The Sin of Everyman

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden. -- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Everyone knows about the sin of Adam and Eve, and for 1,500 years Christian theology has proclaimed its consequences. As an offense against God by man's first parents, it made every man an automatic sinner, born without sanctifying grace. It took away, too, the gifts that had accompanied grace: the idyllic paradise that was Eden; the freedom from pain, from suffering, and from death. Because of it, all men be came subject more to their passions than to their reason, more prone to evil than to good. It was, in short, "original sin."

Like many another basic Christian doctrine -- the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the existence of heaven and hell -- the traditional concept of original sin is currently undergoing more se rious and skeptical scrutiny than ever be fore. Liberal Protestants began their criticism in the last century; now many Catholic thinkers are also challenging the doctrine. One of the latest broad sides is the work of the Rev. Herbert Haag, a Catholic Biblical scholar at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. In his new book, called Is Original Sin in Scripture? (Sheed & Ward; $3.95), Haag argues that there is no Biblical basis for the doctrine.

Woefully Evil. Original sin, says Haag, did not begin to excite widespread theological interest among early Christians until at least the 3rd century. And not until the 5th century--when St. Augustine formulated the doctrine fully and invented the name "original sin"--did it become a basic part of church doctrine. For Augustine, as for many theologians since, the idea of a primordial sin helped explain one of religion's oldest mysteries: the existence of evil in a world supposedly created by a good God. In his pessimistic view, man was himself the culprit, woefully evil because his soul was imprisoned in an utterly fallen body, incapable of good unless drawn to it by the grace of Christ. In answer to the British monk Pelagius, who preached that man could save himself by good works without the initial prodding of grace, Augustine hurled his reply: Humanity had inherited the curse of Adam's sin. Without the grace of Christ's redemption, men were damned.

The proof, Augustine argued, was in two Scriptural passages: the first three chapters of Genesis and the fifth chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. To Augustine, the story of the creation and fall in the Genesis chapters was literal history, the doleful record of man's disobedience to God and the dread results of that sin for his progeny. Paul's Epistle, holding forth the redeeming grace of Christ as an antidote, reinforced his interpretation: in the Latin Vulgate, as Augustine read it, Paul's meaning was clear: it was Adam "in whom all have sinned."

Augustine's doctrine proved durable. For John Calvin, Adam's fall "perverted the whole order of nature in heaven and on earth." To Martin Luther, man was simul justus et peccator--a sinner savable by God's grace received through faith alone. The 16th century Council of Trent re-endorsed Augustine's attack on Pelagianism for the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. And only last year, Pope Paul rephrased the traditional understanding of original sin as part of his modern creed.

No Sense. Nonetheless, it is the common opinion of theologians that the Augustinian version of original sin makes no sense today. For one thing, evolution suggests that Homo sapiens is descended not from one set of parents but from many, thus making a literal Adam and Eve quite unlikely. For another, Biblical scholars agree that the story of man's fall in Genesis is not history but myth--a story that points to the basic truth of evil in the world but says nothing about the inheritance of sin. Augustine even read St. Paul wrong; the correct translation of the passage in Romans was not "in whom all have sinned" as the Vulgate had it, but, as the original Greek correctly phrased it, "because all have sinned."

What, then, remains of the traditional doctrine? "The term original sin," University of Chicago Theologian Joseph Sittler says, "remains as a kind of pail which we've drained of the old literal statements and refilled with quite new interpretations. The doctrine meant to point to the gravity, the universality, and the demonic results of evil. And the language was a way of stating this. But we no longer buy the old notion of biological transmission or try to have a system of inheritance. The notion of 'original' means profound--trans-individual, way back and deep down. The analogy of evil has changed, but the reality hasn't lessened."

Innate Indifference. Original sin, in contemporary interpretations, is thus seen not as a stigma inherited from Adam but as a statement of the human condition--an idea that most Catholic revisionists defend as being well within the spirit of church teaching. Jesuit Henri Rondet, for example, says that original sin is "the ensemble of personal sin of men of all times." Dutch Theologian Ansfried Hulsbosch suggests that man is born to seek perfection; in so far as he fails to grow toward this spiritual goal, he is both "originally" and personally sinful. Englebert Gutwenger of Innsbruck University conceives of original sin "not as any kind of sin at all but rather as a divinely willed state of "innate indifference" from which each man will eventually make a decision for or against Christ, for or against eschatological life.

What original sin comes down to, suggests Vanderbilt Theologian Ray Hart, "is that you can count on man to be a bastard." In a century that has so far produced Hiroshima, Buchenwald and Biafra, this is an insight that is hard to ignore. So/ren Kierkegaard described original sin as a sense of dread; for most of mankind, it is still an uncomfortably familiar feeling.

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