Historical Background
The church's account of human nature was formed in controversy. Pelagius taught in the early fifth century that human beings are born able to choose good without prior grace; Augustine answered that Adam's fall wounded the whole race, and the Council of Carthage (418) and the Second Council of Orange (529) ruled against the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian positions in the West. Eastern theology kept a different emphasis, speaking of ancestral sin and mortality rather than inherited guilt. The Reformers sharpened the Western account into total depravity, while the Council of Trent restated the Catholic position and Arminian and Wesleyan theology later qualified the extent of the damage grace must repair.
Scripture References
- Genesis 1:26-28
- Genesis 3
- Psalm 51:5
- Romans 3:23
- Romans 5:12-21
- Ephesians 2:1-3
The Questions
- Is sin fundamentally a state human beings inherit, an act they commit, or both? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Does the fall destroy the image of God in human beings, deface it, or leave it intact? Work on this question in the Workshop
- Is guilt transmitted from Adam, or mortality and corruption only? Work on this question in the Workshop
- What can the unregenerate will actually do toward God? Work on this question in the Workshop
The Positions on This Subject
Classical Calvinism
The fall left every faculty of human nature corrupted and the will in bondage to sin, so that no one can turn to God until grace first makes the dead sinner alive.
Progressive
Sin is estrangement: from God, from the neighbor, from the earth, and from the true self; it is therefore social and structural as surely as it is personal, and its remedy must heal relations, not only remit guilt.
Methods Brought to This Subject
The methods of theological discovery demonstrably worked on this subject, each with the reason it belongs here and the evidence of its use.
Disability Hermeneutics
What counts as the human norm, and whether bodily difference belongs to the fall or to creation, are this subject's questions asked from the body's side. The disability reading brings texts about healing, wholeness, and the image of God under that question, and the doctrine of human nature has to answer it.
Evidence of use: Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (2007), reads human nature, the fall, and salvation with intellectual disability at the centre, and is the standard work the subject's treatments now cite.
Objections
The strong Augustinian account is objected to on the ground that inherited guilt for another's act offends moral intuition and sits uneasily beside Ezekiel 18's insistence that the son does not bear the father's iniquity. The Pelagian account is objected to on the ground that it cannot explain the universality of sin or the church's practice of infant baptism. Eastern accounts are objected to by Western critics for leaving the mechanism of transmission unclear.
Sources
Primary: Augustine of Hippo, On Nature and Grace (415); Council of Carthage, Canons on Original Sin (418); Second Council of Orange, Canons (529); Council of Trent, Decree on Original Sin, Session V (1546).
Secondary: Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1971); Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 6th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017); John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (Fordham University Press, 1974).