The Human Race Has a Past

What is the origin of evil? What explanation do you give for the front page of the morning news? The Bible teaches that as humans we have collectively rebelled against the God who made us. This means that there is a crime that we all share, that because of our human ancestry we don’t come into the world as neutral arbiters between good and evil or innocence and guilt but as those who are already guilty and corrupt. As John Henry Newman put it, human experience seems to force the conclusion that mankind was implicated in some “primordial catastrophe.” As a race we have a shared past. The theologians call this “original sin,” for it explains the origins of our joint corruption.

The apostle Paul in Romans 5 puts it this way: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

Listen to author Gary Wills: “We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness. There is no ‘clean slate’ of nature unsubscribbled on by…one’s forebears…. At one time a woman of unsavory…experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as ‘having a past.’ The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, ‘has a past.’”

Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective.”

“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

~ Romans 5:12