bq.

“Since the being most proper to humankind is being one’s own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason (that is, insofar as humankind’s most proper being–being potential–is in a certain sense lacking, insofar as it can not-be, it is therefore devoid of foundation and humankind is not always already in possession of it), humans have and feel a debt. Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act.

“This is all that is meant by the old theological doctrine of original sin. Morality, on the other hand, refers this doctrine to a blameworthy act humans have committed and, in this way, shackles their potentiality, turning it back toward the past. The recognition of evil is older and more original than any blameworthy act, and it rests solely on the fact that, being and having to be only in its possibility or potentiality, humankind fails itself in a certain sense and has to appropriate this failing–it has to exist as potentiality.”

—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 42–3

In Agamben’s use of the terms, then, ‘original sin’ doesn’t name anything evil at all, evil being “the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others” (p. 14), or in its specifically human aspect, the attempt to found our own existence in or as the power of (‘actualized’) being (pp. 30–1). In other words, for Agamben, the only human evil is the denial that our existence is only ever possible existence. Original sin, on the contrary, only names the “debt” in which human beings characteristically find themselves, as ‘lacking’ fully realized existence, which “failure” is in fact a good.

This corresponds to Agamben’s broader contention in this book that the good always consists in a self-grasping of evil, and that “truth is revealed only by giving space to non-truth” (p. 12). Those theses rest on the same equivocation in the concepts of evil that appear in the above quote: the “evil,” “failure,” or “non-truth” that the good and truth must include is the (im)potency and incompleteness of being-such-as-it-is (i.e., whatever being, or quodlibet ens). But that incompleteness–or better, because it brings out Nancy’s voice and Blanchot’s, the unworking–is of course a good according to Agamben.

This is also the context within which it is necessary to understand his claim that “ethics has no room for repentance” (p. 43). It doesn’t mean there is no evil that must be avoided or even (possibly) renounced, but that repentance is always a matter of establishing oneself beyond impotent existence. Repentance belongs, in Nancy’s terms, to the pursuit of immanence (viz., the attempt to produce one’s own essence).

bq. Let us not begin our explanation [of the system of alienation], as does the economist, from a legendary primordial condition. Such a primordial condition does not explain anything; it merely removes the question into a gray and nebulous distance. It asserts as a fact or event what it should deduce, namely, the necessary relation between two things; for example, between the division of labor and exchange. In the same way theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of man; that is, it asserts as a historical fact what it should explain. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1st man., XXII; pp. 94–5 in Fromm)

All I take from this little quote is that the doctrine of the fall as it’s usually invoked–in order to explain human sinfulness by reference to some other, earlier human sin–has “always already” been broken, since it doesn’t actually explain anything. The fathers, at least, are usually aware of this. Their common appeal to some hidden sin that precedes the eating of the apple (which would in the same sense “explain” that sin) is a tacit admission that no single historical sin can explain all the sinfulness that follows. What we’re referring to in the doctrine of the fall, rather, is the “uncaused cause” of sin, which is to say, its utter mysteriousness. But in the way the doctrine is usually used, what Marx says is exactly right. If we want to talk helpfully about greed or vengefulness or lust, it’s no good to say that Adam once ate an apple that he shouldn’t have; we have to depend on concrete social facts. A robust doctrine of the fall will do more than refer to some very old sin; it will explain the structural reality of our intransigence.

Fromm does more than critique; he might actually provide a way forward:

bq. Man, before he has consciousness of himself, that is, before he is human, lives in unity with nature (Adam and Eve in Paradise). The first act of Freedom, which is the capacity to say “no,” opens his eyes, and he sees himself as a stranger in the world, beset by conflicts with nature, between man and man, between man and woman. The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and once he has achieved full humanity he can return to the lost unity between himself and the world. This new unity, however, is different from the preconscious one which existed before history began. It is the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process. (Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, §6, pp. 64–5)

This could, perhaps, provide a way of rethinking death–of acknowledging to some extent its apparent goodness within the whole natural order, without ceasing to recognize the way in which human death is evil. One could piggyback off Herbert McCabe’s idea (that Marxist scoundrel) that human death is uniquely atrocious, since in that case alone nature takes away more than she had originally given.

