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To argue, as Niebuhr again and again clearly seems to do (cf., e.g., Children of Light and Children of Darkness: 70) that sin corrupts by inevitably substituting an ideology in place of a scheme of real justice strikes me as following much the same logic as is involved in saying that sin invariably expresses itself by transgressing the law instead of keeping it. 

I should wish to hold, on the contrary, that, just as sin can express itself precisely by flawlessly keeping the law, so sin can use even a scheme of real justice that is entirely free of ideological taint as a means of boasting and as an instrument for assserting one's own special interest at the expense of others'. 

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