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Preface: I find myself compelled to scrape together all that I have ever said and thought about sin and write it down; then I must close the book on that subject, never to return. My project is to put it all in order, to make some sense out of it all, and to arrive at a comfortable judgment, i.e., to make some reliable appraisal of sin.

Why begin these analyses with sin? The notion of sin has long gone empty for me, become debased coinage. It strikes a dull thunk instead of a clear ringing, and the face on the coin is so worn and faded as to show me no image. Economists say bad coinage drives out good. That is true in theology as well. The debased coinage, sin, has driven out of my sight and mind that previously useful Christian understanding of what in man is so destructive: of myself, of community, of the world. Sin has been the linchpin of Augustine’s fourth century system, the theology the church and our Book of Common Prayer that I have grown up with. So I seek here to jerk that linchpin clean out of the system and see where the other pieces fall, and then to search out a twenty-first century understanding of that complex of issues we formerly labeled sin.

Framework for This Conversation

Sin is somehow related to evil, but the relationship is not entirely clear. Sin may be the willful doing of evil, but that again is not completely clear. Sin would seem to involve some willfulness. There is some hurt, some damage to others, even evil involved. And God is somehow proximate. Sin is unnecessary, unnatural, and may be malevolent. The only parcel I can grab hold of in all of this is “evil.” So I must start with that. I observe that there is evil afoot in this world. I would be a fool to deny it. But I would be just as much an idiot to unthinkingly accept evil as simply as it has been presented to me. I must make some distinctions about evil first, and then I must sort out a twenty-first century understanding of sin.

What We Call Evil Changes9

Hitler was just coming into his full power when I was being born. By the time the U.S. entered the war I had already been taught to smell the evil that he embodied. As a child of five I could not understand it. I could not even begin to comprehend it. But I could smell it. I went with my mother to help fold gauze bandages, an appropriate way for me to fight that evil. We knew with a surety, and with passion, that evil was over there, in Germany, among the Nazis, in the Nazis. And in those days the Russians were our friends, our allies in fighting the Nazi evil. The war ended with the Nazis and the Japs (sic) defeated, and we entered a new world, a revised world. Now the Russians, the U.S.S.R., the Communists became the enemy. They were the new evil, and we were terrified of them, or we were at least supposed to be terrified of them, prodded by McCarthyism. And I should have wondered then about the nature of this very threatening cloud of evil that was morphing, changing form and location, and still supposed to be our enemy. But I was still young and that evil was still an absolute. Then my campus roommate stumbled onto a stash of sixteen-inch vinyl public relations War Department recordings, ordered destroyed but instead secreted after WWII, which talked about us driving down the right side of the road into Berlin, while the Brits drove down the left, and those crazy Russians drove right down the middle. And I was confronted with the changeability of the absolute evil. I began to realize that the evil I’d always known as an absolute, instead came in degrees, and sometimes even morphed. I could not really count on it. And through the intervening years since I’ve learned that evil is often a fairly relative thing.

Gradations of Evil with Ill-Defined Edges

Evil is not as simple as a huge basket into which we can throw everything bad. I discern that volcanoes erupting are not really evil: destructive, killing, bad, but entirely natural. Unavoidable. How then can they be evil in any objective way? And earthquakes! If you’re caught in an earth-quake I’m sure it feels overwhelmingly evil. But it is a natural event, an act of nature. Hard for me to call that evil. Hitler? He was evil, no doubt. And Stalin? Yeah, probably evil. But the Communists? Not so clear a call. Idi Amin? Yeah. Jeffrey Dahmer (the serial killer who ate his victims)? Oh yes, that was palpable evil. But what about accidents? I mean real accidents, not somebody’s negligent misstep, but real accidents. They happen! And are they evil? Well, they’re — they’re accidents. Hard to call them evil. More like “random.” And gradually I have come to realize that the world I live in is not made of blacks and whites, but of innumerable shades of gray, with never a true white or an absolute black among them. Always some shade of gray. And randomness. Not everything is intentional. Or caused. Some things just happen. In Newtonian physics everything is predicable, but in quantum physics probability is more like it, and now the physicists are playing with string theory in which even probability becomes improbable.

