4.2 The oxymoron of a "carnal Christian" (part 2)

Previous links in this series at the bottom.
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7. Romans 6-8 gives the theory. We see the frequent reality in practice in 1 Corinthians 2-3. The typology built out of these verses is well-known in holiness circles. The "natural" human does not receive the things of God (1 Cor. 2:14). The "spiritual" person does (2:15). The Corinthians are somewhere in between. They are "fleshly" or "carnal" Christians (3:1).

Again, Paul is not setting up an ordo salutis here, an "order of salvation." More on that in the final chapter. But we can see hints of Wesleyan theology in Paul's rhetoric with the Corinthians. 

We all start off as the default human. We are under the power of Sin. We cannot help but sin whether we want to or not. At worst, we "do not receive the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolish" to us (1 Cor. 2:14). We "are not able to know them because they are spiritually discerned."

The adjective Paul uses here is almost untranslatable: the "natural" person. The King James used "natural." The Revised Standard used "unspiritual." But the word is psychikos, "soul-ish," which is pretty much meaningless to us in English. My sense is that Paul is thinking of the part of us that we share with animals, the living being part. I decided to go with "natural" here, our default person. Yes, it does typify a person without the Spirit.

In short, this person is not a believer. He or she is not "saved." He or she is not a Christian.

8. The Corinthians should be spiritual. After all, they are believers and thus have received the Spirit. They have been set apart by God, "sanctified." Paul actually addresses the congregation as sanctified in 1:2. They are certainly not entirely sanctified! But like all Christians, they were set apart as God's property when they believed and received the Spirit.

It's worth a quick reminder of Paul's theology of the Spirit and coming to be in Christ. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership on us (2 Cor. 1:22). Without the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Spirit is the "earnest" of our inheritance, a guarantee of our destiny, a downpayment of glory (2 Cor. 1:22). The Corinthians were thus set apart as belonging to God, "sanctified," when they came to Christ.

Romans 6 and 8 tell us what this state should look like for a believer. Sin should not rule this person's body -- or mind, for that matter. This person is no longer a slave to Sin, thanks be to God! By the power of the Holy Spirit, this person is able to do the good that God wants them to do and that they want to do. This person is consistently victorious over temptation.

This person has a complete love. They do not merely love their friends and those who love them. They love their enemies as well. This is not a syrupy feeling. This is a will to do the loving thing when the choice presents itself. This person fulfills the righteous requirement of the Law (Rom. 8:4) because the Holy Spirit has written the law of love on their hearts (Rom. 2:15; 13:8).

If the Corinthians had been spiritual like this, they would not have fought with each other over who had led them to Christ (1 Cor. 3:4). They would not have thought themselves to superior to other believers because they had more knowledge (8:1) or had spiritual gifts that others didn't (e.g., 14:21). Rather, they would have loved each other (1 Cor. 13).

9. In short, the Corinthian church was an oxymoron. They were Christians in the flesh -- something that isn't a thing. Somehow, they were stuck in the middle. They had been initially sanctified by the Spirit and set apart to God. They had been baptized into Christ...

... and then they argued over whose baptism was more significant because of who did it! They were "stuck." They were in-between, an anomaly. They had the Spirit but they weren't spiritual. They were sealed by the Spirit but still in the flesh. "These things ought not to be!" (Jas. 3:10).

To describe this "shouldn't be" phenomenon, several New Testament authors drew on the well-known trope of a baby drinking milk rather than meat. Paul says, "I gave you milk to drink not solid food because you were not yet able" (1 Cor. 3:2). 1 Peter encourages its audience to long for the pure milk that babies drink so that they can grow up. Hebrews 5:13-14 compares its audience to children who should have switched to solid food a long time ago but are still on milk.

This is not a state that can normally continue forever. While Wesley over-systematized and raised the bar too high for "going on to perfection," the basic concept is on the money. The carnal Christian needs to move on to maturity. If they don't, they will eventually fall away from God altogether (Jude 24). You cannot be both in the flesh and in the Spirit indefinitely, for these two are at war with each other (Gal. 5:17).

