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). 

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).

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