Original SIn?

Few doctrines can send a person into an atheist scented explosion of hurt feelings and (not unjust) anti-religious sentiment like Original Sin.  And to be honest, even as a Christian I cant say I blame them.  It seems to violate the principle that people can be responsible only for acts done by themselves or with consent.  Often the Bible itself records expressions of outrage.  A particularly funny version is "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth stand on edge." (Jer. 31:29; Ezk. 18:2)  Ever since Augustine's famous interpretation of Romans 5:12, Adam and Eve became history's worst case of douchebaggery on record, like that coworker of yours who steals the one clearly labeled and off-limit lunch in the fridge, only in this case the guy doesn't just burgle a delicious pastrami-and-havarti-with-deli-mustard-and-pickle sandwich, but also damns all of mankind.  Its sort of like finding out that some relative of yours had the misfortune to acquire a debt just the right amount of time after writing had been invented so that both dice and bookies could exist, and then ten thousand years later some jerk with a ridiculously huge abacus (that can somehow calculate egregious amounts of compound interest) comes to you to collect while you, unsuspecting, are rummaging in the fridge for that lost, oh so delicious sandwich of yours.

But I digress.

But what if original sin in some sense stands on a mistranslation?  One of the fascinating differences between Eastern and Western Christianity circles precisely around two different interpretations of Romans 5:12.  The passage reads: "As sin came into the world through one man, and through sin, death, so death spreads to all men because all men have sinned."  In this passage the major issue of translation for Augustine came down to the final part, which was translated into Latin as in quo omnes peccaverunt or "in whom [i.e. in Adam] all men have sinned."  Yet this stands in a somewhat remarkable contrast to the Greek e˙f∆ wˆ— pa¿nteß h¢marton, which cannot really bear that meaning.  At all.  e˙f∆ w can simply mean "because," so the end of the verse would read "because all men sin," making the concept of original sin moot because everyone is guilty not due to Adam (and Eve) but because everyone, in fact, are themselves sinners.  However, the Eastern Orthodox take a slightly different interpretation.  The e˙f∆ w itself can be a "neuter," pronoun--in which case we could translate it as just "because."

However it is possible (and the majority of Patristic theology stands behind this) to interpret the wˆ— as masculine, in which case it refers to the directly antecedent substantive qa¿natoß (death).  The translation that most Patristic theologians took, and which is the almost exclusive path taken by Eastern Orthodoxy today, thus renders the passage: "As sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread to all men; and because of death, all men have sinned."  Thus "Mortality or corruption or simply death (understood in a personalized sense), has indeed been viewed, since Christian antiquity, as a cosmic disease which holds humanity under its sway, both spiritually and physically."  (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology 144f).  Which doesnt let Adam and Eve off the hook for our predicament.  But what we "inherit," from them is not guilt, but a corruption.  Still hard to swallow for those generally inclined to not believe a Christian orientation of things anyway, but the difference is actually quite palpable.  We sin not because we are already guilty creatures, but because of the angst of our mortality.  Material goods like food and drink and other needs become, not merely items of communion amongst one another, but necessary and scarce resources needing aggregation to individuals for personal survival.  Mortality is thus the driving source of conflict.  That is to say, we might not be guilty in Adam (whatever that might mean) but the general human condition of finitude and death is itself a palpable drive toward malificence.

To me this has always made much more sense than the "forensic," sense of imputed guilt.  It manifestly plays on the concept of ontology and so clearly produces the picture that sin is not just an arbitrary decision on God's part.  Since God is the Creator and Sustainer, any break from Him is also a movement toward non-being, a movement toward attempting to secure onesself (but knowing one will ultimately fail).  Hence mortality becomes the driving force to apprehend finite resources for ones self and ones kin as opposed to the general "other."

Whereas the imputation in terms of guilt seems wholly arbitrary (even if legal terms are often used in the Bible) the ontological sense of anxiety and the desperate quest for survival links up quite "naturally," (pun intended) to the world as we know it.