Explainer
Creed
Seven Deadly Sins
Sin
9 min read

Reverse psychology: understand goodness then sin

Psychologist Roger Bretherton concludes our series on the seven deadly sins with a subversive proposition: we don’t understand sin because we don’t understand goodness.
An abstract shadow of a human reaching an hand skyward is overlaid by a trace of orange line that becomes a circle
Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Over the last month or so, here at Seen & Unseen, we have been writing together about the seven deadly sins: greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, anger, envy. If you have seen the David Fincher film, you probably have the grisly murders that illustrate them etched on your retina. But if there is one theme that comes up in all our articles on the subject, it is the fact that sin as a concept no longer carries any weight in our culture. A word that once bore all the heft of heaven and hell, is now the branding for a mildly indulgent discount day at the local health spa.  

One way of responding to the downgrading of sin as a meaningful and useful term, is to argue that we need a return to sin. Sin needs a come-back tour, a conceptual rehabilitation. We need to re-populate the word with meaning to make it current and plausible again. Without a consistent shared language of moral failure, of falling short, of ethical deficiency, it is difficult to imagine how responsible human community can be viable. Alasdair MacIntyre, the virtue ethicist, suggested that the problem with our culture is that multiple ethical games are being played. We are not just disagreeing about what the rules should be, but moreover what game it is we are meant to be playing. Our culture is a babel of voices, proposing conflicting versions of what a good life looks like. Consequently, in moral dialogue, we often fail to understand one another. As MacIntyre puts it: ‘my move to queen-bishop-three, is countered by your lob over the net.’

The etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark.

I am no etymologist. Very occasionally I dabble in a bit of New Testament Greek. But to be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing, and whenever I pronounce Greek root words they sound like items from the IKEA stocklist. And, given my tendency to talk to myself when I write, it’s almost inevitable that sooner or later the ever-attentive Alexa will accidentally order me a bedside lamp in response to what I thought was the Greek for bowels. That said, my understanding of the etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark. Miss by an inch, a foot, a mile – it’s all called sin (assuming archers in Old England preferred imperial units of measurement). Shoot the entire quiver in the opposite direction – that’s sin too. Linguists may tell us that this is an apocryphal origin myth, but it doesn’t matter. Whether in archery or ethics, the point remains the same. Sin is a relative term. It is relative to whatever it is we wanted to do, or aspired to become, but missed. 

Could it be then, that the root of our current cultural anomie is not so much that sin as a concept has been emptied of meaning (though it has), but that we no longer have any consensual agreement on what a good person should look like? We have no shortage of imagination when it comes to inventing new contents for the empty container of sin, but our thinking about goodness is woefully uninspired. Without a target to aim at, sin becomes vacuous. To illustrate this point, I’d like to tell you about two of the most eminent psychologists of the last hundred years. 

Hobart Mowrer and the psychology of sin 

Let’s start with a history lesson. O. Hobart Mowrer (1907-1982) is perhaps one of the most eminent, innovative and bemusing contributors to the short history of academic psychology. At the pinnacle of his career in 1953, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest and most esteemed society of psychologists in the world. But as a life-long sufferer of recurrent depression, the announcement sent him into a deep psychological crisis that left him incapacitated for nearly four months. In 1959, he addressed the APA convention in Cincinnati with one of the most unusual and controversial papers of the decade, Constructive Aspects of the Concept of Sin in Psychotherapy, in which he argued that the euphemisms for sin preferred by psychologists (wrongdoing, immorality, irresponsibility etc.) were not sufficiently powerful to convey the distress of a guilty conscience. He had an ambivalent off-again/on-again relationship with institutional religion, but he was nevertheless impressed with the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that we should do our good deeds in secret. This principle – you are your secrets – became central to his development of Integrity Therapy, a group approach to psychological distress through confession. In the 1970s, the tide of cultural opinion turned against Mowrer, his Integrity Groups were accused of brainwashing their participants, and their popularity waned. Some say he subsequently retracted his views on sin. His episodes of depression continued to dog him, and in 1982, at the age of 75, he died of suicide, having long advocated this as a reasonable course of action in certain circumstances.    

This thumbnail sketch hardly does justice to the sensitive suffering genius of O. Hobart Mowrer. There is no space to recount the academic innovations that make him still one of the most cited psychologists in history. He coined the term ‘pathogenic secret’, the idea that sin – by which he meant the things that secretly bother our consciences – makes us sick. I think he was probably right about that. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered sin. It includes sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, intoxication, orgies, and things like that. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. They hardly make pleasant reading, but they make a great episode of Succession. 

Paul called these ‘works of the flesh’. Works, because they are things we do, situations we manufacture.  Flesh, not in opposition to physical pleasure, but because these kinds of responses (strife, envy, rage etc.) seem to be patterned bodily reactions, part of our conditioning, written into our muscle. The fact that Paul refers to them in plural (works of the flesh) is more significant than it initially appears. For him the unethical life is an incoherent ragbag of reactions, a series of plays and tactics designed to gain immediate personal gratification. As long as we come out on top, or at least think we have, they have done their job. But if we live by them, if we hand ourselves over to the universe of their self-centred cynical logic, our identity fragments, our sense of coherence shatters. We can no longer imagine who we would be if our greed, pride, lust or whatever, was taken away from us. Our appetites become our identity.  

