Christians Obsess Over Personal Sin. Jesus Didn't.

Don't Smoke, Drink, or Chew, or Go With Girls Who Do

The version of the faith I grew up with was deeply concerned with personal behavior. What you watched, what you drank, how you dressed, who you slept with, whether you smoked. Discipleship was essentially a program of personal moral improvement, a slow cleaning up of your private life until you looked and acted like everyone else in the congregation. God was primarily concerned with whether you were becoming a better person by the community’s standards of better. Sin was what you did with your body in private. Holiness was what you looked like in public.

I spent years as a pastor in that framework, and I watched it fail people in ways I could not explain at the time.

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What Western Christianity Did With Sin

The Western church (all the streams that began in Rome) inherited from Augustine a framework in which the primary problem Jesus came to address was the condition of individual sinfulness. To get sinful people saved so they can go to Heaven when they die. Sin is fundamentally a problem of the inner life, and salvation is therefore fundamentally about the transformation of the individual soul, and consequentially their personal behaviors.

By the time this framework had traveled through the Puritan tradition into American evangelicalism and into the Pentecostal movements of the twentieth century, discipleship had become largely synonymous with personal piety. Holiness meant separation from worldly pleasures. The spiritual life was measured by what you abstained from.

I grew up in this world. The Church of God, the Pentecostal denomination I was once ordained in, had a list of behaviors that marked you as holy or unholy. Tobacco. Alcohol. Certain kinds of dress. Entertainment choices. Sexual practices. These were the things the church watched and measured. They were also, as I noted in previous pieces, not derived from careful biblical exegesis but from a cultural inheritance the tradition had treated as Scripture.

What I did not have language for as a pastor was why this framework felt so incomplete. Why did it produce morally respectable people who were also sometimes cruel, greedy, racist, exploitative, and indifferent to suffering? Why did it have so much to say about personal vices and so little to say about the ways power was being used to harm people inside and outside the church?

What the New Testament Actually Emphasizes

When you read the New Testament carefully with fresh eyes, a pattern emerges that challenges the personal piety framework. Yes, the New Testament addresses personal behaviors, but always in the light of how they affect others against their will. Consensual behaviors, such as consenting to consume more calories or carcinogens, aren’t paramount in the teachings of Jesus or the apostles.

Greed is probably the most consistently addressed personal behavior in the entire New Testament. Jesus addresses it more than almost any other subject. The rich young ruler. The parable of the rich fool. The camel and the eye of the needle. Paul calls greed idolatry in Colossians 3. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil in 1 Timothy. Greed is personal but its damage is always relational. It concentrates power, exploits the vulnerable, and destroys community.

Pride and the hunger for status are addressed constantly. The disciples arguing about who is greatest. Warnings about seeking the best seats and performing religiosity for social approval. The Pharisee and the tax collector. Paul’s entire argument about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians is partly a corrective to status-seeking within the community.

Sexual immorality, porneia in Paul’s vocabulary, is a broad term but its consistent context in Paul is exploitation and the violation of covenant relationship. The concern is rarely about private pleasure. It is about the harm done to the partner and to the bonds of community.

Then there are the behaviors the New Testament treats most lightly. What you eat and drink. Bodily habits and personal pleasures. Paul is almost dismissive in Romans 14: the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. In Colossians 2 he says rules about do not handle, do not taste, do not touch have an appearance of wisdom but lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

These are the behaviors Western Christianity made central to its definition of holiness. The New Testament treats them as secondary at best.

“You have died with Christ, and he has set you free from the spiritual powers of this world. So why do you keep on following the rules of the world, such as, ²¹ “Don’t handle! Don’t taste! Don’t touch!”? Such rules are mere human teachings about things that deteriorate as we use them. These rules may seem wise because they require strong devotion, pious self-denial, and severe bodily discipline. But they provide no help in conquering a person’s evil desires” (Colossians 2:20-23, NLT).

A Different Conversation

A few years ago I discovered liberation theology and observed the ways it bridged the confessions of the Western church with the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. I found it to be a helpful theological development that was not encumbered with American, white, Protestant fixation on personal piety.

Gustavo Gutierrez, the Peruvian theologian whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation gave the movement its name, was reading the Exodus narrative, the prophets, and the Gospels and asking why the church in Latin America looked nothing like what he found there. His answer was that the Western church had domesticated the gospel, turning a story about God’s liberation of the oppressed into a program for the spiritual improvement of the comfortable.