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.

In “Biblical Origins and the Problem of the Fall” (Pro Ecclesia 10.1 [Winter 2001]), Gary Anderson goes a great distance towards making sense of a “doctrine of original sin” in a genuinely Old Testament context. (If you don’t otherwise know his work, you should. His knack for holding together both Jewish and patristic readings of Old Testament texts is extraordinary.) He calls attention, first of all, to the way the creation narrative in Genesis 1 strains forward to a completion that doesn’t arrive until the end of Exodus and the beginning of Leviticus: the construction and indwelling of the tabernacle and the first offering of sacrifices, which all proceeds according to the same sevenfold pattern as does the story of creation. The priestly writer thereby signals that creation is consummated only with the fulfillment of God’s promise in Exodus 29:45, that “I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God.” Such is the destiny of creation, which ought to usher in a golden age of peace and bliss, and it is finally accomplished with the first sacrifice being offered to God at the end of Lev 9.

But, “the foundational moment culminates not in perfection but in error.” In the very next verse, Nadab and Abihu offer “unholy fire before the LORD, such as he had not commanded them” and they are consumed by fire. And the final shapers of the OT canon, not content to leave Israel’s foundational sin all the way to the end, insert into the middle of the narrative about receiving the instructions for the tabernacle ch. 32 of Exodus: the story of the golden calf. “According to one rabbinic elaboration,” Anderson notes, “the thought of building such a calf was entertained within just moments of hearing the command that forbade it.” And so a pattern begins to emerge: “as soon as Israel receives the benefaction of her election, she offers not praise and gratitude but rebellion.” And it’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again in the Old Testament, and in fact constitutes the basic shape of Israel’s entire history, deliverance and rebellion. “Original sin” within the Old Testament would be a matter of sin’s inexplicable immediacy.

In this light, the story of Adam and Eve makes much more sense. Against the backdrop of the majestic, priestly version of creation, we have an account wherein humanity’s first act is an act of disobedience. The “Edenic bliss” so often referred to is contained in a single verse–”And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed” (2:25)–before begins the account of the couple’s temptation and fall. And so the story broadens. It recasts the experience of Israel in universal terms. Eden becomes less an explanation of human sinfulness than a basic statement of its mysterious reality, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come. The story is not just about two people who disobeyed and so brought a curse on the world; it’s about the mystery of the human propensity to turn away from God’s offer of grace and goodness.

“The Hebrew Scripture has as its primary focus the nation of Israel. The proclivity toward sin is most profoundly illustrated in the rebellion of this elected nation at Mt. Sinai. But if the elected nation is so prone to sin and those sins continue to rebound across generations, then certainly it is not a great leap to extend this insight to humanity at large. If this is what happens to the nation so highly favored, what could one expect of those shown less consideration? What is revealed in microcosm through the nation Israel can be extended, in macrocosm, to all peoples. This, in fact, is the basic thrust of Karl Barth’s treatment of original sin in his Church Dogmatics. But a full development of that story must await another day.”

“First, one should know where sin found its origin, and that is in our first father and mother, Adam and Eve. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he also forbade them to touch it; the same hour they ate of it, they would die. When Adam and Eve transgressed this command and ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, sin became their inheritance and death their wage. And just as Adam and Eve first inherited sin in the knowledge and recognition of good and evil, so also do all their progeny first inherit it in the recognition of good and evil. Thus, in the knowledge and recognition of good and evil, sin has its beginning, origin, and heritage; before this, Adam’s and Eve’s transgression, no sin, hereditary or real, is mentioned by God. Only after Adam and eve recognized good and evil did God accuse them of the sin, and not before.

