What is sin?
Sin is relationship-breaking that gives evil a foothold. It appears as original sin inherited from the Fall, hereditary sin transmitted through families, collective sin shared by groups, and individual sin personally committed. Repentance addresses personal acts, while complete restoration also heals inherited and collective conditions and changes the fallen lineage.
Sin is one of the most familiar words in religion and one of the least clearly defined. Many people reduce it to breaking a rule, others to a feeling of guilt, and others deny the idea altogether. Scripture treats sin as something far more serious than a mistake: it is a broken relationship with God that spreads through generations and gives evil a foothold in human life. Seeing what sin actually is makes both its gravity and its remedy far clearer.
The Biblical Foundation
The Bible defines sin first as a violation of God's law and standard: "whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law" (1 John 3:4). It is universal — "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) — and it entered history through one act: "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin" (Romans 5:12). Its result is separation and death: "your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isaiah 59:2), and "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). James traces its inner process: "when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death" (James 1:15). Jesus also identified whose work sin serves, telling those who rejected him, "Ye are of your father the devil... he is a liar, and the father of it" (John 8:44).
The Principle's Clarification
The Principle clarifies that sin is any act that creates a condition for evil to work in a person or in a community. Sin is not merely an offence recorded against us; it is a base of relationship established with the one who opposes God, so that Satan gains a claim over the sinner's life, lineage, and environment. The Fall was exactly this: through the misuse of love, the first ancestors joined themselves to the archangel rather than to God, and so humanity received a false lineage in place of God's own. This is why sin cannot be treated as merely personal and occasional. Because it began in the parents of humankind and was transmitted through lineage, sin has layers.
The Different Types of Sin
Sin appears in four related forms. They should be distinguished because each has a different origin and therefore requires a different level of restoration.
1. Original sin is the root inherited from the first human ancestors. It began when Adam and Eve formed an unlawful relationship with the archangel and established a lineage separated from God. Everyone born into that lineage inherits its condition before making any personal moral choice. It is therefore deeper than a bad habit or guilty memory: it is the corrupted root from which the other forms grow.
2. Hereditary sin consists of sinful conditions and consequences transmitted through one's ancestors and family line. Scripture recognizes that the iniquity of parents can affect later generations (Exodus 20:5), not because children are mechanically blamed for every parental act, but because unresolved resentment, violence, addiction, dishonesty, and misuse of love create spiritual and practical burdens that descendants inherit. A person may receive a pattern they did not begin, yet is responsible to stop rather than repeat it.
3. Collective sin is shared by a group whose members participate in, benefit from, tolerate, or inherit responsibility for a common wrong. A family, people, church, nation, or generation can establish such a condition. Daniel confessed with his people, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity” (Daniel 9:5), although he had not personally committed all their wrongs. Collective sin is addressed through truth, repentance, restitution, and responsible action on behalf of the community.
4. Individual sin is the wrong a person freely commits in their own lifetime, in thought, word, or deed. It includes outward acts and inward consent to hatred, lust, pride, deceit, or selfishness. Jesus therefore carried the standard beyond visible conduct to the heart producing it (Matthew 5:21-28). It calls for personal confession, repentance, repair of harm, and a changed life.
These forms are connected. Original sin supplies the fallen root; hereditary and collective sins transmit and enlarge its consequences through relationships and history; individual sin gives it fresh expression through personal choice. Inherited conditions never excuse personal wrongdoing, but explain the field in which responsibility must be exercised. Conversely, personal repentance is indispensable but cannot by itself erase every ancestral, collective, or lineage-level condition.
Sin also grows from the four fallen natures: failing to take God's viewpoint, leaving one's proper position, reversing dominion, and multiplying wrongdoing to others. These are the ordinary machinery of sin in daily life — envy, pride, resentment, and the impulse to pass on the injury we received. The complete remedy must therefore include forgiveness of individual acts, restoration of damaged relationships and communities, separation from fallen habits, and finally rebirth into God's lineage through true parentage and true love.
The Completed Understanding
Sin, then, is not primarily rule-breaking but relationship-breaking. It is the act of standing with the false parent rather than the true one, and its power lies in the conditions it establishes rather than in the momentary pleasure it offers. This is why sin is so persistent even among sincere believers: the individual may be forgiven while the root of self-centred love remains, and it continues to bear fruit. It also explains why sin damages more than the sinner. Every sin binds others into the same pattern, spreads through families, and follows a person into the spirit world, where the character formed on earth is what remains. And it explains the remedy. Forgiveness deals with the acts; changing lineage, restoring the proper order of love, and living for the sake of others deal with the root. Where sin created a base for evil, love, purity, and sacrifice create a base for God.
Living the Principle
Treat sin as a matter of relationships, not only of rules. Ask which relationship each temptation is offering you, and refuse the one that separates you from God. Guard the misuse of love especially, since that is where sin entered the world and where it still does the deepest damage. Repent concretely rather than vaguely: name the act, restore what was harmed, and change the condition that allowed it. Break the inherited patterns of your family line by refusing to pass on the resentment and habits you received, and by loving in the way you were not loved. Above all, replace sin's foundation with God's by living for the sake of others, because a heart continually giving love leaves no room for evil to establish a claim.
These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Read about the author, Sun Myung Moon.
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Sources and further reading
- The Holy Bible, King James Version — Scripture quoted and referenced throughout the answers.
- The Divine Principle (full text) — The complete text of the Divine Principle, the teaching of Reverend Sun Myung Moon that these answers explain.
- Unification texts library (tparents.org) — Large online library of Unification texts, sermons and collected speeches, including the Cheon Seong Gyeong.
- Short video lectures in English — Playlist of short English video lectures presenting these same principles.