What is Sin, Really? (A Brief History of Sin)

A look at how the idea of “sin” has evolved—from ancient Israel to Jesus, Paul, Augustine, and modern evangelicalism—and why I think forgiveness, not fear, is the better way forward.

This post is part of my “Brief History” series, where I trace one idea from its earliest roots to modern American evangelicalism. Today’s topic: sin.

A Brief History of Sin

I was eight years old when I was told I was a sinner.

And that if I understood what that meant, I’d be going to burn in a literal lake of fire. Unless I believed Jesus was God, said a certain prayer, and was baptized.

So I made sure to do those things real fast.

Sin was a word that has always been with me. It meant my personal failures, my imperfections, my bad thoughts, my sexual impulses, my breaking of rules, my saying curse words — all of it.

It meant I was bad. So bad Jesus had to die for me before I was even born. So bad, even at age eight, I was the problem. And God couldn’t look at me anymore without wanting to punish me forever.

So I got “saved.” My eternity was set.

But I kept sinning. I just felt worse about it.

Maybe that’s familiar.

But it’s fair to ask — where did the idea of sin even come from? Has it always meant what we were told it means? Does that way of thinking make sense or serve us anymore?

Let’s take a brief walk through the history of sin — at least the version most of us evangelical Americans inherited — and see how it got to us.

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The Ancient Roots – Sin as a Collective Problem

In the earliest Hebrew scriptures, sin wasn’t mainly about me. It was about us.

Israel saw itself in a covenant with God — a binding agreement between God and the nation (see Exodus 19–24; Deuteronomy 28). If that covenant was broken, the whole community paid the price. Sin was most often portrayed as communal infidelity to God’s commands, and the consequences were corporate — drought, famine, military defeat, even exile. As scholars like Patrick Miller and Walter Brueggemann have pointed out, the prophets weren’t talking about your private moral slip-ups; they were diagnosing the nation’s unfaithfulness to its calling.

Leaders carried even greater weight. Kings and priests acted as representatives before God. If they sinned, it was considered the sin of the whole people.

The prophetic critiques were almost always systemic. Amos, Isaiah, Micah — they called out idolatry, corruption, and the exploitation of the poor as the true sins of Israel. Amos 2:6–7 doesn’t say, “You thought lustful thoughts” or “You said a bad word.” It says, “They sell the righteous for silver… they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.”

That’s not a personal purity checklist; that’s a diagnosis of national corruption.

Even the rituals made this corporate dimension clear. The Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 was for “the sins of all Israel.” The high priest placed his hands on a scapegoat, symbolically transferring the community’s guilt before sending it away into the wilderness. Even individual offerings (Leviticus 4–5) were part of a legal and ritual system that tied you back into the community’s holiness — you weren’t “getting right with God” alone; you were rejoining the covenant people.

That’s not to say the Bible ignores individual sin. Cain murders Abel. David sleeps with Bathsheba and arranges her husband’s death. Achan steals from Jericho. But notice how often those personal sins ripple outward: Achan’s theft leads to national defeat in battle. David’s census brings a plague on Israel. In this world, even when one person sins, everyone can feel the consequences.

So in the Hebrew Bible, sin was first and foremost a we problem.

And if we didn’t deal with it, everyone suffered. The modern evangelical obsession with my sin, my guilt, and my personal salvation would have felt strange in that ancient world — maybe even unrecognizable.

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The Second Temple Shift – Sin Gets Cosmic

Everything changed after the Babylonian exile.

For generations, the prophets had warned Israel that injustice, idolatry, and covenant-breaking would bring disaster. Then it happened — Jerusalem fell, the temple was destroyed, and the people were dragged off to Babylon. It was the national nightmare come true.

When the exiles finally returned under Persian rule, they didn’t just rebuild the city; they rebuilt their theology. The exile became the lens for understanding sin. If breaking the covenant had led to such total devastation, then sin wasn’t just a personal or local problem — it was a force powerful enough to take down the entire people of God.

Even older stories, like Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, took on fresh resonance in an age when the people of Israel had lived their own story of losing a promised home because of unfaithfulness.

This era also brought a shift in how God was understood.

