179 - Not The Way It's S'pposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

Not The Way It's S'pposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
By Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

"All traditional Christians agree that human beings have a biblically certified and empirically demonstrable bias toward evil. We are both complicitous in and molested by the evil of our race. We both discover evil and invent it; we both ratify and extend it.... By disposition, practice, and habit, human beings let loose a great, rolling momentum of evil across generations."

"Everything's s'pposed to be different than what it is here."
--Mac (Danny Glover) in "Grand Canyon"

At the center of the Christian Bible, four Gospels describe the pains God has taken to defeat sin and its wages. Accordingly, Christians have often measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of death on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives-these things tell us that the main human brokenness is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that, while annoyances, regrets, and miseries trouble us in all the old familiar ways, none of them matters as much as sin.

One reason is that sin perverts special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician enjoys a spasm of sweet satisfaction over a sour review of a colleague's recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans to snag a fresh customer, when a teenager reviles his confused grandmother, when we put other people on a tight moral budget, while making plenty of allowances for ourselves-when people do these things, they exhibit a corruption of thought, emotion, intention, speech, and disposition. By such abuse of our powers, we creatures of dignity and responsibility evoke not only consternation, but also blame.

In the film "Grand Canyon," an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it. His route takes him along streets that seem progressively darker and more deserted. Then, the predictable

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. is Professor of Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of A Place to Stand: A Reformed Study of Creeds and Confessions (1979) and he has edited (with Ronald Jay Feenstra) Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays (1989).

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Bonfire of the Vanities nightmare: The man's fancy sports car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenaged guardians wear expensive guns and sneakers. He does manage to phone for a tow truck. But before it arrives, five young street toughs surround the attorney's disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm. Just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver-an earnest, genial man-begins to hook up to the sports car. The toughs protest: the driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the group leader aside and attempts a five sentence introduction to metaphysics: "Man," he says, "the world ain't s'pposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's s'pposed to be. I'm s'pposed to be able to do my job without askin' you if I can. And that dude is s'pposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin' him off. Everything's s'pposed to be different than what it is here."

The driver is an heir of St. Augustine. And his summary of the human predicament belongs in every book of theology.¹ For central in the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be. They ought to be as designed and intended by God, both in creation and in graceful transformation of creation. They are supposed to include peace that adorns and completes justice, mutual respect and goodwill, deliberate and widespread attention to the public good.

Of course, things are not that way at all. Human wrongdoing, or the threat of it, mars every adult's workday, every child's schoolday, every vacationer's holiday. A moment's reflection yields memories and images of wrongdoing so commonplace that we are likely to accept them as normal: A criminal in a 40s film noir hangs up a pay telephone receiver; before exiting the booth, he rips from the telephone book the page he had consulted and pockets it. A third grader distributes party invitations in a manner calculated to let the omitted classmates clearly see their exclusion. Her teacher notes but never ponders the social dynamics of this distribution scheme. A certain breed of motorist first cuts you off and then, to assure that you know the move was intentional, offers you a hand signal of international familiarity. (The offending driver may be a person who has never bothered to curb his wrath and who might be both puzzled and wrathful at the suggestion that he should begin to do so.) Two old flames meet again for the first time since graduation and begin to flicker with nostalgia and boozy self-pity over what might have been. Though each feels happily married to someone else, somehow the evening climaxes for the two grads in a room at the Marriott.

Perhaps we think most often of sin as a spoiler of creation: people adulterate a marriage, or befoul a stream, or use their excellent minds to devise a truly ingenious tax fraud. But resistance to redemption

¹ And Philip Yancey, who reminded me of this scene and its redolence, belongs on every writer's list of fruitful and imaginative friends.

