“Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.

Joel 2:12-13

The Doctrine of Concupiscence

The Desire to Sin

The issue of concupiscence has risen to prominence in orthodox Christian circles in recent years.^[1] While it is the issue of “LGBT” lifestyles and identities which has brought it back into focus, historically it has been of great importance without any reference to such issues.^[2] At stake is the nature of sin and its effect on human nature; a right understanding of repentance and the grace of Christ; and the nature of Christian discipleship. If concupiscence is relevant to contemporary sexuality debates, that is only because it is relevant to our whole understanding of sin and salvation. So clarity on this issue will not only help us address questions of sexuality and gender faithfully and with pastoral wisdom; it will also be of great value for our preaching of the gospel and ministering it to people in all other areas of life. Therefore in this essay my aim is to consider concupiscence in more general terms.

Concupiscence means “lust” or “desire,” and like those words (and the Greek New Testament word epithumeia, which they often translate) can be used to mean a desire for something good or bad. However, rather like the English word “lust” it has in practice been used (since Augustine) almost exclusively for the desire to sin, and it is in that sense that I will use it in this essay. Speaking of concupiscence enables us to distinguish clearly between two different things which are both internal and invisible: the unbidden desire to sin, and mental acts of the will which indicate an assent to some degree with that desire. These may range from the maximal (detailed planning of how to commit a sin, or extensive imaginative enjoyment of what it would be like to do so) to the minimal (momentarily lingering on, rather than immediately refusing to entertain, a sinful desire). But all involve a measure of deliberate intentionality, albeit one known only to the individual concerned. Concupiscence, on the other hand, refers to the desire which precedes any such acts. It is, in short, the desire to sin.

The issue at stake is whether (to quote Article 9 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England) “concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.” Is it a sin to desire to sin? Do I incur guilt before God for wanting to sin, even if I do not act upon that desire? Do I need to be forgiven for such desires? Did Christ need to atone for them, and do I today need to repent of them?^[3]

The Sinfulness of Concupiscence

The universal orthodox Protestant understanding of concupiscence has been, until recently at least, that it is of the nature of sin.^[4] That is, in itself it is an offense to God, and incurs God’s wrath; it is therefore to be repented of, and forgiveness sought only in the cleansing blood of Christ.

The exegetical starting point for the Protestant conviction is the widespread biblical conviction that all mankind, from conception onwards, stands guilty before God.^[5] This can only be the case if we are sinners before ever sinning; our condemnation arises from our nature before that nature has issued any sinful acts. This is explicit in passages such as Ps. 51:5, and Ps. 14:1-3, and Romans 3:9-20. Further, some biblical texts directly make the connection between our sinful desires or lusts and God’s wrath: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Col. 3:5-6).

Paul’s teaching has clear roots both in the teaching of Christ and the Old Testament. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ locates sin in the heart rather than in the actions: the lustful look makes a man guilty of adultery. Now it could be argued that Jesus has in mind a mental act of imagining adultery, rather than simply the unbidden desire to do so. Yet his reference to anger as an internal version of murder suggests otherwise, for anger is far more easily understood as a concupiscent desire than a mental plan to do harm. Conclusive is Jesus’ statement in Mark 7:20-23 that it is what comes “out of the heart of man” that defiles him. The list contains many sinful actions, but Jesus’ point is that they arise from the desires of the heart. Moreover, the list includes coveting, pride, and envy; which are not actions at all but concupiscent desires. “All these evil things”, says Jesus, “come from within, and they defile a person.”

The Tenth Commandment, invoked here by Jesus, is explicitly about the desire to sin rather than a deliberate mental act. Covetousness is the desire for what is not mine. Paul takes this as his great example of the power of sin in his fallen human nature in Rom. 7:7-11; indeed, it was the (unbidden) rise of covetousness in his heart which he says “killed [him].” It is beyond question that Paul sees the covetous desire of his own heart as the reason for God’s just wrath towards him. Indeed, alongside coveting, all of the most serious sins in Scripture—pride, greed, sexual lust, sinful anger—are matters of desire.

