Have you ever heard someone drop the phrase "seven deadly sins" and just assumed it was straight from Scripture? In this episode, I unpack the full story behind both the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues -- where they actually came from, who wrote them, and how they hold up against the Bible. We go sin by sin and virtue by virtue, testing each against passages from Galatians 5, Proverbs 6, Colossians 3, and more. My goal is not to tear these lists down but to help you hold them rightly, as a theologically useful tool that serves Scripture rather than replacing it. If you have ever wanted to understand where these lists came from and whether Christians should still use them, this episode is for you.

Interesting Links:

• Wright, N. T. (2010). After you believe: Why Christian character matters. HarperOne.
• The Gospel Coalition. (n.d.). How to kill the seven deadly sins with grace.
• Ironwood Church. (2025). About the seven deadly sins.
• History.com. (2023). How the seven deadly sins began as "eight evil thoughts."
• Desiring God. (2025, August 5). The seven heavenly virtues: An ancient framework for spiritual formation.
• DeYoung, R. K. (2009). Glittering vices: A new look at the seven deadly sins and their remedies. Brazos Press.
• Classic Theology. (2025, April 22). The seven deadly sins: Their origins and why to love the list.
• Britannica. (2025). Seven virtues.
• Barna, G. (2025, September). Research identifies common sources of confusion about sin.
• Arizona Christian University / Cultural Research Center. (2025, October 21). Redefinition of sin fuels social turbulence, research shows.

References to Bible Verses:

1 Corinthians 13:13; Acts 17:11; Proverbs 16:18; James 4:6; Luke 12:15; 1 Timothy 6:10; James 1:19–20; Ephesians 4:26–27; Galatians 5:26; James 3:16; Matthew 5:28; 1 John 2:16; Proverbs 23:20–21; Philippians 3:19; Proverbs 6:6–11; 2 Thessalonians 3:10; Proverbs 6:16–19; Galatians 5:19–23; Mark 7:20–23; James 1:3–4; Micah 6:8; 2 Peter 1:5–7; Philippians 4:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:21; Colossians 3:5–14; Romans 12:2

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Thank you for listening and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jason McConnell. Let me ask you something. Have you ever heard someone say, maybe in a conversation, maybe in a sermon, maybe from someone trying to make a point at Thanksgiving dinner, "Well, that's one of the seven deadly sins." And you just kinda nod along assuming they were quoting the Bible Here's the thing.

The phrase seven deadly sins does not appear anywhere in scripture, not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, not in a footnote. It's just not there. Neither is the phrase seven heavenly virtues. These are not biblical terms. They are theological terms, and there's a difference, and that difference matters.

Now, before you panic or feel like the rug just got pulled out from under you, stay with me because this episode is not about dismissing something Christians have held for centuries. It's about understanding it honestly. And when you understand it honestly, it actually gets more useful, not less. So today, we're gonna cover three things.

First, we're gonna trace the full history of both lists, where they came from, who wrote them, and how they ended up embedded in Christian culture for sixteen hundred years. Yep. You heard that right, sixteen hundred years. Secondly, we're gonna hold each of these lists up against scripture and ask the honest question: Does the Bible actually address these things?

And third, we're gonna talk about how to hold church tradition and biblical authority in proper relationship because that is a skill every serious Christian needs.

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So let's start with the question underneath the question. Why does it even matter whether the seven deadly sins are in the Bible or not? If they're useful, they're useful, right?

Well, here's why it matters. George Barna's research team at Arizona Christian University published findings in twenty twenty five showing that fewer than one in five American adults hold a consistently biblical view of sin. That's right, one in five. And only fourteen percent of people who call themselves Christians hold a theology of sin that is actually consistent with scripture.

At the same time, seventy two percent of self identified Christians believe people are basically good at heart, which actually directly contradicts what the Bible teaches about human nature. What that tells us is that when Christians don't know where their beliefs come from, whether from scripture or tradition, they end up with a confused watered down theology, and confused theology produces confused living.

Now the seven deadly sins and seven virtues have shaped Christian moral thought for over a millennia. They show up in art, literature, architecture, and Sunday sermons. But most Christians have never stopped to ask who actually wrote these, when, why, and what does the Bible say about the same territory?

That is what we're gonna do today. Here's the historical backdrop you, you should understand. The list did not fall from heaven fully formed. They were developed over roughly a thousand years from the fourth century through the thirteenth by some of the most brilliant theological minds the church has ever produced.

