What is original sin?

Original sin is an Augustine Christian doctrine that says that everyone is born sinful. This means that they are born with a built-in urge to do bad things and to disobey God. It is an important doctrine within the Roman Catholic Church. The concept of Original Sin was explained in depth by St Augustine and formalised as part of Roman Catholic doctrine by the Councils of Trent in the 16th Century.

Original sin is not just this inherited spiritual disease or defect in human nature; it's also the 'condemnation' that goes with that fault.

An explanation for the evils of the world

Some Christians believe that original sin explains why there is so much wrong in a world created by a perfect God, and why people need to have their souls 'saved' by God.

A condition you're in, not something you do

Original sin is a condition, not something that people do: It's the normal spiritual and psychological condition of human beings, not their bad thoughts and actions. Even a newborn baby who hasn't done anything at all is damaged by original sin.

The sin of Adam

In traditional Christian teaching, original sin is the result of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God when they ate a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

Effects of original sin

Original sin affects individuals by separating them from God, and bringing dissatisfaction and guilt into their lives.

On a world scale, original sin explains such things as genocide, war, cruelty, exploitation and abuse, and the "presence and universality of sin in human history".

How to cure original sin

Some Christians believe that human beings can't cure themselves of original sin. The only way they can be saved from its consequences is by the grace of God.

The only way people can receive God's grace is by accepting his love and forgiveness, believing that Jesus Christ died on the cross to redeem their sins, and getting baptised.

Secular ideas of original sin

Modern thinkers don't think the doctrine of original sin is literally true, but they do think it contains real truths about the human condition:

The world is not as good as we want it to be
We are not as good as we want to be
Individual behaviour is greatly influenced by things outside the individual's control
Many of these are historical things:
- events in the individual's past
- events in the past of the individual's family
- customs that their culture has built up through history
These things affect humanity as a group as well as individuals

Christianity and the fall

Original sin is part of the Doctrine of the Fall, which is the belief that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they 'fell' from perfection and brought evil into a perfect world.

Fall goes with redemption

For Christians, the fall is inseparable from redemption - the act by which human souls are washed clean of the stain of original sin.

A tale of two Adams

Christians believe that the story of the fall and redemption is a story of two Adams, and sometimes refer to Christ as the "Second Adam".

The first Adam sins and causes humanity to fall; the second Adam atones for that sin with his death and redeems humanity.

The traditional story of original sin

The story behind original sin is told in the Old Testament book of Genesis:

God originally made a perfect world. He created Adam and put him to live in the Garden of Eden - a blissful place where he had nothing to do but take care of the garden.

God told Adam that he could do anything he wanted, except eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Later, God created Eve to be Adam's wife. Eve was tricked by the serpent into eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of life and death. She gave some of the fruit to Adam and he ate it too.

Adam and Eve realised that they were naked and hid in shame. When God next visited the Garden he realised that they had disobeyed him.

God banished them from the Garden of Eden into the harsh world outside.

God also banned them from eating the fruit of the tree of life, and so death entered the world.

The Fall and the origin of evil

Christians believe that when Adam and Eve sinned in Eden and turned away from God they brought sin into the world and turned the whole human race away from God.

The doctrine absolves God of responsibility for the evils that make our world imperfect by teaching that Adam and Eve introduced evil to a perfect world when they disobeyed him.

An alternative understanding of the story of the fall emphasises that Adam and Eve did wrong because they 'gave in' to the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

These two versions offer radically different ideas about the origin of evil:

in the first version Adam and Eve bring evil into the world by disobeying God
in the second version evil already exists, and Adam and Eve bring sin to humanity by giving in to it

This second understanding fits well with human psychology. Looking at it this way, original sin becomes the tendency for human beings to 'give in' when tempted by the prevailing evils of the society around them, rather than standing up for good, and it helps explain why each individual finds temptation so hard to resist. As the Bible puts it:

... I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... (Romans 7:14-15)

A third understanding teaches not so much that Adam's sin brought sin into the world, but that it removed from humanity the gift that enabled people to be perfectly obedient to God.

A modern interpretation

A modern interpretation of the fall might go like this:

Adam was created in the image of God with the potential to be perfectly fulfilled through his existence and his relationship with God.

But Man failed to fulfil his potential and opted to go it alone and estrange himself from God.

Jesus as the "Second Adam" re-established the relationship with God and showed how man can become perfectly human - which puts him in right relationship with both the creator and his creation.

Usefulness of the doctrine

Original sin is a difficult doctrine, and a rather gloomy one, but it had some key theological benefits that have kept it as a mainstream Christian teaching:

Universality: Original sin teaches that all human beings are flawed and sinful - no-one is better than anyone else
Non-dualist: Original sin explains evil without having to portray God as having a bad side, or an evil partner, responsible for the badness in the world; evil comes from human rebelliousness
Non-designed: Original sin explains how a world that God designed to be perfect is actually full of evil
Not inevitable: Original sin teaches that the world could have remained perfect - it was not inevitable that Adam and Eve would disobey God
Mechanism: Original sin demonstrates a mechanism that enabled the original disobedience to damage everyone

The Fall and Christian Europe

What effect has the concept of original sin had on Western culture, and how did it influence gender and morality in Christian Europe?

Transmission of original sin

How does original sin get from Adam to 21st century human beings?

One rather difficult explanation says that the whole human race was somehow contained in Adam and so when Adam fell, they fell too.

