Sin

SIN

1. Any thought, word, desire, action, or omission of action, contrary to the law of God, or defective when compared with it.The origin of sin is a subject which baffles all investigation; and our inquiries are much better directed when we seek through Christ a release from its penalty and power, for ourselves and the world. Its entrance into the world, and infection of the whole human race, its nature, forms, and effects, and its fatal possession of every unregenerate soul, are fully described in the Bible, Gen 6:5 Psa 51:5 Mat 15:19 1Ch 5:12 Jam 1:14,15 .As contrary to the nature, worship, love, and service to God, sin is called ungodliness; as a violation of the law of God and of the claims of man, it is a transgression or trespass; as a deviation from eternal rectitude, it is called iniquity or unrighteousness; as the evil and bitter root of all actual transgression, the depravity transmitted from our first parents to all their seed, it is called “original sin,” or in the Bible,” the flesh,” “the law of sin and death,” etc., 1Ch 8:1,2 1Jo 3:4 5:17. The just penalty or “wages of sin is death;” this was threatened against the first sin, Gen 2:17 and all subsequent sins: “the soul that sinneth it shall die.” A single sin, unrepented of the unforgiven, destroys the soul, as a single break renders a whole ocean cable worthless. Its guilt and evil are to be measured by the holiness, justice, and goodness of the law it violates, the eternity of the misery it causes, and the greatness of the Sacrifice necessary to expiate it.”Sin” is also sometimes put for the sacrifice of expiation, the sin offering, described in Lev 4:3,25,29 also, 1Ch 8:3 and in 2Co 5:21, Paul says that God was pleased that Jesus, who knew no sin, should be our victim of expiation: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”For the sin against the Holy Ghost, see BLASPHEMY.2. A desert of Arabia Petraea, near Egypt, and on the western arm of the Red Sea, Exo 16:1 17:1 Nu 33:12. To be distinguished from the desert of Zin. See ZIN.3. An ancient fortified city, called “the strength of Egypt,” Eze 30:15,16 . Its name means mire, and in this it agrees with Pelusium and Tineh, the Greek and modern names of the same place. It defended the northeast frontier of Egypt, and lay near the Mediterranean, of the eastern arm of the Nile. Its site, near the village of Tineh, is surrounded with morasses; and is now accessible by boat only during a high inundation, or by land in the driest part or summer. A few mounds and columns alone remain.

Fuente: American Tract Society Bible Dictionary

Sin

Sin is a term which belongs to religion. Moral evil as an injury done by man to himself is vice, as an offence against human society crime, but as affecting his relation to God sin. But even here we may distinguish a more distinctively religious from the more general moral sense. It is distrust of the goodness and grace of God as well as disobedience to the law of God as the standard of moral obligation. To be forgetful of God in ones thoughts, to be neglectful of piety and worship towards God, is as much sin as to disregard and defy Gods commandments. It is sometimes insisted in writings of to-day, such as Tennants (see Literature), that sin must be conscious and voluntary distrust and disobedience; but it will appear that in the Scriptures the emphasis on the subjective consciousness is secondary. Sin includes departure from, or failure to reach, the standard of religious and moral obligation for man determined by the nature and purpose of God; the stress falls more on the objective reality-the difference between what man is and what he should be, God being what He is. While it might be convenient to restrict the term sin to conscious, voluntary acts, yet the wider usage is too deeply rooted in religious thought to be easily displaced. It must be insisted, however, that moral accountability, personal blameworthiness, attaches to the conscious and voluntary acts alone, even although, as regards the consequences of evil, human solidarity is such that the innocent may suffer with the guilty.

The term guilt is one that requires careful definition. It is not punishment; for punishment consists of all the evil consequences of sin, which the sinner in his sense of having sinned regards as resulting from a violated moral law, or more personally as the evidences of the Divine displeasure. This subjective consciousness is not, however, illusory, as it does correspond with and respond to a moral order and a personal will opposed to sin, which are an objective reality. Guilt is the liability to punishment, the sinner by his act placing himself in such a relation to the moral order and the personal will of God as to expose him to the evil consequences included in his punishment. Here again our modern thought with its refinements makes distinctions which the Scriptures for the most part ignore. Can we separate, or must we identify, guilt and sense of guilt? Is there an objective fact and a subjective feeling? If sin is confined strictly to conscious and voluntary acts, then guilt, it would seem, must be measured by the sense of guilt, the blame-worthiness or evil desert that the conscience of the sinner assigns to him. If this were so, then the worse a man became, the less guilty he would be; for it is a sign of moral deterioration to lose the sense of shame in wrongdoing.

The Scripture approach-and surely this is the properly religious approach-to the question is from the side of God rather than of man. A mans guilt is measured, not by his shame or sorrow, but by Gods judgment: his relation to God as affected by his sin is determined, not by his own opinion of himself, but by Gods view of him. The Divine judgment will, we may confidently believe, take due account of all the facts; the departure from, or failure to reach, the Divine standard, the moral possibility of each man as determined by his heredity, environment, and individuality, and his own moral estimate of himself-all will be included in Gods knowledge of him, and so his guilt will be determined, not by an unerring wisdom and an unfailing righteousness only, but also by an unexhausted love. Thus a mans sense of guilt is not the measure of his guilt: for the more callous he is morally, the worse must his moral condition appear in the sight of God; and the more sensitive he is, the better must he appear to God. In the measure in which a man judges himself in penitence will he not be judged guilty by God.

Further, in his subjective consciousness a man tends to separate himself, both in his merits and in his defects, from his fellow-men; but in objective reality men are so closely related to one another as to be involved in moral responsibility for one another. Saints as a whole must bear the blame for many of the conditions which make the criminal; and the saint will bear in his heart as a personal sorrow and shame the sins of his fellow-men. In Gods view also the individual does not stand isolated; but the race is a unity, one in its guilt, yet also one for Gods grace. While, when necessary, we must insist on individual liberty and personal responsibility, we must not ignore the complementary truth of racial solidarity. The Scripture point of view is predominantly, if not exclusively, universal objectivity and not individual subjectivity; and unless we recognize this we shall fail to understand the apostolic teaching.

1. St. Pauls teaching.-As the Dict. of Christ and the Gospels deals with the teaching of Jesus, we are here strictly con fined to the apostolic teaching; and we must obviously begin with St. Paul.

(a) The universality of sin.-St. Pauls view is the distinctively religious view. Men, dependent upon God, and capable of knowing God, glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks, but dishonoured God in their conception of Him, and in their worship (Rom 1:21); their moral deterioration followed religious perversion (Rom 1:24-25). Even in the Gentiles this involved guilt, for the sin was conscious and voluntary, as a disregard and defiance of a law written in their hearts (Rom 1:28-32, Rom 2:14-16). Not less guilty was the Jew who failed to keep the Law of the possession of which he made his boast (Rom 2:23). By such a historical induction St. Paul establishes his thesis of the universality of sin and consequent guilt, and confirms it from the Scriptures, the aim of which is to bring to all men the sense of guilt, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgement of God (Rom 3:19); the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). This thesis is advanced, not for its own sake, however, but to show the need of as universal a salvation offered to mankind in Christ.

The validity of St. Pauls conclusion here is not affected by the correctness or otherwise of the explanation which he offers of the origin of idolatry and the immorality consequent on it. First, we must recognize the Hebraic mode of speech, which represents as direct Divine judgment what we should regard as inevitable moral consequence; and, secondly, we must to-day regard polytheism and the accompanying idolatry as seemingly inevitable stages in the development of the religious consciousness of the Divine. We may admit, however, that idolatry as St. Paul knew it in the Roman Empire was closely associated with immorality; and that Greek and Roman mythology was likely to have an adverse moral influence, as Plato in the Republic recognized.

In affirming that sin involves guilt, exposes man to the Divine judgment, St. Paul was echoing the teaching not only of the OT and of Jesus Himself (Mat 11:22; Mat 23:37; Mat 23:39) but of the universal human conscience, confirmed by the course of human history. There is a moral order in man and the world condemning and executing sentence on sin; and, if God be personally immanent in the world, we cannot distinguish that moral order from the mind and will of God. And, if God be personal, He feels as well as thinks and wills; and so we cannot altogether exclude an emotional reaction of God against sin. St. Pauls term the wrath of God may be allowed its full significance so long as we exclude any passion inconsistent with holy love. Thus we are here dealing, not with an outgrown superstition, but with a permanent moral and spiritual reality-mans sin and Gods judgment, mans need and Gods offer of salvation.

(b) The development of sin.-From the universal fact we may turn to the individual feeling of sin. St. Paul was not merely generalizing his individual experience in his proof of the universality of sin, but it is certain that his individual experience gave emphasis to his statement. The classic passage is Rom 7:7-25, which the present writer must regard as an account of St. Pauls own individual experience, before the grace of Christ brought him deliverance; but there is no doubt that he desires us to regard his individual experience as in greater or lesser degree common to all men. Sin is a power dwelling in man, which may for a time be latent, but which is provoked into exercise by the Law. The knowledge of the prohibition stimulates, and does not restrain, the opposition of sin to law; as the common proverb says, Forbidden fruit is sweet. While the mind knows, approves, and delights in the law of God as holy, righteous, and good, the flesh is the seat and vehicle of sin. The law in the members is opposed to, resists and conquers, the law in the mind, and so the man is brought into bondage, doing what he condemns, unable to do what he approves. This passage raises three questions which must briefly be answered.

(1) Sin as a power.-For St. Paul here as throughout chapters 5, 6, 7 sin is personified as distinct from the animal appetites, the physical impulses, and even the human will itself as dwelling in men and bringing men into bondage. It enters into the heart (Rom 7:17; Rom 7:20), works on man, using the Law itself for its ends (Rom 7:8; Rom 7:11), and enslaves him (Rom 6:6; Rom 6:17; Rom 6:20). In Christ he is freed from sin (Rom 6:18; Rom 6:22) and dies to it (Rom 6:9; Rom 6:11). As freed from and dead to sin, the Christian is not to put his members at the service of sin (Rom 6:13), and must not allow it to reign over him in his body (Rom 6:12). Is this only personification, or does St. Paul regard sin as a personal agent? As a Jew he believed in Satan and a host of evil spirits; and probably, if pressed to explain the power of sin, he would have appealed to this personal agency; but we must not assume that when he thus speaks of sin he is always thinking of Satan. Sin is for him an objective reality without being always identified with Satan (see Sanday-Headlam, International Critical Commentary , Romans, p. 145 f.). For us the personification is suggestive in so far as we must recognize that in customs, beliefs, rites, institutions, in human society generally, there is an influence for evil that hurtfully affects the individual-what Ritschl has called the Kingdom of sin as opposed to the Kingdom of God. The subject of sin, rather, is humanity as the sum of all individuals, in so far as the selfish action of each person, involving him as it does in illimitable interaction with all others, is directed in any degree whatsoever towards the opposite of the good, and leads to the association of individuals in common evil (Justification and Reconciliation, Eng. translation , Edinburgh, 1900, p. 335).

(2) The flesh as the seat and vehicle of sin.-As there is in this Dictionary a separate article Flesh, the subject cannot here be fully discussed: a summary statement must suffice. The flesh is not identical with the body, animal appetite, or sensuous impulse; it is mans whole nature, in so far as he disowns his dependence on God, opposes his will to God, and resists the influence of the Spirit of God. It is man in the aspect, not merely of creatureliness, but of wilfulness and godlessness. It is as corrupted and perverted by sin that human nature lends itself as a channel to and an instrument of sin as a power dwelling in and ruling over man.

(3) The relation of the Law to sin.-The Law reveals sin, because it shows the opposition between the will of God and the wishes of man (Rom 3:20; Rom 7:7). The Law provokes rather than restrains sin (Rom 7:8-9; cf. 1Co 15:56): the commandment is like a challenge, which sin at once accepts. This St. Paul represents not only as the human result, but as the Divine intention (Rom 5:20, Gal 3:19), in order that a full exposure might be made of what sin in its very nature is (Rom 7:13), so that men might be made fully aware of their need of deliverance from it (Rom 11:32). The Law fails to restrain, because of its inherent impotence ( , Rom 8:3), as letter and not spirit (2Co 3:6), as written on tables of stone and not on tables that are hearts of flesh (2Co 3:3; cf. Jer 31:33). Thus sin as a power, finding its seat and vehicle in the flesh, not restrained but provoked by the law in the individual, brings a bondage from which the gospel offers deliverance, even as it sets a universal grace of God over against the universal sin of mankind.

(c) The origin of sin.-What explanation can be offered of the fact of the universality of sin? How has mans nature become so corrupted and perverted as to be described by the term flesh? How can sin be represented as a power dwelling in, ruling over, man, and bringing him into bondage? While St. Paul does not in Rom 5:12; Rom 5:21 formally offer this explanation, the passage being introduced into the argument for another purpose-to prove the greater efficacy of grace than of sin, by as much as Christ is greater than Adam-yet, as he is there dealing with his view of the introduction of sin into the world, we must regard that passage as his explanation both of sin as a power in humanity and of the flesh; for it is not likely that he would leave sin in the race and sin in the individual unconnected. In the article Fall the subject has already been discussed; here only the considerations bearing immediately on the subject of sin need be mentioned. The relation of the race to Adam may be conceived as two-fold: (1) a participation in guilt; (2) an inheritance of a sinful disposition.

(1) Participation in guilt.-St. Paul teaches that all men are involved in the penalty of Adams transgression, for death passed unto all men (Rom 5:12), but he does not teach that all men are held guilty of Adams transgression; for (a) by a surprising change of construction and discontinuity of thought he affirms as the reason for the universality of death the actual transgression of all men for that all sinned, and (b) he guards himself against the charge of imputing guilt when there is no conscious and voluntary transgression, by affirming that sin is not imputed when there is no law (Rom 5:13).

As regards (a), the clause cannot mean that all sinned in Adam (omnes peccarunt, Adamo peccante, Bengel), either as the physical source or as the moral representative of the race; for most probably means because.

As regards (b), while St. Paul affirms that guilt is not ascribed unless there is transgression of law, as in the case of Adam, yet he asserts that nevertheless the same penalty falls on all. For him, therefore, penalty may be racial, while guilt must be personal. This statement, however, is qualified by his declaration in chs. 1 and 2 of the responsibility of the Gentiles as having an inward law. Did he really think of any period or nation as having had in this sense no law?

(2) Inheritance of a sinful disposition.-Unless the analogy with Christ is incomplete, there must be, however, some connexion between Adams transgression and the actual sin of all mankind. How does St. Paul conceive that connexion? It has usually been taken for granted that he teaches that by Adams transgression human nature was itself infected, and that from him there descends to all men a sinful disposition. But he might mean no more than that sin as an alien power found entrance into the race, and brought each individual under its dominion. He may regard social rather than physical heredity (to apply a modern distinction) as the channel of the transmission and diffusion of sin. In view, however, of his teaching about the flesh, it is more probable that he did regard human nature as corrupted and perverted; and, in the absence of any other explanation, we seem warranted in assuming that he did connect this fact with the Fall. We must beware, however, of ascribing to him such definite doctrines as those of original sin and total depravity; for later thought has probably read into his words more than was clearly present to his own mind.

It cannot be shown that St. Paul regarded all men as involved In Adams guilt, either because of their physical descent from him or of any federal relation to him, even although all men are subject to the penalty of death. He does not explain how there is liability to the penalty without culpability for the offence; but he does regard mankind as guilty in the first sense, and not guilty (except by personal transgression) in the second sense. Later theology blurred this distinction in teaching original sin in both sense. Nor is there any ground for holding that he ascribed to Adam that moral endowment which this theology assigned to him. He does not, as is sometimes maintained, represent Adam himself as subject to the flesh in the same way as are his descendants; for 1Co 15:47 contrasts not the unfallen Adam with the pre-existent Christ, but the fallen Adam with the Risen Christ; but be does emphasize the voluntary character of Adams act: it was disobedience (Rom 5:19). Could he have assigned to it the moral significance he does, had he thought of Adam as in the hopeless and helpless bondage described in Rom 7:7-25? This passage, however, represents that bondage not as directly inherited, but as resulting in the individual from a moral development, in which sin uses the flesh to bring it about. Thus he does not teach total depravity as an inheritance.

(d) The penalty of sin.-St. Paul undoubtedly teaches that death is the penalty of sin (Rom 5:12). While he includes physical dissolution, death means more for him (Rom 6:21-23); it has a moral and religious content; it is Judgment and doom; it is invested with dread and darkness by mans sense of sin (1Co 15:56). While we cannot in the light of our modern knowledge regard physical dissolution, as St. Paul regarded it, as the penalty of sin (for it appears to us a natural necessity), yet, viewing death in its totality, as he did, we may still maintain that it is sin that gives it the character of an evil to be dreaded. The connexion between death and sin, St. Paul affirms, is not that of effect and cause, but of penalty and transgression (Rom 5:14), or wages and work (Rom 6:23); for he thinks not of a natural sequence, but of a deserved sentence (Rom 2:5). He approaches our modes of thought more closely, however, in the analogy of sowing and reaping (Gal 6:8; cf. Jam 1:15).

(e) The deliverance from sin.-This is for St. Paul two-fold: it is an annulling of the guilt and removal of the penalty of sin, as well as a destruction of the power of sin. Sin is an act of disobedience (Rom 5:19), committed against God (Rom 1:21) and His Law (Rom 3:20, Rom 7:7), which involves personal responsibility (Rom 1:20), ill desert (Rom 13:2), and the Divine condemnation (Rom 5:15; Rom 5:18). This condemnation is expressed in the penalty of death, which is not, as we have just seen, a natural consequence, but a Divine appointment, an expression of Gods wrath against sin (Rom 1:18, Eph 5:6, Col 3:6). The work of Christ as an act of obedience (Rom 5:19) reversed this condemnation (Rom 8:1), and reconciled men with God (Rom 5:10, 2Co 5:18; 2Co 5:20). We shall miss what is central for St. Paul if we ignore this objective atonement of Christ for the race, and confine our regard, as we tend to-day to do, to the subjective influence of Christ in destroying sins power in the individual.

That inward change St. Paul describes as dying to sin, being buried with Christ through baptism into death, a crucifixion or dying with Christ, a resurrection and living with Christ (Rom 6:1-11, Eph 2:1-10). By this he does not mean insensibility to temptation, or cessation from struggle, but a deliverance from the impotence felt in bondage to sin, and a confidence of victory through Christ. Nor does he mean a process completed in man by Divine power apart from his effort; for believers are to reckon themselves to be not only dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus. But they are not to let sin reign in their mortal selves, nor are they to present their members unto sin (Rom 6:11-13); and they are to mortify by the spirit the deeds of the body (Rom 8:13; cf. Col 3:5). Thus St. Paul knows from his own personal experience a complete remedy for the universal fatal disease of sin; and all that in his letters he presents regarding this subject is presented that he may commend the gospel to men, as the sole, sufficient, Divine provision for the universal dominant human necessity.

2. St. Johns teaching.-(a) In the Fourth Gospel sin is primarily represented as unbelief, the rejection of Christ (Joh 1:11; Joh 16:9), aggravated by the pretension of knowledge (Joh 9:41). As Christ is one with God, this involves hatred of the Father (Joh 15:24). The choice reveals the real disposition (Joh 3:19-21), and so justly incurs judgment. Sin is a slavery (Joh 8:34). One notable contribution to the doctrine of sin is the denial of the invariable connexion of sin and suffering (Joh 9:3), although it is not denied (Joh 5:14) that often there is a connexion.

In the First Epistle sin is described as lawlessness (1Jn 3:4, ) and unrighteousness (1Jn 5:17, ); and, as love is the supreme commandment, hatred is especially condemned (1Jn 3:12). Further, as righteousness is identified with truth, sin is equivalent to falsehood (1Jn 2:22, 1Jn 4:20); but this is not an intellectualist view, as truth has a moral and spiritual content; it is the Divine reality revealed to men in Christ. On the one hand, Christ is Himself sinless, and was manifested to take away sins and to destroy the works of the Devil (1Jn 3:5; 1Jn 3:8); and, on the other hand, believers by abiding in Him are kept from sin (1Jn 3:6), because the Evil One cannot touch them (1Jn 5:18).

Hence arises what has been called the paradox of the Epistle. On the one hand, the reality of the sinfulness even of believers is insisted on; to deny sinfulness is self-deception, and even charging God with falsehood (1Jn 1:8; 1Jn 1:10), and confession is the condition of forgiveness and cleansing (1Jn 1:9). On the other hand, the impossibility of believers sinning is asserted; whoever abides in Christ cannot sin (1Jn 3:6), the begotten of God cannot sin (1Jn 3:9), because kept by Christ and untouched by the Evil One (1Jn 5:18). The explanation is that each of these declarations is directed against a different form of error. Of the first declaration Westcott says: St. John therefore considers the three false views which man is tempted to take of his position. He may deny the reality of sin (6, 7), or his responsibility for sin (8, 9), or the fact of sin in his own case (10). By doing this he makes fellowship with God, as He has been made known, impossible for himself. On the other hand, God has made provision for the realisation of fellowship between Himself and man in spite of sin (The Epistles of St. John, 1883, p. 17). Regarding the second declaration, he offers this explanation: True fellowship with Christ, Who is absolutely sinless, is necessarily inconsistent with sin; and, yet further, the practice of sin excludes the reality of a professed knowledge of Christ (ib., p. 101). What the Apostle is referring to is not single acts of sin, due to human weakness, but the deliberate continuance in sin on the assumption that the relation to God is not, and cannot be, affected thereby. The one class of errorists denied the actuality of sin, the other declared that even the habit of sin did not deprive the believer of the blessings of the Christian salvation.

(b) Another contribution to the doctrine may be found in the conception of a sin unto death (1Jn 5:16), for which intercession is not forbidden, and yet cannot be urged. The reference is not to any particular act, but rather to any act of such a character as to separate the soul from Christ and the salvation in Him. It may be compared to the sin against the Holy Ghost (Mar 3:29) and also to the sin of apostasy (Heb 6:4-5; Heb 10:26).

(c) It must be noticed that in this Epistle there is a very marked emphasis on Satan as the source of mans sin. The Devil has sinned from the beginning, and he that sinneth is of the Devil (1Jn 3:8), and the whole world lieth in the Evil One (1Jn 5:19; cf. Joh 8:44, where the Devil is described as a murderer and a liar).

3. St. Jamess teaching.-(a) St. James offers us, as does St. Paul, although much more briefly, a psychological account of the development of sin in the individual. Having asserted the blessedness of enduring temptation, he denies that God does or can tempt (Jam 1:12-13). Temptation arises when a man is drawn away and enticed by his desire (). This desire need not itself be evil, but it acquires a sinful character when indulged in opposition to the higher law of duty. This desire has sin as its offspring, and this sin full grown is in turn the parent of death (Jam 1:14-15). This natural analogy, with which may be compared St. Pauls figure of sowing and reaping (Gal 6:8), does not, in suggesting a necessary sequence of desire, sin, and death, exclude either mans free will in consenting to the desire or Gods free will in decreeing death as the penalty of sin. Nor does the passage teach that every sin must issue in death. The sin must reach its full development before death is its result. We can also here compare 1Jn 5:16, a sin unto death. As St. James teaches the possibility of conversion (Jam 5:19-20) and enjoins the confession of sin and mutual intercession for forgiveness (Jam 5:16), this development from sin unto death may be arrested by Divine grace. The sequence is a possibility, not a necessity.

(b) What appears at first sight an echo of Rabbinic teaching in Jam 2:10, that stumbling in one point makes a man guilty of all the law, proves on closer scrutiny entirely Christian. The law is not the Mosaic Law, but the perfect law, the law of liberty (Jam 1:25), and the royal law is, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Jam 2:8); and assuredly the respect of persons condemned is entirely inconsistent with that law. Stumbling in such a point is a violation of the principle of the law. As has often been pointed out, Jewish as St. James is, no other NT writer has so completely assimilated the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount; and it is from the inwardness of Jesus standpoint, and not the externality of Rabbinism, that such a saying is to be judged.

(c) In one respect St. James does not, however, closely follow the teaching of Jesus. He assumes the probability of a connexion between sickness and sin (Jam 5:15), and enjoins not only prayer and anointing with oil in the name of the Lord for the healing of the disease, but also personal confession and mutual intercession for the forgiveness of the sin (Jam 5:14-16). For sin involves Divine judgment (Jam 4:12, Jam 5:9; Jam 5:12). There is a friendship with the world which is enmity against God (Jam 4:4). As for the other NT writers, there is in the background of St. Jamess thought about sin the belief in Satan and demons (Jam 3:15).

4. Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews.-(a) The standpoint of Hebrews must be understood if the teaching on sin is to be understood. The Epistle is primarily concerned with mans access to God, and sin, as guilt involving Gods judgment, bars mans approach.

In the New Covenant there is no more conscience of sins, for the worshippers have been once cleansed, as they could not be by the sacrifices of the Law (Heb 10:1-2). While the Law failed to take away sins (v. 11), and could not, as touching the conscience, make the worshippers perfect (Heb 9:9), the blood of Jesus, the new and living Way, gives boldness to enter the holy place of fellowship with God (Heb 10:20), having obtained for us eternal redemption (Heb 9:12). On account of this sacrifice offered once for all, there is remission of sins (Heb 10:18) and believers are sanctified (not in the sense of being made holy, but as set apart for Gods service, Heb 10:10). This guilt, which Christ by His atonement removes as all the propitiatory rites of the Old Covenant had failed to do, involves man in the fear of death with consequent bondage (Heb 2:15) and an evil conscience (Heb 10:22), by which is meant the sense of guilt. The writer is thus concerned not with the subjective aspect of sin as individual bondage to the power of sin, as is St. Paul in Rom 7:7-25, but with the objective aspect of Gods judgment on sin, and the echo of that judgment in mans sense of guilt and fear of death.

(b) The sin which he especially warns against is the rejection of this Divine provision for the removal of sin in Christ. How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? (Heb 2:3). There are two passages of very solemn warning, of even terrible severity (Heb 6:4-6, Heb 10:26; Heb 10:29). Those who have been guilty of apostasy, having yielded to an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God (Heb 3:12), cannot be renewed unto repentance, as they have crucified to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame (Heb 6:6): for them there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgement, because they have trodden under foot the Son of God, and have counted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing, and have done despite unto the Spirit of grace (Heb 10:26-29). G. B. Stevens interpretation of the two passages may be added: If a man deliberately and wilfully deserts Christ, he will find no other Saviour; there remains no sacrifice for sins (Heb 10:26) except that which Christ has made. The Old Testament offerings are powerless to save; one who refuses to be saved by Christ refuses to be saved at all. For him who turns away from Christ and determines to seek salvation elsewhere, there can be only disappointment and failure. While such an attitude of refusal and contempt lasts, there is no possibility of recovery for those who assume it. But this impossibility is not an absolute but a relative one; it is an impossibility which lies within the limits of the supposition made in the context, namely, that of a renunciation of Christ. Nothing is said against the possibility of recovery to Gods favor whenever one ceases from such a contempt of Christ and returns to him as the one only Saviour (The Theology of the NT, Edinburgh, 1899, pp. 521-522).

(c) Unlike St. James, the author of this Epistle does not connect suffering with sin as its penalty, but urges his readers to regard their afflictions as fatherly chastisement (Heb 12:5; Heb 12:13), for Christ Himself was perfected by suffering Heb 12:1-3; cf. Jam 2:10, Jam 4:15).

5. St. Peters teaching.-There is nothing distinctive about the teaching of St. Peter in the First Epistle. He warns his readers, as sojourners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul (1Pe 2:11). He describes the Christian redemption as from the vain manner of life handed down from your fathers (1Pe 1:18). Christs atonement for sin by substitution is distinctly taught: he bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness (1Pe 2:24); and he suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God (1Pe 3:18). In sin he sees a personal agency, Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour (1Pe 5:8).

In the Second Epistle (and also in Jude) the demonology is still more pronounced. The rebellion in heaven against God, and the expulsion of the rebels to hell (2Pe 2:4, Jud 1:6)-this is the ultimate cause of the sin in the world, on which the Divine judgment by fire will fall (2Pe 3:7; 2Pe 3:12).

6. Apocalyptic teaching.-A vivid anticipation of this last judgment pervades the Revelation (Rev 6:10; Rev 15:1; Rev 20:12): God will at last triumph over sin. But into the detailed account of that victory it is not necessary here to enter, as it belongs to eschatology (q.v. [Note: .v. quod vide, which see.] ).

Summary.-It will be useful, having thus passed the different apostolic writers in review, to attempt a more systematic statement of the apostolic teaching. In the background there is the Jewish demonology and eschatology, although it would be a mistake so to emphasize the personal agency of Satan as to give the impression that sin was always thought of in this connexion. St. Paul distinctly personifies sin as a power; and we must recognize this personification as a characteristic feature of his teaching. In accordance with Jewish belief also, the entrance of sin and its penalty death into the race is connected with the Fall of Adam. A morally defective nature is not ascribed to Adam; and such moral freedom and responsibility are assigned to him as make his transgression an act of disobedience deserving punishment. The whole race is subject to the penalty of death; but it is not taught that the guilt of his sin is imputed as personal culpability to his descendants, for the sin of all is affirmed, and imputation of sin, where there is no law, is denied. The assumption that, when there is no outward law, there is an inward, however, deprives the latter statement of its significance. While St. Paul does thus connect the death of all with the sin of all, it would be quite in accord with Jewish thought if he regarded all men as guilty in the sense of liable to the penalty of death, while not guilty as personally culpable for voluntary transgression of known law. It is very probable, if not altogether certain, that he did connect the perversion and corruption of human nature, which he indicates in the use of the term flesh, with the sin of Adam by physical heredity; for it is not likely that he left this fact unexplained, or had another explanation of it than that which he gives of the introduction of sin. While the use of the term flesh in this special sense is peculiar to St. Paul, St. James indicates that the desires of man often issue in sin. All the apostolic writings agree in recognizing the universality of human sinfulness, although St. Paul alone gives a proof of it. The possibility of the process of sin going so far that no recovery is possible is recognized by St. John in his reference to the sin unto death, and by the Epistle to the Hebrews in its warnings against apostasy. The Law fails to restrain, it even provokes, sin; and the gospel alone offers an effective deliverance from sin. The worst sin is the unbelief that rejects the sole means of salvation from sin. For all sin there is judgment; but the severest judgment falls on the neglect of the offered salvation. In Christ there is both the forgiveness of sin and the victory over the power of sin. While actually the conflict with sin still continues in the believer, ideally, according to St. Paul, he is dead to sin as crucified with Christ, or, according to St. John, he cannot sin, for he is kept by Christ. While the Epistle to the Hebrews specially emphasizes the objective aspect of sin as guilt rather than the subjective aspect as weakness, in the NT generally the need of atonement for the guilt is probably even more insisted on than the need of deliverance from weakness. The doctrine of sin is everywhere presented, not for its own sake, but as the dark background on which shines the more brightly the glory of the gospel of the grace of God.

While we cannot subject Christian faith to-day to Jewish eschatology, demonology, psychology, or anthropology, even on the authority of a Christian apostle, and while the apostolic doctrine must in these respects at least be modified for our thought, yet, as it rests on a real moral and religious experience, such truths as the universality of sinfulness in the race, the reality of the moral bondage of the individual, the certainty of future judgment on persistent transgression, the necessity of forgiveness and deliverance, the sufficiency of the grace of God for salvation, will find confirmation from the moral conscience and the religious consciousness wherever there has been the obedience of faith to the Divine revelation and human redemption in Christ Jesus. To most modern thought the apostolic emphasis on these truths seems disproportionate and exaggerated; but, whatever difference of terms and even of ideas there may have been between the disciples and the Master, they did not take sin more seriously than did He who gave His life a ransom for many, and who in His own blood instituted the New Covenant unto the remission of sins.

Literature.-The standard books in NT Theology and Christian doctrine; commentaries on the apostolic writings such as W. Sanday and A. C. Headlam, International Critical Commentary , Romans, Edinburgh, 1902; B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, London, 1889, The Epistles of St. John, do., 1883; J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James 3, do., 1910; H. St. J. Thackeray, The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought, do., 1900; J. Laidlaw, The Bible Doctrine of Man, new ed., Edinburgh, 1895; J. S. Candlish, The Biblical Doctrine of Sin, do., 1893; F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin2, Cambridge, 1906, The Fall and Original Sin, do., 1903, The Concept of Sin, do., 1912; H. W. Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man, Edinburgh, 1911; F. J. Hall, Evolution and the Fall, London, 1910; A. Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Vershnung (Eng. translation , The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, Edinburgh, 1900).

A. E. Garvie.

Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church

SIN

The transgression of the law, or want of conformity to the will of God, 1Jn 3:4.

