GOD, MAN, SIN, SALVATION ARE CENTRAL WORDS IN THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. THE REALISTIC FACING OF THE PROBLEM of sin is the first mark of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches issued its report under the title Mm's Disorder and God's Design. The secular world, too, is pervaded by this thought of aggressive evil and the summons to conflict, and never more than today. Even when our world wars give way to a time of "peace," the sense of peril remains with a call to preparation for conflict. Increasingly, thoughtful men are aware of the evil that inheres in men: selfishness, ignorance, prejudice, fear, pride, greed, suspicion, hatred. And they realize that this is the seedbed for our social ills.

The Fact of Sin

The sense of sin, however, has decreased rather than increased. In Christian thought the sense of sin has two elements: first, seeing evil in the sight of God; second, facing the fact of personal responsibility and guilt. Sin is responsible wrongdoing and wrong being as seen in the light of God. The modern man is not concerned with sin. He looks at individual evil or failures, and consults the sociologist or psychologist. He studies social ills, and tries to change environment or alter laws and institutions. When it comes to conflict between classes, groups, races, or nations, his concern is to assert the tightness of his group and the wrongness of his opponents, and to secure his rights by some kind of 'compulsion, civil or military.

Christianity is by no means unconcerned with the social and psychological side, but it senses a deeper problem and it begins at another place. Its message is, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17). There is a new and better life for men and nations, but first we must repent. The fact of sin comes first—not just the idea of evil, but evil as man's doing and as sin against God.

The reasons for the lack of this sense of sin are plain. The common root is the want of a vital faith in God. To most men God is a distant and rather vague being; to many he is wholly unreal. Their working creed, if not their philosophy, is naturalistic and secularisric. Fellow men and social relations, the world of nature and its gifts, science with its technical achievements, these are real and important. With this goes the lack of a sense of absolute moral authority. That is most plain in totalitarian countries where the state determines what is right and wrong, recognizing no higher authority than its own will. But even where the old words are retained, men have tended more and more to lose the idea of a moral order which has the right to command the nation and business and the individual. There is a pragmatism which declares that that is right which works. More common is the simple assumption that our first concern in international, industrial, and political matters, as well as individually, must be with our own profit or advance. Sometimes a deterministic viewpoint enters in. The approach may be scientific, with the stress on heredity; or social, with the emphasis on environment; or psychological, with the appeal to native instincts or urges. The conclusion is the same: if a man's life is thus determined for him, it is foolish to talk of sin and guilt.

The Church has not been without blame in this situation. Sometimes there has been a sentimental misunderstanding of the love of God, a failure to proclaim his holiness, a blindness to the stern realities of the moral order of the universe.

There has been gain, however, as well as loss. Thoughtful men in these last years have been driven to see the depths of evil to which the human spirit can descend, and how whole peoples could be involved. We have come within the Church to a clearer recognition of individual as well as group responsibility and guilt in these matters of social evils. The debauching of men for commercial profit through alcohol and drugs and prostitution, economic exploitation of the masses by those with wealth and power, the subjection and exploitation of backward races by more powerful nations, the cult of a blind and selfish nationalism, race prejudice and discrimination, and the whole war system, these are sins of our collective life and we are responsible for them.

Conceptions of Sin

A clear doctrine of sin is vital for Christian thought. Christianity is a religion of redemption. Redemption looks two ways. It is at once deliverance from evil and the gift of life, and the latter cannot come without the former. Man needs remaking, not simply making. The ancient world to which Christianity came was well aware of its evil plight, and there were innumerable religions of redemption. Christianity won out, not only by the remedy which it offered, but by its diagnosis of the disease. Its older rival was that philosophy which saw the source of human ill in ignorance and the way of deliverance in knowledge. More appealing and more widespread were the mystery religions which saw man's ills chiefly in the suffering and death which belonged to his finiteness and offered deliverance through sacrament and secret lore and mystical experience. Christianity saw where the problem lay in the sin which separated men from God, divided them from each other, and destroyed the sinner. Christianity recognizes the other ills which afflict man: weakness, immaturity, ignorance, want, suffering, disease, and death; and it envisages their overcoming. But it sees as crucial the problem of sin. A study of sin and its consequences must therefore precede our study of salvation.

