Saving Original Sin from the Secularists

Framing the issue

To ask what it means to be human is to inquire into one of life’s deepest and most important questions. For that reason it is an ancient question with a long and varied history. Greek philosophers were not the first to probe what it means to be a good or virtuous person. The ancient religions of Asia reflected a more deeply felt tension between the human as creature and the human who possessed a divine spirit. But nowhere was the inquiry so critical and defended with such vehemence than in Christianity, and in particular the defense of the doctrine of original sin against heretical views. For the most part, original sin was a religious or theological question, notably so when it was joined with the saving work of Jesus Christ. When the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers took up the question, the religious dimension of human nature became secondary and rendered irrelevant. Consequently, Christian theologians were marginalized and then marginalized themselves by insisting on the historicity of Genesis 3 and the claim that all are sinful because they inherit the sin of Adam and Eve.

Christian theologians have steadfastly insisted that sin tells us something fundamental about the human condition. In their defense of original sin, three theological essentials remained constant: the universality of sin, the inexorableness of sin, and the necessary link between sin and grace. In other words, all humans, without exception, are sinful, and this is our inescapable nature.

Luther’s dispute with Erasmus, centered on the issue of free will, is an instructive snapshot of both historical efforts to save original sin and the difficulties for moving forward. On the surface Erasmus seemed to say all the right things, even affirming that “man of his own power can do nothing and is wholly dependent on the mercy of God.” ¹ Nevertheless, Luther relentlessly challenged Erasmus on the basis that he was only giving lip service to our bondage to sin. Luther did not deny that humans could exercise free will in making many daily choices. His concern was the theological error of affirming in any way that we can exercise free will in the sense that we can do anything to choose or affect our salvation. We cannot choose, for instance, to have faith or choose to be righteous.

Luther’s denial of free will was essential to his understanding of redemption, and for that reason he refused to back off his rather strong language of “bondage.” For Luther the bondage of our will and the sovereignty of God were inseparable. His insistence that no one is capable of making themselves right with God put him at odds with a Christian humanist like Erasmus who wavered just enough to allow free will to compromise the assertion that sinners are wholly helpless in their sin. ² Luther’s legacy, and that of Reformed theology, is to hold fast to the truth that the remedy for our sinful nature is the free gift of God’s grace as revealed and effected in Jesus Christ.

Luther’s dispute with Erasmus seldom left the sphere of religion, and Luther’s most insightful discernments were meant to protect the Christian understanding of sin and grace. For those of a secular mindset a discussion about sin, law, grace, and Christ the Redeemer barely registers, and convincing the contemporary secularist that they do matter is a frustrating task. There is, however, an entry point which opens up a relevant conversation. Original sin is a Christian doctrine that makes an assertion about our fundamental human nature. On this basis, our present-day situation is helped by the renewed interest among secularists in the nature of the being human. Throughout this article reference will be made to their arguments. For a start, though, Stephen Pinker announces in the beginning of The Blank Slate that “An honest discussion of human nature has never been more timely.” ³ Also, Francis Fukuyama makes the interesting observation that virtually all philosophers who attempt to lay out a scheme of deontological ethics “end up reinserting various assumptions about human nature in their theories.” ⁴ Nevertheless, the burden of proof falls on Christian theologians to show why an understanding of human nature matters, and what the consequences are if we have it wrong.

The science of human nature

In his Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama raises an initial obstacle. He writes,

The problem posed by modern natural science goes deeper. The very notion that there exists such a thing as a human “essence” has been under relentless attack by modern science for much of the past century and a half. Part of the problem begins with Darwin, and more specifically with Darwinism, that species do not have essences. ⁵