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counts as sin, too, and often displays a special perversity. In the summer of 1973, a British journalist named Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a dispiriting report of hunger in Ethiopia. To show some of the setting of this misery, the journalist juxtaposed shots of famished Ethiopians with others of Emperor Haile Selassie's feasts. Newspeople from across the world soon showed up in Addis Ababa to cover the yoked stories of popular starvation and official comfort. The next wave of foreigners escorted substantial food gifts from various countries. In the arrival of these gifts, Ethiopia's finance minister spied an opportunity. To the great emergency stores of food donated by compassionate peoples of the world, the minister applied a substantial customs duty. Of course, the donating nations were dumbfounded and said so. Their protest, in turn, dumbfounded the imperial court:

"You want to help?" the minister asked. "Please do, but you must pay." And [the benefactors] said: "What do you mean, pay? We give help! And we're supposed to pay?" "Yes," says the minister, "those are the regulations. Do you want to help in such a way that our Empire gains nothing by it?"²

The Bible presents sin in an array of images: Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it-both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance; even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways.

I

As the great writing prophets of the Bible knew, sin has a thousand faces. The prophets knew how many ways human life can go wrong because they knew how many ways it can go right. (You need the concept of a wall on plumb to tell when one is off.) These prophets kept dreaming of a time when God would put things right again.³

They dreamed of a new age in which human crookedness would be straightened out, rough places made plain. The foolish would be made wise, and the wise, humble. They dreamed of a time when the deserts would flower, the mountains would run with wine, weeping would cease, and people could go to sleep without weapons on their laps. People would work in peace, their work having meaning and point. A lion could lie down with a lamb-the lion cured of all carnivorous appetite. All nature would be fruitful, benign, and filled with wonder

² Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 118.
³ E.g., Isaiah 2:2-4; 11:1-9; 32:14-20; 42:1-12; 60; 65:17-25; Joel 2:24-29.

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upon wonder;⁴ all humans would be knit together in brotherhood and sisterhood; and all nature and all humans would look to God, walk with God, lean toward God, and delight in God. Shouts of joy and recognition would well up from valleys and seas, from women in streets and from men on ships.

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is, of course, what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than just peace of mind or ceasefire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight, in which natural needs are satisfied, natural gifts fruitfully employed-the whole process inspiring joyful wonder as the creator and savior of all opens doors and speaks welcome.⁵ Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

"The way things ought to be" in its Christian understanding includes the constitution and internal relations of a very large number of entities-the Holy Trinity, the physical world in all its fullness, the race of human beings, particular communities within this race (such as the ancient people of Israel or the New Testament church or the American Federation of Musicians), families, couples, groups of friends, individual human beings. In a shalomic state, each entity would have its own integrity or structured wholeness, and each would also possess many edifying relations to other entities. The All Terrain Vehicle Sports Club, for example, might be related to the ecological health of forest streams by protecting it, by placing the streams off limits to members. Finally, "the way things ought to be" would include in persons a whole range of sentient and intelligent responses to other creatures (and even to their relationships with still other creatures)-a spread of appropriate thoughts, desires, emotions, words, deeds, and dispositions. Gratitude, for example, is as fitting an emotional response to undeserved kindness as delight is to such created excellences as the velvety coat of a puppy or the honking of geese in a November fly-by or the hitchhiking home of young beetles on the backs of bees.

Of course, the shalomic dreams of the Hebrew prophets are visionary. The regular bursting of high altitude winery casks so that the mountains may stream with Chardonnay is not necessarily a feature of every ideal world. Nor is Milton's portrait of Eden or More's of Utopia. Not everyone wants Milton's "happy rural seat of various view," for example, or More's communist uniformitarianism. Still, every one of us does possess the notion of a world in which things are as they ought to be. Moreover, though we would stock this world and

⁴ Cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5.33.3: "The days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters, ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine. And when any of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, 'I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me.' "
⁵ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 69-72.

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arrange its workings differently according to our varying ideas of the good (Would hard rock music play any part in a perfect world? Would it, at least, be audible only to its own fans?), we would nonetheless agree on many of the broad outlines and main ingredients of a transformed world.

It would include, for instance, strong marriages and secure children. Nations and races in this brave new world would treasure differences in other nations and races as attractive, important, complementary. In the process of making decisions, men would defer to women and women to men till a crisis arose. Then, with good humor all around, the person more naturally competent in the area of the crisis would resolve it to the satisfaction and pleasure of both.

