Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden. — John Milton, Paradise Lost
Everyone knows about the sin of Adam and Eve, and for 1,500 years Christian theology has proclaimed its consequences. As an offense against God by man's first parents, it made every man an automatic sinner, born without sanctifying grace. It took away, too, the gifts that had accompanied grace: the idyllic paradise that was Eden; the freedom from pain, from suffering, and from death. Because of it, all men be came subject more to their passions than to their reason, more prone to evil than to good. It was, in short, "original sin."
Like many another basic Christian doctrine — the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the existence of heaven and hell — the traditional concept of original sin is currently undergoing more se rious and skeptical scrutiny than ever be fore. Liberal Protestants began their criticism in the last century; now many Catholic thinkers are also challenging the doctrine. One of the latest broad sides is the work of the Rev. Herbert Haag, a Catholic Biblical scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany. In his new book, called Is Original Sin in Scripture? (Sheed & Ward; $3.95), Haag argues that there is no Biblical basis for the doctrine.
Woefully Evil. Original sin, says Haag, did not begin to excite widespread theological interest among early Christians until at least the 3rd century. And not until the 5th century—when St. Augustine formulated the doctrine fully and invented the name "original sin"—did it become a basic part of church doctrine. For Augustine, as for many theologians since, the idea of a primordial sin helped explain one of religion's oldest mysteries: the existence of evil in a world supposedly created by a good God. In his pessimistic view, man was himself the culprit, woefully evil because his soul was imprisoned in an utterly fallen body, incapable of good unless drawn to it by the grace of Christ. In answer to the British monk Pelagius, who preached that man could save himself by good works without the initial prodding of grace, Augustine hurled his reply: Humanity had inherited the curse of Adam's sin. Without the grace of Christ's redemption, men were damned.
The proof, Augustine argued, was in two Scriptural passages: the first three chapters of Genesis and the fifth chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. To Augustine, the story of the creation and fall in the Genesis chapters was literal history, the doleful record of man's disobedience to God and the dread results of that sin for his progeny. Paul's Epistle, holding forth the redeeming grace of Christ as an antidote, reinforced his interpretation: in the Latin Vulgate, as Augustine read it, Paul's meaning was clear: it was Adam "in whom all have sinned."