issue41 jingjing(kito)

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这两天不在,搞不清楚互改顺序了,也没写sign.好象是我改你的,表急啊,明天改

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Original Sin: A Disputation


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Edward T. Oakes


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No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the existence of God to the resurrection of Jesus. But even in those denominations that pride themselves on their adherence to the orthodox dogmas of the once-universal Church, the doctrine of original sin is met with either embarrassed silence, outright denial, or at a minimum a kind of halfhearted lip service that does not exactly deny the doctrine but has no idea how to place it inside the devout life. Even the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, surprisingly enough, calls original sin a "sin" only in an analogous sense (#404), because unlike other (presumably real?) sins it is only contracted and not committed梐 concession that would certainly have surprised Augustine, who had a vivid and almost physical/biological understanding of the First Sin.

Clearly, Augustine抯 authority notwithstanding, the doctrine is in crisis, a crisis different in kind from the challenge that secular modernity hurls at the totality of the Christian message. Secular culture undeniably plays a part here as well, with its doctrine of evolution or its belief in progress (now a rather tattered and shopworn belief, though one that still lurks in certain editorials and books). But much more severe is the outright discomfort believers feel in the doctrine because of what seems to them its internal inconsistency: how can guilt, an ethical and spiritual category, be inheritable, a category drawn from nature? As with the doctrine of predestination, to which it is often married, there seems to be a kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don抰" aura to the theology of original sin: Free will may be free, declares Augustine without apparent embarrassment, only it is not free to do good. "How then do miserable men dare to be proud of free will before, or of their own strength after, they are liberated?" But no sooner does Augustine fear that the concept of original sin might threaten the idea of human responsibility than he quickly turns around and becomes free will抯 best advocate, again without a trace of embarrassment: "Let no man dare to deny the freedom of the will as to excuse sin." In other words, if you do a good deed, that is God抯 doing; if you commit a wrong, it is your doing.

In this situation of widespread denial, perplexity, or negligence, I thought the best defense of the doctrine could be mounted if it were presented as a typical article in Thomas Aquinas?monumental Summa Theologiae. In this work Thomas would begin each treatment of a so-called "disputed question" with a fair-minded exposition of the position he wanted to refute in the latter half of the article. This is the famous Videtur quod section of the argument, which is usually translated as: "It would seem that [such-and-such a doctrine] is not the case."

What makes this opening portion of each article so remarkable is Thomas?generosity and fairness to his opponents. Aquinas is the ideal model here, for, as some commentators have noted, he at times seems to present a better argument for his opponents?positions than they themselves managed to do. Josef Pieper, for example, in his Guide to Thomas Aquinas, notes how Thomas?fairness to his opponents can sometimes catch the reader off guard:

An unsuspecting reader, rather stunned and confused, may read whole pages containing nothing but opposing arguments formulated in a highly convincing manner. There will be nothing at all in the phraseology to indicate that Thomas rejects these arguments梟ot the trace of a hint at the weakness of the argument, not the slightest nuance of ironical exaggeration. The opponent himself speaks, and an opponent who is obviously in splendid form, calm, objective, moderate. . . . In this procedure there emerges an element profoundly characteristic of St. Thomas?intellectual style: the spirit of the disputatio, of disciplined opposition; the spirit of genuine discussion which remains a dialogue even while it is a dispute.
Only after such an exposition of the opponent抯 point of view would Aquinas venture to present his own case. First he would introduce a statement from an authority holding the position Thomas favored. This is the Sed contra ("on the contrary") section of the argument. Now because Thomas explicitly held that argument from authority is always the weakest form of argumentation, his citation of an authority was clearly meant only to give the reader pause: although the arguments previously set forth sound plausible, they cannot be the last word, for after all some authority梑e it the Bible, Aristotle, a Church Father梙olds the contrary opinion. So perhaps there is more to say on the issue (the reader is meant to think) than is first apparent.*

It is only at this point that Aquinas presented his own argument; this is the so-called Respondeo section ("I reply as follows"), which is the pith and substance of the article. Finally, after setting out his own position and the reasoning for it, he answered the objections raised in the first section of the article (ad primum, ad secundum, etc.: "as to the first, second objection," etc). And once more the reader notices Thomas?remarkable serenity in responding to contrary views.

