The Vocabulary of Sin
Photo by Andy Bodemer on Unsplash
In the early 1920s, two wealthy teenagers living in an upscale Chicago neighborhood—Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—were arrested for the murder of a local 14-year-old, Bobby Frank. Luring him to their car, they ruthlessly attacked Frank with a chisel and stuffed his body in a water drain. Motivated by a kind of “beyond morality” nihilism à la Friedrich Nietzsche—Leopold and Loeb were fascinated with committing “the perfect crime.”
The murder—often referred to as the “crime of the century”—influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, which opens with two teens strangling their classmate in the name of Übermensch-inspired superiority, a repugnant idea that would come to sicken their professor and former sympathizer, played by Jimmy Stewart.
But in the real case, Nietzschean ideology was not the only contestable idea. One of the more controversial assertions of the trial originated from the boys’ legal defense. They were represented by renowned attorney Clarence Darrow, known for his involvement in the infamous Scopes Trial, where he defended the teaching of evolution.
Darrow knew his clients would be found guilty. Using carefully crafted language, his strategy was to assert the boys were not evil or sinful. Rather, they were unhealthy; they were sick. The murder was not an act of volitional depravity, he argued. The maladjusted boys could not be held accountable when the real culprits were environmental factors and evolution gone awry.
This was captured in a key segment of Darrow’s closing argument where he suggested “intelligent people now know that every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him.” This was a departure from what Darrow described as “old theories” of a sinful heart, since “few half-civilized people believe that doctrine anymore.”
The defense was clever. Sin, evil, and a fallen nature were substituted by concepts of determinism, illness, and a “sick society.” Darrow even introduced witnesses from the psychiatric community arguing that Leopold and Loeb had wayward “endocrine glands.”
But the departure from metaphysical concepts such as sin or evil in favor of maladapted actions is a tectonic ideological shift with significant implications.
If Darrow was right in his line of reasoning—i.e., there is no such thing as evil—just malleable agents who act in accordance with their hereditary nature and environment—then the dominant solution to social problems is to produce healthy environments.
To be clear, we should always aspire to better social, economic, and political conditions. Environments, structures, and systems matter for influencing our values, thoughts, words, and behaviors. This is not up for debate.
But it is one thing to say that environments influence, quite another to say they determine. If the “old story” is true, that is, if “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” as Paul writes in Eph. 6:12, then regardless of our environment, healthy or not, we still need a Savior.
Various authors have noted the rise of therapeutic language and its potential to colonize our moral and social imagination and supplant vocabulary that may otherwise assist to better name and sort our pathologies. Of course, therapeutic language can be quite beneficial. The challenge arises when we interpret spiritual realities through a therapeutic framework alone, threatening a misdiagnosis. Even a recent Axios article describing America as a “sin nation” seems to understand sin, not as metaphysical iniquity, but as a kind of social vice whose wrongness is proportionate to the undesirable outcomes it produces (the article specifically mentions the 21st-century rise and ubiquitous acceptance of weed, gambling, and digital pornography).
But sin and evil cannot be limited to a consequentialist philosophical framework (i.e., the rightness or wrongness of an act is bound up in the consequence it produces). Sometimes, it is quite the opposite. As Rebecca DeYoung argues in Glittering Vices, the “sin that so easily entangles” often masquerades as attractive, admirable, or satisfying.
There is a (likely apocryphal) story of Henry David Thoreau, who, on his deathbed, was visited by his aunt. “Have you made your peace with God?” she asked. Thoreau is said to have replied, “I never knew there was a quarrel between us.”
The response may be witty, but it denies one of the most fundamental concepts at the heart of the Christian faith. Sin is, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “one of the basic facts of the universe.” Or, as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, one of the more empirically verifiable doctrines of Christianity.
If there is no “sin,” there is no gap between humans and God—no “quarrel.” If there is no gap, there is no need for a Savior. If there is no need for a Savior, then Jesus died in vain, and salvation rests upon our shoulders. Paul tells us that the cost of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:23). If we remove any element of that sequence, we short-circuit the Christian faith.
Defining Sin
There are a variety of ways Scripture understands and characterizes sin (a helpfully comprehensive summary can be found in Against God and Nature by Tom McCall). This includes iniquity, guilt, rebellion, wickedness, evil, lawlessness, unrighteousness, or impiety. Most of us have heard of sin as a “willful transgression” or “missing the mark.”
