(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "A New Interpretation of Original Sin." Beginning with "Original Sin and its Evolutionary Roots in Animal Behavior," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the "Appendix.")

Original Sin, Grace, and Salvation

Semantic difficulties. A definition of original sin used previously called it a "need for salvation by Christ." What implications does our evolutionary concept of original sin have for our theology of salvation? It makes salvation history more coherent, and more consistent with the idea of a Creator who made the universe all of a piece and functioning as intended from the start, needing no ad-hoc adaptations or repairs along the way, but at most merely a planned-for mid-course correction.

The difficulty with original sin in this context is largely a semantic one, and arises from the connotations of the words "sin" and "fall." Theologians, of course, have always insisted that original "sin" does not in itself imply personal guilt on the part of Adam's descendants; yet this term nonetheless continues in use. Would it not clarify things, and remove some difficulties, to speak of original "sin" as original selfishness? Infants, for example, are guiltless of sin, but undeniably self-centered. This self-centeredness is in them by natural generation and is necessary and good for their survival, yet it is an obstacle to an eventual relationship with God. Hence they have the same need for Christ's salvation as all other people (as the church has always taught), even though they are as yet innocent of actual sin.¹⁶

Related to this semantic problem is our habit of describing our sinfulness as "disordered"—as though it were in some sense chaotic, confused, and/or a distortion of some preexisting moral order. But we are now in a position to be more precise: our sinfulness is in fact very well ordered and shrewdly focused on the attainment of our own selfish interests, just as was the behavior of all our evolutionary ancestors. When we do sin in confusion, our guilt is less for it. Our gravest sins are committed with a clear head and cool deliberation. Our internal moral order (such as it was and is) has not broken down; rather, with the dawn of human conscience, the rules of the evolutionary game changed and the bar was raised. It is not that our behavioral gyrocompass has suddenly spun out of kilter. It is merely trying to keep us on the same old selfish course, when the time has come in our evolution for a radical course change.

Similar problems arise from the word "Fall," which inescapably connotes a downward movement. Sin is metaphorically a step downward from virtue. But is not the knowledge of good and evil (gained even, perhaps only, through sin) in another sense a step upward from moral unconsciousness? The story of the Garden of Eden, which parallels the ubiquitous ancient myth of the Golden Age, emphasizes the former metaphor; its image of humanity's "fall," and consequent need for salvation, pervades Christian thought. Yet this central theme of salvation history can be expressed in other terms that do not convey the same subliminal (and inappropriate) impression of a God whose original, idealistic plan for creation was doomed in practice to fail.

God—who had decided to create by means of an evolutionary process driven by selfishness—was perfectly aware of the limitations of the first human beings who would emerge from that process. Only one step up from the apes, with no previous human history to guide them, they were surely the least likely of all people to avoid moral mistakes. Of all humans who would ever exist, they bore the least resemblance to the preternaturally endowed, superhuman Adam of my childhood catechesis. God could not have considered their sins more momentous than those of any subsequent miscreants, or held them accountable for any special moral "headship" of the entire human race. (To do so would be analogous to condemning infants because they need toilet-training!) On the contrary: the God who loved us when we were still sinners (Romans 5:8) surely viewed their moral blunders with forbearance (as we view the misdeeds of children), seeing them as a necessary consequence of the process that had raised them to the human plane.

As a result, even today our sins have "an aspect of immaturity" (Schoonenberg, 1965b). God knew from the beginning that in the fullness of time, like children needing moral training, humans would need divine help to transcend what selfish evolution had done for them. They would need a divine example of altruism that would transcend mere reciprocal altruism, an example whose actions would make possible for them the personal relationship with God that God had intended all along (see John 3:17). This personal relationship with God, in turn, would include collaboration with God as co-creators of the universe, putting the finishing touches on it by actually helping to build what archaic traditions imagined as the timeless Golden Age, what the author of Genesis 2-3 portrayed as the primeval Garden of Eden, what Isaiah 11:1-9 envisioned as a future paradise, and what Jesus described as the already-begun Reign of God.

In short "the Fall" was inevitable. The old selfish behavior was freely chosen, predictably though not deterministically, by all our early human ancestors, as it has been (and more to the point) by ourselves today. Even the greatest saints do, like Paul, that which they wish not to do (Romans 7:15), and Paul's analysis of this situation could not be more congruent with what modern evolutionary science reveals: "My inner self agrees with the law of God, but I see in my body's members [read: in the inherited sources of my behavior] another law at war with the law of my mind; this makes me the prisoner of the law of sin in my members" (Romans 7:22-23).