The basic idea of sin in the Hebrew-Christian tradition is that of disobedience, man's refusal of the will and way of God. But within that tradition there have been wide differences, beginning within the Bible itself. Men have differed in their thought of what God asked of men, and this in turn has rested upon differences in the conception of God. Legalism sees God as sovereign giver of laws, his requirement as the strict keeping of these rules, salvation as the divine reward for this obedience.

In the Old Testament these laws mingle the ethical and the ceremonial. Jesus' noble summary of the law was taken from Deuteronomy. The Ten Commandments with their high ethical demands are central. There is the demand for justice and mercy in human relations, extended to the foreigner as well as the Jew. But side by side with this are prohibitions against planting two kinds of seed in one field and mingling two kinds of thread in one garment, with rigid injunctions as to ceremonially clean and unclean foods (Matt. 22:37-40; Deut. 24:17; 22:9-11).

The prophets did not inveigh against ceremonial and ritual as such. What they brought was a clearer vision of God as righteous and merciful and of his demand that this spirit should rule the life of men, that men should "do justice, and ... love kindness, and ... walk humbly with . . . God." Legalism was by no means all of Judaism in Jesus' day, but it was the dominant concept of the leaders, the scribes and Pharisees. To this Jesus opposed the inner spirit, the spirit of sons who were true children of their Father in humility, trust, devotion to God, and love of men. Sin was the inner spirit opposed to all this: pride, anxiety, disobedience, selfishness (Luke 18:9-14; Matt. 5:43-48; 6:24-34).

Closely akin to legalism are the moralistic and atomistic conceptions of sin resting on corresponding notions of man's life. Moral-ism emphasizes man instead of God. It misses the essential nature of sin which is perceived only in the light of God. Like legalism it stresses the act rather than the inner spirit and attitude which make the real man. The atomistic view of conduct goes with this, Pelagius being the classical representative. Pelagius was right in stressing the ethical and personal, but his conception of these was shallow. Conduct was a succession of separate and independent deeds, which left man independent of the past when new occasion for action arose. But man's sins are not a mere succession of acts; the whole man acts and the whole past enters in to shape the man and condition his future action.

Crucial for the conception of man is the relation of individual and social, alike in their tension and their mutual completion. The one-sided stress on individual or social brings errors in the concept of sin. The idea of the individual human personality and his significance emerged slowly. So we have the earlier concept of sin in which the individual is merged in the group. It is not the individual who sins but the family, the clan, the nation. The individual as part of the group, however, shares in the guilt and penalty. So the whole family is condemned for Achan's sin (Josh. 7:20-25). The opposite extreme is individualism, or atomism. It fails to see that no man lives wholly in and by himself. In varying degrees we help to shape the thought and life of the group, of family and community and nation, as in turn we are shaped by them. Here is group sin. Very often in our day the sin lies in not sharing in the group life and thought, in the attempt to evade responsibility. The reality of sin and guilt is here, though God alone can judge the degree.

The Nature of Goodness

We cannot know the nature of sin by looking at sin alone, for sin is essentially negative. It is present only as men see the good and refuse it. To understand sin, therefore, we must ask what that right attitude of life is to which sin is opposed. What is goodness? Who is the good man?

