What is original sin?
Short answer
Original sin is the name given to the condition Christianity understands to have reached humanity since the disobedience narrated in Genesis 3: an inclination toward evil and a separation from God that nobody chose individually. Christian traditions differ about what exactly is inherited — the guilt of Adam, or only its consequences.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 7 min read
The expression does not appear in the Bible. It is a theological name, consolidated in the Latin tradition from Augustine in the fourth century onwards, for something the biblical texts describe without naming. Knowing that does not weaken the doctrine, but it changes how it should be discussed: what is being argued is the best description of a set of passages, not a formula sitting ready in the text waiting to be copied.
Genesis 3 narrates the rupture and lists the consequences: shame at one’s own nakedness, blame passed from one to the other, hard labour, pain, expulsion from the garden and the return to dust. It is a narrative of damage, and the damage is collective — it reaches the relationship with God, the relationship between people and the relationship with the land. What Genesis does not do is explain how that reaches us. The language of transmission only appears later, in Paul.
Romans 5:12 is the key passage, and the exact point where the discussion is settled is its final clause. The Greek there carries a short expression of disputed meaning. Modern translations, including the one published on this page, read it as an observation: death reached everyone because each has sinned. The old Latin reading, which Augustine had in hand, took it as a relative pointing back to Adam — all would have sinned in him. Much of the Western doctrine of inherited guilt grew from that second reading, and the difference is not pedantry: one version speaks of what each person does, the other of what was already done before anyone was born.
Set against all that is a text any honest explanation has to carry along with it. Ezekiel 18 states plainly that nobody answers for another’s guilt — neither the son for the father’s nor the father for the son’s. Whoever holds to inherited guilt has to explain how to reconcile the two; whoever denies it has to explain Romans 5 and Ephesians 2, which describe a condition prior to any personal choice. The three readings in the note below are, at bottom, three different ways of holding both ends at once.
It is worth noting what tends to be read too quickly. Psalm 51 is a prayer of confession, written in poetic language by someone devastated by what he had done; turning one of its lines into a thesis about human conception is an interpretive operation, not a direct reading. Romans 7, with its conflict between wanting the good and doing the evil, works the other way round: it proves no doctrine, but it describes the experience the doctrine is trying to explain, which is why it tends to convince more than the arguments do.
A practical question almost always follows: and children? In the Catholic Church, baptism removes original sin, and the hypothesis of limbo was never defined doctrine — a document of the International Theological Commission, approved by Benedict XVI in 2007, expresses grounded hope for the salvation of children who die without baptism. Among Protestants the idea of an age of accountability is common, before which there is no personal imputation. None of the major traditions teaches that a child who dies unbaptized is lost.
Finally, what the doctrine actually serves to say, in any of its versions. The human problem is described as deeper than a list of wrong acts: it is not that people do bad things now and then, it is that something is crooked at the source, prior to any individual decision. The practical consequence of that is curiously a relief — nobody is an isolated case of defect, and the solution proposed is never redoubled effort, but Christ. Adam and Christ, incidentally, always appear paired in Paul, and it is the second member of the pair that carries the weight of the argument.
What the passages say
6And so the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and beautiful to the eyes, and delightful to consider. And she took from its fruit, and she ate. And she gave to her husband, who ate.
7And the eyes of them both were opened. And when they realized themselves to be naked, they joined together fig leaves and made coverings for themselves.
The act and its immediate effect, in two verses. The text spells out the reasoning that precedes the decision — the fruit looks good, beautiful and delightful — and shows that the first consequence is not an external punishment but an altered perception of themselves.
17Yet truly, to Adam, he said: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree, from which I instructed you that you should not eat, cursed is the land that you work. In hardship shall you eat from it, all the days of your life.
18Thorns and thistles shall it produce for you, and you shall eat the plants of the earth.
19By the sweat of your face shall you eat bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken. For dust you are, and unto dust you shall return.”
The consequences stated: the land stops cooperating, work turns into hardship and the body has a deadline. Note that the text describes the damage done to relationships, not the transmission of a guilt — that language only appears much later, in Paul.
12Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into this world, and through sin, death; so also death was transferred to all men, to all who have sinned.
The passage the doctrine rests on, and whose final clause decides the outcome. The edition published here reads it as an observation that each person sins; the old Latin reading took it as a reference to Adam, in whom all would have sinned. The Western doctrine of inherited guilt is born, in large measure, from that second reading.
18Therefore, just as through the offense of one, all men fell under condemnation, so also through the justice of one, all men fall under justification unto life.
19For, just as through the disobedience of one man, many were established as sinners, so also through the obedience of one man, many shall be established as just.
The structure of Paul’s argument in two sentences: one offence on one side, one act of justice on the other, with effects that reach everyone. The parallel is what makes the passage so disputed — the weight given to the first term sets the weight of the second.
21For certainly, death came through a man. And so, the resurrection of the dead came through a man
22And just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be brought to life,
The short version of the same pair. It serves as a reminder of proportion: on both occasions when Paul takes up the subject, Adam enters as a contrast in order to explain Christ, and not as a topic in himself.
1And you were once dead in your sins and offenses,
2in which you walked in times past, according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of this sky, the spirit who now works in the sons of distrust.
3And we too were all conversant in these things, in times past, by the desires of our flesh, acting according to the will of the flesh and according to our own thoughts. And so we were, by nature, sons of wrath, even like the others.
The harshest description of the state before grace, with the phrase the inherited-guilt reading most invokes: being something by nature, rather than by choice. Whoever reads original sin as deep corruption finds their strongest text here.
20The soul that sins, the same shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son. The justice of the just man shall be upon himself, but the impiety of the impious man shall be upon himself.
The indispensable counterweight. The prophet rules out the transfer of guilt between generations in both directions, and states that each answers for what is their own. Every explanation of original sin has to accommodate this claim, and it is exactly here that the readings part.
7For behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sinfulness did my mother conceive me.
Much quoted, and almost always outside its genre. This is a prayer of confession, in poetic language, made by someone devastated by what he had just done. Reading the line as a technical claim about human conception is a possible interpretation, but it is interpretation. (This is the psalm numbered 51 in most Bibles, where the same line falls at verse 5.)
18For I know that what is good does not live within me, that is, within my flesh. For the willingness to do good lies close to me, but the carrying out of that good, I cannot reach.
19For I do not do the good that I want to do. But instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do.
It proves nothing and explains a great deal. Paul describes the distance between wanting the good and managing to do it, and it is that experience — recognisable to anyone, believer or not — that the doctrine of original sin is trying to account for.