Previously we saw Keith Ward offer an account of original sin that he thinks consistent with a broad evolutionary picture. As a result of a primal choice for evil and turning away from God, the human race finds itself estranged from God and unable to repair the breach.

Ward distinguishes between what he calls “forensic” and “soterial” accounts of sin. Forensic accounts are chiefly concerned with guilt and punishment, while soterial accounts focus on the way in which the self’s dispositions and inclinations are warped and in need of healing. A purely forensic understanding of sin sees spiritual death as punishment which we have incurred on account of our first parents’ sin. A soterial view, on the other hand, sees our alienation from God and the distortion of our desires as the inevitable consequence of sin rather than a punishment imposed according to a retributive understanding of justice.

The Christian tradition has both forensic and soterial elements, but certain strands emphasize one or the other more heavily. Ward sides with the Christian East (as I understand it) in rejecting the idea of original guilt (as distinct from original sin) and sees the problem for humans more in terms of repairing or healing the self and its relation to God. Original sin is “more like a disease or an incapacity than a crime” (p. 176). And he’s on solid Reformational ground, it seems to me, in holding sin to be not so much a series of discrete acts, but a fundamental orientation of the self – “curved inward” as Luther might put it. This self-centeredness is a result of the evil choices made by our ancestors and the fact that each of us is born into a world where it’s difficult to resist out selfish desires and in which our relationship with God has been shattered.

Consequently, Ward’s account of the Atonement avoids penal or debt-payment metaphors and emphasizes images of participation and healing. As the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus mediates God’s saving grace and forgiveness, making a new relationship possible. Jesus is both the perfect human response to God and a revelation of God’s compassion. Jesus’ life of perfect obedience, which culminates on the cross, results in his Resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit. This makes possible our participation in new life with God. Salvation must involve a change in the subject and not just a remittance of punishment. The purpose of God’s act of Atonement, in Ward’s telling, is to restore humans to a proper relationship with God and to heal their disordered desires.

In Jesus, according to Christian belief, God acts in a uniquely clear, unhampered way, to evoke repentance by revealing the divine nature as suffering, redemptive, unitive love. God acts to show the life that is required of us, to establish a community in which such a life can be begun, to show that the human goal of divine-human fellowship is possible, and to draw people into such fellowship. Thus there will be particular, historical acts that establish this community, founded on a primal revelatory event in which divine-human fellowship is archetypally established. The Spirit is the power which made that event possible, as the icon, and formative pattern of the Spirit’s continued co-operative action throughout the world.

On this view, atonement, the liberation of human lives by God from selfish desire and their uniting in fellowship with the life of God, is necessary if human nature is to attain its intended fulfillment. Such atonement must involve the disclosure of God’s patient bearing of the sufferings of the world (a sacrifice or giving-up of unmixed bliss for the sake of the possible goods of human life). It must involve God’s revealing the pattern of perfected human life in God (a life of healing and forgiveness). It must also involve God’s effective transformation of humans from self-regard to the love of supreme beauty, in accordance with that pattern (the gift of the Spirit). This revelation must come in a particular history and context that is able to manifest God’s particular actions in the world, actions which begin and define the particular process of forgiveness and fulfillment that constitutes the Christian life. (p. 223)

This, in a nutshell, appears to be Ward’s answer to Anselm’s question “why did God become man?” He eschews penal or satisfaction motifs and appeals to what in some ways seems a more patristic understanding: God became human so that humans might become divine. The problem – that from which we need to be saved – is our estrangement from God. In Jesus God restores the possibility of fellowship. But, unlike certain patristic accounts which seem to rely on a reified Platonic notion of human nature, Ward’s appeal to the Spirit as the means by which we are healed and united with God and conformed to the image of Christ may be a more biblical way to think about it.

To connect it back to evolution, we can say that God created a world intended to give rise, through a long process of historical evolution, to finite personal beings capable of enjoying fellowship with God. However, due to a pre-historic choice of self over God, humanity’s progress toward that goal was derailed and we became alienated from God. But God comes to us in the person of Jesus to re-establish that relationship and get the human project back on track and to guide it toward its goal.

Clearly some aspects of Ward’s account deviate from the tradition. The rejection of hereditary guilt may bother those who understand sin and atonement in primarily forensic terms. However, it’s worth pointing out that, evolution aside, there’s never really been a compelling account of how someone can be guilty (and even deserving of damnation) because of a choice their distant ancestors made. Ward’s view manages to retain the insight that we are suffering the consequences of our ancestor’s choices and in need of deliverance from them, without embracing the notion of original guilt. His view also resonates with the Christus Victor motif in seeing humanity in need of rescue from “powers” that hold us in thrall and prevent us from establishing fellowship with God.