Sin and Its Consequences

The Bible has no single word for sin. It has a family of them, and translating them all with one English word is one of the things that makes the doctrine harder to teach than it should be. Start with the three Hebrew terms that keep appearing together, in Exodus 34:7, in Leviticus 16:21, and in Psalm 51:1-5.

Chata, with its noun chattath, has to do with missing. Judges 20:16 describes seven hundred left-handed Benjaminite slingers, every one of whom could sling a stone at a hair without missing, using this verb; Proverbs 19:2 says that he who hurries his footsteps misses the mark. The picture is of an aim not reached, a target not hit, a road not found. And then note something the English cannot show: the same noun chattath also means the sin offering, all through Leviticus 4. One word names the failure and the sacrifice that answers it, which is worth a sermon on its own.

Pesha is a political word before it is a religious one. In 1 Kings 12:19, after the northern tribes break away, the narrator says that Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day, and 2 Kings 8:20 says the same of Edom rebelling against Judah. It is the breaking of a bond by a party who owed loyalty. When Amos opens his book with the transgressions of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre and finally Israel, this is the word, and the accusation is not that they missed a target but that they broke faith. Pesha is the word for covenant-breach, and the personal dimension is built into it: you cannot rebel against a standard, only against someone.

Avon comes from a root to do with bending or twisting, and its range is the most theologically interesting of the three, because one word carries three things that English separates. It can name the crookedness of the act. It can name the guilt the act incurs. And it can name the punishment the guilt attracts. Genesis 4:13 is the clean example: Cain says his avon is greater than he can bear, and translations divide between punishment and guilt because the Hebrew does not. The BSB prints 'punishment' and adds a footnote offering 'guilt or sin', which shows the choice being made in front of you. Isaiah 53:6 says the LORD laid on the servant the avon of us all (the BSB capitalises 'Him', which is the translators' reading of the servant as Christ; the Hebrew has no capitals, and Jewish readers and many scholars take the servant to be Israel or the prophet, so the word study here does not depend on settling who he is), and Leviticus 16:22 has the goat bearing all their avon into the wilderness, where the word has to be carrying act, guilt and penalty together for the image to work. When a theologian says that guilt and punishment are not separable in Hebrew thought, this is the word he is thinking of.

The Greek words inherit much of this and add their own. Hamartia is the general term, the Septuagint's usual rendering of chattath, and it carries the same range of failure, offence and, in Paul, a great deal more. Anomia is lawlessness, literally the absence or violation of law, and 1 John 3:4 uses it to define: everyone who practices sin practices lawlessness as well, and sin is lawlessness. It is what Jesus calls the workers of lawlessness at Matthew 7:23, and it names sin as disorder, a life outside the pattern that ought to govern it. Paraptoma is a false step or a lapse, and its feel is different again: Galatians 6:1 speaks of anyone caught in a paraptoma, and prescribes restoration by the spiritual in a spirit of gentleness, which is not the tone anyone takes towards anomia. Paul uses paraptoma repeatedly in Romans 5 for Adam's trespass, and Matthew 6:14-15 uses it for what we forgive one another.

One warning belongs with all of this, and the Hermeneutics track already gave it to you. The root meaning of a word is not its definition. Preaching that sin means missing the mark, as though that were the Bible's doctrine of sin, commits the etymological fallacy: it takes a picture buried in a word's history and treats it as the content of every use. James Barr dismantled a great deal of that kind of word study in The Semantics of Biblical Language in 1961, and D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies is the short modern guide. What the six words are good for is not definition but range. They show you that scripture describes sin as failure, as revolt, as crookedness that carries its own weight, as disorder and as a stumble, and that a doctrine built on any one of them alone will be too small.

Sin as an act is the easiest of the three and needs least defending. It is what a person does, and scripture names particular deeds without embarrassment throughout. 1 John 3:4 defines in terms of acts. Genesis 4:7 has sin crouching at the door for Cain, and the remedy offered is that he must master it. Every list of commandments assumes that sins are things that get done, and every call to repentance assumes they can be stopped.