1. Original sin is that whereby our whole nature is corrupted, and rendered contrary to the law of God; or, according to the 9th article of the church of England, “It is that whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is, of his own nature, inclined to evil.” This is sometimes called indwelling sin, Rom 7:1-25 : The imputation of the sin of Adam to his posterity is also what divines generally call, with some latitude of expression, original sin.

2. Actual sin is a direct violation of God’s law, and generally applied to those who are capable of committing moral evil; as opposed to idiots, or children, who have not the right use of their powers.

3. Sins of omission consist in the leaving those things undone which ought to be done.

4. Sins of commission are those which are committed against affirmative precepts, or doing what should not be done.

5. Sins of infirmity are those which arise from the infirmity of the flesh, ignorance, surprise, snares of the world, &c.

See INFIRMITY.

6. Secret sins are those committed in secret, or those which we, through blindness or prejudice, do not see the evil of, Psa 19:12.

7. Presumptuous sins are those which are done boldly, and against light and conviction.

See PRESUMPTION.

8. Unpardonable sin is the denial of the truths of the Gospel; with an open and malicious rejection of it. The reason why this sin is never forgiven, is not because of any want of sufficiency in the blood of Christ, nor in the pardoning mercy of God, but because such as commit it never repent of it, but continue obstinate and malignant until death. The corruption of human nature is,

1. Universal as to the subjects of it. Rom.iii.23. Isa 53:6.

2. General, as to all the powers of man, Isa 1:6.

3. Awful, filling the mind with constant rebellion against God and his law.

4. Hateful to God, Job 15:16; and,

5. Punishable by him, 1Sa 2:9-10. Rom 2:9. Why the Almighty permitted it, when his power could have prevented it, and how it is conveyed from parents to their children, form some of those deep things of God, of which we can know but little in the present state; only this we are assured of, that he is a God of truth, and that whatever he does, or permits, will ultimately tend to promote his glory. While we contemplate, therefore, the nature, the evil, the guilt, the consequence of sin, it is our happiness to reflect, that he who permitted it hath provided a remedy for it; and that he “so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

See ATONEMENT, REDEMPTION; and Edwards, Wesley, and Taylor, on Original Sin; Gill’s Body of Div. article Sin; King’s and Jenyns’s Origin of Evil; Burroughs’ Exceeding Sinfulness of Sin; Dr. Owen on Indwelling Sin; Dr. Wright’s Deceitfulness of Sin; Fletcher’s appeal to Matter of Fact; Williams’s Answer to Belsham; Watts’s Ruin and Recovery; Howe’s Living Temple, p. 2. 100: 4; Dr. Smith’s Sermon on the Permission of Evil.

Fuente: Theological Dictionary

sin

A voluntary transgression of the law of God. It is a transgression (Latin: trans, beyond; gradi, to go) because it is an act whereby we go beyond the limits imposed on freedom. It is a voluntary transgression because it is committed knowingly and wiillngly. The law of God, which sin contravenes, comprises not only the natural and the Divine positive law, but also the just precepts of all legitimately constituted authority.

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Sin

The subject is treated under these heads: I. Nature of sin II. Division III. Mortal Sin IV. Venial Sin V. Permission and Remedies VI. The Sense of Sin

I. NATURE OF SIN

Since sin is a moral evil, it is necessary in the first place to determine what is meant by evil, and in particular by moral evil. Evil is defined by St. Thomas (De malo, 2:2) as a privation of form or order or due measure. In the physical order a thing is good in proportion as it possesses being. God alone is essentially being, and He alone is essentially and perfectly good. Everything else possesses but a limited being, and, in so far as it possesses being, it is good. When it has its due proportion of form and order and measure it is, in its own order and degree, good. (See GOOD.) Evil implies a deficiency in perfection, hence it cannot exist in God who is essentially and by nature good; it is found only in finite beings which, because of their origin from nothing, are subject to the privation of form or order or measure due them, and, through the opposition they encounter, are liable to an increase or decrease of the perfection they have: “for evil, in a large sense, may be described as the sum of opposition, which experience shows to exist in the universe, to the desires and needs of individuals; whence arises, among human beings at least, the suffering in which life abounds” (see EVIL).

According to the nature of the perfection which it limits, evil is metaphysical, physical, or moral. Metaphysical evil is not evil properly so called; it is but the negation of a greater good, or the limitation of finite beings by other finite beings. Physical evil deprives the subject affected by it of some natural good, and is adverse to the well-being of the subject, as pain and suffering. Moral evil is found only in intelligent beings; it deprives them of some moral good. Here we have to deal with moral evil only. This may be defined as a privation of conformity to right reason and to the law of God. Since the morality of a human act consists in its agreement or non-agreement with right reason and the eternal law, an act is good or evil in the moral order according as it involves this agreement or non-agreement. When the intelligent creature, knowing God and His law, deliberately refuses to obey, moral evil results.

Sin is nothing else than a morally bad act (St. Thomas, “De malo”, 7:3), an act not in accord with reason informed by the Divine law. God has endowed us with reason and free-will, and a sense of responsibility; He has made us subject to His law, which is known to us by the dictates of conscience, and our acts must conform with these dictates, otherwise we sin (Romans 14:23). In every sinful act two things must be considered, the substance of the act and the want of rectitude or conformity (St. Thomas, I-II:72:1). The act is something positive. The sinner intends here and now to act in some determined matter, inordinately electing that particular good in defiance of God’s law and the dictates of right reason. The deformity is not directly intended, nor is it involved in the act so far as this is physical, but in the act as coming from the will which has power over its acts and is capable of choosing this or that particular good contained within the scope of its adequate object, i.e. universal good (St. Thomas, “De malo”, Q. 3, a. 2, ad 2um). God, the first cause of all reality, is the cause of the physical act as such, the free-will of the deformity (St. Thomas I-II:89:2; “De malo”, 3:2). The evil act adequately considered has for its cause the free-will defectively electing some mutable good in place of the eternal good, God, and thus deviating from its true last end.

In every sin a privation of due order or conformity to the moral law is found, but sin is not a pure, or entire privation of all moral good (St. Thomas, “De malo”, 2:9; I-II:73:2). There is a twofold privation; one entire which leaves nothing of its opposite, as for instance, darkness which leaves no light; another, not entire, which leaves something of the good to which it is opposed, as for instance, disease which does not entirely destroy the even balance of the bodily functions necessary for health. A pure or entire privation of good could occur in a moral act only on the supposition that the will could incline to evil as such for an object. This is impossible because evil as such is not contained within the scope of the adequate object of the will, which is good. The sinner’s intention terminates at some object in which there is a participation of God’s goodness, and this object is directly intended by him. The privation of due order, or the deformity, is not directly intended, but is accepted in as much as the sinner’s desire tends to an object in which this want of conformity is involved, so that sin is not a pure privation, but a human act deprived of its due rectitude. From the defect arises the evil of the act, from the fact that it is voluntary, its imputability.

II. DIVISION OF SIN

As regards the principle from which it proceeds sin is original or actual. The will of Adam acting as head of the human race for the conservation or loss of original justice is the cause and source of original sin. Actual sin is committed by a free personal act of the individual will. It is divided into sins of commission and omission. A sin of commission is a positive act contrary to some prohibitory precept; a sin of omission is a failure to do what is commanded. A sin of omission, however, requires a positive act whereby one wills to omit the fulfilling of a precept, or at least wills something incompatible with its fulfillment (I-II:72:5). As regards their malice, sins are distinguished into sins of ignorance, passion or infirmity, and malice; as regards the activities involved, into sins of thought, word, or deed (cordis, oris, operis); as regards their gravity, into mortal and venial. This last named division is indeed the most important of all and it calls for special treatment. But before taking up the details, it will be useful to indicate some further distinctions which occur in theology or in general usage.

Material and Formal Sin

This distinction is based upon the difference between the objective elements (object itself, circumstances) and the subjective (advertence to the sinfulness of the act). An action which, as a matter of fact, is contrary to the Divine law but is not known to be such by the agent constitutes a material sin; whereas formal sin is committed when the agent freely transgresses the law as shown him by his conscience, whether such law really exists or is only thought to exist by him who acts. Thus, a person who takes the property of another while believing it to be his own commits a material sin; but the sin would be formal if he took the property in the belief that it belonged to another, whether his belief were correct or not.

Internal Sins

That sin may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by the inner activity of the mind apart from any external manifestation, is plain from the precept of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not covet”, and from Christ’s rebuke of the scribes and pharisees whom he likens to “whited sepulchres… full of all filthiness” (Matthew 23:27). Hence the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. v), in declaring that all mortal sins must be confessed, makes special mention of those that are most secret and that violate only the last two precepts of the Decalogue, adding that they “sometimes more grievously wound the soul and are more dangerous than sins which are openly committed”. Three kinds of internal sin are usually distinguished: delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it; gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already committed; and desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.An efficacious desire, i.e. one that includes the deliberate intention to realize or gratify the desire, has the same malice, mortal or venial, as the action which it has in view. An inefficacious desire is one that carries a condition, in such a way that the will is prepared to perform the action in case the condition were verified. When the condition is such as to eliminate all sinfulness from the action, the desire involves no sin: e.g. I would gladly eat meat on Friday, if I had a dispensation; and in general this is the case whenever the action is forbidden by positive law only. When the action is contrary to natural law and yet is permissible in given circumstances or in a particular state of life, the desire, if it include those circumstances or that state as conditions, is not in itself sinful: e.g. I would kill so-and-so if I had to do it in self-defence. Usually, however, such desires are dangerous and therefore to be repressed. If, on the other hand, the condition does not remove the sinfulness of the action, the desire is also sinful. This is clearly the case where the action is intrinsically and absolutely evil, e.g. blasphemy: one cannot without committing sin, have the desire — I would blaspheme God if it were not wrong; the condition is an impossible one and therefore does not affect the desire itself. The pleasure taken in a sinful thought (delectatio, gaudium) is, generally speaking, a sin of the same kind and gravity as the action which is thought of. Much, however, depends on the motive for which one thinks of sinful actions. The pleasure, e.g. which one may experience in studying the nature of murder or any other crime, in getting clear ideas on the subject, tracing its causes, determining the guilt etc., is not a sin; on the contrary, it is often both necessary and useful. The case is different of course where the pleasure means gratification in the sinful object or action itself. And it is evidently a sin when one boasts of his evil deeds, the more so because of the scandal that is given.

The Capital Sins or Vices

According to St. Thomas (II-II:153:4) “a capital vice is that which has an exceedingly desirable end so that in his desire for it a man goes on to the commission of many sins all of which are said to originate in that vice as their chief source”. It is not then the gravity of the vice in itself that makes it capital but rather the fact that it gives rise to many other sins. These are enumerated by St. Thomas (I-II:84:4) as vainglory (pride), avarice, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, anger. St. Bonaventure (Brevil., III, ix) gives the same enumeration. Earlier writers had distinguished eight capital sins: so St. Cyprian (De mort., iv); Cassian (De instit. cænob., v, coll. 5, de octo principalibus vitiis); Columbanus (“Instr. de octo vitiis princip.” in “Bibl. max. vet. patr.”, XII, 23); Alcuin (De virtut. et vitiis, xxvii sqq.). The number seven, however, had been given by St. Gregory the Great (Lib. mor. in Job. XXXI, xvii), and it was retained by the foremost theologians of the Middle Ages.

It is to be noted that “sin” is not predicated univocally of all kinds of sin. “The division of sin into venial and mortal is not a division of genus into species which participate equally the nature of the genus, but the division of an analogue into things of which it is predicated primarily and secondarily” (St. Thomas, I-II:88:1, ad 1um). “Sin is not predicated univocally of all kinds of sin, but primarily of actual mortal sin … and therefore it is not necessary that the definition of sin in general should be verified except in that sin in which the nature of the genus is found perfectly. The definition of sin may be verified in other sins in a certain sense” (St. Thomas, II, d. 33, Q. i, a. 2, ad 2um). Actual sin primarily consists in a voluntary act repugnant to the order of right reason. The act passes, but the soul of the sinner remains stained, deprived of grace, in a state of sin, until the disturbance of order has been restored by penance. This state is called habitual sin, macula peccati. reatus culpæ (I-II:87:6).

The division of sin into original and actual, mortal and venial, is not a division of genus into species because sin has not the same signification when applied to original and personal sin, mortal and venial. Mortal sin cuts us off entirely from our true last end; venial sin only impedes us in its attainment. Actual personal sin is voluntary by a proper act of the will. Original sin is voluntary not by a personal voluntary act of ours, but by an act of the will of Adam. Original and actual sin are distinguished by the manner in which they are voluntary (ex parte actus); mortal and venial sin by the way in which they affect our relation to God (ex parte deordinationis). Since a voluntary act and its disorder are of the essence of sin, it is impossible that sin should be a generic term in respect to original and actual, mortal and venial sin. The true nature of sin is found perfectly only in a personal mortal sin, in other sins imperfectly, so that sin is predicated primarily of actual sin, only secondarily of the others. Therefore we shall consider: first, personal mortal sin; second, venial sin.

III. MORTAL SIN

Mortal sin is defined by St. Augustine (Contra Faustum, XXII, xxvii) as “Dictum vel factum vel concupitum contra legem æternam”, i.e. something said, done or desired contrary to the eternal law, or a thought, word, or deed contrary to the eternal law. This is a definition of sin as it is a voluntary act. As it is a defect or privation it may be defined as an aversion from God, our true last end, by reason of the preference given to some mutable good. The definition of St. Augustine is accepted generally by theologians and is primarily a definition of actual mortal sin. It explains well the material and formal elements of sin. The words “dictum vel factum vel concupitum” denote the material element of sin, a human act: “contra legem æternam”, the formal element. The act is bad because it transgresses the Divine law. St. Ambrose (De paradiso, viii) defines sin as a “prevarication of the Divine law”. The definition of St. Augustine strictly considered, i.e. as sin averts us from our true ultimate end, does not comprehend venial sin, but in as much as venial sin is in a manner contrary to the Divine law, although not averting us from our last end, it may be said to be included in the definition as it stands. While primarily a definition of sins of commission, sins of omission may be included in the definition because they presuppose some positive act (St. Thomas, I-II:71:5) and negation and affirmation are reduced to the same genus. Sins that violate the human or the natural law are also included, for what is contrary to the human or natural law is also contrary to the Divine law, in as much as every just human law is derived from the Divine law, and is not just unless it is in conformity with the Divine law.

Biblical Description of Sin

In the Old Testament sin is set forth as an act of disobedience (Genesis 2:16-17; 3:11; Isaiah 1:2-4; Jeremiah 2:32); as an insult to God (Numbers 27:14); as something detested and punished by God (Genesis 3:14-19; Genesis 4:9-16); as injurious to the sinner (Tob., xii, 10); to be expiated by penance (Ps. 1, 19). In the New Testament it is clearly taught in St. Paul that sin is a transgression of the law (Romans 2:23; 5:12-20); a servitude from which we are liberated by grace (Romans 6:16-18); a disobedience (Hebrews 2:2) punished by God (Hebrews 10:26-31). St. John describes sin as an offence to God, a disorder of the will (John 12:43), an iniquity (1 John 3:4-10). Christ in many of His utterances teaches the nature and extent of sin. He came to promulgate a new law more perfect than the old, which would extend to the ordering not only of external but also of internal acts to a degree unknown before, and, in His Sermon on the Mount, he condemns as sinful many acts which were judged honest and righteous by the doctors and teachers of the Old Law. He denounces in a special manner hypocrisy and scandal, infidelity and the sin against the Holy Ghost. In particular He teaches that sins come from the heart (Matthew 15:19-20).

Systems Which Deny Sin or Distort its True Notion

All systems, religious and ethical, which either deny, on the one hand, the existence of a personal creator and lawgiver distinct from and superior to his creation, or, on the other, the existence of free will and responsibility in man, distort or destroy the true biblico-theological notion of sin. In the beginning of the Christian era the Gnostics, although their doctrines varied in details, denied the existence of a personal creator. The idea of sin in the Catholic sense is not contained in their system. There is no sin for them, unless it be the sin of ignorance, no necessity for an atonement; Jesus is not God (see GNOSTICISM). Manichaeism (q.v.) with its two eternal principles, good and evil, at perpetual war with each other, is also destructive of the true notion of sin. All evil, and consequently sin, is from the principle of evil. The Christian concept of God as a lawgiver is destroyed. Sin is not a conscious voluntary act of disobedience to the Divine will. Pantheistic systems which deny the distinction between God and His creation make sin impossible. If man and God are one, man is not responsible to anyone for his acts, morality is destroyed. If he is his own rule of action, he cannot deviate from right as St. Thomas teaches (I:63:1). The identification of God and the world by Pantheism (q.v.) leaves no place for sin.

There must be some law to which man is subject, superior to and distinct from him, which can be obeyed and transgressed, before sin can enter into his acts. This law must be the mandate of a superior, because the notions of superiority and subjection are correlative. This superior can be only God, who alone is the author and lord of man. Materialism, denying as it does the spirituality and the immortality of the soul, the existence of any spirit whatsoever, and consequently of God, does not admit sin. There is no free will, everything is determined by the inflexible laws of motion. “Virtue” and “vice” are meaningless qualifications of action. Positivism places man’s last end in some sensible good. His supreme law of action is to seek the maximum of pleasure. Egotism or altruism is the supreme norm and criterion of the Positivistic systems, not the eternal law of God as revealed by Him, and dictated by conscience. For the materialistic evolutionists man is but a highly-developed animal, conscience a product of evolution. Evolution has revolutionized morality, sin is no more.

Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason” having rejected all the essential notions of true morality, namely, liberty, the soul, God and a future life, attempted in his “Critique of the Practical Reason” to restore them in the measure in which they are necessary for morality. The practical reason, he tells us, imposes on us the idea of law and duty. The fundamental principle of the morality of Kant is “duty for duty’s sake”, not God and His law. Duty cannot be conceived of alone as an independent thing. It carries with it certain postulates, the first of which is liberty. “I ought, therefore I can”, is his doctrine. Man by virtue of his practical reason has a consciousness of moral obligation (categorical imperative). This consciousness supposes three things: free will, the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, otherwise man would not be capable of fulfilling his obligations, there would be no sufficient sanction for the Divine law, no reward or punishment in a future life. Kant’s moral system labours in obscurities and contradictions and is destructive of much that pertains to the teaching of Christ. Personal dignity is the supreme rule of man’s actions. The notion of sin as opposed to God is suppressed. According to the teaching of materialistic Monism, now so widespread, there is, and can be, no free will. According to this doctrine but one thing exists and this one being produces all phenomena, thought included; we are but puppets in its hands, carried hither an thither as it wills, and finally are cast back into nothingness. There is no place for good and evil, a free observance or a wilful transgression of law, in such a system. Sin in the true sense is impossible. Without law and liberty and a personal God there is no sin.

That God exists and can be known from His visible creation, that He has revealed the decrees of His eternal will to man, and is distinct from His creatures (Denzinger-Bannwart, “Enchiridion”, nn. 1782, 1785, 1701), are matters of Catholic faith and teaching. Man is a created being endowed with free will (ibid., 793), which fact can be proved from Scripture and reason (ibid., 1041-1650). The Council of Trent declares in Sess. VI, c. i (ibid., 793) that man by reason of the prevarication of Adam has lost his primeval innocence, and that while free will remains, its powers are lessened (see ORIGINAL SIN).

Protestant Errors

Luther and Calvin taught as their fundamental error that no free will properly so called remained in man after the fall of our first parents; that the fulfillment of God’s precepts is impossible even with the assistance of grace, and that man in all his actions sins. Grace is not an interior gift, but something external. To some sin is not imputed, because they are covered as with a cloak by the merits of Christ. Faith alone saves, there is no necessity for good works. Sin in Luther’s doctrine cannot be a deliberate transgression of the Divine law. Jansenius, in his “Augustinus”, taught that according to the present powers of man some of God’s precepts are impossible of fulfilment, even to the just who strive to fulfil them, and he further taught that grace by means of which the fulfilment becomes possible is wanting even to the just. His fundamental error consists in teaching that the will is not free but is necessarily drawn either by concupiscence or grace. Internal liberty is not required for merit or demerit. Liberty from coercion suffices. Christ did not die for all men. Baius taught a semi-Lutheran doctrine. Liberty is not entirely destroyed, but is so weakened that without grace it can do nothing but sin. True liberty is not required for sin. A bad act committed involuntarily renders man responsible (propositions 50-51 in Denzinger-Bannwart, “Enchiridion”, nn. 1050-1). All acts done without charity are mortal sins and merit damnation because they proceed from concupiscence. This doctrine denies that sin is a voluntary transgression of Divine law. If man is not free, a precept is meaningless as far as he is concerned.

Philosophical Sin

Those who would construct a moral system independent of God and His law distinguish between theological and philosophical sin. Philosophical sin is a morally bad act which violates the natural order of reason, not the Divine law. Theological sin is a transgression of the eternal law. Those who are of atheistic tendencies and contend for this distinction, either deny the existence of God or maintain that He exercises no providence in regard to human acts. This position is destructive of sin in the theological sense, as God and His law, reward and punishment, are done away with. Those who admit the existence of God, His law, human liberty and responsibility, and still contend for a distinction between philosophical and theological sin, maintain that in the present order of God’s providence there are morally bad acts, which, while violating the order of reason, are not offensive to God, and they base their contention on this that the sinner can be ignorant of the existence of God, or not actually think of Him and His law when he acts. Without the knowledge of God and consideration of Him, it is impossible to offend Him. This doctrine was censured as scandalous, temerarious, and erroneous by Alexander VIII (24 Aug., 1690) in his condemnation of the following proposition: “Philosophical or moral sin is a human act not in agreement with rational nature and right reason, theological and mortal sin is a free transgession of the Divine law. However grievous it may be, philosophical sin in one who is either ignorant of God or does not actually think of God, is indeed a grievous sin, but not an offense to God, nor a mortal sin dissolving friendship with God, nor worthy of eternal punishment” (Denzinger-Bannwart, 1290).

This proposition is condemned because it does not distinguish between vincible and invincible ignorance, and further supposes invincible ignorance of God to be sufficiently common, instead of only metaphysically possible, and because in the present dispensation of God’s providence we are clearly taught in Scripture that God will punish all evil coming from the free will of man (Romans 2:5-11). There is no morally bad act that does not include a transgression of Divine law. From the fact that an action is conceived of as morally evil it is conceived of as prohibited. A prohibition is unintelligible without the notion of some one prohibiting. The one prohibiting in this case and binding the conscience of man can be only God, Who alone has power over man’s free will and actions, so that from the fact that any act is perceived to be morally bad and prohibited by conscience, God and His law are perceived at least confusedly, and a wilful transgression of the dictate of conscience is necessarily also a transgression of God’s law. Cardinal de Lugo (De incarnat., disp. 5, lect. 3) admits the possibility of philosophical sin in those who are inculpably ignorant of God, but he holds that it does not actually occur, because in the present order of God’s providence there cannot be invincible ignorance of God and His law. This teaching does not necessarily fall under the condemnation of Alexander VIII, but it is commonly rejected by theologians for the reason that a dictate of conscience necessarily involves a knowledge of the Divine law as a principle of morality.

Conditions of Mortal Sin: Knowledge, Free Will, Grave Matter

Contrary to the teaching of Baius (prop. 46, Denzinger-Bannwart, 1046) and the Reformers, a sin must be a voluntary act. Those actions alone are properly called human or moral actions which proceed from the human will deliberately acting with knowledge of the end for which it acts. Man differs from all irrational creatures in this precisely that he is master of his actions by virtue of his reason and free will (I-II:1:1). Since sin is a human act wanting in due rectitude, it must have, in so far as it is a human act, the essential constituents of a human act. The intellect must perceive and judge of the morality of the act, and the will must freely elect. For a deliberate mortal sin there must be full advertence on the part of the intellect and full consent on the part of the will in a grave matter. An involuntary transgression of the law even in a grave matter is not a formal but a material sin. The gravity of the matter is judged from the teaching of Scripture, the definitions of councils and popes, and also from reason. Those sins are judged to be mortal which contain in themselves some grave disorder in regard to God, our neighbour, ourselves, or society. Some sins admit of no lightness of matter, as for example, blasphemy, hatred of God; they are always mortal (ex toto genere suo), unless rendered venial by want of full advertence on the part of the intellect or full consent on the part of the will. Other sins admit lightness of matter: they are grave sins (ex genere suo) in as much as their matter in itself is sufficient to constitute a grave sin without the addition of any other matter, but is of such a nature that in a given case, owing to its smallness, the sin may be venial, e.g. theft.

Imputability

That the act of the sinner may be imputed to him it is not necessary that the object which terminates and specifies his act should be directly willed as an ends or means. It suffices that it be willed indirectly or in its cause, i.e. if the sinner foresees, at least confusedly, that it will follow from the act which he freely performs or from his omission of an act. When the cause produces a twofold effect, one of which is directly willed, the other indirectly, the effect which follows indirectly is morally imputable to the sinner when these three conditions are verified:first, the sinner must foresee at least confusedly the evil effects which follow on the cause he places;second, he must be able to refrain from placing the cause;third, he must be under the obligation of preventing the evil effect. Error and ignorance in regard to the object or circumstances of the act to be placed, affect the judgment of the intellect and consequently the morality and imputability of the act. Invincible ignorance excuses entirely from sin. Vincible ignorance does not, although it renders the act less free (see IGNORANCE). The passions, while they disturb the judgment of the intellect, more directly affect the will. Antecedent passion increases the intensity of the act, the object is more intensely desired, although less freely, and the distrubance caused by the passions may be so great as to render a free judgment impossible, the agent being for the moment beside himself (I-II:6:7, ad 3um). Consequent passion, which arises from a command of the will, does not lessen liberty, but is rather a sign of an intense act of volition. Fear, violence, heredity, temperament and pathological states, in so far as they affect free volition, affect the malice and imputability of sin. From the condemnation of the errors of Baius and Jansenius (Denz.-Bann., 1046, 1066, 1094, 1291-2) it is clear that for an actual personal sin a knowledge of the law and a personal voluntary act, free from coercion and necessity, are required. No mortal sin is committed in a state of invincible ignorance or in a half-conscious state. Actual advertence to the sinfulness of the act is not required, virtual advertence suffices. It is not necessary that the explicit intention to offend God and break His law be present, the full and free consent of the will to an evil act suffices.

Malice

The true malice of mortal sin consists in a conscious and voluntary transgression of the eternal law, and implies a contempt of the Divine will, a complete turning away from God, our true last end, and a preferring of some created thing to which we subject ourselves. It is an offence offered to God, and an injury done Him; not that it effects any change in God, who is immutable by nature, but that the sinner by his act deprives God of the reverence and honor due Him: it is not any lack of malice on the sinner’s part, but God’s immutability that prevents Him from suffering. As an offence offered to God mortal sin is in a way infinite in its malice, since it is directed against an infinite being, and the gravity of the offence is measured by the dignity of the one offended (St. Thomas, III:1:2, ad 2um). As an act sin is finite, the will of man not being capable of infinite malice. Sin is an offence against Christ Who has redeemed man (Phil., iii, 18); against the Holy Ghost Who sanctifies us (Hebrews 10:29), an injury to man himself, causing the spiritual death of the soul, and making man the servant of the devil. The first and primary malice of sin is derived from the object to which the will inordinately tends, and from the object considered morally, not physically. The end for which the sinner acts and the circumstances which surround the act are also determining factors of its morality. An act which, objectively considered, is morally indifferent, may be rendered good or evil by circumstances, or by the intention of the sinner. An act that is good objectively may be rendered bad, or a new species of good or evil may be added, or a new degree. Circumstances can change the character of a sin to such a degree that it becomes specifically different from what it is objectively considered; or they may merely aggravate the sin while not changing its specific character; or they may lessen its gravity. That they may exercise this determining influence two things are necessary: they must contain in themselves some good or evil, and must be apprehended, at least confusedly, in their moral aspect. The external act, in so far as it is a mere execution of a voluntary efficacious internal act, does not, according to the common Thomistic opinion, add any essential goodness or malice to the internal sin.

Gravity

While every mortal sin averts us from our true last end, all mortal sins are not equally grave, as is clear from Scripture (John 19:11; Matthew 11:22; Luke 6), and also from reason. Sins are specifically distinguished by their objects, which do not all equally avert man from his last end. Then again, since sin is not a pure privation, but a mixed one, all sins do not equally destroy the order of reason. Spiritual sins, other things being equal, are graver than carnal sins. (St. Thomas, “De malo”, Q. ii, a. 9; I-II, Q. lxxiii, a. 5).

Specific and numeric distinction of Sin

Sins are distinguished specifically by their formally diverse objects; or from their opposition to different virtues, or to morally different precepts of the same virtue. Sins that are specifically distinct are also numerically distinct. Sins within the same species are distinguished numerically according to the number of complete acts of the will in regard to total objects. A total object is one which, either in itself or by the intention of the sinner, forms a complete whole and is not referred to another action as a part of the whole. When the completed acts of the will relate to the same object there are as many sins as there are morally interrupted acts.

Subject causes of Sin

Since sin is a voluntary act lacking in due rectitude, sin is found, as in a subject, principally in the will. But, since not only acts elicited by the will are voluntary, but also those that are elicited by other faculties at the command of the will, sin may be found in these faculties in so far as they are subject in their actions to the command of the will, and are instruments of the will, and move under its guidance (I-II:74).

The external members of the body cannot be effective principles of sin (I-II:74:2, ad 3um). They are mere organs which are set in activity by the soul; they do not initiate action. The appetitive powers on the contrary can be effective principles of sin, for they possess, through their immediate conjunction with the will and their subordination to it, a certain though imperfect liberty (I-II:56:4, ad 3um). The sensual appetites have their own proper sensible objects to which they naturally incline, and since original sin has broken the bond which held them in complete subjection to the will, they may antecede the will in their actions and tend to their own proper objects inordinately. Hence they may be proximate principles of sin when they move inordinately contrary to the dictates of right reason.

It is the right of reason to rule the lower faculties, and when the disturbance arises in the sensual part the reason may do one of two things: it may either consent to the sensible delectation or it may repress and reject it. If it consents, the sin is no longer one of the sensual part of man, but of the intellect and will, and consequently, if the matter is grave, mortal. If rejected, no sin can be imputed. There can be no sin in the sensual part of man independently of the will. The inordinate motions of the sensual appetite which precede the advertence of reason, or which are suffered unwillingly, are not even venial sins. The temptations of the flesh not consented to are not sins. Concupiscence, which remains after the guilt of original sin is remitted in baptism, is not sinful so long as consent is not given to it (Counc. of Trent, sess. V, can. v). The sensual appetite of itself cannot be the subject of mortal sin, for the reason that it can neither grasp the notion of God as an ultimate end, nor avert us from Him, without which aversion there cannot be mortal sin. The superior reason, whose office it is to occupy itself with Divine things, may be the proximate principle of sin both in regard to its own proper act, to know truth, and as it is directive of the inferior faculties: in regard to its own proper act, in so far as it voluntarily neglects to know what it can and ought to know; in regard to the act by which it directs the inferior faculties, to the extent that it commands inordinate acts or fails to repress them (I-II:74:7, ad 2um).

The will never consents to a sin that is not at the same time a sin of the superior reason as directing badly, by either actually deliberating and commanding the consent, or by failing to deliberate and impede the consent of the will when it could and should do so. The superior reason is the ultimate judge of human acts and has an obligation of deliberating and deciding whether the act to be performed is according to the law of God. Venial sin may also be found in the superior reason when it deliberately consents to sins that are venial in their nature, or when there is not a full consent in the case of a sin that is mortal considered objectively.

Causes of Sin

Under this head, it is needful to distinguish between the efficient cause, i.e. the agent performing the sinful action, and those other agencies, influences or circumstances, which incite to sin and consequently involve a danger, more or less grave, for one who is exposed to them. These inciting causes are explained in special articles on OCCASIONS OF SIN and TEMPTATION. Here we have to consider only the efficient cause or causes of sin. These are interior and exterior. The complete and sufficient cause of sin is the will, which is regulated in its actions by the reason, and acted upon by the sensitive appetites. The principal interior causes of sin are ignorance, infirmity or passion, and malice. Ignorance on the part of the reason, infirmity and passion on the part of the sensitive appetite, and malice on the part of the will. A sin is from certain malice when the will sins of its own accord and not under the influence of ignorance or passion.