And so, with the indulgence of the reader, I would like to follow the Thomistic format in addressing the "disputed question" of whether we need any longer to believe in original sin.

Should We Believe in Original Sin?
Videtur quod peccatum originale non sit credibile: It would seem that original sin is not believable, and for the following three reasons. First of all, not only is the doctrine intolerably paradoxical, it is never once mentioned, as such, in the Bible, not even where it is taken to be most evident: in chapter 3 of Genesis and chapter 5 of St. Paul抯 Letter to the Romans. Secondly, our understanding of both evolution and biblical science makes it even more obvious than before how far from the intent of the biblical authors was any doctrine of original sin (careful exegesis of Romans 5, for example, has led many scholars to hold that Augustine developed his view of original sin based on a mistranslation by the Vulgate of a verse in this chapter of Paul抯 Letter to the Romans). Thirdly and finally, the doctrine damages souls. Belief in original sin leads to pessimism: it results in a resigned fatalism about changing those sinful structures that actually can be changed but which go unchallenged because they are all too lazily attributed to the effects of original sin, which by definition is a given and cannot be changed. (Hannah Arendt was rightly annoyed when she returned to Germany after World War II and discovered Germans were blaming Hitler, as well as their own romance with Nazism, on Adam and Eve, a subterfuge scarcely less vulgar than the common criminal抯 pretext, "the devil made me do it.") Let us take each of these arguments in turn.

1) No one now disputes that the Bible does not teach a doctrine of original sin as such. Not only does the term never occur in the entire Bible, these Scriptures梑oth Old and New Testaments梐re also innocent of any notion that Adam抯 sin has made proleptically guilty those who live so far from the source of that sin that they seem incapable of having taken part in it. But that is what the doctrine says. Moreover, it goes on to say that this sin can only be expiated by Christ抯 death and cleansed by baptism; that is, it is a sin which, if left unexpiated and uncleansed, "justifies" God in condemning that person, even an infant, to eternal banishment from God抯 presence梐nd all for a sin never actually committed!

What is remarkable about this doctrine is how even its most ardent defenders admit its blazing paradoxicality. Reinhold Niebuhr undoubtedly presented the best defense of the doctrine in modern times, and even convinced a number of secular critics of its truth. But his stirring apologetic began by openly admitting the strange logical status of the doctrine:

The Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form offends both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable fate. . . . Here is the absurdity in a nutshell. Original sin, which is by definition an inherited corruption, or at least an inevitable one, is nevertheless not to be regarded as belonging to his essential nature and therefore is not outside the realm of his responsibility. Sin is natural for man in the sense that it is universal but not in the sense that it is necessary.
As if that paradoxicality were not enough, one must also admit that the Bible never attributes to Adam the role of biologically tainting us with his guilt, as can perhaps best be seen in the history of Jewish interpretation of Genesis up to and just past the beginnings of the Christian era; for it was the much more common Jewish interpretation, even into the era of the rabbis during the Christian era, that the human proclivity to evil (insofar as it came from anywhere else than man抯 free will) was the product not of the sin of our first parents but of that strange episode narrated in Genesis 6 of the mating of "the daughters of men with the sons of God." This highly enigmatic passage, told with the usual laconic style characteristic of all the patriarchal narratives, was usually interpreted by later (and obviously intensely monotheistic) Judaism as referring not to "gods" but to the rebellious angels, whose mating with "the daughters of men" brought with it a kind of "genetic pollution" to the human race.

Such a view now strikes us as frankly mythological, and indeed it soon lost all hold on the Jewish imagination, perhaps under the influence of early Christianity. It is worth mentioning only because the very prevalence of this interpretation shows how little the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 necessarily leads to a doctrine of original sin when left on its own terms. Even in Romans 5, which does explicitly link Adam抯 sin to the entrance of death into the world (apparently under an incipient rabbinic trend of moving the origin of evil back from Genesis 6 to Genesis 3), there is no notion of original sin according to Augustine抯 scenario; for it is to Augustine, not Paul, that we owe the picture of an ideal Paradise of two human beings created immortal and whose sin brought an unspeakable catastrophe on the human race. When Genesis 3 is read strictly on its own terms and not through the lens of Augustine抯 theology of an ideal Paradise before the Fall, a much different picture emerges. As the Anglican theologian N. P. Williams puts it in his 1926 book The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin:

