What do we do with Original Sin?

A. Why do we focus so much on our sins?

There’s a long and robust tradition in Christianity which focuses on human failings, God’s wrath, divine punishment, and the need for humanity to be rescued from above. Of course, anyone who is the least bit aware of things sees how cruel, greedy, selfish, and proud we humans can be! We see broken and dysfunctional families and we are painfully aware of the consequences of these down the generations. We witness addictions of all kinds, and how they debase human beings. All this against a background of wars, environmental destruction, wealth inequality and scams and fraud and abuse marriage infidelity and violence…

So yes, there is a tendency, in many quarters of the church, to dwell on our depravity as individuals and as a species. And there has been a stubborn tradition to try to scare churchgoers into more moral living by brandishing the fear of hell and torment. Fire and brimstone preachers quickly point to the story of Adam and Eve and the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The rest of the Bible is full of stories of God punishing the wicked. And sacred art over the centuries, from Bruegel and Dante to Michelangelo, never ceased to produce depictions of the tortures of hell, designed, no doubt, to “scare us straight.”

It doesn’t seem to work…

And then we were told that “Jesus died for our sins.” And everything was made okay, because God had accepted that sacrifice, and had forgiven us. While God had been enraged at our sinfulness, God loved us so much that He sent His Son to suffer and die in our place. And, if we but believe, we too will be saved.

Is it any wonder that we skeptics have basically said “thanks, but no thanks” to this picture?

Do we really have to buy in to this scenario in order to be a Christian? I don’t think so. As always, each of us has to sort things out for ourselves, but I’d like to believe that there is quite a different take on our faith tradition which does not downplay human flawedness, but puts the traditional stories in a very different perspective, without being hopelessly naive, simplistic, and polyannaish – or heretical!

Let’s spend a bit of time with the elements of our sacred story which make up the traditional narrative – the Creation stories, the Fall, and the death of Jesus. This is big stuff, and the best I can do in a brief pamphlet is to suggest where you can look to get a different – and healthier, I believe – perspective on the heart of our faith: an unconditionally loving Holy Mystery who invites us into holiness, allows us to live out the consequences of our actions, and brings us back to enjoy participation in divine life, to the measure of our openness to God’s Spirit.

B. The origin of evil in our Sacred Text

Let’s start with Genesis 1 and 2. First off, they are not history: humanity did not start from a single man and woman; there never was a Garden of Eden; nor, of course, a “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Anthropology and paleontology have proven otherwise long ago. Nonetheless, the stories carry valuable truths.

There’s a profound reason our Bible starts with these myths of origins. While Genesis might be the first Book of the Jewish and Christian Bible, it was not written until the time of Exile. As I understand it, the Israelites in captivity were exposed to Babylonian myths of origins and were repelled by their violence and cruelty. This is not how they saw the relationship between creation and their God. Genesis 1 is about a loving God creating a world that God declared as “good.” The Text mentions this over and over again.

However, every culture has also had to find a way to make sense both of suffering and of moral evil. If creation was good, there must have been a time when everything was perfect, and, knowing humanity’s proclivity for wrongdoing, there must have happened something which broke the relationship between a loving Creator, a perfect life, and we humans. Thus, the myth of an “original sin,” something which broke a covenant and angered the Creator.

Does any of that make sense to us today? Closer to the truth is the hypothesis that hominids came down from the trees, discovered, over time as their brain grew in size and capacity, that they were aware. And aware of being aware. And becoming aware that they were to look after “Number One.” Selfishness and self-centredness are the shadow side of that feature which defines humans – namely our self-awareness. This is both our originality and our “original sin.”

That hypothesis helps understand that part of the Biblical myth when God did not want Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge – the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! Human happiness in the Garden depended on them not becoming aware of themselves. Remember what the first consequence of eating of the fruit was? They were aware of themselves being naked, an awareness they had never had before: a sign that they had become aware, and aware that they were aware…

Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, condemned to work for their survival, and told they would die. As the famous evangelical quote which appears on billboards in our area goes, “the wages of sin is death” (as if we die because that is the punishment meted out by God to Adam and Eve for their transgression, and not because of the very nature of life.)

And right after the expulsion, the Sacred texts tells the story of Cain killing his bother Abel out of jealousy. In the myth, eating of the fruit of that Tree gave us access to our awareness, and to realize that we had choices and that some choices were good and some were evil. We kill for mostly immoral reasons… And so it makes sense to create a myth that reminds us every day that our greatest challenge is to use our self-awareness for a greater good than our own.

C. “Original sin” and “salvation history”:

All well and good, but then, where did all this stuff about the universality of “original sin” and the need for a “salvation history” come from, and why does our traditional theology insist that Jesus had to die for our sins?

Early Christians took the Bible myths as fact. They therefore had to find a way to explain why that first “sin” matters to each of us even today. St Augustine, who himself suffered from a serious case of conscience because of his wayward youth, came up with the idea that we must each somehow carry that sin with us from generation to generation. How? Through the sex act! (Sex has always been seen as a such a tainted thing.)

That seems to have made a lot of sense to a lot of people for a long time. It appears to us skeptics as a bit ridiculous. The flawedness that we carry, we carry because we are all self-aware, and our egos are biologically designed to look after us first and foremost. We struggle with sin, not because it is a blemish passed on through sex, but because we are self-aware, and therefore selfish. The myth helps us to remember that, and I can live with it in that understanding.

The next part is trickier: why is God so angry with us? And what sense does it make to say that God had to send Jesus to die in our stead?