Those men were working from scripture, but they were also working from Greek philosophy, from the context of monastic life, and from the pastoral needs of their specific historical moment. The result is a framework that is deeply rooted in biblical truth without being directly biblical in nature. Now, the seven virtues have an even more layered origin.

Half of them come not from the Bible at all, but from Plato and Aristotle. The other half come straight from Paul, and the man who combined them into a unified list was a bishop in Milan in the fourth century. And we'll get into all of that. But here's what I want you to hold onto as we move through the history of this.

The goal is not to discredit these lists. That's not my point here. The goal is to understand them accurately so that you can use them well. Because when you know what they are and where they came from, they become a tool, a sharp, useful, biblically informed tool. And when you don't know, you either over trust them or dismiss them entirely, and both of those are mistakes.

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To understand the seven deadly sins, you have to go back to the Egyptian desert, not Jerusalem, not Rome, the desert. It's the fourth century. Christianity has recently been legalized in the Roman Empire under Constantine, and a movement of Christians called the Desert Fathers and Mothers has retreated into the wilderness to pursue radical devotion to God through prayer, fasting, and contemplation.

These were serious people living seriously austere lives, and they spent a lot of time thinking about what happens inside a person that pulls them away from God. One of the sharpest thinkers in that movement was a Greek monk named Evagrius Ponticus, who lived from around three forty-five to three ninety-nine AD.

Now, Evagrius wrote down a list of eight logismoi, the Greek word for thought or reasoning patterns. He called them evil thoughts, gluttony, lust, uh, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. He was not writing a doctrinal statement. He was writing a guide for monks, a diagnostic tool to help people in contemplative life name the internal pattern that disrupted their relationship with God.

Now, his student, John Cas- Cassian, carried that framework west. Now, Cassian was a monk who had studied under Evagrius in Egypt and then moved to what is now southern France, where he founded two monasteries and spent his life translating Eastern monastic wisdom into Latin for Western Christianity. Now, through his works, the institutes and the conferences, uh, Cassian bought-- brought Evagrius' eight thoughts into the mainstream of Western church life in the early fifth century.

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Then in the sixth century, Po- Pope Gregory I took the list and refined it. Now, Gregory was one of the most consequential figures in the his- history of Western Christianity. He was brilliant, pastoral, enormously productive as a writer. In his commentary on the Book of Job, he rearranged Evagrius' eight thoughts.

He collapsed sadness and sloth into one category, added envy, elevated pride to the statet of-- status of root sin. the mother from which other, the other six grow. A- and that gives us the list most people recognize today: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Now, the framework sat there for several centuries until Thomas Aquinas arrived in the 13th century and gave it its fullest theological treatment.

In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas called them capital sins, from the Latin caput, meaning head, because he saw them as the source sins from which other sins flow. His insight was that these seven sins are not random. They are d- disordered loves, basically. They represent genuine human goods, pleasure, honor, security, love, pursued in ways that are excessive, misdirected, or idolatrous.

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Now, the virtues followed a parallel but similar path. The four cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, did not come from scripture. They come, they come from Plato's Republic and were systematized by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. These are philosophical categories describing moral excellence that any reasonable person could aspire to through habit and practice.

Now, Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who served from 374 to 397 AD, combined these two traditions, Greek philosophical virtue and Pauline theological virtue, into a unified list of seven. He was making a theological argument that Christian virtue does not abandon the best of human moral reasoning, but transform and completes it through revelation.

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Okay, that was a lot to take in, but now let's do some honest biblical audit- auditing, because the most important question is not whether a monk in the fourth century thought pride was dangerous, it's whether God's word says so. And here's the answer. The Bible absolutely addresses every one of these seven sins.

What it does not do is compile them into a numbered list called the Seven Deadly Sins. The biblical treatment is broader, more personal, and in many ways, more penetrating than the classical list. So, you know, let's take a moment and walk through them. Pride, we go to Proverbs sixteen verse eighteen, which says, "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before the fall."

And James four verse six says t- says, "God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble." Pride is one of the most consistently condemned attitudes in all of scripture, from the story of Lucif- Lucifer's fall to Jesus' repeated teaching that the one who exalts himself will be humbled. And then we have greed.

Jesus warns us in Luke twelve verse fifteen, "Watch out! Be on guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions." Then Paul told Timothy in First Timothy six verse ten that, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Greed is not just about money, though. It is about placing ultimate trust in things rather than God.

Okay, so let's move on to wrath. James one verses nineteen and twenty, one of my favorites, "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires." Paul adds in Ephesians four verses twenty-six and twenty-seven, "Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold."