We all acquire, through natural generation, the need for salvation by Christ, which by the above definition is the state of (passive) original "sin." But the cause of our being in this state lies in a natural, necessary evolutionary process, not in any single "active original sin" committed by some "Adam," which is now seen only as fiction.¹⁷ Because our natural, selfish urges lead us to do injustice to others, the salvation we need consists in making our responses to these urges more just, and is aptly spoken of as "justification." The Incarnation and Redemption were part of the plan from the very outset (see Ephesians 1:4-14, 3:9-11; 2 Timothy 1:9-10; 1 Peter 1:18-20). We even acknowledge this in the Easter liturgy when we paradoxically extol the "necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer." For this reason the proper focus of the Christian doctrine of original "sin" is on Christ, the historically real "second Adam," and not on his allegorical counterpart the "first" Adam.

The view advocated here points us in a direction now being taken by many theologians (an outstanding example is Campbell 2000), who regard as salvific the life, teaching, example, and relationships of Jesus—and not, strictly speaking, his death on the cross. Salvation, then, must involve God presenting us with a plan or pattern for how we are to reform our lives. That pattern is Jesus. The cross was simply the price, under the normal conditions of life in our world, that Jesus inevitably had to pay for his prophetic actions—the natural outcome and the symbolic culmination of his mission. It was also the ultimate demonstration of how astonishingly far God was willing to go on our behalf. To say we are saved by the cross of Christ is simply theological shorthand for all that Christ did for us.

The world as a work in progress. God responded to this need, these limitations of ours, by sending aid—freely given and unmerited on our part—in the form of the Son and the Spirit. What they will accomplish with our help, and what we could never accomplish on our own—the building of the Reign of God or of "Eden"—is thus in essence a free gift of God (see Isaiah 26:12, 18; Luke 1:78-79; Matthew 19:24-26). At the same time, this indispensable gift of God purposefully left the building of God's reign incomplete. It left something for us to do in partnership with the Creator. In no way other than through such a process embedded in history could we come to have a personal stake and role in the outcome.

The Creator's plan for the universe required some assembly—in fact a great deal of it. Creating our universe in six days was simply impossible, as much as was the proverbial building of Rome in one day. To be sure, God might have created instantaneously something that looked like our universe, much as Cecil B. De Mille could call into existence a movie set that resembled ancient Rome. But the proverb about Rome is based in part on the fact that a real city is not just an arrangement of buildings, or even a crowd of people; it is an integrated community with a history extending through time, and its value in our eyes is inseparable from its time dimension and its history of organic growth.

As for our universe, special creationists implicitly admit the necessarily artificial, "movie-set" nature of a six-day creation when they postulate that the world was created with an "appearance of age"—for example, that the light seemingly emanating from stars millions of light-years away was actually created en route, and has not really spent millions of years on its journey. This, of course, is just a "space age" version of the old arguments that Adam had a navel despite his never having been inside a mother's womb, or that fossils were created inside the rocks where they are found. It equally implies a certain deceitfulness on the part of a Creator who would fill the "set" of creation with such "false fronts" at every turn. More plausible and palatable, especially to those who conceive of the divine as trinitarian (and hence as a community in itself), is a Creator who wills an authentic, organically- and historically-connected community of creatures.

Like a real human community or a real universe, the Reign of God is something that by its very nature could not be brought into being by divine fiat. When Jesus went through cities healing the sick one by one, he could perhaps have raised his hand and cured all the sick of the world in an instant. But he did not. Instead, he urged his disciples to finish the job, promising that they would do even greater works than his (John 14:12). He had come, after all, not to establish universal health care on earth, but to establish the Reign of God, and to show how it could be done. The man born blind does not owe his blindness to sin; "rather, it was to let God's works show forth in him" (John 9:3). In the largest sense, the inherent limitations of our imperfect universe—born out of blind evolutionary forces and still beset by moral blindness—do not derive from sin. But they will reveal the glory of God's work when the world is brought to its eschatological perfection. This work of God comes about not by fiat but by invitation. The role of chance in the world's origins is no cause for scandal.

