Origins of the Idea of Sinful Nature

Christians who follow the theological bent of Augustine and Luther claim that these men derived the doctrine of sinful nature from Scripture, particularly the Genesis account of the Fall. Luther’s articulation depends on Augustine, one of the early church fathers, in spite of the differences between the two on soteriology. However, since the rabbis worked with the same Hebrew Scriptures for centuries before Augustine and did not come to the same conclusions about the fallen nature of Man, the question arises: “What sources influenced Augustine’s interpretation of the text?” This question is not trivial. Either Augustine had a special revelation from God Himself regarding the interpretation of the Genesis text or he “saw” in the Genesis story something that allowed him to borrow ideas from other sources or he derived the idea from his own study independent of all other sources. Augustine makes no claims concerning the first of these alternatives so we can confidently dismiss the thought that God whispered the doctrine to him. That leaves us with either his exegesis or his application and modification of prior ideas. We might note that Augustine rejected the rabbinic view (see below) because of his anti-Semitism, not unusual for most of the Church fathers. This means that Augustine had to find his sources somewhere other than in the Talmud and the rabbinic writings.

Scholars often note that Augustine was deeply influenced by Plato. It should not be surprising to discover inherent Platonic ideas in Augustine’s theology, and in fact, this is certainly the case when Augustine adopts the Platonic dualism between the material, corrupt world and the spiritual, perfected world. But the origins of doctrine of the sinful nature of Man that influenced Augustine may be considerably older than Plato. In order to discover similarities that may have affected Augustine’s formulation of the idea, we need to uncover the two crucial elements of this doctrine and then investigate even older views that make the same or similar claims.

In brief, the idea of sinful nature includes two central themes. The first is that because of Adam’s disobedience all men since Adam are subject to a spiritual defectiveness, a loss of the ability to enter into the presence of God. This defectiveness not only includes collapse of the relationship with God but also their ability to reason clearly about God, to obey Him as a consequence of understanding His demands, and to turn their lives from sin to righteousness. Simply put, fallen Man is incapable of turning back to God without the expressed and deliberate action of God Himself. This is the idea expressed by Calvin as total depravity. While some theologians following the Reformed tradition may not adopt all of these points (for example, they may not hold the complete fall of reason), the belief that the Fall produced inherited defective spiritual awareness and ability is almost always included in some form or another. As the theologians put it, “Natural man is incapable of any spiritually efficacious act.”

The second pillar of sinful nature deals with the implications of this spiritual deformity on the acts of fallen men. As a result of Adam’s failure, all men since Adam are born with a driving propensity toward sin, a propensity that actually causes men to sin. Unlike the Jewish view that Man is the crossroads of choice for good or evil, the doctrine of sinful nature teaches that Man in his natural state cannot help but sin. His ancestors supplanted the ability to choose righteousness with an irresistible desire of selfishness that inevitably results in sinful choices. Man is not only guilty for his own acts but, in Adam, is guilty for the initial act of disobedience that he repeats and endorses in every subsequent sinful decision. This “Federal Headship of Adam” is the reason for the sinfulness of all men. It is part of the legacy of the Fall.

These two pillars rest on another doctrine, that is, the existence and immortality of the soul. There is little point in asserting the depravity of Man, his consequent sinful condition and his need for divine deliverance if Man does not survive the grave. Christianity assumes the possibility of eternal reward or punishment as a basis for understanding the action of grace or wrath. It is abundantly clear that the body does not survive death. Therefore, the idea of eternal reward or punishment has little consequence for a decomposed body. Something of Man must survive in order for justice to have post mortem application. The Christian conclusion is that the “soul” of Man continues to exist following the death of the body and it is this entity that is subject to final determination under divine justice. Resting as it does on a Platonic dualism, the affirmation that the soul is eternal seems quite plausible. But this dualism is not the only way to read Scripture.