10. The war of the flesh against the Spirit can involve many battles. The Spirit says to do x, but the flesh wants to do y. No battle has taken you that God can't make a way to win (1 Cor. 10:13). The promise of God is that you can win every battle. Under normal spiritual circumstances, you can make the conscious choice to do x every time by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A war can be won even if you lose a few battles. But the more battles you lose, the more in danger you are of losing the war. God has not only given us the Spirit, but the Church -- fellow soldiers to hold us accountable and fight the battles with us. We don't have to lose. We should expect to win.

What is particularly serious is when you lose the same battle over and over again with some "besetting" sin. We'll think a little about addictions and an impoverished will in the final chapter. There are times when God uses the body of Christ to come alongside you because you are extraordinarily pinned down behind enemy lines.

Yet if the problem is that you have a divided will and are a "double-minded" person (Jas. 1:7), your soul is in grave danger. The second and third soils in the Parable of the Soils tell of those who initially receive the word with joy but then either wither because they have no root or because the cares of the world choke them (Mark 4). 

The double-minded person should not expect unending forgiveness when there is no genuine repentance. "Let him or her ask in faith" (Jas. 1:6). And if a person continues to try to use Christ's sacrifice for the same sins over and over again -- not because of genuine addiction or disempowerment but because of a lack of wholehearted allegiance -- let not that person think they will receive anything from the Lord (Jas. 1:7). They have used up their sacrifice (Heb. 10:26). 

In context, James 1:2-8 is talking about a time of trial and testing. God will help you through if you genuinely want help. Ask for wisdom in the trial, and God will give it (1:5). But you must really want God's help. If you're not sure, you're double-minded. A few verses later (1:13-15), James makes it clear that God is not at fault if temptation leads you to sin -- you are.

11. We can thus affirm in an unsystematic way what Wesley was trying to get at with his doctrine of Christian perfection. It is often the case that those who have believed in Christ find themselves in a carnal No Man's Land. They still identify with the person in Romans 7 who wants to do the good but finds themselves in a horrible war with their flesh. And they sometimes lose.

Is there no hope for something more? Is it not possible that the power of the Spirit might take the journey to the next level? Are we doomed to stay on milk our whole life on earth, or might we actually by God's power and grace be able to eat some spiritual steak!

It will take complete surrender to God. It will take full allegiance to Jesus as Lord.  Only then can we be filled with the Spirit to the top of the cup, the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Getting there will likely take some battles. The Battle-of-This-Thing-I-Don't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God. Then do you remember the Battle-of-the-Next-Thing-I-Didn't-Want-to-Fully-Give-God? Then surely there is a point where you have surrendered everything you know to surrender. As Keith Drury put it, you have given God full access to all the rooms of your house. But now will you sign over the deed to the property? [9]

Is not this moment of choice what Wesley and all those holiness preachers were preaching? God will not give us all of him if we haven't given him all of us. "There remains, therefore, a sabbath rest for the people of God" (Heb. 4:9).

Yes, these verses were taken a little out of context. [10] Yes, Wesley overly systematized it. But if we can step back just a little, there is a profound truth here.

And we'll likely have to give more to God again later. We may have to give the same things to God again. That is different. Our power over the flesh is only as sure as we are plugged into a relationship with the Spirit. If we loosen the connection, lessen the relationship, Sin lieth at the door. New things come into our lives -- we have to give them too.

There is no "I'm done now." Every day that is called "today," we enter his rest again (Heb. 3:13). We are Pilgrim until we reach the heavenly city.

In the final chapter, I hope to tie all these threads together into what I have heard Chris Bounds call a via salutis ("way of salvation") rather than an ordo salutis ("order of salvation"). I also want to address some of the concerns of our modern world like addictions. Finally, I want to mention an aspect of holiness that we Westerners are prone to overlook -- corporate holiness.

[9] Keith Drury, Holiness for Ordinary People 2nd ed. (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2004).

