How often have you heard older Christians complaining that the younger generation have no sense or understanding of ‘sin’? I can understand their concern. Without a sense of moral failure in those it addresses, the traditional form missional preaching has no means of engaging would-be converts. Read CS Lewis or John Stott. The case for Christianity always begins with the awakening of a sense of personal moral shortcoming.
But there is a problem with how we have traditionally understood the idea of sin.
How often have we heard from the pulpit something like the following: “We are all selfish, and the essence of sin is selfishness. “Me”, “I”, “my” … Everything centred around yourself. That is the essence of sin–self-love, self-will, self-seeking, self-pride.” (Billy Graham)
Is this really what we mean by ‘sin’? Is our human state of spiritual need really best understood as one of radical selfishness?
For one thing, I question the diagnosis. My own social world has not been lacking in unbelieving acquaintance who devote themselves, quite wholeheartedly, to patently ‘unselfish’ goals. Nor in those who would give their lives in support of a wayward family member or the care of a loved one. No doubt there is something fundamental to our humanity about the way our fulfilment depends upon a sacrificial investment in some project that transcends any narrow definition of our self-interest.
Such apparently unselfish people, I am tempted to suspect, had they been living in earlier generations, would have been church-goers to the man/woman. As things are, they exercise their associative and altruistic impulses entirely outside the sphere of any Christian faith or community. ‘You can live of service to your fellow beings just as well outside the Church as within it,’ they say. ‘Why can’t you serve your neighbours just for the sake of it. It’s us non-Christians who are the genuinely ‘unselfish’ ones.’
How is the Christian to respond? The response that, in the case of non-Christians, their behaviours are ‘really’ rooted in some vainglorious or Pharisaic need to maintain a certain outward show of piety surely rings hollow. It also fails to recognize the tendency of collective and idealistic projects to transcend that very boundary of self and other that the characterization of sin as selfishness causes us to fixate on.
So, when, with such thoughts in mind, I turn back to Scripture, it is a relief to discover that the time-honoured equation of sin with selfishness finds little support there–or in the writings of the early church Fathers, for that matter.
What we find instead, nine times out of ten, is a characterization of sin as idolatry–which is a rather different thing.
By idolatry the Christian writers mean the substitution of creation and created things for the uncreated God as the supreme object of value and focus of devotion. Improper objects of value (idolatrous ‘images’) drive from His paramount place in our hearts the One who is above and beyond the created order, and in whose ‘image’ we were made. These objects are things in creation. They attach us to the natural order. It is as though it were only to Nature that we owed our existence, and not to the God who transcends the natural order. As Scripture repeatedly states, we become like what we worship. In effect, we lose, at least partly, the image of God. We become natural–not supernatural–creatures, doomed, like all that is purely natural, to wither and perish.[i]
The most penetrating scriptural analysis of our human propensity to idolatry is perhaps the first: I mean, of course, the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32. At this stage in the story of the exodus the people of God had been liberated from their Egyptian captivity. But they still have no prescribed forms of cult. What ensues might lead us to conclude that, in the absence of such worship, only the prophetic vision of Moses had sustained the people in their attachment to the true God. At all events, with Moses now long absent on Mt Sinai (ironically in order to receive from the hand of God Himself a blueprint for proper worship) the people, unable to await his return, devise a form of worship for themselves. The precious golden ornaments they have borrowed from the Egyptians (a hitherto strangely redundant element of the story) now find a collective purpose through being forged into an object of idolatrous cult: the golden calf.
Our need to worship something is an instinct so fundamental and so urgent, it would appear, that it threatens to forestall the provision of a proper object. In the words of Aaron, challenged by the furious Moses, it is as though the gold itself, the material expression of that need, formed itself spontaneously into an idol: ‘They gave me the gold; out of it came this calf!’
