4. Parasite

The Bible’s big double message is creation and redemption. The fall into sin intervenes, but never as an independent theme. St. Paul, the Bible’s chief theologian of sin and grace, therefore, speaks of sin in terms of what it is against. Sin is anti-law, anti-righteousness, anti-God, anti-Spirit, anti-life. Paul’s message is that God has shown free and lavish grace to sinners in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Faith in this God, in this Christ, and in their grace is the only hope of human redemption. Accordingly, grace, faith, and righteousness, together with the means of expressing and acquiring them—cross, resurrection, Spirit, justification, baptism into Christ—these topics cluster in the center of Paul’s interest. As for sin, Paul knows that sin lures, enslaves, and destroys, that Christ died to redeem us from it, and that our sin must therefore be dreadful, but he never does tell us exactly where sin comes from. Nor does he try to define the nature of its power and transmission.⁹

Perhaps one reason is that in the biblical worldview even when sin is devastatingly familiar, it is never normal. It is alien. It doesn’t belong in God’s world. Sin is always a departure from the norm and is assessed accordingly. Sin is deviant and perverse, an injustice or iniquity or ingratitude. Sin in the Exodus literature is disorder and disobedience. Sin is faithlessness, lawlessness, godlessness. Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it—both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a missing of the mark, a spoiling of goods, a staining of garments, a hitch in one’s gait, a wandering from the path, a fragmenting of the whole. Sin is what culpably disturbs shalom. Sinful human life is a caricature of proper human life.

So the biggest biblical idea about sin, expressed in a riot of images and terms, is that sin is an intruder, a notorious gate-crasher. Once in the world, the only way for it to survive is to become a parasite on goodness. Think this over. The intelligence of Nazi commanders came from God. The truth portion of an effective lie (maybe 90% of it) makes the lie plausible. The physical power of a guilty assailant comes from the gift of good health. In the Harry Potter series, the Dark Lord, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, could not be an evil genius without being a genius. Nothing about sin is its own; all its power is sucked from goodness. “Goodness,” says
C. S. Lewis, “is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.”¹⁰

Here Lewis reproduces the old Augustinian idea that evil “has no existence except as a privation of good.”¹¹ Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive. To be successful, evil needs what it hijacks from goodness.

In one of his novels, Stephen Vizinczey gives us William T. MacArthur, “the most infamous defense attorney in the whole city of New York.” The interesting thing about MacArthur, says the narrator, is that he could bribe judges and suborn witnesses successfully because in these endeavors he was entirely dependable: “William T. MacArthur’s word was his bond. It was precisely for this reason that he could obstruct justice so effectively.” And the narrator comments that the only people who really succeed at judicial corruption are those who can be trusted.¹²

The smartest blows against shalom are struck by people and movements of impressive resourcefulness—that is, by people and movements gifted by the very God and with the very goodness that their sin attacks. They also hope to gain something good by sinning. The defiant “Evil, be thou my good!” of Milton’s Satan is rare. People may rebel literally for the hell of it, but this is rare. Usually, they are after peace of mind, security, pleasure, Lebensraum, freedom, excitement. Evil needs good to be evil. Satan himself, as C. S. Lewis explains, is God’s Satan—a creature of God who can be really wicked only because he comes from the shop of a master and is made from his best stuff.

The better stuff a creature is made of—the cleverer and stronger and freer it is—then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius still more so; a superhuman spirit best—or worst—of all.¹³

Because it is a parasite, sin multiplies right along with goodness. Faithful parents tend to reproduce themselves, but so do faithless ones. Generous acts congeal into character traits, but so do selfish ones. People who long for God want to satisfy their appetite and also to sharpen it, but the same is true of sex addicts.

Sin is fruitful just because, like a virus, it attaches the life force and dynamics of its host. A child’s natural trust of father belongs among the springs and roots of a good creation. A faithful father accepts his small daughter’s trust and love, strengthens them, and tries to extend them toward God and out toward the world. A sexually abusive father also accepts his daughter’s trust and love, but he uses them to bind his daughter to his lust. Sooner or later, he converts trust to shame, and love to resentment. He corrupts his relationship with his daughter.

5. Corruption

Measuring the damage of the fall, the Belgic Confession states that by our original sin we human beings have “separated ourselves from God, who is our true life” and have “corrupted our entire nature” (article 14). The Confession means to tie all of us in with Adam, Eve, Cain, and Lamech as their descendants. The first sin of Adam and Eve has spread and congealed into original sin—a tendency of the whole race, for which we bear collective guilt. All of us are now bent toward sin. We have in the world not just sins, but sin; not just wrong acts, but also wrong tendencies, habits, practices, patterns that break down the integrity of persons, families, and whole cultures.