While there is a history of philosophers and secularists fending off the notion of a unique human essence, a broad response has erupted. Driving this renewed interest is both the failure of the Judeo-Christian understanding of human nature as defined by original sin and that failure in light of scientific explanations of who we are. The science of human nature is caught up in an interesting turn of events. Over time the study of human nature became more empirical, but it never achieved anything like a consensus. Aiming to be radically empirical, the science of human nature attempts to discover the nature of being human by examining the phylogenetic and ontogenetic lineage of human development. The empirical evidence is gathered from a variety of disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, biological evolution, neurobiology, cognitive science, behavioral science, and primatology. The conclusions being reached are surprising, if for no other reason than to restore a much-needed balance to the dominant Darwinian picture of red in tooth and claw. At almost every turn the exploration is about the origins of altruism, morality, cooperation, and human kindness. The well-known primatologist Frans de Waal writes a book entitled The Age of Empathy (2009), Jeremy Rifkin, one of the most popular social thinkers of our time, writes a volume entitled The Empathy Civilization (2009), Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, summarizes some of the research in child development leading to the conclusion that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative (Why We Cooperate, 2009), and Steven Pinker piggybacks his significant contribution, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), with a not-what-you-would-expect tome, The Better Angels of our Nature (2011). Of course, these books are the popularized version of a body of research that has been proceeding for decades.

The new mantra among anthropologists is to uncover the nature of human nature itself, as opposed to a philosophical or theological inquiry. No one does this better than Maxine Sheets-Johnstone in her trilogy of books, The Roots of Thinking (1990), The Roots of Power (1994), The Roots of Morality (2008), as well as The Primacy of Movement (1996). What underlies this original body of work is a relentless drive to push downward in the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens until one reaches the most fundamental roots of who we are. For example, she argues that competition between males is more fundamental than male aggression that leads to war, and the intimate relationship between emotion and movement is more fundamental than empathy. ⁹ Child’s play as kinetic fun (rough and tumble play) is fundamental to exploring the vulnerability of the body and represents a kind of development that is not mediated by language, indeed, not even preparing for language but fully satisfied in itself. ¹⁰ Again and again she returns to the theme of an embodied epistemology. What links morality to death, what in fact grounds morality and makes it fully real, is one’s own physical body, which is continuously at risk, vulnerable to attack, pain, disease, suffering, and death. The very same physical body is also animated and lifted to euphoria by the sheer vitality of life itself, its celebration and enjoyment. ¹¹

Secular optimism

At some point in our evolutionary history we stepped onto an escalator of reasoning that began with counting on our fingers and ended with differential calculus. And the consequences of an expanded capacity for reasoning spread out much further. In his influential little book, just recently re-released, The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer explores our ability to reason as part of our capacity for perspective-taking, weighing the consequences of our actions, making moral decisions, greater sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others, leading to an expanding circle of altruism. That sphere of altruism has broadened “from the family and tribe to the nation, race, and now to all human beings,” including animals. ¹² While never claiming that we have overcome the selfish behavior at the root of so much harm, Singer believes we can master our genes. We do not have to answer evolution’s call to procreate. We can, and we have, created various means of contraception, and the birth rate has been falling, most dramatically in the world’s 49 poorest countries. ¹³

In spite of our visceral feeling from reading the daily news, the hard statistical facts point to an overall decline in violence and killing. “We may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” is the claim Pinker makes in the preface to his The Better Angels of Our Nature. Utilizing an array of graphs and figures, Pinker sets forth to show that we have become a less violent species over the last several centuries. Even taking into account that Pinker ignores a kind of violence not easily charted, it is difficult to argue with his picture of a world that is less violent. Echoing a similar line of thinking by Singer, together they parade the moral progress we have made. The list is long and impressive: the end (almost) of the slave trade, empowerment of women, outrage toward torture, the initiation of child labor laws, laws against hate crimes, the spread of democracy, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the indictment for crimes against humanity. The laws we have enacted and the behaviors we no longer tolerate testify to a new moral consciousness—an expanding circle of empathy, as Singer describes it.

