Perhaps somewhat tangentially related, but I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for a more philosophical approach to soteriology? I find Reformed debates on this matter can sometimes skew Biblicist and contain lots of hidden assumptions about causality in particular. It seems to me as if a lot of the questions regarding Calvinism (in the particular the work of God in regeneration) are actually about whether secondary causes exist, and in what we manner we can speak of God's unique work versus his ordinary upholding of all things.
Anyone who believes that children are innocent has never looked after a three-year-old. Selfishness is ingrained in human nature. It leads to universal conflict with God, Man, and the Self. It cannot be an original flaw since God does not make junk. It must be a property of the Fall. The denial of this characteristic of human nature has led to the Enlightenment's ideas of the inherent goodness of humanity and the rise of Secular Humanism. If Man is basically good, then we only require the proper circumstances to express that goodness. The State has been trying to effect those circumstances for centuries, always failing because the disease in human nature exists, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not.
The question is the meaning of “ingrained in human nature.” if something is ingrained in my nature, I am innocent of having put it there. There is also an explanation, and possibly even an excuse, for the behavior that results.
Pelagius thought that nothing was ingrained in our nature. All was caused by our free will.
I believe the Augustinian position is to hold that sin is ingrained in our nature, and therefore that not all sin is due to our free will. And I believe this should soften our understanding of our fellow sinners. And of children. ;)
I see “sin” in two definitions . There are the sins we commit, the separate acts of disobedience in violation of our conscience. And there is the capital “s” Sin which is the quirk in our nature that is a result of the Fall. The second leads to the first. Even If we are “innocent” of the second, we cannot plead innocence of the first. The Sin in our nature gives us the suggestion of a certain pathway and we choose to follow it.
One of the reasons, I love your Substack is that you ask fantastic questions. This piece is no different.
When I first became a Calvinist, Romans 9 was the driving passage (sidenote: It no longer is). But I'll never forget hanging out with some reformed Baptist bro's along with an older married childless women. The conversation went to the fate of infants in the womb. 2 of the guys said that infants clearly went to hell, because of their sin nature. The woman got very angry, and proclaimed that God wouldn't do that! Things got heated, but even as a socially inexperienced 22 year old, I recognized that there was a personal story undergirding her anger which the others were not considering.
As I reflected on it later that night, I realized that Romans 9's point that God chooses people without respect to their merit, is dependent upon the point that Jacob and Esau had done nothing either good OR bad. To say that God saves someone from the womb without merit would imply that if God damns someone in the womb then it is ALSO without merit (which we know that God does not do). You can't have it both ways.
Thanks for the compliment, Sid! That is very encouraging.
That anecdote perfectly summarizes the kind of theology I’m trying to do. My hunch is that the error of the Theo-bro is not only to be to intellectualisc; it is not to be theological enough. Christian theology must equally be humane, taking in the experiences of the woman who has seen the suffering of life, miscarried, etc.
For those who worship the God who became man, our theology, cannot be lacking in its anthropology.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. However, I'd like to take exception to something.
You describe the Catholic doctrine of original sin in this way: "Original sin is nothing but the loss of the superadded gift. It does not include any defect in human nature or newly sinful disposition or desires. It means being returned to a state of pure human nature."
Unfortunately, I don't think this is wholly accurate: "nothing but...". There's an important nuance that must be observed, namely, the formal and material elements of original sin.
As St. Thomas teaches:
"Accordingly the privation of original justice, whereby the will was made subject to God, is the formal element in original sin; while every other disorder of the soul's powers, is a kind of material element in respect of original sin. Now the inordinateness of the other powers of the soul consists chiefly in their turning inordinately to mutable good; which inordinateness may be called by the general name of concupiscence. Hence original sin is concupiscence, materially, but privation of original justice, formally" (ST I-II, 82, 3, resp.).
Therefore, the loss of what we now call sanctifying grace and the corruption of nature are traditionally connected and together regarded as original sin.
The most magisterial statement concerning original sin, promulgated by the Council of Trent, adopts precisely this perspective, albeit in less exact and more dramatic terms:
"If anyone does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he transgressed the commandment of God in paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and through the offense of that prevarication incurred the wrath and indignation of god, and thus death with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam through that offense of prevarication was changed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema" (Decree on Original Sin, 1).
Thus original sin entails principally the loss of "holiness and justice" (i.e., sanctifying grace), but secondarily, and necessarily, and simultaneously, the comprehensive corruption, disintegration, and disturbance of our nature, as well as a default position of variance with God and subjection to Satan.
This follows to reason, of course, since our sanctification consists of the reverse: first, the justification of the soul, and then, subsequently, and on account thereof, the integration and exaltation of our nature, i.e., the glorification of the body.
