Sin

Sin is an act or state of disobedience against God.

The New Testament Greek verb harmartano, translated as ‘to sin’, literally means ‘to miss’ a target – and by extension, ‘to fall short’ of a moral standard.

In its simplest sense, ‘sin’ is the transgression of divine law: the breach of rules. Thus murder, theft and adultery are all sins because they are forbidden in the ten commandments. In a broader sense, sins are any deviation from God’s will. Jesus teaches, for example, that even thinking about a breach of divine law is a sinful action, even if no law is broken. So sin is also any ungodly state of mind or motivation or attitude.

More than this, though, Christianity has regarded sin as a state of being: we do not merely commit sinful acts and harbour sinful thoughts, we are sinful in our very being. Even when we are striving with every intention of being good, we cannot overcome our basic state of sinfulness. This idea is called ‘the doctrine of original sin’.

In its naïve, literal form the doctrine of original sin states that the act of disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was an historical event: there really was an apple, a snake and a tree of knowledge. Because of Adam and Eve’s crime, the whole of humanity was placed in a state of sin. So, according to the doctrine, every person is born into a state of sin. Original sin is not an action that we can apologise for, but an ingrained feature of human nature. We can only be saved from original sin by God’s grace.

The doctrine is open to numerous objections. Since the mid nineteenth century, the historical truth of the Genesis story has been completely discredited and is now only believed by cranks and fundamentalists. Much earlier, in the fifth century, Pelagius argued that there was no ‘original sin’ and that sinfulness in the human world had come about through bad moral habits. He believed that the doctrine of original sin, which says we can do nothing to help ourselves, would encourage moral complacency.

The doctrine is also regarded as barbaric by many modern people. The idea that God holds every person in history responsible for the sins of two people paints God as an absurd and unjust tyrant. Similarly, the idea that newly-born infants are ‘sinful’ is, on the face of it, deeply objectionable. Original sin has been seen by some liberation theologians as an instrument of priestly power over the faithful. Others have said that the doctrine of original sin reflects dysfunctional Christian attitudes to sexuality and the body, leading to a destructive psychology of self-loathing.

More radically, some thinkers have argued that the so-called ‘original sin’ was not a sin at all, but a moment of human liberation. Erich Fromm argued, for example, that ‘the act of disobedience set Adam and Eve free and opened their eyes … “Original sin,” far from corrupting man, set him free; it was the beginning of history. Man had to leave the Garden of Eden in order to learn to rely on his own powers and to become fully human’ (The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, 1964). A similar view has been expressed by Philip Pullman in the His Dark Materials trilogy.

The foremost modern advocate of the doctrine of original sin was Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that the doctrine needs to be understood as a factual description of the human condition: ‘Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.’ So original sin is not something we need to feel personally guilty about. However, we should acknowledge the truth of our human moral incapacity.

Niebuhr criticised modern culture for preaching a naïve doctrine of human goodness which completely ignored the ‘mystery of evil in human life’: ‘The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin.’ Niebuhr’s theology has been severely criticised by neo-orthodox Barthians, such as Stanley Hauerwas, for trying to make Christian doctrine acceptable to modern liberal culture.

Whatever view we take, it is hard to see how Christianity can be credible without an adequate theory of tragedy. If we accept that the world is full of moral failure and that our own lives are imperfect (as we surely must), then we require a theory of tragedy in order to make sense of human existence. Secular thinkers like Marx and Freud, having dispensed with Christian ideas of sin, were forced to reinvent the concept in the form of a theory of alienation (Marx) and the death drive (Freud).

THINKERS

Augustine (354–430) is credited, unfairly, with ‘inventing’ the doctrine of original sin. He was, however, the classic exponent of the doctrine.

Tissa Balasuriya (1924– ): a Sri Lankan theologian, who was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1997 for allegedly denying the doctrine of original sin (along with other doctrinal ‘errors’ in Mary and Human Liberation, Mowbray, 1997). Balasuriya argued that he had ‘no difficulty with original sin in the sense of a human proneness to evil’, but objected to the use of the doctrine as an instrument of oppression.

Matthew Fox (1940– ) argued in Original Blessing (1983) that the doctrine of original sin has been given too much prominence and that God’s original blessing of the earth is what defines really human existence.

Ernest Gellner (1925–95) offered a psychological interpretation, arguing that we never start life with a clean slate, because we contain within us complex unconscious material: ‘the unconscious is a new version of original sin’ (The Psychoanalytic Movement, 1985).

St Paul (3–65) set out ideas of original sin in the letter to the Romans: ‘sin came into the world through one man’ (Rom. 5:12). Paul emphasised death as the consequence of Adam’s sin.

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in Gulliver’s Travels showed the corruption of humanity in the depiction of the ‘Yahoos’, a race obsessed by excrement, sex and cruelty.

IDEAS

Cheap grace: a term coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to describe the view of grace that expects no reciprocal sacrifice from us: ‘Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.’

Efficacious grace: the idea that God’s grace overpowers our will.

False guilt: guilt for something we are not responsible for.

Felix culpa: the idea that the original sin of Adam and Even was a ‘happy fault’ because, without this transgression, Jesus would not have been required as a Saviour.

Grace is God’s freely given generosity towards humanity which is believed to release humanity from sin.

Jansenism argued that there is no grace outside the Church.

Mortal sin: according to Roman Catholic teaching, this is a deliberate, knowing and serious act of sin that results in eternal damnation.

The seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth.

Sufficient grace: the idea that God gives us sufficient assistance to overcome sin, but that our own free decision is still required.

Venial sin: according to Roman Catholic teaching, this is a sin that can still be redeemed by God’s grace following a period of punishment in purgatory.

BOOKS

James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (Crossroad, 1998)

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Continuum, 2005)

Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (Continuum, 1995)

Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (Paulist Press, 2002)