2. Vandalism of Shalom
Because God is at the pinnacle of shalom (“the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight”) Christians usually define sin with reference to God. It’s a religious concept, not just a moral one. All sin has first and finally a Godward force. We could therefore draft a definition like this: a sin is any act—any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame. Then sin (no article) is the tendency to commit sins.
But once we possess the concept of shalom, we are in position to specify our understanding of sin. God is, after all, not arbitrarily offended. God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be. (In fact, that is why God has laws against a good deal of sin.) God is enthusiastically for shalom and therefore against sin. Let’s say that evil is any spoiling of shalom, whether physically (by cancer, say), morally, spiritually, or otherwise. Moral and spiritual evil are agential evil, that is, evil that, roughly speaking, only persons can do or have: agential evil thus comprises evil acts and dispositions. Sin is, then, any agential evil for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.
This definition may strike someone as disappointingly formal: it tells us how an act qualifies as sin, but it doesn’t tell us which acts qualify in this way. And, of course, questions about whether particular acts count as sin are old and numerous. Take a case. Suppose you are a dinner guest of a beaming but shaky host. As the evening progresses, you discover that his tastes and achievements in cookery lie at a discouragingly low level. At some point he asks you in front of six other guests how you like his Spam, Velveeta, sauerkraut, and lima bean casserole. The table falls silent, faces turn to you, and your host waits expectantly. Now what? You have to make a decision on the spot, so you do. You do not tell the brutal truth (“Your casserole sucks”). Nor do you evade (“I didn’t know a casserole like this was even possible!”). You lie. Indeed, you lie winningly.
Have you disturbed shalom or preserved it?
Questions of this kind often arise when more than one moral rule applies to a given act and when obeying one rule apparently means disobeying the other. Thus, in the present example, “Tell the truth” appears to lead one way and “Be kind” another.
But maybe this is overly dramatic. Maybe we have a setting here in which shalom is better served by following custom than by agonizing over the applicability of moral rules. Maybe in some social settings a murmur of approval over a doubtful casserole is only a formality, only a customary nicety. Maybe it possesses no more moral force than “Dear” at the start of a letter to the IRS.
Obviously, many moral dilemmas rise to a far more serious and sometimes even agonizing level. It’s bad enough to know the will of God and to flout it. But what if you cannot tell how to build shalom and please God? Christians derive their vision of shalom from Scripture, from reading good and evil within creation, from centuries of reflection on Scripture and creation, and from whatever wisdom God grants. Often the yield from these sources is pretty plain: generally speaking, robbery, assault, malicious gossip, fraud, blasphemy, pride, envy, idolatry, lust, greed, and perjury break the peace, while justice, charitable giving, embracing, praising, harvesting, encouraging, repenting, thanksgiving, complimenting, truth-telling, and worshiping God build it.
But how about killing another human being? Everybody agrees that unjust killing is a culpable disturbance of shalom; but which killings count as unjust? Slaying your parents to speed up the inheritance process surely qualifies, but how about slaying the marauder who forces your side door, enters your family home at 3 a.m., and threatens your fourteen-year-old sister with rape? Is it, so to speak, all right with God if you use force to defend your household and repel the invader? How much force? May you, for instance, blast away with a shotgun? Only after warning first? What if there isn’t time? If you do shoot, must you aim someplace other than the torso or head? Does it matter whether the invader is drunk or crazy? Suppose there are three invaders and you are terrified: do these facts bear on your blameworthiness in the eyes of God if you shoot? As a citizen, are you morally obliged to prepare nonlethal defenses in advance and to practice them?
Outside household defense, what about the famous hard cases that crop up in the abortion, euthanasia, human sexuality, and war debates no matter what position you take on them?
Fortunately, even if I could, I needn’t try to resolve all this before continuing. Christians may disagree about various hard cases, just as people would in other religions or in no religion. Still, the general outlines of a Christian theory of sin remain pretty clear. This is where the definition comes in. “Culpable shalom-breaking” suggests that sin is unoriginal, that it disrupts something good and harmonious, that (like a housebreaker) it is therefore an intruder, and that those who do it deserve reproach. To get our bearings, we have needed to see first that sin is one form of evil (an agential and culpable form) and that evil, in turn, is the disruption of shalom.