[10] In context, Hebrews is telling its audience to recommit their faith to God every day. The author is urging them not to fall in the desert on the journey to the Promised Land. The final Sabbath rest, it would seem, is when we finally make it to the kingdom of God.

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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)
3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

4.1 What is the flesh? (part 1)

3.3 Romans 7 is not about the inevitability of sin in our lives. (part 3)

Previous links in this series are now at the bottom.
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11. I sometimes think that Paul must turn over in his grave (or perhaps do flips in heaven) when he sees how so many have misinterpreted Romans 7 to mean exactly the opposite of what he was trying to say. The conundrum he presents in 7:7-25 is a hypothetical person who wants to keep the Law but lacks the power to do so because he or she does not have the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, the picture has resonated so strongly with the experiences of so many Christians that they can't seem to read the plot to its resolution in Romans 8.

In my opinion, Paul's position on sin in Romans 6-8 is not remotely ambiguous. After all, how does he start this section? "Should we remain in sin so that grace might abound? Absolutely not!" (Rom. 6:1). It sure sounds like he does not believe sin should typify a believer.

Let's try that again in Romans 6:15: "Should we sin because we are not under Law but under grace? Absolutely not!" Hmm. That's strange. Sounds like he's saying sin should not typify the life of a believer. 

How about Romans 6:12: "Do not let Sin be ruling in your mortal bodies." Very strange. It sounds like he is saying that my body should not participate in sinful activities. That sure sounds like sin should not typify the life of a believer.

Romans 6:13 confirms this understanding. "Do not continue to present your [body] members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness but present yourselves to God as living from the dead and your members to God as instruments of righteousness." This is not about a legal fiction where, as Luther said, we are both "sinner and saint at the same time as long as we keep repenting." [10] Paul is talking about the way we concretely live in the world -- how we use our "members," our body parts.

12. While I'm on this point, let me make a quick side trip to Galatians 5:16: "Walk in the Spirit, and you will never fulfill the desires of the flesh." It is worth noting the grammatical constructions here. The first verb is a present imperative -- an ongoing command -- "Be walking." The result is a clause known as the "subjunctive of emphatic negation." It has two words for not in it, which in Greek is an emphatic "no."

Once again, Paul seems to say in strong terms that sin should not typify the life of a believer. This is not a legal fiction, as Luther argued. In Hebrew, "walking" is the word for ethics (halakah). This is about how you live. After all, what are the fruit of the flesh? Galatians 5:19-21 tells us. The deeds of the flesh range from sexual immorality to idolatry.

As a side note, I believe part of our problem in appropriating Scriptures like these is that Western culture has become so introspective, particularly after the Romanticism of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Whereas Paul's understanding of something like envy was probably much more concrete than the "navel gazing" that we hyper-individualistic, introspective Westerners might think. Even Jesus' focus on the heart in Matthew 5 was not likely as hyper-introspective as we can be.

We remember that Paul thought he did pretty well at keeping the Jewish Law before he gave his allegiance to Jesus. In Philippians 3:6, he says that he was "blameless" when it came to the righteousness in the Law. [11] It is a reminder that, in the minds of most Jews at this time, keeping the Law to a standard acceptable by God was considered achievable. 

13. My puzzlement at the popular misinterpretation continues as we work our way through the last part of Romans 6 and into the first part of Romans 7. Paul repeatedly contrasts what we "used to be" before the Spirit and what we are "now." Take a look at these contrasts:

• "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin... having been freed from Sin, you became slaves of righteousness" (6:18).
• "Just as you presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness leading to lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness" (6:19).
•  "When you were slaves of Sin, you were free to righteousness. But now, having been freed from Sin and having been enslaved to God, you have your fruit to holiness" (6:20, 22).
• "When we were in the flesh, the passions of sins (aroused through the Law) were working in our members results that bore fruit to death, but now ... we serve in the newness of the Spirit" (7:5-6).
• "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (Rom. 8:2-4).

Notice how consistent Paul's repeated sense of sin, righteousness, and holiness is throughout Romans 6-8. We used to be slaves to Sin. Our "members" -- our bodies -- used to do things they shouldn't do. We were in the flesh.