It’s hard not to imagine the Holy Mystery in human terms… And if God is not only the Creator, but also perfectly good, then one can easily imagine divine disappointment, if not downright anger, at humanity’s failure to meet God’s expectations or to obey God’s commands. Jewish Scripture is full of these encounters: first God sets out God’s expectations – the Ten Commandments and the constraints to wealth accumulation. The Israelites go their own way, violate the Commandments and accumulate wealth, and the prophets call down God’s punishment for their transgressions. This goes on for the better part of a thousand or more years of Biblical time. (Humans are very slow learners…)

Now, much of this is sacred myth – very important for the moral truth its conveys, but not historically factual. If one reads it factually, though, there are huge implications. In fact, it affects the way in which we understand Jesus’ life and death: if your world-view includes the conviction that humanity is depraved and that our sin angers a righteous God, then your understanding of Jesus is that he came down on behalf of a loving but just God to pay the price for Adam’s sin that no one else could.

In the 10^th century, a well-meaning bishop, Anselm, tried to explain this strange state of affairs to medieval peasants. They understood a thing or two about offending a king, and they knew what a king’s rage at offence looked like. They could easily understand God as king demanding ransom for humanity’s sinfulness. They also understood that this particular King was loving, and it made some sense to them that such a king might send his only son to die in the place of humanity, in order to set things right. And so we ended up with the “substitutionary atonement” theology which has dominated Christian thinking for centuries, with a long line of theologians from Augustine through Aquinas to Luther and Calvin pushing this view as the only orthodox understanding of our salvation history.

And then there is hell… A place of eternal torment for those who have not been reconciled with God. While there is scant scriptural evidence of a “hell” as we understand it, it became an essential part of traditional theology, and has been used from the pulpit as a tool to scare people into good behaviour. (That hasn’t worked too well, either, has it?)

D. A different – and neglected – orthodoxy:

There has always been another, equally orthodox, albeit less well-recognized theology, one that does not see Jesus as the rescuer sent from above to die on our behalf to set things right with a wrathful God. This has been the view of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Franciscan and Celtic theology in general. It really began with Pelagius in the early 5th century. This poor guy had some great ideas which resonate with us today, but his opponent was the mighty Augustine – who won out, and had Pelagius condemned for heresy. In our time, Matthew Fox spoke of an “original blessing” rather than an original sin. It’s a view that holds that Jesus was not a divine rescuer, but the natural evolution of God’s incarnation in our world. Jesus was not a divine sacrifice, but the human face of God, intent on showing us how to live as God intended. This view has been strongly supported by more recent Biblical scholarship who see Jesus as speaking truth to power – both religious and political – challenging the dominant world view based on wealth, status and power, and replacing it with distributive justice (everyone has what they need), humility, and compassion. He was executed by those same powers for his threatening views, which were essentially Biblical and counter to the dominant culture’s values.

E. What if? Something to try on…

What if we put together the best that our Biblical scholarship can suggest about Jesus, his message and his death, alongside a Franciscan understanding of God’s unconditional Love for us, married to an evolutionary understanding of humanity?

We might get a picture something like this. With the appearance of human sapiens, a new dimension of life appears: that of self-sentience, and, with it, all the wonders that humanity has been capable of: language, tools, civilizations, culture. But, along with all this, came the downside of self-awareness – self-centredness. This is as close as we come to the notion of “original sin”: our selfishness is an integral part of our make-up as self-sentient beings. Many sages and religions began, some two thousand years ago, to reflect on the downside of civilizations built on power and greed, and invited people to reflect on the dignity of all individuals. Down the centuries, civilizations have rejected this compassionate approach, and the wealthy and the powerful maintained a firm grip on their power.

In our Western cultural tradition, there came a man, Jesus, who was so filled with the vision of a loving Creator, that he showed his disciples how to live in communities guided by compassion, humility, and distributive justice. This was a threat to both his religion and the political authorities, who conspired together to have him arrested and executed.

We who follow him know that a better way of being human together is possible, but it cannot be forced on anyone. It’s invitational. It’s also very difficult. We keep trying, and fail. But we continue to try, in numerous small ways. We believe we have the energy of God’s Spirit and the vision of Jesus to move us forward and to guide us. We fall, and we get up and keep trying.

We have no need of the Fall, though the myth serves a useful purpose to remind us of our dark shadow side. We have no need for Jesus to die for our sins, though we could easily say that he died because of the sins of humanity! We have no need of several hundred years of theology of human depravity, though we remain painfully aware of how challenging it is to give up on wealth, power, and status, in favour of distributive justice, compassion and humility. And we have no need for hell as a place of eternal torment, implying, as it does, a God who is prepared to see humans suffer for eternity for their sins. This is in radical contrast to the idea of a God who loves us unconditionally. Although we will experience the consequences of our wrong actions through a diminished experience of God’s loving Presence at our death. (Some might object that the absence of a hell in our cosmology would indicate the absence of a moral dimension to the universe. One could argue convincingly that a “consequentialist” view of human actions is sufficient for a universe to be moral: we remain responsible for the consequences of our actions for generations. Eastern thought has used the term “karma” to describe this accountability.)

As a skeptic, I am much more comfortable with this understanding of our faith. I think it remains reasonably consonant with the heart of Jesus’ message, and it at least has the benefit of discarding traditional theology that no longer serves a purpose. But you need to make up your own mind: I’m merely sharing with you the fruit of my thinking.