Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is an engineer, teacher, and former pastor. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has practicing tae kwon do and pondering the mysteries of light.
Our modern world loves extremes. Dichotomous thinking pervades our cultural, political, and theological landscape. Often our “good” is defined in simple opposition to some evil that we see in the world and we seem oblivious to the reality that all extremes distort the truth and warp the good. I was taught growing up that truth is found in the tension between two extremes. This thinking goes back to at least Aristotle who encouraged his students to find the golden mean in a situation. For example, the virtue of courage occurs when there is just the right amount of fear at play. Too much fear leads to cowardice. Too little fear leads to foolhardiness. Like all virtues, courage is found in the tension between extremes.
It seems to me that the modern church tends towards one extreme or another when it comes to sin. On one end we have churches that talk about sin incessantly, and on the other are churches where mentioning sin at all is taboo. The first kind of church thrives on inculcating feelings of shame and guilt and worthlessness to the point where the real depths of God’s abundant grace, unending mercy, and radical forgiveness are lost. The second kind of church seeks to inculcate feelings of encouragement, self-assurance, and #blessedness to the point where it must turn a blind eye to real struggles, real sorrows and the indelible brokenness of our world. The irony is that both of these types of church diminish the mysterious grace of God that is supposedly at the center of their faith. It is overshadowed in the former and unnecessary in the latter.
There are better ways to think and talk about sin, but it may require a reformulation (or a renewing) of our minds.
Our default way of thinking of sin is based off of a legal or law-court model. In this model sin is a transgression against a moral law, whether intentional or unintentional, and deserves punishment. There is plenty of biblical evidence for this model, and I’m not discrediting it completely, but I do want to acknowledge that it is prone to certain distortions and that there are other models available that may be more helpful in our modern world.
I see two main problems with this legal model for sin. The first is that it is focused specifically on the action, but never addresses the motivation or desire that leads to that action. In other words, it is rooted more in the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament than the teachings of Jesus. If you recall, in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus repeatedly uses the formula, “You have heard it said (referencing Old Testament law), but I say to you….” And his reframing of the law is focused much more on motivation and desire, rather than just action. For example, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28). Like our modern legal system, the legal model for sin doesn’t look at root causes, motivations, and desires. It simply seeks to punish the wrong action. It is a surface-level approach, that never plumbs the true depths of sin. It seems blind to the reality that our actions flow from our desires.
The second problem I see with the legal model has to do with the punishments it uses to deter sinful action. In the church, the punishment for sin is death. I have no issue with this; Paul seems clear on this point. What I do take umbrage with is when that idea of death is fleshed out into horrifying visions of eternal torture and hell-fire. My issue is not whether such images can be pulled from the pages of Scripture or not, but whether they make sense theologically and logically. Since humans were made to be in a dependent relationship with their Creator - this relationship is the good thing that we were made for and thus it defines what is “good” - it stands to reason that any deviation from this “good” carries an inherent consequent with it. Or in other words, sin is its own punishment. “The wages of sin is death” because sin is a rejection of God’s good gifts and a movement away from dependence on Him, and this movement is death, not because God gets mad at us for not following His rules to the letter and thus condemns us to burn in hell for eternity for besmirching His honor. The Christian God is not so insecure and capricious.
So instead of the legal model of sin, I suggest an alternate model.
When I was in high school, I drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Copious amounts really. I worked at a fast-food restaurant and thus had an infinite supply of the sugary drink at my disposal. While my teenage metabolism processed the sugar and chemicals adequately, it was clear that this habit was not good for me. At one visit to the dentist I had eleven cavities. My face was filled with acne. Worst of all, if I didn’t have some Mountain Dew, my body would let me know with headaches and cravings. In theological terms, I had a disordered desire. My need for Mountain Dew was a distortion of my natural need for water. In modern parlance, I had a minor addiction to the drink.
Instead of a legal model of sin, what if we thought about sin more as an addiction? It is a disordering of our desires away from the things that lead to life and towards the things that lead to death. Certainly it leads to wrong actions, but those action stem from a much deeper disorder.
Instead of imagining sinners as convicts, what if we used the image of junkies? What if we saw our sin, and the sin of others, as the addiction to, and pursuit of, things that don’t ultimately satisfy?
Here are the advantages that I find this in model. Firstly, it works on the level of our desires. It doesn’t condemn our desires, but it does recognize that our desires can be oriented toward things that satisfy and give life, and toward things that frustrate and bring death. The desires of the alcoholic, the meth-head, the binge-eater, the binge-watcher, the sexually promiscuous are not inherently evil, they are just pointed in the wrong direction. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us.” The remedy to sin then shifts from attempts to deny our desires (which really just intensifies them and makes us more secretive about them), to reorienting them towards the things that actually give life. The correction to my need for Mountain Dew wasn’t to stop drinking, but to switch to drinking water.
The second advantage I see is the recognition that sin is its own consequence. When I was a pastor a few years ago, a woman on meth wandered into our house led by her two young children. She was strung out and her children were hungry and dirty. My wife cleaned and fed the kids, and I talked with the woman. Eventually we contacted the police who brought the woman to the hospital and placed the kids in an emergency foster care house. I visited the woman in the hospital the next day. She was coming off her high and was filled with shame and guilt. She had endangered her children and they had been taken away from her, at least temporarily. The addiction was its own consequence. And this woman felt those consequences so profoundly because she truly loved her children. No talk of hellfire was needed. She was already immersed in the flames. What I attempted to offer her was the promise of forgiveness and the reality of grace. But how could a person in her position accept such mercy? Without a community of people to make it real to her day after day, to demonstrate mercy, grace, forgiveness in real tangible ways, I don’t know how it is possible.
A few months ago I heard a Christian author make the distinction between the Church as a law court, and the Church as a hospital for wounded souls. Most of the churches I’m familiar with function more like a law court. It shapes the way they read Scripture, theologize, and do outreach. I am deeply intrigued by the idea of the church as a hospital for wounded souls, or in terms of this post, a hospital for addicts to sin. A place where it is understood that sin is its own consequence and these consequences shape the world we live in. A place where we recognize that deep down our desires are not bad, they’re just disordered, oriented toward the wrong things. But that this disorder has harmful effects on ourselves, as well as the people and the world around us.
Philip Yancey once wrote that the church should be more like an AA meeting. A place where it is expected that people are coming in broken, that failure and relapse is part of the struggle, that we will only make progress by naming our lack of control and our inherent dependence on something greater, where we have examples to model our lives after, and those who are modeling their lives after us. This, it seems to me, is what discipleship should look like.
Hope in this model requires more than just getting the right laws in place, or getting more people into churches. These may be good things to pursue (emphasis on may be), but they can’t solve the fundamental problem. In fact, nothing can, apart from a dramatic inbreaking of God into this world. But this is really a far greater hope than we usually realize. The healing that awaits us in the New Creation goes above and beyond anything we can imagine. Our most peaceful, joyous and perfect moments here on earth are but a dim shadow of the life God created us for. Next to our future redeemed and reconciled selves, even the best of us live today as addicts, junkies strung out on a complex cocktail of death and disappointment, desperately seeking our next hit of something that will ultimately fail to satisfy. We were made for more than this.
You may rightly ask, “Who then can be saved?” It’s a fair question, but one that Jesus gave the definitive answer, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” There is always hope, but as they say in AA, the first step is admitting you have a problem.