“Thus, the children are born with the purity of creation, unaware of good and evil. Who, then, would want to accuse the innocent children of an inherited sin? Since the origin and basis of sin, the knowledge of good and evil, does not come with birth, the inheritance of the sin against God comes only with the eating of the forbidden fruit. Of its own volition, the hand has to touch the tree of knowledge, and not sooner, before man sins against God and stands accursed. For Ezekiel states that neither will the child carry the father’s guilt, nor the father the child’s (Ezek. 18:19, 20). Who, then, wants to accurse innocent children of a sin?”

—Pilgram Marpeck, The Writings of Pilgram Marpeck, 245–246.

Milton Gaither (MG): Not so! The anabaptists have a very interesting spin on atonement. For a good discussion of it see Roger Olson’s chapter on the Anabaptists in his “Story of Christian Theology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830815058/ref=nosim/brianhamiltwe-20. In a nutshell, the Anabaptists accepted the Augustinian notion of original sin, but rejected the classic solution to that problem (infant baptism). For them, Christ’s death on the cross atoned for the sin of Adam, meaning that babies born before Christ’s death are born under the curse, but babies born after are born innocent. Thus people are only responsible for their own sins and so don’t have to be baptized until they reach the “age of accountability.”

From my perspective this is an interesting solution to a non-existent problem (since the East thinks Augustine’s notion of Original Sin is bogus). Another, and to my mind more positive, consequence of the Anabaptist view of atonement is that it restores freedom of the will and thus allows that salvation can be synergistic rather than monenergistic (as with Luther and Calvin).

Brian Hamilton (BH): Just finished the chapter from Olson–an interesting read! (I’m working on a lit. survey of approaches to Anabaptist historical categories from within and without the tradition, so also highly relevant.) I’m impressed to see such a favorable reading of Anabaptist origins, though his choices of exemplars are a bit sketchy: Hubmaier’s the one Anabaptist leader farthest from agreement on refusal of the sword and the non-magisterial context of the church–not very representative. Menno’s good, especially to represent the continuing legacy of Anabaptism, but appears late in the early movement.

Re. atonement, Olson certainly draws some good (implicit) atonement theology out of Anabaptist convictions surrounding Christology and baptism, but it’s difficult to systematize their thought on the topic. Most early Anabaptist theologizing grows out of polemics–Hubmaier and Menno least so, which I’m sure is the reason for Olson’s choices–so while a few theological distinctives about atonement may arise, we can’t fairly limit their understanding to those distinctives. It’s the lack of comprehensive theology in the early movement and the limited contemporary attempts to deal with atonement that makes me speak of “silence.” (The contemporary exception, of course, is Weaver’s “The Nonviolent Atonement”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802849083/ref=nosim/brianhamiltwe-20 which has generated quite a bit of conversation among us.)

As an aside, this chapter feels like Olson to some degree wants to identify with this movement, and casts an evangelical tint on the whole affair. I can’t speak too intelligently on early Anabaptism’s relation to Augustine (or on Augustine, for that matter), but it would certainly make an interesting project.

You say that a synergistic atonement is to your mind more positive–how much does the East agree? There’s an interesting line of thought, brought by at least one contemporary Anabaptist thinker, that suggests a number of parallels between eastern divinization language and Anabaptist regeneration language. He shies away from the question of influence–where would these Swiss kids have made it east?–but is convinced at least of ecumenical possibilities.

MG: Yeah, you’re right I’m sure. Olson is making the Anabaptists sound more systematic than they were no doubt. By the way, he is a Baptist, so you are right to detect an affinity for the free church. He hates establishment churches. He’s a thoroughgoing anti-Constantinian.

Here’s my take on Anabaptists and St. Augustine: They are against Augustine when it comes to his endorsement of the Church using the coercive power of the state to squelch heresy (as Augustine himself did with the Donatists). But I think they actually embrace Augustine without realizing it when they accept his definition of Original Sin. Their solution, as I said last time, differs from that of the Reformers, but the problem is the same for them as it is for the Catholics and the Reformed.