Evil Is What’s Left

So I must define evil and to do that I start by paring off the things we thoughtlessly call evil, but which are really not. First the random things: they feel bad, may actually have quite bad consequences, but are not evil in themselves, only random, natural, mostly unpredictable: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, mudslides, floods, rock falls, droughts, blizzards, avalanches, diseases, mental illnesses, epidemics and such, the natural disasters caused by very real, physical, measurable, sometimes even predictable forces of nature, though sometimes unpredictable, unforeseeable. Yes, they are destructive and injurious and leave a path of pain and even death and other forms of human misery behind them. But I cannot call them evil; they are natural, unavoidable, unescapable. Certainly not willful; they just happen.

I find a subcategory here: the things caused mostly by forces of nature, only slightly avoidable and rather unpredictable. When my first wife was diagnosed with cancer, I could almost feel the evil that was her tumor, it felt palpable in the room with us, it had an odor and color and, in my mind’s eye, a form and shape, so that while it was hidden deep within her body, I could almost touch and grasp it; it had some presence in the room. Yet in my saner, more reasonable moments I knew it was not a demon, not a touch of satan, certainly not an act of God; a single cell had mutated out of control and reproduced endlessly until it consumed and killed her. These are the factors, events, elements of the natural world in which we live, of which we, at least our bodies, are actually a portion. Their results may feel evil to us, but themselves are natural.

And next I pare off the accidents, true accidents, randomly happening accidents, not of willful intent. Bad consequences, but again acts innocent in themselves. I cannot call these evil either. Newscasters agitatedly misname them tragedies, calamities, but they are not really evil; rather they are naturally occurring events, perhaps influenced by the randomness built into the universe.

Randomness

Several decades ago a friend handed me an issue of the magazine OMNI, and in it an article which continues to fascinate me entitled “Connoisseurs of Chaos.” It was about the discoveries of physicists who study chaos. They learn that chaos is not chaotic at all, but instead that all motion is organized around three forces: the fixed point attractor which defines homeostasis (a fixed or stable state), the limit cycle attractor which defines simple and complex harmonic motions (a rhythmic and recurring motion such as a swinging pendulum), and a random attractor which introduces an element of randomness into all things. I do not understand the complexities but this understanding suggests to me that randomness is built into the universe, into all things, and into all life. It is the driver of the genetic mutations fundamental to Darwin’s thesis of the natural selection of the species. And next, as a theological speculator, I interpolate that some of what we experience or call evil is simply randomness, an unpredictable, unforeseeable twist of events which usually has an undesirable result (when the result is favorable we call it good luck or God’s blessing, but I think it is still randomness). In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner theorized similarly that many bad things are not God’s will, but merely randomness.

Now I am Left with Two Categories of Things I Feel Justified to Call Evil

Jeffrey Dahmer, carefully selecting his victims, killing them with such thoughtfulness and planning that the murder goes undetected, and then eating the body parts of his victims. This is evil, tinged perhaps with an unimaginable psychological aberration, but quite unadulteratedly evil. The willful drunken driver who, having been tagged five times goes out once more to drink and then drunkenly drive, killing a young girl walking along the street. There is willfulness here, an unreasonableness, and, if not a deliberateness, then at least a knowingness and willingness: not as simple as negligence, but maybe deliberate negligence. There is evil here too. It does not smell as pungent as Jeffrey Dahmer’s evil, but still is well within the category. But bounds of this category are mushy, it has an unclear, ill-defined edge. While the Dahmer event was purely individualistic, there is a societal complicity with our drunken driver. These exemplify one category of evil, but there is another. There is the Hitler syndrome.

