ABSTRACT
Pannenberg’s doctrine of sin is, of course, crucially important to our understanding of his whole enterprise of theological anthropology, for sin, together with the metaphor of the image of God, constitutes the most significant theological issue in this part of his work.1 The doctrines of the image of God and sin thematise two basic aspects between anthropological phenomena and the reality of God. As already presented in detail in Chapter 2, to speak of the image of God in human beings is to refer to their closeness to the divine reality, a closeness that also determines their unique position in the world of creation. By contrast, to speak of sin is to point to the factual separation from God of human beings, whose true destiny is, nonetheless, fellowship with God. It has been argued earlier that the image of God, conceived as human destiny, is to be understood as providing direction for the process of self-integration in the living of human life, while sin, being the failure to achieve this destiny, destroys human identity and breaks the unity of human reality. In this sense, the doctrines of the image of God and sin delineate the anthropological manifestation of the basic tension between closeness to God and separation from God that marks all of one’s religious life. At the same time, for the purposes of our work, discussions of sin would serve to project a balanced view of the reality of humanity so as to avoid giving the otherwise over-optimistic picture that every human being is infinitely open to God and fully realises his destiny. Notwithstanding our image of God, the way from disposition to actualisation of human destiny is, indeed, broken by sin.
