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The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans
We can have a sense that when we try to do right by one another, we aren't merely striving against ourselves. The feeling is that we are struggling against something--someone-else. As if there's a force-a person- that wishes us ill. In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul describes just such a Sin, a cosmic tyrant who constrains our moral freedom, confuses our moral judgment, and condemns us to slavery and to death.
Commentators have long argued about whether Paul literally means to say Sin is a person or is simply indulging in literary personification, but regardless of Paul's intentions, for modern readers it would seem clear there is no such thing as a cosmic tyrant. Surely it is more reasonable to suppose "Sin" is merely a colorful way of describing individual misdeeds or, at most, a way of evoking the intractability of our social ills.
In The Emergence of Sin , Matthew Croasmun suggests we take another look. The vision of Sin he offers is at once scientific and theological, social and individual, corporeal and mythological. He argues both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast human network of transgression and that this power is nevertheless real, personal, and one whom we had better be ready to resist. Ultimately, what is on offer here is an account of the world re-mythologized at the hands of chemists, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, and entomologists. In this world, Paul's text is not a relic of a forgotten mythical past, but a field manual for modern living.
Commentators have long argued about whether Paul literally means to say Sin is a person or is simply indulging in literary personification, but regardless of Paul's intentions, for modern readers it would seem clear there is no such thing as a cosmic tyrant. Surely it is more reasonable to suppose "Sin" is merely a colorful way of describing individual misdeeds or, at most, a way of evoking the intractability of our social ills.
In The Emergence of Sin , Matthew Croasmun suggests we take another look. The vision of Sin he offers is at once scientific and theological, social and individual, corporeal and mythological. He argues both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast human network of transgression and that this power is nevertheless real, personal, and one whom we had better be ready to resist. Ultimately, what is on offer here is an account of the world re-mythologized at the hands of chemists, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, and entomologists. In this world, Paul's text is not a relic of a forgotten mythical past, but a field manual for modern living.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published July 3, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 29, 2017
Don't have time to write a real review so I will summarize with "this book is a dense read but it will revolutionize your approach to sin, evil, and the Church" I am going to be chewing on and playing with the concepts in this book for a long, long time.
October 24, 2022
This book is probably best described as the intellectual equivalent of a HIIT workout. Only six chapters and 190 pages, quick read right? I could not have been more wrong. I had to constantly stand on the tips of my mental toes to prevent this book from going over my head. Exhausting but so worth it.
First, what this book lacks in length, Matthew Croasmun makes up for in extremely dense, meaning packed sentences. Every word mattered.
Second, Croasmun demonstrates the high caliber of his mind by the ease in which he shifts between biology, theology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and history. I found myself looking up entire fields of academia previously unknown to me in order to follow his train of thought clearly.
A painful reduction of the complex contributions this book makes to Christian understanding of sin is as follows:
Emergence theory is one way to explain the emergence of beings from complex relationships between underlying parts. It also argues for an upward and downward causation relationship between the emergent being and its base. Applied to a Christian understanding of sin, Croasmun argues that not only can sin be understood on the individual, social, and mythological levels but also describes how each level plays a role in affecting the other levels.
A powerful example he visits multiple times in the book is racism. Racism emerges out of individual people believing and acting in racist manners. These individual racist actions give rise to racialized social structures in which racism resides. Most people will acknowledge this upward causation relationship between individual choices/beliefs and radicalized institutions and systems. However, Croasmun brings up a series of independent studies that demonstrate radicalized structures can affect the neurobiology of individuals existing within those structures, predisposing them to perpetuate existing racial prejudices below the level of conscious thought/belief. In other words, racialized structures intact downward causation on the thoughts, beliefs, actions of the individuals who gave rise to the racialized structures in the first place. There is a self-sustaining feedback loop between individuals and the emergent organism rising out of their complex system of relationships.
So much more can be said about emergence theory that I have no space to expound upon here. If you are itching for a challenge, I encourage you to give this book a try. As for why Croasmun devoted a book to this topic:
“Only a sort of multilevel resistance is appropriate to Sin’s well-integrated multilevel dominion.”
I will be digesting the rich implications of emergentism in many areas of my life for years to come as a result of this book.
First, what this book lacks in length, Matthew Croasmun makes up for in extremely dense, meaning packed sentences. Every word mattered.
Second, Croasmun demonstrates the high caliber of his mind by the ease in which he shifts between biology, theology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and history. I found myself looking up entire fields of academia previously unknown to me in order to follow his train of thought clearly.
