What is original sin?

Question 6074.

Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam’s fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It is one of the few Christian doctrines that can be confirmed by reading a newspaper.

The disagreements are not about whether something is wrong with us. They are about the mechanism. Does Adam’s guilt transfer directly to his descendants, or do we inherit a corrupted nature from which our own guilt then arises? I hold the second, and this article explains why the distinction within original sin matters.

The historical fall

Everything here depends on Genesis 3 being history rather than allegory. Adam and Eve were real people in a real garden facing a real prohibition, and their disobedience was a real event in space and time. Take that away and the doctrine of original sin collapses, along with a good deal else.

The consequences described are immediate and comprehensive. Shame enters, and they hide. Relationship fractures, and they blame. Pain, toil and death follow (Genesis 3:16-24). Access to the tree of life is cut off. Nothing in the account suggests a minor setback that could be repaired by better effort.

Luke traces the genealogy of Jesus back through David and Abraham to Adam without any change of register (Luke 3:38), and Jesus Himself grounds His teaching on marriage in the Genesis account as a record of what God actually did at the beginning. The historicity of the first man is not a detail we can quietly set aside while keeping the rest.

Paul treats Adam as historical throughout, and his argument in Romans 5 depends on it. If the first Adam is a symbol, the last Adam becomes a symbol too, and the whole structure of redemption dissolves. This is why I have no interest in accounts of original sin that begin by evacuating Genesis of history.

What Romans 5 actually says

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Romans 5:12). That verse is the foundation text for original sin, and the final clause is where the debate lives.

The Reformed reading takes because all sinned to mean that all sinned in Adam, so that his guilt is imputed directly to every descendant. On that view a newborn is already guilty of Adam’s transgression before committing any of his own. It is a coherent position held by serious people.

There is a grammatical point worth noting. The Greek phrase rendered because all sinned uses an aorist tense that most naturally describes actual sinning, and Paul has spent the previous three chapters proving in detail that every individual, Jew and Gentile, has in fact sinned. It would be strange to reach chapter five and discover he meant something quite different all along.

My reading is that Paul means what he says. Death spread to all because all sinned, that is, because all actually sinned, and all actually sinned because all inherited a nature bent towards it. The chain runs from Adam’s act, to our corrupted nature, to our own transgressions, to our guilt.

Why I do not hold to inherited guilt

The first reason is that Scripture never states it. The passages used to establish direct imputation require a good deal of inference, and a doctrine that assigns personal guilt to infants for an act committed millennia earlier ought to rest on something clearer than inference.

The second is Ezekiel 18, which addresses this precise question. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:20). God is dismantling a proverb about inherited guilt, and doing it emphatically. Any model of original sin that reinstates what Ezekiel abolishes needs a very strong warrant.

The third is that the alternative explains the evidence just as well. We do not need imputed guilt to account for universal sinfulness. A universally corrupted nature produces universal actual sin, which produces universal guilt, and nobody escapes because nobody has ever failed to sin once capable of it.

What we do inherit

We inherit corruption. David says he was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did his mother conceive him (Psalm 51:5). He is not accusing his mother of anything; he is describing the condition he entered the world in. The bent is there from the beginning.

We inherit death. Paul says that in Adam all die (1 Corinthians 15:22). Mortality is not a natural feature of humanity as created but a consequence introduced by the fall, and it comes to every descendant regardless of personal record.

We inherit a bias rather than a compulsion. That distinction matters. A person with an inherited tendency towards a particular weakness is not thereby forced to act on it in every instance, and Scripture holds people responsible for their choices throughout. What we cannot do is escape the pattern altogether over the course of a life.

And we inherit separation. Paul describes the unbeliever as by nature a child of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), using the language of a settled condition rather than an accumulated total. The doctrine of original sin is at bottom a description of that condition.

The evidence of experience

Nobody has to teach a child to lie. Parents teach honesty, sharing and kindness at considerable effort, and they never once have to teach selfishness. Whatever theory of original sin you hold, the observable data is not in dispute.

G. K. Chesterton observed that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified, and the century that followed his remark did nothing to weaken the claim. Every scheme for producing a new humanity by improving the environment has produced the old humanity with better equipment.

Scripture states the same thing without irony. There is none righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10-12). The Old Testament verdict before the flood was that every intention of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). This is not pessimism about people; it is realism about a species in the condition Genesis 3 describes.

Original sin and human dignity

It is worth saying firmly that original sin does not cancel the image of God. Human beings after the fall are still image bearers, and Genesis 9 grounds the prohibition of murder in that fact long after Eden (Genesis 9:6). The image is defaced rather than erased.

This is why I resist accounts of human nature that treat people as worthless. Fallen humanity still produces art, mercy, courage and sacrificial love. A mother who dies for her child is doing something genuinely good, and the doctrine does not require me to sneer at it.

What such goodness cannot do is save. Our best works are real goods within the natural sphere and are still incapable of establishing a standing before a holy God. Both halves of that sentence are part of a biblical account of original sin.

What about infants?

This is where the different models of original sin pull furthest apart. On a strict imputation view, an infant who dies is guilty of Adam’s transgression and requires a solution before the age of any personal act. On my view, an infant has a corrupted nature but has not yet committed personal sin.

David’s response to the death of his child points the same way. I shall go to him, but he will not return to me (2 Samuel 12:23). He speaks with settled confidence about seeing the child again, and nothing in the text suggests he is speculating.

