HEALING FROM DECEPTION vs. Augustinian Original Sin:
DISCUSSION
A LUTHERAN SHAPED BY ROMAN CATHOLICISM
My thoughts on human depravity, sin, and redemption have evolved over the past twenty years. I have been a Lutheran (ELCA) pastor for nineteen years. When I was in seminary, I was taught over and over that we humans are totally depraved and so cannot play any role in our own redemption. We didn't go as far as Calvinism, but we were told that it was hubristic and idolatrous for us to think that we could contribute to our own salvation at all.
But seventeen years in the parish, and grad school, and teaching at a Roman Catholic university have led me to soften my anthropology. I don't know quite where I fall, but it certainly seems to me, based on both Scripture and Tradition, that God has given us humans the capacity to contribute to our salvation. We need Christ, yes, but, by God's grace, we participate in redemption.
I teach a course called Bible as Literature. We go over the idea of etiological myth, and I suggest to my students that they consider reading Genesis 1-3 as such and not as a literal account of an historical event. I also indicate that Genesis 1-3 is in no way a scientific document and that it is actually anachronistic and thus unfaithful to Scripture to read that text as such. We make heavy use of form criticism, considering that we need to understand the ancient genres of biblical texts instead of taking our contemporary genres and super-imposing them onto biblical texts.
Despite all of that, I still have students who insist on regarding Genesis 1-3 as a scientific/historical text in the contemporary sense. Ultimately, I allow students to interpret the Bible in whatever way makes sense to them, provided that their hermeneutics is logically sound and contributes to the greater good. But I try to help them see the problematics of such a literalist approach. Some students, though, just seem unable to make that shift to a non-literalist approach. The problem, in several instances, isn't defiance so much as it is just that they have difficulty making the switch to a non-literalist approach. The acceptance of a new hermeneutics is cognitively challenging.
How do you help students who are open to making that switch but struggle to do so?
David Von Schlichten, vonschlichten@setonhill.edu
Seton Hill University
THE GARDEN SIN OF ORIGIN
Love with boundaries was something Adam and Eve could not yet understand. Ego boundaries were the one thing God couldn’t give Adam and Eve. Ego must discover its own separateness and come to honor it for its own sake and that of others. Presumably, God could have forgiven Adam and Eve and allowed them to remain in the Garden, but how could Love do that? The Garden was no place for ego development any more than the womb is place for such development.
Adam and Eve needed an environment where they could experience themselves as separate from God to learn a sense of unique and individual self. Without knowing that, they could never understand how to relate with God as adults. And certainly God had no mind to keep them ever-children.
O Happy Fault, O Garden Sin of Origin…O Happy Fault!
Sister Lea Hunter, 4Vatican2Rite@gmail.com
ORIGINAL SIN AS EMPIRICALLY VERIFIABLE
I take fairly seriously the old observation that original sin is one of our few doctrines that is empirically verifiable. At middle age I know too well I am flawed, and have been for a long time. Paul’s words from Romans ring true, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war… (Rom 7 15, 22-23a).
Our connections to an often violent unfolding of our origins as a species and our common roots in mitochondrial Eve connect all of us to each other in deep ways, and carry a legacy of broken relationships and missing the mark, even while we find in ourselves the also deep roots of joy and awe.
What sort of relationship do we have to the tradition as it has grappled with original sin? Our post-modern posting, “it’s complicated” is not an excuse but an invitation; our students don’t need to ignore previous attempts, modern science or new and ancient aesthetic shaping of what they have experienced. Nothing less than an honest embrace of our past attempts, brought to bear on our best questions and deepest instincts will serve the task of understanding where God will find us and where we will find ourselves.
Dan Finucane, djfinuc@aol.com
Saint Louis University
WHO IS THE ORIGINATOR of the great insight that among all our Christian doctrines, original sin is the only self-evident one?
