Some time ago I was asked to contribute to a series of short videos for a local parish on Catholic doctrines that people found difficult. The doctrine I chose was that of original sin which I described as one of the most pernicious teachings of Christianity. The teaching is based on the story of the first human beings who disobeyed God’s commands and were expelled from a beautiful and fruitful garden. The belief is that this original sin has affected all human beings who are born in a situation of alienation from God. The only way to overcome this alienation is through Jesus who as both man and God redeemed humankind and brought about a reconciliation between God and human beings. Human beings accept and share in this redemption through baptism.
What I don’t like about original sin is how it has affected Christianity’s tendency to convince human beings that they are sinners, incapable of being saved apart from accepting Jesus as their saviour and being baptised. This resulted in many people having a poor self-image, thinking of themselves as unworthy sinners and full of self-loathing while others thought they had the right to punish or abuse them and others the right to subject people to forced conversions and baptism. Recently I was challenged in my thinking about original sin. The challenge came from the historian Tom Holland in a video in which he simply commented that in the 1960s Christianity had cast off original sin. In his view that had led to a judgementalism which considered self as good and others as bad, instead of recognising that we are all equally sinners and therefore more accepting of one another. So, was I simply being caught up in a trend as to what original sin was about without thinking it through?
It is true that in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council there was a change in attitude within the Christian community about living in a sinful vale of tears, but it is the book Original Blessing, written by Dominican theologian Matthew Fox in 1983, that caused a stir. In the book Matthew Fox suggested that before the fall-redemption model used to describe the reality of humanity for centuries within Christianity there was original blessing and that this is humanity’s fundamental state. He pointed out that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is one that Christianity shares with Judaism and yet Jews do not interpret that story as a Fall with the consequence that ever since human beings are born in a state of alienation from God in need of redemption. Rather Jews believe that they are born in a relationship with God with a free will that allows them to choose good or evil. As a Jew this is how Jesus would have understood the story. The Catholic Church opposed this view because, I presume, it was such a challenge to the idea of the need of a redeemer and thus belittling the saving and transforming death of Jesus.
But how did such and idea take hold of the Christian imagination? Nothing comes from nothing. So why did St Augustine develop the idea? St Augustine lived in the 4th century which was a tumultuous time for the Christian Church. Christianity, having moved from being a persecuted minority to the state religion of the Roman Empire was caught up in theological debates which led to the definition of doctrines and creeds and the rejection of certain views as heretical. Augustine had been a Manichean but had rejected the dualism that suggested equal powers of good and evil for a belief in the supremacy of the one true God. He also rejected the Donatist heresy believing that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on Christ and not the personal holiness or moral state of the priest, maintaining that the church was a mixed body of saints and sinners. And against Pelagius he rejected the notion that humans could work out their own salvation rather than relying on diving grace.
Does this context help in understanding original sin? I think it helps me in that as a teaching it was not one sided, focussing on undermining individuals and their alienation from God. Rather, it was an answer to the question of perfectionism as in the case of the Donatists. We are indeed all sinners, and this should in fact free us from the burden of expecting perfection in ourselves and others. Can we even rejoice in it? Perhaps Tom Holland is right and if we recognised how we are all fragile, incomplete, imperfect we might be more tolerant of ourselves and others. And in the case of the Pelagians Augustine was emphasising the need of grace that can come to us through the Church but also through life and other people. We are not self-sufficient. Augustine has a famous saying, “you have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” Is this not a better way of looking at our original nature, that we are born with an attraction towards love, towards growth, towards well-being, towards the adventure of living. But are we always aware of that attraction, do we listen to it and respond? There is also the opposite, something in our nature that leads us to selfishness, complacency, individualism. This might be called original sin, an attitude that inhibits and closes us off from others – but whatever it is it never alienates us from God and other people.
What I don’t like about original sin is how it has affected Christianity’s tendency to convince human beings that they are sinners, incapable of being saved apart from accepting Jesus as their saviour and being baptised. This resulted in many people having a poor self-image, thinking of themselves as unworthy sinners and full of self-loathing while others thought they had the right to punish or abuse them and others the right to subject people to forced conversions and baptism. Recently I was challenged in my thinking about original sin. The challenge came from the historian Tom Holland in a video in which he simply commented that in the 1960s Christianity had cast off original sin. In his view that had led to a judgementalism which considered self as good and others as bad, instead of recognising that we are all equally sinners and therefore more accepting of one another. So, was I simply being caught up in a trend as to what original sin was about without thinking it through?
It is true that in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council there was a change in attitude within the Christian community about living in a sinful vale of tears, but it is the book Original Blessing, written by Dominican theologian Matthew Fox in 1983, that caused a stir. In the book Matthew Fox suggested that before the fall-redemption model used to describe the reality of humanity for centuries within Christianity there was original blessing and that this is humanity’s fundamental state. He pointed out that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is one that Christianity shares with Judaism and yet Jews do not interpret that story as a Fall with the consequence that ever since human beings are born in a state of alienation from God in need of redemption. Rather Jews believe that they are born in a relationship with God with a free will that allows them to choose good or evil. As a Jew this is how Jesus would have understood the story. The Catholic Church opposed this view because, I presume, it was such a challenge to the idea of the need of a redeemer and thus belittling the saving and transforming death of Jesus.
But how did such and idea take hold of the Christian imagination? Nothing comes from nothing. So why did St Augustine develop the idea? St Augustine lived in the 4th century which was a tumultuous time for the Christian Church. Christianity, having moved from being a persecuted minority to the state religion of the Roman Empire was caught up in theological debates which led to the definition of doctrines and creeds and the rejection of certain views as heretical. Augustine had been a Manichean but had rejected the dualism that suggested equal powers of good and evil for a belief in the supremacy of the one true God. He also rejected the Donatist heresy believing that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on Christ and not the personal holiness or moral state of the priest, maintaining that the church was a mixed body of saints and sinners. And against Pelagius he rejected the notion that humans could work out their own salvation rather than relying on diving grace.
Does this context help in understanding original sin? I think it helps me in that as a teaching it was not one sided, focussing on undermining individuals and their alienation from God. Rather, it was an answer to the question of perfectionism as in the case of the Donatists. We are indeed all sinners, and this should in fact free us from the burden of expecting perfection in ourselves and others. Can we even rejoice in it? Perhaps Tom Holland is right and if we recognised how we are all fragile, incomplete, imperfect we might be more tolerant of ourselves and others. And in the case of the Pelagians Augustine was emphasising the need of grace that can come to us through the Church but also through life and other people. We are not self-sufficient. Augustine has a famous saying, “you have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” Is this not a better way of looking at our original nature, that we are born with an attraction towards love, towards growth, towards well-being, towards the adventure of living. But are we always aware of that attraction, do we listen to it and respond? There is also the opposite, something in our nature that leads us to selfishness, complacency, individualism. This might be called original sin, an attitude that inhibits and closes us off from others – but whatever it is it never alienates us from God and other people.
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