Sin. A word that has various understandings within the church; particularly the church of the 21^st century. I would imagine that most in the churches have a rather elementary grasp on what sin entails. For those who have thought about it more deeply, even they would have variance on the way they understand sin’s impact upon the human being. Some might think of its affect in terms of a disease that might need to be cured; others as utter death that leaves the human being in a totally incapacitated state left to themselves; and maybe for others, somewhere in between the two poles just mentioned. No matter what someone’s position on sin is it often seems that, even in the best of cases, they attempt to define what sin is in rather abstract, or I suppose, literary ways alone. Indeed, appealing to Scripture seems like the best way to come to an understanding of what sin entails, but literary studies, I would argue, will not give us the depth dimension of sin and its impact. We clearly must engage with Holy Scripture’s teaching on what sin is and does, but I would contest that if we simply attempt to define sin’s heft in that way alone, that we will not arrive at a proper understanding of sin’s reality. The Apostle Paul doesn’t actually think sin from abstraction; can you guess where he thinks it from?

Paul, as with everything, defines sin’s height and depth from, you guessed it: Jesus Christ.[1] If we think sin and σάρξ (transliterated: sarx), or Paul’s frequent usage of ‘flesh’ together, what we quickly come to realize is that sin has penetrated into the very depths of what it means to be human; it has devolved us from beings capable of having a right relationship and fellowship with the living God (which is what it means to be human for us), to a status that has become sub-human, or out of koinonia/fellowship with Yahweh, the triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we think sin, as Paul does, from what it took for God to re-concile us unto Himself, through the enfleshment of the Son, His death, burial and resurrection, then we will come to have a greater appreciation of what God has accomplished for us; and just how utterly wicked and evil our hearts actually are. Douglas Campbell explains it this way as he is describing how the Apostle Paul thinks on these things:

The seriousness of Paul’s account of human wrongdoing here needs to be noted. If sin is just a series of bad choices that proceed from a fundamentally healthy nature, then Jesus needs to provide only a clear example of how to behave, along with some additional teaching about right acting. That he had to die, executing our condition, then resurrecting human nature in a new form, suggests that there was something irredeemably corrupt and contaminated in the old one. As some scholars would put it, our problem is radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), suggesting that our problem goes down into the very roots of our nature.[2]

In other words, sin does something ontological to human nature. As Athanasius and even Maximus the Confessor argue, human beings, apart from the redeemed humanity of Jesus Christ are sub-human. This does not mean that the mass of humanity has no value; it simply notes that without Christ for us we are not living out what it means to be creationally human. It presupposes that humanity has an anchor outside of itself; that it has an image it was originally created in, and then recreated in. To be human in the economy of God’s Kingdom in Christ is to be ‘lifted up’ and seated at the Right Hand of the Father in participation with the humanity of Jesus Christ.

As Campbell’s explanation should make clear: For the Apostle Paul, if it required God to become human, and be executed in our stead, then humanity apart from this gracious work is in a status that is inconceivably mal (bad) before God (coram Deo). We are in a place where our ontology is jacked up; which means that our epistemology is jacked up; which means that our practice and function as homo sapiens is going to be utterly jacked up all the way down. If nothing else, there is more empirical evidence for this truth, about sin and the human condition, than any other field of inquiry. True, from within this ‘fallen’ state humanity will attempt to say that the crooked is straight / the straight is crooked, but even in this state we can see how destructive (even by just looking at the stats) living this way actually is.

The cross of Jesus Christ executes this sinful status, and raises up a glorified Christ in whom God’s Kingdom is rightly framed. A Kingdom wherein “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”[3] Jesus Christ lives that Kingdom for us now, and He breaks into our lives moment by moment letting us know that His Kingdom has come, and is coming; a Kingdom that, at a root level, has reversed the human nature unto the status that the Living and Holy God has always envisioned for it; a status that finds its very lifeblood in Immanuel’s veins; a status, that is exalted and highly lifted up participating in the eternal and triune life of God; a status that this world system, left to its own fallen devices, has no place within—but Christ.

I will be writing more on this topic in days to come. I want to talk about how ‘sin’ impacts salvation theories (soteriology), and its related theme: theological-anthropology. There are, of course, constant debates about what is called total depravity and total inability, so on and so forth. But I think those debates are given orientation by too much of an abstract (from Christ) notion of what sin actually is and does. If we think sin from Christ, and all its organic lineaments, we will arrive, I think, at very different theological categories and ways of thinking than the so called classical discussions have given us in this regard. But we will visit this discussion later. In this post I simply wanted to clear my throat a bit, and let Campbell provide a brief and precise explanation of how sin functions in the theology of Paul the Apostle. This throat clearing exercise will be instructive for later discussions on sin.

[1] Karl Barth is famously known for thinking sin from Christ.

[2] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 116, n.7.

[3] Revelation 21:4, KJV.