The evolution of sin: Sin, theistic evolution, and the biological question---a theological account.

摘要

Theistic evolutionists, especially those in the science-and-theology field, have done more than any other group to wrestle with the challenges that evolutionary biology presents to the doctrine of sin. Their work deserves our attention and admiration. Christian theology can learn from questions that are being raised about our biological condition since these have often been ignored or superficially treated in standard formulations of the doctrine of sin. The thesis of this dissertation, however, is that the majority of proposals by theistic evolutionists to reinterpret key elements of the doctrine of sin either ignore or significantly misrepresent the canonical witness and the consensus of the catholic tradition. In the first place, mainstream theistic evolutionists deny the doctrine of Adam's fall (originating sin); in the second place, the doctrine of originated (or inherited) sin has been increasingly recast as a thesis about biology, or less provocatively, as a thesis about the interaction between biology and the environment; in the third place, there is a widespread rejection of anthropological dualism within the academy in favor of monistic accounts of the human constitution. On each of these fronts, the doctrine of sin firmly resists attempts at biological assimilation and scientific revision. In critical dialogue with the key representatives in the academic discipline of science-and-theology, I argue instead that a constructive, but not uncritical, retrieval of the Augustinian doctrine of sin, sensitive to theological questions raised by modern biology, provides a far more compelling account of sin for a post-Darwinian age.