8/5/2026 – This post contains three posts by BSA member Michael Waddell followed by the post by Charles Bledsoe that inspired Michael.
What is sin? Part 1: the invention of sin.
Michael Waddell posted Feb 10, 2025 at BSA.
Note: This is the start of a 3-part series inspired by Charles Bledsoe’s post An Unabashedly Revisionist Opinion Piece on the Traditional Doctrines of Sin and Salvation. [See Beldsoe’s post below inserted at the end of Michael’s Part 3.]
How should we understand sin? And, more concretely, how have people understood it in the past? Where did these understandings come from? Let’s dig in.
The earliest form of the Hebrew religion didn’t seem to be very different from other ANE belief systems. Unlike our modern conceptions, religion had very little to do with morality. Just like in Babylon and Rome and everywhere else, the Hebrew god resided in a physical place, a temple they called his “house”, because he lived there. Without a god protecting them, a community was doomed. The gods made the rain fall, made the people fertile, and protected you from foreigners. YHWH was different in that he was jealous and condemned worship of other gods, and he was different in that physical representations of him were forbidden, but the main dynamic between god and humanity was pretty much the same in Israel as anywhere else. The most important thing was keeping your god happy, so that he didn’t abandon you. (You can see this obsession with avoiding abandonment all throughout the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. There was a real “Don’t anger daddy or he’ll leave” vibe going on.)
A god’s main concern was not your private life or your morality; it was animal sacrifice, which kept him content. So far as divine rules went, there were local variations: the Greek gods were particularly offended by patricide, and the Hebrew God was offended by unauthorized sexual unions and improper dietary practices. But it wasn’t so much a case of “This is immoral” as “This will disgust your protector and drive him away… and then where will you be?”
The earliest Hebrew genius, in my mind, was Amos. He prophesied that God didn’t care about your sacrifices or your rituals; he cared about your concern for the poor and downtrodden, your determination to treat people justly. This view of religion has become so ubiquitous as to seem obvious now, but it was a really weird claim at the time. You could even call it “anti-religious”, in that it denigrated almost everything that religion did and said that it should be replaced with a focus on morality. This quirky take might have been quickly forgotten, were it not for the fact that Amos also dared to prophesy that Israel would soon be destroyed because of how its poor were treated. And lo and behold, Israel was completely destroyed by the Assyrians not long after! Whether due to divine foreknowledge or dumb luck, this convinced a lot of people that Amos had been right about everything he said. And so “ethical religion” became the norm in one society, and it would eventually take over the world.
This was the first real conception of “sin”, as opposed to “crime”, which was a violation of social rules punished by society, or as opposed to “impiety”, which was a ritual error that would offend God in a way not unlike saying a magical spell wrong could have bad effects. No, this was “sin”: a private action that God found unethical, and that offended him. Note that this idea is really only possible in the context of monotheism, or at least henotheism. If there are lots of powerful gods with different ethical codes, then you might just sacrifice to a different powerful god who lets you be selfish. For there to be a morality that applied to everyone, peasant and king alike, there had to be only one divine will that really mattered.
Now let’s not overstate things. Amos was not a modern, enlightened philosopher. His view was still that you should care for those less fortunate than yourself because if you don’t, your God will abandon you and your nation will be destroyed. It was undeniably a huge advance over what came before, but there were many moral advances still to come.
What is sin? Part 2: Love the Lord your God with all your heart
When Jews decided to never explicitly write God’s name, the word they used instead was adonai, which means “lord”. They didn’t choose to replace his name with “the blessed” or “the great” or “the merciful”, even though they believed God to be all these things. Being a “lord” was God’s most important trait, so much that it could stand in for a name. (After all, there could be other blessed or great or merciful ones, but only one Lord.) In the LXX, and then in the New Testament, the word kyrios (Greek for “lord”) was used, and kyrios was also a title the gospels frequently gave the Jesus, which may have indicated a certain amount of quasi-divine honor given to him. But kyrios was also a normal, everyday word. It just meant “master”, as in, “Slaves, obey your masters”. Every slave-owner was a kyrios, and the most powerful slave owner in the world would be the “lord of all”. If you think about it, the implications are unsettling.
