Power,Possibility,and Personal Agency: What Should Ethics Know of Sin?

Introduction

One striking and influential feature of recent ‘apocalyptic’ readings of St Paul has been the ‘widescreen’ portrayal of Sin as a Power. ¹ This account is exemplified in the work of Beverly Gaventa, and its wide resonance displayed in the popularising presentation of Fleming Rutledge and the reception history surveyed by Lisa Bowens. Moreover, the apocalyptic interpretive sensibility concerning sin has not remained simply the preserve of biblical scholars but has begun to receive doctrinal elaboration in a Protestant systematics that finds a dramatic gospel ontology in such cask-strength Paulinism (so, for instance, the dogmatics of Philip G. Ziegler). Such a widescreen view encompasses a ‘three-agent drama’ of salvation—the cast of characters being God, human creatures, and inimical powers—and therein stresses the real bondage of human persons to anti-God forces. As such, it resists what it sees as merely moralizing interpretations of human sins in favour of a starker moral cosmology. In this way, it may comport well with theology's turn to the social and structural manifestations of sin, but can seem at first glance to leave ‘ethics’ and ‘freedom’ in suspension.

Contrast, then, the approach to Sin and sins of the major Anglican moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan. O’Donovan's recent reflections on the theme treat it as a case study in the difference of perspectives between dogmatics and ethics. The dogmatician, ‘making sin exceedingly sinful, quickly resorts to apocalyptic largeness of scale’, but the moralist is to be concerned instead with ‘possible’ sins to be avoided in the next moment of free action. ² Such a phenomenological focus can yield a compelling portrayal of sins as mis-steps in the pilgrim's journey that is the moral life. But for the sake of elucidating individual moral agency it can seem to bracket, reductively, the wider referents of sin-talk, leaving the ethic of freedom doctrinally (and perhaps sociologically) underdetermined.

These two approaches, each a ‘live’ option in contemporary Protestant theology, clearly sit at quite an angle to each other—at least as positioned in the compressed manner above. In this article, I seek first of all to distil the theological commitments each view intends to secure, observe what each risks, and try to determine what is at stake. Our two views can, I suggest, be harmonised to a point; I entertain the suggestion that David Kelsey's account of Sin and sins might help us to get them on the same map. In that sense, they could be co-ordinated as ultimate and proximate descriptions within an integrative account of what John Webster called ‘moral ontology’. Yet to what extent is a coherent ‘map’ of sin possible, or desirable? A more precisely ethical question also remains: how might such a theological metaphysics of morals concretely inform the faithful practice of ethical imagination, deliberation, and accompaniment? In the third section, then, I venture a skein of tentative responses to the question ‘What should Christian ethics know of sin?’ To do this, I propose we recruit insights won out in subsequent discussions within Pauline studies, and in debates about structural sin in Catholic social thought. In fact, these two separate avenues of reflection can be shown to converge in some helpful ways.

Apocalyptic Theology and the Power of Sin

While we could look to the work of J. Louis Martyn, Martinus de Boer, or others, it is an essay by Beverly Gaventa, ‘The Cosmic Power of Sin in Paul's Letter to the Romans’, that seems to me the clearest statement of the apocalyptic school's perspective. ³ Gaventa observes the sheer quantity of sin-talk in the epistle to the Romans, against which preponderance she finds the relative disinterest of prominent commentators troubling. Paul's language concerning sin is extraordinarily dynamic: his narration sees sin coming into the world, increasing, exercising dominion, producing, reviving, and dwelling. Yet interpretations such as those of Stanley Stowers and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, she points out, ‘consider sin strictly as a feature of human activity or human experience’. ⁴ For them—as more recently, for Emma Wasserman—we ought to read the cosmological language as metaphorical, and see Paul as addressing moral-psychological questions of inner struggle with the passions and desires. ⁵ While for Gaventa this is true, so far as it goes, of the early chapters of the epistle, an anthropocentric perspective is insufficient when we consider the book as a whole:

