Some thoughts on Original Sin & Sacraments

What are the origins of the teaching on original sin, and what are we to make of it today?

From the very beginning, Christians understood that sacramental initiation and the waters of baptism placed them in a condition of hope over against slavery to sin. Baptism expressed a new beginning, a new relationship with God through Jesus and in the Spirit.

Evil and sin, not just personal sin but the cosmic evil that surrounds us all, would not finally triumph over those who remained faithful to their baptism.

Just as the creative power of God held mastery over the power of chaos in the very beginning, and just as Jesus was victorious over sin and death, so those who remained faithful to their baptismal life would finally be victorious over evil and sin.

This was the hope with which the first Christians lived.

The "forgiveness of sin" associated with baptism meant not merely absolution from one's personal faults, but above all a new standing in the face of the far more vast powers of cosmic sin and evil and death.

Every religion recognizes and has its own terms for the sin of the world.

This sin is more than the sum of our own or our neighbors' or even our ancestors' personal sins.

It is a cosmic thing,

it is the mystery of evil that touches everyone who is born into this world,

and it is a terribly real dimension of the ambiguous world into which we are born.

But the sin of the world is not exactly what we have come to know as "original sin." Early in the fifth century Augustine of Hippo, added a new element which was destined to give a very particular shape to Christian understanding of the sin of the world.

Augustine was the first to state that you and I are guilty of the sin of the world and blameworthy for it before we sin personally, indeed before we are conscious of sin or goodness.

Augustine became involved in a dispute with a monk named Pelagius, an influential spiritual director who seemed to be far too optimistic about our natural abilities to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, unaided by the grace of God.

Augustine's dispute with Pelagius and his followers went on for years, and the bishop of Hippo drew on every source at his disposal to demonstrate that human nature is nothing without the grace of God.

Among his arguments Augustine pointed to the tradition of infant baptism as evidence that we are born without grace.

He reasoned that baptism must bring about a grace that was absent to a newborn child.

Otherwise why would the church baptize infants, as it has "always" done?

It did not occur to Augustine to call into question the practice of infant baptism, and he did not have the resources to examine whether this practice was as traditional or ancient as he thought.

He simply accepted the practice and then fashioned it into an argument against the Pelagians without any thought that the motives for baptizing children,

wherever the practice existed, might not always have been identical with his own.

Augustine also worked with a faulty translation of Romans 5:12 and was pressed to explain how all of us had sinned "in" Adam's sin.

The upshot of all this was a teaching on cosmic sin with some new elements: Baptism removes a personal guilt which is inherited from Adam and transmitted through the male semen."

Again, it is important to distinguish Christian awareness of the mystery of evil, the sin of the world, from the idea of individual blameworthiness prior to any personal sin.

The notion that baptism "forgives original sin" in this particular sense is unknown to the church of the first few centuries.

Tertullian (d. 220) held that the semen of the sexual union transmitted holiness, not sin.

And long before Tertullian, Saint Paul argued that a non-Christian spouse is made holy through union with a Christian spouse, on the grounds that the children of a Christian parent arc holy, not unclean (1 Cor 7:14).

 Like Tertullian, Paul presupposes that the gift of God's love precedes sin, even apart from baptism.

Augustine looked at a current practice, that of infant baptism, and from it he argued to a theological theory.

It is not until the ninth century that we find a writer reversing the argument, stating that there is original and individual guilt for the sin of the world, and therefore one must be baptized.

Perhaps the reversal is already implicit in Augustine.

But Augustine would also have insisted that none of this makes sense apart from the faith of the church and such factors as the conscious faith commitment of a baby's parents.

The subsequent tradition did not so insist.

The doctrine of original sin as we have inherited it developed only gradually.

No one will deny the truth about the reality of evil that it affirms.

We are certainly born into an ambiguous world where the force of sin impinges on us as quickly as the force of love.

And we are certainly born with inner tendencies which, once they become conscious, show a propensity for selfishness as much as for self-giving.

But in addition to this dimension of life which the doctrine of original sin has rightly recognized, we also need to be attentive to what it has left unsaid.

Is it not an essential truth of Christianity that God is a total lover, so total that he loves us even before we know how to respond?

Grace is a relationship.

Our side of the relationship develops only gradually, but it is always a response to a love which is already there for us.

What the traditional doctrine of original sin leaves unsaid is this:

God loves us from the first moment of our conception.

We are born at once into the mystery of love and into the mystery of evil.

Both love and sin surround us from the very beginning.

But for nearly 1,500 years, following the school of thought that developed out of Augustine's dispute with the Pelagians, the western church has given a curious priority to the mystery of evil.

Our pastoral approach to baptism has implied that we are first conceived and born into the mystery of evil, and only in baptism do we securely contact the mystery of love.

Once this idea came into play, it generated still others.

The Christian imagination went on to create a no-man's land between heaven and hell called "limbo," a place for the souls of infants who had never sinned but who were nonetheless "guilty" of an original fault.

Limbo was never an official doctrine of the church, but it was taught by all the great scholastics of' the Middle Ages.

