Original Sin

My name is Keven.  I am both a law school graduate and will be graduating from Bethel Seminary and officially entering ministry at the end of the next academic year (God willing).  As a Christian and someone who is deeply invested in God’s Church, one of the things that absolutely astounds me to this day is the number of sacred cows that exists for a religion that isn’t remotely Hindu.  The definition of a sacred cow is of course a belief or practice that is viewed as foundational and essential to the faith but no one is really quite sure why.

Take Original Sin, the doctrine that Western Christendom has held for many centuries which holds that human beings inherit not only Adam’s sin but also God’s judgment for Adam’s sin.  This is all very well and good, except for the part that this doctrine dates back not to Christ in the first century but to Augustine and his battle with Pelagius in the fifth.  This means that whole craploads of Christians, as a matter of fact every single Christian, before Augustine had no notion of original sin nor a need for it.  Additionally we have the problem of Augustine being a Latin Church Father who was unfortunately fairly awful in his Greek, which the New Testament happened to be written in.  Despite all this Original Sin persists in Christian Theology notwithstanding its inability to actually be traced back to the founder of the religion.

Do I believe that I was born the way God wanted?  Not remotely.  Do I believe I have a proclivity to sinful behavior?  You bet your buttons I do, but I also believe that I pay for my own mistakes and nobody else’s.  What I really, really do not believe in, however, is that when a new baby is born God sneers, spits on the ground and says, “Great, more sin.” God is not an unthinking force that reacts to wrongdoing like an allergic reaction.  Rather God judges the heart, seeing not whether it has a proclivity to sin but whether it revels in it.

What really chaps my religious rear, though, is growing up in the church you’re made to think original sin is as Christian as the Nativity.  It’s not like we go through religious instruction and they say, “This is how some Christians have understood the issue.”  What’s worse is the number of Christians that will absolutely fight you tooth and nail over this, because apparently a millennia-old religion spanning multiple cultures and continents telling of a loving and forgiving God won’t attract people unless we convince them they're screwed right out of the starting line.

And such is the first of many, many sacred cows to be addressed in this blog.  Original Sin has been used to the point it slanders God’s character and quite frankly I’m sick and tired of it.  For a great while in this country it was used to justify the doctrine of infant damnation, because you know God just loves to torture babies for eternity.  Original Sin…we don’t need you anymore and we’ll be shopping around for a better product in the near future.  In the meantime, leave a comment asking your own ugly questions of God, Christianity and the Bible and we'll answer them as time permits!