As I wrote in A Brief History of God, the exile loosened the idea of God (YHWH) as a tribal protector of Israel and recast God as the ruler of all nations. And if God’s reign extended over everyone, then sin could no longer be seen as just Israel’s covenant problem — it became a universal human problem. The nations, too, would be judged for injustice and idolatry. Sin was beginning to look like something embedded in the human condition itself, not just in the history of one people.

This is when you start to see sin woven into a bigger, almost cosmic battle. Apocalyptic writings like Daniel and 1 Enoch reflect a world where spiritual beings, angelic armies, and demonic powers shape history.

The stakes have gone from “make things right with your neighbor” to “the fate of the world hangs in the balance.”

By the Second Temple period, the question isn’t just, How do I get clean so I can approach God? It’s, Can humanity ever escape the grip of sin at all?

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Jesus – Sin and the Kingdom of God

In the centuries after the exile, Israel lived under a revolving door of empires — Persian, Greek, and finally Roman. The temple had been rebuilt, but the prophetic hope for God to set things right still felt unfulfilled. Sin was no longer just a theological category; it was tangled up with national identity, political oppression, and longing for liberation.

Different Jewish groups offered different answers. The Pharisees doubled down on strict Torah observance to keep the nation holy. The Sadducees worked within the temple system and made compromises with Rome. The Essenes withdrew to the desert to form pure communities. The Zealots plotted armed revolt. Everyone agreed Israel’s story wasn’t complete — they just disagreed on how God would finish it.

It’s into this mix that John the Baptist begins preaching his message of repentance, calling people to prepare for God’s kingdom as if it were just around the corner. John’s call to repent treated sin as both an individual turning of the heart and a collective turning of the people back to covenant faithfulness — the whole was renewed one person at a time.

Jesus began as one of John’s disciples before launching his own ministry, picking up that vision and running with it — but reframing the conversation about sin in ways that both echo Israel’s past and challenge its present.

From the best we can tell historically, Jesus still saw sin in largely communal terms. His message of the “kingdom of God” was about the renewal of Israel as a whole, not just the moral improvement of individual souls. But he also personalized it in a way that cut across tribal and purity boundaries. In his kingdom vision, the “community of God” wasn’t just defined by ethnicity or temple access — it was defined by mercy, justice, and inclusion.

That means his view of sin was both less exclusive and more personal at the same time. Sin was still what damaged the life of the people, but it could be confronted in the heart of anyone, anywhere. Injustice, exploitation, hypocrisy, the refusal to love neighbor — these weren’t just national failings; they were human failings, and they could be challenged one table fellowship at a time.

His harshest words were for religious leaders who used God to justify oppression or exclusion. And he regularly extended forgiveness to individuals without requiring the temple’s sacrificial system — something that would have been radical in that context.

When Jesus told someone, “Your sins are forgiven,” he wasn’t just offering private reassurance. He was bypassing the temple’s sacrificial process entirely, declaring that reconciliation with God could happen here and now, without priest, payment, or pilgrimage.

In his world, that was as much about restoring someone to the community as it was about spiritual renewal. It was also a prophetic act — much like Nathan telling David “The Lord has taken away your sin” — signaling that God’s kingdom was breaking in.

While modern Christians are often taught that this meant Jesus was claiming to be God, it’s more historically fair to say he was stepping into the role of God’s prophet or spokesperson with unique authority. Not a direct claim to divinity, but certainly a bold claim to act on God’s behalf — and to circumvent the system entirely. That alone was enough to rattle the religious establishment.

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Paul – Sin as a Power That Enslaves

If Jesus spoke about sin in the language of covenant faithfulness and kingdom renewal, Paul took the conversation into new territory.

Paul still saw sin in terms of relationship to God’s people — he never stopped being a Jew shaped by Israel’s story — but he widened the lens so much that sin became a universal human condition. In Paul’s letters, sin isn’t just the wrong things people do; it’s a power at work in the world, a force that enslaves humanity.

When Paul writes, “All have sinned” (Romans 3:23), many of us who grew up in church were taught to hear it as “every single individual has personally sinned.”

But in context, Paul’s main point isn’t to tally up your personal moral record — it’s to level the playing field between Jews and Gentiles. Both groups, he argues, are under the power of sin and equally in need of God’s rescue.

