Toward a Deeper Understanding of Sin
TOWARD A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF SIN
I’ve spent a lot of time deepening my understanding of sin so that I can more effectively teach the concept to my students. I want to share with you some of the fruits of that effort here today on the topic of “sin”. If what I say clicks for you, and helps deepen your understanding, please pass this article along to someone else you know that might gain from reading it too. I know there is a lot of confusion around topics like this today and my conviction is that meaningful clarity around them help people in their day-to-day life to live out their faith and love the Lord with ever greater devotion.
Many of us have a preliminary knowledge of sin—we know that it’s something bad that we’ve done—; we know that the Ten Commandments give a list of some things that are wrong for us to do; if we’re Catholic we might even understand a distinction between mortal and venial sin—that some sins kill the life of the soul while others do not… But across the board, most of us struggle to feel like we have a real sense of what makes something sinful or not. It’s for this reason that many people, as they start to try and learn more about sin, get to a place where they find themselves thinking that everything must be a sin; that there must be nothing that’s even remotely good on its own; that we can do nothing except sin in every moment. Learning the intricacies of sin, whether through scripture or systematic teaching, sees sin expand into more and more realms of activity (e.g. actions, words, thoughts, things done / things not done that should’ve been done, etc.). Getting to that place is a time of great psychological/emotional trial and spiritual peril. Your love of God can feel like it’s teetering on the edge, being brought to a precipice with the abyss perched on the other side. It’s times like these where the lifeline of the great saints offers so much clarity and confidence. As we grow in our knowledge of God & the things of God as He truly is (if it’s truly as He is), our love of God, and everyone else, grows with it. We can hold to that proposition with sure confidence. And so surely can we hold to it that even the inverse is true: if our love of God and everyone else grows, we’ve learned something that is true about God. Test everything; hold fast what is good. (1 Thess 5: 21) Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil 4: 8)
That being said, all these things rely on quite precise understandings of a small handful of things: sin, love, free-will, actions. We won’t exhaust all of these in this article, but today I want to offer insights into how we can understand the mechanics of an action (namely, a “moral action”) such that we can begin to understand sin with greater clarity.
Intrinsically Evil Acts
There are certain actions (i.e. sins) that are always wrong. Regardless of your reason for doing them, they’re wrong. That seems clear enough—until people attempt to apply that logic, as it is on its face, to particular considerations.
- Murder is wrong, so is it wrong to kill in self defense?
- Theft is wrong, so is it wrong to take back something that was taken from you?
- Insulting another is wrong, so is it wrong to tell someone something true that causes them pain?
Questions like these, all of which provoke our instinct to answer in a contradictory way…
- murder: wrong | self-defense: okay
- theft: wrong | retrieving stolen goods: okay
- insulting another: wrong | someone feeling harmed by something good you’ve said: okay
…prove that in order for us to understand how anything is “intrinsically wrong” we clearly must understand something in principle that would highlight these distinctions and reconcile these contradictions. As it stands, they highlight a contradiction, and therefore do not reconcile. So how do we make our way through this conundrum?
Moral Acts vs. Mechanical or Generic Acts
First, moral acts are different than what we can call “mechanical acts”. That is, we’re not concerned with the movement of one’s arm, or the tool used in an act of murder. Whether you strangle a person or decapitate them or shoot them with a gun, all of which are different mechanical acts, you have one moral act: murder.
Second, even the general acts of things like “killing” or “sex” are not constituted as moral acts. For example, “sex” is not intrinsically evil, but “adultery” is; “fornication” is; “masturbation” is. Neither is killing in self-defense evil, but “murder” is; “suicide” is. Here we begin to make out the contours of what constitutes a moral act.
“Killing”: The ending of a life.
“Murder”: The intentional killing of an innocent person.
“Suicide”: The intentional killing of oneself.
“Sex”: The act of copulation between man & woman.
“Adultery”: Sex with someone that is married to someone else.
“Fornication”: Sex with someone that you’re not married to.
“Masturbation”: Sexual self-stimulation.
This is because a moral act is something more than a generic act, or a mechanical act. What’s different? A moral act is an act specified by reason.
“Specified by Reason”
Here is where most people get lost. What does it mean, comprehensively speaking, to have an act “specified by reason”? What does it mean for a thing to be specified by reason?
The answer is that reason constitutes a capacity to recognize the sources (causes) and destination of things…
Technically speaking, the elemental acts of reason are composition and division—recognizing things that belong to a thing (composition) and recognizing things that don’t belong to a thing (division). The applied acts of reason are syllogistic: deduction & induction… All acts of reason seek understanding of a thing in itself and in its proper relations to other things.
…Reason puts together what a thing is by identifying where a thing comes from, and where it’s going. That’s what reason does.
So it goes that “killing”, specified by reason, sees that the act is done by someone, to someone. These are the component parts of any moral act: they have someone they spring from, and someone/something they happen to. What makes a thing an intrinsically evil moral act is when the source, or destination, of an act are illicit.
Illicit Parts of a Moral Act
Every act, properly considered as a moral act, has an acting agent, and a receiving object (regardless of whether the receiving object is different from the acting agent or not). Any time that an acting agent is illegitimate in their authority to do such an act—the moral act is intrinsically evil. Any time the receiving object is innocent of receiving such an act—the moral act is intrinsically evil.
They do not have to both err in order for an act to be intrinsically evil—any time either the acting agent or the recipient object are illicit, the moral act is intrinsically evil, regardless of the reason for doing the act.
You cannot kill an innocent person for any reason.
You cannot have sex with someone married to someone else for any reason.
You cannot take what is rightfully another’s for any reason.
Reconciling the Seeming Contradictions
Hopefully now you can begin to see how those aforementioned “contradictions” are reconciled:
- Murder is “the intentional killing of an innocent person”… Killing in self-defense is not intrinsically evil because the recipient object is not innocent.
- Theft is “the intentional taking of another’s rightful property”… Therefore retrieving stolen goods is not intrinsically evil because the recipient object is not in possession of rightful property.
- Insult is “the intentional use of speech to unjustly injure another”… If you tell someone something true and that causes them pain (e.g. “what you’re doing is a sin and you should stop doing it”), you’ve not caused an unjust injury to them—as a matter of fact, you’ve performed one of the spiritual acts of mercy! (Admonishing a sinner).
Hopefully after reading this you feel like you have a clearer understanding of sin (and how to rebut someone cynically posing these types of scenarios to you to undermine your Christian faith). When Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin, at one point he (Tucker) asked him, “How can someone be a Christian and a world leader?” He was playing the fool and elaborated, “If the Christian is told to turn the other cheek, and not to kill, how can that be reconciled with being a political leader on the world’s stage? Or how do you reconcile that?” (Or something to that effect, I’m going from memory here)… Putin sidestepped the question and never responded to it, but the real answer to Tucker’s insincere question would’ve been to say: “Killing is not a moral act specified by reason. The prohibition is against murder. The Ten Commandments proscribe actions specified by reason. You don’t know what you’re talking about and that question’s not even sincere. The bimillennial tradition of the Church can clarify this for you just fine if you’ll be humble enough to look into it with a sincere heart.” But, unfortunately, that level of clarity in understanding sin, and our Christian faith, is largely gone in this day and age.
Here’s to hoping it can begin to be restored, one person at a time! God bless. +
Great timing.