Theopedia

Pride

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

— Proverbs 16:18

Definition

Pride is the sin of exalting the self above the place God has given it, whether through self-trust that displaces dependence on him, self-love that crowds out love for him, or self-glorying that claims a worth belonging to God alone. Christian tradition, following Augustine, treats pride as sin’s own root: the disposition beneath the first transgression, not one sin alongside the rest.1 Scripture traces it from Eden, where the serpent promised the forbidden fruit would make Adam and Eve “like God” (Gen. 3:5), to Israel’s own temptation to credit its strength for what God had given (Deut. 8:17-18).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to pride by name. Its chapter “Of the Fall of Man, Of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof” states only that Adam, “without any compulsion, did willfully transgress the law of their creation,”2 without characterizing what that transgression was at its root.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, expounding the first commandment the 1689 shares with the wider Reformed confessional family, is more specific. Among the sins it forbids are “self-love, self-seeking, and all other inordinate and immoderate setting of our mind, will, or affections upon other things, and taking them off from him in whole or in part… hardness of heart, pride, presumption, carnal security.”3 Pride, on this reckoning, is not an isolated vice but one expression of the first commandment’s own broader sin: preferring the self, or anything else, to God.

Biblical Basis

Genesis records the first temptation as a promise of self-elevation: eat of the tree, and “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Stephen Charnock reads the substance of Adam’s sin there: he did not aim merely at pleasing his own appetite, but “to live independently on his Creator, and be a God to himself.”4

Israel is warned against the same self-crediting after entering the promised land: “You may say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth” (Deut. 8:17-18).

Pride also names the specific danger Scripture attaches to ministry taken up too soon: an overseer must not be “a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6). Herman Bavinck reads this text, alongside Genesis 3:5, as evidence that the first sin of the angels themselves “consisted in pride,” though he stops short of certainty, since lying and envy are also candidates.5

Against pride, Scripture sets God’s own opposition: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (1 Pet. 5:5, quoting Prov. 3:34). Applied to church life, Alexander Strauch reads this as Peter’s own diagnosis of what divides a congregation: “Pride ruins brotherly relationships and divides churches.”6

Historical Development

Patristic: pride as the root of sin

Augustine’s preaching supplies the classic patristic statement. In a sermon on Romans 1, preached in 404, he traced humanity’s evils to a single source in pride, then generalized the point:

That pride, though, is the first sin is stated openly somewhere else: The beginning of every sin is pride (Sir 10:13). And how then is avarice the root of all evils (1 Tm 6:10)? Because to want more than God is avarice, to want more than is enough is avarice… But what could be prouder than to forsake God through overweening self-confidence? What more avaricious than not being satisfied with God? Pride, therefore, is the same thing as avarice at the origin of sins.1

For Augustine, pride and avarice name the same underlying revolt: wanting something, even the self, more than God.

Reformation: Calvin on self-knowledge and pride

John Calvin opens his account of the Fall in the Institutes by rooting the doctrine in self-knowledge properly ordered: “To use it properly we must be divested of pride, and clothed with true humility.”7 Self-knowledge that stops at admiring human dignity “inflates” a person “with pride,” he argues; only self-knowledge that also reckons with the ruin of the Fall produces true humility. Tracing Adam’s sin to its root, Calvin repeats Augustine’s own diagnosis: “pride was the beginning of all evil, because, had not man’s ambition carried him higher than he was permitted, he might have continued in his first estate.”8

Reformed orthodoxy: Charnock on pride as self-idolatry

Stephen Charnock, in discourses delivered as sermons and published posthumously in 1682, extends the same diagnosis from the Fall into the ordinary life of the believer. Self-love displacing God, he argues, is practical atheism’s own root:

Self is the great antichrist and anti-God in the world, that sets up itself above all that is called God; self-love is the captain of that black band… it sits in the temple of God, and would be adored as God.9

He carries the same point into worship itself, naming the Pharisees as the standing example of piety that breeds pride rather than humility: their devotions left them “not more humble… but overgrown with more weeds of spiritual pride.”10 By contrast, he writes, “the departure of men and angels from God began in pride; our approaches and return to him must begin in humility.”11

Opposing Views

Theologians disagree over whether pride names the first sin as such or is one strand within a larger revolt. Roman Catholic theology, following Augustine’s and Aquinas’s own readings of Sirach 10:13 and Romans 5:19, has generally identified pride as the first sin specifically. Herman Bavinck, representing the Reformed alternative, notes that Protestant theologians have usually begun instead with “doubt and unbelief, followed by pride and covetousness,” and sides with Tertullian against reducing Adam’s sin to any single vice: it was at once “disobedience to God, doubt, unbelief, self-elevation, pride, homicide, theft, covetousness, and so on.”5 On this reading, pride is sin’s most visible feature rather than its sole content.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Scripture’s own command to “glory” or “boast” mean some pride is virtuous? Paul tells the Corinthians that “whoever boasts, let him boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31), and that he himself will boast only “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). John Gill treats this glorying as a fruit of the gospel rather than a permitted form of pride: “Glorying, or boasting, is another effect of justification; not in a man’s self, in his own righteousness… but such as are justified in Christ glory of him, in whom they are justified.”12 Loraine Boettner draws the same line: “boasting is excluded, and… he who glories should glory in the Lord.”13 The object, not the act of glorying itself, is what distinguishes boasting in Christ from pride in the self.

Doesn’t treating all self-love as sinful conflict with the command to love one’s neighbor “as yourself” (Matt. 22:39), which assumes some proper self-regard? Thomas Goodwin answers that grace does not abolish self-love but sanctifies it: “if you cut off this nail entirely, you cut off the finger too.”14 What changes is the object in which a sanctified self finds its good: rather than resting in itself, it comes to find its “greatest good” in God, loving spiritual things “with a stronger love to himself” than sin’s own self-love ever produced, because grace has reordered what the self treats as its highest good.15 Self-love ordered under God, in other words, is not the pride Scripture condemns.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Jared Heath Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 2, 37. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, Of Sin, And of the Punishment Thereof,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 105. ↩

  4. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), 1:122. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 24, “1 Peter 5:1-5, Peter’s Exhortation and Encouragement to the Elders,” 241-254. ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 2, chap. 1, sec. 1, 210. ↩

  8. Calvin, Institutes, 2:213. ↩

  9. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, 1:121. ↩

  10. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, 1:255-256. ↩

  11. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, 1:238. ↩

  12. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 8, “Of Justification,” sec. 6f. ↩

  13. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 223-224. ↩

  14. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 173. ↩

  15. Goodwin, Work of the Holy Ghost, 174. ↩