The difficulty arises when we notice that Paul does not confine his comments about sin to human behaviour, to sin as misdeeds, omitted deeds, even to perverted thoughts and plans. Instead … sin is Sin—not a lowercase transgression, not even a human disposition or flaw in human nature, but an uppercase Power that enslaves humankind and stands over against God. Here, Sin is among those anti-God powers whose final defeat the resurrection of Jesus Christ inaugurates and guarantees. ⁶

This is not, she argues, to suggest that sins as human moral transgressions are uninteresting to Paul, rather to recognise that the burden of his argument as the epistle progresses is to show how they ‘demonstrate the workings of Sin's power’. ⁸ Because of this, the conscription and complicity which characterise the human condition illustrate a ‘resume of Sin's accomplishments’, a situation that demands decisive action of a kind quite beyond forgiveness. With an eye on contemporary ecclesial avoidance of sin-talk, Gaventa writes that we need ‘something entirely other than a Jesus who allows people to improve themselves by following the example of his good behaviour’. ⁹ What is at stake is nothing less than genuine captivity and deliverance: ‘Sin cannot be avoided or passed over; it can only be either served or defeated’. ¹⁰ The liberation of human agents, then, is a wholly divine prerogative. ‘Paul's Romans shows us that the battle against evil is not fought by reducing it to a laundry list of transgressions and trying really hard to avoid them … Evil is God's own enemy’. ¹¹

Something like this basic account is shared among exegetes who are operating with the apocalyptic frame. ¹² A widely read version is that of the Episcopal preacher and theologian Fleming Rutledge, whose presentation of sin in her exposition of The Crucifixion portrays it as related to both responsible guilt and—as Gaventa—alien power. ¹³ For Rutledge, where Christian expression has often offered an explanation of sin as individual ‘bad deeds’ or ‘bad choices’, in Paul the picture is different: ‘Sin is a Power holding our lives in thrall’. ¹⁴ If, as Derek Nelson writes in What's Wrong with Sin, for ‘a very long time in the history of most Western theology, sin has been easily localisable in the distorted will of the individual sinner’, then the apocalyptic panorama offered here situates the anthropological issue against a much larger horizon. ¹⁵ The domain of sin is not only the self, but the very cosmos. It is precisely this scope that is attractive to Rutledge and others, for they find the cosmic language of Sin as Power to be possessed of expansive explanatory potential, especially in relation to the experience of sin's shaping agency from outwith the self. As with liberation and feminist treatments of social sin, the apocalyptic account has gained a hearing especially among those dissatisfied with the apparent individualism and petty moralism of more commonly peddled ‘Western’—read, perhaps, narrowly pietistic or psychologised—doctrines of sin.

A further noteworthy example of this cosmological account's wide resonance is found in the work of Lisa Bowens. Bowens, a Pauline scholar who has published an interpretation of 2 Corinthians in an apocalyptic key, has also written a major volume of reception history entitled African American Readings of Paul. ¹⁶ Here she draws attention to the apocalyptic commitments of many interpreters in this broad tradition, who ‘considered the cosmological feature of Paul's theology to be important because they, like Paul, believed in a supernatural world filled with God, angels, Satan, satanic beings, and the Holy Spirit’. ¹⁷ But more particularly, she writes,

the apostle's emphasis on sin as a power resonates with some of the interpreters … for they see the cosmic nature of sin creating systemic injustices in the nation. Against one of the dominant understandings of their time, in which sin was seen as merely personal, between an individual and God, these interpreters recognized that sin was not just individual but social as well. ¹⁸

This somewhat vexed question of the freedom of the moral subject in a world picture where the real action can seem to take place quite above our heads is one that needs taking up in any theology and ethics that would wish to follow (to any degree) in the wake of an apocalyptically inflected soteriology.

