Bernard Ramm and the Theology of Sin -- By: Robert B. Strimple

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987)
Article: Bernard Ramm and the Theology of Sin
Author: Robert B. Strimple


Bernard Ramm and the Theology of Sin*

Robert B. Strimple

Bernard Ramm’s reputation as one of America’s leading evangelical theologians has been established not merely by the great number of books he has published but by the fact that in whatever area of theology he has focused, he has concentrated on the most central and significant questions and in a way that Christians of very different backgrounds, from professional theologians to new believers, have found stimulating and helpful.

In this volume Ramm reflects upon the phenomenon which troubled the psychiatrist Karl Menninger in his 1973 book, Whatever Became of Sin? 1 Our secular society no longer recognizes such a reality as sin. As Ramm observes: “… the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica…included no entry on sin…. Our daily newspapers record the depressing chronicle of crimes but never call them sins” (p. 1). “… sociology is overloaded with traditional problems that used to be called sins…. Crime is deviant or antisocial behavior. Immorality is now called being sexually active. Deviant sexual behavior is now called alternative sexual preferences” (p. 158).

The result, of course, is not the mere loss of a word from our vocabulary but the loss of a true understanding of human experience. As Pascal had seen clearly in the seventeenth century: “the doctrine of Original Sin is beyond our ability to explain it, but without it we cannot explain anything” (paraphrase Ramm’s, p. 1). The main purpose of Ramm’s book is to develop Pascal’s thesis in such a way as to impress upon our generation the fact that it is the Christian doctrine of sin which illuminates personal and social existence and the course of history, “giving clarity that nothing else in the religions of the world nor the philosophies of the world can provide”

* Bernard Ramm, Offense to Reason: A Theology of Sin (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. x, 187. $15.95).

(p. 163), even though all of them have had to wrestle with the problem of evil.

Beginning with the Enlightenment, Ramm surveys the history of philosophical “explanations” of the evil side of human experience through Hobbes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Skinner, Edmund O. Wilson, Ernest Becker, Stephen Chorover, Camus, and T. S. Eliot (pp. 10-37). Later Ramm examines the teaching regarding sin in the major world religions (pp. 58-61) and in the major modern Christian theologians, from Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Ritschl through Kierkegaard, Tillich, Barth, Hendrikus Berkhof, to Liberation Theology (pp. 129-44). These sket...

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