Paul personifies sin almost like a tyrant or cosmic ruler (Romans 6–8), an enemy from which humanity needs liberation. This framing pulls the problem of sin out of its primarily Jewish context and into the realm of cosmic history. Jesus’ death and resurrection become, for Paul, the decisive victory over this power.

This is not yet Augustine’s original sin — Paul doesn’t say humans inherit Adam’s guilt — but Adam does loom large in his theology. In Romans 5, Paul draws a parallel: just as Adam’s disobedience brought sin and death into the world, Jesus’ obedience brings righteousness and life.

Here, for the fist time, the story of Adam shifts from an ancient Israelite origin tale to a universal explanation for why the whole world is broken.

Paul’s emphasis on faith as the way into this new life means that dealing with sin is no longer tied to temple rituals, ethnic identity, or even direct inclusion in Israel’s covenant. In his view, God is creating a new, multi-ethnic family where the old dividing lines no longer apply — but entry into that family still requires trusting in Christ as the one who has broken sin’s power.

In short, Paul reframes sin from being a covenant violation of one people to being the cosmic plight of all humanity — and frames Jesus not just as Israel’s Messiah, but as the world’s liberator from a universal enemy.

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Augustine and Original Sin

After Paul, the early Christian movement spread across the Roman world, taking root in Greek- and Latin-speaking contexts far removed from first-century Judaism. As the church grew, so did the need to explain the “big picture” of why Jesus’ death and resurrection mattered — not just for Israel’s covenant story, but for every human everywhere.

Paul’s cosmic framing proved incredibly adaptable. In the hands of later thinkers, especially those shaped by Greek philosophy, the Adam-and-Christ parallel in Romans 5 became a way to explain why every single human needs salvation — and why no one can achieve it on their own.

That’s the stage Augustine walked onto in the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

Augustine didn’t invent the idea that Adam’s failure affects all humanity — you can see seeds of it in earlier church fathers. Irenaeus (2nd century) spoke of Adam’s disobedience corrupting human nature but still emphasized human freedom. Tertullian (early 3rd century) suggested the soul is passed from parents to children, providing a way for Adam’s corruption to spread. Cyprian (mid-3rd century) linked infant baptism to removing inherited sin, and Ambrose (4th century) described Adam’s sin as transmitted to all.

What Augustine did was gather these scattered threads and weave them into a comprehensive doctrine: every human is born not only inclined to sin but already guilty because they participated in Adam’s sin. He tied its transmission directly to sexual reproduction, casting a long shadow over Christian views of sexuality. His influence made this the default anthropology of the Western church for the next 1,600 years.

It’s no accident this doctrine solidified just as the church was being co-opted by empire.

If every human is born guilty and helpless to save themselves, then the church becomes the sole dispenser of God’s grace. And in Augustine’s time, that church was deeply entangled with the Roman state. A doctrine of inherited sin pairs neatly with the emerging medieval idea of hell as eternal punishment: salvation is urgent, the stakes are ultimate, and the institution becomes the indispensable middleman between God and humanity.

Augustine’s framework also laid the groundwork for later Western doctrines like propitiation (appeasing God’s wrath) and substitutionary atonement (Jesus taking the punishment we deserved). Read Paul through the “truth” of original sin, and his language about Christ’s death shifts from liberating humanity from the powers of sin and death to satisfying divine justice for individual guilt.

Whether or not that was Paul’s intent, it became the dominant lens in the West. The Eastern church, meanwhile, never fully embraced Augustine’s version; they spoke of ancestral sin—inheriting the consequences of Adam’s fall without the guilt—keeping their focus more on death and corruption than on legal condemnation.

For our purposes, we’re following the line that runs from Augustine through the Latin West. His framing of original sin shaped the medieval Catholic church and was later inherited—sometimes with modifications—by the Protestant Reformers. From there, it would make its way into the DNA of modern evangelicalism.

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Medieval Catholicism and Sin

By the Middle Ages, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin was no longer up for debate in the West—it was the air the church breathed. Sin was not just something you did; it was your default state from birth, and the only escape was through the sacramental life of the church.

This system gave sin a clear structure. Mortal sins (those that kill the soul) could send you to hell unless confessed and absolved. Venial sins (lesser ones) damaged but didn’t destroy grace. Confession to a priest became mandatory, not just for forgiveness, but for reintegration into the life of the community.