James Kelly, jkjrkelly@gmail.com
Fordham University
REPLY
I know the idea from Chesterton's Orthodoxy, but I'm not sure if he is the originator:
“Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin – a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”
Daniel Lloyd Daniel.Lloyd@saintleo.edu
Saint Leo University
TO DANIEL LLOYD:
I have found that many people easily fall into despair, bleakness about the world and even a sense that God is ineffective against all the world's slings and arrows and guns and hate speech. Then there are Christians who minimize evil and have a kind of roseate view of the world, a kind of simplistic theology that is in denial about our fallen state. As an alternative, we can help students to be "theoptimists," not naively optimistic but optimistic because we can see that, despite all the world's sound and fury (the existence of which we do not deny), reality does not signify nothing but is rather profoundly, proleptically hopeful, because God is greater than our sin.
David Von Schlichten, vonschlichten@setonhill.edu
Stone Hill University
TO DAN:
In my classes I try to get after the reality that there is a network, a deep structure of sinfulness in the world that we are born into, that we do not bear individual responsibility for creating but we do bear responsibility for addressing, and that our selves develop with inevitable destructive and self-centered object relations. A few images that I have found work well in class:
1. My father has been an alcoholic longer than I have been alive - I was born into a situation which was already pretty broken, and while that isn't my fault, it is my problem.(A lot of students can relate to that example.)
2. My grandfather was the product of the Deep South in the early 20th century - we live in a time that still has plenty of structural sin... about race.
I am with Dan that there is an empirical character to original sin, but I think we tend to theologize it in a way that makes sin primarily about being on God's "naughty or nice" list rather than about upholding or negating the flourishing of life - a vertical rather than a horizontal view of what makes sin a sin. My concern with how original sin is framed in ecclesial language is that it makes it seem like baptism is about saving us "from God" - since the ceremony itself does not produce any obvious changes in our self-and-other-destructive impulses. In particular, the language about babies being "children of God" after they have been baptized is a big problem for me - what were they before they were baptized? If baptism is to be about death to the old self, there must be some contrast of values - a choice to pursue, however haltingly, an alternative vision of life.
Patrick Cousins, pcousin1@slu.edu
St. Louis University
ON RESPONSIBILITY:
WE didn't invent evil, maybe not even sin. It seems to me baked into this kind of universe, material and spiritual, free and determined, loving and unbelievably cruel. What does that say of the Creator?
We shouldn't be surprised at sin, original and personal. Violence and sin fit the world God made and for which God must assume responsibility. The basic dialogue with God must begin here. Admittedly we don't get the whole picture but we do get a part of it and we must ask the Creator: WHY? Why would God want this kind of universe?
William M. Shea, wshea@holycross.edu
College of the Holy Cross
ETHICS AND ORIGINAL SIN
If God’s omnipotent, then why didn’t God create human beings without the capacity to sin (as God putatively did in Mary’s case?)? If God’s omniscient, then what is the end to which this entire situation of sinfulness is put? And if God’s omnibenevolent, why would God permit evil to exist, or, more provocatively and less in line with orthodox formulations, why would God generate the reality of evil in our world?
My work aims to bring queer theory into conversation with the Catholic moral tradition. For their part, queer thinkers, whenever they get close to talking ethics at all, tend to inhabit continental thought around ethics, which is a system of thought that has sought to redefine responsibility in the wake of devastating critiques launched by Nietzsche, continued in Sartre and Levinas, and re-synthesized and re-deployed (or not, depending on where you stand) in Heidegger’s Dasein and Derrida’s aporias. Overall, their rethinking of responsibility has been to move away from thinking responsibility as that which is defined in terms of the accountable agent to whom, following Kant, actions are imputed, and to move towards thinking of responsibility as an event, a confrontation, a moment of decision in which we are in a sense summoned to respond.
