Back in 1973 the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger penned a book with the title, Whatever Became of Sin? He said that the very notion of sin would soon be absent from contemporary culture. Well, that was a prophetic call, and worse yet, it is true of too many in the church as well.
Simply put, Christ and Christianity make zero sense if we do not believe in sin, and what the Bible has to say about it. So even though most folks today do not want to talk about it, it MUST be at the forefront of our thought and conversations.
With that in mind, this piece does two simple things. First, it lists some good books on the theological, biblical, historical and pastoral understanding of sin. Following that, I offer six quotes to show the sorts of things that can and should be said about this vital topic.
Recommended reading on sin and the fall
Except for the final volume – an old Puritan classic – the books featured here were penned somewhat recently. There are countless more works one can appeal to – including chapters from systematic theologies and the like. But these 20 books make for a good start.
Berkouwer, G. C., Sin. Eerdmans, 1971.
Blocher, Henri, Original Sin. Apollos, 1997.
Braaten, Carl and Robert Jenson, eds., Sin, Death, & the Devil. Eerdmans, 1999.
Campbell, Iain, The Doctrine of Sin. Mentor, 2009.
Gibson, David and Jonathan Gibson, eds., Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective. Crossway, 2024.
Harmon, Matthew and Benjamin Gladd, Rebels and Exiles: A Biblical Theology of Sin and Restoration. IVP, 2020.
Jacobs, Alan, Original Sin: A Cultural History. HarperOne, 2008.
Jones, Mark, Knowing Sin. Moody, 2022.
McCall, Thomas, Against God and Nature: The Doctrine of Sin. Crossway, 2019.
McMinn, Mark, Why Sin Matters. Tyndale House, 2004.
Madueme, Hans, Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences. Baker, 2024.
Madueme, Hans and Michael Reeves eds., Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin. Baker, 2014.
Morgan, Christopher and Robert Peterson, eds., Fallen: A Theology of Sin. Crossway, 2013.
Peters, Ted, Sin:Radical Evil in Soul and Society. Eerdmans, 1994.
Pink, A. W. Gleanings from the Scriptures: Man’s Total Depravity. Moody, 1969.
Plantinga, Cornelius, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. Eerdmans, 1995.
Poe, Harry Lee, See No Evil: The Existence of Sin in an Age of Relativism. Kregel, 2004.
Pyne, Robert, Humanity and Sin. Word, 1999.
Shuster, Marguerite, The Fall and Sin: What We Have Become as Sinners. Eerdmans, 2003.
Venning, Ralph, The Sinfulness of Sin. Banner of truth, 1966, 2022.
Key quotes on sin and the fall
D. A. Carson in Morgan and Peterson
There can be no agreement as to what salvation is unless there is agreement as to that from which salvation rescues us. The problem and the solution hang together: the one explicates the other. It is impossible to gain a deep grasp of what the cross achieves without plunging into a deep grasp of what sin is; conversely, to augment one’s understanding of the cross is to augment one’s understanding of sin.
To put the matter another way, sin establishes the plotline of the Bible. In this discussion, the word sin will normally be used as the generic term that includes iniquity, transgression, evil, idolatry, and the like, unless the context makes it clear that the word is being used in a more restricted sense. In the general sense, then, sin constitutes the problem that God resolves: the conflict carries us from the third chapter of Genesis to the closing chapter of Revelation. Before the fall, God’s verdict is that everything he made is “very good.” We are not told how the Serpent came to rebel, but the sin of the first human pair introduces us to many of the human dimensions of sin. We find rebellion against God, succumbing to the vicious temptation to become like God, an openness to the view that God will not impose the sentence of death on sinners (and thus the implicit charge that God’s word cannot be trusted), defiance of a specific command (that is, transgression), the sacrifice of intimate fellowship with God, the introduction of shame and guilt, eager self-justification by blaming others, the introduction of pain and loss, and various dimensions of death. The fourth chapter of Genesis brings us the first murder, and the fifth chapter the refrain, “and then he died.” The following four chapters bring us the judgment of the flood and its entailments, but humanity is not thereby improved, as the eleventh chapter makes clear…. (p. 22)
Jacobs
Some of us have trouble explaining, or even making sense of, common human behavior; others have trouble understanding our common responses to that behavior. Yet we all stand here looking back on the century of unparalleled cruelty, dotted with names—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—that instantly call to mind the worst that human beings are capable of doing to one another. And we should, with equal justice, mark that century (as well as the one recently commenced) for its cruelty to the natural world, though we lack specific names to associate with that foul work. We have never had more need to explain ourselves to ourselves, but we manifestly lack the resources to do so….
