Original sin

[roseproject]

I’m a little confused about this at the moment and am in need of some clarification.

Is original sin purely a spiritual distortion or does it affect us in pysical ways, as well?
…and, if it’s the former, how is it that we inherit this spiritual distortion from Adam and Eve if a soul is created immediately by God? The distortion wouldn’t come from God, right? Our souls aren’t created by our parents who were the ones who were corrupted. You know what I mean?

Thanks in advance

 

[davidv]

I’m a little confused about this at the moment and am in need of some clarification.

Is original sin purely a spiritual distortion or does it affect us in pysical ways, as well?

Based on Church teaching, it is both. For our first parents, this personal sin had both spiritual and physical consequences. Spiritually, they damaged their relationship with God. Physically they were kicked out of Eden.

…and, if it’s the former, how is it that we inherit this spiritual distortion from Adam and Eve if a soul is created immediately by God? The distortion wouldn’t come from God, right? Our souls aren’t created by our parents who were the ones who were corrupted. You know what I mean?

Thanks in advance

To this day we suffer the effects of the first personal sin. We are born without sanctifying grace and must suffer in the physical world.

 

[marymary1975]

Based on Church teaching, it is both. For our first parents, this personal sin had both spiritual and physical consequences. Spiritually, they damaged their relationship with God. Physically they were kicked out of Eden.

To this day we suffer the effects of the first personal sin. We are born without sanctifying grace and must suffer in the physical world.

^^this!! Though just to expand, the physical consequence was mortality and death. Due to that original sin our nature changed and mortality and sickness entered for all of us. Remember God’s word " if you eat from that fruit you are going to die"

 

[Neofight]

St. Augustin suggests even pain was a result of sin…well actually the result of losing immortality.

If you can find it, read Chapter 19 of Book Two of Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees

 

[roseproject]

To this day we suffer the effects of the first personal sin. We are born without sanctifying grace and must suffer in the physical world.

I guess what I’m really asking is why would this sin affect the souls of their offspring? If a soul is created immediately by God, how would the effects of this sin transfer onto a soul that didn’t personally commit this sin?

 

[Neofight]

I guess what I’m really asking is why would this sin affect the souls of their offspring? If a soul is created immediately by God, how would the effects of this sin transfer onto a soul that didn’t personally commit this sin?

Keep in mind that “effects” and “guilt” are two different things…all descendants of Adam and Eve received the effect, even though not guilty of the sin themselves.

The soul is created at time of conception.

The effect was not transferred, but rather was part of the change in the nature of man that occurred as a result of the sin, so with the change in man’s nature, all future humankind would have this “new” (for lack of a better word) nature.

Peace and all good!

 

[roseproject]

Keep in mind that “effects” and “guilt” are two different things…all descendants of Adam and Eve received the effect, even though not guilty of the sin themselves.

The soul is created at time of conception.

The effect was not transferred, but rather was part of the change in the nature of man that occurred as a result of the sin, so with the change in man’s nature, all future humankind would have this “new” (for lack of a better word) nature.

Peace and all good!

Why would God choose to let this “curse” of sorts effect all of humanity? Couldn’t He have just punished Adam and Eve and let their decedents off the hook; let them be born without these negative effects? It makes me wonder why He couldn’t just do what he did with Mary’s immaculate conception for the rest of us, instead of delaying it until a later time in history? I don’t know, I may be questioning God’s will a little too deeply, but then again, there’s nothing wrong with wondering, right? '^^

 

[marymary1975]

Why would God choose to let this “curse” of sorts effect all of humanity? Couldn’t He have just punished Adam and Eve and let their decedents off the hook; let them be born without these negative effects? It makes me wonder why He couldn’t just do what he did with Mary’s immaculate conception for the rest of us, instead of delaying it until a later time in history? I don’t know, I may be questioning God’s will a little too deeply, but then again, there’s nothing wrong with wondering, right? '^^

Firat you need to remember that the effect of sin goes beyond the present to your future and the future of your offspring. Sin has consequences that work like a pile of dominoes stanfi g up. You hit one and not only the first one will fall but all. Second God didn’t “choose” to let this curse o er humanity. He warned very clearly " you are going to die." The choosing was done by our first parents who choose to break the law and then as a consequence their nature changed to mortality. The third important factor you have to remember is God is perfect. God is omnipotent but he is also perfect so he is not break his own laws and perfection. That is basically why it was impossible for Adam and eve to swicht nature but their offsprings to go back to their original nature. It would have been basically a breach of all natural laws which God is not going to breach because of his perfect nature. Mary was born without sin because she had been chosen to be the mother of Christ so her case is very particular so you can’t really compare her to the rest of us. Also you seem to forget that God gave us the tools to again salvation . you seem to talk like if all humanity got condemned and God didn’t do anything about it and that is not true. We suffered the consequences of sin but God equipped us with all the tools to reject sin and obtain salvation.