As I have alluded to, as well as an ‘apocalyptic school’ of Pauline interpretation, we can now speak of an associated ‘apocalyptic turn’ in systematic theology—a development testified to by the inclusion of a chapter on ‘Apocalyptic Theology’ in The New Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (2022). ²⁰ This turn finds sharpest theological articulation in the dogmatics of Philip Ziegler, and indeed a key component of Ziegler's project is a doctrinal elaboration of the ‘three-agent drama’ and, within it, the cosmic power of Sin. Ziegler's quest for a hamartiology shaped by Scripture has increasingly taken in reflection on the role of the figure of the devil (as synecdoche for the anti-God powers) and his defeat. ²¹ But Ziegler has also sought to set the stage for an apocalyptic theological ethics, contemplating ‘the matter of the Christian moral life in relation to the apocalyptic gospel of God's grace’. ²² This involves consideration of metaethical issues like the place of law—and the radically historicised place of the ‘natural law’.

In one essay, on ‘The Adventitious Origins of the Christian Moral Subject’, Ziegler turns our attention directly to the theme introduced with Bowens above: the drama of human freedom as contextualised and qualified by the Pauline vision of sin and salvation. The essay goes on to engage with Calvin's theology of depravity and regeneration, but it begins with a distillation of Martyn's late essays, which advance, for Ziegler, ‘a perceptive and persuasive account of the status of the human being as moral agent within Paul's evangelical testimony’. ²³ Paul, says Martyn, breaks radically with the standard ‘Hellenistic’ descriptions of the moral life as comprised of ‘moments of decision in which human agents are presented with a choice between two ways, exhorted to choose the better of the two, and then, in an exercise of freedom, do in fact so choose’. ²⁴ By contrast, in Paul's vision, ‘human moral subjectivity is decisively superintended in the first instance by the suprahuman powers of Sin, Death, and “the Flesh”’. ²⁵ In this moral drama ‘as it actually exists’, the question is not so much ‘what human moral agents do’ as that which has been, is being, and will be done to them—including their conscription by Sin and deliverance over to the Flesh. ²⁶ Accordingly, in this ‘moral grammar’ we are ‘remote from any scenario in which rational human agents know and freely choose between ethical possibilities undisturbed from without’. ²⁷ So far, so bleak for ethics, and distinctly unpromising in terms of prospects of moral deliberation that can in any meaningful sense be called ‘free’. But perhaps puncturing our blithe optimism about human agency is exactly the impact the apocalyptic school is trying to make here.

Mercifully, though, that is not the end of the apocalyptic drama, even as it is the most prominent tableau. Martyn—and Ziegler—go on to show how ‘the plight of cosmic captivity’ is ‘disrupted and overcome by God's own coming in the salutary power of his creative grace’. ²⁸ This redemption, truly liberation, entails the reconstitution of the person as moral actor:

nothing less than “new creation”, in which the enslaved and incompetent human agent is remade in the image of the crucified Son by the gift of the Spirit. There appears, in short, a new human agent “in Christ”, one wrenched free from the “body of death” and knit together into the “body of Christ”, the church. ²⁹

Now, the lack of a more extended treatment of moral deliberation might be attributed to the nature of the topographical exercise, the sort of thing pursued by dogmatics rather than ethics as such. But I think there is more to it than that. For Ziegler, a ‘properly evangelical theological ethics should … be fully suspended from soteriology’. ³² This has implications for what is and is not worth reflecting on:

we win very little purchase on the question of human moral subjectivity by reflecting directly on the essential features of our creaturely nature as such, on reason and will as formal structures of our enduring human essence. Set within the history of our making by the serial advents of sin and grace, such features of human reality have very little telling moral valence. ³³

Where have we got to? We have briefly canvassed a few examples I take to illustrate a series of convictions shared across apocalyptic interpreters. On this view, any Christian notion of ‘ethics’ must be relativised by the gospel's announcement of human plight—the bad news within the good. Sin is an unavoidable factor, and an account of the moral life that wants to go through rather than around St Paul cannot proceed as though it does not know about the problem. For one thing, it cannot presume upon the moral subject as modernity's autonomous, buffered self. ³⁴ Clearly critics will worry, much as with social and structural approaches, that this kind of account of sin does not merely constrict but undermines any credible notion of human freedom and personal responsibility. ³⁵ If taken in isolation, the language of bondage to external powers does surely risk passive resignation, or worse, despair. Yet, crucially, what looks to be—and, frankly, is—an essentially pessimistic anthropology is but a penultimate presupposition of a dramatic story in which human beings are graciously caught up in the advent and triumph of God in Christ. While on this view human moral thought and action are situated within a narrative of futility and captivity, the Christocentric and just so participatory soteriology which is its climax means that it does not seem to be deterministic in the final instance. This is especially clear where the renewing power of the Spirit within Paul's moral vision is brought more robustly into view. To sum up: apocalyptic theology and the Power of Sin—for ethics, the bark is fierce, but it is probably worse than the bite.