Thanks, Philip! I appreciate the clarification. I wrote a paper you can find on academia.edu about Aquinas’s anthropology, and I especially appreciate his account of the four wounds to human nature.
However, metaphysically, the position is still that just by losing the superadded gift, human nature devolves into this wounded state. That is why I, with other Reformed theologians, think it is insufficient. Though, I think Aquinas’s position is closer to the Reformed one, and Bellarmine’s is more the one that is in the Catholic Catechism.
What about the idea of "Original Ignorance" which blends the Christian idea of original sin with the Buddhist concept of avijjā (ignorance) pointing to a deep, inherited misperception—a forgetting of our true nature and connection to the Divine. Rather than guilt, it suggests we are born into the unknown both existentially and psychologically.
This concept honors the Christian insight that something is fundamentally misaligned in the human condition, while remaining fully compatible with evolutionary theory. It frames our disconnection not as inherited guilt, but as a natural stage in the development of consciousness—where the emerging self identifies with ego and survival patterns obscure deeper truths. In doing so, Original Ignorance makes space for both spiritual and scientific understandings of how we grow, suffer, and awaken.
I’m sympathetic to this! I think there is a lot of truth in Socrates’ idea that sin comes from ignorance.
However, I believe that, to be sin, it must be willful ignorance. In some sense, the essence of sin is to will contrary to the good, even with if you have knowledge of the good. Hence, Aquinas says that sin has its seat in the will, and affects the intellect secondarily.
I appreciate that distinction, and Aquinas’ emphasis on the will is certainly significant within the Christian moral tradition. Still, I wonder if that framework fully accounts for the layered nature of ignorance and agency.
Often what we call “willful” may still be rooted in deeper, unconscious patterns—habits of perception shaped long before conscious volition. In that sense, the will is already entangled in ignorance. It moves forward in a cloud lacking clarity of vision.
“Original Ignorance” tries to name that primordial misperception—that confusion that gives rise to both our disordered loves and our limited vision. I don’t want to deny culpability but invite compassion for the complexity of human motivation. Even when we seem to “know” the good, our knowledge is shallow—propositional rather than embodied—and thus easily overridden by fear, craving, life, etc.
I think it’s the right needle to thread! I’m opposed to the idea that all sinners have a “unbelieving worldview.” Some of those at my seminary have argued that you cannot distinguish between the will and the intellect in sin, and that that supports the idea that non-Christians can have no knowledge of God or morality. That pushes me in the direction of carefully, insisting that sin is primarily about the will.
However, by trying to thread the needle, we have to begin to grapple with the nature of self deception. Self deception always includes ignorance as a moment, but one that is proceeded by perception and awareness of what is there. Self deception involves hiding from ourselves with is already on a deeper level evident to us.
Hi Joel, I greatly appreciate the concerns motivating this piece and your work in general. Philosophy is unfairly maligned in the contemporary Reformed world, and we must be open to reasoning about these matters outside of exegesis. However, I think there are several important problems with your argument here.
As you imply, the niceness (for lack of a better word) of Zwingli’s position, relative to that of the broader tradition’s is a marginal but genuine advantage and would justify its adoption if all else were held equal between the two positions.
However, as you note in the article, Calvin, the Westminster Confessions, and “Reformed theologians generally,” held that original sin is a source of guilt. The Reformed tradition (or if you prefer, the “post-Zwinglian tradition”) includes an overwhelming precedent against Zwingli’s position. Any argument for Zwingli’s position within the Reformed tradition, therefore, is seriously disadvantaged, and would need to be very strong in order to succeed.
It is not clear what the timeline does to mitigate this burden. He was indeed operating for a couple decades before Calvin, however, his tenure pales in comparison to the over five-hundred years that the tradition has held the contrary opinion since, and his is one voice against the thousands of Reformed theologians who followed him.
The arguments you present do not appear to overcome the tradition’s precedent.
First, you argue with Zwingli that the phrase “original sin (OS)” is a metonymy and that therefore OS is in fact not sin at all. This is because, in your shared view, sin must be a freely chosen action in order to incur guilt, a view that also excludes the desire to sin, which you identify as “temptation,” from being sin.
All of this comes out to an interesting view of sin and temptation, but does nothing to show why it should be accepted. Yes, if we assume guilt must follow from individual free choice, then OS would be a metonymy, but why should we believe this? In its current form, this argument is an example of question begging.
Second, you point out that OS is in some sense a change to human nature, akin to a disease like blindness, which is added to it and inhibits its functioning as perfectly good. This point simply seems to be a continuation of your earlier one, and I’m not really sure what it adds argumentatively. Putting the issue of its argumentative force aside, it is nearly identical to the traditional view of the matter.
