2. What does the
Bible Say?
From What Happened to Sin?, by Seán Fagan. S.M.
The Columba Press, 2008.
However weak the sense of sin may be in the world or whatever the distorted notions of it to be found among Christians, one thing is clear. Evil or wrongdoing is described as sin only when it is understood as directed against God. This is a notion that comes from the Bible, where it is a basic concept in both Old and New Testaments. Before considering the areas of inadequacy or confusion in the modern understanding of sin, therefore, it will be necessary to see what the Bible has to say about it. But we must be careful how we interpret the Bible. It is a misleading oversimplification to think of the Bible as God’s revelation dictated to the sacred writers. It is more correctly understood as the written account of the religious experience of the Jewish people in the Old Testament and of the Christian communities in the New Testament. These writings are culturally conditioned and must not be interpreted in a fundamentalist way. They were divinely inspired in the sense that not only the experience, but the understanding and recording of it were under the influence of the Holy Spirit. That experience was primarily of the special relationship of intimacy to which they believed God had called and introduced them.
God’s love
It involved a world-view that saw the whole of creation, their political history and their personal lives as a working out of that relationship. For them, God was the infinitely-loving, ever-faithful Father who never went back on his word, who allowed them to renew the covenant he had made with them over and over again, in spite of their repeated infidelities. Down through the centuries they had gone ‘whoring after false gods’. The Old Testament is the record of their sins, their missing the mark, their continual failure to live up to what God wanted them to be. But it is also the story of God’s love, of his initiative in choosing them, and of his loving-kindness in continually caring for them, in spite of their failures. Sin is the foil which manifests God’s incredible goodness, his never-ending forgiveness.
Their experience of God reached its peak in their encounter with his incarnate son Jesus, and it is significant that his very name, as explained by Matthew, refers to the forgiveness of sins: ‘you shall call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins’ (1:21). He began his mission by a call to repentance: ‘be converted from your sins’. He spent much of his time with sinners and outcasts, and just before his death he summed up his mission in the sublime words: ‘This is my blood which seals God’s covenant, my blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mt 26:28). The good news preached by the early Church was not simply that Jesus had risen from the dead, but that in his death and resurrection he had overcome sin, that in him we have the forgiveness of our sins. We ask now: what does the Bible tell us about the nature of sin that it is such a fundamental concept?
God and sin
There is no special word in Hebrew for the theological notion of sin, but the Old Testament uses different words to describe what the Jewish people understood by sin. The most common is the verb meaning to ‘miss the mark’, not simply a mistake in judgement, but a failure to reach a goal, and this could also be a non-action, an omission. Other words used were iniquity, guilt, rebellion, disorder, abomination, lie, folly. From the contexts in which these words occur it is clear that sin was not simply the transgression of a law, but caused a break in the relationship between God and his people. Israel understood this relationship as a covenant, alliance or pact of love, initiated by God himself. Because of this special choice of God, they were his people and were expected to act as the people of God. The laws they devised for their conduct and for the ordering of their society, whether discovered through their own experience or borrowed from the surrounding peoples, were understood as the law of God, coming from God himself. Failure to observe them meant to miss the mark of God’s love. It meant to bring about iniquity, a deviation from how things ought to be, and this meant guilt, the distortion produced by sin. Guilt was thought of as a burden too heavy to bear, a rust that eats into a person’s soul and remains engraved on the sinner’s heart. The description of sin as rebellion is not to be understood in terms of today’s political relationships. In the ancient world the relationship between sovereign and servant was one of beneficence, so rebellion was ingratitude and personal insult, much like the rebellion of a child against the goodness of its parents. When sin is described as folly, this is not meant to excuse the sinner with a ‘fool’s pardon’. The word foolishness is used not to imply diminished responsibility, but to indicate that the sinner becomes foolish by his sin.