In fact, the scriptural text says nothing of the kind: it implies, on the contrary, that man was created mortal, formed of the dust and destined to return to it, though he might have made himself immortal by eating of the Tree of Life [that is, the second Tree, not yet touched by Adam and Eve after they ate from the first Tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil], even after his sin; and that it was precisely in order to keep him mortal that Yahweh expelled him from the Garden and posted a cherubic guard to prevent his return. The point of Yahweh抯 warning [in Genesis 2:17] as to the fatal consequences which would follow a breach of his command is, not that man would become mortal after being immortal, but that man, mortal by nature and fated sooner or later to return to dust, would suffer death forthwith as a punishment for sin ("in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die") instead of living out his life to a ripe old age and being reabsorbed into his parent earth through a painless dissolution.
It might be objected that Augustine was basing his theology of original sin not just on Genesis 3 but also on Romans 5:12-21, where Paul explicitly assigns the universality of death to Adam抯 sin (especially in verse 12: "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, so then death spread to all men inasmuch as all sinned"). But the Greek word translated here by the phrase "inasmuch as" is eph抙ô, which in Latin was translated, not quite literally, as in quo; Augustine then took it to mean "in whom," referring to Adam. In other words, Augustine would have read Paul to say that death spread throughout the whole human race because we always sin "in" Adam. But this is not Paul抯 meaning, for if it had been he would have chosen the Greek phrase en hô. In this passage death seems to be a later consequence of personal sin: in other words, according to this interpretation of the Greek, Paul here seems to imply that our individual deaths are the result of our own personal sinfulness, not of Adam抯 primordial sin.

But leaving aside technical questions of translation, there can be no doubt that Paul is not referring to Augustine抯 later doctrine whereby Adam was created perfect and through his own sin introduced into the world a death that would otherwise never have afflicted humanity. On the contrary, he could not be clearer in the rest of his writings that death is not just punishment for sin but is also (and perhaps primarily) a natural condition of fleshly existence.

[ 本帖最后由 jingjingtous 于 2006-1-11 00:49 编辑 ]

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What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. The body is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical [animal, worldly] body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "the first man Adam became a living being" [Genesis 2:7], but the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15:42- 50, emphasis added)
Not only is there no trace in Paul of any notion of an Adam and Eve created immortal, the passage cited here directly contradicts it.

2) But even if we could force Paul to fit Augustine抯 procrustean bed by having him assert a doctrine of an imperishable Adam and Eve before the Fall, and even if we could convince ourselves that the combination of Genesis 3 and Romans 5 leads to a doctrine of original sin, the massive discoveries of nineteenth- and twentieth-century geology, biology, and paleontology block our way. Under their combined and massive impact we no longer interpret Genesis 1-3 literally, understanding by "literal" what is meant in ordinary parlance: taking any vivid historical-seeming narrative to be genuinely historical. Now, at least in professional circles, "literal" means something else: interpreting a text according to the author抯 own intentions independent of later doctrinal overlays (a meaning of the term "literal" approved by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu).

Before his conversion, Augustine had always disliked the Old Testament because he found its history so crude, and it was a real liberation for him to discover St. Ambrose抯 figural interpretation; thus after his conversion he toyed with an allegorical interpretation of Genesis, as in the last three books of his Confessions. But the older he got, the more literal (in the first sense of the term) became his methods; indeed he wrote a book called Genesis Literally Interpreted. And out of such "literal" interpretations came his depiction of the Garden of Eden as, well, a Paradise: no death, no sin, no suffering. Indeed, so glowing was his portrayal of this putative historical "paradise" that, in his debates with the Pelagians, he was hard put to come up with a motivation for the sin of Adam and Eve: what would ever prompt such a fateful sin in such a pleasant environment and in beings created so free of evil tendencies? So he was finally forced to posit at least a smidgen of "concupiscence," a small but appreciable amount of an inclination toward evil in our first parents, to explain their enticement by the Serpent梐 concession which might seem rather to undermine the whole point of the doctrine.

