- Feb 5, 2002
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“I have a question,” my student said ominously as he sat in the chair in my office. I braced internally and probably externally—my heart is worn on my whole demeanor. When he asked it, I was relieved: “How can I be a theology major and keep sinning?”
You can’t go for long in Christian life without discovering what St. John Henry Newman meant when he said, “To know is one thing, to do is another; the two things are altogether distinct.” Knowing that something is a sin to be avoided is not the same as avoiding it.
To go a little further, we find out that our pursuit of doing God’s will and avoiding what is not is hampered by the fact that knowledge of God’s will hasn’t quite penetrated our entire being. St. Paul’s words in Romans 7:18-19 speak very eloquently for us: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” He describes the “delight in God’s law” in his “inner being” that seems stymied by “another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” Like my student, he cries out, “What a wretched man I am!” (7:21-24).
Continued below.
The Necessary Testimony of Hypocrites
We are not perfectly transformed in our minds. We are still slightly hypocritical. But Christ still calls us to speak of his mercies. Knowing our weakness, we can be gentle with others and reverent toward God, who knows our weakness and yet loves and uses us for his purposes even as he is...
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