Government officials would still take office (somebody has to decide which streets are cleaned on Tuesday and which on Wednesday), but, to nobody's surprise, they would tell the truth and freely praise the virtues of other public officials. Public telephone books would be left intact. Highway overpasses would be graffiti-free. Tow truck drivers and erring motorists would be serene on inner-city streets, secure in the knowledge that, under the provisions of government and private foundation grants, former gang members are now all in law school.

Business associates would rejoice in each other's promotions. Middling Harvard students would respect the Phi Beta Kappas from the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople and would seek to learn from them. All around the world, people would stimulate and encourage each other's virtues. Newspapers would be filled with well-written accounts of acts of great moral beauty and, at the end of the day, people on their porches would read these and call to each other about them and savor them with their single martini.⁶

Above all, in the visions of Christians and of other theists, God would preside in the unspeakable beauty for which human beings long and in the mystery of holiness that draws human worship like a magnet. In turn, each human being would reflect and color the light of God's presence out of the inimitable resources of his or her own character and essence. Human communities would present their ethnic and regional specialties to other communities in the name of God, in glad recognition that God too is a radiant and hospitable community of three persons. In their own accents, communities would express praise, courtesies, and deferences that, when massed together, would keep building like waves of a passion that is never spent.

II

In biblical thinking, we can understand neither shalom nor sin apart from reference to God. Sin is a religious concept, not just a moral one. Sin is lawlessness, culpable folly, moral wandering, faithlessness, and much more. But, we call these moral misadventures sin because they

⁶ Which, with the genial irony characteristic of the new world, they would call a martinus.

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offend and betray God. Sin is not only the breaking of law, but also the breaking of covenant with one's savior. Sin smears a relationship; sin grieves one's divine parent and benefactor; sin betrays the partner to whom one is joined by a holy bond.⁷

All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Let us say that a sin is any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed-or its particular absence-that displeases God and deserves blame. Let us add that sin is the disposition to commit sins. And let us use the word sin for instances of either.⁸ Sin is a personal affront to a personal God.

But once we possess the concept of shalom, we are in position to enlarge and specify this understanding of sin. God is, after all, not arbitrarily offended. God hates sin not just because it violates divine law, but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be. (Indeed, that is why God has laws against a good deal of sin.) God is for shalom and, therefore, against sin.⁹ In fact, we may safely describe evil as any spoiling of shalom, whether physically (by cancer, say), morally, spiritually, or otherwise.¹⁰ Sin is, then, agential evil-any act¹¹ or disposition for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. Sin is culpable shalom-breaking.

Shalom naturally includes not only the proper relation of people to people and of people to nature and of nature to God. It also includes the proper relation of people to God. Human beings ought to love and obey God as children properly love and obey their parents. Human beings ought to be in awe of God at least as much as, say, a first-year violin student is in awe of Itzhak Perlman. They ought to marvel at God's greatness and praise God's goodness. Failure to do these things-let alone indulging in outright blasphemy and contempt for God-is sin because it runs counter to the way things are supposed to go. Godlessness is anti-shalom. Godlessness spoils the proper relation between human beings and their maker and savior.

Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and

⁷ For example the golden calf idolatry of Exodus 32 is treachery against the background of covenant vows in Exodus 24:1-8.
⁸ The offered definition is criteriological as opposed to ontological; i.e., it tells us how we know something counts as sin (it displeases God and incurs blame), rather than telling us what sin itself actually is. In other words, the definition tells us what is sinful, but not what is sin. To solve this problem, if it is a problem, we could describe sin as, say, the power in human beings that has the effect, including the criteriologically revealing effect, of corrupting human thought, word, and deed so that they displease God and inculpate their authors. We would then stipulate that this power lies paradoxically behind our neglects and inattentions as well as behind our assaults and trespasses.
⁹ I am not denying that there may be other reasons as well why God hates and rejects sin.
¹⁰ I assume, of course, that intellectual and physical inadequacies that fall in normal ranges for kinds and ages of creatures (no human being, for example, is as fast as a computer or a thoroughbred) do not spoil shalom and do not count as evil.
¹¹ In what follows, I will use act broadly for thoughts, utterances, desires, etc., as well as for what are called "deeds" in such famous sentences as, "I have sinned in my thoughts, in my words, and in my deeds."

