The Great Sin
Mere Christianity for Teachers, Part 12
Take a moment to reflect on these questions:
If you had to rank ‘the top five sins’ of people, what would be at the top?
How did you decide which one was number one?
Was your decision based on your own struggles, or a Biblical principle, or from what you have seen in others?
And how do your students understand what sin is, the reason for it, and what it can look like in their lives?
Has ‘sin’ become an unfashionable word in your context? Or politically incorrect? Do you hear that talking about sin will “Turn people off the love and mercy that God wants for them?”
What I have found interesting, in talking about these issues with teachers, is that they will give explanations for some time without referring to Genesis 1 to 3. Yet that is where the ‘why’ of sin is described. As Dr Bill Dumbrell explained, “knowing good and evil” has a legal context in the original language, in the sense that it is “language denoting the authority to decide an issue.” Thus, by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve:
… claim for themselves the moral autonomy and the right to decide for themselves apart from God (to whom these decisions properly belong) what is good or non-good. [i]
It is why S-I-N can be explained as Self Interested Nature.
But what is the desire that drives such disordered thinking? CS Lewis had a definite idea about what heart-state was and is behind this self-belonging:
The vice I am talking about is Pride, or Self-Conceit…. Pride is essentially competitive. …power is what pride really enjoys. … As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. The first step [towards humility] is to realise that one is proud… At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited it means you are very conceited indeed. (“Mere Christianity”, pp. 106- 112)
Lewis called Pride the Great Sin. We have desires, just like Adam and Eve, to determine right and wrong for ourselves. To think that we can do better than the Creator of the Universe is surely an act of pride, and massively so. The shallowness of such thinking is clearly demonstrated in Genesis 3 and then in Genesis 4.
In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve thought they could hide in the bushes and escape the gaze of the Creator of the Universe. Really? Then their son Cain tried the same game. His pride led him to believe he could lie about the murder of his brother, as if the Creator of the Universe would not know about it. Again, really?
It is why the starting point of approaching God is surrender, even though we (or I) often hear that the starting point is seeking healing. And in one sense, that is correct. But that self-focus will only lead to reconciliation when it leads to a letting go of self. After all, we must lose our lives to gain our souls (Matthew 16:25-26).
These complementary truths – letting go to be saved – are incomprehensible to those whose hearts are not seeking God. It is why they cannot talk about, let alone describe, the problem of evil.
N.T. Wright saw this problem (of not understanding evil) in both modernism and post-modernism. The first stance becomes mechanistic. The second makes everything meaningless. As Wright described it:
First, postmodern analysis is essentially…. Dehumanising. There is no moral dignity left because there is nobody left to bear the blame…. Second, the analysis of evil offered by postmodernity allows for no redemptions… there is no way back to the solid ground of truth from the quicksands of deconstruction. [ii]
What are we to do in the face of pride and its resultant evil?
I suggest that the first thing we need to do with those around us – family, colleagues, students – is to find a way to talk about it. Many times I have asked teenage students in Christian schools, “What is sin?”, and they cannot answer with any coherency. The same happens if I introduce the concept of evil. And sadly, it also happens too often with my (Christian) tertiary students. We must ask God, through His Word and His Holy Spirit, to help us renew our minds enough to find out how to build bridges into the hearts and minds of our students so that they can start to see the reality of Pride and its resultant sin-driven pain.
Turning towards grace through faith is central to such a journey. Wright gave these pastoral insights in terms of turning away from the desire of self-belonging and turning towards our Creator:
The line between good and evil runs through each one of us. (p. 38)
The sea is powerful, but God the Creator is more powerful still. Evil may still be a four-letter word. But so, thank God, is love. (p. 41)
The “problem of evil” is not simply or purely a “cosmic” thing; it is also a problem about me. And God has dealt with that problem on the cross of his Son, the Messiah. (p. 97)
Lewis also saw that the ‘opposite’ of sinful pride was charity (love), and he gave some practical advice about how to grow and mature in such love:
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did… When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. … Good and evil both increase at compound interest. … Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. (“Mere Christianity”, pp. 114-116)
So - how do we invite our students to love God and each other more? Calling out when such heart-states are not present will be part of the mix. But as Augustine noted in his On Christian Teaching, it also involves us being prayerful (to know the hearts of our students) and recognising that we are the message as well as the messenger. That is the basis for then inviting our children and young people to do good, even if they do not ‘feel’ like it.
Grace and peace,
Stephen
PS – there is a book being printed called Why Good Thinking Starts with God. Below is the link that describes it, and another on how to preorder it… and yes, in the interests of transparency, I admit I had the privilege of authoring it.
Why Good Thinking Starts with God by Dr. Stephen J. Fyson (ambassador-international.com)
[i] Bill Dumbrell, “Creation, Covenant and Work” in Crux, Vol. xxiv No. 3, Sept. 1988, pp. 14-24
[ii] NT WRIGHT Evil and the Justice of God (2006) Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, p. 33. For further on this, also see Os Guinness, Unspeakable: Facing up to the challenge of evil, Harper Collins, 2006.