A painful reduction of the complex contributions this book makes to Christian understanding of sin is as follows:
Emergence theory is one way to explain the emergence of beings from complex relationships between underlying parts. It also argues for an upward and downward causation relationship between the emergent being and its base. Applied to a Christian understanding of sin, Croasmun argues that not only can sin be understood on the individual, social, and mythological levels but also describes how each level plays a role in affecting the other levels.
A powerful example he visits multiple times in the book is racism. Racism emerges out of individual people believing and acting in racist manners. These individual racist actions give rise to racialized social structures in which racism resides. Most people will acknowledge this upward causation relationship between individual choices/beliefs and radicalized institutions and systems. However, Croasmun brings up a series of independent studies that demonstrate radicalized structures can affect the neurobiology of individuals existing within those structures, predisposing them to perpetuate existing racial prejudices below the level of conscious thought/belief. In other words, racialized structures intact downward causation on the thoughts, beliefs, actions of the individuals who gave rise to the racialized structures in the first place. There is a self-sustaining feedback loop between individuals and the emergent organism rising out of their complex system of relationships.
So much more can be said about emergence theory that I have no space to expound upon here. If you are itching for a challenge, I encourage you to give this book a try. As for why Croasmun devoted a book to this topic:
“Only a sort of multilevel resistance is appropriate to Sin’s well-integrated multilevel dominion.”
I will be digesting the rich implications of emergentism in many areas of my life for years to come as a result of this book.
December 5, 2025
Complex and thoughtful exploration of an ontology of sin. He walks you through supervenience and downward causation, that the tyrant, sin, emerges from human sinfulness and acts back on humanity. This was a very helpful read.
January 7, 2020
This is a thoughtful approach to the language of Sin/sin in Paul's letter the the Romans. It is a fairly technical work, which makes since because it is derived from a doctoral dissertation but there are a lot of very helpful insights contained in this work. Croasmun examines the debate between the Bultmann demythologizing of Paul's work and Kasemann's mythological viewpoint in conversation with liberationist theological perspectives and then introduces the concept of Emergence Theory as a way to hold the three perspectives together.
docket
September 28, 2019Introduction:
Personification is sometimes the best way to talk about something: "spiritual or even theological language may be required to describe accurately our disposition toward this Being." (3)
Personification is a metaphor which prescribes personhood to that thing which is not a person but doing so assumed a definition and membership list of personhood. What if we mistake what is and isn't a person; between personification and person-identification, so to speak.
This is what we have in Rom 5-8 with Sin. Questions emerge: (1) Are we to conceive of Sin as a "real," "personal," power that menaces the human agent; as a social reality; a complex system of human sins; or simply as a literary device that describes to us a feature of individual human agency?
These questions will not be answered through exegesis but will be answered through philosophical questions about ontology.
"I argue...both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast human network and that this power is nevertheless real, personal, and one whom we had better be ready to resist." (4)
Personification is sometimes the best way to talk about something: "spiritual or even theological language may be required to describe accurately our disposition toward this Being." (3)
Personification is a metaphor which prescribes personhood to that thing which is not a person but doing so assumed a definition and membership list of personhood. What if we mistake what is and isn't a person; between personification and person-identification, so to speak.
This is what we have in Rom 5-8 with Sin. Questions emerge: (1) Are we to conceive of Sin as a "real," "personal," power that menaces the human agent; as a social reality; a complex system of human sins; or simply as a literary device that describes to us a feature of individual human agency?
These questions will not be answered through exegesis but will be answered through philosophical questions about ontology.
"I argue...both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast human network and that this power is nevertheless real, personal, and one whom we had better be ready to resist." (4)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 21, 2019
A fascinating exploration of sin as an emergent phenomenon in Romans -- a spiritual person that exerts power over human beings who are in bondage more and more to sin as they sin. Will be thinking about the arguments here for years to come.
August 11, 2023
Positively one of the most remarkable works of non-fiction I’ve read in years, maybe ever. This book does not make it into my "short book mind blown" category on Goodreads, but only because it isn't quite short enough.
Cutting to the chase in what will no doubt be a long review: what Croasmun suggests is no less than the existence of multi-personal “super-organisms”- living beings consisting of a social body and mind, and with their own subjective self. And he’s making the case in a way that appeals within a modern scientific worldview. To sharpen the point, he is defending the idea that Paul’s letter to the Romans refers to just such an entity in its use of the term hamartia, or Sin. While this notion - Sin as a distinct, singular personal agency or power - is not new, Croasmun’s use of emergence theory to explain it is, a theory which I will try to sketch shortly.
