Whatever happened to the seven deadly sins?
For centuries, theologians, philosophers, and poets treated pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, wrath, and greed as a diagnostic of the human soul in its self-centered sickness. These sins were the biggest windows into the condition of humanity’s broken-down house, the particular ways the soul curves in on itself rather than turning upward to God.
Modern Lens for Sin
A couple weeks ago, political commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote about a shift in how our society views sin in general, and the seven deadlies in particular. They’ve been reframed, he said. No longer are they evidence of personal moral failure as much as the result of a psychological condition or systemic cause.
Consider envy. John of Damascus called it “sorrow for another’s good.” Kant saw it as the propensity to view the well-being of others with distress. Both recognized it as spiritually and socially corrosive. But serious studies of this deadly sin have largely disappeared, perhaps because envy has become useful as a motivating force for political grievance. It’s harder to name envy as sin if it’s what’s powering your coalition.
Pride has undergone a remarkable transformation. Wikipedia now begins its definition by saying it’s “a primary emotion characterized by a sense of security with one’s identity, performance, and/or accomplishments.” What was once the queen of sins—the root from which all others grow, the posture that places the self above God—is now a personality trait, even a virtue. The opposite of pride isn’t humility but shame.
The others have undergone similar revisions. Gluttony has become, in Goldberg’s phrase, “a purely aesthetic, self-referential sin against yourself.” Whether reframed as a metabolic disorder or an identity to celebrate, the way we talk about this deadly sin shows how the very concept of an “ideal behavior outside ourselves” has vanished.
Wrath is recast as vengeance and retribution, even among Christians who now applaud political figures for the mobilization fueled by their performative fury. Sloth, once seen as spiritual torpor and indifference to duty, is now a systemic failure or a psychological diagnosis.
Goldberg believes this reframing leaves us without the appropriate tools to grow as human beings. We’re stuck as victims, either at the mercy of forces bigger than ourselves that keep us morally wounded, or no longer even able to spot the moral darkness in us at all. We end up expecting the government to validate what the ancients called vice, and we keep at arm’s length the people who would call us toward virtue.
Church’s Sin Migration
If Goldberg diagnoses the world, theologian Kirsten Sanders offers a parallel diagnosis for the church. In her essay “God Is Your Father, Not Your Dad,” Sanders traces a migration happening in Christian communities: the drift from a view of sin as soul-sickness to a view of sin as relational distance from God.
To be sure, both pictures—sin as sickness and sin as estrangement from God—can be found in Scripture. The trouble comes when we let the second picture eclipse the first.
When we recast sin as primarily a matter of feeling far from God rather than being in an objective state of rebellion against him, the solution gets altered. We no longer need a physician who prescribes a cure for a dying patient; we go looking for a therapist who helps us understand our feelings. “Is our nature truly impaired,” Sanders asks, “or are we simply suffering the consequences of false beliefs about ourselves?”
I can’t help but point out how much of contemporary Christian music has already made this shift. Many hit songs focus solely on how our faith in God is supposed to make us feel, and how a better understanding of the gospel brings about personal peace and victory.
To be clear: There’s nothing unbiblical about this result. But there’s certainly something unbalanced, and a lopsided view of our sin problem and the gospel solution distorts how we preach, how we counsel, how we sing, and what kind of God we believe we’re worshiping.
The reframing of sin solely within the category of personal growth and identity robs us of the transformative power of truly encountering God as he’s described in Scripture. Sanders reminds us of this: The only way we can take comfort in a God powerful enough to truly provide for the widow and the orphan is if we also recognize his almighty power in making the ocean and everything that swims in it. You don’t get the full benefit of the nurturing Dad without the fearsome Father.
The therapeutic migration of sin subtly reshapes the church’s posture. Sanders writes,
We emphasize that church is a place of belonging more than a place of shared belief and that earnest commitment to the gospel is about our personal growth rather than our worship of the triune God. We talk about God as the ground of our personhood, someone who reveals our vocations, rather than as Creator and sustainer.
She notes that the mainline churches of the late 20th century traveled this road and discovered that “people don’t, in fact, need a God who exists to reinforce their self-esteem.”
What We Lose When We Lose Sin
Both Goldberg and Sanders are circling the same problem from different directions. When sin is reframed—whether by social science or therapy culture—we end up with a smaller God and a shrunken gospel.
The biblical teaching on sin isn’t primarily psychological. As Thomas West and I write in The Gospel Way Catechism, the deepest source of misery in the world isn’t ignorance, injustice, or the failure to be true to ourselves. It’s our cosmic treason against our Creator and his rule. Sin corrupts creation, wrecks relationships, and enslaves us to the Evil One. Our problem doesn’t begin horizontally, against one another. The vertical dimension comes first, against God.
That vertical direction of sin isn’t merely a sense of estrangement or the sadness of feeling far from him. If that were the case, the solution could happen solely at the level of psychology—changing how we feel. No, the vertical dimension of sin reminds us that our sickness and estrangement is real. Our problem isn’t only that we feel estranged from God; it’s that we are estranged from God. That means the solution will be more than self-help.
The cross is a radical solution because sin is a radical problem. Our greatest need isn’t for a Savior who will die to make us feel better about ourselves but for a Savior whose death will pardon rebels, a Great Physician whose blood can heal our sin-sick hearts, a Liberator who sets us free from our captivity.
Goldberg, as an unbeliever, can only point to the loss we experience in the wake of this revision. He sees that the ancient vocabulary of virtue and vice carried wisdom we’ve casually discarded. He argues that serious students of human nature had important things to say long before social science arrived to systematize and medicalize it all.
Sanders pushes us further. If we confine our theology to the therapeutic frame, we end up with a thinner anthropology. Worse, we wind up with a smaller God who no longer inspires our worship or compels our obedience.
Scripture gives us a view of sin large enough to require the gospel. Unless we understand what we’ve been saved from, we’ll never fully grasp what we’ve been saved for.
Sin is ugly. The gospel is beautiful. But you need to see the first clearly before the second can take your breath away.
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