What is Sin?

Sin is the condition or act by which a human person produces evil. Evil is suffering produced by either sin, disease, or accident. Suffering that leads to death and loss of relationship to God is the ultimate evil. The classic Christian list of seven deadly sins includes pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. Islam, led by the Qur'han, sees sin in terms of pride and opposition to God. Iblis or Satan provided the model for human sinning when he refused to obey God's command to prostrate himself before Adam. In an ancient Hindu-Buddhist myth of the fall a primordial disembodied mind living in the golden age descends into a physical body where desire, lust, passion, and covetousness prevail. Others follow, souls taking on flesh. Greed leads to stealing and violence, and the human soul becomes trapped in a physical world of temporal temptation from which it longs to escape to eternity.

Phenomenologically, evil is first experienced biologically as suffering. The most primitive awareness of sin takes the form of defilement, of external contamination deriving from physical contact with what is profane. Rituals of cleansing, usually with water, become the liturgical means for ridding the sinner of defilement. When this becomes internalized, defilement is associated with physical passions welling up from within, with carnal desires that tempt by threatening to overwhelm the rational mind by chaotic passion. Fleshly desires become identified with the lower nature, while mind or soul or spirit becomes identified with the higher nature. The higher nature is where the human will is lodged, and the highest form of sin is a freely willed act of evil.

The Hebrew and Christian scriptures advance no theory of sin, yet examples of sinning abound. Sins corrupt a person's whole heart, and total corruption requires total transformation or renewal by an act of divine grace. Sin applies to the individual heart as well as to a people or nation, warranting transformation of all things into a new creation.

Twentieth-century theologians and psychologists tended to associate the origin of sin with anxiety, anxiety understood existentially as feeling threatened by loss, threatened by dissolution into nonbeing. Death is nonbeing to a human, and the threat of death triggers in the human psyche a panic impulse to steal what it can from the imagined life force. In the moral sphere the pursuit of virtue becomes sinful, as those fleeing anxiety engage in self-justification and scapegoating. To define oneself as virtuous simultaneously requires assigning responsibility for the evil in the world to someone else, usually an enemy; this provides justification for decimating the enemy through gossip, lawsuits, war, or genocide.

Some religious theories associated with sin have been challenged during the era of modern science. The biblical story of Adam and Eve in paradise falling into sin, for example, has long been considered a historical event in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though interpreted quite differently. With the rise of evolutionary theory and deep time, the idea of a single pair of human progenitors has lost scientific credibility. No sinless paradise would be possible according to evolutionary theory because natural selection and survival of the fittest would necessarily apply at the point of origin. This dilemma has left theologians with two options. One is to deny acceptance to evolutionary theory, the path taken by scientific creationists in American Christianity and fundamentalist Muslims in Turkey. The other is to admit evolutionary theory and deny historicity to the Garden of Eden, the path followed by liberal Protestant Christian and Jewish commentators who see the Adam and Eve story as a myth describing everyday human activity.

A second challenge is indirect, the challenge to human free will from biological reductionism in genetics. During the era of the Human Genome Project, public belief in the determining power of DNA grew, and molecular biologists began to assign genes for not only physical traits but also predispositions to behavior. Antisocial behavior such as a propensity toward alcoholism, aggression, and violence were postulated as genetic in origin, as was homosexuality. Sociobiologists added the idea of the selfish gene, the principle that genes employ human bodies and human culture to insure their own replication through reproductionheir version of survival of the fittest. The fittest are those genes that bring their hosts to reproductive age. This idea allegedly explains why families and clans protect their own kin and are willing to prosecute war or even genocide against others. Moral behavior and religious practices became explainable as the result of genetic expression. Some scientists began to claim they had produced a biological explanation for original sin in the sense of an inherited propensity to survive to reproductive age even if it means perpetrating violence against genetic competitors.

The naturalistic question arises here for theologians. If theological interpretations of sin are compossible with genetic or other forms of biological determinism, one needs to ask: If something is natural is it good? If a doctrine of creation asserts that what exists presently in nature is due to God's will, then biological impulses even toward aggressive behavior must become normative. This is a theological version of what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy: What is is what ought to be. However, much of traditional spirituality in Asia as well as the West has regarded human biological makeup as the source of misleading desire and dangerous passion; biological determinism would only increase religious resolve to pit the power of the spirit over the power of the flesh.