The end of “original sin”?
If my students are a representative sample, there’s been a subtle shift in conservative evangelical attitudes towards the Genesis prologue over the past few years. It has become somewhat eccentric, even here, to insist that the creation story is a literal, basically scientific account of our cosmic origins. (That’s not to say it’s eccentric to believe it; I wouldn’t be surprised to find that quite a few of them still assume something along those lines. But it’s eccentric to insist on it; it’s eccentric to argue explicitly for any kind of young earth creationism.) Instead, the litmus test for a trustworthy (non-”liberal”) Christian is whether or not one accepts the historicity of the Adam and Eve story.
Maybe I’m attributing too much subtle wisdom to desperate certitudes, but it seems to me that there’s a real insight involved in this one. I think there’s some sense among these folks that giving up Adam and Eve as factual, historical figures means giving up something important to Christianity as such–and I think that sense is probably right. The doctrine of the fall, of original sin–the idea that sin or death entered the world through Adam–has, in the tradition, always been formulated as if a forbidden apple was eaten by a particular man and a particular woman, at a particular point in our common history. From that first couple all humanity inherits a kind of deformity or depravity (or so it goes in the West), or else through that disobedience, death gains a foothold in the world (as in the East). But if Adam and Eve are only figurative; and if, rather, the first homines sapientes came into existence only after a long process of animal competition and death; then what Christians necessarily experience as the world’s disorder, and as the disorder of our existence (the split of desire against will, for instance), is nearly impossible to pin on any human sin at all. All of that appears as a structurally necessary feature of creaturely existence, and not as the result of some primeval “fall.”
That is to say–if we do away with Adam and Eve as historical figures, as of course we must, it’s not at all clear to me how the doctrine of original sin remains coherent. At least, it would require a lot of rethinking around the ideas of time and providence, about death’s place in God’s order, and maybe even about the human fall in relation to the angelic fall (though God knows that not very many people would want to go there). And maybe, somewhere deep down, my students know all that and are just refusing to begin down that dusky path.
It’s interesting, though, that in Paul’s most systematic treatment of original sin (viz., the first few chapters of Romans), Adam and Eve don’t figure at all.
21 April 2009 |
Comments (8)
Tags: Original Sin, Theological Anthropology
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I expect the fathers would still be a helpful resource on this; there’s no question that they frequently treated Adam and Eve allegorically, and often frankly admitted the poetic character of the whole prologue. Nonetheless, a kind of historicist assumption does seem to underlie the doctrine of original sin as traditionally formulated, whether or not they believed it with quite the dogmatism my students do.
where’s my footnote?
I think that a solution to the problem will have to make some appeal to the angelic fall to be completely satisfactory. First, a recognition of their rebellion seems required to make sense of the NT takes on redemption. Second, it has a solid place in traditional attempts to understand these phenomena. Third, appealing to the envy of the devil is the most economic way of explaining the existence of pre-human death.
I have come across some attempts to explain that it is spiritual and not physical death that is excluded from God’s plan for creation. Though the arguments don’t strike me as unserious, they are as far as I can tell unpersuasive. Did you have in mind any particular ideas about “death’s place in God’s order”?
The gesture toward “time and providence” is an intriguing suggestion. Did you have anything particular in mind?
You’re probably right that the angelic fall would have to figure in a good answer to this problem, but there’s still some part of me that resists–since it requires developing such an elaborate mythology on the basis of a very few, obviously poetic biblical references (the serpent in the garden or Satan falling like lightning). And then, still, we’ll have the difficulty of making sense of the idea that sin entered the world through a human being, and is conquered by a human being. That is, on a broader level, we’ll have to deal with the fact that the New Testament (even if it does treat the principalities and powers as fallen and in need of redemption) explains the drama of redemption on a human/historical level, not an angelic one.
I don’t have much very specific to say about time and providence, but I do remember thinking, while reading Bks 11-12 of City of God, that Augustine might have some way of thinking of human sin as the “original sin” without having to think of it as temporally original. Is the idea absurd, that the history of creation might have been subject to death providentially, with God’s view to the intransigent sinfulness of human beings?
(I completely agree about the attempts to distinguish spiritual and physical death being unpersuasive. Though I can’t imagine the answer being anything other than a strong no, I was only thinking that we had to ask ourselves the question again, is there any sense in which death belongs to the goodness of God’s creation?)
I don’t at all see how getting rid of the literal-historicist reading of Gen. 1-3 requires jettisoning original sin. For the same reason I don’t see why accepting the theory of evolution means getting rid of original sin.
The doctrine of original sin is not about a historical “origin” of sin. That’s not what the term means, or at least not what the term should or has to mean. The term “original sin” means that at the very core of our being we are alienated from God and incapable of doing the good. That is, the doctrine needs to be interpreted existentially, rather than historically, and there is extensive precedent in the tradition for doing so.
By the way, here’s an essay I wrote on the issue of original sin and evolution that bears on some of these issues: http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2008/11/creation-original-sin-and-genesis-1-3.html.
Great essay, David; thanks for calling my attention to it. Sadly, I’m not placated. It’s absolutely necessary, you’re right, to get away from the use of original sin as a kind of historical explanatory mechanism for all current evil (which is an understanding the OT itself avoids, I think). And certainly traditional thought on this question at its best avoids being that crass.
But I’m not sure one can so neatly excise the historical dimension of this doctrine from Paul or from the tradition. The existential dimensions of original sin are in Paul, Origen, Augustine, Thomas, Bonaventure, yes–but all of them also say, without just speaking mythically or allegorically, that sin entered the world through a human being. (Most of them also speak unequivocally about a “state of innocence,” etc.) If you’d like to say instead, on your existential interpretation, through every human being or through being-human itself, the same problem remains: the disorder and death we refer to as the consequence of sin are not in fact “consequences” of anything at all; they belong to the original and necessary (evolutionary) order of things.
I can see how all this would be untroubling to you, coming from the Reformed tradition–since there, as you explain in your essay, creation and fall are decreed all at once. Unfortunately that’s a non-starter for me, because I resist from the beginning the idea of God “decreeing” the fall in any respect at all.
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