He begins by describing various perspectives on social ill/evil. A familiar perspective is that there is no “social” dimension worth speaking of other than as a useful fiction to help us describe the aggregate of individual wills. As such, addressing evil is a matter of “changing hearts and minds,” as it were: calling individuals to personal repentance, in traditional Christian language. Fix the individual, or enough of them, and you fix the social problem. Another alternative sounds more liberal: that evil is coded into the very structural and institutional realities in which we live. Therefore to change the world is to apply pressure on institutions and collective systems, namely by social reform. But for Croasmun, neither individualism nor collectivism fully accounts for what Paul is referring to as Sin (capitalized as an English speaker would do for a proper name) in the book of Romans.
His explanation begins with a discussion of "emergence theory," a theory which addresses a phenomenon observable across many formal disciplines. The idea is that for complex phenomena, a property will develop “over top of” the base phenomenon, a property which has its own being, but whose reality is difficult to pinpoint. Often something that we would call a "fiction," although it quickly becomes apparent that that term isn’t quite right. This property depends on the constituent parts, but is not reducible to the sum of those parts. It is said that the resulting phenomenon "supervenes" upon the lower order parts. Examples: the score at a baseball game, the wetness of water, the "invisible hand" of the stock market. Each of these is a nameable thing, one that is experienced distinctly by an observer. Yet each of them only exists because of the aggregate sum of a whole series of lesser events or objects, which coordinate with one another in a series of patterened relationships. A single water molecule is water, but it is not experienced as wet. Yet anyone would consider it foolish to claim that wetness is illusory. Any given scoring event in a game is not, itself, the score, nor is the game as a whole "the score." The hand of the market is not any powerful investor or trader, it is a measure of the sum of many, many trading decisions, distilled as one event or will. Each of these things “exists” in truest sense- they “have their being” (-ist) “out from” (ex-) some other matter or phenomena. On top of that, a second characteristic is observed: that of "downward causation." In the case of the market, the "invisible hand" is seen moving prices, and traders make decisions on the basis of what “the market” is "doing." The manager of a team will adjust his strategy, how much and which risk to venture, according to the score. Failure to act in accordance with the boundaries set by the emergent property brings very real consequences. The property's influence over lower order parts (traders, players/managers) is definite and undeniable. So these properties “supervene on” and exert “downward causation” upon the matter from which they have their existence; they simultaneously depend upon it and influence it.
Pushing further, it is not only possible but necessary to describe human consciousness - personhood itself - as emergent; dependent upon various systems and subsystems of the human body and brain, yet never itself localizable or reducible to the sum of its parts. The body itself is emergent: 90% of the matter of a human does not share DNA with the human. Bacterial colonies digest food, water constitutes a large portion of bodily matter. The mind depends upon various external tools to do its work. Moving outward, the human being participates in social systems and structures which are both the result of individual choice AND influence those very choices. A “social mind” is discernible. But here's the kicker; Croasmun is arguing that if we claim such a being - a social mind or collective personhood - doesn’t meet the qualifications for a “real” being, but is only imaginary, then we undercut the very notion of the selfhood of the individual human being. If the human being is real, so is the social person, because both are equally emergent. No reasonable definition of personhood can serve only one of these realities. If the collective being is unreal, then so is the individual human. If the individual person is concretely proveable, then so is the social person. Any reasoning that you construct to deny social personhood will undercut the very basis for affirming human individual personhood itself.
This, claims Croasmun, is what Paul is talking about in Romans when he refers to hamartia, or Sin. Pre-enlightenment as they were, Biblical writers were not restricted to an empiricist, materialist account of the world, and so when they saw social and collective forces at work, often irresistible forces, they were readily inclined to name them and consider them as distinct beings. The primary question of TEoS consists of this: Is Paul's reference to Sin a matter of personification (literary device for effect), or person-identification (describing a literal, personal reality in plain language)? Croasmun demonstrates how emergence theory sweeps across a host of modern disciplines to define and argue for, in terms amenable to post-Enlightenment rationalist westerners, the existence of a distinct, personal, collective super-organism, a Being which in the Bible is named Sin. This Being exercises a dominion, having arisen from human choices to sin their way into a certain collective structural order of life, in which boundaries are set on behaviors and even desires (a case study in racism and the killing of Michael Brown helps to bring this out). Paul is identifying a person - a tyrant, in fact. One which, having sprung from human sins, has been loose in the world for millennia, holding humanity in bondage to its evil will.
