Notes on sin – hamartia

Thomas

Thomas

So it goes ...
Veteran Member
Messages
14,959
Reaction score
4,640
Points
108
Location
London UK
The Greek noun hamartia and the verb hamartanō appear more than 200 times in the New Testament.

Hamartia makes an appearance in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, where it means “to miss the mark.” An arrow that missed the target or a spear thrust that failed to land would be a hamartia.

In classical Greek the term broadened its scope to cover a multitude of failures ... yo make a mistake, to miss an opportunity, a failure to reach a goal. It usually was the result of ignorance, rather than perversity, and could cover anything from that did not conform to the behavioural moral norms of society.

Classical Greek does not explicitly imply any kind of moral dimension to hamartia.

The Old Testament brought a whole new dimension to sin, that of an offense against God.

In the New Testament, hamartia became entwined with the idea of repentance. Jesus preached repentance as a prerequisite for the forgiveness of sin.

"The next day, John saw Jesus coming to him, and he saith: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin (hamartia of the world." (John 1:29)

"Afterwards, Jesus findeth him in the temple, and saith to him: Behold thou art made whole: sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee." (John 5:14)

Jesus is quite caustic when challenged:
"Again, therefore, he (Jesus) said to them, “I am going and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin; where I am going you are not able to come.” ... And he said to them, “You are from that which is below, I am from that which is above; you are from this cosmos, I am not from this cosmos. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins, for if you do not have faith that I AM, you will die in your sins.” (John 8:21-24)

There's more in the same vein.

In Christian usage, the term has progressed beyond its original Homeric understanding, and to try and read it back into that entails considerable textual anomalies and renders much of what is said nonsense ... unless God punishes people for making a simple and innocent mistake.
 
“No. I don’t think sin is completely accounted for by faulty reasoning nor that it can be completely cured by re-education. That view has, indeed, been put forward: by Socrates and, in the early 19th Century, by Godwin.

But I think it overlooked the (to me) obviously central fact that our will is not necessarily determined by our reason. If it were, then, as you say, what are called ‘sins’ would not be sins at all but only mistakes, and would require not repentances but merely correction...

People – you and I among them – constantly choose between two courses of action the one which we know to be the worse: because, at the moment, we prefer the gratification of our anger, lust, sloth, greed, vanity, curiosity or cowardice, not only to the known will of God but even to what we know will make for our own real comfort and security. If you don’t recognise this, then I must solemnly assure you that either (you) are an angel, or else are still living in ‘a fool’s paradise’: a world of illusion...

But we know that some of our own acts have sprung from evil will (proud, resentful, cowardly, envious, lascivious or spiteful will) although we knew better, and that what we need is not – or not only – re-education but repentance, God’s forgiveness, and His Grace to help us to do better next time. Until one has faced this fact one is a child.”
C. S. Lewis, Letter to Elsie Snickers, May18, 1952.
 
Romans 5:12
KJV: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:"

DouayRheims Catholic Bible: "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned."

DBH: "Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned."

Hart's analysis of the text:
A fairly easy verse to follow until one reaches the final four words, whose precise meaning is already obscure, and whose notoriously defective rendering in the Latin Vulgate (in quo omnes peccaverunt) constitutes one of the most consequential mistranslations in Chistian history...

Typically, as the pronoun seems to be dative masculine, it might be referred back to the most immediate prior masculine noun, which in this case is thanatos, “death,” and would be taken to mean that the consequence of death spreading to all human beings is that all became sinners. If the pronoun is taken instead as neuter dative, then the phrase would be read as relative to the preceding clause or clauses, which would yield the same reading.

The standard Latin version of the verse makes either reading impossible, for two reasons: first it retains the apparent masculine gender of the pronoun (quo) but renders thanatos the feminine noun mors, thus severing any connection that Paul might have intended between them; second, it uses the preposition in, which when paired with the ablative means “within” Hence what became the standard reading of the verse in much of Western theology after the late fourth century: “in whom [ie Adam] all sinned”. (underline mine)

This is the locus classicus of the Western Christian notion of original guilt—the idea that in some sense all human beings had sinned in Adam, and that therefore everyone is born already damnably guilty in the eyes of God—a logical and moral paradox that Eastern tradition was spared by its reliance on the original Greek.

Paul speaks of death and sin as a kind of contagion here, a disease with which all are born; and elsewhere he describes it as a condition like civil enslavement to an unjust master, from which we ‘must be “redeemed” with a manumission fee; but never as an inherited condition of
criminal culpability.

It has become more or less standard to render é as “inasmuch as” or “since,” thus suggesting that death spread to all because all sinned. But this reading seems problematic too: not only does it evacuate the rest of the verse of its meaning, but it is contradicted just below by v.14, where Paul makes it clear that the universal reign of death takes in both those who have sinned and those who have not...

The most obvious and, I think, likely reading is that, in this verse, a parallelism (something for which Paul has such a marked predilection) is given in a chiastic form: just as sin entered into the cosmos and introduced death into all its members, so the contagion of death spread into the whole of humanity and introduced sin into all its members. This, as we see in Romans and elsewhere, is for Paul the very dynamism of death and sin that is reversed in Christ: by his triumphant righteousness he introduced eternal life into the cosmos, and so as that life spreads into the whole of humanity it makes all righteous (as in Romans 5:15-19, or as in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28).
 
Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware:

... As a Christian in the tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, I cannot accept any worldview that identifies God with the universe, and for that reason I cannot be a pantheist. But I find no difficulty in endorsing panentheism – that is to say, the position which affirms, not "God is everything and everything is God," but "God is in everything and everything is in God." God, in other words, is both immanent and transcendent; present in all things. He is at the same time above and beyond them all. It is necessary to emphasize simultaneously both halves of the paradox beloved of the poet Charles Williams: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou."

The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds a "distinction-in-unity" between God's ousia (essence) and His energeia (energies).

"In His essence, God is infinitely transcendent, radically unknowable, utterly beyond all created being, beyond all understanding and all participation from the human side. But, in His energies, God is inexhaustibly immanent, the core of everything, the heart of its heart, closer to the heart of each thing than is that thing's very own heart. These divine energies ... are not an intermediary between God and the world, not a created gift that He bestows upon us, but they are God Himself in action; and each uncreated energy is God in His indivisible totality, not a part of Him but the whole."

"Nature is sacred. The world is a sacrament of the divine presence, a means of communion with God. The environment consists not in dead matter but in living relationship. The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of divine power and glory"

Through Creation to the Creator, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia (emphasis mine)
 
Thomas said:
The Old Testament brought a whole new dimension to sin, that of an offense against God.
Click to expand...
That whole concept eludes me...

Thomas said:
you are from this cosmos, I am not from this cosmos.
Click to expand...
Not from this universe...hmmmm..

For me, I don't desire to focus on the sin, or the sinner....but learn to hone my ability to forgive.
 
wil said:
My view exactly...
Click to expand...
Knowing as we do the enormity of harm people can do to other people, to animals, to cultures, to objects of value, or to the environment, is it really so elusive to think there might be some kind of transgression? Violations of rights or lives or property is not in some fashion condemnable, and to be regarded as a sin? Like when someone does great harm to others, or to many others, do not not ever say "Oh now I see it. Now that I see the great destruction and cruelty so and so did, I can see what is meant by sin" ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top