Although this point is obscured in more contemporary Reformed accounts of sin and human nature, Calvin is quite clear about their relationship in his Institutes. He writes that human nature, in the precise philosophical sense, must be perfectly good as it was created by God, and thus to demean it in any way borders on blasphemy. The Fall does not, strictly speaking, change this human nature, but controls its expression in human thought and action. Due to man’s fallen will, his nature does not manifest in concrete terms as it should.
Much like a metonymy, Calvin often uses “human nature” in a looser, more figurative way, to mean the state of man after the Fall and afflicted with OS. Man’s “sin nature,” as subsequent authors have referred to it, is not actually man’s nature, but the language of “nature” is useful to highlight the fact that OS is universal to, and (in this life) inextricable from, the human person. For the purposes of most discussions, man’s Fallen will might as well be included in his nature.
As I said at the outset, I greatly appreciate your vision and share many of your concerns. However, I believe your work would be more effective if you attended more closely to the ideas you hope to challenge. Anyway, I hope that if my criticisms here succeed that they aid you in refining your project rather than being a source of unhelpful discouragement. I disagree with some of the particular positions that you defend but I want your broader project to succeed in improving the Reformed discourse on ethics and theology.
This is sloppy, so I apologize, but I want to add a few things to make my initial reply clearer.
There is reason to think that someone would be guilty/damnable outside of their freely chosen action. If we accept the teleological ethic laid out in WSC question one, i.e., that human beings have a “chief end,” then we can draw a (very limited) analogy using tools. For example, if I were to buy a saw to cut wood, but it ends up being too dull to do so, then it has failed, although not by its free choice or even its action.
Under such an understanding, it is more evident why desires can be sins, as the traditional view holds. Even a desire that is not chosen could still be a major deviation from human purpose. Perhaps this why (not to get too exegetical) Jesus seems identify desires as sins along with their corresponding actions in the Beatitudes, for example, “But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mathew 5:28).” I believe this is also clear in reference to God, His moral perfection would seems to include freedom from the desire to sin, and would diminished if He experienced such desire.
Following this line of thought, I believe temptation would refer more to the occasion or opportunity to sin rather than the desire to. The two classic examples of temptation in scripture would seem to attest to this. Satan does not directly implant desire in Eve in the garden, or Christ in the desert, through some kind of mind control; instead, he speaks to them, offering them an attractive opportunity.
On a separate note, I presented Calvin’s model of human nature and original sin as an answer to your point about our nature being invulnerable to our wills. As Calvin writes, our will cannot and does not change our nature itself, but forces our nature to be filtered (so to speak) through a totally corrupt will, greatly impacting how it manifests in our thoughts and actions. It seems that this may be an even more radical elevation of human nature’s integrity than Zwingli’s.
"Now, seeing that they admit the necessity of baptizing infants,—finding themselves unable to contravene that authority of the universal Church, which has been unquestionably handed down by the Lord and His apostles,—they cannot avoid the further concession, that infants require the same benefits of the Mediator, in order that, being washed by the sacrament and charity of the faithful, and thereby incorporated into the body of Christ, which is the Church, they may be reconciled to God, and so live in Him, and be saved, and delivered, and redeemed, and enlightened. But from what, if not from death, and the vices, and guilt, and thraldom, and darkness of sin? And, inasmuch as they do not commit any sin in the tender age of infancy by their actual transgression, original sin only is left."
-Augustine, A treatise on the merits and forgiveness of sins and on the baptism of infants, Book 1, section 39
The Reformed rightly baptize infants, and people are baptized for having committed sin. You may object that Jesus was baptized and committed no sin. In answer, I would say that Jesus was baptized because he was acting in the stead of sinners, and as an example to them. If no sin had been committed by the people he was dying for, no baptism (and no death, of course) would have been necessary. But Jesus is a weird case in so many ways that I don't think he is an appropriate example. Baptism is for the forgiveness of sins, if one reads Romans 6 or most of the other descriptions of baptism given in the New Testament. The testimony of the actual practice of the Church is a very strong reason to believe that original sin is actually sin. As for the linguistic distinction you make, I have a feeling the actual/original distinction uses actual in an Aristotelian sense of act and potency rather than in the sense you use it, and I would not say that potency is non-actual, otherwise it couldn't have any effect on the world, and its ability to effect the world is kind of a defining feature. I do not know the exact history of the phrase "actual sin," so I may be mistaken in this. Regardless, I prefer Calvin's use of "sin" to describe original sin and "fruits of sin" to describe actual sins.
And regardless of the Reformed position on the matter, the Lutheran position has never been in dispute.
"1] Also they teach that since the fall of Adam all men begotten in the natural way are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with 2] concupiscence; and that this disease, or vice of origin, is truly sin, even now condemning and bringing eternal death upon those not born again through Baptism and the Holy Ghost."
