Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12064. The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which surprises people. It comes closest to a line of Augustine’s about loving people and hating their faults, and it reached English through Gandhi of all…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11088 Discerning sin is one of the ordinary tasks of the Christian life, and it is a good deal harder than the lists suggest. Scripture names a great many things plainly, and then leaves us with hundreds of daily decisions it never mentions: this job, that programme, this investment, that friendship, this way of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, and spends the morning wondering whether he has offended God in his sleep and what it says about him that his mind produced it. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain disorder rather than a moral failing, and to speak of sin in the same sentence is unhelpful at best and cruel at worst. The question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08084 Satan’s role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything from adultery to a lost temper in traffic. Others speak as though he barely exists and every failure is nothing more than psychology and bad…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8006. Angelic free will is one of those doctrines that seems abstract until you realise it is the only way to explain how evil entered a universe made entirely good. Something went wrong before Genesis 3, and it went wrong among creatures who were not deceived by a serpent, because they were the serpent….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6059. When Jesus says of the offending hand, cut it off, He is not opening a clinic. He is using deliberate overstatement to say something about sin that gentler language would never get past our defences. The words come in the Sermon on the Mount. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval art, in films and quiz shows, and most people assume the list must be somewhere in the Bible. It is not. So where did the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6005. Are all sins equal in God’s eyes? You have probably heard it claimed; it usually surfaces when someone wants to stop a comparison in its tracks, and it sounds humble. But is it true? Does Scripture really teach that a white lie weighs the same as murder, or a flash of envy the…