This newer formulation has a payoff for redirecting the doctrine of original sin. After all, original sin is one of the few doctrines of our faith that makes no sense on the traditional responsibility-as-accountability framework. Even the great master of systematic theology, Karl Rahner, reformulated the notion so that it actually looks more like structural or social sin, precisely because Rahner had to get to some place anterior to the phenomenon of the willing subject in order to make sense of the doctrine.
I think we can leave the three “O’s” in place (God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence), though that means reconstructing a bit about what they mean in a world that is confronting postmodern epistemologies. After all, if we have any concept of what goodness actually is, then I do think such an instinct comes, ultimately, from a God who, by grace, reveals Godself as the source of Goodness. As the Psalmist writes (36:9): “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light, we see light.”
Craig A. Ford, Jr., craig.ford@bc.edu
Boston College
ORIGINAL SIN AND SCIENCE
Of course the question concerning original sin and its theological understanding is at the center of my own research, since I deal with science-and-theology in the anthropological field! I think it is time to review the entire question and now we can afford good views based on a scientifically inspired understanding of human origins and the thorny issue of evil.
In a nutshell, what we call 'original sin' reflects a long tradition that comes together with a pack of cultural and social views calling to be updated. When we consider the scenario provided by paleo-anthropology, we cannot assume in a naive way the biblical narrative, which is too easy to deconstruct. However we need to make sense of evil, as something present in humans, and not just external to them. It seems that the evolutionary anthropology, stressing needs associated to survival and reproduction, justify attitudes that were unavoidable for our species success. What is missed is a balance between such biological instincts and the conditions for sociality and cooperation.
However such a view risks to naturalize too much all the story, missing the theological hint. There is always something dark in human nature that cannot be explained simply in biological or psychological terms, and something luminous in the way grace can heal all this. What we - as theologians - know is that all humans need redemption, since our nature is very imperfect regarding our expectations, fruit of our cultural evolution. If you want, you could place the issue as a mismatch between natural and cultural evolution in humans, combined with aspects that go beyond this simple representation, and speaking about some special quality, some transcendence above the natural level, both for evil and for good.
Lluis Oviedo, loviedo@antonianum.eu
Pontificia Universita Antonianum, Rome
MALE ARROGANCE AS ORIGINAL SIN
"Mother Eve" is not the temptation cause of Original Sin; ignorance and arrogance are radical components of Original Sin, of 'Falling Short'.
An evolved sense of RADICAL SACRAMENT can help us understand the root sense of original and continuing 'falling short'.
Sylvester L. Steffen, sylvesterlsteffen@evolution101.org
CLARIFICATIONS
Let me begin by defining sin: it is a purely religious concept, in reference to an “act considered to be a transgression against divine law” (from the web). Examples: eating pork for Jews, drinking alcohol for Muslims, smoking for some Baptists, artificial birth control for Catholics, etc. Different religions have different prohibitions but all agree that these are offences against God. Social scientists and philosophers have no use of this concept.
What is “empirically verifiable” is the “fact” that we are all “flawed,” and can repeat with Paul, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” All religions, and all philosophers agree that there is evil in the world. Let’s call this the universal philosophy of evil in the world. But that is not Original Sin.
Original Sin has been a Catholic doctrine in the West (but not in Orthodoxy) for the last 1500 years, reaffirmed by Trent, the CCC and JP II in 5-6 weeks of public audiences. It contains at least three points: it is the actual sin of actual Adam and Eve; it has been transmitted; it deserves eternal damnation. If you drop any of these three points, you do not talk about “original sin” as the established Catholic doctrine.
The question is: how to you handle this very unappealing doctrine?
1. Avoid the issue and talk about social injustice, social sins, structural sins, exploitation, alienation, alcoholism, drug and sex addiction, etc. This works very well with people like Chesterton' who had no knowledge of Trent. Then all can agree that the “fact of sin (e.g. alcoholism) [is] a fact as practical as potatoes.” This is the preferred option of many theologians, it seems.
