It is a commonplace in Christian thought that Adam sinned and all the children of Adam are, because of Adam’s sin, trapped in a cycle of sin. This is usually explained by some genetic explanation. That every child is born in sin, due to Adam’s sin. There is very little biblical evidence for this genetic explanation. Some point to David’s verse in Psalm 51: “In sin did my mother conceive me”, but that verse seems to be talking about the method of conception, not some inner sin that is passed from parent to child.
Certainly Scripture does speak about the fact that every human sins. Romans 3 has a lengthy section on this. The whole gospel is based on the idea of repentance, in which one must assume that anyone needing to repent must first have done something wrong to repent of. And Jesus’ ability to stand strong against temptation and remain without guilt is in contrast to every other person described in Scripture.
Is there an alternative explanation in Scripture to the idea of a sin nature that is passed from parent to child? Certainly there is a different way of looking at it. Instead of a single unified theory of individual human sinfulness, let’s see it as a number of factors involved:
a. Each human is born selfish
From the time we are conceived to the time we are born we are completely alone. No one exists except us and all we are is about ourselves and our bodies. After we are born, it turns out that the mumbles and pokes have to do with a whole world we had no concept of, but we do not yet have the capacity to see the others as people who are the equal to ourselves. Rather, life is about ourselves, our needs and our discomforts. Other people are just about us, and are really extensions of ourselves. We don’t have the cognitive capacity to see even our parents as people as significant to us because, as far as we are concerned, the whole world is about and for us.
That’s how we begin, every one of us. We don’t have any kind of empathy or compassion or mercy because, in reality, there isn’t anyone else yet. In order to become moral beings we must grow into it, and we must be taught it. Most sin, frankly, is simply seeing ourselves as something more than other people. And we are born in that state of selfishness. It is an innocent selfishness, in that we couldn’t possibly be expected to be anything else but self-centered. And this is less of a genetic state, and more of a developmental state encouraged by the circumstance of remaining alone for nine months.
b. We live in a society of sin
Now let’s go back to Adam. Certainly Adam does hold some blame for the sinfulness of the world. But that has less to do with him doing any sin and more to do with the specific sin he committed.
God gave Adam one possible sin, and this had nothing to do with sexuality, which God gave freely, nor did it have anything to do with worshipping God in a particular way. This is all to come much later. The one sin was to not eat of the fruit of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” This isn’t a tree of “good and evil” but a tree of “knowledge”. In other words, the tree was a class in ethics. And God didn’t want Adam to have it. Why is that? Because if Adam ate of this tree, then he would hold morality within himself, without sufficient experience or reason to develop a reasonable ethical system. Adam would be like a toddler creating a moral system in a world of grown ups. And, in the story, this is exactly what happened. Adam and his wife ate of the tree and instantly they created a first principle of their morality: nakedness is shameful. So they were hiding because their new made up ethical system declared nakedness wrong.
Note how God responds to this. At first he said, “Who told you that you were naked?” Realizing that their response was a moral outrage to the shame of nakedness, he said, “Did you eat of the tree I told you not to eat?” Why did he ask that? Because the tree creates moral outrage at items that are not necessarily morally wrong. The tree creates a system of morality of judgment. If there is a genetic “sin” that is passed from Adam to all his children, then, according to Genesis 2 and 3, it isn’t sin in general, but the sin of judging others for things that are not sin or evil in any way. It is the judgment of that which is personally disgusting. It is the rejection of the different, it is the hatred of that which we have determined ourselves is hateful.
What is the end result of this? From the time of Adam to the present day, every parent has taught his child the rules of society, about what is morally right and wrong, and this morality is made up not of sound moral principle or of God’s will but of what they had heard from their parents what is right and wrong and what they determined themselves is disgusting and what is good. Adam’s curse is that we each create our own morality and then impose it upon others.
What is the end result of this? Overbearing religious and legal systems. From Adam’s original sin comes the Pharisees rejecting Jesus because Jesus rejects their silly imposed rules for the sake of the moral principle of love. From Adam’s original sin comes churches that give people lists of sins that do not even come from Scripture. From Adam’s original sin comes a law system that includes thousands of rules and millions of policies. From Adam’s sin comes a tax code that even those who developed it cannot completely understand it.
c. We each choose Adam’s sin
Our selfish selves are born into a system of lawmakers. And, in our natural selfish state, we want to be a lawmaker ourselves, so we can be in charge, so we can tell others what to do, so we can judge others, just like our parents and grandparents and friends and teachers and heroes and saints and politicians and employers. And we train our children to be just like us—judgmental people.
And at some point, our children make their own decision. They don’t want to be self-centered anymore. They want life to be better for them than their parents. And the way they accomplish this is by choosing the same method as their parents—creating a new ethical code by which they (and by extension, everyone else) should live by. Instead of thinking about what is actually good for people around them by listening and focusing on their needs, our children decide that they need to decide for others what is best for them. Some of them grow up to be strong enough to determine what is best for everyone else, and others grow up to be malcontents, knowing how the world should be run, but no one would listen to them.
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