Anthropology
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
Sin: The purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God.
J.C. Wenger, What Mennonites Believe
God created us with a moral nature, able to choose right and reject wrong. God gave us a capacity for unselfish and gracious love. ... god put a monitor at the very center of our being. We call it our conscience. This helps us to know and do what is right. God also gave us an inner awareness that we are responsible to God for our thoughts, words, and deeds. We call this sense of responsibility and accountability free will. We did not remain in he good state in which were were created. In our freedom as persons, we chose to revolt against the creator. Worst of all, by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, we all became sinners. We call the results of this fall original sin. This means that as soon as we enter the world sin begins to affect us.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Sin comes to be, no necessarily but inevitably, in a situation of angst. Anxiety without a definite object exists as a basic dis-ease. In anxiety, humans are faced with two possibilities:
1) trust God
2) trust one's self
Human beings set themselves up in place of God to be gods themselves, subjecting others to their will, or lose sense of self by burying the self in the pleasures of this world.
The Feminist Critique
Feminist Theologians question whether this view of sin and its corollary, Atonement Christology, presupposes the male experience as normative.
Our discussion begins by looking at the research of Carol Gilligan that suggests that the way we look at moral reasoning and cognitive development is based upon a principled rather than a relational notion of justice.
If we then look at particular sins, we can see significant patterns that suggest that men and women sin in different ways. Where as the manifestation of spousal murder, child abuse and sexual crimes among men generally fit the model of sin described by Niebuhr, the female expression of these sins tends to point toward what Judith Plaskow describes as "the failure to take responsibility for self-actualization." Women's ills or sins tend to arise from an under evaluation of self.
Feminist theologians tend to call for models of salvation that focus upon healing rather than atonement, notions that are social rather than individualistic and atomic. Feminist theologians also tend to call for an ethic other than that of self-humiliation. The model of self sacrificial love works for those in power but cannot be an ethic for those without power.