Wages of Sin
1
WAGES OF SIN In his Epistle to the Romans St. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (6:23). This verse was particularly important to Reformation commentators, with their strong emphasis on “justification by faith.” Calvin understands it to say, “As the cause of death is sin, so righteousness, which is Christ’s gift to us, restores eternal life to us” (Comm. sup. Rom. 6:2; cf. Matthew Tyndale, Parable of the Wicked Mammon [ed. Russell], 1.110). For Tyndale, the “wages of the devil” are “the pleasures of this world, which are the earnest of everlasting damnation” (Obedience of a Christian Man, pref. 1.177).
In Marlowe’s Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus, one of the early clues to the audience that Faustus’s impending damnation is self-willed is his perverse half-reading of crucial scriptural texts; for a professor of theology at Wittenberg his misconstrual of Rom. 6:23 is particularly telling of his rejection of grace:
Ieromes Bible Faustus, view it well:
Stipendium peccati, mors est: ha, stipendium, &c.
The reward of sin is death? that’s hard:
Si peccasse, negamus, fallimur, & julla est in nobis
veritas:
If we say that we haue no sinne
We deceiue our selues, and there is no truth in vs.
Why then belike we must sinne,
And so consequently die,
I, we must die, an euerlasting death. (1.1.65-73)
The supplementary verse (1 John 1:8) is likewise a half-quotation; Faustus omits v. 9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Apollyon confronts Christian as he traverses the Valley of Humiliation, claiming him as one of his subjects. Christian replies, “I was born indeed in your dominions, but your service was hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, for the Wages of Sin is death.” Tennyson incorporates the text in his poem “Wages,” as does Carlyle to more dramatic effect in The French Revolution (2.6). In a commentary on the American “success Gospel,” Richard Wright reminisces in Black Boy how when he came home from a road trip with a salesman-evangelist, his Granny was hopeful that some of his sins might have been remitted, “for she felt that success spelled the renewal of righteousness and that failure was the wages of sin.”
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
