John Rawls’s undergraduate senior thesis, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, has given us an invaluable new perspective on his intellectual formation. The young Rawls, who planned to become an Episcopal priest, spent his Princeton years immersed in neo-Orthodox Christian theology and dedicated his thesis to an exploration of its themes. It was in this essay that Rawls first developed his idea of “moral arbitrariness,” and it is significant that he did so in the context of a fierce attack on the Pelagian heresy.
The theological issues involved in this dispute go back, as we have seen, to the very beginnings of the Christian church.
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