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assaults what God has made. Sexism and racism, for instance, show contempt both for various human persons and also for the mind of God. God savors and wants not only humankind but also human kinds. In the cramped precincts of their little worlds, sexists and racists disdain such differences in kind.

In sum, shalom is God's design plan for creation and redemption; sin is human vandalism of these great realities and, therefore, an affront to their architect and builder.

Of course such ideas annoy certain contemporary people. The concept of a design plan to which all of us must conform ourselves, whether we like it or not, appears absurd or even offensive to many. People, for example, who believe in naturalistic evolution think that human concepts, values, desires, and religious beliefs are, like human life itself, metaphysically untethered to any transcendent purpose. They are the product of such blind mechanisms as natural selection for survival working on random genetic mutation.¹² To such naturalist believers, there isn't any general, metaphysical "way it's supposed to be" or anyone like God to sponsor and affirm this state of affairs. Thus, there isn't anything like a violation of the way it's supposed to be, or anything like an affront to God, or anything, therefore, finally equivalent to sin.

Moreover, whether or not they believe in evolutionary naturalism, people who think of human beings as their own centers and lawgivers find the whole idea of utter dependence on a superior quite galling. After all, the proposal that we ought to worship someone who is better than we are, that we ought to study this person's will and then bend our lives to it, that we ought to confess our sins to this same person and beg forgiveness for them, meanwhile pinning our hopes on a gracious response-all this sounds humiliatingly undemocratic.

Moreover, in many cases the same pride that resists God and the superiority of God also fears and resists objective moral truth. For such truth-that some acts are right and some wrong regardless of what we think about the matter, that we have certain obligations whether or not we choose them-stands against the freedom of human beings to create their own values, to make up the moral truth as they go along.

Serious Christians think that many of these modern attitudes are themselves old and famous exhibits of sin's power to deceive. Humans notoriously suppress truth they dislike, says St. Paul (who surely counts as a serious Christian).¹³ In the biblical view, not only do we sin because we are ignorant; we are also ignorant because we sin, because we find it convenient to misconstrue our place in the universe and to reassign divinity in it. (Of course, Christian believers engage in these

¹² For an ingenious (if it is acceptable to be fraternally laudatory in a footnote) development of a suspicion in C. S. Lewis and others that naturalism and evolutionary theory are incompatible-that, in fact, evolutionary theory itself gives the naturalist a clinching reason for rejecting naturalism, see Alvin Plantinga, "An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism," Logos 12 (1991), pp. 27-49.
¹³ Romans 1:18-19.

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misconstruals and reassignments too, only less consistently than stable secularists.)

III

As noted above, sin is culpable disturbance of shalom-that is, culpable in the eyes of God. In this way and others, sin distinguishes itself from many of its conceptual near-neighbors. Though partly overlapping with it, sin is distinct from crime, for example. A main reason for the distinction is obvious: Crime is jurisdiction-relative in a way that sin is not. Thus, some sin, such as writing a no-account check in order to buy lottery tickets, probably breaks a criminal statute in every setting in which there are banks and lotteries. But some sin-Godlessness, for example-is in certain legal jurisdictions non-criminal, or even obligatory. On the other side, though most crime also offends God and therefore counts as sin, certain forms of civil disobedience in a righteous cause (sit-ins in protest of segregation, for example, or in protest of convenience abortion) may offend Caesar but not God.

