What is original sin?
Question 06074
The doctrine of original sin addresses one of the most basic questions in human experience: why do all people sin, and why is the world in the condition it is? The biblical answer traces everything back to a historical event in a real garden, with real consequences that have shaped every human life since.
The Historical Fall
The account of the Fall in Genesis 3 is not mythology or moral allegory. Adam and Eve were historical individuals, the literal progenitors of the entire human race, and what happened in Eden was a real event with real effects. God had given Adam a clear command: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17). Adam and Eve chose to disobey. The consequences were immediate and sweeping: spiritual death, broken relationship with God, the introduction of shame and fear, pain in childbearing, frustration in labour, and ultimately physical death. Paradise was lost, and humanity has been living east of Eden ever since.
This matters for reasons that go well beyond the historical event itself. Romans 5:12 draws the line of consequence directly: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” The universality of sin and death in human experience is traced to what Adam did. Adam was not acting merely for himself; he was acting as the representative head of the humanity that would descend from him.
What We Inherit
Original sin refers to the corrupted nature that every human being inherits as a consequence of Adam’s fall. This is not a guilt for someone else’s act arbitrarily pinned on people who had no say in the matter. Rather, we inherit from Adam a nature bent away from God and toward self – and because that nature is ours, we sin as a matter of course. David puts it plainly in Psalm 51:5: “in sin did my mother conceive me.” The condition is present from the very beginning of life, not something acquired later through imitation or environment.
The consequence of this inherited corruption is that all people sin. Romans 3:23 is unambiguous: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This is not an external judgement imposed on people who might otherwise be innocent; it describes what flows naturally from the kind of nature we all possess. Every person, left to themselves, chooses self over God, and that choice is their own.
Why This Is Not Unfair
The obvious objection is that it seems unjust to suffer consequences for something someone else did. The biblical response to this is not to minimise the concern but to point out that Adam’s act was representative in a way that is consistent with how God deals with humanity, and that the same representative principle that bound humanity to Adam’s failure also opens the way to salvation through Christ. Romans 5:15-19 presses the parallel deliberately: as sin and death came through one man’s failure, so righteousness and life come through the obedience of one man, Jesus Christ. The second Adam accomplishes what the first Adam ruined. The logic of representative headship that brings condemnation is the very same logic that makes redemption possible.
So, now what?
Original sin explains the human condition without excusing it. It accounts for why people are not merely unwell but guilty before God, and why the remedy requires something as radical as death and resurrection rather than education and moral effort. The good news is that the representative principle works in both directions: what was lost in Adam is more than recovered in Christ.
“For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Romans 5:19
