Should We Believe in Original Sin? Videtur quod peccatum originale non sit credibile: It would seem that original sin is not believable, and for the following three reasons. First of all, not only is the doctrine intolerably paradoxical, it is never once mentioned, as such, in the Bible, not even where it is taken to be most evident: in chapter 3 of Genesis and chapter 5 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Secondly, our understanding of both evolution and biblical science makes it even more obvious than before how far from the intent of the biblical authors was any doctrine of original sin (careful exegesis of Romans 5, for example, has led many scholars to hold that Augustine developed his view of original sin based on a mistranslation by the Vulgate of a verse in this chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans). Thirdly and finally, the doctrine damages souls. Belief in original sin leads to pessimism: it results in a resigned fatalism about changing those sinful structures that actually can be changed but which go unchallenged because they are all too lazily attributed to the effects of original sin, which by definition is a given and cannot be changed. (Hannah Arendt was rightly annoyed when she returned to Germany after World War II and discovered Germans were blaming Hitler, as well as their own romance with Nazism, on Adam and Eve, a subterfuge scarcely less vulgar than the common criminal’s pretext, “the devil made me do it.”) Let us take each of these arguments in turn.

1) No one now disputes that the Bible does not teach a doctrine of original sin as such. Not only does the term never occur in the entire Bible, these Scriptures—both Old and New Testaments—are also innocent of any notion that Adam’s sin has made proleptically guilty those who live so far from the source of that sin that they seem incapable of having taken part in it. But that is what the doctrine says. Moreover, it goes on to say that this sin can only be expiated by Christ’s death and cleansed by baptism; that is, it is a sin which, if left unexpiated and uncleansed, “justifies” God in condemning that person, even an infant, to eternal banishment from God’s presence—and all for a sin never actually committed

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