How about the relation of sin to immorality? The issue is knotty in lots of ways that need not delay us. If we follow a big and respectable convention in restricting the scope of morality to, roughly, intra-creaturely behaviors, attitudes, rights, and obligations, then moral right and wrong are grasped, displayed, and judged on, so to speak, a horizontal plane. If so, all culpably immoral acts are sin. Selfishness, for instance, is both immoral and sinful. But not all sin is immoral. According to the convention, a person who broke the Sabbath or who, despite years in the best seminaries, offered Jesus Christ polite respect for his political courage, but despised his call to self-giving love-such a person would be described as, in these respects, sinful but not immoral.¹⁴

We must also distinguish sin from disease. True, sinful acts sometimes transmit disease, or even cause it, as when illicit sex spreads syphillis or battery causes brain hemorrhage. Conversely, disease does sometimes furnish occasion for, or even incline a person toward, sin, as in cases of an invalid's malice toward the healthy. Disease is moreover a traditionally favorite image for sin. Still, the two evils remain distinct

¹⁴ The relation of sin to moral wrongdoing is enormously complex and has attracted a growing and sophisticated literature. See, for example, the debate in Religious Studies 20 (1984) between Basil Mitchell, "How is the Concept of Sin Related to the Concept of Moral Wrongdoing," pp. 165-73; Ingolf Dalferth, same title, pp. 175-89; and David Attfield, "The Morality of Sins," pp. 227-37. See also Marilyn McCord Adams, "Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Philosophers," Faith and Philosophy 5 (1988), pp. 121-43; "Theodicy without Blame," Philosophical Topics 16 (1988), pp. 215-45. What seems clear is that all culpable moral wrongdoing is sin, that some wrongdoing is not sin because it is not culpable (as in some cases of wrongdoing by children, mentally deficient or disturbed persons, or persons whose morally wrong acts are determined by outside influences). What is much less clear is how much sin is morally wrong, and, especially, the proper way to determine and apply standards for making this judgment.

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because sin is blameworthy and disease is not even the disease that is caused by sin.¹⁵

For the same reason, we should not confuse sin with mere error (printing an inadvertently punning headline such as THIEF GETS NINE MONTHS IN VIOLIN CASE), nor with innocent folly (placing a subway sign that reads, ILLITERATE? WRITE TODAY FOR FREE HELP!)¹⁶ Nor should we confuse sin with finiteness, let alone with mere awareness of finiteness. We are not to blame for being human instead of divine, and we are to be credited, not debited, for knowing the difference.

How about the relation of sin to addiction? After all, people nowadays are often said to have become addicted not just to alcohol or cocaine, but also to certain disreputable behaviors and practices, including stealing, spouse-battering, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and even rape.

Suppose we think of the relation, very generally and roughly, as follows. The phenomenon of addiction usually includes moral evil; for all we know, some of it may be chargeable to the addict as sin. Or, conversely, we could put the matter like this: Some sin displays the addictive syndrome, including such phenomena as compulsive repetition of destructive behavior, a tolerance effect, and cessation vows followed by relapses, despair, and, especially, attempts to relieve despair with the same thing that caused it. In any case, we are probably right to reject both the typically judgmental and typically permissive accounts of the relation, saying neither that all addiction is simple sin nor that all sin is non-moral addictive disease. These simplicities have historically been attached by turns to alcoholism, for example, but neither seems at all adequate.¹⁷

Besides distinguishing sin from other concepts that are, so to speak, in the same league and, therefore, count as interscholastic rivals, we also need a few intramural distinctions-that is, ones that clarify certain issues within the concept of sin itself. Accordingly, some sin is objective, some subjective. Let us say an act is objectively sinful just in case it disturbs shalom and makes its agent guilty. An act is subjectively sinful just in case its agent thinks that it is objectively sinful (whether or not it is) and purposely (or in some other accountable way) does it anyhow.

Thus, even if drinking wine is not objectively sinful, it would be quite wrong for a conscientious teetotaler to drink it. Even if volunteering for infantry duty in wartime is not objectively sinful, it would be quite wrong for a conscientious pacifist to volunteer. The reason in both cases is that, by flouting the deliverances of his own conscience, a

¹⁵ In the age of AIDS, it is hard to think of a theological distinction that bears more pastoral, emotional, and spiritual urgency.
¹⁶ Richard Lederer, Anguished English (New York: Laurel, 1989), pp. 66, 85.
¹⁷ Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 111.

