What difference does it make if we
use a word in the plural rather than the singular? Mostly it just means that we
have more than one of the thing. I don’t have a coffee cup in my cupboard, I
have several coffee cups there. If I said I have a coffee cup there I’d
be telling the truth but not the whole truth. If I said I have the coffee
cup in the cupboard my listener would wonder which coffee cup I was talking
about unless our conversation had already made it clear which cup it was.
Either way we would be talking about only one coffee cup. So we could talk
about coffee cup or coffee cups, and the only difference would be how many
coffee cups we were talking about.[1]
Yet in at least one instance the
difference between the singular form of a noun and its plural form is far more
significant than that. That instance is the words sin and sins. We often hear
of sins, and when we say sin we usually mean just one of the many possible
sins. In this meaning of the word a sin is a morally wrong action or thought.
Even we liberal Protestants who don’t spend as much time focusing on sins as
our conservative coreligionists do have heard of the “7 Deadly Sins.” They are
pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Each of them is something
we do or something we feel. They are external or internal bad acts, or in the
case of sloth bad inaction. The Christian tradition has lists of less serious
things we are not supposed to do that we also call sins.
In this meaning the word sin can be a
verb as well as a noun. Jesus uses it that way at the end of the probably
apocryphal story of the woman caught in adultery. At the end of that story
Jesus says to the woman “go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” John
8:11b. This sense of the word, sin as a verb, means to commit some act
considered to be a sin. The meaning of sins as immoral acts is clearly the way
we use the word most these days.
There is however another meaning of
sin. It’s in the Bible. We see St. Paul use the word sin with a different
meaning when he says that he does what he wants not to do and does not do what
he wants to do. When he says “But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin
that dwells within me.” Romans 7:17. At Romans 7:20 he again refers to “sin
that dwells within me.” A wrongful act that we do doesn’t dwell within us or
anywhere else. It is just an act not something with autonomous being that must
dwell somewhere. Paul means something other than a wrongful act by sin here,
but what?
To answer that question we must
understand that for Paul everything that is has its own spirit. He called that
spirit a thing’s “power.” At Romans 8:37, for example, he includes “powers” in
a list of things that cannot separate us from the love of God. People of course
have spirits. We’re familiar enough with that concept. In ancient Greece
however everything had a spirit called a “power.”[2]
Institutions had their power. So did ideas. The power was the spiritual
identity of a thing even if that thing is only an idea.
This isn’t the place to give a long,
detailed explanation of this theory of the powers, but I will give just one
example of how the powers work. Big corporations have cultures, and they’re not
all the same from one corporation to the next. The particular culture of any
particular corporation tends to stay the same even though the people working
for the corporation change. The culture of a corporation may change over time,
but that change almost always comes very slowly. That’s because the
corporation’s power has its own nature that is expressed in the corporation’s
culture. That power resists change. So when new people come into the
corporation they will almost always adapt themselves to the culture that is
already there rather than either work to adapt the culture to themselves or to
work constantly butting their heads against that culture. We’re not talking
here about the power of a corporation as we usually think of that phrase. We
don’t mean the ability of the corporation to do this, that, or the other thing
against opposition. We mean the spiritual energy that dwells within the
corporation and makes the corporation what it is.
Paul understood sin as one of these
powers. It was for him a potent power that dwells, that is, has presence in
each one of us. As Paul says in the verses cited above, sin is a power dwelling
within him that controls him. It prevents him from doing what he knows is right
and makes him do what he knows is wrong. When Paul says sin here he doesn’t
mean a morally bad act. He means something more like a controlling force behind
all human actions that makes us do what we know we ought not do. Paul
understood that the power “sin” was active within himself and within everyone.
Many people in the ancient world,
including many ancient Christians, understood sin in this way. It was common for
people to believe that we humans are actually captives of sin understood as a
power. Our existential problem is less that we commit sins than that we are
captives of sin. Paul says as much in the passage we are considering here.
Romans 7:14 reads: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the
flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” It’s not quite clear here who sold him and
all of us into slavery to sin, but it really doesn’t matter. Whatever caused
our enslavement to the power called sin, Paul and many of his contemporaries
understood that that power dwells within and controls all of us.
One interesting consequence of this
understanding of the human existential problem is that it changes the meaning
of salvation. When sin is not something we do but a power that holds us in
thrall we don’t so much need God’s forgiveness for bad actions we have taken or
good actions we have not taken. What we need is to be freed from our captivity
to sin. We need to be ransomed out of it. Indeed the most common understanding
of salvation in the New Testament is precisely that Jesus’ suffering and dying
on the cross was that ransom. Theologians call this understanding the ransom
theory or the Christus Victor theory. It shares with classical atonement
soteriology that it sees Jesus’ suffering and death as a price paid. It differs
from classical atonement theory in its idea of to whom the price was paid.
Classical atonement theory holds that the price was paid to God. The ransom
theory holds that it was paid to the devil. In classical atonement theory the
price purchased divine forgiveness of human sin. In the ransom theory the price
procured our release from captivity to sin.
Paul at least suggests that that is
what Jesus Christ has done for us in the pericope we are considering here. He
says: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:24-25. By “this body
of death” he means his physical body enslaved to sin. For Paul sin and death
are closely related. He says, after all, that the wages of sin is death. Romans
6:23a. The only way Paul could see us ransomed from our captivity to sin with
death as a consequence was through some action by God. We can’t do it
ourselves. The action that did the job was Jesus’ death on the cross. When we
are baptized, Paul thought, we die to sin because we share in Christ’s death. Then
we rise to a life freed from the power called sin. See Romans 6:1-4.
We are so accustomed to thinking of
sins in the plural as morally bad acts that we may find Paul’s notion that sin
is a spiritual power within us that enslaves us hard to understand and harder
to accept. It does however offer an explanation for human behavior superior, in
my opinion at least, to that offered by the classical Christian theory of the
Fall. We simply cannot deny that much of the time we humans behave badly. We
want to know why. Christianity’s traditional explanation is that when Adam and
Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden they “fell” from a state of
grace to a state of sin and somehow took the rest of us with them.
Paul’s theory of sin as a power
within us says rather that there are evil powers at work in the world. One of
them, sin, dwells in people and binds them to itself. The power sin keeps us
from doing good and makes us do bad. It’s not that we did something horribly
wrong—or that the first humans did—and therefore our nature was changed from
good to bad. It’s that there are multiple powers at work in the world, and they
are mostly evil. One of them called sin gets ahold of each of us and makes us
its prisoner or, to use Paul’s word, its slaves. When we want to do good the
power sin (and not the power of sin, in which phrase sin means something
different) keeps us from doing it. When we want not to do bad, sin makes us do
it anyway.
Is understanding sin as a power
within us to which we are enthralled until Christ sets us free a better
understanding of sin than that traditional conception of a sin as a bad act and
sins as multiple bad acts? I’ll leave the answer to that one up to you. It
certainly is a more profound conception of sin and our relationship to it. It
changes our understanding of Christ’s saving work on the cross. It moves us
away from the classical theory of atonement, and to me at least that is a very
good thing. If nothing else, understanding Paul’s conception of sin as a power
helps us understand Paul as a whole better than we have before; and that too, I
think, is a very good thing.
[1]
Poor Russian. The Russian language of course has singular and plural nouns, but
it has neither definite nor indefinite articles. That fact would make
translating what I just said about a coffee cup and the coffee
cup into Russian harder than it might appear to be—but I digress.
[2]
For a good introduction to this concept of powers see Wink, Walter, The
Powers That Be, Theology For a New Millennium, Galilee Doubleday, New York,
1998.
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