Original Sin

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. PSALM 51:5

The last book Edwards saw through the press, published in the year he died, was a defence of the doctrine that human nature is corrupt from birth. He wrote it against a popular treatise by an English minister who held that men are born morally neutral and become sinners only by imitation and bad example. The disagreement sounds technical. It is in fact the difference between two entirely different religions, because everything depends on what is wrong with us.

The argument from the evidence

Edwards’s opening move was not a proof text. It was an appeal to the record. If human beings are born neutral, and sin is merely learned, then somewhere in the history of the world we should expect to find a person who did not learn it, or a society that avoided it. There is no such person and no such society. The pattern is universal, it appears in every culture that has ever existed, and it appears early — long before a child has had time to be corrupted by example. Universal effects, he argued, require a universal cause. A tree that produces bad fruit in every soil and climate has something wrong with the tree.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. GENESIS 6:5

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

Note the second half of that verse, which Edwards found particularly important. Not only is the heart corrupt; it is corrupt in a way that hides itself from the person whose heart it is. Sin includes its own concealment. This is why self-examination is unreliable and why we are most confident precisely where we are most blind.

Not acts but disposition

The heart of the doctrine is that sin is a condition before it is a behaviour.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. ROMANS 5:12

We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. The acts are symptoms. And this explains something every honest person notices about himself: that his failures are not random accidents but have a consistent direction. The same faults recur across decades. Something is bent, not merely occasionally misused. Edwards described the essence of that bentness with unusual precision. Man was made to love God supremely and all other things in proportion to their worth. In the fall, that ordering collapsed, and the self moved into the position God had occupied. What remains is not the absence of love but love wrongly centred — a private system in which everything is valued by its usefulness to me. This accounts for why so much apparent virtue is hollow. A man may be generous, disciplined and kind, and be so entirely for himself — for his reputation, his self-image, his comfort. The behaviour is admirable and the centre is unchanged.

Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh …and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. EPHESIANS 2:3

By nature. Not by choice, not by imitation. By what we are.

Where Edwards is contested

Honesty requires a note here, and it concerns not the doctrine but Edwards’s particular explanation of it. The difficulty every theologian faces is how we can be justly implicated in the act of a man who lived before us. Edwards’s answer, worked out in the later part of the treatise, is that the unity of the human race with Adam rests on a divine constitution — that identity over time, even the identity of a single person with himself from one moment to the next, is not a natural fact but something God continuously establishes. On that basis, God constitutes the race one with its head. It is an ingenious argument and it has never commanded general assent. Many careful readers who hold the doctrine of original sin firmly find this particular account speculative, and some think it proves too much. Others prefer the more traditional explanation of Adam as covenant head representing his posterity.

The reader should feel free to hold the doctrine and set the explanation aside. Scripture asserts the fact plainly and does not supply the mechanism. Edwards’s attempt to supply one is interesting; it is not binding.

The practical value of this doctrine is that it makes the gospel intelligible. If the problem were bad habits, we would need instruction. If it were bad company, we would need a better environment. If it were ignorance, we would need education. Christianity has been repeatedly reduced to each of these, and each reduction produces a religion of self-improvement. If the problem is a corrupt nature, then nothing will do but a new birth — and that is precisely what is offered.

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. JOHN 3:7

The kindness of a severe diagnosis

It is worth pausing to notice that this doctrine, which sounds so bleak, is in several respects a mercy. A severe diagnosis is kinder than a false one. If a man is gravely ill, the physician who tells him he is a little run down and should take more exercise is not being gentle; he is killing him politely. The doctor who names the disease accurately is the one who can treat it. Edwards understood the alternative accounts on offer, and they have only multiplied since. We are told our problems are the result of upbringing, environment, poor education, unmet needs, or bad social arrangements. Each contains truth. None accounts for the universality of the pattern, and each locates the fault somewhere other than in the person himself — which sounds compassionate and leaves him helpless, since he cannot change his history. There is also an equality in this doctrine that is easily missed and worth dwelling on. If sin is a condition we all share from birth, then the ground before God is entirely level. The respectable and the disgraced differ in how far the disease has visibly progressed, not in whether they have it. The person whose sins are socially acceptable — coldness, pride, quiet contempt, comfortable indifference to suffering — is not further along than the person whose sins are visible and shameful. He is merely better camouflaged.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. ROMANS 3:23

This is why Edwards regarded the doctrine as an enemy of self-righteousness rather than a source of despair. Nobody who genuinely believes it can look down on anyone, because he has no ground on which to stand and look down from. And it makes the gospel proportionate. A God who offered advice to people who needed only advice would be adequate. A God who raises the dead is what the situation actually requires.

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ; (by grace ye are saved). EPHESIANS 2:5

Dead people are not improved. They are raised, or they stay as they are. That is the whole difference between Christianity and every scheme of moral betterment that has ever been proposed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Look at your recurring faults over ten years, not ten days. Ask what the consistency of their direction tells you. 2. Take one genuinely good thing you have done recently and examine the centre of it. Who was it finally for? 3. Stop treating your sin as a series of incidents to be managed and start treating it as a condition to be healed. 4. Where you feel most confident of your own integrity, ask God to search you there specifically. That is where Jeremiah 17:9 applies. 5. Thank God for the new birth — a remedy proportionate to the actual disease.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have wanted to believe my sins are incidents, and You tell me they are symptoms.

I confess that the fault is not in my circumstances or my upbringing or the people around me. It is in me, and it was in me before I could choose it.

Search me where I am most sure of myself, for that is where I am most deceived.

And thank You that You did not offer me instruction when I needed resurrection. I cannot reform what You have said must be born again. Do in me what only You can do. Amen.