On Original Sin and Celtic Spirituality
April 4, 2025
First, a
disclosure. Despite my Scandinavian last name (Danish spelled as though it were
Norwegian), I am actually of more Irish (actually Scotch-Irish probably)
heritage than any other. My middle name is Calnan, a good Irish last name. Which
does not make me an expert on Celtic spirituality. I have learned a bit about
it quite recently in preparation for a trip later this year with a church choir
I sing in to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. So here, for what they’re
worth, are some of my reflections on Celtic Spirituality prompted by thoughts
about the doctrine of original sin.
Since roughly the
beginning of the fifth century CE, western Christianity has espoused a doctrine
called “original sin.” “Original sin” is the
claim that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they ate of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil corrupted their very human nature.
That corruption, this doctrine says, has been passed on to every single human
being through sexual reproduction. The Westminster Confession of Faith, a
Reformed, that is, Calvinist, confession of faith drawn up in 1646 CE puts the
doctrine of original sin this way: “[Adam and Eve] being the root of all
mankind, the guilt of [their sin] was imputed and…death in sin and corrupted
nature was conveyed to their posterity descending from them by ordinary
generation.” The Westminster Confession is a statement by Calvinist
Protestants. It became important especially for Presbyterians, a Calvinist
tradition originating in Scotland. The doctrine of original sin, however, has
never been limited to Presbyterians or any other Reformed, i.e., Calvinist,
Christian tradition. It spread to all of western Christianity in short order
after its first formulation sixteen centuries ago, which was around four
centuries after the time of Christ.
The doctrine is
grounded in an exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The
story has it that God created a man called Adam (which isn’t actually a name
but means something like “earth creature,” but never mind) and put him in a
garden called Eden. God told the man that he could eat anything in the garden
except the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which he was not to
touch. Then God created a woman named Eve (which isn’t actually a name either
but means something like “the mother of all living,” but never mind) to be
Adam’s companion. A “serpent,” which isn’t necessarily a snake, enticed Eve
into eating the forbidden fruit (which almost certainly isn’t an apple) of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil. She gave the fruit to Adam, who ate of it
too. God found out what they had done and casts them out of the garden. God
casts them out because if they remained in the garden they might eat the fruit
of the tree of life, something God, it seems, definitely didn’t want them to
do.
Now, notice a few
things about this story. It is very ancient. It is what scholars call a “J”
source document, which makes it one of the oldest stories in the Bible. It is
an ancient Jewish story, and it is remarkably primitive. In it God walks
in a garden but doesn’t know where his two humans are or what they have done. God
reacts to what the people have done out of fear of what else they might do, and
God inflicts significant punishment on them. For the woman the punishment is the
pain of childbirth. For the man the punishment is the need to farm unsuitable
land. There is no hint of forgiveness or of divine grace in this story.
But notice what
else is not in the story. The text of this story says absolutely nothing about
the sin of Adam and Eve being transmitted to anyone else. Not one word. It is
their sin, and it is their punishment. The notion that their sin corrupted
their nature and that that corruption has been passed to every other human
being through sexual reproduction as the doctrine of original sin claims just
isn’t there. Notice also that Judaism, whose story this one was for a very long
time before it became a Christian story as well, has never developed or
proclaimed anything remotely like the doctrine of original sin. Folks, the
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden simply is no basis for a doctrine
of original sin. That Augustine and others warped it into one does not change
what is and what isn’t in the story.
So why did
western Christianity develop the doctrine of original sin and ground the
doctrine in a story that just doesn’t support it? The first part of the answer
to that question is surely that there is no doubt that we humans are capable of
behaving and do behave very badly a great deal of the time. We humans have
proven ourselves to be greedy and violent in the extreme again and again. Many
of us live far more in hate than we do in love. The history of humanity is, to
a considerable extent, a history of wars in which people set out intentionally
to kill one another. The sins of humanity are so widespread and so profound
that they hardly need more enumeration. We all know what they are. The doctrine
of original sin at least gives a reason for what so often seems to be corrupted
human nature.
