St. Anselm answered this question in the Cur Deus Homo, or “Why God Man.” I do not know whether this is the church’s final answer, as it were, but as far as I understand it quieted the incesssant soteriology debates of the early middle ages.
He argues in dialogue form that the OS was so great that no man could ever possibly atone for it. Yet because man fell, it behooves him to make an atoning sacrifice and not someone else in his place.
God, on the other hand, has the power to forgive but not the necessity.
God’s power + Man’s Obligation = Jesus Christ. Neither God alone nor Man could atone for the OS, which contemporary catholics viewed as a major cosmic rift. So God and Man doubled up, as it were, in the form of JC.
I do not know if this argument is still relevant to Catholicism today.
Uh, are you imposing a strict temporal definition on what can affect anything else?
I trust that since you enjoy freedom today, you’re firmly convinced that nobody who gave their lives on the battlefields of the Revolutionary, Civil, or World Wars has anything to do with whether or not you do?
Assuming you disagree with that rhetorical question, can you see where a payment tendered in advance by a third party can cover debts incurred by someone at a later date? That, in essence, is what the Substitutionary Atonement to which you object suggests.
Furthermore, to God, all of our transient human time is quite simultaneous. In God’s time, the only time that is cosmically relevant, JC did die for every sin that every human has ever committed.
Are we still talking about “original sin”? I was not hijacking this thread to argue strictly on the dying for sins committed two thousand years later. My contention was that for many “original sin” is part and parcel to Jesus being our savior.
Polycarp in that quote of mine, I go on to say that what is needed is the concept of “original sin” to make it believable. However you’re understanding that I did not even buy that concept is correct .
Those who gave their lives did so to protect freedom for themselves and for me, that is correct. The difference is that if I do not continue to be vigilent or be willing to give my life for freedom, then it will be lost. If Jesus had died to do away with the stigma of “original sin”, I would be in his debt, but I would also be responsible for the sins I commit. Good meat for thought, but not convincing to me.
If I set up some sort of trust to pay the debts of my descendants there would have to be some sort of limits to that trust and one would be that there would be a time limit. But then again God has His own legal system, so I will look to others, since I am not the only one that has made this accusation.
One person I’d like to quote is Rev. Leslie Weatherhead the minister of London’s largest Methodist church, many years ago. He wrote The Christian Agnostic and devoted an entire chapter to this subject. Unfortunately, I cannot find any sites that have any information to cite.
What that says to me is that we have a different worldview than the people who wrote the bible.
Rev. Weatherhead, Bishop Spong (or myself) are looking for a reformation in the church, not doing away with it.
Will Rogers (a proclaimed atheist) once said something to the effect that “Christianity would be better off if it worried more about what Jesus said and did and less about how he came and went.” I myself concur with those sentiments.
It was not my intention, kniz, to argue against the point you are making here, but to contrapose the traditional view, as much for clarity’s sake as anything else. To a large extent, I tend to agree with you (which no doubt fails to surprise you, I’m sure).
Animal behavior is ruled entirely by instinct, which is perfect obedience to the will of God since (you might say) He programmed the ‘software’. But when humans evolved the capicity for free will, we became capable of sin.
Here’s where it gets wierd: A young Mesopotamian couple ran away from their tribal village, found a nice little medow, shed their clothes, and proceeded to frolic (and/or cavort). Running out of food, they found these mushrooms growing at the foot of a tree. Instinctively, one is wary of eating mushrooms just as one is wary of snakes. Certain foods are ‘forbidden’ to certain animals because they’re poisonous. But Amanda and Steve were able to override this concern, saying “what the heck” and gobbled 'em up.
As luck would have it, they turned out not to be poisonous toadstools but psychedelic shrooms, dude. Saying your “eyes were opened” and that you “knew good and evil” is a good summation of a psychedelic drug trip, and you also become extremely self-conscious, i.e. paranoid.
This incident was remembered and incorporated into the cultural mythology with the usual distortions.
That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it until I come down.
I am Coptic. Just curious what experience you had with it.
Bobkitty,
Not all churches believe in the Immaculate Conception (Mary born without sin). The Coptic Orthodox church adamantly denounces that belief, although it does believe that Mary is greatest among women.
As for Original Sin: When Adam and Eve were created, they were created perfect in potential. They were in commune with God. However, when they ate of the fruit they were no longer perfect and became seperated from God. Good and Evil were simply laid out by God:
a) Good is not eating of the tree,
b) Evil is eating of the tree.