- Augsburg Confession, Article 2
And this position does not seem contrary to reason to me. That guilt requires action is not self-evident. Consider, for instance, a rational being which is by nature evil and destructive. Such a creature is conceivable. It is not entirely evil, for that is impossible, but its will is so corrupted that it has no hope of escaping its natural state. Arguably, the devil is such a being. Myth and fantasy also give us a plethora of such creatures. Consider, for instance, the vampire. Upon being bitten, a vampire is an offensive creature, whose very nature requires it to sin and destroy. Its nature is so corrupted that it is beyond hope. Do we not rightly say that the nature of the vampire is guilty from the moment it comes into being? If it wasn't, it would not be permissible to destroy it the moment it comes into being, since it is wrong to destroy rational creatures who have not yet done anything wrong. The reason it is guilty is not any action it commits, since it is offensive from the moment it comes into being, but because it is just naturally guilty. Its nature is so corrupted that its existence is incompatible with a rightly ordered world.
Or, as another example, consider the orc. Extirpating orcs from the earth would not be genocide, down to even killing new-born infant orcs, because orcs are unredeemable by nature, at least according to my interpretation of Tolkien, and things that are by nature unredeemable ought to be destroyed. Luckily, even under original sin, man is not that far gone, since he is still redeemable. But he is also still guilty, on reasoning similar to that of the infant orc or newly bitten vampire.
You may object that we only destroy these kinds of creatures because they are destructive. If we don't do so, they will destroy us as soon as they are able to do so. The answer to this objection is to consider a creature which has the ineradicable desire to do every evil which a vampire or orc does, but is incapable by nature of actually achieving them, say because it is imprisoned in an inescapable trap of some sort, or because it has no means of influencing the external world. I would argue that the creature in question still ought to be destroyed at the moment of its creation, even though it is incapable of doing anything to anyone and has yet to even actively desire to do any evil. You may not agree with this, but I think it is at least a reasonable idea, and all I am trying to demonstrate is that it is not obvious that guilt requires action.
Thanks Matthew! The trouble is twofold: On the one hand, man is not a vampire or an orc. Scripture presents Mann as redeemable and not inherently evil in this way.
OTOH , even orcs on this account are not to blame for the condition of their nature. We could imagine an extension of Gandalf and Bilbo‘s pity for Gollum that extended to the orcs.
I think this applies to humans, where the worst criminals, we now discover to be psychopathic. That is, their minds are different in significant ways. Terrible and terrifying as it is to admit, they are not to blame for being born that way. This does not mean that the full force of the law should not punish them for doing evil. However, it does mean that we cannot judge the full moral analysis. For the psychopath to only commit one murder might be evidence of his moral effort, not to commit several more. There’s something in CS Lewis to that effect.
I agree with you that man is not a vampire or an orc. He is redeemable. But if we agree that it is possible to be guilty without action, then it is conceivable that man may be guilty without action. But you seem to think that it is obvious that there can be no guilt without action.
No, I don’t agree that we can be guilty for something that is not an action. I do believe in the possibility, and probably the reality of imputed guilt, without which original sin seems unjust. We are imputed guilty for Adam‘s first sin, and on that basis, we inherit original sin.
But for the sake of argument, I am considering Tolkien’s‘s universe, where you have or that are irredeemable. By contrast, I think Tolkien would want us to treat the worst sinner the way Bilbo treated Gollum.
I agree that we should treat the worst human sinner with compassion, because it is always possible that they could be redeemed. And even if they cannot be redeemed, failing to treat them with as much compassion as possible will make us worse people then we would otherwise be. Even if it is necessary to kill every orc, we should not rejoice in doing so.
This thought experiment was mainly a way of showing why I do not think it obvious that sin requires action. Why do you think it obvious that there can be no guilt without action? It is not obvious to me, and you don't argue for it, since you seem to believe it is just common sense.
Also, because I am having an OCD attack that you might misinterpret what I am saying, I will comment that this is a thought experiment meant to argue that it is conceivable to have guilt without action. It is not an attempt to argue that some people are so irredeemable that they should just be killed. I am just arguing that it is conceivable that a being might exist who is so naturally evil that it ought to be destroyed immediately upon its creation, apart from any action it engages in, not that such a being actually exists. If such a being is conceivable, it argues against the view that it is obvious that guilt requires action.
Not to worry, I understand what you’re getting at! One example would be that people who want to argue that desire is sin frequently argue that our will is somehow involved in desire. The theologian Van Mastricht argues this, and Bavinck basically does as well. That reveals their suppressed adherence to the same principle.
Otherwise, the question would be guilty for what? The notion of guilt has its home in the legal context. There it is for crimes. For a state of being we can imagine a stain or a shameful condition. But I don’t see how the notion of guilt applies to something that is not an action. (Of course, again, we could all be imputed guilty, but that would be guilt for Adam‘s action.)
