James K.A. Smith on Original Sin
"Lost in Translation: Versions of the Fall", in Books and Culture (Nov/Dec 2007).
Mulhall persistently takes it that the doctrine of original sin
specifies that the desires of humans are sinfully perverted "by virtue
of their very condition as human." In a favorite turn of phrase,
Mulhall repeatedly emphasizes that humans are "always already" errant,
corrupted, and misdirected. To be human, then, is to be "essentially"
sinful, "sinful simply by virtue of being human." But this is decidedly
not the orthodox doctrine of original sin. Rather, what Mulhall
give us is an all-too-common Gnostic rendition of it (one which,
admittedly, evangelical Protestants are sometimes prone to confuse with
the real thing). This is to read the Bible as if it began with the
third chapter of Genesis. The paradox is that an orthodox understanding
of original sin does not posit sin as properly "original"; that is, it
does not regard sinfulness as coincident with being human and finite.
And when such a misunderstanding of original sin is coupled with some
hope of redemption, we find the contorted philosophical acrobatics that
Mulhall finds in Heidegger and Wittgenstein: redemption from this
condition of fallenness requires redemption from being human. What is
consistently lacking in these secularized or formalized versions of the
Fall is the distinct nuance of the Christian vision, viz., the
ability to imagine the world otherwise. Without the prior goodness of
creation, there is no Fall. Our present condition is "not the way it's
supposed to be," as Cornelius Plantinga so aptly put it.
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