IB World Religions 3.1.2. Sin, Atonement, Redemption and Repentance Notes

3.1.2. Sin, Atonement, Redemption and Repentance

Sin and the Fall

1. Christians define sin as rebellion against the will of God, a turning away from God rather than only the breaking of a rule. The New Testament word hamartia is taken from archery and means missing the mark.
2. The one word covers two things the tradition keeps apart. Original sin is the damaged condition Christians hold every person inherits, while actual sin is what a particular person does with it.
3. Genesis 3 supplies the narrative, the disobedience of Adam and Eve, which Christians call the Fall. Some read it as history and others as a story that tells the truth about every life.
4. Paul builds the doctrine in Romans 5, setting Adam against Christ so that what entered the world through one man is undone through another.
5. Augustine of Hippo gave the Western account its shape in the fifth century, arguing against Pelagius that human beings cannot turn towards God unaided.
6. Catholic teaching separates mortal sin, which is grave, knowing and deliberate and breaks the relationship with God, from venial sin, which weakens it without severing it.

Atonement in scripture

1. Atonement is one of the few theological terms coined in English, built from at-one-ment, and it names the restoring of a right relationship between God and humanity.
2. Its background is the Hebrew kippur (covering) and Yom Kippur in Leviticus 16, when the high priest entered the holy place and a goat was driven into the wilderness carrying the people's sins.
3. Christians read the death of Jesus through that background, so the Letter to the Hebrews calls him both the priest who offers and the offering itself.
4. The Gospel of Mark has Jesus say that he came to give his life as a ransom for many, and Paul writes that God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.
5. The Church has never defined how the death of Christ achieves this. Councils fixed the wording on the Trinity and on the person of Christ, and left atonement open.

Models of the atonement

1. Because no definition was ever imposed, Christians explain the cross through several models, and most churches use more than one without ranking them.
2. The ransom model, taught by Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa, holds that Christ's death buys humanity back from the powers holding it. Its modern form, Christus Victor, presents cross and resurrection together as a victory over sin, death and the devil.
3. Anselm of Canterbury set out the satisfaction model in Cur Deus Homo around 1098, arguing that sin dishonours God infinitely and only one both God and man could repay it.
4. The Reformers reshaped this into penal substitution, in which Christ bears the punishment due to sinners. It is central to much evangelical preaching and is the most argued over model today.
5. Peter Abelard proposed the moral influence model, in which the cross changes people by showing the depth of God's love. Liberal Protestant theology has often preferred it.
6. Eastern Orthodox theology leans on recapitulation, the claim that Christ passed through every stage of human life and healed it, and refuses to separate cross from resurrection.

Redemption and the redeemer

1. Redemption means buying back, and the New Testament words lutron (ransom) and apolutrosis (release on payment) come from the slave market and from the freeing of prisoners.
2. Its deeper background is the Exodus, where God is said to redeem Israel out of slavery in Egypt, so the word carries rescue as well as purchase.
3. Hebrew law gave it a family shape in the goel, the kinsman redeemer who buys back a relative's land or freedom, and Christians apply the role to Christ.
4. Christians therefore call Christ the Redeemer, and the title points to his death on the cross as the price at which the release is obtained.
5. The word is heard far more in hymns than in argument. Handel's Messiah sets the line from Job 19 about knowing that a redeemer lives, sung every December by people who would not otherwise use it.

Repentance and forgiveness

1. Repentance is the recognition that a person needs to be saved from sin by God's love, and the New Testament word metanoia means a change of mind that becomes a change of direction. Mark opens the ministry of Jesus with exactly that command, repent and believe the good news.
2. Its Jewish background is teshuvah (return), which frames repentance as coming home rather than as feeling bad.
3. The parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 is the tradition's picture of it, and Christians point out that the father runs to meet the son while he is still rehearsing his speech.
4. Catholic teaching sets out three acts of the penitent, contrition or sorrow with the intention not to sin again, confession, and satisfaction or penance, after which the priest gives absolution.
5. Orthodox Christians confess before an icon of Christ with the priest beside them as a witness, a placing that expresses their view that the forgiveness is God's.
6. Most Protestant churches teach confession made directly to God, keep a general confession in the Sunday service, and treat repentance as a daily habit.

The four words in practice

1. The four terms work as one sequence. Sin names the problem, repentance is the human turn, and atonement and redemption name what Christians hold God has done about it.
2. Congregations rehearse it weekly. Most liturgies move from confession to absolution before anything else, so worshippers say the words aloud before they hear scripture.
3. Lent and Ash Wednesday put the sequence on the calendar, and ashes are traced on foreheads with a reminder of mortality and a call to repent.
4. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches often close a service with an altar call, an invitation to come forward and repent in front of the congregation.
5. Orthodox Christians keep four fasting seasons and pray the penitential canon of Andrew of Crete in Lent, so repentance is measured in weeks rather than moments.
6. Hymns carry the vocabulary furthest of all. Charles Wesley wrote of a ransom in And can it be, and Cecil Frances Alexander wrote of pardon at a green hill in a hymn congregations still know by heart.