The third part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015) describes the doctrine of sin common to the great Christian traditions. I leveraged my training in biblical languages and prior research from all my other essays. And I combined these with a study of the doctrine by contemporary theologians at the cutting edge. The point of describing a nuanced and robust doctrine of sin was to find resonances between it and modern social scientific accounts of human behaviour encapsulated by the evolutionary social sciences.

The Historical and Contemporary Theological Concept of Sin

Christian anthropology has historically affirmed that humans were created to enjoy loving relations with the triune God and the rest of creation. [57] However, as the primeval history in Genesis 3 relates, the first human pair succumbed to the persuasion of a serpent and set ‘themselves up as their own arbiters of good and evil, in opposition to God’. [58] This resulted in a curse that brought death to humanity, an antagonised relationship between man, woman, and child, the rest of creation, and Yahweh. Like other ancient Near Eastern literature, the Israelite corpus, which later formed the canon of the Hebrew Bible, was preoccupied with sin and its universality. [59] This universal condition of humanity’s captivity under the power of sin is explained in various places in the Hebrew Bible as the result of creatureliness, finitude, and frailty. [60] Consequently, four important roots for sin: הטא פשע שגגה עוון mean, in varying nuance, to miss the mark, to rebel, and to be in iniquity, intentionally and unintentionally, concerning the cultic stipulations, covenantal relationship, and moral character of Yahweh. [61] The most prevalent metaphor for forgiveness in the early Israelite writings on sin, as a burden to be borne away, נשא, gave sin and its attendant impurity, טמא, the property of a physical substance which required, in one typical instance, a scapegoat for removal. [62] This metaphor was gradually replaced with one of debt and satisfaction with the introduction of Aramaic as the common language of law and commerce in the Persian empire. This can be evidenced by the marked shift in vocabulary and syntax in the Hebrew language among the Second Temple texts in the Hebrew Bible, at Qumran, and in the Rabbinic corpus. [63]

As a result, by the first century CE, ‘in the New Testament, the metaphor of sin as debt was ubiquitous’. [64] The “Our Father” in Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, which preserves the Semitic idiom from Jesus’ original words, uses forms of áφιεµι and óφειληµα, “remit” and “debt” respectively, to refer to “forgive” and “sin”, [65] signifying the linguistic heritage of this metaphorical shift. Like the Hebrew Bible, sin, variously described as αµαρτια, παραπτωµα, παραβασις, παρακοη, áδικια, áσεβεια, κακια, and πονηρος, most basically signifies ‘an activity or stance which is opposed to God’. [66] However, the cultic stipulations present in the priestly sections of the תורה became increasingly irrelevant for the earliest Christians in theology and practice. [67] They believed that the sacrificial system for the forgiveness of sins was summarily fulfilled by the blood of Christ and appropriated via personal µετανοια and πιστις. [68] For the apostle Paul, this universal and enslaving power of sin, which manifests in the human as a φρονηµα της σαρκος, originated from the sin of Adam and the death that resulted from it. [69] Consequently, the self-giving of Christ in death enables the believer to escape death and its reign over her moral dispositions and actions as she anticipates the new creation characterized by a reconciliation between God, humankind, and all creation. This, in turn, enables her to participate in its immanence by radically loving God and neighbour in the present. [70] This emphasis on the bond of death, along with the prevalent metaphors of debt and satisfaction for sin and atonement in the religious writings of the Second Temple period which found their way into the New Testament, led theologians from the early Christian traditions, Syrian, Greek and Latin, to affirm, with varied nuance, that the cause of sin is the result of creatureliness and finitude, and to espouse the Christus Victor model of the atonement. [71]

Examples include the Trinitarian relational ontology expressed in the Athanasian doctrine of deification, θεοσις, the writings of the Cappadocian fathers, and John Damascene’s use of the term περιχωρησις, [72] which emphasizes the fundamentally relational and self-giving nature and personhood of the divine. [73] These suggest that humankind, in their call to share in this divine reality, should strive to continually seek loving relation and radical self-giving with each other and the rest of creation as the mark of living under the new covenant of grace. It is no surprise therefore, that the historical Orthodox interpretation of Pauline original sin, in opposition to Augustine’s, was championed by their advocates as being more faithful to the worldview and thought forms supposed and expressed in scripture. John Romanides, who has offered to speak for this position, argues that the Augustinian understanding of original sin, which is hugely influential in Western Christianity, [74] wherein sin is biologically transmitted via sexual concupiscence from Adam, bringing reatum, vitium, and death to all, [75] is mistaken. [76] He argues that ‘Man does not die because he is guilty of the sin of Adam. He becomes a sinner because he is yoked to the power of the devil through death and its consequences’, which ‘in turn are the root causes for self-assertion, egoism, hatred, envy and the like’. For Romanides, ‘salvation is only the union of man with the life of God in the body of Christ, where the devil is being ontologically and really destroyed in the life of love’. He defends his position by pointing out that the śφ ò clause in Romans 5.12, the Latin version on which Augustine based his doctrine, must refer to θανατος because ‘each time the grammatical construction of the preposition epi with the dative is used by Paul, it is always used as a relative pronoun which modifies the preceding noun’. [77] Consequently, the sentence should be translated “death spread to all men, on the basis of which (death) all have sinned”, not “death spread to all men, because all have sinned (in Adam)”.

