That may be true but it is a red herring. No one is using it here for that purpose. We are talking about events 10,000 years ago or maybe even 1,000,000 years ago. Who knows. That reasoning can be abused doesn’t mean the reasoning is not sound in other applications.
I’m not fond of the idea of human non-human sexual interactions but bestiality is hardly top of the list here in terms of sexual issues. Is it much better for human men to instead have bred with human little girls who couldn’t give consent for a million years? We are also talking about evolution where life pretty much has to destroy and use other life to survive. Moral repugnance —whether justified or not—seems par for the course for those of us cast out of Eden. Even though we may not have been entitled to it, one sure can miss paradise lost at times.
But even if we have to admit this bestiality occurred, and some theologians have attempted to soften it a little, though more importantly, we don’t have to agree with it. If Adam and Eve had not disobeyed God, if they had obeyed and been instead granted access to the beatific vision, this probably was not the way things would have gone for us. Isn’t that the point? But they sinned and now we get wonderful things like death, a fallen nature, cancer and bestiality/incest to start off. Sin isn’t that fun. That’s just the natural world minus the grace of God.
It’s interesting to me that the privation route for original sin can actually salvage -to a degree-what we deem natural evil in that we would not have ever experienced it. We know that biological humans experienced it, but fully metaphysical humans with a rational soul never needed to.
Vinnie
2 Likes
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
202
No you shouldn’t. The catastrophic regional riverine flood of the 3000 BCE Mesopotamian, Early Dynastic I period of Sumer, culminating in Ur’s burial under 8 feet of silt as Woolley found a century ago, is a geological fact.
Vinnie, I have liked your explanations because they give a view of what the RCC teaches and how it can be understood. It has corrected some of my misunderstandings, assuming that the view you presented is really what RCC teaches today. I also read Humani Generis (& some text from the Trent Council) and wondered if Humani generis was ex cathedra. What you wrote clarified also that.
I do not agree with the RCC interpretations on original sin or soul but I think it is important to understand what the other churches really teach. There is too much misunderstandings and judgements based on these misunderstandings.
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gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
206
But the regional floods we might enlist are all too small to fit the details of the Biblical flood narrative. Birds released would NOT have come back to the ark.
I echo @knor ’s appreciation of your posts here, @Vinnie. They’re helpful on two fronts: understanding the Catholic position, and seeing why someone who vocally disputed evangelical defenses of an inerrant book acceded to Catholic defenses of an infallible tradition. I won’t hide that I still don’t see how all the dots connect. And since I know you appreciate openness, here is why it still looks very different to me.
Right, but viewing that spread as something other than biological ancestry does not amount to disagreeing with Paul. Look how he defines the ancestors of Abraham in Romans 4, just a few paragraphs before he talks about the ancestors of Adam. We’re not Abraham’s descendants by physical generation, but if we “follow the example of the faith” that he had. And likewise, we’re all Adam’s descendants “because all sin.” I think it’s wrong to reduce our connection to Adam to imitation, but it’s even more wrong to reduce it to heredity.
Further, I think there’s a very good historical reason why official Catholic teaching doesn’t allow for this reading. It’s right in Trent, which I believe is considered infallible teaching by Catholics:
For that which the apostle has said, By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned, is not to be understood otherwise than as the Catholic Church spread everywhere hath always understood it. For, by reason of this rule of faith, from a tradition of the apostles, even infants, who could not as yet in themselves commit any sin, are for this cause truly baptized for the remission of sins, that in them that which they have contracted by generation, may be cleansed away by regeneration. For, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. (Trent, session 5, canon 4)
Augustine’s (in)famous (mis)understanding of Romans 5:12 is elevated by Trent into the way that verse has always been understood. Never mind that it seems to have started with Ambrosiaster less than a generation before Augustine and only gained widespread acceptance in the West by those who read Paul’s Greek secondhand in Latin. Because of this, the official Catholic teaching doesn’t have “because all sin” in their Bible; in its place, they have the idea that everyone was actually present in Adam when he sinned. It’s as real as Christ’s bodily presence in the host. So of course the idea of inheriting from Adam because we sin like Adam was a non-starter.
Trent’s canons of original sin show just how damaging one poorly translated phrase can be. It led to the real presence of all humans in Adam, which meant infants were born sinful, which meant Jesus needed to be free of this, which required Mary’s immaculate conception. And Trent undergirds all these with the church’s infallibility and the salvific nature of baptism. It’s all bound together as one massa doctrinae.
