Sin according to Paul as alienation from God and neighbours

Abstract

In the introduction the author points out that Paul talks about sin in the context of proclaiming the gospel about Jesus Christ who “gave himself for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom 4,25). He does so together with other with other preaches of the first Church (1 Cor 15,1 – 10). Then he explores the topic about sins according to the epistle to Galatians which is in connection with liberty from Jewish Law, where the christened become participants of that liberty by their baptismal joining to Christ and Church. In the epistle to Romans Paul teaches that all the people are sinful, but they can free themselves to God through Christ by their faith and by the power of Spirit. But, even after christening, there is again the possibility and the fact of sin with believers, who then, just like pagans, drift apart from God and from one another. The Deutro-Paulian epistles explicitly use the verb apallotrioomai – to be alienated from God and from the “membership of Israel” (Col 1,21; Ef 2,12; 4,18). In the third part the author treats the social vices of greed, idolatry (pleonexia), quarrels, “fends and wrangling”, murders, homosexuality and “hatred and variance” in Paul’s list of faults. The author concludes that by the term of alienation from God and neighbours we explain more authentically Paul’s doctrine of sin than by Augustine’s definition of sin as a “distraction from God and turning to beings”.