Gospel Repentance – a Lenten Meditation

Law and Gospel are Scriptural terms with multiple connotations. Both are the proper designations of portions of holy writ. Law, as the translation of Torah, is the collective name of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Gospel is the genre label of each of the four portraits of the life of Christ by SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with which the distinctly Christian Scriptures begin. Each term is also sometimes used as a shorthand for the Scriptures as a whole, making them in this one usage, synonyms. More often, however, they are used as shorter titles for the Old and New Testaments and the Covenants from which the two major divisions of the Bible get these other names. When used this way, and especially when distinguishing the dominant principle and distinct message of each of the two Covenants, Law and Gospel are generally set in contrast with each other.

The contrasts are myriad but there is one in particular that I wish to reflect upon and that is the difference between repentance under the Gospel and repentance as it was under the Law. Or rather, I wish to focus on one of several differences between Gospel repentance and Law, others of which I have discussed elsewhere.

Before looking at this difference we should briefly observe what is the same about repentance under both Law and Gospel. Repentance is the way appointed for those who have offended God to return to Him and find forgiveness and restoration. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the attitude which those who have offended God are expected to take in returning and seeking His forgiveness. This was the case under the Law and it has not changed under Gospel. Under both Covenants it is primarily preached to and expected of those who are already members of the Covenant, although there are Old Testament examples of others repenting and the Sacrament of initiation into the Christian Covenant is a ritual which is symbolic of repentance and the washing away of sin.

Under both the Law and the Gospel people are expected to repent of their bad deeds. Under the Law it is only of evil that people are called upon to repent. When the prophets call upon the Israelites to repent and return to their God it is over idolatry, child sacrifice, injustice, and assorted other such wickedness. When Jonah, very much against his will, proclaimed God’s judgement upon the wickedness of Ninevah, it was of that wickedness that they repented. There is even a word play that is not infrequent in the Old Testament in which “repent” and “evil” are used with a double sense – one the one hand they designate the contrition and the sin of the sinner, and on the other the clemency and the averted retribution of God. The end of the third chapter of Jonah is an example of this, at least if you read it in the original Hebrew or a translation that preserves the Hebrew play on words like the Greek Septuagint or the English Authorized Version and avoid the Non Inspired Version which, favourite of evangelicals though it be, does not. When applied to divine retribution ערַ/κᾰκῐ́ᾱ/evil is clearly limited in its sense to destructive effect and does not have the connotation of moral culpability but the figure of speech preserves the common theme that it is “evil” of some sort that is the object of repentance.


Which brings us to the difference. The Gospel calls upon us to repent, not only of our bad deeds, but of our good deeds as well.

Perhaps your initial reaction to that assertion is to ask how on earth it is possible to repent of one’s good deeds. It is an understandable reaction, especially if you have been taught to think of repentance primarily in terms of a kind of self-improvement – turning away from past wrongdoing and starting to do that which is right. Scripturally, however, the essence of repentance is contrition and humility, and behavioural change is merely its fruit. To repent of one’s good deeds is to confess them to be sins, to renounce all claim to divine praise and reward for them, and to seek God’s mercy and grace for them, as well as for one’s overt bad deeds.

St. Paul showed us how it is done in the third chapter of his epistle to the Church at Philippi. After summarizing all of the reasons why he might “have confidence in the flesh” in verses four and five, he wrote “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ” in verse six and then proceeded in the next verses to use the following much stronger language:

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.

To count one’s personal righteousness “as dung” surely merits the description repentance of good works.

Another passage in which we are enjoined to take a similar attitude is Luke 17:7-10. In this passage the Lord Jesus Christ uses a parable about an earthly lord and his domestic servant to illustrate to His disciples that they are to regard their service to God as their obligation or duty, i.e., that which they owe God, and not as something done for gratitude or reward. “So likewise ye,” the Lord says, “when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”

Next, consider the parable that is found at the end of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 25, beginning at the thirty-first verse. In this famous parable about the Last Judgement, the Lord Jesus says that at His Second Coming He will send His angels to divide the sheep from the goats, placing the sheep on His right hand and the goats on the left, then He will judge the works of each. The same list of works, which has taken on the traditional name of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, is gone over twice, and the sheep are bidden to “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” because they performed these works to Christ Himself whereas the goats are told to “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” because they did not perform these works to Christ Himself. When each group is surprised to be told that they had ministered or failed to minister to Christ they are told that their ministry or failure to “the least of these my brethren” is counted as being done or not done to Christ Himself.

