From Original Sin to Original Love
Christians worldwide observe Lent as a season of fasting, prayer, and spiritual return to God. These six weeks create space for self-reflection, good works, and renewed appreciation of God’s grace. Beginning with the ritual of ashes—reminding us that we are dust and to dust we shall return—Lent invites spiritual renewal as we lament our transgressions.
The doctrine of original sin developed during the 3rd century in Irenaeus of Lyons’ struggle against Gnosticism and was significantly shaped by Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who first used the phrase “original sin.” Augustine’s influential teaching emphasized that humanity inherited a “stain of sin” from Adam’s disobedience, creating a state of moral corruption requiring Christ’s redemption. While the concept of original sin is not biblical, the inspiration for this idea is found in the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve’s disobedience (Gen 3:1-24) against God’s command not to eat of the forbidden tree is the foundation for explaining sin and its consequences: suffering and death. In the late fourth century, Augustine characterized sin as a universal condition of inherited guilt, overcome only through God’s grace via baptism. This concept of fallen creation requiring salvation remains fundamental to Catholic doctrine. As Anselm of Canterbury wrote, “If Adam had not sinned, Christ would not have come.” Since all have fallen, all need redemption.
While interpretations have varied over centuries, the Catholic Church maintains that original sin is inherited guilt from a single couple (monogenism): “Original sin… proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani generis, 1950, para. 37). Although the Church has a lukewarm reception to evolution, the Church distinguishes evolution of the body from the soul, which is created immediately by God (Humani generis, para. 36).
The conviction of sin is deeply embedded in Christian theology. This narrative unfolds against the backdrop of salvation history, culminating in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. As Paul writes, “In Adam all have died; in Christ all are redeemed” (1 Cor 15:22). His Letter to the Romans establishes a parallel between the fallen Adam and Christ, the new person; Paul writes: “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned… much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many… For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:12, 15, 17). The doctrine of original sin is a cornerstone of Christian faith because it sets up a parallel between Adam and Christ, that is, between, fallen humanity and the need for a Savior. Hence, original sin is intertwined with Christology. While many theologians have recognized the need to modify or eliminate this doctrine, it remains entrenched in Christian doctrine because it is a linchpin to the Christian narrative. Simply put, no Adam, no Christ; if there is no need for Christ, then our faith is in vain.
Teilhard de Chardin considered original sin a static solution to the problem of evil. From a biological evolution perspective, no single moment or origin of sin creates a universal condition. While universal adaptations in life are driven by universal properties of matter (energy, entropy, interaction), evolutionary changes tend to be local rather than universal, primarily because creaturely life is local and shaped by environment and culture. We are not born in sin because of some aboriginal transgression by a primitive Adam, Teilhard argued. We are born into a world that is becoming; hence, “original sin” is the universe’s law, the cosmic condition of an evolving world. In a universe this vast, dead ends and wrong turns inevitably occur. No creative process exists without loss, suffering, death, and destruction. The immense suffering and death in biological life has made human emergence possible. After 13.8 billion years of cosmic life and 4.2 billion years of terrestrial life—with significant climate changes and cataclysmic extinctions—our very existence and capacity for reflection must be attributed to something more profound and resilient than original sin.
We have a need to explain evil in a “broken” world. The Fall narrative suggests we once existed in loving unity before turning from good by disobeying God’s command. Yet, this myth lacks credibility against our modern scientific understanding. Biological life is much more dynamic, relational, and resilient. To hold on to an outdated concept that defies modern biology distorts the meaning of the cosmic Christ. Moreover, the concept of depravity and fallenness has had serious consequences throughout history. It has kept believers doubtful of their spiritual experiences and dependent on Church authority for spiritual guidance, while fostering a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness. The ramifications of original sin extend from projected guilt and violence, such as Rene Girard’s concept of the Scapegoat, to technological transhumanism and the aim of digital immortality, to our current political climate of “Make America Great Again,” all of which are based on human weakness and the desire for power.
There is very little reason to maintain the doctrine of original sin and every reason to find alternate meanings to the question of evil and suffering. What if we replaced original sin with original love? Could we understand moral disorder as resistance to or rejection of love—not simply human love, but the unresolved God of love?
Jung offers a psycho-religious approach to fallen nature and suffering that departs from traditional Christian theology. In his “Answer to Job,” he explores how humans connect with religious depths through the unconscious. While traditional Christianity views God as immutable and impassible, Jung conceptualizes God as the principal archetype of the unconscious, similar to Paul Tillich’s notion of God as the “unconditional ground.” For Jung, evil stems not from a privation of good or fallen human nature, but from an incomplete union between divinity and humanity. Jung proposes that God needs humankind to achieve wholeness and completion. Through incarnation, God acquires an expanded and higher consciousness. Divine love exists when God becomes God within us—it is a potential energy that must be activated to demonstrate its power. The individuation processes of God and person are interconnected, suggesting God is inseparable from the self.
