The Sinner and the Victim
Over the course of the past century, Christian theology has increasingly witnessed the rise of victim-oriented soteriologies. The plight of victims, variously specified and defined, has been regarded by prominent theologians as the central soteriological problem. It can scarcely be denied that the bloody history of the 20th century has brought the plight of victims to the fore. Nor can it be denied that Christians have too often seemed ill-equipped to bring the plight of victims, especially victims of institutional oppression and social injustice, clearly into focus for themselves so that reasonable and faithful remedies might be sought. Victim-oriented soteriologies have undoubtedly made an important contribution to a better understanding of the church’s social responsibility.
Polarizations and animosities developed, however, to the extent that the plight of victims displaced the soteriological plight of sinners, or even eclipsed it. Victim-oriented soteriologies tended to define the meaning of sin entirely in terms of victimization. In effect, sin ceased to be a universal category. With their polar opposition between victims and perpetrators, victim-oriented soteriologies arguably displayed a logic with sectarian tendencies.
The task of ecclesial theology in this situation is to dispel polarization by letting central truths be central, and lesser truths be lesser, but in each case letting truth be truth. No reason exists why the cross as atonement for sin should be viewed as logically incompatible with the cross as divine solidarity with the oppressed.
1. “The sinner” is a universal category while “the victim” is a limited or circumscribed category.
Sin is seen as a universal category throughout Holy Scripture. Perhaps the Bible’s most sustained indictment against it is found in the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Apostle seals his harrowing argument by quoting from the Psalms.1
By contrast, “the victim” as a social category is clearly limited in scope. Not all persons are victims of social injustice.2 By definition, if there are social or political classes of victims, there are also victimizers over against them, regardless of whether they operate at a level that is more individual or more cultural and institutional. The poor, for example, are often victims of oppression and exploitation by the rich. Lies go hand in hand with violence, and negative stereotyping accompanies victimization.
The plight of the sinner is fraught with mystery in a way that the plight of the victim is not.
All victims are sinners, but not all sinners are victims. Indeed, some sinners, far from being victims, are beneficiaries of social injustice while others are (guilty) bystanders. What the victim qua victim needs is justice while what the sinner qua sinner needs is a Savior.
2. Sinners, who undertake evil, are tainted by an unshakable guilt, while victims, who undergo evil, retain a basic innocence.
Sinners are those who undertake evil, whereas victims of injustice are those who undergo evil at the hands of others. The difference between “sin” and “victimization” is the difference between wrongdoing and innocent suffering.
There is a sense in which “victimization” always involves innocence. All victims are sinners, but only insofar as they share in the universal human plight. The victim qua victim, however, is a victim, not a sinner. It is essential not to blame the victim for the plight of being a victim. Blaming the victim is a well-known ploy of the oppressor. It is an all-too-familiar tactic, for example, in cases of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. Victims are constantly encouraged by the powerful to enlist in their own oppression by blaming themselves.
Perpetrators qua perpetrators, and victims qua victims, both need the deliverances of grace, though not necessarily in the same ways. Insofar as they are categorically sinners, however, they both need grace and repentance in exactly the same ways. In this sense sin is the great equalizer.
3. The plight of the sinner is fraught with mystery in a way that the plight of the victim is not.
Discourse about human sinfulness is necessarily a broken discourse. Sin defies ordinary modes of comprehension. Almost everything about it is opaque. Its origins, its depths and its consequences are strange, sinister and frightening. Without a conscious effort, under the influence of grace, the temptation to domesticate sin can scarcely be resisted. Sin is domesticated whenever it is portrayed as being more intelligible and less severe than it is.
Sin is at once a brute fact and a dark mystery. Its eerie presence in every aspect of human life is unnerving. Although it may not be surprising that sinners live in a state of denial about their plight, even their denial can be discomfiting. There is nothing more characteristic of sin than self-deception.
A basic difference thus emerges between the sinner and the victim. Because it involves the corruption of the human heart, sin is both radical and universal. Yet while all human beings share in this corruption, no one is a victim by nature. Being a sinner is a fundamental condition whereas being a victim is an accidental property.
The plight of the victim is therefore distinct from the mystery of sin. Victimization is neither universal nor radical nor irreversible in the specific ways that sin is. God condemns sin while extending compassion to the victims. A righteous and merciful God cannot possibly condone sin, but for the same reason this God takes victims of injustice to heart.
4. Sin is a theological category whereas victimization is a sociopolitical (and psychological) category.
We now come to the heart of the matter. A difference in kind is mainly what distinguishes the sinner from the victim. All sin is against God, and some sin is exclusively against God. Sin, it should be emphasized, is not primarily a moral category, but a theological and spiritual category. It pertains first of all to our relationship with God (the vertical dimension), and only in consequence to our relationships with one another (the horizontal dimension). Sin (vertically) is the great spiritual disorder (the tap root), from which all our social and moral disorders arise (lateral roots).
