Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
164the subtilty and temptation of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit... By this
sin they fell from their original righteousness, and c ommunion with God, and so
bec ame dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all t he fac ult ies and part s of t he soul and
body. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the
same death in sin and c orrupted nature c onveyed to all their posterity, desc ending
from them by ordinary generation’ (c h.6).
However, today the idea of an ac tual human fall resulting in a universal
inherit ed depravit y and guilt is t ot ally unbelievable for educ at ed Christ ians. Instead
of the human race being descended from a single specially created pair, we see the
spec ies as having evolved out of lower forms of life over an immensely long period
o f t ime. Instead of the earliest humans living in perfec t c ommunion with the God of
Judaeo-Christ ian monot heism, we see t hem as probably having a primit ive
animist ic out look. Instead of them living in harmony with nature and with one
another we see them as engaged in a struggle to survive in c ompetition with other
animals and probably with other human groups within an often harsh environment.
If out of piety towards the traditional language we wish to retain the term ‘The Fall’,
we can say that the earliest humans were, metaphorically speaking, already ‘fallen’
in the sense of being morally and spirit ually imperfec t. That is to say, they c an be
said to be as though they had fallen from an ideal state. But since that state never
existed, would it not be better to abandon the concept of the Fall altogether? For if
we believe that there never was a human fall from an original paradisal state, why
risk c onfusing ourselves and others by speaking as if there were?
I t ake it t hat our endemic individual and c orporat e self-centredness, from
whic h t he many forms of moral evil flow, is an aspec t of our nature as animals
engaged in the universal struggle for survival; and that this self-centred propensity
exist s in t ension wit h a dec ept ively human c apac it y for ego-transc endenc e in
response to the felt c laim upon us of moral values. In this tension we have a
genuine, though limited, freedom and responsibility; and in so far as we are free
we are guilty for our own wrong c hoic es. There is thus a genuine problem of guilt. I
shall return to this presently. But at the moment we are c onc erned with the anc ient
not ion of original sin.
For it is this that has fed the traditional conceptions of atonement. In the light
of a typic al c ontemporary ethic the idea of an inherited guilt for being born as the
kind of being t hat we are is a moral absurdit y. We c annot be guilt y in t he sight of
God for having been born, wit hin God’s providenc e, as animals biologic ally
programmed for self-protec tion and survival within a tough environment. And even
if we disc ount our modern awareness of the c ontinuity between homo sapiens and
t he rest of animal life, t he moral princ iple behind t he t radit ional doc t rine is st ill
t ot ally unac c ept able. Alt hough evident ly believable in t he age in whic h it was
propounded, t he idea of a universal inherit ed guilt was losing plausibilit y by t he end
of the eighteenth c entury and had entirely lost it, for many, by the end of the
nineteenth.
We have already seen in the ransom idea the way in whic h theology has drawn
its soteriological models from the structures of contemporary society – originally
the pervasive fac t of slavery and t he life-giving possibilit y of being ransomed from