The contemporary science of human nature is aglow with describing and touting human beings as biologically predisposed for empathy. This latest fashion in human nature ranges from the findings of the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal to books such as Teaching Empathy, Teaching Children Empathy, and The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child. Pinker mentions these books as an example of the way empathy is becoming what love was in the 1960s—a sentimental ideal and overrated as a reducer of violence. ¹⁴ Jeremy Rifkin’s Empathic Civilization is no less than a manifesto on the theme that “we are a fundamental empathic species” with profound and far-reaching consequences for society. Rifkin tracks the dramatic rise of empathetic consciousness as it passes through a growing sense of self-consciousness. We see this change taking pace in small- and large-scale ways, from the emergence of self-analyzing autobiographies (Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in l811), the initiation of social reforms, changing attitudes toward those of a different race, the Age of Reason, the Romanic Era, and ending with where we are now, Empathic Globalization. Today we are on the verge of a Revolution in energy/communication, Rifkin declares, as empathy is beginning to stretch beyond national boundaries to biosphere non-boundaries.

Matt Ridley is very good at propagating provocative ideas, and his latest foray is a collection of sound reasons why we should be optimistic about our future. Many of his claims are far from unarguable, but you cannot dispute what we now know to be fact.

We now know, as we did not in the 1960s, that more than six billion people can live upon the planet in improving health, food security and life expectancy and that this is compatible with cleaner air, increasing forest cover and some booming populations of elephants. The resources and technologies of 1960 could not have supported six billion—but the technologies changed and so the resources changed. ¹⁵

Ridley seems to have it right when he identifies the driving force behind the technological progress that has changed the world. Compare the hand axe and a computer mouse and you notice that one was made by a single person, the other by hundreds of minds working together. This is cultural evolution—the building of a collective intelligence through specialization that encourages innovation. No single person knows how to build a computer mouse. The person who assembles it in a factory does not know how to drill for oil from which the plastic came, and the driller does not know how to write computer code. ¹⁷

A composite summary of Singer, Pinker, Rifkin, and Ridley goes something like this: we have been able to make a better world because we have learned to exchange ideas (innovate) and to cooperate (empathize) for the good of others, and violence has declined because of the escalator of reason. None of these four heavyweights, however, think the positive changes we see are the result of a change in human nature. Pinker finds no evidence that our genetic makeup has changed over the last ten-thousand-year-window in which declines of violence are visible. ¹⁸ The use of reason may account for better control of one’s actions, but its more important role lies with altering a humanistic value system so that it privileges human flourishing and peaceful resolution over stealing and clubbing your enemy. ¹⁹ Thomas L. Friedman’s Golden Arches theory seems to be applicable: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” ²⁰

Indirectly, then, the secularists are supporting the argument for an essential human nature—a nature particular to our species that persists over time. Nevertheless, we are left with a suspect premise, namely, the presumption that as human consciousness evolves (our capacity for self-transcendence), we will rise above our instinctual self and master our own evolution. At the very least, let us be clear about what is evolving. Is it human nature or the standards we use to judge what it means to be human?

Not so fast

On the one hand, the secularists have explanations for why we are acting more civilized; on the other hand, they have no explanation for why we cannot consistently do the good we intend, and why evil persist unabatedly. Singer is poignantly aware that we are a long way from being the moral persons we should be. In the last chapter of The Expanding Circle, he laments, “If we were more rational, we would be different: we would use our resources to save as many lives as possible.” ²¹ Both morality or rationality are misleading criteria for judging human nature. We seldom suffer from a lack of ideals, but we do suffer a lack of will to do the good we envision. We are left again with trying to explain why utopian ideologies so often lead to genocide and the disconcerting way we sabotage our good intentions. Even if we were to concede the proposition that the world is improving by some measure and that we are becoming more empathic, we must be careful not to confuse evolving standards of decency with hearts truly free of prejudice. While we can foresee a world absent of nations at war with each other, it is more difficult to anticipate a world without poverty or without broken relationships.

