If you’ve grown up in the church, it’s almost a given that you’ve been taught to believe we have a “sin nature.” After all, that’s…why we sin.
Right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. This is partly because we haven’t taken the time to define our terms as a Church, and partly because we make up clever sayings that we assume will make certain topics easier to understand.
They don’t.
Most “Christianese” is incomprehensible even to Christians. And if you think you get the core of what’s being conveyed by “sin nature,” I’d challenge you to reconsider. There’s a chance you might unwittingly believe a heresy. Before I go too deep into the weeds, though, here’s my thesis for this article:
We are not born as sinners by nature, nor as guilty for another’s act. We are born into separation from God, within a world under the dominion of sin, and that condition ensures that we will all, inevitably, become sinners.
Before I get into the meat of my argument, though, let’s actually define what most people think of when they say “sin nature.”
Defining Sin Nature
I wrote a whole paper on the Greek word σάρξ (sarx), when I was in college. It’s not an uncommon word in the Bible, and we see it pop up in Romans 7-8 where certain translations, like the NIV, render it as “sinful nature.” This is, for all intents and purposes, the foundation of our modern conception of a “sin nature,” but when you actually look at the Greek and compare translations, it’s far from a slam dunk.
I’d encourage you to read Romans 7 in multiple translations side by side. The New Living Translation also leans in this direction, but most others do not. They translate sarx more literally as “flesh” or “law of sin.”
Those are not interchangeable ideas.
“Flesh” is probably the best way to read the word, but it’s flexible, contextual, and often tied to weakness, limitation, or orientation. However, when you read the NIV and come across “sinful nature,” you’re being handed a conclusion that stems from an interpretive decision. It’s a conclusion that argues that there’s an internal, built-in essence, which is sinful, and defines what you are at the level of nature.
At this point, perhaps you’re confused as to why this even matters. Considering how often we refer to the flesh as the sin nature, one would think that they mean the same thing.
They don’t.
Paul uses sarx in a range of ways, but there’s a consistent thread running through it. He uses it to describe human life as it exists in its present, fallen condition; it’s an existence oriented away from God, and it’s the sphere where sin operates and exerts influence. It does not require an ontological “sin component” built into human nature, or a claim that humans are “made of sin” at their core.
In other words, sarx functions more like a mode of existence than a substance.
This matters, because it means that “flesh” leaves room for a framework that says humans are created good, but they now exist in a disordered condition where sin has influence and dominion. On the other hand, “sinful nature” collapses that into a system where humans are, by nature, sinful.
Those are fundamentally different claims about what human beings are at their core.
The “Sin Nature” Problem
If the idea of a “sin nature” rests heavily on translating sarx this way, then the doctrine is not a “plain reading of the text” as some would like to claim. It’s being constructed through a particular interpretive lens.
Again, you might ask: “Why does it matter?”
And I must say, it matters quite a bit. More than most of us ever realize. I’ll set the stage by asking a question:
If “sin nature” is real, where did it come from?
That’s not a rhetorical question – you have to have an answer, if you’re going to assert that it exists. “Nature” is not a vague concept: it refers to what something is at the level of its design, its essence, its created reality. And if that’s what we’re talking about, then there are only a few possibilities.
Option 1: God Created It
If humans are born with a sinful nature, and God is the creator of human nature, then God creates humans with an intrinsic orientation toward sin. That’s…not a small theological nuance.
It places sin at the level of creation itself.
At that point, you’re no longer just saying humanity is fallen, but that God creates beings whose nature is to sin. And as you might expect, that raises an immediate problem. If sin is built into human nature at creation, then God is not merely permitting sin or responding to it. He is, in some meaningful sense, responsible for its presence at the level of design.
That sits very awkwardly with the claim that creation was “very good,” and even more awkwardly with the consistent biblical portrayal of God as not being the author of sin.
Option 2: Humans Generate Their Own Nature
Just from a position of common sense, you should be able to recognize that this one doesn’t work. You don’t exist prior to your nature in order to shape it; you don’t choose your starting condition before you are. So, it doesn’t make sense to say humans somehow produce their own sinful nature at the outset of their existence. That collapses immediately.
Option 3: It’s Inherited from Adam
This is the most common answer, but it only pushes the problem back a step. If Adam’s sin resulted in a change to human nature, then we still have to ask:
- Who now determines what human nature is?