 

[cfauster]

The following comes from inters.org/death :

By interpreting the biblical accounts on creation, especially the one contained in the Book of Genesis , the Church’s teachings associated human death with original sin. After that sin, men and women began to have a relationship with God that is different from the one they had “in the beginning.” The consequences of this sin they hand down to the all mankind (cf. DH 1511-1512; Gaudium et spes, n. 13). Our ancestors, having been the subject of divine promises, were invited to accept life as God’s permanent gift and not to doubt the original goodness of their Creator. Immunity to death depended on their behavior before God’s commandments. The first sin was an attempt to build their life in an autonomous way, trying to behave independently from God, and forgetting that life was possible only by recognizing it as God’s gift. The price paid was the loss of immunity: «for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return» (Gn 3,19). Human beings, who came from the earth, will return to the earth with death. Death is the painful return, in the opposite direction from the act of creation, to the earth. After original sin, all men and women are subject to the law of death and no human effort can obtain a full victory over it. …
According to the well-known Augustinian consideration, at the beginning of human history, God gave men and women, despite their being creatures, the “capacity not to die” (posse non mori, cf. De Genesi ad litteram, VI, 36,25: CSEL 28,197): resurrection (or a state of union with God no longer reversible) would have represented the immediate crowning achievement of each historical life, without the interruption of death. This does not mean that physiological laws would have been invalidated, and that human beings would have continued their earthy life indefinitely: what is promised as achievement of the universal history in a redeeming history marked by sin, could have been the achievement of each individual life if there had been no sin (cf. Schmaus, 1953). …
Therefore, the biblical account offers a specific reading on the origin and meaning of death: without sin there would be no death, and because of an individual sin, death holds sway over everybody (cf. Rom 5,12). Death is thus presented as the destiny of those who are sinners; it reveals the presence of an intimate disorder in human life, the discomfort of a contradiction dominating human beings themselves, by contrasting with their desire for an everlasting existence and eternal life.

 

[roseproject]

Firat you need to remember that the effect of sin goes beyond the present to your future and the future of your offspring. Sin has consequences that work like a pile of dominoes stanfi g up. You hit one and not only the first one will fall but all. Second God didn’t “choose” to let this curse o er humanity. He warned very clearly " you are going to die." The choosing was done by our first parents who choose to break the law and then as a consequence their nature changed to mortality. The third important factor you have to remember is God is perfect. God is omnipotent but he is also perfect so he is not break his own laws and perfection. That is basically why it was impossible for Adam and eve to swicht nature but their offsprings to go back to their original nature. It would have been basically a breach of all natural laws which God is not going to breach because of his perfect nature. Mary was born without sin because she had been chosen to be the mother of Christ so her case is very particular so you can’t really compare her to the rest of us. Also you seem to forget that God gave us the tools to again salvation . you seem to talk like if all humanity got condemned and God didn’t do anything about it and that is not true. We suffered the consequences of sin but God equipped us with all the tools to reject sin and obtain salvation.

I guess really what the question that I’m straining to find an answer to is this:

Is sin a seprate “sustance” or is it simply a wrong act committed? I guess, in short, should it be thought of as a verb or as a noun? If it’s a verb, how is it that one, singular act can affect (in the way that original sin does) someone outside of the one that committed it? No other sin has this effect. Why did this singular act affect the world so drastically outside of the one who committed it? If it’s a noun, then it is a thing which can “move” on it’s own, so to speak. It is a thing that can infect (in a more spiritual sense). How did sin transmit itself onto the world? Did the world just suddenly become corrupted like, from the perfect world it was, and then “poof”, sin infected the world after Adam and Eve disobeyed God? Can an act infect the world in such a profound way, but wasn’t simply caused by bad example passed on through generations?
I hope I’m making myself clear hehe ^^’ It hasn’t really occured to me that not understanding original sin would also lessen how I understand Jesus’s redemptive mission on earth. If original sin doesn’t make sense to me, than Jesus’s mission looses it’s clarity too. The issue has been like a weight inside me. I feel like I can’t praise God wholeheartedly. You can’t wholeheartedly praise someone for saving you if you don’t understand what you’re being saved from

 

[grannymh]

I guess what I’m really asking is why would this sin affect the souls of their offspring? If a soul is created immediately by God, how would the effects of this sin transfer onto a soul that didn’t personally commit this sin?

I guess what I’m really asking is why would this sin affect the souls of their offspring?