1. The first mark of the good man is loyalty. To be good means squaring our life with our convictions, saying "yes" to the highest that we know and living it. Our common speech recognizes this when we use such words as upright, straight, square, on the level. These figures all imply a standard of judgment and loyalty to it. No man is really a man, really human, until he knows something higher than himself; no man is a good man except as he obeys this vision. His knowledge may be inadequate; the test is loyalty, not knowledge. On the other hand, because he knows that his true life is found in loyalty to the highest, he will be eager to know. He will be far removed from those who say complacently: "I do what I think is right." The will to do God's will involves the will to know God's will. It calls for the humble spirit, the open mind, and the earnest search. In turn, obedience to the light is the way to more light. "If any man's will is to do his will, he shall know" (John 7:17). Nor does loyalty as such suffice; it must be loyalty to the highest—for religion, loyalty to the Most High. There are lesser loyalties and higher, and the lesser loyalty may involve treason to the highest. We have seen in our day how loyalty to class or race or nation could become treason to God and humanity and the source of endless evil. Even where no evil is directly involved, the lesser loyalty may stand in the way of the higher. So we have the uncompromising word of Jesus: "No one can serve two masters" (Matt. 6:24). "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" (Matt. 6:33).

2. The good man is unselfish. The positive and more adequate word is love, love as good will, positive, creative, extended toward all. We may call loyalty, or obedience, the "formal" aspect of goodness, love the "material" aspect. For the Christian the two aspects are inseparable, for loyalty to a God of love means the rule of love in man. Only thus are we children of our Father (Matt. 5:28-48).

3. Faith is the third mark of a good man. Many would admit the criteria of loyalty and good will and question that of faith. Usually it is the misconception of the meaning of faith which lies back of this. Faith is no mere matter of belief, whether resting on evidence or going beyond this. For religion faith is man's response of trust and surrender when he finds himself challenged by a Being higher than himself who speaks to him at once as power and goodness. It does not exclude reflection, criticism, and experiment; rather, it invites these. It roots in an inner conviction which calls for trust and adventure. It challenges man to do if he would know. It calls for decision and action as the condition of life. Here is the final challenge, the great invitation. Man's no to this challenge is the great refusal.

These basic aspects of goodness make plain the Christian viewpoint. It is not the passing deed that counts but the abiding spirit and motive which lie behind it, the life attiude which determines conduct and molds character. This concept of goodness is ethical and dynamic. At the same time it is deeply religious. It is the Christian faith that in some form or other God speaks to every man. He comes as the summons of the good and the offer of help. The good man is he who says "yes" to this demand of obedience and the summons to believe and trust. The Christian answer as to how man may attain this goodness will come with our study of salvation.

The Christian Conception of Sin

It is in the light of the Christian idea of goodness that its conception of sin is to be understood. Sin is responsible wrongdoing viewed in its relation to God. It is a religious term; its meaning is seen in the light of God. It is an ethical term; it is concerned with justice and mercy and the humble walk with God, not with ritual performance or ceremonial purity or correctness of belief. It is determined by the spirit of a man, by attitude and character and not the isolated deed. It is wrongdoing seen in the light of God, but it includes every relation of life, a man's responsibility to his neighbor and himself as well as to God.

The essential nature of sin may now be defined more closely.

1. Sin is disobedience. It is man's No to the call of the higher. Man became man when first he knew something higher than himself, when there came, however dimly, a vision of God and good and the realization that here was his true life. That moment was the real creation of man in the image of God. Sin came with man's refusal to follow that call. That is still the nature of sin. It does not mean that a man with full knowledge of the good makes a deliberate choice of evil as his way of life. Few, if any, are the men who say with conscious purpose, "Evil, be thou my good." The knowledge may be meager. The particular choice may be simply part of a general pattern of living made with little awareness of its meaning. But some awareness there is, at the moment or in earlier decisions, of a summons to good and the choice of one's own will and way.

What often hides from us the presence of sin all about us and its nature as disobedience is the fact that the common man has little thought of avowed and positive opposition to God and good. He does not consciously adopt a wrong life purpose. It is lack of purpose which marks his life; it is indifference, moral inertia, aimless drifting. But what are these but ways of saying "no" to God? There are some matters about which we do not need to decide, but not this one. God summons us to make a basic decision. "Choose this day whom you will serve," he says. Jesus condemned the sin of the empty room, or rather the folly of supposing that life's room could be kept empty, that the evil spirit could be driven out without making place for God. Nor is it simply a matter of the individual life. It is the challenge of God summoning man to stand for him or against him in his fight against evil and his purpose of good. Here "neutrality is iniquity." This is the meaning of Browning's severe judgment in "The Lost Leader."

