Lecture 6-5: Remaining Sin in the Believer

These two verses sit at the hinge of one of the most fought-over passages in the New Testament, and this lecture will not pretend the fight is over.

The doctrine, stated before the debate

Nearly the entire Christian tradition — Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Lutheran, and most (though, as this lecture will show, not all) evangelical traditions — affirms in some form that a genuinely justified, genuinely regenerate believer continues to struggle with real, indwelling sin throughout this life, and is not simply delivered from the presence of sin at conversion the way they are delivered from its penalty. Catholic theology has traditionally named the residual disorder of desire remaining after baptism concupiscence — not itself sin in the fullest sense once baptismal grace has been received, but a real, weakened inclination toward sin that continues to need resistance and grace. Reformed and Lutheran traditions have tended to speak more starkly of remaining sin or, in Luther's famous phrase, simul justus et peccator — simultaneously righteous and a sinner — the believer fully and irrevocably justified in Christ's righteousness while still, in actual daily experience, a real sinner in need of ongoing mortification of the flesh. Despite real differences in how each tradition names and explains the mechanism, the shared pastoral claim is the same: do not expect, and do not teach a congregation to expect, that conversion produces immediate, complete freedom from the actual experience of temptation, struggle, and failure.

Romans 7:24-25: the debate this lecture will not resolve by fiat

Lecture 2-5 already flagged the long-running exegetical debate over Romans 7's "I" — whether Paul describes his own unregenerate past self under the law, his own ongoing struggle as a believer in the present, or a rhetorical everyman standing for the human condition generally, Jew or Gentile, under the law's demand without the Spirit's help. That debate returns here with its sharpest edge, because 7:24-25 is the passage's emotional and theological climax, and how a reader answers the "who is speaking" question determines whether this passage is straightforward evidence for remaining sin in the believer, or evidence for something else entirely.

State the major options honestly. The regenerate-believer reading — associated historically with Augustine's later, mature anti-Pelagian writings (after he moved away from an earlier reading closer to the next option), and with the mainstream of the Reformed and Lutheran tradition since — takes 7:14-25 as Paul's own present-tense description of his ongoing experience as a believer: "I delight in God's law after the inward man" (7:22) is not language Paul would use of his unconverted self, on this reading, and the cry of 7:24 followed immediately by thanksgiving in 7:25 fits a believer who already knows and trusts the deliverer even while still groaning under remaining sin's weight. This reading makes Romans 7:24-25 a paradigm text for the doctrine this lecture is arguing.

The unregenerate-past reading — associated with a strand going back to some patristic exegesis before Augustine's later shift, and defended by a number of modern commentators including, in different forms, C. E. B. Cranfield's earlier work and various dispensationalist and some Wesleyan readings — takes the whole of 7:14-25 as Paul's retrospective description of life under the law without the Spirit's aid, a condition Romans 8 then describes Christians as having left behind ("there is now no condemnation," "the law of the Spirit of life has set you free," 8:1-2). On this reading, 7:24-25 does not describe the ongoing Christian struggle at all — it describes exactly the condition Christ delivers a person out of at conversion, and using it to explain a believer's present sin risks normalizing defeat Romans 8 says the Spirit has already ended.

The rhetorical-everyman reading — associated with a number of contemporary commentators reading Romans 7 against the backdrop of ancient rhetorical convention (the use of "I" to voice a representative human experience rather than strictly autobiographical testimony), including strands of the "New Perspective on Paul" scholarship — takes the chapter as Paul narrating, in the first person for rhetorical vividness, the condition of anyone (Jew especially, given the law's specific role in the argument) who knows God's law is good and right yet finds themselves unable to keep it by the law itself, apart from any resolution of whether that "anyone" is regenerate or not; the point of the chapter, on this reading, is what the law by itself cannot do (Romans 8:3), not a report on Paul's personal psychological state at any one time.

This is a point where readers will not agree, and this lecture states plainly that it will not resolve the exegetical question by fiat, exactly as 2-5 declined to when the debate first appeared. What this lecture will say is that the doctrine of remaining sin in the believer does not, in fact, depend on Romans 7:24-25 alone — 1 John 1:8 ("If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us") is addressed unambiguously to believers and makes a version of the same claim without Romans 7's exegetical difficulty attached to it. A reader who takes the unregenerate-past or rhetorical-everyman reading of Romans 7 specifically is not thereby committed to denying remaining sin in the believer generally; they simply hold a different text as their primary support for a doctrine most of the tradition affirms on other grounds as well.