It’s not a controversial point of scholarship that the translation embedded (twice!) in Trent’s teaching on original sin is poor. I think even most Catholics accept that. But however flawed it may be, the conclusions drawn from it are still considered infallible. It’s the declarations based on that translation that make a literal Adam so essential to Catholic teaching. Strip it away, and the whole logic of Mary’s immaculate conception falls apart, and that cannot be allowed to happen.
To me, this is yet another case of doubling down on one of Augustine’s errors. When he read, “For all have sinned,” he wondered how that could be true of infants. And so sin changed from a blameworthy moral misstep to an inherited disease so it could pass from parent to child independent of willful acts. And Feser furthers the same reasoning. I think we need to give the infants a break. They’re not who Paul was talking to. “For all have sinned” meant people who really have done bad things against God, not just people who were made sinful at their creation by inheriting a privation.
There’s more that we need saving from than our own past sins. Infants as well as everyone else need a Saviour. We don’t need to show that infants have sinned, or have sin, to affirm that. And we don’t have to limit their chances for salvation to whether they were baptized.
Stretching Paul’s words to encompass infants dilutes the meaning of sin and isn’t fair to infants. Yes, as humans we have frailty that entices us to choose the wrong path. Adam and Eve had that too. That’s one more way we’re like them. And that connection is just as real and meaningful as heredity.
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gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
208
One of the contributions made by the GAE book is the counter-intuitive reality that several ancestral pairs almost inevitably qualify as Universal Common Ancestors of everyone alive today… even if you don’t think Adam/Eve ever existed.
You used the phrase “by physical generation”, rather than “by genetics”. And this is true … With 46 chromosomes, we can quickly do the math:
Me = 46
2nd Generation = 23 chromosomes from a Parent
3rd Gen = 12 chromosomes from a Grand Parent
4th = 6 chromosomes from a Great Grand Parent
5th = 3 chromosomes from a Great Great Grand Parent
6th = 2 chromosomes from a Great Great Great Grand Parent
7th Generation = 1 chromosome from a Great Great Great Great Grand Parent
So, by the 8th or 9th generation, the probability is overwhelming that even genetic “transpositions” will have eliminated 99.999% of any possible genetic material from that generation to or from me. Generously using 40 year generations (rather than say 30 or 25), after 360 years, the odds are I won’t have (nor my 6th cousins and beyond) any genetic material from any of my 4th-Great Grand parents (on average)!
(Of course, if any of the aforementioned ancestors mated with cousins, the mathematics change.)
But if we use the term GENEALOGICALLY, instead of GENETICALLY, then the math reverses to become EXPONENTIAL!
The closer the maximum number of possible ancestors approaches the actual population size alive in that generation, the more likely that someone from that generation can become a Universal Common Ancestor! And this probability becomes even higher if the population is rather self-contained …. by mating confined to only Italians, or only Europeans, or only Westerners!
In genealogy, all humans alive today share universal common ancestors, with a model suggesting everyone’s family trees merged just a few thousand years ago, meaning we’re all distant cousins (like 15th-16th cousins or closer), while Mitochondrial Eve (matrilineal) and Y-chromosomal Adam (patrilineal) are recent common ancestors for specific DNA lines, but not the single most recent for all people.
Key Concepts:
MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor): For all living humans, geneticists estimate the MRCA lived surprisingly recently, maybe only a few thousand years ago, with everyone sharing the same ancestors from just before that point.
Mitochondrial Eve: The most recent common ancestor of all humans through the direct maternal line (mitochondrial DNA), estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa.
Y-chromosomal Adam: The most recent common ancestor of all living males through the direct paternal line (Y-chromosome), also living tens of thousands of years ago.
Pedigree Collapse: As you go back in time, family trees rapidly merge, meaning people share ancestors many times over, making everyone distantly related.
SO: What about Abraham? This analysis only works when you are discussing a given generation…. for example, “Everyone Alive Today”. Abraham COULD be a Universal Common Ancestor of everyone alive today. There could be MULTIPLE UCA’s in any given living generation.
So how do we know Abraham is one of our UCA’s? It’s a matter of faith, of course. If you think God would want Abraham’s lineage to survive into the present day …. the math says it is distinctly possible.
