The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Original Sin

Robin said:
"I tend to think of it in terms of a genetic disease. God's law of creation is that all creatures reproduce after their own kind. Adam, made in the image of God, marred that image with his rebellion and contracted the "disease" of the corruption of his nature - a false image of God if you will - and passed it along to all of his posterity. It is inherited like diabetes, not "infused" from some outside source."


Robin, thanks for your reply but what you have just said is what I’ve always believed myself until recently challenged by the Scripture.

I would never argue that a disease cannot be inherited as well as caught by the individual somewhere in a jungle. In fact this proves my point. Inherited disease is often passed to one son but not to another.

IMO, the truth is that God still holds men responsible for their "disease" of sin, as any good Calvinist will tell you. This is regardless of whether they live in a world of good and evil or not. He could not hold us responsible for our sin even if He had allowed sin to be passed on in an inherited manner. We do not hold anyone morally responsible who has inherited a disease.

We do, or should know that in God’s administration before the fall of Adam that the choice of evil was forbidden and forbidden with the penalty of death. Adam rejected His beautiful government’s administration by his willful sin in the garden of our gracious God. We should also know that true free will, and therefore freedom itself, does not lay in our libertarian choice between good and evil but the righteous ability to chose only that which is good.

Perhaps we might consider that what we inherited is not sin or a "sinful nature" but the corrupt and condemned political administration of good and evil (our present world) of Adam and his children that allows deception and often, if not always, encourages the choice of evil.

Denny

Romans 3:22-24