The exterior causes of sin are the devil and man, who move to sin by means of suggestion, persuasion, temptation and bad example. God is not the cause of sin (Counc. of Trent, sess. VI, can. vi, in Denz.-Bann., 816). He directs all things to Himself and is the end of all His actions, and could not be the cause of evil without self-contradiction. Of whatever entity there is in sin as an action, He is the cause. The evil will is the cause of the disorder (I-II:79:2). One sin may be the cause of another inasmuch as one sin may be ordained to another as an end. The seven capital sins, so called, may be considered as the source from which other sins proceed. They are sinful propensities which reveal themselves in particular sinful acts. Original sin by reason of its dire effects is the cause and source of sin in so far as by reason of it our natures are left wounded and inclined to evil. Ignorance, infirmity, malice, and concupiscence are the consequences of original sin.

Effects of Sin

The first effect of mortal sin in man is to avert him from his true last end, and deprive his soul of sanctifying grace. The sinful act passes, and the sinner is left in a state of habitual aversion from God. The sinful state is voluntary and imputable to the sinner, because it necessarily follows from the act of sin he freely placed, and it remains until satisfaction is made (see PENANCE). This state of sin is called by theologians habitual sin, not in the sense that habitual sin implies a vicious habit, but in the sense that it signifies a state of aversion from God depending on the preceding actual sin, consequently voluntary and imputable. This state of aversion carries with it necessarily in the present order of God’s providence the privation of grace and charity by means of which man is ordered to his supernatural end. The privation of grace is the “macula peccati” (St. Thomas, I-II, Q. lxxxvi), the stain of sin spoken of in Scripture (Joshua 22:17; Isaiah 4:4; 1 Corinthians 6:11). It is not anything positive, a quality or disposition, an obligation to suffer, an extrinsic denomination coming from sin, but is solely the privation of sanctifying grace. There is not a real but only a conceptual distinction between habitual sin (reatus culpæ) and the stain of sin (macula peccati). One and the same privation considered as destroying the due order of man to God is habitual sin, considered as depriving the soul of the beauty of grace is the stain or “macula” of sin.

The second effect of sin is to entail the penalty of undergoing suffering (reatus pænæ). Sin (reatus culpæ) is the cause of this obligation (reatus pænæ ). The suffering may be inflicted in this life through the medium of medicinal punishments, calamities, sickness, temporal evils, which tend to withdraw from sin; or it may be inflicted in the life to come by the justice of God as vindictive punishment. The punishments of the future life are proportioned to the sin committed, and it is the obligation of undergoing this punishment for unrepented sin that is signified by the “reatus poenæ” of the theologians. The penalty to be undergone in the future life is divided into the pain of loss (pæna damni) and the pain of sense (pæna sensus). The pain of loss is the privation of the beatific vision of God in punishment of turning away from Him. The pain of sense is suffering in punishment of the conversion to some created thing in place of God. This two-fold pain in punishment of mortal sin is eternal (1 Corinthians 6:9; Matthew 25:41; Mark 9:45). One mortal sin suffices to incur punishment. (See HELL.) Other effects of sins are: remorse of conscience (Wisdom 5:2-13); an inclination towards evil, as habits are formed by a repetition of similar acts; a darkening of the intelligence, a hardening of the will (Matthew 13:14-15; Romans 11:8); a general vitiating of nature, which does not however totally destroy the substance and faculties of the soul but merely weakens the right exercise of its faculties.

IV. VENIAL SIN

Venial sin is essentially different from mortal sin. It does not avert us from our true last end, it does not destroy charity, the principle of union with God, nor deprive the soul of sanctifying grace, and it is intrinsically reparable. It is called venial precisely because, considered in its own proper nature, it is pardonable; in itself meriting, not eternal, but temporal punishment. It is distinguished from mortal sin on the part of the disorder. By mortal sin man is entirely averted from God, his true last end, and, at least implicitly, he places his last end in some created thing. By venial sin he is not averted from God, neither does he place his last end in creatures. He remains united with God by charity, but does not tend towards Him as he ought. The true nature of sin as it is contrary to the eternal law, repugnant namely to the primary end of the law, is found only in mortal sin. Venial sin is only in an imperfect way contrary to the law, since it is not contrary to the primary end of the law, nor does it avert man from the end intended by the law. (St. Thomas, I-II, Q. lxxxviii, a. 1; and Cajetan, I-II, Q. lxxxviii, a. 1, for the sense of the præter legem and contra legem of St. Thomas).

Definition

Since a voluntary act and its disorder are of the essence of sin, venial sin as it is a voluntary act may be defined as a thought, word or deed at variance with the law of God. It retards man in the attainment of his last end while not averting him from it. Its disorder consists either in the not fully deliberate choosing of some object prohibited by the law of God, or in the deliberate adhesion to some created object not as an ultimate end but as a medium, which object does not avert the sinner from God, but is not, however, referable to Him as an end. Man cannot be averted from God except by deliberately placing his last end in some created thing, and in venial sin he does not adhere to any temporal good, enjoying it as a last end, but as a medium referring it to God not actually but habitually inasmuch as he himself is ordered to God by charity. “Ille qui peccat venialiter, inhæret bono temporali non ut fruens, quia non constituit in eo finem, sed ut utens, referens in Deum no n actu sed habitu” (I-II:88:1, ad 3). For a mortal sin, some created good must be adhered to as a last end at least implicitly. This adherence cannot be accomplished by a semi-deliberate act. By adhering to an object that is at variance with the law of God and yet not destructive of the primary end of the Divine law, a true opposition is not set up between God and that object. The created good is not desired as an end. The sinner is not placed in the position of choosing between God and creature as ultimate ends that are opposed, but is in such a condition of mind that if the object to which he adheres were prohibited as contrary to his true last end he would not adhere to it, but would prefer to keep friendship with God. An example may be had in human friendship. A friend will refrain from doing anything that of itself will tend directly to dissolve friendship while allowing himself at times to do what is displeasing to his friends without destroying friendship.

The distinction between mortal and venial sin is set forth in Scripture. From St. John (1 John 5:16-17) it is clear there are some sins “unto death” and some sins not “unto death”, i.e. mortal and venial. The classic text for the distinction of mortal and venial sin is that of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 3:8-15), where he explains in detail the distinction between mortal and venial sin. “For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble: every man’s work shall be manifest; for the day of the Lord shall declare it; because it shall be revealed in fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” By wood, hay, and stubble are signified venial sins (St. Thomas, I-II:89:2) which, built on the foundation of a living faith in Christ, do not destroy charity, and from their very nature do not merit eternal but temporal punishment. “Just as”, says St. Thomas, [wood, hay, and stubble] “are gathered together in a house and do not pertain to the substance of the edifice, so also venial sins are multiplied in man, the spiritual edifice remaining, and for these he suffers either the fire of temporal tribulations in this life, or of purgatory after this life and nevertheless obtains eternal salvation.” (ibid.)

The suitableness of the division into wood, hay, and stubble is explained by St. Thomas (iv, dist. 21, Q. i, a. 2). Some venial sins are graver than others and less pardonable, and this difference is well signified by the difference in the inflammability of wood, hay, and stubble. That there is a distinction between mortal and venial sins is of faith (Counc. of Trent, sess. VI, c. xi and canons 23-25; sess. XIV, de poenit., c. v). This distinction is commonly rejected by all heretics ancient and modern. In the fourth century Jovinian asserted that all sins are equal in guilt and deserving of the same punishment (St. Aug., “Ep. 167”, ii, n. 4); Pelagius, that every sin deprives man of justice and therefore is mortal; Wyclif, that there is no warrant in Scripture for differentiating mortal from venial sin, and that the gravity of sin depends not on the quality of the action but on the decree of predestination or reprobation so that the worst crime of the predestined is infinitely less than the slightest fault of the reprobate; Hus, that all the actions of the vicious are mortal sins, while all the acts of the good are virtuous (Denz.-Bann., 642); Luther, that all sins of unbelievers are mortal and all sins of the regenerate, with the exception of infidelity, are venial; Calvin, like Wyclif, bases the difference between mortal sin and venial sin on predestination, but adds that a sin is venial because of the faith of the sinner. The twentieth among the condemned propositions of Baius reads: “There is no sin venial in its nature, but every sin merits eternal punishment” (Denz.-Bann., 1020). Hirscher in more recent times taught that all sins which are fully deliberate are mortal, thus denying the distinction of sins by reason of their objects and making the distinction rest on the imperfection of the act (Kleutgen, 2nd ed., II, 284, etc.).

Malice of Venial Sin

The difference in the malice of mortal and venial sin consists in this: that mortal sin is contrary to the primary end of the eternal law, that it attacks the very substance of the law which commands that no created thing should be preferred to God as an end, or equalled to Him, while venial sin is only at variance with the law, not in contrary opposition to it, not attacking its substance. The substance of the law remaining, its perfect accomplishment is prevented by venial sin.

Conditions

Venial sin is committed when the matter of the sin is light, even though the advertence of the intellect and consent of the will are full and deliberate, and when, even though the matter of the sin be grave, there is not full advertence on the part of the intellect and full consent on the part of the will. A precept obliges sub gravi when it has for its object an important end to be attained, and its transgression is prohibited under penalty of losing God’s friendship. A precept obliges sub levi when it is not so directly imposed.

Effects

Venial sin does not deprive the soul of sanctifying grace, or diminish it. It does not produce a macula, or stain, as does mortal sin, but it lessens the lustre of virtue — “In anima duplex est nitor, unus quiden habitualis, ex gratia sanctificante, alter actualis ex actibus virtutem, jamvero peccatum veniale impedit quidem fulgorem qui ex actibus virtutum oritur, non autem habitualem nitorem, quia non excludit nec minuit habitum charitatis” (I-II:89:1). Frequent and deliberate venial sin lessens the fervour of charity, disposes to mortal sin (I-II:88:3), and hinders the reception of graces God would otherwise give. It displeases God (Revelation 2:4-5) and obliges the sinner to temporal punishment either in this life or in Purgatory. We cannot avoid all venial sin in this life. “Although the most just and holy occasionally during this life fall into some slight and daily sins, known as venial, they cease not on that account to be just” (Counc. of Trent, sess. VI, c. xi). And canon xxiii says: “If any one declare that a man once justified cannot sin again, or that he can avoid for the rest of his life every sin, even venial, let him be anathema”, but according to the common opinion we can avoid all such as are fully deliberate. Venial sin may coexist with mortal sin in those who are averted from God by mortal sin. This fact does not change its nature or intrinsic reparability, and the fact that it is not coexistent with charity is not the result of venial sin, but of mortal sin. It is per accidens, for an extrinsic reason, that venial sin in this case is irreparable, and is punished in hell. That venial sin may appear in its true nature as essentially different from mortal sin it is considered as de facto coexisting with charity (1 Corinthians 3:8-15). Venial sins do not need the grace of absolution. They can be remitted by prayer, contrition, fervent communion, and other pious works. Nevertheless it is laudable to confess them (Denz.-Bann., 1539).

V. PERMISSION OF SIN AND REMEDIES.

Since it is of faith that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good it is difficult to account for sin in His creation. The existence of evil is the underlying problem in all theology. Various explanations to account for its existence have been offered, differing according to the philosophical principles and religious tenets of their authors. Any Catholic explanation must take into account the defined truths of the omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness of God; free will on the part of man; and the fact that suffering is the penalty of sin. Of metaphysical evil, the negation of a greater good, God is the cause inasmuch as he has created beings with limited forms. Of physical evil (malum pænæ) He is also the cause. Physical evil, considered as it proceeds from God and is inflicted in punishment of sin in accordance with the decrees of Divine justice, is good, compensating for the violation of order by sin. It is only in the subject affected by it that it is evil.

Of moral evil (malum culpæ) God is not the cause (Counc. of Trent, sess. VI, can. vi), either directly or indirectly. Sin is a violation of order, and God orders all things to Himself, as an ultimate end, consequently He cannot be the direct cause of sin. God’s withdrawal of grace which would prevent the sin does not make Him the indirect cause of sin inasmuch as this withdrawal is affected according to the decrees of His Divine wisdom and justice in punishment of previous sin. He is under no obligation of impeding the sin, consequently it cannot be imputed to Him as a cause (I-II:79:1). When we read in Scripture and the Fathers that God inclines men to sin the sense is, either that in His just judgment He permits men to fall into sin by a punitive permission, exercising His justice in punishment of past sin; or that He directly causes, not sin, but certain exterior works, good in themselves, which are so abused by the evil wills of men that here and now they commit evil; or that He gives them the power of accomplishing their evil designs. Of the physical act in sin God is the cause inasmuch as it is an entity and good. Of the malice of sin man’s evil will is the sufficient cause. God could not be impeded in the creation of man by the fact that He foresaw his fall. This would mean the limiting of His omnipotence by a creature, and would be destructive of Him. He was free to create man even though He foresaw his fall, and He created him, endowed him with free will, and gave him sufficient means of persevering in good had he so willed. We must sum up our ignorance of the permission of evil by saying in the words of St. Augustine, that God would not have permitted evil had He not been powerful enough to bring good out of evil. God’s end in creating this universe is Himself, not the good of man, and somehow or other good and evil serve His ends, and there shall finally be a restoration of violated order by Divine justice. No sin shall be without its punishment. The evil men do must be atoned for either in this world by penance (see PENANCE) or in the world to come in purgatory or hell, according as the sin that stains the soul, and is not repented of, is mortal or venial, and merits eternal or temporal punishment. (See EVIL.) God has provided a remedy for sin and manifested His love and goodness in the face of man’s ingratitude by the Incarnation of His Divine Son (see INCARNATION); by the institution of His Church to guide men and interpret to them His law, and administer to them the sacraments, seven channels of grace, which, rightly used, furnish an adequate remedy for sin and a means to union with God in heaven, which is the end of His law.

VI. SENSE OF SIN.

The understanding of sin, as far as it can be understood by our finite intelligence, serves to unite man more closely to God. It impresses him with a salutary fear, a fear of his own powers, a fear, if left to himself, of falling from grace; with the necessity he lies under of seeking God’s help and grace to stand firm in the fear and love of God, and make progress in the spiritual life. Without the acknowledgment that the present moral state of man is not that in which God created him, that his powers are weakened; that he has a supernatural end to attain, which is impossible of attainment by his own unaided efforts, without grace there being no proportion between the end and the means; that the world, the flesh, and the devil are in reality active agents fighting against him and leading him to serve them instead of God, sin cannot be understood. The evolutionary hypothesis would have it that physical evolution accounts for the physical origin of man, that science knows no condition of man in which man exhibited the characteristics of the state of original justice, no state of sinlessness. The fall of man in this hypothesis is in reality a rise to a higher grade of being. “A fall it might seem, just as a vicious man sometimes seems degraded below the beasts, but in promise and potency, a rise it really was” (Sir O. Lodge, “Life and Matter”, p. 79). This teaching is destructive of the notion of sin as taught by the Catholic Church. Sin is not a phase of an upward struggle, it is rather a deliberate, wilful refusal to struggle. If there has been no fall from a higher to a lower state, then the teaching of Scripture in regard to Redemption and the necessity of a baptismal regeneration is unintelligible. The Catholic teaching is the one that places sin in its true light, that justifies the condemnation of sin we find in Scripture.

The Church strives continually to impress her children with a sense of the awfulness of sin that they may fear it and avoid it. We are fallen creatures, and our spiritual life on earth is a warfare. Sin is our enemy, and while of our own strength we cannot avoid sin, with God’s grace we can. If we but place no obstacle to the workings of grace we can avoid all deliberate sin. If we have the misfortune to sin, and seek God’s grace and pardon with a contrite and humble heart, He will not repel us. Sin has its remedy in grace, which is given us by God, through the merits of His only-begotten Son, Who has redeemed us, restoring by His passion and death the order violated by the sin of our first parents, and making us once again children of God and heirs of heaven. Where sin is looked on as a necessary and unavoidable condition of things human, where inability to avoid sin is conceived as necessary, discouragement naturally follows. Where the Catholic doctrine of the creation of man in a superior state, his fall by a wilful transgression, the effects of which fall are by Divine decree transmitted to his posterity, destroying the balance of the human faculties and leaving man inclined to evil; where the dogmas of redemption and grace in reparation of sin are kept in mind, there is no discouragement. Left to ourselves we fall, by keeping close to God and continually seeking His help we can stand and struggle against sin, and if faithful in the battle we must wage shall be crowned in heaven. (See CONSCIENCE; JUSTIFICATION; SCANDAL.)

DOGMATIC WORKS: ST. THOMAS, Summa theol., I-II, QQ. lxxi-lxxxix; IDEM, Contra gentes, tr. RICKABY, Of God and His Creatures (London, 1905); IDEM, Quaest. disputatae: De malo in Opera omnia (Paris, 1875); BILLUART, De peccatis (Paris, 1867-72); SUAREZ, De pecc. in Opera omnia (Paris, 1878); SALMANTICENSES, De pecc. in Curs. theol. (Paris, 1877); GONET, Clypeus theol. thom. (Venice, 1772); JOHN OF ST. THOMAS, De pecc. in Curs. theol. (Paris, 1886); SYLVIUS, De pecc. (Antwerp, 1698); Catechismus Romanus, tr. DONOVAN, Catechism of the Council of Trent (Dublin, 1829); SCHEEBEN, Handbuch d. kath. Dogmatik (Freiburg, 1873-87); MANNING, Sin and its Consequences (New York, 1904); SHARPE, Principles of Christianity (London, 1904); IDEM, Evil, its Nature and Cause (London, 1906) ; BILLOT, De nat. et rat. peccati personalis (Rome, 1900); TANQUEREY, Synopsis theol., I (New York, 1907).

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A.C. O’NEIL Transcribed by Frank O’Leary

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIVCopyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Sin

(Heb. Sin, ]; Sept. [v.r. ] or ; Vulg. Pelusium), the name of a town and of a desert perhaps adjoining, upon which modern researches have thrown important light.

1. A city of Egypt, which is mentioned in Eze 30:15-16, in connection with Thebes and Memphis, and is described as the strength of Egypt, showing that it was a fortified place. The name is Hebrew, or, at least, Shemitic. Gesenius supposes it to signify clay, from the unused root , probably he or it was muddy, clayey. It is identified in the Vulg. with Pelusium , the clayey or muddy town, from ; and seems to be preserved in the Arabic Et-Tineh, which forms part of the names of Fum et-Tineh, the Mouth of Et-Tineh, the supposed Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and Burg or Kal’at et-Tineh, the Tower or Castle of El- Tineh, in the immediate neighborhood, tin signifying mud, etc., in Arabic. This evidence is sufficient to show that Sin is Pelusium. The ancient Egyptian name is still to be sought for; it has been supposed that Pelusium preserves traces of it, but this is very improbable. Champollion identifies Pelusium with the Poresoum or Peresom (the second being a variation held by Quatremere to be incorrect) and Baresoum of the Copts, El-Farma of the Arabs, which was in the time of the former a boundary city, the limits of a governor’s authority being stated to have extended from Alexandria to Pilak-h, or Philae, and Peremoun (Acts of St. Sarapamon MS. Copt. Vat. 67, fol. 90, ap. Quatremere, Memoires Geog. et Hist. sur l’Egypte, 1, 259). Champollion ingeniously derives this name from the article ph prefixed to ep, to be, and oum, mud (L’Egypte, 2, 82-87; comp. Brugsch. Geogr. Inschr. 1, 297). Brugsch compares the ancient Egyptian Ha-rem, which he reads Pe-rema, on our system Pe-rem, the abode of the tear, or of the fish rem (ibid. pl. 55, No. 1679). Pelusium he would make the city Samhat (or, as he reads it Sam-hud), remarking that the nome of the city Samhud is the only one which has the determinative of a city, and comparing the evidence of the Roman nome coins, on which the place is apparently treated as a nome; but this is not certain, for there may have been a Pelusiac nome, and the etymology of the name Samhat is unknown (ibid. p. 128; pl. 28, 17).

The exact site of Pelusium is not fully determined. It has been thought to be marked by mounds near Burg et-Tineh, now called El-Farma, and not Et-Tineh. This is disputed by Capt. Spratt, who supposes that the mound of Abu-Khiyar indicates where it stood. This is further inland, and apparently on the west of the old Pelusiac branch, as was Pelusium. It is situate between Farma and Tel-Defenneh. Whatever may have been its exact position, Pelusium must have owed its strength not to any great elevation, but to its being placed in, the midst of a plain of marsh land. and mud, never easy to traverse. The ancient sites in such alluvial tracts of Egypt are in general only sufficiently raised above the level of the plain to preserve them from being injured by the inundation. It lay among swamps and morasses on the most easterly estuary of the Nile (which received from it the name of Ostium Pelusiacum), and stood twenty stades from the Mediterranean (Strabo, 16, 760; 17, 801, 802; Pliny, Hist. Nat. 5, 11). The site is now only approachable by boats during a high Nile, or by land when the summer sun has dried the mud left by the inundation; the remains consist only of mounds and a few fallen columns. The climate is very unwholesome (Wilkinson, Mod. Egypt. 1, 406. 444; Savary, Letters on Egypt, 1, let. 24; Henniker, Travels).

The antiquity of the town of Sin may perhaps be inferred from the mention of the wilderness of Sin in the journeys of the Israelites (Exo 16:1; Num 33:11). It is remarkable, however, that the Israelites did not immediately enter this tract on leaving the cultivated part of Egypt, so that it is held to have been within the Sinaitic peninsula, and therefore it may take its name from some other place or country than the Egyptian Sin. (See No. 2.),

Pelusium is noticed (as above) by Ezekiel, in one of the prophecies relating to the invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, as one of the cities which should then suffer calamities, withl probably, reference to their later history. The others spoken of are Noph (Memphis), Zoan (Tanis), No, (Thebes), Aven (Heliopolis), Pi-beseth (Bubastis), and Tehaphnehes (Daphnae). All these, excepting the two ancient capitals, Thebes and Memphis, lay on or near the eastern boundary; and, in the approach to Memphis, an invader could scarcely advance, after capturing Pelusium and Daphnae without taking Tanis, Bubastis, and Heliopolis. In the most ancient times, Tanis, as afterwards Pelusium, seems to have been the key of Egypt on the east. Bubastis was an important position from its lofty mounds, and Heliopolis as securing the approach to Memphis. The prophet speaks of Sin as the stronghold of Egypt (30:15). This place it held from that time until the period of the Romans. Pelusium appears to have been the perpetual battlefield between the Egyptians and their foreign enemies. As early as the time of Rameses the Great, in the 14th century B.C., we find Sin proving itself to be what the prophet termed it, the strength of Egypt. One of the Sallier papyri in the British Museum contains a record of the war between the Egyptians and the Sheta; and the victory which Rameses gained in the neighborhood of Pelusium is detailed at length. The importance of this victory may be gathered from the fact that the Sheta are said to have made their attack with 4500 chariots. As Diodorus specifies the number of this Pharaoh’s army, which he says amounted to 60,000 infantry, 24,000 cavalry, and 27,000 chariots of war, it is no wonder that he was enabled successfully to resist the attacks of the Sheta. Diodorus also mentions that Rameses the Great defended the east side of Egypt against the irruptions of the Syrians and Arabians with a wall drawn from Pelusium through the deserts, as far as to Heliopolis, for the space of 1500 furlongs.

He gives a singular account of an attempt on the part of his younger brother to murder this great Pharaoh, when at Pelusium after one of his warlike expeditions, which was happily frustrated by the adroitness of the king (Diod. Sic. 1, 4). Herodotus relates (2, 141) that Sennacherib advanced against Pelusiim, and that near Pelusitum Cambyses defeated Psammenitus (3, 10-13). In like maner the decisive battle in which Ochus defeated the last native king, Nectanebos (Nekht-nebf), was fought near this city. It was near this place that Pompey met his death, being murdered by order of Ptolemy, whose protection he had claimed (Hist. Bell. Alexand. p., 20, 27; Livy, 45, 11; Josephus, Ant. 14, 8, 1; War, 1, 8, 7; 1, 9, 3). It is perhaps worthy of note that Ezekiel twice mentions Pelusium in the prophecy which contains the remarkable and signally fulfilled sentence, There shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt (30, 13). As he saw the long train of calamities that were to fall upon the country, Pelusium may well have stood out as the chief place of her successive humiliations. Two Persian conquests and two submissions to strangers first to Alexander, and then to Augustus may explain the especial misery foretold of this city: Sin shall suffer great anguish (Eze 30:16).

We find in the Bible a geographical name which has the form of a gentile noun derived from Sin, and is usually held to apply to two different nations, neither connected with the city Sin. In the list of the descendants of Noah, the Sinite, , occurs among the sons of Canaan (Gen 10:17; 1Ch 1:15). This people, from its place between the Arkite and the Arvadite, has been supposed to have settled in Syria north of Palestine, where similar names occur in classical geography, and have been alleged in confirmation. This theory would not, however, necessarily imply that the whole tribe was there settled, and the supposed traces of the name are by no means conclusive. On the other hand, it must be observed that some of the eastern towns of Lower Egypt have Hebrew as well as Egyptian names, as Heliopolis and Tanis; that those very near the border seem to have borne only Hebrew names, as Migdol; so that we have an indication of a Shemitic influence in this part of Egypt, diminishing in degree according to the distance from the border. It is difficult to account for this influence by the single circumstance of the Shepherd invasion of Egypt, especially as it is shown yet more strikingly by the remarkably strong characteristics which have distinguished the inhabiants of Northeastern Egypt from their fellow countrymen from the days of Herodotus and Achilles Tatius to our own.

Nor must we pass by the statement of the former of these writers that the Palestine Syrians dwelt westward of the Arabians to the eastern boundary of Egypt (2Ch 3:5). Therefore it does not seem a violent hypothesis that the Sinites were connected with Pelusium, though their main body may perhaps have settled much farther to the north. The distance is not greater than that between the Hittites of Southern Palestine and those of the valley of the Orontes, although the separation of the less powerful Hivites into those dwelling beneath Mount Hermon and the inhabitants of the small confederacy of which Gibeon was apparently the head is perhaps nearer to our supposed case. If the wilderness of Sin owed its name to Pelusium, this is an evidence of the very early importance of the town and its connection with Arabia, which would perhaps be strange in the case of a purely Egyptian town. The conjecture we have put forth suggests a recurrence to the old explanation of the famous mention of the land of Sinlim, , in Isaiah (Isa 49:12), supposed by some to refer to China. This would appear from the context to be a very remote region. It is mentioned after the north and the west, and would seem to be in a southern or eastern direction. Sin is certainly not remote, nor is the supposed place of the Sinites to the north of Palestine; but the expression may be proverbial. The people of Pelusium, if of Canaanitish origin, were certainly remote compared to most of the other Canaanites, and were separated by alien peoples, and it is also noticeable that they were to the southeast of Palestine. As the sea bordering Palestine came to designate the west, as in this passage, so the land of Sinim may have passed into a proverbial expression for a distant and separated country. SEE SINIM; SEE SINITE.

2. A wilderness (; Sept. ; Vulg. desertum Sin) which the Israelites reached after leaving the encampment by the Red Sea, (Num 33:11-12). Their next halting place (Exo 16:1; Exo 17:1) was Rephidim, either Wady Feiran, or the mouth of Wady es-Sheikh, SEE REPHIDIM; on which supposition it would follow that Sin must lie between those wadies and the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and of course west of Sinai. Since they were by this time gone more than a month from Egypt, the locality must be too far towards the southeast to receive its name from the Egyptian Sin of Eze 30:15, called by the Sept., and identified with Pelusium. (See above.) In the wilderness of Sin the manna Was first gathered, and those who adopt the supposition that this was merely the natural product of the tarfa bush find from the abundance of that shrub in Wady es-Sheikh, southeast of Wady Ghurundel, a proof of local identity. SEE ELIM.

As the previous encampment by the Red Sea must have been in the plain of Mukhah, the wilderness of Sin could not well have been other than the present plain el-Kaa, which commences at the mouth of Wady Taiyibeh, and extends along the whole southwestern side of the peninsula. At first narrow, and interrupted by spurs from the mountains, it soon expands into an undulating, dreary waste, covered in part with a white gravelly soil, and in part with sand. Its desolate aspect appears: to have produced a most depressing effect upon the Israelites. Shut in on the one hand by the sea, on the other by the wild mountains, exposed to the full blaze of a burning sun, on that bleak plain, the stock of provisions brought from Egypt now exhausted we can scarcely wonder that they said to Moses, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger (Exo 16:3). SEE EXODE.

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Sin (2)

(properly , , both originally signifying to miss) is any action, word, desire, purpose, or omission contrary to the law, of God; a voluntary violation of, or failure to comply with, the divine law (Rom 3:20; Rom 4:15; Rom 7:7; Jam 4:17). Whether such a law be revealed in the holy oracles, or in the constitution of our nature, the violation constitutes the transgressor a sinner (Rom 1:19-32; Rom 2:11-15). The various words by which sin and wickedness are set forth in the Old Test. throw considerable light upon the real nature and tendency of the evil.

1. The proper and original idea of sin appears to be that it is a coming short of our true destiny, a missing the mark (, ). The end of man’s being is to be like unto God, to have his will in thorough harmony with the divine will, and so to glorify God and enjoy him forever. God is love; and to love him and be beloved by him is true blessedness. The whole law is summed up in love, whence sin, which is contrary to love, is a failure in the purpose of our existence.

2. This leads us to the second idea of sin, namely, that it is the transgression of God’s law. From the Christian theistic standpoint there is no doubt as to the existence of an eternal moral order. That which, according to this rule, ought to be done is good; that which ought not to be done is sin. The law being neither advice nor prayer, but a positive demand, our only relation to it can be either that of submission or transgression. Whether we look upon God’s law as moral, that is, stamped upon our nature, or positive, that is, revealed to us from without, in either case it should be considered binding upon our hearts, and should be implicitly obeyed, because it proceeds from the holy and loving Author of our being. Duty is represented in Scripture as a path along which we should walk, and to sin is to transgress or to go out of the way of God’s commandments; hence the use of the word , to pass over.

3. Again, every transgression is represented in the Bible as an act of rebellion ( and ) God is the Ruler of his people, the Father of the human race. In both these capacities he demands obedience. To sin is to rebel against his paternal rule, to revolt from his allegiance. It is to act independently of him, to set up the will of the creature against the will of the Creator, to put self in the place of God, and thus to dishonor his holy name.

4. Further, to sin against God implies distrust of him and a willingness to deceive him, and to act treacherously towards him (; camp. also and ). To entertain a suspicion of God’s goodness is to distrust him; and when once that suspicion has been planted in the heart, alienation begins, and deceit is sure to follow.

5. Another remarkable fact about sin is that it is perversion or distortion (); it is a wrong, a wrench, a twist to our nature (), destroying the balance of our faculties, and making us prone to evil. Man is thrown out of his center and cannot recover himself, the consequence of which is that there is a jarring of the elements of his nature. Sin is not a new faculty or a new element introduced, but it is the confusion of the existing elements which confusion the Son of God came to take away, by restoring man to his right balance, and leading him once more to a loving and self sacrificing trust in God.

6. Sin is also unrest (), a perpetual tossing like the waves of the sea; a constant disturbance, the flesh against the spirit, the reason against the inclination, one desire against another, the wishes of one person against the wishes of another; a love of change and excitement and stir; and withal no satisfaction. Man was never intended to find rest except in God; and practically when God is not his center he is like a wandering star, uncertain and erratic, like a cloud without water, and like seething foam.

7. Connected with this is the idea which identifies sin with toil (), Wickedness is wearisome work; it is, labor without profit; it is painful, sorrowful travail; it is grief and trouble. And after all the labor expended on sin, nothing comes of it. The works of darkness are unfruitful; sin is vanity, hollowness, nothingness (); the ungodly are like the chaff which the wind scatters away; they can show no results from all their toil.

8. Sin is also ruin, or a breaking in pieces (). Adversity, calamity, distress, misery, trouble, are represented by the same words as wickedness, mischief, harm, evil, and ill doing.

Gathering together the foregoing observations, they bring us to this result, that sin is wilful disobedience of God’s commands, proceeding from distrust, and leading to confusion and trouble. Sin lies not so much in the act as in the nature of the agent whose heart and life have been perverted. We are taught by the Scriptures that man was led into sin originally by the Evil One, who insinuated suspicions of God’s goodness; and was thus misled, deceived, ruined, and dominated over by Satan.

See Burroughs, Sinfulness of Sin; Dwight, Theology; Fletcher, Appeal to Matter of Fact; Fuller, Works; Gill, Body of Divinity, art. Sin; Goodwin, Aggravations of Sin; Hagenbach, Hist. of Doctrines; Howe, Living Temple; King and Jenyn, Origin of Evil; Muller, Christian Doctrine of Sin; Orme, Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; Owen, Indwelling Sin; Payson, Sermons; Williams, Answer to Belsham; Watts, Ruin and a Recovery.

