A sinful act is one, which breaks a set of rules. Christianity, this is God's law. To Christians a sin is an act that falls short of God's intention or disobeys his word. In this essay I will discuss how various Christian groups judge sin and decide which acts are sinful. These groups will be, existentialists, liberation theology, Iraneaus, Augustine and I will include quotes from the Bible to see what it thinks about sin.
             Augustine was a Christian who believed that we (mankind) inherit sin from Adam and Eve. They sinned in Eden by disobeying god, and since we are all their descendants then we are all contaminated by this sin. He believed that we were given perfection and fell from it. He believed that because God is perfect that he could not have created evil, and therefore not sin. He thought that sin came about as a lack of something. This 'something' is love and worship of God as we are now self-worshipping. He developed the theory of concupiscence. This means we are bound to desire and this leads us to sin. Because God created one human nature (without the ability to sin) and this nature 'fell' we now can only sin. It is for this reason that in is an important part in Augustine's description of the human condition.
             Iraneaus had a complete opposite view to this. Unlike Augustine, he did not take the story of Eden as actual and therefore did not believe in inherited sin. He believed that we have not lost perfection but that paradise can still be achieved (opposite to views about the fall). H e saw Jesus as the example that we are not born with sin, as he was a man who achieved perfection dying without sin. As a Christian the idea of sin was still very important to Iraneaus but he thought that as we sinned we matured gaining perfection. Therefore sin was not as important in describing the human condition to him as it was to Augustine.
             Christian Existentialism is a belief t
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