But however awkward it may be on its own terms, this literalizing scenario of Augustine抯 completely collapses under the impact of Darwinian biology and of the geology on which it rests. Now "literal," at least for those not schizophrenic about modern science, can only mean taking the biblical authors on their own terms by bracketing away later doctrinally inspired interpretations. This method highlights features of the text not previously noticed, such as how radically variant are the two accounts of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis and how much both are reliant on ancient Hebrew cosmology, which itself borrows heavily from Babylonian sources. And none of these sources recognizes a scenario whereby the first progenitors of the human race were created immortal. Indeed most mythological accounts of the origin of man see the human species as the last and weakest of prior, much stronger, races (as in Hesiod抯 notion of the Age of Gold declining to Silver and then to his own wretched Age of Iron, etc.).

3) Finally, even if some way could be found to give a plausible hermeneutical spin to these difficulties, even if theologians found a way of presenting the doctrine in a convincing way, we have the experience of Christian history to tell us of the effects of this doctrine on those churches that most emphasize the doctrine.

It is generally believed that theological schools such as Jansenism and denominations such as Calvinism bring in their wake legions of members with withered emotional lives, censorious views of their less austere neighbors, and a bleak, nearly blasphemous, view of God抯 love. At least that is the picture handed down to us from countless sources in the culture, from Nathaniel Hawthorne抯 novel The Scarlet Letter to more vulgar displays of the journalistic mind, such as H. L. Mencken抯 scorn for the Tennessee literalists of his day or, more recently, the soap-opera treatment to which the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart was subjected a few years back.

And there must be something to this perception, at least if we are to take the testimony of certain people raised in the Calvinist tradition seriously. For example, Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, suffered from a bleak and relentless depression stemming, according to his biographers, from the combination of his herculean efforts to spread democracy coupled with his firm belief that the vast majority of the human race was going to hell in any event. And Henry James, Sr., the father of the famous novelist Henry and his equally renowned philosopher brother William, suffered under a similar theology-induced depression until he had what he described as a "vastation" (clean sweep) and became a Swedenborgian.

To the extent this cultural perception is accurate, it must rest on what is the most illogical and contradictory aspect of the doctrine of original sin, at least as it is normally heard in the pew: that we are morally culpable for possessing instincts which we cannot help possessing. One is reminded in this context of Calvin抯 weird, though logical, inference in his Institutes (II, i, 8) that "infants bring their own damnation with them from their mothers?wombs; the moment they are born their natures are odious and abominable to God." To build a pedagogy on this premise is, needless to say, to invite disaster, as we learn in the poem "Holy Willie抯 Prayer" by the Scotsman Robert Burns; one of the grimmest poems in the language, it depicts the vision of babies dropping right from their mothers?wombs into hellfire. The Rev. Williams, whose book we have already cited, generally offers a sober, impartial history of this doctrine, but when he comes to its moral and psychological effects he can be positively withering, and on no one is he harsher than on Augustine:

The downright brutality which led him to discard his mistress of fifteen years?standing, the mother of Adeodatus, without, apparently, so much as a thought of making reparation for his fault by marrying her, appears in his theology as the heartlessness which leaves the great bulk of mankind, even helpless infants, in the massa perditionis, doomed to everlasting flames for a sin which is not their own. The terrible strength of the sexual passions which devastated his youth and early manhood accounts for the prominence which the idea of "concupiscence" assumes in his writings; and the apparently instantaneous sublimation of these emotions through his conversion explains the feeling of irresistible grace upon which his theology of predestination and election was founded, as well as the ultra-puritan fanaticism which colored his opinions with regard to wedlock and procreation. . . . The fact that Augustine nevertheless maintained this inhuman theory [of the damnation of unbaptized infants] down to the last days of his life is a melancholy illustration of the way in which the best of men may allow the kindly instincts of human nature to be overridden by the demands of a fanatical logic.
And so, it would seem that original sin ought not be believed.