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person breaks trust with God. For by doing what he thinks is wrong, a person does what he thinks will grieve God. And the willingness to grieve God by one's acts is itself grievous. Moreover, acting against one's conscience blunts and desensitizes it; indeed, repeated thwarting of one's conscience might eventually kill it. The subjective sinner therefore threatens moral suicide.

But, committing moral suicide is objectively sinful. So all subjective sinners are also objective ones-sinners who, so to speak, keep shooting themselves in the conscience. The present distinction requires a commitment to a limited kind of moral subjectivism: Some acts are genuinely (even if not objectively) wrong for one person, but not for another, and wrong on account of what the person thinks about them. The distinction also requires a commitment to at least one form of moral absolutism: It is always wrong to act against one's conscience. All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. Acts are either right or wrong (whether objectively or subjectively), either consonant with God's will or not. But among good acts some are better than others, and among wrong acts some worse than others. To a Christian, thinking deliciously about adultery is just as wrong as committing it and not a different offense in kind.¹⁸ But Christians know that adultery in one's heart damages others less, at least for the short term, than does adultery in a motel bed and may therefore rank as less serious on the badness spectrum.

Similarly for other offenses: Given a choice, our neighbor would rather have us covet her house than steal it. Neglecting to feed one's children seems clearly worse than neglecting to expose them to the fine arts (though that is bad enough). The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree On the personal investment and motive of the sinner. (This is the heart of the distinction between mortal and venial sin in the Catholic tradition.)

Most criminal codes acknowledge the relevance of motive in measuring the seriousness of an offense: the codes set higher penalties for premeditated murder than for involuntary manslaughter. And they acknowledge the relevance of the amount and kind of damage done by an offense: the codes set higher penalties for murder than for attempted murder. But, of course, both measurements count. A premeditated theft of the whole supply paper towels from a restaurant restroom is a less serious offense than an involuntary vehicular manslaughter.

In crime and sin, involuntariness may mitigate, but it does not necessarily excuse. A thoroughly ungrateful person, for example, may have her ingratitude entirely without choosing it or trying for it. Indeed, she may not even know that she has it. For years, it never occurs to her that, where God and family members and friends are

¹⁸ Matthew 5:27-28.

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concerned, she ought to feel some of the mixed sense of being blessed and indebted that spiritually healthy people feel. Her ingratitude is scarcely under her control in at least these respects and is so far forth involuntary. But it is also clearly sinful. If the ingrate were to detect her flaw and see its unloveliness, she would properly confess and repent of it.¹⁹

For many people, the traditional seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) are involuntary states of mind. They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which these people have little or, at best, only variable control. Where the deadly sins are concerned, a person may not want these states of mind (nobody wants to be envious), may not choose them, may not mean or try to have them.²⁰ In fact, just the contrary. Yet, there they are, and we rightly call them sins, even when they are involuntary.

Of course some people do want some of these sins. Certain people want lust, for instance. That is why they try to excite it. They want not just sex but also the appetite for sex. But even then they may disappoint themselves. As St. Augustine knew, jaded appetites can be hard to freshen up. We cannot control lust very well at all. Even persons who want it often cannot get it or, at least, cannot express it.²¹ Much the same thing could be said about anger, sloth, and other deadly sins. They neither appear nor disappear on command. Involuntary sin is not under a person's control in the ways just described. But, in order to call it sin, we have to stipulate that its owner acquired it through some fault of her own, that she is responsible for having it-in short, that she is culpable. And here matters become murky.