Sin as a state is the doctrine of the previous lesson applied to the individual. A person does not begin neutral and become a sinner by sinning; the acts come out of a condition. Psalm 51:5 says the psalmist was brought forth in iniquity, and the BSB adds 'I was sinful when my mother conceived me', which states outright a reading the Hebrew leaves more open, as the previous lesson noted. Romans 7:17 and 7:20 speak of sin living in me. Jesus in Mark 7:21-23 locates the source inside, in the heart, and lists what comes out of it. The state is why the biblical remedy is never simply better effort, and it is why the New Testament's language for salvation includes being born again, made alive, given a new heart and made a new creation rather than only being pardoned.

Sin as a power is the one most often missed, and Romans 6 and 7 are full of it. Read those two chapters watching only for the grammar. Sin reigns, at 5:21 and 6:12. Sin acts as master, and Paul promises at 6:14 that it will not: 'For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.' People are slaves of sin at 6:17 and 6:20 and are set free from it at 6:18 and 6:22. The old self was crucified so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, at 6:6. Sin lives in a person at 7:17 and 7:20. Sin seizes its opportunity through the commandment, produces covetousness, deceives and kills, at 7:8 and 7:11. In every one of those, hamartia is the grammatical subject doing something to people, usually with the definite article, and Paul writes about it the way he would write about a slave owner or a king. Jesus says the same thing more briefly at John 8:34, that everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and Galatians 3:22 says the Scripture pronounces all things confined by sin.

Ernst Kasemann pressed this reading hard in the mid-twentieth century, arguing that Paul's anthropology is not about the individual's inner life at all but about lordship: a human being always belongs to a power, and the gospel is a transfer of dominion from one lord to another. More recently Beverly Gaventa has developed the point in her work on Romans, treating Sin as one of the enslaving powers, along with Death, that God acts in Christ to defeat. This is not an eccentric reading; it is an observation about which words are the subjects of which verbs. Its value for a teacher is immediate. A congregation told only that sin is what they do will hear the gospel as a demand for improvement. A congregation shown that sin is also something that holds them will hear it as a rescue, which is how Romans 6 presents it.

Romans 7 raises a famous question this lesson will name and not settle, because it is genuinely open. Who is the I of verses 14 to 25, saying 'For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do'? Three answers are held by serious readers. It may be Paul describing his own pre-Christian experience, seen in retrospect, which was the common patristic reading and Augustine's own earlier one. It may be the Christian's continuing experience, which is Augustine's mature position and the standard Lutheran and Reformed reading, and it is why Luther's formula simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner, is usually anchored here. Or the I may be rhetorical, a figure adopted to speak for Israel under the law or for humanity in Adam, which Werner Georg Kummel argued in 1929 and which Douglas Moo, James Dunn and N. T. Wright have developed in different directions. The present tense in verses 14 to 25 tells for the second, the past tense of verses 7 to 13 and the triumph of chapter 8 tell against it, and the honest answer is that the commentaries divide and always have.

One further note, because it touches a real division. The Lutheran simul is a claim that the justified person is genuinely righteous in Christ and genuinely still a sinner in himself, both fully and at the same time. Catholic theology has traditionally held that justification really makes a person just, so that what remains in the baptised is concupiscence, which comes from sin and inclines to sin but is not itself properly sin. That disagreement was addressed directly in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1999, agreed between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, which states the common ground about the continuing opposition to God in the justified and records that the two sides still describe it differently. If you teach the simul, teach it knowing that a careful Catholic reader has a considered answer to it and that the two churches have said in writing how far they agree.

Sin has more than one consequence, and running them together is one of the commonest failures in preaching. Three are distinct in scripture and each has its own vocabulary and its own remedy.

Guilt is a verdict about what I have done. It is forensic, it belongs in a courtroom, and its language is law, charge, accountability and acquittal. Romans 3:19 says the law speaks so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Psalm 51:4 confesses Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight. The remedy for guilt is forgiveness and justification, a verdict reversed, and this is the consequence that Western theology since Anselm has treated as the main event.

