The good news of sin

This post was originally as a sermon I preached for Camas Friends Church, WA, United States, on Sunday 21 April 2024.

For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.

Romans 7:19 (NAB RE)

I want to talk about sin. Depending on what type of Quaker you are, this may seem a very un-Quakerly thing to do. The Quakers I know in Britain hardly talk about sin at all, and the first Quakers of 17^th century England were very wary of anyone putting too much emphasis on sin, like the Puritans. The Puritans believed in something called ‘double predestination’: We are born guilty and depraved, destined for an eternity in hell, and only God can save us. However, the number of places in heaven is limited and God has already chosen who will be saved. To add to this terrible situation, you have no way of knowing in this life if you are one of the chosen few. Sin is an inescapable reality and damnation an ever-present possibility. Living with this theology was a heavy, anxiety-inducing burden. The Quakers rebelled against this theology, saying that freedom from sin in this life was a possibility. We could live in the assurance of our salvation. Quakers accused Puritan ministers of “preaching up sin,” weighing people down rather than directing them to the liberating Light of Christ.[1] I’m not a Puritan, but in this post I write about sin, and about how deeply it dwells in our flesh, so deep that escape in this life is very unlikely. I hope my Quaker forebears can forgive me. Although it may sound like I’m about to “preach up sin,” I want to suggest that talking about sin, having a good theology of sin, can help us to be faithful followers of Jesus. Although sin itself is nothing to be celebrated, we can have a way of talking about and understanding sin that is good news.

In my Quaker community in Britain, sin is not a popular term. Sin is rarely talked about, and Quakers are quite clear that the idea of “original sin” is not a welcome one. When I tell Quakers I’m interested in sin, or working on a theology of sin, I get some startled, even horrified, reactions. I can understand why. The idea that we are born deserving of eternal punishment in hell, or that sex is inherently sinful, is offensive. Many people have been damaged by being told that they are depraved sinners, totally unworthy of love. I didn’t grow up as a Christian, and when I got to know Christians and what they believed, I found their understanding of sin very confusing. Sin seemed to group together behaviours and actions that didn’t really belong in the same category. A Christian schoolfriend told me that we only to get to heaven with a clean slate, and any sin, no matter how tiny, counted against us. This meant that a jealous thought or an innocuous lie was equivalent to murder in God’s eyes. Many Christians name things as sinful that don’t look like sin to me. When I came out as gay as a teenager, another Christian schoolfriend couldn’t acknowledge my sexuality. She thought she could carry on being my friend whilst ignoring one of the greatest disclosures of my life. Her reasoning was that she loved the sinner but hated the sin. I wish she could see me now, and how happy I am in my queerness. If this is what sin is then I don’t need saving from it. At the same time, many Christians actively campaign for things which, to me, seem very sinful, like the death penalty or punishing people for being poor. The word “sin” has a bad history. It comes with a lot of baggage. Many of our theologies of sin are themselves sinful.

Because of this sinful history of sin-talk, there are a few foundations I need to lay before I can get into my thoughts on sin. One of my favourite theologians, Jürgen Moltmann, said that sin-talk should only take place within the therapeutic circle of the church.[2] Sin-talk should only take place within a community who loves and cares for one another. Before we can talk healthily about sin, we need to know that we are part of God’s good creation. As God’s creatures, we have a share in God’s goodness that nothing can alter. We are loved and lovely in all our messiness. Our destiny is not eternal torment in hell, no one’s is. Our destiny is the love of God that has no end. This can be a hard fact to know deeply, and many of us can spend a long time learning it. Sin can never be the first word. The first and last word is always the God who is Love.

Why not just stay with us being loved and lovely? Why move on to sin at all? This seems to be where Quakers in Britain currently are. We are very used to talking about the innate goodness of humanity. We believe that everyone is unique, precious, a child of God. We believe everyone has ‘that of God’ within them.[3] In the booklet Twelve Quakers and Evil (2006), one Quaker writes: “Like many Quakers, I believe that we are born not, as some religious people might have it, suffering under a cruel burden of Original Sin, but rather basking in the joy of Original Blessing.”[4] The term “original blessing” comes from the title of a very popular book by Matthew Fox.[5] Fox argued that humanity needs a new religious paradigm, one that does away with the idea of a fall from paradise and replaces it with a creation-centred spirituality that emphasizes the goodness of the world.