Lest you think I’m reading too much into things, the word doulos (Greek for “slave”) is used over a hundred times in the New Testament, and it’s most often used to refer to a follower of Jesus. Most English translations politely render the word as “servant”, but Greek has a word for servant, and that’s not the word used. They use the word for slave.
What’s going on here? Is Christianity a religion of slavery? Are we supposed to relate to God in the way a slave sees his master?
There are a couple of things to say. First, in the ancient world the subjects of a king were all, in some sense, his slaves. (The Athenians knew this well, which is why they had a long history of priding themselves for being free men without a king.) This is why people called their king kyrios. Second, in a culture of dominance like the Roman Empire, it was not unusual for a poor person to willingly become a slave to a powerful kyrios, coming under his protection, especially if his yoke was easy and his burdon light. And third, the Torah was finalized and given its unifying character in the wake of the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. As Dr. Wright describes in “Why the Bible Began”, the former subjects of the Judean king were figuring out how to be a people after their state was destroyed and their king deposed. They responded by creating a literary work that united them in their relation to YHWH, without the need of a government to connect them. This work, the Torah, emphasized that the true “lord” is God, and not any king, and that what unites Jews is their submission to the law of God rather than to any human dictates.
In Judeo-Christian thought, being a slave to God (or to Christ) is a voluntary act that one can revoke at any time, but that no one would want to revoke. It was choosing to live under God’s law, to live your life as God would want you to, in perfect obedience… not because your agency was stolen from you (as is the case in actual slavery), but because you choose it. Since slavery was ubiquitous in these societies, it was the obvious metaphor, but it was not a perfect metaphor.
In the basest form of this understanding, “sin” can be defined as acting like a disobedient slave, a decision which one can expect to lead to justified beatings from the master. But this understanding also opens the door to a different conception. If slavery is an imperfect metaphor, and if being committed to doing God’s will is a voluntary condition that one joyfully accepts to one’s own benefit, then the result of sin is not punishment, but the alienation from God’s will and its positive potential effects on your life. I’ll go into that more in Part 3.
What is sin? Part 3: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” by Michael Waddell Feb 10, 2025
As touched on in the Part 2, the language frequently used in the Bible discussing the relationship between people and God describes God as a master and humans as slaves. Obviously, the most direct way of reading this is both unappealing and ethically unacceptable, but Christianity and Judaism have not survived for millennia bringing comfort and spiritual meaning to billions, by treating their members as literal slaves.
There have always been two parallel understandings. On the one hand, God demands fearful obedience, and we’re expected to gladly give that in exchange for the gift of his law and his love. But on the other hand, God doesn’t force us to do anything. God knows the best way for us to live, which is to act out of love in all things, and he gives his guidance if we listen. He does not compel; he invites. Our will is completely free.
There was a time when we expected kings to lord over their subjects. There was a time when a woman was better off under the authority of a man who could compel obedience, with no recourse against abuse, than trying to make it on her own without a male guardian. In that sort of society, there’s little practical difference between a loving, guiding protector and a kyrios (e.g. slave-owner). But we, thankfully, don’t live in such a society. And the old metaphors don’t work particularly well anymore.
I have kids, and I get to watch them grow morally. I sometimes have to tell my 7-year-old “Do this, because I said so. I don’t have time to explain it to you. I know what’s best for you, now do as I say.” It’s different with my 15-year-old. The way I see it, the developing concepts of sin and obedience in Judeo-Christian tradition follow a similar trajectory. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the proverbs say, but they don’t say it’s the end of wisdom. We don’t have to be stuck in an obedience-through-fear mindset.