But now, we are set free from the flesh. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are now slaves to righteousness. This is a result of the Spirit. Our members -- our bodies -- now produce fruit of righteousness and holiness in our lives.

14. We need to emphasize the point. Over and over throughout Romans 6-8, Paul repeatedly says that believers should no longer be slaves to the power of Sin. We should step back and point out why this was important to his overall argument in Romans. His opponents were accusing him of teaching "let us do evil that good may come" (Rom. 3:8). He had a bad reputation among Jews, as James reminds him in Acts 21:21 -- rumor was he was telling Jews not to keep the Law. They saw him teaching a sinning religion.

Accordingly, Romans 6-8 have as their primary rhetorical goal to show that his theology is not "pro-sin." Those who say that he encourages people not to keep the Law are dead wrong. "Do we nullify the Law through faith?" he poses in Romans 3:31. "Absolutely not!" he responds repeatedly. [12] 

Paul is absolutely against sin. That is his point in these chapters. In that sense, the popular interpretation of Romans 7 is diametrically opposed to Paul's fundamental purpose in this section.

15. With this overwhelming context in mind, let's finally turn to Romans 7:7-25. In these verses, most Pauline scholars believe that Paul is picturing the situation of someone who wants to keep the Law but does not have the power of the Spirit in order to do it. [13] Let's track his train of thought.

7:14 -- "The Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly (carnal), having been sold under Sin." We should immediately sense that something is up. Why? Because throughout the last part of Romans 6, he aligned being a slave to sin to the time before we came to be in Christ. 

In fact, in the verses right before this one, he has been talking about the beginnings of his spiritual awakening. "I wouldn't have known sin except for the Law" (7:7). "I was alive apart from the Law once" (7:9). He's telling his past story. [14]

So when he gets to 7:14, he is talking about our default human state starting out -- not his present condition. [15] He is not talking about the state of the person who has been baptized into Christ and has received the Spirit. He is telling the story of "everyman" in his or her spiritual pilgrimage. We all start off "in the flesh," a slave to Sin.

7:15, 19 -- "I don't know what I'm doing, for I don't do what I want to do but I do what I hate... I don't do the good I want to do, but I do the evil I don't want to do." As with 7:14, Paul is dramatizing the plight of the person who wants to do good but cannot actually do it because they are still a slave to sin. They have not yet been freed from the power of Sin and become a slave to righteousness.

A quick reminder of 6:17 is in order: "Thanks be to God because you used to be slaves of Sin but you obeyed from the heart the type of teaching to which you were committed. And having been set free from Sin, you were enslaved to righteousness." See where Paul has located himself in the storyline in the last part of Romans 7? It is before a person has come to be in Christ.

In fact, this same progression -- leading to the "Thanks be to God! -- takes place at the end of Romans 7. The struggle of the person who is a slave to Sin reaches a climax. 

7:22-25a -- "I delight in the Law of God in my inner person, but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man am I! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God! Through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  

The drama now reaches its peak. Note again. In Romans 6 Paul has implored the Romans not to let sin reign in their "members," in the actions of their bodies. If Paul were talking about his current experience in these verses, he would be in a lesser spiritual state than he is instructing the Romans to be.

No! This is the situation of the person who is still a slave to Sin. This is a person whose "members" are still instruments of unrighteousness. He gets to the same climax alluded to in Romans 6:17 where, "Thanks be to God!" the new believer is set free from the power of Sin. How does this happen? It happens "through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Romans 8 follows directly on this victory! [16] "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free from the law of Sin and death!" We have now reached the resolution of the tension Paul portrayed in the last part of Romans 7. The situation of when we "used to" be slaves to Sin is resolved. We are now at the part of the story where we have been freed from Sin and are now slaves to righteousness.

Indeed, now we can keep the Law by the power of the Spirit! "God has accomplished the impossibility of the Law that was due to the weakness of our flesh...  so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us" (8:2-4). Sin no longer reigns in our mortal bodies. We no longer yield our members as instruments of unrighteouness. We are no longer sold under Sin. 