Answer: Because, all humankind is in Adam as “one body of one man.” Therefore, Original Sin is a “contracted” state and not a “committed” act on the part of descendants.
(Information source. St. Thomas Aquinas, DeMalo, 1. CCC 404)

Links to the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition

usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catechism/catechism-of-the-catholic-church/

scborromeo.org/ccc.htm

Note: Original Sin will start to make sense once it is seen as the free deliberate shattering of humanity’s relationship with Divinity. Adam, being a creature, did not have the power to repair this relationship. Only someone on the level of the Creator could restore it. God so loved us that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity assumed our human nature so that He could stand in the place of Adam and reconcile humanity with Divinity.

 

[cfauster]

I think the following is very helpful:

asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2006/PSCF6-06Murphy.pdf

 

[fred_conty]

I’m a little confused about this at the moment and am in need of some clarification.

Is original sin purely a spiritual distortion or does it affect us in pysical ways, as well?
…and, if it’s the former, how is it that we inherit this spiritual distortion from Adam and Eve if a soul is created immediately by God? The distortion wouldn’t come from God, right? Our souls aren’t created by our parents who were the ones who were corrupted. You know what I mean?

Thanks in advance

Original sin is inheirited not from DNA, but from lineage, because sin is not material. The sin caused them to lose God’s life within them that entittled them to heaven which is pointed out by being exiled from paradise. They being exiled, we also of their lineage, are also exiled. Paradise, tho earthly, is a symbol of heavenly paradise.

Before the test, they were strong and healthy physically and spiritually. They had the supernatural and preternatural gifts. They were at peace in themselves, and with the world. They were at peace with God in the state of supernatural grace. We should not compare ourselves, in our fallen weak state, to them. They had a much more informed intelligence and stronger will power than we have by virtue of their gifts. With their strength of soul and body leaning them to say “yes” to God, their sin would be greater.

The church absolutely teaches that man lost his freedom from dying and suffering, which man had at the beginning. Also his loss of sanctifying grace or the life of God within their souls.

The church favors the teaching of also losing certain additional gifts(concupiscense): They now have difficulty in knowing the truth; weakening of the will for good; strength in struggling for good; the judgement of reason over the passions.

Galatians 5:16-17
“Live in accord with the spirit and you will not yield to the cravings of the flesh. The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; the two are directly opposed. That is why you do not do what your will intends.”

Romans 7:14+
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. How if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, bu sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So then I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am. Who will diliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin.

Notice that in Romans, a substitution for the word, sin, would be concupiscense. That stuggle which he is describing is the effect of sin itself.

May the God of hope fill you with every joy.

 

[cfauster]

“The idea that the sin of the first humans resulted in a sinful state of their descendants raises the question of how this condition is transmitted from one generation to another. A contrast is often drawn between Augustine’s belief that people are unable to avoid sinning because of a condition inherited from Adam and that of Pelagius, in which people have the freedom to avoid sin but are influenced by a sinful environment, including the example of Adam. But we will see that posing the question as a choice between heredity and environment presents a false dichotomy …
Original sin did not become a contentious topic among Christians until the fifth century. The issue came to a head in debates between Augustine of Hippo and the British monk Pelagius and their supporters. Their disagreement was not first about the sin of Adam but over the extent to which human beings could do God’s will without saving grace. Augustine insisted that without such grace no one is able to trust and obey God properly—that all are sinners from the beginning of life. One of his main arguments was that the church baptized infants, like adults, “for the forgiveness of sins” (in the words of the Nicene Creed), a practice that would make no sense if infants were not in some sense sinners. Pelagius had a more optimistic view of unaided human powers. Augustine explained the sinfulness of all people by tracing their condition to Adam, “in whom all sinned” according to a Latin translation of Rom. 5:12. For Pelagius, on the other hand, Adam essentially set a bad example that we may or may not follow…
How could a sin committed by the first humans result in a condition in which all later humans are sinners from the beginning of their lives? This condition has sometimes been called “hereditary sin” but it need not be understood as “genetic” in the sense that it is coded for by DNA. We know of conditions which are “hereditary”— inherited from a parent—but not “genetic,” such as fetal alcohol syndrome. That condition is “environmental,” being caused by conditions of the uterine environment which are due to the mother’s consumption of alcohol…
This differs from the naive view attributed to Pelagius, that Adam simply provides a bad example for us. The effects of our environment can be far more pervasive than that, as the analogy of fetal alcohol syndrome suggests. They are not things that we freely choose to accept or reject, but influences that we take in “with our mother’s milk” …
James Barr has pointed out that the story of Genesis 3 can best be read as one not of lost immortality but of a lost chance for immortality. Humanity is “dust” and, in the natural course of things, returns to dust. After the first humans sin, they are kept from the tree of life (3:22) and thus cannot “live forever.” This tree, mentioned briefly at the beginning of the Bible, reappears at the very end. In Rev. 22:2, the tree of life is found not in a garden but in the middle of a city in which “death will be no more” (Rev. 21:4). Immortality is not something that humanity once had and forfeited but an eschatological hope. Yet the tree of life is a historical object, one that reverses conventional expectations about immortality. The tree of life is the cross of Christ.”

