Stock Names for Sin
In a discussion of Eve’s fall into sin in Milton’s Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis reminds us of the way our minds begin to embrace sin:
No man, perhaps, ever at first described to himself the act he was about to do as Murder, or Adultery, or Fraud, or Treachery, or Perversion; and when he hears it so described by other men he is (in a way) sincerely shocked and surprised. Those others “don’t understand.” If they knew what it had really been like for him, they would not use those crude “stock” names. With a wink or a titter, or in a cloud of muddy emotion, the thing has slipped into his will as something not very extraordinary, something of which, rightly understood and in all his highly peculiar circumstances, he may even feel proud. If you or I, reader, ever commit a great crime, be sure we shall feel very much more like Eve than like Iago. — A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 126.
Part of the way in which we avoid confronting our own sins, then, is by giving other names to them. It’s not “murder”; it’s “euthanasia” or “abortion.” It’s not “adultery”; it’s a “love affair.”
On top of that, of course, we also often try to keep our minds from thinking about the sins we’re about to commit, including keeping from naming them, even to ourselves. We don’t say, “Now I’m going to have a fit of rage.” Instead, we simply rage, and then, perhaps because we refused to name the sin when we chose to commit it, we act as if it somehow just happened: “I just blew up!”  A man may not say to himself, “I’m going to go and look at some pornography.” He says, “I feel like surfing the web,” and then he refuses to name just what he’s looking for. But somehow he finds it.
And when we’re confronted on the sins, our minds start casting about for ways to explain them away, to justify ourselves, again using words other than the “stock” names: “I wasn’t raging; I was a bit irritable, that’s all. It wasn’t really adultery. I’m married, yes, but that’s really only on paper. For all intents and purposes, my marriage is really over and so, if only you understood my unique circumstances, you’d see that what I was doing was really okay. It wasn’t as serious and as terrible as you make it out to be.”
So part of our calling as Christians, and part of the church’s calling and the pastor’s calling, is to call sins by their real names, by the “stock” names, the names that we shy away from, the names that reveal our sins for what they really are.
June 28th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Excellent observation John. May I publish this on my blog? Charles Chambers
June 28th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Sure.