Indeed, we are no longer "in the flesh," for "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (8:8). Now, we are "in the Spirit" because the Spirit of God dwells in us (8:9). Note that Paul expects this to be true of all believers. He is not describing what he thinks will take place after a second experience. In a perfect world, this situation would be true of everyone in Christ.

However, as we will see in the next chapter, the problem is that we often find Christians who are still to some degree in the flesh. In Romans 6-8, Paul gives the ideal and the way it should work. But leave it to the Corinthian church to mess things up! In the next chapter, we will see how it is often necessary for us as believers to move on to the spiritual from the carnal. Once again, we find a place to argue that most Christians can find themselves at a second moment of grace.

16. We shouldn't leave this chapter without a quick mention of Romans 12:1-2, a classic entire sanctification text. "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice -- holy, pleasing to God -- which is your appropriate worship. And stop being conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mindset so that you can verify what the will of God is -- the good and pleasing and complete will of God."

Do you see that this instruction alludes back to Romans 6? In Romans 6, Paul urged the Romans to present their "members" as instruments of righteousness leading to holiness. He told them not to let Sin reign in their mortal bodies. As he now starts the exhortation of Romans 12-15, he returns to that theme. Our bodies -- which were formerly slaves to sin -- must now be given completely to God. Our flesh is crucified (Gal. 2:20). We die to Sin and now live to God (Rom. 6:2). We are no longer conformed to this world.

Now, we walk in the Spirit and do not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). Our mindset is transformed and renewed. Note that Paul is not focusing on ideas or worldviews here. The transformed mind to which he refers is made clear in the chapters that follow. Far from ideology, he has in view a mindset of mutual submission and love of one another. Indeed, Romans 13:8 sums up what a renewed and transformed mind is -- it is a mindset of love toward others.

Now we can not only see clearly what the good, pleasing, and complete will of God is. We are now empowered to do it through the power of the Holy Spirit. God has made possible the impossible through the sin offering of Christ Jesus so that we can now fulfill the righteous requirement of the Law.

Of course, experience demonstrates that most Christians are not quite there at first. In theory -- in theology -- we all should be. But in practice, there is often a middle zone where a Christian is still fleshly or carnal. It is to this uncomfortable middle zone that we turn next.

[10] simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans.

[11] One of the most transformative articles on my interpretive journey with Paul was Krister Stendahl's "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," now in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Fortress, 1976). 

[12] The difference between Paul and some other Jewish believers is that he did not consider Israelite-specific laws to be binding on his Gentile converts. He also seemed to believe that the unity and mission of the church took precedence over keeping these Israelite-specific laws. Although he did not express it in this way, he was laying the seeds of what later Gentile Christians would think of as the "moral law."

[13] It's an ancient literary device known as prosopopoeia.

[14] I actually think he is telling the story of everyone, not his story specifically, but I don't want to distract from the main point here.

[15] I have heard individuals say something to the effect of, "He is using the present tense. Therefore, he is talking about his current state and what is happening in the present." I'll try to be kind. This statement reflects an utter lack of understanding of Greek tenses. They are not primarily about time. In fact, some argue they are not about time at all. In any case, the Greek present tense can be used in several ways (including to talk about the past). This argument doesn't even pass first-semester Greek.

[16] You might note that I have left off the final part of 7:25 for clarity's sake: "So then, I myself with my mind serve the Law of God but with my flesh the law of Sin." This sentence summarizes the pre-faith condition of the person who does not have the Spirit but wants to keep the Law. However, because this summary comes after the climax of Paul's train of thought, some mistakenly think it condemns us to never have victory over the power of Sin. Again, this interpretation completely undermines Paul's train of thought in these three chapters.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story 

1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

2.1 What is holiness? (part 1)
2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)

3.1 What is sin? (part 1)
3.2 All sins are not the same. (part 2)

E4. The current bent of humanity is toward evil.

Now the fourth post in the third section of theology in bullet points.
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1. The apostle Paul put it this way, "There is no one righteous, not even one... there is no one who seeks God" (Rom. 3:10-11). He was paraphrasing Psalm 14, which probably was much more limited in scope originally, but Paul applies it toward a doctrine of all humanity's default sinfulness. [1] "All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23) [2]

Augustine (354-430) took Paul's comments here and constructed a doctrine of total depravity. The idea of total depravity is that, in its current fallen state, humanity is not able to do any good whatsoever in its own power. He formulated this idea while combatting the Pelagians, who believed that humanity was not totally fallen morally and could still do good in its own power. [3]

John Calvin (1509-64) especially would then pass on Augustine's interpretation in the Reformation to say that, because we cannot choose God at all in our own power, then those who are saved must do so entirely because God has chosen us (election) and empowered us (irresistable grace). This is the idea of predestination, that only those God has specifically chosen can be saved for eternity. The rest will inevitably go to hell because they have no power to do good in themselves and God has not chosen them.

John Wesley (1703-91) also believed in total depravity, but he believed that the Holy Spirit, at some point in a person's life, empowered you to move ever so slightly toward God if you would so choose. If you did, then the grace would increase and it would eventually lead to eternal salvation in heaven rather than eternal damnation in hell. In this way, while Wesley believed we could do no power whatsoever on our own, he believed God's power made our "election" conditional on our responses to God.

Strictly speaking, Augustine may have over-read and overly systematized Paul himself. Paul really only seems to be arguing for a thorough depravity of humanity. In that sense, Eastern Orthodoxy may come closer to Paul than Western Christianity. Paul claims that 1) every human has sinned and that 2) no one is righteous in his or her default state. [4] But Paul does not say, "No one can do a single good thing in his or her own power."

Nevertheless, sometimes it is hard to look around at the world and not find yourself repeating the words of Paul and the psalmist. Is there anyone who is righteous out there? Does not everyone simply do what is to their own advantage whether it hurts other people or not? Who sacrifices their own pleasure for the sake of a greater good? Who gives to those in need the extra they have? Who does not cling violently to what they think is "theirs"--my money, my rights, what I deserve? Who does not lie when it is to their own advantage? Who does not try to manipulate others to get what they want? Who listens to the other without insisting that their way of thinking and doing is the only right way?

2. This situation of humanity leads us to the question--why? Why is humanity bent toward hate of neighbor and usurping God's place? In the first post of this section on evil, we suggested that the two absolute commandments of Christianity--love God and love neighbor--provided the two basic categories of sin. You can sin by defying God's authority and you can sin by wronging others.

When we say that humanity is "bent to sinning," we are saying that the default state of humanity is to usurp God's authority and to wrong others. Both of these imply that the central feature of sin is the human bent toward itself. At the heart of sin is the human tendency to take for itself what is rightfully God's and to take for itself in a way that takes away from others.

Why is this the case? For Augustine, the fundamental cause was a "sin nature" we have inside us. When Adam sinned, we lost the moral image of God entirely. Human nature became thoroughly corrupted. Our individual acts of sin thus result from our sin nature, a nature that all humans now have because of Adam's original sin.

Augustine had a very specific interpretation of Romans 5:12. He did not know Greek, but his sense of the Latin translation was that this verse indicated that all humanity had sinned "in" Adam. He understood the verse to say that, "And thus death passed into all humans, in whom all sinned." We all thus needed infant baptism to atone for our participation in that original sin.

Almost all translations today recognize that Paul was rather saying that death passed to all humans because we all sin like Adam. Paul was thus not saying that humanity stands under God's condemnation for Adam's sin but because we all sin like Adam did. As Ezekiel 18:4 says, "The one who sins is the one who will die." God does not hold us as individuals responsible for the sins of others, including the sin of Adam.

So how did Paul understand Adam's sin to have impacted us? He understood the world to have come under the power of Sin as a result of Adam's sin. Despite the way some versions used to translate the word, Paul did not use the term "sinful nature" to refer to the power of Sin over me. Rather, the word he uses is "flesh," that is, my skin.