This parable has suffered from much misinterpretation over the years due to a superficial reading. The misinterpretation is theological rather than ethical. Obviously, on the ethical level, the parable conveys the simple moral lesson that we ought to perform these works to everyone who needs them, great or small, as best as we are able and is in this regard, similar in meaning to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Theologically, however, legalists of all stripes have regarded this passage as evidence that Christ taught otherwise than St. Paul on the matter of works and justification, despite the abundant testimony to the contrary that can be found in St. John’s Gospel. In this passage, the legalists claim, works are all that is talked about and there is no mention of faith at all. Note what this simplistic and superficial interpretation overlooks.

The sheep are divided from the goats, not by the judgment of their works, but before the judgment of their works. At no point is it suggested that performing the Works of Mercy is what makes the sheep sheep or that failing to so perform is what makes the goats goats. Indeed, to interpret the parable this way goes against the obvious implications of the responses of each group to the judgement. The sheep are surprised to hear their works praised, the goats are surprised to hear of their failure. In the case of the goats what this suggests is that they were self-satisfied and confident that they HAD performed sufficient good works of this type so as to merit eternal reward. Ergo the shock to find their smallest failures being brought into focus and the harsh condemnation that they actually receive.

As for the sheep it suggests that they had done precisely what I have been arguing the Gospel calls us to do – to repent of our good works as well as our bad. They counted the good works that they were surprised to hear praised as loss, they had disavowed any and all claim to praise and reward for their works, and considered themselves, as Christ had commanded, to be “unprofitable servants.” They had renounced all claims to a righteousness of their own works and had placed their faith entirely in the Saviour Whom God had provided to a fallen and sinful world, trusting to His all-sufficient merit alone. For that is where faith is to be found in this parable. It is what makes the difference between the sheep and the goats. Believers and unbelievers alike will be judged on their works, because works are the only basis upon which anyone can be judged. The nature of the judgement is radically different for the two different groups. Those who have placed their faith in the Saviour that God has freely and graciously provided, and who are pardoned for their sins and credited with the righteousness of Christ, find their smallest service praised and rewarded (Matthew 10:42). Their service, if subjected to scrutiny, would not measure up, so God’s acceptance of it and bestowing of praise and reward upon it, is also an act of mercy and grace, on top of His having freely given them salvation in Christ. Those, however, who reject the salvation that God has freely given but seek to establish their own righteousness by works, find their self-righteousness subjected to that scrutiny to which no human works can stand up.

If the need under the Gospel to repent of good works as well as bad has not already been made clear, let us now consider the basic meaning of ἁμαρτία which is the primary word used for “sin” in the New Testament. The branch of theology that considers the doctrine of sin takes its name, hamartiology, from this word and it is also the word used in the classical literary criticism of Aristotle for the “tragic flaw” of the hero in a Greek tragedy. The basic concept suggested by ἁμαρτία is that of missing the mark.

Imagine that you are back in Nottinghamshire in the reign of Richard the Lionheart competing in an archery contest. You have been doing very well and have outshot all your competitors. All of a sudden a last minute challenger shows up. He is wearing a heavy hooded cloak hiding his features because he is the legendary Robin Hood, an outlaw being hunted by the very Sheriff who is hosting the match. Your last shot was just slightly off the bull’s eye. The hooded challenger claims that he can beat you. Allowed to try, Robin hits the bull’s eye smack dab in the centre. The Sheriff rules that you be given another chance and you try again. Your next arrow comes even closer to the bull’s eye than your previous one – but Robin’s is still closer. Then, to rub it in, Robin shoots a second arrow and splits the first having hit the mark perfectly twice in a row. He then proceeds to blow a raspberry, wiggle his thumbs at you, and do an obnoxious victory dance all around you but you aren’t paying any attention too of this. All you can think about is how your shots, of which you had been so proud, don’t look so good anymore compared to his. You were closer than all of the other competitors except Robin – but you had still missed the mark. That’s ἁμαρτία. That is what the New Testament’s primary word for sin means.