2. Use the language of symbols and myth in reference to Genesis 1-3. David Von Schlichten says he uses this approach. And it works! Weakness: how do you “demythologize” the CCC and the JP II’s teaching on the subject? Can you apply the principles of biblical hermeneutics to official Catholic teaching?
3. Face the issue head on. That is what I wish theologians would do. There are many avenues, all of which need considerable research.
Some “enemies of the church” (e.g. scientists) know this doctrine pretty well and will throw it in your face. Some ultra-conservatives will do the same. What will you say then?
Pierre Hegy, pierre.hegy@gmail.com
Adelphi University
TO PIERRE:
In explaining the doctrine to students, I use the following strategy:
1) limit of language & concept: I prefer to call it "sin/guilt by association," or "sin of nature", a "sin" only in analogical sense, not actual personal sin. Better to call it the "fault of the ancestors" (progonikon harmetema)
2) historical context: it was developed out of Augustine's debate with the Pelagians on human nature, and his relentless defense for the necessity of infant baptism (due to massa damnata). A theory of limbo is at least a theological nuance of Augustine's extreme view.
3) comparative perspective: Irenaeus has a more hopeful idea about the fallen human nature, not a total depravity & deprived of free will; thus a doctrine of theosis is possible. John Cassian also shares a similar hope on human nature. Thus, Augustine's view is not universal as one assumes.
4) Augustine's mistranslation of Roman 5:12-21, see the "sin of Adam" as sin of disobedience committed by freewill, and transmissible through human reproduction. The story of Genesis 3 needs not be taken literally as Augustine did. The CCC also admits that Gen 2-3 uses figurative language. So original sin is not a "historical fact" like people want to believe.
5) process theology: Augustine assumed a golden age of humanity in Eden, then suffering set in. What if humanity is evolving through the process of self discovering? Irenaeus' anthropology sees human creation in stages: first in the image of God, then grow into the divine likeness, is more helpful in this regard.
6) last but not least, I ask my student of what is the real consequence of upholding the doctrine as conceived by Augustine, and confirmed by Trent today?
My point is that this doctrine, authoritative in the Western churches needs to be understood in its historical & theological context & complexities. It must be faced head on to avoid fundamentalist interpretation, especially in light of contemporary sciences on human origin & human development.
Anh Q. Tran, S.J. aqtran@scu.edu
Santa Clara University
A CLOSER READING OF CCC
A close read of the CCC under the heading of original sin allows us to see a distinction between the “actual sin of actual Adam eve” and original sin. For example, CCC 390 challenges any conception of original sin that would insist on a literal reading of the characters' actions: "The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.” Moreover, once we get into the substance of the matter, the CCC distinguishes between 'original sin' (peccatum originale) and the 'first sin of man (sic)’ (primum peccatum hominis). About the first sin, we read, "Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. This is what man's first sin consisted of” (In hoc hominis primum constitit peccatum, emphasis mine). The CCC continues, following the tradition laid out by Augustine and Aquinas, to say that this sin has a universal scope just as Christ’s redemption has a universal scope, depriving human beings of the original justice with which human beings were endowed.
The best way to talk about original sin is not the use the word ‘sin', but to use the word ‘state.’ We need to be in a state where we are right with God. The task of deploying the term in our contemporary period is, first, to dissociate “original sin” with the word “sin.” The latter term implies too much imputability to an individual agent. And, in any case, the CCC makes it clear that they are distinct.
Craig A. Ford, Jr., craig.ford@bc.edu
Boston Colleg
TO CRAIG:
Original sin is called “sin” only by way of analogy, as St. Thomas explains (In II Sent., dist. xxv, Q. i, a. 2, ad 2um). Finding another word may not be crucial, but such an effort does have a tradition behind it: don't see "sin" in what we call original sin because it is not the same thing.
Allan Fitzgerald, allan.fitzgerald@gmail.com
Villanova University