Question Of Sin Research Articles

죄는 유전되는가?: 진화와 원죄에 대한 프레드릭 테넌트의 논의

Evolutionary theory questioned Adam’s historicity, his Fall, and the doctrine of original sin. Frederick Tennant was a pioneering theologian who, accepting the achievement of natural science, sought to provide a new explanation for the origin of sin. He found it inappropriate to give a moral judgement on the animal nature of human beings which was the result of the evolutionary process. According to him, committing sin is not the necessary consequence of the corrupted human nature, but sin happens becuase the moral consciousness, which gradually appears in human experience, fails to animal instincts. What Tennant sought was not the destruction of the Christian faith, but the rebuilding of the Christian knowledge in accordance with the modern academic achievement. He emphasised that his theory was not connected with the fundamental contents of the Christian faith, because apart from the question of sin’s origin, the universality of actual sin is the sufficient basis of the gospel of redemption. Tennant’s view reminds that human knowledge of the revelation progresses as that of the world does.

Thomas Carlyle and Stoicism

AbstractRecent studies have pointed to the importance of Thomas Carlyle’s engagement with classical thought, especially Epicureanism and Cynicism. However, in these recent studies, Carlyle’s debts to Stoicism have received only passing attention. Previous scholars hardly considered the question at all, and those who did argued that Carlyle could never have accepted the passive withdrawal and indifference of the Stoics. By way of corrective, the current article offers a comprehensive account of Carlyle’s engagement with Stoicism, showing that he subscribed to an active interpretation of the latter that emphasized will, duty, and heroic action. Indeed, contemporaries were well aware of Carlyle’s debts to Stoicism, pointing out that his thought stood in stark contradiction to Christian doctrines of original sin. Thus, while Carlyle’s Stoicism was compatible with his hereditary Calvinism insofar as divine providence and duty were concerned, there was a significant contradiction regarding the question of sin. In this sense, Carlyle’s Stoicism made an important contribution to the ‘meliorist’ revolt against orthodox Christianity.

On the Question of Sin: Stalin and Human Nature

This article deals with one aspect of Joseph Stalin’s unrecognised contribution to redefining human nature. The larger whole of such a redefinition was what may be called an Augustinian awareness of the depth and pervasiveness of evil. The specific aspect on which I focus is the question of sin within that larger whole. The key distinction concerning sin is between the detection of sin in others and in oneself. While the former was relatively easier, the internal process was the more difficult, for it entailed the need for ‘criticism and self-criticism’ – that is, admission, confession, repentance and, where necessary, punishment. The surprise of this emphasis, in which sin is understood in relation to the socialist project and the party, is that the personal dimension of sin was a new departure in a Russian Orthodox context, providing one element of the development of a socialist counter-tradition. The focus of this study is relatively rare in our times: careful and detailed attention to Stalin’s texts and thought.

Placing Sin in Karl Rahner’s Theology

Karl Rahner is seldom viewed as a theologian of sin: precisely the contrary. A recent book by Emmie Ho-Tsui (published in Austria, 2011) reopens the question of sin’s place in Rahner’s works. This article reports on Ho-Tsui’s book and carries her inquiry forward, with special focus on Rahner’s studies on penance and with a renewed look at his idea of the fundamental option. Rahner recovers the ancient idea of penance as reconciliation with the church, implying that sin can be best understood in terms of the break from and return to ecclesial communion. Rahner’s insistence that human persons can pronounce a definitive ‘no’ to God affirms sin’s reality, thus the need for ecclesial reconciliation. Taken together, his penance studies and thoughts on the fundamental option comprise an agenda for articulating the radical mercy that the church is called to—but often does not—enact.

Sin and Natural Theology: An Augustinian Framework Beyond Barth

AbstractThis article focuses on the question of sin in the context of natural theology‚ in light of the Barth/Brunner debate. A contemporary notion of sin would benefit from Barth’s approach, but shorn of his strict doctrine of sin as nothingness (‘Nichtiges’). Brunner holds to the Augustinian tradition’s claim that sin is a paradox by distinguishing between the formal and material in the

The Gift of Debt: Agnon's Economics of Money, God and the Human Other

Money, gifts, and debts play a crucial role in Agnon’s first novella, Vehaya he’akov lemishor (And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight; 1912), which tells the story of the bankruptcy of middle-class shopkeepers Menasheh Ḥayim and his wife Kreindel Tcharni in mid–nineteenth-century Galicia. Following Nietzsche’s claim of the internalization of debt as the origin of monotheist religion, I read Agnon’s novella as the literary construction of an analogy between capitalism and religious faith as two economic systems of debt and credit, destined for crisis. Framed this way, Menasheh Ḥayim’s subsequent journey as a beggar brings up questions of sin, responsibility, and the hierarchy of monetary and divine debts. Whereas Menasheh Ḥayim’s life is constructed via debts to external authorities, his death exchanged for his wife’s life underscores that the debt to the human other functions in Agnon’s novella as a gift which bypasses the economy of debt and credit. Read this way, Menasheh Ḥayim’s death for an other against the demands of an external authority becomes a critique of both the traditional and modern Jewish subject, constituted through debt to religion or its modern substitutes such as capitalism or Zionism.

