Are All Sins Equal in Orthodoxy?
Yes and no: in Orthodoxy all sins make us sinners in need of God's mercy, yet they are not equal in culpability. St. James (echoing Deuteronomy) teaches that a single breach shows our need for salvation, while pastoral tradition and St. Paul stress differences of intent, knowledge, and action. Spiritual fathers measure degree and apply mercy so healing and amendment can follow.
Note: This article is an automatically generated transcript of an audio lecture. It was transcribed and lightly reworded for readability using automated tools, so it does not reproduce the speaker’s exact words. For the original, listen to the recording linked below.
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Key takeaways:
- All sins make a person a transgressor and require God's mercy and salvation
- Sins grow from thought to word to deed, increasing culpability as they mature
- Knowledge, intent, and spiritual maturity alter the seriousness of a sin
- Spiritual fathers discern degree of guilt for appropriate pastoral penance
- Mercy should govern Christian response—mercy triumphs over strict judgment
James, Deuteronomy, and the equality of sin
Are all sins equal? Are there degrees of sin? This is a great question. There's a text in the New Testament in St. James's epistle that confuses many people on this subject. It's from chapter 2, verse 10: "Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all." What does this text mean? Does it mean that if you commit a single sin you are guilty of everything? The question can be answered this way: yes and no.
From one perspective, one single sin, one single violation of the law, makes you a transgressor of the law. It makes you a sinner. So in the sense of "are all sins equal," if the referent is equal with regards to what? If the referent is equal with regards to making a person a sinner, making a person subject to death, placing a person in a condition in which he or she needs to be saved, the answer is absolutely yes. All sins are equal in that regard.
Whether you commit a hundred sins a year or 10 million sins a year, like me, we are absolutely equal with regard to being in the grip of death and being liable to terrible judgment for our sins. As Saint Paul says, "The wages of sin is death." He didn't say the wages of many, many sins is death. He said the wages of sin, sin itself. And unfortunately for us, we who do many sins— all of us—a single sin manifests the fact that we are sinners. We are sinners. Death is our future unless we have one above death, the conqueror of death, who is able to deliver us.
This text that James is referring to comes from Deuteronomy. At the end of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, the holy prophet and God-seer Moses prepares the people to enter the promised land. They have completed their wilderness wanderings and are getting ready to enter the land. He has them write the law in great detail, then stand between the mountains with the blessings and the curses on both sides. He reads the law, blessing those who will keep the word of God and cursing those who violate it, and the people participate in this blessing-and-cursing covenant renewal in order to promise themselves that they will be faithful to God. You show your faithfulness by obedience; love is shown by keeping the words of God.
In fact, in that text, in Deuteronomy 27, verse 26, you find these words: "Cursed is the man that does not confirm all of the law by doing it." This is what James is referring to in chapter 2. Saint Paul also refers to this text in his epistle to the Galatians, and he uses it in Galatians 3:10: "For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law to perform them.'"
Saint Paul is making the point that there is no standing before God by our own deeds. We do not have our standing; we are not accepted into God's family, we are not justified, we are not put in a right relationship with God by our own deeds. Self-righteousness has no place in the Christian life. Works-righteousness has no place in the Christian life. In fact, if we start thinking that our relationship with God is built upon us being "pretty good people," we are manifesting that we have a very, very fake and unstable relationship with God. May God help us to banish that language from our vocabulary. May we never speak such words of madness as, "Oh, I'm a pretty good person, really, really." There is one who is good, he who is in heaven, and he makes people good by his grace—holy and beautiful and loving. But we, dear ones, live by the mercy of God.
How sins vary by stage and manifestation
So the answer to the question, are all sins equal? Are there degrees of sin? First, the answer, I think, is yes. All sins are equal in the sense that all sins make us transgressors of the law, in great need of the mercy of God, liable to death and in need of a Savior. But having said that, with a different referent—this time comparing sin with sin—the answer is absolutely not. All sins are not equal, and there certainly is great difference between this kind of sin and that kind of sin, or even between different manifestations of the same sin.
Remember that it's one thing to let a sin start in your mind, and this is where sin starts. An evil thought appears, and instead of rejecting it because we're awake noetically and watching and trying to live for God moment by moment, sin begins when we couple with that thought. We allow ourselves to contemplate and start thinking about a particular sin. Hopefully, with the help of God, we recognize that the sin is taking place, repent right then, cast that thought out, and replace it by a thought of beauty, of truth, and of goodness.
If we don't, then that thought will grow and begin to manifest itself in action, and there are types of actions. For instance, take the sin of anger. Anger will begin with a thought, usually of offense: That person has mistreated me. That person has not responded properly to something that I did for them or to them. We begin to nurse a grievance in our minds. Maybe we've been treated terribly unjustly. Instead of embracing every trouble by faith — trusting that the contradictions that come into our life day by day are from Christ, so that we can grow in love and bear a little tiny crop he is giving us as an imitation of his own life — we think we should be treated perfectly by other people, and we get upset.
If that grievance grows, it can spread from the mind to the mouth, and that anger can be expressed in grumbling. That anger can be expressed in slander or gossip or even in saying terrible words to the person who offended us. That is much worse. That is the sinful seed coming to evil fruit.
If we don't cut it off there, if we allow it to grow and fester and we meditate upon it day after day, it can take more tangible expression. It can go from words to deeds: we can push someone if we're very angry or, perhaps, God forbid, strike them or pick up something and throw it at somebody. This is a much more grievous expression of anger. Anger that started in the mind, progressed to the mouth, and is now being expressed by the fists can, if we do not stop it, intoxicate us like a nasty drug, as though we are on some sort of terrible drug trip. We can kill someone. We can kill someone.