What are the ingredients in corruption? First, a corrupted person turns God’s gifts away from their intended purpose. She perverts these gifts. For example, she might use her excellent mind and first-class education not to extend the reach of God’s kingdom, but just to get rich. She wants to get rich not in order to support terrific projects in the world, but just to move up the social ladder. We ordinarily think of a prostitute as someone who rents her body. But a person can also rent her mind for a high hourly rate, and she perverts it if she rents it because she wants to feel superior to the people who bag her groceries and park her car.

Second, a corrupted person joins together what God has put asunder. He pollutes his relationships with foreign elements that don’t belong in them. We all know that it’s possible to pollute a river by dumping toxic waste into it. But it’s also possible to pollute our minds with things that debase them. It’s possible to pollute worship by bringing into it unredeemed elements from Vegas lounge shows (the special music is done by a Christian performing artist lying on top of the piano). It’s possible to pollute friendships with social ambition and college sports with taunting. A father who sexually abuses his daughter pollutes his relationship by adding sex to it. Good things have a kind of integrity, a kind of oneness or “this-ness.” A polluted event or relationship is one that has been compromised by introducing into it something that doesn’t belong there. Now the event or relationship isn’t just “this,” but “this and that.”

Take the case of idolatry. Like an adulterer, an idolater corrupts a relationship by introducing a third party into it. (In Scripture, idolatry and adultery are often paired up as emblems of each other.) So idolatry isn’t just an act of craving fame, for example, instead of God. Idolatry is also the act of putting fame alongside God and trying to serve them both. Your god, said Luther, is “whatever your heart clings to,” and that often means we’ve got more than one god. We are like an adulterous husband who, right through his affair, “still loves his wife.” He loves two women—or so he thinks. Similarly, a Christian who wants to be God’s child but also wants to be famous and admired in the world is a person with two loves: God and fame, fame and God. He loves them both. He “wants it all.”

In Scripture, God warns against double-mindedness of this kind not only because it is disloyal, not only because it is staggeringly ungrateful to our maker and Savior, but also because it is so foolish. Idols can’t take the weight we put on them; they’re false gods. Worldly fame can occasionally be used to gain a hearing for the gospel, but it cannot forgive us. It can’t cure us. Despite rumors, it can’t secure us. And the untamed desire for it can split a person. Divided worship splits worshipers. Divided love splits lovers. The truth is we have to choose. Like a sailor with one foot on a dock and another on a departing catamaran, we have to choose.

The Bible’s account of the human predicament is that from the start we’ve been choosing wrong. We’ve kept on perverting and polluting God’s gifts. It’s not just that each of us commits individual sins—telling lies, for example, or plagiarizing a paper. The situation is much more serious than this. By sinning we not only grieve God and our neighbor; we also wreck our own integrity. We are like people whose abuse of alcohol ruins not only their liver, but also their judgment and their will, the things that might have kept them from further abuse of alcohol. The same pattern holds for everybody. We now sin because we are sinners, because we have a habit, and because the habit has damaged our judgment and will.

I think we understand how this process works. A woman who has gotten into the habit of lying might eventually find it hard to tell the difference between a lie and the truth. Whatever’s convenient seems “true” to her. She now lies because she’s a liar. And she has no particular desire to change. Similarly, a man who thinks women are “bitches” or “broads” might feel insulted—and angry—when a woman refuses to be treated like a bitch or a broad. The reason is that he feels entitled to his sexism, and he feels sure that she isn’t entitled to object to it. His sexism has corrupted his judgment.

When we sin, we corrupt ourselves, but we may corrupt others, too. A father who beats up his son breaks some of the bones of self-respect that hold his son’s character together. As the novelist Russell Banks shows in Affliction (maybe you’ve seen the masterful film by Paul Schrader that’s based on it), an abusive father might break down his son’s dignity to such an extent as to wreck his son’s chances of making and keeping solid relationships. In fact, abuse fosters abuse, or as social scientists say, abuse predicts abuse. Victims victimize others and even themselves. In this way sin gains momentum. Worse, all sinful lives intersect with other sinful lives—in families, businesses, educational and political institutions, churches, social clubs, and so forth—in such a way that the progress of both good and evil looks like wave after wave of intertwined spirals.

Where the waves meet, cultures form. In a racist culture, racism will look normal. In a secular culture, indifference toward God will look normal, as it does in much secular education. Human character forms culture, but culture also forms human character. And the formation runs not only across regions and peoples, but also along generations. A boy can “inherit” his father’s sexist idea that men ought to dominate women. A daughter can “inherit” her mother’s sexist idea that women ought to let men do it.