It was a necessary consequence of a doctrinal stand which gave priority to the mystery of evil, and which made God's love somehow dependent upon the performance of the ritual of baptism.

Happily, in this whole view of things, common sense intervened and provided an escape clause for sincere non-Christians called "baptism of desire."

But here is where the weakness of this whole theology shows up.

In order to account for the sincerity and personal faith of millions of Buddhists and Jews and countless others, one surreptitiously confers on them a baptism which is no baptism at all, and which these folk do not in fact "desire."

The problem here is that under the influence of Augustinian teaching on original sin, baptism became the explanation for the presence of God's grace in this world.

The cart was put before the horse, and it became accepted teaching that baptism is necessary for the salvation of all, whether they have heard the gospel or not.

The famous text from John's gospel which says that "unless one is born through water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (3:5) presupposes that the Spirit has in fact managed to speak through the way Christians have preached and lived the message of Jesus.

The all too obvious flaws and failures of Christians were never an integral part of the doctrine that baptism is "necessary for salvation."

And yet Christian common sense held its own, in an involuted sort of way.

What the doctrine of "baptism of desire" says, in the last analysis, is that it is one's personal faith in God and not baptism which is necessary for salvation.

When it is read against this whole background and burden of theological suppositions, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is truly a revolutionary document.

It gives first priority to the mystery of God's love for us, and it nowhere suggests that we need to be absolved from an original evil.

The Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (#16) made a dramatic move away from the Augustinian school of thought when it affirmed in so many words that God loves everyone who is born into this world, prior to baptism and apart from baptism.

The RCIA spells out the same thing in the liturgical and sacramental realm.

It restores to the church, both in theory and in practice, the concept of a sacramental process which recognizes our "horizontal" journey toward God.

In this process, the ritual or sacramental moments do not make present a God who is otherwise absent.

Rather they celebrate a love that is present to us long before we learn to celebrate it.

This shift in perspective is, I think, utterly fundamental to the Christian view of things.

Creation is good, and the human person is good, if for no other reason than that God has created and loved us before we were born.

Catholic Christianity balked at the pessimism of the sixteenth-century reformers who taught that we are radically depraved, and that Christ finally does no more than cover over our radical sinfulness.

But at the same time Catholicism has based its baptismal practice on the same pessimism which grew out of Augustinian thought and which generated Reformation teachings on the depraved state of human nature.

Once again, the question is not whether the doctrine of original sin says something true about the mystery of evil.

It certainly does.

The question is whether the doctrine as it has come down to us leaves too many important things unsaid.

In the last analysis, we are dealing here with the kind of bottom-line attitudes that are important to understand.

Optimism or pessimism about human nature, the priority of love or the priority of evil—such things involve fundamental stances toward reality that can neither be proved nor disproved.

One can even argue which of these stances is more authentically Christian.

Each Christian tradition, including the Catholic tradition, has at different times wavered between the choices.

Augustine's own pastoral writings, especially the letters and sermons written when he was not engaged in hot dispute with the Pelagians, give a primacy to grace and the love of God which is often absent from his treatises on sin and predestination.

If the Catholic church took a firm stand in theory against Calvin's pessimism regarding human nature, it has at the same time lived out essentially the same pessimism in its baptismal practice.

It is easy enough to insist in theory, as Catholicism has, that we are born only deprived, not depraved.

But in practice this has been more a verbal than a real difference.

If the mystery of evil does not really have a priority, why have we rushed to have infants baptized, and why have we taught generations of nurses and doctors to baptize stillborn infants and even fetuses?

The RCIA restores to the church the optimism of grace and the primacy of the mystery of love over that of evil.

In so doing it reflects the vision contained in the ancient Hebrew stories of  creation, where "God saw that it was good."

It will be interesting to see if, in the decades to come, Catholics and Protestants alike will be willing to revise the presuppositions of the last fifteen hundred years, and return to an older theology which recognizes the presence of God's love in this world prior to and apart from baptism.

Unless this change in attitude takes place, it is hard to see how baptism can ever become more than a vertical connection with God.

The notion of a sacramental process has been absent from other sacraments than baptism.

In the new Rite of Penance, for instance, sacramental absolution is described as the "completion" of a process of conversion (#6),

an idea which is perfectly parallel to baptism-confirmation-eucharist as the "final stage" of initiation.

But this has not usually been our approach to penance.

 For many centuries we have been saying, "Go to confession and get forgiveness."

The new rite says, "Experience the Lord's forgiveness, then go to confession and celebrate it."

Protestants used to say of Catholics that "Catholics go to a priest for forgiveness, while Protestants go directly to God."

This comment was known to anger some Catholics.

Perhaps, given the way confession was often used, the remark was too close to the truth.

In any case, the new rite makes it clear that sacramental confession does not bring God's forgiveness into being, any more than baptism brings his love into being.

The ritual sacrament of penance is unintelligible apart from the process leading up to it, where Christians first "experience and proclaim the mercy of God in their lives" and then "celebrate with the priest the liturgy by which the church continually renews itself" (#11).

It is difficult for us really to believe in the parable of the Prodigal Father.