But the basic notion of sin throughout the Old Testament is that of a break in the relationship between God and his people. The relationship in question is not primarily between creator and creature, but that between the divine and human partners in a personal union, a mutual relationship of belonging. Israel actually experienced the ever-present love of God through the long years of its history, and in that sense knew God, as a wife knows her husband and is known by him. In the regular ceremonies for the renewal of the covenant, the people were sprinkled with the blood of the animal offered to God, to signify a kind of blood-relationship between God and his people, to emphasise that they were his family. But sin separates them from him. The prophet thundered: ‘It is your sins that separate you from God when you try to worship him. You are guilty of lying, violence, and murder’ (Isaiah 59:2-3). Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel describe the people’s sins as marital infidelity, disobedience, and pride. Though no action of the creature can really hurt the creator, Jeremiah speaks in God’s name with all the sorrow and heartbreak of a deserted husband:
My people, why do you turn away from me without ever turning back? You cling to your idols and refuse to return to me. I listened carefully, but you did not speak the truth. Not one of you has been sorry for his wickedness; not one of you has asked ‘What have I done wrong?’ Everyone keeps on going his own way, like a horse rushing into battle. Even storks know when it is time to return; doves, swallows, and thrushes know when it is time to migrate. But, my people, you do not know the laws by which I rule you. How can you say that you are wise, and that you know my laws? Look, the laws have been changed by dishonest scribes. Your wise men are put to shame; they are confused and trapped. They have rejected my words; what wisdom have they got now? (Jer. 8:5-9).
The New Testament
This is the background which the New Testament writers took for granted. They used the classical Greek noun hamartia and the verb hamartanein for sin, but turned them into theological terms by giving them a meaning not found in profane sources. To the Old Testament understanding they added new elements: that sin is not only an individual act, but also a state or condition, that it is a power at work in the world, but it is finally overcome by Jesus. Matthew, Mark and Luke have little to say abut sin, but it is significant that what they do have is usually in reference to forgiveness. They present Jesus as the friend of sinners, embodying by his patience, delicacy and tact, the mercy of God. In these gospels, it is made clear that ritual impurity is not a sin, that sins come from the heart and they alone defile a person (Mt 15:1819). Sin is compared to the wandering of a son from his father’s house (Lk 15:18), but he need only ask for forgiveness and he is immediately received back.
In the writings of John, sin is described as lawlessness, unrighteousness. He who sins is from the devil and is the slave of sin. Sin is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. The sinner loves darkness rather than the light. More often than not, John uses the word sin to describe a state rather than a single act.
The Greek word for sin occurs sixty times in the letters of Paul, and it is he who has the fullest theology of sin in the New Testament. For him, sin is universal, something in which every human being is involved. It is first and foremost a state or condition of human nature from which sinful acts come. It is a power which has us in its grip. We are ‘under sin’ in the same way that a child is said to be under its parents, or an army under its commander. Sin ‘lords it over us’ like a despot. Sin ‘takes us captive’ as prisoners are taken in war. It is not merely an external power, but gets right inside us, into our every fibre, so that we become the ‘slaves of sin’. But Paul also affirms our freedom in the face of sin. We can resist and overcome sin by Christ dwelling in our hearts, by his spirit taking possession of us (Rom 8:1-17). The New Testament speaks of the consequences of sin. Sin results in a hardening of the heart, a dulling of the moral sense, so that there is less and less reluctance to sin, and thus sin begets sin. It also results in ‘death’. According to Paul it was sin that brought death, both physical and spiritual, into the world. Finally, it brings eternal damnation. In Christ’s picture of the last judgement, the wicked are sent out of God’s sight: ‘Depart from me, you condemned’. Jesus himself speaks of the ‘unquenchable fire’ of Gehenna (Mk 9:43), of the ‘eternal punishment’ in store for sinners (Mt 25:46), and Paul warns of ‘the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from his glorious might’ (2 Thess 1:9). Of course these expressions, even from the lips of Jesus, are not to be taken literally in a fundamentalist sense, as we shall see in chapter 8.
Sins and sinfulness
Throughout the Bible, therefore, sin is taken seriously in all its aspects. It is not the mere transgression of a law, but a mysterious reality at work in the world, a dark power that can be overcome only by God himself, an evil that is finally conquered by the death of Christ. But this mysterious force is also described in terms of its concrete manifestations, in the sinful actions and omissions of individual people and of groups of people.