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Sin

is “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God” (1 John 3:4; Rom. 4:15), in the inward state and habit of the soul, as well as in the outward conduct of the life, whether by omission or commission (Rom. 6:12-17; 7:5-24). It is “not a mere violation of the law of our constitution, nor of the system of things, but an offence against a personal lawgiver and moral governor who vindicates his law with penalties. The soul that sins is always conscious that his sin is (1) intrinsically vile and polluting, and (2) that it justly deserves punishment, and calls down the righteous wrath of God. Hence sin carries with it two inalienable characters, (1) ill-desert, guilt (reatus); and (2) pollution (macula).”, Hodge’s Outlines.

The moral character of a man’s actions is determined by the moral state of his heart. The disposition to sin, or the habit of the soul that leads to the sinful act, is itself also sin (Rom. 6:12-17; Gal. 5:17; James 1:14, 15).

The origin of sin is a mystery, and must for ever remain such to us. It is plain that for some reason God has permitted sin to enter this world, and that is all we know. His permitting it, however, in no way makes God the author of sin.

Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:1-6) consisted in his yielding to the assaults of temptation and eating the forbidden fruit. It involved in it, (1) the sin of unbelief, virtually making God a liar; and (2) the guilt of disobedience to a positive command. By this sin he became an apostate from God, a rebel in arms against his Creator. He lost the favour of God and communion with him; his whole nature became depraved, and he incurred the penalty involved in the covenant of works.

Original sin. “Our first parents being the root of all mankind, the guilt of their sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature were conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation.” Adam was constituted by God the federal head and representative of all his posterity, as he was also their natural head, and therefore when he fell they fell with him (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:22-45). His probation was their probation, and his fall their fall. Because of Adam’s first sin all his posterity came into the world in a state of sin and condemnation, i.e., (1) a state of moral corruption, and (2) of guilt, as having judicially imputed to them the guilt of Adam’s first sin.

“Original sin” is frequently and properly used to denote only the moral corruption of their whole nature inherited by all men from Adam. This inherited moral corruption consists in, (1) the loss of original righteousness; and (2) the presence of a constant proneness to evil, which is the root and origin of all actual sin. It is called “sin” (Rom. 6:12, 14, 17; 7:5-17), the “flesh” (Gal. 5:17, 24), “lust” (James 1:14, 15), the “body of sin” (Rom. 6:6), “ignorance,” “blindness of heart,” “alienation from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18, 19). It influences and depraves the whole man, and its tendency is still downward to deeper and deeper corruption, there remaining no recuperative element in the soul. It is a total depravity, and it is also universally inherited by all the natural descendants of Adam (Rom. 3:10-23; 5:12-21; 8:7). Pelagians deny original sin, and regard man as by nature morally and spiritually well; semi-Pelagians regard him as morally sick; Augustinians, or, as they are also called, Calvinists, regard man as described above, spiritually dead (Eph. 2:1; 1 John 3:14).

The doctrine of original sin is proved, (1.) From the fact of the universal sinfulness of men. “There is no man that sinneth not” (1 Kings 8:46; Isa. 53:6; Ps. 130:3; Rom. 3:19, 22, 23; Gal. 3:22). (2.) From the total depravity of man. All men are declared to be destitute of any principle of spiritual life; man’s apostasy from God is total and complete (Job 15:14-16; Gen. 6:5, 6). (3.) From its early manifestation (Ps. 58:3; Prov. 22:15). (4.) It is proved also from the necessity, absolutely and universally, of regeneration (John 3:3; 2 Cor. 5:17). (5.) From the universality of death (Rom. 5:12-20).

Various kinds of sin are mentioned, (1.) “Presumptuous sins,” or as literally rendered, “sins with an uplifted hand”, i.e., defiant acts of sin, in contrast with “errors” or “inadvertencies” (Ps. 19:13). (2.) “Secret”, i.e., hidden sins (19:12); sins which escape the notice of the soul. (3.) “Sin against the Holy Ghost” (q.v.), or a “sin unto death” (Matt. 12:31, 32; 1 John 5:16), which amounts to a wilful rejection of grace.

Sin, a city in Egypt, called by the Greeks Pelusium, which means, as does also the Hebrew name, “clayey” or “muddy,” so called from the abundance of clay found there. It is called by Ezekel (Ezek. 30:15) “the strength of Egypt, “thus denoting its importance as a fortified city. It has been identified with the modern Tineh, “a miry place,” where its ruins are to be found. Of its boasted magnificence only four red granite columns remain, and some few fragments of others.

Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary

Sin

The pictorial power of the Hebrew language is seldom exhibited more clearly than in connection with the various aspects of evil. Every word is a piece of philosophy; nay, it is a revelation. The observer of human affairs is painfully struck by the wearisomeness of life, and by the amount of toil and travail which the children of men have to undergo to obtain a bare existence; he sees the hollowness, vanity, and unreality of much that seems bright and charming at first; he notes that human nature, in its personal and social aspects, is distorted and out of course; that the chain of love which ought to bind the great family in one has been snapped asunder; that isolation and desolation have taken the place of unity and happiness; that the relationship between man and his Maker has become obscured, and that even when man knows the will of God, there is something in his nature which prompts him to rebel against it; lastly, he comes to the conviction that this state of things is not original, but is opposed to men’s best instincts, and frustrates the original design of their creation.

The Hebrew Bible meets us with a full acknowledgment of these manifold aspects of human suffering, and blends wrong-doing and suffering to a remarkable degree, setting forth sin in its relation to God, to society, and to a man’s own self, depicting it in its negative aspect as iniquity or unrighteousness, and in its positive aspect as rebellion and a breach of trust.

The word translated sin throughout the O.T., with very rare exceptions, is derived from the word Chatha (), which originally signifies to miss the mark, and answers to the Greek notifying the fact that all wrong-doing is a failure or a coming short of that aim which God intended all his children to reach. [The word is used in its original sense in Jdg 20:16, where we rend of ‘seven hundred chosen men left-handed, every one of whom could sling stones at an hair’s breadth, and not miss.’] If man was originally made in the image of God, it must have been implanted in him as a first principle that he should live as God lives. Every departure, therefore, from the law of Right is a coming short of the purpose for which man was made, and a missing of the goal which ought to be reached.

The word usually implies blame-worthiness, and is largely used in confessions, to express a conviction that wrong has been done either towards God or towards man. this wrong is not necessarily wilful, for many sins were committed through negligence or ignorance (see Lev 4:2; Lev 5:15, Num 15:28). sin is not usually regarded in the O.T. as a condition (i.e. sinfulness), but as a definite act, whether of thought, word, or deed. The word was applied not only to moral evil and idolatry, but also to breaches of ceremonial regulations.

The following are the only passages in which other words besides Chatha have been rendered sin by the translators of the A. V in Lev 4:13, and Num 15:28-29, we find the word Shagah (), to err; in 1Ki 17:18, Aven (), vanity or iniquity; in Pro 10:12; Pro 10:19; Pro 28:13, Pesha (), rebellion or transgression.

Chatha is occasionally rendered by some other word instead of sin. Thus it is rendered fault in Gen 41:9, and Exo 5:16; trespass in 1Ki 8:31; harm in Lev 5:16; blame in Gen 43:9; Gen 44:32; offend in Gen 20:9; Gen 40:1; 1Ki 1:21; 2Ki 18:14; Ecc 10:4; Isa 29:21; and Jer 37:18.

The verb has a peculiar meaning in the Piel or Intensive Voice, as is the case with several other verbs in this Voice it is rendered as follows:–to make reconciliation (2Ch 29:24); to bear loss (Gen 31:39); to offer for sin (Leviticus passim); to cleanse from sin (Exo 29:36; Lev 14:49; Lev 14:52; Eze 43:20; Eze 43:22-23; Eze 45:18); to purge or purify (Lev 8:15; Num 8:7; Num 8:21; Num 19:9; Num 19:12-13; Num 19:17; Num 19:19-20; Num 31:19-20; Num 31:23); also in the familiar words of the Psalm (Psa 51:7), ‘Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean,’ and in Job 41:25, where we read of the Leviathan that ‘when he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid; by re as on of breakings they purify themselves

The LXX, which is generally very consistent in retaining the rendering has in some ceremonial passages adopted renderings similar to those now noticed. Thus we find in 2Ch 29:24, Eze 43:22; Eze 45:18; Num 8:21; Num 19:12-13; Num 31:19; Num 31:23; in Lev 14:49; Lev 14:52, Num 19:12; Num 19:19-20; Num 31:20; in Exo 29:36, Lev 8:15; Lev 9:15; in Psa 51:7; in Eze 44:27 Exo 30:10, Eze 43:23; Eze 45:19; in Num 19:19; and Num 8:7; Num 19:17.

Fuente: Synonyms of the Old Testament

Sin (1)

(See EXODUS.) Pelusium (Eze 30:15-16), the strength of Egypt, its frontier fortress on the N.E. in contrast to No or Thebes at the far S. of Egypt. From sin, “muddy,” as Pelusium comes from flos “mud,” “day.” So the Arab Teeneh from teen, “mud.” But Lepsius explains Pelusium the Philistine town, the last held by the shepherd dynasty (?). A Sallier papyrus records a great battle at Sin between Rameses and the Sheta; here too was the alleged deliverance of Sethos from Sennacherib, mice gnawing by night the Assyrians’ bowstrings and shield straps. Herodotus says that Sethos’ statue with a mouse in his hands stood in Vulcan’s temple, and an inscription, “look on me and learn to reverence the gods.” Ezekiel’s prophecy “Sin shall have great pain” was fulfilled in the Persian Cambyses’ great cruelty to the Egyptians after conquering Psammenitus near Pelusium. Ochus here defeated Nectanebos, the last native king.

Fuente: Fausset’s Bible Dictionary

Sin (2)

Viewed as chatha’, “coming short of our true end,” the glory of God (Rom 3:23), literally, “missing the mark”; Greek hamartanoo. ‘awen, “vanity,” “nothingness”; after all the scheming and labour bestowed on sin nothing comes of it. “Clouds without water” (Jud 1:12; Pro 22:8; Jer 2:5; Rom 8:20). Pesha’ “rebellion”, namely, against God as our rightful king. Rasha’ “wickedness,” related to rash “restlessness”; out of God all must be unrest (Isa 57:20-21); “wandering stars” (Jud 1:13). Maal, “shuffling violation of duty,” “prevarication” (1Ch 10:13). ‘aashaam, “guilt,” incurring punishment and needing atonement, Ra, “ill,” “ruin,” the same word for “badness” and “calamity” literally, breaking in pieces. Awal, “evil,” “perversity.”

Amal, “travail”; sin is weary work (Hab 2:13). Avah, “crookedness,” “wrong,” a distortion of our nature, disturbing our moral balance. Shagah, “error.” abar, “transgression through anger”; “sin is the transgression of the law,” i.e. God’s will (1Jo 3:4). Sin is a degeneracy from original good, not an original existence, creation, or generation; not by the Creator’s action, but by the creature’s defection (Ecc 7:29). As God is love, holiness is resemblance to Him, love to Him and His creatures, and conformity to His will. Selfishness is the root of sin, it sets up self and self will instead of God and God’s will. The origination of man’s sin was not of himself, but from Satan’s deceit; otherwise man’s sin would be devilish and ineradicable. But as it is we may be delivered. This is the foundation of our redemption by Christ. (See REDEMPTION; SAVIOUR; ATONEMENT.)

Original sin is as an hereditary disease, descending from the first transgressor downward (Psa 51:5). National sins are punished in this world, as nations have no life beyond the grave (Pro 14:34). The punishment of the individual’s sins are remedial, disciplinary, and deterrent in this world; and judicially retributive in the world to come. (On eternal punishment, see HELL.) The Greek aionios represents the Hebrew olam and ad; olam, “hidden”, “unlimited duration”; ad, applied to God’s “eternity” and “the future duration” of the good and destruction of the wicked (Psa 9:5; Psa 83:17; Psa 92:7). The objections are:

1. That, the length of punishment is out of all proportion with the time of sin. But the duration of sin is no criterion of the duration of punishment: a fire burns in a few minutes records thereby lost for ever; a murder committed in a minute entails cutting off from life for ever; one act of rebellion entails perpetual banishment from the king.

2. That the sinner’s eternal punishment would be Satan’s eternal triumph. But Satan has had his triumph in bringing sin and death into the world; his sharing the sinner’s eternal punishment will be the reverse of a triumph; the abiding punishment of the lost will be a standing witness of God’s holy hatred of sin, and a preservative against any future rebellion.

3. That the eternity of punishment involves the eternity of sin. But this, if true, would be no more inconsistent with God’s character than His permission of it for a time; but probably, as the saved will be delivered from the possibility of sinning by being raised above the sphere of evil, so the lost will be incapable of sinning any more in the sense of a moral or immoral choice by sinking below the sphere of good.

4. That eternal vengeance is inconsistent with God’s gospel revelation of Himself as love. But the New Testament abounds in statements of judicial vengeance being exercised by God (Rom 12:19; Heb 10:30; 1Th 4:6; 2Th 1:8).

Fuente: Fausset’s Bible Dictionary

SIN

The Bible refers to sin by a variety of Hebrew and Greek words. This is partly because sin may appear in many forms, from deliberate wrongdoing and moral evil to accidental failure through weakness, laziness or ignorance (Exo 32:30; Pro 28:13; Mat 5:22; Mat 5:28; Rom 1:29-32; Jam 4:17). But the common characteristic of all sin is that it is against God (Psa 51:4; Rom 8:7). It is the breaking of Gods law, that law being the expression of the perfection that Gods absolute holiness demands (Isa 1:2; 1Jn 3:4). It is the missing of the mark, that mark being the perfect standard of the divine will (Deu 9:18; Rom 3:23). It is unbelief, for it rejects the truth God has revealed (Deu 9:23; Psa 78:21-22; Joh 3:18-19; Joh 8:24; Joh 16:9). It is ungodliness, and it makes a person guilty before God (Psa 1:5-6; Rom 1:18; Jam 2:10).

Origin of sin

From the activity of Satan in the Garden of Eden, it is clear that sin was present in the universe before Adam and Eve sinned. But the Bible does not record how evil originated. What it records is how evil entered the human race (see EVIL).

Because human beings were made in the image of God, the highest part of their nature can be satisfied only by God. They cannot be independent of God, just as the image of the moon on the water cannot exist independently of the moon (Gen 1:26-28; see HUMANITY, HUMANKIND). Therefore, when God gave the created world to them, he placed a limit; for complete independence would not be consistent with their status as being in Gods image (Gen 2:15-17).

But the human beings God created went beyond the limit he set, and so they fell into sin. Because of their ability to know God, they were tempted to put themselves in the place of God. They wanted to rule their lives independently of him and be the final judge of what was good and what was evil (Gen 3:1-6). Pride was at the centre of human sin (Rom 1:21-23; 1Jn 2:16; cf. Isa 10:15; Isa 14:13-14; Oba 1:3 a; see PRIDE).

Sin entered human life because people doubted God, then ceased to trust him completely, and finally were drawn away by the desire to be their own master (Jam 1:14; cf. Eze 28:2; Eze 28:6; Joh 16:9). Human sin originated in the human heart; the act of disobedience was the natural outcome (Pro 4:23; Jer 17:9; Mar 7:21-23).

Above all, sin was against God the rejection of his authority, wisdom and love. It was rebellion against Gods revealed will (Gen 3:17; Rom 1:25; 1Jn 3:4). And the more clearly Gods will was revealed, the more clearly it showed human sinfulness (Rom 3:20; Rom 5:20; cf. Joh 15:22-24).

Results of sin

As a result of their sin, human beings have fallen under the judgment of God. They have come into a state of conflict with the natural world (Gen 3:17-19; Mat 24:39), with their fellow human beings (Gen 3:12-13; 1Jn 3:12), with their inner selves (Gen 3:7; Gen 3:11-13; Rom 7:15; Rom 7:19) and with God (Gen 3:8-10; Gen 3:22-24; Rom 3:10-18). The penalty they have brought upon themselves is death (Gen 2:17; Gen 3:19; Gen 3:22-24; Rom 6:23). This involves not only physical death but also spiritual death. It means separation from God, who is the source of spiritual life (Joh 3:3; Joh 3:7; Rom 6:16; Rom 7:5; Rom 7:13; 1Co 15:56; Eph 2:1-5; see DEATH).

Ever since Adams sin, the human story is one of people running from God, loving themselves instead of God, and doing their will instead of Gods (Rom 1:19-23). The more they reject God, the more they confirm their own stubbornness and hardness of heart (Mat 11:20-24; Mat 13:12-13; Rom 1:28-32; Eph 4:18). Sin has placed them in the hopeless position of being separated from God and unable to bring themselves back to God (Isa 59:2; Rom 3:19-20; Gal 3:10). God, however, has not left sinners in this helpless condition, but through the one fully obedient human being, Jesus Christ, has reversed the effects of Adams sin (Rom 5:6; Rom 5:8; Rom 5:15; Rom 5:18).

All sinned in Adam (Original sin)

In Rom 5:12-21 the whole human race is viewed as having existed originally in Adam, and therefore as having sinned originally in Adam (Rom 5:12; cf. Act 17:26). Adam is humankind; but because of his sin he is humankind separated from God and under his condemnation.

Because of Adams sin (his one act of disobedience) the penalty of sin, death, passes on to all people; but because of Christs death on the cross (his one act of obedience) the free gift of God, life, is available to all people. Adam, by his sin, brings condemnation; Christ, by his death, brings justification (Rom 5:17-20; Rom 6:23; 1Co 6:9-11). If condemn means declare guilty, justify means declare righteous; and this is what God, in his immeasurable grace, has done for sinners who turn in faith to Jesus Christ (Rom 5:16; Rom 8:33; see JUSTIFICATION).

Just as Adam is the representative head of humankind as sinful and separated from God, so Jesus Christ is the representative head of humankind as declared righteous and brought back to God. All who die, die because of their union with Adam; all who are made alive, are made alive because of their union with Christ (Rom 5:16; 1Co 15:22). Christ bears sins penalty, but more than that he brings repentant sinners into a right relationship with a just and holy God (Rom 4:24-25; Rom 5:8; 2Co 5:21; Gal 3:10-13; Php 3:9).

Human nature is corrupt (Total depravity)

In addition to being sinners because of their union with Adam, people are sinners because of what they themselves do. They are born with a sinful nature inherited from Adam, and the fruits of this sinful nature are sinful thoughts and actions (Psa 51:5; Joh 3:6; Eph 4:17-18).

People do not need to be taught to do wrong; they do it naturally, from birth. Sinful words and deeds are only the outward signs of a much deeper evil a sinful heart, mind and will (Pro 4:23; Jer 17:9; Mar 7:21-23; Gal 5:19-21; Eph 2:3). Every part of a person is affected by this sinful nature. The corruption is total (Gen 6:5; Gen 8:21; Isa 64:6; Rom 3:13-18; Rom 7:18; Rom 7:21; Rom 7:23) and it affects all people (Rom 3:9-12; Rom 3:23; 1Jn 1:8; 1Jn 1:10).

Total depravity means not that the whole of humanity is equally sinful, but that the whole of each persons nature is affected by sin. All people are sinners, but not all show their sinful condition equally. The strong influences of conscience, will-power, civil laws and social customs may stop people from doing all that their hearts are capable of, and may even cause them to do good (Luk 6:33; Luk 11:13; Rom 2:14-15; Rom 13:3). But in spite of the good that people may do, human nature is still directed by sin. It has a natural tendency to rebel against Gods law (Rom 7:11-13; Rom 8:7-8; Gal 5:17-21; Col 2:23;). (See also FLESH.)

A hopeless position apart from God

Since human nature is in such a sinful condition, people are unable to make themselves into something that is pleasing to God (Isa 64:6; Rom 8:7-8). The disease of sin has affected all that they are (their nature) and all that they do (their deeds). Every person is a sinner by nature and a sinner in practice (Psa 130:3; Rom 3:23; 1Jn 1:8; 1Jn 1:10).

The position of sinners before God is hopeless. Their sin has cut them off from God, and there is no way he can bring themselves back to God (Isa 59:2; Hab 1:13; Col 1:21). They are slaves to sin and cannot free themselves (Joh 8:34; Rom 7:21-23). They are under Gods condemnation, and have no way of saving themselves (Rom 3:19-20). They are the subjects of the wrath of God and cannot avoid it (Rom 1:18). (See also JUDGMENT; PROPITIATION.)

This complete hopelessness may be summarized under the word dead. People are dead in their sin and unable to make themselves alive. But God in his grace gives them new life, so that they can be spiritually born again (Joh 3:3-8; Eph 2:1; see REGENERATION). This is entirely the work of God. It is made possible through the death of Jesus Christ, and is effectual in the lives of all those who in faith turn from their sin to God (Joh 1:13; Joh 1:29; Joh 6:44-45; Act 3:19; Rom 3:24-25; Eph 2:8-9). (See also ATONEMENT; RECONCILIATION; REDEMPTION.)

Having been forgiven their sin and freed from its power, believers then show it to be true by the way they live (Rom 6:1; Rom 6:14; Rom 6:18; Gal 5:1). Because of the continued presence of the old sinful nature (the flesh) they will not be sinless, but neither will they sin habitually (Rom 6:6-13). They can expect victory over sin, and even when they fail they can be assured that genuine confession brings Gods gracious forgiveness (Mat 6:12-15; 1Jn 1:6-10; 1Jn 2:1-2; 1Jn 3:10). (See also CONFESSION; FORGIVENESS; SANCTIFICATION.)

Fuente: Bridgeway Bible Dictionary

Sin

SIN.Sin is personal hostility to the will of God. Christian teaching with regard to it is relative to the facts of the gospel, being necessarily implied by the death of Christ considered as a work of redemption. It is the Christian interpretation of facts of experience, which are independent of any explanation of life, whether offered by theology, philosophy, or scientific theory. Its value is irrespective of the view which historical criticism may suggest of the literature of the OT. Neither is it affected by theories of the organic development of the world or human life derived from modern biological thought. Philosophic systems, monistic or otherwise, cannot be allowed to govern or modify a doctrine which in the first instance can be tested only by relation to beliefs grounded not upon metaphysic, but experience. The Christian will rather hold that a philosophic theory inadequate to the facts of the gospel has been too hastily identified with reality.

1. The gospel never rises above the limits of its first publication as the Kingdom of God (Mar 1:14-15). No doubt the terms are deepened and spiritualized, as well by the subsequent teaching of Jesus (Luk 17:20; Luk 19:11, Act 1:7-8) as by the accomplishment of His atoning work (Luk 24:44-49). But though what might have remained an external and almost physical conception became the manifestation of one eternal life (Joh 3:15-16, 1Jn 1:1-3), nevertheless the Church of the living God (1Ti 3:15), the relation of a people of possession to their rightful Lord, King, and Father (Tit 2:14) is constant. Allegiance, faith, sonship are the marks of those who share the membership of this Kingdom. What Jesus the Messiah found was disobedience and disloyalty. Human life, as He was called upon to deal with it, involved subjection to another prince (Joh 14:30), bondage to another master (Joh 8:34), sonship to another father (Joh 8:44). To the consciousness of Jesus, Satan was present, not as a convenient personification of evil that became actual only in the individual wills of men, but as the author of sin, the person in whom evil has its spring, even as God is the fount of life. Jesus sense of dependence upon the Father did not carry with it a monism which saw God in all and all in God. For Him, as for St. John, the whole world lay in the Evil One (1Jn 5:19, cf. Luk 4:5-6). His own conflict was with the prince of this world (Joh 14:30). To be delivered from the Evil One was the converse of being brought into temptation (Mat 6:13 : the insertion of in Mt., and the absence of the clause in the best Manuscripts of Luk 11:4 suggest that it is correlative to the preceding clause, representing the same act differently). He had seen Satan fallen as lightning from heaven (Luk 10:18). Over against the Kingdom of God was the kingdom of Satan (Mat 12:26-28; Mat 16:27; Mat 25:41, cf. Rev 16:10). The drama of human life was accomplished in presence of this already existing dualism. Christ assumes the current Hebrew conception of a world of spiritual personalities under the leadership of Beelzebub (Luk 11:14-26). The stampede of the swine at Gerasa witnesses to their control, within the limits of Divine permission, over natural forces (Mar 5:13). Physical disease results from Satans bondage (Luk 13:16). Possession by demons is an abnormal case of its influence over human beings (e.g. Mar 9:20-22). And all opposition to the purpose of God is inspired by Satan (Joh 8:42-47). The Jews were of their father the devil, so that the works wrought by them were antithetic to the works of God manifested in Jesus (Joh 8:44). Even the chosen Twelve Satan had asked to have, that he might sift them as wheat (Luk 22:31). So the Passion was a continuation of the Temptation, a direct agony and death-struggle wherein the prince of this world was cast out (Joh 12:31; Joh 16:11), the strong man spoiled (Luk 11:21).

From the first the proclamation of the good news, accompanied as it was with the curing of diseases and the casting out of demons (Mat 10:7-8, Luk 9:1-2), witnessed to the real character of Christs work asredemption, ransom, and salvation. For the true unification between the normal and universal purpose of the gospelthe forgiveness of sinsand the occasional and particular accessories of itexorcism and healinglay not so much in the analogy between bodily disease and spiritual wickedness, as in the fact that both are the exercise of the one Satanic power within the usurped kingdom of evil. No doubt there is a certain suggestiveness in the parallel between disease and sin, which Jesus Himself recognized. But there is nothing in His teaching to suggest the later ideas of taint, infection, vitiated nature. It is trespasses which the Heavenly Father must do away, and that by forgiveness (Mat 6:15); salvation from sins (Mat 1:21), i.e. actions involving guilt, is implied by the name Jesus (see art. Guilt). The bringing forth of the people from Pharaohs bondage to serve Jehovah is the ancient experience which is before the mind of devout men under the old covenant as the pattern of the deliverance which Messiah was to accomplish (Mat 2:15, cf. Hos 11:1). Salvation is therefore not the restoration of spiritual health, but the liberation of Gods people from an evil service. The ministry of the Son of Man consists in giving His life a ransom (Mar 10:45, Mat 20:28; cf. 1Ti 2:6). And the Fourth Evangelist only interprets the mind of the Master when he speaks of Jesus as dying for the nation, and destined to gather together into one the scattered children of God (Joh 11:51-52). He was the shepherd bringing home the lost sheep dispersed upon the mountains (Joh 10:16); or, somewhat to vary the idea, the Redeemer coming into the world, not to judge it along with its prince, but to save it from the Evil One (Joh 3:17-18, Joh 12:31; Joh 12:47, Joh 17:15), and casting out the indwelling Satan by the finger or Spirit of God (Luk 11:20). The acceptable year of the Lord is a year of release (Luk 4:18-19).

2. From the implications of the Gospel narrative we pass to the theology of the Epistles. In order togain a clear view of St. Pauls doctrine of sin in its completeness, it is necessary to go behind the Epistle to the Romans. We must bear in mind, first of all, the essentially Jewish basis of his thought. To him salvation, or redemption, carried all the associations which had gathered round it in Hebrew history. The Kingdom of Messiah was a vivid reality, and the earlier Epistles show that at first he was not without the common anticipation of its immediate establishment in manifested power. Satan was a concrete fact. If at one time it was the Spirit of Jesus that suffered him not (Act 16:7), at another Satan hindered him (1Th 2:18). The thorn in the flesh was a messenger of Satan (2Co 12:7). The Christian is armed in order to ward off the fiery darts of the Evil One (Eph 6:16). Principalities and powers were the unseen antagonists of Christs servants (Eph 6:12, cf. Luk 22:53), the enemies over whom Christ triumphed in the Cross (Col 2:15). If Messiah was to be manifested at the Parousia, Satan was also destined to be manifested in the Man of Sin (2Th 2:3-11). A remarkable parallel to the conception of the Evil One, which appears both in the Synoptics and in the Fourth Gospel, is found in the prince of the power of the air (Eph 2:2). The same passage describes those who become sons of God as by nature children of wrath (Eph 2:3), dead not in sin but through trespasses (Eph 2:5), sons of disobedience because inwrought by this evil spirit (Eph 2:2). Demons are as much part of St. Pauls world as of that which appears in the Synoptists. He identifies them with the heathen gods (1Co 10:20-21). Belial is the antithesis of Christ (2Co 6:15). To lapse from Christian conduct is to turn aside after Satan (1Ti 5:15); to be separated from Christian fellowship is to be delivered to Satan (1Co 5:5, 1Ti 1:20). And that redemption meant primarily for St. Paul translation from the kingdom of Satan to the Kingdom of God (Col 1:13), is attested by the form in which he narrates before Agrippa the story of his commission as Apostle of the Gentiles (Act 26:18). All this is in close correspondence with the mind of Jesus, and must be brought with us to a closer examination of the Pauline doctrine of sin.

That sin is essentially disloyalty to God is the substance of the locus classicus on the nature of sin, Rom 1:18-32 Knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks (Rom 1:21). It will be observed, first, that the Apostle here speaks of sin in its widest signification, including such distinctions as are involved in the theological conceptions of original and actual. We have here, therefore, a definition of sin which must govern all subsequent uses of the term. All the elements which enter into particular sins, or transgressions of known law, are representedknowledge of God and dependence upon Him (Rom 1:20), wilful and therefore inexcusable refusal of due homage (Rom 1:21), the incurring of guilt and consequently of Gods wrath (Rom 1:18). Further, it is noticeable that the plural men, not the collective man, is used throughout the passage. There is nothing abstract in this general view of sin, even though it be universal (cf. all sinned, Rom 5:12; all died, 2Co 5:14). Another point is, that St. Paul is led to disclose this vision of sin as the necessary postulate of the gospel (Rom 1:16-18), in which is revealed a righteousness of God (Rom 1:17, Rom 3:21). Lastly, there is no confusion, as in the popular mind, between those physical excesses which are called vice, and the inward refusal to have God in their knowledge (Rom 3:28), whether it applies to the sensuous or the spiritual nature of men, which alone is sin. God gave them up unto a reprobate mind (Rom 3:28), with all its consequences to the complex personality of man. This is of great significance. St. Pauls appeal is not to the equivocal testimony of external facts, which considered in themselves are non-moral, but to facts as interpreted by conscience. Fundamentally this is the appeal to personal experience, and it is clear from the Epistle to the Romans, as from the whole Pauline theology, that the Apostle is universalizing his own experience, as he saw himself in the light of the vision of Jesus of Nazareth (Gal 1:11-17, Rom 7:7-25).

Now St. Paul expresses his relation to sin in the phrase sin dwelleth in me (Rom 7:17). He is describing the common experience of an inward struggle, when neither good nor evil is finally in the ascendant. The complete sinful condition would be one of consent (Rom 1:32, 2Th 2:12), in which the law of sin was unchecked by the law of the mind (Rom 7:23, Gal 5:17). The terms must not be misunderstood in view of the modern conception of scientific law, Law in St. Pauls theology involves the personality of the lawgiver, so that to find this law in the members (Rom 7:23), to be inwrought by sin, seems to point to an indwelling spiritual presence. Is this a mere figure? St. Paul reverts to it in a still more significant form. Christians are not to let sin reign in their mortal bodies (Rom 6:12). Compliance with evil involves an obedience (Rom 6:16), a slavery (Rom 6:17). There is a close parallel between those who, as alive in Christ Jesus, are servants of God, and those who being dead in trespasses serve sin (Rom 6:15-23). Two hostile kingdoms, two rival loyalties, make their claim upon a mans allegiance. So, when under the form of Adams transgression, sin is considered in its universal aspect (Rom 5:14), a personal sovereignty is again suggesteddeath, i.e. sin in its consequent development, reigned through the one (Rom 5:17). The effect of Adams transgression is represented as the establishment of an authority (cf. 1Co 15:24, Eph 2:2; Eph 6:12, Col 1:13) over his descendants rather than as a corruption of their nature, carrying with it therefore condemnation (Rom 5:16; see art. Guilt) as the due sentence of God upon those who reject His law. This personal embodiment of hostility to the Divine law and government, in view of St. Pauls general outlook on the spiritual world, can be none other than Satan, exercising, as captain of spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12), not an external compulsion but an inward influence, not therefore impairing the responsible personalities that are indwelt. Thus St. Paul can say, Death passed unto all men, for that all sinned (Rom 5:12). Sin is always a personal attitude, never a pathological condition. Death is its consequence (Rom 5:12), but the physical analogy of St. James (Rom 1:15) has no parallel in St. Paul. It is always the sentence, punishment, or wages (Rom 6:23; see art. Guilt), the sequel to the righteous judgment of God (Rom 2:5). So, too, salvation is not a remedy for mortal disease, but a personal act of kindness and mercy on the part of an offended but loving God (Eph 1:5-10; Eph 2:7, Tit 3:4-8). Looking to the state from which men are rescued, it is redemption (Gal 3:13; Gal 4:5); looking to that into which they are brought, it is reconciliation (Rom 5:10-11; Rom 11:15, 2Co 5:18-19). Both involve the personal action of the Fathers loving will, whereby He chooses to forgive the past and bring back His children into fellowship with Himself (Rom 5:3-8, Col 1:19-22; cf. 1Pe 3:18). As applied to the individual, this is justification (Rom 3:24; Rom 4:25; Rom 5:9 al.), which represents not a process of renewal, but an amnesty extended to the sinner. What Christ slew by the Cross was the enmity (Eph 2:15-16). Its effect, therefore, is not an infused righteousness, but a free pardon whereby sins are no longer reckoned (Rom 4:7-8, 2Co 5:19).

