CLF 4 FINALS
REVIEWER
CHAPTER 3: Sin
Introduction
• St. Thomas Aquinas “Summa
Theologiae”
• St. Peter sinned mortally → grave
matter, full knowledge and full
consent.
• Human freedom as interaction of
will and intellect.
Humanity’s road to perdition
Perdition
- a religious concept from Christianity
that means hell or eternal damnation.
Medieval theologians St. Thomas holds a
negative view of many human beings:
humanity fails to exercise our moral
responsibilities most of us are on the road to
perdition.
Massa damnata
- “the damned masses” – mass of
perdition
• St. Augustine came up with it Many
believers continue to hold it.
• Perhaps this is one reason why we so
frequently acquit ourselves of moral
responsibility because we do not want to
face how morally bad and hence
mortally damned, we actually are.
• William James - Varieties of
Religious Experiences
- “Healthy soul”
- “The sick soul”
- “healthy souled believers”- we were
especially and naturally good
Massa bona
- we’re sinful but God’s mercy
overcomes this and we are all saved.
Judgment day
- For Pope Francis we are sinners but
loved; miserable but forgiven.
Two ways of falling into sin
Weaknesses- our sexuality
Way of strength
Examples:
• The publican and Pharisee praying
in the temple.
• The rich man steps over Lazarus
and ignores Lazarus
• Parable of the Good Samaritan
- Let’s be aware of at least two truths: that
we are probably greater sinners than we
admit that is because we sin out of our
strength.
- Gospel stories/ Scriptures help us to
better see our sinfulness and ourselves
again.
Ordinariness of sin, domestication of
sin and the sin of omission
Omission- excluded
John Mahoney “The Making of Moral
Theology” considers this manner of
confessing sins and describes it as the
domestication (process of adapting) of our
sinfulness
Pervasive- an unwelcome influence or
spreading widely throughout an area or a
group of people.
Deceptive- giving an appearance or
impression different from the true one;
misleading.
 Elusive- difficult to achieve.
Our sins from weakness preoccupy our
efforts.
Sins sadly blind us from our coldness of
heart.
F. Sionil Jose stories Olvidon (fiction)
echoed our hidden sinfulness
In the fiction stories of F. Sionil Jose discuss
- Avoiding our neighbors
- Selfishness
- Apathy or lack of concern
- Violence
- Coldness of heart
An article “Autobiography and selfdeception
(deceiving)
David Burell and Stanley Hauerwas
- studied the life of a German collaborator of Hitler
named Albert Speer- German architect.
Albert Speer
- loved only himself and his family.
Hannah Arendt (political
philosopher)
- “banality of evil”, the “everydayness” or
“ordinariness of badness”
Given the right situation, the proper timing,
the right conditions and indeed it may not
take us much to become a Speer.
• We are more likely to become a Speer
than a Hitler because
• We do not want to confront our
sinfulness
• We presume (think) our goodness and;
• We do not think we are wicked.
Sin as indifference towards the call of
love
- According to a theologian James
Keenan, “Sin is simply failure to love”
- “Sin is in the failure to bother to love”
- There is self-satisfaction and self-
righteousness.
How to confess our sins
- A conscience that strives to act justly is
not a guarantee that the action will in
fact be right.
- Blindness is also the preponderance
(advantage) of sin.
- Sin committed out of our giving into our
brokenness.
- A German moral theologian Franz
Bockle said that effectiveness of
confession lies in the very recognition of
our sinfulness in the very act of
confession itself.
St. Ignatius’s insight for first week of
Spiritual exercises
o We are sinners but saved.
o In sacrament of reconciliation, we
try to name not only the wrong we
have done but also the instances we
have not loved.
SOCIAL SIN AND ST. AUGUSTINE’S
ORDO AMORIS
Ekstasis- state of being beside oneself or
rapt (fascinated) out oneself.
Caritas- Christian love of humankind;
charity
Status quo- existing state of affairs
regarding social or political issues.
Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from
a Birmingham jail wrote not to outright
racists, rather he wrote to white preachers.
Reinhold Niebuhr an American
theologian wrote about the phenomenon of
unmindfulness
And apathy in human communities in Moral
Man, Immoral Society.
He argued that individuals can be motivated
by a sense of compassion and justice but
that societies are not capable of such
transcendence (go beyond normal limits)
MOVIES
Giver- people were trapped in a society that
has controlled diversity, no emotional life
and no color. What they cannot see, they
cannot understand.
Divergent- their society prided itself in
their neat groupings and standards that
kept them from facing the off hidden issues
of kind, love, and compassion.
City Ember- the characters live in a
collapsing underground city and society of
order and control, with a forgotten box
giving instructions to flee and get to the
earth’s surface.
The Hunger Games- which we find
ourselves might be controlling us from
seeing reality as it actually is.
Think outside the box.
Parable of the rich young man
• It is not always following the
commandments.
• But helping others who is needy and
giving up richness.
Rather than omission (being left out or
excluded) be a commission (having a
function and purpose)
Sin is still felix culpa “happy fault” the sin of
Adam viewed as fortunate, because it
brought about the blessedness of the
Redemption.
“We dare to pass on the love that was given
us in Christ, it is in this call to love that we
truly became what we love, that is Christ;
the order of love manifests itself as healing
creativity in service and
Inclusion of the marginalized and the poor,
we become Christ for others”.
CHAPTER 4: The Development of the
Moral Life and return to the
commandments.
INTRODUCTION
- Moral theologians actively engage