Though sin was always understood by the biblical writers as ‘against the Lord’, it was not restricted to religious failures in the narrow sense. It extended to all forms of selfishness, deceit, and exploitation. In the eighth century BC the prophet Amos was quite specific when, in the Lord’s name, he castigated Israel for their sins:
Listen to this, you that trample on the needy and try to destroy the poor of the country. You say to yourselves: ‘We can hardly wait for the holy days to be over so that we can sell our corn. When will the Sabbath end, so that we can start selling again? Then we can overcharge, use false measures, and tamper with the scales to cheat our customers. We can sell worthless wheat at a high price. We’ll find a poor man who can’t pay his debts, not even the price of a pair of sandals, and we’ll buy him as a slave’ (Amos 8:4-6).
Likewise, though the Bible speaks of individual sinful actions, it lays more stress on the sinful attitudes behind them. Paul told the Colossians: ‘You must put to death the earthly desires at work in you such as sexual immorality, indecency, lust, evil passions and greed (for greed is a form of idolatry)’ (Col 3:5).
Jesus made it quite clear that sin comes from the heart, that it is not a mere surface action: ‘The things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these are the things that make a person unclean. For from the heart come the evil ideas which lead people to kill, commit adultery, and do other immoral things: to rob, lie and slander others’ (Mt 15:18-19). Indeed, the greatest sin is the uncircumcised or stony heart, the hard, obdurate neck that makes people unteachable, impervious to God’s call, insensitive to a neighbour’s need.
Psychology of sin
The Bible is also quite perceptive on the basic psychology of sin. The third chapter of Genesis, interpreted by Paul and succeeding generations of Christians as a description of the first, or original, sin, is really the story of every sin. The early chapters of Genesis tell us nothing historically about the first humans or what happened at the beginning of time, but they give us the religious meaning of what is happening all the time, not just to the first humans but to all human beings throughout history. We know nothing of the historical condition of the first humans on earth (who appeared over 40,000 years ago), but the paradise story describes God’s plan for all people of all times. He created us ‘in his own image and likeness’. Our human nature is basically good. Male and female he created us and he sees that we are basically good, that until we mess things up we have no reason to hide or be ashamed. He shares with us his ‘dominion over all the creatures of the earth’. He invites us to intimacy with him, wishes to treat us as friends who ‘walk with him in the garden’. But sadly we are not satisfied simply to accept his goodness; we want to be like him in deciding for ourselves what is good or evil. The one thing we cannot have, to be gods, is the one thing we envy and want. This is the essence of all sin, to put self before God, to want something which is not ours, to want it so much that we ignore the consequences to ourselves or others. This, of course, is deception. We are blinded by our selfishness, and it is only afterwards that our eyes are opened, we discover that we are naked and have to hide, from God and from each other. Not only have we turned from God, but we are no longer at peace within ourselves, we are at odds with our neighbour and even the material world itself seems to turn sour on us.
The Vatican Council’s key document, on the Church in the Modern World, refers to this and relates it to all people:
People abused their freedom at the very beginning of history. They lifted themselves up against God and sought to attain their goal apart from him ... What revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when we look into our own heart we find that we are drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from our good creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as our source, we have also upset the relationship which should link us to our final destiny; and at the same time we have broken the right order that should reign within ourselves as well as between ourselves and other people and indeed all creatures. We are therefore divided within ourselves. As a result, our whole life, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness (GS 13).
Historical development
This is the concept of sin we get from the Bible: our refusal to live according to God’s plan, to behave as his children. Because of the special covenant of love which God had established with his chosen people, every deliberate failure to be fully human, to be hospitable, social and just was seen not simply as a misdemeanor, but as sin, as an offence against God himself. Of course, it would be an over-simplification to imagine that a theologically-refined notion of sin was present from the beginning of human history, that the concept had no historical development. In fact, all religion is historically and culturally conditioned. God’s word in the Bible comes to us in human words, and every word from the moment when humans first learned to speak is culturally conditioned, reflecting the experience and culture of the speakers.
There is no word of God in pure unadulterated form, a-temporal and a-cultural. The biblical descriptions of the creation of the world and the beginnings of the human race are not historical facts, literally true, but stories that teach profound religious truths dressed in the simple thought-patterns of primitive people.
