Are all sins equal in the sight of God?
Time to break that wheel
Fellow Pilgrims,
We’ve all heard the phrase; “All sins are equal in the sight of God.”
But… are they? The statement suggests that God is outside of justice, and it can leave us reeling at the thought that God might ignore the horror of very grave sin. What kind of God would count a white lie as an evil equal to genocide?
This well-worn statement does not make sense of the God we meet in scripture. Jesus tells Pilate that “the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin” (John 19:11), and scripture names different consequences for different sins. Paul, for example, highlights the weight of sexual sin, when he tells us “all other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18).
Scripture shows us a God who is unfailingly good and unfailingly just, a God who recognizes the weight and gravity of sin. “The LORD detests differing weights, and dishonest scales do not please him” (Proverbs 20:23).
So, why do we keep saying this thing?
“All sins are equal in the sight of God” is a misinterpretation of Protestant rejection of late medieval Roman Catholic penitential theology and practice.
The image below (from Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, Clarendon Press, 1991) shows those practices as a cycle or a wheel.
First, one is born subject to original sin, but baptism removes the guilt of that sin, putting the baptized person into a state of grace (a state in which sin is forgiven, and the person knows they are saved should they die.)
Inevitably, the baptized person sins, losing that “state of grace.” The person confesses, receives absolution from a priest and performs acts of penance, and is then returned to a state of grace/salvation.
The person goes round and round on this wheel, again and again, always needing sacramental restoration to be returned to a “safe” state. To die in a state of grace, is to be bound for heaven. To die outside of such, is to be doomed to hell.
(Here, Roman Catholic theology makes a distinction between “mortal” and “venial” sin. Mortal sin is bad enough to cause a fall from a state of grace. Mortal sin is grave and intentional, as opposed to venial sin, more minor sins which would not take a sinner out of a state of grace. Protestant theology insisted there is no such distinction, not because all sins are equal, but because Protestant theology denies the necessity of the wheel.)
On the model rejected by Protestant theology, one needs to die in a state of grace—provided through access to the church’s “late rites,” a final confession and absolution, together with receiving the Eucharist.
We have quite a bit of evidence that folks lived in tremendous fear of dying without those last rites and so being condemned eternally. In fact, this seems to have been one incentive to conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, where Protestant faith promised that salvation is available directly from Jesus, without requiring the church’s sacramental intervention.
Protestant teaching tried to reject this cycle, to break this wheel, by insisting that believers are not dependent on repeated sacramental intervention in order to stay in a state of grace or to keep their salvation. The best Protestant instinct, here, is not to deny that some sins carry special gravity or terrible consequences, but to deny that the church can and should be in charge of weighing those sins and their consequences. Protestant theology denies that the church can mediate forgiveness and sanctification.
I suspect that “all sins are equal in the sight of God” is almost entirely a holdover from the Protestant attempt to pull us out of the penitential cycle. To be clear, I am in favor of breaking that cycle, and I am saying that we don’t need to deny the difference between sins in order to do so. The Protestant point, here, is that Jesus forgives sin and grants us salvation, fully and totally.
Besides the distinction between venial and mortal sin, late medieval Roman Catholic penitential practice also included detailed manuals for priests to help them to weigh the gravity of sin and provide the correct consequences (acts of penance) in light of which sins were worst. If we examine these manuals, we can see that criteria for determining which sins were “worse” often seem quite questionable. Again, I think Protestant theology was right to deny this kind of churchly accounting of and control over sin, even if it has left us with the unfortunate legacy of phrases like “ all sins are equal.”
The Giant Wheel, plate 9 from Imaginary Prisons, 1761, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, via Artvee.
The Protestant point is not that “all sins are equal.” The point is that Jesus has won the victory over all sin, and we need not live in fear that we haven’t properly or adequately atoned for our sin, because Jesus has paid it all.
Protestant theology broke the wheel of the late medieval penitential cycle.
Kind of.
I suspect we haven’t gone quite far enough. Too much of the wheel remains in our hearts, minds, and theology. The idea that the eternal fate of each soul is clearly sealed at the moment of death, and that we humans can know what that fate is, is tied closely to the wheel. The idea that we might be too sinful to be redeemed, that our sin might go beyond what God is willing to handle, is tied closely to the wheel. The idea that we might need, desperately, to try to cognitively recall and confess every sin we’ve ever committed is tied to that wheel.
And it’s exhausting.
Let’s keep crushing that wheel and inviting ourselves and others into the sweet peace of Jesus.
Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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