Patrick McCormick, C. M. Sin as Addiction. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989
McCormick’s historical discussion of the concepts used to talk about sin is enlightening:
Sin as stain or defilement is the problem to which most of the biblical book of Leviticus is devoted. This concept is “pre-ethical” because it does not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary actions. It lumps together mistreatment of other people, burying a dead person and having sex with one’s spouse (which in other passages is commanded, in order that humans may “be fruitful and multiply). It emphasizes the dreadful power of the Holy One and the danger posed to the individual and the community for even accidental “uncleanness.” The main reason to avoid sin as defilement is to avoid punishment for the individual or the community.
Sin as a violation of the divine law or command is a very common understanding of the problem. This involves “three basic assertions: (1) that sin is to be understood primarily in a juridical, even a penal context, (2) that the one who sins is the individual, and (3) that the act of sin is primarily one of willful rebellion, usually the rebellion of a lawless individual against the divinely sanctioned order.” It assumes that the sinner is completely free and able to choose to sin or to avoid sin. In situations of close alignment between religion and government, the secular law-enforcement agency has the power to pursue and punish the sinner, who in this situation is also a criminal. This model leads to the assumption that the religious institution(s) and the state are innocent and right and the individual sinner/criminal deserves punishment. McCormick observes that in Roman Catholic history the sacrament of penance reduced the work of the priest/confessor to identifying the category of sin being confessed and prescribing the penance required. When this penance included the recitation of prayers, prayer became equated in the mind of the layperson with punishment, obviously an unfortunate development. Another consequence of this level of legalism was that it clearly differentiates between sinners/bad people and good people who do not break the divine law.
Sin as personal changes the focus somewhat from the act of violating divine law to the person who makes a free and conscious choice to repudiate the will of God. The difference this makes is that it recognizes the rift in the relationship with God that sin causes and the ways in which sin alienates people from each other. This was a move away from legalism and toward the covenantal relationship between humans and God. It also represented a move away from the focus on punishment and the analysis necessary to determine penance. The resulting focus on intentionality and relationships resulted in a strong sense of the alienating results of sin. The growing emphasis after the 1960s on individualism and privacy rights has resulted in sin’s being seen as a private matter relating to individual persons. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that “sin is not experienced simply or primarily in an individualistic framework. Rather, the mystery of human sinfulness makes its presence felt in the interpersonal, familial, societal, national, ecclesial and global communities of humanity.”
In Romans 6, Paul emphasizes Sin as enslaving power that compromises human freedom. Family systems approaches to therapy point out that “it often happens that symptoms of emotional illness in the ‘identified patient’ function as a mask or release valve for serious structural dysfunctions in major task-areas of the family.” Similarly, the people we identify as individual sinners live and sin in the context of broken communities and societies. “To recognize the cooperative effort of numerous persons in situations of evil is not primarily or always necessarily to assign blame or culpability to some and innocence to others. Rather, it is to recognize that human responsibility exists in a variety of forms and on a number of levels.”
Sin as a spiral of habitual behavior can be seen already in the work of Thomas Aquinas’s emphasis on virtue and vice, focusing on character development. Aquinas recognized that “virtues and vices determine the actual course human life takes; they are in some sense determinants of human behavior. . . .In this light individual actions, while very important, are better understood as symptoms of a deeper and more pervasive decision to turn against the love of God, as symptoms of a more deeply rooted (and harder to reverse) stance against God.”
Habitual sin also seems to be like a disease, even a contagious one. My habitual sin affects all my relationships and, in the case of families, extends to the next generation. Sin also infects corporate bodies and bureaucratic units, which “can be evil, tending to function at a level of morality which we would never tolerate in individual persons.” It is sometimes objected that understanding sin as a disease relieves the sinner of responsibility. This is not the case. A person with an identified chronic disease has a responsibility to do everything she can to manage and, if possible, overcome the disease, whether her lifestyle caused the disease or she caught the disease from someone else. Everyone has habits, lifestyle choices, and prejudices that suck the life out of the self and others. There is no one who is not “infected” by the sin disease. There can be no distinction between sinners and non-sinners.