This second category is much more problematic, more greatly impactful, and leads to the heart of my problem with sin. The evil that remains in the basket is communal and cultural: poverty, oppression, racism, violence. I have lived through the war with Nazi Germany, the S.S. Troops, and Hitler’s effort to exterminate all Jews from the face of the earth, the Holocaust. And I saw the latter years of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., of his and his government’s efforts to dominate and to eliminate persons and populations that were in the way, his cruel oppression and murder of his own people. And I am living in the aftermath of George W’s preemptive war against Iraq, his eradication of Saddam Hussein and his government, and the resultant unleashing of the conflictful, bloodthirsty clans and tribes and sects within the culture which Hussein had understood how to keep in check through the use of cruel oppression. And I am watching the deliberate enrichment of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class in this country, and in the mid-East the oppression of dispossessed Palestinians by the same Jewish people who had been so cruelly oppressed by the Nazis and others. The litany can go on; I am well aware of this evil in this world. I am a systems person, I believe in and understand social systems. And this evil is systemic, not individual. It is deliberate, social, even though perhaps unconscious (or pre-conscious or subconscious); and it is deeply embedded in the social system. We build together and then live within a social system which rewards and punishes for no obvious or reasonable cause, or for deeply hidden causes. And we do nothing about it. We allow that evil. We may even quietly, silently, unwittingly enable it. We are complicit, sometimes ignorantly, but always voluntarily. We cooperate with that social system. In our prayers we pray abstractly about poverty, but we do not pray in ways that actually change or alleviate that poverty; we pray and then let it be. Therefore many go hungry, or homeless. And we allow it. And we do not consider that a sin for which we are individually culpable, in need of God’s forgiveness. And that is the heart of the problem. Hitler may be the embodiment of evil, but the reality is that we vote for him, and cheer for him at rallies, and readily or reluctantly and unresistingly, do his will. Again, the boundaries of both these categories are only vaguely visible, and fade into invisibility.

When I study these two categories of evil, one word resounds within me, malevolence. There is a will to do harm, injury, oppression, neglect, however conscious and deliberate, or unconscious and complicitous that will might be. Malice.

The Trivialization of Sin

Into the world I’ve just sketched I invite you to talk with me about sin. This is the framework within which I am questioning, “What is sin?” Mine is a world in which there truly is evil, but in degrees and gradations and maybe even in layers. And where often things that appear evil, may not be; but are just bad, or destructive. Or simply random. Unpredictable. Unforseen and unforeseeable. Even though damaging and hurtful.

In this world the notion of sin has been trivialized beyond significance. The sin we talk about these days in church is individualized, putting the locus entirely within the individual. Since earliest Christianity we have focused on versions such as the seven deadly sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. I note that these sins all require me to look within myself, at my interior life. But in reflection I note that Jack Bowers’s sins are puny and nearly insignificant when I confess them alongside a Hitler, a Stalin, an Idi Amin, a 2014 Tea-Party-driven U.S. Congress. The Hebrew Scriptures had it right when they placed the locus of sins mainly (though not exclusively) at the national level, when they sent the scapegoat off into the Wilderness of Zsin bearing on its head the collective sin of the nation. Yes, we may be complicit as individuals in the evils of the national sin, but Jack Bowers is not the paramount sinner. It is true that we can smell the evil of some individuals e.g., a cannibalistic serial murderer, and that we, the society, need to be protected from that evil. But mostly we need to be rescued from the evil of national sin, for we are both victims and complicit collaborators in that: hunger, poverty, inequity, oppression, abuse, functional slavery, destructive and self-serving governance, greed. To encourage myself to be focused interiorly on my own petty sins as an individual is to be seduced away from any awareness of the sinfulness of the nation or culture (which awareness might lead to reform and change, repentance and newness of living). Using Walter Breuggemann’s metaphor of the Empire, to focus on my sins serves to imply the sinlessness or incorrectability of the Empire, and thereby serves to isolate me, disempower me, to make me less important to the community and the Empire.

This individualized sin has become less than useless, and instead rather dysfunctional and misdirecting, even counter-productive, because it blinds me (makes me inattentive) to some larger realities of this world, our attention is diverted from the greater evils in our world. Thereby some far greater forces of evil are safely hidden from our scrutiny and we become unwitting collaborators in those greater evils, complicit, enabling them by allowing our eyes to be diverted into watching the puny evils on our own hands while ignoring the greater evil, or by thinking ourselves too small, too powerless, too stupid and inept to be able to do anything about them.

Evil Reprised

At the risk of being repetitive I need to back up and be clear what I am not talking about when I say “Forces of evil.” I am not talking about the natural forces of this physical world which cause events we thoughtlessly or hyperbolically call evil and tragic: Those events themselves I cannot really label evil. Let me lay those to the side as not part of this conversation.