This evolutionary view thus presents a very different, more parsimonious, and less jaundiced picture of human history than the logical alternatives. Rather than humans having been specially created at a pinnacle of perfection from which they immediately "fell," only to begin a painful reascent with divine help—and rather than their following a long "upward" path of progress from "lower" forms of life that was interrupted by the same "Fall" just as the threshold of human nature was reached—it is instead far more consistent with the image of a unitary creative act and a consequently seamless creation to visualize human origins and human history as a story of generally "upward" progress (however slow, blind, halting, and sporadic), which led first to moral consciousness and only later to moral improvement.

A good or a "fallen" creation? Traditionally, Christian theologians described not only humanity but the entire universe as in some way "fallen" due to the sin of Adam. What I suggest is the somewhat paradoxical notion that the universe as it came from the hand of the Creator was both good and "fallen" at the same time. The world, while imperfect or unperfected, can be perfected with the help of grace. (Here we see once again the awkwardness of using the term "fallen" to describe something that has not in any meaningful sense "moved downward," but simply has yet to move further "upward." We cannot conclude from seeing a man at the foot of a ladder that he has fallen off it; he may never have been on it to start with.)

Sin (moral evil) came into the world with humans, but selfishness, death, and other imperfections (physical evil) were present from the origin of life. Selfishness was a necessary ingredient and mechanism of creation-by-evolution, but was eventually to be transcended through our salvation. God, after all, said only that the created world was "very good," not that it was perfect.

Undeniably, our environment has suffered in countless ways from the sins of humanity (overpopulation, pollution, climate change, extermination of species, unsustainable exploitation of resources, etc). But it is not helpful to say that the "world" apart from human society and its immediate environs is in some theological sense "fallen." Selfishness, ingrained in all life and in evolution, forms the historical substrate and raw material of our own sinfulness. But like a spent booster rocket lifting astronauts into orbit, it is more useful to speak of it as limited in its potential than as "fallen" in its condition.

In this view, rather than human sin having brought about all the imperfections of the world, it is more nearly the opposite. Those imperfections were built into this world by its Creator (see Romans 8:20, 11:32). While the inherent limitations of this material world set the stage for our sinfulness, the final decision is always ours. Free will and human culpability (given the availability of grace) are neither excluded nor diminished (see Sirach 15:11, 20a; James 1:13a). The blame and responsibility for the moral evil that pervades our world are ours alone, because this evil (unlike physical evil) stems from individual human choices made with full consciousness that we could choose differently.

That unconscious organic evolution which still goes on endlessly around us, and which made us so selfish that the total avoidance of sin is beyond our mere human power, has also raised us up, preparing us to become its own consciousness and conscience, a role into which we still struggle to grow. As the Catholic tradition has long repeated, "grace builds on nature." We each need Christ's saving action to overcome our original selfishness and answer his call. But there is more. Human behavior is so deeply rooted in the entire evolution of the universe that the cosmic salvation glimpsed by Paul, in Romans 8:19-23, is seen—clearly and grandly—to include salvation, not from space, time, and matter, but also in and of them.

Are there fates worse than death? Perhaps by this point the Christian who is skeptical of Darwinian evolution is willing to concede a certain logical coherence to the foregoing. Yet no mere intellectual assent seems capable of expunging his or her gut feeling that a good God would not tolerate the suffering that an evolutionary universe must entail. What more can be said to assuage this existential anxiety?

As I discuss in the Appendix, there are logical responses to the objection that Darwinian evolution is "cruel" and "wasteful." But we must clarify what we mean by terms such as "suffering." When we think of suffering in nature, what come first to mind are all the unpleasant ways in which animals can die: predation, parasitism, disease, starvation, complications of giving birth, and physical accidents, for instance. But it is not likely this kind of suffering that bothers us the most. Most people, for example, think it is justifiable to inflict pain on animals in the course of important medical research that cannot be done any other way. In fact, we seem ready to tolerate almost any amount of suffering in ourselves or others, so long as it serves some purpose. Suffering and dying for one's country, family, religion, ethical principles, etc., are even praised and encouraged.

The real horror is futility, i.e. suffering (and for some even life itself) that has no purpose. The myth of Sisyphus, who eternally rolls his stone uphill again and again, is a classic view of hell as pointless make-work. Cyclical repetition, devoid of reason and hope, is our ultimate nightmare.