3. The rest of the NT is in general agreement with St. Paul. St. James, though he speaks of sin as the intermediate stage between lust and death (Jam 1:15), yet by the very figure used to describe their relationship, clearly recognizes that all three are essentially the same in kind. Lust is not animal impulse but undeveloped sin. The sinner is one who has committed sins (Jam 5:15), which may be covered by repentance (Jam 5:20) and forgiven in answer to prayer (Jam 5:15). Sins, therefore, are personal transgressions against God, which, if unremitted, involve judgment (Jam 5:12), a personal condemnation and sentence on the part of the Judge (Jam 4:12, Jam 5:9). Lust is not even a pathological condition of the will. It has the nature of sin, being not a result of ignorance, but essentially a personal determination of will. This is more clearly brought out by the assertion that lust, not God, is the tempter (Jam 1:13-14), which suggests the presence of an evil will, the source of that friendship of the world which is enmity against God (Jam 4:4), taking occasion of the natural passions and desires of men to influence spiritually the human personality. The wisdom which cometh down from above is set over against a wisdom which is devilish (Jam 3:15; Jam 3:18; Jam 3:17).

St. Peter, while he speaks of fleshly lusts that war against the soul (1Pe 2:11), is even more emphatic than St. James in his recognition of the personality of evil. Sin is part of a mans activity, a vain manner of life from which we are redeemed by the blood of Him who bore our sins, i.e. our actual transgressions, that He might bring us to God (1Pe 1:18-19, 1Pe 2:24, 1Pe 3:18). For the redeemed Christian it still exists in the person of Gods enemy, who is now the adversary of Gods people also, seeking once more to draw them away from their allegiance (1Pe 5:8).

St. John, with his profounder insight, gives to the doctrine of sin what is perhaps the widest and most comprehensive sweep in the NT. Sin is lawlessness (1Jn 3:4). This sentence, with its coextensive subject and predicate, is all but a definition. It recognizes no distinction in kind between sin and sins, which are practically interchangeable in the Johannine writings. If the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world (Joh 1:29, Vulgate peccata mundi), the Son is manifested to take away sins (1Jn 3:5). If the blood cleanseth from all sin (1Jn 1:7), Jesus Christ is the propitiation for our sins (1Jn 2:2). The cleansing is sacrificial (), implying personal dealings with God. It is therefore forgiveness of sins which those for whom it is prevalent receive (1Jn 1:9, 1Jn 2:12). St John does not speak of sin as a state. Doing sin is opposed to doing righteousness (1Jn 3:4; 1Jn 3:7-8). In him is no sin (1Jn 3:5) is equivalent to Which of you convicteth me of sin? (Joh 8:46, cf. 1Pe 2:22),a clear record rather than a perfect state. That which abides in him who believes in the name of Jesus (1Jn 3:23) is the love of the Father, a personal relation having been established which is opposed to the love of the world (1Jn 2:15-16). Here, however, is no condemnation of the natural impulses or of matter. That Jesus Christ is come in the flesh to save the world is St. Johns cardinal doctrine (1Jn 4:2, 2Jn 1:7). But, as with St. James and St. Peter, it is lust, and the corruption that is in the world through lust, which constitute the bondage from which men need deliverance (1Jn 2:16; 1Jn 5:4-5). What then is lust? That is the point at which St Johns whole view opens out before us. The Fourth Gospel has recorded the prayer of Christ for His disciples, not that they should be taken from the world, but that they might be kept from the Evil One (Joh 17:15); and also His condemnation of the Jews because, continuing in the bondage of sin, it was their will to do the lusts not of their body, but of their father the devil (Joh 8:44). And the Apocalypse unfolds the mystery of iniquity in language fully accordant with the view of sin implied in the Gospel. The old serpent the devil (Rev 12:9; Rev 20:2) deceives the whole world (Rev 12:9, Rev 20:2; Rev 20:10), having power (, Rev 13:2) and even authority (, Rev 13:4; cf. Luk 4:6) over the nations, manifesting his rule in the mystic Babylon (Rev 16:19; Rev 17:1-6), and the kingdom of the beast (13 passim), until He who is the Alpha and Omega, having by His angel sealed the servants of God (Rev 7:2-3), brings in the final salvation, the Kingdom of God and the authority of His Christ (Rev 12:10). St. Johns last word is written in the First Epistle. Behind human history is the devil, who sinneth from the beginning (1Jn 3:8). The explanation of human sin, therefore, is the relation of the world to this spirit. The whole world lieth in the evil one (1Jn 5:19). To be begotten of God (1Jn 3:9), who is light (1Jn 1:5), truth (1Jn 5:20), and love (1Jn 4:8), is a reversal of those relations described as being of the devil (1Jn 3:8), who is a murderer and liar (Joh 8:44), and the power of darkness (1Jn 2:11; cf. Luk 22:53, Act 26:18). Philosophically, there can be little doubt that St. John is content with a dualism, which he is not concerned to resolve, starting as he does from the facts of experience (1Jn 1:1; 1Jn 4:14; cf. Joh 19:35). Though evil is antithetic to good, it is not in a Platonic sense as non-being ( ). The problem is approached from the positive and concrete standpoint of personality. Though God is indeed the beginning and the end (Rev 1:8; Rev 21:6; Rev 22:13), yet a similar phrase is used in speaking of the author of evil as in describing the Word (1Jn 3:8; 1Jn 1:1): both are from the beginning. The final triumph, though complete, is represented symbolically as the imprisonment (Rev 20:2-3; Rev 20:7; Rev 20:10), not the annihilation, of Satan. The Hebrew mind, which, in spite of mystical affinities with Platonism and, possibly, of direct influence from Greek sources, is dominant in St. John, did not feel the necessity of a metaphysical monism, being content to respond to the revelation of a supreme spiritual Person, the fear of whom was the beginning of wisdom and mans chief end (Job 28:28, Psa 111:10, Ecc 12:13). It is enough to know that they who abide in him that is true have by a transference of allegiance overcome the Evil One (1Jn 2:13).

The Epistle of Jude, with which 2 Peter must be closely associated, clearly exhibits that apocalyptic view of the spiritual issues behind the facts of human life and experience of which there are abundant traces in the NT outside the Book of Revelation, and which indicate a war in heaven (Rev 12:7) as the ultimate explanation of sin (Jud 1:6; Jud 1:9; Jud 1:14, 2Pe 2:4; 2Pe 3:7; 2Pe 3:12). To the Jewish mind this language is not what Western thought would understand by mere symbol. It is rather the symbolic representation of real existence, the Hebrew equivalent of Greek mysteries. It is a mistake, therefore, to neglect either the Apocalypse or the apocalyptic passages of other writings in the interpretation of the NT, or to fail to perceive that their characteristic ideas underlie the theology of the Apostolic age, as the Platonic mould of thought governs the religious philosophy of the 4th cent., the biological that of the 19th. The contempt of millenarianism, while it banished much that was fantastic in Christian teaching, had the correspondingly unfortunate result of obliging interpreters of the NT to arrange its statements against a background not contemplated by the writers themselves. The result in the case of sin has been the assigning of inadequate and shifting values to the term, and the misapplication of physical or other analogies. For Apostolic Christianity the background is always God with His Kingdom of angels and men on the one hand, and on the other the devil with his angels, extending his usurped authority over those human servants whom he holds captive. Sin is active hostility to God.

4. The whole question of original sin is removed from the atmosphere in which it is usually discussed, when it is realized that the difference between sin and righteousness is not one of infused or implanted characters, but of relationship to God. It need not be either affirmed or denied that moral and spiritual tendencies are, like the physical organism, capable of transmission. Still more irrelevant is the discussion whether acquired characters descend by inheritance. These are questions for psychological research, and may be left for decision upon scientific grounds. No doubt theories of transmission, from the crudest Augustinian notions of sexual propagation to the subtlest doctrine of heredity, have been advanced by religions philosophers to account for the universal need of salvation. So inveterate has this type of thought become, that it adheres to the phrases, e.g. depravity, corruption of nature, and the like, in which theology has endeavoured to express the Scripture teaching. Though the confessional formulas that employ such phrases are not committed to interpretations of the NT which imply a theory, opponents of what is supposed to be the traditional doctrine have in consequence been allowed to attack it in the interests of a more scientific psychology, on the assumption that original sin is held to be a predisposing cause of actual sin. Mr. F. R. Tennant, for example, in his Hulsean Lectures, starting from the premiss that ethical attributes are not rightly applied to anything but the activities of a will that knows the moral law, has no difficulty in proving that appetites and passions are the raw material of morality, belonging to the environment of the will, not an universal and hereditarily transmitted disturbance of mans nature. The consequence follows that sin, which must involve guilt, applies properly only to the individual, while original sin is little more than a name for the solidarity in nature and environment of the race of actual sinners. Whatever may be said of the background of Augustinian thought or the atmosphere in which the confessions of the 16th cent. were drawn, there can be no doubt that they only reasserted the language of the NT in ascribing the wrath of God to the race no less than to the individual. Terms like abnormal humanity, taint of nature, infirmity of will, may be useful practical analogies, but, like all analogies, they defeat their end if rigorously pressed. For what Scripture means is, not that individual responsibility is conditioned by racial defect, but that the guilt attaching to individuals belongs, in the first instance, to the community (see art. Guilt).

5. The controversies that have arisen about the question whether sin is a privation or a depravation of nature, would have lost much of their force if theological thought had adhered more closely to the Scripture mode of regarding sin. The later mediaeval view, stereotyped by the standards of Trent, represented man as deprived of a gift which raised him above nature (supernaturale donum). The unsophisticated experience of human nature leads us to regard it as not in its chief outlines evil, and so far as it denies an inherent corruption in the actual content of manhood the Tridentine position is sufficiently justified. But the Reformers were right in their main contention, which was that sin involved a positive departure from the Divine purpose. If sin in its essence is neither the loss nor the disturbance of personal endowments, but simply disloyalty to God, then to be outside the Kingdom and to own allegiance to the Evil One means that positive hostility to the law of God which is to be very far gone from original righteousness. For sin disturbs nature only in the sense in which all personal action disturbs, by directing towards spiritual ends the material which nature supplies. Again, we have to emphasize the truth that sin enters only when spiritual relations have been established.

6. This consideration will also show the irrelevance of inquiring into the origin of sin, in so far as this means an empirical investigation of human history. For if sin postulates responsibility, we are no nearer a solution of the problem by a knowledge of the rudimentary forms of what, in its final development, we call conscience. Only if emotions and passions be regarded as sinful, can it be of use to note that impulses, the ultimate restraint of which becomes imperative, are at certain stages necessary for the preservation of the individual or the propagation of the race. There need be no desire on the part of any Christian theologian to question the premisses on which the scientific evolutionist pursues his investigations into the origin of the human species. We may grant, for example, that no chasm separates the appearance of man upon the earth from the development of other and lower forms of life. It is hazardous, and quite unnecessary, to contend for organic and moral life as new departures. Taking a merely external view of man, we may say that the conditions under which sin not only becomes possible but actually takes place, are the perfectly normal result of a process of development through which the race has passed previously to the acquisition of full moral personality (F. R. Tennant, Hulsean Lect. p. 81). But then sin is a determination of the full moral personality. Even if we accept the story of mans first disobedience as historically a fact, it is no more explicable as a necessary stage in human evolution than the latest instance of wrong done by one man against another. That all men are the enemies of God until reconciled by the mediation of Christ, is a question of personal relationship unaffected by scientific research. The observer can do no more than register, so far as he can discover them, the conditions under which activities have resulted which, in view of the will of God, assumed to be known, are recognized as disloyalty and therefore as sin. No doctrine of sin is possible except on the assumption of a personal experience involving the recognition of God. The universality of the need which it expresses is attested, not by any demonstrative proof, but by the conviction of sin through which each individual has passed to the freedom of the Christian life. Of such Christian experience the witness of the Church is the summary, and its missionary labours are the measure of its faith that redemption is applicable to all. With this alone is Christianity as such concerned. It does not go behind the activity of a self-determining being, judged by conscience. Its doctrine of the Fall, therefore, is not a pseudo-scientific account of the strength of passion or of the survival of habits and tendencies incidental to an earlier stage in development, which is refuted by the discovery that the story of mankind is that of a continuous progression. It has nothing to do with the material of actual sin, which, though environment may have been vastly modified by corrupt action, cannot rightly be spoken of as polluted. But it is the expression, in the only manner of which language admits, of the postulate of guilt and slavery involved in preaching the gospel, Gods message of free salvation, to every creature.

The story of the Fall, recorded in Genesis 3, though it shaped the form in which St. Paul stated the universality of sin, does not vitally affect a teaching which, in its absence, would have sought another method of expression. Indeed, its essential features are all present in the Epistle to the Romans before it is stated in terms of Adams transgression. To say that the doctrine is merely illustrated by the story, would be to attribute to the Hebrew Christian mind of the 1st cent, an attitude towards the OT possible only in a critical age. Nor will the use of Adam as a category for summing up the human race in 1Co 15:21 f. warrant us in believing that St. Paul was led to his characteristic idea of human solidarity otherwise than along the lines natural to a Jewish interpreter of the OT in Apostolic times (see Sanday-Headlam, Romans, p. 136, Effects of Adams Fall, etc.). But it is equally certain that St. Pauls use of the OT is far removed from a hard Western literalism, its narratives being the authoritative forms under which spiritual truths are apprehended rather than the material of historical science (see Sanday-Headlam, ib. p. 302, St. Pauls use of the OT). The canons of interpretation applied to the early narratives of Genesis cannot affect their doctrinal use in the NT. If the first truth which concerns the moral life of man be the Divine origin, and therefore the essential goodness, i.e. conformity to the Divine intention, of the material world and of his own personality, the second is that nevertheless he is an alien from God. This interpretation of the facts of life, which escapes the negation of a true morality involved alike in Oriental dualism and philosophic monism, is entirely independent of the Genesis stories, and separable from them in the NT. It is, however. remarkable that even in these early narratives the religious truth is presented with a completeness conspicuously absent from many later theologies. The three personalities of God, Man, and the Evil One,disobedience, guilt, exclusion from the Kingdom, the need of liberation from an external tyranny typified in the promised bruising of the serpents head,all are essential to the reality of sin. It is difficult to understand how this could be better represented than by attributing an act of disobedience against God and of compliance with the voice of a stranger to a common ancestor of all living. The situation thus expressed is briefly summarized by St. Paul, All have sinned, and (therefore) fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23).

Confusion is often caused by the tendency to revert to a materialistic conception of sin on the part of those who would explain its presence in terms of the evolution hypothesis. It is sufficient, so the argument runs, to observe the difficulty that each must encounter of enforcing his inherited organic nature to obey a moral law (Tennant, Hulsean Lectures, p. 81). But, apart from the fact that what needs explanation is the self-arraignment which the process entails, it is contrary to experience, no less than to Scripture, thus to place the organic nature in an essential relation to sin, which is made to consist in the failure to moralize it. The publicans and harlots go into the Kingdom of heaven before those with whose wilful rejection of God the physical and emotional nature has least to do. Even popular Christianity places the devil at the climax of temptation; nor are youthful lusts, though they may constitute the earliest and most obvious material of transgression, the deadliest and most intimate occasion of sin. The impulse to make stones bread, or appropriate the kingdoms of the world, masks a temptation to independence of Divine authority which is the essential element in guilt. St. Pauls doctrine of the Flesh with its passions and lusts (Rom 7:5; Rom 8:8, Gal 5:24 etc.) cannot be set against this. It has been abundantly shown that the Pauline anthropology, to use the words of Lipsius, rests entirely on an OT base. The old man ( , Rom 6:6 etc.) is, therefore, the body, not as uncontrolled by spirit, but as inwrought by the Evil One (see above). According to Christian teaching, sin takes occasion by any commandment or recognized purpose of God, whether related to the physical nature or not; nor would the theologian of any age be a whit less emphatic than the modern theorist in placing it, not in the impulse, but in the deliberate refusal to reject the impulse. All men are born in sin, not as inheriting insatiable and abnormal appetites, which, however strong, are still outside their personal responsibility, but as subject to influences which, felt within us as ourselves (Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After), well up in personalities hostile to the Kingdom of God.

It will be urged that influences such as these are still external to the individual, of whom, therefore, sin cannot be predicated anterior to positive acts of transgression. But, in the first place, this separation between actions and character does not correspond with experience. The man as distinct from his activities is an abstraction. The psychological infant is an ideal construction (see Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, bk. ii. c. 2). No one has any knowledge of himself except in action. It is empirically true that concupiscence hath of itself the nature of sin (Thirty-nine Articles, 9), because in experience the line between suggestion and acquiescence is imaginary, and he that looketh on a woman to lust knows that he has already committed adultery. And this is not inconsistent with the complementary truth that temptation is not sin. But, secondly, while it may be admitted that sin on this view is metaphysically not free from difficulty, it must be observed that no peculiar problem is created by it. It is not exposed to the objection which naturally arises if it is explained in terms of a theory of heredity. Such theories are necessarily tentative and provisional, and it is the vice of all explanations based upon the current hypotheses of scientific investigation, that they tend to outrun assured results, and to involve religious truth in the imperfections of systems always in process of becoming antiquated. As soon, however, as it is perceived that the supposed analogy of an acquired character transmitted by propagation to descendants does not accurately represent the teaching of Scripture, objections raised on this score from the point of view of advancing science lose their force. The problem involved in the exercise of personal influence acting through the self-determining will of another personality, remains just where it is, whether sin be a reality or not; St. Pauls I, yet not I stands for an experience which is constant, whether the inspiring influence be the grace of God or sin that dwelleth in me. Whatever may be true of hypnotic suggestion or of abnormal conditions like demoniacal possession, the normal course of personal influence, even of one man upon another, is not to paralyze the individual, so that the resultant action is not his but anothers. That sharp separation of personalities which makes one human being wholly external to another may to some extent be due to the illusion of physical limitations. But at any rate, in dealing with spiritual wickedness, we reach a sphere where these conditions are left behind, and the distinctions which they involve are inapplicable. That spirit should thus act upon spirit involves no new difficulty, because its possibility is involved in the creation of free, responsible personalities, capable of love and therefore of enmity, of responding to a spirit of evil no less than to the Spirit of God. This may involve a race, just as the Holy Spirit indwells the Kingdom of heaven and each member of it. Sin is the antithesis, not of freewill, but of grace. The true analogy of redemption is rather the exorcism which leaves the subject clothed and in his right mind, than the remedy which repairs the ravages of disease. Salvation is not the process by which the sinner is gradually transformed into the saint, but the justifying act whereby the unrighteous is transferred to the Kingdom of grace. No doubt the evil spirit may return to the house from which it went out, and we are not, therefore, compelled to reject facts of experience, and deny the gradual nature of self-conquest. But to think of sin as an inherited or acquired character which is being gradually reduced, is to introduce a distinction between original and actual sin which removes the former altogether from the category of guilt. Satan entered into Judas (Luk 22:3, Joh 13:27); and our Lords statementHe that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet (Joh 13:10)seems to imply liability to incur fresh guilt rather than a redemption as yet incomplete. That sin remains even in the regenerate is sufficiently accurate as an expression of the observed fact of the imperfect lives of Christians. But the deeper view of St. John is that disciples, being still in the world, have constant need to be kept from the Evil One in whom it lies, and to receive afresh propitiation and forgiveness for sins actually committed in consequence of this spiritual contact.

7. The Biblical doctrine of sin, as here outlined, enables us to interpret the Incarnation in harmony with the best modern psychology. It is no longer possible to think of human nature apart from personality as a bundle of facilities, among which, as we have experience of it, is the faculty of sin. Sin therefore is not an ingredient in ordinary humanity, which must be regarded as absent from the pure humanity assumed by the Son of God. To inquire whether the manhood in Christ was capable of sin is irrelevant, when it is perceived that impersonal natures are abstractions of thought with no existence in fact. Sin is hostility to what Jesus Christ is, the living God. The house of a personality, human or Divine, or, as in the case of Christ, both, cannot be divided against itself. The truth expressed in the old theological conception of the impersonal humanity of our Lord is simply this, that He received by inheritance from the human race whatsoever is capable of transmission, the structural fabric with which biology is concerned, the material within which conscious personality expresses itself. Thus He is in all points like to His brethren, who inherit from their ancestry what in itself is morally neither good nor bad. He was identified with human sin, not only representatively but vitally (Rom 5:12-20, Psa 2:2-4)a truth which so far eludes statement as almost inevitably to involve in heresy those who, like Edward Irving, seek to express it. But the Word became flesh, and that without sin, not because the virus was omitted in the act of conception, but because, being God, He cannot deny Himself, the terms sin and God being mutually exclusive. God became man under those conditions which sin had created, viz. the environment of Satans kingdom together with the guilt and penalty of death. He did not therefore redeem by becoming man, but by surrendering Himself to the entire consequences, reversing the sentence of condemnation, by death overcoming death, and opening the new environment of the Kingdom of heaven to all believers. The fact of the Atonement witnesses against the view that the Incarnation was the destruction of an evil heredity through union with the Divine nature. Its principle is the indwelling of the Personal Spirit or holiness first in Jesus Christ (Rom 1:4) and thereafter in the free personalities of the children of God (Rom 8:11), expelling by His presence and power the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience (Eph 2:2).

Literature.J. Mller, The Christian Doctrine of Sin, English translation 2 vols.; J. Tulloch, The Christian Doctrine of Sin; A. Moore, Some Aspects of Sin; C. Gore, Appendix ii. on Sin in Lux Mundi10 [Note: 0 designates the particular edition of the work referred] ; O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, Sin; Clemen, Die Christl. Lehre v. der Snde; F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin (Hulsean Lectures), also Sources of the Doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin (valuable on account of its historical survey of the development of Christian theory); Professor James Orr, Gods Image in Man, etc.; The Child and Religion (a volume of essays by various authors; Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , artt. Sin, Fall, and Heredity. In addition to these, most of the standard works on Systematic Theology may be usefully consulted; also Sanday-Headlams Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. For science, G. Romanes, Exam, of Weismannism; Haeckel, The Last Link; P. N. Waggett, Religion and Science. For the Ritschlian theory see A. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, English translation ch. 5; also A. E. Garvie, The Ritschlian Theology, ch. 10.

J. G. Simpson.

Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels

Sin

SIN.The teaching of the Bible with regard to the doctrine of sin may be said to involve a desire, on the part of the leaders of Jewish thought, to give a rational account of the fact, the consciousness, and the results of human error. Whatever be the conclusion arrived at respecting the compilation of the early chapters of Genesis, one thought, at least, clearly emerges: the narratives are saturated through and through with religious conceptions. Omnipotence, sovereignty, condescending active love, and perfect moral harmony, all find their place in the narratives there preserved, as attributes of the Divine character. The sublime conception of human dignity and worth is such that, in spite of all temptation to the contrary belief, it remains to-day as a firmly rooted, universally received verity, that man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:27).

I. The Old Testament

1. The early narratives.It is remarkable that in the story of the Fall the writer (J [Note: Jahwist.] ) attributes the sin to a positive act of conscious disobedience to God, and not only so, but he regards it as an entity standing over against good (Gen 2:17), This is more clearly brought out in the same writers narrative of the murder of Abel, where sin is represented as couching at the door, lying in wait for the overthrow of the sullen homicide (Gen 4:7). The profound psychological truth that the power of sin grows in the character of him who yields to its dictates is also noticed in this story. Falsehood and selfishness and defiance of God are heard in Cains answer to the Divine voice. These stories are the beginning of the history of a long process of development which resulted in the Flood. From individual acts of wrong-doing we are brought face to face with the condition, every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Gen 6:5). Hitherto God is represented as commanding, punishing, pleading with man, and even encouraging him with hopes of future restoration (Gen 3:15). The growth and arrogance of sin in the human race became so pronounced and universal that He is said to have rejected man completely, and in His wrath to have destroyed His creation, which was infected by mans corruption. He is grieved at his heart, and is repentant for having made man on the earth (Gen 6:6 f.). The same narrator, in giving the current explanation of the diversity of human language, notes another racial rebellion against God, which was punished by the overthrow of Babel (Gen 11:1-9).

A change in the Divine method of dealing with sinful man is now noticeable. The writers lead gradually up to this, beginning with Noah, whose righteousness (walk with God, cf. Gen 6:9) stands in solitary contrast to the universal decadence. The educative elective principle enters into the relationships of God and man. A covenant is established by which these relationships are defined, and by consequence human consciousness is gradually deepened. As a result, temptation to sin becomes more formidable and many-sided. In Individual cases outside the covenant we see, indeed, evidences of a higher standard of moral obligation than that reached by the Patriarchs (cf. Gen 12:18 f., Gen 20:9 f.). At the same time, the history of Esau furnishes us with proof that already glimmerings of a more profound ethical basis upon which to build human character, than that recognized elsewhere, had begun to obtrude themselves. If in the case of Abraham faith was reckoned for righteousness (Rom 4:9), and belief in the fidelity of Gods promises, in the face of the most untoward conditions, constituted the foundation-stone of the patriarchs noble character, so in Esaus case it was the lack of this belief, with the consequent inability to appreciate the dignity to which he was born, that lay at the root of his great and pathetic failure. The secret of Josephs power to resist temptation lay, not merely in his natural inability to be guilty of a breach of trust towards his master, but still more in his intense realization that to yield would be a great wickedness and sin against God (Gen 39:9). Thus, while it is true to say that the dominant conception of sin in the OT is that it is the great disturbing element in the personal relations of God and man, it seems to have been realized very early that the chief scope for its exercise lay in the domain of human intercourse. The force of Abimelechs complaint against Abraham lay in the fact that the former was guiltless of wronging the latter, whereas he was in serious danger of sinning against God in consequence of the patriarchs duplicity.

2. The Sinaitic Law.The next great critical point in the evolution of human consciousness of sin is reached in the promulgation of the Law from Sinai. Here the determinative process of Divine election is seen in its widest and most elaborate working. The central purpose of the Law may be considered as of a twofold character. Not only are the restrictions tabulated in order to the erection of barriers against the commission of sin (God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before you, that ye sin not, Exo 20:20), but positive enactments regulating the personal communion of God and Israel provide frequently recurring opportunities of loving and joyful service (Exo 23:14 ff.). The law of restitution, as given in Exo 21:1-36; Exo 22:1-31, may be regarded as harsh in some of its enactments, hut it may be easily conceived as an immense stride forward on the road to the royal law. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Jam 2:8). Nor can it be said that restitution and mutual service between God and His people are left out of sight in those chapters of Exodus which are universally recognized as containing the oldest part of the Mosaic Code. These anthropopathic conceptions of God abound, and are seen in the idea of His jealousy being roused by idolatrous practices (Exo 20:5), in the promises made to Israel that, in return for services to Jehovah, He will save His people in the face of their enemies (Exo 23:25 ff.). Thus it will be easily understood that, as the Levitical and Priestly Codes were gradually elaborated into a somewhat intricate system of legal and ceremonial obligations, the nomenclature of sin in its various aspects came to he accordingly enlarged. For example, in one verse three distinct words occur in connexion with Divine forgiveness (forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, Exo 34:7), and though there is a certain vagueness in the precise meaning to be attached to each of these words, whether it be guilt or punishment, rebellion or sin-offering, wickedness considered as a condition, or trespass, which is in the writers minds, the thoughts underlying each have to do with the relations between God and His people. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the ceremonial enactments provided a circle of ideas of permanent importance in the Hebrew conception of Jehovahs character. The law of clean and unclean animals and things paved the way for truer and nobler thoughts of Gods holiness, and of the uncleanness of sin as being its contradiction. The trespass of Achan, involving as it did the whole of Israel in his guilt and punishment, did not consist so much in his stealing of the common spoil taken from the enemy, as in his appropriating what was holy, or devoted unto the service of God (Jos 7:1; Jos 7:11 ff.). The presence of the devoted thing with the common property of the army dragged the whole people into a position of guilt, which could be expiated only by the death of the offender. In this way alone could they be restored to Divine favour, and their army receive Divine succour.

3. Deuteronomy and the Historical Books.In the Deuteronomic summary of the Law, whatever be the date at which it was edited, a loftier ground of obedience is attained. Love, of God and of their fellow-men, is more explicitly dwelt on as the motive power of human life (Deu 6:5; Deu 10:12 etc.), and the heart is again and again referred to as the seat of that love, both passively and actively (Deu 11:18, Deu 6:6, Deu 10:16). The basis upon which it is rested is the fact of Gods love for them and their fathers evidenced in many vicissitudes and in spite of much to hinder its activity (Deu 4:37, Deu 7:7 f., Deu 10:15). Though there are numerous echoes of the older conception that the keeping of Gods commandments is one side of a bargain which conditions mens happiness and prosperity (Deu 4:24; Deu 4:40, Deu 6:15), yet we observe a lofty range of thought bringing in its train truer ideas of sin and guilt. The sternness of God is insisted on, but as having for its objective the good of His people (Deu 10:13, Deu 6:24). It is a necessary phase of His love, compelling them to recognize that sin against God is destructive of the sinner. The ultimate aim of the Deuteronomist is the leading of men to hate sin as God hates it, and to love mercy and righteousness as and because God loves them (cf. Deu 10:18 f., Lev 19:33 f.), by establishing the closest relationship and communion between Him and His people (cf. Deu 14:1 f., Deu 7:6, Deu 26:18 f., Deu 27:9, Deu 28:9 etc.).

One sin is specially insisted on by the Deuteronomist, namely, the sin of idolatry. No doubt this is largely due to the experience of the nation under the judges, and during the history of Israel subsequent to the great schism. The national disasters which recur so frequently during the former of these periods are always attributed to this sin; while the return of the people, under the guidance of a great representative hero, is always marked by the blessings of peace and prosperity. So in the story of the Northern Kingdom the constant refrain meets us in each succeeding reign: He cleaved unto the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, wherewith he made Israel to sin (2Ki 3:3; 2Ki 10:29; 2Ki 13:2 etc.). During the vigorous and successful reign of Ahab and Jezebel, the seeds of national decay were sown, and the historian neglects not to point out the source to which the later mournful decline may be traced (1Ki 16:31). On the other hand, there is little reference to this sin during the reigns of Saul and David, and, in spite of the weaknesses of character displayed by the former, the historian pictures for us a great advance in national vigour and growth under these kings and their successors in the Southern Kingdom. The great rebellion against the Davidic dynasty is itself attributed to the declension of Solomon in his old age from the pure Jehovah-worship so zealously and consistently advocated by his father. We must remember also that, side by side with the introduction of foreign religious ideas, vice peculiar to Oriental despotism invaded the royal court and the nation of Israel. We are not, however, altogether limited to what is here inferentially taught as to national sin, with its consequent national punishment. David himself is represented as guilty of a sin which marred his character as an individual, and of an act of indiscretion which seems to have been regarded as a breach of that trust held by him as Gods vicegerent on earth. Both these cases are of interest for the light which they throw on the doctrine of sin and its consequences. In the case of Bathsheba, which was a purely personal transgression, the prophet Nathan comes not only as the hearer of a message of Divine pardon to the repentant sinner, but also as the stern judge pronouncing sentence of severe and protracted punishment. The death of the newly born child and the subsequent distractions arising out of the affair of Absalom are looked on as expressions of Gods wrath and of retributive justice (see 2Sa 12:10-18). Whatever the contemporary reasons may have been for regarding his public act as sinful, and even the reckless Joah considered it an act of wanton folly, we find the same features of repentance and forgiveness, and the same inclusion of others in the suffering consequent on its commission. The prophet Gad comes to the king as the revealer of Gods wrath and the messenger of Gods pardon (2Sa 24:1-25). Into this narrative, however, another element is introduced, telling of the difficulty which was felt, even at this early stage of human history, as to the origin of sin. God is said by the early historian of Davids reign to have been the author of the kings act, because His anger was kindled against Israel (2Sa 24:1). It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at one stage of Hebrew thought God was looked on as, in some respects at least, the author of evil (cf. Exo 4:21; Exo 7:3; Exo 14:8, Jdg 9:23, 1Sa 16:14; 1Sa 18:10; 1Sa 19:9). Nor ought we to be surprised at this, for the problem is one which was sure to present itself very early to the minds of thoughtful men; while the numerous instances where the commission of a sin seemed to have been made subservient by God to the exhibiting of His power and love afforded presumptive prima facie evidence that He Himself willed the act as the minister of His glory (see the history of Joseph with the writers comments thereon, Gen 45:5; Gen 50:20, Psa 105:17; cf. Job 1:6-12; Job 2:1-7, Hos 2:1-23). It is interesting to note the advance made in speculative thought with regard to this still unsolved, and perhaps insoluble, problem, between the time of the above-mentioned historian and that of the later Chronicler (1Ch 21:1). Here the name of Satan or Adversary is boldly inserted as the author of the sin, a fact which reminds us of the categorical denial of the Son of Sirach, He hath not commanded any man to be ungodly; and he hath not given any man licence to sin (Sir 15:20). That the origin of sin continued to be debated and speculated upon down to a very late period is evidenced by the vehement warning of St. James against imputing to God the temptation to evil (Jam 1:13), and by the counter assertion that God is the Author of nothing but good (Jam 1:17).