Furthermore, J. A. Fitzmyer, in his commentary on Romans, has pointed out that the śφ ò clause itself has at least eleven different meanings, ‘each of which affects the sense greatly’. [78] Consequently, it seems that Augustine’s life circumstances may better explain his inspiration for original sin. In this regard, Ernesto Bonaiuti and others have pointed out that Augustine had shifted from an allegorical to a literal interpretation of the Latin Bible following his encounter with Ambrosiaster and his commentaries from 395 CE onward. [79] His adoption of the language of massa peccati, along with his own sexually promiscuous youth, lent itself naturally to the formulation of this doctrine. When he was later embroiled in the Pelagian controversy, wherein his works on free will were being cited against him by Pelagians, these provided the catalyst for his formulation of the doctrines of predestination and unconditional election which would become re-emphasized with modification in the Reformation a millennium later. As a case in point, John Calvin’s main source for his theology of original sin and human depravity was Augustine’s writings. However, unlike Augustine, who

made considerable effort to explain that sin does not find its origin in God […] Calvin located sin in God’s eternal decree and permission. Whereas Augustine formulated his view to counter the Manicheans and Pelagians, Calvin shifted the focus in his doctrine on original sin to knowledge of God and the self. The result was that he emphasised the noetic character of sin as moral and religious blindness. […] According to Calvin, sin is not transmitted through conception, but because of God’s divine decree. [80]

This insistence on human depravity and bondage to sin was also visible in the works of Martin Luther. He famously characterized sin as unbelief and as homo incurvatus in se. In other words, the sinner, in his action, attitude, and nature, is utterly oriented away from God and toward the desires of the self. [81] With the Enlightenment, the doctrine of original sin and its attendant notion of corporate guilt and corruption fell into disfavour among some of its key thinkers. [82] Many of the ideological assumptions of the Enlightenment have continued to influence Western and Christian thought to this day. Nevertheless, theologians from all the great Christian traditions have continued to affirm some form of sin that resembles what has been described thus far. For example, the classic Liberal theology encapsulated by Albrecht Ritschl has described original sin in economic and political terms, that is, in ‘sinful structures’ that bind society to a sinful way of living. [83] The Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher has described original sin ‘as the encompassing deed and encompassing guilt of the human race’, [84] sin in general as a result of a weakening of the consciousness that one is utterly dependent on God, [85] and redemption to be ‘Christ’s whole life that he communicates his unbroken God-relationship to us through the church’. [86] The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner believed that ‘original sin consists of the fact that human beings have a history of refusal and radical rejection of God’s self-communicating love, and this history of personal and communal sin enters into and becomes an inner dimension of each person’s situation’. [87] And the Reformed theologian Karl Barth has echoed this relational notion of sin in his anthropology when he affirms that

the humanity of every person consists in the determination of his or her being as being-together with the fellow-human.” To view human being “without the fellow-human” is to miss it altogether, for “a human without the fellow- human . . . would eo ipso be alien to the man Jesus.” and so be precisely inhuman. [88]

Prominent contemporary theologians from all the great branches of Christianity have continued, with an ecumenical flair, to embrace concepts of sin that are broadly consistent with the theology being presented thus far. [89] Nicholas Lash has emphasized that in the Christian tradition, sin has been understood in ontological terms first before it was understood in ethical ones. [90] Consequently, he sees a primary form of sin as egotism, that is, ‘the denial, by the creature, of its createdness’ which manifests, in one way, by holding other creatures in contempt. [91] Joel Green has defined sin as the way ‘in which humans – individually, collectively, and systematically – neglect, deny, and refuse simply to be human – that is, to embrace and live out their vocation as creatures made in the image of God’. [92] Rowan Williams understands sin to be ‘a buried capacity for communion between human beings as such – as flesh and spirit, as mortal, sinful and walled-off from each other, in need of a relation God alone can provide’. [93] Hence, for him ‘the goal of Christian growth is a knowledge of God entirely founded in the sharing of life, an intimacy between persons, the fellowship of God with human beings in their humanness’. [94] Matt Jenson points out that ‘to be a person means to be (1) created (2) for a specific purpose’, and that purpose is ‘communion with the Father in the Son by the Spirit, communion with one another and communion with ourselves’. [95] Therefore, sin ‘catapults one into the wrong orbit – oneself – and represents this kind of stultifying, isolating, self-aggrandizing and self-diminishing posture’, and the sinner ‘is a person who tries to live without relations, who lives as though she has no relations. […] Curved in on herself, the sinner is one who lives as if reality were other than it is’. [96] Like Matt, who aligned the theology of Augustine and Luther with a relational anthropology, Robert Jenson has also understood Augustine’s superbia and Luther’s homo incurvatus in se to be heart a rejection of the triune God as the sole object of love, in and through whom humans ‘are free to love friend or spouse or child or enemy also—or, for that matter, good food and drink or elegant mathematics or the amazing structure of the universe’. [97]