Shame is a verdict about who I am in the eyes of others. It is not the same thing at all: guilt says I did wrong, shame says I am exposed, diminished, no longer able to show my face. Look again at Genesis 3, because the narrative is explicit about the order. Before the eating, the man and his wife were naked and not ashamed. After it, their eyes are opened, they know they are naked, they sew coverings and they hide, and when God calls, the man's own explanation at 3:10 is that he was afraid because he was naked, so he hid. The first reported consequence in scripture's first account of sin is shame, and nobody mentions guilt until God speaks. The rest of the Bible keeps the thread. Ezra says he is ashamed and embarrassed to lift his face to God. The Psalms plead again and again not to be put to shame. Isaiah 54:4 tells Zion not to be afraid, for she will not be put to shame. Romans 10:11 promises that anyone who believes in Him will never be put to shame, and Hebrews 12:2 says Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame. The remedy for shame is not acquittal; it is honour, welcome, being named as a son or daughter and seated at a table.

Defilement is a third thing again: not what I did and not how I am seen, but what I have become, contaminated, unfit to approach. This is the whole idiom of Leviticus, with its clean and unclean, its washings and its sprinklings. Isaiah 6:5 cries woe because he is a man of unclean lips, and the coal touches his mouth. Psalm 51:7 asks to be purified with hyssop and washed whiter than snow. Hebrews 9:14 says Christ's blood purifies our consciences, and Hebrews 10:22 speaks of hearts sprinkled to cleanse a guilty conscience and bodies washed with pure water. 1 John 1:7 says his blood cleanses from all sin. The remedy for defilement is cleansing, and a person who feels dirty is not helped by being told he is pardoned.

Now the cultural point, and it is not a decoration on this lesson. Anthropologists since Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1946 have distinguished cultures in which social control runs mainly through guilt from those in which it runs mainly through shame, and later writers, among them Roland Muller and Jayson Georges, added a third in which the governing category is fear and power. The rough generalisation is that Western societies since the Reformation have been unusually guilt-oriented, and that most of the rest of the world, including most of the societies the biblical writers lived in, organises moral life around honour and shame. Missiological writers have built on this: Mark Baker and Joel Green in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, Jackson Wu on Chinese contexts, Bruce Malina on the Mediterranean world of the New Testament.

Take the caution with it. The three-culture typology is a heuristic and not a taxonomy. Anthropologists have criticised it for treating whole societies as single types when every society contains all three, and Benedict herself wrote her book during a war, without ever setting foot in the country she was analysing. Used carelessly it becomes a way of telling people what their culture is instead of listening to them.

Used carefully it does real work, and for the students of this school it does more work than for most. If you are reading this in Nigeria, the Philippines, Egypt, India or Guatemala, you very likely live where being disgraced before your family and community is a heavier reality than being declared guilty in a court, and the gospel presentation you were handed by a Western mission may have answered a question nobody around you was asking. The point is not that guilt is a Western invention. Romans 3 is not culturally optional and the courtroom is genuinely in the text. The point is that the Bible supplies all three sets of vocabulary because it addresses all three consequences, and a preacher who has only one of them is working with a third of his material. Teach the crucifixion as the place where the guilty are acquitted, the shamed are honoured and the unclean are washed, because the New Testament says all three, and let the emphasis fall where the person in front of you actually hurts.

Is there such a thing as sin that belongs to a structure rather than to a person? The argument is live, it runs along political lines that make both sides suspicious of each other, and both sides have texts. Take it in that order.

