Paul, in like manner, before his conversion, loved and desired righteousness, provided only that this righteousness might be the product and achievement of his own will and might reflect honor on himself; in short, provided only that self might still be uppermost. To be dependent for righteousness upon another was abhorrent to him. And yet this very impulse toward righteousness may have been due to the divine Spirit within him. On Paul's experience before conversion, see E. D. Burton, Bib. World, Jan. 1893. Peter objected to the washing of his feet by Jesus (John 13:8), not because it humbled the Master too much in the eyes of the disciple, but because it humbled the disciple too much in his own eyes. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:218—“Sin is the violation of the God-willed moral order of the world by the self-will of the individual.”Tophel on the Holy Spirit, 17—“You would deeply wound him [the average sinner] if you told him that his heart, full of sin, is an object of horror to the holiness of God.”The impulse to repentance, as well as the impulse to righteousness, is the product, not of man's own nature, but of the Christ within him who is moving him to seek salvation.
Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning after she had accepted his proposal of marriage: “Henceforth I am yours for everything but to do you harm.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 138—“Love seeks the true good of the person loved. It will not minister in an unworthy way to afford a temporary pleasure. It will not approve or tolerate that which is wrong. It will not encourage the coarse, base passions of the one loved. It condemns impurity, falsehood, selfishness. A parent does not really love his child if he tolerates the self-indulgence, and does not correct or punish the faults, of the child.” Hutton: “You might as well say that it is a fit subject for art to paint the morbid exstasy of cannibals over their horrid feasts, as to paint lust without love. If you are to delineate man at all, you must delineate him with his human nature, and therefore you can never omit from any worthy picture that conscience which is its crown.”
Tennyson, in In Memoriam, speaks of “Fantastic beauty such as lurks In some wild poet when he works Without a conscience or an aim.” Such work may be due to mere human nature. But the lofty work of true creative genius, and the still loftier acts of men still unregenerate but conscientious and self-sacrificing, must be explained by the working in them of the immanent Christ, the life and light of men. James Martineau, Study, 1:20—“Conscience may act as human, before it is discovered to be divine.”See J. D. Stoops, in Jour. Philos., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 2:512—“If there is a divine life over and above the separate streams of individual lives, the welling up of this larger life in the experience of the individual is precisely the point of contact between the individual person and God.” Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:122—“It is this divine element in man, this relationship to God, which gives to sin its darkest and direst complexion. For such a life is the turning of a light brighter than the sun into darkness, the squandering or bartering away of a boundless wealth, the suicidal abasement, to the things that perish, of a nature destined by its very constitution and structure for participation in the very being and blessedness of God.”
On the various forms of sin as manifestations of selfishness, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:147-182; Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:268, 269; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:5, 6; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 243-262; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers, 11-91; Hopkins, Moral Science, 86-156. On the Roman Catholic “Seven Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, [pg 572]Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust), see Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexikon, and Orby Shipley, Theory about Sin, preface, xvi-xviii.
C. This view accords best with Scripture.
(a) The law requires love to God as its all-embracing requirement. (b) The holiness of Christ consisted in this, that he sought not his own will or glory, but made God his supreme end. (c) The Christian is one who has ceased to live for self. (d) The tempter's promise is a promise of selfish independence. (e) The prodigal separates himself from his father, and seeks his own interest and pleasure. (f) The “man of sin” illustrates the nature of sin, in “opposing and exalting himself against all that is called God.”
(a) Mat. 22:37-39—the command of love to God and man; Rom. 13:8-10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”; Gal. 5:14—“the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; James 2:8—“the royal law.” (b) John 5:30—“my judgment is righteous; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”; 7:18—“He that speaketh from himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him”; Rom. 15:3—“Christ also pleased not himself.” (c) Rom. 14:7—“none of us liveth to himself, and none dieth to himself”; 2 Cor. 5:15—“he died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again”; Gal. 2:20—“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.”Contrast 2 Tim. 3:2—“lovers of self.” (d) Gen. 3:5—“ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” (e) Luke 15:12, 13—“give me the portion of thy substance ... gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”(f) 2 Thess. 2:3, 4—“the man of sin ... the son of perdition, he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.”
Contrast “the man of sin” who “exalteth himself” (2 Thess. 2:3, 4) with the Son of God who “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7). On “the man of sin”, see Wm. Arnold Stevens, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360. Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 24—“We are conscious of sin, because we know that our true self is God, from whom we are severed. No ethics is possible unless we recognize an ideal for all human effort in the presence of the eternal Self which any account of conduct presupposes.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:53-73—“Here, as in all organic life, the individual member or organ has no independent or exclusive life, and the attempt to attain to it is fatal to itself.” Milton describes man as “affecting Godhead, and so losing all.” Of the sinner, we may say with Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 5:4—“He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.... There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.” No one of us, then, can sign too early “the declaration of dependence.” Both Old School and New School theologians agree that sin is selfishness; see Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Finney, Taylor. See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 287-292.
Sin, therefore, is not merely a negative thing, or an absence of love to God. It is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the centre of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God's will, the sinner makes self the centre of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.
We may follow Dr. E. G. Robinson in saying that, while sin as a state is unlikeness to God, as a principle is opposition to God, and as an act is transgression of God's law, the essence of it always and everywhere is selfishness. It is therefore not something external, or the result of compulsion from without; it is a depravity of the affections and a perversion of the will, which constitutes man's inmost character.