A sin is a lack of conformity to, or transgression of, a law believed to have divine sanction. Some doctrine of sin and of reconciling the deity is part of most religions. Zoroastrianism premises a conflict of sin with holiness. The central doctrine of Buddhism turns on the demerit of human actions, which must be purged by transmigration.
In no sacred books is the sense of sin so developed as in the Bible. Throughout the Scriptures sin appears as that element in man which puts him at enmity with God, and requires the work of a Redeemer.
It was not till the controversies between Pelagius and Augustine, at the end of the 4th century, that the doctrine of sin received full development. The early Greek fathers regarded sin as opposition to the will of God, and as such involving death. But they did not affirm that the guilt of Adam's sin or the corruption of his nature descended to all mankind. Tertullian, in his doctrine of Traducianism, held that sinfulness had been propagated from Adam. But it was reserved for Augustine to maintain, against Pelagius, that Adam's sin completely corrupted man's whole nature; that his guilt and its penalty pass to all his children; that man is born in a state of sin; and that in virtue of Adam's peccatum originale, the offspring of Adam is a massa perditionis, incapable of satisfying God, and naturally disposed to pursue evil only. Pelagius maintained contrary doctrines, and semi-pelagianism insists that in spite of the weakening of his powers through hereditary sinfulness man is yet not wholly inclined to evil. The Greek Church continued to affirm man's will as free as Adam's before the fall. Duns Scotus admitted that man had lost by Adam's fall justitia originalis, but laid stress on the freedom of the will. Thomas Aquinas taught that the unbaptized infant is damned. At the Reformation both Luther and Calvin asserted what they regarded as Augustinian and Pauline views. Zwingli looked on sin as an inherited disease; Arminians and Socinians denied hereditary sin altogether. In German speculation, the Hegelians taught that sin was a necessary condition of the development of mankind; and Schleiermacher that the sinful state of man was a disturbance of his nature.