If sin is “missing the mark” then our good deeds are to be counted as sins as much as our bad deeds. For however good our deeds may appear to us, or however well we may think we do in comparison with others, they fall far short of the mark for which we ought to be aiming – the perfect righteousness of God as stated in His Commandments and manifested in Jesus Christ. Many who seem to have no problem with confessing that they have sinned by their bad deeds and who would acknowledge that their good deeds fall short of the perfection of God balk at confessing such shortcomings to be sin. The pride that is at the root of the sinfulness of fallen human nature wishes to cling on to something for which it can claim credit, even if it be merely the intention or sincerity of our deeds. The Gospel, however, calls upon us to renounce all claim to merit of our own that we might place our confidence entirely in the all-sufficient merits of Christ.
We are in Lent, the period the Church has assigned since ancient times for penitent reflection in preparation for Passion Week’s commemoration of the events of our salvation, culminating in the celebration of the Resurrection on Easter. This Lent, let us not be satisfied with repenting of our bad deeds, but repent of all of our deeds, even those we are accustomed to think of as g

A Couple of Deadly Sins

In the traditional moral theology of the Christian Church, seven “sins” were identified as being particularly deadly. These were Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice (Greed), Gluttony and Lust. I place “sins” in quotations not because I question the Church’s judgement of these as being wicked, but because they are actually vices rather than sins. A sin is an evil act like murder, robbery, or lying. A vice is an evil character trait or habit – the opposite of a virtue which is a good character trait or habit. These seven obviously fall within the vice category, and in classical Christian moral theology are ordinarily contrasted with seven Christian virtues, but the name “Seven Deadly Sins” somehow became attached to the list, has the weight of centuries of prescription behind it, and, if it comes down to that, has a better ring to it than “Seven Deadly Vices.”

Dorothly L. Sayers, who was a mystery writer, Christian apologist, and medieval scholar in the early to mid twentieth century, gave an address to the Public Morality Council at Caxton Hall in Westminster, in 1941, entitled “The Other Six Deadly Sins.” The text of her address can be found a number of collections of her essays, including Creed or Chaos? and The Whimsical Christian. The six which are the topic of her talk are those other than Lust and the point of her discussion was that these six had come to be neglected and Lust overly emphasized in popular Christian teaching. “Perhaps the bitterest commentary” she said “on the way in which Christian doctrine has been taught in the last few centuries is the fact that to the majority of people the word ‘immorality’ has come to mean one thing and one thing only.”

Ironically, in traditional Christian theology, as reflected in Dante Aligheri’s Divine Comedy - of which, incidentally, Sayers produced a translation – Lust was considered to be the least of the seven. Pride – the sin of Lucifer and the original source of all other sin - was considered to be the worst. The order in which I listed them in the first paragraph of this essay goes from worst to least – traditionally, the Church would list from least progressing to worst, beginning with Lust. As Virgil leads Dante up the mountain of Purgatory in the Purgatorio, they encounter the faithful being purged of their vices in order of their seriousness, beginning with lust and ending with pride.

If Dorothy L. Sayers was right in saying that popular Christian ethics had come to focus too heavily upon Lust to the exclusion of other sins, and she was, there is now a tendency in certain circles to make Avarice into the sum and total of all evil. Sayers used the term Covetousness for this vice. Both terms are now rather archaic but they are also more precise than the most common contemporary equivalent, Greed, which in its ordinary, everyday usage, includes Gluttony as well as Avarice. Avarice was the third least of the Seven Deadly Sins in traditional Christian ethics but those who seek to wed Christian theology to socialism often seem to consider it to be the worst. This is because they see Avarice as the driving force behind the capitalism they hate so much.

Whether Avarice actually is the force behind capitalism is debatable – much depending, of course, on how one defines capitalism. We will return to that momentarily. What is indisputable, however, is that Envy – traditionally, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins - is the force behind socialism. Nobody put it better than Sir Winston Churchill who said “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery”. Envy is hate and resentment of other people because of what they have. It is the very essence of socialism.

