Why Sin Shuns the Light and Wants to Remain Unknown

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Sin demands to have a man by himself.

It withdraws him from the community.

The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.

Sin wants to remain unknown.

It shuns the light.

In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together in Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 5, ed. James H. Burtness and Geffrey B. Kelly; transl. Daniel W. Bloesch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 110.

HT: Ed Shaw, The Plausibility Problem: The Church and Same-Sex Attraction (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2015).