From the article to which I linked in my previous post:
asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2006/PSCF6-06Murphy.pdf

 

[roseproject]

^^this!! Though just to expand, the physical consequence was mortality and death. Due to that original sin our nature changed and mortality and sickness entered for all of us. Remember God’s word " if you eat from that fruit you are going to die"

How would something that isn’t physical like a germ or something (sin) have a physical concsequence? How can a soul that was formed straight from the hand of God become corrupted? Someone made the comparisson with an alcoholic giving birth to a baby who may and up having alcoholic tendancies, but it still implies the use of a physical substance to influence the development of the physical being of the child.
Humans are composed of body and soul, but does ALL sin have a physical effect because of the soul/body unity?

Grr, I feel like the more I think about it, the more confused I get

 

[roseproject]

How would something that isn’t physical like a germ or something (sin) have a physical concsequence? How can a soul that was formed straight from the hand of God become corrupted? Someone made the comparisson with an alcoholic giving birth to a baby who may and up having alcoholic tendancies, but it still implies the use of a physical substance to influence the development of the physical being of the child.
Using a more abstract example, would a murderer give birth to a murderer? Would a coward give birth to a coward? Sometimes, but not always. It wouldn’t be the mother’s falt in that case that the kid chooses that way of acting/thinking (assuming the mother didn’t influence the child by physical means).

Humans are composed of body and soul, but does ALL sin have a physical effect because of the soul/body unity?

Grr, I feel like the more I think about it, the more confused I get

 

[roseproject]

^^this!! Though just to expand, the physical consequence was mortality and death. Due to that original sin our nature changed and mortality and sickness entered for all of us. Remember God’s word " if you eat from that fruit you are going to die"

How would something that isn’t physical like a germ or something (sin) have a physical concsequence? How can a soul that was formed straight from the hand of God become corrupted? Someone made the comparisson with an alcoholic giving birth to a baby who may and up having alcoholic tendancies, but it still implies the use of a physical substance to influence the development of the physical being of the child.
Using a more abstract example, would a murderer give birth to a murderer? Would a coward give birth to a coward? Sometimes, but not always. It wouldn’t be the mother’s falt in that case that the kid chooses that way of acting/thinking (assuming the mother didn’t influence the child by physical means).

Humans are composed of body and soul, but does ALL sin have a physical effect because of the soul/body unity?

Grr, I feel like the more I think about it, the more confused I get

Note: I accidentally posted this comment twice. I wanted to edit one of my comments to elaborate more but accidentally quoted my own comment. Sorry for the double reply X_X

 

[roseproject]

^^this!! Though just to expand, the physical consequence was mortality and death. Due to that original sin our nature changed and mortality and sickness entered for all of us. Remember God’s word " if you eat from that fruit you are going to die"

How would something that isn’t physical like a germ or something (sin) have a physical concsequence? How can a soul that was formed straight from the hand of God become corrupted? Someone made the comparisson with an alcoholic giving birth to a baby who may and up having alcoholic tendancies, but it still implies the use of a physical substance to influence the development of the physical being of the child.
Using a more abstract example, would a murderer give birth to a murderer? Would a coward give birth to a coward? Sometimes, but not always. It wouldn’t be the mother’s falt in that case that the kid chooses that way of acting/thinking (assuming the mother didn’t influence the child by physical means).

Humans are composed of body and soul, but does ALL sin have a physical effect because of the soul/body unity?

Grr, I feel like the more I think about it, the more confused I get

Note: I couldn’t edit the last comment to elaborate my point better, so that’s why I replied to your comment twice x_x

 

[cfauster]

Most scholars agree that physical death per se would have occurred regardless, and did occur in non-human creatures as well. The consequences of sin in the first humans included a different sort of death; the previously-quoted text from the Pontifical University in Rome website suggests that had the first humans not sinned, physical death might have been followed immediately by something like the resurrected life of Jesus Christ on the first Easter. But because of sin, that was lost, to await redemption through Jesus Christ.

 

[fred_conty]

The Catholic church has said on this first sin, we as catholics believe that death came because of Adam’s first sin, that is, physical death. And also spiritual death came because mankind lost sanctifying grace, the life of God in the human soul. And we also believe that suffering came with it.

The chief cause is the sin of Adam. The secondary cause is generation, which connects the human being with the head of the race.

The way in which this original sin is passed down is…the descendents simply don’t have eternal life, either physical or spiritual. It was lost for everyone thru one man, Adam. He was the father of all, and life was lost thru him.

So in Christ, the new Adam, life was restored to mankind, both spiritual and physical…spiritual restored thru baptism Christ’s spiritual coming, physical to be restored thru Christ’s physical coming at the world’s end.