It is for these reasons, along with the matrix of systematic concerns to be explored below, that all streams of the magisterial Reformation included the sinfulness of concupiscence in their confessions.^[6]

II. Concupiscence and the Gospel

Rome: Putting Righteousness Within Reach

Concupiscence became a significant issue in the Reformation period because it goes to the heart of the different understandings of the gospel held by Protestants and Roman Catholics. For Rome, righteousness is something which we achieve ourselves, with the assistance of divine grace.^[7] While justification includes forgiveness of sins committed before baptism, its main significance is the transformation of the individual so that he may merit eternal life for himself. For “Justification establishes co-operation between God’s grace and man’s freedom.”^[8] The final judgment, and the quantity of sin yet to be cleansed away in Purgatory, depends on the merit of our own good works. The non-sinfulness of concupiscence is vital for this scheme, because it depends upon truly meritorious works being possible. And given that the desire to sin unquestionably remains in the sinner, this can only be so if the desire to sin itself incurs no guilt. As Steven Wedgeworth says in relation to Trent’s position, “If concupiscence has the nature of sin, then the baptized cannot truly be said to be righteous”.^[9]

The Reformation: Sin Lies in the Heart

Luther, and the Reformation after him, asserted instead that justification is a sovereign declaration by God that Christ’s righteousness counts as ours. It must be so, for Scripture is clear that the true believer remains a sinner in this life, no matter to what degree his acts and habits of body and mind have been transformed. The righteous are righteous not on their own account, but because Christ’s righteousness has been imputed to them. Otherwise, what could Paul have meant by calling himself the foremost of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15)? Why does he consider all his own righteous works to be excrement (Phil. 3:8)? These powerful statements lean upon the assumption that, in a regenerate man, who strives for righteousness, those acts which are a rejection of sinful desire and a deliberate choosing of what is good, nevertheless are filthy rags before God. And they are so because, beneath all our good thoughts and deeds, there still lurks a heart which desires to do evil. And that evil desire condemns, even when the acts of the will are righteous.

Far from inclining Luther and all those who have followed him to despair, however, this realization was the key to true gospel assurance. For it signals the absolute need to give up on works-righteousness. And giving up on that is the essential element in Christian faith: for it is when we despair of our own righteousness that we are able to cast ourselves fully upon Christ for his. For in every way—deeds, words, thoughts, and desires—Christ has been righteous where we have not.

Christ and Concupiscence

This of course raises essential questions about Christology. Christ is our savior because he was tempted in every way as we are, yet was without sin (Heb. 4:15). But what was the nature of Christ’s temptations, and the status of his desires? Does the fact that he was tempted mean that he desired to sin? If concupiscence is itself sin, then the answer to that question must of course be no. But how then are we to understand his temptations?

The answer to that is to recognise that there is a significant range in the meaning of “temptation” in Scripture. Πειρασμoς, the normal Greek word, means in general a “trial.” Often, of course, it means testing by external inducements towards sin, which is how we normally understand “tempt” in English. Heb. 4:15 clearly includes the latter, but probably has in view the wider sense too: Jesus was enticed towards sin by the Devil and the world, and also endured terrible trials of circumstance, and in both experienced what we do. He did not sin in the least in response to either.

But within the narrower meaning of πειρασμoς as an inducement towards sin, there is an important distinction as to who does the tempting. James puts it this way: “Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire” (Jas. 1:13-14). James exposes that in our temptations the thing responsible for “luring and enticing” us to sin is our own desire. This is one of the clearest biblical assertions that concupiscent desire is culpable before God. In this sense Jesus most definitely was not tempted, for if he were, then he himself would be guilty of sin. Thus the writer to the Hebrews and James are using temptation to refer to two distinct things. Hebrews speaks of temptations arising from outside ourselves (e.g. the Devil tempting Christ), for which we are not responsible, while James of those arising from inside ourselves, for which we most certainly are. We must make a distinction, then, between internal and external temptation. Our Lord was tempted externally, by the Devil, and others around him (Peter, for instance, in Mark 8:33); but he was not tempted internally, for he had no sinful desire to “lure and entice” him.

