It’s time to talk about sin. Part 1

(This week’s article is about Sin and Freedom – coming in 4 parts)

It’s time to talk about sin

Part 1

Secular critics bemoan the way Christians are “obsessed” with sin. “It’s so negative, so pessimistic, so based on guilt”, they say, “time to leave it all behind”. However, my only interest in sin is to be free of it. My faith has given me a wonderful vision of what life would be like if it wasn’t blighted by this thing we call “sin”. The astonishing thing is not that Christians labour under a guilty load of sin, but that they have an inkling of what life is like without it.

We must accept that human beings (in our sinful frailty?) have indeed often messed up in our thinking about sin, and Christians have tortured themselves and imposed burdens on others through our lack of understanding and spiritual maturity. Another reason we’ve messed up is because of the extraordinary power of sin. Evil is so very evil that it has the ability to corrupt even those things that are in themselves  good. So, it’s not as though – if Christians stopped banging on about sin – it would all just go away, and we would live in a guilt-free, happy and altruistic world. All that would happen is that sin would continue to run riot, but no-one would even be attempting to frustrate it. Sin is like a force that apparently has a life of its own (though in reality, it’s simply parasitic upon our own human actions), and, in practical terms, it is as though it assails us and malevolently erodes the foundations of justice, goodness and truth in society, and in individual lives. It is an extraordinary reality. I wish it didn’t exist – not so that I would be free from having to talk about it, but so that we could all be free from its cruel influence. We all know that it can take a moment to destroy what took years to create, and this asymmetry explains some of the power of sin. We all know that even if each person just does one small act of selfishness now and then, somehow, when everyone does the same, it adds up to the nightmare of grinding poverty, of children collecting drinking water from muddy puddles and dying from preventable diseases. Each person just felt a bit afraid and threatened, and before we know it, we are at war, or demonising those who are different. So, let’s not feel bad about talking about sin.