Now to be fair a distinction needs to be made here. In North America an unfortunate tendency has developed to lump every law and every government program that is aimed at - whether effectively or not - bettering the conditions of the less advantaged under the label of socialism. This is not what the word socialism has historically meant and it is certainly not what Churchill meant by it in the above quotation. Indeed, laws and programs intended to better the conditions of the less advantaged have historically, often been introduced by conservatives, like Otto Von Bismarck in Germany, Benjamin Disraeli in the United Kingdom, and R. B. Bennett and John G. Diefenbaker in Canada for the purpose of combating socialism. In an interview with the Paris Review in the early 1970s, Anthony Burgess remarked that “to take socialism seriously, as opposed to minimal socialization (which America so desperately needs), is ridiculous”. This is the necessary distinction so let us borrow Burgess’ apt terminology for it. The laws and programs that comprise minimal socialization are not based upon Envy, but Envy is the essence of true socialism.

Socialism began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and has been formulated in many different ways and has spawned many different movements which often bear little resemblance to one another.. Some socialists were anarchists who wanted to get rid of the state, others saw the state as the instrument by which their goals would be achieved. Some believed violent revolution was the path to their collectivist utopia, others insisted upon working peacefully and lawfully within the established system. Beneath all of these differences, what the various socialists had in common, is the idea that the private ownership of property is itself evil and unjust and that it is the source of most or all other evils and injustices in society. Originally, socialists proposed as a “solution” to this “problem” that private ownership be replaced by some form of collective or common ownership. Today, many, perhaps most, socialists have abandoned the advocacy of collective ownership in favour of a combination of confiscatory taxation, a heavily regulated market and an expansive welfare state that is far beyond anything that could be described as “minimal socialization”. What they have not abandoned is the basic idea of socialism that blame for the ills from which society suffers is to be placed on the “haves” for having so much. This hatred of the “haves” for having, continues to permeate all socialist rhetoric and it is precisely this attitude which the Church has traditionally condemned as the cardinal vice of Envy.

The relationship between socialism and Envy, therefore, is undeniable. Socialism is an ideology, and its basic concept reduces to Envy. If there is a relationship between capitalism and Avarice it is by no means as clear as this. Capitalism is an economic arrangement in which people own property on or in which commercial goods are produced (farms, mills, mines, factories, etc.), hire other people to work on or in that property, and market the goods, living off of the profit, that which they receive for the sale above what is necessary to cover the costs of operating their property. If some or even most capitalists (property owners) show Avarice in overcharging for their goods or underpaying their employees this does not mean that capitalism itself is based upon Avarice in the way that socialism is based upon Envy. (1)

Not only is the connection between socialism and Envy clearer and more fundamental than the connection, if any, between capitalism and Avarice, Envy is in the traditional teachings of the Christian Church the worse of the two vices. Let us consider why the Church traditionally ranked these vices in this way.

Avarice is similar to Lust and Gluttony in that it is a natural, God-given desire that has been perverted by excess into a vice. God, the Bible tells us, created man male and female, and ordered him to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. Sexual desire, therefore, in and of itself, cannot be the bad thing that the Bible and the Church condemn as Lust. Lust is sexual desire taken to a vicious excess. Similarly God created us so that we require sustenance and gave us an appetite for food. If we did not have that appetite we would starve to death, but when that appetite is indulged to excess it becomes the vice of Gluttony. If Lust is the perversion by excess of the good, natural, and God-given sexual appetite and Gluttony is the perversion by excess of the good, natural, and God-given appetite for food, Avarice is the perversion by excess of the good, natural, and God-given appetite to have material possessions.

Jesus said that all of God’s commandments could be summarized in the greatest two – to love God and to love our neighbour. It follows from this that all vices and sins must be defects in our love for God and other people. This tells us how the vice of Avarice is to be distinguished from the natural, God-given, desire for material possessions. It is not sinful to want “things”. If however, we put our trust in material wealth, looking to our possessions as our source of personal security, then we have failed to love God properly because we have committed idolatry by giving to our material possessions the faith that we owe our Creator. The desire to have – even to have more – is not in itself Avarice. It becomes Avarice when we look at others and think “I don’t want them to have any, I want it all for myself”.