The Israelite understanding of sin developed in keeping with their notion of God. The Jewish people had a special experience of God as a personal being who consecrated them as his chosen ones:
I am almighty God, obey me and always do what is right and I will make my covenant with you ... I will keep my promise to you and to your descendants in future generations as an everlasting covenant. I will be your God (Gen 17).
This is clear from the earliest of the sacred writings. But, just as every adult still carries within him the infant and adolescent he once was, the Israelites down through the centuries continued to be influenced by more primitive notions of an autocratic, enforcing God, a rewarding and punishing God, a God more interested in his own laws and decrees than in people. Keeping the law brought the material rewards of long life and wealth, while failure brought God’s punishment in the form of poverty, misfortune, sickness and death. The modern version of this attitude is the Christian who avoids sin primarily because of the fear of hell, or who does good ‘to get to heaven’. Besides, a shift of emphasis often took place. Since all laws (even of hygiene, social order and liturgical services) were interpreted as God’s laws, the Jewish religion was in constant danger of being reduced to legalistic formalism: law for its own sake, the letter of the law even at the expense of its spirit.
In this context, sin became an offence against the law rather than a break in one’s personal relationship with God. Though originally seen as God’s will, God’s word, mediating his love, the law at times became almost a barrier hiding the real God from his people. Since one was perfect by the observance of the law, especially as interpreted by the Pharisees, all who did not follow Pharisaic observances were deemed sinners, and in the time of Christ the great majority of simple country people who could not understand or even remember those observances were considered beyond redemption. This attitude trivialises the whole notion of sin, divorces it from responsible morality. Jesus reacted strongly against this legalistic approach and condemned the Pharisees for straining at gnats and swallowing camels whole. Speaking of the Sabbath observance, he reminded them that the law was made for people, not vice versa. Over-emphasis on law can stunt moral growth. There are still people today who see morality in terms of what is allowed or forbidden, who seldom ask why, who never wonder whether the laws in question are really God’s law in the particular circumstances.
Moral codes in the Bible?
This last point raises another important question with regard to what the Bible has to say about sin. When there is question of ‘God’s law’, we look to the Bible as the revelation of God’s will, expecting to find a code of revealed morality, God’s own list of what is right and wrong. This over-simplified approach has led to no small confusion in contemporary discussion of moral issues. Biblical quotations are used as arguments against, for example, masturbation, homosexuality and contraception, although it is quite clear that the biblical writers had no conception of these problems as understood today. This ‘fundamentalist’ approach to Scripture is not limited to ordinary Catholics, but is to be found even in official documents of the Church.
The clearest and simplest example is in Casti Connubii, Pope Pius Xl’s encyclical on marriage, referring to Genesis 38. The text says:
Those who, in performing the conjugal act, deliberately deprive it of its natural power and efficacy, act against nature and do something which is shameful and intrinsically immoral. We cannot wonder, then, if we find evidence in the Sacred Scriptures that the Divine Majesty detests this unspeakable crime with the deepest hatred and has sometimes punished it with death, as St. Augustine observes: ‘Sexual intercourse even with a lawful wife is unlawful and shameful if the conception of offspring is prevented. This is what Onan, the son of Juda, did, and on that account God put him to death’ (nn. 54-55).
The text referred to here describes how Onan, in fulfilment of the levirate law, should have raised up children for his dead brother by sleeping with his sister-in-law, but instead spilled his semen on the ground every time he had intercourse with her. Scripture scholars have long since shown that this text says nothing whatever about sexual morality as such; it condemns Onan for his failure to carry out his duty to his dead brother. None of the more recent Vatican documents quote this text when discussing contraception, but neither have they ever explained that Pius XI was simply wrong. This kind of ‘reform by amnesia’ does real harm to the credibility of ‘Church teaching’.
