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The framework for original sin that most of us are familiar with comes from a bad interpretation of a bad translation of one verse in one letter from Pual. Unfortunately, however, it has all kinds of implications for we think about ourselves and God. So let's talk about it.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
So someone asked me this week what are the worst theological mistakes that almost everyone has bought into? Now this was a really interesting question it got me thinking about all kinds of different areas with which I think the church has missed the story of Jesus and headed off down a wrong course. But there were a few that came to mind. I think if I was to name the absolute biggest area that I think we've missed it, it would be this: that somehow God as Father is a counterpoint to the grace that we see in Jesus. This idea that Jesus does not fully represent God, that somehow we need a counterbalance to that.
Speaker 1:God is loving and graceful and everything that Jesus is but also this other thing we keep over here in the corner. That is a terrible theological mistake. It misses the entire foundation of the Christian story, this idea that in Christ we see the fullness of the divine. So first of all, that's the biggest one I think we get wrong. Second, which is related to that is this, that Jesus was nice and graceful and peaceful and we love all that, but he's coming back and he's going to be very different.
Speaker 1:I see this one all the time: the second coming Jesus is coming as a warrior, he's not coming as a lamb anymore, he's coming as a lion, he's going to be lopping off heads with a sword, and that is a complete misreading of what is going on in Revelation. I'm doing some writing right now to come and address that at some point, so maybe we'll get to that down the road, but the one I want to talk about today is this one: it's original sin. This idea that has permeated so much of Christian culture that really finds its roots in a bad reading of Paul's Greek. So let's talk about this a little Original Sin really is this idea that somehow the sin of Adam was passed down to all of humanity and that every one of us, even when we are born on that first moment we enter the world, we are already guilty and sinful because of something some guy did a long long time ago. And this permeates so much of our theology the ways that we think about God, ways that we think about ourselves.
Speaker 1:It makes us think about a God who is very legalistic, like there are rules and God has to follow those rules no matter what. It makes us think about ourselves in ways that downplay the significance of our lives and our contribution to God's story. God has put us here in the world to steward creation, to heal it, to repair it, to help build it into something creative and beautiful alongside God. But when we start with this assumption that we are born sinful, already guilty, already rejected by God, and till we somehow make amends, then I think what we end up with is this devaluing of our ability to affect good in the world. We'll talk about some of the verses that we use to interpret things that way, and how this original sin idea has misconstrued or misshapen our theology when it comes to those verses.
Speaker 1:But that's essentially where original sin comes from. Adam and Eve, they made a mistake. You and I, well, we pay for it ever since. The ironic thing is this comes from a single verse in the book of Romans and it comes not really from that verse, from a mistranslation. I'm going to read you here Romans five twelve, a pretty famous verse, but I'll read it to you here from the NIV.
Speaker 1:I gotta find it. Probably would have made sense to queue it up on my phone before I started. Romans five twelve says, Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all people because all sinned. So this is actually pretty straightforward, The idea that death enters the world through sin, therefore all of us are going to die and all of us just like Adam make the same mistakes that he did, we sin. Now Paul goes on in this letter to argue that if just through one man sin and could enter the world and affect all of us, then wouldn't it be great that if just through one man sin could be overcome, death could be defeated, and all of us could share in that glory as well?
Speaker 1:Paul's making a very universalist claim here. Sin and death come through one man, salvation, healing, the overcoming of death and destruction all comes through one man as well. It's a very optimistic argument he's making. However, where do we get from this to the idea that because Adam sinned, you and I are already born sinful and guilty? Well, we get to that idea through Augustine.
Speaker 1:And the intriguing thing about Augustine is as brilliant as he was, as much as he contributed to Christian thought, and as much as I enjoy reading a lot of his writings, he could not read Greek. So when he is reading Paul's writings, he is reading a translation of them. And he happens to be reading a Latin translation that mistranslates mistranslates one single word in this verse. We know that Latin translation that Augustine had, and what it says here is, In this way death came to all people in him all sinned. That little Greek word because has been changed to in Him in Latin.
Speaker 1:And we're not exactly sure where the error was introduced, but we do know that in those early Latin manuscripts that Augustine had access to, that's what it said. So Augustine reads this and he says, in him all sinned, that must mean somehow that his sin, your sin, my sin comes, it originates in Adam. Now Augustine coming from a pre modern world makes some assumptions about semen and biology and how sin is transmitted. He literally believes that sin is transmitted through the seed of the male down to the next generation. It's a biological thing that's built into humanity, which is why we die, which is why we're all infected with it, sort of like a virus before we knew what viruses were.
Speaker 1:However, he is working from a mistranslation here. Paul never said that in him all sin. He says, because sin entered the world through Adam, all sin. We live in a sinful broken world. We live in a world with greed and malice.
Speaker 1:We grow up seeing habits around us and they become part of us. This is actually how the Eastern Church has always understood these verses. Where the Eastern Church always was Greek, it always read Greek, they never had to deal with Latin translations like Augustine. And so they have something called Ancestral Sin. It's essentially this idea that in Adam sin enters the world, but once it's here it infects everything.
Speaker 1:And so you and I are born into a world filled with sin. We see it around us, we imitate it, it infects us, and we end up sinning. In the end, practically not a lot changes. We still acknowledge with Paul that all of us make mistakes and all of us sin, but the root of it is our mistakes. The fact that we, shaped by a broken world, don't live up to everything that we could.
