Saving Sinners in a Sinless World

How do you talk about "sin" when nobody believes in sin anymore?

I cannot speak for America, but certainly in the United Kingdom and Australia, the words “sin” and “sinner” are no longer an affront. They are considered moralizing religious terms.

When many people hear “sin,” what they hear is “naughty but fun.”

Or else, sin means sticking it to religious authority, the church, and right-wing cultural Christianity.

To be a sinner is to be a rebel who refuses to knuckle under any authority, especially against religious authority.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

For example, not far from where I used to live in Brisbane, Australia there was a highway. On one side of the highway was a strip mall with a tattoo parlor called “Sin the Skin,” then on the other side of the highway directly opposite was another strip mall with an adult sex shop called “Sinsational.” I’m not making this up!

Now, if I told people at these strip malls that Jesus offers them salvation from “sin,” they are either thinking I’m trying to recruit them to a religious cult, or else I’m trying to suck some fun out of their lives.

In a post-Christian world sin is not a bad word, a shocking concept, or something one seeks naturally to avoid. It’s partying hard, going with the flow, or even being true to yourself.

Accordingly, one needs to be a little more creative on communicating the idea of sin in a given culture.

For example, Australians are very big on looking after their mates, being faithful to their friends, and caring for their mob. You don’t “rip off” your mates or your mob. Accordingly, Peter Ko has argued that in Australia a helpful idiom is to talk of sin is in terms of “ripping God off,” which is a very “Aussie” way of trying to convey the idea of sin without the cultural and religious baggage of the word itself.

I would add that even despite our post-Christian and neo-pagan world, there is still one word that has currency for explaining sin, which transcends political divides.

That is the notion of “evil.”

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Whereas “sin” has religious overtones and can sound archaic, the language of “evil” is recognizable and comprehensible across many subcultures.

People gasp evil and have an almost instantaneous understanding of its gravity and horror. They see evil on the news. Nearly every movie has a bad guy, a villain, a monster, and evil power lurking behind it.

While people will baulk at the language of “sin,” they will take you seriously when you talk about evil.

The challenge is to get them to think about evil not as something over there, found in other people, but something that infects and inhabits themselves. The evil is in me just as it is in you!

For people who are big on social justice but have a low view of religion, it is possible to translate the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth into a Nietzchean idiom: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Which is to say, in your quest for a just world, if you don’t check the evil that resides in your own heart, then you risk becoming worse than the very thing you think you’re fighting against!

You would be surprised how many people have entertained the fantasy of just one, big violence purge to clear the world of their enemies to create utopia on earth. A utopia achieved by gulags or guillotines!

Jesus promises to forgive us of our sins and to deliver from the evil around us and in us!