In an ear­lier post I argued that it was pos­si­ble that some Gen­tiles ful­filled the require­ments of the law of God sim­ply by their good nature. Tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy dis­counts such pos­si­bil­ity. Let me add a few more thoughts on the sub­ject — ver­i­fy­ing the con­text and the usage of terms will shed more lights on the mean­ing of the pas­sage. (more…)

In Joshua 7 despite the com­mand of God some of the Israelites took the things of Jerico devoted to destruc­tion, and that caused the dis­plea­sure of God towards the peo­ple. It is often thought that because of the sin of a few all the peo­ple became sin­ners. Does the sin of a sin­gle man really makes all oth­ers sin­ners? If it is so, where is jus­tice? If a fam­ily mem­ber com­mits a crime and because of it you are called a crim­i­nal though liv­ing right­eously wouldn’t you cry out for jus­tice? (more…)

Paul says in his epis­tle to the Romans,

Rom. 2:12 All who have sinned with­out the law will also per­ish with­out the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hear­ers of the law who are right­eous before God, but the doers of the law who will be jus­ti­fied.

In the above Paul refers to sin­ful acts, not to some kind of “sin nature”. I have dealt with the idea in another post. (more…)

The idea of some kind of sin nature — along with many other ideas — was devel­oped through­out the lat­ter part of the early cen­turies. Spare me from dig­ging out the “when”, you can find plenty of info on Google if you dig hard enough.

The Jew­FAQ has a very good arti­cle about what Jews think about human nature. Here is the link, read “The Dual Nature” portion:

http://www.jewfaq.org/human.htm (more…)

Chris­tians often quote Romans 3:10 as proof text that all human beings are sin­ners. The prob­lem is they never check the psalm from which it is quoted from. Rather than using this verse as a pointer back to Psalm 14 where it gains a very dif­fer­ent mean­ing, they read it out of con­text, and then they read the new, alien mening back into the psalm. Wasn’t the new sup­posed to explain the old? (more…)