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Augustine's doctrine proved durable. For John Calvin, Adam's fall "perverted the whole order of nature in heaven and on earth." To Martin Luther, man was simul justus et peccator—a sinner savable by God's grace received through faith alone. The 16th century Council of Trent re-endorsed Augustine's attack on Pelagianism for the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. And only last year, Pope Paul rephrased the traditional understanding of original sin as part of his modern creed.
No Sense. Nonetheless, it is the common opinion of theologians that the Augustinian version of original sin makes no sense today. For one thing, evolution suggests that Homo sapiens is descended not from one set of parents but from many, thus making a literal Adam and Eve quite unlikely. For another, Biblical scholars agree that the story of man's fall in Genesis is not history but myth—a story that points to the basic truth of evil in the world but says nothing about the inheritance of sin. Augustine even read St. Paul wrong; the correct translation of the passage in Romans was not "in whom all have sinned" as the Vulgate had it, but, as the original Greek correctly phrased it, "because all have sinned."
What, then, remains of the traditional doctrine? "The term original sin," University of Chicago Theologian Joseph Sittler says, "remains as a kind of pail which we've drained of the old literal statements and refilled with quite new interpretations. The doctrine meant to point to the gravity, the universality, and the demonic results of evil. And the language was a way of stating this. But we no longer buy the old notion of biological transmission or try to have a system of inheritance. The notion of 'original' means profound—trans-individual, way back and deep down. The analogy of evil has changed, but the reality hasn't lessened."
Innate Indifference. Original sin, in contemporary interpretations, is thus seen not as a stigma inherited from Adam but as a statement of the human condition—an idea that most Catholic revisionists defend as being well within the spirit of church teaching. Jesuit Henri Rondet, for example, says that original sin is "the ensemble of personal sin of men of all times." Dutch Theologian Ansfried Hulsbosch suggests that man is born to seek perfection; in so far as he fails to grow toward this spiritual goal, he is both "originally" and personally sinful. Englebert Gutwenger of Innsbruck University conceives of original sin "not as any kind of sin at all but rather as a divinely willed state of "innate indifference" from which each man will eventually make a decision for or against Christ, for or against eschatological life.
What original sin comes down to, suggests Vanderbilt Theologian Ray Hart, "is that you can count on man to be a bastard." In a century that has so far produced Hiroshima, Buchenwald and Biafra, this is an insight that is hard to ignore. Søren Kierkegaard described original sin as a sense of dread; for most of mankind, it is still an uncomfortably familiar feeling.