Communicating with Sufferers: Lessons from the Book of Job

This article looks at the question of sin and disease in bioethics with a spiritual-theological analysis from the book of Job. The biblical figure Job is an innocent and just man who suffered horrendously. His dialogues with others—his wife, his friends, and God—can give many valuable insights for patients who suffer and for those who interact with them. Family, friends, physicians, nurses, chaplains, and pastoral workers can learn from Job how to communicate properly with sufferers. The main question for Job was how to maintain the tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy and not yield to the temptation of cursing God but to speak well of Him in moments of difficulties.

The Theological Concept of YHWH’s Punitive Justice in the Hebrew Bible: Historical Development in the Context of the Judean Community in the Persian Period

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the issue of the relationship between individual and community, and guilt and punishment arising therefrom is one of the most important topics. The texts upon which this paper is based present sections touching upon the question of sin and its consequences for the righteous, as well as for the wicked. This analysis positions that inquiry, based upon the focus in Gen 18, within the larger context arising from the ancient Israelite tradition. Gen 18:22b-33a mirrors the idea that God tolerates or forgives the guilt of a community because of the righteous individuals within that community. The concept of YHWH’s punitive justice in the Hebrew Bible indicates historical progress which reflects the socio-economic as well as demographic context. After exhaustive analysis of Gen 18:22b-33a, the author opines that the logical implication can be drawn that the historical situation of the Judean community in Persian era Palestine required protection of the righteous, not punishment of the sinner.

My Body is a Testimony: Appearance, Health, and Sin in an Evangelical Weight-loss Program

Christian weight loss programs in the United States are significant sites of evangelical negotiation between cultural distinction and cultural participation. First Place, a Christian weight loss program sponsored in churches across the country, both appropriates dominant American concerns about health and fears of obesity, and reinscribes them in a cultural context that gives religious meaning to this seemingly worldly pursuit. The author, basing herself on qualitative research, examines three critical areas in which First Place distinguishes itself from its secular counterparts and renders weight loss a spiritually significant task: motivation for weight loss, the problem of physical appearance, and the question of sin. The author argues that First Place is an example of both evangelical submission to and cultivation of cultural capital and symbolic power.

SIN AND ITS RELEVANCE TO HUMAN NATURE IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

The question of sin in Aquinas's Surnma Theologiae is an unusual one, for unlike the systematic treatment of other topics, such as virtue or happiness, sin remains an ambiguous concept throughout the work. In certain places, Thomas speaks of sin in the theological concepts of the Patristic tradition as a violation of God's law or as a rupture in the proper relationship between God and the believer. In others, he uses a discourse in keeping with Classical philosophy's notion of vice to describe sin as an act contrary to the dictates of reason. While the two perspectives are not completely opposed, Aquinas's use of both results in sin's nature never being adequately defined as a single reality in the Summa and thus raises the question, not only how best to understand sin, but what a philosophical or theological understanding of sin might imply for Aquinas's ethical system as a whole. The ambiguity of sin reflects a tension within Thomas's thought between the theological and philosophical sources on which he bases his theory. In particular, Aquinas's seeming inability to reconcile the two perspectives reveals his divergence from Augustine's assumptions about human nature as thoroughly corrupt, and thus marks a necessary departure from the Patristic tradition for the development of Thomas's virtue ethic founded upon the belief in the essential goodness of human nature. An examination of the concept of sin in the Summa therefore does not yield a definitive answer to the question of Aquinas's operative understanding of the term, but it does point to his tendency to favor a philosophical approach, when read in the light of his fundamental beliefs about human nature.

The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination

This text covers the earliest Jewish and Christian readings of the story of Adam and Eve. For these ancient interpreters, the tale of human beings cannot be understood outside the larger context of Scriptures' drama about our common human destiny. Creation and redemption are ultimately inseparable. The perspectives of Judaism and Christianity about our common human condition - the problem of evil, the nature of sexuality and the question of sin and forgiveness - are illustrated in this text through an examination of the biblical text that allows the story of Genesis to intersect with each of our own stories.

Pour une dogmatique de l'acte de la création

The author poses the question of the compatibility between cosmological and philosophical assertions concerning the creation of the world. He proposes as a reply the dogmatics of creation which starts from the original act of God's will who, in the creating word of the Logos, creates the world in its dynamic nature with, as its finality, the existence of man, logos of God in the creation. The author deals with space, time, geometry and the «legality» of the world with respect to the singular act of creation and with respect to the freedom of God. This justifies the necessity of incorporating in dogmatics the question of sin, which is the possibility of the dynamic nature of the world, and beauty, the beauty of the created world and the beauty created the man, which brings one back to the question of freedom.

Sexism as Original Sin

CHRISTIAN FEMINIST THEOLOGIANS have received negative assessments of their treatment of sin. A mild criticism holds that feminists are relatively inattentive to topic of sin because they are preoccupied with valorizing women's experience (Yeager). A more severe analysis charges that because of an obsession with the promotion of full humanity of women, feminists are narcissistic and risk self-deception on question of sin; they identify sin in patriarchy but refuse to apply it to women (Stroup). Christian feminist theology has not always effectively challenged these persistent criticisms. As Rosemary Ruether suggests, feminists have had a strong aversion to topic of sin because of special way Christian tradition associates sin with women (72-115, 160, 165-183). Close arguments on behalf of feminist positions on sin are very much in order. In contrast to criticisms sketched above, I hold that Christian feminist discourse about sin is constructive. It offers an important contribution to our theological understanding of historically specific forms of human waywardness, not simply of one kind of sin (sexism). To make my case, I begin with a proposal about nature of discourse in order to show strengths and weaknesses of feminist accounts of sin.