Now, the Bible does not say anger is always wrong, but it consistently warns against wrath as a settled disposition. Okay, then we have envy. Galatians five verse twenty f- six warns against conceit provoking and envying one another. James three sixteen is blunt, "For where you have envy and selfish am- ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice."

Envy is the sin that cannot celebrate another person's blessing, and scripture treats it as a root of widespread destruction. Moving on to lust. Jesus addresses this head on in Matthew 5:28. "Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." John writes in 1 John 2:16 about the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes as markers of a life oriented towards the world rather than towards God.

Finally, we have sloth. Proverbs 6:6-11 famously sends the sluggard to watch the ant, and Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat." But the deeper biblical sense of sloth is not laziness. It is acedia, a spiritual numbness, uh, an indifference to the things of God, and scripture has plenty to say about that too.

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So big summary, but now here's the most interesting thing, I think. The Bible actually does have a numbered list of sins, and it also uses the number seven. Proverbs 6:16-19 says, "There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies on a person who stirs up conflict in the community."

That's not the same list, but the instinct to name and number the root sins of human, human heart is already present in scripture itself, it seems. The closest New Testament parallel to both of these lists together is, is Galatians 5:19-21 and verses 22 and 23, the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit.

Paul's list of fleshy works includes sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies. That's more than seven. A- and it's less tidy. And that is actually more true to how sin works. It bleeds, it spreads, and it overlaps.

What Aquinas got right, I think, is, is that the Seven Capital Sins are not meant to be an exhaustive list. They are source sins, the roots from which the branches grow. And scripture kinda supports that logic, even if it doesn't produce the identical list itself. Jesus said in Mark 7:20-23, "What comes out of a person is what defiles them, for it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, uh, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly."

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Now let's do the same audit on the virtues, and here's what I wanna be upfront with about something.

The virtues have a more complicated origin than the sins, and that complexity is kind of worth sitting with rather than just papering over. Now the four cardinal virtues, as I mentioned, prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice are not from the Bible. Full stop. They come from Greek philosophy. Plato named them in The Republic.

Aristotle developed them in the Nicomachean Ethics. They describe moral excellence that, in the Greek philosophical tradition, any person could cultivate through habitual practice and rational reflection. They predate Jesus by about four centuries. Now, should that disqualify them? I don't think so, and here's why.

Paul himself quoted Greek poets in Acts 17 when he was preaching to the Athenians. He said, "For in him we live and move and have our being." That was a line from a Cretan philosopher named Epimenides. And, and by the way, if I'm not getting extra points for these names, I really should. I hope you guys are keeping track of that.

Anyways, Paul was not afraid to find truth in unexpected places as long as it was brought under the authority of scripture. And when you look at the cardinal virtues and what they actually describe, they do map onto Biblical categories. Prudence is wisdom. Proverbs has an entire theology of wisdom.

Temperance is self-control, which Paul lists as a fruit of the spirits in Galatians 5:23. Fortitude is perseverance, which James 1 verses 3 and 4 says produces maturity. Justice is doing right by others, which Micah 6 verse 8 calls one of the three things God requires of us. So the Greek label is not Biblical.

And Aquinas rightly distinguished them from the cardinal virtues by saying these could only be received through divine grace. You cannot habit your way into genuine faith, hope, or love. They are gifts. Now, when Ambrose combined these two traditions in the fourth century, he was making a significant theological move.

He was saying that Christian virtue does not reject the best of human moral reasoning. It completes it. Grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it, as the old scholastic phrase goes. The most direct biblical parallel to the seven virtues is the fruit of the spirits in Galatians 5:22-23: "But the fruit of the spirits is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."

Two things stand out here. First, the fruit is produced by the spirit, not manufactured by human willpower. Second, it is called fruit, singular, suggesting that these are facets of a single transformed life, not nine separate tasks to check off. Now Peter, he gives us another beautiful virtue framework in Second Peter verses one, uh, sorry, Second Peter 1:5-7.

He writes to make every effort to add goodness to faith, and, and to goodness knowledge, and to knowledge self-control, and to self-control perseverance, and to perseverance godliness, and to godliness mutual affection, and to mutual affection love. That is a chain of virtues rooted entirely in the grace of God And then there's Philippians 4:8, which is fascinating for a different reason.

But Paul writes, "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." The Greek word Paul uses for excellent is arete, which is exactly the word Aristotle used for virtue. Paul knew that word.

