We have a problem with sin.

Not the one you are thinking of, most likely, but this one: the word “sin” simply doesn’t convey adequately what “sin” really is anymore.

In contemporary Western language, “sin” is an indulgence or a minor transgression – something that is naughty, but in a good way. In advertising parlance, it has become associated with chocolate. There’s a chocolate cake recipe called the “Midnight Sin Chocolate Cake”. Not so long ago, Streets produce a range of Magnum icecreams which were      called the 7 Deadly Sins. I think the idea was that they were a temptation that was irresistible. This was, if you think about it, an astonishing trivialisation of the concept of sin – reducing it to a dietary indulgence that might earn us the penance of a few extra hours on the treadmill.

That “sin” can be a kind of ice cream means that the marketers of the product thought that they could appeal to the concept of sin without any fear that consumers would actually think that the product was seriously sinful or actually deadly. They could have fun with it, because, as they saw it, the whole idea of sin is part of a half-remembered mythology that no one takes seriously anymore.

It’s worth tracing how this came to pass. Prior to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Church had divided the notion of sin into three categories: original, mortal, and venial. Original sin refers to the state of general sinfulness into which all human beings are born since Adam. This could be repaired by baptism.

Mortal sin involves actual deeds committed by individuals that, left unconfessed and unamended, would result in condemnation to hell. This included anything from murder to masturbation.

Venial sins are those sins that disrupt or damage a person’s relationship with God but not break it. These sins may be, for example, sins committed without full knowledge of what you are doing.

The emphasis was clearly on sin as sins: that is, as individual actions that break the law of God and whatever else the Church had added on to this. In a largely Christian culture, the assumption was that most if not all people were baptised Christians, and so teaching about sin was a matter of helping Christians deal with the ongoing presence of sin in their lives.

Mostly this was done by creating a kind of divine accounting system, with the Church acting as a bank. You had to confess mortal sin, and then do penance in order to atone and so regain your good standing with God.

Though the Reformation provided a searing challenge to this way of thinking from the text of the Bible, the emphasis on sin as sins – as primarily about actions, in other words – has had a lasting effect on the cultural consciousness of the West.

Then around the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of Freudian psychology led to the diagnosis of guilt as an illness rather than as a spiritual condition. Freud himself once wrote that “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.” What we needed to deal with the problem of guilt, or rather the problem of guilty feelings, was not atonement, but therapy. “Sin” was the product of a religious mythology which served to prop up institutions whose interest was served by perpetuating it so it could claim to be the solution. Create the problem of sin, and you can profit by solving it. But of course, you will need to create more of the problem in order to justify your existence.

Freud’s attack on the mythology of sin and his claim to have found an alternative cure through psychotherapy have had a lasting impact, even if his particular remedies remain controversial. Sin had become, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor points out, sickness.

And so the word “sin” has become a kind of debased currency. Speaking of sin to contemporary people is a little like trying to spend shillings and pounds in twenty-first century Australia.

And yet, we cannot truly preach the gospel of Jesus Christ if we cannot communicate about sin and about God’s judgment against sin. The cross of Jesus Christ makes no sense at all unless we can speak about sin.

So: how are we going to do that?

Two books I have read in the last few years have I think given me hope of a way forward. The first is the English writer Francis Spufford’s brilliant book Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. 

Spufford’s book is one of the liveliest and convincing defences of Christianity I have ever read – and I say this even though I have some major disagreements with some of the things he says in the book.

One of the best things about the book is the way in which he addresses the sin without calling it by this name. Rather, he calls it “The Human Propensity to Stuff Things Up” (well, he actually uses a stronger word than “Stuff”), or the HPtFTU for short.

The use of the profanity is shocking, but it makes its point. The HPtFTU is pervasive, and we are all complicit in it. By putting it this way, Spufford shows that we are not simply rule-breakers. There is something about us as human beings that leads us to mess up the things we create and possess, or the things around us that we love, or even ourselves. We cannot help ourselves in this. The internet is an extraordinary force for good, but also an extraordinary force for porn. We cannot manage an equal distribution of wealth, or an end to world hunger, despite having the means to do so. We cannot manage our own relationships, or avoid hurting the ones we love.

The idea of the HPtFTU helps us to see that we are both the victims and the perpetrators of sin. We get struck by it coming and going; and we pass it on to one another like a communicable disease. It is experientially true, and powerfully so for most people. My one question for it as a concept is: where’s God in the picture? You could believe in the HPtFTU, but simply disregard God entirely. And yet, the story of sin in the Bible is fundamentally about God and his dealings with human beings.

A second book on sin gives us a biblical picture of sin that helpfully also considers the Godward nature of sin. The book is Not the Way it’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, and it is written by Cornelius Plantinga. The title of the book is a good summary of the way Plantinga describes sin: it is literally “not the way it is supposed to be.” Sin is a “vandalism of shalom.” Shalom is the Hebrew word which describes God’s peace in his creation; and if that is vandalised, then the offence is directed towards the creator himself.

The great benefit of this description of sin is that you can see how it describes our attitudes and actions within the created sphere as having a Godward dimension. The creation is meant to be rich with joy and goodness and delight, to the glory of God the creator. When you contribute your bit to skewing it away from that goal, you are participating in sin – for which you are responsible to the creator as a human being called by him for a glorious purpose. The power of this description is that it can be extremely personal in a way that contemporary people recognise. It names the beauty of the world, and the beauty of individual human beings, but also names our experience of the world as much less than this. We all catch a glimpse of how extraordinary human life can be, but also know disappointment, failure and pain. We know how the tumours of remorse grow on us. For people living in prosperity and amidst much natural beauty, as we mostly do in Australia, this is a way to get to grips with the things that seem not to make sense.

To understand the nature of sin as not the way it’s supposed to be, we need to give a rich description of the way it is supposed to be. If we understand creation in all its intended beauty, and as the place in which God intended to display his glory, truth, power and goodness for the sake of his name, then we will not fail to see how the created world – and ourselves as part of the creation – simply do not meet that expectation. We will understand something of the dreadful tragedy that is human sinfulness; and how that involves not simply the breaking of a few trivial rules, or the eating of a couple of extra chocolate ice creams, but actually a desecration of the holiness of the world that was made by the creator.