Envy is a different sort of vice altogether. It is not a twisting or a perversion of a natural desire but consists entirely of ill will towards others.. Envy resents another for what he possesses. The resentment is based upon the fact that it is his and not mine regardless of whether I actually want it for myself or not. Envy wants to see what the other person has taken away from him even if oneself is not thereby enriched or benefited in any way. As Dorothy L. Sayers said of Envy:

Envy is the great leveller: if it cannot level things up, it will level them down; and the words constantly in its mouth are “My Rights” and “My Wrongs.” At its best, Envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst, it is a destroyer-rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.

It is closely related to Pride, which in the traditional view is the only one of the Seven worse than itself. Pride is the worst of the Seven because it is the true “Original Sin” in the sense that it was the first sin, the sin of Lucifer, the root from which all other sin sprang. If Pride is the root sin, Lucifer’s sinful attitude towards himself, the second sin, the first to grow out of the root of Pride in the heart of Lucifer was Envy, his sinful attitude towards his Creator.

The Church’s traditional ranking of the vices seems entirely right and sensible. Envy is the second worst after Pride because the two are inseparably intertwined, almost the same sinful attitude in two different aspects, Pride looking inward and Envy looking outward. They are satanic in the most literal sense of the word – the sins that brought about Lucifer’s fall – and thus the spring from which the tainted river of sin and vice flows. Avarice, like Gluttony and Lust, is a lesser vice, a natural, God given desire that has been twisted and taken to excess, by the corrupting influence of the root sins of Pride and Envy.

Thus traditional Christian theology sheds much light on the kind of modern theology that looks more sympathetically towards socialism, the heart of which is Envy, than towards capitalism, which socialists claim promotes Avarice. (2)

(1) This essay will probably come across as an apology for capitalism, which I suppose it is if we associate no other connotations with capitalism beyond the definition in the eighth paragraph. The term usually has other connotations of course. These include mass production, industrialization, urbanization, technology, progress, and basically all the concepts that are wrapped up in the word “modern”. I make no apology for a capitalism that includes these concepts, each of which I look upon with varying degrees of suspicion and disgust. These are as much a part of socialism, however, as they are of capitalism.

(2) Dorothy L. Sayers, whose speech “The Other Six Deadly Sins” I have referred to throughout this essay, said that “If Avarice is the sin of the Haves against the Have-Nots, Envy is the sin of the Have-Nots against the Haves.” While I understand why she would say this, I question it. Anybody who has worked or volunteered for an organization that distributes food, clothing, etc. to the Have-Nots and has had to try and prevent those who are ahead in the distribution line from hoarding everything from those who are behind them in the line, will know that Avarice or Greed is hardly an unknown vice among the Have-Nots. On a somewhat related note, V. S. Naipaul has the narrator of one of the stories in his In a Free State comment “But no, like all poor people they want to be the only ones to rise. It is the poor who always want to keep down the poor.” I would also suggest that if one wants to observe Envy, on a truly spectacular scale, one has to look among the Haves.

Sin and Hypocrisy

Modern, progressive, thought is fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the doctrine of original sin. The most basic element of progressive thought is the idea that human evil and suffering is caused, not by a flaw in human nature, but by flaws in the organization of society, and that by correcting these flaws, man can build for himself Paradise upon earth. The doctrine of original sin, on the other hand, teaches that man is a fallen being, that the evils he commits and suffers arise out of his own flawed nature, and that he cannot break his own exile from Paradise but must trust in the grace and mercy of God. These two ideas are mutually incompatible and it is the latter, the doctrine of orthodox Christianity and an essential component of conservative thought, which most accurately describes man as he is in the world as it is.

The doctrine of original sin is predicated of man as a collective being. (1) It is the collective sin of our race, in which we each have an equal share. It is the same for any one person as it is for the next. Personal sin, on the other hand, refers to the sins which we each commit as individual persons. While one of the implications of original sin, is that each of us is guilty of personal sin, personal sin differs from person to person and is never exactly the same for any two individual people. Your personal sins are the sins which you have committed and for which you are accountable, whereas mine are the sins which I have committed and for which I am accountable.

