What do Christians actually mean by sin?
Not a list of forbidden pleasures. The Hebrew word means missing — falling short of what something was for. Sin is the damage: to your relationship with God, between people, and inside yourself. That is why Christianity does not offer better behaviour as the cure. You do not treat a fracture with etiquette.
The word has been ruined by association. Most people hear sin and think of a church disapproving of enjoyable things — a Victorian list, mostly about bodies.
That is not what the word means, and the misunderstanding makes the whole of Christianity incomprehensible. If sin is a list of rules, then salvation is keeping them, and grace is unnecessary.
The word itself
The main Hebrew word, chata, means to miss. It is used of an archer whose arrow falls short, and of a road that fails to reach where it was going. The Greek equivalent works the same way.
So the first idea is not forbidden. It is missed — falling short of what something was for. A knife that will not cut has missed. A friendship that has curdled into something else has missed.
Applied to a person: not that you broke a regulation, but that you are not what you were made to be, and you know it.
Three kinds of damage
Read the Bible’s account and sin is never only between an individual and a rule book. It breaks in three directions at once.
With God. The relationship is the point, and it is the thing damaged first. Not a fine incurred — a turning away.
Between people. Every wrong you can name is a relationship broken: theft, betrayal, contempt, indifference to someone’s suffering. The commandments are mostly about what people do to each other.
Inside yourself. This one is the most familiar and the least discussed. The gap between the person you intended to be and the one who keeps showing up. Paul describes it exactly: the good I want to do, I do not do.
One writer’s definition is the best short one available: sin is shalom-breaking — the wrecking of the way things are supposed to be.
Why this changes the whole picture
If sin is rule-breaking, the fix is discipline. Try harder, do better, keep score.
If sin is damage, the fix is repair — and you cannot repair a relationship you broke by being polite about it, or heal yourself by resolving to be well.
That is why Christianity’s answer is not a self-improvement programme. It is a rescue and a healing, done from outside, because someone in a hole cannot be their own ladder.
Romans 7:19KJVFor the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.Why anyone would accept the diagnosis
The reasonable objection is that this is a religion inventing a disease so it can sell the cure.
Two things are worth putting against that. Nobody has to be taught the feeling. The sense of falling short of yourself is not a doctrine — it is the most ordinary human experience there is, and every philosophy has to say something about it.
And the account explains the shape of the world better than the alternatives. People are capable of enormous good and of horrors, often the same people. A story in which humans are basically fine struggles with the second half; a story in which they are worthless struggles with the first. Made for something, damaged, and repairable fits both.
Objections answered
Isn't this just religion making people feel guilty?
Guilt as a permanent condition is not what is on offer — that is the caricature, and sometimes churches have delivered it. The claim is a diagnosis followed immediately by a cure, and a diagnosis with no treatment attached would be cruel. The order matters: you are worse than you thought, and more loved than you hoped.
Who decides what counts as sin?
Not a committee, on this account, and not majority opinion either. If sin is falling short of what you were made for, then the standard is what you were made for — which comes from the maker, not from a vote. That is why Christians say God’s character rather than God’s preferences.
Some of the things called sins seem harmless.
Some things Christians have called sins were cultural additions, and Jesus spent a lot of his time attacking exactly that — people adding rules and calling them God’s. If a prohibition cannot be traced to something that damages a person or a relationship, it is worth asking where it came from.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that sin is universal, that it damages the person as well as offending God, that no one can repair it themselves, and that Christ’s work is the remedy.
Roman Catholic
Distinguishes mortal from venial sin by gravity, knowledge and consent, and locates the remedy in grace received through the sacraments.
Eastern Orthodox
Speaks less of guilt and more of sickness — sin as a disease of human nature inherited rather than a crime inherited, with salvation as healing.
Protestant
Emphasises the universality and seriousness of sin and that its remedy is received by faith rather than achieved.
Related questions
Inspired by Logos — "What Is Sin? Is Your Definition Missing the Mark?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
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