The doctrine of Original Sin is one of the most contentious doctrines in Christian teaching.
At its most extreme, the doctrine of Original Sin holds that every human being comes into this world totally depraved, utterly sinful. We are born imprisoned in a condition of sin and the inherited collective guilt of all humanity. In ourselves we are utterly powerless to do anything good. We must be completely reborn by the Spirit in order to escape the terrifying justice that awaits all those sin-sick souls who remain by nature, bound in darkness and destined to an eternity of suffering.
There are two problems with the doctrine of Original Sin in its most strident form:
1. It fails to take seriously the reality that people are capable of tremendous beauty, goodness, and love even though they completely reject the doctrine of Original Sin and its offered solution to the alleged human dilemma.
2. It has never looked deeply into the eyes of a small child.
The purity and innocence of all human beings in their early years, should be enough to at least call into question any suggestion that we come into this world as totally depraved beings locked into a dark miasma of sin. It is true we all reach a point when this dark vision may appear to be an accurate description of our nature. But we did not begin in this blighted condition and we are all, at times, able to live in a more noble fashion regardless of the presence or absence of faith in our lives.
In the face of the beauty of a little child, it is tempting to dismiss the whole idea of Original Sin altogether. Perhaps we were born completely perfect, flawless little beings who have been twisted over time by the cruel forces of culture and the violent reality of the broken human community into which we were born.
But, if our awareness of the beauty of an infant, tempts us to dismiss the doctrine of Original Sin, honesty about the darker side of our nature, might cause us to pause a moment. It is undeniable that, somewhere along the journey of every human life, there is a dark bend in the road. We all turn away from the luminous purity and innocence we originally brought into this world. We all wander off down violent byways and follow the deceptive illusion of self-interest, greed, and power that lead away from our true destiny.
The doctrine of Original Sin can be viewed merely as an expression of the awareness that every human being lives imperfectly the gift of human life we have been given. Paul is not being unnecessarily dark or pessimistic when he declares that
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)
Paul is simply acknowledging the reality of his own deep inner awareness that he was created for something more luminous than he consistently achieved.
There is undeniably some quirk in the human condition that causes us to cause pain. There is a crack that runs through the centre of the human condition. The rough edges of this crack in our lives inevitably lacerate the people with whom we interact. We are wounded and we wound one another. There has never been a human being who did not bleed. There has never been a human relationship on this earth that did not transmit some pain.
The wreckage of the human community and the inexpressible beauty of humanity bear abundant witness to the fact that, when the Christian church developed the doctrine of Original Sin, it was reflecting seriously on the human condition and describing a reality with which we are all familiar.
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May 31, 2012 at 7:41 am
jaqueline
I think all of us if we are honest can feel that chasm within us. That split within. Some of us get to cover it better, some of us don’t…but it is there, isn’t it , for all of us, that feeling of being on the edge of something dark?
God wasn’t being metaphorical when he said that we shall surely die was he?
Yet, it seems the Christ story doesn’t leave it there…Christ entered that dark, didn’t he. so that even the dark becomes a place of hope and life and death and destruction no longer have a hold. And may if we trust and believe even that place of dark and despair becomes a place of light and hope.
May 31, 2012 at 8:31 am
John
Would I say that I believe in Original Sin? This condition may have existed in the distant past, but in my view Christ’s death and resurrection has made it possible for human beings to transcend it – after Golgotha, the potential for ongoing human transformation was renewed, though this grace depends as well on our capacity for growth as spiritual beings. The self must strive – there must be a conscious effort, however gradual, toward conscious and wilful change. We go back to the paradox of faith and works that animated so much of the Reformation: this paradox persists.
While a lot of the churches would still claim to uphold the doctrine of Original Sin, I would say that secular society has long since sought out scientific accounts of human behaviour – the good and the bad. This is also true of those who have studied the Holocaust and other human-caused atrocities (Robert Jay Lifton is an important figure in this area of research).
Original Sin has arguably been reconceived – consciously or not – in terms of ongoing and seemingly unresolvable contradictions in human brain structure – the notion of a reptilian part of the brain versus a more recent empathic and potentially rational part of the brain. There are also the genetic arguments that human beings are inherently selfish – by nature’s design, so that we instinctually consider self-interest before other factors. We might also look at Sigmund Freud’s model of the mind (no doubt outdated, but still incredibly influential), that saw the self as at least three forces struggling for control: Ego, Id, and Superego. There are also the psychoanalytic theories of infant behaviour, which suggest that even the seemingly innocent infant is actually driven by aggressive urges. I don’t know if I have one argument to put forward here – just throwing some alternative ideas around.
Before I sign off on this entry, I want to type out an excerpt from a book by the culture critic Morris Berman titled The Twilight of American Culture (2000). I’m not sure if the excerpt will make sense out of context, but it raises one important points. I don’t mean to suggest that I agree with them, they are more food for thought:
“It was [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau’s belief that the problem of social inequality – which is to say, the problem of power – was characteristic of human beings in civilization. We now know that he was wrong, but only partly wrong. Because of prolonged infant dependency, and the human psychological configuration of self/other separation that usually begins in the third year of life, the will to power is part of our biological and psychological makeup, but it tends to get triggered in civilization much more than in hunter-gatherer cultures. In a brilliant bit of ethnography, Pierre Clastres argued (in Society Against the State) that such cultures had a complex and paradoxical way of keeping the will to power in check … [Still] returning to a hunter-gatherer state, complete with its complex ‘leveling mechanisms’ to prevent social inequality, is not a very likely possibility. This raises the question of what would work. In his Short History of the Future, Wagar projects a scenario in which altruism and an accompanying lack of interest in power are programmed into human beings by means of genetic engineering, creating a new species, Homo sapiens altior. His assumption is that no religion or spiritual discipline will ever manage to do this. Rather, along the lines of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, we would have to invade the personality scientifically in order to produce changes this radical in nature” (pp. 179-180).
One last thing I’ll throw out there is the idea of the ‘Empathic Civilization’ articulated in recent years by Jeremy Rifkin. Here is a lecture/animation of the main idea from YouTube:
You could say that Berman is the pessimist here, and Rifkin the optimist.
June 2, 2012 at 8:16 am
Tress
Thank you Christopher
What you say is as usual , clear and to the point.
St Paul, although a person of his time,has a clarity from which we can still learn
.There are many opinions that simply obfuscate the simplicity and truth of
of the message of love and responsibility that Jesus preached.The Buddhists called it diitti! I Iike that word!