Shalom naturally includes not only a healthy relation of people to people and of people to nature and of nature to God, but also the proper relation of people to God. In the Christian view, human beings ought to love and obey God as children properly love and obey their parents. Human beings ought to be in awe of God at least as much as, say, a middle school basketball player is in awe of Kobe Bryant. They ought to marvel at God’s greatness and praise God’s goodness. In the Christian view, failure to do these things—let alone indulging in outright scorn of God—is sinful because it runs counter to the way things are supposed to be. Godlessness is anti-shalom. Godlessness spoils the proper relation between human beings and their maker and savior. The great North African Christian thinker St. Augustine famously stated the relation like this: “O Lord,” prayed Augustine, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”2
Let me add that sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made. Sexists and racists, for example, show contempt both for various human persons and also for the mind of God. God loves not only humankind, but also human kinds. In the cramped precincts of their little worlds, sexists and racists disdain such differences in kinds.
In sum, shalom is God’s designed plan for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and, therefore, an affront to their architect and builder.
Of course, such ideas annoy certain contemporary people. The concept of a design to which all of us must conform ourselves, whether we like it or not, appears absurd or even offensive to many. Metaphysical naturalists, for example, who believe in wholly unguided evolution may think that human concepts, values, desires, and religious beliefs are, like human life itself, metaphysically untethered to any transcendent purpose. They are the product of such blind mechanisms as natural selection for survival, working on random genetic mutation. To such metaphysically naturalist believers, there isn’t any “way it’s supposed to be” or anyone like God to sponsor and affirm this state of affairs. Thus, there isn’t anything like a violation of the way it’s supposed to be, or anything like affront to God, or anything therefore equivalent to sin. In particular, sin makes no sense if human life, taken as a whole, is purposeless—only “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” as Bertrand Russell once put it—for at its core human sin is a violation of our human end, which is to build shalom.
Moreover, whether or not they believe in purely naturalistic evolution, people who think of human beings as their own centers and lawgivers reject the whole idea of dependence on a superior being. Indeed, they find this idea entirely distasteful. To them, the proposal that we ought to worship someone who is better than we are, that we ought to study this person’s will and then bend our lives to it, that we ought to confess our failures and assign life’s blessings to this person—the notion that we ought to take this posture toward any other person at all—is humiliatingly undemocratic, an offense to human dignity and pride.
Not incidentally, the same pride that resists God and the superiority of God resists objective moral truth as well. Such truth (i.e., that some acts are right and some wrong regardless of what we think about the matter) stands against the freedom of human beings to create their own values, to make up the moral truth as they go along, to socially construct good and evil.
Serious Christians think that modern attitudes of this kind are themselves old and famous exhibits of human self-deception. Humans notoriously suppress truth they dislike, St. Paul wrote (see esp. Romans 1:18). In the biblical view, not only do we sin because we are deluded; we are also deluded because we sin, because we find it convenient to misconstrue our place in the universe and to reassign divinity in it. (Of course, Christian believers engage in these misconstruals and reassignments, too, only less consistently than stable secularists.)
Our thinking gets bent and our learning along with it. Nicholas Wolterstorff, a prominent philosopher, observes that when we try to learn something we bring to the task not only certain “hard-wired capacities for perception, reflection, intellection, and reasoning,” but also mental software, programming formed outside of school, including a whole range of beliefs, assumptions, and commitments.3 Nobody pursues purely “objective” learning. Everybody pursues “committed” and “socially located” learning. In fact, everybody’s learning is “faith-based,” and this is so no matter what his scholarly or professional field. The question is never whether a person has faith in something or someone, but in what or whom.