Perhaps somewhat tangentially related, but I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for a more philosophical approach to soteriology? I find Reformed debates on this matter can sometimes skew Biblicist and contain lots of hidden assumptions about causality in particular. It seems to me as if a lot of the questions regarding Calvinism (in the particular the work of God in regeneration) are actually about whether secondary causes exist, and in what we manner we can speak of God's unique work versus his ordinary upholding of all things.
Anyone who believes that children are innocent has never looked after a three-year-old. Selfishness is ingrained in human nature. It leads to universal conflict with God, Man, and the Self. It cannot be an original flaw since God does not make junk. It must be a property of the Fall. The denial of this characteristic of human nature has led to the Enlightenment's ideas of the inherent goodness of humanity and the rise of Secular Humanism. If Man is basically good, then we only require the proper circumstances to express that goodness. The State has been trying to effect those circumstances for centuries, always failing because the disease in human nature exists, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not.
The question is the meaning of “ingrained in human nature.” if something is ingrained in my nature, I am innocent of having put it there. There is also an explanation, and possibly even an excuse, for the behavior that results.
Pelagius thought that nothing was ingrained in our nature. All was caused by our free will.
I believe the Augustinian position is to hold that sin is ingrained in our nature, and therefore that not all sin is due to our free will. And I believe this should soften our understanding of our fellow sinners. And of children. ;)
I see “sin” in two definitions . There are the sins we commit, the separate acts of disobedience in violation of our conscience. And there is the capital “s” Sin which is the quirk in our nature that is a result of the Fall. The second leads to the first. Even If we are “innocent” of the second, we cannot plead innocence of the first. The Sin in our nature gives us the suggestion of a certain pathway and we choose to follow it.
One of the reasons, I love your Substack is that you ask fantastic questions. This piece is no different.
When I first became a Calvinist, Romans 9 was the driving passage (sidenote: It no longer is). But I'll never forget hanging out with some reformed Baptist bro's along with an older married childless women. The conversation went to the fate of infants in the womb. 2 of the guys said that infants clearly went to hell, because of their sin nature. The woman got very angry, and proclaimed that God wouldn't do that! Things got heated, but even as a socially inexperienced 22 year old, I recognized that there was a personal story undergirding her anger which the others were not considering.
As I reflected on it later that night, I realized that Romans 9's point that God chooses people without respect to their merit, is dependent upon the point that Jacob and Esau had done nothing either good OR bad. To say that God saves someone from the womb without merit would imply that if God damns someone in the womb then it is ALSO without merit (which we know that God does not do). You can't have it both ways.
Thanks for the compliment, Sid! That is very encouraging.
That anecdote perfectly summarizes the kind of theology I’m trying to do. My hunch is that the error of the Theo-bro is not only to be to intellectualisc; it is not to be theological enough. Christian theology must equally be humane, taking in the experiences of the woman who has seen the suffering of life, miscarried, etc.
For those who worship the God who became man, our theology, cannot be lacking in its anthropology.
Joel,
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. However, I'd like to take exception to something.
You describe the Catholic doctrine of original sin in this way: "Original sin is nothing but the loss of the superadded gift. It does not include any defect in human nature or newly sinful disposition or desires. It means being returned to a state of pure human nature."
Unfortunately, I don't think this is wholly accurate: "nothing but...". There's an important nuance that must be observed, namely, the formal and material elements of original sin.
As St. Thomas teaches:
"Accordingly the privation of original justice, whereby the will was made subject to God, is the formal element in original sin; while every other disorder of the soul's powers, is a kind of material element in respect of original sin. Now the inordinateness of the other powers of the soul consists chiefly in their turning inordinately to mutable good; which inordinateness may be called by the general name of concupiscence. Hence original sin is concupiscence, materially, but privation of original justice, formally" (ST I-II, 82, 3, resp.).
Therefore, the loss of what we now call sanctifying grace and the corruption of nature are traditionally connected and together regarded as original sin.
The most magisterial statement concerning original sin, promulgated by the Council of Trent, adopts precisely this perspective, albeit in less exact and more dramatic terms:
"If anyone does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he transgressed the commandment of God in paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and through the offense of that prevarication incurred the wrath and indignation of god, and thus death with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam through that offense of prevarication was changed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema" (Decree on Original Sin, 1).
Thus original sin entails principally the loss of "holiness and justice" (i.e., sanctifying grace), but secondarily, and necessarily, and simultaneously, the comprehensive corruption, disintegration, and disturbance of our nature, as well as a default position of variance with God and subjection to Satan.
This follows to reason, of course, since our sanctification consists of the reverse: first, the justification of the soul, and then, subsequently, and on account thereof, the integration and exaltation of our nature, i.e., the glorification of the body.
Best,
Philip
Thanks, Philip! I appreciate the clarification. I wrote a paper you can find on academia.edu about Aquinas’s anthropology, and I especially appreciate his account of the four wounds to human nature.