Sin was also something you could, in a sense, pay down. Penance—prayers, pilgrimages, fasting—was the way to work off temporal punishment. By the 11th and 12th centuries, this system gave rise to indulgences: official documents declaring time off your sentence in purgatory. And that created a whole new layer—sin and forgiveness as a kind of spiritual economy, one that could be abused for political and financial gain.

Hell loomed large. By now, the medieval imagination—shaped by visions like Dante’s Inferno—saw hell not as a vague place of separation from God, but as an eternal torture chamber for the unrepentant. If Augustine’s theology gave the church control of the cure, Dante’s imagery made people desperate for it.

In this world, sin wasn’t just a personal or communal reality—it was the lever that moved the machinery of salvation, penance, and ecclesial authority. And that machinery would grind on until the gears jammed in the 16th century.

The Reformers

When Martin Luther and other Reformers broke with Rome in the 16th century, they didn’t reject Augustine’s idea of original sin—they doubled down on it. Luther, an Augustinian monk, believed sin so thoroughly corrupted the human will that we could do nothing to move toward God on our own. Salvation had to be sola gratia—by grace alone.

But the Reformers stripped away the sacramental system the medieval church had built around sin. No more penance, no more indulgences, no purgatory you could work off. Instead, they taught that justification—being declared righteous—was a once-for-all legal verdict, received through faith. Good works still mattered, but they were the fruit of salvation, not the condition for it.

John Calvin systematized this further. In his Institutes, sin became part of the doctrine of “total depravity”—the idea that every part of human nature is tainted by sin. It didn’t mean humans are as bad as possible, but that no part of us—mind, will, emotions—escapes sin’s reach.

This kept Augustine’s legal framing front and center. Sin was still primarily an inherited guilt that separated humanity from God, solved only by Christ’s substitutionary death. The Reformers saw themselves as recovering Paul’s gospel from centuries of church corruption—but they were still reading Paul through the Augustinian lens.

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Puritanism and the Founding of America

When the Puritans set sail for the New World in the 17th century, they brought their theology of sin with them—hardened by persecution in England and sharpened by their desire to build a “city upon a hill.”

For the Puritans, sin was not just a spiritual problem; it was a threat to the survival of the community. They saw themselves as a covenant people, like ancient Israel, bound together under God’s law. A sinner in the camp—whether through heresy, moral failure, or even lax Sabbath observance—could invite God’s judgment on the whole settlement. Public confession, church discipline, and sometimes banishment were tools to protect the body from contamination.

Preachers like Jonathan Edwards didn’t just warn about sin’s dangers—they painted it in high-definition terror. His famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God portrayed humanity dangling over the pit of hell, held only by God’s thin thread of mercy. In this vision, original sin wasn’t an abstract doctrine—it was a loaded musket pointed at every human soul.

The Puritans’ fusion of covenant theology, Augustinian original sin, and Calvinist total depravity laid the groundwork for an American religious culture that saw morality as the backbone of national destiny. That meant personal sin and public virtue were never separate categories—they rose or fell together.

This was the theological DNA that shaped the revivals, denominational splits, and moral crusades of the next two centuries, carrying the Puritan view of sin straight into the bloodstream of American evangelicalism.

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Revivalism and the Evangelical Turn

By the 18th and 19th centuries, America’s Protestant landscape was shifting. The Great Awakenings brought traveling preachers, open-air meetings, and a new focus on the individual sinner’s need for salvation.

The revivalists didn’t abandon Augustine or the Reformers—they personalized them. Instead of hearing about sin mainly from the pulpit on Sunday, you might hear it shouted under a tent, on a courthouse lawn, or from a fiery preacher standing on a wagon.

The problem wasn’t just that humanity was fallen; it was that you were a sinner, right now, and if you died tonight you’d face hell.

Figures like George Whitefield and later Charles Finney made the “conversion moment” central. The altar call emerged as a way to seal the deal—an instant when you moved from condemned to forgiven. While the Puritans had seen salvation as a long, uncertain process of proving one’s election, revivalism made it an immediate transaction between the sinner and God.

This shift dovetailed with America’s democratic spirit. In a culture that prized personal choice and individual freedom, the gospel was framed as a decision: accept Jesus and be saved, or reject Him and face eternal punishment. Sin became less about communal covenant-breaking and more about my personal rebellion against God—solved not by sacrament or slow discipleship, but by a single prayer of repentance.