The mere fact that a particular practice is related in the Bible as ‘God’s law’ does not mean that it is still binding on today’s Christians. In fact, those who quote scriptural texts as the primary basis to approve or condemn various kinds of human behaviour today must read the Bible very selectively. In the Genesis story, Onan is condemned by God for not doing what would be regarded today as totally immoral, namely having an adulterous relationship with his sister-in-law, Tamar. Furthermore, God’s design in the story is realised by Tamar tempting her father-in-law into having intercourse with her by pretending to be a prostitute. This is only one of the many cases in the Bible where incest, fornication, polygamy, deceit, etc. are presented as part of the divine plan. The same chapter of Deuteronomy which formulates the levirate law obliging a man to sleep with the wife of his dead brother and produce children for him, also has Moses, in God’s name, commanding: ‘If two men are having a fight and the wife of one tries to help her husband by grabbing hold of the other man’s genitals, show her no mercy; cut off her hand’ (Deut 25:11).
Even in the matter of obedience there is a Bible text which is revolting to a modern Christian conscience. As lawgiver speaking in God’s name, Moses commands:
Suppose a man has a son who is stubborn and rebellious, a son who will not obey his parents, even though they punish him. His parents are to take him before the leaders of the town where he lives and make him stand trial. They are to say to them: ‘Our son is stubborn and rebellious and refuses to obey us; he wastes money and is a drunkard.’ Then the men of the city are to stone him to death, and so you will get rid of this evil. Everyone in Israel will hear what has happened and be afraid (Deut 21:18-21).
Old Testament law strictly forbade sexual intercourse during the seven days of the menstrual period, and anyone in violation was to be ‘extirpated’, executed by stoning, burning, strangling or flogging. The punishment for adultery was death by stoning for both the man and the woman (Deut 22:22) and a woman found not to be a virgin on her marriage night was to be stoned to death by the men of her town (Deut 22:21).
The Ten Commandments
Of course, common sense will immediately see that these barbaric precepts can in no way be accepted as ‘God’s law’. But the traditionally-minded will go on to explain that we must distinguish between man-made laws which reflect the mentality of a particular age and culture (like those just quoted) and the revealed law of God as expressed in the Ten Commandments. Certainly, there are distinctions to be made between the meaning and importance of different biblical texts, but it does not follow that we can find in the Bible a literal code of ‘revealed morality’ handed down by God himself, a list of moral laws directly revealed. Most people are aware that the story of Moses being given the stone tablets containing the Decalogue on Mount Sinai is not to be taken literally, but how many realise that, in terms of material content, most of the Ten Commandments were widely known centuries earlier by non-Israelite peoples, and were the common law of Mesopotamia? In formulating the Decalogue, the Israelites drew on the accumulated wisdom of the surrounding peoples as well as on their own experience. Their laws reflect popular morality of the time, and derive from a variety of circumstances and backgrounds. Scripture scholars tell us that in the early history of Israel, the common law concerning the institution of marriage was not very different from what it was in the neighbouring civilisations. Polygamy, legalised concubinage, divorce prevailed there as elsewhere. There was no sociological break with the rest of the ancient Near East. The only real distinction was the specifically religious one, namely the basic values of the society and its understanding of God.
This applies also to the New Testament. Jesus left no detailed code of morality, so Paul and the early Christian communities simply fell back on the moral codes current at the time, which happened to come from the Stoic philosophers. The lists of virtues and vices in Paul’s letters are largely the household rules common in his day (Col 3:18-4:1; Ephes 5:22-6:9; 1 Cor 6:9-10). What is special to Paul and the other New Testament writers is the new context in which they presented these lists. The vices and virtues then current in the Greek world were used to describe what is opposed to ‘life in the Spirit’ and what are the fruits of the Spirit for one who is ‘in Christ’ (Gal 5:1,2,6,16-25). The New Testament, therefore, cannot give us a direct and simple answer to modern problems like the oil crisis, inflation and poverty, racial conflict, ecology, social justice, birth control, homosexuality, stem-cell research.