If original sin is the realistic rain on the utopian parade of progressivism, personal sin is not exactly a popular concept with modern thought either. It is not that modern people think of themselves as perfect. That is far from being the case. “I’m not perfect” or “nobody’s perfect” are phrases that can be found on virtually everybody’s lips from time to time. Modern people do not like to think of their flaws and failings in terms of sin, however. In part this is because sin is a word with religious associations which seem antiquated to the modern secular mind. It is also because the word sin suggests the idea that one is responsible for one’s actions, and therefore guilty of one’s wrongdoing, for which one can and will be held accountable.

To be fair to modern man, these have never been popular ideas, at least when applied to one’s own self. Consider the words of Adam and Eve in response to God’s questioning in the Garden after the fall in the third chapter of Genesis. However one reads these chapters, literally or figuratively, the point is clearly there that passing the buck is as old as sin.

That having been said, sin is clearly one of those concepts that modern man considers himself too advanced to believe in anymore. Forty years ago a book was published that asked the question “Whatever Became of Sin?” (2) The author was Dr. Karl Menninger, a renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder with his father and brother, of the famous psychiatric clinic and foundation that bear their family name. According to Dr. Menninger, the concept of sin has been on the wane, first because as the modern state developed assuming much of the functions previously performed by the church, much socially undesirable behaviour was moved from the category of sin into the category of crime, and second because with the development of modern medical science, and particularly psychiatry, sinful behaviour has been further reclassified into the category of disease and its symptoms. Another factor he identified was the development of modern ways of regarding society as being collectively responsible for the erring actions of individuals.

Menninger did not see all of these developments as being entirely or even mostly negative – except perhaps the evolution of the modern state of which he wrote with an almost anarchist, individualist contempt. He nevertheless made the case that we still needed the concept of sin. Indeed, he wrote that it was “the only hopeful view.” (3) His reasoning was that since the world was still full of evil, we need the concept of sin, which allows responsibility for evil to be assigned but which also offers the possibilities of repentance, atonement, grace and forgiveness, to retain our sanity.

If the concept of sin has gone out of fashion as a way of thinking about and describing human behaviour that is undesirable and wrong, the same cannot be said of the concept of hypocrisy. The words hypocrisy and hypocrite are doing very well indeed, especially as terms of abuse for those who still hold to the old-fashioned ideas of sin and righteousness.

Hypocrisy is a charge which secular society and unbelievers like to throw against the Christian church and against Christian believers, perhaps without full comprehension of what it is that they are accusing Christians and the church. Often it seems as if those leveling the charge seem to think that the definition of a hypocrite is “a religious person who commits a sin.” This is not what the word means at all.

Hypocrisy was originally a Greek word. It was formed by adding the prefix hypo, which means under, to the verb krino, which means to separate, decide, distinguish or pass judgement. In the old Ionic dialect used by Homer, this compound originally meant to reply or to give an answer. In the later Attic dialect however, i.e., that spoken in Athens at the height of its classical civilization in the period before, during, and just after the Peloponnesian War, the word had been adopted as a technical term for use in the theatre. In this period, when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were writing their great tragedies for the Athenian stage, the word hypocrisis referred to the work of actors in performing these plays. This usage evolved from the original meaning of the word because it literally described what an actor was doing in the play’s dialogue – answering or replying to the other speakers.

In English, we do not speak of the performing of a role on stage as hypocrisy, nor do we speak of the performers as hypocrites. Instead we use the words acting and actor to describe these things. The meaning of our English word hypocrisy is a metaphorical extension of the idea of acting. An actor is someone who pretends to be someone he is not, the character he is assigned in the play in which he is performing. A hypocrite is also someone who plays a role. He is someone who pretends to be more righteous or virtuous than he actually is. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He denounced the scribes and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites. Christ may not have been the first to use the word in this way but it is through His use that it became the word’s primary meaning.

If hypocrisy is putting on an act of being more righteous than you actually are is secular society’s charge that the church is full of hypocrisy accurate?