Sin as addiction is the model that McCormick wants to promote. From a variety of sources he offers a definition: “Addiction would seem to be a pathological relationship with a (normally) mood altering substance or process. Over the short term this substance or process promises the ‘user’ a consistent, dependable and repeatable solution to the anxieties and pains of life. . . A belief system builds up around the user’s relationship to his/her addiction and its increasing importance . . .More of the substance or process is required to kill the pain, a good deal of which is now being introduced by the very use of the addictive substance or process. A cycle is in place. The solution has become the problem, but continues to be employed as if it were a solution. In order to continue to use the addictive solution and maintain the addictive belief system the person must now engage in all sorts of denial and deception to ignore its counter-productivity and painfulness.”
Similarities between Sin as enslaving power (cf. Romans 6) and addiction:
A refusal to accept our own limitations. Substance addicts in denial assure themselves that they “can quit anytime.” (It is worth noting that relationship addicts, on the other hand, often believe and say that they “cannot live without” the person with whom they have a toxic relationship, which is just as false). Sin involves an addiction to some aspect of creation or culture. The sinner is “converted” away from exclusive allegiance to the Creator and replaces God at the center of one’s life with work, sex, child-rearing, professional advancement, perfectionism, criticism of others, appearance, one’s stock portfolio, consumerism, friendship, spouse, approval by others, ideology of the left or right, etc. McCormick recalls the 1980s bumper sticker: “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” This substitution is what the Bible calls “idolatry.” The person may be and often is religious, but the relationship with God becomes formalized into church attendance or moral superiority and presents no challenge to the primary life fixation.
“ . . . the addictive model [for understanding Sin] is not about guilt and innocence. It is not juridical but therapeutic, concerned primarily not with establishing culpability, rendering judgment and assigning punishment, but with treating, healing, and curing.”
Recovery from Sin is never complete for individuals or for groups, just as recovering alcoholics are too wise to say that they are completely “cured” of alcoholism. One of the values of the conception of Sin as addiction is that it reminds us that we are all sinners and in need of ongoing conversion to the Lordship of Christ. Such conversion does not consist of baptism or church membership or praying “the sinner’s prayer,” or “asking Jesus into one’s heart.” Conversion as recovery is also not an achievement. It begins with the recognition precisely that the sinner cannot control her compulsion to various idolatries and the surrender of the will to the Creator and Lord of life. McCormick identifies basic components of recovery from Sin/idolatry:
Prayer – the constant act of entrusting ourselves to God and refusing to judge and “fix” ourselves and others.
Honesty – “an unconditional commitment to the truth and to honesty,” which excludes self-justification and excuses.
Love – a posture of patience and forgiveness toward others and oneself.
Solidarity – maintaining vulnerable and transparent relationships within a community of trusted others for accountability and support.
Hope – taking one day at a time, doing “what can be done in cooperation with the grace and power of God” and refusing to be anxious about what cannot be changed.
Perfectionism is out of the question because the work of recovery is never complete. The recognition of and healing from one addictive idol makes possible the discovery of other behaviors that are self-destructive or destructive of life-giving community. McCormick closes with the observation that “In all of this recovery means a kind of patience that is hopeful and a kind of hope that is patient.”
For further investigation:
Pdf of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA here: www.aa.org/pages/en_US/twelve-steps-and-twelve-traditions
Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. Franciscan Media, 2011.
J. Keith Miller, A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth. Revised ed. HarperOne, 2011.
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing, 2010.
There are many more publications on this topic but these are some of the ones I have read.
The publications and groups of Celebrate Recovery: celebraterecovery.com represent one of the most widespread Christian recovery ministries. I have participated in several groups and found them to be safe and confidential. However, Christian gays and lesbians may find some of their videos and materials unhelpful, as some videos and printed materials assume that same-sex attraction is by definition a condition from which recovery is necessary.
