On the Effects of Sin
Q. What is sin?
A. Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.
Q. How does sin have power over us?
A. Sin has power over us because we lose our liberty when our relationship with God is distorted.
Having looked at the three uses of the Law to conclude our discussion of the Ten Commandments, the Catechism moves on to explain our situation such that we need any uses of the law besides telling humans how to relate to each other and to God to maintain an undistorted relationship. In an earlier post, I went into some significant detail about the nature of Sin, especially as it relates to the question of Original Sin and the ensuing inextricable distortion of our wills. I’ll focus mostly on the implications of the power that Sin has over us, but first here’s a summary of the nature of Sin talked about in the earlier article: God created human beings with wills that were intended to be fully aligned with and determined by God’s will; we were meant to desire what God desires. However, for us to truly have wills, we had to have the capacity to choose to have our wills determined by God or by something else. All human beings inexplicably choose to root their wills in something other than God, leading to a situation where every subsequent act emerges from that already distorted will.
I’ll take as my departure point then this last part of the summary, namely the reason why this initial distortion leads to our inability to get ourselves out of our distorted situation, to describe why we “lose our liberty.” The second question about sin here affirms a traditional distinction in Christianity going back at least to Augustine about being truly free (liberty) and being able merely to choose between alternative choices (free choice). Freedom (liberty) in its proper sense is not simply the ability to choose between any given set of alternatives, such as whether to go to the movies or a baseball game. Instead, it’s specifically the ability to choose to will as God wills, to choose and desire what God wants us to choose and desire. However, once our wills have become distorted in that original and originating choice, we no longer have the true freedom. Indeed, we can choose between various equally unattractive options, but we no longer have the ability to truly choose between the good and the evil.
Importantly, the tradition has often said that this means that there are no truly “good” acts done by humans prior to justification (we’ll get to what justification means in the coming posts). Article 13 of the Articles of Religion, the original doctrinal standard for Anglicanism, states that, “Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of the Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ… yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.” In other words, deeds done “outside” the grace of Christ cannot properly be said to be “good” and indeed may be considered sinful. This does not mean that under the effects of Original Sin human beings are unable to make choices that have objectively positive effects—this would be demonstrably untrue. The point is that the standard for what a truly “good” deed is in Christianity is incredibly exacting: It must be done out of perfect love of God and perfect love of neighbor grounded in that perfect love of God. In a world in which all of our wills are distorted, this perfect willing is impossible; all our deeds, even the most noble-seeming are shot through with ambiguity and mixed motives.
As an interlude before getting to the question of the extent of the effect of Sin, it is worth distinguishing once more between Sin and sins. I’ve been using Sin, with a capital “s” and in the singular, to refer to the condition of Sin, the condition of distorted and broken relationships. When used in the plural and with a lowercase “s,” “sins” refers then to the specific and individual actions that flow from this distorted state of affairs. On this understanding, the real problem is not individual sins; these are symptoms of the disease, and one could conceivably exist in a state of never doing any individual oft-recognized sins (although that’s highly unlikely) and still be in a state of Sin. The Catechism does not follow this particular convention of capitalizing Sin and leaving sins lowercase, but it does acknowledge the distinction, a point driven home by the fact that the Rite II Gloria changes the Rite I’s language of Jesus taking away “the sins of the world” to say that Jesus “takes away the sin of the world.”
This brings us to the last point not yet considered about Sin, namely what the specific effects of our distorted relationships with God, with the world, and with each other are. Certainly, all of the western Christian tradition has acknowledged that the principal and most serious effect of this distorted relationship is that humans will die, meaning arriving, without some divine intervention, in a state of ultimate and final separation from God, the world, and self. Historically the western tradition has also overwhelmingly held that there is some kind of punishment involved in death—it is not simply the natural result of God allowing us to dissolve into our choice to be separated from God—and that this punishment includes some kind of conscious torment in Hell. However, such a view was not the universal position of the early or Eastern churches, and the last two centuries have seen an increasing number of thinkers entertain the idea that for those in a state of Sin something like death and the cessation of existence is the end.
The question that has entertained a significant number of thinkers and on which there exists a great diversity of opinions is how different our lived experience is because of the Fall. In other words, would human beings who did not suffer the effects of Original Sin have a significantly different kind of human existence? On this question, the Catechism does not require taking any of these particular positions. Representative of the “less difference” position is Thomas Aquinas who held that the effects of the Fall were mainly about our outlook on the world and a matter of degree: Humans would not necessarily have been free of injury or pain, but rather would have had a different, less negative disposition toward such things—such things simply would not have bothered us as much. Similarly, humans don’t lose their original capacity for moral reasoning or knowledge of God, but simply have it diminished. On the other extreme is someone like John Wesley who held that defects such as injury, illness, and ignorance are all the effects of the Fall. In a pure state of fallen nature, humans fall to an almost sub-bestial state, almost unable to reason or think at all and even having our physical speed greatly diminished (although Wesley thought that such a state was a pure abstraction—for him, as soon as humans sinned, God poured out prevenient grace to begin restoring their capacities). More recently, the theologian Karl Barth took the effects of the Fall on the human understanding to its farthest extent yet, positing that humans are utterly incapable of conceiving of God under the conditions of the Fall, holding that any human derived conception of God was an idolatrous artifact of the human mind. For Barth, only Divine self-giving to the human intellect could overcome this and make knowledge of God possible. It is important to remember, though that regardless of this significant range for how human nature has been effected by the Fall, all Christian thinkers recognize that humans are unable to restore themselves to proper relationship with God, the world, and themselves through their own power.
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