Unoriginal Sin

Skeptics of Christianity do not like the doctrine of original sin.

“It’s bad enough,” they say, “that you Christians insist we’re all sinners personally; but what is this belief that we all come into the world under the curse of Adam? Adam was one person, and we’re different persons — how can one man’s sin be blamed on others, especially after thousands of years? How is that fair?”

Moral Subjectivism

Of course, atheists are all subjectivists, morally speaking. While they all seem to insist that there’s some real thing called “morality”, and they very often insist that that they personally have enough or plenty of it — how dare you suggest otherwise! — they also insist morality’s true center is themselves; that authority for moral precepts comes from the desires and beliefs of the individual (or, in some cases, from his society’s collective desires and beliefs, which he agrees with). That being so, they do not think of themselves as sinners at all. How can I be a sinner if being good is the very same thing as doing what I want anyway?

But this original sin thing is a whole other level, so far as they’re concerned. They don’t see it as having to do with their own natural inclination toward sin. (They insist they don’t have one, and subjectively warranted means the same as objectively right.) Moreover, they are sure it is some sort of primordial slander being foisted on mankind by an overzealous Christianity, one too preoccupied with its own guilt to be conscious of everybody else’s essential innocence (or at least of their level of crime being so low that no reasonable judge would ever bother about it).

So, they say, the whole thing is unfair in a couple of ways, one much worse than the other. They might admit they have, perhaps, made some morally questionable decisions, but this business of original sin is simply too far from their way of thinking to sound like anything but totally unwarranted nonsense to them.

The Original Sin

Oh, the irony. What they do not realize is that they, themselves, even in their objection, are reproducing the original sin.

What do I mean? Well, look in Genesis 3. When the serpent tempts Eve, he starts with this stratagem: “Has God said?” The basis of his argument is that far from being the center and touchstone of truth, God dissembles; he says one thing, but knows another is really true. And, the tempter continues, “God knows … that you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”

What does it mean to know good and evil? When I first read it, I thought maybe it meant merely to know about good and evil, or to know what they are, as if good and evil were things that were already in some sense ‘out there’ for Eve to come to know. But I think the truth is deeper than that: the real temptation was not merely to come to know what good and evil are, but even more, to re-center the moral world in Eve herself.

That’s definitely a key feature of the narrative. From that moment onward, Eve was no longer to trust God to tell her frankly what she should do, or what was right and wrong. From that moment, Eve herself would be the one every decision must pass through. Even the commandments of God were first to be run through ‘the court of Eve’, where Eve would be the judge; and only if they passed that bar would Eve any longer believe them.

Recapitulating the Sin

Eve re-centered the moral question in herself, de-centering and displacing God from that role. Going forward, she would arbitrate all cases according to her own wisdom. In that sense, the tempter did not lie when he said Eve would “be like God”. Knowing good from evil would become her job, not his anymore.

Here’s the reason that the moral subjectivist is repeating the original sin. Like Eve, he demands that God appear before the bar for the subjectivist’s adjudication. Since good and evil are, according to the subjectivist, whatever he decides they are, unless God can pass whatever value set the subjectivist happens to hold at a given moment, he will not accept the authority of God or bow himself any divine decision on that subject.

Instead, the subjectivist will make himself the arbiter of good and evil. He will know. He will center the moral world in himself.

Advocating Original Sin

Unbeknownst to himself, then, a moral subjectivist is an advocate of original sin. Far from being its passive victim or the mere recipient of a curse foisted on him from antiquity, he’s a co-participant, an active conspirator with the primordial bad decision. What Eve had formerly done, he is also doing. He is a true child of his mother — and even more, of his father Adam, who partook of the same sin with even greater awareness than his wife. What right, then, has he to protest that his association with the original sin is unfair?

Isaiah famously writes, “All of us, like sheep, have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way.” His own way. In turning to that, we’ve de-centered God from our personal moral universe, and made ourselves out to be our own judges of such things. We’re instinctively moral subjectivists. And the first step of salvation is to re-center our moral estimations in God, realizing that he, not we, is the rightful arbitrator of all moral standards; it is we who must come before his bar, not him before ours.

The Judge’s Eyes

It is there, at the judgment throne of God, that we find out the truth about our moral state as human beings and, if we are truly wise, fall on our knees and beg mercy of the rightful Judge. Centering morality in ourselves will never allow us this perspective. It puts us in the judge’s seat, and makes us think we see through his eyes; and we cannot see ourselves any longer or our own state. It deludes us that the moral code that judges us is written on our own hearts, not in the word of God.

But the robes don’t fit us. We don’t actually have a good enough feel for the Law. What we think is okay is often very wrong; and our self-centeredness blinds us to that reality. We all tend to excuse faults in ourselves even when we see them perfectly in others. We make extenuations for things we want to do, whether or not we make any for things we care less about. We’re not good judges, and we’re not THE Judge. We just want to be.

That’s what subjectivism is: the story of Eve eternally repeated. It’s the connection between the original sin and us, today.