Thoughts on Sin and Salvation – Part I of II
“Why didn’t God just forgive our sins without involving Jesus?”
This question, which was first posed to me about two years ago in conversation with a close friend, resurfaced suddenly and violently in my mind last week. Very much is at stake in our answer. For one, if we are left speechless (as I was) by questions concerning the theology of the cross, we should likely be dissatisfied with our ability “to make a defense to anyone who asks… for a reason for the hope that is in [us].” But more importantly, how can we respond appropriately to God’s loving gift of grace in Christ Jesus if we don’t understand it? If the death of God’s Son wasn’t a necessary part of our salvation after all, then the whole story of Jesus begins to seem tangential and even cruel. It is of central importance, therefore, that we understand the significance and necessity of the cross.
My thoughts on this issue revolve around what I see as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sin that motivates much contemporary reflection on divine forgiveness. Here and in the following week’s post, I will examine this misunderstanding and present what I consider to be a more useful alternative. It is my hope that I will be able to develop a framework that facilitates ever-greater appreciation for God’s love as expressed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Before I was a Christian, I conceptualized sin in terms of God’s attitude towards human actions. Sins composed the subset of human actions that garnered God’s disapproval, and God’s disapproval was both necessary and (uniquely) sufficient to make any given action sinful. This way of thinking seemed reasonable enough to me at the time, and my guess is that it seems reasonable to very many people today. On this view, sin is essentially created by God; I perform actions, and then God causes some of them to be sinful by His reactions to them. Let’s call this conception of sin dispositional because it posits that events get their sinfulness from divine dispositions.
On a dispositional view of sin, we might construct the notion of forgiveness of sins as follows: sin x is forgiven if God determines to hold person y (who performed sin x) in good regard despite sin x. (Here we leave the notion of “good regard” intentionally vague.) If we have this understanding of the forgiveness of sins, it is quite natural and correct to wonder why God couldn’t have just forgiven our sins without involving Jesus. He could in fact do it quite easily by resolving to hold all people in good regard despite their sins.
My goal is to show that the dispositional view of sin is incorrect and deleterious to a proper understanding of the cross. Though it would be an arduous task to rigorously defeat the dispositional view, we can at least turn to an intuitive difficulty with it. The intuitive difficulty arises when we seek to answer the question, “Why is sinning undesirable?” Presuming that we agree that sinning is ultimately undesirable, the only answer that comes to mind involves God’s eventual wrath on sinners. But perhaps this answer runs counter to our intuitions. Perhaps we believe that there is something deeply dissatisfying and miasmal about a sinful life – something quite apart from God’s eventual retribution. Perhaps this is why we feel compassion for those who have lived such lives rather than merely a vague conviction that they have miscalculated how bad things will be for them on the Day of Judgment. If this intuitive difficulty with the dispositional view of sin is at all convincing, we might be motivated to seek out a conceptualization that more adequately addresses the concerns above. Next week, I hope to develop such a view and use it to better understand the place of Jesus in the forgiveness of our sins.
