Dr Paul Allen

Author: RC Sproul. Historically speaking, both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have understood that there are degrees of sin. The Roman Catholic church makes a distinction between mortal and venial sin. The point of that distinction is that there are some sins so gross, heinous, and serious that the actual commission of those sins is mortal in the sense that it kills the grace of justification that resides in the soul of the believer. In their theology, not every sin is devastating to that degree. There are some real sins that are venial sins. These are less serious sins in terms of their consequences, but they don't have the justification-killing capacity that mortal sins have. Many Evangelical Protestants have rejected the idea of degrees of sin because they know that the Protestant Reformation rejected the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sins. As a result, they've jumped to the conclusion that there are no distinctions between sins in Protesta...

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, a painting by John Martin (painter), died 1854, thus 100 years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Sin can be pictured as an archer releasing an arrow from his bow and missing the target. It is not, of course, that failure to hit the bull's-eye in target shooting is a grave moral matter. Rather, the simplest biblical definition of sin is "to miss the mark." In biblical terms, the mark that is missed is not a target filled with straw; it is the mark or "norm" of God's law . God's law expresses His own righteousness and is the ultimate standard for our behavior. When we miss achieving this standard, we sin. The Bible speaks of the universality of sin in terms of missing the mark of God 's glory. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" ( Romans 3:23 ). To say that "nobody's perfect" or "to err is human" is to acknowledge the universality of sin. We are all sinners in...