That is what the story of the Fall is about in Genesis 3. When our first parents rejected the life of God, they lost it not just for themselves, but for all of us. God constituted us as social and interrelated creatures, like it or not. Our choices effect the rest of the human race and the choice of our first parents to throw away the life of God has damaged human nature and howled in pain down the ages ever since. So we suffer from a kind of spiritual birth defect where something—the life of God in the soul—should be and is not. And that vacuum warps and distorts us in various ways, leading us to live out our warped and distorted lives in various ways.
Original sin does not mean, “If your father was a horse thief, then you are a horse thief.” As Ezekiel pointed out long ago:
The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself” (Ezekiel 18:20).
We are each responsible for our own choices. But our very ability to choose is damaged by original sin. We are born with a weakened will, a darkened intellect, and disordered appetites and all of that gets expressed as soon as we start to manifest the power to express it.
This is why the Church distinguishes between original sin and actual sin. Original sin refers to the interior brokenness that comes of our condition of being “in Adam”: i.e. coming of a race that has lost the life of grace that we should have had. Actual sin refers to the bad acts we choose to commit as a result of our brokenness. So Scripture tells us:
Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death. (James 1:12-15)
The Tradition makes an important distinction here. We are born afflicted with original sin, but God did not desire that, nor does he desire us to sin since he cannot contradict himself. As John reminds us:
God is light and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)
The damage we bear from the Fall comes not from God but from our first parents misusing their freedom and from the accumulation of generations of sin warping succeeding generations. So Wisdom tells us:
God did not make death, and
he does not delight in the death of the living…
But ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death. (Wisdom 1:13,16)
God does not create us to be sinners, nor tempt us to sin. His whole will is ordered toward our salvation, not toward some absurd game of cosmic cat and mouse in which he forbids sin, then tries to get us to commit it, then blames us for doing so. He is not a demented sociopath. Rather, because of our solidarity with our first parents and theirs with us, the effects of their sin are experienced in our lives and we are born as broken creatures. As Jesus notes in the Sermon on the Mount, sin begins in our hearts. That is why he says that if you hate or lust after somebody, you have already committed murder or adultery in your heart (cf. Matthew 5:21-30).
That said, original sin also does not mean that we are “totally depraved”, as though all goodness has been extinguished in us. We remain creatures in the image and likeness of God. But the image and likeness are distorted; the mirror has been shattered. We still reflect God’s likeness, but the reflection is more like a warped mirror in some nightmarish circus. We have brilliant intellects, but we use them, not only to discover E=MC2 but to build bombs for burning cities to death. We have hearts that create great symphonies–and devise mind-shattering cacophonies for North Korean torture and CIA brainwashing experiments. We give our hands to become healing surgeons, and to breaking bones in back alley muggings. We can choose life or death—but sooner or later we all choose death. We all sin. We all need salvation.
And so, the early Church thought searchingly about this in light of Jesus’ own words about his mission. He himself told us the reason he had become man: “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). And he crowned his earthly ministry with this act:
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a chalice, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:26-28)
This was how he both explained and made us participants in the entire saving drama of his Passion, Crucifixion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension that immediately followed the Last Supper. None of it would make sense if there were no sins to forgive. And, indeed, as we shall discuss more fully later, the murder of Jesus is itself the proof of our fallenness.
And so, the Church concluded that Paul was simply speaking common sense and universal human experience when he said we are, apart from Jesus’ saving help, “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). It did so, not to be a buzzkill, but because Catholic theology is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is forged in the crucible of experience and tells us what is so, not what we wish was so.
More tomorrow.
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