However, metaphysically, the position is still that just by losing the superadded gift, human nature devolves into this wounded state. That is why I, with other Reformed theologians, think it is insufficient. Though, I think Aquinas’s position is closer to the Reformed one, and Bellarmine’s is more the one that is in the Catholic Catechism.
What about the idea of "Original Ignorance" which blends the Christian idea of original sin with the Buddhist concept of avijjā (ignorance) pointing to a deep, inherited misperception—a forgetting of our true nature and connection to the Divine. Rather than guilt, it suggests we are born into the unknown both existentially and psychologically.
This concept honors the Christian insight that something is fundamentally misaligned in the human condition, while remaining fully compatible with evolutionary theory. It frames our disconnection not as inherited guilt, but as a natural stage in the development of consciousness—where the emerging self identifies with ego and survival patterns obscure deeper truths. In doing so, Original Ignorance makes space for both spiritual and scientific understandings of how we grow, suffer, and awaken.
I’m sympathetic to this! I think there is a lot of truth in Socrates’ idea that sin comes from ignorance.
However, I believe that, to be sin, it must be willful ignorance. In some sense, the essence of sin is to will contrary to the good, even with if you have knowledge of the good. Hence, Aquinas says that sin has its seat in the will, and affects the intellect secondarily.
I appreciate that distinction, and Aquinas’ emphasis on the will is certainly significant within the Christian moral tradition. Still, I wonder if that framework fully accounts for the layered nature of ignorance and agency.
Often what we call “willful” may still be rooted in deeper, unconscious patterns—habits of perception shaped long before conscious volition. In that sense, the will is already entangled in ignorance. It moves forward in a cloud lacking clarity of vision.
“Original Ignorance” tries to name that primordial misperception—that confusion that gives rise to both our disordered loves and our limited vision. I don’t want to deny culpability but invite compassion for the complexity of human motivation. Even when we seem to “know” the good, our knowledge is shallow—propositional rather than embodied—and thus easily overridden by fear, craving, life, etc.
Thinking out loud here…trying to thread a needle.
I think it’s the right needle to thread! I’m opposed to the idea that all sinners have a “unbelieving worldview.” Some of those at my seminary have argued that you cannot distinguish between the will and the intellect in sin, and that that supports the idea that non-Christians can have no knowledge of God or morality. That pushes me in the direction of carefully, insisting that sin is primarily about the will.
However, by trying to thread the needle, we have to begin to grapple with the nature of self deception. Self deception always includes ignorance as a moment, but one that is proceeded by perception and awareness of what is there. Self deception involves hiding from ourselves with is already on a deeper level evident to us.
Hi Joel, I greatly appreciate the concerns motivating this piece and your work in general. Philosophy is unfairly maligned in the contemporary Reformed world, and we must be open to reasoning about these matters outside of exegesis. However, I think there are several important problems with your argument here.
As you imply, the niceness (for lack of a better word) of Zwingli’s position, relative to that of the broader tradition’s is a marginal but genuine advantage and would justify its adoption if all else were held equal between the two positions.
However, as you note in the article, Calvin, the Westminster Confessions, and “Reformed theologians generally,” held that original sin is a source of guilt. The Reformed tradition (or if you prefer, the “post-Zwinglian tradition”) includes an overwhelming precedent against Zwingli’s position. Any argument for Zwingli’s position within the Reformed tradition, therefore, is seriously disadvantaged, and would need to be very strong in order to succeed.
It is not clear what the timeline does to mitigate this burden. He was indeed operating for a couple decades before Calvin, however, his tenure pales in comparison to the over five-hundred years that the tradition has held the contrary opinion since, and his is one voice against the thousands of Reformed theologians who followed him.
The arguments you present do not appear to overcome the tradition’s precedent.
First, you argue with Zwingli that the phrase “original sin (OS)” is a metonymy and that therefore OS is in fact not sin at all. This is because, in your shared view, sin must be a freely chosen action in order to incur guilt, a view that also excludes the desire to sin, which you identify as “temptation,” from being sin.
All of this comes out to an interesting view of sin and temptation, but does nothing to show why it should be accepted. Yes, if we assume guilt must follow from individual free choice, then OS would be a metonymy, but why should we believe this? In its current form, this argument is an example of question begging.
Second, you point out that OS is in some sense a change to human nature, akin to a disease like blindness, which is added to it and inhibits its functioning as perfectly good. This point simply seems to be a continuation of your earlier one, and I’m not really sure what it adds argumentatively. Putting the issue of its argumentative force aside, it is nearly identical to the traditional view of the matter.