Hebraic thought prior to the influence of Hellenism in the 4^th Century BC seems to have understood death in quite a different way. There is almost no material in the Tanakh that speaks of any sort of existence following death. Since Hebraic thought about human existence does not conceive of any dualism between body and soul, the death of the body means the non-existence of the entire person. This is readily apparent in the Hebrew word nephesh, often inappropriately translated with the Greek idea of “soul.” Nephesh is an inclusive concept, not distinguishable in parts. It is the Hebrew idea of “person,” applied to nearly every function of human being. At death, the body returns to the ground from which it came (as Scripture suggests – ashes to ashes, dust to dust). The animating force of the person, the divine breath of Genesis 2, returns to its source as well, in this case, YHWH. In Hebrew thought the animating force is not “owned” by the human being. It is borrowed during the lifetime of a person and is given back at death. Sheol is a place (?) of all the dead, but its role in Hebrew thought is very nebulous. There is certainly no well-developed idea of eternal reward and punishment in the Tanakh. What men hope for is a full life here on the earth. In the first century, Hebrew thought seems to include the idea of a final judgment but this is not necessarily conditioned upon the spiritual existence of disembodied “souls.” The expectation of a final judgment is built on the idea that God will resurrect all the dead on Judgment Day. He will reanimate all those who have fallen asleep in the grave, not reunite them with their continuously existing “souls.”

This is a radical departure from the usual Christian idea of soul immortality. We might ask how Christianity, working with the same texts plus the apostolic writings, derived the eternal existence of one part of a human being called the “soul.” Briefly, that investigation takes us back to the intertwined connections behind the doctrine of sinful nature. Both ideas seem to have arisen from the Dionysian cult. An interesting connection is found in Linear B, the written language of the Mycenaean culture. The name of Dionysus was discovered in the fragments of Linear B. This is significant because Linear B predates the Greek pantheon of gods. Dionysus is not named among the Greek gods yet his cult is already present in Mycenaean culture. This means Dionysus is older than the Greek gods. That would suggest the cult may have been present as early as Minoan Greece. Significant parallels exist between the Minoan fertility cult and Dionysian religion. The predominance of women, the sacrifices for purification (including human sacrifice) and sophisticated temple rituals could imply that the Dionysus cult originated with Minoan or pre-Minoan cultures and there is evidence to suggest that the Minoan culture probably came from some parts of the fertile crescent. In other words, the Dionysus cult of souls may actually have originated in its infancy stage from cultures that would have surrounded Israel as early as 3000 BC.

The Dionysus cult included rites of birth, death and rebirth, trance induced experiences, spirit possession, a release from societal mores, and the postulation of a part of divinity within Man, that is, the eternal soul. If the connection from the Middle East to Minoan to Mycenaean cultures is correct, then the Dionysus cult included pagan rituals and thinking that Israel may have confronted when Moses led the people from Egypt. At any rate, this much is certain. The Dionysus cult of souls was already in place before Greece entered the Mycenaean period and the idea of the immortality of the soul did not originate with Plato but is in fact more than a thousand years older. When Augustine imported the idea from Plato, he was not picking up a purely Platonic idea (even if Plato refined the thought). He was actually borrowing a doctrine from pagan cultures of great antiquity.

There is little point in examining Hebrew texts to find antecedent suggestions of the idea of sinful nature. Even if there are texts historically older than the Genesis material, theologically Genesis represents the beginning of the Hebraic ideas and it is to this text that Augustine turns to establish his doctrine. Augustine employs Paul’s letters as explanation for the consequences and implications of the Fall, but it is the Fall that brings about the necessity of sinful nature. Therefore, in order to see if Augustine relied on older Greek ideas, even if these were transmitted to him through Plato, we must look to the record before Plato. When we explore these ancient texts, we discover something quite amazing.

