Excursus on the Fall and Original Sin, Part 3: Christian History

Proponents of the classic Western Christian teaching of original sin, as articulated in the thought of Augustine of Hippo and later championed by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition, often act as if it’s the the clear implication of Genesis 3 (and Romans 5), and that to deny their doctrine is tantamount to denying the Christian faith itself. As Hans Madueme put it, “original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve are essential to how God has chosen to reveal himself in Holy Scripture,” and “Without the fall [as understood in the Augustinian tradition], all of that [Good News of salvation in Christ] is threatened, even eschatology becomes baseless, wishful thinking” (Madueme 33; 16).* The first two parts of this excursus have already demonstrated a profound flaw in this argument. Far from being “essential to how God has chosen to reveal himself in Holy Scripture,” Genesis 3 was largely ignored in the rest of the Old Testament, and while Adam’s sin was taken increasingly seriously as the centuries wore on, including in the New Testament, we have seen no evidence of any belief that comes close to the classic Augustinian understandings Madueme deems so fundamental. Some passages may be read through that lens without a problem, but they by no means need to be read that way, and the alternative readings were much more common.

Today we’ll trace the development of the interpretation of these texts, and the understanding of sin and salvation that went with them, through Christian history.

2nd Century: Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, and Irenaeus

While we’ve seen that Paul’s interpretations of Genesis 3 fit in nicely with those of Second Temple Judaism, the Christians of the next two generations showed little awareness of Jewish philosophy and apocalypticism, and seem to have developed their own approach from scratch (Tennant 274). But that doesn’t mean they came to different conclusions.

After a virtually complete absence in the Apostolic Fathers (the first generation of Christian leaders following the Apostles), themes of the universality of sin and the need for grace, and even an “evil inclination” in human nature first appear in the writings of the Apologist Justin Martyr. Yet, he connects human sin to the ongoing work of evil spirits, not to Adam’s fall (Apology 10 cited in Tennant 276). Where he does mention Adam, he’s clear that our guilt is due to our own sins; speaking of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, he wrote: “He did it for the human race, which, since Adam had become subject to death and the serpent’s deceit, each having by their own fault committed sin” (Dialogues 88). Nor is there a sense that humanity is incapable of following God’s ways: “The human race, which were created like God, free from suffering and immortal if they should keep His commandment …. yet becoming like Adam and Eve, bring death upon themselves” (Dialogues 88). While Justin was addressing very different questions than his rough contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons, the latter shows a similar orientation on the question of sin. On the subject of where the blame lies for our lack of communion with God, Irenaeus wrote: “But on as many as, according to their own choice, depart from God, He inflicts that separation from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord” (Against Heresies 5.27.2). There is definitely a doctrine of the Fall in Irenaeus, and even some kind of idea of an original sin — “We sinned against God in Adam, and through Eve the whole of humanity became liable to death” — but his overall message affirms human freedom to choose what is right, without any hint that we somehow pre-existed in Adam and are therefore blameworthy from birth because of his actions (Against Heresies 4.22.1, Tennant 287-289).

Overall, for this period of Church history, we can assert that Genesis 3 and the nature of sin was not a major issue (MacFarland 30-31). When this reflection did happen, it affirmed that Adam’s sin introduced death and corruption into the world, but not in a way that prohibited humanity from communion with God. We are condemned not by virtue of our humanity, but by virtue of our choices to follow in Adam’s path.

3rd Century: Tertullian, Origen, and Clement

In the third century, our attention shifts to North Africa and Egypt. In Tertullian’s later work, we see the first suggestion that the consequences of Adam’s sin are biologically transmitted; this is a big step towards the ideas that Augustine would later affirm, but Tertullian still upholds human freedom and does not show any hint that guilt is passed congenitally along with sinfulness and mortality (MacFarland 31). Clement of Alexandria shows perhaps some familiarity with Hellenistic Jewish writings and takes up their understanding that Adam’s sin is representative of human behaviour rather than determinative for it, along with a greater comfort than many Christians with understanding the Genesis 3 story as allegorical (Tennant 293). Clement’s student Origen is more challenging to assess since his writings demonstrate a variety of approaches to the story and its implications. At times he spiritualizes the Genesis 3 story in order to make it fit into middle platonistic dualism — that is, that the human soul had to have ‘fallen’ already in order to submit itself to material existence. At other times, he asserts a biological transmission of sinfulness not unlike Tertullian’s; and still at others, he takes an agnostic approach, insisting that neither Genesis nor Paul addressed the mechanics of sin (Tennant 296-303).