With (or despite) my paltry description, you may be able to see how emergence theory provides the a missing link that unites the individual and systemic accounts of evil- that the social systems which are created by individual choice and participation in turn exercise a power over individuals, a power impossible to disobey without serious consequences. For one who finds themself within a particular system, the effects are no less than fully real: a stock trader’s actions - even their biology down to their hormonal state - is altered; a baseball manager's job and therefore his very real well-being may be on the line. A criminal organization requires the submission of its constituents on pain of violence, coercing them to do violence themselves, often things they would never do on their own. The idea of corporate personhood, a legally existing person that makes decisions and has its day in court, springs to mind. Each of these systems is not merely observable as a social phenomenon, but even as a biological one, as the field of epigenetics has begun to reveal to us.
The climactic puzzle piece is to see the notion of an emergent social person as exactly what the Apostle Paul refers to in Romans: Hamartia, the willful agent that springs from human sins, systematizing and constructing the world such that human participants lose the ability to resist its tyrannic dominion. It is the Power to which they are enslaved, Paul declares, until they are killed off in baptism and joined to the Body of Christ, an equally social body, but one pre-existing its human social form. Through faith and in baptism, Paul observed that believers participate in Christ who, in both his personal body and now in his social body, vies with and defeats the tyrant Sin in a titanic struggle for cosmic dominion.
Croasmun’s book is evidently developed from his PhD thesis, so it’s a very technical read. He cites a huge amount of research from across an impressive spectrum of disciplines - neurology, philosophy, physics, biology, cognitive sciences, and social psychology to name a few. This is what makes it such an impressive feat- not simply the remarkable conclusion he comes to, but that he translates a distinctly pre-scientific, pre-modern "spiritual" idea into terms intelligible to modernity and its common assumption that "nothing exists which can't be materially seen or measured." Croasmun's study is an important lesson in "mereology," or the study of how the whole relates to the parts, and what, therefore, should be considered a "real thing." This is a practice most of us use for understanding reality without even thinking about it; when it is brought into the open and adjusted, strange and terrifying things begin to seem possible.
I imagine two kinds of reaction to the claims found in The Emergence of Sin. The first is to dismiss the idea of emergent beings, a "super-organism," as silly, pre-scientific, even childish, the product of too much fantasy literature. The second is to agree that mysterious personal entities (demons, etc) exist, but there can be no account given of them in scientific or systematic terms; it’s just “spiritual,” and therefore lies solely in the domain of faith and religion. I would strongly caution against either of these responses. It’s not that Croasmun's theory is definitively proven, or even proveable. In fact I think the charge may be available that this account is, in the end, circumstantial. However I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make sense of the existing data - linguistic, philosophical, social, and scientific - in a more compelling way. Whether you’re starting from the notion that a “collective person” is a preposterous idea, a legal fiction, a fanciful literary technique; or have long entertained the existence of mythological or demonic beings, this is a book that will challenge and provoke you, and enlarge your sense of what the cosmos is actually like. With the caveat that this is quite a difficult read, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Your mind, too, will be blown if you hang on for the ride.
Cutting to the chase in what will no doubt be a long review: what Croasmun suggests is no less than the existence of multi-personal “super-organisms”- living beings consisting of a social body and mind, and with their own subjective self. And he’s making the case in a way that appeals within a modern scientific worldview. To sharpen the point, he is defending the idea that Paul’s letter to the Romans refers to just such an entity in its use of the term hamartia, or Sin. While this notion - Sin as a distinct, singular personal agency or power - is not new, Croasmun’s use of emergence theory to explain it is, a theory which I will try to sketch shortly.
He begins by describing various perspectives on social ill/evil. A familiar perspective is that there is no “social” dimension worth speaking of other than as a useful fiction to help us describe the aggregate of individual wills. As such, addressing evil is a matter of “changing hearts and minds,” as it were: calling individuals to personal repentance, in traditional Christian language. Fix the individual, or enough of them, and you fix the social problem. Another alternative sounds more liberal: that evil is coded into the very structural and institutional realities in which we live. Therefore to change the world is to apply pressure on institutions and collective systems, namely by social reform. But for Croasmun, neither individualism nor collectivism fully accounts for what Paul is referring to as Sin (capitalized as an English speaker would do for a proper name) in the book of Romans.