Erwin Rohde in his classical treatment of ancient Greek religious ideas writes this about the Attic authors: “That the sins of the ancestors were visited upon their descendants here upon earth was an ancient article of faith especially strong in Attica.”[1] He continues with two examples:

“The conscious choice and decision, though regarded as necessary, seemed to demonstrate fully the personal guilt and responsibility of the doer. The cloud of evil that proceeds from the deed of the ancestor casts a dark shadow also over the minds of his son and his son’s son. Not from his own mind or character does the will to do wrong take its origin. The noble, pure and resolute Eteokles, the model of intelligent manhood, the shield and protection of his people, falls in a moment, a victim of ominous destiny; his clear-sighted spirit is darkened, he give himself up—his better self—for lost, and rushes upon his doom with awful resolve. The ‘sins derived from his ancestors’ drive him on.”

“God himself guides and urges forward Orestes to the act of matricide which he plans and carries out with fully conscious purpose—a crime that is also a duty.”[2]

Personal responsibility and divine compulsion mix to produce guilt-ridden behavior as if “divine justice” requires the guilt of the father be executed upon the son to complete the satisfaction of cosmic justice. In Attic poetry, the children pay for the father’s crime. God insists upon it.

We might reflect upon the parallel thought in Exodus 34:7 (“visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and forth generation). Is it possible that our translation of the difficult Hebrew verb paqad (to make a visitation) is really the reflection of a Greek idea rather than a truly Hebraic thought? Have we imported Attic poetry into our translations because our cultural view already contains the idea of trans-personal cosmic justice?

When we apply this Attic idea to the era of the Church fathers, we see that these Greek poets formulated the same proleptic justice demanded by Augustine’s idea of sinful nature. Adam’s “crime” requires appeasement. But its infraction is so great that divine justice can be served only by the punishment of all of his children. The idea of God’s vengeance perpetrated upon subsequent generations is a Greek conception of justice and is unknown among the Hebrew prophets. The prophets make it abundantly clear that every man stands before the Judge of all the earth on his own merit. No child is punished for the sins of his father or his father’s father although the consequences of the father’s sinful behavior clearly have effect upon the children. But consequence is not the same as guilt. Even the often cited verse in Exodus 34:7 cannot be read as divine vengeance perpetrated upon generations following the offense since the key word, paqad, has the sense of “oversight” (making a visitation) rather than executing judgment.[3] But Augustine did not think in Hebraic terms. His background was Greek philosophy and buried in the ethos of the Greek worldview are the remnants of Attic poets and the ancient pagan cult of Dionysus.

The cult of Dionysus seems to be at logical odds with the scientific bent of Greek philosophy. The Greek thinkers that spawned our ideas of a world governed by laws of cause and effect, devoid of the previous whims of the gods, might be considered immune to the ecstatic experiences of the Dionysus cult, but the idea of the immortality of the soul still appealed to the Greek sense of ethical justice. If, as the atomists suggested, a man simply disappeared at death in the rearrangement of “atoms,” true justice was not served upon those who escaped through disintegration and reincarnation. Therefore, many of the scientific philosophers still retained some strain of prior cultic affiliation where the “soul” and justice were concerned. They adopted in one form or another the underlying principle that “divinity of the human soul” was a fundamental constituent of the world, separated only from the infinite and unfettered life of the god by its bodily imprisonment. The cycle of purgation, needed for reunion with the world soul, was a reformulation of the idea of reincarnation. Through it the souls of men received their just rewards or punishments until at last they were freed from physical bondage and the material world. The common understanding of body and soul became the basis of Greek dualism, a separation of the physical and the spiritual that relegated all the material world to corruption, evil and suffering. This dualism ultimately affected most of the early Christian theologians and is still present in Christian doctrines today. The idea of sinful nature retains some elements of this Greek dualism since it proposes that after the Fall all the universe is somehow affected by sin and is therefore corrupt until and unless the action of the Spirit redeems it. Man in particular experiences this fall from grace, discovering that his spirit is imprisoned in a body constantly tempted and seduced, and from which there is no escape even in the saving work of God until at last his soul finds relief from the mortal body in death.