With this strong focus on goodness, how then do Quakers in Britain explain evil and sin? They generally believe that human beings are essentially good, with some choosing to do evil acts. We think of those people who choose evil as needing help, healing, and rehabilitation. We might see someone who does evil things as suffering from poor mental health, rather than being evil at their core. When Quakers talk of who is responsible for evil, the general belief is that we are only guilty of the evil things we freely choose to do. If free choice is not involved, then neither is guilt. Quakers aren’t alone in believing this. This is a widespread belief in the modern world, which values the sovereignty and free will of the rational individual person. We are only responsible for our free choices. Even though this belief is widespread today, it has a long history. One of its most famous exponents was an Irish monk from the 4^th century called Pelagius. He believed that we each have free will, a will that can freely choose good or evil. For Pelagius, it’s always possible to avoid sin. We can always freely choose good. But is this true in our experience? In Romans 7:14-25, the apostle Paul writes of a disconnect between what he wants to do and what he ends up doing. His will and his action don’t match up. His body and his mind are in conflict with one another. “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” This was the experience of a North African bishop called Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was a fierce opponent of Pelagius and argued that our will is not as free as we suppose. Our ability to will rightly is itself deformed. We may know what we want, but we can’t want what we want.[6] Now Augustine has a bad reputation amongst the Quakers I know. He’s the one who came up with the idea of original sin in the first place, including babies being born guilty and deserving punishment in hell. I’m not going to argue that Augustine was right about everything. There’s much of his thinking that I don’t agree with. But I think what he says about how deeply sin shapes us has a lot of truth in it. I find Augustine especially helpful when I think about the sin of racism and whiteness.

In Britain, many white people think that racism is something only bad, racist individuals do. The idea that racism also dwells in “good” white people is treated as an outrageous suggestion. To call someone “racist” is seen as shockingly offensive, even more offensive than racism itself. In this way of thinking, racism is something we freely choose to do. We are only racist if we freely choose to do or say something racist. But this way of understanding racism is hugely flawed, as it doesn’t match the experience of those who suffer racism on a daily basis at the hands of “good” “non-racist” people. There was a Black barrister who, on the way to a courtroom, her place of work, was stopped three times by three separate individuals, each mistaking her for a defendant.[7] Each of these individuals saw a Black woman and decided instinctively that she did not belong in that space. None of these individuals considered themselves to be racist, but they nevertheless played out the racism that equates blackness with criminality. Were they guilty? If we equate guilt with free conscious choice, then apparently not. Black theologian Anthony Reddie calls this a ‘theology of good intentions,’[8] where our good intentions cancel out any responsibility we may have for our harmful actions. He tells the story of a Black youth who was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and so missed an important school exam. Reddie writes: ‘The belated apologies that were subsequently made by the police force and the examination board were somewhat hollow. It was, of course not their fault. As the Black youth was not at fault either, save for the obvious crime of being Black, it would appear that no one was at fault.’[9] In a world of well-meaning and so guiltless people, the existence of racism remains an unsolvable mystery. We have, in the words of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘racism without racists.’[10]

A theology that links guilt only with freely chosen acts can’t make sense of the intricate web of broken relationships that shape our lives, the way we think, speak and act. Racism is not confined to the acts of wicked individuals. It’s embedded deeply in our social structures and appears in our unconscious behaviours. We can call this “systemic sin.” This is the kind of sin that gets everywhere, that’s ingrained. As a white person, I may not consciously choose to be racist, but that doesn’t inoculate me against perpetuating racist systems. George Yancey is a Black philosopher who works with white students to help them understand their whiteness. He writes of his well-meaning students being ‘ambushed’ by their whiteness.[11] Just when they think they’ve reached the depths of their whiteness and are in control of it, they’ll do or say something that reveals an even deeper chasm. The moment they think they’ve finally become a “good” white person, or even shaken off their whiteness, their behaviour reveals to them that they’re still stuck in the system.

This is where Augustine’s take on our distorted desires, our inability to will freely, makes sense to me. As a white person, I can want to be anti-racist or escape my whiteness, but my will has been shaped from birth by a system of white supremacy. “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” Who knows how long it will take me to unpick the tangled knots of white supremacy that are threaded through me. I recently heard the theologian Al McFadyen use the metaphor of breath and pollutants in the air. The very air I breathe, the air that gives me life, is filled with pollutants from the cars and trucks outside my study window, and these pollutants are in the breath I use to say my daily prayers. Even when I’m praising God, I’m breathing out polluted air. The ecosystem that we live and love and perhaps thrive in is also a damaged one. This makes me think of the microplastics in our oceans, the tiny fragments of plastic from our car tyres, clothes and packaging that end up in the sea and water cycle. Marine creatures take in the polluted water, and the microplastics enter deeply into their bodies. We, like the fish, exist in a state of sin. Sin is the damaged air we breathe, the damaged ocean we swim in. We are born into a world already mangled by our forebears, and from birth we are marked deeply by this damage.

For white Quakers who believe that we’re only responsible for the evil things we freely choose to do, we have no way to explain the racism that exists within the Quaker community, never mind the wider world. Our inability to talk about sin prevents us from confronting the sin of racism. Our overfocus on human goodness has created an image of the good white Quaker. We are used to telling a story of how good and courageous Quakers have been in the past. We are used to speaking of Quakers as the heroes of the abolitionist movement. When we say something is or isn’t “Quakerly” we mean something is or isn’t good. If you ever visit Friends House in London, as you walk up to the entrance, you’ll notice that each paving slab is engraved with a particular Quaker achievement. The message is: Quakers are good people who do good things.