4. The Prophets.By far the most important stage in the history of the OT doctrine of sin is that which is marked by the teaching of the Prophets. The four practically contemporary prophets of the 8th cent. are Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah. The first named reveals a wide outlook on the world at large, and a recognition of the prevalence and power of sin in other nations than Israel. Damascus, Philistia, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab, as well as Judah and Israel, all come under the displeasure of the prophet Amos. Each had been guilty of cruelty and wrong to the people of Jehovah. The characteristic faults of these heathen peopleslust and tyranny of the strong over the weakhad invaded Israel too. The love of money, with its attendant evils of injustice, and robbery of the poor by the wealthy, is inveighed against by both Amos and Hosea as deserving of the wrath of God (cf. Hos 12:7 f., Amo 4:1; Amo 8:4 ff.). This degeneracy of the people of the Northern Kingdom during the reign of Jeroboam ii. was as much in evidence in the ranks of prophets and priests as among the other ruling classes, and to it, as the cause, is assigned the downfall which so speedily followed (Amo 3:11; Amo 6:1-7; Amo 2:7; Amo 9:1 ff., Hos 4:9; Hos 9:7 f., Hos 5:1, Mic 3:5; Mic 3:11 etc.). Both Isaiah and Micah mourn over the same moral deciension (Isa 5:8; Isa 1:18 f., Mic 2:2 etc.), and it may be said that it is owing to the preaching of these four prophets that the centre of gravity, as it were, of sin is changed, and the principles of universal justice and love, as the fundamental attributes of Jehovahs character and rule, are established. It was the prophetic function to deepen the consciousness of sin by revealing a God of moral righteousness to a people whose peculiar relationship to Jehovah involved both immense privileges and grave responsibilities (Amo 3:2, Hos 3:5 ff., Mic 3:1 ff. etc.). Terrible, however, as were the denunciations, and emphatic as were the declarations of the prophets against the vices of greed, oppression, and lust, they were no less clear in their call to repentance, and in promises of restoration and pardon (Isa 1:18 f., Mic 7:18, Hos 6:1, Amo 9:11 ff.). The story of Jonah of Gath-hepher is the revelation of a growing feeling that the righteous dominion of Jehovah was not, in the exercise of its moral influence, confined exclusively to Israel. The consciousness of sin and the power of repentance have now their place in the lives of nations outside the Abrahamic covenant.

Hitherto the prophetic teaching was largely confined to national sin and national repentance. It is not till the days of Jeremiah that the importance, in this respect, of the individual begins to manifest itself. The lament of Jeremiah, it is true, frequently expresses itself in terms of national infidelity (Jer 2:5-37; Jer 8:7; Jer 35:14-17; Jer 31:28; Jer 32:32 ff. etc.). At the same time an element of individualistic thought enters largely into his teaching (cf. Jer 17:10, Jer 32:19). On its darker side he notes how universally present sin is seen to be: from the least even unto the greatest, from the prophet even unto the priest all are infected (Jer 8:10, cf. Jer 8:8). It is impossible to find a man either just or truth-loving (Jer 5:1); and the explanation is not far to seek, for sin is a disease which affects the individual heart, and therefore poisons the whole life of each man (cf. Jer 13:7, Jer 5:23, Jer 7:24 etc.). The nature of the disease he characterizes as desperate in the awful deceit which supervenes (Jer 17:9). A hopeless pessimism seems at times to have pervaded the prophets teaching, and such of the people as were aroused by his appeals were smitten by a blank despair (Jer 10:23, Jer 2:25, Jer 18:12, Jer 13:23 etc.). As the prophet grows older, however, and gains a wider knowledge from his own bitter experiences, he discovers a way of escape from the overpowering influences of sin. As the heart is the seat of evil, it is found that the creative act of God can provide a remedy (Jer 31:33, Jer 32:39, Jer 24:7). A new heart straight from the hand of God, beating with new and holy impulses, is the sure, as it is the only, hope for men (Jer 32:40). Every individual, from the least to the greatest, in whom the Divine activity has been at work shall have the felicity of hearing the blessed sentence, I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more (Jer 31:34).

Following up and developing this tendency, Ezekiel is express in his declaration of the moral independence of each man. Repudiating, as Jeremiah did, the doctrine that the sin and moral guilt of the fathers are imputed to the children, he elaborates clearly and emphatically the truth, which to us seems axiomatic, that the soul of the father is personally independent of the soul of the son, with the terrible but inevitable corollary, the soul that sinneth, it shall die (Eze 18:4; Eze 18:20; cf. Eze 18:10-20). The profound truth which lies at the basis of the ancient belief in the close interaction of individual and racial guilt is, of course, valid for all time, and has been sanctified by the historical fact of the Incarnation. The life, work, and death of Christ have their value in the re-establishment of this truth, and in the re-creation, as it were, of the concurrent truth of the solidarity of the whole human race (cf. the expression we are all become as one that is unclean, Isa 64:6).

5. Psalms.We turn now to the Psalms, and there find, as might be expected, the deepest consciousness of personal guilt on the part of the sinner. Of course, it is to be remembered that the Jewish Psalter is the product of different epochs in the national history, ranging probably from the heyday of prophetic religion to the age immediately succeeding the Captivity, if not much later. It may be said, indeed, that this volume of sacred poetry constitutes a kind of antiphonal response to the preaching of the Prophets. Confession of and repentance for sin, both personal and national, constitute the prominent features of the authors attitude. A deep love for God breathes through each poem, and a profound hope that at some future date Israel may once again be restored to the favour of Jehovab.

The religious instinct of the compilers displays itself in their choice of those Psalms which form a preface or introduction to each of the five sections or books constituting the entire volume, setting the music, so to speak, of each part. The First Book (Psa 1:1-6; Psa 2:1-12; Psa 3:1-8; Psa 4:1-8; Psa 5:1-12; Psa 6:1-10; Psa 7:1-17; Psa 8:1-9; Psa 9:1-20; Psa 10:1-18; Psa 11:1-7; Psa 12:1-8; Psa 13:1-6; Psa 14:1-7; Psa 15:1-5; Psa 16:1-11; Psa 17:1-15; Psa 18:1-50; Psa 19:1-14; Psa 20:1-9; Psa 21:1-13; Psa 22:1-31; Psa 23:1-6; Psa 24:1-10; Psa 25:1-22; Psa 26:1-12; Psa 27:1-14; Psa 28:1-9; Psa 29:1-11; Psa 30:1-12; Psa 31:1-24; Psa 32:1-11; Psa 33:1-22; Psa 34:1-22; Psa 35:1-28; Psa 36:1-12; Psa 37:1-40; Psa 38:1-22; Psa 39:1-13; Psa 40:1-17; Psa 41:1-13) opens with a Psalm which is simply an expression of the power of sin and of the awful danger to which men are exposed by dallying with it. It is thus well fitted to be the prelude to such outbursts as occurin Psa 6:8 f., Psa 10:1 ff., Psa 17:8 ff., Psa 22:1 ff. etc. The Second Book (Psa 42:1-11; Psa 43:1-5; Psa 44:1-26; Psa 45:1-17; Psa 46:1-11; Psa 47:1-9; Psa 48:1-14; Psa 49:1-20; Psa 50:1-23; Psa 51:1-19; Psa 52:1-9; Psa 53:1-6; Psa 54:1-7; Psa 55:1-23; Psa 56:1-13; Psa 57:1-11; Psa 58:1-11; Psa 59:1-17; Psa 60:1-12; Psa 61:1-8; Psa 62:1-12; Psa 63:1-11; Psa 64:1-10; Psa 65:1-13; Psa 66:1-20; Psa 67:1-7; Psa 68:1-35; Psa 69:1-36; Psa 70:1-5; Psa 71:1-24; Psa 72:1-20) commences with a poem which is the language of a soul desperately longing for full communion with its God, and, in spite of an oppressive fear heightened by the mockery of sinners, triumphing in the hope that the lovingkindness of Jehovah will yet call forth praise and joy. It is in this section that we have teaching of the deepest import touching the consciousness of personal and racial guilt; and at the same time a detestation of sin accompanied by a spiritual longing after inward righteousness hard to be paralleled in the OT. Here, too, hope conquers; forgiveness and restoration are looked forward to with sublime confidence. Perhaps in 50:715 we have an echo of the Prophetic denunciation of legalism in its degenerate days (cf. Isa 1:11-15, Jer 7:21 ff., Amo 5:21, Mal 1:10). The Third Book opens with a poem (Psa 73:1-28) in which the holiness of God is opposed to the folly and pride of sinners. The difficulty attaching to the problem of the relation between sin and suffering, so dramatically discussed and worked up in the Book of Job, is here dwelt on. For its answer we are referred to the certain fact that God is the strength and refuge of all those who are pure in heart. In Psa 90:1-17, which opens the Fourth section of the volume, the author puts the eternal and omniscient God over against man, with his iniquities and secret sins, as they call forth His terrible but just wrath (Psa 90:11). The beauty of holiness and the confident trust that God is the ultimate refuge of all who come to Him are again and again dwelt on in the Psalms of this book (cf. Psa 103:11 ff.). In the Fifth division. beginning with Psa 107:1-43, the note of praise is struck, and is kept up almost without intermission to the end. The final exaltation of Zion, corresponding to the lasting overthrow of iniquity (Psa 107:42), is proclaimed with a certainty which can express itself only in songs of loudest praise. With an insight which can only be termed inspiration. we find one of the poets co-ordinating the forgiveness of Jah and the fear of Him as cause and effect (Psa 130:3 f., cf. The Psalms in The Cambridge Bible, by Kirkpatrick).

6. Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes.The confidence thus expressed is all the more remarkable because of the general belief in the universality of sin and of its effects (cf. Psa 14:2 f., Psa 51:5), a belief which was shared by the authors of the Book of Job (Job 14:4; Job 15:14 ff., Job 4:17), Proverbs (Pro 20:9), and Ecclesiastes (Ecc 7:20, cf. 1Ki 8:46). In the Proverbs we have what might be described as an attempt to place the moral life on an intellectual basis. The antithesis of wisdom and folly is that which marks the life of the righteous man and the sinner. Ethical maxims, the compiled results of human experience, follow each other in quick succession, but the book is devoid of the bright, warm hopefulness so characteristic of the Psalms. The sinner is left to his fate, and the wise man is he who, ordering his own life aright, leaves the fool to pursue his folly and deserve his fate.

The author of the Book of Job sets himself to solve the problem of the connexion between sin and human suffering, and though he fails, as he was bound to fail, to clear up the difficulty, he makes it evident that the one cannot always be measured in terms of the other. The conviction of his own innocenceJobs most treasured personal possessionupholds his belief against the prevalent conception that sin is always punished here and now, and that righteousness is always rewarded in like manner. The end of this dramatic treatise, however, emphasizes the popular creed, though the experience of Job must have shaken its universal validity. The conception of sin is, of course, entirely ethical, but is very wide in its scope. In defending himself against the thinly veiled accusations of his friends, Job reveals his ideas of the range and depth of the ravages of sin in human life and conduct, and gives evidence of remarkable spiritual penetration (e.g. ch. 31, see R. A. Watsons commentary on this book in The Expositors Bible). Mention may, perhaps, be usefully made here of Elihus contribution to the discussion, in which he intervenes by a lengthened argument to prove that suffering may he looked on not merely as punishment for sin, but also as a means of discipline, and as designed by God as a warning against sin (cf. chs 33 ff.).

II. Apocryphal Books

Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon.The intellectualism which is characteristic of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes finds a prominent place in Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon. There are here two sharply defined classes of men (two and two, one against another, Sir 33:15), a dualistic conception which permeates all creation (cf. Sir 42:24). The sinner is to be dealt with unmercifully (help not the sinner, Sir 12:4), for no good can come from him who refuses instruction. It is possible, however, for the sinner to return unto the Lord and forsake his sins (Sir 17:25 f.). The only way in which righteousness may be pursued is by the cultivation of wisdom and instruction, and by paying heed to the experiences of daily life (Sir 34:9, Sir 39:1-8, Sir 14:20 ff.). Let reason be the guide of human action and all will be well (Sir 37:16, cf. Sir 32:19). It is possible for the educated man to acquire such a command over his inclinations that he is able of himself to make the great choice between life and death (Sir 15:17), but for the fool there is little hope (Sir 15:7). Looking back on the centuries of human history the writer discovers that sin has brought in its train all the great physical calamities which mark its progress (Sir 39:28 ff.). The relation is, however, external, and is a mark of Divine vengeance and wrath against sinners (cf. Sir 40:9 f.). There is no trace of the profound conception of spiritual sympathy between the different orders of creation, characteristic of the teaching of St. Paul (cf. Rom 8:19-22).

The author of the Book of Wisdom displays the same fundamental thought that wisdom and sin are totally incompatible (Wis 1:4 f.). Ignorance and folly are identified with sin (Wis 2:21 f., Wis 4:15, Wis 5:4 etc.). and not merely the causes of sin. The only way to attain to righteousness is by the careful, unremitting discipline of the reason (cf. Wis 2:1, Wis 17:1, Wis 6:15 f.). Running like a thread of gold through the whole book, however, is the conception of the immortality of righteousness and of those who cultivate wisdom (Wis 1:15, Wis 2:23, Wis 3:4, Wis 6:18 f., Wis 8:16-17 etc). In the beautiful personification of Wisdom (Wis 6:12 to Wis 8:21) we find the writer not only speaking of the Spirit of God as being its Author and Diffuser, but practically identifying them with each other (cf. Wis 9:17, Wis 12:1, cf. 2Es 14:22). The universality of sin does not enter largely into his teaching (cf., however, Wis 3:12; Wis 12:10; Wis 13:1), and at times we feel as if he believed that some were born to be righteous and some to sin, the power of moral choice being really confined to the former (cf. Wis 8:19 ff., Wis 7:15 f.).

III. The New Testament

1. Synoptists.The practical outcome of the teaching of the OT is seen in the emphasis laid by the first of the Synoptists upon the function which it was the destiny of Jesus to discharge in connexion with sin. The angelic communication to Joseph (Mat 1:21) may, without illegitimate criticism of origins, be considered as one of those illuminating flashes of Divine revelation which obtain their interpretative value in the light of subsequent history. At any rate, this is the feature of Jesus work upon which the Apostles laid particular stress, in their earliest as in their latest teaching. It is true that the preparatory work of the Baptist aroused in the breasts of the multitudes who thronged to hear him an active consciousness of sin, together with the necessity for repentance and the possibility of consequent forgiveness (Mar 1:4). The preaching of John was, however, necessarily lacking in one element which makes the life and work of Jesus what it pre-eminently isa new power introduced into the world, giving unto men the gift of repentance (Act 5:31; cf. Act 11:18), and enabling them to turn away every one from their iniquities (cf. Act 3:26). It is significant in this connexion that the recorded teaching of Jesus bears comparatively few traces of direct abstract instruction regarding sin. At the same time, we must not forget the scathing denunciation hurled by Him at the legalistic, and worse, conceptions of sin abounding in the Rabbinical schools of His time (cf. Mat 23:4-28, Mar 7:9 ff.), or the positive, authoritative declarations by which He drew from the ancient laws of Sinai the essential ethical ideas therein enshrined (cf. Mat 5:21-48, where the teaching may be described as an intension rather than an extension of the area of sin). For Him the law and the prophets had an abiding significance (Mat 7:12), but their regulative values needed re-adjustment. Sin, against which the Law was a deterrent, and the preaching of the Prophets a persistently solemn protest, has its domain not in the physical but in the spiritual region of mans life (cf. Luk 11:33-44). It is by poisoning the life at its roots that it destroys the whole upward growth, and it is here that the language of Jesus assumes its most formidable prophetic severity. There are certain classes of sins, however, against which He uttered His most solemn warnings. Their common characteristic is that of wilfulness or deliberateness. Remarkable amongst these is that described as blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (cf. Mar 3:29 = Luk 12:10 = Mat 12:31 f.), which St. Mark designates an eternal sin. Taking into consideration the circumstances in which the words were spoken, it is clear that Jesus was pointing to a condition of the soul when it loses all power to retrace its steps, when it reaches a place where even Gods forgiveness cannot follow. The sin of unreality was one to which the Pharisees were specially addicted, and to it, therefore, He drew their attention constantly (Mat 23:5-7, Mar 12:38 f., Luk 20:45 f., Luk 11:43; cf. Mat 6:1-16; Mat 5:20).

Every sin is bound to exercise influence, not only on the life and character of those immediately guilty, but also on a circle outside. There is, however, a species having for its special object the dragging down of those who would otherwise be innocent. The terms of the emphatic warning against leading others astray, either by positive interference or by the force of example (cf. Mar 9:42, Mat 18:5, Luk 17:2), remind us of the sad presage by which Jesus foreshadowed the traitors end (Mat 26:24). The word used to denote this sin is also employed in speaking of sin in its relation to the guilty individual. The fact that Jesus deals with both aspects at the same time shows how strongly He felt the impossibility of any sin remaining, in its working, a purely personal offence. There is always here in activity a force which may be described as centrifugal, inevitably bringing harm to those within the circle of its movement (cf. Rom 14:7 f.). Nor did Jesus hold Himself to be free from this danger of contamination (thou art a stumbling-block unto me, Mat 16:23), while He points to the ideal Kingdom of the Son of Man where nothing causing men to stumble shall be allowed a place (Mat 13:41). It is interesting to remember here that St. Paul uses the same word to express the result of the preaching of Christ crucified to the Jews (1Co 1:23; cf. Gal 5:11, Rom 9:32 f., 1Pe 2:8). This was, indeed, a contingency foreseen by Jesus Himself, as will be seen in His answer to the messengers of the imprisoned Baptist (Mat 11:6). Doubtless these words were intended to convey a gentle warning to the prisoner against permitting the untoward circumstances of his life to overcome his once firm faith in the Messiahship of One whom he had publicly proclaimed as the Lamb of God (Joh 1:29). A direct reference to an OT example of this sin occurs in Rev 2:14, where the conduct of Balaam is held up to reprobation.

In the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Jesus taught the necessity for the realization of personal guilt on the part of the sinner in order to forgiveness and justification in the sight of God (Luk 18:13). In the same way, it was the lack of this sense by the Pharisees, so far as they were themselves personally concerned, that constituted the great obstacle to their conversion (Joh 9:41).

A prominent feature of Jesus teaching has to do not so much with active, deliberate sins as with what may be termed sins of omission. It seems as if He wished to inculcate, by repeated emphasis, the truth that the best way to combat temptation with success is to be active in the pursuit of good. The spiritual side of this doctrine He enshrined in the form of a parable, in which He pointed out the danger to the soul arising from neglect to invoke the active agency of the Holy Spirit, even though the unclean spirit had been exorcized and banished out of the man (see Mat 12:43-45 = Luk 11:24-26). In the discourse descriptive of the General Judgment, Jesus marks the crucial test by which men shall be tried: Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me (Mat 25:45). The same thought is conveyed frequently in parabolic form, as for example in the parables of the Ten Virgins (Mat 25:1-13), the Talents (Mat 25:14-30) in which is emphasized the profound lesson, from him that bath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away (cf. Mat 13:12), Dives and Lazarus (Luk 16:19-31); while much of the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is based on the same principle (cf. Mat 5:38-44).

2. St. Paul.The presentment of the gospel message to the world outside the Jewish nation led St. Paul to review in detail the origin, cause, scope, and result of sin. Starting from his own individual experience, which was that of a sinner profoundly conscious of his position (cf. 1Co 15:9; 1Co 9:27, Rom 7:18 ff., 1Ti 1:15), and conscious also of the remedy inherent in Christs gospel (2Co 12:9), he insists on the universality of the presence and power of sin, in order to establish the co-ordinate universality of the presence and power of the manifested righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ (Rom 3:21 f.; cf. the expression where sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly, Rom 5:20). The central feature of St. Pauls teaching is the activity of Gods grace in forgiving, restoring, and justifying the sinner; and for the purpose of establishing the reasonableness and the necessity (cf. 1Co 9:16) of bringing the gospel before the world, it was needful first to establish the guilt of all for whom it was intended, and to create, so to speak, in men a consciousness of moral failure and helplessness. This he does in the opening chapters of his Epistle to the Romans. Here, although he deals separately with Jews and Gentiles, he maintains the proposition that all alike are sinners (Rom 5:12, cf. Eph 2:3). It is true that the Jew was the recipient of the Law; and as such he occupied the position of the moral teacher of mankind. But instead of proving the means whereby a true knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20; cf. Rom 5:13) is gained, it became, through abuse, a hindrance rather than a help to his spiritual advancement (see Rom 2:17 ff.). And just as the Jews stultified the Divinely given Law, by the exaltation of its merely transitory elements at the expense of its essential moral ideals, so the Gentiles defied the law written in their bearts, testified to by their conscience (Rom 2:15).

This reduction of all mankind to the same level in the sight of God is further incidentally pressed by the establishment of a definite relationship between the sin of Adam and racial guilt (Rom 5:12; Rom 5:18). What precisely were St. Pauls opinions as to this connexion it is impossible to discover. It is doubtful whether, in face of the intensely practical work in which he was engaged, he stopped to work out the problem of original sin. It is enough for him that sin entered into the world through one man and that through the one mans disobedience the many were made sinners (see Sanday-Headlam, Romans 5 in ICC [Note: CC International Critical Commentary.] , p. 136 ff.).

Different interpretations have been given of the words translated for that all sinned (Rom 5:12), some seeing in them an explicitstatement that the whole human race was involved generically in the sin of Adam (cf. Bengel. ad loc., and Liddon Epistle to the Romans, p. 103). Others affirm that St. Paul is here asserting the freedom of the will, and is stating the plain proposition that all men have sinned as a matter of fact, and of their own choice. The Apostle, however, seems to have left room for a synthesis of these two ideas. It matters not whether he has done so consciously or not. As the result of Adams transgression sin obtained an entrance and a sphere of action in the world, and not only so, but a predisposition to sin was inherited, giving it its present power over the human will. At the same time, the simple statement all sinned, explanatory as it is of the universality of death, includes the element of choice and freedom. Even those whose consciousness of sin was weakened, if not obliterated, by the absence of positive or objective law, were subjected to death. Here we have the assumption of generic guilt arising directly out of St. Pauls belief in the relation between sin and physical death, as that of cause and effect (cf. 1Co 15:22). Not only is the connexion here mentioned insisted on, but, passing from physical death to that of which it is but a type, spiritual or moral death, he shows the awful depth to which sin has sent its roots in mans nature (Rom 6:21 ff., cf. Rom 6:8 ff., Rom 2:7 ff.).

Mention has been made above of the power of choice, where sin is concerned, inherent in human personality. Into the very seat of this power, however, sin has made an entrance, and has found a powerful ally in the flesh (Rom 7:18). The will to resist is there, but its activity is paralyzed. Though St. Paul makes the flesh or the members of the body the seat of sin, he is far from teaching that human nature is essentially evil. The flesh may be crucified with its passions and lusts (Gal 5:4; cf. 1Co 9:27, Rom 6:19), and the bodily members instead of being servants to uncleanness may become servants to righteousness unto sanctification (cf. art. Flesh in Hastings DCG [Note: CG Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels.] ). An important feature of St. Pauls doctrine of sin consists in his exposition of the function of law in revealing and arousing the consciousness of sin. A curious expression, the mind of the flesh (Rom 8:7), emerges in this connexion, and the impossibility of its being subject to the law of God is insisted on. Apart from the law sin is dead, but, once the Law came, sin sprang into life, its presence and power were revealed (cf. 1Co 15:56), and by it man was confronted with his own moral weakness.

In spite of his belief in the all-pervading character and strength of sin, St. Pauls gospel is the reverse of a gospel of despair. If, on the one hand, there is a death which connotes moral corruption and slavery to sin, on the other hand there is a death unto sin which is not only a realization of, but a participation in the death of Christ. The fact of his employing the same word and idea in senses so completely contrasted lends a marvellous force and finality to his teaching on the remedial and restorative effects of Christs work (cf. Rom 6:2-14, Eph 2:1-10). A favourite idea, relative to this, is that of crucifixion. The member of Christ as such has crucified his old man (Rom 6:6), the flesh with the passions and lusts thereof (Gal 5:24; cf. Gal 2:20). This is the ultimate ideal result of the redemptive work of Christ. The experience of St. Paul forbade him to believe that the state of death unto sin is fully realized here and now (1Co 9:27, cf. Sir 37:18). His continuous references to the Christian life as one of warfare, in which it behoves the follower of Christ to be armed with weapons offensive and defensive, shows that his conception of the struggle against sin is that of one unceasing age-long conflict, issuing in victory for the individual, as for the race, only when the Kingdom of Christ is established in a peace that is everlasting (Eph 6:11-17, 2Co 10:4 ff; 2Co 6:7, Rom 13:12, 1Ti 1:18; cf. Php 2:25, Phm 1:2 etc.).

3. St. John

(a) In order to understand St. Johns presentation of Jesus teaching on sin, it will be useful to see his own individual doctrine as given in his Epistles. Here the mission of Christ is dwelt on as having for its objective the taking away of sins (1Jn 3:4; 1Jn 3:8; cf. Joh 16:11; Joh 1:29), and abiding in him is dwelt on as constituting the guarantee of safety against sin (1Jn 3:6; cf. Joh 15:4 ff.), as it also affords power to live the active fruitful life of righteousness. Further, there is a law which expresses the Divine ideal of mans constitution and growth, and whoever violates it, by wilfully putting himself in opposition to this law, is guilty of sin, for sin is lawlessness (Joh 3:4). Another aspect of this law has to do with the mutual relationship of Christians who should be bound together by a love which is the reflexion of the eternal love of God for men (1Jn 4:7-21). If the law of love is neglected or broken, even in the matter of intercessory prayer for brethren who have sinned, unrighteousness is present, and all unrighteousness is sin (1Jn 5:13-17). From this we see how intensely real was St. Johns belief in the presence and power of sin amongst men. Indeed, one of the tests by which a mans sincerity may be discovered is his power of realizing this fact. He, moreover, gives as his reason for writing this Epistle, that ye may not sin (1Jn 2:1). The need of an Advocate who is also the propitiation for our sins is insisted on as being the special creation of Christ in Christian consciousness (1Jn 2:1 f.; cf. Joh 14:16). All this brings into clearer relief and greater prominence his doctrine of the sinlessness of the professing follower of Jesus Christ. The Christian as such cannot sin, because he is begotten of God (1Jn 3:8; cf. 1Jn 5:18, 3Jn 1:11), and, on the other hand, he that doeth sin is of the devil (1Jn 3:8). The Christian abides in Christ (cf. Joh 15:4 ff.), and because he does so he sinneth not (Joh 3:8), whereas the committal of sin is the sure guarantee that he has neither seen nor known Him. The secret of his safety lies in the promise of Jesus that He keeps (cf. Joh 17:12) His own so that the evil one toucheth him not (1Jn 5:18). The paradox in which St. John thus clothes his doctrine of sin reveals his profound conception of its character. Any sinful act by the Christian interrupts, and mars so far, his fellowship with God. If, however, the act he not the outcome of the mans habit or character, he cannot be said to do sin in the sense of realizing sin in its completeness (see Westcott, Epistles of St. John, on 1Jn 3:4). The fruit of Divine fellowship is developed in the Christians inner or central life from which sin is banished; and this reminds us somewhat of St. Pauls view of the crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and lusts.

A peculiar reference is made by St. John to a sin unto death. This might be translated with perhaps a closer adherence to the writers thought if the article were omitted. It is not any specific act or acts that he so characterizes. The saying must rather refer to sinful deeds of a character which wholly separates from Christ, and thus tends to death (see Westcott, op. cit., on 1Jn 5:16). In so far as it springs from a heart which wilfully and with contumely rejects Christ, in so far may it he identified with the sin against the Holy Ghost (cf. Mar 3:29, Mat 12:3 f., Luk 2:10). The writers refusal to insist on intercessory prayer for one thus guilty calls to mind the warnings in the Epistle to the Hebrews against the sin of apostasy or wilful sin after the reception of the knowledge of truth (cf. Heb 6:4-6; Heb 10:26). It is probable that St. John has in his mind a class of sins which combines within itself the characteristics of both those mentioned (see art. Sin in Hastings DB [Note: Dictionary of the Bible.] iv. p. 535b). One feature of 1 John connects this Epistle very closely with the Fourth Gospel, revealing itself in those passages which identify sin with falsehood, and righteousness with truth. It seems as if the writer traced all sin back to the spirit which leads men to deny that Jesus is the Christ (1Jn 2:22; 1Jn 4:3). On the other hand, the acceptance of this belief carries with it the assurance of Gods abiding presence, wherein is the sure guarantee of the realization of His purpose in usthat we might live through him (1Jn 4:9, cf. 1Jn 4:2; 1Jn 5:1).

(b) Fourth Gospel.It is this last aspect of sin that is the dominant note of the teaching of St. Johns Gospel. Indeed, this writing may he said to be a record of the sad rejection foreshadowed in the general terms, He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not (Joh 1:11). This was more particularly true of the Jews of Jerusalem and Juda, where the story of Jesus ministry as told in this Gospel is for the most part laid. It is thus significant that in His last great discourse with His disciples, occurring as it did in Jerusalem, the centre of the activity hostile to His claims, Jesus lays special stress on the sin of unbelief in Him (The Holy Ghost will convict the world of sin because they believe not on me, Joh 16:8 f.). The revelation of the Divine life, with its manifold evidences of love and mercy in and by Jesus, took away whatever excuse men might have in the presence of Gods judgment. The real reason for the rejection of Jesus by the Jews lay in their hatred of the Father (Joh 15:24, cf. Joh 15:22). Indeed, it is this very revelation, designed by God as the eternal remedy against sin (Joh 1:29), which in its process and achievement affords further possibilities to sin and its consequences (Joh 9:41; cf. Luk 12:47 f.).

Nor must we omit to note that in this Gospel sin is regarded as a species of slavery. The reference to this aspect occurs but once (Joh 8:34), but that it occupied an important place in early Christian teaching is evident from the incidental notices found scattered throughout the NT (cf. Rom 6:16-20, Tit 3:3, 2Pe 2:19, Mat 6:24 = Luk 16:13 etc.).

The popular belief in the connexion between sin and physical suffering is noticed also in the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus is represented as denying its universal applicability (Joh 9:3). At the same time He recognized that in certain cases the belief was justified (Joh 5:14). It was, perhaps, His profound knowledge of a similar but a deeper relationship than thisthe relationship of sin to the whole lifethat gave to the words and actions of Jesus that exquisite tenderness in His treatment of individual sinners so noticeable in this Gospel (cf. Joh 4:17 f., Joh 8:11; Joh 8:15); a tenderness which He would fain impart to His followers in their dealings with fellow-sinners (cf. Joh 7:24, Mat 7:1 ff., Jam 2:13).

We are thus enabled to see that the view of sin held and taught by Jesus is profounder and graver than any as yet existing, for it is an offence against One who is at the same time a righteous and loving Father and a just and holy God (Luk 15:18; cf. Mat 5:48, Joh 3:16 ff. etc.). The life of Christ is the object-lesson which Christians are invited to imitate in their daily relationships and life (Mat 11:28, Joh 13:15, 1Jn 2:6, Php 2:5; cf. 1Pe 2:21 etc.), and St. John has pointed out to us, in the words of Jesus Himself, the standard to which His followers are asked to aspire, when He defied His bitter life-long enemies to convict Him of sin (Joh 8:46).

