New Wineskins: A New Approach to Original Sin and the Redemption

By Patrick J. Amer

Evolutionary psychologists have shown that we have inherited from the higher animals and primitive humans certain instincts which were necessary for survival in prehistoric times, but which incline humans to hurt other humans. I call them the Antisocial Instincts, and I propose that they replace the doctrine of Original Sin.
Jesus did not come to die for our sins. The idea that God had to sacrifice his only son to make things whole is a repugnant idea. Jesus came to teach, and his principal ethical teachings can be organized into five Precepts, which directly oppose the Antisocial Instincts in humans and their institutions. Teaching them is Jesus's principal redemptive action.
Jesus did not intend to accomplish the redemption by himself. He intended that his followers complete his redemptive activity by following his five Precepts and using them to reform humanity's social and political institutions. By doing so, we can become followers of Jesus in his redemptive activity, and in this activity find meaning, hope, freedom, and authenticity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781725253681

Patrick J. Amer

Patrick J. Amer practiced law in Cleveland, Ohio for forty-one years, and now lives in Bluffton, South Carolina. In his thirties, he left the Christian faith. In his fifties and sixties he returned to the church, studied Christian sources, and began formulating his own approach to Christian theology.

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Introduction

Among the central doctrines of Christianity are Original Sin, which is the explanation of what in humans required a redemption, and the Redemption itself, which is the explanation of what Jesus did to counter the effect of Original Sin and so redeem humanity. The traditional Christian doctrines in these two areas were to a considerable extent shaped by the cultures in which they were formulated, in the case of Original Sin in the writings of Augustine in the early fifth century, and in the case of the Redemption in the writings of Anselm in the late eleventh century. With the enormous differences between the cultures of the late Roman Empire or the feudal early Middle Ages and our own times, these traditional doctrines have now become so implausible that they are not truly believed by many Christians who have thought about them. As we now live in a culture largely influenced by modern science, and as the doctrines of Original Sin and the Redemption are anthropological in nature, the relevant sciences should play a significant role in the contemporary understanding of these doctrines. The purpose of this book is to show that evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology, and a study of the ethical teachings of Jesus can give us new and different explanations of Original Sin and the Redemption.

We have lost a generation in the Christian churches. Older Christians testify that while they are still Christians, their children and grandchildren aren’t. I submit that a major reason for this loss is that the younger generations, raised in a secular society with a strong presence of science, cannot find a compelling narrative in the traditional doctrines of the Christian churches.

Younger educated people cannot find an explanation of the state of humankind in the ancient myth of Adam and Eve. The notion that we all have inherited sinfulness from the disobedience of a mythical couple in ancient times is simply not believable any more. The notion that a fierce and angry God is punishing us all for that disobedience does not convey a message to educated people which meaningfully interprets and explains the presence of so much evil and suffering in this world.

The belief of many that Jesus of Nazareth offered his life as a sacrifice to an offended God is similarly not acceptable. The Christian belief that Jesus is himself God leaves us with a story of one God who at the same time is angry with humanity and is enough in love with humanity to suffer death to appease the angry God, who is the same God. Again, these teachings offer no reasonable explanation of the evil and suffering which are built in to many human institutions, and no clear portrayal of the changes that are necessary to resist these evils.

Absent credible explanations of the sources of human evils in the world, and what Jesus of Nazareth did to combat and overcome these evils, people raised in Christianity have drifted away from the Christian Churches. Better explanations and a coherent narrative are needed to get them back.

Having a more modern, more mature explanation of what it is in our biological and anthropological makeup that makes us do harm to other human beings is intellectually satisfying. But it is much more than that. Christian theology has always maintained that the redemptive activity of Jesus was intended to, and did, redeem us from our Original Sin. So a correct understanding of Original Sin leads directly to a correct understanding of the redemptive action of Jesus and of the role that the followers of Jesus must take to bring that redemptive activity to fruition. I will propose that the duties of the followers of Jesus are actually much different from the duties which the Christian churches have traditionally taught. The teachings of Jesus call upon his followers to change many amoral or immoral characteristics of the social, cultural, and political institutions of our societies. To understand this, and to accept the ethical aims set forth by Jesus, are and should be life-changing. This is what this book is about.

It is relatively easy to describe the crippling flaws of the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin. It is less easy to explain the sources of the human inclinations to hurt other humans. But there is a simple and natural explanation of these tendencies and their sources. This explanation is firmly grounded in modern sciences, particularly the findings of cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology. It is the purpose of Part I of this book to set forth this explanation.