I view them as infallible in the same way the Bible is to me, only insofar as God uses it to accomplish his ends. I don’t view all Church teachings as infallible tradition and neither does the Church. The Catholic Church only claims infallibility on select matters. I have chosen to align with it because I think its the primary (not only) continuation of and vehicle God uses to teach the gospel. For me, I would say, just as no one has to believe their specific interpretation of the Bible is infallible to take it very seriously, I do not necessarily need to believe my understanding of Church tradition or even that the tradition itself is inerrant and infallible to take it seriously. To be a good standing member of the Church though, I cannot be a keyboard warrior, challenging all its teachings–which more likely than not–I don’t understand. The same goes for the Bible–which I have been guilty of in the past. I am trying to approach both with a hermeneutic of trust and respect. The Church definitely has dogma but it also has a lot of teachings considered authoritative but reformable.
This is why the Church provides us with a clear hermeneutical rule. According to the Code of Canon Law, “No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident” (CIC 749 §3). This exegetical presumption of non-infallibility of all magisterial teachings is traditional as it explicitly appeared already in the Pio-Benedictine code from 1917 (CIC 1323 §3).
1323 § 3. “A thing is not understood as dogmatically defined or declared unless this is manifestly established.” Source: Peters, Edward, editor. 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law: In English Translation with Extensive Scholarly Apparatus. Ignatius Press, 2001.
So what is that other that you speak of? Maybe I overstated that link but let’s see. First what I think is plainly evident is that Paul requires an actual event and an actual Adam. To deny this is in my mind, is to disagree with Paul. I’ve seen a lot of people try to get around that and I think that exegesis is just not good. The logic and force of the argument really depends on it to me. I also wouldn’t reduce it to heredity. We are talking genealogy here but I wouldn’t reduce it to that either. There is an aspect of God making a covenant of sorts. It is God who chose to give the preternatural gifts to Adam and Eve and he gave them so on a conditional basis. On violating that condition, their privation spreads to all their ancestors (whom God is creating souls for at conception in Catholic thought). Adam and Eve were given special gifts and their offspring now live without them.
Imitation and being descendants are two possible ways for that connection to Adam to happen but imitation is a poor option. What are others in your mind? For me, I’m not sure how others wouldn’t essentially be denying any consequences to original sin. We are sinners because we sin? That is not very controversial. But Paul says death spread to all men because of Adam’s sin. He doesn’t just state we sin just like Adam and therefore we die. Infants who never sin also die. They are born mortal. Per Paul, death has been passed to all after Adam. From science we know that death is a natural part of life. Biological humans would have experienced death before Adam. If not for the preternatural gifts, Adam an Eve would never had had the option not to. But since they blew it, now everyone after them (full metaphysical humans) are prone to that same natural death as biological humans. As noted by Kemp, polygenism is difficult because the infants alive then would not have participated in the sin.
How do you propose that death, which was already a part of the natural world, spread to all of Adam’s ancestors (or all biological humans?) on account of Adam’s sins outside of the privation of the original grace bestowed on Adam and Eve? And I think this is the answer to your next issue:
Against this I would say you are focusing on only part of the verse. I’m not stretching Paul’s words, I’m just taking them all into consideration. One of the other consequences of that privation is death. Infants who don’t sin die like everyone else. Paul knew this. Everyone knows babies die. So I am not sure what kind of break we are supposed to give them when they experience the full consequence of of death from Adam’s sin per Paul? It seems in focusing on the sin aspect, you have ignored the “death” aspect. At any rate, this is what New Advent says on that:
Since Adam transmits death to his children by way of generation when he begets them mortal, it is by generation also that he transmits to them sin, for the Apostle presents these two effects as produced at the same time and by the same causality. The explanation of the Pelagians differs from that of St. Paul. According to them the child who receives mortality at his birth receives sin from Adam only at a later period when he knows the sin of the first man and is inclined to imitate it. The causalityof Adam as regards mortality would, therefore, be completely different from his causality as regards sin. Moreover, this supposed influence of the bad example of Adam is almost chimerical; even the faithful when they sin do not sin on account of Adam’s bad example, a fortioriinfidels who are completely ignorant of the history of the first man. And yet all men are, by the influence of Adam, sinners and condemned (Romans 5:18, 19). The influence of Adam cannot, therefore, be the influence of his bad example which we imitate (Augustine, “Contra julian.”, VI, xxiv, 75).
