Abstract
John E. Toews, The Story of Original Sin, James Clarke and Co.: Cambridge, 2013; 144 pp.: 9780227174142, £17.50 (pbk)
Toews is a Mennonite professor who tells us that he came to faith out of fear of an angry God – a picture partly formed by the doctrine of original sin understood, in the world he grew up in, as the original sexually transmitted disease. The book grows from the haunting impact of this teaching, and his question about biblical authority for it, especially the key text of Romans 5.12.
Toews identifies succinctly the primary texts from the Bible and the early Church, tracing as clearly as he can when the doctrine of original sin gets formulated in this specific definition, and concluding that it is not until the fourth century, via a dodgy interpretation of the text by Ambrosiaster, that Augustine comes to an understanding that ‘biological reproduction is the means for the transmission of sin’ (p. 83) even if it is not technically traducianism in his understanding. He shows how it has political dimensions, adding weight to the case for infant baptism as necessary to wash away the taint of original sin – and of course eventually strengthening the importance of the virgin birth as a way of Jesus avoiding this taint. Ultimately one could argue that the immaculate conception owes its existence to this doctrine, a thought which would horrify many a Protestant. Toews reasserts that in the biblical texts and earliest tradition, Jesus chose to resist sin, a choice open to all other people. And he asks the crucial question: ‘How could Jesus fully take on our humanity and represent us if he didn’t assume our fundamental human condition’. Or, as Irenaeus put it ‘the unassumed is the unhealed.’
Toews helpfully touches on the Eastern tradition, which regards Adam’s sin as immaturity, and never goes near the connection between sexuality and sinfulness. He is less strong on contemporary debate, however, and I feel that this is because his mindset is simply not to explore wider questions about how else original sin has been understood or about a wider theology of sin. That is fair enough. He ‘does what it says on the tin’. Toews makes some important points along the way – understanding sin as a relational and political concept not an ontological one, for example – without elaborating on them. He touches upon the question of where Satan fits in, and how that relates to the figure of the Serpent. In the light of the recent furore over the experimental Anglican rite of baptism, this is clearly a question which hasn’t gone away.
There is a classic line in the early chapter exploring the Genesis account, when Toews considers one effect of the Fall – that Adam and Eve do not want to meet God naked. ‘The text says nothing more, and we should not let Augustine, or Luther, or Freud, or anyone else tell us that there is more than the text says’ (p. 8). Well yes, such an approach enables him to avoid getting locked up in some assumptions, but it does also reveal quite a breathtaking refusal to consider the question from other frames.
Toews simply wants to nail this one idea which has had such a huge impact on the theology of his own church, and yet conflicts with its espoused principle of seeking biblical authority. And in the process he offers the slenderest of loose threads which could be pulled in various interesting directions. Perhaps he has done us a service in piquing our curiosity and loosening those threads through his determined focus.