Sin is at once a brute fact and a dark mystery. Its eerie presence in every aspect of human life is unnerving.
Sin in its vertical or Godward vector manifests itself in the following: unbelief, spiritual blindness, idolatry (i.e., worshipping something as God which is not God, especially worshipping that which makes for death); religious indifference; rebellion against God’s will; disordered desires — loving the wrong things, loving the right things wrongly, not loving God above all else, loving ourselves at the expense of God and our neighbors (self-seeking); not trusting God to meet all our needs (Phil. 4:19) while denying God’s grace as sufficient for us (2 Cor. 12:9); a sense of entitlement and resentment toward God as opposed to a proper fear and gratitude; manipulating God through religion (not least in politics); turning from God through anxiety and despair; treating God merely as an instrumental value (as a means to our ends) rather than as the Highest Good (summum bonum) by whom all other goods are contained, relativized and judged.
Note that sin is not primarily estrangement. It is primarily a matter of enmity toward God. Although sin is sometimes defined as “missing the mark,” this idea, though not entirely wrong, remains at a superficial level. It overlooks the weightier matter of sin as rebellion against God and estrangement from him. Sin is not like a failure in archery. It is a deep-seated corruption of the heart, the hand and the mind.
Social injustice, on the other hand, is an intolerable form of moral evil. It operates at the horizontal rather than the vertical level. All sins against human beings are also sins against God, but some sins against God are not necessarily sins against human beings. If reductionism and confusion are to be avoided, these aspects need to be kept distinct.
5. The remedy for the sinner lies in the Gospel whereas the remedy for the victim requires works of the Law.
Sin needs a salvation beyond human powers to effect. Victimization, on the other hand, demands remedies that can be humanly achieved. Only God can save us from our sins, but victims and their allies can unite to rectify social wrongs. This is a far-reaching difference between the sinner and the victim. The remedies stand in inverse proportion, so to speak, to the maladies. Whereas the malady of sin is active, its remedy is a gift to be received. For victims of injustice, on the other hand, the situation is much the reverse. The malady is inflicted, but the remedy depends on concerted social action.
The deliverance of victims from injustice, on the other hand, is not essentially a gift but a task, and an arduous one at that. Whereas the deliverance of the sinner moves, as it were, from the active to the passive (from complicity to receptivity), the deliverance of the victim moves from the passive to the active (from affliction to resistance). Sinners cannot save themselves through works of the law, but works of the law are exactly what victims of injustice need. For victims to be delivered from their sorry condition, their works, in concert with others, are indispensable.
Social responsibility is required of the faithful who know they have been delivered from sin by grace. Obedience to God is inseparable from resistance to structural injustice. Gratitude for grace means solidarity with the poor and the oppressed.
6. The sinner’s peril and hope are eternal whereas those of the victim are temporal.
Because all sin is essentially against God, its peril and hope have to do with eternal life. Victimization, by contrast, is more nearly social and political, so its peril and hope are correspondingly this-worldly. The difference between the sinner and the victim emerges sharply at this point.
The sinner’s peril points to divine judgment and eternal loss. It is because sin represents a shattered relationship with God that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23) — and this is necessarily so. The death dealt by sin is spiritual and eternal, because it means estrangement from God as the Fountain of life. To be cut off from God can only mean endless misery.
The victim’s peril, on the other hand, is often a very present suffering in time of trouble. It finds little relief in human history. God’s solidarity with the oppressed does not prevent them from dying in untold numbers while seeing little justice in their lives. The temporal hopes of the victims, despite occasional and hard-won progress, are disappointed more often than not. Even the most inspiring social victories — intrinsically good and well worth attaining — leave deeper questions in their train.
If there is a hope for history’s mangled victims, not to mention for socially reprehensible believers, and even for the impenitent to find final repentance, then grace must have the last word. The promise of the Gospel is that all our miseries are no match for the triumph of Christ.
In the resurrection of the Crucified Savior, the hope of the sinner and of the victim are one. “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
1. All scripture passages are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
2. In this essay I am thinking about victims of systematic, social injustice, not isolated cases, or more or less random acts of victimization. This approach is in line with victim-oriented soteriologies.
George Hunsinger is is the McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned his degrees at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. A leading expert on Karl Barth, he was the 2010 recipient of the international Karl Barth Prize. He serves as an ordained Presbyterian minister, the founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (2006), and a delegate to the official Reformed/Roman Catholic International Dialogue (2011–2017). He is interested in “generous orthodoxy” as a way of overcoming the historic liberal/conservative impasse in modern Protestant theology.
This article is taken from from George Hunsinger, “The Sinner and the Victim.” T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin. Ed. Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. 433–450 by the author’s permission.