What do we say about Sin?

The Journal of Christian Studies volume 5, issue 2 will be shipping soon! The theme of this issue is "Sin, Confession, and Repentance," and in this issue we invited reflections on the theology of sin, including also confession of sin and repentance. 

Below is Keith's Editor's Note and the articles in JCS V/2.

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Editor's Note

Keith D. Stanglin

Sin, confession (of sin), and repentance—these are three instances of what I sometimes call “churchy” words. That is, they are words rarely heard outside of the church’s walls in a non- or post-Christian culture. Increasingly, it seems, these same words are rarely heard also within the church’s walls. Back in 2001, Barbara Brown Taylor observed in mainline Christian denominations an apparent difficulty in pronouncing words like “sin,” “damnation,” “repentance,” “penance,” and even “salvation.” By now, this reticence has spread across much of Western Protestantism.

On its own, sin is not a pleasant topic to discuss, with regard either to its universal scope or to more personal instances. Historically speaking, much of the modern de-emphasis on sin is an overreaction to late medieval emphases on sin and its penalties, which were connected with sometimes torturous confessions to ordained priests, the use and abuse of indulgences, external rites of penance, and the looming threat of purgatory. The magisterial Protestant versions of salvation by grace alone through faith alone left no room for works of penance, indulgences, or purgatory. Penance was ousted from the catalogue of sacraments, and confession of sin—usually public in the early church, later privatized in the medieval church—was now under the purview of the priesthood of all believers. For Martin Luther, oral confession was still necessary. But with no requirement of confession to an authorized confessor in a prescribed setting, formal and then informal confession fell out of practice. That is, low-church Protestantism stipulates no mechanism for confession of sin and repentance. The baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater.

The language of sin and repentance by no means disappeared overnight. It remained prevalent in evangelical Protestantism wherever Pietism and Revivalism were important factors. An early biographer of the Cambridge divine, William Perkins (1558–1602), reported that when Perkins preached, “he used to pronounce the word damn with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors’ ears a good while after.” And no one could accuse eighteenth-century figures like John Wesley or Jonathan Edwards of going soft on sin. Sin remained a force, but, again, with no mechanism for oral confession and absolution. Fire and brimstone sermons were likely heard in churches influenced by the Second Great Awakening, including churches of the American Restoration Movement. When Churches of Christ rediscovered the doctrine of grace, there was less room for the language of sin and condemnation.

Culturally speaking, at least in public discourse, inasmuch as sin implies wrongdoing against God, secularized society has no category for sin. Confession of and accepting responsibility for wrongdoing or folly—saying you’re sorry, with no attempt to blame other persons or systems—is a rarity. And if there is no sin, then there is no need for confession, and there is certainly no need for repentance, a change of mind from worse to better.

The absence of the language of sin, I suggest, is a symptom of a society that has forgotten God, a social symptom that has now spread throughout the Western church. After noting the absence of the language about sin especially in mainline churches, Barbara Brown Taylor continues:

Abandoning the language of sin will not make sin go away. Human beings will continue to experience alienation, deformation, damnation, and death no matter what we call them. Abandoning the language will simply leave us speechless before them, and increase our denial of their presence in our lives. Ironically, it will also weaken the language of grace, since the full impact of forgiveness cannot be felt apart from the full impact of what has been forgiven.

In order to speak of the good news of salvation in its fullness, then, we must speak also of sin. This movement—hearing and grappling with the bad news before getting to the good news—is biblical and especially Pauline. Confession and repentance are and always have been part of the solution to sin, for God has always abounded in steadfast love and compassion toward sinners. The message of Scripture is that, once we come to our senses, re-clothed and in our right mind, when we confess our sins, renounce them, repent of them, and we confess Christ and our need for his grace and Spirit, then he hears our cry, he acknowledges us, receives us, and removes our guilt.

In an age of secular and even Christian pressure not to talk about these tough matters, it is all the more essential for the Journal of Christian Studies to encourage the kinds of conversations that need to be happening in churches. In this issue of JCS, we invited reflections on the theology of sin, including also confession of sin and repentance. Contributors were asked to address at least one of the following questions: What is sin? How are such wrongs made right? What does it mean to confess and repent? How can a better understanding of sin and repentance benefit the church?

We offer this issue for the sake of the church and to the end of proclaiming and enacting the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27).

Keith D. Stanglin

Editor

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Articles:

“Against You, You Only, Have I Sinned”: Reclaiming the Transcendence of Sin

M. Todd Hall

Abram and Melchizedek as an Analogy for Healing Moral Injury

Daniel McGraw

The Emotive Dimension of Repentance

Te-Li Lau

Are All Sins Equal?

Keith D. Stanglin

Purged by the Presence of God: A Commendation of Corporate Confession of Sin and Absolution

Brett Vanderzee

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