Sin

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

— Romans 3:23

Sin is any failure to conform to, or transgression of, the law of God, whether in an outward act, an inward desire, or the corrupted nature every person inherits from Adam.¹ It is measured against God’s own law, not against human reason, conscience, or convenience, and it carries a double weight: guilt, a liability to punishment, and pollution, a corrupting stain on the sinner, neither ever present without the other.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession distinguishes the corrupted nature all humanity inherited from Adam from the actual sins that nature produces: “from this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions” (Rom. 8:7; Col. 1:21; James 1:14-15; Matt. 15:19).² That corrupted nature, original sin and total depravity, produces sin in the ordinary sense: the specific acts, words, and inward states that break God’s law.

Biblical Basis

Paul states sin’s universality without exception: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23); “none is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). John defines sin the same way Hodge’s survey of the Reformers does: “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4), and denies any exemption from it: “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Sin is not confined to outward acts. Christ locates it in the heart itself: “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matt. 15:19) — the very text the confession cites for how actual transgressions proceed from the corrupted nature.

Historical Development

Bavinck engages Augustine’s classical account of sin as privatio boni, a privation of the good, but argues it is incomplete on its own: sin is also “an active, corrupting, destructive power,” not a substance with existence of its own but, in its very deprivation of the good, still “an activity,” the way a crippled dog’s hobbling is still a kind of walking. Sin cannot create and cannot destroy; it can only redirect the God-given faculties it corrupts, so that “in its operation and appearance, sin is always a parasite of the good.”³ Bavinck also draws out the guilt/pollution pairing at greater length: the two “always go together as the two inseparable sides of sin; where the one is, there the other is also.” Guilt is “the objective brokenness of our relation to God,” which obligates the sinner to endure punishment; pollution is the corruption of “our subjective communion with God,” which renders the sinner unclean rather than merely liable.³

Charles Hodge distinguishes five things in this definition: sin is a specific evil, distinct from mere unwisdom or inexpediency; it stands related to law, so that “where there is no law, there can be no sin”; the law in question is not human reason, conscience, or expediency but the law of God himself; sin consists in the want of conformity of a rational creature to God’s nature or law; and it “includes guilt and moral pollution.”¹ His son, A.A. Hodge, frames sin’s relation to God’s law in three distinct senses. Every rational creature stands, simply by being God’s creature, under a “natural” obligation to be conformed to “the divine law of absolute moral perfection, any want of conformity to which is sin,” a relation that is permanent and cannot be transferred to another. Beyond this, humanity stood under a “federal” relation to that law in the covenant God made with Adam as the whole race’s representative, and, after Adam’s fall, under a “penal” relation to the law’s condemnation, the relation from which the elect are released only because Christ has assumed it in their place.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 178-179. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof,” para. 4. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 404. ↩