This sense of futility is what creation is groaning in anticipation of release from in Romans 8:18-23. We progress-minded Westerners (imbued with the biblically inspired optimism noted in "Static (Cyclic) versus the Evolutionary Universe, and the Biblical Origins of Science") all want to move forward, taking part in some genuine advance, rather than to be mired in an everlasting standstill or futile repetition. But modern evolutionists are quite right in pointing out, contrary to superficial teleological thinking, that evolution does not necessarily or automatically produce "progress" in most individual lineages. (Many would deny it ever produces progress, though I disagree.) Since the overwhelming bulk of evolution is not leading evolving organisms anywhere beyond their next meal or their next mating season, and since most of them meet with unpleasant ends along the way, it would seem there is plenty for creation to groan about.

A time-honored response to this existential agony is simply that of faith. Job can accept his suffering because he has faith that God's wisdom, though unfathomable, can be trusted. The New Covenant gives a more explicit reason for this faith. It promises that the subjection to futile repetition is "not without hope" (Romans 8:20). Hope lies in the purpose of creation, as can be seen by linking Romans 8:18-23 with John 16:21 (when a woman has borne her child, she no longer remembers her pain). If the evolution of intelligent life—capable of freedom and love—and the realization of the Reign of God are sufficient purposes for creation as a whole (as I think they are), then all else finds its purpose in its contribution to those ends. Every creature's death that results from natural selection improves the adaptation of its own lineage. Every death without exception feeds other organisms, continues the flow of energy and nutrients in the biosphere, and keeps the whole process of life and evolution going. The creation, which finds its consciousness in humanity (and in whatever other intelligent life there may be on other planets), both senses its suffering through us and recognizes through us that it has not been in vain. In the end it will "no longer remember its pain."

And lest there be any doubt, it is also spelled out for us how we are delivered from this futility that we see in so much of both human and evolutionary history: "Realize that you were delivered from the futile way of life your fathers handed on to you, not by any diminishable sum of silver or gold, but by Christ's blood beyond all price: the blood of a spotless, unblemished lamb chosen before the world's foundation and revealed for your sake in these last days" (1 Peter 1:18-20).

As it is, the world has actually accomplished something by its labor and groanings: it has brought forth life, in amazing diversity, and intelligent life to boot. Furthermore, at least on this planet, all living things are not just figuratively, but literally, each other's brothers and sisters. All of them are connected in an unbroken chain from the first burst of primordial energy, to the first bacterium, to us and to Jesus himself. The very atoms of our bodies were manufactured in stars that formed and exploded eons ago, scattering their substance as the dust from which our own solar system and its inhabitants were made. In fact, we could not have been made—our own multi-billion–year evolution could not even have begun—until after these earlier generations of stars had come into being and passed away.

And that was only the beginning. "Life in human beings has an age of more than three billion years: from the beginning the chain has never been interrupted. Every human being is alive with a life that started shortly after the formation of the earth. In a precise sense, every human being incorporates the condensed history of the universe from the beginning of the formation of protons to the formation of the brain" (Schmitz-Moormann 1997, 52).

As Charles Darwin said, "There is grandeur in this view of life."

Is there an alternative? Yes, countless creatures have had to suffer and die along the evolutionary way. But a universe in which an animal could never be killed is unimaginable. For example, for it to be impossible for an animal to be killed by lightning, we would have to live in a universe in which there would be no lightning, or electricity, or weather, or electrons, or physical laws anything like the ones we know—including evolution (and thus not even the animal itself). Probably such a universe could not even be fashioned out of matter and energy. We know from daily experience that anything made of parts can come apart, and that the more moving parts something has, the more prone it is to break down. Every particle in creation is made up of smaller particles, quarks, "strings," or other entities, all in motion; and nothing in the known universe has more of these moving parts more complexly organized than a human body. So long as we and worlds are made in this way—so long as physicality is synonymous with multiplicity of parts—it is impossible that breakdowns of every imaginable sort could be avoided. God could no more make an unbreakable physical universe than a square circle. Hence, the physical "evil" of animal suffering is inseparable in principle from even a good creation, just as the real evil of sin is inseparable from a creation in which intelligent creatures have free will. God doesn't need to make excuses for this. It's part of the price we pay for all that is desirable in creation; and taking the package as a whole, it's worth the price.

