Expert: J.M.J. West - 11/10/2008

Question
QUESTION: When God sent Jesus to the cross, is it possible that He was atoning for His own sin in failing to create a man-being who was not hopelessly depraved?  If you take into account the reality of how God really created the universe and man, over many billions of years, using many random processes including random introduction of gene changes, there is no reason to expect that a righteous could ever have been created by God.  At the time of Christ's sacrifice, the sin was God's sin, in my view, in creating a depraved human race.  This race can  be redeemed.  Catholics believe it is redeemed by the life of the Church.  Born agains believe man is redeemed by life in any Christian church and the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  But on the day Christ died, was not the sin God's sin, that required atonement?  Please take this seriously, is is a serious question.

ANSWER: Brian,

Thank you for your questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

YOU WROTE: "When God sent Jesus to the cross, is it possible that He was atoning for His own sin in failing to create a man-being who was not hopelessly depraved?"

Sin, by definition, is a privation (a rejection of) God, who is all good.  So the idea of God sinning is in fact a contradiction.


YOU WROTE:"If you take into account the reality of how God really created the universe and man, over many billions of years, using many random processes including random introduction of gene changes, there is no reason to expect that a righteous could ever have been created by God."

Careful about "realities" and such broad sweeping claims.  I'm not an anti-evolutionist by any means, and will argue in favor of it to some degree, but just when Man became Man is not a defined moment in history, though it must have been at a certain point after such years of evolution, assuming man is not a "special creation".

That said, there is no reason I can conceive of to assume that an omnipotent God couldn't have created man "Good", whether or not he created him from the ground as a special creation, or via evolution.  Regardless of when man was created, God created him "very good" (Gen 1, 2; cp with Gen. 1 when the earth and animals are created and are merely "good", man is "very good".)

YOU WROTE: "At the time of Christ's sacrifice, the sin was God's sin, in my view, in creating a depraved human race.  This race can  be redeemed."

If the sin is God's, what would redemption mean for man?  And what would this mean for God?

God is all good, and omnipotent.  God is Love, and he created mankind for no other reason than to share his goodness and love (he lacked nothing or he'd not be perfect, so the creation of man adds nothing per se to God).  But love cannot be forced, and God is not a rapist.  The Doctrine of Original Sin states that at creation, mankind was given a choice to love and serve God, or to reject him in favor of self.  God is Love, and love must be free, so man was created free.  In that freedom, he chose to be "like god, but without god".  In that primordial moment, the latter was chosen and it wrought devastation upon human nature and the world.   This devastation is "original sin", which is not actually a "sin" per se, but the consequences of that one, first sin which put man at odds with his Omni-benevolent Creator.

You WROTE: "Catholics believe it is redeemed by the life of the Church.  Born agains believe man is redeemed by life in any Christian church and the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  But on the day Christ died, was not the sin God's sin, that required atonement?  Please take this seriously, is is a serious question."

The only way it would be his sin is that he PERMISSIVELY allowed sin as the consequence of freedom.  It was Original sin which Christ came to fix, this fundamental disunity and disharmony wrought in man by that first, primordial sin which put him against his creator.

For a longer but more thorough study of Original Sin, you might enjoy this passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

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"396 God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."[276] The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"[277] symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.
Man's first sin

397 Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. This is what man's first sin consisted of.[278] All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.

398 In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Created in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully "divinized" by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to "be like God", but "without God, before God, and not in accordance with God".[279]

399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness.[280] They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image - that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.[281]

400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination.[282] Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man.[283] Because of man, creation is now subject "to its bondage to decay".[284] Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will "return to the ground",[285] for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.[286]

401 After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin There is Cain's murder of his brother Abel and the universal corruption which follows in the wake of sin. Likewise, sin frequently manifests itself in the history of Israel, especially as infidelity to the God of the Covenant and as transgression of the Law of Moses. And even after Christ's atonement, sin raises its head in countless ways among Christians.[287] Scripture and the Church's Tradition continually recall the presence and universality of sin in man's history:
What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end, and at the same time he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures.[288]
The consequences of Adam's sin for humanity

402 All men are implicated in Adam's sin, as St. Paul affirms: "By one man's disobedience many (that is, all men) were made sinners": "sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned."[289] The Apostle contrasts the universality of sin and death with the universality of salvation in Christ. "Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men."[290]

403 Following St. Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the "death of the soul".[291] Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin.[292]

404 How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam "as one body of one man".[293] By this "unity of the human race" all men are implicated in Adam's sin, as all are implicated in Christ's justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.[294] It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act.

