Beware the mild view of sin

In my conversations with Catholic friends, I have found it useful to reference the five “magnetic points” expounded by British theologian Daniel Strange.

There are five fundamentals that all human beings are looking for and to which they are magnetically drawn. Because of their universal presence in people’s lives, they can be seen in Catholics.

According to Strange, each religion responds in various ways to these five questions. Their responses are points of attraction for people to be drawn to them. The questions are:

1. The search for totality: a way to connect to reality (see this article here).
2. The need for a norm: a way to live (see this article here).
3. The yearning for deliverance: a way out of oppression
4. The sense of destiny: a way to control
5. The reality of a higher power: a way to measure up to the supernatural

Every religion, Roman Catholicism included, provides improbable and insufficient answers to the magnetic points. The gospel subverts these answers and fulfills the magnetic points. Let’s talk about the third magnetic point of the list: the yearning for deliverance.

In the Roman Catholic mindset, the mild doctrine of sin impacts the way one expects and hopes to be delivered from it. “The papists, although they do not deny that human nature is corrupt, nevertheless minimize it such that original sin is almost nothing else than a depraved inclination toward sin.” I think that this comment by John Calvin well captures the crux of the matter. When dealing with sin, Roman Catholicism recognises its serious reality, albeit in a non-tragic view. Even if weakened by sin, nature (all created reality) maintains its ability to interface with grace (God’s favour) because grace is indelibly inscribed in nature. This is the theology of sin that can be found in Roman Catholicism, both in its traditional account and in its present-day developments.

Nature is seen as ‘open’ to grace. For them, although nature has been touched by sin, it is still programmatically open to be infused, elevated, supplemented by grace. In contrast to Biblical teaching, the Roman Catholic ‘mild’ view of the Fall and of sin makes it possible for Rome to hold a view of nature that is tainted by sin but not depraved, obscured but not blinded, wounded but not alienated, morally disordered but not spiritually dead, inclined to evil but still holding on to what is true, good and beautiful. There is always a residual good in nature that grace can and must work with.

Contrast this view with the Biblical account of sin whereby, with the exception of the Lord Jesus Christ, all humanity, from the moment of conception, shares a corrupt human nature that makes us subject to God’s wrath, incapable of any saving good, prone to evil, and leaves us dead in sin and enslaved to sin.

According to the Bible we need deliverance from this bondage. Jesus says: “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14v6). He alone brings a finished deliverance; we cannot perform it ourselves and are liberated from guilt and shame.

Although sin is recognised, in Rome’s architecture it does not receive the importance it should receive Biblically. This underestimation has consequences for the whole of Roman Catholic theology. The yearning for deliverance cannot be achieved because ultimately it is not faith in Christ alone that delivers it, but a combination of good works, sacraments, and intercession of the saints.

J.C. Ryle’s sober comment comes to mind: “The plain truth is that a right knowledge of sin lies at the root of all saving Christianity. Without it such doctrines as justification, conversion, sanctification, are ‘words and names’ which convey no meaning to the mind.” Roman Catholicism has a minimised view of sin, and that impacts its view of deliverance from oppression, away from Biblical Christianity.