Sin: The Experience of a Post- Modernist

One of the greatest difficulties many modern people have is finding a unity between their instincts on right and wrong and purpose and modern ways of thinking. This is the consequence of our conditioning. Modern philosophies have killed off God and consequently have removed the concept of sin. However it cannot remove the subjective reality of sin. This is engrained into our instincts.

In Washington, the Managing Editor of what is probably the city’s most prestigious political weekly was such a post-modernist thinker. Martha (not her real name) regarded all constructions of good and evil as social structures without any absolute force. So she thought that although the Jewish holocaust looked pretty ghastly from a Jewish perspective, for those committed to an Arian theory it looked like the way to go. She considered that morality depended on your point of view, whether you are talking about the tribal conflicts in Ruanda or other more recent conflicts such as those in Ukraine or the Middle East. She felt you could construct concepts of evil and good out of the social matrix of where you live.

At this time Martha got to know Mark and Connie Dever. Mark is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. They invited her to come to a Bible Study that they run. She noted that they handled the text well and because she was interested in words and texts she went along. However she did not agree with anything that was said, considering it all to be a load of ‘poppycock’. However she still found these events interesting as they studied the gospel of Mark. She did not know much about the Bible so she went along and learned all the ‘stuff about Jesus’, even though she did not believe it. It was just interesting handling of the texts as far as she was concerned.

Martha was then sent on an assignment to PNG (Papua New Guinea) for political reasons. Just as she was about to leave she came across the story of a priest who had been arrested for paedophilia. He was about to return home for retirement after spending thirty five years in PNG. It transpired that he had sodomised no fewer than two hundred children over those thirty five years. She could not stop thinking about this man and the possible consequences of his actions. She thought about all the relationships his behaviour would touch. What would happen to those children when they grew up? How many of them would become abusers themselves? Would they ever be able to have happy marriages? These issues grabbed her.

When she returned to Washington she discussed it all with Mark Dever. Mark’s response was to ask,

“Martha, was it wicked?”

Martha replied,

“Come on Mark, we all know that the vast majority of child abusers were themselves abused as children. This sort of thing gets passed on, doesn’t it? They are as much victims as victimisers.”

Mark smiled,

“True enough. That’s what the Bible says too. Sin is social as well as personal. ‘Sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.’ There are few private sins. That is not the issue. The issue is, ‘Was it wicked?’”

Martha could not get away from this question. When she bumped into Mark on the street he would say,

“Hi Martha, ‘Was it wicked?’”

When she went to the Bible study she would be greeted with,

“Hi Martha. Welcome. ‘Was it wicked?’

Every time Mark saw her he asked,

“Was it wicked?”

Martha could not sleep. Her instincts and her philosophy were in conflict. She would wake up in the middle of the night and would hear Mark’s voice saying,

“Was it wicked?”

Then one night she woke up in the middle of the night. She couldn’t sleep. She was sweating by the side of her bed as she wrestled with the same question. Then she concluded,

“This was wicked. This was wicked. This was very wicked.”

Then it dawned on her that sin has an absolute dimesnsion, it is what God sees in us, and she began to think,

“Maybe I’m wicked too.”

Martha’s gut instincts had overcome her original way of thinking. Within three weeks she had become a Christian. It now all made sense, her instincts and rational thinking were united. Now she is one of the most able communicators of the gospel in Washington. It all makes sense.

No-one asks for pardon till they know they are guilty. No-one asks for life until they are under the sentence of death. You don’t ask for forgiveness until you know you are wicked. Nothing will satisfy the void in peoples’ lives until they realise they are devoid of God.

Our generation’s attempts to generalise and rationalise all evil, particularly in ourselves, has the effect of domesticating the gospel. It becomes diluted and weakened. We don’t need forgiveness but help to deal with the issues. The cross has become devoid of meaning. He came to die so that I can be forgiven but I prefer some form of psychotherapy to deal with every issue, even the sin that separates me from God.

i This account was taken from a talk by Don Carson to the Christian Medical Fellowship annual student conference in February 2003