Take the case of a white boy raised in a family of racists in Mississippi in the 1850s. Call him Jim Bob. The local cultural assumption of white superiority threads through all of Jim Bob's education, adult modeling, and training in etiquette. Jim Bob never encounters forceful alternatives to this assumption. He is dimly aware that some Yankees and certain Southern eccentrics are "nigger lovers," but the one time he asks about these unusual creatures, respected local authorities assure him that they are all either crazy or phony. Unless, like Huck Finn, extraordinary circumstances encourage

¹⁹ Robert Merrihew Adams, "Involuntary Sins," The Philosophical Review 94 (1985), pp. 3-31.
²⁰ In Adams, "Involuntary Sins," pp. 8-9, the concept of voluntary control appears to include at least one of the concepts of trying, or choosing, or meaning to do something.
²¹ In De Civ. Dei 14.15-16, Augustine speculates that the enfeeblement of our will-shown in particular by its failure to govern the various forms of libido-is poetic justice: Insubordination at the heart of our lives mirrors our insubordination to God. One dramatic instance of this, Augustine delicately suggests, is that male erections are no longer voluntary. Both tumescence and flaccidity have become (often unwanted) events rather than acts. The soul is so divided that impotence bedevils not only the godly who are earnestly attempting to beget children, but also lascivious playpersons who are impotent even to do evil. See also Garry F. Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 282-83.

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in him the growth of a fugitive's independent mind, Jim Bob will simply absorb racism from his environment. The things he sees and learns combine to corrupt his consciousness so that he simply adopts-without challenge or struggle and likely with only a little reflection-the assumption that the proper posture of whites toward blacks is some patronizing blend of superiority, wariness, control, and apartheid.

Biblically instructed Christians now know that a racist state of mind is wholly wrong, an offense to the aggrieved race and an offense to God. Racism is a breach of shalom and, seemingly, an excellent example of sin. But, if a particular person has this state of mind so inadvertently that it would be true to say of him that he could not have helped acquiring it, that there is now no realistic way he could avoid having it, can we still call him guilty for having it? And if not,²² do we call his state of mind sin? Is Jim Bob's racism sin? And is Jim Bob a sinner just because he has this state of mind?

Questions like these lead us, of course, into great philosophical and theological swamps. Fortunately, we need not wade into them all the way up to our necks in order to reach a point at which our route can continue (and, shortly, terminate). Perhaps three observations will suffice:

(1) The suggestion that Jim Bob could not have helped acquiring his racism is speculative. Cultural influences, personal strengths and insights, the human capacity for self-deception, conscience as shaped by "the law of God written on the human heart," and numerous other factors combine in such intricate ways that we are seldom in position to make accurate judgments about even our own blameworthiness, let alone someone else's. Judgments about degrees of culpability, unless required by such special roles as parent, judge, or jury, may therefore wisely be left in the hands of God.

(2) The Christian tradition has traditionally and plausibly reserved the word sin for culpable evil. The inclusion of culpability in it distinguishes sin from certain natural evils, from simple errors and follies, and especially from moral evils (kleptomania, say, or pedophilia) that might have been blamelessly acquired. Thus, if Jim Bob is not to blame for acquiring his racism, that wrongful state of mind is moral evil, but not, strictly speaking, sin. Still, we naturally call Jim Bob's racism sin because moral evil in a person is often sin, and we do not know that Jim Bob's is not, and because (especially in a no-fault culture) we have come to fear the softness of self-deception slightly more than the hardness of accusation.

(3) Also, even if Jim Bob is not to blame for his racism, somebody

²² I am supposing that incompatibilism is true, i.e., that an agent's freedom, and hence his moral responsibility, with respect to some act (or, in this case, the acquisition of some evil state of mind) is incompatible with that act's being determined by causes other than the agent. For more on the relation of involuntary sin to blameworthiness, and on the bearing of compatibilist and incompatibilist theories on the theory of involuntary sin, see Adams, "Involuntary Sins," pp. 28-31.

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is.²³ Somebody in the chain of influences leading to Jim Bob's racism knew better, and this is true even if we have to follow the chain back to our first parents who emerged good and innocent from the hands of God.

