So far as I can tell, the concept of “original sin” arose because St. Augustine of Hippo and some other important Fathers of the early Church were trained as lawyers. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible was the sacred works of a people who organized their lives by strict legal codes. Consequently, God was depicted as a Law-giver and Judge rather than as a Creator. This is an analogical depiction, as is true of all human efforts to depict God other than the existentialist view of St. Thomas Aquinas. That Dominican theologian would have been the last to deny the need for analogies once the existentialist insight is in place. The insight is: God is His own Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being. All else that exists is the result of acts-of-being that only God can perform.
Analogies are necessary for human beings to try to understand God’s self-revelations to us or to try to understand God in His freely chosen role as Creator. But we should be careful not to try to imprison the Almighty Himself in human analogies.
The concept of “Original Sin” builds on the pagan idea of a Golden Age in the past when all things, and the earth as a whole, were in a state of perfection. Moreover, they were at peace with each other.
So, why is the earth a place of struggle and decay? Why is the earth a place where things, or living creatures, come into being only to die after a short while?
The story of ‘Original Sin’ tries to answer those sorts of questions:
Clearly, there was a great fall. Since God is a generous and all-merciful God, then the fall was not due due to His actions but rather to some great crime on the part of our ancestors, a rebellion against the Creator. Man’s nature, once perfect in a creaturely sense — at peace with God and Creation, was injured beyond all possibilities of human repair. Most importantly, death came upon men.
All else being equal, this doesn’t strike me as so implausible a viewpoint, except that it’s in conflict with modern empirical knowledge. Man is not a fallen god-like creature but rather a hairless ape who shares a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Back beyond that ancestor, we share a common ancestor with rats. Even more importantly, it conflicts with the Christian revelation that God is all-powerful. Human actions could not be sufficient to detour the story God wished to tell, meaning that we are the creatures He created and intended to create. Our job is to understand what sorts of creatures we are and to try to understand why God would have made us this way.
As a start, I’ll claim that we are not fallen creatures who need a Judge Who will overlook the crime of our ancestors, a crime in which we all somehow shared. We’re more modest creatures than that and our natural fate is death. We’re made to live for a few short decades and then to pass away.
But the question arises: Why have Christian thinkers not begun to adapt our understandings of ourselves so that those understandings are consistent with modern empirical knowledge? I fear the answer is human pride. We simply don’t want to be ‘really’ apes. Maybe our DNA but surely we have a super-nature of some sort that transcends mere ape-hood. Moreover, there is a certain amount of pride some can feel in thinking of man as made for eternity but for a crime of his ancestor. Some enjoy thinking they are descended from Jesse James or Attila the Hun. The humble truth is that we are more humble creatures than that. The possibility of resurrection, of life after death, of life for time without end as a companion of God, is the purest of gifts. Immortality isn’t a lost property of man, it’s something he never had and couldn’t have had.
Sometimes, talk about ‘original sin’ or ‘depravity’ reminds me of the Pharisee beating his chest in public. We would be gods, if only gods exiled to a penal colony. Forgiveness we’ll accept but not the free gift that would raise a apish creature to a higher state of being, not the free gift that gives a peaceful life to a creature who is a battleground between order and disorder during his mortal life.
As a Catholic who aims to bare my soul in the Confessional once a month, I don’t deny the reality of sins in the sense of acts or omissions for which I’m responsible, yet, if I were perfect, I would still not ‘deserve’ a resurrection from my grave. By God’s commands, I feel bound to aim for perfection, for sinlessness, but that’s simply my duty to my Creator. I would have the same duty even if He had not sent His Son to be the first of the resurrected.
We shouldn’t think of our human selves in prideful terms as descendants of a god-like man and woman who fell by their own acts. In fact, I don’t think a fresh reading of the book of Genesis would support such a view. We’re apes and should be surprised and grateful that God would even consider giving us characteristics that will have to be super-added to our mortal selves.