Can God Sin?

From my earlier post on God's Morality, a question was raised on "Can God sin?" I do not claim to know the answer, but maybe by the end of my written thought process, I'll have somewhat of a conclusion and where I stand.

First we must define the terms.

God --> The divine being. Coming from the Christian faith, to me (and as I will refer to him throughout) God is an immaterial spirit who created the world and continues to exist in everything everywhere and reveals himself to humans here and there. That would probably suffice for my definition as far as this topic is concerned, although further clarification may be allowed.

Can --> What does it mean if I ask Can God do something. Is he able to? If he so chose to, he could imagine anything and do it. He could create the universe, destroy the universe, if he can. So notice the question is not would God do something, but can he, if he wanted to.

Now for the real topic. How do you define sin. There are 2 ways that I'm going to approach defining sin.

1. Sin --> Going against God, separation from God, not doing what God has commanded. This is a very popular definition. I would even say it's the (overwhelmingly) dominant definition in Christianity. In this model, God, being sovereign, makes up what is right and what is wrong. When he created the universe, he also "created" what was good. Good was doing what he said. Good brought people closer to God, and sin brought them away from God. Separation is the result of the action (sin), and the action (sin) is when we (the people) go against the commandments/instructions of God. Adam sinned because he ate the apple when he was told not to. Christians sin when we don't follow the Bible (the Bible for the purpose of argument here is going to be equivalent with God's commandments). How would everyone else sin? By not following the law anyway (as addressed by Paul in Romans). As Paul says, we all have the law of God written on our hearts, and when we sin, we're still to blame whether we know God's commands or not (I'm not telling you my own opinion, but how it is presented by Paul).

Whatever God does then, is good. If good is defined as what God is, then whenever we are good, we are being like God. When we love others, we are doing what God would do. Goodness is defined by God.

This model works I suppose, you have God as good, and he wants everyone on earth to be good as well. He tells us what to do (directly or indirectly), and then if we follow it we are on God's good side, and if not then we are not on his good side, which leaves us screwed. This is not the topic to discuss whether or not people who have never heard of God are doomed as sinners, but to ask if God can sin.

Ignore the statement "God can do anything" for a moment ok?

If loving others is good because it's what God would do (WWJD?), then we could form a perfect model of behavior by following what God would do. So to Christians, when Jesus shows up and people start saying that he is God, they say that if we do what Jesus did, we are doing what God would do because Jesus was/is God.

So by this model, if God got jealous of a man's wife and came down and struck the husband dead in a rage and then killed his wife in order to take her up to heaven, this would not be sin. If sin is defined by what God does/is, then this would still not be sin, because God is doing it.

This is very uncomfortable. Of course we would say God wouldn't do something like that, but we'd like to think that God could do it. So if we follow model 1 of sin, then God cannot sin, because as soon as he would do something that we'd like to call sin, it becomes not-sin because by definition it can't be (since God is doing it).

I reject this model. I think it can be inappropriately used (as my example above shows), and just leads to ridiculousness.

This leads to model 2.

2. Sin --> Moral code is independent of what God choses to do. Something isn't good because it is like God. We do not call God good because he defines what good is, but we call him good because he "follows" the moral code better than anyone. In this way, God could sin. We would again say that he would never sin, but we would admit the possibility that he could if he wanted to.

This is again uncomfortable. It is less uncomfortable, because we can say that Jesus (God) was the perfect human because he didn't sin.

As a side note, this is simiar to Pelagianism. This would imply that we could all be like Jesus, and choose not to sin. Pelagianism was declared heresy in 451 CE.

Also, neither of these models accounts for Original Sin. I'll leave it at that. Original sin doesn't make sense in these models and I may talk about it another time.

The biggest way that this model (2) of sin seems not quite right is that it makes God independent of morality. He didn't invent it, but abides by it. That just seems weird. It makes it seem as if God is not really inherently good, but has to try just like anyone else, and because he succeeds, we can worship him. This is definitely uncomfortable.

What then does that leave us with. To the question "Can God sin?" we are left with a yes or no that puts God in awkward positions.

I then challenge sin itself. I challenge the notion of it. But I will save that for another time. My conclusion on the question "Can God sin?" is that there is a problem with the question of sin. I would challenge the idea of God and sin that is all to common. Not that they don't exist, but that they are extremely misunderstood. I do not claim that I know something everyone else doesn't, but I would only ask people to think about things on their own, and don't just accept what you're told.