Are We Yet Sinners? The Argument That Misses Its Target

There is a certain kind of argument that feels satisfying not because it is particularly strong, but because it is remarkably tidy. It takes something complex and layered, smooths out the rough edges, and presents a streamlined version that seems almost self-evidently true. It dissolves discomfort, leaving us with a cleaner, more manageable picture of ourselves and our place in the world.

Apparently the idea “we are sinners” is not really biblical at all. C. J. Cornthwaite speaks with calm confidence that this idea is on shaky ground, and is a doctrine that developed relatively late. Its something that is psychologically damaging, theologically unnecessary, and best left behind in favour of something more liberating. The voice of temptation calls out, "No, you are not a sinner." The appeal is obvious: who wouldn’t want to shake off a burden that has weighed heavily on so many for centuries?

However, on close examination his argument is malconcieved at nearly every crucial point. It feels persuasive only because it quietly rearranges the terms of the debate.

Collapsing the Categories

The first sleight of hand involves collapsing distinct categories into one blurry whole. Cornthwaite carelessly moves between at least four distinct ideas treating them as they were the same idea.

1. “Original sin” (often meaning inherited guilt)

2. A “sinful nature” (a condition or disposition)

3. “Being a sinner” (a way of describing a person)

4. “Doing sinful things” (individual actions)

But these are not the idea. And they have never been interchangable.

Think of how we talk about human failure in everyday life. A person might occasionally tell a white lie (an individual action), yet we also recognise when someone has developed a habitual tendency toward dishonesty (a disposition or “nature”). We might describe that person as “a liar” in a meaningful way without claiming they were born guilty of every lie ever told. Careful thinkers—whether theologians or simply observant friends—have long kept these conceptions separate.

In the conversation about sin, however, these layers are often flattened. “Original sin” gets bundled together with the idea of a “sinful nature” (a deep-seated condition or bent), the descriptive label “sinner,” and the plain reality of committing sinful acts. Critique one element—say, the notion that guilt is passed down like eye colour is inherited—and suddenly the entire framework is declared suspect.

That leap, however, does not logically follow. One can reasonably question a particular formulation of inherited guilt while still recognising that all human beings sin, that this failure is both universal and stubbornly persistent, and that “sinner” remains a truthful way to describe our shared condition. The Christian tradition has always made room for these careful distinctions, and to collapse them is not to only to step outside the tradition, but to create an easy target for deconstruction—like knocking over a cardboard cutout of the Empire State Building instead of engaging the actual structure it represents.

Reducing Sin to Behaviour

Once the categories have been flattened, a second move becomes almost effortless: sin is quietly reduced to mere behaviour. We hear that sin simply means “missing the mark,” like an archer whose arrow falls short of the bullseye. There is real truth here, of course. Sin certainly includes concrete actions—things we do or fail to do that fall short of the glory of God (Roman 3:23), his goodness, love, and justice. Think of the parent who snaps at their child after a long day, the friend who gossips because it feels good in the moment, or the driver who cuts someone off in traffic out of impatience. These are real moral failures, and naming them as sin is neither harsh nor abstract.

Yet something vital is left unsaid in this behavioural account. In the New Testament, especially in Paul’s letter to the Romans, sin is not portrayed merely as occasional moral slips.

“So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me… For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out… For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:17–20)

Cornthwaite reduces sin to what we do, but the Bible treats sin as something that has hold of us. Sin appears in Roman 1-8 as something deeper: a condition, even a power, that shapes and explains human behaviour. Paul does not write as if people sometimes trip up morally and could easily do better if they just tried harder. He describes a pervasive reality in which, left to ourselves, we consistently fail to live as we were made to. It is not “people sometimes do bad things,” but something closer to “people cannot, on their own, consistently do otherwise.” This is a far more sobering diagnosis.

Reducing sin to isolated actions leaves us with an uncomfortable question we cannot easily answer: why is moral failure not occasional but universal? Why does it show up across every culture, every level of education, every system of ethics or self-improvement? Why does greater self-awareness or better upbringing so often fail to fix it? Cornthwaite affirms “we all miss the mark” and do so continually, but this merely descriptive—it tells us what happens. He lacks the fuller Christian account that helps to explain why. He has universal wrongdoing with no underlying condition. This is to watch every person in the room grow pale and sweat and insist there is no sickness—just a coincidence of unrelated symptoms. It starts to look less like honest observation and more like a determined avoidance of the obvious.

Telling a Convenient History

The final piece of the argument is a simplified historical narrative that sounds plausible enough to stick. According to this story, the early church knew nothing of “original sin.” Then Augustine of Hippo arrived, burdened by his own personal struggles, influenced by questionable philosophy and perhaps a poor translation of Scripture. He invented the doctrine, the Western church adopted it, and we have been living with this harmful inheritance ever since. It is a neat tale: one man, one moment, one problem we can now discard.

But history is never that tidy. Long before Augustine, early Christian thinkers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexandria were already describing humanity as profoundly corrupted, subject to death, sliding toward non-being (a profound ontological crisis) and incapable of restoring itself through its own efforts, requiring divine intervention.

Irenaeus of Lyons

From Against Heresies:

“Man… having been led captive by sin, and being held under the power of death, could not of himself return to incorruption.”

And elsewhere:

“Through the disobedience of one man who was originally moulded from virgin soil, the many were made sinners and forfeited life.”

Athanasius of Alexandria

From On the Incarnation:

“Men… had turned from eternal things to things corruptible, and had become the cause of their own corruption in death.”

And more forcefully:

“For having transgressed the commandment, they were returning to their natural state, so that as they had come into being out of non-existence, so also they were on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.”

And crucially:

“It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption… For this would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.”

They did not all use Augustine’s precise vocabulary, nor did they frame the issue identically. Yet the core conviction runs through their writings: something has gone deeply wrong with the human condition at a structural level. This is not a thin account of moral failure—it is a thick account of human ruin.

This is not a late Western invention but part of a shared inheritance reaching back to the earliest centuries. The simplified story reduces a rich, multi-voiced tradition to a single dismissible origin point. It replaces careful theological argument with mere genealogy: “This idea came from there, therefore we can set it aside.” But ideas are not refuted simply by tracing their influences. Explaining Augustine’s background is not the same as engaging his actual claims. That's the genetic fallacy—dismissing a claim based on where it came from rather than whether it is true. Claims stand or fall on whether they make coherent sense of the biblical text, of moral experience, and of the stubborn realities of human life.

Drawing the Threads Together

When we place these three moves together, the overall strategy comes into focus. Categories are collapsed so that a critique of one part discredits the whole. Sin is reduced to surface-level behaviour so that deeper explanations seem unnecessary. History is simplified so that the idea appears late, contingent, and therefore disposable. With the groundwork quietly rearranged, the conclusion feels almost inevitable: we don’t really need this uncomfortable notion of sin. We can move on.

The irony is difficult to ignore. If sin, at its most basic level, means “missing the mark,” then this very argument may itself be an instance of it—not in a crude moral sense, but in an intellectual one. It aims squarely at Christianity’s understanding of human sinfulness. It simply does not hit the target.

Far from being a burden to discard, the Christian account of sin offers a sobering yet ultimately hopeful diagnosis. It refuses to flatter us with easy optimism about human nature, yet it also refuses to leave us there. By naming the depth of the problem, it opens the door to a deeper solution—one that addresses not just our actions, but the condition from which those actions flow. In a world full of tidy arguments that simplify away our discomfort, this older, more realistic vision still has the power to ring true to lived experience. It may not feel immediately liberating, but it has the rare virtue of actually describing the world—and us—as we really are.