Freedom and Original Sin

A friend of mine recently provoked me into contemplation of the concept of original sin when he expressed doubt in it, raised by the apparent inconsistency between the idea that we are born sinful and worthy of judgement beyond our own ability to be otherwise, and the idea that our moral responsibility hangs by the thread of our free will. "What a good, tough question!" I thought. The trouble is, I believe that being responsible for our wrongdoings is vitally important, and that genuine free will is an indispensable prerequisite to responsibility. At the same time, I believe in original sin. I don’t believe in the full-fledged Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, which claims that the unjustified can never do anything good whatsoever, but I do believe that we are all born with a natural desire to reject God; that is, to be sinful. And I believe that we are all held accountable before God because of this.

At one level, the conflict raised here can be easily dismissed. We need only remember that there is a difference between Sin and sins; that is to say, there is sin as a general condition affecting the whole of mankind, and individual sinful acts. There is no reason to say that because we are born into the condition of original sin, we are therefore not free to choose whether we will commit or forego particular actions, for which we are responsible. While the sinful nature we all share has a huge sway over our choices, few Christians, with the exception of strong Calvinists, believe that it controls us to such an absolute extent that in our natural state we are incapable of choosing to commit a good action. In that sense, a person may be rightly held morally responsible for his or her free choices, even while they have been born into a general situation which they did not choose.

However, we need to go deeper than this. The brunt of the problem emerges when we realize that in a way, our particular actions, while very important and deserving of judgement, are incidental. By this I do not mean that they are insignificant, but that they are symptomatic to the underlying condition of the sinful nature, or original sin. It is because of this that we can see that a person who, just for sake of argument, has lived a perfect life in terms of behavior, never doing anything wrong nor failing to do right, may be no better off in the long run than a serial killer or a pimp. Underneath their thin veneer of righteous behavior is the same problem shared by child molesters and suicide bombers. They live for their own purposes and glory rather than God’s. Righteousness for the sake of being independent from God is perhaps the worst kind sin there is.

And yet, this deepest of faults, this root condition from which all sinful actions grow and the final charge to be leveled against us but for the blood of Christ, seems to be the one sin we didn’t choose. We were born with it. And if we didn’t choose it, how can it be sin? Or alternatively, if it is sin, how could we have not chosen it?

That’s really sticky. I think C.S. Lewis poured a little bit of degreaser into the mess when he pointed out (I can’t recall where) that the fact that we can’t quite help being the way we are doesn’t make us any less deserving of wrath. Sometimes creatures can be just plain nasty apart from any consideration of freedom. I have never hesitated to kill a mosquito buzzing around my ear on the grounds that it did not choose to be a mosquito. In a simple way, we are deserving of wrath because we are broken, deformed, failed versions of what we were meant to be. If not deserving of judgement, throwing corrupted humanity to a cosmic scrap heap seems appropriate.

However, this won’t quite do (thank the Lord!) because this is not quite the situation we are in. Not quite, even if very close. Part of this whole paradox runs a parallel with the paradox of humanity itself: we are creatures, but creatures of God; we are dust, but we are God’s breath; we long to have things our own way, but we have never for a moment stopped longing for things that can only be fulfilled by God; we are tombs of darkness but we are God’s brilliant image; we are both the tragedy and crown of creation. In short, we may be sinners, but we are not mere beasts.

So it is that although the mosquito treatment won’t be such an easy way out, in the process of observing this, we are given something of hint. That hint lies in the fact that whatever might be said about the sinful state of humanity, things are not as hopeless as the doctrine of original sin would suggest if it were the only principle at work. If in fact it was the end-all description of where we are at, I fear that we would be little more than mosquitos awaiting a terminal appointment with the divine flyswatter. While we have no reason to doubt that Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God was committed out of their complete free will, it seems we would have equally small reason to doubt that there choice might very well be the end of all freedom for those who follow in their posterity. (It is very possible that there are kinds of free choices, which, if made, take away freedom. A free man may sell himself into slavery and also lose the wealth to buy back his liberty.) After all, I think it stands to reason to believe that inasmuch as sin pushes us away from God, distance from God removes freedom. While we would rightly say that nobody ends up in hell who didn’t freely chose to go there rather than accept being present with God, nobody in hell is really free in the most meaningful sense of term. Because all life and being-hood derive from God, the further we are from him, the less real and alive we are, and eventually we may reach a point of being nothing more than an empty shadow, the negative image of a real person, a barely existent phantom clutching to nothing but itself and its own way. That may be freedom, but it is freedom with no external object. It has all capacity of choice but nothing to choose, which we might say is the worst way of being free we can imagine. All of this is to say that things very well might have followed such a path that after Adam and Eve sinned, and the human race may have quickly degenerated into senseless monsters deserving of wrath but hardly morally accountable.

But, that is not how it happened. There is definitely something else at work here. We are still made in God’s image, and even though we are all born into a race that is marred and therefore alienated from his perfection; a race that is born with a natural inclination to mistrust God and take things our own way instead, even still each one of us, from the smallest child to the bloodiest tyrant, longs for him. Of course, it goes without saying that our sin consists of trying to fulfill this longing with things he did not intend. But we all have a choice to live in one of two ways: to move towards God or away from him. All of us are on this line in and some state of motion. We are capable of feeding our original sin, but equally capable of, (and therefore responsible to) feeding our desire to know God. This is partly what Paul refers to in Romans when he argues that mankind is left without an excuse because God has revealed himself to all through nature. This is what I will call the first intrusion of God’s grace. It is the provision that we are not as bad as we might be. It is the common mercy God gives all of us: that we retain his image and never cease to long for him. We are given the gift of choosing to seek his way rather than the way of self-lordship.

And yet that only gets us so far. At the end of the day, even if we diligently pursue God, we can no more find him and become reconciled to him than an ant can wander its way to the moon. Wanting God is good and a magnificent step of repentance, but unshackling ourselves of our abiding impulse to reject him, granting ourselves pardon and restoring in ourselves the full and brilliant image of all that we were meant to be is a wee bit beyond our capability. If God left us with the first intrusion of his Grace, we would be worse off than the beast-men of our first consideration, whose corruption might contain the mercy of ignorance.
Enter the second invasion of God’s grace, the slain Christ. In fact, Christ was said to be slain before the foundations of the world. I take this to mean that ever since sin marred the face of creation, the death and resurrection of Jesus for sin was a reality, a reality fixed by the unyielding promise of the omnipotent God. The importance of this in regard to our question is that always, even from the very beginning, God has not only given people the free choice to repent of their original sin, but has possessed the means to reconcile them to himself.

This means that the question of how God could judge someone for merely being the only kind of thing they can be–a sinner–is a question foreign to the actual reality in which we live; a reality which is framed by God’s amazing grace. People are not so much judged for having Adam as an ancestor as for rejecting the grace of God. It is something we all tend to do; after all, accepting grace means accepting to live on God’s terms rather than our own and to admit that our way is insufficient. But it is not what we must do. Grace is not a pill which God makes us swallow. It is the eternal testament to our sin, our freedom, and God’s glorious love.