Speaker 1:We sin. We fall short just the way that Paul says. But it's my sin that gets me in trouble. It's not Adam's sin a long, long time ago that was already infecting me as a little baby. A little baby is not a broken, sinful human until all of our inadequacies, our selfishness, our shame, our greed get impressed on those children and they learn to imitate us.
Speaker 1:Now some of you know if you've followed this channel that I'm a big fan of Rene Girard. And this is a profound part of his theories of the Atonement. He says that the initial motivation to scapegoat someone this really is our original sin. This idea that I can put my sin on you, I can blame you for the frustrations, for the conflict, for the brokenness of the group. Together, if we cast you out, if we murder you, if we scapegoat you in some way, we can feel better about ourselves.
Speaker 1:He says this is what formed humanity. It's what allowed us to go from small family units to tribal communities to eventually societies, cities, all the things, cultures that we build today that allow us to master and have dominion over the world. All of that comes because we scapegoat each other. And he says that every human being has been born into a world that is predicated on the idea of enemies and scapegoats. Therefore, we all fall into the trap.
Speaker 1:We all sin. But the sin again is on us. It's ancestral. It's part of our world. It infects us.
Speaker 1:But we are the ones who make the mistakes, not Adam. Now, why is any of this important if in the end all sin and fall short of the glory of God? Well, because again this interpretation leads us down all kinds of misreadings of Scripture. Let me read one for you here that I hear people bring up a lot in a way that's tied to their reading of original sin. It comes from the prophets, from Habakkuk, it's chapter one verse 13.
Speaker 1:He says this, Your eyes are too pure, talking about God, to look on evil you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Well, if we believe that we are sinful from birth, that we as human beings are inherently flawed and broken from the sin of Adam, we get this idea, we get this impression that God cannot tolerate us, will not look at us, that we are dirty, disgusting little monkeys and God wants nothing to do us. Again, we do fall short, we do sin, but that's something that we can recognize, we can see, we can turn away from, not something that's inherently part of our identity as human beings. Now the irony is, if you look just a couple verses farther in Habakkuk, what you'll see is that is not what the prophet is saying at all anyway. The prophet is actually mad at God because God is looking on sin and is tolerating wrongdoing.
Speaker 1:Prophet is saying to God, Look, God, you're supposed to be better than this. You're supposed to punish all wrongdoing, all of my enemies. You are supposed to be the one who enforces what I want in the world, but you're not doing it. When the prophet says you cannot tolerate sin, he's trying to force God to do what he wants him to do, which is to punish wrongdoers. God, however, is graceful, continues to extend compassion even to those who do evil, trusting that, like Paul said, one day one would come who would overcome all death and sin and welcome us into something better.
Speaker 1:So the prophet is not saying God will not look at you, tolerate you, love you. The prophet is saying, actually God will do that for some who are much worse than you. Of course God will love you too. And when we step away from this idea that our identity is formed in the sin of Adam, and recognize that yes, we make mistakes, but our identity is the beloved creation of a generous God who continues to invite us forward, who continues to provide grace and compassion to us. It actually motivates us to want to do better.
Speaker 1:Another famous one here comes from another prophet, this one Isaiah. All have become like one who is unclean and all of our righteous acts are like filthy rags. We all shrivel up like a leaf and in the wind our sins sweep us away. That's Isaiah 60 four:six. Again, I'll hear this trotted out by people like you can do no good in the world.
Speaker 1:You were formed in the sin of Adam. You are broken and sinful and wretched and dirty and nothing you do can affect change or goodness or hope in world. Only God can do that. Well, mean I believe that in a sense. Only God is the one who creates goodness and brings it into being in the universe, but you are part of that goodness.
Speaker 1:And actually, if you read the prophet Isaiah, the whole point of the prophet is we should be doing more to create goodness, more social good, more justice, more freedom for prisoners, more welcoming of those who are on the margins of our societies. If we do that, then God will look on us with grace. But if we don't do any of that, if we reject our ability to create good in the world, if we don't create peace and prosperity for those who are on the margins, then even our righteousness, our worship songs, our singing, going to festivals, showing up at church every week, well then that is like filthy rags. The whole point of Isaiah is actually worship means nothing unless it's paired with social justice, the way that we interact with the world and change it for the better. And again, I think it is this reading of original sin, this idea of our identity rooted in the sin of Adam that leads us away from the true message of the prophets.
Speaker 1:Prophets are trying to encourage us to be the best version of everything God created us to be, to recognize our sin, to see the ways that we've been shaped by corrupt systems and structures that are around us all the time that close in our imagination of the world and make us think in selfish and greedy ways. But when we break out of that, and we recognize that we have chosen wrong paths and we choose a more narrow path, not the broad one that comes naturally to all of us just by looking around the world and following the crowd, but the one that chooses self sacrifice and generosity, chooses to give ourselves away in the model of Jesus, then we can actually become welcomed into everything God imagines for all of us. When we let go of this one bad interpretation of a bad translation of one verse in one of Paul's letters, we discover a God who is not legalistically holding Adam's sins against us, but one who is welcoming us to evaluate and understand our own choices and predicament in the world and then move towards something better alongside God's Son. So maybe you've never heard of that breakdown of original sin and always wondered why it never really made sense to you, maybe this idea of ancestral sin makes more sense.
Speaker 1:The fact that you've been shaped by a world around you and yes, you make mistakes, but they're your own to make and then turn away from. And maybe that might encourage you to see not the capricious ness of God in the story, but the goodness and the grace of the God who comes to you always inviting you toward something better.