The moral dimension of our consciousness, and the moral evil that results from human traits such as aggression, evolved out of the physical world and physical evil, just as learned behavior and ultimately culture evolved out of instinctual behavior. But this phrase "evolved out of" does not imply that the older traits have been left behind, or even that they no longer serve a constructive purpose. Without the interplay between antagonism and attraction in our societies, and without clashing individual interests, we would lose our individual identities and the role-division that makes possible social cooperation—even the harmonious complementarity among the differentiated members of the Body of Christ (see 1 Corinthians 12:4-30; Romans 12:4-8; Ephesians 4:11-16).

In the midst of our suffering, God "not only provides and protects (like a father) but also … suffers with us so that something new may be born as a result of this suffering (like a mother)" (Sonnenberg 1995). We come into the world bawling our heads off, complaining of our discomfort, and completely oblivious to the decades of life and hours of labor our mothers have gone through to bring us to this point. Later, we complain that God does nothing about the suffering we encounter in the world—equally oblivious (see Hosea 11:3-4) to the billions of years of bringing-to-birth necessary to produce creatures capable of such complaints, and also capable of doing something ourselves, as members of the Body of Christ, to mitigate the suffering. We need to take a larger and more mature view.

It seems natural for human beings confronted with random disaster to ask why God wills or permits this; and, receiving no convincing answer, to doubt God's beneficence or even existence. In Mark Twain's pessimistic story The Mysterious Stranger, an old woman declares her faith that not a sparrow falls to the ground without God seeing it. "But it falls, just the same," replies Satan. "What good is seeing it fall?" It is bad enough to suffer the loss of possessions, health, life, or loved ones, without losing one's faith as well. That, at least, is avoidable.

Consider the relationship between the very young child and the parent. The child lives in a seemingly irrational world in which the parent is all-powerful. An unpleasant event, such as a treat denied, a shot administered by a doctor, or even an illness or natural disaster, is something arbitrarily willed or tolerated by the parent or something that the parent failed to prevent. So the child may blame the parent for the consequent suffering. It is only as we grow older that we realize that some of those "misfortunes" against which we railed—such as the vaccination—had a logic to them that a child was unable to comprehend. We even come to realize that there are limits to a parent's power to prevent really bad things from happening.

One of the greatest advances in our intellectual maturation as a species was the discovery of evolution. Only now are we beginning to realize how an evolutionary, material world really works. Take the simple fact that all material things have moving parts, and all things with moving parts are subject to breakdowns. This is a law of nature whose necessity not even God, the lawmaker, could evade: God's decision to create a material world could only be a decision to create breakable (and ultimately broken) things. And nothing in the known universe has more moving parts and more ways to break down than a human being. A parent—or God—could protect a child completely from "physical evil" only by not bringing that child into existence at all.

The case of moral evil is no different. None of us would willingly give up free will, even though selfishness threatens its exercise with perversion at every turn. Without that original selfishness, however, life could not have evolved and we would not exist. God's decision to create material beings with free will could only be a decision to create sinners.

Applicable to both physical and moral evil, then, is the punch line of Jesus' parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30): "pull up the weeds and you might take the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest." God's ways are not like ours, impatient as we are for what we fancy to be "justice." We are like the heretic-hunting Catholic abbot Arnaud Amaury, who in 1209 ordered the massacre of the suspect townspeople of Béziers, saying, "Kill them all; the Lord will recognize his own!" Jesus, in contrast, says: "Save them all; the Lord will recognize his own!" Not only human sinners, but even natural phenomena of which we disapprove, may play such important roles in the divine plan that uprooting them might cause disruption beyond our imagining.

Although the inherent limitations of the material universe are not the result of an "enemy"'s sabotage, the constraint they place on God's action is the same. Just as an immediate divine curb of sinners would take away our free will and our meaningful participation in bringing about the Reign of God, so God could intervene to prevent natural mishaps or ameliorate nature's "cruelties" only at the cost of taking back all the control of events that had originally been delegated to natural laws. So why delegate it in the first place? Such interventions would be needed literally countless times every second to make the "kinder and gentler" world of nature that critics of evolution would like.

Neither could the critics be appeased by God preventing only the "worst" tragedies. If no child ever died of cancer and the worst suffering known to us were a stubbed toe, we would still cry to heaven against the injustice done to our bruised digits. Or if, instead, we really were spared all physical and mental discomfort and lived in a permanent state of anesthetized bliss, the result would not resemble Eden so much as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Until the "harvest" of the Last Day, then, God must refrain from either breaking or binding up the bruised reeds of this world (Isaiah 42:3-4) in ways that might compromise the greater good of an autonomous creation.