The case for the category begins with the prophets, and it is stronger than its critics usually allow. Isaiah 10:1-2 pronounces woe on those who enact unjust statutes and issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of fair treatment and withhold justice from the oppressed: the object of the woe is legislation. Amos 5:10-12 condemns those who hate the one who reproves in the gate, who oppress the righteous by taking bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the gate, which is a judicial system. Micah 2:1-2 describes men who plot evil on their beds and at morning's light accomplish it because the power is in their hands, who covet fields and seize them, which is a property regime. Micah 6:10-11 names the short ephah, dishonest scales and bags of false weights, which is a market. Ezekiel 16:49 defines the iniquity of Sodom as arrogance, being overfed and complacent, and not helping the poor and needy, which is not an act but a way of life shared by a city. Beyond the prophets, Daniel 9 and Nehemiah 9 have righteous men confessing, in the first person plural, sins committed by generations they never met, and Joshua 7 has Achan's act bring consequences on a whole army. In the New Testament, Paul's language of the principalities and powers, at Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 2:15, has been read since Hendrik Berkhof's Christ and the Powers in 1953 and Walter Wink's trilogy as naming the spiritual interiority of institutions, which are created good, become idolatrous, and hold people under obligations no individual chose. Catholic social teaching has used the category formally: John Paul II wrote of structures of sin in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia in 1984 and in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis in 1987, and the Catechism at 1869 speaks of social situations and institutions contrary to God's goodness. Latin American liberation theology, from Gustavo Gutierrez onwards and in the conclusions of the Medellin conference of 1968, made the category central, speaking of institutionalised violence.

The case against is not a refusal to care about injustice, and anyone who presents it that way has not listened to it. It runs like this. In scripture sin is always finally attached to agents who can be addressed, who can repent and who can be forgiven, and a structure can do none of the three: you cannot preach to a tax code. Every one of the prophetic texts above is addressed to people, the ones who write the decrees and hold the scales and take the bribes, which is exactly what you would expect if the wrong is being done by persons through institutions rather than by institutions as such. Second, the category has a known failure mode, which is the dissolution of personal responsibility: if my sin is the system's, I am a product rather than an agent, and the pastoral effect is the one Pelagius was complaining about in Rome. Third, it can be used to assign guilt by category, so that a person is answerable for what people like him have done, which is precisely what Ezekiel 18:20 forbids and what Deuteronomy 24:16 rules out in law. Fourth, critics argue that the analytic apparatus, the idea that structures have interests and generate consciousness, comes from nineteenth and twentieth-century social theory rather than from scripture, and that importing it smuggles in a whole account of society under cover of a biblical word.

Each side answers the other, and the answers are worth having. Defenders reply that nobody claims a structure is a guilty subject in the way a person is, and that the careful formulations say so explicitly: John Paul II insists in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia that structures of sin are always rooted in personal sins and reducible to them, which is a limit set from inside the tradition that uses the term. They add that the confessions in Daniel and Nehemiah are hard to fit into a purely individual account, and that Ephesians 6:12 says our struggle is not against flesh and blood, which at least resists reduction. Critics reply that if the category is that carefully limited it is doing less work than the rhetoric suggests, and that in actual use the limits are usually dropped.

Say what is settled and what is not, because the settled part is large and often lost in the argument. It is not in dispute that scripture condemns corrupt courts, rigged scales, oppressive laws and a comfortable society that ignores the poor, and that it holds nations and cities accountable as wholes. Anyone who says the Bible addresses only private morality has not read the prophets. It is also not in dispute that individuals remain answerable for their own acts and that Ezekiel 18 means what it says. What is disputed is whether structural sin names a genuinely distinct kind of sin, with its own subject and its own guilt, or whether it is a useful shorthand for the accumulated and institutionalised sins of persons. That is the real question, it has not been settled, and you should be able to argue it from either side.

In 1524 Erasmus of Rotterdam published a short book on free choice, and in 1525 Luther answered it with a long one. The exchange is the sharpest statement of this module's central question that the church possesses, and it is routinely misrepresented on both sides, so take each man in his own words.

Erasmus called his book a diatribe, meaning a discussion, and the title tells you his posture. He defines free choice as a power of the human will by which a person may apply himself to the things that lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them. That is a modest claim and he knew it: he assigns the overwhelming share of the work to grace and insists he is not saying a person saves himself. His argument has three parts. Scripture is full of commands, exhortations, promises and threats, and he presses that these presuppose someone able to respond; his principal proof text is Sirach 15:14-17, that God made man from the beginning and left him in the hand of his own counsel, and he adds Deuteronomy 30:15-19, Genesis 4:7, Isaiah 1:19 and Matthew 23:37. Second, the passages on both sides are genuinely obscure, and where scripture is obscure a Christian may suspend judgment; Erasmus preferred the sceptic's reserve and said so. Third, and most characteristically, some questions should not be shouted before a crowd, because a doctrine of total inability will be heard by ordinary people as permission. The named weakness of his case is twofold and both halves were pressed at the time: his central proof text is from Sirach, which Luther did not accept as canonical, so the argument's foundation was not common ground; and his definition of applying oneself is vague enough that Luther complained he could not tell what was being claimed.

