By
Job Ayuba, 28th December, 2016
Sin-talk,
or discussion on sin, is always done in connection with other themes in
theology because sin is a contingent phenomenon. To identify the nature of sin,
an excursion has to be taken into the terrains of creation, theological
anthropology, and theological ethics. There is sin because there is the
sovereign will of God and personal autonomy of human beings.
In
moral terms, sin is an act that is bad or immoral. To conceive of sin as a
moral category we must have an idea of what we mean by bad. Bad is the negation
of goodness, thus a synonym for evil. Good is a quality of being, for it is
only a thing that exists that can be said to be good or bad. Things are good by
the very fact of their existence. For a thing to exist implies that it is good.
That goodness is derived from their createdness – the creator is supremely good
and He bestows the quality of goodness on the creation.
At
the heart of the idea of goodness is desirability. To say a thing is good is to
imply it is desired or desirable. There are three senses of being good (goodness):
1) useful, 2) pleasurable, and 3) moral. A thing is useful if it serves as a
means to an end, or to a purpose. It is pleasurable when it brings pleasure and
satisfaction. It is moral when it conforms to the order of right reason. The
concepts of end (telos, purpose),
satisfaction, and right reason are to be understood theologically or as use in
classical philosophical tradition. We can go further from the idea that things
are good because they are created by the supremely good God to establish that
things possess inherent goodness, implying usefulness and capable of giving
satisfaction when rightly appropriated.
But
this inherent goodness or quality of goodness is in degrees. It can be
diminished and augmented. A thing is good to the degree of its completeness or
capability to serve its end or give satisfaction. Diminution of this quality of
inherent goodness is what constitutes as badness or evil. Augustine of Hippo
wrote, “When … a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is,
by just so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the
good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding
diminution of the good.”[i]
There are two
senses of goodness: physical goodness and moral goodness. Physical goodness is
the quality of a thing which is complete – it has completeness of its
properties. All things are good, or possess the quality of goodness, simply
because they exist. But a thing can exist without possessing being to a level
it ought to have for it to be described as having physical goodness. This
possession of being as it ought to have is called completeness and is called
physical goodness. Moral goodness is attained through the exercise of the gift
of free will or power of choice. It is the realization of inherent human capacity
or potentials. Therefore, humans are created and endowed with physical goodness
so that they can attain moral goodness. They started good (physically, or
essentially) and are to end good (morally) by realizing their inherent created potentials.
The failure to use their essential endowment to attain the good is the nature of
moral evil.
Evil
can be moral or natural. It is natural evil when there is no direct or
immediate human causality and moral evil when there is human causality and
blameworthiness (human responsibility). Evil is a quality of a thing that
exists. It cannot be conceived as an independent phenomenon. It is a quality of
existence. Thus, evil cannot be conceived in the abstract. Evil can be talked
about in concrete categories like evil things, evil experience, evil acts, or
bad things, bad experiences, and bad acts.
Evil
understood as the privation of the good, and as a quality of things that exist,
we can then conclude that there cannot be a thing that is wholly and totally
evil. Evil exists in degrees in things, but the things themselves are essentially
good. From the three senses of goodness, we can describe moral evil as an act
that does not serve to realize the end of human existence, that does not result
in human happiness, and that does not conforms to right reason.
The
Christian doctrine of total depravity captures this idea of essential goodness
and human sinfulness. Total depravity or sinfulness of humanity means the human
person is so affected by sin that every of its action is tainted and affected
by sin. The doctrine then does not teach that people are as sinful or evil as
they could ever be but that they are affected in every dimension of personhood
by sin. They are living in a situation or condition refers to as the original
sin; it is a state or way of being. Created free, with a free will, humans were
not created to incline to do either good or evil. They were instructed by God
to freely do the good and avoid evil. To have an inclination or tendency is not
to be free. But that freedom was lost by Adam’s free decision to do evil. Humans
now have a tendency to sin and have lost the power and freedom of choice.
The primary
obligation of humans in the creational order is to understand how to determine
between good and evil and do the good. Doing good means acting in accordance
with creational order, which itself is in consonance with the nature of God. Humans
are created essentially good (physically) because they were created with the
completeness to do the good and to avoid evil. Human being as a free being is
not conditioned to act in any particular way; they were only given instructions
that will foster the creational order. The law was given to help humans know
what is evil, and by obeying the law they will avoid doing evil. This is seen
in the Garden of Eden where the only law God gave the first humans is not to
eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2.17). Paul wrote,
“If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin” (Romans 7.7). He
also said the law was given for transgression (Galatians 3:19) and as our
guardian (Galatians 3.24).
Sin
is an anti-God disposition. Also, it is a quality of a particular human act and
the state (situation, condition) that produces the particular human act. Human unique
contribution to creation is in the exercise of their free will – in the choices
they make. From that choices proceed good and evil. Therefore, God is not
responsible for moral evil or sin and sin is not inevitable to humans. For sin
is not a necessary consequence of human freedom but a contingent consequence
with human free decision breaking the connection between God and the act
thereby making humans responsible for the act. Human action is a reality
because human free will was exercise. The action constitutes a sin because it
fails to attain goodness. A sinner is a human being in revolt against God;
human being who declared independence from God. The possibility of sin is there
because our fundamental way of being in the world has being altered or
distorted. Humans commit particular acts of sin because they are in a distorted
condition of being or situation of sin.
Humans
are sinners because they have inherit the sin of Adam in the form of guilt and have
been communicated a tendency to sin. The tendency, or predisposition, to sin is
a result of the loss of human freedom. Sin is not in the proper nature of
humans. The tendency to sin is a distortion of the nature of humans. Thus, the
sin problem consists of inherited guilt of Adam, a condition of sin, and particular
actual sins. Jesus died to free us from that original guilt of Adam that we
share by inheritance and to make it possible for us to receive a new nature
through a new birth to address the problem of our tendency to sin.
[i]
Saint Augustine,
Handbook on Faith, Hope,
and Love, 13.