This is a question that goes to the heart of the Reformation. Luther’s view of human nature was one of his fundamental errors. The Church teaches that Adam and Eve were in possession of both supernatural and preternatural gifts over and above human nature. Through their sin they lost these gifts but still retained human nature. Luther, however, thought that because of their sin man has a fallen human nature.
The Church teaches that everything in creation was created good (even Satan). This is why Genesis states that man is created in the image and likeness of God. The Church Fathers made a distinction between these two terms. We are in the image of God because, among other things, we have a spiritual soul with the faculties of intellect and will (this image of God cannot be lost). The likeness of God corresponds to our state of grace. When we are in a state of grace we are in the likeness of God (obviously this can be lost). It is lost through our free actions to pursue sin.
Hi I am Lutheran and so I desire to answer as a whole and this specifically.
Luther was wrong, and Paul says so in Romans 1. Calvin took Luther’s error about the nature of man, which was informed by Platonism as well as the prevailing philosophies of his day which were the foundations of humanism, and ran with that error and ended up by teaching that the fall destroyed the Imago Dei. I think Luther was right about a great many thing (obviously) but he was wrong about this.
Furthermore, Calvin, working from Luther’s bad assumption about human nature, devised a system by which no man anywhere can have any knowledge of God at all, which the Bible flatly contradicts, and that no man can do anything pleasing to God in any fashion apart from Christ, which the Bible contradicts (for example the OT Saints and their praise.)
Luther’s teaching came from Augustine but he misunderstood Augustine. Augustine argued that man is fallen from birth, but that fallenness is not inborn guilt but rather an inborn bent that gives us a false appetite that would rather worship self than God. Augustine taught (
On Teaching Christianity is the book btw) that we are born with affections that instead of being focused on God, as we should be, are focused on ourselves, as our father Adam’s were when he chose to eat in spite of his knowledge of the Law given him by God to not do so. Therefore Augustine argues that our love is real, but it consumes that which is loved rather than upholding and helping it. Our passions are real, but they consume that about which we are passionate rather than upbuilding and bettering that thing. Does that make sense?
In this manner, we are born with a
tendency to sin but not an
actual guilt of sin. The notion that we are guilty of Adam’s sin because we were in Adam when he fell is Platonic.
But doesn’t the Church teach that we are in Christ on the Cross?
Yes, but that is different.
The reason why is that Christ took on the flesh of man and when He did so the infinite communicated itself to the finite, and so the death of Christ is not the death of one man, but an infinite death of infinite value, and so His resurrection is an infinite resurrection rather than that of one man as well.
These are difficult distinctions to understand but they are very important because if we do not make them then we will become man centered rather than God centered. Remember Calvin begins his systematic theology with a study of man and Thomas begins his with God. That is no accident. Calvin, and here he parted from Luther radically, constructs a theology of an infinite fall with a finite atonement rather than the Thomist or Augustinian understanding of an infinite atonement and finite fall. That is why Calvin did not believe that Christ was present in the Eucharist; because he could not accept that the infinite could communicate to the finite.
But Augustine taught that the infinite did communicate to the finite, as did Thomas, and furthermore Augustine, unlike Luther, taught that our nature is good but our appetites are bent, and it is by the corrupted affections that we sin and become guilty before God rather than being born guilty without choice or chance as Calvin believed.
God Bless.