Although this point is obscured in more contemporary Reformed accounts of sin and human nature, Calvin is quite clear about their relationship in his Institutes. He writes that human nature, in the precise philosophical sense, must be perfectly good as it was created by God, and thus to demean it in any way borders on blasphemy. The Fall does not, strictly speaking, change this human nature, but controls its expression in human thought and action. Due to man’s fallen will, his nature does not manifest in concrete terms as it should.
Much like a metonymy, Calvin often uses “human nature” in a looser, more figurative way, to mean the state of man after the Fall and afflicted with OS. Man’s “sin nature,” as subsequent authors have referred to it, is not actually man’s nature, but the language of “nature” is useful to highlight the fact that OS is universal to, and (in this life) inextricable from, the human person. For the purposes of most discussions, man’s Fallen will might as well be included in his nature.
As I said at the outset, I greatly appreciate your vision and share many of your concerns. However, I believe your work would be more effective if you attended more closely to the ideas you hope to challenge. Anyway, I hope that if my criticisms here succeed that they aid you in refining your project rather than being a source of unhelpful discouragement. I disagree with some of the particular positions that you defend but I want your broader project to succeed in improving the Reformed discourse on ethics and theology.
This is sloppy, so I apologize, but I want to add a few things to make my initial reply clearer.
There is reason to think that someone would be guilty/damnable outside of their freely chosen action. If we accept the teleological ethic laid out in WSC question one, i.e., that human beings have a “chief end,” then we can draw a (very limited) analogy using tools. For example, if I were to buy a saw to cut wood, but it ends up being too dull to do so, then it has failed, although not by its free choice or even its action.
Under such an understanding, it is more evident why desires can be sins, as the traditional view holds. Even a desire that is not chosen could still be a major deviation from human purpose. Perhaps this why (not to get too exegetical) Jesus seems identify desires as sins along with their corresponding actions in the Beatitudes, for example, “But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Mathew 5:28).” I believe this is also clear in reference to God, His moral perfection would seems to include freedom from the desire to sin, and would diminished if He experienced such desire.
Following this line of thought, I believe temptation would refer more to the occasion or opportunity to sin rather than the desire to. The two classic examples of temptation in scripture would seem to attest to this. Satan does not directly implant desire in Eve in the garden, or Christ in the desert, through some kind of mind control; instead, he speaks to them, offering them an attractive opportunity.
On a separate note, I presented Calvin’s model of human nature and original sin as an answer to your point about our nature being invulnerable to our wills. As Calvin writes, our will cannot and does not change our nature itself, but forces our nature to be filtered (so to speak) through a totally corrupt will, greatly impacting how it manifests in our thoughts and actions. It seems that this may be an even more radical elevation of human nature’s integrity than Zwingli’s.
Apologies for the long comment.
"Now, seeing that they admit the necessity of baptizing infants,—finding themselves unable to contravene that authority of the universal Church, which has been unquestionably handed down by the Lord and His apostles,—they cannot avoid the further concession, that infants require the same benefits of the Mediator, in order that, being washed by the sacrament and charity of the faithful, and thereby incorporated into the body of Christ, which is the Church, they may be reconciled to God, and so live in Him, and be saved, and delivered, and redeemed, and enlightened. But from what, if not from death, and the vices, and guilt, and thraldom, and darkness of sin? And, inasmuch as they do not commit any sin in the tender age of infancy by their actual transgression, original sin only is left."
-Augustine, A treatise on the merits and forgiveness of sins and on the baptism of infants, Book 1, section 39
The Reformed rightly baptize infants, and people are baptized for having committed sin. You may object that Jesus was baptized and committed no sin. In answer, I would say that Jesus was baptized because he was acting in the stead of sinners, and as an example to them. If no sin had been committed by the people he was dying for, no baptism (and no death, of course) would have been necessary. But Jesus is a weird case in so many ways that I don't think he is an appropriate example. Baptism is for the forgiveness of sins, if one reads Romans 6 or most of the other descriptions of baptism given in the New Testament. The testimony of the actual practice of the Church is a very strong reason to believe that original sin is actually sin. As for the linguistic distinction you make, I have a feeling the actual/original distinction uses actual in an Aristotelian sense of act and potency rather than in the sense you use it, and I would not say that potency is non-actual, otherwise it couldn't have any effect on the world, and its ability to effect the world is kind of a defining feature. I do not know the exact history of the phrase "actual sin," so I may be mistaken in this. Regardless, I prefer Calvin's use of "sin" to describe original sin and "fruits of sin" to describe actual sins.
And regardless of the Reformed position on the matter, the Lutheran position has never been in dispute.
"1] Also they teach that since the fall of Adam all men begotten in the natural way are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with 2] concupiscence; and that this disease, or vice of origin, is truly sin, even now condemning and bringing eternal death upon those not born again through Baptism and the Holy Ghost."