It is also relatively easy to describe the manifest errors in the concept that Jesus offeredsubstitutionary atonement for the sins of humanity by his death on the cross, thereby redeeming humanity from its sinful state and placating an angry God. It is less easy to explain how Jesus’s life, teachings, and death worked a natural redemption of humankind, and created an opportunity for all his followers to participate in the work of this redemptive activity. Such an explanation of Jesus’s redemptive activities can be based firmly on the texts of the gospels. Part II of this book sets forth this explanation, and shows how it is integrated with the explanation of human tendencies to hurt other humans set forth in Part I.

Part III shows that the new understandings of original sin and the redemptive activities of Jesus call for a paradigm shift in Christianity, and describes some of the ways in which followers of Jesus can participate in the work of his redemption of humanity and the world.

The gospels are the narrative of Christianity. There has grown up around them a meta-narrative of doctrines and interpretations, of teachings which are not contained in the gospels. This book reinterprets the meta-narrative by relying more closely on the narrative.

I will generally use the New Revised Standard Version for quotations from the bible in this book. I will occasionally substitute the language of older translations, particularly where they seem more familiar or more comfortable. For example, I will use forgive us our trespasses rather than forgive us our debts, and the mote and the beam rather than the speck and the log, the splinter and the wooden beam, or the very small particle and the beam of timber. After each passage quoted from a gospel, I will cite the gospel in which it is found (abbreviating Matthew’s name to Matt), followed by the chapter number and, after the colon, the number of the verse or verses. Where a quoted passage is followed by the citation of other scriptural passages, the quoted passage comes from the first of the references, and the other references are to parallel passages in other gospels.

Several good friends read early drafts of the manuscript, and gave me many helpful comments. I am grateful for the thoughts of Jerry Anderson, Nicky Bell, Daryl Domning, Kitty Ferguson, Anita Hill, Marjorie Milbrandt, Jim Moore, and Woody Woodroofe. I am particularly indebted to Roger Haight, my mentor and friend, who suffered through several drafts and gave me sound advice throughout. And my dear wife Betty gave me her help and her patience during the long sessions of drafting and revising the manuscript.

Part I

Original Sin

1

Original Sin and Social Sin

The Traditional Doctrine of Original Sin

The traditional and current doctrine of Original Sin is the linchpin of Christian theology and practice. This doctrine correctly sees the necessity of an explanation of sin and evil in all of humankind. The authors of the first chapters of Genesis thought it appropriate to show that their God had no responsibility for human sin and evil, and the story reflects that decision. Their powerful story is at the root of Christian piety and the Christian world view: all humans are sinful, and all Christians are, through the sin of Adam and Eve, separated from God, and must regularly beseech God for mercy.

The doctrine of Original Sin originated and was developed in the third and fourth centuries by early Christian fathers who were seeking to describe what Jesus’s redemptive activity redeemed humanity from.¹ As the redemptive activities of Jesus were considered to be universal, so Original Sin had to be universal, and the early church fathers turned to Genesis chapters 1 through 3 for the story of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, which they had no reason to believe was not historically accurate.

The story of Adam and Eve begins with their creation in a state of sinless perfection, continues with their breach of God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and ends with their being cast out of paradise and into the state of humanity as we know it. Just before their expulsion, God told Eve that women would suffer in childbirth and would be submissive to their husbands, and to Adam God said that subsistence farming would be difficult, with toil and sweat, and that all humans would eventually die. (Gen 3:16–19)

To explain this fall, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas taught that in punishment for their original sin God had deprived Adam and Eve of blessedness, which is sanctifying grace and eternal life, and justice, which is the ability to do God’s will consistently, and that this deprivation was passed down to all their human descendants, accounting for the spiritual and moral condition shared by all humankind. Reasoning from this description of the first human sin, the church fathers concluded that the redemptive activity of Jesus was to take the sins and evils of humankind upon himself, and offer himself as a sacrifice of atonement to God. The gifts of blessedness and justice were restored by Jesus’s redemptive activity, and were subsequently transmitted to Christians by baptism. This interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve has remained core Christian doctrine to this day. Two examples of this, in Catholic and Episcopalian doctrine, are:

By his sin Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all human beings. . . . As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the domination of death; and inclined to sin. (This inclination is called concupiscence.)²

Original sin . . . is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.³

In the last several centuries this account of Original Sin has become severely strained. Some of its serious problems are:

For most of the history of the Christian churches, the story of Adam and Eve was regarded by educated people as historical truth. For the last two centuries, this is no longer possible. God did not in fact create humanity in a state of sinless perfection. The world was not created in six days, but in something over thirteen billion years. God did not separately create each species. Life’s forms evolved by natural selection over a period of a little less than four billion years. Pre-hominids gradually evolved through several intermediate steps into human beings over the last two million years. Homo erectus could use fire half a million years ago. Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago. At what point in this long slow period of evolution Homo sapiens became humans is impossible to determine. There must have been a first human, but who that was is unknowable. The story of Adam and Eve is a myth, and in many respects a harmful one.

