The Father of Innovation? Augustine and Original Sin

 

As counterintuitive as it may seem, to deny the doctrine of Original Sin is to deny God's grace in saving sinners. 

Since death is caused by sin, the fact that children can die prior to any willful action demonstrates an inherited condition of sinfulness. Otherwise they would not die. Sin precedes death, therefore, where death is, there sin has preceded. As the Apostle Paul writes:

"Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). 

All men sinned in Adam, even though they did not perform the selfsame action of eating that specific forbidden fruit. This is the Biblical view of death, especially given that Paul roots our death in the Garden Fall of Adam wherein physical and spiritual death are implicate in each other. He roots our sin in our very nature (physis). We are born with this nature, for born Fallen,

"We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature (physis) children of wrath, like the rest of mankind" (Ephesians 2:3).

But someone might ask: “Which early church fathers prior to Augustine taught that we inherited the guilt of Adam's sin?”

If that question is rhetorically trying to make the point that Augustine was being an innovator, then it misses the mark. But if one is asking in all sincerity and as one in sympathetic agreement with Augustine's orthodox Scriptural doctrine, then we can rightly say that Original Sin is taught in Scripture and was the presupposition of the universal Church, as evidenced by the conciliar condemnation of Pelagianism in the Council of Carthage (418), which Council was also formally affirmed in later Ecumenical Councils. 

It was the error of Pelagius that moved the Church to articulate and so make explicit what was implicit up until that time. This is no different in principle from the 4th Century articulation and explication of the doctrine of Christ's being homoousios with the Father.

For it is fairly evident that that the controversy with Pelagius precipitated the explicit articulation of what was implicit in the earlier Fathers regarding Original Sin. And so just as no one used homoousios prior to Nicaea (except heretics), it was however explicated in the forge of controversy by the orthodox Fathers to combat Arianism. Therefore, not finding the notion of Original Sin explicit in earlier writers actually ends up not having any deep significance, unless one is willing to depart from catholic orthodoxy.

We might also add that the pre-schism, Conciliar East affirms the orthodoxy and dogmatic authority of Augustine, as the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II) in 553 declares:

"We further declare that we hold fast to the decrees of the four Councils, and in every way follow the holy Fathers, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Theophilus, John (Chrysostom) of Constantinople, Cyril, Augustine, Proclus, Leo and their writings on the true faith." (Session 1 – Extracts from the Acts: Emperor Justinian’s Letter Read Before the Fathers)

Last but not least, the Eastern Church also formally affirms the doctrine of Original Sin, as their Council of Jerusalem of 1672 affirms (despite its other errors), and so at least serves as a hostile witness in favor of Augustine's orthodoxy on this doctrine.

But we might also add that Cyprian in the 3rd Century wrote: 

"If anything could hinder men from obtaining grace, their more heinous sins might rather hinder those who are mature and grown up and older. But again, if even to the greatest sinners, and to those who had sinned much against God, when they subsequently believed, remission of sins is granted— and nobody is hindered from baptism and from grace— how much rather ought we to shrink from hindering an infant, who, being lately born, has not sinned, except in that, being born after the flesh according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death at its earliest birth, who approaches the more easily on this very account to the reception of the forgiveness of sins— that to him are remitted, not his own sins, but the sins of another?" (Letter 58:5)

Now, whether a person accepts such a statement from Cyprian as evidence of the doctrine of Original Sin prior to Augustine, it is nonetheless true that the entire Church universal accepted the doctrine as true to Scripture. It would be false to suppose that it is untrue simply because it was articulated later and in response to the heretic Pelagius.


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