Original Sin

History

Roots

Genesis never uses the words “original sin.” The doctrine comes from reading the fall in Genesis 3 alongside Paul: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12–19). Paul does not say how Adam’s sin reaches everyone else, and the early church left the question open for centuries.

Some pieces were in place long before Augustine. In North Africa, Tertullian taught that the soul is passed on from parent to child and carries “an antecedent, and in a certain sense natural, evil which arises from its corrupt origin” (On the Soul 41, c. 210). Cyprian of Carthage defended baptizing newborns because an infant, though it “has not sinned,” has “contracted the contagion of the ancient death” by being born of Adam, so that in baptism “are remitted, not his own sins, but the sins of another” (Letter 58, to Fidus, mid-third century). The practice of infant baptism “for the remission of sins” would become the strongest argument in the later fight.

Causes

The doctrine took its classic shape in a quarrel. Pelagius, a British ascetic teaching in Rome, held that God commands nothing people cannot do, and that Adam harmed his descendants by setting a bad example, not by damaging their nature (Pelagianism). His follower Caelestius went further: Augustine reports that he refused to condemn the claims “that Adam’s sin injured only himself, and not the human race; and that infants at their birth are in the same condition wherein Adam was before the transgression.” Caelestius was condemned “first at Carthage, and afterwards at Rome” (On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin 2.2–3, 418).

Augustine answered in a run of treatises. In On the Merits and Remission of Sins (411–412) he argued that sin “passes on to all men by natural descent, and not merely by imitation,” reading Romans 5:12 to say that death reigned because people “were bound by the chain of death in that one man in whom all men sinned” (book 1, ch. 9–11). His Latin Bible rendered Paul’s Greek eph’ hō (“because”) as in quo (“in whom”), and he followed an earlier Latin commentator, now called Ambrosiaster, in taking “whom” to mean Adam (summary, secondary).

Definition

The bishops of North Africa settled the question at the Council of Carthage in 418. One canon anathematized anyone who says Adam was created mortal and “would have died in body” whether or not he sinned. The next condemned anyone who says infants are baptized for remission of sins but “derive from Adam no original sin, which needs to be removed by the laver of regeneration” (canons 109–110 in the African Code). Pope Zosimus endorsed the condemnation the same year. This note dates the doctrine to 418 for that reason: Augustine’s arguments had been in circulation since 412, but Carthage is where the Western church first defined the inheritance of sin as binding teaching. The Council of Orange (529) restated it against the softer “Semi-Pelagian” views of Gaul.

Influence

Augustine set the frame for all later Western theology of sin and grace. If every person is born guilty and bent toward sin, salvation has to start with grace, not with human effort. That conviction runs straight into his teaching on predestination, into the medieval theology of baptism, and into the Reformation.

Medieval theology refined the definition. Thomas Aquinas described original sin as “the privation of original justice” together with “the inordinate disposition of the parts of the soul,” and so “not a pure privation, but a corrupt habit” (Summa Theologiae I–II q. 82). On this account Adam lost a supernatural gift for himself and his descendants, and nature without that gift is disordered, though not destroyed.

The Reformation reopened the question of how deep the damage goes. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) made original sin its second article. The Council of Trent answered in its fifth session (1546), and the Protestant confessions that followed each defined the doctrine in their own terms. The two sides agreed far more than they disagreed here; the dispute moved on to justification.

Key ideas and contributors

We were all in Adam. Augustine’s central claim is that humanity was present in its first father. “God, the author of natures, not of vices, created man upright; but man, being of his own will corrupted, and justly condemned, begot corrupted and condemned children. For we all were in that one man, since we all were that one man” (City of God 13.14). Because the whole race was there “seminally,” Adam’s sin is truly ours, and its guilt and its damage come to us by birth.

Propagation, not imitation. Trent fixed the Catholic definition against the Pelagian reading. Adam’s sin, “which in its origin is one, and being transfused into all by propagation, not by imitation, is in each one as his own,” and it is removed only by the merit of Christ, applied in baptism (session 5, canon 3). The same decree adds that the desire to sin that remains in the baptized, concupiscence, is not “truly and properly sin” but comes from sin and inclines to it. It also declares that it does not mean to include the Virgin Mary in the decree, which looks ahead to the Immaculate Conception.

Contracted, not committed. The modern Catechism states the Catholic view carefully. Original sin is passed on “by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice,” and so is “called ‘sin’ only in an analogical sense: it is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’ - a state and not an act” (§404). It “does not have the character of a personal fault” in Adam’s descendants, and “human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded” (§405).

Truly sin, even the desire. The Lutheran position is stronger. The Augsburg Confession (art. 2) teaches that all are born “without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence; and that this disease, or vice of origin, is truly sin,” and it condemns “the Pelagians and others who deny that original depravity is sin.” That puts it at odds with Trent on whether concupiscence in the baptized is sin. Lutherans then had their own fight when Matthias Flacius taught that original sin had become the very substance of fallen human nature (summary, secondary). The Formula of Concord (1577) rejected that “as a Manichean error” and kept a distinction between corrupt nature and the sin in it (Epitome, art. 1).

