What is sin in Christianity?

Sin is more than breaking rules; it is a turning away from God and the good — a broken relationship and a disordering of the human heart. The New Testament word often translated 'sin' carries the sense of missing the mark. Christianity sees sin as both individual acts and a deeper condition that individual acts express.

The Fall refers to the story in Genesis 3 in which the first humans, Adam and Eve, disobey God and eat from the forbidden tree, losing their original harmony with God, each other, and creation. Christians read it as an account of how a good world came to be marked by sin, suffering, and death — whether as literal history or as a theological picture of the human condition.

Do all Christians believe in original sin the same way?

No. Catholic and most Protestant traditions affirm original sin but describe its severity differently, from a wounded nature to total depravity. Eastern Orthodoxy speaks instead of 'ancestral sin,' emphasizing inherited mortality and corruption more than inherited guilt. The disagreements are real and old.

Sin & the Fall — What Christianity Means by a Broken World

Q: What is original sin?

Original sin is the doctrine that the effects of the Fall are inherited: human beings are born into a condition already bent away from God, rather than starting morally neutral. Augustine gave the idea its classic Western form. Traditions differ on how strongly to state it — from total depravity to a weakened but not ruined nature.

The claim that something
is wrong with us.

Christianity's diagnosis is uncomfortable and, many would say, hard to argue with once stated plainly: the world was made good, and something in us keeps turning away from that good. That turning is what it means by sin — not mainly a list of forbidden acts, but a bent in the human heart. This page opens the story it tells about how the bend got there, and what it does and doesn't claim.

Missing the mark, not just breaking the rule

The word most often translated “sin” in the New Testament, hamartia, is an archer's term: missing the mark. That image is more exact than “rule-breaking.” Sin is falling short of what we were aimed at — a failure of relationship and direction before it is a violation of a code.

So Christianity distinguishes between sins, the individual acts, and sin, the deeper condition those acts come from — a heart curved in on itself, choosing lesser goods over the highest one. This is why the tradition can call even respectable, law-abiding lives “sinful”: the issue isn't a rap sheet but a disordered set of loves. Read this way, sin is less like a crime and more like an illness or a gravity, something that pulls even when no rule is technically broken. And that framing is what makes grace necessary rather than merely nice: you cannot rule-follow your way out of a condition that shapes the follower.

The Fall, and what it's really about

The origin story sits in Genesis 3. In a good creation, the first humans are given freedom with a single limit; tempted, they overstep it, reaching to “be as gods” on their own terms. The result is not just punishment but rupture — estrangement from God, from each other (they hide, they blame), and from the creation now described as resistant and mortal. Christians read this story along a spectrum, from literal history to a theological portrait of the human condition, but the point it carries is the same either way: our brokenness is not how things were meant to be. It is a fall from something, not the way things always were.

From that story grows the doctrine of original sin — the claim that the Fall's effects are inherited, so that we're born already bent rather than starting from neutral. Augustine gave this its classic Western shape. Here the traditions genuinely diverge, and it's worth naming: much of Protestantism speaks of total depravity (every part of human nature touched by sin); Catholicism of a nature wounded but not destroyed; Eastern Orthodoxy of ancestral sin, stressing inherited mortality and corruption over inherited guilt. What they share is the refusal to say human beings are simply fine as they are — and the insistence that the diagnosis exists for the sake of a cure.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”— Romans 3:23 (KJV)

The through-line

The doctrine of sin is bleak only if you stop reading there. In Christianity it's the first half of a sentence whose second half is grace — a diagnosis written by a physician who intends to heal.

The claim that something
is wrong with us.

Sin is

The Fall

The debate

Missing the mark, not just breaking the rule

The Fall, and what it's really about

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