societyIn ancient Judaism, sin is traced back to the paradigmatic act of dis-
obedience by Adam and Eve. Sins committed after the Abrahamic cov-
enant are violations of a sacred contract. The Torah refers to such
violations as bet (“missing the mark”) and later Rabbinic thought calls
them averah (“crossing the line”). The book of Numbers (15) draws a
distinction between unconscious and conscious sin, whereas later rabbis
draw a distinction between grave and light offenses, which become the
mortal and venial sins of later Christian theologians.
Christian thinkers also draw a distinction between original and actual
sins. Humans are born with original sin, but actual sin refers to transgres-
sive deeds, words, or thoughts, which call for atonement by suffering
punishment, remorse, or penance. Actual sins are further subdivided into
mortal or venial, a distinction that relates to degrees of human awareness,
severity, and deliberateness. Actual sin is also divided into material and
formal. The former type of actual sin is a wrongful act contrary to God’s
law, but the sinner is not culpable because the subject is unaware of the
transgression, whereas a formal sin is a direct violation accompanied by
awareness that it is a transgression.
From a symbolic perspective used by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur
(1913–2005) in his book The Symbolism of Evil, sin is a symbolic defile-
ment or stain that assumes two traits: it objectively infests and it subjec-
tively inflicts dread upon a sinner. The consciousness of sin leads a person
to an awareness of his/her guilt and motivates confession by the sinner.
In summary, sin is not merely personal; it is also communal.
Further reading: Eichrodt (1961); Peters (2003); Ricoeur (1967); von Rad
(1965)SOCIETY
This dialectical phenomenon is a human product that also produces an
individual, in the sense that an individual becomes a person through a
social process acting upon its original producer. This dialectical process,
according to the sociologist Peter Berger, operates in three stages: exter-
nalization (a physical and mental outpouring of the individual into the
world); objectification (attained by products of the activity of external-
ization); internalization (transformation of objective social reality to
subjectivity of individual).
The reciprocal relationship between humans and society is also evident
in the relation between religion and society, in that the existence of social