That murder compared to that initial thought is very different, very much more grievous; we have allowed the sin to mature and deepen, so its culpability has increased and it has become a much more grievous sin. That paradigm can be applied to any temptation that we face and to any sin that we give into. That's just reality.
Just think: if you are a husband, would you rather have a wife who has a temptation to, let's say, greed or acquisitiveness? Let's say that she has a thought of going shopping and you don't have any money for her to go shopping because you have a growing family and you have to pay the bills. Would you rather have your wife have a thought, a greedy thought, about going to Macy's, or actually go to Macy's and spend your entire house payment on dresses and shoes and purses? Which would you rather have? Or let's flip it: if you're a wife, would you rather have your husband have a lustful thought about another woman or commit adultery with the woman in his workplace? Which is more grievous?
Obviously, in practice we know that not all sins are equal and that there are certainly degrees of sin. There are multiple factors that play into the degree of sin. In fact, there are so many factors that no one can measure a sin except God. And those who must measure these sins are those that God has appointed to be the shepherds of our souls: spiritual fathers, father confessors, those whom God has given to us to care for our souls.
Measuring culpability and pastoral discernment
We have to measure these things because, just like in physical medicine, there are degrees of disease and sickness. Measuring the degree is key to finding a solution. We share a common mortality and we all have diseases, but some have cancer and some have stage one cancer or stage two cancer or stage three cancer or stage four cancer. The treatment follows the diagnosis of the degree of the disease, and that's exactly the case in the spiritual life.
Doctors of the soul—spiritual fathers and father confessors—study and want to know all sorts of things. They need to know how sins work, how they grow, and what affects them. This is why confession is such a serious business and why it is so important.
Some of the factors that contribute to the measure and degree of a sin are, besides the degree of expression I already mentioned: thought, words, and actions; intentions and hidden intentions; secret thoughts; the general strength or weakness of a person in their spiritual life; and the level of knowledge or of ignorance that the person has.
Think of the holy prophet Moses. Think of Moses at the end of his life, just after he had been penning the book of Deuteronomy and describing the commandments we've been discussing. He was forbidden to enter the Promised Land. Why? Because the people were protesting against him and attacking his character and being disobedient for the one millionth time. Though he had endured them patiently for forty years, the Lord told him, "Speak to the rock and I'll cause water to come out," and Moses, in his anger, struck the rock instead of speaking to it. For that, he was forbidden from entering the Promised Land.
Can you imagine? To us, one tiny little sin—one small careless disobedience—excluded the holy prophet and God's heir, Moses, from the Promised Land. Why? Because he was a man who lived with God. He had been given such a high level of life and had acquired such a high level of spiritual maturity that the standard for him was different. For him to commit one small act of disobedience is not the same as for those at the bottom of the hill to commit a sin.
So the level of knowledge or ignorance and the amount of spiritual experience a person has had contribute to the degree of seriousness of a sin. Whether they have committed that sin previously matters as well. To commit a sin you have never committed before, do penance, find God's mercy and healing, and then do it again—oh, that's high-handed from God's perspective, right? To repeat something you have already experienced and already been healed from is a far more grievous situation, a far more serious sin.
Second falls are worse than first falls, thirds are worse than seconds, and failure to amend is more serious. Other contributing factors include the degree of the sinner's sensitivity to pain, the presence or absence of comforting realities that could counteract temptation, a person's age, family condition, and so on. All of these are factors that, from God's perspective, influence the degree of seriousness of a sin and just how terrible a certain sin is.
What should we conclude from this? Conclude this: live by the mercy of God. Saint James says, after he makes it clear that those who want to live by the commandments of God have to hold to them all, he says, "But mercy triumphs over judgment."
The practical verdict: imitate God's mercy
He's trying to teach us that in all of our dealings, let us always stay in the proper position as those who have received the grace of God, those who cherish God's mercy in our life, shown in the salvation that has been graciously worked and given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, God's only Son. Let us offer that same mercy that has been given to us, despite our disobedience, and let that be the norm for all of our relations with everyone, especially those who have offended us.
Let us be generous and share the same mercy that God has given to us with everyone else. This is how we can conquer self-righteousness and works righteousness and, in fact, live in the joy of the kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of mercy.
Frequently asked
What does James 2:10 mean about committing one sin?
James 2:10 echoes Deuteronomy's covenantal standard: breaking one point shows failure to keep the whole law and thus demonstrates our standing as sinners in need of salvation. The passage emphasizes our dependence on God's mercy and the impossibility of achieving right-standing by works alone, not that every sin is identical in guilt or consequence.
How do Orthodox spiritual fathers measure the seriousness of a sin?
Spiritual fathers weigh multiple factors: whether sin remained a thought or became word or deed, the person’s intention and secret motives, their knowledge or ignorance, prior falls, and overall spiritual maturity. Only God fully judges, but confessors discern degree to diagnose the soul's sickness and prescribe appropriate penance and pastoral therapy.
Why are repeated falls considered more grievous in Orthodoxy?
Repeated falls after repentance indicate hardened will and negligence toward received healing. A first fall may be met with mercy and correction; repeating the same transgression shows higher culpability because the person knowingly returns to sin. This pattern deepens the disease of the soul and calls for firmer pastoral measures to provoke repentance and amendment.
