Original Sin

A reader suggested a thread on the topic of Original Sin.

What I have to say about the subject may be clear already from sermons I have posted. The Fall needs to be seen as the Fall from Grace. The expression "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" comes with the ancient Hebrew concept of knowledge, which is a bit different from our modern concept. "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived..." (Gen. 4:1) Knowledge, to the ancient Hebrews, meant intimacy and experience. "By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities," says the prophet about Christ as the Suffering Servant (Isa. 53:11). That does not mean that Christ saved us by learning and acquiring information, but by his own experience of death, his intimacy with it. The choice to disobey God did not produce knowledge of good, but knowledge of a distinction between good and evil; the knowledge was not understanding evil, but intimacy with and experience of evil. Man knew what it meant to disobey God, and became acquainted with evil as a result. This knowledge produced the Fall from grace, because it involved the act of disobedience.

Following patristic reasoning, specifically that of St. Gregory of Nanzianzus, evil has no actual substance, but is simply a shadow that blocks the light of God's goodness. It is an emptiness, a void, a vacuum, like a black hole. Darkness cannot solve the problem of light (John 1:5). The Fall added nothing to human nature, rather it deprived fallen mankind of grace.

So far nothing I have written should be controversial among the major communions of the Church. Nonetheless, the understanding of Original Sin in the East and in the West tends to be different in one major respect. The Orthodox Church does not define Original Sin in terms of inherited guilt, whereas standard Latin teaching includes the idea of being conceived with culpability, inherited guilt. It includes a teaching that each child is born guilty of Adam's transgression, an added element of teaching which goes beyond the universal consensus of the Church. This has led to the Roman Catholic doctrine that baptism washes away the stain of Original Sin, an idea rejected in the Eastern tradition.

Much depends on how to correctly translate Romans 5:12: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." It has been argued by Orthodox Christians that the translation should say: "sin by death," not "death by sin." By this view, the story in Genesis shows that sin produced death, but that the Fall into sin has been passed on to the whole human race through death. (This fits I Corinthians 15:21.) The Greek idiom eph ho was rendered in Latin as "in whom." But, the Greek idiom means "because of," not "in whom." It is from this Latin translation that the idea sprung that everyone has sinned in Adam rather because of Adam.

All Christians share this belief: All the children of man inherit a fallen nature. This underwent change, according to the Orthodox, into the idea that they also inherit culpability, mainly due to St. Augustine's efforts against the heresy of Pelagius (c. 354-418). Pelagius did not believe in Original Sin at all, and taught that each individual had the power to overcome sin without grace. Pelagius was teaching heresy that denies the need for a Savior, and so it was necessary to refute him.

All too often members of the Orthodox Church distort western theology, set up straw men, and shoot them down. But, In this case it does not seem unfair to criticize a standard Western approach to a specific doctrine, or at least to say that we have a genuine distinction (as opposed to artificial distinctions produced by imaginative polemicists). Did St. Augustine go too far? And, does the idea of inherited guilt actually find its basis in scripture? Should we limit our own teaching of Original Sin to the Fall from grace, and avoid the doctrine of inherited guilt?