Sed contra: on the contrary, the Psalmist says: "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5). Or, for those who would deny the authority of the Bible but need to be brought up short so as to question the seeming plausibility of all of the above, I cite Reinhold Niebuhr: "The truth is that, absurd as the classical Pauline doctrine of original sin may seem to be at first blush, its prestige as a part of the Christian truth is preserved, and perennially reestablished, against the attacks of rationalists and simple moralists by its ability to throw light upon complex factors in human behavior which constantly escape the moralists."

Respondeo: And therefore, to all of the above, I respond as follows:

First of all, the doctrine of original sin is not, despite what some historians of dogma aver, St. Augustine抯 invention sprung full-blown from his overheated sex life. It is really, when soberly examined, an inference that arises from reflection on the reality of evil when considered in the light of ethical monotheism. John Henry Newman, for one, always insisted that original sin is the only way believers can make sense of the world when they contrast that world to their faith in God. So powerful is his description of the meaning of this doctrine (it is probably the most famous passage in his Apologia pro vita sua) that it bears quoting in full:

If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. . . . [To consider] the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle抯 words, "having no hope and without God in the world"梐ll this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.
This remarkably modern passage does not, admittedly, present a full-throated defense of the doctrine of original sin, for it still allows a choice between atheism or a subscription to a belief in the Fall to account for the presence of evil in the world. But that is how the doctrine of original sin has in fact functioned in the history of the Church抯 thought: it is a secondary implication arising from a prior belief in God抯 goodness and omnipotence. Thus the waning of belief in God was bound to make the doctrine of original sin seem irrational. But that hardly makes it less indispensable, as Steven Duffy argued in an important 1988 article in Theological Studies:

In the twentieth century, when human beings have already killed well over one hundred million of their kind, disenchantment [with an optimistic view of human nature] has set in. Two world wars, the Gulags, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, the nuclear and ecological threats form a somber litany that makes the optimism of the liberals ring hollow and naïve. Despite technological progress, evil, far from vanishing, has only become more powerful and more fiendish. . . . And artists like Conrad, Camus, Beckett, Golding, and Murdoch contend that because of our hearts of darkness there may be countless nice men and women but few if any genuinely good ones. In all these perspectives evil is held to be inherent, somehow structural, ingrained. And its terrible power defies explanation and solution. Paradoxically, the silver wings of science and technology, on which soared the hopes of the industrialized societies, carry the ultimate menace to the human prospect.
Nor is the doctrine, in its essence, tied to a "literal" interpretation of the narrative of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, despite what so many people think. In fact, the ubiquitous evil of the world, when honestly considered, is not a reality that an honest person should see first and primarily as an abstract issue of speculative theodicy ("How can there be evil out there when God is good?"); rather it is one that should first arise from within the human heart itself ("Why do I do the evil I abhor?").

What is more, the consequences of abandoning the doctrine are nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, perhaps the best way of defending the doctrine is to follow the career of modernity and see the consequences of not holding to the doctrine. I am reminded in this context of a shrewd observation by Anatole France to the effect that never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good. When one glances over the catalogue of evils that have so pockmarked this century, it is extraordinary how many have come from doctrines founded on the notion of the perfectibility of man. As Niebuhr puts it so well:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.
This too, like Cardinal Newman抯 defense of the doctrine, is not a positive "proof" in the technical sense but merely points to the consequences of abandoning the doctrine. But such a modest opening gambit at least blocks the way to an outright denial of the doctrine. For it is, after all, mostly because of Augustine抯 own formulations of a perfect Paradise spoiled by a nearly unmotivated sin that make Christians feel stranded in their sense of the doctrine, especially in the light of evolution. On its own terms, the doctrine stands as a cipher pointing to what everyone senses in his or her own heart: that sin after Adam always takes the form of acquiescence and not of origination. We are born, that is, into a world where rebellion against God has already taken place, and the drift of it sweeps us along.

Nor, properly understood, is Augustine抯 rosy scenario of Paradise (which John Milton used so effectively in Paradise Lost) all that absurd: the Catechism speaks of the "figurative language" of Genesis 3 (#390), and the same must therefore apply, a fortiori, to Augustine抯 portrait of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The reason we are drawn, despite the theory of evolution, to Augustine抯 and Milton抯 portrait of Paradise before the Fall is the memory of that original justice we once had with God but lost through sin, as Pascal explains so well:

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