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Sin and Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Roger Trigg
Roger Trigg
Affiliation:
Reader in Philosophy, University of Warwick
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Extract

What is the relationship between the concept of sin and that of freedom? There is a powerful tradition in European thought linking the idea of moral evil with human freedom. Only with a broadening of consciousness, with the awareness of alternative possibilities, did man become able to choose between good and evil, and was responsible for that choice. The myth of the Fall, it seems, shows that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil gave man the ability to sin, because the awareness of alternatives allowed man to pursue one rather than the other. Without that freedom thus acquired man was innocent and incapable of moral evil.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 191 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

page 191 note 1 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, transl. by Greene, T. M. and Hudson, H. H. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 30.Google Scholar

page 192 note 1 Op. cit. p. 26.Google Scholar

page 192 note 2 The Concept of Anxiety, transl. Thomte, R. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton U.P. 1980), p. 58.Google Scholar

page 192 note 3 Op. cit. p. 36.Google Scholar

page 192 note 4 Op. cit. p. 39.Google Scholar

page 193 note 1 Forty-four Sermons, Sermon XXXVIII, ‘Original Sin’ (originally published 1760).Google Scholar

page 194 note 1 Op.cit. p. 35.Google Scholar

page 195 note 1 The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, III.: Northwestern U.P., 1974), p. 284.

page 195 note 2 Op. cit. p. 282.

page 196 note 1 Op. cit. p. 286.

page 199 note 1 Op. cit. p. 76.

page 199 note 2 Op. cit. p. 40.

page 201 note 1 See my book, The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of Sociobiology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).