Original sin

I got nailed by my Sunday School class yesterday. It happened like this…

I was doing my part-time duty teaching Adult Sunday school and we were studying Psalm 51. When we got to the verse “in sin did my mother conceive me”, I asked whether David was expressing the depth of his sin (much as Job expressed the depth of his suffering by cursing the day of his birth) or whether this was a statement about “Original Sin”. (I should have been better prepared, but…) I defined Original sin as an inherited guilt from Adam which is removed by Baptism and then I went on to stick my foot in it by describing the doctrine as “Catholic” (which, it is). After which the good Lutherans in the class said this was Lutheran belief also. “Really?” My class then reminded me that (as an ex-Southern Baptist) I had never gone through Catechism.

So properly put in my place, I’ve poured through the Book of Concord and read extensively about Original Sin yesterday and today. Having studied these texts, I am left with one question I need to answer before class next week and another question for myself.

The first question deals technically with what Original Sin is. The reformers use the word “inherited” for Original Sin and then go on to talk about a human being being born without righteousness or the power to become so. What I wish to know, for the class, is whether original sin means that Adam sinned and was thereby transformed from a righteous person to an unrighteous person, and that trait has been inherited by all of his children, or whether the guilt of his particular sin is imputed to all of his descendents. I know the reformers teach the former, but I’m not sure about the latter.

The second question deals with my own encounter with the teaching. I gained a rather negative view of the idea of Original Sin (as I quoted it to my class up in the first paragraph) when I saw the theological knots it caused the Catholics who tried to answer the question of how Jesus avoided original sin (leading them to some strange [IMO] ideas about the Virgin Mary and formally to doctrine of the Immaculate Conception).

Now I fully appreciate that a bent towards sinning is universal among human beings and we cannot save ourselves from sin and death. But what does original sin mean if one believes (as I do) that Adam was not a historical person, and that (as all biologists do) that acquired traits are not inherited. If we cannot blame our sinful nature on a real historical Adam, then does that say (what the reformers denied) that mankind was created sinful? If the answer to that question is “no”, then how can I affirm original sin, either as inherited guilt or as pre-installed unrighteousness?

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Cursing of the Fig Tree

Someone said to me:

There’s a big difference between Jesus saying something figuratively and doing something figuratively. Next time I have to wash the dishes I think I will do it figuratively. It should be just as effective eh??

Here’s one example of what I think is a parable turned into a literal event in the Gospels: the incident of the cursing of the fig tree [Mat. 21:19 ff. // Mark 11:13]

You know the story…Jesus sees a fig tree with no fruit, curses it, tree is withered.

It only looks literal in a narrow context. The parable appears 3 times in the Gospels: Matthew 21:19, Mark 11:13 and Luke 13:6. Now I know that the Luke story starts “then he told them a parable” while the others say “Jesus did…”. But that in itself is not strange when you think about how often the early Christian community wrote their beliefs about Jesus into actions in his life.

In Mark and Matthew, the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem and routing the money changers appears in the middle of the story about the fig tree. (Both Gospels have one fig story and one Jerusalem story. Luke also has one fig story and one Jerusalem story — only they aren’t together. ) Continue reading

Posted in Bible | Leave a comment

Marx’s Criticism of Feuerbach and Its Application to Kierkegaard

Karl Marx has a clearly expressed critique of Ludwig Feuerbach; this critique is contained in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” Of course there is no expressed criticism by Marx of Søren Kierkegaard since Marx was not familiar with Kierkegaard’s works. But it is still of interest to compare the two viewpoints in light of the important influence of these two philosophers on modern theology. In this paper I will review Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach and discuss their application (if any) to Kierkegaard. I hope to show that the criticisms do not apply.

Marx’s first criticism of Feuerbach (Marx: I, II, V, IX) is that Feuerbach did not conceive of the reality of human sensuous activity. Feuerbach’s analysis of Christianity is essentially a passive one (i.e. contemplative, and psychological (Feuerbach, xxxv), and it is clearly stated that for him, the relation between thought and matter is a passive one.) Hence, even if thought and ideas are not mechanistically determined, material relations are–since man can do nothing in response (activity). For Feuerbach then, the objects of the senses are objectively real as objects of contemplation, but not the human activity. Feuerbach could not account for the reality of a revolution. Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment