Sin: What is Wrongdoing?

What is Wrongdoing?
I want to start off with a definition of wrongdoing that is as broad as possible. That means we will be careful about any "wrongs" we then say don't count as sin. I'm going to define wrongdoing as anything a person does that is harmful, negative, or in some way undesirable to someone.

Second, I want to make a distinction right off the bat between wrongdoing and guilt. A person can wrong another person unintentionally. In some cultures, the act itself implies guilt, even if you accidentally knocked the other person out the window. I've heard stories of missionaries whose life came into danger because they accidentally killed a person in a traffic action. We have trouble understanding this idea, but notice that the cities of refuge in the Old Testament were for those who unintentionally killed someone else.

By contrast, our culture has a very loose sense of guilt in relation to wrongdoing in the sense I am taking it. We will consider a person free of guilt if we can show they were insane or had extenuating circumstances like an abusive childhood. I personally feel our culture needs some clarification on the purposes of criminal penalty as we've shifted from the idea of justice to the idea of rehabilitation as the purpose of incarceration.

Now the fun begins. Sometimes you have to "hurt" someone on one level to "help" them on another. Allowing a child to experience the consequences of a bad choice is undesirable to him or her, but it is not wrongdoing. Justice is not wrongdoing by definition, even if it is perceived negatively by the person experiencing it (see earlier blog on justice). Indeed, the Greek word translated as "wrongdoing" in 1 John 5:17 has the fundamental sense of an unjust action (adikia).

Further, there are actions that bring growth that are not wrongdoing. A child may think homework is a teacher doing them wrong. A child may think making you take medicine is wrong. But these are "just" actions that have the benefit of the child in mind. Surely we wouldn't want to say that the "end justifies the means" either. You can't kill innocent Joe because it will benefit Kate, Carl, and Cindy. This leads us to a vague idea of justice versus injustice. We all have a certain common sense that knows actions that benefit but are unpleasant are not unjust.

Next, it is clear that there is both intentional and unintentional wrongdoing. For our purposes, I would like to divide these into four categories: 1. accidental wrongdoing where no guilt is involved (i.e., no deficiency on my part resulted in the accident), 2. accidental wrongdoing where guilt is involved (i.e., something wrong about me resulted in the accident), 3. subtly intentional wrongdoing that I didn't think about fully consciously, and 4. intentional wrongdoing--I knew it was wrong and I did it any way or I knew what I should do and I didn't do it anyway.

My tradition, the Wesleyan tradition, has almost exclusively identified sin with the fourth type of wrongdoing. Some would identify sin with all four as any kind of imperfection at all. I personally think that we can roughly speak of 2-4 as kinds of sins with varying levels of seriousness.