Doing wrong or committing sin

By John Meunier on

Is there a difference between doing wrong and committing a sin?

And what is that difference?

A question someone asked me recently raised these questions for me.

Posted in: Sin

8 Responses

  1. PamBG

    I’m not sure I think there is a difference.

    However “committing a sin” can be an emotionally-loaded phrase for some. In which case, I think, you don’t use the phrase if it’s going to be a stumbling-block. Certainly, if the person thinks “you committed a sin” is one and the same thing as “God hates you”, then I think we do well to find another phrase.

    Because I will own the label “liberal” if someone throws it at me, a lot of people think I don’t believe that I’m a sinner. But I don’t really know how I could think that I wasn’t a sinner. Maybe that’s the Lutheran in me but I’ll never believe that I or anyone else is perfectly sinless although I believe that perfect sinlessness is a grace that we should pray for.

  2. Craig L. Adams

    If sin (properly so called) is “a willful transgression of a known law of God” then one could still do wrong unintentionally or ignorantly and not be under the impression that one had sinned.

    1. John Meunier

      I had this Wesleyan distinction in mind as I wrote the post.

      So, if I harm you, Craig, through ignorance or unintentional error then I have not sinned. If you make me aware of the wrong I have done, however, it would be a sin not to seek to redress it.

      But Wesley also wrote that our sinful tempers “cleave” to all our works. Even our works of mercy and piety are infected with the sinful tempers of our flesh – pride, idolatry, lust, greed, etc. So, they are not sinful per se, but they are somehow tainted by the sinful flesh that gives rise to them. So, here, we can do the right thing, but do it in a sinful way.

      Or maybe I’m pushing Wesley too far there.

      At any rate, I’m curious whether Wesley’s distinction holds up to the Scripture.

      1. PamBG

        But Wesley also wrote that our sinful tempers “cleave” to all our works. Even our works of mercy and piety are infected with the sinful tempers of our flesh – pride, idolatry, lust, greed, etc. So, they are not sinful per se, but they are somehow tainted by the sinful flesh that gives rise to them.

        There is a hyper-conservative Lutheran theology that says because all human beings are sinful, that all actions that are done by the unsaved are sins. So, when a non-Christian helps the poor or shows mercy to an enemy, that’s a sin. I wonder if there was some sort of theology extant in Wesley’s day that this was an “answer” to.

        I agree that I can have the sinful temper of selfishness and not necessarily commit a selfish act. What I wouldn’t agree with is the argument that if I didn’t intend to be selfish when I insisted that my wants came before your needs that I haven’t sinned.

        So, for instance, I think that the developed world sins against the developing world in the current economic order which favors us. I don’t buy the argument “Well, I’m caught up in a system that is bigger than me and I can’t do anything about it, so you can’t call that a sin.” And it does seem to me that if we say this isn’t a sin because it is not our personal intention to harm anyone, then we abdicate the responsibility to change. We are in Churchill’s situation of “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men (sic) to do nothing.”

        1. John Meunier

          If I understood Wesley’s theological context better, I would likely understand thing about him the elude me now. I do not know if he was reacting to something else.

          As for the sins of the global economic system, well, I’m not sure where I am on that. My basic theological reflex is to agree that abdication of responsibility and agency is not a proper first move.

  3. PamBG

    Yes, if I recall correctly now, John Wesley made that distinction. I’d forgotten about that and can’t readily think where you’d access it. I’d need to think about whether or not I agree.

  4. Dan Lower

    Perhaps this has limited relevance to Wesleyanism, though, because it comes from Karol Wojtyla (pre-Papacy JPII), but:

    “If I believe that A is good, and I do A, I act well even if A is really bad.”

    From this edition of Love and Responsibility

    As to the economic dilemma, I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful (as a general theological note) to declare that not working especially hard to change a given economic system, even if one knows it is sinful, amounts to an individual sin. One’s actual ability to affect change seems to be quite relevant. (I apologize if that was not the intent of what was said.)

    1. John Meunier

      Wojtyla surely qualified that in some way, yes?

      A depraved person thinks many things are good that are clearly not so. We can easily distort the definition of “good” to meet nearly any end. My personal definition of “good” and God’s definition are going to clash at times, aren’t they?