Sin and consequences

Camassia is talking about Original Sin and children, and points to some of the difficulties many people have with the idea that children are capable of evil. Whatever we may think about his doctrine of Original Sin, I think Augustine was closer to the truth than many moderns in seeing that children are capable of consciously choosing evil.

In fact, I suspect many of us have observed, in ourselves or others, the ability of children to be cruel in a way that is somewhat shocking. I remember with shame times as a kid when I picked on or made fun of someone else, for no discernible reason other than that I could. (And I was not exactly one of the “cool kids,” shocking as that may sound, so you’d think I would be more sensitive to taunting others.)

Of course, there are at least two questions surrounding the issue of Original Sin – the question of an inherited or innate tendency to commit sin, and the question of an inherited guilt for sin. The Western tradition has generally held to both (with some exceptions), while the East seems to take the view that we inherit a propensity to sin, but not guilt.

For instance, here’s Bishop Kallistos Ware of the Orthodox Church:

For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam’s original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it, results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis. But does it also imply an inherited guilt? Here Orthodoxy is more guarded. Original sin is not to be interpreted in juridical or quasi-biological terms, as if it were some physical ‘taint’ of guilt, transmitted through sexual intercourse. This picture, which normally passes for the Augustinian view, is unacceptable to Orthodoxy. The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider. It is here, in the solidarity of the human race, that we find an explanation for the apparent unjustness of the doctrine of original sin. Why, we ask, should the entire human race suffer because of Adam’s fall? Why should all be punished because of one man’s sin? The answer is that human beings, made in the image of the Trinitarian God, are interdependent and coinherent. No man is an island. We are ‘members one of another'(Eph. 4:25), and so any action, performed by any member of the human race, inevitably affects all the other members. Even though we are not, in the strict sense, guilty of the sins of others, yet we are somehow always involved.

Orthodoxy has sometimes been accused by Western theologians of having a quasi-Pelagian view of sin, while the Western tradition has been criticized for embracing a morally objectionable notion of inherited guilt. Whatever the accuracy of those criticisms, both traditions agree that we need God’s grace to move from sin to blessedness, and deny that we are capable of living morally acceptable lives independently of God. I think this may be why both the West and the East have insisted on infant baptism (and in the East infant communion) – they both realize that we are helpless to do good without God’s grace and need all the help we can get.