Peter Wales thinks the besetting sin of our age…

…is blindness to the fall. I partly agree and partly disagree.

Certainly we are an age that doesn’t like to acknowledge sin against You Know Who, because that would entail acknowledging You Know Who. So yeah, you get all kinds of rubbish about Following Your Bliss and moral relativism and so forth.

But we are, nonetheless, acutely an age that is aware of sin too. It’s just that the sin we are aware of belongs to Those People over There–Nazis, pedophiles, racists, child pornographers, wife beaters–whoever the moral relativist’s enlightened peers have decided is Beyond the Pale. Those people are not merely sinners but are human devils quite beyond redemption or forgiveness and eligible for nothing but death.

Having rejected God, our age does not get freedom from sin. What it gets is sin without the hope of forgiveness or redemption. You can’t wish sin away. It continues to be real anyway. But we try to wish it away by excusing sin beyond the bounds of common sense–and then whipsaw into the total refusal of forgiveness for sin we cannot invent an excuse for. Moral relativists, when they stop being moral relativists, are among the most merciless moralists on planet earth, as angry at the Church for forgiving sins as for warning of sin. The paradox of the gospel, meanwhile, is that God warns of sin but also forgives it readily while the world denies sin beyond all sanity and, in the end, forgives no sins.