4. St. James.The author of this circular letter views sin in its practical bearings on the daily life of men. Nevertheless, his conception of its character and results is as far-reaching as we have seen it to be in both the Pauline and the Johannine teaching. Its origin he traces to the surrender of the individuals will to desire (Jam 1:14 f.). In itself the desire may be natural and innocent: it is when the man resolves to gratify it against what be feels to be the higher law of duty, that he becomes guilty of sin even before he carries out his resolve in act (J. B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James, note on Jam 1:15). The writer combats the idea that God is the author of evil, by insisting on the fact that each man may make a good or a bad use of temptation. As a morally free agent he stands or he falls, and the result of this freedom may be the promised crown of life (Jam 1:12) or hopeless death (Jam 1:15). We are here reminded of the sin unto death (1Jn 5:16) referred to already, for sin when full-grown, when it has become a fixed habit determining the character of the man, brings forth death (J. B. Mayor, op. cit. p. 53; cf. R. J. Knowling, Epistle of St. James, ad loc.). This Epistle betrays its Jewish origin in the attitude of the writer to the Law; for him the result of the Incarnation has been the transmuting of the Mosaic Law into the perfect law, the law of liberty (Jam 1:25, cf. Jam 2:12), the royal law (Jam 2:8). It may be said that he sometimes merely echoes the well-known opinion of contemporary Jewish Rabbins about transgressing the minutest behest of the Law (see the extracts from Rabbinical writings quoted by R. J. Knowling, op. cit., note on Jam 2:10). At the same time it must be admitted that his conception of sin, even when it finds expression in the seemingly trivial case of respect of persons (Jam 2:9), is founded on a true spiritual view of the relation of man to God (Hastings DB [Note: Dictionary of the Bible.] , vol. iv. p. 533b). The law of love is the essential guiding principle of all Christian life, and where this law is transgressed in the social relations of that life, the expression in our Epistle ye commit sin (lit. ye work sin, Jam 2:9) is not too strong or emphatic.

A further point in connexion with St. James teaching occupies the closing passages of his Epistle. In this, as in the whole of his writing, he deals with it from the point of view of the daily life. In his exhortation to mutual confession of sins and intercessory prayer for forgiveness he is incidentally dwelling on the truth that all real Christian life is conditioned by its adherence, both in word and in deed, to the principle of love (cf. Jam 2:15 f.). The same may he said of his advice with regard to the corporate prayer of the Church on behalf of one who is physically sick (Jam 5:14 f.). It is probable that our author held the common Jewish belief that sin and disease were connected as cause and effect, and his conviction that the prayer of faith reaches out in its power to the whole man, extending even to the forgiveness of his sins by God, is based on his belief in the solidarity of human life as well as of the law to which it owes its allegiance. As in the case of the member of the community whose bodily and spiritual needs are ministered to by the active intervention of the Church, so he urges each individual member to prayer on behalf of his erring brother. The twofold blessing promised to this act of brotherly love may well be taken as an expression of his conviction that the individual lives of the members of the Christian community are knit so closely together that no single act of sin can be committed without so far bringing death within range of all, and that no act of love can be exercised without so far bringing mercy and forgiveness to all, and thus covering a multitude of sins (cf. 1Pe 4:8).

5. Hebrews.It cannot be said that there is any special doctrine of sin in this Epistle. Its readers were well acquainted with OT conceptions and teaching, and the writer deals mainly with the superiority of the New Covenant over the Old in supplying means whereby there shall be no more conscience of sins (Heb 10:2; cf. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Add. Note on Heb 9:9). The central feature of this writing is the stress laid on the discovery by Christianity of a new and living way (Heb 10:20) by which we have direct access to God. It is by the removal of guilt in the forgiveness of sins by the sacrifice of Jesus that this way is opened once for all (Heb 10:10; cf. Heb 10:19, Heb 9:12 etc.). Special emphasis is therefore laid on the failure of the Mosaic institutions to take away sins (Heb 10:11, cf. Heb 9:9), and on the awful character of the danger of harbouring an evil beart of unbelief (Heb 3:12).

The temptation to which the Hebrews were exposed was that, under stress of persecution, they would reject the final revelation of God in Christ, or revert, under the influence of the Hellenistic Judaizers, to the somewhat eclectic faith of the latter. This wilful sin the writer characterizes as crucifying the Son of God afresh (Heb 6:6) and as treading Him under foot (cf. Heb 10:29). In warning them against the dangers to which they would be exposed during the time of suffering and trial now imminent, he points out to them that these trials may become in their own hands the means of their spiritual advancement. Instead of being the sole outcome of sin, suffering is often the chastisement of a loving Father that we may be partakers of his holiness (Heb 12:10). The great Example, whose solution of an age-long problem we are asked to study, was Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame (Heb 12:2), and who though in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin (Heb 4:15), was nevertheless made perfect through sufferings (Heb 2:10).

See also artt. Atonement, Forgiveness, Guilt, Propitiation, Redemption, etc.

J. R. Willis.

SIN.The stronghold (fortress) of Egypt, Eze 30:15-16, must be Pelusium, the Egyp. name of which is not clearly known, or some fortress in its neighbourhood. In the list of governors appointed by Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, while native princes were retained elsewhere, Sin is the only city put in charge of an Assyrian: no doubt he was placed at Pelusium to keep open the gate of Egypt for the Assyrian king.

F. Ll. Griffith.

Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible

Sin

The Hebrews had in use several words by way of expressing the nature of sin; in the diversities of it. But the truth is, that sin doth not consist in this, or in that act of it, for the acts of sin are but the branches; the root is within: so that strictly and properly speaking, in the fallen and corrupt nature of man, sin itself is alike in every son and daughter of Adam. And that it doth not break out alike in all is not from any difference in the nature of man, but in the power of the divine restraints. If this doctrine, which is wholly Scriptural, were but thoroughly and fully understood by all men, what humbling views would it induce in all, and how endeared to all would be the person, blood, and righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ! I beg to leave this on the reader’s mind.

Fuente: The Poor Mans Concordance and Dictionary to the Sacred Scriptures

Sin (1)

(, hatta’th, a missing, , ‘won, perversity , pesh, transgression, , r, evil, etc.; , hamartano, miss the mark, , parabasis, transgression with a suggestion of violence, , adika, injustice, unrighteousness):

1.Sin as Disobedience

2.Affects the Inner Life

3.Involves All Men

4.The Story of the Fall

5.The Freedom of Man

6.A Transgression against Light

7.Inwardness of the Moral Law

(1)Prophets

(2)Paul

(3)Jesus

8.Sin a Positive Force

9.Heredity

10.Environment

11.Redemption

12.Life in Christ

13.Repentance

14.Forgiveness

LITERATURE

1. Sin as Disobedience:

A fairly exact definition of sin based on Biblical data would be that sin is the transgression of the law of God (1Jo 3:4). Ordinarily, sin is defined simply as the transgression of the law, but the idea of God is so completely the essential conception of the entire Biblical revelation that we can best define sin as disobedience to the law of God. It will be seen that primarily sin is an act, but from the very beginning it has been known that acts have effects, not only in the outward world of things and persons, but also upon him who commits the act.

2. Affects the Inner Life:

Hence, we find throughout the Scriptures a growing emphasis on the idea of the sinful act as not only a fact in itself, but also as a revelation of an evil disposition on the part of him who commits the act (Gen 6:5).

3. Involves All Men:

Then also there is the further idea that deeds which so profoundly affect the inner life of an individual in some way have an effect in transmitting evil tendencies to the descendants of a sinful individual (Psa 51:5, Psa 51:6; Eph 2:3). See HEREDITY; TRADITION. Hence, we reach shortly the conception, not only that sin is profoundly inner in its consequences, but that its effects reach outward also to an extent which practically involves the race. Around these various items of doctrine differing systems of theology have sprung up.

4. The Story of the Fall:

Students of all schools are agreed that we have in the Old Testament story of the fall of Adam an eternally true account of the way sin comes into the world (Gen 3:1-6). The question is not so much as to the literal historic matter-of-factness of the narrative, as to its essentially psychological truthfulness. The essential thought of the narrative is that both Adam and Eve disobeyed an express command of God. The seductiveness of temptation is nowhere more forcefully stated than in this narrative. The fruit of the tree is pleasant to look upon; it is good to eat; it is to be desired to make one wise; moreover, the tempter moves upon the woman by the method of the half truth (see ADAM IN THE OLD TESTAMENT). God had said that disobedience to the command would bring death; the tempter urged that disobedience would not bring death, implying that the command of God had meant that death would immediately follow the eating of the forbidden fruit. In the story the various avenues of approach of sin to the human heart are graphically suggested, but after the seductiveness of evil has thus been set forth, the fact remains that both transgressors knew they were transgressing (Gen 3:2 f). Of course, the story is told in simple, naive fashion, but its perennial spiritual truth is at once apparent. There has been much progress in religious thinking concerning sin during the Christian ages, but the progress has not been away from this central conception of willful disobedience to the law of God.

5. The Freedom of Man:

In this early Biblical account there is implicit the thought of the freedom of man. The idea of transgression has sometimes been interpreted in such wise as to do away with this freedom. An unbiased reading of the Scriptures would, with the possible exception of some passages which designedly lay stress on the power of God (Rom 8:29, Rom 8:30), produce on the mind the impression that freedom is essential to sin. Certainly there is nothing in the account of the Old Testament or New Testament narratives to warrant the conception that men are born into sin by forces over which they have no control. The argument of the tempter with the woman is an argument aimed at her will. By easy steps, indeed, she moves toward the transgression, but the transgression is a transgression and nothing else. Of course, the evil deed is at once followed by attempts on the part of the transgressors to explain themselves, but the futility of the explanations is part of the point of the narrative. In all discussion of the problem of freedom as relating to sin, we must remember that the Biblical revelation is from first to last busy with the thought of the righteousness and justice and love of God (Gen 6:9 tells us that because of justice or righteousness, Noah walked with God). Unless we accept the doctrine that God is Himself not free, a doctrine which is nowhere implied in the Scripture, we must insist that the condemnation of men as sinful, when they have not had freedom to be otherwise than sinful, is out of harmony with the Biblical revelation of the character of God. Of course this does not mean that a man is free in all things. Freedom is limited in various ways, but we must retain enough of freedom in our thought of the constitution of men to make possible our holding fast to the Biblical idea of sin as transgression. Some who take the Biblical narrative as literal historical fact maintain that all men sinned in Adam (see IMPUTATION, III., 1.). Adam may have been free to sin or not to sin, but, in his fall we sinned all. We shall mention the hereditary influences of sin in a later paragraph; here it is sufficient to say that even if the first man had not sinned, there is nothing in our thought of the nature of man to make it impossible to believe that the sinful course of human history could have been initiated by some descendant of the first man far down the line.

6. A Transgression Against Light:

The progress of the Biblical teaching concerning sin also would seem to imply that the transgression of the law must be a transgression committed against the light (Act 17:30; 1Ti 1:13). To be sinful in any full sense of the word, a man must know that the course which he is adopting is an evil course. This does not necessarily mean a full realization of the evil of the course. It is a fact, both of Biblical revelation and of revelation of all times, that men who commit sin do not realize the full evil of their deeds until after the sin has been committed (2Sa 12:1-13). This is partly because the consequences of sin do not declare themselves until after the deed has been committed; partly also because of the remorse of the conscience; and partly from the humiliation at being discovered; but in some sense there must be a realization of the evil of a course to make the adoption of the course sinful. E.g. in estimating the moral worth of Biblical characters, especially those of earlier times, we must keep in mind the standards of the times in which they lived. These standards were partly set by the customs of the social group, but the customs were, in many cases, made sacred by the claim of divine sanction. Hence, we find Biblical characters giving themselves readily to polygamy and warfare. The Scriptures themselves, however, throw light upon this problem. They refer to early times as times of ignorance, an ignorance which God Himself was willing to overlook (Act 17:30). Even so ripe a moral consciousness as that of Paul felt that there was ground for forgiveness toward a course which he himself later considered evil, because in that earlier course he had acted ignorantly (Act 26:9; 1Ti 1:13).

7. Inwardness of the Moral Law:

The Biblical narratives, too, show us the passage over from sin conceived of as the violation of external commands to sin conceived of as an unwillingness to keep the commandments in the depths of the inner life. The course of Biblical history is one long protest against conceiving of sin in an external fashion.

(1) Prophets.

In the sources of light which are to help men discern good from evil, increasing stress is laid upon inner moral insight (compare Isa 58:5 f; Hos 6:1-7). The power of the prophets was in their direct moral insight and the fervor with which they made these insights real to the mass of the people. Of course it was necessary that the spirit of the prophets be given body and form in carefully articulated law. The progress of the Hebrews from the insight of the seer to the statute of the lawmaker was not different from such progress in any other nations. It is easy to see, however, how the hardening of moral precepts into formal codes, absolutely necessary as that task was, led to an externalizing of the thought of sin. The man who did not keep the formal law was a sinner. On such basis there grew up the artificial systems which came to their culmination in the New Testament times in Pharisaism. On the other hand, a fresh insight by a new prophet might be in violation of the Law, considered in its literal aspects. It might be necessary for a prophet to attack outright some additions to the Law. We regard as a high-water mark of Old Testament moral utterances the word of Micah that the Lord requires men to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with Him (Mic 6:8). At the time this word was uttered, the people were giving themselves up to multitudes of sacrifices. Many of these sacrifices called for the heaviest sufferings on the part of the worshippers. It would seem that an obligation to sacrifice the firstborn was beginning to be taught in order that the Hebrews might not be behind the neighboring heathen nations in observances of religious codes. The simple direct word of Micah must have seemed heresy to many of its first hearers. The outcome, however, of this conflict between the inner and the outer in the thought of transgression was finally to deepen the springs of the inner life. The extremes of externalism led to a break with moral realities which tended to become apparent to the most ordinary observer. The invective of Jesus against New Testament Pharisaism took its force largely from the fact that Jesus gave clear utterance to what everyone knew. Those who thought of religion as external gave themselves to formal keeping of the commandments and allowed the inner life to run riot as it would (Mat 23:23, et al.).

(2) Paul.

With the more serious-minded the keeping of the Law became more and more a matter of the inner spirit. There were some who, like Paul, found it impossible to keep the Law and find peace of conscience (Rom 7). It was this very impossibility which forced some, like Paul, to understand that after all, sin or righteousness must be judged by the inner disposition. It was this which led to the search for a conception of a God who looks chiefly at the heart and judges men by the inner motive.

(3) Jesus.

In the teaching of Jesus the emphasis upon the inner spirit as the essential factor in the moral life came to its climax. Jesus honored the Law, but He pushed the keeping of the Law back from the mere performance of externals to the inner stirrings of motives. It is not merely the actual commission of adultery, for example, that is sin: it is the lustful desire which leads to the evil glance; it is not merely the actual killing of the man that is murder; it is the spirit of hatred which makes the thought of murder welcome (Mat 5:21, Mat 5:27). Paul caught the spirit of Jesus and carried the thought of Jesus out into more elaborate and formal statements. There is a law of the inner life with which man should bind himself, and this law is the law of Christ’s life itself (Rom 8:1-4). While both Jesus and Paul recognized the place of the formal codes in the moral life of individuals and societies, they wrought a great service for righteousness in setting on high the obligations upon the inner spirit. The follower of Christ is to guard the inmost thoughts of his heart. The commandments are not always precepts which can be given articulated statement; they are rather instincts and intuitions and glimpses which must be followed, even when we cannot give them full statement.

8. Sin a Positive Force:

From this standpoint we are able to discern something of the force of the Biblical teaching as to whether sin is to be looked upon as negative or positive. Very often sin is defined as the mere absence of goodness. The man who sins is one who does not keep the Law. This, however, is hardly the full Biblical conception. Of course, the man who does not keep the Law is regarded as a sinner, but the idea transgression is very often that of a positive refusal to keep the commandment and a breaking of the commandment. Two courses are set before men, one good, the other evil. The evil course is, in a sense, something positive in itself. The evil man does not stand still; he moves as truly as the good man moves; he becomes a positive force for evil. In all our discussions we must keep clearly in mind the truth that evil is not something existing in and by itself. The Scriptures deal with evil men, and the evil men are as positive as their natures permit them to be. In this sense of the word sin does run a course of positive destruction. In the thought, e.g., of the writer who describes the conditions which, in his belief, made necessary the Flood, we have a positive state of evil contaminating almost the whole world (Gen 6:11). It would be absurd to characterize the world in the midst of which Noah lived as merely a negative world. The world was positively set toward evil. And so, in later writings, Paul’s thought of Roman society is of a world of sinful men moving with increasing velocity toward the destruction of themselves and of all around them through doing evil. It is impossible to believe that Romans 1 conceives of sin merely in negative terms. We repeat, we do not do full justice to the Biblical conception when we speak of sin merely in negative terms. If we may be permitted to use a present-day illustration, we may say that in the Biblical thought sinful men are like the destructive forces in the world of Nature which must be removed before there can be peace and health for human life. For example, science today has much to say concerning germs of diseases which prove destructive to human life. A large part of modern scientific effort has been to rid the world of these germs, or at least to cleanse human surroundings from their contaminating touch. The man who sterilizes the human environment so that these forces cannot touch men does in one sense a merely negative work; in another sense, however, his work makes possible the positive development of the forces which make for health.

9. Heredity:

It is from this thought of the positiveness of sin that we are to approach the problem of the hereditary transmission of evil. The Biblical teaching has often been misinterpreted at this point. Apart from certain passages, especially those of Paul, which set forth the practically universal contamination of sin (e.g. Rom 5:18, etc.), there is nothing in the Scriptures to suggest the idea that men are born into the world under a weight of guilt. We hold fast to the idea of God as a God of justice and love. There is no way of reconciling these attributes with the condemnation of human souls before these souls have themselves transgressed. Of course much theological teaching moves on the assumption that the tendencies to evil are so great that the souls will necessarily trangress, but we must keep clearly in mind the difference between a tendency to evil and the actual commission of evil. Modern scientific research reinforces the conception that the children of sinful parents, whose sins have been such as to impress their lives throughout, will very soon manifest symptoms of evil tendency. Even in this case, however, we must distinguish between the psychological and moral. The child may be given a wrong tendency from birth, not only by hereditary transmission, but by the imitation of sinful parents; yet the question of the child’s own personal responsibility is altogether another matter. Modern society has come to recognize something of the force of this distinction. In dealing with extreme cases of this kind, the question of the personal guilt of the child is not raised. The attempt is to throw round about the child an environment that will correct the abnormal tendency. But there can be little gainsaying the fact that the presence of sin in the life of the parent may go as far as to mark the life of the child with the sinful tendency.

10. Environment:

The positive force of sinful life also appears in the effect of sin upon the environment of men. It is not necessary for us to believe that all the physical universe was cursed by the Almighty because of man’s sin, in order to hold that there is a curse upon the world because of the presence of sinful men. Men have sinfully despoiled the world for their own selfish purposes. They have wasted its resources. They have turned forces which ought to have made for good into the channels of evil. In their contacts with one another also, evil men furnish an evil environment. If the employer of 100 men be himself evil, he is to a great extent the evil environment of those 100 men. The curse of his evil is upon them. So with the relations of men in larger social groups: the forces of state-life which are intended to work for good can be made to work for evil. So far has this gone that some earnest minds have thought of the material and social realms as necessarily and inherently evil. In other days this led to retreats from the world in monasteries and in solitary cells. In our present time the same thought is back of much of the pessimist idea that the world itself is like a sinking ship, absolutely doomed. The most we can hope for is to save individuals here and there from imminent destruction. Yet a more Biblical conception keeps clear of all this. The material forces of the world – apart from certain massive physical necessities (e.g. earthquakes, storms, floods, whirlwinds, fires, etc.), whose presence does more to furnish the conditions of moral growth than to discourage that growth – are what men cause them to be. Social forces are nothing apart from the men who are themselves the forces. No one can deny that evil men can use physical forces for evil purposes, and that evil men can make bad social forces, but both these forces can be used for good as well as for evil. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain waiting for the redemption at the hands of the sons of God (Rom 8:19-23).

11. Redemption:

In the thought of Jesus, righteousness is life. Jesus came that men might have life (Joh 10:10). It must follow therefore that in His thought sin is death, or rather it is the positive course of transgression which makes toward death (Joh 5:24). But man is to cease to do evil and to learn to do well. He is to face about and walk in a different direction; he is to be born from above (Joh 3:3), and surrender himself to the forces which beat upon him from above rather than to those which surge upon him from below (Rom 12:2). From the realization of the positiveness both of sin and of righteousness, we see the need of a positive force which is to bring men from sin to righteousness (Joh 3:3-8).

Of course, in what we have said of the positive nature of sin we would not deny that there are multitudes of men whose evil consists in their passive acquiescence in a low moral state. Multitudes of men may not be lost, in the sense that they are breaking the more obvious of the commandments. They are lost, in the sense that they are drifting about, or that they are existing in a condition of inertness with no great interest in high spiritual ideals. But the problem even here is to find a force strong enough and positive enough to bring such persons to themselves and to God. In any case the Scriptures lay stress upon the seriousness of the problem constituted by sin. The Bible is centered on redemption. Redemption from sin is thought of as carrying with it redemption from all other calamities. If the kingdom of God and of His righteousness can be seized, all other things will follow with the seizure (Mat 6:33). The work of Christ is set before us as chiefly a work of redemption from sin. A keen student once observed that almost all failures to take an adequate view of the person of Christ can be traced to a failure to realize adequately the seriousness of sin. The problem of changing the course of something so positive as a life set toward sin is a problem which may well tax the resources of the Almighty. Lives cannot be transformed merely by precept. The only effective force is the force of a divine life which will reach and save human lives. See REDEMPTION.

12. Life in Christ:

We are thus in a position to see something of the positiveness of the life that must be in Christ if He is to be a Saviour from sin. That positiveness must be powerful enough to make men feel that in some real sense God Himself has come to their rescue (Rom 8:32-39). For the problem of salvation from sin is manifold. Sin long persisted in begets evil habits, and the habits must be broken. Sin lays the conscience under a load of distress, for which the only relief is a sense of forgiveness. Sin blights and paralyzes the faculties to such a degree that only the mightiest of tonic forces can bring back health and strength. And the problem is often more serious than this. The presence of evil in the world is so serious in the sight of a Holy God that He Himself, because of His very holiness, must be under stupendous obligation to aid us to the utmost for the redemption of men. Out of the thought of the disturbance which sin makes even in the heart of God, we see something of the reason for the doctrine that in the cross of Christ God was discharging a debt to Himself and to the whole world; for the insistence also that in the cross there is opened up a fountain of life, which, if accepted by sinful men, will heal and restore them.

13. Repentance:

It is with this seriousness of sin before us that we must think of forgiveness from sin. We can understand very readily that sin can be forgiven only on condition that men seek forgiveness in the name of the highest manifestation of holiness which they have known. For those who have heard the preaching of the cross and have seen something of the real meaning of that preaching, the way to forgiveness is in the name of the cross. In the name of a holiness which men would make their own, if they could; in the name of an ideal of holy love which men of themselves cannot reach, but which they forever strive after, they seek forgiveness. But the forgiveness is to be taken seriously. In both the Old Testament and New Testament repentance is not merely a changed attitude of mind. It is an attitude which shows its sincerity by willingness to do everything possible to undo the evil which the sinner has wrought (Luk 19:8). If there is any consequence of the sinner’s own sin which the sinner can himself make right, the sinner must in himself genuinely repent and make that consequence right. In one sense repentance is not altogether something done once for all. The seductiveness of sin is so great that there is need of humble and continuous watching. While anything like a morbid introspection is unscriptural, constant alertness to keep to the straight and narrow path is everywhere enjoined as an obligation (Gal 6:1).

14. Forgiveness:

There is nothing in the Scriptures which will warrant the idea that forgiveness is to be conceived of in such fashion as would teach that the consequences of sin can be easily and quickly eliminated. Change in the attitude of a sinner necessarily means change in the attitude of God. The sinner and God, however, are persons, and the Scriptures always speak of the problem of sin after a completely personal fashion. The changed attitude affects the personal standing of the sinner in the sight of God. But God is the person who creates and carries on a moral universe. In carrying on that universe He must keep moral considerations in their proper place as the constitutional principles of the universe. While the father welcomes back the prodigal to the restored personal relations with himself, he cannot, in the full sense, blot out the fact that the prodigal has been a prodigal. The personal forgiveness may be complete, but the elimination of the consequences of the evil life is possible only through the long lines of healing set at work. The man who has sinned against his body can find restoration from the consequences of the sin only in the forces which make for bodily healing. So also with the mind and will. The mind which has thought evil must be cured of its tendency to think evil. To be sure the curative processes may come almost instantly through the upheaval of a great experience, but on the other hand, the curative processes may have to work through long years (see SANCTIFICATION). The will which has been given to sin may feel the stirrings of sin after the life of forgiveness has begun. All this is a manifestation, not only of the power of sin, but of the constitutional morality of the universe. Forgiveness must not be interpreted in such terms as to make the transgression of the Law of God in any sense a light or trivial offense. But, on the other hand, we must not set limits to the curative powers of the cross of God. With the removal of the power which makes for evil the possibility of development in real human experience is before the life (see FORGIVENESS). The word of the Master is that He came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly (Joh 10:10). Sin is serious, because it thwarts life. Sin is given so large a place in the thought of the Biblical writers simply because it blocks the channel of that movement toward the fullest life which the Scriptures teach is the aim of God in placing men in the world. God is conceived of as the Father in Heaven. Sin has a deeply disturbing effect in restraining the relations between the Father and the sons and of preventing the proper development of the life of the sons. See further ETHICS, I., 3., (2); ETHICS OF JESUS, I., 2.; GUILT; JOHANNINE THEOLOGY, V., 1.; PAUL THE APOSTLE; PAULINE THEOLOGY; REDEMPTION, etc.

Literature.

Tennant, Origin and Propagation of Sin; Hyde, Sin and Its Forgiveness; chapter on Incarnation and Atonement in Bowne’s Studies in Christianity; Stevens, Christian Doctrine of Salvation; Clarke, Christian Doctrine of God; various treatises on Systematic Theology.

Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

Sin (2)

sin (, sn, clay or mud; , Suene, Codex Alexandrinus , Tanis): A city of Egypt mentioned only in Eze 30:15, Eze 30:16. This seems to be a pure Semitic name. The ancient Egyptian name, if the place ever had one such, is unknown. Pelusium (Greek , Pelousion) also meant the clayey or muddy town. The Pelusiac mouth of the Nile was the muddy mouth, and the modern Arabic name of this mouth has the same significance. These facts make it practically certain that the Vulgate (Jerome’s Latin Bible, 390-405 A.D.) is correct in identifying Sin with Pelusium. But although Pelusium appears very frequently in ancient history, its exact location is still not entirely certain. The list of cities mentioned in Ezek in connection with Sin furnishes no clue to its location. From other historical notices it seems to have been a frontier city. Rameses II built a wall from Sin to Heliopolis, probably by the aid of Hebrew slaves (Diodorus Siculus; compare Budge, History of Egypt, V, 90), to protect the eastern frontier. Sin was a meeting-place of Egypt with her enemies who came to attack her, many great battles being fought at or near this place. Sennacherib and Cambyses both fought Egypt near Pelusium (Herodotus ii. 141; iii. 10-13). Antiochus IV defeated the Egyptians here (Budge, VIII, 25), and the Romans under Gabinius defeated the Egyptians in the same neighborhood. Pelusium was also accessible from the sea, or was very near a seaport, for Pompey after the disaster at Pharsalia fled into Egypt, sailing for Pelusium. These historical notices of Pelusium make its usual identification with the ruins near el-Kantara, a station on the Suez Canal 29 miles South of Port Said, most probable. Sin, the stronghold of Egypt, in the words of Ezekiel (Eze 30:15), would thus refer to its inaccessibility because of swamps which served as impassable moats. The wall on the South and the sea on the North also protected it on either flank.

Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

Sin

Sin, 1

Sin, a city of Egypt, which is mentioned in Eze 30:15-16, in connection with Thebes and Memphis, and is described as ‘the strength of Egypt,’ showing it to have been a fortified place. The Sept. makes it to have been Sas, but Jerome regards it as Pelusium. This latter identification has been generally adopted, and is scarcely open to dispute. Pelusium was anciently a place of great consequence. It was strongly fortified, being the bulwark of the Egyptian frontier on the eastern side, and was considered the ‘key,’ or, as the prophet terms it, ‘the strength’ of Egypt. It was near this place that Pompey met his death, being murdered by order of Ptolemy, whose protection he had claimed. It lay among swamps and morasses on the most easterly estuary of the Nile (which received from it the name of Ostium Pelusiacum), and stood twenty stades from the Mediterranean. The site is now only approachable by boats during a high Nile, or by land when the summer sun has dried the mud left by the inundation: the remains consist merely of mounds and a few fallen columns. The climate is very unwholesome.

Sin, 2

Sin, the desert which the Israelites entered on turning off from the Red Sea (Exo 16:1; Exo 17:1; Num 33:12) [SINAI].

Fuente: Popular Cyclopedia Biblical Literature

Sin

City in Egypt: the LXX has , and the Vulgate (as in the margin), Pelusium. Ezekiel calls it ‘the strength of Egypt.’ Eze 30:15-16. It is supposed to be identified with the modern Tineh, where a few ruins are found. It is close to the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, about 31 4′ N, 32 28′ E.

There are many different words both in the O.T. and N.T. signifying ‘sin,’ ‘iniquity,’ ‘wickedness,’ etc., with various shades of meaning.

1. It is important to notice the scripture definition of sin. It is ‘lawlessness.’ 1Jn 3:4. Hence the distinction made between ‘sin’ and ‘transgression,’ the latter being the infraction of a known command. From Adam to Moses man “had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression ,” yet men had sinned and died. Rom 5:14. A positive law was given to Adam, which he disobeyed; but from Adam to Moses no definite law was proclaimed, consequently there was no transgression, yet there was sin in the sense of lawlessness, and such sin as called for the deluge. The same distinction is plainly involved in Rom 4:15; “Where no law is, there is no transgression,” yet there may be sin, and it is averred that “as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law.” Rom 2:12.

The rendering of 1Jn 3:4, in the A.V., “sin is the transgression of the law,” is a mistranslation. The Greek word is , from , negative, and , law. This word occurs fourteen times, and in this verse only is it translated in the A.V. ‘transgression of the law.’ In 2Co 6:14 it is ‘unrighteousness,’ and in eleven places it is rendered ‘iniquity,’ signifying any wickedness. Further, , from the same root, is translated ‘without law’ in 1Co 9:21; ‘unlawful’ in 2Pe 2:8; and ‘lawless’ in 1Ti 1:9. These passages clearly indicate that the meaning of 1Jn 3:4 is “Every one that practises sin, practises also lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness: ” that is, doing one’s own will, regardless of all restraint of God and man. This applies whether there is a definite law or not, but when there is a definite law sin is also transgression.

The principal words used for ‘sin’ in the N.T. are , , , to deviate from a right course: and for ‘transgression,’ ‘transgressor,’ , , , to pass by or over a boundary.

2. Sin did not originate in man, but with the devil. 1Jn 3:8. It came into the world by man, and brought in death as its penalty.

3. An important point is to distinguish between ‘sin’ and ‘sins,’ a distinction which must exist after the first entrance of the principle. The ‘sins’ of a man are what he actually commits, and are the ground of judgement, while also proving the man to be the servant of sin. A Christian is one whose conscience has been perfected for ever by the one sacrifice for sins; the Spirit of God has brought him into the value of that one offering, hence his sins, having been borne by Christ on the cross, will never be brought to his charge as guilt upon him by God, but if he sins there is a holy gracious dealing with him on the ground of Christ’s propitiation, so that he is led to confess the sin or sins, and has the joy of forgiveness. ‘Sin’ as to the principle, involving the alienation of all things from God since the fall of man, and especially seen in man’s evil nature, has been judicially removed from before God in the cross of Christ. God has “condemned sin in the flesh” in the sacrifice of Christ, Rom 8:3, and consequently the Spirit is given to the believer. The Lord Jesus is proclaimed as “the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” (‘not sins,’ as it is often quoted). He will purge heaven and earth from sin, and in result there will be new heavens and a new earth, wherein will dwell righteousness. Though Christ tasted death for every one, or everything, He is not represented as bearing the ‘sins ‘ of all: His death as regards ‘sins’ being qualified by the words ‘of many,’ ‘our sins,’ etc.