I hold this with a degree of tentativeness, because Scripture does not address the question as directly as we would like. What I will not do is build a doctrine of infant baptism or infant damnation on a silence, and the pastoral cost of getting this wrong for a grieving family is very high.

So I hold, with most Baptists, that those who die before moral accountability are safe in the mercy of God through the work of Jesus. That is not because they were innocent in nature but because the atonement is genuinely unlimited in its provision, and God applies it justly.

Original sin and the will

Here I part company with the Reformed development of the doctrine. Corruption is real and pervasive. It affects intellect, will, affections and conscience, and there is no unfallen compartment left in us. That much I affirm without hesitation.

What I do not affirm is that the fall left human beings incapable of responding to the gospel unless first regenerated. The Spirit convicts the world concerning sin, righteousness and judgement (John 16:8-11). Jesus says that when He is lifted up He will draw all people to Himself (John 12:32). The initiative is entirely God’s, and the response is genuinely ours.

The difference between us is not about the seriousness of the fall. It is about whether God, having taken the initiative, leaves the creature a genuine response to make. I think Scripture assumes throughout that the summons to repent and believe is a real summons addressed to people who can answer it, and I have set out the wider case in how faith and repentance relate.

Faith precedes regeneration in my understanding, and original sin does not overturn that. God calls, convicts and draws, and the person who believes is then born again, justified and sealed. I have set out that order in what regeneration is.

The vocabulary of sin in Scripture

Hebrew uses three main words, and each adds something. Chata is missing the mark. Avon is crookedness or iniquity, something twisted out of shape. Pesha is rebellion, the deliberate breach of a relationship. Between them they describe failure, distortion and revolt.

The New Testament’s principal word is hamartia, again with the sense of missing the mark, alongside parabasis for transgression and paraptoma for a false step. Notice that the vocabulary describes both acts and condition, which is exactly what a doctrine of original sin requires.

Paul also uses the singular sin in Romans as something close to a personified power, a ruling force under which the unredeemed live (Romans 6:16-18). That usage sits alongside the plural sins for individual acts, and both are needed. One describes the master, the other the service rendered to him.

This range matters because it prevents us reducing sin to rule breaking. Sin is a condition producing acts, a distortion producing distortions, and a broken relationship producing further breaches. Any of those on its own would be an incomplete account.

Why this is not unfair

The objection is obvious. Why should I suffer for something Adam did? I would answer in three ways, and the first is that on my model you are not condemned for Adam’s act. You are condemned for your own, which arise from the nature you inherited.

The second is that you would have done the same. Adam sinned in the best conditions any human being has ever enjoyed, with one prohibition and perfect fellowship with God. Nobody reading this has a record that suggests they would have lasted longer.

The third is that the remedy is offered to all. Romans 5 sets Adam and Jesus side by side precisely so that the second solidarity can be seen to be wider and stronger than the first. As one trespass led to condemnation for all, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all (Romans 5:18).

The last Adam

The whole point of the doctrine is that it sets up the solution. Paul’s argument is not that we are ruined and that is the end of the matter. It is that what one man did to us, another Man has more than undone. The second Adam succeeded where the first failed, in far worse conditions.

That is why original sin is finally a hopeful doctrine rather than a gloomy one. It tells us that the problem is deeper than behaviour, which means the solution has to be deeper than reform. Nothing short of a new birth and a new standing will do, and both are offered freely.

Paul makes the comparison work by contrast as well as parallel. The free gift is not like the trespass, he says, because where the trespass multiplied, grace abounded all the more (Romans 5:15-20). The second solidarity is not a bare reversal of the first; it carries us further than Adam ever took us down, into a standing Adam never had.

It also tells us that the problem is universal, which means the offer is universal. Christ died for all (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). If the condition were partial, the offer could be partial. Because original sin is total in scope, so is the provision made for it.

What difference it makes

It changes how you view yourself. You are not fundamentally good with occasional lapses; you are fundamentally in need of rescue and have received it. That is more humbling and more freeing than the alternative, because it removes the pressure to maintain an image that was never true.

It changes how you view others. Nobody is a lost cause and nobody is beyond needing grace. The doctrine of original sin levels the ground so thoroughly that contempt becomes impossible to sustain honestly.

It also changes how you read your own children. Parents who expect innocence are baffled by the first act of deliberate defiance and often take it personally. Parents who understand the doctrine are neither shocked nor despairing, and they can train a child honestly rather than trying to preserve an innocence that was never there.

And it changes how you view society. Every scheme that assumes people will behave well if the structures are right will disappoint, because the trouble is not in the structures alone. Good structures are worth building, and they will not produce a new humanity. Only God does that.

So, now what?

If you have never faced the diagnosis, face it. original sin is not an insult; it is an explanation, and it accounts for what you already know about yourself in the quiet hours. Pretending otherwise has never made anyone better.

If you have faced it and are in Christ, stop being surprised by your own capacity for sin. You were saved as a sinner, not as a promising candidate, and the shock you feel at your own failures often comes from a view of yourself the gospel never endorsed.

And take the second Adam as seriously as the first. What Adam did shaped you without your consent. What Jesus did is offered to you and waits on your response. Which of those two solidarities are you living in today?

For Further Study

Readers who want to take original sin further will find Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology a clear starting point from a dispensational position, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology sets out the historic options with unusual fairness. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology remains valuable for its careful separation of what Scripture states from what systems infer, and Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image is worth reading even where I part company with his conclusions. For the wider dispensational framework, J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord both repay the effort, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is helpful on the Hebrew background.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

Romans 5:12, ESV