On the other hand, I do need to restate firmly that there is evil in this world; evil is not a fiction. My burden in this chapter is not to identify all the evils, but to point in their direction and examine how sin is related to those evils.

The boundaries enclosing what we can call evil are mushy, unclear, muddied. I cannot draw them specifically. Only one word from my thesaurus rings true for me: malevolent. Evil is human-caused, not natural or random; it intends to do ill, mainly to other but sometimes to self; and it involves some willfulness, however consciously and deliberately, or unconsciously and seemingly accidental (not really so).

The History of Sin

In the Hebrew Scriptures

For myself I must start from our deep cultural roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. I have found profound insights in those writings, though mixed with stuff peculiar to that age and culture so no longer applicable, and also with stuff uninsightful ergo stupid, insipid, sometimes dead wrong (e.g., erroneous reproductive biology, misogyny, women as chattel property). So I read those Scriptures with great caution, taking away what has been insightful across the centuries, considering what might be useful when translated into twenty-first-century realities, and discarding the useless and flat out wrong.

The Vocabulary

In Leviticus we are given a fundamental Jewish understanding of man. First, a little midrash: the student asks, “Rabbi, why is the bet doubled in lab?”10 And the rabbi’s response is “Because the heart (lab)has two yetzers (impulses), the yetzer ha-rah and the yetzer tov (the impulse to evil and the impulse to good).” In the Levitical law it is clear that YHWH understands man has built into him both impulses, and that man must be choosing between them. And it follows inevitably that sometimes man will choose the impulse to evil rather than the impulse to good. Understanding this, YHWH gives man in the Levitical law a means for coping on those occasions when man chooses the evil impulse, namely the sacrificial law through which the evil is undone and the impurity washed away. So the purpose of the Levitical law is to enable man, when he commits sin, to return to YHWH with the impurity expunged so that he can again be in right relationship with YHWH.

The Levitical law11 recognizes two types of sins: injunctive sins (aseh) “Thou shalt love YHWH elohim . . .” and prohibitive (ta-aseh) “Steal not.” The law also recognizes three categories of sin:

1. Khet (in the Hebrew ’ṭḥ meaning “to miss the mark”): inadvertent unintentional sins, mistakes, errors, and

2. Avon [also zdon] (in the Hebrew m’l meaning “to act unfaithfully, treacherously, to trespass”): advertent trespasses (crookedness) e.g., a man is hungry and eats the available pork knowing it’s against dietary law e.g., probably the sort of thing intended in the Lord’s Prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and

3. Pesha (in the Hebrew ‘šp meaning “to rebel”): demonstrative sin (rebelliousness, breaking a covenantal relationship) e.g., Absalom raising an army to usurp his father’s throne.

So some sins are seen as unintentional, others as intentional but not earth-shaking, and some as very heinous, basically rebellious, and ultimately rebellious against YHWH. The Levitical law, recognizing those gradations, then prescribes specific sacrifices for the first two gradations, khet and avon but has none for pesha. It appears that pesha must instead be publicly confessed, which would seem to then reduce the pesha to the severity of avon for which sacrifice can be made.

1. The verb “to sin” ’ṭḥ) is much used, the noun less so (but then Hebrew is a verb-based language). What does the word mean? Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon says that the core meaning is “to miss the mark/goal/way/path, to do/go wrong, commit a mistake.” The Holladay Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon makes the verb “to be at fault, offend” and “be blame-worthy.” It would seem to carry no shading about intent or guiltiness. It refers to an action, not an intention or a motivation. One hurls a stone with a sling but misses the objective, Goliath.

2. The verb “to trespass” (ml‘) is less used in the Hebrew text. Brown-Driver-Briggs cites the core meaning as “to act unfaithfully, treacherously,” while Holladay altogether fails to cite it. In noun form this root means “an unfaithful, treacherous act.” And,

3. The verb “to rebel” (‘šp) Brown-Driver-Briggs translates as “to rebel, transgress” and is used much more frequently in the noun form to simply mean “transgression” though in several degrees of severity.