The Dionysus Cult of Souls offered the adherent a path of salvation through ecstatic union with the god and, at the same time, provided support for the desire for cosmic justice. If the souls of men survived the grave, then justice could have its way even after death. But if the purgation of the disembodied soul was not enough to avenge the crime, the gods could (and did) visit the required punishment upon the offspring or relations of the deceased. In other words, the Dionysus cult offered proleptic justice in this world and the next long before Augustine adopted the idea in his view of sinful nature. Someone must pay and in Greek religious thought, the requirement of payment reached beyond the life of the perpetrator.

It is worth noting that the Christian idea of appeasement comes from the same Greek background. According to the Reformers (but curiously not the early Church fathers), sin requires punishment because it violates God’s character. As a result of sin, God is angry with men and must be appeased. Only death will pay for the hideousness of sin. Therefore, Jesus offers himself as the substitutionary death, diverting the anger of God from the sinner. The cosmic scales of justice are balanced through the vicarious death of Jesus. All sin was transferred to Jesus on the cross. God’s justice is satisfied. We are redeemed. While Adam’s disobedience plunged all subsequent human beings into God’s wrath, Christ’s obedience and death on the cross reversed the process by fulfilling the requirement of divine justice. The parallels with the Dionysus cult are striking, including the sacrifice, purgation of “sin,” removal of pollution, healing and cathartic experiences. The Dionysus cult even contained an idea of atonement quite similar to later Christian concepts, that is, something akin to the penal theory of atonement adopted by the Reformers. Augustine laid the foundation for the thinking that an angry God, insulted and estranged because of human sin, requires cosmic punishment to avenge His slandered character. Luther merely adapted this idea to the cross event, claiming that Jesus “paid the price” for us, satisfying the anger of God. “The ‘stain’ which is wiped out by these mysterious and religious means is not ‘within the heart of man’. It clings to a man as something hostile, and from without, and that can be spread from him to others like an infectious disease. Hence, the purification is effected by religious processes directed to the external removal of the evil thing; it may be washed off (as by water from a running spring or from the sea), it may be violently effaced and obliterated (as by fire or even smoke alone), it may be absorbed (by wool, fleece of animals, eggs), etc.”[4] Greek religious thought eventually concluded that the body itself was the ultimate problem. The soul was pure, divine and unsullied by the corrupt world but it was imprisoned in an essential weak and evil container of the body. Therefore, the ‘soul’ required to be purified from the polluting embarrassment of the body.”[5] It is but a short step from this external contamination by evil forces to the inclusion of sin within the heart of Man. Augustine made that step by drawing on the Platonic development of these Dionysian ideas. Now the corruption of sin becomes the central characteristic of Man. His very soul is stained. Augustine is left with the theological problem of how to remove this essential, inherited nature. Augustine offered ransom. Luther added payment. But both men never questioned the origin of a view of God that suggests He is vengeful, angry, and punitive.

We might consider the parallels between the Christian idea that God’s action alone is the sole redemptive power in rescuing Man from his fallen condition and the Greek mystical religious claims concerning the entry of the god into the soul of a petitioner. In the Greek mystical religions, the god entered into the body of the priestess, taking possession of her soul and allowing her to receive heavenly revelation. “And this belief was that a highly exalted state of feeling could raise man above the normal level of his limited, everyday consciousness, and could elevate him to heights of vision and knowledge unlimited; that, further, to the human soul it was not denied, in very truth and not in vain fancy, to live for a moment the life of divinity.”[6] This idea of divine intervention and involvement in the lives of ordinary human beings was at the heart of the Greek mystical cults. The soul must be freed from the corrupting powers of bodily captivity. Orphic religions describe this avenue of salvation in terms quiet similar to later Christian theology. “A ‘release’ is possible; but man in his blindness and thoughtlessness cannot help himself, cannot even, when salvation is at hand, turn himself towards it.”[7] Salvation comes when the god affects purgation upon the adherent. “The height of morality is in this case the turning again towards god, and the turning away not merely from the weakness and errors of earthly being but from the whole of earthly life itself; renunciation of all that ties man to mortality and the life of the body.”[8] The Orphic cults even speak of the wages of sin, but within the cult, the wages of sin is the death of the soul because it is attached to the body. What is salvation? To be freed from the body and its earthly connection. How is this accomplished? By the direct intervention of the god.

