Sin (Condition that is not simply)

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

a condition that is not simply moral evil as recognized by the awakened human conscience, but guilt before God or the gods. Some doctrine of sin, and of the mode of averting the anger of the deity, of reconciling Him, and of escaping from the guilt, is accordingly part of most religions, ancient and modern. Zoroastrianism is a conflict of sin and holiness. The central doctrine of Buddhism turns on the demerit of human actions and human life, which must be purged by transmigration. But in no sacred books is the sense of sin so keen and developed as in the Bible in the writings of the prophets of the God of holiness, in the Psalms, in the Gospels, and in Paul's epistles. Throughout the the Scriptures sin appears as that element in man which puts him at enmity with God, and for his salvation requires the work of a Redeemer (see CHRISTIANITY). The early Greek fathers regarded sin as opposition to the will of God, and as such involving death as its just penalty. But they did not affirm that the guilt of Adam's sin or the corruption of his nature descended to all mankind. Tertullian, in virtue of his doctrine of TRADUCIANISM (q. v.), was bound to hold that sinfulness had been propagated from Adam to his descendants. But it was reserved for Augustine to ma maintain, against Pelagius, that Adam's sin completely corrupted his whole nature; that the corruption of his his children. PELAGIUS (q. v.) maintained contrary doctrines, and semi-pelagianism insists that in spite of of the weakening of his powers through hereditary sinfulness man is yet not wholly inclined to evil. The Greek Church continued to deny hereditary guilt, and to affirm man's will as free as Adam's before the fall. Thomas Aquinas taught that hereditary sin is truly sin, and the unbaptized infant is damned. At the Reformation both Luther and Calvin asserted what they regarded as Augustinian and Pauline views. Zwingli looked on hereditary sin as an inherited evil or disease; Arminians and Socinians practically denied hereditary sin altogether. In modern German speculation the Hegelians taught that sin was a necessary condition of the development of mankind. The doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles (Art. ix.) is as follows: "Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk); but of the naof it is the fault and corruption ture of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to ev evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." The Westminster Confession teaches (chap. vi.): "By this sin" (i. e., the eating of the forbidden fruit) "they" (i. e., our first parents) "fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions." Sins have been divided into categories, as sins of omission and of commission, deliberate voluntary sins and involuntary sins, sins of infirmity, etc.