For all the talk of a radically new view of human nature, we have not dislodged the biblical view of a creature unable to escape the daily conflict of opposing dispositions to do good (yester ha-tov) and to do evil (yester ha-ra). The history of those who ignore this basic biblical truth is one of tilting the balance in either one direction or the other. Presently, we need to resist the rush to jump on the new bandwagon that “human beings are not inherently evil or intrinsically self-interested and materialistic, but are of a very different nature—an empathic one.” ²²

There is also the matter of an alternate reading of our history. Writing from a decidedly secular perspective, Michel Foucault is not nearly so sanguine about how to read the twentieth century and his body of work goes a long way toward exposing the hypocrisy and self-delusion behind our rational justifications. Whatever progress we have made, we have also learned more sophisticated ways to steal, oppress, and kill. “The devil wears Prada,” as we now say. By focusing on the bigger picture, Pinker finds himself obligated to explain the Holocaust and recent genocides, which he does admirably. ²³ Yet, in her groundbreaking book, Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman writes, “Auschwitz was conceptually devastating because it revealed a possibility in human nature that we hoped not to see.” ²⁴ And what that possibility consists of is how facilely we have moved on as if “putting children in gas chambers is relatively benign.” ²⁵ For it seems that nothing can shatter humankind’s confidence that it can determine its own fate and create a different future. So quickly we forget Reinhold Niebuhr’s discernment that “the possibilities of evil grow with the possibilities of good.”

It would be misguided, however, not to recognize that something has changed about ourselves. We know for certain that humans are cultural animals par excellence who can modify their behavior based on learning and then pass that learning on to future generations in nongenetic ways. Cultural evolution, along with our genius for technological innovation, means we are able to replace the slow, meandering processes of natural selection with the immediacy of designer genes and neuropharmacology. Tim Flannery, an ecologist who directs the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, comments on the almost obvious: we “make spears rather than evolve fangs, and weave clothes rather than grow furry coats.” ²⁶ What is truly far-reaching about our evolution as a species is the development of self-awareness to the extent that we possess a radically new means to remake ourselves in our own image. But we should be forewarned that greater self-awareness does not translate into being masters of our desires, impulses, or intentions any more than a greater capacity for reason has brought an end to war, poverty, or any of the deadly sins of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

For whatever the reasons, what if the self is getting better, less selfish and more cooperative, less vengeful and more empathetic, less violent and more civilized? Do arguments to this effect undercut traditional apologies for original sin? ²⁷ Is the Christian understanding of original sin only about how to get to heaven as Luther framed the question? Could it be that all the signs that we are becoming more empathic and altruistic do not circumvent the fact that there this is something so fundamental about being human that it cannot change if we are to remain human?

Original sin postulates a self that cannot do the good it wants to do, and does the evil it does not intend to do. Here we have to remind ourselves of the critical distinction between sin and sins. As aptly stated by Marjorie Suchocki, sin arises from the condition of sin, or original sin begets sinners. ²⁸ While sin is a human condition, the sins we commit are personal, cultural, and historical expressions of who we are. The secularists are correct that what is considered sinful behavior is defined somewhat arbitrarily and historically. The moral progress they point to may be real enough in the sense that we are becoming more sensitive, morally speaking, but the progress may also be a chimera obscuring a sinful self defined by pride, self-deceit, idolatry, and overreaching. Morality and moral codes, then, reflect a change in the cultural values we hold dear at the moment, while human nature points to species-specific traits that endure in spite of changes in cultural norms.

Morality (read St. Paul’s “law”), therefore, cannot be the bedrock of what Christian theology refers to when speaking of sin. Morality is what happens when humans codify what they already consider good or wrong behavior. Morality is about the self-conscious choices we should or should not make, but further back in our evolutionary development is an even more rudimentary, inner conflict to kill or let live, to harm or benefit another, to cooperate or to take advantage of another person. Behind the moral rules we constructed—and for the most part they were rules meant “to protect and sustain social order, to resolve interpersonal conflict, and to combat the rampant pursuit of individual welfare”—is a more fundamental self impaired by conflicting motives and intentions. ²⁹ Paul Ricoeur’s reflection about sin gets to the root of the paradox of why reason or morals or even good intentions fail us. “A ‘desire’ has sprung up, the desire for infinity; but that infinity is not the infinity of reason and happiness…it is the infinity of desire itself; it is the desire of desire, taking possession of knowing, of willing, of doing, of being.” ³⁰