A further distinction is necessary here also. For Christ did have unfallen human desires, some of which the Devil attempted to use in his temptation. Our Lord was hungry, and the Devil sought to use this as a means to induce him to misuse his divine power. But this is a different thing from desire to sin; the natural desire for food did not, in Christ, turn into or merge with an evil desire to disobey God. Therefore there is an important sense in which Christ’s temptations were not like ours. He did not, using his own words to his disciples in Gethsemane, “enter into” temptation. He did not have an internal battle with sin, for sin found no foothold within him. His own heart never sided with the Evil One in luring his will toward sinful acts.

Christ Our Righteousness

Some fear that all this means that Christ’s empathy with us (clearly of concern to the writer to the Hebrews) is impaired.^[10] This, however, is misguided, as can be seen by looking at this from two angles.

First, if we imagine that Heb. 4:15 means the Lord shared every sinful desire that we have then, far from presenting Christ as our perfect savior, it would make him the worst of all men.^[11] For none of us is tempted by every sinful lust known to man. The greedy may not be prone to pride; drunkards may not be drawn to sexual vice. But if Heb. 4:15 refers to our sinful desires as Jas. 1:14 does, then Christ must have desired every sin ever desired by the hearts of sinful men, making his heart darker and his desires more depraved than any other individual ever. Such a blasphemous and ridiculous conclusion of course demonstrates the error of the premise.^[12]

Second, let us ask: what is the hope the gospel offers to sinners? It is precisely that Christ is righteous where we are not; that his righteousness supplies our lack of righteousness, and his sufferings have atoned for our wickedness. And so the comfort that he brings to me when I bring before him the evil desires of my own heart is not an impotent sympathy: “Yes, me too. Terrible, isn’t it?” Rather, my corruption is answered by his absolute integrity. Confronted by the same external temptations as I am, the beauty of our savior is that his heart, in glorious contrast to mine, did not join in with them to draw him towards sin. It is precisely this which the writer to the Hebrews rejoices in: “For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Heb. 7:26).

Moreover, Christ could only atone for the guilt of our desires because he himself did not share them. What he could not present as perfect to the Father, he could not redeem in us. Had he sinned with his lips, he could not have atoned for our sinful words; had he sinned with his mind or hands, he could not have atoned for our sinful thoughts or actions. And likewise, had he taken sinful desires to the cross, he could have offered no atoning sacrifice for our sinful desires.

III. The Pastoral Value of Understanding Concupiscence

The Reformed doctrine of concupiscence therefore goes to the heart of the gospel. It has profound implications for how we understand the whole of Christian faith and life.

The desire to step back from the guilt of concupiscence, as demonstrated by Rome, is driven by a desire to lessen my guilt, so that it can be solved by my innocence rather than by Christ’s righteousness. And for that reason Protestants have always felt the need entirely to reject Rome’s account. Either I am saved by Christ’s righteousness, or by some limitation in my sinfulness. Either I can persuade myself that I can achieve sufficient merit before God, or I must flee to and lean wholly on Christ who has achieved it for me. Here lies the doctrine of concupiscence’s great significance: it is knowing that sin is a matter of the heart that must drive our own discipleship, and shape the pastoral care of Christians in the church.

The Nature of Repentance

As long as we think that sin lies merely in acts of the will, repentance similarly will only involve acts of the will, which is the root of the Roman doctrine of penance. But if sin lies in the desires of the heart, mere penance is inadequate. It is tearing our garments, but not our hearts.

True repentance, in contrast to penance, is all about the heart. Like David in Ps. 51:5-6, repentance must go beneath our actions to the reason why we did them: because we were “brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” David sees his desire to sin, with him from conception, as itself arousing God’s wrath. True repentance is not grief about having done what is bad, for there may be many reasons—not all of them godly—for regretting a sinful action. True repentance is grief over wanting to do what is bad. It is the realization that what I am is itself an offense to God’s holy being. This is especially important in a culture obsessed with Self. “This is just who I am” is a means of declaring our desires good, and their fulfilment essential. Christians, in contrast, must surrender the worship of self as the idolatry that it is, and despairing of our own righteousness, come to God in Christ with broken and contrite hearts.