The other word crucial to our understanding is kaparah (atonement), (in the Hebrew rpk ) which means basically to wash away (i.e., ablution) and in some contexts is translated “ransom.” In the Pi’el (the intensive mood) kiper is translated “to cover over, pacify, propitiate.”

In the Levitical law the commission of sin causes uncleanness to accrue to the sinner. That uncleanness is not in itself evil, rather it renders the person impure, therefore unable to enter the presence of YHWH to worship. The uncleanness itself is amoral, without moral value or implication (e.g., leprosy is neither immoral, nor the result of an immorality, an infraction of the law. It is simply an uncleanness which would contaminate others and must be quarantined. Likewise a nocturnal emission and menstruation are not bad or immoral, but simply unclean, i.e., rendering the person too impure to withstand the purity of YHWH’s presence). The uncleanness must be washed away before approaching YHWH’s presence. In the atoning sacrifice the sin is not forgiven, nor does the sacrifice remove responsibility for the sin. The offence must first be restituted/redressed, and after that the accrued uncleanness can be washed away, removing the impurity of the offering-bringer so that he can enter YHWH’s presence.

One other word shuv (in the Hebrew šub) should be reviewed, one which we regularly translate “repent.” The Hebrew verb shuv means basically “to turn” or “to turn aside” or “return,” hence to change direction. One is walking the path and chooses to take the left/right-branching path. It implies a choice, an act of the will. It is sometimes translated “to repent.”

Two Sorts of Laws

Scholars have been clear there are two strains within the Hebrew law. One I judge to be concerned about the orderliness of tribal living; it sets standards and limits and sanctions to enforce those limits. The other (Lev 17–26, dubbed the Holiness Code) is concerned about the purity of the nation, the quality of its worthiness to be YHWH’s people. If we intend to pay attention to the Mosaic law (e.g., by citing it as reason for our biases, phobias and irrationalities), then we need to be very clear that these two strains of the law, while woven together in the Hebrew text somewhat seamlessly, are quite different, serve different purposes, and are dealt with in different ways. The infractions of the first strain, those that disrupt relations within the tribe are sins, but infractions of the holiness code are abominations (not sins), offenses which render the tribe so impure that YHWH will not (or cannot?) relate to it (e.g., a man lying with a man as with a woman is not a sin but an abomination, because it is a form of worship in the temple of Astarte, the goddess of fertility who is YHWH’s primary competitor in Canaan). Conversely in the holiness codes a wayward son should be stoned to death, not to sanction such behavior, or deter others from so acting, or to maintain the integrity of tribal affairs, but to remove impurity from the tribe, in order to regain sufficient purity that the tribe will qualify, become again pure enough, to be in relation with YHWH.

Consequences, Not Intent

I find neither the tribal code nor the holiness code much concerned about intent12; but I do find both concerned with act and consequence. The underlying attitude seems to me, why you did it is of little consequence, but that you did it, and that so-and-so was injured by your so doing is of consequence, to me, YHWH, because it harms the well-being of the tribe. In order to redeem the sin some fair, equitable restitution must be made, and then the impurity erased. This seems to me a reasonable stance. Contrariwise I perceive the judging of intent in our culture to be a most precarious undertaking.

Focus is Community, more than Individual

But in the cases of both the tribal law and the holiness code I deem that the focus is on the tribal community much more than the individual. It is the community which is at risk. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, it is the sins of the nation which are of greater concern and are put on the head of the scapegoat and carried out into the Wilderness of Zsin to be taken away. By focusing our Christian attentions regarding sin on the individual, we have lost that national focus entirely.

