Why the meaning of sin changed radically during the first centuries of Christianity Ancient Christians invoked sin to account for an astonishing range of things, from the death of God's son to the politics of the Roman Empire that worshipped him. In this book, award-winning historian of religion Paula Fredriksen tells the surprising story of early Christian concepts of sin, exploring the ways that sin came to shape ideas about God no less than about humanity. Long before Christianity, of course, cultures had articulated the idea that human wrongdoing violated relations with the divine. But Sin tells how, in the fevered atmosphere of the four centuries between Jesus and Augustine, singular new Christian ideas about sin emerged in rapid and vigorous variety, including the momentous shift from the belief that sin is something one does to something that one is born into. As the original defining circumstances of their movement quickly collapsed, early Christians were left to debate the causes, manifestations, and remedies of sin. This is a powerful and original account of the early history of an idea that has centrally shaped Christianity and left a deep impression on the secular world as well.

Examines and criticizes Niebuhr's and Tillich's doctrines of sin and grace from the perspective of women's experience.

"In The History of the Devil, Flusser frames the human situation from a pseudo-religious point of view. The phenomenal world, or reality in a general sense, is identified as the Devil, and that which transcends phenomena, or the philosophers' and theologians' reality, is identified as God. Referencing Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in its structure, Flusser provocatively leads the reader through an existential exploration of nothingness as the bedrock of reality, where phenomenon and transcendence, Devil and God become fused and confused. So radically confused, in fact, that Flusser suggests we abandon the quotation marks from the terms Devil and God. At this moment of abysmal confusion, we must make the existential decisions that give direction to our lives"--Publisher's description.