For other Christian recovery materials and networks see The National Association for Christian Recovery: www.nacr.org/
McCormick’s historical discussion of the concepts used to talk about sin is enlightening:
Sin as stain or defilement is the problem to which most of the biblical book of Leviticus is devoted. This concept is “pre-ethical” because it does not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary actions. It lumps together mistreatment of other people, burying a dead person and having sex with one’s spouse (which in other passages is commanded, in order that humans may “be fruitful and multiply). It emphasizes the dreadful power of the Holy One and the danger posed to the individual and the community for even accidental “uncleanness.” The main reason to avoid sin as defilement is to avoid punishment for the individual or the community.
Sin as a violation of the divine law or command is a very common understanding of the problem. This involves “three basic assertions: (1) that sin is to be understood primarily in a juridical, even a penal context, (2) that the one who sins is the individual, and (3) that the act of sin is primarily one of willful rebellion, usually the rebellion of a lawless individual against the divinely sanctioned order.” It assumes that the sinner is completely free and able to choose to sin or to avoid sin. In situations of close alignment between religion and government, the secular law-enforcement agency has the power to pursue and punish the sinner, who in this situation is also a criminal. This model leads to the assumption that the religious institution(s) and the state are innocent and right and the individual sinner/criminal deserves punishment. McCormick observes that in Roman Catholic history the sacrament of penance reduced the work of the priest/confessor to identifying the category of sin being confessed and prescribing the penance required. When this penance included the recitation of prayers, prayer became equated in the mind of the layperson with punishment, obviously an unfortunate development. Another consequence of this level of legalism was that it clearly differentiates between sinners/bad people and good people who do not break the divine law.
Sin as personal changes the focus somewhat from the act of violating divine law to the person who makes a free and conscious choice to repudiate the will of God. The difference this makes is that it recognizes the rift in the relationship with God that sin causes and the ways in which sin alienates people from each other. This was a move away from legalism and toward the covenantal relationship between humans and God. It also represented a move away from the focus on punishment and the analysis necessary to determine penance. The resulting focus on intentionality and relationships resulted in a strong sense of the alienating results of sin. The growing emphasis after the 1960s on individualism and privacy rights has resulted in sin’s being seen as a private matter relating to individual persons. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that “sin is not experienced simply or primarily in an individualistic framework. Rather, the mystery of human sinfulness makes its presence felt in the interpersonal, familial, societal, national, ecclesial and global communities of humanity.”
In Romans 6, Paul emphasizes Sin as enslaving power that compromises human freedom. Family systems approaches to therapy point out that “it often happens that symptoms of emotional illness in the ‘identified patient’ function as a mask or release valve for serious structural dysfunctions in major task-areas of the family.” Similarly, the people we identify as individual sinners live and sin in the context of broken communities and societies. “To recognize the cooperative effort of numerous persons in situations of evil is not primarily or always necessarily to assign blame or culpability to some and innocence to others. Rather, it is to recognize that human responsibility exists in a variety of forms and on a number of levels.”
Sin as a spiral of habitual behavior can be seen already in the work of Thomas Aquinas’s emphasis on virtue and vice, focusing on character development. Aquinas recognized that “virtues and vices determine the actual course human life takes; they are in some sense determinants of human behavior. . . .In this light individual actions, while very important, are better understood as symptoms of a deeper and more pervasive decision to turn against the love of God, as symptoms of a more deeply rooted (and harder to reverse) stance against God.”
Habitual sin also seems to be like a disease, even a contagious one. My habitual sin affects all my relationships and, in the case of families, extends to the next generation. Sin also infects corporate bodies and bureaucratic units, which “can be evil, tending to function at a level of morality which we would never tolerate in individual persons.” It is sometimes objected that understanding sin as a disease relieves the sinner of responsibility. This is not the case. A person with an identified chronic disease has a responsibility to do everything she can to manage and, if possible, overcome the disease, whether her lifestyle caused the disease or she caught the disease from someone else. Everyone has habits, lifestyle choices, and prejudices that suck the life out of the self and others. There is no one who is not “infected” by the sin disease. There can be no distinction between sinners and non-sinners.
