Theologian Preston Sprinkle has been the subject of perennial controversy among a segment of Christians who affirm a traditional sexual ethic. Its most recent iteration was sparked by comments from Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield is a former lesbian-identifying English professor turned Presbyterian who rejects the term “gay Christian” as a description for Christians who remain same sex attracted even if they do not engage in same sex acts. Sprinkle, who is the president of the Center for Faith, Sexuality, & Gender, has taken a more open-handed approach to such language even as he affirms a more traditional Christian sexual ethic. When Butterfield criticized Sprinkle at Liberty University’s convocation, some of her co-combatants on Twitter snapped into action. Pastor Jared Moore retweeted a clip from her speech with the comment that Sprinkle is a “heretical liar” for claiming that, “same-sex attraction is a sinless temptation, and only a sin if you act on it.”
But is it the case that a non-affirmed sinful desire, unacted upon, counts as a sin for the person who experiences it?
At the center of this dispute are two assumptions about sin:
- Sin is a choice, so if we don’t choose to act out a bad desire, we aren’t sinning (I’ll call this the moderate view).
- Even if we reject bad desires we are nevertheless held morally responsible for them and deserve to face God’s wrath for them (I’ll call this the conservative view)
These assumptions flow from how one views “original sin”: Adam’s decision to disobey God and its enduring impact upon humanity. In Against God and Nature, Thomas McCall summarizes the points under debate in discussions of original sin:
“Christian theologians throughout the history of the church have wrestled with exactly how to formulate the doctrine of original sin. Questions arise: clearly, original sin involves corruption or pollution, but does original sin also entail original guilt? … [If guilt, then] for what exactly are we guilty: Adam’s own action of sin, or our own state of corruption? And how do we account for the guilt of someone else’s act of sin being applied or accredited to all?”
While there are lots of variations in how these questions have been answered in the Christian tradition, for the sake of simplicity I’ll group them into two–corresponding to the conservative and moderate views listed above.
Conservative view (original guilt)
In the conservative view, all of humanity bears guilt and personal responsibility for Adam’s sin–either because we were “in Adam” (realism) or because he represented us (federal headship). This conservative understanding is strongly associated with a Reformed/Calvinistic evangelical tradition and is well-represented in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.
Grudem defines sin as:
“any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature. Sin is here defined in relation to God and his moral law. Sin includes not only individual acts such as stealing or lying or committing murder, but also attitudes that are contrary to the attitudes God requires of us. We see this already in the Ten Commandments, which not only prohibit sinful actions but also wrong attitudes.”
But we are not only guilty for the wrong attitudes we have, but, “We Are Counted Guilty Because of Adam’s Sin.” Grudem explains:
“all members of the human race were represented by Adam in the time of testing in the Garden of Eden. As our representative, Adam sinned, and God counted us guilty as well as Adam… God counted Adam’s guilt as belonging to us…”
But could a God who would do this actually be moral? In his exploration of original sin, Alan Jacobs give voice to the suspicion many of us have of a doctrine that holds us accountable for someone else’s actions:
“Without doubt nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has implicated in its guilt men so far from the original sin that they seem incapable of sharing it. This flow of guilt does not seem merely impossible to us, but indeed most unjust. What could be more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than the eternal damnation of a child, incapable of will, for an act in which he seems to have had so little part that it was actually committed 6,000 years before he existed” (Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History)?
Despite these natural objections to the doctrine of original guilt, how precisely this transference of guilt can be morally justified isn’t a major concern for Grudem. In typical conservative Reformed fashion, he is content that God’s decree is always the very definition of good:
“God is the ultimate judge of all things in the universe, and since his thoughts are always true, Adam’s guilt does in fact belong to us. God rightly imputed Adam’s guilt to us.”
Moderate view (corruption only)
While some conservatives imply that their view is the only one rooted in the Bible, it’s worth noting that it is not the only view held by Bible-believing Christians. In fact, the early, pre-Augustinian church seems marked by the understanding that humanity inherited Adam’s corruption and mortality, but not his guilt–a view still held by Eastern Orthodox Christians, not to mention some Reformed and many Arminian Christians.
Because of what Adam did, we are inclined to death, sickness, corruption, and even sin. We need to be saved from the consequences of Adam’s sin, as well as from the guilt incurred by our own sins, but not from our shared guilt for what Adam did.
The Biblical Data
The two positions we’ve examined seem to have more roots in systematic theology and philosophy than in biblical exegesis and biblical theology. What path does Scripture cut for us through these tall weeds?
To begin with, the Old Testament does have a category for actions (often unchosen) that separate us from God but for which we are not reckoned as sinners: uncleanness. For God to dwell in the land of Israel, the people had to be holy–set apart from both sin and uncleanness. Unclean acts were those that ceremonially polluted the people and the land–making them common as opposed to holy–but which were not inherently sinful. A woman’s period or a man’s nocturnal emissions, for example, would make them unclean and would require a time of ritual washing and separation before they could enter the presence of God, but they were not seen as immoral acts.