Sadly, it often is. Individual Christians and the organized church are frequently guilty of hiding their sins and putting on a front of righteousness. That such would be the case is indirectly suggested by the words of Jesus Himself. He would hardly have gone to such lengths to warn His disciples against the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees if He did not think them susceptible to that leaven. Where the charge falls short of hitting its mark is in the unspoken assumption that there is less hypocrisy outside the church than there is inside it.

In my first semester at Providence College there was a class that if I remember correctly was mandatory for all freshmen that was kind of an introductory course to apologetics and evangelism. Part of the course dealt with common excuses given for rejecting the gospel. When our professor, Stan Hamm, asked us how we would respond to someone who says “the church is full of hypocrites”, I blurted out “there is always room for more!”

While I had obviously said that as a wiseass remark, it does actually answer the excuse in a way. Hypocrisy, the pretence of being a better person than one actually is, is a ubiquitous trait of humanity, not just of the religious and it is often best exemplified by those who use the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse to avoid believing the gospel themselves. Indeed, in using the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse for not joining it, one is implicitly claiming to be non-hypocritical, to be completely transparent, open, and honest, which is itself almost certainly a pretence, and therefore, arguably the ultimate form of hypocrisy, being a hypocrite about not being a hypocrite.

In fact, an argument can be made that there is far less hypocrisy within the church than there is outside it. Those who level accusations of hypocrisy against the church when Christians are caught in sin often seem to assume that Christians purport to be sinlessly perfect and demand that others be as well. Yet the very opposite is the case. By the terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, one cannot be a Christian without confessing oneself to be a sinner.

Think about it. A popular method of sharing the gospel, among North American evangelicals, presents the way of salvation as the ABCs of Christianity. While this is not a sterling example of Christian orthodoxy – it distorts the gospel by presenting it as a series of steps that you have to follow in order to obtain salvation rather than a message of good news about how God has given us salvation in Jesus Christ – the A, in the ABCs, always stands for admitting that you are a sinner. (4)

In more traditional Protestant theology, divine revelation is regarded as being divided into two messages, Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what God demands of us, the Gospel tells us what God in His grace has done for us in Jesus Christ. The practical function of the Law is to show us our need for the Gospel – to show us that we are sinners, who cannot meet God’s righteous demands, and must therefore trust in the salvation God has provided in Christ.

In liturgical churches, a general confession and absolution of sin is made every time the Mass is celebrated. In the traditional order of the Latin Mass this was the very first thing that was done after the asperges, before even the introit. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer it is the first part of the eucharistic liturgy following the readings and the sermon. A general confession of sin is also made in the liturgy of the divine office and the private confession and absolution of specific sins is also encouraged by many churches, most obviously the Roman.

Christianity, in other words, is all about acknowledging one’s sins and trusting in God’s forgiveness. To the extent, therefore, that a person believes in and practices this religion of confession of sin and reception of divine forgiveness through faith, he is likely to be less of hypocrite rather than more of one.

Hypocrisy, let me reiterate, is more than just falling short of the moral standards one believes in or which are taught by the religion to which one belongs. The word that best describes that is actually the word with the discussion of which we began this essay, i.e., sin. (5) That confession of sin is one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is the best answer to the charge that the Christian church is uniquely hypocritical, for hypocrisy is pretending to a righteousness one does not possess, a universal human trait that is lessened, somewhat, by Christianity’s requirement that one confess one’s sins.

To be fair, those to whom hypocrisy is the first thing that comes to mind when the church is mentioned could respond to the preceding argument by saying that it is the preachy attitude of the church combined with the sins of its members that they consider to be hypocritical. A response like this could be a legitimate complaint about the manner in which Christian moral truths are sometimes presented. It could also be a complaint that would be made regardless of the manner in which the message is presented because of a notion that as long as the church and its members are themselves imperfect people they have no right to proclaim moral truths.