Evil, according to Jung, originates from God’s dark side—the “wild” and “unrequited” God who seeks completion in the human soul. God and humans require each other for life’s wholeness. Jung suggests they unite in human consciousness as the deep meaning of history, both personally and collectively. By understanding evil at the psychic level rather than from a primeval fall, we can better comprehend Jesus’s life as one who reconciled his psyche with the inner energy of divine love. Jesus, confronting darkness and doubt, showed the human potential for divine love. Christ embodies the ideal self—the psychic totality of the individual. His life demonstrates how freedom in love disrupts boundaries of division, showing that costly love demands depth and courage.
Without integrating evil, there is no totality—what remains unconscious manifests externally as fate. While original sin binds us to weakness and guilt, “original love” empowers freedom and choice. Adam and Eve symbolize the internal forces of male power (anima) and feminine receptivity (animus). Without reconciling these forces through integrated consciousness, they manifest themselves outwardly as patriarchy and submission. Without integration of the self, the world is godless chaos.
If original sin represents a split psyche of good and evil, original love expresses wholeness and deep relationship. We need a new season of wholeness and love, a realization that God needs us to become whole and complete. The symbol of Christ is the individuation of God and person: God becomes something new in us and we become something new in God. This new person is the Christic, the person of new life, committed to the energies of love and the creation of a new world. For what we are, the world will become.
View print-friendly version
18 Comments
Leave a Comment
Related Posts
Crisis and Hope
Myths are compelling stories that shape our lives. Our complex world is a mixture of myths—stories of how we got here, what governs our lives, and what determines good and…
I agree completely. We need a new story of our origins in Love. If the new story is a Love story and I do believe it is, then who were the original lovers? It takes two to create new life. The creation of new life makes little sense apart from the relationship between the Lovers who began the whole affair. God is not an individual. God is a relationship between Lovers who are unique, autonomous and whose union is a dance, equal, mutual, and reciprocal. Who were those lovers? What was the nature of the love between them that was powerful enough to create the world in which we live and move and have our being? As above, so below. Where is the human, incarnational model of this love? How can there be peace in the world when we don’t know where we came from? How can we answer any of the perennial questions, “Who am I”, “Where did I come from”, “Why am I here”? What is the story of our birth and who are our parents? We are alienated at the core and foundation from our very sacred and loving roots.
Teilhard believed that creation wasn’t finished yet, that creation is still becoming. Since to create is to unite and because we are not fully united as a species collectively, we are not fully created. We are still in the womb laboring to birth, to hold up the mirror of the original Love that is our destiny. We are still in the Divine Dance of those Lovers whose self empyting and filling has created this Womb of Love and possibility that we are laboring to manifest.
I am so grateful that Ilia continues to post this Franciscan Alternate Orthodoxy as Richard Rohr calls it.
When I come from love it is so much easier to radiate love to others. It is so much easier to have a relationship with God than a Quid Pro Quo fear based one.
I wish we could ‘banner’ this until everyone ‘gets it’.
Thank You!
Thank you for exposing this traditional idea of ‘original sin’ versus what I would call ‘original goodness.’ In Genesis 1:31, the Bible states, “God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” This points us to understand that we are made in “God’s image and likeness” thus we too are “very good.” The Church throughout centuries and continuing today, still promotes the concept of original sin as Ilia points out so eloquently. As the Franciscan’s have taught, our faith is not predicated on the idea of atonement and being “saved” but it is about “at-one-ment,” being one with Christ. As Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr says, “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”
Wow! Your words, so full of wisdom, of depth, fill my heart with joy, faith and hope! I carry this sense of One forward as best as I am able. I thank you from the depths of my heart.
We need to go beyond the printed words, images, metaphors and literary devices used in scripture and open our imaginations, reaching into the hidden nuances that are being spoken, into our core self, our Spirit, our true self.
Everything that Yeshua taught his disciples was about rising to higher and higher levels of consciousness. Everything he did, in all his teachings, in the miracles he gifted to individuals to regain wholeness, were pathways in rising to higher and higher levels of consciousness.
The stories, the parables, his radical actions, his inevitable death, are his gifts to everyone, not just a select few who once had water poured or sprinkled on them as rising yeast to bring them to life, to higher and higher levels of consciousness.
Yeshua’s radical actions are about remembering, rising from darkness into light, the light we are already and have been, even before our incarnation in our present human spacesuit form. The human spacesuit form we chose for this incarnation is light energy, formed into matter, to be a life support vehicle for our Spirit to achieve higher and higher levels of consciousness in our present incarnation.