We identify with our own social group and filter our learning through its membership requirements. So the rich do social science one way and the poor another, and it seems that neither is able to see things from the perspective of the other nor even wants to. Or scholars commit to godlessness, convinced that God would cramp their freedom or intellectual integrity. With remarkable candor, Richard Lewontin, a Harvard biologist, once confessed his faith in materialism:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.4
It would be hard to find a clearer demonstration of the fact that scholars who believe in God are not the only ones to guide their scholarship by their faith commitment. And atheism at the base of the learning pyramid is only one exhibit of how thinking and learning have gotten bent. People feel estranged from the persons and movements they study, and their estrangement often stems from resentments with a spiritual base. So people form rival schools, with rival systems and worldviews, trying hard not merely to win their way, but also to defeat or even humiliate somebody from another school. The result is the well-known envy, rivalry, and sheer cussedness of a good deal of the academic enterprise, which is in these ways merely typical of the human enterprise.
Obviously, more education won’t fix what’s wrong with education. Nor will any other merely human corrective. Such fixes are tainted with the same corruption that needs fixing.
3. The Human Race “Has a Habit” Where Sin Is Concerned
God’s original judgment on creation was that it was “good,” even “very good.”5 God made a paradise, and we can still find signs of it. Christians still sing “This is My Father’s World” and do so with gusto:
This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres. . . .
This is my Father’s world: he shines in all that’s fair;
In rustling grass I hear him pass—he speaks to me everywhere.
It’s a good hymn, but it gives us only half the picture—only paradise and not paradise lost. As matters stand, creation still declares the glory of God, but it also declares the tragedy of fallenness, of chaos, of painful carnivorousness. On a bluebird day in May, “All nature sings and round me rings,” and you can probably recall a few bluebird days that delighted you and filled you with longing. But nature also includes animals that tear each other up and animals that rape each other or kill each other for sport. Some animal parents devour their own offspring. Creation speaks out of both sides of its mouth now. It still sings and rings, but it also groans. As St. Paul says, “the whole creation has been groaning” for release from its “bondage to decay” (see Romans 8:21–22).
The whole creation includes us. To see human decay, all you have to do is look around town, look around the world at CNN online, check out some of the more violent fights on YouTube. You’ll find both hostility and indifference. In fact, you’ll find hostility packaged up as entertainment and indifference treated as normal. (In Scripture it’s just as evil and perhaps more common to turn one’s back on God or neighbor as to attack them.) Every day’s news shows us a new assortment of merciless dictators, negligent contractors, remorseless killers. Year after year we see new film footage of old miseries—for example, of refugees forced out of their houses and onto long marches by soldiers who are “simply following orders” in conflicts fueled by long memories and short tempers. As others have noticed, human depravity is the one part of Christian doctrine that can be proved.
That is how it was on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when the whole world looked into the face of terror. The men who flew airliners into New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon planned the attacks for maximum death and destruction, not only to those who fell under direct assault, but also to the spirit of a watching Western world, forced to see spectacular images of its own vulnerability. Words like “evil” seemed suddenly resonant again as the world’s acoustics changed in a single day.
Philosophers notice such things as well as everybody else. They notice that evil is the main human problem. Even when these thinkers reject God, they recognize that the world is out of joint and that human beings, too, are “alienated” or “divided” or “repressed.” Human beings live irrationally, as philosophers put it, or “inauthentically.” The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described the human condition in a particularly bleak way. “If we want to know what people are worth morally,” said Schopenhauer, “we have only to consider their fate as a whole and in general. This is want, wretchedness, affliction, misery, and death.”6
Human life is not the way it’s supposed to be. And so the world’s great thinkers often diagnose the human predicament and prescribe various remedies for it. They diagnose ignorance and prescribe education. They diagnose oppression and prescribe justice. They diagnose the conformism of “bad faith” and prescribe the freedom of authentic choice. A few look at the world, fall into a depression, and put their prescription pad away.
Christians think that the usual diagnoses and prescriptions catch part of the truth but that they do not get to the bottom of it. The human problem isn’t just ignorance; it’s also stubborn pride. It’s not just oppression; it’s also corruption. That’s why newly liberated victims of oppression often end up oppressing others. The human problem isn’t just that we timidly conform to prevailing modes of life; it’s also that nothing human can jolt us out of our slump. Even a move to a pristine backwoods in British Columbia won’t save us because we carry our trouble with us.