The other explanation, expanded below, is that all human beings are descendants of Adam and Eve.

Modern Catholic teaching is less clear about the mechanism of transmission and refers to it as a mystery.

St Augustine's theory

St Augustine, who largely devised the theory of original sin, thought that original sin was transmitted from generation to generation through sexual intercourse. Augustine did not say exactly how this happened.

He said that it was transmitted by "concupiscence", when people had sex and conceived a child.

Concupiscence is a technical theological word that Augustine used to refer to sexual desire as something bad in the soul that was inseparable from normal human sexual impulses.

Sexual desire was bad, he taught, because it could totally overwhelm those caught up in it, depriving them of self-control and rational thought. This disapproving view of passion was quite common among Christians of Augustine's time.

Augustine thought that concupiscence was present in all sexual intercourse. He thought that it was just as bad and uncontrolled in a marriage as it was in non-marital sex, but that an excuse could be made for it within marriage because its purpose was to produce legitimate children.

This bad element in sex provides the means by which original sin is transmitted from father to child. It transmits both humanity's guilt for Adam's crime and the sickness or defect that gives human beings a sinful nature.

"...whenever it comes to the actual process of generation, the very embrace which is lawful and honourable cannot be effected without the ardour of lust....

[This lust] is the daughter of sin, as it were; and whenever it yields assent to the commission of shameful deeds, it becomes also the mother of many sins.

Now from this concupiscence whatever comes into being by natural birth is bound by original sin..."(Augustine, De bono coniugali)

The Council of Trent

The Council or Trent (1545-63), or Trentine councils were a series of Roman Catholic theological meetings in response to the Reformation.

The Council of Trent gave the official stamp to the idea that original sin was transferred from generation to generation by propagation - which means during the sexual act that led to conception. This formalised the notion of Original Sin as part of Roman Catholic doctrine.

The Council explicitly ruled out the idea that original sin was transferred by "imitation"; in order to block the idea that human beings just copied the bad example set by their parents and others.

Imitation and mimesis

These closely related ideas teach that original sin is passed on by copying the sinful tendencies of other people. The Council of Trent decreed that this idea was false.

Getting rid of original sin

The only way a person can 'cleanse' their soul from sin is to:

accept that Christ's death on the cross atoned for this sin
accept that only God's grace can cure this sin
confess their sins and ask for forgiveness
be baptised

Many churches accept that infants can be cleansed of original sin by being baptised soon after birth. The other elements required are carried out by adults on the baby's behalf during the ceremony.

Redemption

In St Paul's letter to the Galatians, he wrote: "Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery". This conception of Redemption as freedom from bondage is crucial for Judeo-Christian thought.

Problems with original sin

The unanswered question

On the face of it, original sin doesn't answer the question as to how evil got into the world; instead it leaves other questions to be answered. As one writer puts it:

"Why is there original sin? Because Adam sinned? Then why did Adam sin? If it was because of the serpent, why did the serpent sin? If the serpent is supposed to have been a fallen angel, why did the angel sin? And so on."

Serpent

And there is a second, but related, question. If evil did not exist before Adam sinned, how could Adam know that what he was about to do was evil - how was he to know that it was wrong to disobey God?

It's unfair

For modern people the idea of being punished for a crime committed by someone else is unethical and unacceptable.

Original sin belongs to each of us because it belongs to all.

It's misogynistic

The doctrine of original sin blames Eve for tempting Adam into sin and has been responsible for centuries of Christian bias against women.

It's anti-sex

Augustine's theory of original sin was so intrinsically tied up with his disapproval of human sexual love that for centuries it contaminated all sexual passion with the idea of sin.

It's too pessimistic

Some Christian thinkers are unhappy with the idea that human beings start out so bad that they can't become good without God's help.

It's not literally true

Science shows that the Biblical creation story is not literally true, and demonstrates that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden are myths and not historical figures.

This destroys the idea of original sin as being caused by the misbehaviour of the first man and woman, and the idea of inheriting guilt or punishment for that misbehaviour.

Most modern theologians don't think this a good reason to abandon the doctrine of the fall. They believe that although the story is not historically true, it does contain important truths about the state of humanity.

It's contradicted by evolution

The doctrine of original sin is based on the idea that God created a perfect world, and that humanity damaged it and themselves by disobeying him.

Evolution, on the other hand, suggests that life in the world is steadily changing and becoming more diverse. Scientists do not tend to think of this as a moral good or evil, but in a sense evolution sees life on earth as moving closer to 'perfection' - becoming better adapted to its environment.

"The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense." (Bishop John Shelby Spong, A Call for a New Reformation, 1998)

A more modern idea is to give an ethical spin to the evolutionary idea and suggest that humanity should not be concerned about a past fall from grace, but concentrate on becoming more ethical beings and thus bringing about a better world.

What about unbaptised babies?

Bishop Richard Holloway has described the idea that unbaptised babies go to hell as "one of the most unsympathetic of the Christian doctrines," and not greatly improved by the teaching that there is a special "limbo" for unbaptised babies on the outskirts of the inferno.

Is guilt good?

Original sin has been criticised for inspiring excessive feelings of guilt. The 18th-century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke once said: "Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion."

Is the feeling of guilt a vital part of our moral lives or can it do more harm than good?

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/originalsin_1.shtml

Original Sin and the Fall