This leads to the question:
Does bondage to sin mean the suppression of all freedom?
Schoonenberg answered like this:
Yes, if the term “freedom” is understood simply in contrast to “bondage”.
No, if the term “freedom”’ means “freedom of the will”, a correspondence the Bible never uses, but is implicit in the Scriptures use of the word “heart”’.
Summary of text [comment] page 83
[Schoonenberg moved to another facet of virtue and sin.]
According to Paul, sin rules in “man” and over “man” through concupiscence.
Schoonenberg quoted Paul’s Letter to the Romans 7:17. His sinful deeds “are not done by I, but by the sin that dwells in me.”
Paul is in bondage to a sinful attitude that renders him powerlessness.]
[The whole person experiences ‘what is good and what is bad’, the intersection of human thought and human action.]
[The whole person is subject to the state of grace as well as the state of self-destruction, in the intersection of recognition and participation.]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[The whole person stands in the heart, the intersection of choice and desire.]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[At present, 50 years after Schoonenberg, we glimpse how Schoonenberg was on target.
The idea of concupiscence includes both flesh and reason. Both were corrupted in the Story of the Fall. Both belong to Original Sin.
The historic emphasis in Church doctrine on concupiscence elevates the idea that flesh is redeemable because reason (fortified by grace) could rule.
However, whenever the comment in the parenthesis is ignored or forgotten, then Pelagius, a Stoic disguised as a Christian, takes the stage.]
[Infant baptism introduces a state of grace that rights reason by lifting the burden of material evil … I mean, Original Sin … from the baby.
This short-circuited the Manichean agenda.
Rather than asking reason to memorize secret knowledge in order to escape the burden of matterevil, Augustine asked reason to accept the historic configuration of Original Sinevil.
Once the latter was regarded as plausible, baptism could remove the evil, leaving the believer in a world infused with Original Sin, yet, at the same time, liberated from the necessity of escape.]