As noted, the Church does not limit their chances to baptism. Scholastics put them in paradise for a long time but for modern Catholics, we just put them in God’s hands and that should be more than enough for any Christian.
Why would you say sinless infants need a savior though?
I’m not super familiar with all aspects of Trent but where does the Church teach this? New Advent has the following exegesis of Romans 5 which seems to me to not teach that at all:
These Protestant writers lay much stress on the last words of the twelfth verse. We know that several of the LatinFathersunderstood the words “in whom all have sinned”, to mean, all have sinned in Adam. This interpretation would be an extra proofof the thesis of original sin, but it is not necessary. Modern exegesis, as well as the GreekFathers, prefer to translate “and so death passed upon all men because all have sinned”. We accept this second translation which shows us death as an effect of sin. But of what sin? “The personal sins of each one”, answer our adversaries, “this is the natural sense of the words ‘all have sinned.’” It would be the natural sense if the context was not absolutely opposed to it. The words “all have sinned” of the twelfth verse, which are obscure on account of their brevity, are thus developed in the nineteenth verse: “for as by the disobedience of one man many were made sinners.” There is no question here of personal sins, differing in species and number, committed by each one during his life, but of one first sin which was enough to transmit equally to all men a state of sin and the title of sinners. Similarly in the twelfth verse the words “all have sinned” must mean, “all have participated in the sin of Adam”, “all have contracted its stain”. This interpretation too removes the seeming contradiction between the twelfth verse, “all have sinned”, and the fourteenth, “who have not sinned”, for in the former there is question of original sin, in the latter of personal sin. Those who say that in both cases there is question of personal sin are unable to reconcile these two verses.
Maybe this is what the New Advent article on original sin is talking about here:
Several theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neglecting the importance of the privation of grace in the explanation of original sin, and explaining it only by the participation we are supposed to have in the act of Adam, exaggerate this participation. They exaggerate the idea of voluntary in original sin, thinking that it is the only way to explain how it is a sinproperly so-called. Their opinion, differing from that of St. Thomas, gave rise to uncalled-for and insoluble difficulties. At present it is altogether abandoned.
But I think all these issues go back to long before Trent and I have no issue with Mary’s immaculate conception. None at all. Full of grace.
I’m sure Feser meant to say, “According to Catholic theology…”
I’ve read Thomistic authors (such as Nicanor) who argue that Adam & Eve were given the gift of original righteousness and various other supernatural helps, which were lost in the “Fall,” but this is the first time I’ve ever encountered one who claimed God offered A&E the “beatific vision” in Genesis 2-3. That strikes me as going far beyond the text into pure speculation. There are no “offers” at all; there are only prohibitions in Gen. 2 and the encounter in Gen 3:8-9 and following:
“Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
If this is the face-to-face “beatific vision,” then it was already experienced by Adam & Eve, not offered to them on condition of obedience.
Mainly, this strikes me as a common problem I see with interpretations of the overarching narrative of scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Too many have seen the end of the story as a perfect circle back to the original conditions of Eden. IMHO, the end is greater than the beginning. The “New Jerusalem” is a perfect cube like the “Holy of Holies” in the temple, but the “end state” is vastly larger than the original.
The problem with all your bolded text was pointed out by Kierkegaard. If Adam was entirely unlike us – that is, normal human beings – then why is he our representative? He’s unlike you or I or anyone else who has ever lived, yet the collective fate of all humanity was determined by his decision? And, again, none of this has any support from the text itself. (Neither does the Reformed “federal head” theory, for that matter.)
Kemp cited multiple Catholic theologians who don’t seem bound by Trent. The problem with Trent is that it’s based on Scholastic philosophy rather than facts. Research has borne out the fact that the primary way humans learn is imitation, which also goes by the names mimesis, social learning, and enculturation. Chimps have a form of culture and learn to make rudimentary tools by imitating exactly what mom shows them to do. But humans learn the process and apply it elsewhere. We also take it a step further and learn by observing what others do and imitating their behavior. This isn’t just how we learn to behave in society (don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie, etc.); it’s also how we learn to speak language.
In short, humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, and we’re surrounded by both good and evil examples from birth. That would include early humanity before they had the mental or linguistic capacity to distinguish “good” from “evil.” There had to be a transition state between animal innocence and human guilt.
Social learning/enculturation is also my explanation for peccatum originale originatum. But that’s another story.
