It’s remarkable how often one sees the nature of original sin questioned. It is implicitly questioned every time someone asks why the tragedy in Colorado happened? How could a ‘normal’ (white, American, bourgeoise, grad student) person do such a thing? Without knowing it, the world seems to be dancing to Aristotle and Rousseau’s tune without even realizing it.
The great, non-Christian, Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described the life of man in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short”. Why? Because man is a killer. Man is a beast, capable of ghastly and evil acts. If you go for a hike in the woods, and get bit by mosquitos and flies, you’ll realize that ultimately, everything in the world is trying to eat something else (pace Vegetarians). This is survival, what Darwin wrote of. America was built on the bloodied backs of African slaves, Canada was fed by the war-mongering Imperialism of Great Britain, and even now developing countries lay in ruins, bondage, and suffering, so that we can have Nike shoes and diamond rings, soaked in sweat and blood.
In such a world, how can one be so grossly naive as to affirm that people are naturally good? If anything, the arbitrary murders of twelve people are not what is in need of explanation, but rather, the compassion around the bereaved families and the thirst for justice amongst the American populace are more curious. In this evil world, why is there anything good?
For Christians of the Lutheran confession, the following words explain the scenario quite well. G.K. Chesterton, a man who lived through the Boer War, the Russian Revolution, and First World War had this to say:
“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved…I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is—the Fall.”- G.K. Chesterton “Orthodoxy”
The problem is not society or economic scarcity, or poor circumstances. No. Such things could’ve been solved long ago. The problem with the human race in the Augustinian-Christian worldview is the heart. It is not simply that man intends to be good, but just can’t seem to carry it out, more horrifically, man seeks to be evil and can’t work hard enough to carry it out. In a grad course on 20th century German history, I once noted that the Holocaust is only a historical problem if one assumes human nature to be good. If one believes that man will do whatever it takes to achieve their own utopia, to carry out their own will which is itself evil, then it’s just another day in the life of fallen humanity.
In his novel on the Cristero War in Mexico where the Government tried to eradicate the Christian religion from the country in the name of progress, Graham Greene describes a priest thinking about the situation in light of greater theological and anthropological truths.
“How often the priest had heard the same confession–Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization–it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” – Graham Greene “The Power and the Glory”
For according to the Christian Gospels, when God became man, to provide mankind with His truth and love, man was so evil that they tortured him to death. Every crucifix is a reminder of man’s ability to ‘cooperate with God’, which is to say, when man joined together for their own good, they felt it best to kill Goodness Himself. Or as Pope John Paul II challenged: “We eventually have to ask ourselves the question; why was Love nailed to a cross?”
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:8