Insights from Scripture
The question then arises: if it is a mistake to go to the Bible for ‘new bits of morality’, specific moral laws directly revealed by God, how are we to use Sacred Scripture in our understanding of morality, or why bother with the Bible at all? There are many things we find in Scripture to inspire and enlighten us in deciding moral issues: God’s parenthood and the consequent fact that we are all brothers and sisters in God’s holy family, infinitely and equally precious in his sight; the goodness of creation; the world entrusted to our stewardship and responsibility; God’s care for all, especially the weak; the dignity of each human person, created in the image and likeness of God; God’s patience and never-ending forgiveness; the example of Jesus in his relation to his Father and in his total availability to all people without distinction; his attitude to evil and his acceptance of the cross; the sermon on the mount; the beatitudes; God’s will for the salvation of all people. Any number of insights or themes can be gleaned from the Bible to influence us in our approach to moral problems, to sensitise us to certain values, to colour our outlook and attitude to daily life. We can also be enlightened and helped by studying how the people of God in times past dealt with particular problems, in both Old and New Testaments. But their solutions cannot be the last word for us. In the Bible we can find some concern about fundamental human values, the same values to which we ourselves subscribe. But something else altogether is the Bible’s description of historically dated attempts to enshrine these values in laws for human behaviour.
The values are still meaningful and binding, but some of the laws embodying them have little meaning in today’s world. Even the values themselves have undergone a change in many cases. For example, we still think that hospitality is a high moral value, but we shrink from the way Lot sacrificed his daughters for the sake of it. When the men of Sodom wanted to have their way with his two visitors, Lot entreated them:
Friends, don’t do such a wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who are still virgins. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do whatever you want with them. But don’t do anything to these men; they are guests in my house, and I must protect them (Gen 19:7-8).
These changes of attitude and understanding are not arbitrary, but are part of the normal process of human growth. From the time of Abraham or Jesus to our own day, there has been considerable development in the conscience of people, without extra bits of directly revealed moral knowledge. The prophets could summon the people of God to a holy war to exterminate enemies, including women and children, and Paul would be surprised at our modern abhorrence of slavery. For centuries popes, bishops and monasteries kept slaves without the slightest scruple. But today’s Christians cannot afford to feel too superior, since we still have a long way to go in acknowledging in practice the full human rights of women, homosexuals, etc.
Why quote Paul to the effect that homosexuals are excluded from the kingdom of heaven (e.g. 1 Cor 6:9), and forget that the Bible also says that ‘women are not to wear men’s clothing, and men are not to wear women’s clothing; the Lord your God hates people who do such things’ (Deut 21:5)? This is not meant as petty criticism of the biblical writers, but simply to make the point that the word of the Bible alone cannot give us God’s revealed solution to a moral problem. People were confused when preachers labelled things as sins on the basis of a few words from Scripture, and until recently they felt disloyal and guilty when tempted to criticise the preacher or the Church. We are simply asking the wrong question when we ask: what does God say? and then search the Scriptures for the appropriate quotation.
In fact, Jesus himself rejected the formal authority of the Scriptures as absolutely binding. Interpreting Scripture for his hearers, he did not treat it like other rabbis, drawing out its every implication, but instead opposed one passage with another to show what God’s will meant in the present. The people of God in the Old Testament were not handed a code of morality from heaven, but had to discover and formulate it in the course of their experience, according to the varying circumstances of their lives. They refined and perfected it through the centuries. At times it lagged behind that of their pagan neighbours in some respects, while in others it reflected a more refined moral sense. The essential difference between their code and that of their neighbours was not that one was revealed and the other not. In terms of material content, they were practically the same. The distinguishing feature of the Jewish Decalogue was its religious meaning and context. For the Israelites, the Ten Commandments were not simply the rules for peaceful living in community, but the consequence of their being specially chosen by God, their response to his loving initiative in making them his chosen people. The commandments were the concrete expression of the way of life implied in the covenant situation of the whole people of Israel. In this context, the people came to see them, not as discovered by human wisdom through the ages, but as God’s gift to them, and in that sense ‘revealed’.
