Five problems for the moral consensus about sins

Abstract

A number of Christian theologians and philosophers have been critical of overly moralizing approaches to the doctrine of sin, but nearly all Christian thinkers maintain that moral fault is necessary or sufficient for sin to obtain. Call this the "Moral Consensus." I begin by clarifying the relevance of impurities to the biblical cataloguing of sins. I then present four extensional problems for the Moral Consensus on sin, based on the biblical catalogue of sins: (1) moral overdemandingness, (2) agential unfairness, (3) moral repugnance, and (4) moral atrocity. Next, I survey several partial solutions to these problems, suggested by the recent philosophical literature. Then I evaluate two largely unexplored solutions: (a) genuine sin dilemmas and (b) defeasible sinfulness. I argue that (a) creates more problems than it solves and that, while (b) is wellmotivated and solves or eases each of the above problems, (b) leaves many biblical ordinances about sin morally misleading, creating (5) a pedagogical problem of evil. I conclude by arguing that (5) places hefty explanatory burdens on those who would appeal to (b) to resolve the four extensional problems discussed in this paper. So Christian thinkers may need to consider a more radical separation of sin and moral fault.Ingolf Dalferth (1984) distinguishes the ontological question 'what is sin?' from the criteriological question 'what is sinful?'. Much theological discourse on the doctrine of sin concerns the ontological question of sin's nature or essence, but recent philosophical discussions of sin have often grappled with the criteriological issue of which acts, attitudes, or states of affairs should count as sinful or fall under sin's extension, whatever sin turns out to be. In this paper, I identify problems that emerge from answers to the criteriological question of how sins are extensionally related to moral faults. My primary aim is to engage critically with recent relevant Englishspeaking philosophical scholarship, so I will not attempt an in-depth historical study of how theologians or philosophers have answered this question throughout the ages, and I will not address cognate theological topics, like soteriology. However, in setting up the problems I discuss, 1 I will refer primarily to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, because these are the primary authoritative canons of texts informing the religious traditions, in which recent English-speaking philosophical discussion of sin has taken place, and because the Christian traditions and their roots in Jewish traditions are the ones I know best.(237), but "sinful acts" is the narrower category, because it includes only conscious, voluntary, blameworthy offences that are objectively against God.Super-Moralists, in contrast, retain Moral Sufficiency while rejecting Moral Necessity, arguing that while all moral faults are sins, some sins are not moral faults. This combination of commitments seems to have been espoused by several prominent theologians. For example, Emil Brunner writes: "It is perfectly possi...

Communal sin, atonement, and group non-agential moral responsibility

“…For instance, Mitchell (1984 deems sin a breach in man's relationship with God, and acknowledges the importance of morality while accommodating for the areas that are not accounted for in that category. A more radical separation between sin and moral wrongdoing is argued for in Ashfeld (2021). 34.…”