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Inordinate Desire: The History of and Exegetical Basis for the Sin of Gluttony
Olson, Jeffrey Scott
Olson, Jeffrey Scott
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Abstract
The sin of gluttony has a long history in Christian tradition as one of the seven deadly sins, but it has almost entirely disappeared from the modern church’s moral vocabulary. Unless one were a fifth-century monk, it might be difficult to answer the following questions: What is gluttony? Why is it so “deadly”? How do I overcome it? With chapter 1 serving as an introduction to the subject and to my argument, chapter 2 outlines the traditional definition of the sin of gluttony as expressed in the works of John Cassian, Gregory the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. It concludes with a brief excursus tracing the shape of the tradition between Gregory and Aquinas, noting its near uniformity in the centuries between them. Chapter 3 examines Cassian, Gregory, and Aquinas as they outline the various dangers of the sin of gluttony. Further, it looks to others—such as Peter Chrysologus, Isidore of Seville, Origen, and John Climacus—who also affirm the destructive spiritual, physical, and even eternal consequences of gluttony. Chapter 4 makes two arguments: (1) that the church consistently prescribes fasting as the primary means of restraining the appetite and (2) that restraining the appetite is an ascetic rather than a biblical purpose for fasting. Chapter 5 proposes a biblical and theological framework for overcoming the sin of gluttony by integrating Aquinas’s concept of inordinate desire and Augustine’s ordo amoris (“ordered love”) with a robust pneumatology represented by John Calvin. Chapter 6 provides an exegetical analysis of Scripture passages that explicitly refer to gluttony followed by the biblical narratives that the church has historically used to understand and illustrate glutton. Based on this analysis of Scripture, I define gluttony as the immoderate consumption of food arising from an inordinate desire for something more than or other than what God provides. Chapter 6 concludes with an explanation of the primary features of this definition and their relationship to the traditional understanding of gluttony represented by Cassian, Gregory, and Aquinas. The picture of the glutton as an overeater dominates the modern understanding of the sin of gluttony, but is it a biblical image? Chapter 7 examines Scripture’s portrayal of overeating and human fatness. It seeks to demonstrate the exegetical basis that Gregory and Aquinas do not provide when they affirm that eating “too much” qualifies as, in Aquinas’s words, a “fitting species” of the sin of gluttony. Chapter 8 concludes the dissertation, summarizing its argument and raising important questions related to the sin of gluttony that lie outside the scope of this project but that could be explored fruitfully based on the biblical and theological foundation presented here. An appendix follows the conclusion addressing the most common question I have received in relation to my work on gluttony: How does the biblical approval of and even call to feasting relate to the sin of gluttony? This dissertation contributes an exhaustive exegetical treatment of biblical texts related to gluttony, a critical evaluation of their traditional interpretations, and an exegetically derived definition of gluttony.
Description
Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026
Date
2026-05
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The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary