SIN AND GRACE (2): NATURE OF SIN

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. 

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[i] Saint Augustine, Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love, 13.