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,

     One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,

One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,

     One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!

There is no goodness that is merely absence of evil. Our word "virtue" derives from the Latin virtus, which denotes vigor and valor and efficiency. God demands decision for good against evil and wholehearted devotion and open confession. What fails of this is sin. "He who is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23). The apathy and indifference of the many has been a greater obstacle to the advance of the kingdom of God than the active and aggressive evil of the few. To that may be added the fact that the goodness of "good men" is so often a poor, halfhearted matter. "He was not a bad man," we read of Jean Christophe's father, "but a half-good man, which is perhaps worse." ¹ Says Browning:

The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. ²

2. Sin is selfishness, or egocentricity. This may not be the sole word to describe the inner spirit of sin, but it is the most significant. It is this that lies back of disobedience. Man refuses the claims upon his life, the claims of love and devotion, of God and the right, because he wants his life for himself. It is the root of pride, setting self over God, counting self as sufficient. There are forms of sin that seem much darker: envy, greed, lust, hate, cruelty, murder. We speak of a diabolical spirit. Yet selfishness, egocentricity, lies back of all these. The evil man does not want evil for its own sake, He does not say, "Evil, be thou my good," or my god. He simply wants his own good, the satisfaction of his own desires, the supremacy of his own will and way. His desire may become greed, his passion a cruel lust. If others stand in his way, then anger and hate and murder may follow. It is so with the more negative sins noted above: inertia, insensitiveness, indifference. These, too, root in a selfishness that will not sacrifice its own ease and self-interest. Men like this are not opposed to the advance of right and the good of others, but they will not assume the cost of pain and toil, the risk of personal loss. So they rank with those "wretched souls" whom Dante found before the gates of hell, shut out alike from hell and heaven, the men

                                                    who lived

Without or praise, or blame, with that ill band

Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,

Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves

Were only.

3. Sin is wrongdoing seen in its relation to God. Sin is an ethical term; it concerns man's free and responsible choice. But sin is more than ethical; it is a religious term, and its deepest meaning is seen only when it is viewed in the light of God. This is not, of course, a question of either-or, of an ethical or a religious concept. What is needed is a thoroughgoing ethical concept of God, on the one hand, and a realization of the depth of meaning which is given to the world and life by our faith in God.

As to the first: God is not arbitrary sovereignty, giving commands, asking submission, demanding for himself sevenths of time and tithes of income, with formal acknowledgment of his sovereign power. God is love and truth and righteousness; these are what he asks of men. To refuse these is to sin against God. But there is more than this, and this "more" gives to sin its deeper, distinctively religious meaning. God is goodness in a Person; he is the Father who calls men to love and trust, to worship as well as to obey, to live with him as his children. Sin is the refusal of this claim of God.

But we must add to this: God's goodness is active, creative, redemptive; it is goodness moving toward a high goal. In the love of God, in the fellowship of the Church, in the following of Christ and the service of men, our lives are linked to this high end. Only in this divine perspective can we see the full meaning of human life. And only so can we realize the full meaning of sin, which has too often been obscured by a one-sided stress on sovereignty, sometimes joined to a legalistic tendency. This is the wonder and the glory of the Christian faith, that it not only links our human life to God in personal obedience and trust, but joins it through our faith and service with God's great purpose for his world. Sin, then, is not a matter of particular deeds or of merely individual relations; it is the denial of that great purpose of God.

Sin in its deepest and most significant aspect may therefore be described as unbelief, or unfaith. These terms must be understood in the distinctive Christian sense. It is not a matter of beliefs in the common sense of accepting religious ideas or doctrines, but of man's response in trust and obedience to the God who speaks to him. We are dealing here with the heart of the Christian conviction. God speaks to men "in many and various ways" (Heb. 1:1). He offers men forgiveness and help, light and life. He offers himself in life-giving fellowship. All that is right and true and good comes to us in him. He shows men the meaning of life and calls them to fulfill their vocation. To refuse him is to refuse alike the gift and the task of life. It is to separate ourselves from him who is life. Unbelief in the biblical sense is man's refusal to respond to the God who speaks to him, the refusal of trust and obedience. It is the opposite of that faith through which men are saved. This is the great refusal; this is sin in its final meaning. As faith is the open door to God and the beginning of all good, so the refusal of faith denies God and good and closes the door to life. So the crucial word in Jesus' lament over Jerusalem is not his denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees but his judgment on the people: "you would not!" (Matt. 23:37. Cf. Luke 23:35, "And the people stood by, watching.")