James Cone made the same argument from the context of American racism. The God of the Bible is consistently on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. A Christianity that obsesses over private moral behavior while remaining silent about the structures that crush human beings has confused the gospel with something else.

It is a truly biblical theology. Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah all preach consistent prophetic indictments of those who grind the faces of the poor, who pervert justice, who use power to dominate the vulnerable. Isaiah 58 is perhaps the sharpest statement: God is not interested in your fasting and your religious observance while you exploit your workers and ignore the hungry. The fast God chooses is to loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free.

Jesus inherits this tradition directly. The parable of the sheep and goats locates final judgment not in personal doctrinal correctness or private moral purity but in whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the prisoner. The harshest words in the Gospels are reserved for religious leaders who use their authority to burden and exclude rather than liberate and welcome.

What I Am Coming To Believe

I am not proposing that liberation theology replaces the whole of Western theology or that personal sin does not exist. The New Testament addresses personal behavior, and the transformation of the inner life is genuinely part of what God is doing in human beings. You cannot reduce Christianity to just a social justice program without losing something essential.

But I am proposing that Western Christianity has so privatized sin that it has lost the prophetic tradition almost entirely. When the church spends more energy policing what its members taste, touch, love, and handle than it does confronting the structures that exploit the vulnerable, it has inverted the New Testament’s own hierarchy of moral concern.

Liberation theology is correcting a distortion within Western Christianity, not replacing it. It is recovering the prophetic and social dimension that the tradition suppressed, without abandoning the personal and relational dimension that the Western tradition rightly preserves.

Reformed Theology Already Knows This

There is an irony worth naming here. The Reformed tradition, which produced some of the most rigorous thinking about personal piety and behavioral conformity in Protestant history, also contains the clearest theological argument against the framework I am critiquing.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone, sola fide, is the Reformation’s most fundamental assertion: salvation is not a program for becoming a better person. It is God’s declaration of righteousness over the sinner on the basis of Christ’s work alone, received through faith, entirely apart from human moral achievement. You do not earn it. You do not maintain it by behavioral conformity. You do not lose it by failing to live up to the community’s standards of holiness. The Reformers fought bitterly for this against a Catholic penitential system they believed had turned salvation into exactly the kind of moral improvement program I am describing.

Calvin was equally clear that sanctification, the transformation of the Christian life, is the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer and flows from justification rather than contributing to it. You do not become righteous in order to be accepted. You are accepted and therefore become, slowly and imperfectly, more like the one who accepted you. The order matters. Grace precedes transformation. Belonging precedes behavior.

The problem is that this theology, which should have produced a community of people freed from the anxiety of moral performance, often produced the opposite in practice. When justification by faith becomes a doctrinal position held alongside an intensely behavioral definition of sanctification, the result is a community that says you are saved by grace but discipled by conformity. The gospel door is wide open and the hallway inside is very narrow.

Liberation theology’s correction is important here. If salvation is genuinely about God’s rescue of human beings from the powers that harm and destroy them, and not about God’s program for producing morally respectable individuals, then the community of the saved should look like people being freed from those powers, not people being policed into behavioral conformity.

God can tolerate us being human, enjoying the pleasures of life. What God will not ultimately tolerate is the use of power to exploit, exclude, and destroy the vulnerable. That is the sin the prophets named. That is the sin Jesus addressed most sharply. And that is the sin the church has been most reluctant to confront, because it is also the sin most of us are most complicit in.

What Discipleship Actually Looks Like

If the locus of sin is reoriented this way, discipleship looks different. The church spends less energy policing the private behaviors of its members and more energy asking how its community participates in or resists the structures that harm the vulnerable. Pastoral care is less about helping people clean up their personal lives and more about walking alongside people in the full complexity of their humanity. The measure of a healthy congregation is not how morally respectable its members look but how seriously it takes the question of who is being harmed and who is doing the harming.

This does not mean personal transformation stops mattering. It means the transformation the New Testament describes is bigger than personal respectability. It is the transformation of people who have been freed from the powers that harm them and freed for participation in God’s work of liberation in the world, just as they are.

Jesus said the whole law and the prophets hang on loving God and loving your neighbor. The prophetic tradition knew what loving your neighbor meant in practice. It meant confronting the powers that harm them. It meant standing between the vulnerable and those who would exploit them.