Temptation

A number of writers have argued that, since Christ “in every respect was tempted as we are, yet without sin,” therefore temptation itself, for us, does not involve sin. As regards external temptation this is true. I would have no need to repent of an external inducement to sin which was (as for Christ) not joined at all by my own desire. Yet this is rarely true of us. When my internal desire—perhaps joining with the external invitation—lures and entices me, I must indeed repent of it.

In the Roman view, it was possible to see temptation as a thing to be welcomed; an opportunity to exercise virtue.^[13] But this fails utterly to understand the seriousness of sin, proudly believing in my own righteousness when my very desire to sin exposes instead my guilt before God and my great need of Christ. Temptation is to be met not with smug confidence in our strength of resistance, but in broken-hearted flight to Christ alone for refuge.

Thus, temptation is never something with which we are to make peace, no matter how comforting we might find it to do so. We cannot grant quarter to our lusts. We are not to seek to find good in them, or settle for an acceptable level of them, allowing them a permanent place in our lives. We are to flee from temptation, for the desires of our hearts are desperately wicked.^[14]

True Conviction of Sin

It is of the nature of conviction that we learn to hate sin in our hearts. Paul commends the hatred of the sin of covetousness (Rom. 7:15); epithumeia is to be “put to death” for it is “on account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Col. 3:5-6). But if we don’t believe that God hates (and therefore judges) concupiscence, nor will we. Why would we hate what God does not?

Consider, for example, a normally chaste man who clicks on a link to a pornographic website, or a normally patient mother who loses her temper with an irritating child after a sleep-deprived night. In each case, the deliberate sin is the work of a moment, and may be rapidly regretted and concluded. In such cases it is easy to blame the sin on an accident, a momentary loss of self-control, or the action of another in extending the temptation in the first place. But if concupiscence itself is sinful, this is impossible. C.S. Lewis described growth in Christian maturity like this: we “begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are… If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding.”^[15] The lapse into sin simply exposed what was in my heart already. I should of course grieve for having committed a sinful act; but I should grieve much more that I wanted to do it. Thus true conviction of sin must be the conviction of the guilt of my sinful desires. To come to Christ for salvation, I must realize that it is my heart, not my clothes, which needs to be torn.

Freedom from Slavery

Everyone who practices sin, said our Lord, is a slave to sin (John 8:34). Sin enslaves because we love it. Like an alcoholic—who is a slave not to drink itself but to his love for it—the reason we cannot escape from sin’s bondage is that we don’t want to. Like the rich young man, we walk away from God because our hearts have been captured by other things. Concupiscent desires are the shackles that bind us.

But as long as we are persuaded that sinful desires themselves carry no blame from God, we are unlikely to want to be rid of them. Indeed, given their pull upon us, we will tend to want to hold onto and treasure them; to imagine that we can keep them as a neutral part of who we are. It is quite possible for the outwardly moderate man to nurture and cherish greed in his heart; for the outwardly chaste man to feel pride in (or at least acquiescence toward) his secret lustful desires. But neither will ever be free from the slavery of sin. He may fall back into his greedy or lustful actions, or he may not, but never will the grip of those things on his heart be loosened.

But Christ’s desire for his people is that they should be set free. The newly-kindled love for God which he implants in the soul of those in Christ, should so overwhelm the soul that he sees his concupiscence for what it is, a stench in God’s nostrils, and in the power of the Spirit wages war against it. Thus Paul says: “But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:17-18). It is when we hate our sinful desires as God does, that we are set free from their power over us.

Sanctification: Mortification of Lusts

This leads us to consider how sanctification—in the classic Reformed sense of the transformation of character to become more like God in his holiness—takes place in the believer.

Paul tells us in Col. 3:5-6 that we are to “put to death what is earthly,” and this includes both sinful acts (“sexual immorality, impurity”) and sinful desires (“passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry”). What this demonstrates is that, while concupiscent desires may be stubborn, they are not immutable. They do not form a fixed part of our characters to be either endured or proudly embraced. Rather, they can be put to death. They can be fought against, opposed, refused, and starved; and as we do so we should expect that they will shrivel and lessen. Like ruts in a dirt road, they push us in a certain direction; but determined refusal of them, and following Christ’s commands instead, will begin both to level them and lay new tracks in better directions.

