Shawn, thanks for picking up this topic. I'd requested more on this, and you delivered. Your scholarship and exposition are top-notch, as always!
But man, oh man - this was one of the worst, most impenetrable articles I've ever read! And re-read. And re-read again.
I think I finally follow the thrust of what you picked at. But given how hard and messy it was (who declared what, who sniped at whom, when, and in what language, with what translation..), I can only conclude that there's no there there.
The underlying concept(s) are so disordered and incoherent, so contentious and so disputatious, so full of untenable conclusions and irredeemable dead-ends, that there simply is no logically acceptable, let alone logically fruitful, concept worth discussing. There may be underlying theological questions worth exploring. But theologically this "doctrine"(? concept? train of thought? chain of logic?) is simply useless.
Especially, as I've posted in some other Replies, as it's completely divorced from the Hebrew tradition from whence came the Genesis story(ies). In this post you don't try to take the history back any further, and I suspect that it cannot reach back into the Old Testament - the O.T. being a history of the Covenant between God and Man and/or God and His People. It's not a story that contains anything about imputation of guilt.
So again - in my thinking - we're left with a concept solely of Christian origin, unanchored to any Hebrew tradition. Meaning it could not be understood by a first-century resident of Israel, i.e., one who would have received the message first-hand. And so must be treated as an independent revelation, a retroactively-inferred reason for the death and resurrection of Jesus. But yet every treatment from the early Christians onward grounds the concept in Adam's Fall - in a Hebrew story of creation.
There is just too much nonsense here. It's re-affirming my disbelief in the entire Christian theology and traditions I've been taught.
Thanks again, though, for the scholarship on this. Your posts have re-affirmed my belief in the Christian message that I've been taught: that love, and love in actions, matter. That they matter to others, and they matter to making me the new person I'm called to be.
And (maybe less generously than Ian's comment) the theology be damned.
After reading all of it, I conclude we will know a person is a Christian by their love, not their theology. Let’s get on with living and doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. And let God be the judge. I think CS Lewis said that hell is full of theologians arguing about what view of scripture is correct. Or maybe they will just live forever in ivory towers. Earth to theologians …
Interesting. How does this square with covenant theology? By that I mean, God made a covenant with Adam, which Adam broke, which then therefore was attributed to all of his descendants. Much like the covenant God made with Abraham.
Love this discussion! As an old lay person with decades of study in the Bible and Christian History, I have come to the conclusion that one’s belief is almost entirely based on which viewpoint they choose to accept.
Most people simply parrot what they have been taught accepting it as universal and often defend their accepted position as absolute truth.
My studies over the decades have lead me to question almost everything I was taught, believed, and promoted for the first 27 years of my life. It was in a well-known, conservative, Evangelical seminary that I suddenly realized that the lesson I was taking notes on was entirely built upon highly questionable assumptions and beliefs.
50 years later, as a liberal Episcopalian, I only confidently believe that a loving God exists and that I choose to honor God by living in that flawed Christian tradition. I strive to live out the moral teachings of Jesus with the realization that his unfulfilled apocalyptic views influenced his most extreme teachings. For me, the rest of Christianity is mired in historical theology which I hold tenuously and lightly.
I recite the ancient creeds despite gaping questions and doubts. I sincerely honor the Eucharist because of the presence of Jesus I feel in it. I kneel, I stand, I genuflect, I bow out of gratitude to God’s continued love. I find comfort in the litany even as I must sometimes treat with ambiguity for the implied, erroneous theology.
To many Evangelicals, I no longer qualify as Christian.
This is the blessing and the curse of the first amendment’s protections. It provided the soil for religion as a whole to flourish but also to splinter and redefine itself a thousand times over… and that’s the death knell for a unified doctrine.
I'm sorry but I don't exactly understand. In old Latin, "the sentence now says that every human being sinned in Adam, personally and retroactively, at the moment of the first transgression." But what exactly does the Greek original say? I can't make that out from what you've written. Sorry.
Absolutely no apology needed! I described what the Latin was doing without ever stating plainly what it replaced from the Greek. Thank you for catching that omission.
The Greek is eph' hō pantes hēmarton, and read the way most scholars read it, it means "because all sinned." So Paul's sentence runs: sin entered through one man, death came through sin, and death spread to everyone because everyone sinned. The verb is plain past tense and the subject is everybody. Their own sinning is what death follows in the Greek.
The Latin in quo turns that final clause into a place rather than a reason. Not "because all sinned" but "in whom all sinned," with Adam as the "whom." Same four words, and now the sentence reports that the whole human race committed the first transgression while inside Adam and not because of their own sinning.
I want to be careful to mention that the Greek is not claiming anyone is innocent. It says death reaches you because YOU sin. It just doesn't say you sinned in the garden, which the Latin implies.
Shawn, thanks for picking up this topic. I'd requested more on this, and you delivered. Your scholarship and exposition are top-notch, as always!
But man, oh man - this was one of the worst, most impenetrable articles I've ever read! And re-read. And re-read again.
