Sin, Biology, and Moral Responsibility

By Hans Madueme

The Christian doctrine of sin implies that human beings are responsible creatures. This overwhelming truth so pervades every book and (possibly) every chapter of the Bible that it hardly needs defense. Sin, of course, is the very reason for the glad tidings of redemption. From the beginning, we sinned by disobeying God’s commandments (Gen. 2:17; 3:1–6), a pattern that has repeated itself every day since that catastrophe in Eden; the apostle John describes sin as lawlessness (1 John 3:4). But elsewhere in the canon, sin is also couched as missing the mark (hamartia), unrighteousness (adikia), ungodliness (asebeia), transgression (parabasis), and so on. Early theologians even tried locating the essence of sin in pride, greed, selfishness, unbelief, and other vices. Nevertheless, Scripture’s different ways of talking about sin agree that it always involves culpability before God (Ps. 51:4). Cornelius Plantinga therefore rightly defines sin as “any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed—or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.”

A theory of the person consistent with the doctrine of sin must include the capacity for what I call moral transcendence. Moral transcendence includes three interrelated features that encapsulate the theory of moral responsibility implicit in Scripture.

First, all sin presupposes the baseline experience of the unity of consciousness and intentionality. The unity of consciousness is my first-person experience of sinning against God: “Against you,” says David, “you only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). The experience of the Holy Spirit convicting of sin is not merely a series of neurons firing, or a complex sequence of brain function; rather, it is fundamentally a supernatural awareness of personal wrongdoing. The knowledge that I stand before God as his creature and that I have sinned against him is a first-person awareness of my unified self, an awareness that cannot be reduced to one or more parts of my body or brain. Intentionality, on the other hand, is a technical philosophical term referring to one aspect of consciousness, the “of-ness” or “about-ness” that we associate with mental states (often referred to as “qualia” by philosophers). Whenever I sin, there is always something I desire, want, or think that I need. Seconds before I decide to speak unkindly to my wife, I may feel the conviction of the Spirit urging me to desist because what I am considering saying to her will displease my heavenly Father. If I ignore that prompting and lash out verbally, I may later reflect on what I have done and feel remorse and perhaps repentance. Thus, every instance of human sinning involves intentionality, an array of mental acts directed at things, other people, and ultimately God.

Second, all sin is responsive to reason, and that presupposes a (nonphysical) mind. Sin always involves intellectual, emotional, or volitional aspects of the human person. We believe the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong ways; we desire things opposed to the will of God and we consciously disobey God even when we know that it displeases him. Scripture, in fact, gives a uniform depiction of human sinning: Eve sinned because “the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Gen. 3:6 NIV). Cain sinned against Abel because he was angry that God preferred Abel’s sacrificial offering to his own (4:2–8). Aaron sinned by making a golden calf because he was persuaded by the Israelites and their desire to have gods like the other nations (Exod. 32:1–24). The Pharisees were hypocrites, not practicing what they preach, because “they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others” (Matt. 23:6–7). Judas betrayed Jesus, at least in part, because there was money to be had (26:14–15).

Throughout Scripture people make moral choices in response to what they perceive as good reasons. The biblical attitude to sin assumes that people are morally responsible to the degree that they think, say, and do things for specific reasons—culpability holds as long as they sin for reasons that they think are compelling (even if divinely determined). This model fits the everyday, common-sense view of moral agency, and it seems extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that a physicalist account of the human person could account for such responsiveness to reasons.

Third, all sin originates from the heart, the moral center of every person. Everybody is guilty of sinning against God, but the doctrine of original corruption goes deeper. In addition to the inevitability of human sinning, Scripture also witnesses to the fact that we enter this world as sinners, each of us possessing a morally corrupt condition that precedes any sins we commit. This original corruption starts from birth (Ps. 51:5; 58:3) and renders us full of evil and deception (Eccles. 9:3), dead in our transgressions and enemies of God (Eph. 2:1–3). Every facet of the human personality, from the soul and mind to emotions and desires, is tainted by depravity; every sinful thought and action is polluted (Matt. 15:16–20; Luke 6:43–44). Furthermore, Scripture frequently locates the origin of sin in the heart—for example, Jeremiah testifies that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Jesus says, “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45 NIV). Anthony Hoekema describes the heart as “a description of the inner core of the person; the ‘organ’ of thinking, feeling, and willing; the point of concentration of all of our functions. In other words, sin has its source not in the body nor in any one of man’s various capacities, but in the very center of his being, in his heart. Since sin has poisoned the very fountain of life, all of life is bound to be affected by it.” According to the testimony of Scripture, we are culpable for any sin that discloses the inner corruption of our hearts.

This disclosive element reflects original sin. God can hold me accountable for a moral state over which I have no control (original corruption) as long as it accurately reflects my current spiritual condition. This way of thinking about responsibility roughly lines up with what some philosophers have dubbed “deep responsibility.” People are blameworthy (that is, deeply responsible) for dispositions and actions that reflect “robust” rather than “mere” ownership. Jesse Couenhoven is worth quoting at length:

I mark the qualitative difference between the two kinds of ownership relevant to a discussion of deep responsibility by speaking of the difference between “mere” and “robust” ownership. Many things that are part of our identities, things that we own, are not attributable to us in such a way that it is fair to blame us for them. For instance, my pale skin might make it easier for me to be sunburned and perhaps to develop skin cancer, but I cannot be blamed for the paleness of my skin because it is a merely biological fact about me. The fact that I worry about giving my students grades they do not deserve reflects my character in a deep way, however, and it is robustly owned.… The idea that we are deeply responsible for what we robustly own, and that robust ownership is of the heart, and what comes from it, makes sense of the idea that only persons can sin: only persons have the hearts that make culpable evil a possibility. It also clarifies why biological conditions like leprosy are not sinful. A person should not be blamed for evils that are not evils of the heart; leprosy, cancer, and the like do not disclose a person’s beliefs and desires, and so they are not things for which a person can be considered culpable (one might be responsible for somehow intentionally contracting leprosy, but that is a separate kind of case).

Sin cannot be biological because we are not deeply responsible for biological facts that are true of us; such biological realities do not disclose our moral core.

— Hans Madueme is professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He previously served as the managing director of the Henry Center for Theological Understanding and the associate director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Madueme is on the editorial board of Themelios and is a senior editor for Sapientia. He is also the coeditor of Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin and Reading Christian Theology in the Protestant Tradition.

image: Noah’s Ark

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Excerpted from Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences by Hans Madueme (Baker Academic, 2024). Used by permission.

“This is a brave and bracing argument for prioritizing dogma over Darwin—and for retaining the doctrine of original sin as essential to biblical realism, coherent systematic theology, and the gospel itself.”

— Kevin J. Vanhoozer, research professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“[T]his intelligent and well-researched book encourages Christians to respect scientific findings, while affirming the epistemic primacy of Scripture in our post-Darwinian age. This book is a gift to the church.”

— Mary Vanden Berg, Calvin Theological Seminary

Find Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences at Baker Academic, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com, and other booksellers.

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