- Augsburg Confession, Article 2
And this position does not seem contrary to reason to me. That guilt requires action is not self-evident. Consider, for instance, a rational being which is by nature evil and destructive. Such a creature is conceivable. It is not entirely evil, for that is impossible, but its will is so corrupted that it has no hope of escaping its natural state. Arguably, the devil is such a being. Myth and fantasy also give us a plethora of such creatures. Consider, for instance, the vampire. Upon being bitten, a vampire is an offensive creature, whose very nature requires it to sin and destroy. Its nature is so corrupted that it is beyond hope. Do we not rightly say that the nature of the vampire is guilty from the moment it comes into being? If it wasn't, it would not be permissible to destroy it the moment it comes into being, since it is wrong to destroy rational creatures who have not yet done anything wrong. The reason it is guilty is not any action it commits, since it is offensive from the moment it comes into being, but because it is just naturally guilty. Its nature is so corrupted that its existence is incompatible with a rightly ordered world.
Or, as another example, consider the orc. Extirpating orcs from the earth would not be genocide, down to even killing new-born infant orcs, because orcs are unredeemable by nature, at least according to my interpretation of Tolkien, and things that are by nature unredeemable ought to be destroyed. Luckily, even under original sin, man is not that far gone, since he is still redeemable. But he is also still guilty, on reasoning similar to that of the infant orc or newly bitten vampire.
You may object that we only destroy these kinds of creatures because they are destructive. If we don't do so, they will destroy us as soon as they are able to do so. The answer to this objection is to consider a creature which has the ineradicable desire to do every evil which a vampire or orc does, but is incapable by nature of actually achieving them, say because it is imprisoned in an inescapable trap of some sort, or because it has no means of influencing the external world. I would argue that the creature in question still ought to be destroyed at the moment of its creation, even though it is incapable of doing anything to anyone and has yet to even actively desire to do any evil. You may not agree with this, but I think it is at least a reasonable idea, and all I am trying to demonstrate is that it is not obvious that guilt requires action.
Thanks Matthew! The trouble is twofold: On the one hand, man is not a vampire or an orc. Scripture presents Mann as redeemable and not inherently evil in this way.
OTOH , even orcs on this account are not to blame for the condition of their nature. We could imagine an extension of Gandalf and Bilbo‘s pity for Gollum that extended to the orcs.
I think this applies to humans, where the worst criminals, we now discover to be psychopathic. That is, their minds are different in significant ways. Terrible and terrifying as it is to admit, they are not to blame for being born that way. This does not mean that the full force of the law should not punish them for doing evil. However, it does mean that we cannot judge the full moral analysis. For the psychopath to only commit one murder might be evidence of his moral effort, not to commit several more. There’s something in CS Lewis to that effect.
I agree with you that man is not a vampire or an orc. He is redeemable. But if we agree that it is possible to be guilty without action, then it is conceivable that man may be guilty without action. But you seem to think that it is obvious that there can be no guilt without action.
No, I don’t agree that we can be guilty for something that is not an action. I do believe in the possibility, and probably the reality of imputed guilt, without which original sin seems unjust. We are imputed guilty for Adam‘s first sin, and on that basis, we inherit original sin.
But for the sake of argument, I am considering Tolkien’s‘s universe, where you have or that are irredeemable. By contrast, I think Tolkien would want us to treat the worst sinner the way Bilbo treated Gollum.
I agree that we should treat the worst human sinner with compassion, because it is always possible that they could be redeemed. And even if they cannot be redeemed, failing to treat them with as much compassion as possible will make us worse people then we would otherwise be. Even if it is necessary to kill every orc, we should not rejoice in doing so.
This thought experiment was mainly a way of showing why I do not think it obvious that sin requires action. Why do you think it obvious that there can be no guilt without action? It is not obvious to me, and you don't argue for it, since you seem to believe it is just common sense.
Also, because I am having an OCD attack that you might misinterpret what I am saying, I will comment that this is a thought experiment meant to argue that it is conceivable to have guilt without action. It is not an attempt to argue that some people are so irredeemable that they should just be killed. I am just arguing that it is conceivable that a being might exist who is so naturally evil that it ought to be destroyed immediately upon its creation, apart from any action it engages in, not that such a being actually exists. If such a being is conceivable, it argues against the view that it is obvious that guilt requires action.
Not to worry, I understand what you’re getting at! One example would be that people who want to argue that desire is sin frequently argue that our will is somehow involved in desire. The theologian Van Mastricht argues this, and Bavinck basically does as well. That reveals their suppressed adherence to the same principle.
Otherwise, the question would be guilty for what? The notion of guilt has its home in the legal context. There it is for crimes. For a state of being we can imagine a stain or a shameful condition. But I don’t see how the notion of guilt applies to something that is not an action. (Of course, again, we could all be imputed guilty, but that would be guilt for Adam‘s action.)