- What changed that nature?
If every human being is born with a sinful nature after Adam, then either God is now creating humans with that altered nature, or something other than God is determining human nature. If it’s God, we’re back at the first problem. If it’s not God, then we’ve introduced a force that can redefine human nature independently of the Creator, which creates an entirely different set of issues.
And if you’re tempted to say that sin has the power to redefine human nature, I’d ask you to stop and consider what you’re implying. Sin certainly is powerful enough to enslave, corrupt, distort, and dominate, but it can’t rewrite what God created at the level of essence. If it could, then sin would not just be a parasite on creation.
It would be a rival creator.
Augustine’s Original Guilt
No Church Father is more famous than Augustine of Hippo. Many of the doctrines still circulating in Western Christianity trace back, in some form, to his formulations in the 4th and early 5th centuries. That influence extends, at least in part, to how we think about sin, nature, and what it means to be human after the fall.
Augustine read Romans 5:12 and understood it to mean that everyone is sinful at birth because we are all born “in Adam.” As a result, all are guilty of sin from the moment they are conceived. Augustine combined that belief with creedal thought (baptism for the “remission of sins”) and concluded that if an infant died without being baptized, they would go to hell.
Unsurprisingly, the concept of inherited guilt raises problems. For starters, it flatly contradicts what the Bible itself has to say on the topic:
Deuteronomy 24:16 – “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.”
Ezekiel 18:20 – “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.”
Throughout Scripture, guilt is consistently tied to personal action, participation, and responsibility. Put more simply, you can’t be held accountable for sin, until you…sin.
Plenty of scholars have pointed out Augustine’s errors here, including John Meyendorff. And while Augustine’s view of “original guilt” isn’t quite as pervasive as it used to be, it does still rear its head in more hyper-conservative circles – particularly among Calvinists. Even if they don’t take a stance quite as extreme as “original guilt,” most Reformed Christians hold to a view with a similar flavor.
Overall, if you believe in the existence of a sin nature, you also have to account for two things: (1) where that nature comes from, and (2) why it doesn’t imply guilt from the outset. To stay consistent, these have to be reconciled.
A Better Framework
Whether you adhere to “original guilt” or not, we need a better way to describe our fallen condition. Sin nature is a heretical claim because it makes God the author of evil. Even if you don’t mean it that way, the term itself is imprecise enough to cause confusion.
My claim is that human nature is inherently good, but it exists in a corrupted condition that makes sin inevitable.
But before I go any further, let me address the red flag that probably just went up. Saying human nature is inherently good does not mean that humans are morally upright, capable of living without sin, or are unaffected by the Fall. Instead, it means something much more basic: what God created as human nature has not been replaced with something evil at the level of its essence.
In other words, the Fall didn’t introduce a new, sinful ontology. It introduced rupture, disorder, and corruption into an already good creation.
“Corruption” is really the key word there. The essence of being human and the basic structure of human faculties (will, desire, reason) are not evil, but the orientation and integration of those faculties – along with the environment they operate in – have been corrupted.
This corruption took place at the Fall, and it’s something we’re born into because Adam was the representative of us all. Just like we’re born with literal flesh and blood, we’re also born with corrupted wills and desires. You might not be born neutral, but you’re also not born guilty. Adam poisoned the well, so to speak, and every human being is born needing to drink from it.
This means we’re relationally cut off from God in a world under sin’s dominion. We grow inside that system and enter into a reality where corruption is already the operating environment. This deviates from the idea of a sin nature, because a person can be placed in conditions where failure is guaranteed without that failure being what they are by nature.
If you want a fuller breakdown of how Christ restores what was lost, I’ve already covered that in detail in my Models of Atonement article. For now, suffice it to say that Christ did not come to replace a sinful nature with a new one.
He came to heal, restore, and reorient the nature God created.
Final Thoughts
Back in Genesis, the story doesn’t begin with a corrupted humanity. God made everything “very good,” and even now, he creates our inmost being and knits us together in our mother’s wombs (Ps 139:13).
We are fearfully and wonderfully made. God is not described as creating something corrupted at the level of its essence. That means creation is still good, the Fall is still real, and sin is still inevitable, but…
It’s not what we are. And that has serious implications for how we understand doctrines like Total Depravity.
But that’s a topic for another time.