I think I finally follow the thrust of what you picked at. But given how hard and messy it was (who declared what, who sniped at whom, when, and in what language, with what translation..), I can only conclude that there's no there there.
The underlying concept(s) are so disordered and incoherent, so contentious and so disputatious, so full of untenable conclusions and irredeemable dead-ends, that there simply is no logically acceptable, let alone logically fruitful, concept worth discussing. There may be underlying theological questions worth exploring. But theologically this "doctrine"(? concept? train of thought? chain of logic?) is simply useless.
Especially, as I've posted in some other Replies, as it's completely divorced from the Hebrew tradition from whence came the Genesis story(ies). In this post you don't try to take the history back any further, and I suspect that it cannot reach back into the Old Testament - the O.T. being a history of the Covenant between God and Man and/or God and His People. It's not a story that contains anything about imputation of guilt.
So again - in my thinking - we're left with a concept solely of Christian origin, unanchored to any Hebrew tradition. Meaning it could not be understood by a first-century resident of Israel, i.e., one who would have received the message first-hand. And so must be treated as an independent revelation, a retroactively-inferred reason for the death and resurrection of Jesus. But yet every treatment from the early Christians onward grounds the concept in Adam's Fall - in a Hebrew story of creation.
There is just too much nonsense here. It's re-affirming my disbelief in the entire Christian theology and traditions I've been taught.
Thanks again, though, for the scholarship on this. Your posts have re-affirmed my belief in the Christian message that I've been taught: that love, and love in actions, matter. That they matter to others, and they matter to making me the new person I'm called to be.
And (maybe less generously than Ian's comment) the theology be damned.
After reading all of it, I conclude we will know a person is a Christian by their love, not their theology. Let’s get on with living and doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. And let God be the judge. I think CS Lewis said that hell is full of theologians arguing about what view of scripture is correct. Or maybe they will just live forever in ivory towers. Earth to theologians …
Interesting. How does this square with covenant theology? By that I mean, God made a covenant with Adam, which Adam broke, which then therefore was attributed to all of his descendants. Much like the covenant God made with Abraham.
Nice work! I think you'll appreciate this from Orthodox scholar Dr. Joel Edmund Anderson:
"Augustine and the Doctrine of Original Sin (Part 2): Background About the Ultimate STD"
https://www.joeledmundanderson.com/augustine-and-the-doctrine-of-original-sin-background-about-the-ultimate-std/
Love this discussion! As an old lay person with decades of study in the Bible and Christian History, I have come to the conclusion that one’s belief is almost entirely based on which viewpoint they choose to accept.
Most people simply parrot what they have been taught accepting it as universal and often defend their accepted position as absolute truth.
My studies over the decades have lead me to question almost everything I was taught, believed, and promoted for the first 27 years of my life. It was in a well-known, conservative, Evangelical seminary that I suddenly realized that the lesson I was taking notes on was entirely built upon highly questionable assumptions and beliefs.
50 years later, as a liberal Episcopalian, I only confidently believe that a loving God exists and that I choose to honor God by living in that flawed Christian tradition. I strive to live out the moral teachings of Jesus with the realization that his unfulfilled apocalyptic views influenced his most extreme teachings. For me, the rest of Christianity is mired in historical theology which I hold tenuously and lightly.
I recite the ancient creeds despite gaping questions and doubts. I sincerely honor the Eucharist because of the presence of Jesus I feel in it. I kneel, I stand, I genuflect, I bow out of gratitude to God’s continued love. I find comfort in the litany even as I must sometimes treat with ambiguity for the implied, erroneous theology.
To many Evangelicals, I no longer qualify as Christian.
This is the blessing and the curse of the first amendment’s protections. It provided the soil for religion as a whole to flourish but also to splinter and redefine itself a thousand times over… and that’s the death knell for a unified doctrine.
I'm sorry but I don't exactly understand. In old Latin, "the sentence now says that every human being sinned in Adam, personally and retroactively, at the moment of the first transgression." But what exactly does the Greek original say? I can't make that out from what you've written. Sorry.
Absolutely no apology needed! I described what the Latin was doing without ever stating plainly what it replaced from the Greek. Thank you for catching that omission.
The Greek is eph' hō pantes hēmarton, and read the way most scholars read it, it means "because all sinned." So Paul's sentence runs: sin entered through one man, death came through sin, and death spread to everyone because everyone sinned. The verb is plain past tense and the subject is everybody. Their own sinning is what death follows in the Greek.
The Latin in quo turns that final clause into a place rather than a reason. Not "because all sinned" but "in whom all sinned," with Adam as the "whom." Same four words, and now the sentence reports that the whole human race committed the first transgression while inside Adam and not because of their own sinning.
I want to be careful to mention that the Greek is not claiming anyone is innocent. It says death reaches you because YOU sin. It just doesn't say you sinned in the garden, which the Latin implies.
I hope that helps!
Oh, got it. Now it makes total sense. But then, newborns have not yet sinned?