[image error]In the latter part of the Fourth Century, a monk named Evagrius of Pontus compiled a list of eight sins that people commonly commit. He didn’t consider this to be an exhaustive catalog of sinful behavior. The eight actions Evagrius singled out were meant to represent the main categories under which all other sins might fall. They came to be known as “capital” sins. His list included gluttony, fornication, greed, sadness, anger, weariness, vainglory and pride. Later church leaders reduced the list to seven, reasoning that vainglory and pride were essentially the same.

No doubt some of the items in the old monk’s list seem odd to us. Hardly anybody I know would call sadness a sin, let alone a capital sin. When someone’s sadness is debilitating, we usually treat it as a disease. Likewise, gluttony seems to moderns to be a throwback to an age when food was scarce. We might think that it is unhealthy or perhaps rude. But we generally don’t consider it to be a sin. Indeed, we usually don’t think about it at all. I’ve only heard one sermon on gluttony in my life and that was from a guest speaker during a chapel service while I was a student in seminary. The athletically fit speaker told the audience that those of us who were overweight preached the gospel with our mouths but contradicted it with our lives (or more specifically, with our bodies). In the class that followed chapel several of us were eager to know what our professor, a man of some girth, thought of the message. “Give me a moment,” he said. “I am enjoying a Snickers bar.” He chewed for a while and then in a wry tone declared: “All I have to say is that Proverbs 11:25 says, ‘The liberal soul shall be made fat.’”

Weariness also seems out of place to most of us. After all, isn’t weariness just a consequence of hard work? The industrious person is more likely to consider it a badge of honor. We don’t even know what vainglory is, though we tend to recognize it in others. In those instances, we call it boasting. While we may be reluctant to categorize boasting as a sin, we do agree that it is bad form. Unless, of course, it appears on a resume. Fornication is still generally considered to be a sin. But hardly anybody commits it anymore. Instead, people “make love.” Love is widely regarded to be a good thing and for many people making love is simply part of the dating ritual. Those who stumble upon the Bible’s denunciation of this sin wonder what all the fuss is about.

Contrary to the famous line uttered by Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, most do not think that greed is good. But neither do they really view it as a sin. At worst, I suppose, they consider it to be impolite, at least when it is displayed publicly. As long as greed is not put on display, people look at it as either thriftiness or success.

If you read Facebook or drive the expressway, you already know that nobody believes that anger is a sin these days. We view it as an emotion. Actually, we now consider it to be a virtue, especially if it is exercised in the cultural or political sphere and is characterized as a “passion for justice.” Indeed, most of the sins in this list have been turned upside down, so that what the ancients once regarded as sin modern people have relabeled to be less than sin. In an age which has learned to call evil good and good evil, the seven deadly sins are now the seven deadly virtues.