It is said that the birth of the modern and postmodern era has resulted in the demise of many concepts and ideals that were once cherished. While this phenomenon is witnessed in many aspects of culture, it is arguably most discernible in the realm of morality.
Ideas such as moral absolutism, sexual purity and chastity which were treasured and valued in the past are now abandoned because they are simply regarded by enlightened moderns as antiquated, outmoded and passé.
From the Christian perspective, the concept that has most fallen out of favour in our time is sin. Accompanying the disappearance of the notion of sin is perhaps something even more minacious and dangerous—the loss of all sense of sin.
Several developments in our time may have contributed to this phenomenon.
The first is the determinism that is associated with the extrapolations that some scientists make concerning the human person, based on recent discoveries in genetics. For example, Francis Crick, in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis made this quite remarkable claim:
‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.1
This statement is philosophically reductionistic and naïve. But it is nonetheless powerful and compelling to the general public simply because it is made by a renowned molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner, who together with James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.
If scientists such as Crick have abolished sin (by first eliminating free will) through their reductionism and determinism, others have done so by their unbridled libertarianism.
The motto of contemporary society, which reverberates in every area of life, is “Be true to yourself”.
Modern libertarianism is fuelled by individualism and self-expression. It is a philosophy and a way of life that upholds human freedom and autonomy as supreme virtues, and which condemns any external interference, especially from religion.
“Be true to yourself” signals the emergence of what is called the “authenticity paradigm”, which is presented as the cultural ideal. The central dogma associated with this paradigm is that moral justification is located in the self and not in some extraneous authority.
Thus, any action that proceeds from one’s self conception is consistent with one’s desires and expresses one’s true self is not only morally permissible, but also laudable. The authenticity paradigm is undergirded by a moral relativism which eschews any objective moral standards to which everyone must conform.
The third development is the most subtle, and it has to do with the change in our vocabulary. A slew of words has been used in place of the word “sin” today, partly because of secularism and partly because the word has lost its appeal.
What was in the past considered to be sin based on the clear teaching of the Bible is now described as a “mistake”, a “flaw” or a “bad decision”. Each of these substitutes diminishes the “sinfulness of sin”, to borrow an expression from the seventeenth century Puritan theologian Ralph Venning.
To describe sin as a mistake is to make it appear unintentional. To say that it is a flaw (imperfection) is to suggest that it is merely a defect in one’s character and not a moral failure. And to equate sin with a bad decision is to reduce it to bad judgement, and not a transgression against God.
To describe sin as a mistake is to make it appear unintentional. To say that it is a flaw (imperfection) is to suggest that it is merely a defect in one’s character and not a moral failure. And to equate sin with a bad decision is to reduce it to bad judgement, and not a transgression against God.
Regrettably, this cultural shift away from the traditional concept of sin is evident not only in secular society. It is also sadly present in the Church.
In 2007, Jerry Bridges notes in his book Respectable Sins that Christian communities in America are downplaying sins such as pride, jealousy and gossip, while strongly condemning sexual sins.2
That was in 2007. Today, it is not uncommon to find that some churches in the US have redefined sexual morality to accommodate the larger culture by normalising cohabitation, premarital sex and same-sex relations.
Some churches today have such a distorted understanding of the love of God that it consequently results in the downplaying of the gravity of sin and the need for repentance.
AW Tozer wrote about this so presciently over six decades ago:
The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become the opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded.3
So, what is it that caused our culture, our society and even our churches to dismiss and downplay the biblical concept of sin to such an extent that it becomes inconsequential?
It is (to borrow from Venning again) the sinfulness of sin!
1 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 3.
2 Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate (Navpress, 2007).
3 AW Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (HarperOne, 1961), 105.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College and Theological and Research Advisor at the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.