Dr Paul Allen

Among today’s evangelicals, it has become virtually commonplace for us to talk as if all sins render us equally guilty before God. Perhaps we have bristled at a previous generation’s tendency to identify one or two sins as particularly hell-deserving. Perhaps we are looking for a way to winsomely engage a society allergic to the idea of sin. My guess is that many of us just want to do justice to Scripture’s universal condemnation of human sinfulness. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Should we really insist that some have sinned worse and fallen farther? But then we listen to Jesus and find, as usual, that like so many tables in the temple courts, he turns over our assumptions. Although Jesus warns us not to make hasty, simplistic conclusions about who the “worse sinners” are (Luke 13:1–5), he also warns us that some sinners, if they do not repent, will face “the greater condemnation” (Luke 20:47). He teaches that some will receive a comparat

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 Protestantism. We