This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on September 20, 2015, as Part 1 of The Doctrines of Man and Sin class. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
It’s an honor to spend these ten weeks with you teaching on these important subjects. There’s hardly a more relevant topic: we’re all human and we’re all sinful, so we relate very well to both—they’re part of our daily experience and of everyone we interact with. Sin touches every area of our lives, every day: it’s on the news, in our workplaces, in our churches and homes, on our screens—and worst of all, in our hearts.
This is a class about theology, but it’s also a class about how we should live, and I want to hold those two together—divorce them and you run into all sorts of trouble. We’ll use some big, difficult-sounding terms, but I’ll try to keep it accessible and lay a foundation for how we should live every day. We’ll touch on controversial matters too, and I’ll present my current understanding of what I think Scripture teaches—without pretending to have it all figured out. There’s a humility we should all have about our reading of Scripture, one that keeps us rooted in it and willing to change if it teaches us otherwise. For the record, I embrace the view of God’s sovereignty and the doctrines of grace we hold dear here, and that’s the perspective I’ll teach from; faithful believers differ on some of these issues, and that’s fine. Be Bereans—if something doesn’t strike you as right, don’t just throw it out; dig into the Scriptures and study it for yourself. Today is simply a high-level overview of what we’ll cover, and why these doctrines are worth our time; I won’t spend much time in the Bible today, but we’ll have plenty of it in the weeks to come.
Why Study Theology?
In many minds, theology is a dry, boring thing that logic-oriented people love to debate—something that flares up pride and does more harm than good—so people say, “I just want to obey Jesus; just tell me what to do.” But theology matters for at least four reasons. First, theology glorifies God. Theology is the study of God—who he is, what he has made, and all he has done—and the better we know God, the more we rejoice in and worship him. That requires the Spirit; it’s possible to seek knowledge of God in the head and never have it touch the heart, but when God attends his Word by his Spirit, it moves us to awe, gratitude, and worship—which brings him great glory.
Second, theology helps us obey. What we believe and how we behave are inseparable. We can obey portions of the Bible without understanding its theology, but to obey it fully, from the heart, we need to grasp what it teaches. Right living without right theology risks becoming moralism—going through the outward motions without a mind and heart captivated by who God is. Third, theology isn’t optional. The Bible everywhere commands us to pursue knowledge and to defend the truth—and you can’t defend the truth without knowing it well. And fourth, theology enables missions. We can’t evangelize the lost or defend the faith without it; right theology can be the difference between heaven and hell. Not every theological issue is life and death, but some are non-negotiable—you can’t deny that God exists, or that Jesus came and died for sinners, and still have heaven. The gospel itself is the richest of theology: truth about who God is, what he has done, who we are, and our desperate need.
The Types of Theology
Our study focuses primarily on systematic theology—the study of what God has revealed about a topic, harmonizing it into a unified picture. It surveys all that the Bible says (and taps general revelation too, since all truth is God’s truth) and makes truth statements about a subject: what is true about man? what is true about sin? We’ll also dip into three related disciplines. Biblical theology traces the progress of revelation as it unfolds across the Bible’s one continuous story of God saving sinners through Jesus; it looks at each book’s unique contribution (for instance, the theology of sin in Romans—consistent with the whole Bible’s teaching, yet with its own emphases), asking what the Bible reveals about a topic and how it reveals it. Historical theology traces a doctrine through church history, asking what the church believed about man or sin in any given era. And practical theology gets to application—how we should live today in light of the Bible’s teaching.
Anthropology and Hamartiology
Our two doctrines have technical names, both built (as many theological terms are) from Greek. Anthropology—the doctrine of man—comes from anthrōpos (man or mankind; in Greek, as historically in English, it can mean humanity in general, not just a male) and logos (word or study). Hamartiology—the doctrine of sin—comes from hamartia, the primary New Testament word for sin (which does carry the sense of “missing the mark”), plus logos. Knowing the terms isn’t essential, but it’s useful as you read theology and join discussions. Over the next nine weeks we’ll survey a wide range of topics—views of creation and where the soul comes from, the nature of man (are we one part, two, or three?), the image of God, common grace, free will, God’s will and decree, depravity, original and inherited sin, Adam’s headship and imputation, gender relationships in home and church, the covenants between God and man, the fall, the nature and effects of sin, degrees of sin and punishment, temptation, sin in the believer’s life, and modern-day ethical issues. We won’t cover it all, and not in great depth—whole books are written on each—but that’s the menu.
Why Study Man and Sin?
Beyond the general case for theology, why these two doctrines? Because they stand at the heart of the Bible’s message and God’s plan to glorify himself. If you boil the Bible down to its most basic themes, I don’t think you can get more fundamental than God, man, sin, and grace. The Bible covers more, and you could expand the list, but those four capture so much of its core message and the gospel. Two of the four are the focus of our study, and the other two are directly tied in—grace is God’s response to sin, and man is made in God’s image—so you really can’t understand the Bible, or the gospel, without understanding man and sin. Many of the things we’ll cover are genuinely life-and-death issues (unlike some debates about angels or demons that may never touch your eternal state); it’s very possible to get the gospel wrong if you get man and sin wrong. Understanding our humanity is also key to understanding the incarnation—the nature of Jesus’ incarnational work, which is at the core of the gospel. And these doctrines shape every day of our lives and every relationship we have.