Luther's reply, On the Bondage of the Will, opens by thanking Erasmus, and the compliment is real and important. He says that Erasmus alone has gone for the vital spot, the hinge on which everything turns, instead of wearying him with side issues about indulgences and papacies. His position: the fallen will is genuinely a will, and it chooses freely in the things below it, but towards God it is not free, because it is bound by what it loves. His image is a beast of burden ridden either by God or by Satan, and unable to choose its rider or to run to either; the riders contend over it. He distinguishes necessity from compulsion: the sinner is not dragged unwillingly, but sins willingly, which is why he is answerable. And he presses the texts Erasmus's scheme has to absorb: John 15:5, apart from me you can do nothing; John 6:44, no one can come unless the Father draws him; Ephesians 2:1-5, dead in trespasses and made alive; and the whole of Romans 9, with Pharaoh's hardening at Exodus 9:12. The named weakness of his case is also twofold. His statements about necessity run close to determinism and were read that way by his opponents. And he says openly that God works in the wicked, handling it with a distinction between God preached, whom we may know in Christ, and God hidden, into whose will we must not inquire, and admitting that at this point reason must be silent. Many readers, including sympathetic ones, find that a place where the argument stops rather than resolves.

The aftermath matters as much as the books. Erasmus replied in two parts, the Hyperaspistes of 1526 and 1527, and Luther never answered, which means the exchange is not a debate with a conclusion but two statements and a rejoinder. Luther himself, in a letter of 1537, said that of all his books only this one and the catechism were worth preserving. The Council of Trent aimed directly at his language in the sixth session, anathematising the view that free will was extinguished after Adam's sin and is a name without a reality. And the Lutherans themselves reframed it: the Formula of Concord, in its second article, restates the bondage of the will in terms that carefully reject Stoic necessity and insist that God is in no way the cause of sin, which tells you that Luther's harder formulations were uncomfortable to his own heirs within fifty years. The Eastern tradition frames the whole question differently again, in terms of synergia, the cooperation of divine grace with a human freedom that grace itself makes possible, and without the Western vocabulary of merit that makes cooperation sound like a claim on God.

So what can you now do that you could not at the start of this module? You can state what the image of God is and is not, give the three standard accounts with their defenders and their texts, and say honestly which questions Genesis 1 leaves open. You can discuss body, soul and spirit without pretending that counting nouns settles anything, and you can say what nephesh and psyche actually do in their sentences. You can read Genesis 3 as narrative and show a class the serpent's method, and you can say exactly which words are in the chapter and which the tradition has added. You can give Augustine and Pelagius, Orange, the Eastern doctrine of ancestral sin, three theories of imputation, and the Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan and Anabaptist settlements, each in its own vocabulary and from its own texts, and say which of the four remaining questions divide them. You can define total depravity correctly and correct the caricature without overcorrecting. And you can name six biblical words for sin, three distinct consequences, and the argument about structures, and you know which parts of all that are settled and which are not.

One thing to carry out. This module has been about a diagnosis, and a diagnosis is only worth as much as the treatment that follows it. Notice how often the argument above turned on a question that could not be answered from anthropology at all: what grace is, who it is given to, whether it can be refused, and how one man's act can count for another. Every one of those questions is really a question about Christ, which is where module 5 goes. It takes up the incarnation, the two natures in one person and the councils that hammered out that language, the work of Christ and the ways the church has described what the cross accomplished, the resurrection and exaltation, and the threefold office of prophet, priest and king. Bring the diagnosis with you. The reason the church argued so hard about who Christ is was that it had first seen clearly what was wrong with us.