305 - Offense to Reason: A Theology of Sin

Offense to Reason: A Theology of Sin
By Bernard Ramm
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985. 187 pp. $15.95.

Bernard Ramm, whose outspoken evangelicalism has already been thoroughly expressed in his earlier

306 - Offense to Reason: A Theology of Sin

volumes on Scripture, apologetics, and theological reason, here attempts a restatement of the Christian doctrine of sin. He takes his clue from Pascal, and affirms that "the doctrine of original sin is beyond our ability to explain it, but without it we cannot explain anything." Working from a somewhat loose definition of sin as "the sum of all the litanies of human woes, evils, and sufferings," he states that "sin is contradiction; sin is violence; sin is serpentine subtlety."

With sin so widely defined, he finds some knowledge of it almost everywhere-among secularists, Buddhists, Hindus, and even Marxists. Nevertheless, he argues, only those within "the mainstream of Christian theology" have really taken sin seriously, for only they have really believed in "generic Adam, generic Temptation, generic Fall, and generic Sin." Therefore, according to Ramm, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, Kierkegaard, Tillich, Barth, Berkhof, and the liberation theologians have all missed the mark. Ramm himself, regrettably, appears to do no better. His book lacks definitional clarity, indulges in careless summaries of the positions of others, seems hastily written, and suffers from egregious lapses in typography. And, after all, for Christians, one may ask, is it finally the doctrine of sin which gives "clarity that nothing else in the religions of the world nor the philosophies of the world can provide"?

John E. Burkhart
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago, Ill.