Defeating Sin

That a topic as important and layered as the defeat of sin in an individual's life is handled with such error, inconsistency, and flippancy by the evangelical world should alarm any sincere Christian.  Personal victory over sin is often held up as a necessary goal even as it is also described as a hopeless and inane thing to aim for.  In order to intentionally engage in the process of moral improvement, one must be aware of what acts or motives can be legitimately defined as sin, but one must also be willing to accept the logical possibility of moral perfection.  Although there is far more to moral improvement than the former, in many cases, realizing that numerous things the church has condemned across centuries are not sinful is a vital step towards understanding one's moral status.

It is quite easy to gratuitously feel discouraged when everything from anger to sexual attraction to leisure activities like video games is regarded as inherently sinful, as many evangelicals imply or teach outright, and thus the first step towards defeating sin is defining sin correctly.  One has to understand what is and is not sinful in order to thoroughly understand what it means to triumph over sin.  The legalism of the evangelical church prevents them from obtaining this comprehension, but their opposition to moral improvement runs deeper than this: its members fail to admit that they can not only completely overcome a given shortcoming, but also that it is not logically impossible for them to attain moral perfection.

It is as if the evangelical world is simultaneously desperate to emphasize that God is more powerful than sin while also unwilling to admit that moral progress is not unattainable.  This contradiction allows them to pay lip service to the idea of sanctification--which is nothing but the doctrine of moral betterment--without ever acknowledging that they can actually be consistently better.  Consequently, evangelicals are able to convince themselves that it is ultimately impossible to truly become sinless prior to one's death, despite the non sequitur fallacies and Biblical errors involved.  After all, denying that sinlessness is possible in this life can easily foster moral apathy and contentment with one's sins.  There is perhaps no better way to make oneself feel at peace with moral failure.

A rationalistic approach to Biblical passages about sanctification reveals that there is nothing in the Bible which claims that humans cannot become sinless before death.  The Bible even explicitly demands moral perfection from each individual Christian (Matthew 5:48).  It is, of course, logically possible to be sinless because there is no specific instance of sin that cannot be avoided, as well as because free will necessitates the ability to do that which is good, and no one needs the Bible to realize that the concept of moral perfection is not incoherent.  There is still a need to clarify that Biblical Christianity does not teach that humans are unable to align with righteousness after their redemption.  In fact, a person could even become morally perfect without ever becoming saved and thus restored to God in the first place--though it would still be impossible for their self-realized moral perfection to erase the guilt of their former sins (that is, they would still be unable to earn eternal life).

It is not obscurity or a lack of Biblical confirmation that keeps evangelicals from admitting thar moral perfection is possible before heaven.  Rather, it is stupidity, insecurity, or both.  Moral perfection can be a frightening concept for those who realize that they are not concerned with morality for morality's sake.  As evangelicals repeatedly make clear, they are either not concerned with morality in any serious sense or they are concerned with traditions and preferences, not morality itself.  The inherently moralistic (and more specifically, theonomist) nature of Christianity is an alien thing to them, something that demands of them that which they are not willing to give.  As evangelicals might selectively affirm elsewhere, an unwillingness to grapple with the Biblical commands to pursue absolute moral perfection does nothing to remove those commands from the Bible, but it does prove to the person experiencing that unwillingness that they are not in the pursuit of truth.