If, however, imperfect people and institutions are disqualified from preaching moral truths, then nobody is left to preach them. Imperfect preachers are the only kind available. About twenty years ago I read a book, lent to me by my pastor at the time, in which the author made this point in a way that I have never forgotten. The author, Dr. R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries, wrote:

No minister is worthy of his calling. Every preacher is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful a preacher is to the Word of God in his preaching, the more liable he is to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful a man is to the Word of God, the higher the message is that he will preach. The higher the message, the further he will be from obeying it himself. (6)

Dr. Sproul is a well-known Reformed theologian, that is, a Calvinist. Calvinism, like all human attempts at understanding God, has its strengths and weaknesses. The holiness of God, that which sets Him above and apart from sinful man, which makes His grace amazing indeed, is one of the areas in which Calvinism tends to be strong and this was the subject of the book. This paragraph about the imperfection of preachers, and how the better they are at doing their job, the further they themselves are from that which they preach, comes at the end of a chapter based upon the propher Isaiah’s experience in the sixth chapter of the book bearing his name. Summoned into the presence of God, He declared God to be thrice holy, and himself to be undone. Yet, when God asked who would go and speak His message, the man of “unclean lips” volunteered and God accepted his service.

A few years ago I ran across another book whose author tackled the question of which is preferable, an imperfect testimony to moral truth or no testimony at all, and argued for the former. Among the points Jeremy Lott made in the provocatively titled In Defense of Hypocrisy, were that accusations of hypocrisy are often also examples of it, that many things that we would probably classify as examples of hypocrisy don’t actually meet the criteria for inclusion in that category, and that other things which are hypocrisies we are actually better off with than without. Examples of the latter would be the variations on “looking the other way” that are necessary for unwritten rules to work. In his sixth chapter, he made a compelling case for the idea that society is far more tolerable when unwritten rules – which often contradict the written rules, hence the need for the hypocrisy – are in operation, than when everything is done strictly by the book.

What I found to be the most interesting argument in the book, however, was an argument in the fourth chapter about religious hypocrisy, in which Lott traced the antihypocrisy movement back to its Founder, Who was, of course, also the Founder of the institution most often accused of hypocrisy. If the church has often been guilty of distorting Christ’s message and failing abysmally to follow His teachings – and, being composed of sinful human beings, of course, it has – the antihypocrisy movement has not done any better. Indeed, it has inverted His condemnation of hypocrisy. Whereas Jesus condemned the Pharisees for not living up to the standards of the Mosaic Law they preached, contemporary antihypocrites condemn the preaching of moral standards that one cannot live up to. Or as Lott put it “the bone that he couldn’t swallow was that they were far too self-serving in their reading, not necessarily that they were too demanding”. (7)

To make his point, he asked a fascinating “what if” question:

If the teachers of the law had ceased to teach and the priests had locked up the temple, would the preacher from Nazareth have said, Well, at least they aren’t being hypocrites? Not unless he suddenly decided to depart from the tone and tenor of everything he’d ever said in public. The Jesus of the Gospels would have raged against them twice as hard for abandoning even the trappings of religion. (8)

This reasoning seems iron-clad to me, especially when one considers that Jesus, while condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, told His listeners they still had to respect their authority and obey the Law they taught (Matthew 23:2-3).

The contemporary antihypocrites, whose objection is to the preaching of moral standards rather than the failing to live up to them, would presumably not look askance at the disappearance of the concept of sin. If, however, Dr. Menninger was correct in regarding the concept of sin as the only way of thinking about evil in the world that provides us with hope, and if Jeremy Lott is correct in arguing that some kinds of hypocrisy actually make society more tolerable, we have good reason to regard the moral thinking of today as being greatly inferior to that of about seventy years ago. Perhaps it is time we turn back the clock.

(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2013/09/original-sin-and-free-will.html

(2) Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became Of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973).

(3) Ibid., p. 188.

(4) The B is for believe, but the C varies, in some versions being call upon the Lord, in others confess Christ, in yet others commit yourself to Christ.

(5) The technical term for the study of the concept of sin is hamartiology. This comes from the most basic Greek word for sin, hamartia. Its verbal cognate, hamartano was the word the Greeks used for falling short of your target when throwing a spear, and thus by extension, failing to meet your goals.

(6) R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1985, 1993), p. 50.

(7) Jeremy Lott, In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006) p. 108.

(8) Ibid. Bold indicates italics in original.