The opposite of Sin is faith

"But why does the cross look so much like just giving up and letting evil have its way?"

"Ah," Pietro said. "That is because the cross is directed not at mortal evil but at Sin. Moral evil, we can often do something about - and when we have the power and the opportunity, we should do it with all the energy at our disposal. But Sin, which is the radical inability to human nature to be true to itself - our failure to bring off, individually or socially, a version of the world that actually squares with the Word's version of it - that hard fact of our existence we cannot undo just by willing it to be better in the future. There is simply too much in the past that we cannot change. My parents, and my parent's parent's parents - and yours and everybody's, everywhere and always - have left us an intractable mess. And so have we with our own children. All our promises to do better tomorrow have given us only a today as unreformed as any yesterday. We still unspeak his word about us day in and night out. And those unspeakings, those contradictions, are irremovable from history by our efforts. Therefore, on the cross, the Word unspeaks our unspeakableness in the silence of his death and respeaks us into beauty by the power of his resurrection. He has made a new creation, you see. The only problem is, you can't see it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. You can only hear about it and decide to believe him. The opposite of Sin with a capital S is not morality; it's faith"

"So where does that 'unspeaking' leave morality?" Madeleine asked.

"Where it always was. It remains the truth about us, and it remains a truth that we forsake only at our own peril. In addition, it remains something that we should actively enter invite the world to conform itself to - precisely because, to whatever degree it does, it will become a place of beauty and joy. We do, after all, pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. But God is a realist, if nothing else: since total conformity to the moral law is something that has never shown any sign of arriving soon, God has decided not to count on it as a means for finally cleaning up the mess we have made. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He has taken the cleanup entirely into his own hands. He has just gone and done it without waiting for us; and he invites us simply to trust that he has it all accomplished for us in Jesus - and to proclaim that trust by acting as if we really believed it."

"Can't you say it more succinctly?"

"Sure. The moral law is great stuff, but as an instrument of salvation, it's a bust."

- Robert Farrar Capon, Light Theology & Heavy Cream