Recovering Evangelicals #17 Original Sin: the traditional view(s)
One of the core tenets of Christian theology … is also often one of the hardest to embrace, and all-too-often a reason for giving up on the faith.
How is an abstract, theological concept like guilt or sin transmitted down through genetic lines? Can that really be inherited like skin color, or a tendency towards high blood pressure?
Or does it become my problem because I’m genealogically related to “that guy,” an ancestor of mine who lived thousands of years ago? (Genetic and genealogical relatedness are two different things.) But how can I be held responsible for what he did? And what do I do with the mountain of scientific evidence that tells me “that guy” never even existed?
And how does Christ’s death fix this problem? Why can’t God just forgive?
Questions like these make this idea of Original Sin really hard to hold on to. But if one jettisons the idea, then what was the point of Jesus dying on the cross?
In this episode, Boyd and I team up with an Old Testament / Hebrew scholar to look at how the ancient Hebrews who wrote/read the story in Genesis chapter three never interpreted it the way the Apostle Paul did, and certainly not the way Augustine later stretched it all out of proportion.
And we set the stage for a whole new perspective on this idea, and for the even thornier discussion about Atonement Theology that builds on it.
What gives us the right to second-guess the Apostle Paul and Saint Augustine? The fact that we now have information that was completely unavailable to them at the time: humans did NOT originate from a primal pair in what we now call Iraq, six thousand years ago. Instead, a mountain of evidence given to us (by God) tells us that humans originated two or three hundred thousand years ago, out of Africa, and have never numbered less than ten thousand.
Faced with this contradiction, most believers opt for one of three easy solutions:
- blissful ignorance … pretend the science isn’t there;
- denial … label the science as false;
- give up … discard the whole belief system.
We think an honest and pragmatic approach is to re-examine those ideas.
Here’s the first in a four-part series of episodes that dig into this core aspect of Christian theology.
Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below …
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