Concupiscence

Concupiscence (from Latin concupiscentia) translates the Greek epithumia, meaning strong desire or craving — rendered as lust or evil desire in modern versions. In Romans 7:8, Paul describes sin using the commandment against coveting as its point of attack: sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, produced in him every kind of concupiscence. The passage illustrates the paradox that the prohibition, rather than restraining desire, actually inflames it in fallen human nature.

Paul uses the term again in Colossians 3:5, listing concupiscence alongside immorality, impurity, and covetousness as elements of the earthly nature that believers are to put to death. In 1 Thessalonians 4:5 he contrasts Gentile lust (concupiscence) driven by ignorance of God with the sexual purity expected of believers. The theological tradition, especially in Augustine and the medieval scholastics, used concupiscence as a technical term for the disordered desire that remains even after baptism — the inclination toward sin that, while not itself sin in the fully guilty sense, is the soil from which actual sin grows. The term thus bridges the biblical vocabulary of desire with the later moral theology of the Western church.