Unrepentant sinner

[ebia]

I just noticed yet another flogging-a-dead-horse thread where the OP talks about "unrepentant sinners".

Hopefully we've all moved beyond the pre-reformation Catholic idea that repentence is feeling a bit guilty and flogging yourself with a whip at least to the slightly more biblical meaning of turning away from sin (and back to God).

So, given that, how could one possibly be a repentant sinner (except in the sense of an ex-sinner)? Isn't it an oxymoran. And therefore isn't "unrepentant sinner" a truism - ie all sinners are unrepentant?

Or does the phrase "(un)repentant sinner" imply that the person saying it is still living with the (incorrect) medieval notion of repentance?

 

[quatona]

I tend to think that both terms suffer from the fact that they are nominalizing verbs into labels that then are used to describe an entire person.
I suspect that persons sometimes sin and sometimes don´t sin, that they sometimes sin in full knowledge that they sin and sometimes without that knowledge, that there are times when they repent of what they feel is a sin and times when they are weak and do the same again, just to later repent again. (E.g. the entire field of addictions is a sequence of "sinning" and "repenting", and there are psychologists who say that that´s exactly what addictions are about.)

Nominalization - a means to oversimplify things.
"Have you ever told a (white) lie? Then you are a liar." No. I am a person who has told a lie exactly once and for the remaining 99,9999% of statements I have made have not lied.

 

[ebia]

Thanks for the thoughful response.

No Christian responses?