To speak of sin as selfishness, disobedience, and unbelief is not to conceive it as being composed of three parts, or elements. Sin is a basic attitude, the assertion of self as against the claim of God and good. On the positive side it is the self-centered life. That leads in turn to the negative side: the refusal of obedience to the right and good, which in its ultimate meaning is the refusal of God.

4. This basic sinful attitude takes many different forms, forms as diverse as are the many relations which make up life. It is an easy mistake to take one of these aspects and make it the substance of the whole. That was done by the older theologians who, following I John 3:4, defined sin simply as lawlessness. But God is more than lawgiver, and sin in relation to God includes more than infraction of his law. It is equally an error to identify sin with man's fleshly nature and define it as sensuality. Here clearly is a sphere of sin. Here selfishness takes the form of self-indulgence.

RELIGION AS SALVATION

In sexual sin it means the degradation of others as well as disloyalty to man's higher nature and calling. But it is because man is more than flesh that he sins in the flesh, as lesser creatures do not. The appeal is made to Paul, who was probably influenced at this point by the Hellenistic dualism of body and spirit. But Paul is not a dualist. He does not identify sin with the flesh, and he includes among "the works of the flesh" such sins as enmity, strife, jealousy, anger and selfishness (Gal. 5:20).

Of late, neo-orthodox writers like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr have revived the Augustinian-Calvinistic definition of sin as pride, or viewed pride as the basic sin. Earth's most frequent reference is to the tempter's words in Gen. 3:5: "Ye shall be as God" (or "as gods"). Pride is man seeking to exalt himself to the place of God instead of humbly recognizing his creaturely status. Niebuhr says, "Man falls into pride, when he seeks to raise his contingent existence to unconditioned significance." ³ The sinfulness of pride is obvious. It is another matter to make it the basic sin and the root of all sin. One need only look at the world about him today and at the sins which curse men: the lack of faith, the want of love, the spirit of greed and lust and hate, the love of things, the desire for wealth and pleasure and power over others, above all the indifference to the needs of men and the demand of God. There is not much in all this of the effort to escape "contingent existence" and reach "unconditioned significance." Nor are drunkard and glutton and libertine marked by the spirit of pride. It is interesting to note the sins to which Jesus refers in the Sermon on the Mount: hate of brother, lascivious desire, the lack of true and simple speech, the want of love, unreality and display in religion, divided loyalty, anxiety, the spirit of criticism and judgment, the want of trust and of a plain and single obedience. These are the sins which we see today.

Once more we must recall that the concept of sin depends upon the concept of God and of that which is good in God's sight. Where a one-sided stress is put upon the divine sovereignty and transcendence, there the emphasis, as with Earth, will be on the creaturehood of man and the sin of pride which exalts itself against God. Jesus knows the sovereignty and power of God. Men are to fear him "who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28). He stresses humility; his way is that of lowliness of heart. But the humility is to be joined with rejoicing in the God who reveals himself to babes. And when he speaks of fear, it is in order that in the fear of God men may be set free from all other fears, and that they may rejoice in a God whose love and power, extending to the sparrow, is even more concerned with man who is "of more value than many sparrows" (Matt. 10:31). So we come again to the infinite love which wields this power and to the final test: to trust this God, to obey him in reverence and awe, to live as children in the Father's spirit of love.