Hereditary corruption of the whole person. John Calvin defined original sin as “a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all the parts of the soul, which first makes us obnoxious to the wrath of God, and then produces in us works which in Scripture are termed works of the flesh” (Institutes 2.1.8, 1559). The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles say much the same: original sin “standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man” (Article IX).

Federal headship. Later Reformed theology added a legal frame, now usually called Covenant Theology. The Westminster Confession (1646) teaches that the first covenant “was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience” (7.2). Adam acted as the representative head of the race, so when he fell, “the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation” (6.3). The appeal of this model is its symmetry with Romans 5:18–19: as Adam’s disobedience is counted to those he represented, Christ’s obedience is counted to those he represents. Jonathan Edwards’s The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) and John Wesley’s The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757) both defended the doctrine against the English writer John Taylor, from Calvinist and Arminian sides.

An event in history. Catholic teaching has insisted that the fall happened. The Catechism holds that Genesis 3 “uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man” (§390). Pius XII’s Humani Generis (1950, §37) ruled out “polygenism,” because it could not see how it fits with original sin, “which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all.”

Key controversies

Pelagius: example, not inheritance. The first objection is the one the doctrine was built to answer. Pelagius held that a sin that is not freely chosen cannot be a sin, and that God would be unjust to blame infants for an act committed before they existed. Augustine’s later opponent, Julian of Eclanum, pressed the same point for years. Augustine replied by pointing to infant baptism and to Romans 5, and the Western church sided with him at Carthage and again at Ephesus (431). The moral objection never went away; it returns in every later debate about whether inherited guilt is fair.

The Orthodox objection: ancestral sin. Eastern Orthodox theology accepts that Adam’s fall affects everyone, but denies that his guilt is inherited (see Ancestral Sin). A Q&A from the Orthodox Church in America puts it briefly: “while everyone bears the consequences of the first sin, the foremost of which is death, only Adam and Eve are guilty of that sin” (OCA). What passes down is mortality and corruption, which make personal sin all but certain. John Romanides argued that Augustine, “by relegating the power of Satan, death, and corruption to the background and pushing to the foreground of controversy the problem of personal guilt,” introduced an approach “foreign to the thinking of St. Paul” and “not accepted by the patristic tradition of the East” (“Original Sin According to St. Paul”; his fuller case is The Ancestral Sin, 1957, English 2002).

The Greek of Romans 5:12. Much of that dispute turns on two words. Orthodox writers, following John Meyendorff, say “the Greek idiom eph ho which means because of was translated as in whom,” and “saying that all have sinned in Adam is quite different than saying that all sinned because of him” (Antony Hughes, “Ancestral Versus Original Sin”, archived). Many modern translations, such as the ESV linked above, read “because all sinned.” Defenders of the Western doctrine answer that it never rested on in quo alone: the argument of Romans 5:15–19, where “one man’s disobedience” made “the many” sinners, carries it without the mistranslation.

How much was lost. Inside the West, the sharpest dispute is over degree. Trent’s “wounded” nature and Calvin’s corruption “extending to all the parts of the soul” lead to different accounts of free will, of what the unregenerate can do, and of whether concupiscence is sin. The Reformed doctrine of total depravity (Calvinism) and the Arminian doctrine of prevenient grace (Arminianism) both begin from original sin and part ways on what grace must do about it.

Imputation and fairness. Federal headship answers the Pelagian complaint by saying Adam was our appointed representative, but critics find that no better: why should a person be condemned for a representative they never chose? Some Reformed theologians drop immediate imputation of guilt and keep only inherited corruption; others reply that the same objection would undo the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Karl Barth reversed the usual order in Christ and Adam (1952), reading Adam through Christ rather than Christ through Adam, so that Romans 5 becomes first a text about grace.

Evolution and the historical Adam. Modern biology raises the newest problem. Many geneticists read the evidence as pointing to an ancestral population rather than a single couple, which strains both Augustine’s “we all were that one man” and Humani Generis. Responses cover the range. Some, like C. John Collins in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (2011), defend a historical first pair. Peter Enns’s The Evolution of Adam (2012) argued that Paul’s Adam reflects ancient assumptions and that the doctrine must be restated without him. Between these, William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021) places a real Adam far back in prehistory, and S. Joshua Swamidass’s The Genealogical Adam and Eve (2019) argues that a recent couple could be genealogical ancestors of everyone alive without being their only genetic source. Advocates of Evolutionary Creation have proposed “moderate” versions of the doctrine that keep inherited corruption and drop inherited guilt. Opponents warn that loosening the historical fall loosens the parallel between Adam and Christ on which Paul builds.