Through the Eucharistic Prayer, our liturgical ritual, where soul self is re-membered, re-attached again and again into the Body of God, from which we each emanated as a Divine Spark. We each have always been part of the Body of God, even before Creation exploded into existence, and continually evolves to higher levels of consciousness.
Yeshua, Source’s Spirit, is always inviting us to evolve to higher levels of consciousness. That is his goal for each of us, to assist us in achieving our mission in this incarnation.
The Spirit’s invitation is never forced, it awaits our response when our own spirituality is ready with new spontaneity to emerge to new experiences. That is the essence of Resurrection.
There are no references to our being made of the “dust of the earth” in the New Testament, only as “children of light” as it pertains to the redeemed. Seems the Christ and Christ-consciousness awaken and elevate our sense of self from the material (mortal) and psychic, to the transpersonal or spiritual (panpsychic) as our identity, essence, and depth. Donning sackcloth, ashes, and hair shirts are associated with our mistaken identity of the past as earthbound, and/or having centered there. However, once awakened we can “fall” to those levels of awareness, because at birth we began in bodies wherefrom our minds were shaped and conditioned. And their gravitational or regressive pulls on consciousness and identity do remain, in varying degrees, this side of the grave. So what is healed, or made whole (holy) in salvation, strictly speaking, is neither body or mind, but a false concept of ourselves as body and/or mind, dominant when our spiritual sense has not been awakened, or for some reason is eclipsed. But generally, believer or unbeliever, all human experience begins as rooted in the ground plan of the body and its energies informing the mind via sense-bound knowing, until they are transformed or renewed in the spiritual by grace from a higher order. But we do have a lower nature, bound up in the material and mental centers of our being, whose gravitational pulls incline us toward the sinful and evil. Truth be told, as a whole, mankind is the wreckage of what could be, might be, or perhaps once was, great. If such were not so we wouldn’t be on the cusp of thermonuclear war, climate change inhabitability, or in the grip MAGA deceptions. Satan and darkness are the rulers of this present world, in the words of the Master himself.
Here’s John Phillip Newell’s take on Irenaeous from his book ; Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul
Irenaeus saw Christ not in opposition to this deep natural knowing, but as a radical affirmation of it. Christ, he said, is the “recapitulation” of the Word through which everything has come into being.[3] To recapitulate something is to say it again. It is to utter afresh what needs to be clarified or brought back into consciousness. So Irenaeus saw Christ not as a new Word, a Word that is somehow over against what is deepest in the earth and the human mystery. Rather, he saw Christ as respeaking the sacred essence of the universe, re-sounding the divine that is at the heart of all things. This was to see Christ as reawakening in humanity what it has forgotten.
Irenaeus’s teaching carries significant implications for how we view the essence of our being. In Christian vocabulary it can be called our Christhood, the intersection of the divine and the human, the marriage of heaven and earth, that is deep within us. To awaken to this union is to experience recapitulation, or a resounding, of the deepest notes of our being. It is to find our true depths resounding with the vibration of the sacred in all things
Thank you for sharing this much needed revision to guilt-laden 4th century Christian theology. Original Goodness aka Christic Love offers humankind an archetype that better explains the Paschal Mystery of Life, Death, and Resurrection aka Order, Disorder, and Reorder. Happy Incarnation, Passion/Death, and Resurrection, where the Risen Christ is encountered again and again and again throughout ongoing re-creation/evolution. Peace and All Good.
Why do you think that theology exploring evolution is getting so little traction? Is it that so much is already invested in atonement theories? What will it take for evolution to become the starting point for theological discussion?
I think it may have something to do with the fact that direct creation of a perfect humanity is a simpler idea. To accept a more complicated idea we need a compelling reason. Have you written anything about why God chose the route of evolution?
This is a masterful piece. It affirms for me my sense the what is primordially ‘original’ is ‘grace’. It emanates from our Judeo-Christian story of creation where the writer simply states that God saw that it was good. However ‘it’ came about it is a statement of wonder at the complex beauty of the human being. A ‘creature’ whose very being is whole yet dependent; individual yet essentially in relationship who is sufficient yet destined for connection. Humanity is a sublime ‘we’ whose existence is ever to go forward from its root in other, in soil, sand, water, sun, wind. Without knowing the existential meaning of ‘no’ humanity would never come to understand the fullness of ‘yes’. I do not believe that Jesus became incarnate because of sin, unless of course, sin is defined as the incompleteness of evolution. Jesus was evolutionary in terms of creations relationship with the creator. Jesus was evolutionary as a teacher. Christianity has failed to make that distinction and thus “Christianity” has been an unduly active contribution to division rather than towards ‘divinity’.