About once a year in my theology or Bible classes, a student will say something like the following: “But as we know, all sins are equal in God’s sight.”
In response, I’ll often ask: “How do we know that? Can you think of any passages that support the claim?” In what follows, we usually discover that the phrase “As we know” is substituting for any solid evidence from Scripture or tradition.
This realization need not be belittling. In fact, the chance to rethink our unexamined assumptions can be one of the great joys of learning, even for professors.
The Bible never states that all sins are equal in God’s sight. Several passages teach the opposite. And in the end, both common sense and church tradition corroborate the biblical witness. More importantly, the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can avoid a subsequent move that sometimes does great harm, especially to victims of abuse.
Grace is real. God is just. Sin is serious. All are sinners. But none of those facts leads to anything like the equalizing of, say, child abuse and coveting thy neighbor’s goat.
Theologian Beth Felker Jones has written well on this subject over at her Substack (here), where she traces the unfortunate myth to a Protestant desire to avoid certain medieval Catholic assumptions about mortal and venial sins, penance, and a web of other questions. It’s a great post, though I can’t seem to review it now behind the Substack paywall.
My focus is slightly different.
I’d like to work quickly through the points I laid out above to show why it’s time to retire this evangelical cliché:
- Scripture never says it.
- Scripture frequently teaches the opposite.
- Common sense and church tradition corroborate the Bible.
- There’s a hidden danger in the myth, especially for victims of abuse.
To keep things short, this post deals only with points 1 and 2.
JESUS CONTRA EVANGELICALS
In the interest of being fair, I’ve tried to wrack my brain for any passages that might challenge what I’ve said above. But upon inspection, none pass muster.
Case in point: What about Jesus, when he links inner attitudes (of, say, lust or hatred) to outward actions (like adultery or murder)?
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28).
From this passage, we learn that outward acts flow forth from internal ruminations. Both lust and adultery are serious and sinful. And indeed, one springs from the other like a plant from a seed, or a birth from conception (see also James 1:14-15).
Hence, we should care not just about our external actions, but about the inner habits of the heart that birth them. (In fact, this isn’t new: the Ten Commandments warn not only against theft but coveting—which arguably is what leads to theft, adultery, and sometimes murder.) What Jesus says is crucially important. But he never says, “All sins are equal.”
Elsewhere, he teaches quite the opposite.
In the texts below, Jesus links the seriousness of certain sins (and the level of their accompanying consequences) to the amount of knowledge or opportunity possessed by those who reject the way of truth and obedience.
- Matthew 10:15: When sending disciples to preach and minister to some of their own people, who know God’s word and yet rebel against it, he proclaims that “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (Matthew 10:15).
- Matthew 11:22: He then says something similar when decrying the lack of repentance in the Jewish towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida, where many miracles were performed: “But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.”
- Luke 12:47-48: More starkly, Christ tells a parable about some unwatchful servants whose punishments are proportionate to the knowledge they had of their master’s will. Their unwatchfulness is the same, but their culpability and consequences differ:
“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
- John 19:11: Finally, when standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus again demonstrates that while the Roman Governor is guilty of rejecting truth and (indeed) murdering an innocent man, he does so with more ignorance and less premeditation than do others. That’s no plea for Pontius Pilate, but it does mean, “the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
In short, Jesus is clear that while repentance is required from everyone, not all sins are equal in culpability or accompanying consequences.
What’s shocking, then, is not that Jesus sees some offenses as more egregious in God’s sight than others (that’s just common sense if God is just), but that he focuses on the sins of callous self-righteousness coming from religious insiders (scribes and Pharisees), who while having ample exposure to the word of God, still reject their Messiah and his way of peace and justice, even while they exploit the vulnerable.
Thus, prostitutes and tax-collectors flock to him, and theologians plot his murder.
Once again, Christ calls all to repentance, which is the only right response to any sin. But his talk of “millstones” is reserved for those who prey upon the “little ones” (Luke 17:2). And his most famous fire and brimstone parable is about a rich man who ignores a beggar underneath his table (Luke 16:19–31).
This makes me wonder: Is the evangelical myth about all sins being equal less about Protestant vs. medieval Catholic minutiae, and more about Christ’s way of weighing our offenses?
BEYOND JESUS
The same goes for the rest of the New Testament.
Paul is perhaps clearest of all that all people (except Jesus) are sinners (Romans 3:23), and that sin’s wages are ultimately death (Romans 6:23).
James likewise argues that to break one part of the law makes one a lawbreaker. Hence, there is no place for boasting in anything apart from Christ, in whom “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:10,13).
But as Miroslav Volf points out:
From “All are sinners” it does not follow that “All sins are equal.” [. . .] The aggressors’ destruction of a village and the refugees’ looting of a truck and thereby hurting their fellow refugees are equally sin, but they are not equal sins; the rapist’s violation and the woman’s hatred are equally sin, but they are manifestly not equal sins.
The world of equal sins is a world designed by the perpetrators.
~Exclusion and Embrace, p.82
In this last line, we begin to see the hinge-point between the biblical truth and why it matters in our daily lives.
More on that next time.
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