A second part of
the answer to the reason for the doctrine of original sin is that it pushes
people toward control by the church and thus by any state with which the church
is aligned. The doctrine says we’re all corrupt. We’re all horrible sinners. We
are sinners because it is just our nature to be sinners, and we are lousy at
overcoming the drive of our inherent, corrupt nature. Therefore, what we need
more than we need anything else is to be saved from our sin and from what we
take to be sin’s consequences. In most of Christianity, the church as taught
that it controls salvation. Do what the church tells you to do, don’t do what
the church tells you not to do, and believe what the church tells you to
believe, and don’t believe what the church tells you not to believe, and your
soul will be saved from an eternity in the torment of hell, which is where you
actually belong because you’re such a sinner. The doctrine of original sin
facilitates the church’s drive toward replacing God with itself as the
dispenser of salvation.
Folks, the
doctrine of original sin is utter nonsense. It is that for several reasons. One
is that it is, as we saw above, simply terrible exegesis of the story of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That story doesn’t even hint at anything
remotely like the doctrine of original sin. Yes, Adam and Eve are punished in
the story, but there is no suggestion that their intrinsic nature was
corrupted. All they did was exercise the free will God gave them albeit they
exercised it badly. Yet even if the intrinsic nature of the first two people
(as the story presents Adam and Eve as being) were corrupted by what they did,
the story in no way suggests that anyone else’s intrinsic nature was corrupted
by that sin.
The doctrine of
original sin is also nonsense because it paints too dark a picture of human
nature. Yes, we humans can be awful. Trust me on this one. I’m a professionally
trained historian, and I know how ugly human history can be. And no, I’m not
intending to minimize the evil people commit and the damage it imparts on other
humans. But human nature isn’t just corrupt. We humans also do a great many
things that a corrupted human nature would never do. We commit great acts of
charity, and at least some of us work for justice. We create great expressions
of the grandeur of the human spirit. We produce great art. Great architecture.
Great literature. Great philosophy. We do an awful lot that is incomprehensible
within the doctrine of original sin. We must reject that doctrine altogether.
So. Does the
Bible give us any valid insight into human nature? Yes, it does. It comes from
the other creation story in Genesis, the one with which the Bible opens. In
that creation story, which is very old but not as old as the Garden of Eden
story, we read that God said “Let us make humans in our image, according to our
likeness….” Then:
So God created humans in his
image,
in the image of God he created
them;
male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26 and 27.
Here we have a
very different image of humanity than the one the doctrine of original sin
gives us. This magnificent (though of course poetic not scientific) creation
story has God make both male and female human beings as having nothing less
than the image and likeness of God about them.[1]
Psalm 8 makes the same point by having the psalmist say to God “you have made
[human beings] a little lower than God.” Psalm 8:5a. Is it possible to have
less than nothing? The Garden of Eden story has nothing in it that actually
supports much less requires the doctrine of original sin. If anything, Genesis
1:26-27 has even less.
Friends,
Christianity does not require us to accept the doctrine of original sin. There
have, in fact, always been Christians who haven’t. Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, of which Russian Orthodox Christianity is by far the biggest
portion, has never accepted it. The doctrine of original sin was formulated in
the western part of the late Roman Empire, and it was formulated in Latin. The
Eastern Christian church of the time spoke and wrote in Greek not Latin.
Linguistic and cultural differences may help explain why the west accepted the
doctrine but the east did not. In any event, Eastern Orthodox Christianity has
never proclaimed the doctrine of original sin.
