Disordered attachment would be the Catholic understanding.
I couldn't personally relate to the idea of viewing sin primarily as an "
offence", that's a legalism in my mind which would make it very difficult to understand what "salvation" (
sozo) literally means in Greek:
to be made whole.
Sin is not about two categories of avowed "lawful" and "unlawful", and then lapsing into the “bad” pile, but rather in the tradition, a case of not having ordered one's desires properly.
As the Epistle of James in the New Testament puts it:
"
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts." (
James 4:1-2)
If we had not 'fallen', in the Catholic doctrinal imagination, humankind would have remained perfectly free to make every moral decision but wouldn't have been plagued by selfish cravings which disordered both ourselves and the wider web of our human relationships, as well as our relationship with God too.
In his
Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) indicated that the exercises were designed to “
overcome oneself, and to order one’s life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection.”