We turn next, however, to a theologian whose concern to vouchsafe the space, time, and selfhood for responsible moral deliberation leads quite intentionally to a circumscription, within Christian ethics, of the kinds of claims made by the apocalyptic school.

Oliver O’Donovan and the Possibility of Sins

There are a number of texts across the extraordinarily wide-ranging production of Oliver O’Donovan that we might go to for an account of sin. But it is his latest substantial treatment of the topic that, at least at first glance, produces an arresting impression of contrast with the signal convictions of the apocalypticists. I will focus here, then, on a small selection of passages from O’Donovan's recent trilogy, Ethics as Theology (2013, 2014, 2017). These volumes represent a major contribution to contemporary theology, and—in ways that readers are still pondering—a recalibration of the earlier fundamental moral theology represented by Resurrection and Moral Order. ³⁶ They are also finely wrought; even, as Clare Carlisle describes the first book, labyrinthine. ³⁷ So I isolate these passages, insofar as I do, with some trepidation. To pull on just one thread here threatens to do harm, in a literary and conceptual sense, to a densely woven tapestry. Nevertheless, to put O’Donovan's thought into conversation with other voices, we must do just that.

The discussion of sin in volume 1, Self, World, and Time—a volume designed to serve as an ‘induction’ to O’Donovan's project—provides the programmatic parameters in relation to which subsequent meditations upon specific sins are pursued. These variations on the theme are distributed across volume 2, Finding and Seeking, and volume 3, Entering into Rest, and comprise contemplation of sins against self, world, and time, that is, against faith, love, and hope. ³⁸ But while it self-consciously sets the terms for the later performances, the first volume's account of sin in fact arises indirectly; O’Donovan turns to the topic to illustrate his wider convictions about the distinction between the angles of vision proper to dogmatics, on the one hand, and ethics, on the other. He returns to the theme in Finding and Seeking to recapitulate the argument, so I will draw on those passages here, too.

Sin, then, is a case study in the difference in disciplinary perspectives, and is so fittingly because of a perennial ‘duality’ in the idea of sin itself, ‘apparent since Augustine made the distinction of “original” from “actual” sin’:

the one the basis for our radical guilt before God, the other the effect of our humdrum day-to-day temptations. There is a third-person and a first-person point of view. As an objective reality, sin is a universal truth about mankind, a generic disunity with creation and a solidarity in refusal of the good. But sin is also experienced as a subjective reality, and in this light it presents itself as “trial”, a danger “crouching at the door” of every practical endeavour, but not a necessity, since to believe it so would be to renounce all responsibility for it. ³⁹

The two approaches are, O’Donovan wants us to think, complementary: ‘two moments in a dialectic relation’. ⁴⁴ He also specifies that relation: ‘Moral Theology, always speaking in second place and after the dogmatic theologian has finished, views sin not as a presupposition but as an open possibility’. ⁴⁵ But, in seeking to secure ethics’ proper vocation of comprehending and accompanying moral action, he is sensitive to the way in which a strongly dogmatic view can obscure the decisively ethical dimension:

