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to explain what it's all about, Alfie…
It was through one man that sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death pervaded the whole human race, inasmuch as all men have sinned.
You may have heard it said many times, indeed you may have said it yourself, when a new-born baby is first examined, "Oh, look, he's got his father's nose!"… "Yes, he has; he'll grab anything. Give your father his nose back, you little blighter!"
How much do we inherit from our parents, and in what measure from each? Quite a lot, I guess, and sometimes it seems that we inherit a characteristic that has jumped a generation. My eldest daughter smiles in exactly the same way that her maternal grandmother used to do – her face falls into exactly the same expression, to a degree that is utterly remarkable.
Do we inherit characteristics of temperament or, in the old balance between nature and nurture, do we learn our temperament from our parents rather than inherit it? That is far more difficult to answer, but I suspect that it is a mixture of the two. When you link questions such as these to the problem of why human beings do evil things, or, even more pertinently perhaps, why evil things happen to good people, then a huge field of philosophical and theological enquiry and debate opens up. The fifth chapter of Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans attempts an answer which has conditioned the Church's doctrine on the question for two thousand years, in one way or another.
Not all translations of the bible capture the subtleties of Saint Paul's original words. Indeed some are translated in particular skewed ways to bias their own doctrinal preconceptions. However, this rendering of the text conveys it as well as any and better than most: It was through one man that sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus death pervaded the whole human race, inasmuch as all men have sinned.
It helps to know exactly what Saint Paul said. He does, in fact, use the phrase, "inasmuch as". In other words, Saint Paul implies that every generation repeats the sin of Adam, but not strictly by inheriting it. When the bible was translated into Latin for the western Christian world based upon Rome, the phrase chosen for the translation did not adequately convey what Saint Paul had written. Indeed, it added a meaning that had not been there originally. The Latin translation used the phrase, "in whom", rather than, "inasmuch as". In other words, it implied a biological inheritance of the sin of Adam – in whom all have sinned – rather than a universal copying from upbringing and nurture – inasmuch as all have sinned.
Unfortunately, Saint Augustine of Hippo, he who wrote the magisterial volume, "Civitas Dei" – City of God – at the end of the fourth century, and much about the theology of Grace, did not read Greek, so he based his theology of Grace on the mistranslation and the implication of the universality of sin due to biological inheritance. We are all brought into the world by biological conception, and thus we are all inheritors of the sin of Adam, Saint Augustine maintained.
You can probably guess how Saint Augustine's views affected much wider spheres of Christian doctrine. Two important doctrines are often confused with one another, or people use their names interchangeably without realising that it is quite wrong and misleading to do so – the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and of the Immaculate Conception. The first refers to the birth of Jesus and the second to the birth of Mary, his mother.
If you take Saint Augustine's interpretation of the sin of Adam – that sin is biologically inherited – the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, maintaining as it does that Jesus had no human father but was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, guarantees that the sin of Adam – or, original sin, as it is sometimes called – did not pass to him through his father. The Church has always been very sure of that, because it is grounded in scripture and enshrined in the historic creeds. But surely then, the sin of Adam must have passed to him through his mother?
The answer that the Church proposed to that problem was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This maintained that, "from the first moment of her conception the Blessed Virgin Mary was… kept free from all stain of original sin." Now, not every scholar of the Church down the centuries was in agreement with that doctrine. Many could see the logical necessity of the doctrine if you took Saint Augustine's theory of the biological inheritance of original sin to be correct, but others wanted to suggest that Saint Paul's original claim that each generation chooses to repeat the sin of Adam meant that Jesus, because of who he was and by whom he was brought up, chose not to repeat the sin of Adam. Therefore, the Immaculate Conception of Mary was a doctrine that did not need to be maintained. However, maintained it was, and it was formally defined by Pope Pius IX as recently as 1854.
The timing is fascinating and highly significant because it coincided with Charles Darwin's imminent publication of the Theory of Evolution. Evolutionary theory suggests that the will to survive is biologically built into every species, and if it comes to a choice between you surviving or somebody else surviving, you will always take the selfish option, because you are "programmed" to survive. Can you see what is happening here? It is not a case of modern science being totally against ancient Christian doctrine. Remarkably, modern evolutionary science and the old Augustinian doctrine of inherited original sin come together precisely, although from radically different starting points – one from the point of survival, and the other from the point of sin. The out come is the same. We are as we are. We shall always choose the selfish (or, in Christian terms, sinful) option.
But Jesus Christ didn't – either from the point of the sin of Adam, or from the point of his own inbuilt desire to survive. Indeed, the story of Gethsemane and of Good Friday showed that Jesus believed that there was something more important in this life than individual survival. Rejecting that choice, he believed that his future was not in his own hands but in the hands of his heavenly Father. He believed that his rejection of the choice of his personal survival would in some way allow all the rest of us to survive.
Those who wrote the New Testament took that line precisely. Saint Paul summed it up very neatly in the midst of what is otherwise a very complicated doctrinal argument: …as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. The Church was so convinced of this that it was enshrined in the Nicene Creed: For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven…
And that is where we as Christians and, indeed we as human beings, are – whether fated or choosing to be selfish and sinful, yet being offered the possibility of reconciliation with God for all eternity because of the selflessness of his Son. If you choose the path of that reconciliation and believe that it is a path along which God will lead you, then the healing of the troubles of the soul and of the anxieties and wounds which living a human life inevitably brings will not only be assured, but such healing will also be an integral part of God's plan to bring you home safely to himself… one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all...