The doctrine of original sin has likewise been interpreted by these contemporary theologians relationally. Echoing Liberal theology, Ian Barbour has argued that ‘we are born into sinful social structures, such as those that perpetuate racism, oppression, and violence [because] every group tends to absolutize itself, blind to the rationalization of self-interest’. [98] Rowan Williams has characterised original sin as something that imposes itself on all of humanity because ‘before we can be conscious of it, the system of oppressor-victim absorbs us. It is this “already” which theology […] refers to as original sin—the sense of primordial “diminution” from which we all suffer before ever we are capable of understanding or choice’. [99] Others have offered to interpret original sin from historical, pathological, neuro-scientific, and corporate perspectives, yielding results that align variously with Orthodox and Augustinian flavours of the doctrine, enriching them in the process. [100] Consequently, redemption tends not to be described as a dualistic denigration of and flight from embodied personhood and community, characteristic of some Eastern religions and some forms of Christian fundamentalisms, [101] but as creaturely reconciliation toward their true nature and vocation as persons: peaceable, loving and eternal communion with each other and with their Creator. [102] These have implications for the lived Christian life. Green points out that before the resurrection at the παρουσια, there is ‘a transforming already at work in the creation of a new humanity through the dissolution of barriers dividing human beings from one another along gender, social, or ethnic lines’. [103] Consequently, for Alistair McFadyen,

since sin is energised disorientation in relationships, opposition to sin must take the form of a comprehensively energised reorientation towards the superabundance of life in, with, towards and from God, the bringing of a new covenant (indicated most clearly in the narration of the Last Supper) through the re-energising of superabundant life and relationality. [104]

Having provided a short typology and survey of the historic and contemporary understanding of sin largely common to all the great Christian traditions, the following section will engage with Wilson’s conflict model between consilience and mature Christian theological anthropology. It will then explore how the ESS and sin can enjoy a mutually constructive relationship.