405 Although it is proper to each individual,[295] original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

406 The Church's teaching on the transmission of original sin was articulated more precisely in the fifth century, especially under the impulse of St. Augustine's reflections against Pelagianism, and in the sixteenth century, in opposition to the Protestant Reformation. Pelagius held that man could, by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God's grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam's fault to bad example. The first Protestant reformers, on the contrary, taught that original sin has radically perverted man and destroyed his freedom; they identified the sin inherited by each man with the tendency to evil (concupiscentia), which would be insurmountable. The Church pronounced on the meaning of the data of Revelation on original sin especially at the second Council of Orange (529)[296] and at the Council of Trent (1546).[297]

(More Here: http://www.christusrex.com/www1/CDHN/visible4.html)
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I hope that helps.  Feel free to ask any further questions you might have to clarify this further.

Pax Christi,

-J.M.J. West


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks for the excellent answer.  I just want to point out that many earnest Christians believe that all, or most of Genesis is allegory.  There probably was no Adam, no Garden of Eden.  Just as medical science has progressed a great deal since the day of St. Augustine, so has anthropology.  Man is firmly in God's hand, but he is a work in progress - creation continues.  If you look to the Catechism for answers to all challenging questions, you will be like the priest and Pope who condemned Galileo, and destroyed a lot of people's faith in the process.  At the time of Christ's death and resurrection, man was born in genetic sin, inherited from the primates.  It was not man's fault that he lied and killed, these traits are inborn.  Ah!  Perhaps the reconciling factor is that God truly has not finished with us yet.  When the timeless God completes His work, we WILL be perfect.  I'm still not sure I answered anything here, but my brother you certainly did not by quoting me Genesis and the Catechism.  But your love showed thru, thanks.

Answer
Brian,

Thanks for the follow-up.  I'm sorry you don't feel the answer was quite satisfactory, but sometimes it takes a go or two to get to the meat of the question.  Perhaps we've laid a good foundation to continue this.

YOU WROTE:"I just want to point out that many earnest Christians believe that all, or most of Genesis is allegory.  There probably was no Adam, no Garden of Eden.  Just as medical science has progressed a great deal since the day of St. Augustine, so has anthropology."

Actually, that's not entirely true.  It would be more accurate to say that most have viewed the Genesis accounts (plural), as using FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE to relay a REAL event in our primordial history.

See: http://www.catholic.com/library/Creation_and_Genesis.asp
http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp

YOU WROTE:"Man is firmly in God's hand, but he is a work in progress - creation continues."

All creation is continually sustained (or constant-creation) of God, certainly.  And man is a work in progress, hence the need for the whole process of salvation history from the covenants of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David, and culminating in the covenant of Christ which sought full reconciliation between God, the all good creator who is in his very being Love, and all of his creation which estranged itself from him.

YOU WROTE: "If you look to the Catechism for answers to all challenging questions, you will be like the priest and Pope who condemned Galileo, and destroyed a lot of people's faith in the process."  

Actually, before Galileo, Copernicus dedicated HIS work on a helio-centric universe to the Pope, who received it greatly.  It is an grevious error of the modern world to assume that Catholicism was an enemy of science.  The overwhelming majority of honest historians will tell you that modern science would not be possible without the Catholic Church, who oversaw and funded science during the so-called "Dark ages" (which, precisely because of such advances in science, were anything but dark!).

Galileo's problem was being headstrong (which, if you read his writings, it shows pretty strongly) and insisting on how the church ought to interpret certain passages - and this in the wake of the reformation's all-encompassing embrace of personal, private interpretation of scripture.

More here:
http://www.catholic.com/library/Galileo_Controversy.asp

You might also be interested to read Cardinal Bellarmine's response to Galileo, here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html

YOU WROTE:"At the time of Christ's death and resurrection, man was born in genetic sin, inherited from the primates."

What do you base this upon other than your own intuition?

YOU WROTE:"It was not man's fault that he lied and killed, these traits are inborn.  Ah!  Perhaps the reconciling factor is that God truly has not finished with us yet.  When the timeless God completes His work, we WILL be perfect."

We can agree that we are not yet perfect - but this is precisely what the atonement was about.  The entire point of Christ's death and resurrection - according to all CHRISTIAN SOURCES - was reconcile fallen man to God.  Hence St. Paul writes "For if, through the offense of one, many be dead; much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many."

YOU WROTE:"I'm still not sure I answered anything here, but my brother you certainly did not by quoting me Genesis and the Catechism.  But your love showed thru, thanks."

What kind of answer would suit you best for answers about what Christianity teaches and believes?  Let me know, and feel free to ask further questions, I'm at your disposal.

Pax Christi,

-J.M.J. West