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Friday, December 07, 2018

Is original sin unjust

One objection to Calvinism is that original sin is unjust. It is unjust to punish the innocent. To punish someone for something they didn't do.

That's hardly unique to Calvinism. That's standard Latin theology. Traditional Catholic theology. Classical Arminianism. The historic rationale for infant baptism is to remove the stain of original sin. (Not my own position.)

I'd add that in Genesis, the primary punishment was losing access to the tree of life. But it's not as if that's something Adam's posterity was entitled to. 

But let's discuss the objection head-on. All things being equal, it's a miscarriage of justice to punish someone for something they didn't do. But are there exceptions?

Suppose I'm a juror. The defendant is a professional hitman. He's been indicted on a charge of capital murder. The prosecution makes a convincing case, so the jury, myself included, convict him, and he's executed.

But after his execution, an investigative reporter does a story showing that he was innocent. The cops planted incriminating evidence. 

Do I feel guilty? No. There's no doubt that he murdered many people. While it's ironic that he was falsely accused and punished, that makes up for all the times he got away with it. Indeed, it's less that he deserves. 

In what sense was he innocent? He was innocent of this particular crime, but he was guilty of this kind of crime. So even though he was punished for what someone else did, he was guilty of doing the same kind of thing on multiple occasions. This conviction takes the place of all the other times he eluded justice.  So there's a kind of moral transference. 

To approach it from a different angle: after they lost the war, the top Nazis committed suicide. I don't know the specific motivation. Perhaps they were terrified of what would happen if the Russians got hold of them.

But suppose they didn't commit suicide. Suppose they were put on trial. Is it necessary to convict them of murdering any particular Jew? If it's demonstrable that they were generally guilty of murdering Jews, is it morally necessary to prove that they murdered a particular Jew? 

I'm not saying these illustrations automatically vindicate the justice of original sin. But I'm provided counterexamples to show that there's nothing wrong in principle with punishing someone for what someone else did. 

9 comments:

  1. Steve, another example /analogy is something in law we call extended joint criminal enterprise. I'm in Aus, but I assume you guys have something similar. In essence, two persons conspire to rob a store and both do so. However in the midst of that, one shoots and murders the cashier. Under EJCE, the person who didn't do the shooting is caught up in the murderers act. He becomes liable for murder even though he never committed the actual murder itself. The context warrants an extending of culpability . The point is to highlight even on a human level there are certainly occasions where we extend culpability.

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  2. The example you give of the murderer who got away with numerous murders but got executed for one he didn't commit: does this exactly fit being punished for something they didn't do? He DID commit murder, not this particular murder but murder indeed. And the nazis-also committed murder-its not as though they're innocent.
    The problem with inheriting original sin, the part i struggle with, i s that the ones who inherit original sin didn't commit sin before they inherited the sin. And they only commit sin BECAUSE they inherit this original sin, unless I'm seeing things wrong in that regard (unless someone would say that everyone with an unfallen nature, as Adam had to begin with, would commit sin inevitably eventually). If it was the case that all Adams posterity would have inevitably committed sin anyway, given his same unbonded will, then there wouldn't be much of a problem with them being guilty. But being as though all Adams posterity come into this world under a curse, unable to avoid sin due to their now fallen nature, and then some of these posterity end up "passed over" regarding election, is the hardest part of Reformed theology for me personally.

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    1. I don't think there's any one thing human agents would do. Rather, God has alternate plots for every human agent. There are infinite forking roads in God's imagination.

      When God creates the world, he picks at least one of those to play out in reality. If God made a multiverse, then we do opt for one course of action in one universe, and a different course of action in a parallel universe.

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  3. I wonder if attributed sin is best explained by the mercy of God, not His justice. If God judged us on our own merits, their would be no Atonement.

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  4. I guess I might have prefaced that by supposing that, all men individually, even though created good, if left to their own devices, will sin, because "left to their own devices" means the absence of God, and thus necessarily sin. So by attributing Adam's sin to all men, He does them no wrong and no harm, and in fact sets forth the first inkling of the Atonement. He makes clear that we are to see our own condition in every man, and a foretaste of kind of friendship He plans for us to have with Him.

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  5. Take the example of the business owner that can be sued or punished because of the actions of an employee. When I worked at a gas station the owners were fined (punished) if one of us sold cigarettes to a minor.

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  6. Steve: wether there are alternative plots, multiverses, infinite forks, etc, i don't know how any of that matters when the bottom line is: in the actual world that was instantiated in this universe in Eden, Adam made a choice that bonded the will of every single one of his ancestors and essentially sealed (although i know, there are secondary causes in play) their eternity. There is a real and tragic sense in which the reprobate are "doomed from the womb" as the saying goes. There is a real sense in which the reprobate are unjustly saddled with a bonded will (they never chose to be born, but nevertheless are, and are born with a will and nature damnably opposed to God)-this is a difficult concept to accept, although we MUST accept it because Paul in Romans 9:19-20 verifies it as reality. I think ill probably go to the grave and into glory with this reality rubbing my psyche the wrong way, but i don't see any way to ignore the grave, morose reality of it in the meantime. God does what He does, Romans 9:21.

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    1. For what it's worth, if anything, I could easily be mistaken in one or more of the following, but here's my present thinking:

      1. I would have thought the loci classici for original sin would have been Rom 5:12-19 and 1 Cor 15:21-22.

      2. Rom 9 seems better used as a counterargument against (say) finding fault with God charging us with Adam's sin.

      3. Maybe Steve is (in part) hinting at the fact that, if we had been in Eden with Adam and Eve, then we too would have sinned as Adam and Eve sinned?

      4. If we find it unfair of God to judge us "in Adam", then would we find it unfair of God to judge us "in Christ" too?

      5. No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. We're social creatures, not discrete units. Our actions affect others and others' actions affect us (e.g. the sins of fathers affecting children).

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  7. EOD:
    1 & 2: I think you are right. I presented Romans 9 as an example of where my own personal peeve and protest against God (finding fault in fallen creatures with a bonded will) matched that of Paul's hypothetical character. Its a hard truth to swallow. There must be something we don't see, being on this side of eternity, in the unjustness of the reprobate being faulted for something they have no power against/desire to choose differently all because they possess a will/nature foisted upon them through having Adam as their ancestor.
    3. Ive heard this as an answer to the problem before too (i.e. everyone would have fallen given the same choice Adam & Eve faced). Its hard to conceptualize. It seems almost a form of Monism though: God went through all the possible outcomes of every conceivable soul facing the serpent in Eden and actuated one outcome only, in this case the outcomes are all the same. So in this view its not God actualizing the BEST possible world, but the ONLY possible world.
    4. Both situations are unfair indeed. One situation is obviously more palatable than the other. Im utterly grateful for being scooped up gracefully out of a pit i was in. No one in their right mind would protest being elected out of a fiery destiny they had no control over (no one seeks God d/t their inherited nature). Its the being "passed over" thats hard to accept, especially, again, in light of the nature of fallen man being inherited and not directly "chosen" by the individual.
    5. Agreed. BUT...In the case of original sin theres no reciprocal; what we choose has no affect on Adam & Eve's destiny. Its only a one-way street in this regard. As you say-the father's sins affect the children.

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