A precis of this article by Michael Bird.

Here in the West, we live in a ‘diverse, secular, and pagan world’ which has a thin overlay of its past Christianity.

In such a world, ‘religious’ words, such as sin, repentance, faith, and redemption, convey meanings that are very different from those intended by Christians.

This is especially so with respect to the word ‘sin’:

‘Our English word to unchurched ears sounds like archaic, moralizing, religious rhetoric. As a result, trying to convince people that they are sinners and that their sin separates them from God is becoming increasingly difficult. This creates a dilemma: it is hard to proclaim the “forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47; Acts 2:38; Col 1:14; Eph 1:7) to people who don’t understand sin or else do not believe in it.’

‘Sin’ in a post-sin world

‘Sin’ is either trivialised (‘naughty but nice’) or moralised (it’s the word religious people use of people and actions of which they disapprove).  In fact, ‘sin’ may even be celebrated:

‘In a post-Christian world, sin is not a bad word, a shocking concept, or something one seeks naturally to avoid. It is partying hard, going with the flow, or even being true to yourself.’

This is not to say that non-Christians have no conscience and no sense of right and wrong.  But the language and concepts they use are not biblical.  They don’t use categories such as ‘guilt and innocence, shame and honour, impurity and cleansing, or vice and virtue’.

Rather, they view ‘bad stuff’ through a three-part lens:

Therapeutic.  Whatever eases pain and promotes pleasure is good.  If something hurts, limits self-expression, or stifles desire, it’s bad.  Whatever I choose to do is OK, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

Autonomy.  People should be free to do as they please, to be masters of their own destinies:

‘No external authority, whether government or a religious organization, should impose their values on me and my body. I have the right to pursue my dreams, my pleasures, and my relationships without anybody stopping me.’

Oppression.  People and issues are sharply divided into categories of oppressor and oppressed.  Without pausing to consider the complexities involved, this kind of polarised thinking is applied to Israel and Palestine, LGBTI rights, the British Empire’s track record in relation to slavery, or immigration issues: one side is the oppressor and the other is the oppressed.

If the above three metrics form the ethical paradigm from which many people operate, if this is their language for measuring wrong, for articulating what is good, then how do you convince them that sin affronts God and dehumanizes the person?

How then can we talk about sin?

We need to be able to explain sin in terms that can be understood within a certain culture or sub-culture.

We are helps by the fact that the Bible itself speaks of sin in different kinds of ways, using different kinds of language.

In Rom 1-3 we see Paul describing:

‘sin among Gentiles as ignorance, idolatry, impurity, inhumanity, and immorality, and among Jews as disobedience and unfaithfulness.’

In today’s word:

‘Some cultures will understand sin through the lens of honor and shame, others through guilt and innocence, and others in terms of power and oppression. Often you can simply match the cultural scale of right/wrong against the appropriate biblical word and unpack it from there.’

But, sometimes, a bit more creativity is needed:

‘For example, Australians are very big on looking after their mates, being faithful to their friends, looking after their mob. You don’t “rip off” your mates or your mob. Accordingly, Peter Ko has argued that in Australia a helpful idiom is to talk of sin in terms of “ripping God off,” which is a very “Aussie” way of trying to convey the idea of sin without the cultural and religious baggage of the word itself.’

Talking of ‘evil’

‘Evil’, with all its connotations of gravity and horror, still has currency, across religious and plitical divides, for explaining sin.  People read of evil in the news, see it in movies:

‘While people will balk at the language of sin, they will take you seriously when you talk about evil.’

The challenge is to help people realise that evil is not simply ‘out there’, but is also ‘in here’.

‘I’ve found that people are open to discussing evil. What is its nature? What makes someone evil? What is the cure for the world’s evils? This makes it easier to get around to the big question that everyone needs to ask themselves in the end: Am I evil?’

Most do not think that they are evil.  They will respond by saying:

“There are eight billion people on this planet I haven’t murdered, I adopted a dog from an animal shelter, I donate to the Red Cross, and I help my landlady take out her garbage.” To which I retort, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis are not the standard for evil. Evil is a lack of love, a lack of empathy, an absence of God’s goodness in us. Evil is a mixture of a hideous selfishness and an inability to love others. To which I ask them: How are you doing on that score?

Romans 7:7-25 is helpful in exploring this, as is this quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:

‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’

For those who place a high value on social justice, the teaching of Jesus can be translated into a Nietzchean idiom:

‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

Many long for a just world, a bit violent purge to achieve utopia on eartch.  But they would achieve it by gulags and guillotines!

‘From Solzhenitsyn and Nietzsche, we can ask: Do you feel the same struggle within yourself? What are you really capable of? What evil do you harbor in your own heart? As Jesus himself warned, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander” (Matt 15:19 NIV). When you warn people that evil is not something that only exists in other people, but is already in them, then the cries, “Deliver us from evil” (Matt 6:13) and “Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me” (Rom 7:21), start to make more sense.’

We are then in a better position to make sense of God’s plan to heal the world; – to heal us:

‘The cross is about rescue from evil and reconciliation to God. The cross is God’s solution to environmental vandalism, war, greed, injustice, and cosmic evil—even our own evil. Evil offends God because it ruins the beauty of his creation. It rebels against his holiness and love. Evil mars us into malevolence by its selfish seduction.’

How to preach sin in a post-Christian world

Tom McCall has helpfully defined sin as:

‘whatever is opposed to God’s will, as that will reflects God’s holy character and as that will is expressed by God’s commands. Sin is fundamentally opposed to nature and reason, and it is ultimately opposed to God.’

Bird himself has argued:

‘The root of sin is the worship of the self in place of the worship of God. Sin breeds self-made men and women who love to worship their creator—themselves. Sinners want to be free of God’s word, his will, his worship, and his world. Sin turns humanity into treasonous tyrants committed to any form of terror to gratify their lusts or to secure their own power. Sinners want a theocracy where they are the “theo.” Sin, in the end, is a form of cosmic treason. Sin is the foolish effort at deicide and the even more foolish belief in self-deification. It amounts to a pathetic attempt at a coup d’état against the Lord of the cosmos.’

In today’s post-Christian world, concepts such as ‘shame, contamination, ripping someone off, injustice, or tyranny’ may communicate something of the biblical idea of sin.

It is absolutely essential that such connections are made, because:

‘the call remains to “Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16 NIV; emphasis added). We must lead people to worship the Lord Jesus “who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age” (Gal 1:4 NIV; emphasis added).’