Being by nature born in sinne (or Why Original Sin is a Goodly Doctrine)

This Sunday, many Episcopalians will recite the Great Litany as part of their worship on the First Sunday of Lent. It is a stark recitation of our failure to live into God's goodness and a pleading for deliverance. It is a reminder that Christianity is a salvation religion: it assumes that there is something dreadfully wrong with us and the world and that we require deliverance from beyond ourselves.

The tendency among some Christians to minimize the radical nature of sin is not very helpful. Nor is it reflective of what Christianity in the Anglican tradition has taught:

Question.
What is the inward and spirituall grace [of baptism]?

Answer.
A death unto sinne, and a new birth unto righteousness: for being by nature born in sinne, and the children of wrath, we are hereby made the children of grace.

That is from the Catechism of the Scottish prayer book of 1637 (the one according to which Samuel Seabury (the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States) was ordained and on which ours is based). The same Catechism is found in the 1559 BCP (the Elizabethan Prayer Book used by Her Majesty as well as Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Hooker, John Donne, and others of the formative period of Anglicanism).

And there is A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER by John Donne

William Temple wrote, ". . . reason itself as it exists in us in vitiated. We wrongly estimate the ends of life, and give preference to those which should be subordinate, because they have a stronger appeal to our actual, empirical selves . . . It is the spirit which is evil; it is reason which is perverted; it is aspiration itself which is corrupt." Nature, Man, and God, p. 368.

Actually, a sort of good news is hidden in the Christian doctrine of sin - even that "awful" doctrine of original sin. To believe in original sin is to believe that the way things are is not the way things are meant to be. It is to believe that sin is not the truest thing about us. It is to believe that violence, selfishness, and will to power are not "natural" but aberrations of God's original intent which precedes our fall into complicity with evil.

While, the philosophical Liberalism of the Enlightenment - from which what we popularly call "liberalism" and "conservatism" are both descended - is notoriously optimistic about human nature, it is actually based in something less than hopeful. As John Milbank points out in Liberality vs Liberalism:

[Liberalism is] based, in a Manichean fashion upon the ontological primacy of evil and violence: at the beginning is the threatened individual, piece of property, or racial terrain. This is not the same as an Augustinian acknowledgment of original sin, perversity and frailty -- a hopeful doctrine, since it affirms that all pervasive evil for which we cannot really account (by saying for example with Rousseau that it is the fault of property or social associations as such) is yet all the same a contingent intrusion upon reality, which can one day be fully overcome through the lure of the truly desirable is transcendent goodness (and that itself, in mode of grace, now aids us). Liberalism instead begins with a disguised naturalisation of original sin as original egotism: our own egotism which we seek to nurture, and still more the egotism of the other against which we need protection.

Original sin is, ironically, a hopeful doctrine because it declares that the way the world is and the way we are is not the way the world or we are meant to be. And we are not stuck with the sinfulness of our egotism, violence, and unlove.

Sin is pervasive, not just around us but in us. As such it is not something for which we only seek forgiveness but something from which we hope to be delivered and healed. The really good news is that God does not only forgive us for our sin, perversity and frailty, but promises to heal and strengthen us. In the prayer of absolution, we ask not only to be forgiven, but strengthened in all goodness. There is no room for cheap grace or moral complacency. We are called to repent and seek to be holy as we live into the promise that God will make us so.

Good Lord, deliver us.