This is the text to the free study guide to our free booklet, Our Sin and Our World.
My sin is ever before me,” the psalmist identified as David says (Ps 51:3, NRSVUE), and his desire for a “clean heart” and “a new and right spirit” (51:10) resonates with all who are troubled by our failings and shortcomings. The Bible makes it clear that we should be troubled: through our sins we—and everyone else—fall short of the righteousness God desires from us (Rm 3:20–23; 1 Jn 1:8, 10), and in doing so we negatively impact the whole world (Gn 6:5, 11–12; Rm 8:19–23).
John Chrysostom, explaining Paul’s words in Romans 8, highlights the corrupting influence humanity has on nature. The climate change and mass extinctions we see today give horrible evidence of the result of our sinful abuse of the natural world.
At the same time, Norman Powell Williams reminds us, we also understand sin by refraining from distorting our theology about its effects…a point not always observed within many Christian traditions. The early Christians (as well as many today in the eastern churches) did not see the first humans as perfect beings whose fall resulted in the condemnation of all humanity. Instead, they saw the first humans as frail and imperfect, and who passed on to their descendants this weakness and susceptibility to sin.
The greatest weakness, Augustine says, is pride. While the doctrine of “Original Guilt” rightly criticized by N.P. Williams was greatly developed by Augustine, we can nonetheless benefit from his warning that sin is rooted in artificially elevating ourselves as gods and rejecting our relationship with the true God.
The more we turn away from God, and thus leave a void in our lives that otherwise would have been filled with goodness, the more we will experience evil filling that void. “For evil,” John of Damascus tells us, “is nothing else than absence of goodness.” It is therefore no surprise, as Gregory the Great notes, that one sin frequently leads to another. Even worse, because each subsequent sin is frequently incited by the negative effects of the previous sin, we can find ourselves punished by the very sins we willfully pursue and commit.
Note the self-centeredness of sinfulness: we elevate ourselves above God, actively pursuing badness which harms both us and the world around us. At the same time, though, Martin Luther says the purpose of the Law is to help us break through this self-absorption. A person will be able to see their inability to fully overcome their sinfulness, and thus their desperate need for the healing work of God. As with Augustine, there are other aspects of Luther’s thought with which one might disagree (such as his emphasis on the depravity of humanity), but his point about the Law leads us to the next lesson: the vital importance of two commandments of the Law, and our need both for Christ’s fulfillment of these commandments and—through his transforming and empowering relationship with us—to live them out ourselves.