Studying the Doctrine of Man
A few reasons to study the doctrine of man in particular: to grow in our knowledge of God, to grow in our reverence for him, and to be equipped to defend the truth. John Calvin opens his Institutes with a chapter titled “The Knowledge of God and That of Ourselves Are Connected, and How They Are Interrelated.” He writes, “No one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God….The knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him.” As we look at ourselves, we’re moved to learn more about God—and we can’t truly understand ourselves except in light of God. But it’s not enough to look at ourselves; Calvin adds, “Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.” It’s only as we see who God is that we rightly stand in awe of him. The fear of God is fundamentally comparative. Think of Mount Everest: a photo on someone’s phone doesn’t convey it—you have to stand before it and measure it against yourself to grasp how immense it is, and it’s that immensity that moves you to awe. So with God: look at him in a vacuum, without comparing who he is to who you are, and you miss the full weight of the distinction. We worship God not for how he’s like us but for how he’s different—we’re finite, he’s infinite; we’re mortal, he’s immortal; we’re his likeness, he’s the reality; we’re the creature, he’s the Creator. As we grasp that Creator-creature distinction, our reverence and fear of God grow. And we study these things to defend the truth, because our culture—and, sadly, voices within the church—attack them: denying that Adam and Eve existed, that life in God’s image is precious, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that men and women are different by God’s design.
Studying the Doctrine of Sin
Why study the doctrine of sin? First, we can’t accept the gospel without acknowledging our own sinfulness. I saw this firsthand recently. We were back in Minnesota for a family funeral and had dinner one evening with a relative who, as far as we can tell, doesn’t know the Lord—he never speaks of him, and there’s no evident spiritual interest. When someone lovingly tried to share Christ with him, he brushed it off: “Oh, don’t worry about me—I’m a Christian,” recalling a church he attended as a child. He sees himself as having no needs—why would he need this gospel? He doesn’t see his own sinfulness, his helplessness and hopelessness—and until a person sees himself as sinful, the gospel falls on deaf ears. Even for those of us who are saved, the better we understand our sinfulness, the more precious the gospel becomes. A young child can come to Christ knowing he’s a sinner, but across a lifetime that understanding deepens and widens, and the gospel grows ever sweeter.
Jesus said it’s not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick—until you see yourself as sick and grasp the diagnosis, you won’t see your need of a physician. Second, the better we understand our sinfulness, the more we love God and live in gratitude. In Luke 7, the woman forgiven much loves much; there’s a direct connection between how much we know we’ve been forgiven and how much we love. Calvin again: from the sense of our own ignorance, poverty, and corruption, “we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, full abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone.” Third, if we don’t know what the Bible calls sin, we may be living in sin without realizing it. Scripture speaks of sins of ignorance, which the Lord can forgive—but it’s good to grow more sensitive so we can turn from them. Many things widely accepted among Christians the Bible may well call sin. A coworker once mentioned, matter-of-factly, that his family shares a Netflix password—“it’s just a password,” the culture says—but if we think carefully about how to apply the Bible, we may find God considers such things differently than we assumed.
Our hearts are deceitful and constantly justify sin, so we need the light of God’s Word to expose it. And, finally, the more godly we become, the more aware we become of our own sinfulness. We tend to picture godly people as those who barely sin, but what I’ve found—in my own experience and in reading the pastors and theologians of church history—is that the godliest people grow ever more aware of their sin the closer they draw to the light. It’s like sunlight streaming through a window: suddenly you see countless specks of dust that were there all along, unnoticed. When the light of God’s Word and presence shines in, it exposes what otherwise goes unseen. Sin is far more evil than we think—even the smallest child knows sin is bad, but it’s worse than the best of us imagines—and increased sensitivity to it is a gracious gift of God, one we pray this study will bring, so that we might walk in a way that pleases him.
Resources for Further Study
If you’d like to dig deeper, almost any systematic theology—a book covering roughly ten major areas—will have chapters on both man and sin, and that’s a great place to start (even as a family, for those with teens and older). Among modern works, Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology is especially good at bridging head to heart, with study questions, key terms, and a hymn at the end of each chapter; John Frame’s and Michael Horton’s are excellent, and Robert Reymond’s is helpful. For something more concise, try J. I. Packer’s Concise Theology or R. C. Sproul’s Everyone’s a Theologian. Among the classics: John Calvin’s Institutes, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, and Louis Berkhof. On man and sin specifically, there’s the brief What Is Man?, J. Gresham Machen’s The Christian View of Man, Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image, and Crossway’s Theology in Community volume on sin. A couple of newer series are worth watching too—Zondervan’s New Studies in Dogmatics (with a volume on humanity) and Crossway’s Foundations of Evangelical Theology. All of these come from a doctrines-of-grace perspective.
One question that came up was how to stay faithful to the Bible in our interpretation—how theologians sometimes reach positions that make you wonder whether they’re importing their own biases. It’s a hard thing to answer briefly. If you read only the Bible but don’t understand its original context and languages, you can still walk away with a false conclusion—so we do benefit from sources outside the Bible that help us understand it rightly. The tension is to let God’s truth from other sources inform our reading without distorting the text. There’s no simple formula for knowing when you’ve gone too far; it takes a lot of back-and-forth. One good safeguard is letting Scripture interpret Scripture: if some archaeological or cultural insight sheds new light on a passage, test whether the rest of Scripture harmonizes with your reading—ask, “If I take this view, what does it do to the rest of the Bible?” If it starts to unravel elsewhere, that’s a good sign the insight isn’t sound.
Let’s ask the Lord’s blessing on what we’ve looked at. Father, thank you for the opportunity to gather and study your Word—the truth you’ve revealed about yourself, about us, and about our sinfulness. Give us all minds that are receptive and attentive to these teachings, and above all soften our hearts to learn how we should live in light of the truth. Apply these things and bring about real change in our hearts, our families, and our church. Bless our time now as we gather to sing, worship, give, and hear your Word. In Jesus’ name, amen.