The Sin of Moral Conformity
For the wages of sin is death, . . .Romans 6:23 NASB
Sin– Perhaps we’ve made a terrible mistake. We have assumed (and been taught) that sin is a breach of the law, in particular, God’s law. We’ve been taught that sin is doing wrong when we know what is right. We’ve been taught that sin is a violation of conscience. But maybe all of this is a mistake.
I’m not going to argue the case on my own here. I’m just going to share with you comments from Michael Wyschogrod, whose brilliant, Jewish insight into the idea of sin speaks for itself. We’ve looked at some of these before, but it’s worth reading them again. So, read these:
“Sin is possible only when the transgression is a violation of the command of a divine lawgiver.”[1]
“He [Adam] is to obey God in order to obey God and for no other reason. And when he disobeys God, he has not violated a law that has an autonomous claim on his conscience and which therefore puts him in the wrong in an objective sense, but he has rebelled against God, whose command he has broken. The violation is, then, directed at God. And because it is directed at God, it constitutes a break in the relationship between God and man which requires remediation.”[2]
“Contemporary man insists on knowing why the good is good and evil, evil. And once such knowledge is obtained, or the illusion of such knowledge is obtained, the need for a commanding God disappears entirely. For if the commanding God forbids that which is anyhow inherently evil and commands that which is anyhow inherently good, then his forbidding and commanding lacks all authority, since the mere fact that God forbids or commands something cannot by itself make it either evil or good. This discovery, first made by Plato in the Euthyphro, substitutes an autonomous moral claim for a commanding God and eliminates the concept of sin from our moral dictionary.”[3]
“Man’s first sin is thus an act of disobedience whose aim is to obtain a knowledge that will make man God-like. With this knowledge, man is able to make his own moral judgments and thereby become God-like because he no longer needs God’s commands.”[4]
“He [Man] is determined to make his own judgment as to what is good or bad and thus become God-like. The inner meaning of sin is not simply an act of disobedience against God but an attempt to overthrow God by making man into a God-like creature.”[5]
“What is at stake in man’s first sin, then, is a morality based on obedience to God versus a morality based on human recognition of what is right and wrong.”[6]
“Sin is a religious and not an ethical category. To ‘have knowledge of good and evil’ is to be unable to sin. This is so not because those who possess this ‘knowledge’ always act in accordance with it but because, even when they do not, their violation is not an act whose essence is the violation of God’s command. It is a violation of the requirement of morality, however those requirements are understood. And here we come to something of a problem in the realm of autonomous morality, that is, morality based on ‘knowledge’ of good and evil and not strictly on divine command. Simply stated, the problem is this: isn’t all violation of such autonomous morality to be understood as error rather than willful wrongdoing? And if indeed it is error, then it is really not evil, since evil occurs only when someone knows that something is evil and does it anyway.”[7]
“But when man develops a morality not based on God’s commandment—even if coincidentally much of it may coincide with those commandments—an act of expulsion of God has occurred. He is no longer the lawgiver. Now reason or moral intuition or something else performs the function that the Bible can only envisage God as performing. Man dethrones God, and this form of rebellion is particularly dangerous because it leaves man morally fulfilled, freed of the guilt that may be experienced—sooner or later—by the rebel who violated God’s command and who might not remain self-righteous as the moral rebel. The moral rebel finds a relationship with God increasingly irrelevant as his moral convictions deepen and he engages himself more and more in the realization of his moral ideals in the context of the real world.”[8]
“If man has such total freedom of choice and if the good is such a ‘natural’ choice and if repentance is so relatively easy, then there is really not much reason for taking sin very seriously at all.”[9]
And this confirmation from Jacques Ellul, one of the great Christian thinkers of the last century:
“To be like God is to be able to declare that this is good and that is bad. This is what Adam and Eve acquired, and this was the cause of the break, for there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that our declaration will correspond to God’s. Thus to establish morality is necessarily to do wrong. This does not mean that a mere suppression of morality (current, banal, social, etc.) will restore the good. God himself frees us from morality and places us in the only true ethical situation, that of personal choice, of responsibility, of the invention and imagination that we must exercise if we are to find the concrete form of obedience to our Father. Thus all morality is annulled. The Old Testament commandments and Paul’s admonitions are not in any sense morality. On the one side they are the frontier between what brings life and what brings death, on the other side they are examples, metaphors, analogies, or parables that incite us to invention.”[10]
Finally, perhaps a reminder from a 4thCentury heretic (was he really?):
“First then you ought to measure the good of human nature by reference to its Creator… If it is he who has made the world good, exceedingly good, how much more excellent do you suppose that he has made humanity… Fashioned in his own image and likeness… Learn to appreciate the dignity of our human nature.”
Pelagius (4thCentury)
“You will realize that doctrines are inventions of the human mind, as it tries to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realize that scripture itself is the work of human minds, recording the example and teachings of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters, it is becoming like him.”
Pelagius (4thCentury)
Topical Index: sin, Romans 6:23, Michael Wyschogrod
[1]Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, ed. and trans. R. Kendall Soulen (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 55.