Here then is the great transgression, the ultimate sin of idolatry whose denunciation resounds through biblical prophets and church fathers alike. Does it involve ‘selfishness’? Quite the reverse. Think of it like this. Gold, then as now, marked status and the attribution of value. The gold ornaments while in private hands could have been a cause of envy and dissension. So, what does Aaron do? Invite the people to pool this wealth for a common religious project. Impressively, this meets a willing response. No mention of any stinginess, rivalry or quarrelling. And when Moses first beholds the worshippers on his return from Sinai with the tablets of the Law in his arms, they are happily feasting and dancing. The strife and bloodshed come later– not as a result of Aaron’s improper worship, but as a consequence of its violent suppression by Moses.
The biblical focus on idolatry is something that, for a long time, I attributed to the ‘primitive’ conditions surrounding the emergence of the monotheistic faith of the Old Israel. But now, this insistence on proper worship–and the interdiction on wrong worship–strikes me as more relevant to us today than our traditional notion of sin as selfishness. The aspiration to ‘make the best of ourselves’, the pursuit of security and happiness for our children or our community, the protection of our natural environment can all become ends in themselves, and, as such, idolatrous. But these forms of devotion are scarcely ‘selfish’; they even take us ‘out of ourselves’, as we like to say. Nor even, that holy grail of contemporary spiritual aspiration, the quest for the full realization of our own human ‘potential’. For we are interconnected social beings, after all, whose lifegoals are not containable within a narrow definition of personal self-interest. The pursuit of these goals can perfectly well be sacrificial, especially when our exertions are not rewarded with success. The fact remains, of course, that, from a Christian perspective, where such things become ends in themselves, rather than undertaken in the name of Christ and for the glory of God, the sacrifice is wrongly directed–as surely as the sacrifices offered up to the golden calf or the gods of the Egyptians.
So, what of these ‘other gods’ to whom our idolatrous impulses are directed? Are there divine rivals of Christ in our contemporary world? Scripture and the Christian Tradition are unclear on the ontological status of the ‘gods’ idolatrously represented. They do not allow us to be conclusive on the question of whether demons ‘exist’. Yet there seems little doubt that there are demonic forces of a social, political and economic nature that operate under their cover. Little doubt, either, that the sway of such forces over our individual and collective lives is nourished by our subservience to their representations.
Now, to see things in this way is to introduce a less individualistic understanding of sin. For the burden of wrong worship is not just a matter of personal wrongdoing; it involves the whole collectivity. (Think of the Israelites ranged around their golden calf.) It almost certainly also involves demonic forces that transcend and dominate the individual – ‘the powers and principalities of this world’. (Think of the gods of the Egyptians that the Israelites had only just left behind, and whose influence, one suspects, underlay their religious experiment with the golden calf.) Wrong worship is a matter of servitude in a cause in which one may have acquiesced but which one has almost certainly not chosen-any more than the Israelites chose to spend their lives in the construction of the Pyramids. This consideration replaces the perspective of personal ‘vice’ with one in which we come to view ourselves, not solely as ‘perpetrators’, but as both perpetrators and victims within a field of demonic social and political forces, from which we may withhold our allegiance, but which we certainly don’t command. What Christian baptism brings to such situations is more than forgiveness. It is the exorcism of demons and a substitution of right worship for wrong. As the Psalmist puts it:
Those that worship other gods, Multiply their sorrows. Their drink-offerings of blood I will not pour out, Or take their names upon my lips. (Psalm 16.4)
So, we may not be so far from the ancient Israelites as we tend to think. Perhaps, the sacrifices of the ancient pagans berated by the OT prophets would have felt to their perpetrators–as our own sacrifices do to us–less a matter of gratuitous wrongdoing, than of pious duty (albeit a piety wrongly directed). And, on the other side, perhaps, we should start to view that field of secular influence in which we are caught up as potentially demonic.
Finally, isn’t it time we began to hear LESS from our church leaders about personal selfishness and MORE about the idolatrous worship of our distinctive contemporary forms of paganism? It may, of course, be that the phenomena of our contemporary idolatry are inadequately understood by them. In that case, there seems no more urgent task than that our leaders and theologians turn their attention to this question. After all, the success of our Christian outreach depends upon being able to give a convincing diagnosis of the contemporary state of spiritual need. Without that, what hope have we of explaining to the obstinately unconvinced the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ to our age?
[i] The essence of idolatry is excellently captured by St Athanasius, On the Incarnation