So the Church decides who’s a human being and who’s not? Sorry to keep repeating myself, but the concept of subhuman H. sapiens is morally repugnant. And let’s be clear: It’s not the official stance of the Catholic Church that there is such a distinction as Biological Human and Theological Human. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Good gosh. I can’t believe you said that out loud.
A complete non sequitur
Not a difficult question at all. Children below the “age of reason” are innocent until they’re not. If the adults in a clan “came of age” somewhat as a group, it doesn’t short-circuit their children’s development. They still have to commit their own “first sin” to be morally culpable before God.
Sorry. I’m still down with the idea that infants and children who die are ushered into the presence of God.
There’s zero biological evidence that God chose two individuals out of a population. The biological evidence is that humanity, like every other species, arose from a population. Therefore one must explain how original sin and the “Fall” occurred among a population, or fall prey to special pleading.
I’m sorry, but I’m not impressed by church history or belief on the subject of human origins. Our forebears were ignorant about the subject and just making their best guesses. Some came closer to the truth than others.
It’s easy to explain human reason as the product of evolution. Souls, on the other hand, couldn’t have been a product of evolution, but the existence of the soul is believed by faith, not science.
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gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
212
Jay, what your post amounts to is one denominational camp of Christians “kavetching” about the beliefs of another denominational camp. Must you replay the East-West schism of the medieval church on these boards?
@Jay313 Your latest response is really not up to your normal standards. You have jumped the shark here. First your two points that were substantial:
The issue is one of imitation vs abstract thought. No one denies anything about how animals or humans learn on a physical level or the amazing feats they are sometimes capable of. You seem unfamiliar with the relevant philosophical arguments pertinent to abstract thought. You just regurgitate naturalism.
This was addressed by Feser but there are other responses possible. We have lost something that was a free gift that were simply not entitled to or owed by nature of our being. We can certainly lament it but we have no just complaint here. We are owed nothing. Full stop. I even gave a school teacher analogy. If a school is overstaffed and teachers have extra help, and then loses the over-staffing it, they cannot justifiably complain their situation is unfair. You have to make your own copies. Boo hoo. That is part of the job. Like creation itself, these preternatural gifts stem from love overflowing and abundant grace. Why God didn’t put everyone in their own garden? I don’t know. He didn’t. What more is there to say? We are constrained by physical reality and revelation. We work within the confines of what it and try to make sense of them.
Now on to your less substantial comments. You say things like
Who is trying to show there is or even thinks there could be biological evidence of a theological statement or supernatural act? This is silly. This is an exercise in showing how the doctrine of original sin, as understood as a privation of supernatural grace, and a literal Adam and Eve can be consistent with modern science if we understand Adam and Eve as the genealogical ancestor of metaphysical human beings. This really should not need explaining at this level of discussion.
On the beatific vision, Feser believes they had access to it if they obeyed, not that they were presently experiencing it. They could not have sinned in that case:
Feser: When I say that Adam and Eve “lost the beatific vision,” I don’t mean that they had actually enjoyed it (in the way the saints in Heaven do) and then somehow sinned anyway. I just mean that it was going to be theirs if they wanted it – what they had to do actually to “take possession” of it, as it were, was to obey – but they chose instead to disobey.
As noted, I am not a philosophical naturalist, I do not worship at the altar of science and I do not believe a human is capable of being defined solely in terms of biology. I reject your materialistic view of humans on both scriptural and metaphysical grounds. This has already been stated unequivocally and quite clearly. So I am not all understanding why you bringing this up?
You are calling these views morally repugnant and saying you can’t believe I said them out loud when the only thing that really fits that bill is your inability to understand someone’s arguments on their own terms. There are some beings made in God’s image and there are some who are not. If you find that distinction repugnant, I can only disagree. But if the best you can muster is atheist-thumper logic like “science doesn’t prove the Biblical account” we don’t have much to discuss.
You may distinguish between reason and the soul all you like but the argument is that abstract thought requires a rational soul and is beyond the scope of materialism. I fully disagree with your assertion which really just stems form intellectual hubris. Feser responded to this type of thinking in one of the parts of this original sin series:
Catholic theologians have not the slightest basis for saying that our nature is simply not exhausted by our physical attributes.
