Original sin

“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

— Psalm 51:5

Original sin is the doctrine that every human being descending from Adam by ordinary generation is born already guilty and already corrupt: guilty because Adam’s first sin is reckoned to his whole race, and corrupt because a sinful nature, not merely a bad example, is passed down from parent to child. It is distinct from “actual sin,” the individual sins a person later commits; original sin is the condition a person is born into and out of which actual sins grow. The Fall is the historical event; original sin is the doctrine of what that event did to everyone descended from Adam.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states, of Adam and Eve’s fall: “Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”¹ It then grounds this in Adam’s representative headship: “They being the root, and by God’s appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed, to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.”²

Charles Hodge, working from the same Reformed confessional tradition, identifies the doctrine’s three components. Quoting his church’s standards: “the sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.”³ Original sin is therefore not one thing but three, held together: (1) the imputation of Adam’s guilt, the legal ground on which his descendants are counted guilty in him; (2) the corruption of nature, a real moral defect inherited from him, not a mere legal fiction; and (3) the inability that corruption produces, a lost capacity for any spiritual good until God intervenes. The confession is explicit that this corrupt nature is not simply an unfortunate inclination but sin properly speaking, in itself and in all its motions.³

The confessional formulation distinguishes original sin from actual sin without separating them: original sin is the root, actual sins are the fruit that root inevitably produces given opportunity. It also distinguishes imputed guilt from inherited corruption without dividing them: Reformed theology holds both together as the “sinfulness of that estate,” refusing either a bare legal fiction (guilt with no real corruption) or a merely biological account (corruption with no judicial verdict). The mechanics of the imputation itself (how Adam’s single act becomes each descendant’s guilt) are treated at length in imputation of Adam’s sin; the extent and practical effects of the resulting corruption are treated in total depravity. This article’s concern is the doctrine as a whole: what it claims, on what warrant, against which alternatives.

Biblical Basis

David confesses more than his own misdeeds when he says, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5), a condition traced to conception, prior to any actual sin of his own.

Paul’s argument in Romans 5 is the doctrine’s central text. Herman Bavinck reads the chapter’s key phrase carefully: “‘inasmuch as all sinned’ [Rom. 5:12]… does not mean that Paul locates the cause of every person’s death in his or her actual sins, for in 1 Corinthians 15:22 he expressly states that all die in Adam… The plain meaning is this: Adam sinned; consequently sin and death entered the world and reigned… Paul’s point here is that our sinful condition is God’s antecedent judgment on the entire human race thanks to the sin of the representative man, Adam. This is the doctrine of original sin.”⁴ Paul states the same Adam-Christ parallel directly: “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Elsewhere he describes those not yet in Christ as “by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Eph. 2:3), a condition, not merely an accumulation of choices.

Historical Development

Before Augustine. The doctrine did not begin with Augustine, though he gave it its classic statement. Bavinck: “Original sin was not a new teaching of Augustine, though earlier theologians did tend to stress free will and actual sin more than the sin inherited from Adam.”⁵ Augustine himself claimed only to be restating the church’s existing faith: “I did not dream up original sin, which the catholic faith believes from of old.”⁶

Augustine against Pelagius. The doctrine was formalized in controversy with Pelagius, a British monk who, according to Bavinck, held “that all persons are born with pure souls; sin and evil come into being only through imitation. On our own, without grace, we can will and do the good. Sin is always and only a personal matter. To charge us with the sins of others is contrary to God’s justice.”⁷ Hodge notes that denying any real damage to Adam’s descendants beyond bad example, the claim “that Adam’s sin injured only himself,” was among the formal charges brought against Pelagian teaching at the Synod of Diospolis in 415.⁸

The Semi-Pelagian middle ground. Reaction against the harder edges of Augustine’s doctrine, that fallen man can do no spiritual good whatever without grace, produced a mediating party among fifth-century monks. Hodge: “The party thus formed against the orthodox or established doctrine was called Semi-Pelagian, because it held a middle ground between Pelagius and Augustine,” led by John Cassian, Vincent of Lérins, and Faustus of Riez.⁹ Its substance, as Hodge elsewhere summarizes it, was that original sin “is not so dreadful an evil as Augustine represented it. Men are weak and sick; but not helpless and dead.”¹⁰

Rome and Trent. Medieval Scholastic theology recast original sin as chiefly the loss of a donum superadditum, a supernatural gift added to otherwise unfallen human nature, alongside concupiscence, which Rome does not count as sin in itself. Bavinck: “The Council of Trent expressed itself very cautiously, saying that Adam not only lost righteousness but was also changed for the worse in soul and body… Concupiscence, which remains in the baptized, is not itself seen as sin but only arises from sin and inclines to sin. The free will is not lost but weakened… When concupiscence is not itself seen as sinful, it is hard to see what concrete effects remain of original sin except for the imputation of Adam’s trespass. The human state after Adam’s fall differs little from the pre-fallen state. We are left in only a state of ‘naked naturalness,’ not a state of depravity.”¹¹ Robert Bellarmine states the underlying logic: “the corruption of nature did not flow from the lack of some natural gift nor from the accession of some bad quality but only from a loss of the supernatural gift occasioned by Adam’s sin.”¹²