The New Testament also acknowledges the role of knowledge and coercion in mitigating guilt. Recall that Jesus asks the Father to forgive His crucifiers because they didn’t know what they were doing (Luke 23:34), acknowledging both that an offense has taken place and that it would be just to overlook it due to the intent of its perpetrators. Early Christians were also encouraged to pay compulsory taxes even though they supported the building of pagan temples and enabled wicked tyrants to expand their evil empires. If intent and compulsion are factors that are able to remove guilt from potentially immoral actions, then certainly we should treat the idea of inherited guilt with some skepticism. Indeed, if God’s law given to Moses is any indication of His moral character, then we should take very seriously this command from Deuteronomy in developing our theology of original sin:
“Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16, NASB).
Paul complicates our picture somewhat. When we get to his letters, we find two contrasting emphases that add to our view of sin and culpability.
On the one hand, Paul gives us the primary verse that the idea of original guilt is built upon:
“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because [ἐφ᾽ ᾧ] all sinned” (Romans 5:12, NASB).
Does Paul mean that all men were in some sense sinning when Adam sinned, and thus we are guilty with him? The Latin Vulgate translation that Augustine read would suggest so, since the Greek phrase above reads in quo (in whom) in the Vulgate. However, the Greek original is harder to pin down. ἐφ᾽ ᾧ (eph ho) could be literally translated “on the basis of which,” or more simply “because,” as it is in many English translations. Even if we understand Paul to be saying that all of humanity sinned because all of us were in a sense in Adam, it is still not obvious that we must have inherited his guilt and not just the corruption that he passed onto us.
Another reading is that ἐφ᾽ ᾧ could mean “with the result that,” so that Adam’s sin and the death that followed it spread to all men, bringing about sin in all people. The text is somewhat inconclusive, though at minimum we can agree that it communicates that what Adam did affected all of humanity, bringing about both sin and death.
But if Paul could be read as saying that we are guilty of Adam’s sin in this verse, the rest of his letter to the Romans presents a different perspective on sin–that we are its victims.
Enslaved to Sin
In Romans 3:9, Paul describes Jews and gentiles as both being “under sin,” meaning under its power. He also describes the human predicament as one of being “sold [as a slave] under sin” (7:14, 6:6). In this present evil age, “sin reigns” (5:21). The only hope for being freed from Sin–the cosmic tyrant–is having our old self crucified with Jesus. In this process, “the body of sin” might be done away with. Is Paul referring here to the sinful bodies of each person, or is it an “emergent social entity” like the Body of Christ, as Matthew Croasmun suggests in his book The Emergence of Sin? In either case, the problem is that Sin has gained control over us and we are therefore its slave.
Ernst Käsemann, reflecting on Paul’s understanding of Sin in Romans, writes that Paul “is not speaking primarily of [individual] act and punishment but of ruling powers which implicate all people individually and everywhere determine reality as destiny” (Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans. Cited in Matthew Croasmun’s The Emergence of Sin). Croasmun concludes, “the cosmic disaster—the enslavement to the powers—is fundamental for Käsemann. The individual human agent’s acts of sin are only a consequence of this enslavement” (Croasmun).
Martinus C. de Boer similarly concludes:
“The residents who make up this domain, the world (κόσμος) under Sin, are expected to be obedient (6:16) to their lord and king, and thus to do what it requires and demands. In fact, as slaves and thus as part of a given and fixed hierarchical structure of relationships, they have little or no choice” (Nijay K. Gupta, Sin and Its Remedy in Paul).
Paul himself suggests that the man outside of Christ cannot help but obey Sin, lamenting: “the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (8:18-19, NASB). De Boer follows this logic to its seeming conclusion:
“Sin causes someone to do what they do not want to do. Sin, then, is evidently not to be identified with the human self who wills to do what is good… but cannot achieve it. The descendants of Adam are here being portrayed as the victims and pawns of an alien force that compels them to do things that they know they should not do. As a power, Sin causes or effects ‘sinful deeds’ (ἁμαρτήματα, 3:25), turning human beings into “sinners” (5:8, 19) who actively “commit sin” (2:12; 3:23; 5:12; 6:15)” (Gupta).
So which is it: “Are human beings guilty of sins, as 5:12d suggests (“death spread to all because all have sinned”), or helpless against the cosmic tyrant Sin, as Paul indeed seems to describe the situation, and as Käsemann insists” (Croasmun)?
The answer is that sin happens to us, but then we recreate it within ourselves and others. Sin is a cycle that we perpetuate: “each and every human being is born a slave to Sin and will as a matter of course behave in a way that reflects this situation… Every human being repeats this primal sin, thereby becoming a slave of Sin with its terrible consequences for human life” (de Boer in Gupta).
