Original Sin

This is my fourth try to write this. We can agree that God created the Earth and that man was once in a right relationship with Him. Then, Adam ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The important question becomes, "What does that mean for us today?" Evangelicals, as I understand it, believe that means there is a "strike" against all of us when we are conceived, because Adam has passed on his sin nature to all of his children. It's kind of like a cosmic mark against us. This meshes with the Roman Catholic position ala St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Anselm.



Luther said that Original Sin is:

I. Ignorance of God

II. separation from God

III. Having no direction or purpose

I can agree with that one. However, as I understand the Orthodox position, they believe that Original Sin is more like ... like we are still in the image of God, but the image is marred. There is a hymn, the Evlogitaria of the Dead, sung at Orthodox funerals which has the following lines:

An image am I of your ineffable glory

Though bearing marks of offenses.

and

Of old Thou hast created me from nothing and honoured me with Thy divine image;

but when I disobeyed Thy commandment,

Thou hast returned me to the earth whence I was taken:

lead me back again to Thy likeness, refashioning my ancient beauty.

We are not all bad. We are only broken and mangled and marred. The only thing we inherit from Adam is a bad father, not bad seed. And death. We get death too. But death is both God's blessing as well as His curse. It is a curse because mankind was not created to experience death but to live forever. It is a blessing because death, however painful, stops separation from God dead in its tracks (without death, man would live in a state of separation for eternity).



And this is of great importance, because it goes to the heart of what we believe about Christ's sacrifice. Catholics and Protestants believe that God is appeasing Himself by the death of Himself so he won't be offended by our presence. The Orthodox is like ... like Aslan and the Table. Because Christ was not guilty of our sinS (highlight the plural), and He died for them in our place, everything was reversed and death was defeated by death.



But I'm getting ahead of myself. Your thoughts?