The Orphic and Dionysian cults influenced both popular Greek thought and the constructions of the philosophers in two ways. First, they provided evidence for the belief that Man could experience the realm of the divine and secondly, they underscored the assumption that Man has both a soul and a body and was therefore connected to divinity. In Greek thought prior to Plato, the presence of the soul allowed men to become channels of the gods. After Plato, the religious tendency of Greek thought saw the souls of men as the representation of divinity captive in material bodies, released at death for reunion in some form or another with the spiritual realm of their prior existence.

Christian theology adopted this dualism, especially as formulated by Plato. The upper world of perfection was the true home of the soul. After the Fall, the soul remained imprisoned in the body but nevertheless continued to share in the upper spiritual world. The Fall represented a fall from grace, plunging the soul into contact with the broken, and now essentially corrupted, world. Just like the Orphic and Dionysian cults, on his own Man was not able to ascend to the heavenlies and return to soul-existence. The return requires the intervention of God. While Plato postulated that reason could lift a man from the delusion of the “cave” and return him to the true light, and the Orphic and Dionysian cults asserted that a mantic was the essential link between this fallen world and the heavenly realm, Christianity saw God’s elective force and the atonement of Jesus as the required bridge between the corrupted and the incorruptible. Plato’s reason was replaced by election. Dionysus’ ecstatic experience was replaced by the experience of the Spirit. But the methodology did not change the assumptions. First, men in their present state are corrupt and unworthy of the sublime. Secondly, the immortal soul is the only true connection with the world of divinity. Thirdly, through some intervention of the divine, the souls of men are capable of apprehension and acquisition of this ethereal realm. Fourthly, purgation of some sort is necessary to rid men of their corruption. And fifth, divine cosmic justice metes out trans-personal punishment for infractions against the god(s) by distributing the required punishment to subsequent generations. Each of these assumptions are present in the Dionysian and Orphic cults of the early Greeks and each seems to also be present in the work of the early Church fathers. It is true that the Church fathers rewrite the language so that it uses biblical terms, but the ideas are essentially the same. This is all the more telling when the rabbis, with the same biblical language at hand, did not develop doctrines similar to those of the Church fathers. Rather than view God as an insulted ogre ready to inflict punishment upon the despicable sinner for being born with the stain of his ancestors, rabbinic thought (and the parables of the Kingdom recounted by Yeshua) portray the Father as eternally anxious to restore the relationship at any cost, lovingly coaxing Man back into fellowship by offering Himself as the means of grace. The Father is running to redeem the prodigal, not standing aloof waiting for the sinner to receive his deserved wrath. The significant difference between the rabbis and the Church Fathers is the Greek pagan culture.

This suggests that the original idea of original sin comes not from Scripture or actually from Plato but rather from those religious ideas imported into the mindset of Greek paganism from the East, hundreds of years before Plato added his articulation. If this is true, and the evidence certainly seems to support it, then the idea of original sin and its consequent doctrines of noetic depravity, divine election, and distributed retribution are actually pagan ideals disguised as biblical (that is, Christian) doctrines.

Perhaps the rabbis were simply fortunate that their antiquity revolved around the prophets and not around ecstatic rites. Perhaps that’s what saved them from the same inclusion of pagan thoughts. Or was it that a commitment to Moses provided a bulwark against the incursion of any idea not directly supported by Torah?

[1] Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls & Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, Vol. 2, p. 423.

[2] Ibid., p. 424.

[3] See the discussion of paqad in TWOT.

[4] Edwin Rohde, Psyche, p. 295.

[5] Ibid., p. 302.

[6] Ibid., p. 291.

[7] Ibid., p. 342.

[8] Ibid., p. 343.