Endnotes

• [57] See Westminster Shorter Catechism, in The Westminster Confession of Faith.
• [58] A. N. S. Lane, ‘Irenaeus on the Fall and original sin’, Darwin, Creation and the Fall (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), p. 145.
• [59] There are over fifty words for sin in biblical Hebrew, see Robin Cover, ‘Sin, Sinners: Old Testament’, in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Yale University Press, 2007); Brevard Childs notes that ‘the OT, too, recognizes sin as disruption, alienation, and falsehood among humans and in relation to God’, Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, p. 9; see also Gen. 6.5-7; 8:21; Ps. 51:5; Prov. 20:9; Qoh. 7:20, 29.
• [60] See Cover, ‘Sin’; see also Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 222, 223; and Gen. 3.19; 6.3; Job 4.17-21; 14.1-6; the Psalter.
• [61] See Cover, ‘Sin’; and Gen 4.13; 20.3-5; priestly sections of the תורה; Isa 1.2; the Deuteronomistic historians and the prophets; ‘Each[prophet] added his personal imprint on the description of sin, […] But they all point in the same direction, namely toward an alienation from God which, because it is a voluntary abandonment of Yahweh, breaks the bond between God and Man, and can therefore be nothing other than disruption and destruction of the divine order’, Cover, ‘Sin’.
• [62] See Lev. 16.22; 24.15.
• [63] Gary Anderson, Sin (London: Yale University Press,2009), pp. 16, 16, 16, 35, 96, 193; see also Lev. 26; Isa.40:1-2; Dan. 4; Tobit, 11QMelchizedek; for the Rabbinic corpus, see Eliezer Diamond, Holy Men and Hunger Artists(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 67.
• [64] See Rom. 6.23; Matt. 18.23-35.
• [65] See Matt. 6.12. This is in contradistinction with the Lukan version which uses the more recognizable αμαρτια, see Luke 11:4. This metaphorical emphasis led to Alms giving becoming a distinctive early Christian activity, see Anderson, Sin, p. 153; see also John Barclay, ‘“The poor you will always have with you”: Why it Mattered to the Church to Give to the Poor’, Houston Baptist University Theology Conference.
• [66] E. P. Sanders, ‘Sin, Sinners: New Testament’, in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Yale University Press,2007); see the list of sins in I Peter and James for some examples.
• [67] See Acts 10 and 15.
• [68] See Acts 2.28; Heb. 9.14, 22; 10.12.
• [69] See Gen. 3; Rom. 1.32; 3.23; 5.12; 6.16,23; I Cor. 15.56.
• [70] Sanders, ‘Sin’; see also Isa. 6-11; 15.7; Matt. 22.37-40; Rom. 6.2-14; 16-18; 7.4-6; 8.8; II Cor. 5.17-21; Heb. 2.15.
• [71] Anderson, Sin, pp. 31, 32, 130. Examples include Jacob of Serug, Narsai, Irenaeus, and a whole slew of Greek Church Fathers, Anderson, Sin, pp. 119-120.
• [72] Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: DLT, 1990), pp. 51, 55-61; Denis Edwards, ‘Original Sin and Saving Grace in Evolutionary Context’, in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (California: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1998), p.388.
• [73] Unlike the pagan theology of antiquity, which prioritized ontology as the foremost category for describing the divine, much of Christian theology, following the Cappadocian and Chalcedonian concepts of the Trinity, prioritized personhood, see Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 95.
• [74] This doctrine was affirmed in the Council of Trent.
• [75] See Gregory Peterson, ‘Falling up: Evolution and Original Sin’ in Evolution and Ethics (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 274.
• [76] Many early theologians did not hold to Augustinian original sin either. They include Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen and John Chrysostom, see McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 15f.
• [77] J. Romanides, ‘Original Sin According to St. Paul’, St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, 4 (1955-6), pp. 21, 20, 25, 23.
• [78] John Bowker, Is God a Virus? (London: SPCK, 1995), p. 248.
• [79] See Carol Harrison, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 109; and Ernesto Bonaiuti, ‘The Genesis of St. Augustine’s Idea of Original Sin’, Harvard Theological Review, 10 2 (1917), p. 169.
• [80] N. Vorster, ‘Calvin’s modification of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin’, In die Skriflig, 44 3 (2010), pp. 71, 83.
• [81] Luther echoes Eastern theology when he writes that ‘our shame is great, that we were the devil’s children. But the honor is much greater, that we are children of God. For what greater fame and pride could we have … than to be called the children of the Highest and to have all he is and has?’, Jensen, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 311.
• [82] ‘In its traditional form, the doctrine of original sin appears to modern sensibilities to propose a metaphysics of sin (to ontologise sin in the form of bondage and non-personal attribution of guilt) which runs directly counter to the metaphysics of freedom characteristic of modernity’, McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 28.
• [83] See also Peterson, ‘Falling Up’, pp. 284, 284.
• [84] Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 149.
• [85] William Craig, Defenders Podcast Series 2, Doctrine of Man 13, 15, 13, 15.
• [86] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 187.
• [87] Edwards, ‘Original Sin’, p 377.
• [88] Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 73.
• [89] The view that personhood is fundamentally relational has been converging in theology and philosophy in the last century according to Matt Jenson, The Gravity of sin (London: T & T Clark, 2006), p. 1; see also Edward Russell, ‘Reconsidering Relational Anthropology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5 (2003)
• [90] See Nicholas Lash, ‘Production and Prospect: Reflections on Christian Hope and Original Sin’, in Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 279-80.
• [91] Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 35, 38.
• [92] Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, p. 69.
• [93] Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 230.
• [94] Williams, Wound of Knowledge, p. 30.
• [95] See John Zizoulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985)
• [96] M. Jenson, Gravity, pp. 188, 189, 186, 191.
• [97] Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 140; see also McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 217-8.
• [98] Barbour, When ScienceMeets Religion, p. 134.
• [99] Rowan Williams, Resurrection, (Pilgrim Press, 2003),p. 124.
• [100] For corporate excess see Clayton, Philip, ‘Biology and Purpose’, in Evolution and Ethics, pp. 106-8; for the neurosciences and sin, see Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life; for a historical and pathological approach, see McFadyen’s account of the Holocaust and child abuse in his Bound to Sin.
• [101] The earliest Christians considered this kind of Gnostic dualism to be heretical.
• [102] Jenson, Systematic TheologyVol 2, pp. 312, 317, 319.
• [103] Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, p. 70; see I Cor. 12.12-13; Col. 3.10-11.
• [104] McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 223.