There was no state of original sinless perfection in humans. There was no Garden of Paradise. The anthropological evidence shows that from the earliest periods, humans and their pre-human ancestors killed each other in combat.⁴Hunter-gatherer tribes were as violent and warlike as the agricultural communities which succeeded them.⁵ For all prehistoric tribes, survival was a constant struggle. There is no evidence of a diminution of human capabilities from the first appearance of humans, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

The Genesis narrative itself, read closely, does not support the traditional Christian teaching that Adam and Eve fell from a state of prior perfection when they ate the apple and sinned. In the temptation story, Adam and Eve are presented as hopelessly naive and adolescent. All of their human needs and delights were met to their full satisfaction in the Garden of Eden. They had walked with God among the trees in the evening breeze. One cannot imagine any kind of original perfection of humanity without immunity from, or at least strong powers of resistance against, temptation to sin of any kind. But we find none of that in Adam and Eve. One word from the serpent, and they ate the fruit. What the text supports is not the fall of mankind. What the text shows is that prior to the fall, Adam and Eve were all too fallible and human, and their trust in God and in his word was shallow and fickle. When God confronted them with their disobedience, their first reaction was to express their shame at being naked, and their second reaction was to blame another for their disobedience, Adam blaming Eve, and Eve blaming the serpent. (As a last kind act before expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise, God made them both a set of clothes.) (Gen 3:21) We can all identify with the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to temptation. This is because in the Genesis myth itself human nature is shown to be just the same before the Fall as it was afterward. In other words, there was no Fall, and Adam’s sin was not the Original Sin. The great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher expressed his dissatisfaction with the Adam and Eve myth and the theology which was based on it as follows:

And indeed it is glaringly and intrinsically incompatible with all that we can learn of the divine ways, to suppose that to such an extent God should have made the destiny of the whole human race contingent upon a single moment, the fortunes of which rested with two inexperienced individuals, who, moreover, never dreamed of its having any such importance.⁶

While we are looking at the story of Adam and Eve, let us look at the nature of the command they disobeyed. God did not command them not to kill, or not to steal, or not to lie. God commanded them not to eat the fruit of a particular tree. This was a wholly arbitrary and meaningless command, a rule of dietary prohibition. When we examine the teachings of Jesus in Part II, we shall see what Jesus taught about meaningless and arbitrary rules, like rules of dietary prohibition, even when those rules were set forth by proper religious authorities as the commands of God.

The traditional doctrine of original sin depends wholly on the assertion that the original sin and guilt of Adam and Eve was inherited by all humans. This notion is both unjust and pernicious, and bad biology as well.

It is unjust because each person’s moral relationship with God should be, and is, ultimately a matter of his or her own responsibility and his or her own conduct. The idea that the relationship between a person and God was materially and adversely altered by two other people thousands of years ago cannot be reconciled with the concept of a just, fair, and benevolent God. The explanation that all men and women were represented by Adam and Eve is a legal fiction, and an indefensible one. One cannot delegate one’s personal moral responsibility to another, nor assume personal culpability and guilt for the fault of another. Even if one could, none of us ever did consent to be represented by a mythical prehistoric Adam or Eve.

The inheritability of original sin is a pernicious concept as well. Once one believes that the guilt of the sin of Adam and Eve is the guilt of every man and woman, it is reasonable to believe that in general men and women can be held responsible for and can be punished for the sins of their ancestors. This is a powerful rationalization for prejudice and persecution. Even if it were true (which it is not) that the Jews of Jesus’s time killed Jesus, it would not be true that later generations of Jews had any responsibility for Jesus’s death. Yet many Christians throughout the last two thousand years, believing (because of the story of Adam and Eve) that sin and guilt is inheritable, have persecuted the Jews as Christ-killers.

The concept of the inheritability of sin and guilt is also bad biology. No information about the activities of a person during his or her life, or about that person’s acquired character, can be transmitted from that person’s body or mind to the genetic material which that person transmits to his or her offspring. In the words of a master of evolutionary science, no information can be transmitted from the proteins of the body to the nucleic acids of the germ cells, in other words, that an inheritance of acquired characters does not take place. This is the so-called ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology.⁷Modern science has definitively concluded that sin and guilt cannot pass from generation to generation through genetic heritage.

The traditional Christian teaching of the fall of mankind in Adam’s sin is misleading in that it implies that God had a plan for humanity, Plan A, which Adam and Eve frustrated by their sin, and that then God, with resourcefulness, switched to Plan B, which was the redemptive life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The creation story, like all myths, treats God as if God were a king with great powers, rather than a true God. God enjoyed the Sabbath rest after six days of creation, and God liked to walk among the trees in the garden