Of course, there is no promise of entire sanctification on this side of Christ’s return; on that day we shall be like him, but not before. But this does not mean that we cannot, in the power of the Spirit, see their mastery over us overthrown and their power to lure and entice us away from Christ decline. For though sin persists in a Christian’s heart, it does not reign there any longer (Rom. 6:12-14).

If, therefore, we would see our temptations lessen, we must repent of the part which our own sinful desire has played in them. We must learn to hate sin with a holy hatred. We should pray to see our sins as God sees them; and driven by love for him, in the power of the Spirit, strive to put off the old self and put on the new self. Conversely, of course, if we convince ourselves that God does not hate our desires to sin, we will not hate them either.

Cultivating Humility

One of the glorious paradoxes of Christian faith is that, as we grow in godliness, we should lessen in pride; the more we advance in Christlikeness, the more keenly we should know our own sin and the more humble we should be. Paul knew himself as the foremost among sinners, and all mature Christians should say the same.

But if concupiscence has not the nature of sin, how could this possibly be? Are all mature Christians actively pursuing and committing great sins, and doing so more seriously than non-Christian people are? We should not deny, of course, that all Christians do continue to commit wilful sins, and should repent continually of them. Nevertheless, it simply is not the case that Paul, or Peter, or Isaiah, or for that matter any of the ordinary, godly, mature saints in all of our churches are committing greater sins than those who know nothing of Christ and are (in Paul’s words) “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness” etc. (Rom. 1:29). Christ’s sanctifying work is real, and his holy people are truly no longer what they once were.

And yet Christ’s saints are not pretending when they bewail and confess their own sinfulness. They do so because they know that sin lies most truly in the heart; and the more they grow in grace, the more they are able to see it for what it is.

IV. Conclusion: Salvation in Christ Alone

Christ’s aim for every Christian is that he or she should come to him, take his yoke, and forsaking his own desires set his mind and heart on Christ. He is to abandon all hope of justifying himself, recognising that sin has corrupted not only his hands but his heart; and he is therefore to flee to Christ as his perfectly pure redeemer and head, and find in him the one who is our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

The work of pastoral care is to proclaim this to people, and to help them to see both how great their need for Christ is and how totally he meets that need. What we have seen is that it is essential to this for them to realize that their sinful desires—greed, slothfulness, pride, covetousness, rage and others, including of course sexual lusts—are the core and the heart of sin. Sin is at heart about a misdirected love—a love for what is evil. The significance of our wilful sins is that they reveal us to have already had a sinful heart.

It is only when we truly see this that real repentance is possible. And it is only when we see Christ’s purity of heart in contrast to ours that we will flee to and rest on him as our only savior. It is therefore at the heart of the pastor’s ministry, his preaching and teaching, both in public and from house to house, to direct people to see both the sinfulness of their concupiscence, and Christ’s total freedom from it.

The alternative, to declare our sinful desires not to be sin in themselves, might well offer a sort of comfort to those who hear. But it will be a cold comfort, for it pretends to elevate us beyond much need of a savior, even as it lowers Christ from a glorious redeemer to a mere sympathizer and example. If we leave the corrupt desires of our hearts off of the ledger of our sins, then the grace we need in Christ is catastrophically reduced. And with it our love for him is reduced. For he who is forgiven little, loves little.

The Reformed doctrine of concupiscence, in contrast, forbids us to find a false comfort by persuading ourselves that we are not so bad as God, in the Scriptures, has said that we are. It drives us to a far more stark understanding of the depth and severity of our sin than we would ever naturally want to admit. It leaves me facing the holy, righteous God, knowing that my sins are not only as high as heaven but go down to the deepest parts of who I am. And in so doing it leads me to Christ, who in his perfect purity of hands, mind, and heart has provided one, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, offering, and satisfaction for all of my sins. In him alone, when he returns in glory and raises us to eternal life, will we finally come to love God as he did, with all our heart, and soul, and mind, and strength.

