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According to this doctrine everyone is born with ‘original sin’ and therefore everyone needs to be redeemed by the sacrificial and atoning death of Christ. But what exactly is ‘original sin’ and in what does redemption, or liberation, from ‘original sin’ consist?
Introduction. The doctrine of original sin which refers to the ‘morally vitiated condition in which we find ourselves at birth as members of a sinful race’1 is commonly regarded as one of the most difficult parts of Christian theology.
Rather than examine and discuss the concept of original sin as set forth by Augustine and others, this paper looks at what sin is and what was the first or original sin in the Garden (Genesis 3). Using Scripture, narrative, personal experience, and the gift of human reasoning, we find that the original sin in the Garden was not what many ...
In this spirit, the question was often asked if the generalization of infant baptism in the West (5th century), but also in the East (6th century), was influenced by the theory of “original sin” and the Augustinian “bogeyman” concerning the inevitable condemnation to hell of all who die unbaptized.
The fact that Scripture declares the universal need of atonement (John 3:16; Acts 4:12), of regeneration (John 3:3,5), and of repentance (Acts 17:30) also indicates that sin is universal. An additional proof is the fact that all persons are subject to death, the penalty for sin (Rom 6:23).
For Luther, sin does not mean only the external act of the body, but first of all the internal movement of the heart. In its depth it is like a root, that nourishes the whole tree – a clear allusion to Mt. 17,7 appears here. According to Luther, there is only one real sin, and that is the “original sin”, as the root sin of the “heart”.
Here I consider two aspects of the west-ern church’s traditional doctrine of original sin.1 The first is the sinful con-dition in which each human life begins, peccatum originale originatum, “original sin as originated.”