There have also
been Christians in the west who never accepted it. The best example your humble
author knows of this rejection of original sin is Celtic Christianity. Just
where the Celtic people first lived is a bit controversial, but for our
purposes they resided, and reside, primarily in the Scottish Highlands and in
Ireland. Their deep spirituality precedes Christianity, but the people adopted
it to Christianity, or Christianity to it, after Scotland and Ireland became
Christian. The pre-Christian origins of Celtic spirituality together with its
refusal to accept things like the doctrine of original sin caused the official
Christian churches of the Celts homelands to work hard to suppress it, but it
is still with us today. One of Celtic spirituality’s chief centers was the
island of Ione off the west coast of Scotland. People still go there to learn
Celtic spirituality and experience its power in a Christian context.
As your humble
author understands it, the primary premise of Celtic spirituality is that
everything that exists, including all of nature and every human being, is
infused with the divine. Creation is not God, but it subsists within God. It is
saturated with God. Celtic spirituality says that deep in our souls we all know
the truth. We all know that we and are imbued with a divine spirit and so is
everything else in creation. We forget that truth. That, I think, is where evil
comes from. When we forget that God is in us, and in everyone and everything
else, we act selfishly and violently. We put material values ahead of spiritual
ones. Celtic spirituality calls us to rediscover and reclaim our being rooted
in and infused with God. To rediscover and reclaim that every other person who
has ever lived, who lives now, or who ever will live is so infused with God too.
To rediscover and reclaim that the same is true of all of creation. Everything
comes from God, subsists in God, and is saturated with the divine.
Your humble
author has a couple of reservations about Celtic spirituality. It can sound a
bit too pantheistic. Celtic prayer sometimes sounds like it is praying to
nature but then adds a Christian tag to avoid a charge of idolatry. The
advocates of Celtic spirituality insist that it is not pantheistic. Creation
and God are not identical. Rather, Celtic spirituality is panentheistic. This
means that God is the Creator of all that is, and all of creation exists within
God, but creation is not God. Panentheism is indeed how God and creation relate
to each other. It avoids the pitfall of classical theism that it separates God
and creation in an ultimately unhealthy way. It avoids the pitfall of pantheism
that the material isn’t just diffused with the divine, it is the divine. Celtic
spirituality gets it right as long as it avoids actual pantheism.
Your humble
author’s other objection to Celtic spirituality is that it can sound horribly
naïve about nature. It so emphasizes the divine goodness of nature that is
seems not to see the dark side of nature. Yes, we humans often experience
nature as beautiful. But nature can also be horribly ugly. Life sustains itself
by consuming other life. Nature is filled with the violence of fang, talon, and
claw. Some of nature’s plants will kill you if you consume them. Nature has a
dark side, a fact Celtic spirituality can seem, to me at least, to overlook.
It can sound a
bit naïve about us humans too. Each one of us has a shadow side to our psyches.
We all have aspects of our being that we suppress, that we try to bury in the
unconscious layer of our psyches. Much of the harm we people do comes from the
fact that we never address our shadow side. We don’t come to terms with what we
bury there. Because we don’t, what is buried there comes out in unhealthy and
destructive ways. OK. We humans come from God and are diffused with God. But we
are also a lot more complex than that. You humble author gets the sense that
the proponents of Celtic spirituality need to spend more time with Carl Jung.
So. The doctrine
of original sin is indefensible. It is grounded in really bad biblical
exegesis, and it paints far too bleak a picture of human life. If Celtic
spirituality can avoid pantheism, which its primary advocates say it does, it
can be a spiritually healthy corrective to the doctrine of original sin. Yes,
we humans commit bad acts, lots of them. But that doesn’t mean our nature is corrupt
or that that corruption comes from Adam and Eve through sexual reproduction. God
created us in the image and likeness of God. Celtic spirituality says that
means that we are diffused with the presence of God. Rediscover that truth, and
we can transform the world. May it be so.
[1] We
know, as the ancient world from which this story comes did not, that human
sexuality comes in more varieties and is substantially more complex than are
simply male and female. We can’t project our knowledge back onto the priest who
wrote Genesis 1, so we just have to live with the text’s calling all people
male or female; which, of course, doesn’t mean we have to agree with it.
