About a century after the Creed was formulated at Nicaea, another controversy (involving a man named Pelagius) would drive the Western Church to work out in greater detail this mysterious idea, while still leaving it a mystery.
The question that wracked the 5th Century Western Church was this: Are we, as Pelagius said, sinners because we sin or do we, as St. Augustine countered, sin because we are sinners? Such questions seldom trouble people today. Indeed, an awful lot of people think the easy, obvious, and liberating answer is “We are sinners because we sin!” So with some pluck and elbow grease we can just try real hard and improve ourselves without God’s help.
Now there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement and we can get better at some things. But the universal experience of the human race throughout all of time, space, and eternity (with two notable exceptions) is that sooner or later (usually within a few days and sometimes within a few minutes) that project breaks down. Usually it breaks down in small ways, sometimes in big ones, but always in some way or other. And when you try really hard–eat right, stay fit, get plenty of exercise and do your very, very best–you start to discover deep, tectonic plates in the soul where there are giant, broken, and misaligned things grinding and smashing parts of your heart and soul in painful ways.
Making this clear was the agonizing work of discovery that fell to the people of the Old Testament. Israel is given the law through Moses (himself a deeply flawed man) and responds, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Exodus 24:7). Within eight chapters of this confident declaration, the nation is prostrating itself to a Golden Calf and having orgies. And that pattern will play out again and again throughout Israelite (and human) history. Over and over, Israel will promise that, this time for sure, they will obey God and remain true to their covenant with him and, over and over, they betray him, not only at the national level, but in each human heart. Prophets come and go, calling them back to fidelity and, for their pains, are martyred in gruesome ways, culminating in the murder of the Son of God himself. And he will, in no small measure, be killed because he will make plain the paradoxical purpose of the law: that it exists in order to show that we are incapable of keeping it without his help:
Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:45-47)
So Jesus’ servant Paul will likewise discover that the purpose of the law, like a Buddhist koan, is to confront us with the fact that we cannot obey it. As he says:
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:14-25)
In other words, the law of Moses was a diagnostic tool, like an x-ray machine. It was essential to the healing process, but it could heal nothing. It could tell you what was wrong with you but having done so could do nothing more. For healing, we must apply to the Physician. So Paul sums things up this way:
No human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:20-22)
In short, the core lesson the law teaches is that we do broken things because we are broken people: we sin because we are sinners. There is something wrong with us. “Original sin” is the theological term for that interior brokenness. It’s a bit like blindness. It’s not a thing, it’s a lack of something. But that does not make it unreal.
Of which more tomorrow.
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