The Reformation. Bavinck: “The Reformation opposed this Roman Catholic weakening of original sin. It is not just a loss of something but a total corruption of our nature.” Calvin: “the whole man is of himself nothing but concupiscence.”¹³ The Reformed avoided the most extreme Lutheran phrasing (Luther called original sin “essential sin,” and the Formula of Concord described the fallen will as no more capable of good than “a stone, a trunk, or mud”¹⁴) while still teaching that original sin “consisted, negatively, in the loss of original righteousness and, positively, in the corruption of nature, and that it was rooted in the imputed trespass of Adam.”¹⁵

Mediate imputation at Saumur. A dispute within later Reformed orthodoxy reversed the confessional order: Josué de la Place (Placaeus), of the Academy of Saumur, argued “original sin is imputed to us because we are born corrupt,” making inherited corruption the ground of imputed guilt rather than the reverse. The Synod of Charenton condemned the view in 1645; a version of it later reappeared in Jonathan Edwards and the New England theology.¹⁶ The full case for and against mediate versus immediate imputation belongs to imputation of Adam’s sin rather than here.

Alternative Views

Pelagianism. In its own terms, Pelagianism denies that Adam’s sin did anything to his descendants beyond setting a bad example: each soul is created pure, sins only by its own choice in imitation of Adam, and bears guilt only for its own actual transgressions.⁷ Against this, the confessional position holds that Scripture’s language of being born “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3) and “shapen in iniquity” from conception (Ps. 51:5) describes an inherited condition, not merely a learned habit, and Pelagianism has no place for that kind of condition.

Semi-Pelagianism. This position grants a real weakening of human nature by the Fall but denies that fallen man is entirely unable, apart from grace, to begin turning toward God: “weak and sick; but not helpless and dead.”¹⁰ The confessional response is that this concedes too little: the corruption Scripture describes leaves fallen man not merely weakened but, apart from grace, “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” the point argued at length under total depravity.

Roman Catholicism. On this view, unfallen Adam possessed a supernatural gift (the donum superadditum) added to a nature that was, in itself, merely natural; the Fall consists in losing that added gift, leaving human nature weakened but intact, with concupiscence a consequence and occasion of sin rather than sin itself.¹¹ The Reformed objection, following the Reformation critique above, is twofold: first, treating original righteousness as a superadded extra rather than part of what it meant for Adam to be rightly constituted understates how thoroughgoing the Fall’s damage was; second, denying that concupiscence is itself sin does not fit Paul’s description of the “flesh” warring against the Spirit in the regenerate (Gal. 5:17), which the Reformed read as sin remaining, not merely sin’s harmless occasion.

Objections and Responses

Objection: it is unjust to hold anyone guilty for a sin committed before they existed. This is the deeper question of how Adam’s single act becomes each descendant’s own guilt, which this article does not attempt to settle in full; see imputation of Adam’s sin for the confessional answer. What belongs here is narrower: Scripture asserts the fact of inherited guilt and corruption, that people are born “children of wrath,” independently of any full explanation of its mechanism. Hodge makes this point against attempts to ground the doctrine in a pre-existent, personally-sinning soul: that explanation “presupposes the fact to be explained. The fact remains whatever becomes of the explanation.”¹⁷

Objection: an infant cannot voluntarily sin, so how can an infant be guilty? The confession’s answer is that original sin is not confined to voluntary acts of the individual; the corrupted nature itself, prior to any act, is “truly and properly sin,” and Adam’s guilt is imputed on the ground of his covenantal headship rather than each descendant’s personal choice.³ Whether that headship is fair to impute is the same question addressed above and treated fully under imputation of Adam’s sin.

Objection: the church cannot even agree how a sinful nature is transmitted (traducianism vs. creationism), so the doctrine must rest on speculation. Bavinck concedes the difficulty rather than papering over it: “Traducianism neither explains the origin of the soul nor the hereditary transmission of sin… traducianism is of no help because sin is not material, not a substance, but a moral quality, moral guilt, and moral corruption.”¹⁸ Creationism, which most Reformed, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox theologians have historically preferred over the Lutheran-favored traducianism,¹⁹ fares no better at explaining the mechanism; its advantage, in Bavinck’s judgment, is only that it “is prepared to leave this mystery alone and not attempt a spurious explanation.”²⁰ The doctrine of original sin itself, however, rests on Romans 5 and similar texts, not on either theory of the soul’s origin. The biblical claim does not wait on a settled metaphysics of transmission. The broader traducianism/creationism debate is treated in humanity.

Original sin

Confessional Definition

Biblical Basis

Historical Development

Alternative Views

Objections and Responses

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

Original sin

Definition

Confessional Definition

Biblical Basis

Historical Development

Alternative Views

Objections and Responses

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References