Not the Guilt but the Consequences

It seems in keeping with the way Genesis works that human beings suffer the consequences of our parents' primordial sin but not their guilt. Putting aside the question of historicity, the point is the meaning now, and not some kind of historical meaning, but a cultic meaning more interested in helping me understand me (as a member of humanity today) than caring much about the details of the past. Adam and Eve are my story and the story of everyone else in my community. The fall, then, marred but did not eliminate the imago. Human beings cannot walk a straight line, morally speaking, but they have a sense of straightness. Innocence shatters against pitiless experience again and again. The story of the world is the long failure--but not without hope.

I do think this includes mortality because human beings are by nature mortal. It is the tree of life, the gift of God, that grants ongoing everlastingness to mortal flesh. This also means that I do not ascribe to the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul.[1]

In saying this, I do not agree with Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin as it teaches the universal application of guilt. Historical theologians do not see it taught in the first few centuries of the church. Gerald Bray has said, "It is a virtual axiom of historical theology that the doctrine of original sin, as we recognize it today, cannot be traced back beyond Augustine." What the early church, Greek and Latin-speaking, affirmed was what I have said here--inherited consequences, not guilt. J. N. D Kelley said, "There is hardly a hint in the Greek fathers that mankind as a whole shares in Adam's guilt." The Latin fathers did teach sin as a corrupting force, but Adam's guilt, they said, "attaches to Adam himself, not to us." Had the apostles taught guilt, wouldn't it be evident? It is just as evident they did not.

Damnation, then, is not a product of our being, but of the inevitable and irresistable selfward curvature of our hearts and the inevitable choices and consequences this creates. Damnation is just a recognition of the truth of things. Damnation is every day.

Simultaneously, justification undoes damnation. Salvation promises and begins the restoration of the imago. In the words of the church: "I will with God's help."

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See also "Penciling in a gesture toward providence, determinism, liberty."

[1] A careful reader will note a dialogue here with Plato's Phaedo 74-76. In that dialogue, Plato argues that even though we only see imperfect things, such as sticks of different length, we discern the underlying ideal form of Equality. We discern ideal forms, he said, because our souls see them in the state between reincarnated embodiment. Platonism teaches the immortality of the soul. And the discernment of ideal forms is a plank in Plato's argument for soul immortality. This scaffolding further informs the Platonic doctrine that education is reminding the embodied soul of what it already knows; education as recollection. In that case, knowledge is a priori and the seventeen-century Rationalists were correct. Marc Cohen provides a thorough analysis of Plato's argument in the Phaedo and its context in the history of ideas.

Plato's doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a direct influence on the Christian doctrine of eternal punishment. Because souls are immortal, punishment must be analagous. But if souls are not immortal, then eternal punishment is not a dogmatic necessity.

The knowledge of the ideal forms is reworked in Christian theology from a knowledge obtained in some pre-bodied state of unmediated contemplation to a product of logos which, through creation, is available in the imago of every human being. The logos is the source of all ideal knowledge, which humans reflect imperfectly by means of participation in the imago Dei.