Personally, I believe that the idea “Do what God wants or he’ll send you to hell” is at best immature. I believe God is all-loving, but only all-powerful in a paradoxical sense. He didn’t create the world; he gave the world meaning, which is a more important form of creation. He doesn’t control the weather or violate the laws of nature; he shows us his will, which is to act through love at all times, and when we do so — when we surrender our will voluntarily to him — this is a more meaningful way of changing the world. I believe that Jesus (the Jesus of faith) is our example of living perfectly according to God’s will, which we can all aspire to do. I believe that sin is any act which goes against that divine will and takes us further from what God wants us to be, and that the only punishment is… that we find we’re further away from what God wants us to be. And I believe that this view is every bit as Biblical as the orthodox version. And I believe we become more accepting, loving people by emphasizing the accepting, loving interpretations of what it means to walk in the light, surrender to God’s will, and walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
An Unabashedly Revisionist Opinion Piece on the Traditional Doctrines of Sin and Salvation
By Charles Bledsoe, Feb 9, 2025
I’m going preface and set up my comments here with some snippets from the Encyclopedia Britannica articles on sin, Original Sin, and salvation:
“Sin is regarded in Judaism and Christianity as the deliberate and purposeful violation of the will of God”
“In the Old Testament [sic], … Sinful acts are viewed as a defiance of God’s commandments, and sin itself is regarded as an attitude of defiance”
“Both Christianity and Judaism see sin as a deliberate violation of the will of God and as being attributable to human pride, self-centredness, and disobedience”
“Traditionally, the origin has been ascribed to the sin of the first man, Adam, who disobeyed God in eating the forbidden fruit (of knowledge of good and evil), in consequence, transmitted his sin and guilt by heredity to his descendants”
“Christianity’s primary premise is that the incarnation and sacrificial death of Jesus Christ formed the climax of a divine plan for humanity’s salvation”
“The basic tenets of Christian soteriology may be summarized as follows: humanity deserves damnation by God for the original sin, which it inherits by descent from Adam; each human also deserves damnation for his own actual sin. … his [Jesus’] crucifixion may be evaluated as a vicarious sacrifice offered to God as propitiation or atonement for human sin.”
Well, I don’t know about you-all, but there’s way too much (what strikes me as) authoritarianism in all of that for my taste. The thinking here emphasizes that what’s pathological about the human condition, what’s awry with our relationship with God, and what constitutes the essence of sin is our not rightly relating to the authority of a sovereign God.
I think we would do well to historically contextualize this conception of sin, and recall that it was the understanding of wrong relationship with God and sin of people who lived in a time and culture that featured highly authoritarian rulers who were very keen on their sovereignty being submissively respected. It would seem that the ancient Israelites and the Bible’s authors, like others in antiquity, envisioned God, and what it meant to be on wrong terms with God on the model of these autocratic and obedience-demanding human potentates.
This model of God and sin then in turn led to the judicial model of salvation, in which sin is transgressive disobedience that merits and demands punishment, and the retributive sense of justice of a juridical divine sovereign must be satisfied before it’s possible for “Him” to grant us salvation. The revelation of God’s mercy and love in Jesus then becomes twisted into an impassive legal matter and a brutal blood sacrifice.
Personally I prefer to conceive sin to be our not emulatively relating to the loving nature of God, our failing to conduct ourselves in attunement with divine agape. Salvation/being in right relationship with God then becomes a matter of cultivating responsiveness to, and emulation of God’s love. It then becomes something that’s available to all human beings, rather than exclusively to Christ-believers. And an exemplarist Christology—in which the significance of Jesus is his revelation/exemplification of God’s love, not his performance of an act of vicarious atonement—can then replace the whole judicial soteriological model.
To my mind this very happily Jeffersonianly transforms the whole meaning of Jesus being the revelation of God’s love into a matter of the content of his character and his caring ethico-social message, as against a disagreeable vision of a God whose love is constrained by an anthropomorphic, authoritarian, juridical sense of justice, and who requires a satisfactional sacrifice before “He” can lovingly offer us redemption, and who even then ungenerously makes redemption exclusively conditional upon faith in Christ; and a Christ whose actualization of divine love involves his vicarious death for the sins of others more than his modeling a love-based morality and mode of interpersonally relating to others.
This Jesus, Jesus as the personification of the correct conduct of life, i.e. a form of life in ideal harmony with God’s loving mode of being, sans all of the orthodox Christological baggage, is much more appealing to me; and, I would argue, can be of much greater benefit to the spirituality of those who make him their vehicle of ultimate concern, and means of rightly relating to God. (Of course I’m talking about the idealized Jesus of faith now, in my view the historical Jesus was an apocalypticist whose character wasn’t flawless, and whose love-ethic was somewhat vitiated by its unfortunate grounding in an apocalyptic eschatology. But Jesus’ career didn’t end with his execution, his faithful have resurrected and evolved him into much more than he was in life.)
