William Wilberforce’s 1797
essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing
Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, confronts
the lukewarm attitudes of religion in his culture. It really resonated with me,
more than two hundred years later, because there are so many parallels or
foreshadowings of present-day culture.
One thing that is constant
throughout history—thus putting my life on an equal footing with Wilberforce’s—is
the presence of sin. Sin is often simply defined as “evil” or “wickedness” or “doing
bad things,” but I would argue that sin’s scope is a little wider than your
stereotypical “bad” things like criminal acts, but extends to anything that is against God.
Wilberforce says that:
“Mankind are in general
deplorably ignorant of their true state.”
This is in part due to the very
nature of sin: it is a self-camouflaging sickness that inherently twists and
ruins and eventually kills everything it touches. Humans are naturally sinful—Jeremiah
17:9 says “The heart is deceitful above all things”—and because this sin is
most effective when it is left alone and unacknowledged, it masks itself so
that we don’t even realize it’s there.
“…he is tainted with sin, not
slightly and superficially, but radically and to the very core.”
Sin is not always ugly on the
surface, because as sinful creatures ourselves we are hardwired to see sin as
acceptable, even beautiful.
Even when sin is identified, it simply
changes its tactics so as not to seem as threatening as it truly is. Instead of
tracing sin back to the Fall of Man (and as the root of all the problems and
evils of the world) many people are content to view sin as simple imperfections
and mistakes.
This, Wilberforce points out, it
just as prevalent a misconception among “nominal Christians” as it is among people
who aren’t Christians at all.
“The bulk of professed
Christians are used to speak of man as of a being, who, naturally pure, and
inclined to all virtue, is sometimes, almost involuntary, drawn out of the right
course, or is overpowered by the violence of temptation. Vice in them is rather
an accidental and temporary, than a constitutional and habitual distemper.”
Because we don’t understand sin,
we underestimate it. Even when we know what sin looks like, it can easily “fake
its death” so to speak, appearing to be defeated when really it’s just changed
its shape.
“We thus mistake our merely
outgrowing our vices, or our relinquishing them from some change in our worldly
circumstances, for a thorough, or at least for a sufficient, reformation.”
In other words, a man or woman
may seem to be more virtuous in their old age, when it’s more due to having
less energy than in their youth.
“…there appears throughout, both
in the principles and allowed conduct of the bulk of nominal Christians, a most
inadequate idea of the guilt and evil of
sin. We every where find reason to remark, that, as was formerly observed,
Religion is suffered to dwindle away into a mere matter of police. Hence the guilt of actions is estimated, not by the
proportion in which, according to Scripture, they are offensive to God, but by
that in which they are injurious to society.”
This is why more “spiritual”
sins like idolatry are accepted—even to the point where people don’t realize it
exists—while murder and other sins against
other people are not tolerated. In short, we care more about the sins that
are directed against us than we care
about the sins directed against God.
Yet it is only when we have a
fuller understanding of how sin operates that we gain a fuller understanding of
something that counteracts it: forgiveness. I see this in my own culture, where
people are very self-forgiving, making excuses for their own mistakes, and all the
while accusing and condemning and judging the people around them so harshly
that it sends a clear message: anyone who messes up is beyond redemption.
“They who have very low
conceptions of the corruption of human nature, would be proportionably less indulgent
to human frailty.”
People get socially shunned,
fired from their jobs, and basically ruined when it is discovered they’ve sinned
in the past…no matter whether they’ve changed since, or have apologized
already, or if they apologize even now. There is less mercy when it’s assumed
that humans are basically good and without flaw, than if we accept that humans
are broken in nature to begin with.
No comments:
Post a Comment