4. In the important passage in Rom 5:15-20, the word OFFENCE occurs. The Greek is , from ‘to fall off or away.’ It is used for Adam’s fall or sin, and God’s free gift is in respect of many sins. “The law entered that the offence might abound,” that is, that the offensiveness or heinousness of sin might be made manifest. The same word is translated ‘fall, fault, trespass, and sin.’

Fuente: Concise Bible Dictionary

Sin (1)

Miscellany of minor sub-topics:

– Paul’s discussion of the responsibility for

Rom 2

– Degrees in

Luk 7:41-47; Luk 12:47-48

– Progressive

Deu 29:19; 1Ki 16:31; Psa 1:1; Isa 5:18; Isa 30:1; Jer 9:3; Jer 16:11-12; Hos 13:2; 2Ti 3:13

– Its progressiveness exemplified in Joseph’s brethren:

b 1. First, jealousy

Gen 37:4

b 2. Then, conspiracy

Gen 37:18

b 3. Finally, murder

Gen 37:20

– Sinfulness of

Job 22:5; Psa 25:11; Isa 1:18; Rom 7:13

– Defiles

b General references

Psa 51:2; Psa 51:7; Isa 1:18; 1Jn 1:7 Defilement

– To be hated

Deu 7:26; Psa 119:113

– Against the body

Ecc 5:6

– The besetting

Heb 12:1

– Little sins

Son 2:15

– Unpardonable

Mat 12:31; Mar 3:29; Luk 12:10; 1Jn 5:16-17

– Instances of unpardonable:

b Israel’s

Num 14:26-45

b Of Eli’s house

1Sa 3:14 Reprobacy

– No escape from the consequences of

b General references

Gen 3:8-12; Isa 28:18-22; Amo 9:1-4; Mat 23:33; Heb 2:3 Punishment, Divine Punishment, No Escape from

– Attempt to cover, vain

Isa 29:15; Isa 59:6

– Secret sins

Psa 19:12; Psa 44:21; Psa 64:2; Psa 90:8; Ecc 12:14; Eze 8:12; Eze 11:5; Mat 10:26; Luk 8:17; Luk 12:2-3; Joh 3:20; Rom 2:16; Eph 5:12

– Fools mock at

Pro 14:9

– Against knowledge

b General references

Pro 26:11; Luk 12:47-48; Joh 9:41; Joh 15:22; Rom 1:21; Rom 1:32; Rom 2:17-23; Heb 10:26; Jas 4:17; 2Pe 2:21-22 Ignorance, Sins of

– Not imputed to:

b Righteous

Psa 32:2

b Ignorant

Rom 5:13

b Redeemed

2Co 5:19

– Pleasures of

b General references

Job 20:12-16; Job 21:12-13; Luk 8:14 Pleasure, Worldly

– In believers a reproach to the Lord

2Sa 12:14

– None in heaven

Rev 22:3-4

Unclassified scriptures relating to, defining and illustrating

– General references

Deu 29:18; 2Ch 12:14; Job 14:4; Job 22:5; Psa 25:11; Psa 95:10; Pro 4:23; Pro 24:8-9; Ecc 5:6; Isa 1:6; Isa 1:18; Isa 44:20; Jer 7:24; Jer 17:9; Eze 20:16; Mat 5:28; Mat 12:31; Mar 3:29; Luk 12:10; 1Jn 5:16-17; Mat 12:33-35; Mat 7:17-18; Luk 6:45; Mat 13:24-25; Mat 13:38-39; Mat 15:2-20; Joh 8:34; Joh 8:44; Rom 5:12-21; Rom 7:7; Rom 7:13; Rom 14:23; 1Co 5:6; Eph 2:1-2; Heb 3:13; Heb 12:15; Jas 1:14-15; Jas 2:10-11; Jas 4:1-3; Jas 4:17; 2Pe 1:4; 1Jn 3:4; 1Jn 3:6; 1Jn 3:8-10; 1Jn 3:15 Atonement; Conviction; Depravity; Regeneration; Repentance; Reprobacy; Salvation; Sanctification; Wicked, Punishment of

Confession of

Lev 16:21; Num 14:40; 2Sa 24:10; 2Sa 24:17; 1Ch 21:17; 2Ch 29:6; Ezr 9:4-7; Ezr 9:10-15; Neh 1:6-9; Neh 9:2-3; Neh 9:5-38; Job 7:20; Job 9:20; Job 13:23; Job 40:4; Job 42:5-6; Psa 32:5; Psa 38:3-4; Psa 38:18; Psa 40:11-12; Psa 41:4; Psa 51:2-5; Psa 69:5; Psa 73:21-22; Psa 106:6; Psa 119:59-60; Psa 119:176; Psa 130:3; Isa 6:5; Isa 26:13; Isa 59:12-15; Isa 64:5-7; Jer 3:21-22; Jer 3:25; Jer 8:14-15; Jer 14:7; Jer 14:20; Jer 31:18-19; Lam 1:18; Lam 1:20; Lam 3:40-42; Dan 9:5-6; Dan 9:8-11; Dan 9:15; Luk 15:17-21; 1Co 15:9; Jas 5:16; 1Jn 1:8-10

Consequences of, entailed upon children

– General references

Exo 20:5; Exo 34:7; Lev 26:39-40; Num 14:33; Job 5:4; Job 18:19; Job 21:19; Psa 21:10; Psa 37:28; Psa 109:9-10; Pro 14:11; Isa 14:20-22; Jer 31:29-30; Jer 32:18; Isa 65:7; Lam 5:7; Rom 5:12-21 Wicked

Conviction of

Conviction; Repentance, Instances of

Forgiveness of

– General references

Exo 34:6-7; Num 14:18; Lev 4:20; Lev 4:26; Lev 4:31; Lev 4:35; Num 15:25; Lev 5:4-13; Num 14:20; 2Sa 12:13; 1Ki 8:22-50; Job 10:14; Psa 19:12; Psa 25:7; Psa 25:11; Psa 25:18; Psa 32:1-2; Psa 32:5; Psa 51:9; Psa 65:3; Psa 79:9; Psa 85:2-3; Psa 99:8; Psa 103:12; Psa 130:4; Isa 1:18; Isa 6:6-7; Isa 43:25-26; Isa 44:21-22; Isa 55:6-7; Jer 2:22; Jer 5:1; Jer 5:7; Jer 31:34; Jer 33:8; Eze 33:14-16; Eze 18:21-22; Mat 1:21; Mat 6:12; Mat 6:14-15; Mat 18:23-27; Mat 26:28; Mar 2:5; Mar 2:7; Mat 9:2; Mat 9:6; Luk 5:21; Luk 5:24; Mar 3:28; Mar 11:26; Mat 18:35; Luk 3:3; Mat 3:6; Luk 24:47; Joh 8:11; Joh 20:23; Act 2:38; Act 10:36; Act 10:43; Act 13:38-39; Act 26:16-18; Rom 4:7-8; Eph 4:32; Col 2:13; Heb 8:12; Heb 9:22; Heb 10:2; Heb 10:17-18; Jas 5:15; Jas 5:20; 1Jn 1:7; 1Jn 1:9; 1Jn 2:1-2; 1Jn 2:12; 1Jn 5:16; Mat 12:31-32; Luk 12:10; Rev 1:5 Atonement; Conviction; Offerings; Repentance

Fruits of

Gen 3:7-24; Gen 4:9-14; Gen 6:5-7; Deu 29:18; 1Ki 13:33-34; Job 4:8; Job 5:2; Job 13:26; Job 20:11; Psa 5:10; Psa 9:15-16; Psa 10:2; Psa 94:23; Psa 141:10; Pro 1:31; Pro 3:35; Pro 5:22-23; Pro 8:36; Pro 10:24; Pro 10:29-31; Pro 11:5-7; Pro 11:18-19; Pro 11:27; Pro 11:29; Pro 12:13-14; Pro 12:21; Pro 12:26; Pro 13:5-6; Pro 13:15; Pro 22:8; Pro 27:8; Pro 28:1; Pro 29:6; Pro 30:20; Isa 3:9; Isa 3:11; Isa 9:18; Isa 14:21; Isa 50:11; Isa 57:20-21; Jer 2:17; Jer 2:19; Jer 4:18; Jer 5:25; Jer 7:19; Jer 14:16; Jer 21:14; Eze 11:21; Eze 22:31; Eze 23:31-35; Hos 8:7; Hos 10:13; Hos 12:14; Hos 13:9; Mic 7:13; Mar 7:21-23; Act 9:5; Rom 5:12-21; Rom 7:5; 1Co 3:3; 1Co 6:9-11; Gal 5:19-21; Gal 6:7-8; 1Pe 4:3

Known to God

– General references

Gen 3:11; Gen 4:10; Gen 18:13; Exo 16:8-9; Exo 16:12; Num 12:2; Num 14:26-27; Deu 1:34; Deu 31:21; Deu 32:34; Job 10:14; Jos 7:10-15; Job 11:11; Job 13:27; Job 14:16-17; Job 20:27; Job 34:21-22; Job 34:25; Job 24:23; Psa 44:20-21; Psa 69:5; Psa 90:8; Psa 94:11; Ecc 5:8; Isa 29:15; Jer 2:22; Jer 16:17; Jer 29:23; Eze 21:24; Hos 5:3; Hos 7:2; Amo 5:12; Amo 9:1-4; Amo 9:8; Hab 2:11; Mal 2:14; Mat 10:26; Mat 22:18; Mat 26:46; Luk 6:8; Joh 4:17-19; Joh 5:42; Joh 6:64; Joh 13:11; Rev 2:23 God, Omniscient; Jesus, The Christ, Omniscience of

Love of

– General references

Job 15:16; Job 20:12-13; Pro 2:14; Pro 4:17; Pro 10:23; Pro 16:30; Pro 26:11; Jer 14:10; Eze 20:16; Hos 4:8; Hos 9:10; Mic 7:3; Joh 3:19-20; Joh 12:43; 1Pe 3:19-20; 2Pe 2:22 Reprobacy; Wicked, Described

National, punishment of

– General references

Gen 6:5-7; Gen 7:21-22; Lev 26:14-38; Deu 9:5; Job 34:29-30; Isa 19:4; Jer 12:17; Jer 25:31-38; Jer 46:28; Eze 16:49-50; Jon 1:2 Government; Nation

– Instances of:

b The Sodomites

Gen 18:20

b Egyptians

b General references

Exo 7 Egypt

b Israelites

Lev 26:14-39; Deu 32:30; 2Sa 21:1; 2Sa 24:1; 2Ki 24:3-4; 2Ki 24:20; 2Ch 36:21; Ezr 9:1-15; Neh 9:36-37; Isa 1:21-23; Isa 3:4; Isa 3:8; Isa 5; Isa 59:1-15; Jer 2; Jer 5; Jer 9; Jer 23; Jer 30:11-15; Lam 1:3; Lam 1:8; Lam 1:14; Lam 4:6; Eze 2:1-10; Eze 7; Eze 22; Eze 24:6-14; Eze 28:18; Eze 33:25-26; Eze 36:16-20; Eze 39:23-24; Eze 44:4-14; Hos 4:1-11; Hos 6:8-10; Hos 7:1-7; Hos 13; Amo 2; Amo 5; Mic 6; Mic 7:2-6

b Babylon

b General references

Jer 50:45-46; Jer 51 Babylon

Punishment of

– General references

Gen 2:17; Gen 3:16-19; Gen 4:7; Gen 6:3; Gen 6:5-7; Gen 18:20; Gen 19:13; Exo 32:33-34; Exo 34:7; Lev 26:14-21; Num 15:30-31; Num 32:23; Job 21:17; Psa 95:10-11; Jer 44:2-3; Jer 44:5-6 Punishment; Wicked, Punishment of

Repugnant to God

– General references

Gen 6:6-7; Num 22:32; Deu 25:16; Deu 32:19; 2Sa 11:27; 1Ki 14:22; Psa 5:4-6; Psa 10:3; Psa 11:5; Psa 78:59; Psa 95:10; Psa 106:40; Pro 3:32; Pro 11:20; Pro 6:16-19; Pro 15:8-9; Pro 15:26; Pro 21:27; Isa 43:24; Jer 25:7; Jer 44:4; Jer 44:21-22; Hab 1:13; Zec 8:17; Luk 16:15; Rev 2:6; Rev 2:15 God, Holiness of; Holiness

Repugnant to the righteous

– General references

Gen 39:7-9; Deu 7:26; Job 1:1; Job 21:16; Job 22:18; Psa 26:5; Psa 26:9; Psa 84:10; Psa 101:3-4; Psa 101:7; Psa 119:104; Psa 119:113; Psa 119:128; Psa 119:163; Psa 120:2; Psa 120:5-7; Psa 139:19-22; Pro 8:13; Pro 29:27; Jer 9:2; Rom 7:15; Rom 7:19; Rom 7:23-24; 2Pe 2:7-8; Jud 1:23; Rev 2:2 Holiness

Separates from God

– General references

Deu 31:17-18; Jos 7:12; 2Ch 24:20; Job 13:24; Job 23:3; Job 23:8-9; Psa 78:59-61; Isa 59:1-2; Isa 64:7; Eze 23:18; Hos 9:12; Amo 3:2-3; Mic 3:4; Luk 13:27; Mat 7:23; Mat 25:41; Rom 8:7; Heb 12:14

– SeeGod, Holiness of; Wicked, Punishment of

God, Holiness of; Wicked, Punishment of

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible

Sin (2)

1. Desert of, a wilderness between Elim and Sinai:

– Children of Israel journey through

Exo 16:1

– Children of Israel murmur for bread in

Exo 16:2

– Manna and quails given in

Exo 16:4-36

– Children of Israel numbered in

Num 26:64

2. A city of Egypt

Eze 30:15

Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible

Sin

Sin, Wilderness of (sn). A region between Elim and Rephidim. Exo 16:1; Exo 17:1; Num 33:11-12. Here the Israelites were first fed with manna and quails. The wilderness extends 25 miles along the east shore of the Red Sea, from Wdy Taiyibeh to Wdy Feiran; it is now called the plain of el-Markha. It is barren, but has a little vegetation.

Fuente: People’s Dictionary of the Bible

Sin

Sin. A city of Egypt, mentioned only by Ezekiel. Eze 30:15-16. The name is Hebrew, or at least Semitic, perhaps, signifying clay. It is identified in the Vulgate, with Pelusium, “the clayey or muddy” town. Its antiquity may, perhaps, be inferred from the mention of “the wilderness of Sin” in the journeys of the Israelites. Exo 16:1; Num 33:11.

Ezekiel speaks of Sin as “Sin the strongholds of Egypt.” Eze 30:15. This place was held by Egyp, t from that time, until the period of the Romans. Herodotus relates that Sennacherib advanced against Pelusium, and that near Pelusium, Cambyses defeated Psammenitus. In like manner, the decisive battle in which Ochus defeated the last native king, Nectanebes, was fought near this city.

Fuente: Smith’s Bible Dictionary

Sin

hamartia (G266) Sin

hamartema (G265)

parakoe (G3876) Disobedience

anomia (G458) Unrighteousness, Lawlessness

paranomia (G3892) Breaking the Law

parabasis (G3847) Transgression

paraptoma (G3900) Trespass, Fault

agnoema (G51) Error

hettema (G2275) Failure

This group contains numerous wordshamartia, hamartema, parakoe, anomia, paranomia, parabasis, paraptoma, agnoema, hettemaand more can easily be added. It is not difficult to see why: sin may be viewed from an infinite number of aspects in all languages. The diagnosis of sin primarily belongs to Scripture, where it is viewed from the greatest number of perspectives and described with many various images. When sin is viewed as the missing of a mark or aim, it is referred to as hamartia or as hamartema. When seen as the transgressing of a line, sin is termed parabasis. When understood as disobeying a voice, sin is called parakoe. When perceived as falling where one should have stood upright, sin is labelled paraptoma. When portrayed as the ignorance of what one should have known, sin is termed agnoema. When depicted as the diminishing of what should have been given in full measure, sin is called hettema. When viewed as the nonobservance of a law, sin is termed anomia or paranomia. When seen as a discord in the harmonies of God’s universe, sin is referred to as plemmeleia.Sin may be described in ways almost beyond number.

We will begin our study of this word group with hamartia, the word most frequently used to describe sin. Hamartia’s etymology is uncertain and so cannot help us accurately define the word or distinguish it from the other words in this group. Suidas derived hamartia from marpto, as though hamartia came from hamarptia (a failing to grasp). Buttmann’s conjecture that hamartia belongs to the root meros (G3313), meiromai, on which a negative intransitive verb (to be without one’s share of, to miss) was formed, has found more favor. Only this, however, is obvious: when sin is contemplated as hamartia, it is regarded as a failing (or missing) of the true end and scope of our lives, namely God.

A slighter understanding of sin and its evil goes hand in hand with a slighter ethical significance in the words used to express it. Nowhere in classical Greek do hamartia and hamartanein (G264) have the depth of meaning they have acquired in revealed religion. They run the same course there that all ethical terms seem to have run. Employed first about natural things, hamartia and hamartanein were then applied to the moral or spiritual realm. Initially hamartanein meant to miss a mark and was the exact opposite of tychein (G5177). Thus over and over in Homer we read of the warrior hamartei, who hurls his spear but who fails to strike his foe. Ton hodon hamartanein is to miss one’s way. Next, hamartia was applied to the intellectual realm. Thus we read of the poet hamartanei, who selects a subject that is impossible to treat poetically or who seeks results that lie beyond the limits of his art. Hamartia constantly is contrasted with orthotes. Hamartia is so far removed from any necessary ethical significance that Aristotle sometimes (if not always) withdrew it from the realm of right and wrong. The hamartia is a mistake (per- haps a fearful one), like that of Oedipus, but nothing more. Elsewhere, however, hamartia can be as close in meaning to our use of sin as any word used in heathen ethics.

Hamartia refers to sin in the abstract as well as to sin in the concreteto the act of sinning and to the actual sin. Hamartema, however, never refers to sin as sinfulness or to the act of sinning. Instead, hamartema refers to sin in terms of its separate consequences and acts of disobedience to a divine law.There is the same difference between anomia and anomema, between asebeia and asebema, and between adikia and adikema. This is brought out in Aristotle’s contrast of adikon and adikema: “To adikema and to adikon are different. Adikon is by nature or by order; but whenever this very thing is committed, it is an adikema” Clement of Alexandria has a long but not very profitable discussion on the distinction between hamartia and hamartema, between adikia and adikema, and between other words in this group. Asebeia is used with adikia just as asebes (G765) is used with adikos, anosios and hamartolos.

Asebeia is positive and active irreligiona deliberate withholding from God of his dues of prayer and service, as if one were in battle array against him. The Authorized Version always translates asebeia as ungodliness,” and the Rheims Version always translates asebeia as “impiety” and asebes as “impious,” though neither of these words occur in our English Bible. The asebes and the dikaios are always opposed to one another (cf. Gen 18:23) as the two who wage on earth the great warfare between light and darkness and between right and wrong.

Parakoe occurs only once in the New Testament (Rom 5:19) and never in the Septuagint, though parakouein is used several times in the Septuagint in the sense of “to disobey.” In its strictest sense, parakoe is a failing to hear or an incorrect hearing. The sense of active disobedience that results from this inattentive or careless hearing is superinduced on the word, or perhaps the sin is already committed in failing to listen when God is speaking. Bengel has a good note:

Para [G3844] in parakoe expresses as suitably as possible the reason for the origin of Adam’s fall. Does one inquire how the mind and will of any upright person was able to suffer defeat or to receive injury? Answerthe mind and will wavered at the same time through carelessness; nothing can be assumed prior to carelessness, just as the relaxing of the guards is the beginning of the capturing of a city. Parakoe, disobedience, indicates such carelessness.

Frequently in the Old Testament, disobedience is described as a refusing to hear (Jer 11:10; Jer 35:17) and it appears literally as such in Act 7:57. In Heb 2:2, where parakoe is joined with and follows parabasis, the writer is implying that every actual transgression embodied in an outward act of disobedience was punished as was every refusal to hear, though such refusals might not have resulted in outwardly disobedient acts.

Generally we have translated anomia as “iniquity” (Mat 7:23; Rom 6:19; Heb 10:17), once as “unrighteousness” (2Co 6:14), and once as “transgression of the law” (1Jn 3:4). Anomia is contrasted with dikaiosyne and used with anarchia and antilogia. Anomos is used negatively at least once in the New Testament to refer to a person without law or to whom a law had not been given. Elsewhere anomia is used of the greatest enemy of all law, the man of sin, the lawless one (2Th 2:8). In 2Th 2:8 anomia does not refer to one living without law but to one who acts contrary to law, as also is the case with paranomia, which occurs only in 2Pe 2:16 (cf. Pro 10:29), and with paranomein (G3891) in Act 23:3. It follows that where there is no law (Rom 5:13), there may be hamartia or adikia but not anomia, which Oecumenius defined as “the error against the adopted law” or as Fritzsche stated, “the contempt for the law or the permissiveness of morals by which the law is violated.” Thus the Gentiles who do not have a law (Rom 2:14) might be charged with sin; but since they were sinning without law, they could not be charged with anomia. Behind the law of Moses that the Gentiles never had is another law, the original law and revelation of the righteousness of God that is written on the hearts of all (Rom 2:14-15). Since this law is never completely obliterated in the human heart, all sin, even that of the darkest and most ignorant savage, must still in a secondary sense remain as anomia, a violation of this older, though partially obscured, law. Thus Origin stated:

Guilt indeed has this differentiation from sin, in that guilt refers to those things which are done against law; hence also the Greek language calls it lawlessness [anomian]. But that can also be called a sin which is committed against what nature teaches and conscience censures.

It is the same with parabasis. There must be something to transgress before there can be a transgression. Sin occurred between the time of Adam and Moses, a fact attested to by death. Those people who lived between the law that was given in paradise (Gen 2:16-17) and the law that was given from Sinai sinned, though not “according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam” (parabaseos,Rom 5:14). With the coming of the law at Sinai, for the first time there was the possibility of transgressing that law (Rom 4:15). Parabasissome act that is excessive or enormousis the term especially used to refer to such transgressions or trespasses. Cicero wrote: “To sin is as if to leap across lines.” According to Paul, a parabasis, seen as the transgression of a given commandment, is more serious than hamartia.From this viewpoint, and with reference to this very word, Augustine often drew a distinction between the peccator (sinner) and the praevaricator (transgressor), and between the peccatum (sin, hamartia) and the praevaricatio (transgression, parabasis). Thus Augustine stated:

Every transgressor indeed is a sinner because he sins with the law, but not every sinner is a transgressor because some sin without a law. For where there is no law, there is neither a transgressor.

The Latin word praevaricator (one who does not walk straight) introduces a new image, not that of overstepping a line but that of halting on unequal feet, though this imagery had faded from the word by the time Augustine used it. Augustine’s motive in using praevaricator, or collusive prosecutor, was that this word dealt unjustly with a law. In Augustine’s language, one who is under no express law and sins is a peccator (sinner), but the one who has such a law and sins is a praevaricator (transgressor). Before the law came men might be the former, but after the law they could only be the latter. In the first there is implicit disobedience, in the second explicit disobedience.

Paraptoma occurs only in later Greek and then rarely. Cocceius wrote: “If we look at the origin of the word, it signifies those actions for which someone falls and lies prostrate, so that he cannot rise and stand before God.” In Eph 2:1, where paraptomata and hamartia occur together, Jerome distinguished them (apparently in agreement with others) in this way: the former are sins suggested to the mind and partially entertained and welcomed there; the latter are embodied in actual deeds:

They say that paraptomata are, as it were, the beginnings of sins, when a silent thought has crept in while we are drowsy but does not drive us to ruin. Sin, however, exists when something actually is done and reaches its conclusion.

This distinction is unwarranted, except insofar as sins of thought partake more of the nature of infirmity and have less aggravation than the same sins consummated and embodied in actions. Thus paraptoma sometimes is used to designate sins that are not the gravest or the worst, as is clearly the case in Gal 6:1, where the Authorized Version translated it as “fault,” and not obscurely, as it seems to be in Rom 5:15; Rom 5:17-18. Polybius used paraptoma to refer to an error, to a mistake in judgment, to a blunder. In another inadequate distinction, Augustine described paraptoma as the negative omission of good, as contrasted with hamartia, the positive doing of evil.

Paraptoma has not always been understood so mildly and certainly is not used that way in Eph 2:1, “dead in trespasses [paraptomasi] and sins.” In Eze 18:26 paraptoma refers to mortal sin. In Heb 6:6 parapesein (G3895) is equivalent to the “sinning [hamartanein] willingly” of Heb 10:26 and to the “departing from the living God” of Heb 3:12. A passage in Philo that closely resembles the two in the Epistle to the Hebrews expressly precludes a weaker understanding of paraptoma. In this passage Philo used paraptoma to describe a man who had reached an acknowledged pitch of godliness and virtue but who had fallen from that state: “He was lifted up to the height of heaven and is fallen down to the depth of hell.”

Agnoema occurs in the New Testament only in Heb 9:7, though agnoia (G52) is used in the same sense of sin in Psa 25:7 (and often), and agnoein (50, to sin) occurs in Hos 4:15; Sir 5:15; and Heb 5:2. Sin is referred to as an agnoema when one tries to make excuses for it (as far as this is possible), to regard it in the mildest possible light. Although there is always an element of ignorance in every human transgression (making it human and not devilish), this mitigates but does not eliminate the sin; it makes forgiveness possible but not necessary. As Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luk 23:34). And Paul said, “I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief (1Ti 1:13). No human sin, except perhaps the sin against the Holy Spirit, is committed with a complete recognition of the true nature of the evil that is chosen and of the good that is forsaken. Many passages in Plato identify vice with ignorance and even claim that no man is voluntarily evil. Whatever exaggerations Plato’s statements may contain, sin is always to a greater or lesser degree an agnoema. The more the agnoein (as opposed to the “sinning willingly” of Heb 10:26) predominates, the greater the extenuation of the sinfulness. Therefore the one New Testament use of agnoema (Heb 9:7) is very appropriate. In Heb 9:7, the agnoemata (errors) of the people for which the high priest offered sacrifice on the great Day of Atonement were not willful transgressions; they were not “presumptuous sins” (Psa 19:13) that willingly were committed against the conscience and with a high hand against God. Those who committed such sins were cut off from the congregation; there was no provision in the levitical constitution for the forgiveness of such sin (Num 15:30-31). Rather, these were sins that resulted from the weakness of the flesh, from an imperfect insight into God’s law, and from a lack of due circumspection that afterwards were viewed with shame and regret. The same distinction exists between agnoia and agnoema as the one between hamartia and hamartema and between adikia and adikema:the former is often more abstract, and the latter is always more concrete.

Hettema is not used in classical Greek, though hetta, a briefer form of the word, is contrasted with nike (G3529), as defeat is opposed to victory. Hettema is used once in the Septuagint (Isa 31:8) and twice in the New Testament (Rom 11:12; 1Co 6:7), but only in 1Co 6:7, where it refers to a coming short of duty, to a fault, does it have an ethical sense. According to Gerhard: “Hettema is a decrease, a lack, from hettasthai, to be defeated, since sinners succumb to the temptations of the flesh and of Satan.”

Plemmeleia occurs frequently in the Old Testament (Lev 5:15; Num 18:9; and often), as well as in later ecclesiastical Greek, but not in the New Testament. Properly speaking, plemmeleia is a discord or disharmony.Augustine’s Greek was faulty when he related plemmeleia and melei (G3199), “it is a concern,” and made plemmeleia equivalent to ameleia (carelessness). Instead, plemmeleia refers to sin that is regarded as a discord or disharmony in the great symphonies of the universe: “Disproportioned sin jarred against nature’s chime, and with harsh din broke the fair music that all creatures made to their great Lord.”

Delitzsch made the following observation on the more important Hebrew terms that more or less correspond with the ones we have just studied:

Sin is called poa’ [G6586] as being a tearing away from God, a breach of fidelity, a falling from the state of grace, in Greek asebeia; hata’ah[G2401] is a missing the mark set by God, a deviation from what pleases God, achieving what is contrary to God, in Greek hamartia; ‘an [G5771] is a perverting what is right, a misdeed, an incurring of guilt, in Greek anomia or adikia.

Fuente: Synonyms of the New Testament

Sin

the transgression of the law, or want of conformity to the will of God, 1Jn 3:4. Original sin is that whereby our whole nature is corrupted, and rendered contrary to the nature and law of God; or, according to he ninth article of the church of England, It is that whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is, of his own nature, inclined to evil. This is sometimes called, indwelling sin, Romans 7. The imputation of the sin of Adam to his posterity, is also what divines call, with some latitude of expression, original sin. Actual sin is a direct violation of God’s law, and generally applied to those who are capable of committing moral evil; as opposed to idiots or children, who have not the right use of their powers. Sins of omission consist in leaving those things undone which ought to be done. Sins of commission are those which are committed against affirmative precepts, or doing what should not be done. Sins of infirmity are those which arise from ignorance, surprise, &c. Secret sins are those committed in secret, or those of which, through blindness or prejudice, we do not see the evil, Psa 19:7-12. Presumptuous sins are those which are done boldly against light and conviction. The unpardonable sin is, according to some, the ascribing to the devil the miracles which Christ wrought by the power of the Holy Ghost. This sin, or blasphemy, as it should rather be called, many scribes and Pharisees were guilty of, who, beholding our Lord do his miracles, affirmed that he wrought them by Beelzebub, the prince of devils, which was, in effect, calling the Holy Ghost Satan, a most horrible blasphemy; and, as on this ground they rejected Christ, and salvation by him, their sin could certainly have no forgiveness. Mar 3:29-30. No one therefore could be guilty of this blasphemy, except those who were spectators of Christ’s miracles. There is, however, another view of this unpardonable offence, which deserves consideration: The sin or blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, says Bishop Tomline, is mentioned in the first three Gospels. It appears that all the three evangelists agree in representing the sin or blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as a crime which would not be forgiven; but no one of them affirms that those who had ascribed Christ’s power of casting out devils to Beelzebub, had been guilty of that sin, and in St. Luke it is not mentioned that any such charge had been made. Our Saviour, according to the account in St. Matthew and St. Mark, endeavoured to convince the Jews of their error; but so far from accusing them of having committed an unpardonable sin in what they had said concerning him, he declares that whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; that is, whatever reproaches men may utter against the Son of man during his ministry, however they may calumniate the authority upon which he acts, it is still possible that hereafter they may repent and believe, and all their sins may be forgiven them; but the reviling of the Holy Ghost is described as an offence of a far more heinous nature: The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness. Unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven. It is plain that this sin against the Holy Ghost could not be committed while our Saviour was upon earth, since he always speaks of the Holy Ghost as not being to come till after his ascension into heaven. A few days after that great event, the descent of the Holy Ghost enabled the Apostles to work miracles, and communicated to them a variety of other supernatural gifts. If men should ascribe these powers to Beelzebub, or in any respect reject their authority, they would blaspheme the Holy Ghost, from whom they were derived; and that sin would be unpardonable, because this was the completion of the evidence of the divine authority of Christ and his religion; and they who rejected these last means of conviction, could have no other opportunity of being brought to faith in Christ, the only appointed condition of pardon and forgiveness. The greater heinousness of the sin of these men would consist in their rejecting a greater body of testimony; for they are supposed to be acquainted with the resurrection of our Saviour from the dead, with his ascension into heaven, with the miraculous descent of the Holy Ghost, and with the supernatural powers which it communicated; circumstances, all of which were enforced by the Apostles when they preached the Gospel; but none of which could be known to those who refused to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah during his actual ministry. Though this was a great sin, it was not an unpardonable one, it might be remedied by subsequent belief, by yielding to subsequent testimony. But, on the other hand, they who finally rejected the accumulated and complete evidence of Jesus being the Messiah, as exhibited by the inspired Apostles, precluded themselves from the possibility of conviction, because no farther testimony would be afforded them, and consequently, there being no means of repentance, they would be incapable of forgiveness and redemption. Hence it appears that the sin against the Holy Ghost consisted in finally rejecting the Gospel as preached by the Apostles, who confirmed the truth of the doctrine which they taught by signs and wonders, and divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost, Heb 2:4. It was unpardonable, because this was the consummation of the proofs afforded to the men of that generation of the divine mission of Christ. This sin was manifestly distinct from all other sins; it indicated an invincible obstinacy of mind, an impious and unalterable determination to refuse the offered mercy of God. It would appear from this, that those only committed or could commit this irremissible offence, who were witnesses of the mighty works wrought by the Holy Spirit in the Apostles after Christ’s ascension and the day of pentecost. Our Lord’s declaration appears chiefly to respect the Jews.

This view will serve to explain those passages in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the hopeless case of Jewish apostates is described. But See BLASPHEMY.

Fuente: Biblical and Theological Dictionary