Hear that? Not “a highly controversial basis.” Not “a basis that I, Jason Rosenhouse, find unconvincing.” No, not the slightest basis. Now, forget about my own arguments for the intellect’s immateriality (though Rosenhouse says nothing in response to them). A great many more important Catholic philosophers and theologians have also presented serious arguments for it, as have non-Catholic Christians and pagan thinkers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Secular writers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers have endorsed forms of dualism. Secular writers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Galen Strawson, while they do not embrace dualism, nevertheless reject physicalism. Yet others, like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Joseph Levine, have argued that there are at least serious difficulties facing physicalism which have yet to be answered. And many materialists who think these difficulties can be answered at least acknowledge that the difficulties are indeed serious ones raised by critics in good faith. Then there are secular non-dualists like Tyler Burge, John Searle, and William Lycan, who (as I have noted before) have expressed the opinion that the dominance of materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind owes less to the quality of the arguments in its favor than to ideological thinking.
Ideological thinking was being polite. Its hubris.
You might believe in a soul based on faith or scripture (or you might not?) and I would not fault your faith or you for following scripture. But countless philosophers have put forth arguments that abstract thought cannot be material. You sweep it all under the rug and offer a caricature that dismisses anything contrary to your own dogma as “faith.” Metaphysical arguments are not faith, they are metaphysical arguments. I’ll send you a copy of Feser’s book on souls if you want to read it. DM me the details if so.
Some of us still believe we need to figure out what accommodated truth the inspired authors of scripture is teaching. Some of us also take seriously the great traditions of the Christian church established by Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the same one responsible for our Canon. I doubt the Church proper is impressed by your sweeping dismissal of it on this issue.
As the atheists here are fond of telling me, a belief being comforting doesn’t make it true. I don’t disagree but it’s simply conjecture. That is faith. I have the same faith. When I say they are put in the hands of God, I see them being held by Jesus who said “let the little children come to me,” and “love your enemies.”
As I responded to @Marshall, little children die and suffer the results of Adam’s sin, according to the apostle Paul, long before any of them have a chance to sin. You are focusing only on sin and not death because you know death has been around as long as biological life has. The beauty of the privation route is it actually allows us to take Paul (and science) seriously. But to you Paul is just an ancient who didn’t know what he was talking about.
No, Jay Johnson, armed with scientism and feeble evolutionary evidence of when he thinks abstract thought evolved naturally, does. This was an exercise in reconciling the church’s actual dogma and authoritative teachings with biological science. The church does not deem everything I wrote dogma.
No argument there. And I’m not aiming to tear down what you’ve come to accept. I expect you to write from your framework while I write from mine without either of us trying to show how our views make sense in the other’s framework. I know my beliefs wouldn’t make me a good Catholic. (It’s because of some of them that Catholicism has little appeal to me.) But that doesn’t mean I can’t respect those who have come to see things differently.
I get uneasy when any church body starts declaring that some specified subset of its teachings is without error. To me, that denies a really important part of original sin: universal human corruption. Like I said in that excerpt: “All humans, and all human institutions harbour corruption. Churches are no exception. The various doctrines of original sin both explain and exhibit that truth.”
I don’t think so. Paul had no problem showing how we’re all sinners in Romans 1–3 without bringing up Adam or any actual event. Instead, he retold the garden story as something done by many people many times (1:20–25). In the second half of Romans 5, he recasts all that he’s already said in the language of a mano-a-mano contest between Adam and Jesus, showing how Jesus is the bigger man.
Romans 5 isn’t where he establishes we’re sinners. It’s a reframing. It’s not much different than how elsewhere he uses Hagar and Sarah to illustrate two covenants. Paul writes Eve and the serpent out of the story in order to reduce it to man-vs-man, and he collapses Jesus’ whole life into one “act of righteousness” to make the parallel with Adam’s sin, so I really don’t think it hangs on historical rigor. It’s quite likely that Paul did think Adam was a literal man, but what he wrote doesn’t depend on that.
Imitation combined with a recognition that we are the same kind – humankind. That’s what Adam means, so I think the two humans split from Adam show us human nature. We imitate that because we are that.
Though it’s important to recognize the shared humanity of all people, I think traditions go wrong when they try to draw the line on who is human. The easiest way to do so is by having a first couple from which all descend. But in real life, biology is messy. Drawing the line on who is truly human may be as unworkable as drawing the line between a child and an adult. “Child” and “adult” are real categories, but the line is still messy. I expect it is that way for the earliest humans too. Fortunately, we don’t need to draw that line because we don’t live then. We can trust God to draw it correctly and accept that in our time, all people are humans. When we read Adam and Eve’s story, we’re reading our story.
