Feeling Original

I am reading a book about Original Sin. I rather like Original Sin, though a great many Christians have problems with the idea; they include our Reader here at Swanvale Halt, who delivered a sermon denouncing the idea some months ago (I haven't had the opportunity to be contradictory yet). These Christians tend to react badly to the thought that we are all born somehow stained and corrupted, that a tiny baby can need cleansing and purifying before it's fit for God to look at it. This, of course, is a caricature of the doctrine, but it's what people think. As far as I'm concerned it's a comfort. We are all in the same boat, and incapable of actually being pure, of working our way into heaven by sheer application of will. It's the flip-side of God having done the work for us.

The author points out how terribly important the democratic implications of Original Sin were in the evangelical and Methodistic revivals of the 18th century, and how, with some exceptions, the upper classes tended to hate the idea. Spiritual equality with their servants and employees was the last thing they wanted to have preached to them; it outraged their ideas of breeding and lineage. Conversely, the poor had presented to them the image of a God who loved them no matter how depraved and corrupted they might have felt themselves to be, or might have been told they were. Nowadays everybody is constantly told how valuable they are; our opinions are endlessly sought over every conceivable matter; the ideology of personal fulfilment rests ultimately on the belief of the unchallengeable value of our choices. You can't see Original Sin making much sense in a society that thinks like that.

I reflected that I've underestimated Original Sin's role in my own conversion, in favour of the intellectual and aesthetic process. Even before that I had a vague but strong sense of the wrongness of things, of the inevitability of loss and breakage, both in the world as a whole and within myself. What could be done about it? What could allow us to separate ourselves from that brokenness and allow movement, change, freedom? That question came long, long before anything approaching Christian belief, but it surely prepared me for God to come as an answer.