So, while none of these theologians came close to affirming the doctrines of the fall and original sin as would later become canonical in the West, we do see a step towards them in the idea that Adam’s sin is sexually transmitted.

4th Century: Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers

The fourth century was a momentous one in Christian history. This is when Christianity was first legalized, and later became the preferred religion in the Roman Empire. It is also the century of the first two great ecumenical councils, which bequeathed to us the Nicene Creed. For Athanasius, the defender of what would become Christian orthodoxy at Nicaea, the Fall does not mark a fundamental change in human nature, but a return to our natural state, which had been elevated in the Garden (On the Incarnation 3-5). Athanasius basically holds to a recapitulation idea of salvation, in which Christ’s work in the incarnation and the cross undoes the effects of Adam’s sin, but he does not specify the particulars of how it works (Tennant 313). Toward the middle of the century, Cyril of Jerusalem links Adam’s sin with death and calls it a “great wound of our nature,” but he also confines the scope of this wound to personal, rather than inherited sin (Catechetical Lectures 12.7).

The Cappadocian Fathers, Sts Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregorry of Nyssa, seem to approach Augustine’s formulations in some ways, but stay quite distant from them in others. Basil, for example, asserts that Adam’s sin is imputed to his descendants and makes them sinners in fact and not just in potential (Tennant 317). Gregory of Nyssa considered the image of God in us to have been deformed by Adam’s sin (Against Eunomius 2.10). While humanity is still able to do right, it’s an uphill climb and we are more likely to do wrong than good (Life of Moses). And Gregory of Nazianzus asserted some sense of inherited guilt as a consequence of Adam’s sin (Tennant 319). But despite this, they still all affirm free will and the possibility of doing right.

So, in these fourth-century theological giants, we certainly see stronger language surrounding the Fall than in previous centuries, but once again critical features of the classic Western formulation of original sin are missing. It’s notable at any rate that, in this era of intense theological debate and formulation of orthodoxy through the ecumenical councils, language surrounding the Fall and original sin is completely lacking from any of the Creeds (Green 62).

Augustine of Hippo

The idea that Adam’s sin warped human nature to the degree that all his descendants inherit his guilt and are left incapable of choosing the good is missing from the theological record through the fourth century (Green 62). Yet, through the influence of the fifth-century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo, they became the dominant theology of the Western Church, and were later reaffirmed by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition after him. We might rightly wonder how Augustine got to where he did.

Much has been made of the importance for Augustine of a commentary on Romans written by an unknown figure who has come to be called Ambrosiaster (Green 62, Louth 88, Kruse). The most widely accepted translation of the final clause of Romans 5.12 reads “and so death spread to all because all have sinned….” But Ambrosiaster interpreted it as “and so death spread to all, in whom all have sinned,” with the ‘whom’ referring back to the ‘one person’ who sinned at the start of 5.12. This is a possible translation — remember the whole passage in question is riddled with grammatical difficulties and ambiguity — but not a likely one (See Green 69 and Louth 88f for good discussions of the issues). Regardless, Ambrosiaster’s reading implies that all humanity sinned in Adam’s sin. As he wrote, “For it is clear that all have sinned in Adam as though in a lump. For, being corrupted by sin himself, all those whom he fathered were born under sin” (Commentary on Romans).

Augustine took this line of thought and ran with it. The context for his reflections on sin was the Pelagian Controversy (Tennant 273, Madueme 12). Without going into too much detail here, Pelagius was concerned that the massive influx of people into the Church because of Christianity’s new, preferred status, was weakening it, filling it with people who were Christians in name only. His response was to focus his theology on the importance of living out the teachings of Jesus. Rightly or wrongly, Augustine interpreted Pelagius’s belief in the possibility of fully living out Jesus’ teachings as a rejection of the reality of sin — and therefore as a rejection of salvation in Christ — and so he responded by doubling down on the consequences of the Fall. According to Augustine, the entirety of human nature was “seminally present” in Adam. Adam passed to his descendants not only his propensity towards sin and the mortality that was the consequence of his sin, but also his guilt and condemnation (Madueme 24, Louth 87). Apart from God’s grace granted through faith in Christ, it is therefore impossible to do right (MacFarland 33). This is what Augustine meant by peccatum orignalis, original sin: “sin that’s already inside us, already dwelling in us at our origin, at our very conception” (Jacobs xiii, cf. Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John 49.12.2.15). Thus, it is not simply just that we sin, but that we cannot not sin: We are fully “overcome by [Adam’s] fault,” and under “a harsh necessity” to sin and “lack freedom” to do otherwise (On the Perfection of Man’s Righteousness 4.9).