The father had never stopped loving his son and welcomed him instantly.

He wasn't even interested in the boy's "confession."

This is not the way human justice works, and it is not generally the way we have viewed the sacrament of penance.

Catholics have tended to see confession with the mind-set of the elder son in the parable:

You are not forgiven until you have made your speech, recited your list of sins, given some guarantees, and proven yourself worthy to join the rest of us who haven't strayed.

But once again, do we take as our starting point the mystery of God's love, or are we to remain fixated with sin and evil?

The Lord's constant and faithful love for us is the good news.

We are never not forgiven.

The problem is our acceptance of the forgiveness that is always there for us.

God does break into our lives in sudden ways, but even then a process of reflection is needed for us to absorb it all.

The apostle Paul was knocked from his horse and blinded at the moment of his conversion, and then had to spend days in prayer and reflection before the scales fell from his eyes.

Only then was he baptized (Acts 9).

The acceptance of love or forgiveness is clearly a different matter from being loved and forgiven.

Once we see the sacramental moment as a final stage in a larger process, it is clear that the "grace of the sacrament" is intimately tied up with consciousness, with a growth in awareness.

The sacraments do not bring about something that was absent.

Sacraments proclaim and enable us to own a love that is already present to us.

A sacrament celebrates the Lord's giving, certainly.

But his giving begins long before the sacramental moment.

What we need to focus on, within the sacramental moment, is our taking the love of God home with us, with a fresh awareness of that love.

Celebrating the sacrament brings us closer to one another in the church, and to the Lord who is there for us.

That is one dimension of the "grace of the sacrament," as we saw in the last chapter.

The other dimension, perhaps the most inner and intimate grace, is the new awareness of the love that is there for us.

Such awareness is no more instantaneous for us than it was for Saint Paul.

That is why most of the church's new rites lay so much stress on the process of preparation that must precede the sacramental moment.

One sacrament has been left curiously untouched by the renewal of recent years, and that is the celebration of marriage.

There are no provisions for celebrating, in a Christian way and before the assembly of the church, the stages in a couple's coming together.

For many centuries marriage has been viewed primarily as a contract, and the liturgy of matrimony has centered almost exclusively on the exchange of consent which constitutes the legal bond.

In our time theologians have been exploring a whole other dimension of marriage which had long been neglected.

For Christians, marriage is not merely a contract but a covenant, a spiritual relationship modeled on the covenant between God and his people, his beloved spouse.

The distinction between covenant and contract has now become part of any theological discussion of marriage,

 and it is clear that not every matrimonial contract becomes a true spiritual and sacramental covenant.

If the process of a couple’s coming together is a gradual process of growth in understanding the meaning of their union, one could conceive of celebrating this whole process in forms analogous to initiation into the Christian community.

The first stage of celebration could be a ceremony of betrothal

A second stage, parallel to the rite of election or choice, might be a formal exchange of consent and legal recognition of the contract.

This could be followed by a final period of preparation, with appropriate rites of blessing and healing.

Finally, after a sufficient period of time, there would be a celebration of the sacramental covenant.

Much work would obviously have to be done before such a model could be realized in practice.

The rite of matrimony has for so long been tied up with legal recognition of the bond that it is difficult to separate this element from celebration of the sacramental covenant.

Moral questions also enter in.

At what stage would the couple begin living together?

Pre-marital sex is considered immoral, and in the present stage of discussion on such matters, pre-marital means literally pre-nuptial (pre-wedding ceremony).

If one were to celebrate marriage in stages, and if a couple were to live together after the celebration of the contract but before the final celebration of the covenant, we would have to put some nuances on our moral theology.

If a marriage can be said to have begun before the final stage of celebration, i.e., the final sacramental nuptials, we need to consider a distinction between pre-marital and pre-nuptial sex.

On the whole, we as a church have been quite deaf to the lived experience of many young couples.

Many sincerely Christian couples, who have already made a commitment to one another and are in no sense “sleeping around,” have decided that it is important for them to live together before they can stand up before a Christian community and call that community to witness their union.

This often comes from an experience of so many bad or meaningless marriages among friends and relations. 

The couple want to discover the sacrament and make sure there is a sacrament between them before the can authentically celebrate it.

I am not suggesting that this is the attitude of every couple who live together before the nuptials.

One might not like this form of entering a marriage, and one might counsel against it because of many possible dangers.

But the fact is that in our time, when the roles and mores associated with marriage are undergoing so much change – not all of it for the worse – many committed couples are living the catechumenal model and a genuine sacramental process in their developing relationship.

Can we listen to what might be authentic in all of this?

We certainly have to do better than condemn people on the grounds that pre-nuptial sex is wrong

This is a touchy problem, and I make no pretense of saying the last word on it here.

The 1980 Roman Synod of Bishops urged the development of betrothal rites, to help raise couples’ awareness of the Christian meaning of marriage.

Enabling couples to celebrate their engagement in the presence of the assembly would be an excellent first step toward making the church more present to the sacramental process of marriage.

But this will be seen as just another isolated rite, until we do much more work on helping people to understand the full sense of sacrament as a lived process.