The Law and Concupiscence (Part 2)
In the first part I argued that your doctrine of sin is only as broad and deep as your doctrine of the law, and that the broad and deep Reformed doctrine of the law therefore begins to explain why we believe that concupiscence is sinful. God’s commandments reach to the heart.
But the argument that our unchosen sinful desires are sinful rests above all on the tenth commandment.
1. The tenth commandment
We are used to thinking of ‘Thou shalt not covet’ as a commandment against envy—wanting something that is not yours. This is its first and most obvious meaning. But the purpose of the commandment is much more than this.
It is worth noticing the oddity of this last commandment. All the others are about external actions (even though, as we’ve seen, they were always meant to be read much more expansively), but the tenth commandment reaches straight for the inner person. Every other command could in principle be enforced by the government. But only in an Orwellian nightmare would any government try to ban coveting.
Long before Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and speaking from another mountain, the Lord gave the tenth commandment to show us that His perfect law extends to our desires.
2. Covetousness is concupiscence
In both Hebrew and Greek, the word translated ‘covet’ simply means desire. The connection is clearer still in its Latin translation: Non concupisces. You shall not have concupiscence. Later, the apostle Paul would quote this command to prove his point about the law and sin. In doing so, he would set ‘covetousness’ (concupiscence) sand ‘sin’ side by side (Rom 7.7).
The case for the sinfulness of concupiscence rests on two biblical pillars:
Concupiscence breaks the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not covet’.
Paul explicitly calls concupiscence ‘sin’.
According to the Bible, concupiscence is sin. The only way to get around this is to argue that ‘sin’ doesn’t mean ‘sin’ (this was what the Council of Trent went for) or to argue that ‘concupiscence’ only means deliberate acts of sinful desire.
3. Concupiscence is the inclination to sin
Every Christian agrees that deliberate lust is wrong. You can’t read Matthew 5 and think otherwise. The significant move made by Protestants in the sixteenth century was to say that concupiscence in the tenth commandment doesn’t just mean ‘a deliberate purpose’ to sin, but also ‘the desires by which we are tempted’ (Calvin).
This comes in part from what we saw in the first part about the depth of the law. If the first nine commandments all speak to our desires, then what is the point of the tenth commandment? Lusting after my neighbour’s wife already breaks the seventh commandment. And coveting his stuff breaks the eighth. The tenth appears to have nothing distinctive to say.
You could reply that the tenth commandment is not a distinct law at all, but just reinforces the fact that the whole law is internal. But then we would have nine commandments and a footnote. If there really are ten distinct commandments, then a better answer is available: the first nine commandments forbid our voluntary desires (deliberate anger, deliberate lust, etc.), whereas the tenth commandment reaches our involuntary propensity towards sin.
The most decisive evidence, though, is the way that Paul uses the tenth commandment in Romans 7. There’s so much going on in that difficult chapter that this is easy to miss. But the way that Paul talks about concupiscence here suggests that he means more than just specific moments where we deliberately lust after something sinful.
The Italian theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli, who taught Romans at Oxford, gives three arguments for why concupiscence refers to any ‘affection or propensity’ towards sin.
First, consider why Paul chooses to quote the tenth commandment. If he only wanted to show that the law reveals particular instances of sin, then he could have quoted any of the commandments. Murder and adultery are much more evocative examples of sin than covetousness. But the fact that Paul chooses the tenth commandment shows that he didn’t just want to talk about particular instances of sin, but ‘the innate desire and corruption that impels us to all evils’. The law reveals concupiscence as ‘the fountain and head of all evils’.
Second, notice that Paul simply writes, ‘Thou shalt not covet’. He doesn’t feel the need to quote the list of objects that are recorded in Exodus and Deuteronomy (house, wife, ox, etc.). This shows that the heart of the tenth commandment is the desire itself. This is why people who split the tenth commandment into two commands based on the different objects (such as Roman Catholics and Lutherans) must be wrong. The moral principle of the law is not bound up in the objects of desire, but in the desire itself. The list of objects serves simply to give concrete and relevant examples. But Paul’s abbreviation of the commandment suggests a more general application—to our corrupt inclination.
Third, take seriously Paul’s argument that the law reveals something that he ‘would not have known’. Whatever the tenth commandment forbids must be something we couldn’t have worked out on our own. But even people without the law knew, through natural law, that voluntary lust is sinful. ‘Depraved affections and perturbations’, as Vermigli calls them, ‘were condemned by the [pagan] philosophers in their moral teaching’. When Paul says that he would not have known sin apart from the tenth commandment, he must mean something deeper: ‘the very root of all sins’ which, though it is ‘hidden and concealed’, is ‘exposed by the law of God’.
So, when we read the tenth commandment, we shouldn’t just think about the envy that we feel when we look at our neighbour’s car or bookshelf or garden (though we should think about that). We should also bring to mind every way in which our hearts love and desire what God has forbidden, even when we don’t want them to.
Conclusion
Here’s the point: a deep doctrine of sin comes from a deep doctrine of the law of God. A shallow doctrine of the law of God usually leads to a shallow doctrine of sin. If it sounds strange to you that Protestants have almost always thought that concupiscence, or unwanted sinful desire, is wrong, then you should also take a look at your understanding of God’s law. The bare-bones notion that our rule of life is nothing more than what is explicitly commanded in the New Testament will probably lead you into bare-bones Christian ethics and a bare-bones view of sin. The remedy is the full-fat moral theology of the Reformed tradition.
Here's a secondary point: controversial questions like these will rarely ever be solved with simple exegetical proof-texts, but that doesn’t let us off the exegetical hook—our doctrines should be biblically grounded. One recent article claims that the traditional view on sinful desire comes from Bible passages being ‘squashed into a specific theological system in order to support an existing conclusion rather than allowed to speak on their own terms’. The reality is that we can never approach the Bible completely free of theological systems and pre-existing ideas. A pure, one-way movement from biblical exegesis to doctrinal conclusions is impossible to achieve. But the Reformed doctrine of concupiscence is informed, moulded and reinforced by serious, careful exegesis of the Bible, especially the Ten Commandments and Romans 7.
Let me finish with one final thought. Unlike the Reformation debate, the modern debate on concupiscence has focussed almost wholly on the issue of same-sex sexual desires. For those of us who do not experience such desires, this topic can be a breeding-ground for self-righteousness. As such, it’s worth adding one more voice from the sixteenth century, from an unknown divinity student at the University of Geneva. The tenth commandment, he says, shows that ‘fulfilling the law is impossible for even the holiest of people, and that all people in themselves are plainly condemned’.
Hear also what Saint Paul saith:
‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.’ (Rom 7.24–8.1)
For the full case with documentation, see: The Exegetical Foundations of the Sixteenth Century Reformed Doctrine of Concupiscence
