Varieties of sin

Christopher Schrock responds to my post on “materialist psychology” with this fascinating passage from A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (209-10)by Joel Beeke and Mark Jones. They are summarizing Thomas Goodwin’s An Unregenerate Man’s Guiltiness :

“Goodwin points out that human beings are constituted differently in body and soul. Their natural constitutions fuel particular sins: ‘as choler for anger, melancholy for settled wrath and repinings, sanguine for uncleanness.’ The soul and body bear an organic relation to each another, and so the things that are done in the body are never to be considered apart from the uncleanness of the soul; yet the soul acts in different ways because of the different types of bodies men and women are endowed with . . . .

“Thus, Goodwin claims that every person is ‘radically still inclined to all these [i.e., all kinds of sin], be the constitution of his body what it will, suppose never so indisposed to any of these sins; so as put that soul into another body, it would be as notoriously inclined to them as any other man is.’ In other words, Goodwin contends that the constitution of a person’s body has a decisive impact on the sins he commits. Moreover, the social standing of a person also has implications for the types of sins he commits: ‘Men of lower understanding are given to lust of the body, men of higher understandings to . . . a desire of honour and applause.’ Perhaps a change in one’s understanding or level of mental development—if Goodwin allows for that—through education would bring about a change in that person’s choice of sins to commit.

“Goodwin goes on to show that certain sins are more prevalent at different stages of life. A child possesses a heart that will be prone to certain sins only later in life, for example. Moreover, the lusts of individuals are drawn out according to their various callings. Judas stole because he was a sinner, but also because as treasurer he was presented with an opportunity to steal. Goodwin also calls attention to the role of God in restraining sin. ‘God oftentimes stops and plugs up the holes as he pleaseth, that they may not run out at every hole’ (Est. 5:10). To answer the objection that certain sins are contrary to each other and so men are not given to all types of covetousness, Goodwin explains that people are inclined to different sins at different times in their lives. So the prodigal youth may become covetous in his old age. It is also true that some people have an antipathy to certain sins, but this antipathy is not moral but physical, ‘either because their bodies will not bear it, or for some other incommodity they find in it.’ Finally, not all people commit the sin against the Holy Spirit because this sin has a further qualification attached to it, namely the sinner must have ‘first had supernatural light, against which he sinned’ (Heb. 10:26; John 9:41). The unregenerate man, then, is capable of every kind of sin. Context, time, circumstance, and other factors, may account for why he or she may or may not commit certain sins. But, make no mistake, forGoodwin and his Puritan contemporaries, there is no question but that they would have agreed with Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s (1813-1843) famous declaration that ‘the seeds of all sins are in my heart.’”