Presumption

I received another jolly good question: 

Talk to me about the sin of presumption. Isn't there presumption involved in all sins? Since you're always planning to go to confession, unless you're really just planning to completely abandon God.

My response:

The sin of presumption is a concept in Catholic moral theology having to do with presuming we are forgiven, even if we have no intention of repenting or doing anything to merit God's forgiveness. Another way of looking at it is that this type of sin is the ultimate form of spiritual entitlement: I am entitled to God's forgiveness and grace even if I completely blow off everything that God expects of me to be worthy of that forgiveness.

 

For instance, I just presume God will forgive me for embezzling money, not going to Mass, and all these bad things I know to be wrong. I intentionally continue to do them, presuming God is just an old powder puff who will not hold me accountable or judge me. This is precisely what St. Paul is talking about in Romans 6: "What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?" This is the sin of presumption...sinning all the more so that grace may about because we feel entitled to merit God's grace, even if we are completely unrepentant.

 

Now, to get to your point, there is a different between presumption and the Christian hope. Christian hope is a virtue where we place our trust solely in God while simultaneously attempting to follow the Commandments and path God lays out for us. Presumption lacks sincerity because we trust God only insofar as a cosmic mechanical function, where our ultimate trust is not on God at all but on ourselves. We presume we are good enough without even trying to merit salvation. We are entitled to that not by our faith or works or trying to live morally, but simply that we are ourselves a prize that surely God would never judge as wanting. We presume God will conform to our will.

 

Now, you can get off into the theological weeds here and begin to break down the different types or degrees of presumption. Some types of presumption can be graver than others, but at the end of the day, any presumption not grounding in the Christian hope is really an exercise of sinning all the more so that grace may about. That's why we call it a sin, because we are presuming to tell God to conform to our will. In some way, that's precisely the same kind of sin of Adam and Eve in the garden where they basically told God, "Not your will, but ours be done."