the harvard ichthus

Thoughts on Sin and Salvation – Part II of II

Last week, I set out to achieve a deeper understanding of Jesus on the cross by reflecting on one popular understanding of sin, which I characterized as dispositional because it identifies the sinfulness of actions with God’s dispositions towards them.  On a dispositional view of sin, I argued, it makes sense to wonder why God didn’t just forgive our sins without involving Jesus.   But I also pointed out what I see as an intuitive difficulty with the dispositional view of sin; such a view does not seem able to account for the damage we do to ourselves when we sin (as opposed to the damage we incur because of God’s wrath).  This difficulty led me to reject the dispositional account of sin, and I promised to present and explicate an alternative view this week.  With God’s guidance, I hope to do so now.

I propose a relational view of sin.  On this view, action x (performed by person y) is sinful or not sinful in virtue of its tendency to damage (sinful) or not to damage (not sinful) person y’s relationship with God.  Whereas on a dispositional view actions become sinful solely on account of the activities of God, on a relational view sins are best characterized as a particular subset of interactions between the individual and God.  As in any relationship, the outcomes of these interactions depend on the personalities and expectations of both parties.

This relational view of sin helps us to understand why our sins are harmful in this life, apart from the ultimate judgment of God.  Construing sin as that which damages our relationships with God and keeping in mind the fact that God is the source of all spiritual life, it becomes natural to see how our sin prevents us from being fully alive.  Every time we sin, we separate ourselves from God.  If you like, he stands with open arms, but we turn and wander away from him.  It is hardly surprising, then, that sin seems to drive us away from the best things in life.

It is important to remember the motivation for adopting a dispositional view of sin in the first place, which was the Bible’s clear teaching that God hates sin.  It is true that focusing too much on God’s hatred of sin led to the construction of that unfortunate view, which made his disapproval constitutive of the nature of sin.  Nonetheless, God’s hatred of sin is a fact for which we must account.  On a relational view of sin, we can do this simply; God hates sin because it prevents us from being in a relationship with him, which is his greatest desire for us.

Now let’s consider the question of the cross.  On a dispositional view of sin, we found it natural to wonder why God didn’t just forgive our sins without involving Jesus.  Do we face the same question on a relational view?  First, we should recognize that since we now understand sin to exist independently of God’s dispositions, his choosing to hold all people in good regard despite their actions would do little to solve the problem.  It would, to be sure, preclude his eventual wrath on the ungodly, but insofar as we see sinfulness as separation from God and a failure to realize our ultimate purpose in relationship with him, a God who chose simply to disregard sin would be profoundly unloving.  We are told not that our God merely does not punish the sheep that wanders away from his pasture; we are told that he pursues the sheep and calls it back to the fold.  And we should rejoice, since to let a sheep wander is to condemn it to death.  This, then, is how I suggest we view the forgiveness of our sins: not as the abstract mental transaction of a philosopher god, but as a very concrete, very bloody rescue operation undertaken in powerful love to recover the most unruly flock of sheep that has ever existed.  Our principal need – the need to be rescued – is often overlooked in discussions of sin and forgiveness.  Let us therefore consider it carefully whenever we set our minds on the cross, that we might more fully grasp the passion of the man hanging there.

Note:

A proponent of the dispositional view of sin might attempt to explain the damage we do to ourselves when we sin as follows: even though actions are sinful only in virtue of God’s dispositions towards them, he has created us so that the actions he regards as sinful are precisely those that are detrimental to us.  Such an answer naturally raises the question of why God is concerned with our wellbeing.  If we answer, as Christians, that it is because he loves us and desires for us to flourish in his care, then we have adopted the central tenet of the relational view, which is that actions become sinful in virtue of their effects on our relationship with God.

That a thorough explication of the dispositional view leads to the relational view is not surprising; the former is essentially an incomplete and explanatorily stunted version of the latter.