Yes, that fits more naturally with the way Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians. All die because Adam is mortal and all are in Adam. “As one of dust, so are those who are of the dust, and as one of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, we will also bear the image of the one of heaven” (15:48–49). Here it isn’t sin that causes death, but being made of dust like Adam was.
So, when Paul makes death the wages of sin in Romans, I think he has something more in mind than physical death. After all, animals that never sin die too. They are born mortal. That’s not something unique to those descended from Adam.
In Romans and 1 Corinthians, Sin and Death are often personified as malevolent powers. Paul’s argument in Romans 5–6 doesn’t work if Death is just the same death that befalls animals. He means more by it.
We agree on all earthly creatures dying both before Adam and Eve and after their sin. But in between, you have a period of immortality that is lost, and that loss needs to spread to all humans so they don’t end up immortal. Do you see how this only solves the very problem it creates? Different views strip out both the immortalized humans as well as the humans mortalized by original sin. As such, they’re not left with immortal infants on the loose that need to be mortalized.
In the Eden account, physical death is natural. Adam is made from dust, and he will die because “you are dust” (Gen. 3:19), not because he ate something bad. The threatened death, however, seems to be revealed as exile (3:22–24). Being driven out is losing access to the tree of life. That is how he dies on the day of his disobedience, not a millennium later. And in this way, the story of one couple tells the story of a nation, as well as the story of all humankind.
Physical death was already there, but Death as the last enemy spreads through human sin in much the same way as language and other elements of culture spread.
For one thing, they’re mortal. Eternal life is the Saviour’s gift.
Trent, session 5, canon 4, where it uses a translation of Romans 5:12 that ends “in whom all sinned” instead of “because all sinned” and then says that the Catholic Church has always understood the verse one way in which it necessitates the baptism of infants for the remission of their sins. But I’m obviously no expert on that stuff either. I’m sure it’s read many ways, just as Romans 5:12 is.
All churches and denominations have their own traditions in how they interpret the biblical scriptures. I happen to belong to a denomination that does not list anything but the biblical scriptures (canon) and Apostolic creeds (the first ecumenical ones) as the basis of Christian life. Yet, we are well aware that we too have (unwritten) traditions that guide our interpretations of what is ‘biblical’ and what is not.
If we represent the minimalistic end of Christian traditions, RCC represents the other end. It is understandable that RCC has its’ own traditions in how it interprets the scriptures and, due to a long history of philosophical thinking, these interpretations may be expressed in quite philosophical language. The long history of dominance within the western world and the large size has also given some overconfidence in how the interpretations are told - ‘we are the only correct Church and have the only correct interpretations’. That would not be bad IF all the interpretations would be the best possible ones, representing what the original apostolic teaching was and what the biblical scriptures clearly teach.
From the perspective of someone outside the RCC, one weakness in the interpretations of RCC is that some interpretations have drifted far away from the starting point, towards such bubbles of philosophical/metaphysical reasoning that have started to live their own life. The teaching becomes dependent on the abstract metaphysical thinking and reasoning of previous theologians and because of that, is not anymore strongly anchored in the real world. The doctrines related to A&E seem to belong to this group.
I appreciate the attempts to reword the doctrines in ways that are consistent with the facts of the real world. I also accept the starting point that the world is more than what can be seen and measured by the current methods of scientific research. Yet, I think that if our explanations and doctrines do not fit to what can be observed, something in our interpretations is wrong.
It does not help if the religious authorities (pope & al.) tell that the discussion on the topic is closed, stop thinking about possible alternatives and accept what is told by faith - believe, do not debate. That seemed to be the message told in the Humani Generis letter and many other RCC documents.
“But not less” - is how I hear some fundamentalists respond to that. As in, if it doesn’t include just plain ordinary physical death, then how could we trust it to mean anything more than that? At least that’s my take on their concern here. Which betrays the prioritization of materialism over metaphor or meaning that so bedevils their approaches to scriptures and remains their stubborn blind spot. So the “more” that it means is the significant question to pursue I think.
5 is physical, 6 is ‘spiritual’, i.e. morally trapped/freed surely?
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
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Gentlemen, I should have been more clear:
In genealogy, all humans alive today share SOME Universal Common Ancestors (that are HUMAN). And if you introduce a “privileged” mated pair into a living population, the mated pair can become a Universal Common Ancestor in 1,500 to 2,000 years!
