Recently a good friend asked me if people could sin without knowing it. I’m inclined to not only say yes, but to argue that we are perpetually sinning without knowing it. In fact, part of the reason human beings can’t stop sinning on our own is because we don’t know when we’ve sinned.

Our knowledge as human beings is extremely limited. We try to make sense of all the information that we have by designing systems of thought, but inevitably they fall short and miss part of the picture. Reinhold Niebuhr puts it well, saying “All human knowledge is tainted with an ‘ideological’ taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be final and ultimate knowledge”

We like to think we’ve eaten the apple and possess the knowledge of Good and Evil. But as it turns out, we haven’t. The entire lesson of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis is that God is God and human beings are not. Put in context and taken seriously but not literally, the story of the Temptation and the Fall is better read not as a past event, but rather as a constant and ongoing temptation. As human beings, we want to have the knowledge of good and evil – we would like to be God.

In the Gospels (particularly Matthew) Jesus is extremely critical of those who think they have the rules all figured out. In all of the Gospels he makes it clear that he is establishing something new, something that is turning the established order upside down.

Of course, all of this epistemic humility can lead to a very real problem, the complete paralysis of action. One of the greatest insights of Luther was the paradoxical notion that human beings are simultaneously saints and sinners. Since we are sinners, we can never be sure that what we are doing is correct; but since we are saints, we believe that God is at work in history to bring good out of our actions.

Niebuhr reformulates this into a more applicable test of religious tolerance, “The test is twofold and includes both the ability to hold vital convictions which lead to action; and also the capacity to preserve the spirit of forgiveness toward those who offend us by holding convictions which seem untrue to us.”

Tolerance is sometimes misunderstood as a form of relativism, but in truth, in order to tolerate something one must first suppose it to be wrong or, at a minimum, undesirable. This kind of tolerance is the true measure of our ability to act as saint and sinner; to be able to hold a belief that demands action on our part while at the same time being able to tolerate those who hold opposing beliefs.

For me, this tolerance comes in part from the recognition that all of us are sinners, whether we know it or not. It comes from a reliance on the cornerstone of Lutheran theology: grace. In order to continue to act in spite of my tendency towards sin I must rely on grace and forgiveness. Niebuhr sums it up beautifully:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.