Personal and social in contemporary talk about original sin

Elements of a possible systematic interpretation of the original sin

Abstract

After he has outlined some recent doctrinarian and theological ideas about the original sin, the author comes to a conclusion that if that religious truth aims at preserving its existential weight, it has to be subjected to a reactualized interpretation, respecting the biblical and traditional legacy on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, respecting the contemporary evolving picture of the world with which it should not come into conflict. Therefore, the author tries to formulate such an interpretation, using some elements generated by the modern theology of the original sin, but also adding his own views. Such model of interpretation of the original sin is based, on the one hand, on a combination of talking about the sin of the first people, understood as a rejection of God’s invitation to the “other”, spiritual evolution (and, by that, to simultaneous overcoming of the inertness of certain genetically coded answers to the selective environ-mental pressures through history) and, on the other hand, of talking about the sin of the world and the structures of the sin. In every human generation the drama of the beginning occurs, since every human being can hear God’s invitation to spiritual maturing of his own final identity, but, at the same time, everyone is faced with the pressure of selection heritage. The difference, not always irrelevant, between Adam’s generation and other generations is that, with people after Adam, the invitation to spiritual constituting of man as an individual and as a community occurs under a negative pressure of man’s ingrowing into a world of human coexistence, marked by the structures of sin developed during the “history of the sin” of mankind. Finally, the author draws attention to great current challenges as well as to genetical and ecological problems which are also partly clarified by the truth of the original sin.