The real human predicament, as Scripture reveals, is that inexplicably, irrationally, we all keep living our lives against what’s good for us. In what can only be called the mystery of iniquity, human beings from nearly the beginning have so often chosen to live against God, against each other, and against God’s world. We live even against ourselves. An addict, for example, partakes of a substance or practice that he knows might kill him. For a time he does so freely. He has a choice. He freely starts a “conversion unto death,” and for reasons he can’t fully explain, he doesn’t stop until he crashes.7 He starts out with a choice. He ends up with a habit. And the habit slowly converts to a kind of slavery that can be broken only by God or, as they say in the twelve-step literature, “a higher power.”
According to Genesis 3, sin appeared very early in the history of our race. In this chapter our first parents try to be “like God, knowing good and evil,” and succeed only in alienating themselves from God and from each other. They choose to believe the tempter rather than their maker and turn their garden into a bramble-patch. The good and fruitful earth becomes their foe (see Genesis 3:17–18; cf. 4:12–14) and their own sin then rises in a terrible crescendo. Adam and Eve’s pride and disbelief trigger revolt, scapegoating, and flight from God (see Genesis 3:4–5, 10, 12–13). Their first child ups the ante: Cain resents and kills his brother Abel, launching the history of envy that leads to murder. Like his parents and the rest of the race, Cain refuses to face his sin (“Am I my brother’s keeper?”), and God exiles him to a place “east of Eden” (see Genesis 4:9, 16). In a phrase that suggests the restlessness of all who are alienated from God, Cain becomes “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (see Genesis 4:12), a murderer who now fears other murderers, and has to be saved from them by a mysterious mark that God places upon him.
Among these strangers (Genesis hasn’t the slightest interest in telling us where they came from), Cain starts a family and passes sin down the generations like a gene. At the sixth generation, the Genesis narrator pauses to snap a picture of a homicidal braggart by the name of Lamech, the Bible’s first terrorist: “You wives of Lamech, listen . . . . I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23–24).
From there, the history of sin and corruption moves on, down the ages, in a cast of billions. Each new generation and each new person reaps what others have sown and then sows what others will reap. This is true not only of goodness (much-loved children can offer a sense of security to their own spouses and children), but also of evil, which each generation not only receives but also ratifies by its own sin. Terrorists, for example, do not think of themselves as others think of them—irrational zealots consumed by some nameless malice that has turned them into enemies of the peace established by decent people. Like Lamech, they think of their violence as retaliation. And because they have long memories, terrorists may think of themselves as redressing grievances that are decades or even centuries old.
The glory of God’s good creation has not been obliterated by the tragedy of the fall, but it has been deeply shadowed by it. The history of our race is, in large part, the interplay of this light and shadow.
According to Genesis 3 and Romans 5, our whole race “has a habit” where sin is concerned. Near the beginning of our history, we human beings broke the harmony of paradise and began to live against our ultimate good. As Genesis 3–4 reveal, from nearly the beginning we have rebelled against God and then fled from God. We once had a choice. We now have a near-compulsion—at least that’s what we have without the grace of God to set us free. Over the centuries we humans have ironed in this near-compulsion with the result that each new generation enters a world that had long ago lost its Eden, a world that is now half-ruined by the billions of bad choices and millions of old habits congealed into thousands of cultures across all the ages. In this world even saints discover, in exasperation, that whenever they want to do right “evil lies close at hand” (Romans 7:21). We are “conceived and born in sin.” This is a way of stating the doctrine of original sin, that is, that the corruption and guilt of our first parents have run right down the generations, tainting us all. As the author Garry Wills writes, none of us has a fresh start:
We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness. There is no “clean slate” of nature unscribbled on by all one’s forebears. . . . At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as “having a past.” The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, “has a past.”8
Evil is what’s wrong with the world. As Simon says in the movie, it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.