There is a story about Confucius, that goes like this (free translation from the Bloody Shovel blog):
Zilu: The Duke of Wei has asked for your opinion in how to rule his realm. He’ll call you for an audience any time. What will be the first thing you tell him?
Confucius: Oh, that he must fix the names.
Zilu: What? That? Oh come on, master, what does that even mean. “Fix the names.” I don’t get it.
Confucius: Shut up, you stupid brat, and listen. It is like this. If the names aren’t correct, what you speak becomes nonsense. If you speak nonsense, you can’t get things done. If you don’t get things done, you can’t get the rituals to work. If the rituals don’t work, the law isn’t applied as it should. If the law isn’t applied as it should, the people can’t make a productive living. When a ruler names something, he must be able to make sense when talking about it. And when talking about it, he must be able to do what he means.
I think it is important that those of us who teach in the Church rightly understand the names of things. We must be able to talk sense and that comes from knowing the meaning of the things we talk about.
For a long time I have thought that “sin” meant “alienation from God”. At the same time I thought that “death” meant “disconnection, especially from God.” But this would imply that sin and death were the same thing, while the Bible clearly teaches that death is a consequence of sin. So they can’t be the same thing.
The question of what sin is has a big impact on how we understand the teaching in Romans 4-8, where Paul talks about the relationships between sin, death, the law, grace, faith, the Holy Spirit and so on. Failure to think clearly about what sin is made this section more difficult than it needed to be.
But recently I’ve come to think that sin can be defined as “will to power.” That is, sin is insisting on one’s own way. This idea appears a number of times in the Bible; in particular Romans 2:8 uses the word “self-seeking” to describe this idea. (The meaning of the Greek word is somewhat uncertain, but elsewhere it is translated as “selfish ambition”.) 1 Corinthians 13:5 says that “love does not seek its own way.” By contrast, the fall involved a desire to be like God in knowing good and evil — that is, being one’s own moral authority. (I think here of Frank Sinatra’s famous epitaph: “I did it my way.”)
Sin, then, is to insist on your own way, thereby refusing to let God speak into your life. This results in alienation from God, which we can describe as death, since John 17:3 tells us that “This is eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” So alienation from God is alienation from life, and is thereby equivalent to death.
We can say that death is alienation — not just from God, but from anything. A relationship dies when the connection of that relationship ceases to exist; the parties are dead to one another. In physical death we become alienated from or own bodies, through which we influence the world. In general, death removes us from the influence of the thing we have died to.
To sum up: sin is will to power or insisting on one’s own way. Death is alienation. Will to power with respect to God means we do not allow a relationship with him to affect us; thereby we are dead to God. But being dead to God means we are dead in truth, since God is the source of life.
At this point we can examine the dynamic between sin and law. Law attempts to combat will to power by circumscribing it or putting limits on it. You may want to do various things, but there are some things you will not be allowed to do even though they are possible. Law acts as a check on our will to power.
But notice that it does not actually address the issue of will to power itself. It does not really cure the problem. Simply putting limits on our self-seekingness does not make us seek God.
Even worse, the interaction of Law and will to power can backfire spectacularly. As Paul puts it in Romans 7:7-8,
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, You shall not covet.
But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead.
In other words, when sin — will to power — encountered the Law, the result was an intensification of the rebellion at the heart of sin. Because our unsaved identity is constituted as will to power, the Law is a direct attack on who we are, and the frequent result is that we fight back and become more sinful — more focused on our own way — than ever.
There are more subtle ways this can work itself out. Our will to power can seize upon the law and attempt to make it a means to exert power in the spiritual realm. I become powerful with respect to God because I can keep his law. I have something about which I can boast, and I can thereby exert power over God himself. I’ve earned my standing before God.
Grace comes in and bypasses this whole dynamic. Through God’s initiative of Grace, he invites a relationship. He bears the cost of that relationship — even to death — because our initial reaction will be violent rejection. But apart from God we are hungry and thirsty, empty and lost. And we might even know it.
So … perhaps … we respond, however hesitantly. We hear the word that God speaks and believe it, or some part of it. And, since words are the currency of relationship, we become involved in a dialog with God and the glimmering of a relationship begins.
Notice in passing that for this relationship to even begin, we must have begun to die to our will to power. We have to have admitted that we are not enough — we need more, something God has. At some point — assuming all goes well — we yield to God. We let go of ourselves — we die to ourselves and become alive to God.
This is the symbolism of baptism — dying with the death that Jesus won for us so that we are no longer enslaved by our will to power (sin). Note that at this point we are no longer sinners! We have let go of our rebellion and God now can speak into our lives. We now have peace with God and standing before God (Romans 5:1-2). Our response to of faith to his word makes us righteous. But it also means, as 2 Corinthians 5:15 puts it, “… and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”
We notice, perhaps with surprise, that the Law plays no part in this. God has finessed the whole issue of Law, avoiding the rebellious reaction that the Law would engender: “Sin will not rule over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14). Instead, God bypassed the Law and offered a living relationship that would transform us from the inside. That living relationship was made possible because identification with Christ’s death could disconnect us from sin — our will to power — and even from ourselves. We have died to sin — will to power no longer dictates who we are.
All this helps me, at least, understand better why salvation comes by grace through faith apart from works of the Law. Notice that when Paul says that the Law is not sin he is completely right — the Law tries to meet sin head on. But because it does not deal with the true issue of sin — our self-centered will to power — it is even subject to being co-opted by sin, producing disobedience and unbelief.
[Update: I realized that I hadn’t finished my thought in this post.]
So … what about Romans 6:1? That verse asks, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?”
The question can be restated: “Given that God has initiated a relationship with you by grace, does that mean you can just pursue your will to power?”
Having said it that way, the absurdity should be obvious. Paul answers it by saying, in v. 2, “By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” That is, we have died to our will to power. It is no longer determinate in our lives. How, then, could the abundance of grace that meets us in our relationship with God induce us to go back to our previous state in which we were dead to God and empty?
Grace does not enable our will to power; it overcomes it through the power of God’s life within us — his Holy Spirit. The only problem is that it does it in a non-intuitive way, by avoiding a head-on engagement and slipping in behind it. It establishes a relationship in the face of our determination to have things our own way. It makes it impossible to say, “I did it my way” any longer. And that is salvation.