Social Sin

Only slowly has mankind achieved the idea of the significance of the individual person as a free, rational, responsible being, a person with inherent rights as such. In religion it came through the prophets and Jesus; one of its fruits in our social life is the democratic faith and way. The mark of primitive life was solidarity, the dominance of the individual by family or clan or tribe. Christianity did not eliminate the idea of the group life; rather it lifted it to a higher level. It reconciled the interests of individual and group: the individual gave himself in devoted loyalty and service; the group enabled the individual to realize his fullest life. Not only the Church but every form of human fellowship has significance for the Christian faith. Home, community, industry, state, all are spheres in which God's will is to be done, in which God and man are served. All are to be expressions of the personal and ethical and not merely impersonal institutions. They are neither the enemy's territory nor a religious no man's land. And these, as well as the individual soul, are a place of God's presence and redemptive action.

With this comes the idea of group sin, or social sin. We are not losing here the concept of sin as involving knowledge and freedom and responsibility. There is no group apart from the individuals which compose it, though the group life has a meaning and a wealth which is more than what comes by a mere addition of individuals. We have then two forms of human life and action, that of the individual and of the group. In both cases we have moral responsibility and sin.

It has been said that "only individuals are moral agents." ⁴ But there is no part of our life into which group action does not enter. We are constantly thinking and planning and acting together. Sometimes the association is intimate and the share of the individual very clear, as in the home or in a business partnership. Sometimes the individual's share, and so his responsibility, seems very slight. In the larger group actions, as in industry and the state, only the few seem to be implicated. Yet here, too, there is a growing conscience, most of all in the Western democracies. Modern democracy insists increasingly not only on the rights of the individual but upon his obligations. And not even under dictatorship can the rank and file of the people be excused from all responsibility for evil action and tragic consequence. Indifference, apathy, the failure to study and think and act, even at cost of danger, this too is a sin. And this failure is the greatest danger in a democracy. Our associated life, in industry and state and in other fields, tends to become increasingly impersonal, with its decisions ever further removed from the group. Yet the whole thesis of democracy is that such participation is possible, and that government should be not only of and for the people, but by the people.

What we have then is both individual and group action, and that means both individual and group responsibility and sin. We act together, thinking, planning, deciding; and so there is group responsibility and group sin. But we have entered into this as individuals; it is our decision, our merit or blame. What is needed here is to realize that man as man is both individual and social; he cannot be an individual except in social relations, nor can there be any society apart from individuals. And so there are sins which we commit together, group sins; and in this group conduct individuals share responsibility. Thus we create, or consent to, an economic order which denies men equal opportunity, which brings about extremes of wealth and poverty, alike morally harmful. We have watched whole nations developing an ultranationalism with its sins of pride, racial prejudice, exploitation of backward peoples, a selfish isolationism, and militarism. The weaknesses of men have been exploited for profit in the sale of alcoholic drinks and habit-forming drugs, in gambling and prostitution. There are group sins of the spirit, which may characterize a nation, a class, or a community; prejudices of race and religion are commonly the sins of a social group, from which the individual takes them over. Materialism, secularism, the worship of pleasure and material possessions and power, these form a social atmosphere with potent influence on individual life. In turn, the individual, by passive acceptance or active participation, furthers the group sin and shares in the blame.

The extraordinary development of associated life in the modern world, due to modern science, technical advances, attendant mass industry, and world trade, has tended to depersonalize great areas of human life and so to demoralize it. The common man seems to have little share in all this corporate life of industry and government, and he feels little responsibility. Hence the sense of group sin is wanting. Yet there remains the fact that our responsibility and culpability reach beyond individual action; the individual life is never merely individual. And the urgent task in the social field is to resist this movement which rules out alike morality and religion from man's group life; to fight against an absolutist control from above, whether political or industrial; and, while democratizing the social order, to enforce upon the common man the moral responsibility which democracy brings him. And with this there should go a new appreciation of each one's share of guilt in the great group sins of our day.

1) Remain Holland, Jean-Christophe, 1,30.

2) The Statue and the Bust, st. 83. Cf. Luke 12:35.

3) Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, pp. 20, 145, 146; Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, I, 18ff.

4) Niebuhr, op. cit., I, 208.