scriptures in developing their Christian
Ethics.
- James Gustafson, one of the said
Christian ethicists proposes two modes
of ethical reading vis-à-vis/ regarding
the New Testament
- as revealed morality or revealed reality
as context of ethical principles by which
to live by
- Reading the New Testament through the
lens of “revealed morality” means that
we are seeking to figure out if it reveals
new code of ethics by which we should
live.
What about dietary laws?
Dietary law
- means any of the rules and customs
concerning what may or may not be
eaten under particular condition.
Having a moderate in all the things we
do and eat.
Religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Church
of the Latter-Day Saints and Seventh Day
Adventist practice/ do dietary laws.
For Catholicism, there is no apparent
dietary restrictions, but moderation and
some forms of fasting are observed.
The Ten Commandments and Call to
Caritas
Moral theology has been largely dominated
by the concern to assist priests in the proper
administration of the sacrament of
confession.
Three periods can be discerned from this
fact: age of the early Middle Ages.
Penance
- consisted of contrition, or feeling sorry
for one's sins, confession of one's sins to
a priest, and performing certain works
of satisfaction or punishments imposed
by one's priest. If one failed to confess a
major sin, one went straight to hell.
“Confessional manuals” of high
Scholasticism and the “ moral manuals” of
modern times.
A transition was due by the time of Peter
Abelard, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St.
Hildegard of Bingen.
During the period of their scholasticism,
they realized a sense of being a person with
unique experiences, “Interiority” as we call
it today.
In the twelfth century, terms like person
and other emerged in a whole new way.
Because of this outcome doing the
sacrament of penance also developed,
new questions arose like:
What if a person committed a sinful act but
did not fully mean it?
What if she was misled into sin? Or what if
he was forced?
Questions of intentionality, ignorance and
freedom emerged in the twelfth century.
- Confessors’ role was not only to be just
judge, he is also the physician of the
soul. As a result confessional manuals
were written in the twelfth century and
influence moral theology until sixteenth
century, these larger and complex
manuals still used the categories of the
seven deadly sins.
- Martin Luther’s Large Catechism
dedicated nearly half of its 120 pages to
the Ten Commandments. In that same
year Luther published Small Catechism,
which was designed so that the head of
the household could handily instruct his
Christian family.
- The Ten Commandments became then
the staple of the moral tradition in every
major denominational movement of the
sixteenth century.
- The Ten Commandments were
recognized again as “the rock of
Christian Ethics”
The Moral Manuals and the
Commandments in the Scriptures
After the Reformation, Catholics
incorporated the Ten Commandments not
only into their new moral manuals. Indeed,
if the twelfth century marks a break with
the penitential, the sixteenth century
marks a break with the confessional
manuals.
Moral manuals use the Ten
Commandments to analyze contemporary
cases of these sins
A good example of moral manual was that
by the Jesuit Francisco de Toledo who
has served seven popes.
Considering the Commandments in
our day
- The law that God gave was a law not
primarily for God’s benefit and
delight, but for ours.
- The laws give us a mode of
exercising our freedom. In this sense
the laws are gifts from God to teach
us how to use our freedom as human
beings
St. Thomas Aquinas
• for instance said that nothing
bothered God about human
conduct except when human
beings brought harm upon
themselves.
• He believed that our well-being
has always been the aim of the
love and wisdom of God.
- God’s law is not for God’s
entertainment, but rather for our
benefit.
- The Ten Commandments are a rock,
then because they express the
providential sovereignty of God.
- When we were growing up, we
understood Roman Catholicism
primarily in terms of sacramental and
devotional practices. We wanted into
God’s presence, through the mass,
benediction, confession, communion,
the rosary, and the lives of saints.
- In the sixth century, the Council of
Orleans and later Martin of Braga
articulated a prohibition against “servile
work”. This law was not an imposition
or a burden on the serf’s person who is
forced to work on a plot of land during
the Medieval period
Law and Rights
- Language of the commandments
reminds us of the language of law, and
today many of our laws are about rights.
- The historian Brian Tierney offers us
a timely corrective that makes such
utterances no longer credible.
- In the Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on
Natural Rights, Natural law and Church
law, Tierney argues that long before
such momentous events as the signing
of the Magna Carta, the instinct of the
church was to articulate and defend the
rights of individual persons.
- The Stoics like Seneca and Cicero
earlier claimed that natural law was
found in its universal, objective
expressions, twelfth century church
canonists developed that insight
considerably and defined the natural law
as a personal force, faculty or power
inherent in individual human persons.
- John Gerson proposed a reform of the
church as a whole that depended on the
respect of its individual members.

- Like William Ockham and the

canonists before him, Gerson
presumed a correspondence and not a
contradiction between personal natural
rights and the common good.

- Las Casas, in particular used these

insights to defend the rights of American
natives against their European
conquerors. The only way to attain
justice and the common good was to
recognize and articulate the rights of its
members.