We can see this reinstantiation of sin most clearly on a societal level. Jacobs writes, “I don’t see how I, as a white Southerner raised in the 1960s and 1970s, could have avoided some taint of racism, yet I don’t think I should use that upbringing to declare myself innocent” (Jacobs). Human societies tolerate racism, slavery, abortion, war, and all types of injustice because even as individuals who hate these sins, we feel powerless to push back against the strong current of social forces and often participate in perpetuating these sins. The conditions of our existence also increase our likelihood to sin: we sin because people hurt us, because our community abandons us, because it’s what we saw our parents do and it’s all we know, or because our DNA gives us a higher propensity for drunkenness or cruelty or fornication. In other words, we come into a world that is corrupted with a human nature that is also corrupted. Thus we are predisposed to sin, not by any fault of our own, but then we turn around and choose to perpetuate the cycle.
Sin kills even when it isn’t chosen–even when it happens to us. If we are being biblically accurate as well as pastorally useful, we should be making distinctions between sin that is chosen and Sin as the condition of this present evil age that often victimizes us against our will.
Where Do These Views Lead Us?
The doctrine of original guilt carries with it some unhelpful baggage, namely that it creates a sense of ongoing guilt even in those who are faithful to God in their choices and behavior. On the other hand, it is questionable whether it adds anything practically positive that can’t be derived from the corruption-only view. Even as we debate whether we are victims of Adam’s sin, willing participants in it, or both, the solution is the same: we cannot save ourselves but need God to rescue us. Jesus died to defeat the power of sin–not just the sins we choose, or even the sins that tempt us, but also sin as a force that entraps, harms, and kills us.
We are slaves to sin, but we are enabled by the Holy Spirit to die to our sin and serve a different master–Jesus. Sin may still have an influence upon us, but we don’t belong to it. The call to repent, therefore, is a call to stop serving the master we’ve been enslaved to. Christ is our Harriet Tubman, our Moses, who is able to lead us out of slavery and into freedom. If we have indeed followed Him out, committed ourselves to Him, and continue to reject our former way of life even as it calls out to us–are we still enslaved to our former master? Paul says no:
“do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (6:13-14, NASB).
But if sin still influences me to the point that I have within me still a desire to do what is evil, though I instead yield to Christ and serve Him, how am I still incurring guilt for sin?
Conservative evangelicalism in general and conservative Calvinism in particular is keen to affirm in the strongest possible terms that humans are guilty before God; and, in the case of the latter, that we deserve God’s wrath even though we were pre-determined according to the plan, purpose, and foreknowledge of God to sin: we are guilty even though we had no volition, no choice, to do otherwise. It should therefore be no surprise that many in this camp affirm that even rejected desires which are foisted upon us due to Sin’s impact upon humanity through Adam’s sin still make us guilty.
If the claim of these most conservative Christians was merely Paul’s–that humans will die because they are separated from God–that would be logical, perhaps even unobjectionable. But the notion that God will torment a baby forever because of what a distant relative did–that they are guilty and deserve eternal conscious torment for it–defies both reason and any conceivable definition of God as omnibenevolent other than the arbitrary one proposed by Grudem.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most biblical way forward is to acknowledge that there is some truth in both perspectives–that we are both victims of and willing participants in Sin. The conservative view is most true when we redefine its claim that my unchosen desires to do wrong are sin: they are most certainly sin in the sense that they are the product of Sin, the enslaving force that holds the world under its sway. However, it is not so obvious that they are sin in the sense that I have acquired moral guilt from them and thus deserve God’s wrath.
The conservative view sees personal guilt as central to their theology of sin–so central, in fact, that many are happy to see it as all that can and should be said about sin. This instinct is misguided. But another instinct they have, to designate as sin all that is opposed to God’s character, is on surer footing. As Grudem writes:
“In a universe created by God, sin ought not to be. Sin is directly opposite to all that is good in the character of God, and just as God necessarily and eternally delights in himself and in all that he is, so God necessarily and eternally hates sin. It is, in essence, the contradiction of the excellence of his moral character. It contradicts his holiness, and he must hate it.”
But this is where we must push back against the conservative view: is it actually important for truth and orthodoxy that I insist that others should feel very guilty for their unwanted desires to do sin, even if they refuse to act them out because they no longer yield to Sin but to Christ? Or is it enough that we see our sinful desires as evidence that we live under the domain of Sin and its consequences and are thus deeply in need of a Savior?
In other words, who’s right? Do my unchosen desires to do wrong count as sin? In the sense that these desires are opposed to God’s holiness and the result of the fall, yes.
But are they sin in the sense that they will be counted against me when I’m before the judgment seat of Christ? That’s debatable, to say the least. And being willing to entertain that debate doesn’t make someone a “heretical liar.”