Again and again, the literature and culture of the West have returned to this doctrine, worrying over it, loathing it, rejecting it—only to call it back in times of great crisis or great misery. (It was in the bowels of the Soviet Gulag that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn came to believe in it.) It repeatedly infiltrates our culture, provoking always the strongest of responses. We cannot make sense of it and yet cannot kill it. The task of this book is to explore the provocation of this single strange idea—a provocation that is located in its combination of repulsiveness and explanatory power. (xvii-xviii)
Jones
To merely describe sin as “missing the mark” is a gross injustice to the actual vocabulary of the Bible and the nature of sin. Even our catechetical instruction on sin can leave us with an underdeveloped doctrine of sin if we do not dig deeper into the biblical picture. After all, sin defined as “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, A. 14) needs further unpacking. Indeed, as sinners we fail to conform to God’s righteous standards: “Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). Also, we not only fail to do what God commands, but we also rebelliously pursue what He prohibits: “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7).
Understanding the wide-ranging assortment of the biblical descriptions of sin offers us a clearer view of the appalling character of sin. This makes sense theologically insofar as God names and describes Himself at different times in redemptive history as a way for us to know His character. Crucial in any discussion on the nature of sin is the undisputed biblical fact that sin is directly against a holy, righteous, unchangeably good God (Ps. 51:4). Sin is theocentric (Rom. 1:18-32), and thus illegal (Rom. 3:20). In this sense, it is anti-relational as we, the offenders, rise up in enmity against God, the offended.’ When we hate God, we as fellow image-bearers stand no chance in our natural disposition toward one another. The vocabulary of sin in the Scriptures is designed to help us understand what sin is and why it is a problem. (pp. 51-52)
Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sinby Cornelius Plantinga Jr. (Author)
Plantinga
My goal, then, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to evoke in us fear, hatred, and grief. Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss. For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint. (xiii)
Al Mohler in Gibson and Gibson
The project of eliminating sin as a meaningful category in our society has been intentional, in the sense that the modern mind is increasingly committed to structures of thought that eliminate any theological referent at all, and especially any notion of human moral responsibility combined with the inevitability of divine judgement. The great therapeutic and intellectual turns of the twentieth century have now given birth to the abundant confusions of the twenty-first century. We confront millions of human beings who lack a knowledge of the one true God and, quite inevitably, also lack a knowledge of themselves. One thing many moderns seem absolutely convinced of, is that whatever they may be, they are not sinners. The modern project is thus celebrated as an achievement of human liberation. We have now liberated ourselves from the repressive and unhealthy notion of sin, but the truth is, we are no happier. The liberation from sin has turned out to be far less fulfilling than its prophets will admit. Christians now face the challenge of contending for the reality of sin, not only as a meaningful category with therapeutic implications, but as an objective truth without which we can understand neither ourselves as individuals nor the reality of human society. Of course, this comes hand in hand with the truth that the entire Christian worldview based upon Holy Scripture is now terra incognita to millions of our neighbours…. (pp. 897-898)
Schuster
The doctrine of the Fall, as we have noted, has come upon rather hard times, and not without a measure of scholarly cause. But the Fall – whatever its existential reverberations in individual lives – we can at least picture as being safely remote in time and place. Discussions of sin, on the other hand, come with a disconcerting and intrusive immediacy that late twentieth and early twenty-first century society seems determined to hold at bay….
Not, of course, that we should lose sight of the labors and insights of those who have sensitized us to the devastating effects of structural and systemic evils, including oppression and discrimination in their myriad forms. Sin is not just a matter of small-scale personal nastiness. Nor would we deny that genetic and biochemical factors give some persons predispositions and vulnerabilities from which others are free. Nonetheless, loss of the category of sin at the individual level more surely robs us of dignity and of hope than does the most punishing “miserable sinner” theology of another age. After all, “miserable sinners” retain the status of those who have responsibility for their behavior in the prospects of a Savior who can deliver them. Those who are only victims of governments, cultures, psychology, or biology are shut up to whatever help compassion for their state may (or may not) evoke, whatever healing a new technology may provide, or whatever transformation the latest public reform efforts or private bootstrap operations may produce – a set of options that should not cheer the clear-eyed observer of human history. These efforts to protest individual innocence, that is, come at an extremely high – not to mention unbiblical – price.
To insist that the doctrine of the sin is an essential protection of human dignity is certainly not to deny that sin is, first and most basically, an evil…. (pp. 99, 101)
