The Source of Original Sin

Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther

For sin is not foreign to me; it is not random, clinging to my external appearance, like all sinful acts are and do. It is also not something that is beyond me, as in the tragic sense, underscoring my existence. Rather, sin is as intimate as the unity of life and self and as intimate as the unity if myself and sin. It is the condition of my existence. It lives in the “I” of a person who wants to be free of God, establishing himself as the measure of all things that cannot conceive of any other way of life, activity, productivity, formation, or becoming. The law therefore is the boundary – the frontier – in which God meets man. It is the line of death for the self’s will to live and of the self’s interest for life. Here, in the law, the living God and the living self collide. The law reveals, but only in the secrecy of a person’s self-insight, when he realizes that God and man are not one and that, indeed, they are mortal enemies. Luther calls the sins which are this identified and discovered in a condition of not wanting God to be God, the “peccatum originale,” or original sin. But this translation does not do justice to what Luther meant, because the term “original sin: is misleading. Again and again, original sin has been understood to man something having to do with a bad inheritance that is handed down through the chain of generations. Thus, the implication is that it is not I myself who sin, but my forefathers who sinned before me. But it is precisely this interpretation of original sin that Luther vehemently rejects. “Original sin” has nothing whatsoever to do with inheritance, at least not if we are able to take it in its evangelical context. Yet, this interpretation persists as one of the worst misconceptions of theology where, now and then, people try to “dress up” this despised teaching with the aid of current theories on heredity. But they are nothing more than mere word-play. If we want to avoid this confusion, we are better off translating the term “peccatum originale” word for word from the Latin. Thus it reads: source of sin or sin from its original source. The sin that is discovered is the sin that lies hidden at its source, behind all appearances. It means to understand that sin comes from out of an incomprehensible depth, as when one traces the path of a river to its source. Luther therefore means the point at which a person comprehends this source is the self – the “I” – from out of which a chasm opens that not even reason can fathom.