Orthodoxy, in contrast, has a different conception of original sin to begin with. For us, Adam and Eve’s sin gave us not a genetic defect with noetic and volitional implications (bondage of the will, etc.) but DEATH. Death is what is passed down. The atonement for us then is more about the destruction of death. If you visit an Orthodox church you’ll notice at once how the resurrection gets all the emphasis. Western Christianity, both Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist, is all about the blood of Jesus. It’s all crucifixion. Orthodoxy of course believes Christ died, but it’s the resurrection that is our salvation, for it is SALVE, healing us of death itself.

Not buying Augustinian Original Sin, we also have always believed in free will. Hence synergy. Yes, Orthodoxy and Anabaptist soteriology share synergy. The difference is that Anabaptists (unfortunately in my view) are working through Luther and Calvin even though they try to reject them. Anabaptists inherited from the earlier reformers this odd notion that justification and sanctification are two separate events, so that one “gets saved” at a particular moment in time and THEN works that out in a life of sanctity. For Orthodoxy (and for Holy Scripture I would strongly hold) this distinction just doesn’t exist. But with that caveat I’d agree that there are strong parallels between Anabaptist notions of regeneration and Orthodox theosis.

And one more thing, in at least one case there is an actual historical connection! The Moravian Brethren were Orthodox way back. They were forced to conform to Roman patterns and eventually rebelled against this. Many of the Moravian reforms were actually returns to their Orthodox ways. Unfortunately (in my vew) their rejection of Rome took place in a Protestant context and thus became not a return to historic orthodoxy but a pastiche of old and new that led to yet another division within christendom.

BH: Not fair! Anabaptists are the one community in Western Christianity that have consistently criticized the overemphasis on the death of Jesus. Remember, these are the people that insisted that the life of Jesus–indeed, that life that leads to death–is the normative example of personhood and obedience. Discipleship, that central description of the Christian life for the Anabaptists, is described over and over again as “walking in the resurrection” in early Anabaptist writing and in contemporary rhetoric. Especially now, Anabaptists often face the claim that they’ve made the crucifixion irrelevant for the Christian life–I think J. Denny Weaver (who wrote that recent book on atonement) even denies that it was necessary. Instead, suffering is the inevitable consequence of faithful obedience, what the early Anabaptists called the “baptism of blood” that necessarily followed from the baptisms of spirit and water (in that order).

I’m intrigued by your distinction between Anabaptist (dualistic) and Orthodox (holistic) views of justification and sanctification. If your description is right, I side with the Orthodox–but I’m not convinced. To my knowledge, “justification” and “sanctification” are rarely used in early Anabaptist discourse. There’s a clear understanding of repentance, of course, that is made tangible in the concrete act of baptism, but the Anabaptists were trying to hard to distance themselves from Luther to call it a moment of justification. On the other hand, there is a sense of immediacy that seems to accompany much discussion of obedience’s relation to baptism, and maybe (heaven forbid) there are parallels here to this business of “getting saved.”

What gives you the idea that Anabaptists accepted Augustine’s definition of original sin? Like I said, I only know anything about Augustine second-hand, but the solid Anabaptist conviction of the innocence of infants seems not to jive too well. Original sin doesn’t “emerge” at some “age of accountability” (an anachronistic term) either, it’s just that now these people have the option, like Adam and Eve, of choosing for or against obedience. The fall looms in the background, and maybe these adults are more prone to disobey than to obey, but would the Orthodox disagree? Is that the same as original sin? What does The Fall look like in the East, for the powers and for individuals?

Interesting note about the historic intersect between Orthodoxy and Anabaptism! I seem to remember that John Hus had some influence on at least a few of the early Anabaptist leaders, so maybe that’s where some of these ideas came from.