This is why I tend to think that the instincts that led Mowrer to develop a therapy emphasising integrity was right.  Provided of course, that we embrace the full definition of integrity, rather than simply taking it as a synonym for honesty. The integrity to which Mowrer’s groups aspired was not just the truthfulness that comes from the disclosure of secrets, but the inner harmony that comes from the restoration of wholeness. What looked superficially like an unhealthy preoccupation with sin, was in fact Mowrer’s pursuit of the unified state of self that accompanies goodness. A sentiment that leads us to psychologist number two.  

Martin Seligman and the psychology of goodness 

Fast forward four and half decades from Mowrer’s election as APA president. It is 1998 and another newly-minted APA president, Martin Seligman – arguably the most famous clinical psychologist in the world – is making his inaugural address. Seligman is unique among world-famous psychologists in many ways, not least of which being his claim that he was ‘called’ to be a clinical psychologist. He later told a conference at Lambeth Palace that as a young research scientist, during his deliberations on whether to follow the path into clinical practice, he woke one night from a dream of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. As he admired the architecture of the iconic building, God himself – a giant bearded old man – lifted the roof and boomed: I want you to be a clinical psychologist. Of course, as a secular Jewish academic, Seligman doesn’t believe in God, but this doesn’t deter him from openly admitting that his vocation in clinical psychology was not wholly chosen but issued from the unspoken depths of his being. 

This deep-seated sense of vocation may go some way to explaining why his 1998 inaugural address has gone down as a turning point in the history of psychology. His central assertion was that up until then psychology had been obsessed with the negative (what’s wrong with us) and that it was time to rebalance the discipline with a refocus on human flourishing, which at the time he formulated as the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. This is viewed by some as the birth of Positive Psychology, which according to Seligman was a corrective to the ‘rotten to the core’ view of human beings that had dominated the discipline since Freud. It is difficult to imagine a proposal more diametrically opposed to that of Mowrer. While Mowrer argued for a renewed awareness of ‘sin’, Seligman asserted to the contrary that it was the vast ignorance of goodness that bedevilled contemporary psychology. We already had a rich, ever-expanding science of what was wrong with people, what we needed was an equally detailed, every bit as expansive science of what was right with us. The explosive growth of positive psychology over the last few decades has been a response to that call, to develop a full-blown science of goodness. 

In the years that followed, Seligman revised his idea of the good life multiple times, perhaps his most ambitious proposal being the concept of Prospective Psychology; the idea that we as a species are best defined not by our past but by our future. He held this future-orientation to be so characteristic of human nature that we could name the species after it- homo prospectus.  We are defined not by what we have been, but by what we are yet to be. It is an insight he shares with many of the thoughtful people who have pondered ethics over the years. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered virtue. It includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. I often feel better about life, just reading it. 

Paul called these beautiful qualities, ‘fruit of the Spirit’. It is significant that in the original New Testament Greek, the word fruit is singular: καρπὸς (No! Alexa! I don’t need garden furniture!) He doesn’t write fruits, but fruit of the Spirit. He points toward some kind of unity, harmony, consistency in these qualities. Mowrer no doubt would have called it integrity. Goodness is much more than the avoidance of naughtiness; it is the restoration of wholeness to our shattered and divided selves. Sin is much more than the cheeky indulgences we succumb to at the end of a bruising day at work; it is the misdirection and derailment of all we could become. And this is where the tale of two psychologists terminates. Contrary to what the marketing executives may have conspired to tell you, sin is not your friend; it is the enemy of your genuine divine magnificence. That’s what makes deadly sin so deadly. 

Explainer
Creed
Identity
Leading
6 min read

German election turmoil's nothing new, here’s how Martin Luther responded

Innovative ideas around identity shaped the world around him.

Robert is professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

A head and shoulder painting of Martin Luther against a red background
Luther, by Cranach the Elder.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tensions build as the German election approaches. Money is flowing, bargaining going on behind the scenes. (We are talking the election of 1519 here). There is the favorite, Karl—they called him Carlos in the Spanish dominions he had  inherited from his maternal grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella—, grandson of the German emperor, Maximilian of Austria, and there is the challenger, the King of France, Francis I, and there is the wild card, the duke of Saxony, one of the seven electors who would elect the next emperor, Frederick, called the Wise.  Frederick had no imperial ambitions, and he tipped the election to his distant cousin, the then young man we call Charles V.  Two years later, that gave Frederick the leverage to win a hearing for his most prominent professor at the pride of his heart, his new university in Wittenberg, Martin Luther. 