Remaking ourselves

Living as we do in the twenty-first century, the test case for the defense of original sin will be how this era of biotechnology plays out. The fact that we can design our genes means that we will do exactly that, for the temptation to remake ourselves is at the heart of who we are. Until only recently secularists had to be content with the hope that we could rise above our instinctual nature by way of education and reason. In one proposal after another we were given justifications to believe we could recondition ourselves to be a better person. Given our predisposition to transcend what is, education and behavior modification will be displaced by neuropharmacology, genetic engineering, and a phone app-type of Skinnerian behavior modification. ³¹ We are discovering just how eager we are to make use of technology to alter ourselves: growth hormones to make us taller, steroids to make us stronger, Prozac to change our personality, Adderall and Vyvanse to be the smartest we can be when it counts, and whatever means become available to design the children we wish to have. ³² This will happen under the banner of better medicine, better health, and a better understanding of the human genome, all of which qualify as good intentions.

The hope that drives modern-day secular optimism is the confidence that we can transcend our instinctual nature, and it is that confidence that must be thoroughly examined, for it is the defining question that separates Luther from Erasmus, as it does Niebuhr from Pinker. Pinker, for instance, asks, “So if we are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it?” ³³

Can we transcend who we are—our fundamental and essential self? I propose that we cannot because we are caught in an ultimate “Catch 22.” Since who we are will inevitably be written into the genetic codes we write, and because who we aspire to be will be little more than a reflection of the values a society holds dear at the moment, the person we “create” is inescapably the person we cannot escape. To state this veritable truth in another way, the evolutionary path that so defines us is the desire to do all things, change all things, know all things, master all things. To diminish this capacity would be to change what makes us human, and while we may do this inadvertently, we cannot do it intentionally because the same instinctual drive that strives for infinity leads both to God and to be God-like.

When Reinhold Niebuhr set out to mount a new defense of original sin, he understood the necessity to anchor sin in the human condition itself. Redirecting the discussion away from individualistic sins and a literal reading of the “Fall,” Niebuhr argued that history repeats itself because human nature repeats itself. And in an equally innovative move Niebuhr defined the human condition as our desire to transcend the creature we are. ³⁴

The human capacity for self-transcendence is why we contemplate a God who created all things—the fundamental religious impulse—and at the same time accounts for why we are never content with being just a creature. In his unique way, Karl Barth condenses the eternal now into the historic present:

On the very brink of human possibility there has, moreover, appeared a final human capacity—the capacity of knowing God to be unknowable and wholly Other, of knowing man to be a creature contrasted with the Creator, and above all, of offering to the unknown God gestures of adoration. This possibility of religion sets every other human capacity also under the bright and fatal light of impossibility. ³⁵

Redeeming grace

The Christian conception of original sin grew incrementally during the first four centuries, not only or primarily about human nature but what theologians understood to be the remedy to the problem, the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. ³⁶

Both the language of Luther and St. Paul point to the change that grace effects, namely, the unbinding of the human will. Verses 5 and 6 are the thematic preface to Romans 7 : 7–25, and Romans 8 : 1–11 explicates life in the “newness of the Spirit:

7 : 5 While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. ⁶ But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the Spirit.

8 : 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. ³⁷

If we ask whether the transformation of a life lived “according to the Spirit” implies a fundamental transformation of human nature, I think it does not. Down through the centuries there has been a long debate concerning this question, which is both substantive and technical. (For example, the possession of preternatural gifts in Adam’s original state, the loss of these gifts through Adam’s sin, and the condition of original sin as the privation of sanctifying grace. ³⁸

And why does this apologetic matter? As our incessant and inescapable will to transcend our finitude becomes the next stage of human development, any philosophy or ideology that says, “where there is a will, there is a way,” is a recipe for disaster. Our future will continue to be a history of good and bad decisions, but this ability to remake ourselves in the image of our desires will tempt us to overreach like no other possibility. Thus, it is important to state clearly and prophetically that our human condition is universal and irredeemable save for the gift of God’s grace, which even then is a gift received anew each day.