His explanation begins with a discussion of "emergence theory," a theory which addresses a phenomenon observable across many formal disciplines. The idea is that for complex phenomena, a property will develop “over top of” the base phenomenon, a property which has its own being, but whose reality is difficult to pinpoint. Often something that we would call a "fiction," although it quickly becomes apparent that that term isn’t quite right. This property depends on the constituent parts, but is not reducible to the sum of those parts. It is said that the resulting phenomenon "supervenes" upon the lower order parts. Examples: the score at a baseball game, the wetness of water, the "invisible hand" of the stock market. Each of these is a nameable thing, one that is experienced distinctly by an observer. Yet each of them only exists because of the aggregate sum of a whole series of lesser events or objects, which coordinate with one another in a series of patterened relationships. A single water molecule is water, but it is not experienced as wet. Yet anyone would consider it foolish to claim that wetness is illusory. Any given scoring event in a game is not, itself, the score, nor is the game as a whole "the score." The hand of the market is not any powerful investor or trader, it is a measure of the sum of many, many trading decisions, distilled as one event or will. Each of these things “exists” in truest sense- they “have their being” (-ist) “out from” (ex-) some other matter or phenomena. On top of that, a second characteristic is observed: that of "downward causation." In the case of the market, the "invisible hand" is seen moving prices, and traders make decisions on the basis of what “the market” is "doing." The manager of a team will adjust his strategy, how much and which risk to venture, according to the score. Failure to act in accordance with the boundaries set by the emergent property brings very real consequences. The property's influence over lower order parts (traders, players/managers) is definite and undeniable. So these properties “supervene on” and exert “downward causation” upon the matter from which they have their existence; they simultaneously depend upon it and influence it.
Pushing further, it is not only possible but necessary to describe human consciousness - personhood itself - as emergent; dependent upon various systems and subsystems of the human body and brain, yet never itself localizable or reducible to the sum of its parts. The body itself is emergent: 90% of the matter of a human does not share DNA with the human. Bacterial colonies digest food, water constitutes a large portion of bodily matter. The mind depends upon various external tools to do its work. Moving outward, the human being participates in social systems and structures which are both the result of individual choice AND influence those very choices. A “social mind” is discernible. But here's the kicker; Croasmun is arguing that if we claim such a being - a social mind or collective personhood - doesn’t meet the qualifications for a “real” being, but is only imaginary, then we undercut the very notion of the selfhood of the individual human being. If the human being is real, so is the social person, because both are equally emergent. No reasonable definition of personhood can serve only one of these realities. If the collective being is unreal, then so is the individual human. If the individual person is concretely proveable, then so is the social person. Any reasoning that you construct to deny social personhood will undercut the very basis for affirming human individual personhood itself.
This, claims Croasmun, is what Paul is talking about in Romans when he refers to hamartia, or Sin. Pre-enlightenment as they were, Biblical writers were not restricted to an empiricist, materialist account of the world, and so when they saw social and collective forces at work, often irresistible forces, they were readily inclined to name them and consider them as distinct beings. The primary question of TEoS consists of this: Is Paul's reference to Sin a matter of personification (literary device for effect), or person-identification (describing a literal, personal reality in plain language)? Croasmun demonstrates how emergence theory sweeps across a host of modern disciplines to define and argue for, in terms amenable to post-Enlightenment rationalist westerners, the existence of a distinct, personal, collective super-organism, a Being which in the Bible is named Sin. This Being exercises a dominion, having arisen from human choices to sin their way into a certain collective structural order of life, in which boundaries are set on behaviors and even desires (a case study in racism and the killing of Michael Brown helps to bring this out). Paul is identifying a person - a tyrant, in fact. One which, having sprung from human sins, has been loose in the world for millennia, holding humanity in bondage to its evil will.
With (or despite) my paltry description, you may be able to see how emergence theory provides the a missing link that unites the individual and systemic accounts of evil- that the social systems which are created by individual choice and participation in turn exercise a power over individuals, a power impossible to disobey without serious consequences. For one who finds themself within a particular system, the effects are no less than fully real: a stock trader’s actions - even their biology down to their hormonal state - is altered; a baseball manager's job and therefore his very real well-being may be on the line. A criminal organization requires the submission of its constituents on pain of violence, coercing them to do violence themselves, often things they would never do on their own. The idea of corporate personhood, a legally existing person that makes decisions and has its day in court, springs to mind. Each of these systems is not merely observable as a social phenomenon, but even as a biological one, as the field of epigenetics has begun to reveal to us.