He used it deliberately. He was not dismissing Greek moral reasoning. He was baptizing it. That is the model for how Christians should engage with tradition, not uncritical acceptance, not reflexive rejection, honest evaluation held up against scripture, keeping what holds.

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All right, so we have covered the history and the biblical audits.

Now let's talk about what we actually do with all of this. Now, the wrong response to learning these lists are not in the Bible is to throw them out. "If it's not in scripture, I don't need it." Sounds like a principled position, but it would mean discarding most of Christian theology, which is developed over centuries by faithful, brilliant people who work from scripture.

The creeds are not in the Bible either. The word Trinity is not in the Bible. That does not make them wrong. The equally wrong response is to treat these lists as scripture, to quote them with the same authority as Galatians, to build doctrine on them without checking them against God's Word. That's how Christians end up with confused theology.

Now, the right response here is the third path, and, and the reformers had a phrase for the principle it rests on. They distinguish between scripture as norma normans, the norming norm, the standard that judges everything else, and traditions as norma normata, a normed norm, a standard that has itself been measured by scripture.

I know that's confusing, right? The seven sins and seven virtues belong in the second ca- category. They are a tradition that has been largely validated by scripture, but not scripture itself. Now, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 tells us, "Test them all. Hold on to what is good." That is the operating principle, and when you test the seven deadly sins against God's Word, you find that they hold up well, not perfectly.

The specific list Gregory landed on and, uh, is, it's not the only defensible version, and you could make a case for adding or removing items, right? But the framework that, that sin flows from disordered love inside the human heart, that's the pattern that can be named and diagnosed. I- is... That is thoroughly bi- biblical.

The, the pairing of each sin with its opposing virtue is especially useful pastorally. Po- uh, poet Prudentius- first formalized this in a work called The Psychomachia in the fifth century, a poem in which each vice is squared off against the virtue that it defeats. Humility defeats pride. Chastity defeats lust.

Temperance defeats gluttony. Charity defeats greed. Diligence defeats sloth. Patience defeats envy. Kindness defeats anger. They all kind of pair up. Now, I want you to look at how beautifully that maps onto Colossians chapter three. Paul writes in verse five through 14, "Put to death, therefore, what belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed.

But now you must also rid yourself of all such things. Clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience." That puts off the sin and puts on the virtue.

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The two lists give that command hands and feet, kind of gives it substance The Gospel Coalition reviewing a book on the seven deadly sins made a point that I think is exactly right.

The seven deadly sins can only be overcome through grace, not willpower or moral effort. The virtues are not a ladder we climb, they are a portrait of what the spirit produces. That framework matters. If you produce virtues as a checklist of behaviors to perform, you will fail and feel guilty. If you approach them as a description of what the spirit-filled life looks like, they become a mirror and a prayer.

Romans 12:2 says, "Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." The word transformed there is the Greek word metamorpho, the same root as metamorphosis. This is not behavior modification, this is change in kind. A- and the seven sins and seven virtues at their best help us see what we are being transformed from and what we are being transformed into.

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I feel like this is one of the more complicated episodes I've done, so I, I- hopefully you're following along. But let me try to bring this home. Today we covered a lot of ground. We traced the seven deadly sins from the Egyptian desert in the fourth century from Evagrius' eight evil thoughts through John Cassia, Pope Gregory I, and Thomas Aquinas arriving at the list most people recognized: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

We traced the seven virtues from Plato and Aristotle through Paul's letters and Bishop Ambrose of Milan. And we held both lists up against Scripture finding that while neither list is biblical, both lists are deeply rooted in what the Bible teaches. The takeaway I would like you to walk away with is this: the seven sins and virtues are not Scripture, but they are one of the most useful tools the church has developed for understanding what Scripture is talking about when it describes the war between the flesh and the spirit.

They name the patterns. Scripture gives them authority, and the Holy Spirit does the actual transforming Here's one of the things you can do this week. Pick one of these seven deadly sins, whichever one you know is your particular struggle, because we all have them. Find three Bible passages that speak to it directly.

Let scripture do the diagnosing. Then look up the virtue that opposes it, and look for it in Galatians 5:22-23. Ask the Holy Spirit to produce that virtue in you. That is the work, not the willpower, not the checklist, a prayer and an open Bible. Colossians 3:10 tells us, "We have put on a new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge of the image of its creator."

That is who you are in Christ, and that is what both of these ancient lists, at their best, are trying to describe.

Until next time, keep loving your neighbors, dive into God's Word daily, and may the Lord bless you and keep you and fill you with His peace. Take care, God bless, and we'll see you in the next episode.