When I was in college (a liberal arts Christian college, mind you) and then in seminary, it often seemed as if my entire faith was a bit like a house of cards. As this professor or that professor would challenge the ideas and beliefs that I had innocently made my own because someone had taught them to me, there were times when I feared the whole house might tumble down. As a result, I was reticent to begin tinkering with the individual cards. Over time, though, as I have grown and matured and experienced God far more tangibly, I have removed certain cards from the house and have been pleasantly surprised that the house remains standing even though it looks different!
Lately I have been thinking about the doctrine of Original Sin. In the past few months I baptized a baby and an adult at different times and I found myself feeling disturbed by the question I am supposed to ask about turning from evil. This question is a hold-over from the doctrine of original sin. Simply put, original sin is the idea that when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden their sin became the sin of every human. St. Augustine took it even further and he said sin is transmitted through sexual intercourse and so every human is born sinful because of the transmission. Sin is a disease in other words.
If every person is born fully sinful, you can see why there was a need for baptism and for salvation. Jesus became the answer for what to do about all of humanity being under the curse of sin. Jesus would die in order to take away the stain of original sin. And so it goes. The Catholic Church even decided over time that if babies who were born died without being baptized, they would not go to heaven. Initially it was thought they would go to hell but too many people objected so eventually it was said they went to a baby limbo somewhere in between heaven and hell.
As a child and teenager, I bought the idea of original sin hook, line and sinker. It explained the fact that no matter how hard I tried to be perfect, I just couldn’t sustain it for any length of time. For years I have been wondering about the doctrine. The appeal of original sin is that it explains why no person is perfect. Not you, not me, not any person. But what is perfection? Who gets to define it? And just because a person “sins” at one time or another, does that mean they are sinful? How does living with this view of humanity and this view of God impact us over time? On the one hand, we are created in the image of God and on the other hand we are born in sin and remain in sin until we are saved (except that the flaw in that line of thinking is that even after people are saved, they still sin…). So what’s it all about anyway?
The doctrine of original sin is one of the bottom cards. If we pull it out or tinker with it, what will happen to the rest of the house of Christianity? I have decided to preach a sermon on it this coming Sunday so I hope to find out. Is it a foundational card or has it been an extra all this time and we’ve just been too afraid to find out? I’ll let you know next week!