Wednesday, December 21, 2005
There's Sin, and Then There Is ???
This post from Adrian Warnock in which he celebrates the fact that under-10-year-olds still believe in God set me to thinking. Adrian links to a newspaper article looking at the kid's lists "Most famous," etc.
Number 2 under "Worst Things In The World?" - Smoking. Now right on the heals of reading this -- I came accross this BBC piece:
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? This raised the question in my mind, "Is smoking a sin?" Now, of course, such has been debated endlessly at Boar's Head Tavern and I don't really want to dip into the specifics -- rather I want to consider the generalized question of what is a sin, and are there behaviors that while inadvisable do not rise to the level of sin?
Almost any reasonable person is going to answer that last question in the affirmative. The question becomes what are those behaviors? Back into specifics when I want to look at generalities. What is gained by making those inadvisable behaviors appear sinful?
Well, of course, it tends to decrease the incidence of those behaviors -- but at what cost? Often at the cost of increasing what really is sinful behavior. Thus sex outside of the bounds of marriage increases while smoking decreases. Hmmm.
I think this has a serious deterimental effect on the gospel. Sin is our indicator of our need for God, and the salvation He offers. Thus, if our sin meter is broken we never realize how much we really need God.
Consider, not smoking is a relatively easy task to accomplish, especially compared to say, avoiding lust. Thus if we think smoking is more sinful than lust we are not as convicted of our need for God as we might otherwise be. I think you begin to see the problem here.
It's time for the church to once again put on it's thinking cap about ethics. We need to move past the theological maxim "all sin is the same" and re-develop a reasonable set of ethics. It really will be helpful for the advancement of the gospel.
Number 2 under "Worst Things In The World?" - Smoking. Now right on the heals of reading this -- I came accross this BBC piece:
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? This raised the question in my mind, "Is smoking a sin?" Now, of course, such has been debated endlessly at Boar's Head Tavern and I don't really want to dip into the specifics -- rather I want to consider the generalized question of what is a sin, and are there behaviors that while inadvisable do not rise to the level of sin?
Almost any reasonable person is going to answer that last question in the affirmative. The question becomes what are those behaviors? Back into specifics when I want to look at generalities. What is gained by making those inadvisable behaviors appear sinful?
Well, of course, it tends to decrease the incidence of those behaviors -- but at what cost? Often at the cost of increasing what really is sinful behavior. Thus sex outside of the bounds of marriage increases while smoking decreases. Hmmm.
I think this has a serious deterimental effect on the gospel. Sin is our indicator of our need for God, and the salvation He offers. Thus, if our sin meter is broken we never realize how much we really need God.
Consider, not smoking is a relatively easy task to accomplish, especially compared to say, avoiding lust. Thus if we think smoking is more sinful than lust we are not as convicted of our need for God as we might otherwise be. I think you begin to see the problem here.
It's time for the church to once again put on it's thinking cap about ethics. We need to move past the theological maxim "all sin is the same" and re-develop a reasonable set of ethics. It really will be helpful for the advancement of the gospel.