IV

As this ambitious suggestion implies, moral evil is social and structural as well as personal; it comprises a vast historical and cultural matrix that includes traditions, old patterns of relationship and behavior, atmospheres of expectation, social habits. Of course, culpability in social and structural evil is notoriously hard to assess. Still, we know perfectly well that human pride, injustice, and hard-heartedness weave the web of social evil that catches people like Jim Bob and that this is true even when we cannot state with certainty whose pride, injustice, and hard-heartedness appear in the weave.

What we can state is that, wherever people are to blame for these faults that generate racism, their racism is itself sin. In case they infect others with racism (children, say, or pupils), that new and derived racism is naturally called sin because it is the fruit of sin and because it is morally evil. Accordingly, lots of ordinary Christians would simply call Jim Bob's racism sin, no matter how he acquired it.

In so doing, they would be following a long tradition. The paradigm case is the doctrine of original sin. All traditional Christians agree that human beings have a biblically certified and empirically demonstrable bias toward evil. We are all both complicitous in and molested by the evil of our race. We both discover evil and invent it; we both ratify and extend it. But in particular cases, including our own, only God knows the relevant degrees, and even the relevant kind,²⁴ of blame for original and actual human evil.

Though we cannot always measure culpability for it, we do know that sin possesses appalling force. We know that when they sin, human beings pervert, adulterate, and destroy good things. They create matrices and atmospheres of evil and bequeath them to their descendants. By disposition, practice, and habit, human beings let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations.

Although, partly because of the silence of Scripture, Christians of various theological orientations differ on central issues in the doctrine

²³ Robert C. Roberts, Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in An Age of Therapies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 301.
²⁴ If original sin is culpable, as the Augustinian and Calvinist traditions maintain (The Heidelberg Catechism, A7 and A10, says that "we are born sinners-corrupt from conception on," and that God is "terribly angry about the sin we are born with as well as the sins we personally commit"), we are culpable in some different sense of culpability than is used in ordinary moral discourse about actual sin. The major difference is that, according to these traditions-whether because we were seminally present in Adam or because Adam was appointed by God as our "federal head"-a human being inculpates herself "in Adam" before she has even been born. Everybody is a sinner by second nature. Thus, the Reformation contention that we are not only sinners because we sin; we also sin because we are sinners.

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of original sin-for example, how a child acquires the fateful disposition to sin, whether this disposition is itself sin, how to describe and assess the accompanying bondage of the will-they agree on the universality, solidarity, stubbornness, and historical momentum of sin. That is, all serious Christians buy a generic doctrine of corruption that extends far beyond individuals to whole cultures, societies, or, in Augustinian terms, "cities."

Garry Wills refers to the "linked sequences of disaster, the series calamitatis of history:

Defective human choices have multiple consequences, some unforeseen, some unintended.... We are involved in each other's miscalculations, inadequate foreknowledge, hasty or regretted acts.... We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness. There is no "clean slate" of nature unscribbled on by all one's forebears,... At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as "having a past." The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, "has a past."²⁵

Of course our past also includes saints, civilizations, generous laws for gleaners, hospices, relief agencies, virtuoso peacemakers, and rural traditions of pitching in at a neighbor's barnraising. Good has its own momentum. Corruption never wholly succeeds. (Even blasphemers acknowledge God.) Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still. To speak of sin outside of creation and grace is to misunderstand its nature: Sin is a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous, caricature of genuine human life.²⁶

But, contrariwise, to speak of grace without sin is to diminish the sudden loveliness of God, the transcendent and unexpected power of redemption, the terrible splendor of the work of Jesus Christ-it is to reduce these realities to a mere embellishment of the music of creation, a mere grace note. In short, for the Christian church (even in its recently popular seeker services) to ignore, euphemize, or otherwise mute the lethal reality of sin is to cut the nerve of the gospel. For the sober truth is that without full disclosure on sin, the gospel of grace becomes impertinent, unnecessary, and, finally, uninteresting.

²⁵ Garry F. Wills, Reagan's America.- Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 384. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, says Wills, always disbelieved in original sin, finding it uncheery.
²⁶ "...[H]uman life in sin is only a caricature of real humanity." Geoffrey W. Bromiley, "Sin," in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), p. 519.