“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:16).

What an interesting way to put it. You might have thought Paul would say, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and the notion of sin is hogwash.”

But no, whether Christianity is true or not — and even if Nietzsche is right that “God is dead” — we are still in our sins. I know, I know, philosophically you can give me a good argument that where there is no God, there is no such thing as sin: Sin is a meaningful concept only where there is a Personal lawgiver. True enough.

But my earliest memories are of shameful thoughts and deeds that have no better description than the word “sin.” Sin as a concept has a quality that should please the 14^th century English logician William of Ockham, and succeeding practitioners of the scientific method. It contains all the facts of my experience with nothing spilling over and unaccounted for. It is economic, parsimonious, simple, elegant.

I for one am grateful to have heard the news of the gospel — that a solution was provided for the miserable predicament I found myself in since consciousness of existence was coterminous with consciousness of guilt.

And now the inverse is gloriously true:

“Christ has been raised, my faith is not futile, and I am not still in my sins.” Glory!

The Vatican recently came out with a list of “new sins” for its constituents to avoid: drug use, pollution, economic injustice, and genetic manipulation. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Church’s official that oversees “matters of conscience,” discussed the new categories in the Vatican’s paper, l’Osservatore Romano. (Join the WMB discussion here.)

According to an AP newscast, the Vatican remains concerned about issues such as abortion and pedophilia, but an analyst for the Vatican said people are too obsessed with sex and that there are other, more important sins to take into consideration. Although one critic of the new injunctions thought the Vatican “gets its nose into too many things,” the Catholic Church is not the only religious entity redefining and refining its positions.

The Southern Baptists have also jumped on the “new sin” bandwagon, turning the focus from the more commonly invoked sins to climate change when Southern Baptist leaders drafted a declaration criticizing their denomination for being “too timid” on environmental issues. The leaders seek to change impressions that Southern Baptists are “uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed.”

With 60 percent of Italian Catholics no longer attending confession, this multi-denominational push to recognize a wider set of “sins” may be an effort to retain relevance in light of changing cultural values and scientific progress. The church’s emphasis on premarital sex and abortion arose from the same impulse in the wake the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade.

Providing people with a list of additional things to feel bad about may be even more alienating, though, especially in a culture that increasingly rejects sin itself as a concept. Some Jewish groups have decided to forgo the sticky issue of sin altogether, divesting religious practice of all reference to God, sin and repentance through the uncommon marriage of secular humanism and ancient liturgy.

Although expanding a list of sins and denying sin itself are opposite impulses, both show an evolution of religious practice and prompt questions of how faith can both accommodate culture and transcend it.

Trap doors. The universe is full of them. C.S.Lewis understood that when he wrote a little children’s story about a simple, homely wardrobe in an abandoned upstairs room that became the entryway to another world. This was no mere literary device on his part, to get Lucy from England to Narnia; there is something deep and spiritual afoot.

Ted Bundy, hours before they executed him in Florida, told James Dobson about the trap door that got him: pornography. He was just a kid of 12, and he and his buddies found a magazine in the alley in his neighborhood. Why Satan’s door will suck in one and not another is a mystery. But he has lots of different trap doors.

There are the notorious ones — internet porn, the bottle, the slots casino, astrology. But there are unlikely ones too — prescription pain medicine, the mall, love of horses, a love of art collecting. Makes no difference to Satan. “Soft underfoot” is as good as suicide.

I have known of men who fell through trap doors never to be heard of again. But by God’s grace, I have known of men who fell through trap doors, and after getting beat up by Satan for years, were graciously rescued by God.

God provided other trap doors, so that they stumbled into grace unawares. Some of those grace doors were unlikely too. Like prison. Which Satan no doubt meant as a trap for his kingdom, but which God co-opted for his own kingdom. Praise His unsearchable wisdom and mercy!

Today I understood what “guard your heart” means (Proverbs 4:23). Not having given it much thought in the past, I had blithely assumed the injunction had to do with protecting oneself from exposure to certain airborne temptations — as in a quarantine, or some kind of spiritual chastity belt.

I once asked a friend with a biblical counseling degree what’s the most important thing she learned. She didn’t miss a beat: “The heart is active, not passive.” She explained that though things are done to us — even horrible things — ours is always the choice of how to respond to those. The person I become is never the product of the external influences upon me but of my interaction with them.

