Psychiatry and Sin

October 17, 2019

So general has the denial of sin been, that it has not been theologians who have resurrected the idea, but psychiatrists. Karl Menninger, of the Menninger Psychiatric Institute of Kansas, has published a book entitled 'What Ever Became of Sin.' He shows the slow devolution of the concept of sin. According to him, moralists stopped preaching about sin because everything was love; then the jurists picked the theme, and sin under law became a crime. Then the psychiatrists took it up from the legalists, and sin then became a symptom or a complex. Some rather tragic effects have resulted from this denial of sin. First of all, we have many complexes that are produced by sin, and we are blind to the true cause, which is guilt.