". . . No matter what part of the world we come from or what strata of society we represent, we must all admit our own shortcoming—that we only feel exonerated when we gauge our level of saintliness in comparison to someone else of lesser esteem."
One of the most powerful stories I have heard on the nature of the human heart is told by Malcolm Mudderidge. Working as a journalist in India, he left his residence one evening to go to a nearby river for a swim. As he entered the water, across the river he saw an Indian woman from the nearby village who had come to have her bath. Muggeridge impulsively felt the allurement of the moment, and temptation stormed into his mind. He had lived with this kind of struggle for years but had somehow fought it off in honour of his commitment to his wife, Kitty. On this occasion, however, he wondered if he could cross the line of marital fidelity. He struggled just for a moment and then swam furiously toward the woman, literally trying to outdistance his conscience. His mind fed him the fantasy that stolen waters would be sweet, and he swam the harder for it. Now he was just two or three feet away from her, and as he emerged from the water, any emotion that may have gripped him paled into significance when compared with the devastation that shattered him as he looked at her. "She was old and hideous . . . and her skin was wrinkled and, worst of all, she was a leper. . . . This creature grinned at me, showing a toothless mask." The experience left Mudderidge trembling and muttering under his breath, "What a dirty lecherous woman!" But then the rude shock of it dawned upon him—it was not the woman who was lecherous; it was his own heart.
This is precisely the teaching of Christ's message. When we look into the human heart we see the lust, the greed, the hate, the pride, the anger, and the jealousness that are so destructive. This is the heart of the human predicament, and the Scriptures call this condition sin.
". . . Jesus talked about that, the heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it?"
G.K. Chesterton said that there are many, many angles at which one can fall but only one angle at which one can stand straight. If we do not understand sin, humanity will forever test the angles. The worst effect of sin, according to Christ, is manifested not in pain or poverty or bodily defacement but rather, in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy loves, the low ideals, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.
If you reject this concept of sin as a Christian imposition upon our freedom, unsustained by modern psychological theory, listen now to these surprising words from Professor Hobart Mowrer, one-time president of the American Psychological Association, who taught at both Harvard and Yale. In an article in the American Psychologist in 1960 he said:
For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense, that is, to have excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost. This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in existentialism, which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics, themselves, we find ourselves asking, "Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?"
In reaction to the state of near limbo into which we have drifted, we have become suddenly aware, once again, of the problem of values and of their centrality in the human enterprise. This trend is clearly apparent in the programs at our recent professional meetings, in journal articles, and to some extent already in our elementary textbooks. Something very basic is obviously happening to psychologists and their self image.
Mowrer then quotes Anna Russell in a psychiatric folk song:
At three I had a feeling of
Ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follows naturally
I poisoned all my lovers.
But now I'm happy I have learned
The lesson this has taught,
That everything I do that's wrong
Is someone else's fault.
Can there be a clearer statement on the condition of the human heart? To be sure, Mowrer would not want to be perceived as espousing a biblical doctrine of sin. (Unfortunately, as many of you know, Mowrer's own life ended in suicide.) But he does confess outrightly that the humanistic trivializing of wrongdoing is utterly bankrupt and incapable of expressing our real human predicament. An admission such as this from one not sympathetic to Christianity signifies that the attempt to portray mankind without any transcendent accountability has inexorably contributed to our individual sense of loss and alienation. And once that feeling of trangement is etched upon our consciences, we are alienated not only from God, but even from ourselves and ultimately, from our fellow human beings.
Reference: Can Man Live Without God, Pages 136-138
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