This morning I was upset about a sin I have been caught in. It wasn’t too long before I noticed what my heart was doing with that unpleasantness: I was like a cornered animal, darting this way and that for an escape — covering it with a veneer of godliness.

The heart is a carefully calibrated instrument. To calibrate is “to standardize by determining the deviation from a standard so as to ascertain the proper correction factors; to adjust precisely for a particular function” (Merriam-Webster’s). The “standard” is the holiness of God. The tendency is to “deviation.” The “correction factors” are all the words of God.

The antidote to the place I’m stuck in is prayer: it’s hard to deceive myself when I’m praying. I don’t generally lie to myself in prayer.

Of all the descriptions — positive and negative — respondents to a Barna survey could choose from to describe present-day Christianity in America, anti-homosexual garnered the highest agreement. After probing what respondents had in mind when listing this trait, the authors of UnChristian write:

“Outsiders say our hostility toward gays — not just opposition to homosexual politics and behaviors but disdain for gay individuals — has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.”

What’s more, they note from Barna’s other survey research that a considerably higher percentage of Christians believe homosexuality to be a sin than believe divorce for reasons other than adultery is a sin. When reading this I was curious how gossip and slander would fare, neither of which seems to receive the attention from pulpits that pornography and homosexuality receive. It’s no secret that many of us have created our own hierarchies of sin, with the ones we are prone to at the bottom, and the ones that hold no attraction for us at the top. The authors suggest that homosexuality’s top billing translates into hatred not just for the sin, but for the sinner.

Shayne Wheeler is one of the pastors and other prominent figures whose thoughts are featured in UnChristian. He notes, in the chapter on Christian anti-homosexuality, that:

“During the Alexandrian plague (third century), Christians risked their lives in caring for the sick, taking a posture of grace that said, ‘I am here for you. I may die, but you will not be alone.’ The church embodied the gospel and the message was not forgotten.”

When the AIDS epidemic struck the U.S. in the 1980’s, Wheeler notes, Christians became known for the opposite stance. Prominent Christians announced that it was God’s judgment on gays. While some kind-hearted Christians tried to serve this stricken community, many of us sat on our hands. “It has not been forgotten,” says Wheeler.

UnChristian’s authors make clear that they are not calling for an embrace of homosexuality. They are instead asking that Christians treat this like any other sin, and respond with the love that we would show someone caught up in a sin we find more acceptable.

I often err in the other direction, feeling harshness toward those whose sins mirror my own. What I hate in myself, I hate in others. It is hard, isn’t it, to separate the sin from the sinner, especially when we sinners clasp our sins so tightly to ourselves, like the lizard in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce? Yet this is what Christ has done, cleaving us into New Man and Dead Man, and though we drag that dead man’s corpse about with us, it is the New Man our Lord sees. It is what we are supposed to see in each other as well, the brother or sister who is not yet free from sin, but who is shaking it off like a snake’s skin.

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis wrote that every person we meet is either an “immortal horror or an everlasting splendor.” It seems we should pity the former, and embrace the latter. Mercy, in either event, should rule the day. That doesn’t mean we forsake speaking the truth, but it seems our speaking ought to have more the essence of a cancer doctor delivering bad (and perhaps good) news, than of a hangman pronouncing judgment. Too many people — homosexuals and straight alike — have been hearing the latter from Christian mouths, including my own.

Editor’s note: See Tony’s other two posts in this series, “Hypocritical Christianity” and “Target-shooting Christianity,” as well as his column in the current issue of WORLD, “Going negative.”

Thanksgiving sometimes gets a little too oversentimentalized for me.  I love it, and I love being sentimental, but I sometimes like to insist on leavening the fluff with a little warm reality.  So, while we’re talking about being thankful, let’s also consider what seems to be the counterpoint to thankfulness, which is to say, denial.  The Times says we’re all in denial.  About something. 

[J]ust try denying it and watch friends make a list. For Freud, denial was a defense against external realities that threaten the ego, and many psychologists today would argue that it can be a protective defense in the face of unbearable news, like a cancer diagnosis.

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