I am a sinner. I don’t deny it. But most of the time I don’t
think much about it either. I don’t seem to obsess about sin the way the
ancients used to, at least not about my own sins. I  don’t punish myself or go to extreme measures
to fight sin off. Most of the time, my sin feels more like a low-grade fever
more than it does a raging fire. Its presence is an ongoing irritation that may
hinder me from being my best, but it doesn’t keep me from functioning. Sin
doesn’t bother me that much either. If anything, the fact that I am a sinner
serves as a kind of escape clause when things go badly. “What did you think
would happen?” I want to say. “I am a fallen person living in a fallen world.
Of course, I went off the rails.”

The fact that we are sinners is one of the few religious concepts that a majority of people agree upon. Most people identify with the label sinner. I think we actually derive a measure of comfort from the assertion. We are strangely comforted by sin’s universal presence. For some of us, the comfort we take in knowing that we all sin is the kind that a bad student might take from the class curve. We reason that if sin is normal, then we are normal. Even if there is something wrong with us, we can at least say that it is only your average, garden variety of wrong. Everybody suffers from it. Surely God won’t penalize everybody?

The ancients weren’t as sanguine about the subject. The
early Christian monastics went into the wilderness not only to pursue holiness
but to make a study of their sinfulness. Those early Christians analyzed sin
and categorized the many ways it manifests itself. They were interested not
only in identifying the specific acts that should be regarded as sinful but
wanted to understand the internal dynamics which shaped sinful behavior.

Why do we think so differently? One reason is that we have
very different notions about virtue. Most moderns don’t think much about virtue
at all. The word seems too out of date. Virtue sounds more like something our
Victorian great-grandparents would have been concerned about. The notion of
virtue is indeed an ancient one. The Greek philosopher Aristotle saw virtue as
the pattern of right behavior that characterized a person. Virtue is a habit of
life that moves in the right direction. Vice is the same, only moving in the
opposite direction.

But even if the term seems archaic, the idea of virtue is
not as old fashioned as we might think. Not if we understand virtue as a
preferred pattern of life. We may have dropped the philosophical language as a
culture, but we still have strong feelings about the way people should live. Theologian
James K. A. Smith captures this when he defines virtue as “an ultimate vision
of the good life.”

We may not talk about virtue much, but we believe in it. If
you doubt this, spend a few hours reading through the opinions expressed on
your favorite social media feed. What is all that outrage about? More often
than not, it is about virtue or the failure of virtue. We may not all agree on
the standard but our vision of “the good life” is clear enough that we
regularly criticize those who don’t measure up to that vision. Contemporary
interest in virtue seems to be primarily negative. Our ideas about what is good
do not necessarily serve as a basis for self-examination and personal
improvement. Often they merely provide the grounds for carping against others we
perceive to have fallen short.

Others of us treat sin the same way we do high cholesterol
or obesity. We know that if we ignore it,