This weight of reputational goodness means we can become obsessed with our own personal goodness, our own moral purity. We have a reputation to live up to! Quaker theologian Rachel Muers has said that, if we focus on our testimonies as a set of moral rules, if we focus on being good individuals, attempting to separate ourselves from the sinful systems we live in, we can get locked into a closed circle of self-justification.[12] We can forever feel that we are not living simply enough or truthfully enough, and so strive to be ever more “Quakerly.” When I was teaching courses for people who were new to Quakerism, or who were considering becoming members of the Religious Society, I would often hear people say they didn’t feel good enough to be a Quaker. Quakers can become fixated on being good, sin-free people, rather than facing the reality that they can never be free from the many systems of sin that infect us.

This struggle to be good in a world riddled with sin is exhausting. So where is the good news? I believe the way out of sin is to fully face how damaged we are by it. I say stop struggling to be good. We are not called to be good. As Jesus says in Mark 10:18, no one is good but God. Instead, we are called to be faithful, even whilst existing in a state of sin. I learnt this lesson in my early 30s. For most of my life I have wanted to be a perfect person. I grew up gay in England in the 80s and 90s, in the shadow of Section 28. This was a law introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government against “the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” in schools. I grew up knowing there was something about me that was unspeakably shameful, and so I did what many gay men have done and tried to be “the best little boy in the world.”[13] I thought being perfectly good would make up for the shame of being gay. I was mangled by the systemic sin of homophobia. The marks of this mangling lasted long after I’d come out and married my husband. I was only able to give up being good after my husband and I spent seven months living and working in a place called the Othona Community in Essex, in the South East of England. It’s sort of like a Christian holiday camp, on the coast next to a beautiful seventh-century chapel. We cooked, cleaned, and welcomed guests. Visitors would say to me, ‘This is such a wonderful place! It must be great to live here all the time.’ I would smile and nod, thinking how difficult it was to live there.

After five months, I was tired of the noisy, ungrateful guests. I was fed up with the people I worked with. Little things created big arguments. I had reached the end of my tether. I’d thought being a nice person was all you needed to live in community with others, but I was wrong. I looked at everyone around me and thought ‘You’re not nice people. I hate you all!’ Then I looked at myself, seeing how angry I was, hating what I saw. I wasn’t the nice, good, perfect person I wanted to be. I would never be the best little boy in the world.

Having let go of being good, I found another way to be, through prayer. At Othona they have morning and evening prayer in the old chapel, and each prayer time ends by holding hands in a circle, looking into each other’s faces, and saying: ‘May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore, Amen.’ In order to wish grace, love and fellowship to annoying colleagues and guests, I had to forgive them, just as they were forgiving me for all the ways I had annoyed them that day. Grace isn’t something you earn or deserve. I’ve heard it said that in every community there’s at least one person who is ‘extra grace required’, someone who needs a great deal of grace extended to them. At Othona I learned that sometimes that person is me. I left Othona no longer concerned with my own goodness. Instead I was a sinner struggling to be faithful, firmly rooted in the love and goodness of God.

We are not called to save the world. That’s a burden too heavy for us to bear. We are instead called to follow the Spirit of Christ speaking within us, the Spirit of the one who carries the sin of the world, the one who can lead us out. Part of the work of Jesus is to break us out of the closed circle of self-justification. As long as we struggle to be good we will never be able to bear the weight of our guilt. We are responsible for the harm we do, whatever our intentions. We are guilty of the sin we unconsciously perpetuate and amplify. This guilt will crush us if we rely on our own goodness. If instead we rely on the goodness of God, the goodness we partake in as God’s beloved creatures, then our guilt can be faced. Then we can do our small part to untie the sticky knots of sin that riddle our lives. We are loved and we are responsible. We are sinners and we are saints. We are warped by sin and we are precious children of God.

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[1] Nikki Coffey Tousley, ‘Sin, Convincement, Purity, and Perfection’, in The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 172–86.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1992), 127–28.

[3] Margery Post Abbott, ‘Mental Illness, Ignorance, or Sin? Perceptions of Modern Liberal Friends’, in Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives, ed. Jackie Leach Scully and Pink Dandelion (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 83–95.

[4] Quaker Quest, Twelve Quakers and Evil (United Kingdom: Quaker Quest, 2006), 5.

[5] Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear & Company, 1983).

[6] Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[7] Owen Bowcott and Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent, ‘Investigation Launched after Black Barrister Mistaken for Defendant Three Times in a Day’, The Guardian, 24 September 2020, sec. Law, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/sep/24/investigation-launched-after-black-barrister-mistaken-for-defendant-three-times-in-a-day.

[8] Anthony G. Reddie, Nobodies to Somebodies: A Practical Theology for Education and Liberation (Peterborough: Epworth, 2003), 154.

[9] Reddie, 160.

[10] Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 6th ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

[11] George Yancy, Look, A White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 170.

[12] Rachel Muers, ‘“It Is Worse to Be Evil than to Do Evil”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Challenge to the Quaker Conscience’, in Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives, ed. Jackie Leach Scully and Pink Dandelion (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 174–82.

[13] This is the title of a book by Andrew Tobias, first published in 1973.

[Feature Image Photo by Julio Rionaldo on Unsplash]