The climactic puzzle piece is to see the notion of an emergent social person as exactly what the Apostle Paul refers to in Romans: Hamartia, the willful agent that springs from human sins, systematizing and constructing the world such that human participants lose the ability to resist its tyrannic dominion. It is the Power to which they are enslaved, Paul declares, until they are killed off in baptism and joined to the Body of Christ, an equally social body, but one pre-existing its human social form. Through faith and in baptism, Paul observed that believers participate in Christ who, in both his personal body and now in his social body, vies with and defeats the tyrant Sin in a titanic struggle for cosmic dominion.
Croasmun’s book is evidently developed from his PhD thesis, so it’s a very technical read. He cites a huge amount of research from across an impressive spectrum of disciplines - neurology, philosophy, physics, biology, cognitive sciences, and social psychology to name a few. This is what makes it such an impressive feat- not simply the remarkable conclusion he comes to, but that he translates a distinctly pre-scientific, pre-modern "spiritual" idea into terms intelligible to modernity and its common assumption that "nothing exists which can't be materially seen or measured." Croasmun's study is an important lesson in "mereology," or the study of how the whole relates to the parts, and what, therefore, should be considered a "real thing." This is a practice most of us use for understanding reality without even thinking about it; when it is brought into the open and adjusted, strange and terrifying things begin to seem possible.
I imagine two kinds of reaction to the claims found in The Emergence of Sin. The first is to dismiss the idea of emergent beings, a "super-organism," as silly, pre-scientific, even childish, the product of too much fantasy literature. The second is to agree that mysterious personal entities (demons, etc) exist, but there can be no account given of them in scientific or systematic terms; it’s just “spiritual,” and therefore lies solely in the domain of faith and religion. I would strongly caution against either of these responses. It’s not that Croasmun's theory is definitively proven, or even proveable. In fact I think the charge may be available that this account is, in the end, circumstantial. However I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make sense of the existing data - linguistic, philosophical, social, and scientific - in a more compelling way. Whether you’re starting from the notion that a “collective person” is a preposterous idea, a legal fiction, a fanciful literary technique; or have long entertained the existence of mythological or demonic beings, this is a book that will challenge and provoke you, and enlarge your sense of what the cosmos is actually like. With the caveat that this is quite a difficult read, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Your mind, too, will be blown if you hang on for the ride.
December 10, 2020
One of the most interesting, insightful books I have ever read. The weighty title actually underplays what the book is about - despite its relatively brief (< 200 pages) length, it dives deeply into theology, evolutionary biology, philosophy of mind, entomology, cognitive science, sociology, and more. The first 3 chapters (which don't even get to Romans), on Emergence and Personhood are worth the price of admission alone. Not only do I understand Romans better, I understand the world better.
It is not a casual read. It's the type of book that throws around terms like "ontological monism", "mereology", and "autochthonous", repeatedly uses Greek words without explanation (understandably ἁμαρτία most of the time, but also many others), and cites sources like "philosophers of Chemistry", something I've never even heard of. But if you persist, astonishingly interesting and insightful ideas.
It is not a casual read. It's the type of book that throws around terms like "ontological monism", "mereology", and "autochthonous", repeatedly uses Greek words without explanation (understandably ἁμαρτία most of the time, but also many others), and cites sources like "philosophers of Chemistry", something I've never even heard of. But if you persist, astonishingly interesting and insightful ideas.
August 31, 2019
This was a gargantuan undertaking, and the author handled it with steadfastness and as much clarity as can be mustered for such a dense array of topics. Tackling the multivalent subject of emergent theory to apply it to Paul's use of s/Sin (let the reader understand) is a brilliant way of synthesizing the vaired accounts of what sin "is", and I for think this may be a generational book on the subject, much like Cornelius Planting's "Not The Way it was Supposed to Be" was for the last generation.
Now, if only we can get him to write a popular-level version of this book.
Now, if only we can get him to write a popular-level version of this book.
October 4, 2025
Such an incredible contribution to the conversation around sin’s effects on the mind, marrying Romans 1:18-32 with 12:1-2. I look forward to applying emergence theory in my dissertation, the introduction of which Croasmun did a phenomenal job!
December 23, 2025
Honestly, a philosophically thoughtful and hermeneutically engaging deep dive into a key topic. I really appreciate this offering to our larger theological conversation. Also, Croasmun’s sweeping interdisciplinary engagement is an encouragement to us all to engage broadly and deeply.
April 3, 2020
May be one of the best books I’ve read dealing with a lithe robust nature of sin - from the origins to the effects of s/Sin. Highly recommended
June 6, 2020
yuck for religion class and it was so boring
August 20, 2023
One of the most powerful books I have ever read. Still thinking this one over.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews