To ponder:
What do you think the connection, conceptually speaking, is between moral wrongdoing and sin? Are the categories of moral wrongdoing and sinful behavior coextensive? Does sin include anything that is not immoral? Does immorality include anything that is not sin?
If moral wrongdoing and sinful behavior are coexstensive, is there a strong intensional synonymity between the adjectives "immoral" and "sinful"?
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)
Friday, January 25, 2008
Sin and Morality
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3 comments:
I'm not sure how much of substance I can contribute, but here's a try anyhow.
It seems that "sinful" and "immoral" are coextensive but differing in their defining qualities. "Sinful" denotes an act which is against God, and "immoral" denotes an act which against humanity. Evey act I would think involves both parties, so every act that is sinful could possibly be immoral and vice versa. Further, love of God and love of neighbor are conjoined, such that love of God is expressed through love of neighbor, and love of neighbor comes about most properly when one loves God. Therefore, the set of sinful and immoral actions are the same.
At least that's what I want to say in my idealistic moments. However, then I run into problems like the situation presented in the book Silence. (If you plan on reading it and don't want it spoiled, don't read any further; it's still a powerful book even if you know what's happening, though, so I'm not sure that it matters). In the end, the Portuguese missionary is asked to trample on a picture of Jesus in order to stop a group of Japanese from being tortured (when the Japanese had even already recanted their faith). It seems that to take the symbolic action of renouncing his faith was sinful, but letting the people be tortured was immoral. I'm not quite sure how to reconcile that one.... The author's response was that Jesus had come into this world for things like being trampled, and so it was all right for the missionary to step on him to save the people (of course, this is without all of the nuancing and the building of relevant themes throughout the book).
Don't worry. Your Silence spoiler isn't that much of a spoiler, even though I haven't finished that book yet. (I last started it over a year ago). I've read the chapter on Shusaku Endo (sp?) in Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor, and he gives away that much. For me reading Silence--when I get around to it--will be about the journey to that point, rather like reading Lawhead's Byzantium is all about the journey to the main character's death in Byzantium at the end of the book (only the book itself actually gives that ending away on the first page).
I think I have conceptual space at least for more sins--ritual/ceremonial defilements, I guess, that incur divine wrath--that are not immoral/unethical. The question is, is this conceptual space empty with respect to its extension in the actual world?
To use some biblical examples: was a non-Levite's touching the ark an amoral sin? What about Jesus' touching a leper? What about a women who is bleeding touching the garment of a respected male rabbi in public?
The first of these gets an immediate divine response according to the scriptures, at least on one occasion. The latter two do not, and so it might be easier to see them as "mere social conventions", and not a real part of the extension of the concept of ceremonial sins.
But it seems to me that the fact that God strikes someone dead is only an epistemic aid to our figuring out what really is sinful, at best. It is not necessary that God do so in order for a ceremonial sin to be really and truly wrong.
Or is it? Maybe the only categories I have in my head are sins that are really and truly wrong (immoral) and sins that don't seem to be really and truly wrong, except they seem to make God angry enough to kill people.
Here's a big practical question: Is a baptized and confessing and actively socially righteous and privately pious Christian's being involved in a non-adulterous, monogamous, committed, romantic, sexually active relationship with a fellow Christian of the same sex, which is characterized by mutual love and mutual submission (plus whatever other moral virtues we might attach to an ideal marriage) immoral? Or is it just sinful? Would it be sinful if God didn't either strike you dead or condemn you to Hell (temporarily or permanently) for it?
I think that those examples show that must be a greater intensive difference between sin and morality than I had had supposed, but I wonder if it requires that they are different in extension. It would seem that anything that I do which would encourage sinful behavior on the part of another would be immoral as well (assuming non mitigating circumstances). My committing sinful acts would both affect those around me, at least creating the possibility of encouraging others to sin, and would create within myself a habit which would affect future actions, which would also have a possible public effect, and so on (I don't hold that any action is completely private, and so "it's fine if it doesn't affect anyone else" is more or less inapplicable in my view).
I suppose that one could talk about someone on a desert island who is commanded to make sacrifices, but will never see another human person again. Perhaps this person can sin without the action being immoral. So maybe there is a logical difference in extension, but I don't think that there is a practical one.
So, I think that I would say in your example of the otherwise perfect homosexual couple, that if they are sinning, they are also being immoral due to the example which they are setting. If this immorality is completely detached from consequences, natural law, and virtuous habits, then I think we would have to be working within a pure divine command ethics, which doesn't really appeal to me that much. The alternatives would be that it is against some aspect of creation (whatever this might be), or that it really is not immoral and so it is not sinful either.
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