped into doing them, and whenever (if ever) we stop doing those things, it’s a miracle.
Paul writes in his letter to the Romans chapter 7, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
Notice how descriptively true this is, even on the topic of very small sins. I tell myself I’m not going to snack after 6 p.m., and then suddenly at 9 p.m. I’m filling a bowl with Cheez-its. But also notice Paul’s way of thinking. When we are sinning, it is “sin living in me that does it.” Again, as an alcoholic, I get this. When I was in the stages of my life when I was drinking heavily, it was the alcohol living more than me. I was dying little deaths every day under the regime of the alcohol.
Because sin is clearly so powerful in the world, it’s no surprise Christian faith developed a rather expansive view of it. It’s not just a few bad things we’ve done or do. Instead, it’s a originary thing that has been throughout all humanity and impacts us precisely because it is born in us throughout all generations. This is the doctrine of “Original Sin.”
Philip Melanchthon addresses original sin at length in the Lutheran confessional writings. Here’s one example:
“We, therefore, have been right in expressing, in our description of original sin, both namely, these defects: the not being able to believe God, the not being able to fear and love God; and, likewise: the having concupiscence, which seeks carnal things contrary to God’s Word, i.e., seeks not only the pleasure of the body, but also carnal wisdom and righteousness, and, contemning God, trusts in these as good things.” (Apology to the Augsburg Confession)
The confessions take original sin up one notch even from the issue of sin controlling our behaviors and wreaking havoc in our world and in our lives. For the Reformers, together with most of the thinking of the church, original sin is first of all lack of belief in God, lack of fear and love of God.
Now, this isn’t because atheists are bad people and immoral. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most contemporary studies show that atheists are often more moral and empathetic than Christians. But go with the thinking here for a bit. If sin is bondage, if sin is a thing that rides us and we can’t on our own get out from under it, then the release from sin has to be trust in someone or some thing more powerful from sin that can release us.
In Christian theology, this is God. So belief in God and its relation to sin is not so much about holding the right doctrines as it is trusting the one who can set us free. Which is why, whenever good Lutheran theologians write about sin, they always include the topic of confessing that sin and being absolved (forgiven), because the only good reason to bring up sin anyway is to forgive it.
“For we also retain confession, especially on account of the absolution, as being the word of God which, by divine authority, the power of the keys pronounces upon individuals.” (Apology to the Augsburg Confession)
If you see a dog with its leash snagged in a bush, you help release it, right? So too is how God relates to sin. We see this repeatedly in the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus, where in stories almost too numerous to count, Jesus does two things simultaneously with people: he heals them of their disease and he forgives them of their sin.
“Your faith has made you well. Go and sin no more.”
Jesus combines these words with the healing because he is the Son of God, and he has power over sin. He doesn’t say this because we have power over our own sin and he’s just shaming us into action. It’s more like someone put us in jail and Jesus shows up, able to break the bonds of the prison cells, and does so.
Now, this is part of the doctrinal position of the church I’ve been trying to articulate better, because I think some of the historic articulations get it wrong. In the Augsburg Confession it reads, "“For the magnitude of the grace of Christ cannot be understood [no one can heartily long and have a desire for Christ, for the inexpressibly great treasure of divine favor and grace which the Gospel offers], unless our diseases be recognized.“
I don’t think this is quite right. I think our sense of the magnitude of Christ’s grace is entirely dependent on our sussing out the magnitude of our sin (even though for many this is indeed crucial—think of the hymn Amazing Grace here). Our sin doesn’t have to be the worst in order for Christ to be the best.
But it is the case that coming to awareness that we are in bondage to sin, and Christ is our liberator from sin, places us experientially in a different place than if we thought we were the lords of our own sin or righteousness, and God in Christ shows up as a cheerleader.
Inasmuch as life is freedom (and I think that’s a pretty solid thesis), then whoever sets us free gives us life is a kind of truism. Conversely, whatever holds us in bondage brings death. Setting aside briefly whether or not sin is related to “eternal death,” I think on a practical level we can agree that being in bondage to sin while still alive is a living death.
So then it’s not too great a proposition to expand this out to the longer life we hope to live in God, because whatever “life after death” may be, at least in part it’s life either with the one who has bound and trapped us, or with the one who has set us free. If when we die the sin that claimed us in life still gets to claim us, that would be a real death. If when we die the one who set us free from the bondage to sin has also set us free from the death related to that sin, and so there is life in that One.
This is why Christian theology has often indicated we die before we die. Paul talks about having “died to sin.” We understand baptism to be a drowning, a death. Or there’s the notion, also in Paul, that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”
The point, paradoxically, is that we live our best life, our life of freedom, when we do so having died to ourselves and alive to God. Which is of course quite different from worrying or agonizing over some things our misguided neighbors have misconstrued as sin (like, for example, same-gender love), and instead, seeing how life-giving it truly is when we are set free to love one another.
And it really is free. No wages involved. That’s the final and significant difference between the lordship of sin and the freedom in Christ.
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”
- William Shakespeare
I think that we all fear death, but it is as much a part of life as birth.
There were times, especially when I was younger, that things I did or choices I made could have harmed or killed me or people I loved or people didn't even know. After all, healthy youth feels invincible. Some are never fully healthy or survive with scars or disabilities, they tend to be wiser of necessity. They must find a way to go on and live with their physical and mental condition.