As we know, A&E chose option b which created a chasm between the perfect world of God and the imperfect, evil world of man. Had God’s original comandment been to not eat Kung Pao Chicken and A&E ate Kung Pao Chicken, that would have been the original sin. It didn’t matter what God commanded them to do, the disobedience of man against God is evil and disobeying Him would only seperate man from God until God offered us a bridge to cross the chasm from evil to goodness–Jesus Christ
Certainly you can sin by being too original (the way some people dress for the oscars comes to mind) but you can also sin by being too un-original and boring. As always, the virtue is in the middle ground. Go now in peace and sin no more.
There seems to be a misconception that “original sin” is a fundamentalist concept. It is not. (At least not in any fundamentalist church with which I’m familiar.)
I grew up in a (very) fundamentalist Southern church, and I never heard of “original sin” until I interacted with Catholics in my adult years. The concept was completely alien to me.
The teaching in my church (church of Christ) was that children were sinless, and would go to heaven if they died. Only those who had reached the “age of discretion” had to worry about Hell. What was the “age of discretion”? Differed for every person, but basically, the age at which you are presumed to fully understand the difference between right and wrong, and are therefore capable of “sinning”. When you reached that age, you were expected to be baptised for remission of sins.
See? No concept of “original sin.”
Are there any fundamentalist churches which do believe in “original sin”? If so, which ones?
For the record, these days I’m an atheist. Just don’t want to see my well-meaning fundamentalist friends unduly tarred as baby-damners.
Well, Southern Baptists and Pentecostals (as in Jimmy Swaggert) come immediately to mind. There are many fundamentalists in the Methodist Church (my denomination), especially after they united with the EUB’s. They all believe in “original sin”.
I’m not doubting you, kniz. I’d just like to see some cites on this doctrine. My impression has always been that “Original Sin” was Catholic doctrine, but hey, maybe I’m wrong.
Or perhaps it’s just a question of semantics. Perhaps the Protestant churches you listed, while believing in something very much like the concept of “Original Sin” just don’t throw the phrase around as much.
The churches of Christ certainly believe that all are sinful. However, they do not believe that we are sinners when we are born. Rather, they believe that it is inevitable that all people will sin in their lifetimes. Important distinction, I think.
Do the Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals believe that we are stained by sin at birth?
(And what does happen to dead babies in those faiths?)
I think that taken as an ALLEGORY, the Adam/Eve/Garden Of Eden Story is really quite beautiful and true.
These two people have a life in this simple, sacred place where everything is taken care of. They make the choice to “eat of the fruit of knowledge”.
Their situation hasn’t changed as of this point, but they now know enough to see things differently. They find themselves naked and seek clothing, etc. Was their life better living under these circumstances in ignorant bliss or is it better to aspire to be something higher, but lose that innocence forever?
That’s how I define original sin. Maybe at some point we had some kind of basic innocence and lived simply. Humans as a species moved beyond that, and now the knowledge we have means that we will see our insignificance in the vastness of creation, and without a larger force to guide us we will always be lost. You don’t have a choice about this: you will grow up in a world full of wonderful technology and astounding knowledge, but in exchange for that you will never be truly innocent.
The fundies look at it differently: the first people did something bad and as such we have a smudge on our souls from the beginning. God can’t have smudged souls in his presence, so everyone is really screwed. Fortunately enough, Jesus can be your cosmic dry-cleaner and through him you can get a sparkly clean soul and go live with God. I like my version better
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would God regard something completely trivial as ‘evil’ when there is plenty of real harm that humans are capable of? It would have made much more sense for God to have said, “You may eat of the flesh of the dodo bird, but don’t kill them all or else they’ll be gone forever and I’ll be Pissed”.
Furthermore, it’s the Tree of Knowledge. This is not simply a case of tempting people with sweets to test their self-restraint. When they ate the fruit, their “eyes were opened” they were “like gods, knowing good and evil”.
This suggests sudden enlightenment.
Why would the fruit be imbued with such properties if this is a purely ‘generic’ question of obedience vs diobedience?
I think equating knowledge with sin is the result of the metaphor becoming garbled and missing pieces.
Thanks for the legwork, kniz. Color me surprised. Guess this topic just never came up in conversations with Baptist and Methodist friends.
Still, it’s obvious that not all fundamentalist churches follow this doctrine. (Mine didn’t, at least not in its usual form.)
That’s why the use of the term “fundy” on this board always sort of annoys me. “Fundamentalists” are not a monolithic group, but comprise multiple Protestant denominations with a range of beliefs on any given point of doctrine. Besides which, I don’t know of anyone who self-identifies as a fundamentalist; it’s a term that generally gets applied to various Protestant churches by non-Protestants.
Saying “fundies believe this” and “fundies do that” is painting with too broad a brush, IMHO.
and others…Andrew Greeley’s