Flesh, for Paul, is not intrinsically evil. It is, rather, "weak" (Mark 14:38). It is susceptible to the power of Sin. Before Adam's sin, Sin did not reign as a power in the world. After Adam's sin, the world now stands under the power of Sin. Without the power of the Spirit to counteract the power of Sin, humanity is helpless to do the good, even if we should want to do so (e.g., Rom. 7:15). [5].

Paul can thus use the word "flesh" in more than one way. He can use it to refer merely to my human "skin" as weak but not necessarily sinful (2 Cor. 12:9). It is probably significant that Paul does not attribute the inherent weakness of human skin to Adam. What Paul attributes to Adam is the power of Sin over our skin. Paul can thus use the word "flesh" to refer to that aspect of humanity's current state that is subject to sin and say that, "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8:8).

The current bent of humanity is toward evil. It is bent to seek itself over God and itself over others. Historically, Christians have believed that the sin of Adam brought the world and human flesh under the power of Sin. The result is that we cannot do the good in our own power, indeed, that no one even will want to do the good apart from the power of the Spirit.

Further, Christians believe that a parallel Fall took place in heaven with Satan and his angels. Adam's fall may have made the world susceptible to the power of Sin in some impersonal way. Satan's sin brought personal powers of sin into play in the world. We not only have the impersonal force of Sin over us. We face the personal faces of evil and temptation in those beings who chose against God. [6]

Whatever the cause, Christians believe that the bent of humanity at this time is toward evil, and we cannot do good apart from the power of God.

Next week, E5: All have sinned.

[1] Psalm 14 is poetry, and this speaks somewhat hyperbolically of the state of things in the psalmist's own day (he was not making a statement about humanity for all time). In particular, he is speaking of the fool who would say in his or her heart that God was not around (Ps. 14:1). As an example, the psalmist surely is not including himself among such fools. "Not even one" is thus quite likely hyperbole.

We should not consider it a problem that New Testament authors heard different truths in the words of the Old Testament than were exactly what those words likely meant originally. This flexibility of language is the primary tool the Spirit uses to speak so directly to so many different people.

[2] Author's translation.

[3] These ideas were condemned at a regional council at Carthage in 418 and ratified at the universal Council of Ephesus in 431.

[4] Even here, although Paul did seem to believe that every human (except for Christ) has sinned, that is not really his point in Romans 3:23. In Romans 3:23, Paul's point is that all have sinned whether you are a Jew or a non-Jew. Both have sinned and thus need Christ. "All," both non-Jew and Jew, have sinned.

[5] You might note that, contrary to Augustine, the default problem in Romans 7 is not that humanity does not want to do the good, as if we are totally depraved. The problem is that, even when we want to do the good, we do not have the power to do it.

[6] The impact of evolution on this discussion would be profound in that it potentially questions the idea of a Fall. On the one hand, one might suggest that the drive toward the self is part of God's creation but that the power of Sin introduced with Adam seriously warped that drive. If one only takes Adam as a metaphor, then one would have to conclude that God created us with conflicting drives, one of which pushes us toward self-interest and the other of which calls us toward others. The default human state would thus be one of continual conflict.

Christianity and Original Sin

I have a writing assignment due today for a particular denomination's Sunday School literature. I thought I would draft it here.
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“Original sin” is not a topic we hear much discussed or even mentioned from the pulpit these days. Many Christians may never have even heard of it. It refers of course to the first sin of our human parents, Adam and Eve, the “original” sin. In terms of us today, the question of original sin has to do with how the sin of Adam and Eve has left its impact on us as human beings.

At least since the days of a Christian named Augustine (354-430), it has been conventional to think of our human nature as “fallen.” That is to say, our humanity is not what God intended it to be originally. God intended for us to do good and not to do evil. God intended us to be able to think more clearly and understand the world more accurately than we do.