Sin as addiction is the model that McCormick wants to promote. From a variety of sources he offers a definition: “Addiction would seem to be a pathological relationship with a (normally) mood altering substance or process. Over the short term this substance or process promises the ‘user’ a consistent, dependable and repeatable solution to the anxieties and pains of life. . . A belief system builds up around the user’s relationship to his/her addiction and its increasing importance . . .More of the substance or process is required to kill the pain, a good deal of which is now being introduced by the very use of the addictive substance or process. A cycle is in place. The solution has become the problem, but continues to be employed as if it were a solution. In order to continue to use the addictive solution and maintain the addictive belief system the person must now engage in all sorts of denial and deception to ignore its counter-productivity and painfulness.”
Similarities between Sin as enslaving power (cf. Romans 6) and addiction:
A refusal to accept our own limitations. Substance addicts in denial assure themselves that they “can quit anytime.” (It is worth noting that relationship addicts, on the other hand, often believe and say that they “cannot live without” the person with whom they have a toxic relationship, which is just as false). Sin involves an addiction to some aspect of creation or culture. The sinner is “converted” away from exclusive allegiance to the Creator and replaces God at the center of one’s life with work, sex, child-rearing, professional advancement, perfectionism, criticism of others, appearance, one’s stock portfolio, consumerism, friendship, spouse, approval by others, ideology of the left or right, etc. McCormick recalls the 1980s bumper sticker: “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” This substitution is what the Bible calls “idolatry.” The person may be and often is religious, but the relationship with God becomes formalized into church attendance or moral superiority and presents no challenge to the primary life fixation.
“ . . . the addictive model [for understanding Sin] is not about guilt and innocence. It is not juridical but therapeutic, concerned primarily not with establishing culpability, rendering judgment and assigning punishment, but with treating, healing, and curing.”
Recovery from Sin is never complete for individuals or for groups, just as recovering alcoholics are too wise to say that they are completely “cured” of alcoholism. One of the values of the conception of Sin as addiction is that it reminds us that we are all sinners and in need of ongoing conversion to the Lordship of Christ. Such conversion does not consist of baptism or church membership or praying “the sinner’s prayer,” or “asking Jesus into one’s heart.” Conversion as recovery is also not an achievement. It begins with the recognition precisely that the sinner cannot control her compulsion to various idolatries and the surrender of the will to the Creator and Lord of life. McCormick identifies basic components of recovery from Sin/idolatry:
Prayer – the constant act of entrusting ourselves to God and refusing to judge and “fix” ourselves and others.
Honesty – “an unconditional commitment to the truth and to honesty,” which excludes self-justification and excuses.
Love – a posture of patience and forgiveness toward others and oneself.
Solidarity – maintaining vulnerable and transparent relationships within a community of trusted others for accountability and support.
Hope – taking one day at a time, doing “what can be done in cooperation with the grace and power of God” and refusing to be anxious about what cannot be changed.
Perfectionism is out of the question because the work of recovery is never complete. The recognition of and healing from one addictive idol makes possible the discovery of other behaviors that are self-destructive or destructive of life-giving community. McCormick closes with the observation that “In all of this recovery means a kind of patience that is hopeful and a kind of hope that is patient.”
For further investigation:
Pdf of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA here: www.aa.org/pages/en_US/twelve-steps-and-twelve-traditions
Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. Franciscan Media, 2011.
J. Keith Miller, A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth. Revised ed. HarperOne, 2011.
Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing, 2010.
There are many more publications on this topic but these are some of the ones I have read.
The publications and groups of Celebrate Recovery: celebraterecovery.com represent one of the most widespread Christian recovery ministries. I have participated in several groups and found them to be safe and confidential. However, Christian gays and lesbians may find some of their videos and materials unhelpful, as some videos and printed materials assume that same-sex attraction is by definition a condition from which recovery is necessary.
For other Christian recovery materials and networks see The National Association for Christian Recovery: www.nacr.org/