The dogmatician, making sin exceedingly sinful, quickly resorts to apocalyptic largeness of scale. Sin is the refusal of God and goodness, Satanic and ultimate. Man's petty “no” to God is deepened by the Incarnation into a demonic “no”, and sucked into the slipstream of the Antichrist. This is very fine, and every theologian will need at some point to follow this journey via the wastes of sin and the midnight sun of God's will in Christ to the pole where good and evil have their final confrontation. But a problem arises when the polar expedition has laid no plans for coming back. If and when sin grows large in its scope, it assumes a demonic unity which forewarns of the flood at the end of time; but what are we to say about the many small streams of sin, the meanness of deficiency, the weakness of opportunity let slip, the inadequacy co-possible with every God-given possibility, which comprise what Paul called “grieving the Spirit”? ⁴⁶

St Augustine, O’Donovan says, serves as a guide. The Bishop of Hippo ‘did not make the mistake of confining sin to protology and eschatology’, but ‘was alert to the New Testament Epistles, where the discussion of sin often looks in two directions: to protological definitions … taking sin back to a radically false position vis-à-vis the world and its creator’ and ‘to broad phenomenological surveys … tracing the ways sin fans out in the variety of forms it assumes in the world’. ⁴⁷ Accordingly, our speech about sin ‘must retain an exploratory, undefined character, for it is only as we discern the path of discipleship that we discern the ramifying possibilities of losing our way that lie open before our feet’. ⁴⁸ Ethics may offer classifications, but must recall that these are ‘no more than heuristic’. ⁴⁹ ‘Discernment of temptation’ cannot be done in advance, but rather ‘on the ground’ in relation to a particular ‘cultural context’. ⁵⁰ And ethics ‘is not to classify the failures as though they were something, but to mark their position as one might warn of a hole in the road by drawing a white circle around it’. Why? Because ‘sin is a form of evil, and evil has no being, only a failure’. ⁵¹ Still, ‘that does not leave nothing for Moral Theology to do’:

The underlying structure of sin corresponds to the underlying structure of action, and its recurrent and necessary forms can be, at least, illustrated, the possibilities which open from them pointed out. It can provide a framework within which our own and others’ temptations may be intelligently discerned. ⁵²

So much for a sketch of O’Donovan's core claims about the division of labour in the discourse of sin. A hasty reading might lead one to assume that O’Donovan's focus upon agency as ‘the exercise of freedom’ ⁵³ and on the individual moral actor—which is, we might say, properly personalist—would crop the dimensions of his depiction of sin. Such a zoomed-in view of the moral life might seem to leave out of shot the kinds of social or structural setting that have come so strikingly to the fore in recent theology, in favour of what Anna Rowlands describes as ‘a solely individualist metaphysics of sin’. ⁵⁴ But that is not the case here. We will in fact find O’Donovan attentive, as a thoroughgoing Augustinian, to the relational and political ramifications of sin. In Ethics as Theology and elsewhere, he offers perceptive phenomenological characterisations of ‘social evil’. As he writes in The Ways of Judgment: ‘In a social description of sin we are taken beyond the idea of a particular agent's distorted acts to the distorted relations which constrain the possibilities of acting’. ⁵⁵

Still, O’Donovan's concern is generally not, in the terms of John Donne, ‘that sin, where I begun’, but rather ‘that sin, through which I run’. ⁵⁶ Certainly, O’Donovan's ethic also derives much scriptural inspiration from St Paul—including Romans and Galatians, perhaps the two key texts for apocalyptic theology, and including the portions of those epistles which are not obviously paraenetic. But I wonder if his moral theology as a whole might be thought to draw its principal scriptural imaginary from the ‘way’ of Psalm 119, and in keeping with this wisdom text and its guiding motif, his account of sin here is of the misdeed as the path wrongly taken. ⁵⁷ Sins are those misadventures in which, as the Prayer Book memorably has us confess, we have ‘erred and strayed’. ⁵⁸

In sum: for O’Donovan, ethics should know sin primarily as a personal possibility. But this is not to say he has privatised the concept, rendering it interior without remainder. He is a moral realist, and even in his new turn, from Resurrection and Moral Order to ‘Pentecost and Moral Agency’, ⁵⁹ the awakening to one's freedom as a moral subject is still portrayed in dialogue with the givens of created order—and concomitantly the distortions of social and political life. In O’Donovan's theology, ethics’ first-person view is not about navel-gazing, but about looking faithfully for my next move in the world, one only I can take, ventured in step with the Spirit. ⁶⁰

