My sermon from July 9, Two Paths, generated a good response and one particularly insightful reader asked me several questions that I’ve turned into a Q&A.
There must be at least some good in man beyond that which may come from redemption from collective original sin.
Let’s simply parse this on the grammar. “There must be...” Must there be? Must there be blue-eyed babies and puppies? Must there be famine, war, and tempest?
Do we live in a world where anything must be? And if we do live in such a deterministic world, by whose authority and power must anything be? Surely man is a limited creature incapable of such awesome powers of determination. If there is any being that must be, then surely it is not man who must be, at least not of his own volition.
Perhaps it would be better to ask, “Could there be at least some good in man beyond that which may come from redemption for collective original sin?”
Now we are on better ground, if not quite terra firma. At least we are speaking in terms of contingencies.
My reply is: If original sin is as bad as it sounds, then surely redemption from it must come first, a priori to any other good. In other words, redemption is the first good on which all secondary goods must rest. (Now you see that I am more comfortable using deterministic language when speaking of the work of God.)
Does one have to accept original sin in order to accept the Christian church?
I am not sure it is accurate to say that one “accepts the Christian church.” One can assent to the doctrine and submit to the discipline and participate in the worship of the Christian Church. One can profess the Christian faith, but I don’t think that we are asked to accept the Christian Church per se.
Perhaps you meant that as shorthand for what I’ve just written. If so, then yes, original sin is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian Faith and taught by both the Roman and Protestant churches.
If membership in a church is to mean anything, then, at the very least, it ought to mean an honest subscription to that church’s teachings, a willingness to submit to her discipline, and an eagerness to participate in her worship.
I have a problem with this. Does the newborn babe emerge with sin?
The answer is yes. The newborn babe is a born sinner. This is clearly taught in the baptismal rite from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England:
“DEARLY beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin: and that our Saviour Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost: I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to this Child that thing which by nature he cannot have; that he may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy Church, and be made a lively member of the same.”
So, the teaching is clear, or ought to be.
However, many ministers are not clear in their teaching and more modern editions of the Book of Common Prayer have muted the clarity of this doctrine. Yet even the 1979 edition has these words (and other words like it) in the baptismal rite, “sanctify this water, we pray you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that those who here are cleansed from sin….”
It begs the question that if infants are not born sinners, then for what reason do they need to be cleansed? Why baptize them at all?
It’s hard for me to accept this.
I can understand that, but the gospel teaches us that we were “bought at a price” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). That means we couldn’t pay our own ransom or settle our own debts. If true for adults, who at least might have some reason to imagine they’ve “earned it” how much truer for infants, who are born with nothing?
The third stanza of the old hymn, “Rock of Ages,” written by the Anglican priest Augustus Toplady, says it well:
Nothing in my hand I bring,
simply to the cross I cling;
naked, come to thee for dress;
helpless, look to thee for grace;
foul, I to the fountain fly;
wash me, Savior, or I die.
Was [Jesus’] sacrifice directed to each of us or to the community of believers? Here again is a question of original sin. Is it the sin of the individual or the sins of man collectively?
The answer is, “It’s both.”
St. Paul writes, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Elsewhere, Paul calls Jesus the “new” or “last” Adam. If we inherit guilt through Adam, we inherit righteousness (a legal declaration of pardon) through adoption as God’s children.
“For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.”
God speaks to us both as individuals and as His people.
In our post-Renaissance, post-Reformation world collective sin is hard to accept e.g., does a German youth today carry a burden for the Holocaust?
The prophet Ezekiel answered this question 2,000 years before the Renaissance and Reformation.
Ezekiel 18:20 reads:
“The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.”
(I would encourage you to read the whole chapter, which is a meditation on your very question.)
On the other hand, both Exodus 34:7 and Deuteronomy 5:9 teach that God will visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Collective guilt is right there in the pages of Scripture, in the very Ten Commandments.
Now, Article XX of the Thirty-Nine Articles teaches that the Church may not “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another” and yet Ezekiel seems to be “repugnant” to Exodus and Deuteronomy.
What is a preacher to do? Well, he cannot say that Ezekiel supersedes Exodus and Deuteronomy, neither can he preach only Exodus and Deuteronomy and ignore Ezekiel. He must try to explain the truth in both.
That would be a very hard explanation to come by but for the offering of Christ on the cross who made there a “perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual” (Article XXXI).
What did God the Father do on the cross?
He poured out the fulness of His wrath on the Son of the children of the generations of Adam who hated Him.
Thus, the One bore the sins of the many, making possible the restoration of the kind of justice envisioned by Ezekiel.
In Christ, justice has been restored and from now on it is possible that:
“WHEN the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive” (Ezekiel 18:27).
Again, the old 1662 prayer book shines here, because that is the first “Opening Sentence” for both Morning and Evening Prayer. The new prayer books (even the venerable 1928) have omitted this sentence because the further we get from the Reformation the less of an understanding we seem to have of Christ’s “perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world.”
This is the reason why Marxism and its successor ideologies like Critical Race Theory are flourishing: because preachers are not preaching sin (original and actual) and the remedy for sin (Christ’s blood). Because of their failure to preach Christ crucified, men are once again subjected to tyrannous powers that employ guilt to control them.
Can virtue be defined only as the absence of evil? Can good be defined only in relation to bad? Yes, virtue is the absence of evil but is it only that? I suggest there can be near absolute good and bad to a degree that does not need the opposite to define it.
What’s interesting is that your definition of virtue is the inverse of Augustine’s definition of evil. Augustine ascribes no reality to evil and defines evil as the absence of good. So, you are quite right that good is good in its own right and does not need an opposite to define it.
This is where eastern religion is in error. Based on the Tao, Yin and Yang, etc., it is a Manichean system. Again, I would argue that Marxism and critical theories are Manichean and parasitical. They require an opposite (capital, the bourgeois, “whiteness”) in order to define themselves and then only by way of critical interrogation and deconstruction.