Christian theology consistently holds together truths that appear to need to crumble: Jesus is fully God and fully human. People are sinners and created within the image of God. The church is local and universal.
And yet, despite what we affirm, in practice, Christians are sometimes unable to walk and chew gum at the identical time. Instead of holding two truths in tension, we are inclined to slide to 1 side or the opposite, distorting it in the method. We treat Jesus either as an invulnerable, transcendent being or as a mere prophet. We speak as if humans are either so degraded we’re able to nothing but sin or mostly positive with just a few rough edges. We consider the church as if it were only our own sect or we minimize the local congregation.
Evangelical theologians have done great work in Christology, anthropology, and ecclesiology, respectively, to retrieve those three truthful tensions. But there’s a fourth tension yet to be retrieved: All sins smash us, and yet not all sins smash us equally.
To start, allow us to be clear: Sin—nonetheless small—is a serious thing. And sin is barely atoned for by the work of God in Jesus Christ. But saying that Christ is the just one who atones for all sin is different from saying that each one sins do the identical form of work on us.
All sins break the sinner and create havoc around us. And yet the Scriptures consistently depict the sins we do as different, not only in effect on each other but before God. Within the Law, for instance, different social remedies are given for various sins, and so are different sacrifices (Lev. 4; Ex. 21). Not the whole lot requires a bull or a goat. Sometimes a dove will do. In the Prophets and Proverbs, God distinguishes—and even prioritizes—certain sins above others, and accounts for differences of intentional versus unintentional (Prov. 6:16–19; Ezek. 45:20).
Jesus names grieving the Holy Spirit in a category all its own (Matt. 12:31) and says some sins put us near the fires of hell (Matt. 5:22). Paul likewise says that sins committed against our own bodies do particular kinds of injury that other sins don’t do (1 Cor. 6:17–19).
Failing to carry these two truths about sin together has led us to moral confusion. For instance, there’s a terrific deal of energy currently dedicated to the matter of sexism in American churches. We mustn’t hide the undeniable fact that the sin of sexism has done real damage throughout the church, but how we name that damage makes a terrific deal of difference.
As the accounting for these wrongs has begun, many discussions have bundled very different sins, lumping together anything from sexually abusive ministers to interpersonal biases. Every sin causes damage and requires repair, but common sense alone tells us these sins are meaningfully different. Raping a lady shouldn’t be similar to having sexist assumptions about coworkers.
I don’t think that anyone would make the error of equating these sins. But once they’re grouped under a single label—sin—confusion sets in, because theologically, evangelicals treat this great range of actions as united in effect: Sin separates us from God, full stop. As we now have already seen, that is true; but, in isolation, it misses much of the story. The payoff is available in our ethics. If our theology doesn’t allow us to distinguish between different sins with different kinds and scales of injury, we may have a tough time coming to appropriately different responses.
How did we get to this place? Part of the problem is overreading portions of Scripture—to admit with Romans 3:23, for instance, that each one have fallen in need of God’s glory shouldn’t be to say that each one of the ways we fall short are the identical. Saying that “there is no such thing as a one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10) is different from saying that each one unrighteousness is alike in gravity or effect.
This ethos—that each one sins are equal in nature—traces itself to not the New Testament but to the Reformation and later eras. Consider John Calvin, who argues, against an older tradition, that each one sins—great or small—are damning ones. Or Jonathan Edwards’s contention that all sins by finite creatures are infinite offenses against an infinite God.
While treatments akin to these have the effect of helping us to take all sins seriously, additionally they have the unintended effect of leveling all sins, such that it becomes difficult to say why accidental harm is different from intentional harm or why degrees of harm matter. When we simply frame all sins as damning sins, we ignore how Scripture recognizes that different sins break our relationship with God in alternative ways and, thus, require different temporal remedies. Christ’s atonement is the singular way that humanity is brought back into relationship with God, but restoring particular people to health requires different types of repair.
Consider the instance here of two disciples, Peter and James. Both disciples, we’re told, are present with Jesus within the Garden of Gethsemane, and each flee (Matt. 26:56). But Peter’s flight from the Romans includes an lively form of denial (Matt. 26:69–75). Accordingly, Peter’s three-fold denial is met by Jesus’ three-fold query of whether Peter loved Jesus (John 21:15–17). A deeper and different form of wound required a distinct form of repair.
The older tradition of reflection on this query, seen within the work of theologians including Thomas Aquinas, differs from Calvin and Edwards in at the least three vital ways. First, it activates the excellence between sins Christians commit intentionally and people we commit unintentionally. All sins are deviations from God’s will, however the ones we do deliberately will not be similar to those we do in ignorance (Luke 12:47–48).
Second, while everyone seems to be inclined toward sin, we will not be all inclined to sin in the identical way. Some struggle habitually with lust and others with pride. Though each sins lead us to destruction, we could be fallacious to say they destroy our lives in the identical way. The difference here shouldn’t be their effect on others but on the character of the sins themselves, the previous being the need for bodily pleasure and the latter the exaltation of the self above others and God. Lust may thoroughly deform our minds and our desires, debasing us as creatures, but to nurse pride is ultimately to upend the moral universe, placing oneself above God.
And third, different sins require different remedies. To turn back to an earlier example, exposing sexual assault is different from exposing sexist thoughts. Both involve power, objectification, and sex. But also they are different: One is a violent act of will; the opposite is a mental or cultural habit. One requires legal intervention; the opposite requires interpersonal amends and discipleship.
Those differences will not be only on the human level. God distinguishes between different sins too, and the best way forward requires recognizing those differences. That means having the ability to say that some sins damage us greater than others—the sins we deliberately commit are different from those done in ignorance or foolishness. It means understanding that each one sin does damage, but different sins do different damage to sinner and victim alike. This recognition would make it easier to see what different responses to sin are needed.
Recovering this tension—that each one sins smash us, and yet not all sins smash us equally—doesn’t mean veering into the other error of self-serving sin rating, of claiming, Thank God, we will not be like that tax collector (Luke 18:9–14). On the contrary, it means understanding that God knows each of us by name, knows our particular sins, and knows the actual virtues we’d like to recuperate from those sins.
This is the a part of sanctification that comes after repentance: The lustful need chastity, the prideful humility, the violent peace, the uncharitable love. Scripture exhorts us to hunt all these fruits of the Spirit’s work, that are perfected within the person of Jesus and given as God’s good gifts for particular sinners with particular wounds.
That all are broken by sin is without query. But the longer term for evangelicals must involve more nuance in our diagnoses, more recognition of the character of every sin and its damage, and more attention to the slow path of virtue. For absent a treatment that attends to our brokenness particularly ways, we’ll proceed to be just like the house swept clean in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 12:43–45: There can be no recent inhabitants of virtue to maintain manifold demons at bay.
Myles Werntz is the writer of From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision of Christian Life Together. He writes at Christian Ethics within the Wild and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
