ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
NAMING SIN T
Why We Need to Rediscover the Big Seven by Jonathan Martin
HE SEVEN DEADLY SINS— pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth—are seemingly archaic categories. More broadly, the language of sin itself feels archaic to modern ears. Especially when we see a world so deeply broken, it is easy to say that we perhaps have “big- ger fish to fry” than old issues of sin and repentance. Yet, not long ago I found myself drawn to preach a series on these sins. It did not feel like seven weeks of wallowing in the mud. It was not “nega- tive” per se, as it is impossible to speak of these ancient vices without also speaking of the corresponding virtues we are given to transcend their power over us. It is because we live in a profoundly broken world that the necessity of recapturing the language of sin is so pro- nounced. Many of us still labor under the old assumption that sin primarily consists of private acts that have few implications for the world around us. Yet I would contend that the privatization of matters of sin and holiness is one of the greatest challenges facing the Church today.
Sin Is Never Private
The Scriptures themselves pose a radi- cal threat to our understanding of sin as a “personal” issue. In the Old Testament narrative of Achan’s sin in Joshua 7, all of Israel is judged because of the rebellious act of one man. In the New Testament epistle to the Corinthians, Paul offers a stinging critique of the entire Christian community for their failure to address a man who was sleeping with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5). In Scripture, the line
8 EVANGEL | October 2010
between personal/individual sin and cor- porate/communal sin is so blurred as to be indistinguishable. One thing is certain: we never sin alone.
Conservatives in society in general are prone to emphasize individual sin and individual responsibility—at least in terms of sexual ethics. Liberals in soci- ety are more inclined to point out that corporate greed, systemic racism, and structures that prey on the poor and mar- ginalized are primary manifestations of sin. Yet this is a false choice. Our personal sins are so tightly bound together with systems of evil at work in our world that there is no way we could ever untangle those strands. We cannot separate what we do in the bedroom from what we do in the boardroom.
A couple of contemporary thinkers offer helpful examples of how we might
The seven deadly sins give us the language to take sin out of the abstract and into the particulars. We are able to recognize and parse sin through these seven categories not so that we might wallow in them, but to learn what it might mean to turn from them.
get beyond this false division between individual and corporate sin. One is Wendell Berry. I had the great honor of meeting the Kentucky farmer, poet, nov- elist, and social commentator a couple of years ago at Duke University, and am still marked by the experience. One of Berry’s more controversial (but also more insightful) critiques is that you can tell everything about how people will treat their land by how they treat their women. When women are exploited, objectified, and treated as resources to be “used,” the same approach will be taken to the land. Thus, it is impossible to separate between how one man treats one woman from the broader implications of sin in the world, in God’s good creation.
An equally powerful example is Chris
Hedges’ Empire of Illusion, which contains the most raw, blistering critique of por- nography I’ve encountered. It is impos- sible to view our national infatuation with porn the same way after his brutal expose of the porn industry. Writing around the same time that the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal was making international news, Hedges connected the images the public saw of naked prisoners piled on top of each other in degrading positions as the natural outcome of a culture that is infat- uated with pornography. Those countless hours of individuals watching images of degradation in the “privacy” of their own homes eventually has lasting ramifica- tions for the world we live in. This is what a culture of pornography produces. This is the logical end for a culture that wor- ships sex. If you worship sex and there are no parameters and no boundaries in
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