The emotional energy of revivalism helped spread evangelical faith across the frontier and into the cities. But it also cemented a version of the gospel where sin was defined primarily as a private moral failure, and the stakes were eternal, personal damnation.

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Fundamentalism and Modern Evangelicalism

By the early 20th century, revivalist evangelicalism was colliding with modern science, higher biblical criticism, and rapid cultural change. In response, conservative Protestants doubled down on what they saw as the “fundamentals” of the faith—biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, substitutionary atonement, and the literal reality of hell.

Sin, in this climate, became a fixed, non-negotiable category: a universal condition rooted in Augustine’s original sin, proven by your personal moral failures, and punishable by eternal conscious torment. Fundamentalists defined themselves partly by what they opposed: liberal theology, evolutionary theory, changing sexual ethics, and any worldview that challenged the Bible’s authority.

Billy Graham brought this theology into living rooms across America. His crusades had a softer, more winsome tone than the fire-breathing revivalists of the past, but the core message was the same: you are a sinner in need of salvation, and only Jesus can save you. Graham helped make personal conversion the centerpiece of American Protestantism, giving it both mass appeal and cultural respectability.

That’s why, in 1980, a country preacher came out to my house to tell eight-year-old me that I was going to hell. The urgency of saving souls was baked into the culture, and sin was the reason. If you understood you were a sinner, then the only rational move was to accept Jesus immediately—before it was too late.

By the 1990s, many churches had swapped the “turn or burn” style for a more “seeker-sensitive” approach. Instead of scaring people into the kingdom, the idea was to attract them with upbeat praise bands, comedy sketches, fog machines, and pastors in skinny jeans. The megachurch movement was born.

The style had changed, but the theology hadn’t. It was still Augustine’s original sin, still the same heaven-or-hell stakes—just presented with a smile and a latte.

By the dawn of the 21st century, this fusion of revivalist urgency, fundamentalist boundary-keeping, and seeker-friendly marketing had shaped a distinctly American evangelical imagination: sin as both an individual heart problem and a cultural enemy to be defeated.

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And That’s How Sin Found Us

I was eight when I first heard I was a sinner. Not in some abstract theological sense—personally. Me. My thoughts, my impulses, my body, my choices. Bad enough that God couldn’t look at me without wanting to punish me forever. Bad enough that Jesus had to die before I was even born.

It was a heavy thing to hand a kid, but I carried it. And for a long time, I didn’t question where it came from.

Perhaps you carried that as well.

It’s a lot to put on a child.

Especially if it’s not true.

Now I know that the story I received didn’t just drop out of the sky. It was centuries in the making—born in the covenant framework of ancient Israel, reshaped by prophets, reframed by Jesus, theologized by Paul, systematized by Augustine, enforced by medieval Catholicism, recoded by the Reformers, and mass-produced by modern evangelicalism. Along the way, it shifted from a communal breach of covenant to a cosmic condition we inherit from birth, with eternal consequences hanging in the balance.

And here’s the thing: that vision of sin has real power. It can motivate self-reflection and change. But it can also keep people trapped in shame, convinced their deepest identity is “guilty.” It can become a tool for control, justifying fear and manipulation in the name of God.

Maybe the better questions to ask now are: who is the concept of sin really serving? Is it making us better as people? Is it making us better as a nation? As a world?

Or is it mostly making us less loving, less hopeful, less faithful, and less willing to love our enemies?

For many of us, the honest answer is the last one.

Where I Am These Days

“Sin” is a loaded word. So loaded that it often shuts down real conversation about how to overcome our human instincts to put ourselves above others.

Here’s where I am these days as a mystic Christian—you may end up somewhere else.

If Jesus came with “authority to forgive sin” and also taught us to forgive one another seventy times seven, to forgive our debts, and to prove we’ve received his message by loving one another—and even our enemies—then my focus shifts. It becomes proactive, not defensive.

I forgive.

Because while “sin” is a complicated subject, I know when I’ve been sinned against. When I’ve been hurt, dismissed, or taken advantage of. I’m not perfect, but I try to forgive when that happens.

Because whatever sin is—or isn’t—forgiveness is the path to freedom.

For those who sin against me, yes.

But also for me.

And, I believe, for you too.