Charles regarded this Augustinian friar, who had been excommunicated at the beginning of 1521 by Pope Leo X, as a dangerous heretic.  He wanted to declare Luther a criminal, open for execution on the open road by whoever might find him and run him through.  Frederick advised the young emperor not to treat a German subject like that, so Charles arranged for Luther to come to the imperial diet in Worms in May 1521 to recant.  Luther explained to the emperor that he really could not recant since his writings contained many truths.  He continued, “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”  Later reports say that he added the words, “I cannot do anything else. Here I stand. God help me!”  Whether he said “here I stand” or not, that is what Martin Luther did at Worms and continued to do for the next quarter century until his death. 

Upon what was he standing?  As a “doctor in Biblia,” a “teacher of the Scriptures,” Luther had taken up the latest methods of the so-called humanist movement for exploring ancient texts in their original languages.  Jurists turned to Justinian’s Code in sixth century Latin. Physicians were reading Galen’s medical advice in ancient Greek. Theologians immersed themselves in the Bible in Hebrew and Greek.  Luther had put the tools of these methods to use as he lectured in the 1510s on the Hebrew Psalms, and then the apostle Paul’s letters to the Romans and to the Galatians.  There he found a new way of viewing himself, the God whom he found speaking to him in the pages of the Bible, and his fellow human creatures.  He used the world “righteousness” in the way we might use “personal identity” today.  He heard from the biblical writers a different way of identifying who he was at his core by listening to God’s regard for him.

Just as our DNA is a gift, not something we have to work to earn, so Luther’s core identity came from outside himself.

Luther certainly did not deny that human performance helps give each human being a variety of identities as we go about what he saw as callings from God in our exercise of responsibilities in our homes, in our economic life, in our societal networks and political structures.  He believed that in these spheres of life we are active in shaping the way other people view and identify us.  But at his core, Luther found the person behind the masks of his everyday life to be unable to perform everything that would make him the good person he wanted to be, the good person he thought God wanted him to be.  Just as our DNA is a gift, not something we have to work to earn, so Luther’s core identity came from outside himself.  It came as a gift from God, his Creator.  He received it passively, and his trust in the God who gave him this passively bestowed identity set his entire life in order.  Because he trusted God to be his support and to justify who he was, he felt freed to perform his responsibilities toward other human creatures actively. 

Luther believed that on his own he had not been able to trust God, to love him and give him proper respect.  Like the modern psychiatrist and philosopher, Erik Erikson, Luther believed that trust forms the basis of human personhood and personality.  He saw that his trusting some Absolute and Ultimate formed his character and enabled him to function as a human being.  He recognized in the God presented by the Old Testament prophets of Israel and the New Testament evangelists and apostles the ultimate and absolute person, who approached the human creatures who had turned their backs on him by becoming one of them as Jesus of Nazareth.  In the mysterious ways of the Creator, Jesus’s death covered the transgressions and offenses, the mistakes and failures, of all human beings, and in his resurrection God gave new life, a new identity, true righteousness to those who trust in him. 

Luther found that message liberating.  It freed him from being imprisoned in a cycle of always insufficient attempts to be the person he wanted to be to please his Creator.  He rested in the unconditional love of this Creator, who had come face to face with humankind as the rabbi from Nazareth, crucified but back from death itself.  That freed Dr. Luther to be bonded to those within his reach who needed his care and love.  He need not manipulate them by doing them the good he needed to make himself look good in God’s sight and feel satisfied with himself.  He now could do them the good that they truly needed.  That gave his tempestuous spirit a sense of joy and peace. 

He lived out a rather peaceable life under the ban of church and empire, but safely ensconced in the lands of his Saxon electors.  Family life brought him much joy.  His judgment that God had given human beings the gift of sexuality for companionship and support as well as procreation made him uncomfortable with his own vows of celibacy, but not so uncomfortable that he would have married had not a nun named Katharina von Bora, who had left the cloister, laid claim to him.  Together they created a bustling household with their six children being raised in the cloister where Martin had lived as an Augustinian Brother, large enough to house students and guests from places far from Wittenberg.  Katharina served as his counsellor and theological conversation partner as well as the efficient manager of this ever-changing parade of co-inhabitants of their home. 

Music filled their home.  Luther’s firm tenor voice and his lute and his flute led family and visitors in evenings of song, sometimes giving voice to hymns he had written.  His sense of tone and rhythm coupled with sensitivity to the fine points of spoken and written speech made him a scholar of great skill and a translator who “looked into the mouths” of the people in the marketplace and render the Bible in their tongue.  His curiosity stimulated or at least supported colleagues at the university across the disciplines, including a botany instructor who took students the woods to look at leaves and colleagues in mathematics and astronomy who were playing with the new calculation of the heavens by Nikolaus Copernicus. 

Luther’s lively engagement with life and his dramatic search for peace in the pages of the Bible produced a man who enjoyed life despite his struggles with “melancholy,” a widespread disease of his time, and the threats of violence to his person that never disappeared.  His robust wrestling with the biblical texts provides even today stimulating, even provocative reading for anyone, who is looking for the heart of the matter, the matter of self and life. 

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