Since Adam derived his spiritual life from his union with God, his separation from the Lord meant death. Moreover, since Adam destroyed the natural order with his sin, it shouldn’t surprise us that his sin would also deteriorate the whole human race. “The whole creation groans,” says the apostle Paul, “being subject to futility, but not willing” (Romans 8:20, 22). Creation bears part of the punishment deserved for humanity, since all creatures are under the stewardship of humanity.

The curse of sin affects everything—all creation on the earth and in the skies above. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that the curse of sin would also affect all of Adam’s offspring. When Adam sinned, God punished Adam by withdrawing all the good gifts he had given him, such as wisdom, virtue, justice, truth, and holiness. He further punished Adam by replacing those good gifts with bad things such as blindness, impotence, vanity, impurity and unrighteousness. God also involved Adam’s posterity in the punishment of sin and plunged them all into the same wretched condition. Early Christian writers named this hereditary corruption “Original Sin.” Original Sin meant that humanity no longer had a nature that was good and pure.

The subject of Original Sin was heavily debated because it doesn’t seem to make sense: Why should the fault of one person render all people guilty? The difficulty of comprehending this doctrine may be why the early Church Fathers did not explain it clearly or at length. Their timidity in explaining the doctrine, however, did not prevent the rise of Pelagius. Pelagius was a teacher who taught that Adam’s sin only hurt himself and did not affect his descendants. Satan, by craftily hiding the disease of sin, tried to render it incurable. Yet, when the orthodox teachers of the church clearly proved from Scripture that the sin of the first man passed to all his descendants, the only recourse the false teachers had was to redefine it and claim that Original Sin only passed to other humans by imitation, not propagation. In other words, these false teachers argued that later people saw and followed a bad example but were not innately bad themselves. Augustine and others like him, however, labored to show that we are not corrupted by acquiring wickedness from the outside, but we are innately corrupted from our very birth.

The false teachers had great arrogance to deny Original Sin. But surely there is no ambiguity in David’s confession, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and, in sin, did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). David is not trying to blame his parents. Instead, he is commending God’s goodness towards him as God was good to him even though he was a sinner from birth. David’s situation is not unique. His confession is merely an example of the common experience of the whole human race. All of us descend from an impure descendent. We come into the world tainted by the contagion of sin. Before we ever see the “sun” of God’s goodness, we are in God’s sight defiled and polluted. “Who can bring a clean thing out of unclean one? Not one” says the Book of Job (Job 14:4).

“Blogging the Institutes” is my on-going attempt to paraphrase John Calvin’s work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can find out more about the series in the Introduction. For all the posts in this series, check out the Master List.