Instead, Augustine—and then later Protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley—believed that we have a sinful nature inside us, a “carnal” or “fleshly” nature that makes it impossible for us to do good or choose God without the power of the Holy Spirit inside us. Without the Holy Spirit, our plight is that of Romans 7:15: “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Augustine believed this sinful nature was passed down “genetically” through sex, thus providing a partial explanation for why Jesus needed to be born of a virgin.

The default state of humanity is now “totally depraved,” incapable of doing any good in its own power. Although “total depravity” is more often associated with John Calvin, many of us in the Wesleyan tradition (as well as many Calvinists themselves) might be surprised to know that John Wesley affirmed this idea as well. Like Calvin, Wesley did not believe that we as human beings are able to choose God or do good on our own. Like Calvin, Wesley believed we could only choose God or do good if the Holy Spirit was empowering us to do it. The difference is that Wesley believed God offered this power to everyone, while Calvin believed that God only selected a few choice individuals to receive it. Such people were only God’s puppets, forced to do only what He made them do.

Another key difference between Calvin and Wesley is in how optimistic they were about God’s power to help us do good in this life. Luther did not believe we should even discuss such things, for the very discussion might tempt us to boast in our own righteousness. By contrast, Calvin did think the drive toward becoming more righteous in this life was important. But he believed the imprint of the original sin inevitably stayed with us our entire lives, with the result that we would never be able to stop sinning. The sinful nature inside us would be a part of us till we were glorified at the point of our deaths.

Wesley, on the other hand, was more optimistic. He believed that God wanted to overcome our sinful natures entirely, to “sanctify” us entirely and make us completely holy in this life. In the century that followed Wesley, various thinkers responded to these ideas. The Wesleyan tradition has historically affirmed that God wants to eradicate our sinful nature and destroy it. Others, like the Keswick tradition, have taught that our “carnal nature” will always be around, tempting us to sin, although they believe God can and wants to empower us to win over such temptation, even though it will always be a struggle on some level.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have the benefit of recent studies that help us look at Paul’s writings with fresh eyes. As a result, several aspects of the historical debate we have just mentioned seem a bit out of focus. For one, the phrase “sinful nature” is misleading at best, even though the New International Version and other translations use it consistently. But Paul nowhere uses the word nature in this way. The actual word he uses is flesh.

To begin to understand what Paul means by “flesh,” we only need take the word in its normal sense: skin. Paul understood our bodies to be enslaved to the power of Sin, along with the entire creation (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). This understanding is similar to what Augustine and later Christian thinkers have thought, but also significantly different.

In Paul’s thinking, the entire creation, including the skin of my body, has come under the power of Sin as a result of Adam’s sin. It is better to think of this power as a power over me rather than a power inside of me. To be sure, we have to take such images as metaphors. Paul was not thinking of the frontal lobes of our brains, but God was giving Paul’s audiences true pictures of the human condition in terms they could understand. We get into strange waters indeed when we try to mingle Paul’s ancient psychology with modern categories!

So Paul says things like, “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7:14, NASB). A nice way to define flesh in this sense is my skin under the power of Sin. However, Paul does not see this state as the norm for the believer. Many readers of Romans 7 strangely stop without going on into Romans 8, where Paul indicates that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). In other words, Christians not only can get “out of” their sinful flesh—they cannot please God if they do not!

The confusion in debates over our “sinful natures” follows both from subtle misreadings of Paul we have inherited from Augustine and from taking various metaphors too literally. Basically, Paul teaches that the default state of humanity is one of moral disempowerment and alienation from God. Christ has made it possible, not only for us to be reconciled to God, but also for the Holy Spirit to empower us in relation to sin.

The powers of Sin in this world will be around until Christ returns. But we as Spirit-filled believers are not consigned to defeat in the face of temptation. “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to us all. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13, TNIV). This truth, consistently proclaimed by Paul, has largely been lost to contemporary Christianity to such an extent that it is scarcely believed even by those of us in the Wesleyan tradition.

But it is a truth we more than any other tradition are responsible to bring to this generation of believers. God has made it possible, through the power of the Holy Spirit, for us to live Christ-like lives in this world. What was impossible in our own power and in our own flesh, “God did: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and ... condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4, NASB).