To this point, we have taken soundings from two contemporary theological sensibilities which seem, at first hearing, to each play loudest the other's quiet notes. To be sure, they share a theological analysis of the relation between the ultimacy of sin and the possibility of human agency: both recognise that a thoroughgoing reckoning with the sense in which sin is ‘before’ human action can raise questions for the way we think of our freedom to act. It might be possible to tidy away the differences by reference to O’Donovan's own account of disciplinary divisions of labour—if these are ships passing in the night, it is because they are supplying different ports. But they also undeniably seem to express essentially juxtaposed convictions about what this all means for ethics, and so, taking the positions as they stand, any harmonising will not be so easily done. O’Donovan is concerned to procure and preserve the space needed for responsible moral deliberation, over and against a trend that ethics is absorbed without remainder ‘into the theological construction of reality’. ⁶¹ The apocalyptic school is at pains to keep depictions of human nature and freedom responsible to the chastening reality claims of scriptural theodrama. Ethics, on O’Donovan's view, is to know of the sins that lie ahead; for apocalyptic theology, such knowledge comes too late, because Sin, writ large, is a power to be located prior to any notion of free personal action. The problem is not the possibility of going astray, but the prevenient reality of being held captive. What would it look like, then, to attempt to bring these two more-or-less salutary commitments together—to construe them as together informing the Christian imagination of the world within which we act, and the persons we are as moral actors?

What Should Ethics Know of Sin?

As we seek to integrate the two sensibilities, we can do so in several different ways. We could attempt to map them as different kinds of description, one concerning the ultimate or ontological plane, and the other the penultimate or existential. ⁶² As an exercise of systematic theology, we might harness the framework of David Kelsey's theological anthropology Eccentric Existence, which sets out explicitly to characterise both Sin and sins in relation to each facet of its account of humanity as defined in relation to God's economy. ⁶³ For Kelsey, these levels of description—of ultimate and proximate contexts for human being—allow us to see both Sin and sins in terms of mis-response to God's gracious relating to create, reconcile, and draw to consummation. Crucially, this captures the dimension of ‘against-God-ness’ that identifies all sin its deepest theological sense. ⁶⁴ Because of the economic patterning of Kelsey's account, such characterisations also allow him to elaborate phenomenologically on each facet of Sin and each modality of particular sins. ⁶⁵ Again, this is, as Joy Ann McDougall notes, not a ‘catalogue of actual sins’, but an evocation of how ‘the distortions of sin’ are both personally implicating and ‘manifest in public and social practices’. ⁶⁶ Kelsey's theological snapshots of sin could be fruitfully compared to O’Donovan's accounts of sins against faith, hope, and love. Moreover, Kelsey's account of Sin in relation to eschatological consummation itself draws directly on the apocalyptic reading of St Paul, while the tenor of his account of humanity and sins in relation to creation owes much to the wisdom literature. ⁶⁷

To stay at a certain level of abstraction for a moment, we could say that the cosmological picture emphasised by apocalyptic theology might furnish part of what John Webster often called a ‘moral ontology’, setting the scene of the ‘moral field’. ⁶⁸ In terms of the dialogue I am seeking to develop as regards sin in particular, a recent study by Matthew Croasmun might offer a way forward. In The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans, Croasmun has sought to traverse interpretive divides by venturing a multi-level reading of Sin and sins that deploys the notion of ‘emergence’ from the philosophy of science. ⁶⁹ If we can see how cumulative powers emerge from human agents and in turn exert downward causation upon them, he argues, then we can nimbly avoid the demand that we interpret references to sin in Paul as either an external power or discrete acts of moral transgression. Instead, we can perceive sin as at once a matter of individual moral responsibility, a feature of human social structures, and—emerging from and supervening upon these—a cosmic tyrant. What is perhaps particularly interesting in relation to our theme is that Croasmun sees the two powers in Paul, the ‘Body of Sin’ and the ‘Body of Christ’, to ‘exercise dominion through the control of the moral reasoning of members of its body’. ⁷⁰ Croasmun's emergentist sketch of sin and its connections at personal, social, and cosmic levels could be thought especially amenable, then, to a move which sees apocalyptic cosmology as a contributor to Christian moral ontology. ⁷¹