Matthew Roberts is the Minister of Trinity Church York, England, part of the International Presbyterian Church. He is the author of Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self (Christian Focus, 2023).

1. I have tackled this previously, and engaged with some of the literature, in Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2023), Chapter 4. ↑

2. Necessarily, of course, since the concept of sexual “identity” only arose to prominence in the late twentieth century, having been first invented in the late nineteenth; and the concept of a ‘gender identity’ was almost unknown outside a small circle of Queer Theorists until the twenty first. ↑

3. An important clarification will be useful at this point. In discussions of the question by Protestant theologians, intentional sins are called by the name “actual” sins, because they are acts of the will, breaking the law of God either by commission or omission (e.g. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology 9.13.1.). Unfortunately in modern colloquial English ‘“actual” means something more like “true” or “real”, and therefore “actual sin” can sound to some like it is in contrast to things which are “not really sin.” This has led some writers on the topic to significant misunderstandings, in which statements which rightly distinguish between actual sin and concupiscence are taken to mean by that distinction that concupiscence is not sin. An example is in the Sydney Anglican Diocesan Doctrine Commission report on the Doctrine of Concupiscence of 2022: “… having a propensity for such attractions should not be equated with the commission of actual sin… actual sin only occurs when we fail to resist temptation and allow ourselves to be enticed by our own desires (Jas 1:14-15). Therefore, while we are right to lament our fallen condition, we are not called to repent of temptation but to resist it.”(6.5). The first two clauses are formally correct, but the “therefore” of the final clause indicates that the authors have misunderstood what “actual sin” means. Furthermore, the final clause contradicts the report’s own clear earlier statement that concupiscence “is fully deserving of God’s wrath and damnation” (4.4). The report as a whole fails to distinguish both between internal mental acts and concupiscent desire, and between internal and external temptation (to be discussed in detail below). These are serious failures which undermine its whole treatment of the subject. ↑

4. See the fine discussion in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 142-144 ↑

5. The Westminster Confession of Faith Q5 cites Prov. 20:19, Ecc. 7:20, Jas. 3:2 and 1 Jo. 1:8,10 in support of this point. It therefore takes the universality of sin as sufficient to prove that concupiscence is sinful. ↑

6. See the Augsburg Confession (Article 2), Belgic Confession (Article 15), Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England (Article 9), Heidelberg Catechism (Question 10), and Westminster Confession of Faith (Ch. 6.5). ↑

7. Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), Section 2010, 437. ↑

8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Section 1993. 433 ↑

9. Steven Wedgeworth, “The Heart Wants What It Wants: A Protestant Assessment of the Doctrine of Concupiscence,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024 (forthcoming)), 654. Wedgeworth’s treatment of the history of the doctrine is excellent. ↑

10. For example, Andy Robinson of Living Out: “In order to make the point that temptation to sin is sin in and of itself you have to spend a lot of time demonstrating that Jesus’ temptations are different to ours. The problem is that the NT makes precisely the opposite point. And if we lose sight of that we have lost one of the chief pastoral helps in the midst of temptation.” https://twitter.com/andyscgp/status/1722564544914993356, accessed 4th December 2023 ↑

11. I am grateful to my friend Jonty Rhodes for this observation. ↑

12. Please note I am not accusing any of those who do not distinguish between external and internal temptation of blasphemy—merely that this would be a logical conclusion of that position if applied rigorously to Christology. ↑

13. Materia exercendae virtutis, to use Aquinas’ phrase (though Aquinas does not approve of this view; Summa Theologica 1.48.5). A striking example in my own experience was being invited by work colleagues (who knew I was a Christian) to attend a strip club with them, on the basis that it would “give me a chance to show how virtuous I am” by resisting the temptations on offer. Needless to say, I declined. ↑

14. John Owen speaks of how, since “lust and temptation are mixed together… nothing but what can kill the lust can conquer the temptation… all other dealings with it are like tamperings with a prevailing gangrene: the part of the whole may be preserved a little while, in great torment; excision or death must come at last… it must come to this,- its lust must die, or the soul must die.” John Owen, ‘Of Temptation’, Works vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 113. ↑

15. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (London: Fontana Books, 1952), 160 ↑