Bible not the last word
The Commandments themselves are quite general and flexible. They were sufficient for the needs of a simple nomadic people. But with the growing complexities of agricultural and town life, they needed to be further spelled out. Hence the proliferation of Old Testament laws. But these laws all reflected the circumstances and understanding of their times. Thus, for example, some of the laws governing sexuality are more concerned with justice, with the rights of husband and father, than with sexual life as such, and they consider the woman more a possession of man than a person in her own right. The same is true of the New Testament. Many of its moral precepts are coloured by the culture of the period. Our task is to disentangle the basic Christian attitudes and principles from the particular form in which they are embodied and presented. Jesus did not leave a detailed code of morality, and the New Testament writers did not adhere rigidly to the letter of what he said. Rather, they interpreted, adapted and applied his sayings to new situations. The early Christian communities had to formulate their own specific moral rules in the light of the new life in Christ which they believed they were called to live. The life and words of Jesus would always be a special challenge and example, but faith in him could never dispense his followers from the continuing search for God’s will in the concrete. The same is true today. A Bible quotation can never solve a moral problem or end a discussion. The Christian community of today may get special help from the words of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments. It will be enlightened, encouraged and strengthened by the presence of the Risen Christ and his Spirit in its midst. But it still has to discover the appropriate rules to meet new situations and needs, to discern God’s will in the present.
Sin outside the Church
The question: what does the Bible say about sin? could give the impression that sin is a reality only for believers. This is not the case. Sin is a reality for all people, just as redemption and grace are for all. The word sin is not used apart from a religious context, so unbelievers do not normally describe evil-doing as sin. Without belief in a personal God, they cannot see that their misdeeds are a break in the relationship with him. But it does not follow that the reality covered by the word ‘sin’ has no place in their lives. They are all part of God’s plan of salvation. The Bible tells us of God’s infinite love for all people. To make explicit his plan for humanity, he chose a special people to be the vehicle of his revelation and self-gift. In the Old Testament he chose a handful of nomads and fashioned them into a people, a close-knit community whom he set apart and consecrated for himself. They in turn consecrated themselves to him by accepting to be his people as he was their God. In founding his Church, Christ renewed the covenant God had made with his people. In fact he made a new covenant, so that the Church is the new people of God. The Christian community is a people consecrated by God in baptism, specially marked and set aside for a purpose in the world ¾ to be his witnesses, a sacrament or sign of his presence among human beings, not just a sign pointing elsewhere, but an efficacious sign making his presence a here-and-now reality for those who believe. Christians respond to this call by consecrating themselves to him, accepting the challenge to be his witnesses, to try to reproduce in the world something of the life of Christ himself, individually and in community.
But the difference between them and the rest of humanity is not that God is present to them and not to the others, that they have grace and salvation denied to outsiders. The difference, rather, is between explicit and implicit. God is doing explicitly in the Church what he is doing implicitly in the world at large. There is no world of ‘mere nature’, cut off from the supernatural world of God. God and his love and salvation are involved in the whole human world. In the depths of their conscience, all people are called to be good, to be fully human, to grow into the fullness of the maturity of Christ. Christians know this explicitly. Others hear it implicitly in the moral demands of their conscience, and they have the freedom to accept or reject it. To the extent that they respond to this call in fidelity to their conscience, that they go beyond their own selfishness and reach out to others in genuine concern, they are implicitly responding to God and thus growing in the Christ-life, even though the circumstances of their lives may cut them off from any explicit knowledge of God or Christ. Their moral consciousness can develop to a point at which it passes implicitly into religious consciousness, even without their being aware of it. Thus, there can be an implicit awareness of the divine reality even in some persons who profess themselves atheists. Such people are often called ‘anonymous Christians’. Their morally good behaviour, therefore, is a growth in Christ and grace, and their evil deeds are sins, though of course they themselves would not describe them as such. There are many people who know little of Christianity but live God-filled lives that are the equal of our canonised saints.
In our discussion of the various factors affecting people’s notion of sin in the following chapters, we confine ourselves to those who have a religious context to give meaning to the term. But this should not allow us to forget that non-believers can sin and are caught up in the mystery of sin in the world. On the other hand, we need to be reminded that if we speak of ‘anonymous Christians’ in the world outside the Church, there are also a number of ‘anonymous pagans’ in the midst of our Christian communities. If ‘belief’ is to be measured by real commitment to Christ and his gospel rather than by pious practices and mere surface attachment to a Church, the line between belief and unbelief may pass through each one of us rather than between classes of people. For that matter, the line between saint and sinner is not simply a division between two groups, but passes through each individual heart, since each one of us is a bit of both. This should cause no surprise, since every Christian is a sinner who is called to be a saint.