These expressions speak to a universal concept that cuts deeper than being sick or maladjusted, what CS Lewis calls “a misdirection of our nature” (italics his). This broader understanding of sin is well illustrated in the works of St. Augustine. In his book On Free Choice of the Will, for example, Augustine and his interlocutor, Evodius, discuss the source and nature of evil.
After being told that adultery is an example of an evil action, Augustine asks Evodius to articulate what, specifically, gives adultery its evil character? Referencing what could be described as a golden rule principle, he responds, “Anyone who does to another what he does not want done to himself does evil.”
“What if someone’s lust is so great that he offers his wife to another and willingly allows him to commit adultery with her?” asks Augustine. “[For] by your rule he does not sin, since he is not doing anything that he is unwilling to have done to himself.”
Evodius tries another tactic. “It is evil,” he says, because “I have often seen people condemned for this crime.” Augustine capitalizes on his mistaken logic. “But haven’t people been condemned for good deeds?” (not least of which was Jesus Christ!) Surely, the legal status of an action is not the best barometer for whether it is “evil.”
After Evodius gives up, Augustine provides his own standard for discerning evil: “Then perhaps what makes adultery evil is inordinate desire, whereas so long as you look for the evil in the external, visible act, you are bound to encounter difficulties.” In other words, the evil—the sin—originates not in the action but in malformed affection nestled in the heart. Augustine points out that a man who desires the spouse of another, even if prohibited from having her, “is no less guilty than if he were caught in the act.”
This is why theologian Sarah Coakley refers to sin as “misdirected desire” or desire that has missed its goal. This is not just missing the mark by “doing” the wrong thing; it is missing the mark by desiring, seeking, worshipping, preferring the wrong thing.
Years ago during a corporate dinner, I once sat across from a banker boasting of how he dutifully cared for his wealthy elderly neighbor, not out of proximate love, but because he calculated she would put him in her estate and, upon her inevitable death, he would strike it rich. The action may have appeared altruistic, but its originating motive was disordered, warped, and sinful.
This is the whole point of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the rhetorical structure of his message: “You have heard it said…but I tell you.” Jesus is talking about the intention of the heart—not just our actions and how they accord with the law. It’s not just murder that is sinful—it is the anger in your heart. It’s not just about the gift you leave at the altar—it is about the conflict with your neighbor. It’s not just about committing the act of adultery—it is about the lust inside of you. It’s not just about the vows you make, but about how they line up with your integrity.
Jesus is saying “anyone can love their neighbor and hate their enemy”—including tax collectors and pagans—but here Christ calls us to have a change of heart and do the much more radical act of “loving our enemy.”
We are Dying Too
Toward the beginning of WWII in the late 1930s, the Saturday Evening Post received an entry from a man named Robert Abrahams. His story, titled The Night They Burned Shanghai, tells of contemptuous, selfish, and apathetic friends playing a card game while the world was on fire in the pangs of war. As terrible as war is, suggests the author, equally menacing and lethal is the contempt, apathy, and selfishness within us. His entry ends with this memorable poem.
Tonight Shanghai is burning
And we are dying too.
What bomb more surely mortal
Than death inside of you?
For some men die by shrapnel,
And some go down in flames,
But most men perish inch by inch
In play at little games.
This is the story we tell as Christians. And if there is something fatally incendiary that resides inside me called “sin”—what do we do? What do we do about such a condition? “Our problem is not how to live as if there were no God, [or] how to live with a sense of God’s absence,” writes author Gilbert Meilander. “Our problem is how to love God. How to fix the heart on God. How to love God when immersed in worldliness.”
Addressing the problem of rightly ordered love begins with our language.
“Given the choice, most people in America would rather be sick than a sinner,” writes Stanley Hauerwas in his essay Sinsick. “Sin sounds too judgmental for a ‘compassionate culture.’” Contrastingly, we are reminded of John Wesley’s words, “Know your disease! Know your cure!” The disease of evil is the disease of sin. The cure is grace through God. Confessing, repenting, dying to self, believing in Christ for salvation, and participating in the full, abundant life of God. Christ said, “whoever shall lose his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25).
Language gives shape to our imaginative landscape, and when we narrow our vocabulary for naming pathologies we risk misdiagnosing the malady and, thus, the medicine. A discourse that prioritizes a healthy social environment and elevates habits, practices, and language associated with mental and physical health is both laudable and necessary. But the historic Christian faith also confesses a sickness that runs deeper than what is often acknowledged in modern therapeutic parlance. We are sick, yes. But we are also sinful. And it is the latter that requires a cross.
Kevin Brown is the 18th President of Asbury University.