This marked a decisive shift in the direction of Western theology, and rejected the almost universal consensus until then, among both Jewish and Christian theologians, that we are free and able to choose right over wrong (MacFarland 32f). Yet despite how radical it was, Augustine’s thought was officially approved at the anti-Pelgian Council of Carthage (411-418) and reaffirmed at the Council of Orange (529) (Madueme 12). And indeed, for many to this day, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin can and should be equated with the Fall itself (Madueme 11).

Later Developments in the East

Augustine’s ideas did not fare nearly as well in the East. Rather than talking about original sin in the way Augustine did, the Christian East preferred to think in terms of ancestral sin (Louth 84, cf. Ware 224). This idea holds that “each of us as humans [is] born into a web of sin: the accumulated sin, and its consequences, of all our forefathers and foremothers. We find ourselves, inexorably, participating in this web of sin, for the sins of all the generations that gone before us have eroded whatever examples of good conduct we might have had” (Louth 86). We might call this the ‘hurt people hurt people’ theory of universal sinfulness: Adam’s sin impacted his children, and their sins impacted all those around them, and on and on and on. I’ve also seen it described as like dying fabric: in a sin-dyed world, it’s impossible not to be stained ourselves. In this view, Adam’s refusal to live out his vocation to mediate the image of God in the world has left it and all the relationships within it “disrupted, out of joint” (Louth 86). This perspective upholds the great and serious consequences of the Fall, but also maintains the older Jewish and patristic consensus that we are guilty before God only inasmuch as we participate in Adam’s sin by following in his footsteps, and are in fact free to choose otherwise (Ware 223).

A surprising but revealing test case for the two traditions is how they came to understand the Virgin Mary’s “sinlessness,” which was a very old a tradition. The East, with its understanding that ancestral sin made sinlessness very, very difficult, but not impossible, told a story of how her parents were holy people and how she grew up in and around the Temple in Jerusalem, surrounding herself with worship, God’s presence, and godly people. In the West, with its belief in original sin, they ended up having to create the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary — in which the grace of Jesus’ death was pre-applied to Mary’s conception, to allow her to be free from original sin.

Later Developments in the West

Augustine’s formulations became dogmatic in the West and this was not something that was challenged in the Reformation, as both Luther and especially Calvin remained firmly rooted in an Augustinian paradigm (Madueme 12). But this unified front broke down in later centuries. Jacobus Arminius, for example, balked at the determinism of Calvin’s theology and reinstated belief in free will (Madueme 27). John Wesley similarly pushed back against the extremity of Reformed thought, holding that divine judgment was based on personal sins rather than inherited guilt from Adam (Green 58).

In other words, what we might call the Protestant minority report, as seen in Arminians, Methodists, and many Anabaptists, ended up, through their own independent reading of the texts, restoring the consensus interpretation of the early Church: That Adam’s sin had great and lasting consequences for humanity, but that we are each free and responsible only for our own sins.

Concluding Thoughts

The past three posts have been a long digression from a series that is ostensibly about Genesis 1-11. But, since the interpretation of Genesis 3 has had such a huge impact on Christian theology, especially in the West, it felt important to explore this. What we’ve seen is that, far from being the obvious reading of Genesis 3 and Romans 5.12 that Augustinian Christians, whether Roman Catholic or Reformed, claim it to be, Augustine’s ideas surrounding the Fall and original sin are outliers in the historical theological record. Judaism knew and knows no doctrine of original sin whatsoever, and while patristic Christianity certainly had strong beliefs about Adam’s sin, the general consensus stopped far short of Augustine’s interpretations. And, Protestants returning to the Scriptures in discomfort with the extremity of the doctrine of original sin more or less independently rediscovered the broad historical consensus in opposition to Augustine’s formulations.

This is not to say that Augustine was necessarily wrong — that’s beyond the scope of these posts — but does prove that the assumption that his thought is the obvious, clear teaching of Scripture and traditional Christianity is false. And for this reason, the interpretation of Genesis 3 that emerged in our study, non-Augustinian as it is, is actually very firmly within the bounds of ancient and traditional Christian teaching.

 

* See the series bibliography for full detail.s