The Wesleyan-Holiness alternative: entire sanctification

The mainstream Reformed and Lutheran expectation, and the Catholic doctrine of ongoing concupiscence, both anticipate lifelong struggle with remaining sin as the normal Christian experience this side of glorification. The Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, following John Wesley's own doctrine of "Christian perfection" or entire sanctification, and developed further by later Holiness-movement theologians, argues for a genuine, second, distinct work of grace subsequent to conversion in which the believer's heart is cleansed of the root of sin itself — not a claim of sinless perfection in the sense of never again making a mistake or falling short of God's absolute perfection, which Wesley himself denied was in view, but a real, substantial freedom from what Wesley called "sin properly so-called," willful, known transgression of a known law of God, and from the inward bent toward sin driving it. On this view, entire sanctification is a real possibility for believers in this life, received by faith much as justification is, not merely a distant eschatological hope.

Critics within the Reformed and Lutheran traditions have argued this doctrine underestimates the ongoing depth of remaining sin this course has spent this whole lecture describing, risks either a self-deceived claim to a freedom the person does not actually have, or a redefinition of "sin" narrow enough (limited to fully deliberate, fully known transgression) that much of what Scripture calls sin — the disordered affections and unconscious pride Chapter 5's account of the noetic and psychological effects of sin (5-2) described — simply falls outside the category being claimed as conquered. Wesleyan-Holiness theologians have replied that this criticism proves too much, effectively denying that the Holy Spirit's sanctifying power in this life can ever accomplish what Scripture itself promises (1 Thessalonians 5:23's prayer that God would sanctify the believer "completely," and 1 John 3:9's strong language about the one born of God not continuing in sin), and that a doctrine of inevitable lifelong defeat can itself become a pastoral excuse for settled, comfortable sin rather than a spur toward the holiness Scripture actually commands. This is a minority position among this course's own readership, but a serious one, held by entire denominational families (the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan Church among them) who would object, rightly, to having their own doctrine dismissed as naive rather than engaged on its own textual and theological terms.

What sin costs, six chapters later

This course opened with a single verse, Romans 3:23, and a promise: that by the end, the reader would know what "sinned" and "falls short of the glory of God" actually name, rather than being able to recite the verse without being able to say what it costs. Six chapters later, the answer this course has built, piece by piece, is not comfortable. Sin cost the whole race its standing before God the moment one man's rebellion became every man's condition (Chapter 3). It costs the sinner a mind, will, and affections that no longer function as they were made to (Chapter 5, 5-2). It costs creation itself, groaning under a curse it did not choose (Chapter 5, 5-3). It costs, for those who refuse every remedy offered them, the eternal consequence Chapter 5's fifth lecture (5-5) refused to soften by asserting away the traditions that disagree about its precise shape. And — this lecture's own addition to that ledger — it costs even the justified, reconciled, genuinely forgiven believer a lifelong, sometimes exhausting, struggle that does not simply end at the moment of conversion, whatever a given reader concludes about Romans 7's exact referent.

That is a heavy ledger, and this course has tried, at every contested point, not to lighten it dishonestly in either direction — not by asserting more certainty than the church's own long argument actually has, and not by softening sin's actual weight to make the doctrine easier to hold. But the ledger this course has built was never the whole account, only the half it set out to write. Luke 7:47's woman wept at Christ's feet not because her debt was announced to her in the abstract, but because she had been forgiven it — and the size of what this course has argued she, and every reader, actually owed is precisely what makes 6-4's argument true: the larger the accurately reckoned debt, the larger the love that meets its cancellation. This course closes, appropriately, without canceling anything itself. It has done only what a doctrine of sin can do: state, as honestly as six chapters allow, what is actually owed. What happens to that debt is the next course's argument to make, and this one is content, at its final page, to have made that argument necessary rather than optional.

5. Going to the Sources

John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777) — Wesley's own careful, repeatedly revised statement of the entire-sanctification doctrine, including his own qualifications about what it does and does not claim; read it before accepting either the doctrine or a caricature of it from its critics, since Wesley spends much of the text distinguishing his actual claim from misreadings that were already circulating in his own lifetime.