![[assets/covers/gospel-of-sin-management.jpg]] Gospel of sin management is Willard's diagnostic term for what the Christian message has become on both wings of the theological spectrum: on the right, a transaction securing forgiveness of individual sins and admission to heaven; on the left, a mandate for social justice and liberation. Neither version has any place for the transformation of persons, the formation of character, or the ordinary texture of human life. Both manage sin; neither produces life. The structural problem is that one specific theory of [[Atonement]] (Christ's death as settlement of a legal debt) has been elevated to the whole of the message, displacing regeneration and formation from the centre. [[Discipleship]] and the renewal of the person become extras, separable from salvation proper. What the gospel 'is thought to be essentially concerned with' is only how to deal with sin; life, actual existence, is not included, or included only marginally. The contrast Willard presses is between being declared righteous and becoming so; between a changed status and a changed person. The consequence is not an anomaly but the natural output of a system perfectly designed to yield it. Those who find these gospels hollow and reject them almost certainly believe they have rejected the gospel of Jesus Christ; in fact, they have not yet heard it. Those who accept them will, by near-unanimous scholarly consensus, never hear the one thing Jesus actually preached: the [[Kingdom of God]]. On the right, theological conservatism doubles down: the 'gospel of the kingdom' in Matthew refers entirely to a future millennial political reign, stripped of any present significance. On the left, the kingdom becomes a social programme. Peter Wagner, after thirty years as a Christian, confessed he could not recall a single sermon on the kingdom from any pastor he had sat under. The suppression is structural, not incidental; the two managed-sin gospels occupy exactly the space that kingdom preaching would otherwise fill. ## Subtopics - [[Bar Code Faith]]: the right-wing mechanism by which salvation is severed from discipleship through the doctrine of instantaneous, transactional mental assent ## Appearances - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 2 'Gospels of Sin Management', pp. 35–59 ## Related [[Atonement]] · [[Social Gospel]] · [[Discipleship]] · [[Kingdom of God]] · [[Grace]] · [[Legalism]] · [[Dallas Willard]]