The purpose of this chapter is to outline in a more systematic way Augustine’s understanding of the nature of sin. This involves exploring a number of issues which have not been discussed in the previous chapters, namely, Augustine’s insistence that even when we were virtuous, we might also be sinful; his understanding of original sin; and his idea of sin as consent to carnal concupiscence.

This chapter demonstrates that the Laudian avant garde was not limited to the university but encompassed older men in rural livings, whose commitment to Laudian values was, by this point, decades old, but whose views were also connected to the universities. The chapter reveals lively exchanges amongst such provincial ministers, in print and the pulpit, on some of the hot issues of the day. The chapter homes in on three men in rural livings, Robert Shelford, James Buck and Edward Kellett, all of whom have featured prominently throughout the book. Shelford’s works can be connected to firebrands in Cambridge like Richard Crashaw or Edward Martin, and to bulwarks of the provincial puritan establishment like Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who borrowed the image of the lodestone from Shelford in order to refute, in print, some of the central Arminian contentions that underpinned Shelford’s position. Some of the central claims made by Buck developed themes canvassed in the university and elicited a response, again in the pulpit and in print, from Humphrey Sydenham in Somerset. In this way something of the liveliness and fluidity of the theological scene during the 1630s is recaptured.

The Council of Trent addressed the topics of original sin and justification in two decrees, developed in succession. The Decree on Original Sin reaffirms a broadly Augustinian understanding of original sin, its effects, and its remedy in baptism. What remains after baptism is not sin in the strict sense. The Decree on Justification lays out the path from sin to grace to glory. Emphasis lies on both the constant and decisive role of grace and on the way grace engages rather than nullifies the agency of the justified. The Decree on Justification in particular not only rejected errors, but expounded Catholic teaching.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

This chapter explores the constraints that a commitment to the inevitability of sin places on an understanding of the existence and nature of human freedom, and the implications of this understanding for debates about divine providence. It is argued, first, that the New Testament univocally attests to the inevitability of sin, and second, that given this biblical witness, Christians should not be swayed by one reason commonly given for rejecting theological determinism: in order to preserve libertarian freedom for humans at large. Still, considerations regarding the inevitability of human sin leave untouched another common argument against theological determinism: that it makes God the author of sin. Considerations of the inevitability (and culpability) of sin, on the one hand, and concerns about divine authorship of sin, on the other, might push one toward an uncommon combination of compatibilism and theological indeterminism. However, given the apparent unfairness of punishing individuals for sins they could not have avoided committing, a position between standard compatibilism and free will skepticism is tentatively endorsed.

Democracy in America begins from the central insight that religion precedes politics. This is best seen in the prominent role that Tocqueville accords to America’s Puritan Founders. The Puritans, in his view, contribute much to the spirit of American political culture. On the one hand, they contribute a covenantal theology that focuses on the importance of intermediation among otherwise separate democratic individuals. Yet the Puritans are also responsible for notions of sinfulness and religious “stain” that have the potential to assume illiberal forms. As Joshua Mitchell argues in this chapter, one potentially illiberal danger of Puritanism is the scapegoating of particular groups through the dynamics of identity politics. In Mitchell’s view, we need to reckon with America’s Puritan legacy not only through the lens of John Calvin and the covenantal theory of mediation but also through the prism of Blaise Pascal whose insights into the problems of loneliness, separation, and redemption illuminate contemporary political dilemmas.

Influence of the dualist ‘Encratite’ tradition helps account for the pessimistic colouring of Augustine’s view of human nature, but this is far from being the whole story, in which a turning point was his attempt to explain what it could mean to say that God hated Esau. The sacred books which both Augustine and Pelagius accepted without question could bear either of their probably honest interpretations of grace. Even modern scholars can react strongly in opposite directions to this fifth-century controversy, on a spectrum from barely concealed dislike of Augustine’s idea of grace to apparently heartfelt eloquence in presenting it. While twenty-first-century society is comfortable with pluralism, at least on these topics, fifth-century Christianity was not. Contradictory certainties must have generated both uncertainty and unease among those not committed to either side.

The two authors come apart here, not simply because Ruse is a nonbeliever and Davies a practicing Christian. Ruse was raised a Quaker and so, thinking theologically, he thinks in a Quaker context. More than anything he is accepting (or he would be if he were still a believer) of apophatic theology. One cannot say what God is but rather what He is not. How one works out the details of the Trinity are not that important. One is committed to the Trinity on faith, and for the rest – “now we see through a glass darkly.” For Davies, by contrast, theology is grounded in the thinking of the great theologians. He believes one can make progress on understanding the Trinity. Here is where the clash comes, not so much because Ruse is a nonbeliever, but because his theology tells him that all such attempts as those of Davies are bound to fail. 1 + 1 + 1 ≠ 1.

Locke regarded the Law of Nature as divinely given and, hence, inherently rational, universally binding, and eternally valid. This view of the Law of Nature informs his natural law theory, which presents both biblical and natural theological arguments. Yet, he believed in the superiority of the Law of Faith, delivered by Christ, over both the Law of Nature and the Law of Moses. To Locke, Christ not only affirmed the Law of Nature completely and unambiguously, but also assured humanity of otherworldly rewards and sanctions and of God’s forgiveness of the repentant faithful. Thus, the Law of Faith effectively promotes the practice of morality and the development of moral character and enables human beings to pursue salvation. Maintaining the necessity both of good works and of acceptance of God’s assisting grace for salvation, Locke rejected predestination, denied original sin, and excluded the satisfaction theory of atonement, which he described as a disputed doctrine, from his account of Christianity in his public writings. However, some of his manuscripts demonstrate his dislike for the satisfaction theory, to which he preferred the Arminians’ governmental theory of atonement.

Kant’s thesis that there is in human nature an innate, universal, inextirpable, and radical propensity to evil belongs to his attempt to choose fragments of (Christian) revelation and see if they cannot be seen to lead back to the religion of pure reason. Though Kant regards this thesis as unproven, he offers it as an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of original sin that can be used in moral discipline, though not in moral dogmatics. To understand Kant’s concept of evil, we must understand his concept of freedom and disentangle it from incomprehensible metaphysical speculations with which it has often been associated in the literature. Kant’s concept of moral evil is extremely abstract, consisting in the choice of some nonmoral incentive over the moral incentive. Evil can never be made entirely intelligible because evil is action, hence done for reasons, but there can never be a sufficient or decisive reason for doing it because the moral incentive is rationally prior to all nonmoral incentives. But Kant thinks evil can be made intelligible to an extent by seeing it as part of nature’s purposiveness in developing human species predispositions in the social condition.

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.