The Shift from Community to Individual Focus

And then one more final notion while I’m still loitering in the Hebrew yard. I noted above that the two core concerns of the Mosaic law were the maintenance of tribal coherence and harmony, and the tribal purity (acceptability to YHWH). In the earliest historical period as the tribes unified, the tribal issues morphed into concern for the nation. But in the latter portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, and thence throughout the Christian writings the emphasis turns away from the nation and the larger community and onto the individual. And my probing mind will not leave it alone; how comes this shift from the national to the individual? There are two defining events in Hebrew history, the exodus and the exile. We Christians recognize the exodus and play with it within our own Christian traditions, but we do nothing with the exile. We ignore it almost completely. Yet it is as central as the exodus to Judaism. What are we missing? As I watched (setting aside the special case of Gen 1–11) the Hebrew Scriptures pass in front of my eyes in Jack Miles’s God: A Biography I found myself watching YHWH morph from the private chaplain and benefactor to Abram’s lineage into the ruthless, furious, relentless warrior of the exodus vying for the faithfulness of the twelve tribes and then of the earlier kings, then flip-flopping into a bi-polar sanctioner of the post-Solomonic apostate kings, finally retreating into internationality and delivering his chosen people into exile, and then gradually withdrawing, until in the closing books of the Tanach he has become remote, increasingly absent and finally gone altogether, and in his place we discover individual heroes who are the saviors of the nation (but don’t really save, only rescue). And as that exilic and post-exilic period evolves, under the influence of first Babylonian and then Hellenistic cultures, I detect a shift from concern for the nation, which literally no longer exists for the Jews, into concern for and focus upon the individual, so that the post-exilic writings focus primarily on the behavior and piety of the individual rather than on the cohesiveness and purity of the nation. In Jesus we see, I think, a confusion of the two strains, social concerns for justice and mercy toward all people, but with a semi-Pharisaic fixation on individual behavior and piety. So two strains. And the first Christians appear to pick up the individual focus, but, being themselves a dispossessed people under the heel of Rome, do nothing with the national concerns. And because of this focus Christianity successfully appeals to the oppressed, the disenfranchised of the empire.

Summary

I find no consistent, tight definition of sin throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. The Eighth-century prophets assume sin is a moral offense against God, that God requires of us a moral life, and that repentance alone for offenses is not sufficient; sin contaminates, which contamination must be removed/covered over with sacrifice. Sin in various books of the Tanach is described as defiance of God, imputed (moral) offense, rebellion against God, infidelity, apostasy, social injustice, profaneness, and blindness. It may be transgression of a regulation, unwitting or willful non-obedience. The root seems to be “to miss the mark,” which for me implies being less than or different than ought to be, and the referent for that oughtness is YHWH. It appears to me that in the earlier portions of those Scriptures sin is mostly concerned with tribal, or later national, cohesiveness and harmony, but in the post-exilic portions focuses more on individual piety and behavior. While shame may well be associated with sin throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, I am fairly convinced that emotional guilt (vis-a-vis moral guilt) was no part of sin in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Early Christian History

Now I turn the page to take a very quick look at the first Christians, though my deeper concern is with Augustine at the very end of the fourth century.

The Gospels

The curtain rises on John, baptizing in the Jordan wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance (i.e., change of mind) for the remission (i.e., sending away) of sins. When John is jailed Jesus comes striding onto the scene preaching the “. . . Good news of the kingdom of God: the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye, and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). I note that their separate messages are roughly similar. Both speak of repentance (changing of mind) and where John’s referent is remission (sending back) of sin, Jesus’ is the kingdom of God (purity). Neither speaks much of the Father’s love; both are heavy on judgment for offenses and endtime stuff. And I note in passing that in John’s gospel sin is itself abstracted into the failure to recognize God’s presence in Jesus.

The Pauline Letters

Saul, renamed Paul after his mystical conversion on the road to Damascus, is a character interesting to me (though I do not much like him or most of his interpretation of the message). A zealous, anti-Christian, fire-breathing Pharisee on his way to arrest some Christians, he is struck blind by a light from heaven which claims to be the Christ. My irrelevant fascination with Paul is simply this, that the man I see after his mystical experience and conversion is exactly the same man I had seen before the life-changing road-to-Damascus event; the same zealous, fire-breathing, driven man, only now pro-Christian instead of anti-Christian. But unchanged.

Paul brings two geniuses to the movement: his ability to organize and shape communities, and his reframing of Jesus’ message into a language of love and community life. Sin seems to me not so central a part of his message as a tool for managing community life. But in him, the first Christian writer, son-of-God notions and why the necessity of his death are already starting to take shape in his letters. The prophetic teacher and healer Jesus is in the process of being elevated to something super-human.

The Apostolic Fathers