Why Original Sin is Good News
Photo by Steven Wright on Unsplash
How many times have we come across bad behaviour, whether perpetrated by others or by ourselves, only to meet with the excuse - again from others or from ourselves - “I am only human”?
This phrase is incredibly subtle for, at least from the standpoint of the Christian tradition, it highlights a profound truth, as well as a profound lie.
The truth is highlighted by philosophers in the tradition of Nietzsche, who echo his lament that “we are human, all too human” (made in his 1878 work Human, All Too Human: A book for Free Spirits). The phrase laments the utter brokenness of the human race. As we shall see later, this is something that is incredibly true. Having said that, one must note that Nietzsche takes this one step further. Because the human race is so profoundly broken, all human works must be by extension broken as well. These human works, for Nietzsche, include truth claims that ostensibly come from the standpoint of divine revelation.
The truth Nietzsche brings to our consciousness is our brokenness. The lie that Nietzsche brings to us is that we are ontologically broken. For Nietzsche, the human condition is such that we were offenders from our conception, and that we cannot expect anything other than to die as offenders. When we look at this iniquity stained world we live in, it can be very tempting to agree that we are “human, all too human”. It can also be very tempting to think that there is no counterpoint to Nietzsche.
Yet, such a counterpoint can be found in a statement by Steven Guthrie of Belmont University, made in an interview in volume 109 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal about his book Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human. The counterpoint, says Guthrie, comes in the form of a tension within the Bible upon a careful read.
On the one hand, the Biblical texts repeat the all too familiar notion of the fallenness of humanity, with his chosen people, and later the emerging Church, failing to live up to God’s perfection over and over again, and even descending into depravity. It would seem that this long litany of lapses in one fell swoop proves Nietzsche right on two fronts: the fact that humans are nothing more than a race of malefactors, and that pretensions to be followers of a perfect God are nothing more than that - mere pretensions.
On the other hand, the hook in Guthrie’s counter comes from the fact that this fallenness is not the original state of things. Our being malefactors are a sickness, not part of our DNA. Original sin may have stained the human condition and made us “all too human”. However, the good news of Original Sin is that it is reminder that we are not primordially depraved.
What is more, the narrative of the Garden of Eden after the Fall was not there to simply say that we are fundamentally outcasts. As Scott Hahn wrote in his A Father Who Keeps His Promises, one of the hermeneutics through which to read the history of salvation incorporates an understanding that, having been cast out of the Garden, we are called to return back to it. Contra Nietzsche, we are called to be restored to our aboriginal pre-lapsarian state. Also, contra to Nietzsche’s understanding of faith as a human pretension to mask over the fact that we are all but Adams and Eves, the crux of the Christian faith is a divine emptying, where God became incarnate in the New Adam, the new standard of what it means to be human.
Thus, for Guthrie, the problems we see in the world are not due to the fact that we are all too human. Contra Nietzsche, and from the standpoint of Christ, the problem is due to the fact that we are not human enough.
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