Original Sin

M. C. STEENBERG

The term “original sin” is normally taken to indicate a specific view on the origin of sin and its effects in the world, as read through the perspective of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in Eden (Gen. 2–3ff.). Specifically, it reads this text as suggesting a state of original perfection in which human­ity was created and from which it “fell” through transgression. This fall affected the nature of humanity, such that it was to some degree imbued with sin, thereafter inherited by future generations. This condition of in­built sin (described in certain Latin authors as concupiscence, a process of being bound up in errant desire) is in moderate writers of the early Latin Church taken to indicate a general propensity or inclination toward error, while in more extreme exponents it has been developed into doctrines (partic­ularly in post-Reformation western theol­ogy) of “total depravity” or an inheritance of the guilt of Adam’s transgression.

The doctrine of original sin originates largely from St. Augustine and certain other writers of the patristic Latin West, such as Tertullian. From the outset it has been questioned by exponents of Orthodox theol­ogy. While the emphasis on the universal scope of sin is certainly consonant with Orthodox thought, notions of a perfect “pristine condition” and a fall from grace have often been seen as at variance with Orthodox anthropology – or at least as a reading of Genesis that puts excessive emphasis on a transformation of human nature that results from its first transgression. Orthodox writers have tended to emphasize the developmental nature of humanity’s creation into perfection, rather than as already perfected before declining; and have resisted strongly the conceptions of inherited guilt that are often central to western expositions of original sin. As a result, there is a preference among some Orthodox writers in the modern era to use the phrases “ancestral sin” or “primal sin” as a means of distinguishing a non-“Augustin- ian” reading of the Genesis account of transgression from the understanding of original sin now dominant in the West. A precise definition of original sin is, how­ever, difficult to pin down historically, and presentations of “Augustinian” doctrine in this regard are often generalized and impre­cise, leading at times to a popular “East versus West” rhetoric on the point that has little concrete basis in the actual writings of the early church.

Nonetheless, what has become the popu­lar definition of original sin (i.e., a perfect original state, a fall, a transformation of nature) does establish a point of contrast with traditional Orthodox anthropology and conception of sin, which is more dynamic, open-ended, developmental, and therapeutic. It thus forms an issue of ongoing disputation between Eastern and Western Christianity at large.

SEE ALSO: Humanity; Repentance; Soteriology

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Williams, N. P. (1927) The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: Bampton Lectures for 1924. New York: Longmans, Green.