I am not competent—and it is not the concern of this article—to adjudicate exegetical details. ⁷² But tracking these developments with a constructive theological end in mind, the ‘either/or’ demanded by much biblical studies is less of a pressure, and it seems altogether easier to paste the insights of these various readers of Paul into a generously constructed collage informed both canonically and doctrinally. ⁷³ Such cartography of the metaphysics of morals is surely valuable in its way, though I cannot pursue it any further in a direct way here. But there are at least two reasons to think that this iconographic representation only takes us so far in terms of our topic. First, dogmatically speaking, we should not think that sin and its manifestations ought to be coherent. ⁷⁴ And second, we need to press further into what, as O’Donovan convincingly demonstrated, is a pressingly ethical question with dynamism and integrity of its own. ⁷⁵ To that end, we need not simply to see how ontological and moral perspectives can be laid satisfactorily next to each other, or the existential-anthropological nested as a microcosm within the cosmological, but precisely to ask how scriptural and doctrinal claims about sin's shaping of reality should factor into the practical discernment of human action. ⁷⁶

Perhaps surprisingly, to its critics, apocalyptic theology has already got us quite a long way. Ziegler's holistic description of why the apocalyptic idiom might be ‘uniquely adequate to discerning the realities of our age’ demonstrates its ability to render theologically intelligible a range of experiences that are essential subject matter for moral thought:

A soteriological discourse that speaks of our captivity, complicity, and gracious liberation into the hands of another genuine and genuinely philanthropic Lord—that discourse is able to illumine how it is that we are, in fact, played by powers, structures, and systems of all kinds (political, technological, etc.), subjected to effective discursive and disciplinary regimes (which, having been conjured by us as the outworking of sin, now prosecute us with a kind of “downward causation” all their own), and moved by unfathomable drives and obscure impulses, both psychological and social, all of which amounts to so many modes of repudiation of God's grace and freedom. ⁷⁷

Taking this line of exploration forward, let me briefly note five areas of enquiry, and therein, tentatively, five things I think ‘ethics should know of sin’. My hope is that they can be seen as mutually illuminating angles of analysis.

Conclusion

In a formal sense, this article has sought to advance in one focused way the implications of apocalyptic theology for Christian ethics, ¹¹⁴ and to extend into wider conversation, with reference to a single theme, the insights of O’Donovan's moral vision. So much is left unaccomplished: not least, because ‘not all is Paul’ (and we have not even surveyed all of the epistles); because Christian ethics is beholden to the whole canon as authoritative; and because it reads the scriptures in the company of the tradition. But I hope this article has also made a little material progress on the question of ethics’ knowledge of sin. If it has done so only by locating the two positions apparently at odds, then synthesising them on common ground—ground in fact already partly occupied by quite a few integrative thinkers—then that is not, in itself, an original advance. Yet if these intramural (and ecumenical) interactions are rarer than they should be, then I hope this limited exercise indicates the kind of generative conversations that others might join.

It would be a theological and a moral mistake, however, to leave our question there. There is one final, and utterly crucial, thing that ethics should know of sin. This is the one commitment that provided the strong logic of Karl Barth's hamartiology, namely, that sin is a ‘grace dependent concept’ (Serene Jones). ¹¹⁵ Sin is a powerful surd in creation which is seen in truth only retrospectively, in its overcoming by God in Christ, and in the everyday conviction, deliverance from, and healing of sin wrought in our lives by the Spirit. Brian Brock puts it well, in a way that perhaps most of our interlocutors could say ‘Amen’ to—and with this I will close: ‘Without God's constant forgiveness, we do not see our sin; and without the exposure of our sins and our repenting of them, we remain in the deadening byways down which other gods have enticed us.’ ¹¹⁶