With Osipov on sin
Today I am going to look in detail at Eastern Orthodox view of sin, based on Prof. Osipov’s talk entitled “Sin and human nature”.
Osipov begins by pointing out that Eastern Orthodoxy disagrees with Protestant and Catholic view of sin as violation of external God’s law that leads to punishment. Instead, it prefers to see God’s law as the law of the nature of our being and sin as the violation of this nature. So our motivation for avoiding sin should be not the punishment, but understanding that we contradict and damage our own nature.
Then he proceeds discussing three categories of sin:
- Personal sin. This includes sinful attitude inside the person (e.g. covetousness) as well as sinful acts toward others (stealing, murder).
- Inherited sin. The sinful passions we inherit from our parents. Osipov acknowledges that people are already born broken, with sinful desires, some with more, some with less. To Osipov this is common sense - everybody knows that in a criminal family the children often turn to crime. His own opinion is that this is how we are to understand God’s punishing people up to third or fourth generation. Nevertheless, the amount of inherited sin in us has nothing to do with our likelihood of becoming Christian. After all, the way to Christianity is not an absence of sin or sinful desires, it is the ability to see our own sinfulness and desire to overcome it.
- Original sin. Here Osipov’s criticizes the Western view of original sin as our guilt (and corresponding punishment) for Adam’s sin. He also criticizes the view of Jesus’ sacrifice as earning our justification from this guilt and appeasement of God’s wrath. Instead, Eastern view is that it is not the guilt that is transferred to us from Adam but depravity and sickness. We are not guilty of Adam’s sin, we are sick. The death was not the punishment for Adam’s action but a result of the corruption of human nature due to his sin.
What do you think? Which points do you agree with and which do you disagree?If you have an opinion please leave a comment. I will post my own response in a couple of days in a separate post.