The result of all this spiraling and inheriting is devastating. Whole matrices of evil appear in which various forms of wrongdoing cross-pollinate and breed. The “gaming” culture, for example, includes a lot more than slot machines and roulette tables: it also partners with the sex, liquor, and pawn shop industries to foster multiple addictions. The culture of war includes not only killing, its main business, but also such side-businesses as espionage, counter-espionage, treachery, dis-information, profiteering, prostitution, and drug abuse. “War is hell” not only because of its violence and destruction, but also because of the physically and morally nauseating atmosphere it generates. (Part of being a “war hero” is to come back from war with decency and bravery still intact.) Popular entertainment culture includes not only songs and dances, but also films that glorify greed or mindless sex and that routinely portray the parents of teenagers as naïve or stupid.

When we are born into the world, we are born into these matrices and atmospheres. Our slate has been scribbled on by others. We are born into a world in which, for centuries, sin has damaged the great interactive network of shalom—snapping or twisting the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others.

Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defenses against invaders. We might describe corruption as spiritual AIDS—a systemic and progressive devastation of our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks it down and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins. These make life progressively miserable: conceit, for instance, typically generates envy of rivals, a nasty form of resentment that eats away at the one who envies. “Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.”¹⁴

All this corruption amounts to a pervasive depravity of human nature. This doesn’t mean we are all as nasty as we can be. It doesn’t mean that, in a corrupted state, we always choose the worst alternative. Even in a fallen world, ordinary people practice ordinary kindness every day. They build hospitals, organize relief efforts, and manage twelve-step programs for addicts. A warring world that needs peacemakers also has some, and some of the great ones get prizes. The Holy Spirit preserves much of the original goodness of creation, and also inspires new forms of goodness—and not only in those people the Spirit has regenerated. Besides such regenerating grace, which actually turns a person’s heart back toward God, the Spirit also distributes “common grace,” an array of God’s gifts that preserves and enhances human life even when not regenerating it. As John Calvin observes, God’s Spirit works everywhere in the world to pour out good gifts on the merciful and the unmerciful, on the grateful and the ungrateful, on believers and unbelievers alike. (Rain falls on the fields of unbelievers, too.)

Moreover, God checks the spread of corruption by preserving in humanity a sense of divinity and the voice of conscience. To bridle lawlessness, God uses shame, fear of discovery, fear of the law, even a desire for profit among those who believe that honesty is the best policy. Further, God preserves a basic sense of civic justice—a “seed of political order” to go along with the seed of religion—and, for enrichment of life, invests particular talents in jurists, scientists, artists, and poets.¹⁵ Still further, the world’s great religions contain civilizing tendencies, greater or smaller, that remind us of God’s will for the kingdom. (Christian peacemakers have learned much from Gandhi.) The same goes for customs and traditions. As I said, culture forms character, and the result may be very bad. But it may also be quite good, as one can tell in traditional Asian cultures with low crime rates and high regard for the elderly. Popular culture, which sometimes celebrates lust and trivializes faith, can also stir us with a call for humanitarian aid or with a filmed version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which powerfully portrays the disruption of shalom and the painful, heroic efforts needed to restore it. Add these things up, and you’ll have an impressive number of common graces. The Holy Spirit often blows ahead of the progress of the gospel and to remarkable effect.

And it’s a good thing, too. Human beings need common grace just to keep life going in relatively civil ways. This is so because evil contaminates everything—minds as well as bodies, churches as well as states, preachers as well as prize fighters. People sometimes rebel against grace itself. For example, they might feel insulted to be offered forgiveness, resenting the implication that they need it. Evil runs through everything, not around some things.

If you put together corruption and common grace, you’ll be in a position to explain a remarkable fact: worldly people are often better than church people expect, and church people are often worse. Church people are sometimes much worse than we expect. In fact, says Geoffrey Bromiley, to see sin “in its full range and possibility,” we have to look at religious sin, church sin, the kind of sin that people commit ever so piously.¹⁶ You might say that the Devil goes to church a lot. It’s also deeply sobering to reflect on the fact that terrorists who run airliners full of screaming passengers into heavily populated buildings do it with joyful hearts: they think they’re serving the God who will soon reward them as martyrs for righteousness.

So what we see, if we look around town, is that it isn’t only secularists who “suppress the truth” about God (Romans 1:18). Believers do it, too. How else can we explain that Christians have used their faith to enforce slavery? How else can we explain that Christians have used their faith to suppress honest inquiry into science or history? Or think of this: why does our picture of God so often look like a picture of us? Pondering such questions, Merold Westphal suggests that before we Christians dismiss Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the three main architects of “the atheism of suspicion” in the modern age, we ought to learn something from them about the corrupt uses of religion, even of true religion.¹⁷ Honest religious practice builds spiritual momentum: “to those who have, more will be given” (Mark 4:25). But dishonest religious practice can cause shipwreck in the human soul: “from those who have not, even what they have will be taken away” (Mark 4:25). Aware of this terrible possibility, the Jewish thinker Martin Buber once lamented that just as “there is nothing that can so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can,” so also “religion can hide from us, as nothing else can, the face of God.¹⁸