A humble or a disciplinarian God? Theistic evolutionists sometimes make the mistake of saying that God chose to create by means of evolution, when in fact no other choice was available. "Special creation" of things as they are today was not a practical alternative: Mr. De Mille could not have shut off his cameras, walked away from his movie set of ancient Rome, and then expected it to come to life as a real city. Pinocchio, and Pygmalion's Galatea, come to life only in storybooks. God the Father no more made Adam directly from clay than did the apocryphal boy Jesus bring clay birds to life. That was not an option.

Failure to recognize that God had no choice but to create by evolution explains why the notion of God's humility, now much discussed among theologians, is so readily misunderstood. In particular, theodicy asks: How can a God who is both almighty and benevolent tolerate evil? Seemingly, the creator of this suffering world cannot be both; if God were almighty and benevolent there would be good without evil. So if we insist on a benevolent God, we must accept one whose powers are limited.

A self-humbling God, who cedes power over the world to the world's own laws, seems like just such a weak God, one that is not almighty. Process theology, however, plausibly holds that a God who acts through persuasion (as can be seen in Jesus' example) can actually exercise far greater influence on events, and hence greater power, than one who uses brute force. This is because a world with the freedom to help create itself has much more integrity and value than a puppet-like universe that is coerced into being; and the Creator is greater to the extent that the world created has greater value.

This God is like any good parent—like the father of the Prodigal Son—who allows freedom, who does not coerce, who longs for the child's return, and who rejoices with him in the end.

Why, then, does evil remain? Not because God has gratuitously given up the power to prevent it. The key to the paradox is simply to realize that banishing evil from an autonomous world involves a contradiction, and is therefore impossible, even for God. On the other hand, a non-autonomous world, even one without evil, is not worth creating. The "power" to do the impossible is illusory; hence there is no meaning in saying that God "surrenders" it. Inability to do that which intrinsically cannot be done is no real limitation on God's power.

Just as inadequate to explain evil as is God "choosing" to create by evolution is the idea that suffering and death are somehow spiritually good for us: that we learn something from them, that they build character, that acceptance of them shows our obedience to the Creator, that without them we would not appreciate the gift of life. All this may be true. But to the extent this idea implies that God deliberately created suffering and death for just these purposes, it is seriously misleading. Such "benefits" should be seen as by-products, at best, of laws necessary to this or any physical universe—not as the fruits of training gratuitously inflicted on us by a divine drill instructor.

From this we can see that suffering of all kinds (from a stubbed toe to the Nazi Holocaust) is even more intrinsically a part of the human condition than we ever suspected. We could dodge it only by not existing at all, and God could shield us from it only by not creating us at all. Can this be a source of comfort to the afflicted? Is it comforting to the sick child to know that its parent can do nothing to prevent or cure the illness? Is it comforting to the adult to realize that human suffering and death cannot be altogether prevented, even by God? In itself, no. But the first step in finding comfort is to stop looking for it in the wrong places.

Only when we have accepted the reality and limitations of life in a material universe, and have dispelled some of the confusion about what we can reasonably expect of God, can we then see clearly that the ultimate comfort God offers us lies in "new heavens and a new earth," a dominion built on different principles from those of the Darwinian world, and a dominion we ourselves are invited to help God build. "He shall wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, crying out or pain, for the former world has passed away" (Revelation 21:4).

Yes, this mysterious dominion will be fully realized only in the distant future, but it is not a mere "pie in the sky" possibility. It is here and now, active in changing our world, and already well advanced in its construction. "The reign of God is already in your midst" (Luke 17:21). And when, with God's help, we have entered this new existence, God will no longer remember our sins (Isaiah 43:25), and we will no longer remember our pain. "You will suffer in the world," promises Jesus. "But take courage! I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

16. In traditional technical terms, they are born in a state of "passive original sin" or peccatum originale originatum, as distinct from Adam’s personal sin or "the Fall", which was "active original sin" or peccatum originale originans.



17. At best, the story of Adam could be read as an allegory of the collective selfish actions of our ancestors that were favored by natural selection, and thereby encoded into our genetic heritage.

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.