Interesting Thoughts on Original Sin

Sacrifice and human sacrifice was practiced by false religion long before Abraham, Moses or any of the prophets. It had become so ingrained in human consciousness, the idea that God demanded sacrifice before showing a benign attitude to sinful human beings, that God had little choice but to wean them off of their addiction to the whole idea SLOWLY. It took all the generations between Abraham and Jesus to complete the project.

His future plan was revealed to faithful Abraham and was not completed until Christ died on Good Friday afternoon.

The book of Hebrews celebrates the fact that Jesus Christ was so successful in finally putting a stop to the whole filthy business.
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I'm not ignoring them; I'm explaining why you're wrong.

Jesus Christ fulfilled the old Law, so there was no reason to carry the ceremonial parts of Jewish practice forward. You're simply telling me the Christian perspective on all of it, which I already know. But to assert that the Jews themselves did not think sacrifice led to forgiveness of sin is just wrong, even going by Biblical evidence itself and without resorting to external sources.

Consider the passage you quote in Ezekiel. I notice you left out verse 20, which reads "The soul who sins shall die". You also fail to pay attention to the passage in verse 21 that reads "keeps all my Statutes", which is a clear reference to the Law. Ezekiel was prophesying to a people who were cast out of their homeland into Babylon, and had seen their Temple destroyed. Ezekiel was receiving God's Word on what they must do to re-admitted to the Covenant of the Law. It was not the Christian message of grace through faith, because Christ's time had not yet come. The Law still prevailed over Israel, which means that salvation was by the Law.

Israel's task in captivity was to once again become God's people by following his Statutes (Law). God promised to renew them as his chosen people and bring them back to Israel. (This is where we get the magnificent passage in Ezekiel 36:24-26). The point of Ezekiel is that of a renewal of Israel's covenant relationship to God. It is not a rejection or abrogation of Jewish Law as a way to salvation.

As to the book of Jonah, this little story is as close as the Bible gets to actual satire. Consider: rather than a faithful prophet speaking to a disobedient people, we have a disobedient prophet speaking to an obedient people; rather than obey his sovereign God, Jonah runs away from his task; and when God forgives the Ninevites when they repent, Jonah rebukes him for doing so!

In short, the thrust of the story is that Jonah is a ridiculous and terrible prophet (which we already knew from 2 Kings 14:23-25). It's almost comedic in tone. The irony of Jonah's prayers is that he is daring to ask for deliverance while he is actively disobeying the God he is praying to. The lesson is one of forgiveness in the face of true repentance -- if God can forgive the repentant Ninevites, surely Jonah must as well. And the book ends with Jonah not learning a darned thing; he ends as dunderheaded as he began.

 

It’s very simple: if atonement can be had by means other than blood sacrifice, then the latter is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve it. The flour sin offering is such an example. Therefore whatever instrumentality blood sacrifice may have is both occasional and metaphorical.

 

I don't think it's very thought provoking at all, because of this bit here:

I think this whole exercise is empty. Christians read the OT alongside the NT. Our new understanding, informed by direct access to the Word made flesh, assists us in interpreting the old understanding.

Nothing discussed in the OT contradicts the doctrine of original sin. At best all it shows us is that God's people were misguided for centuries - which is not particularly interesting as half the Gospel narrative is Jesus correcting teachers of the law or upending their assumptions. At worst it is just silent on it, which is even less interesting.

Does Dr. Enns have a blog post quota or something? What a waste of his time and everyone who bothered to read it.

 

If we make the assumption that the OT/Tanakh contains the same teaching on original sin as the NT, then it will come as no surprise when that’s precisely what we find. Dr. Enns’ point - which I agree with - is that this assumption cannot be derived from the text of the OT/Tanakh itself.

 

Of course they believed it. So had all the pagan nations surrounding them. So did the Egyptians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians and Philistines. There was NOTHING distinctive about the Jews regarding the fact that they believed God needed to be appeased by sacrifices. Everybody else did too. Even Noah did, years before Abram, even cave men did back in the stone age. No change there then, until Jesus Christ died on that cross. Up until then, they were all WRONG, according to the New Testament writer to the Hebrews, and he should know.

Heb. 10:4-10. "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”
When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
They might have all believed that sacrifices could take away sins, but they were obviosly WRONG about that, according to the writer to The Hebrews.

""it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." And it ALWAYS was.
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God mandated the "filthy business" to begin with, by laying down the ritual, ceremonial, and moral laws in Exodus and Leviticus. I know that Christians tend to ignore the "boring" books of the Old Testament, but confusion of this kind is why a closer reading of the Old Testament is absolutely necessary. The God of the OT is the same God as the one in the NT. God does not change. What was good then is good now. The sacrificial system was not halted because it was bad or wrong; it was halted because Christ fulfilled its purpose and rendered it unnecessary under the Covenant of Grace. The Apostle Paul makes this very point in chapter 3 of his epistle to the Romans:

Rom. 3:1-2:

Paul says that Jews have an advantage because at least they have the Law.

But....

Rom. 3:19-20:

The Law does not save people. It only convicts them of their sin. It is only by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ that we are saved, by faith. Faith and not the Law is the path. God's grace is not given as wages paid for work done, but as an unearned and undeserved gift by faith in God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

If God is always the same and never changes, then surely his mercy and his justice are always operative, i.e., simultaneously, not in succession.

 

If God had mandated, as you say, sacrifices to ACTUALLY take away sin, rather than just play along temporarily with God ignorant semites, who like all the pagan tribes around them BELIEVED already that God required sacrifices of dead animals, birds etc, there would have been NO NEED to replace or 'fulfil' the filthy system to begin with, and no necessity for His Only Son to be hounded to death and murdered by those same 'sacrifice hungry, ignorant, superstitious religionists' that Christ refuted time and time again whenever they argued with him, wherever he went.

Would YOU have allowed your only son to volunteer to become a human sacrifice to replace a system of sacrifices which was already fully functional and fit for the purpose of removing sins.

And as to 'filthy' can you even imagine the mess involved with slaughtering 700 oxen and 7,000 sheep in a single day in the temple in Jerusalem, when it was little more than a bronze age village. With slaghtering pens little bigger than a modern farm yard, and a lot less hygenic than any modern day slaughterhouse or abattoir.
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I wish I didn’t have to put it this way, but that’s basically what the theory of penal substitutionary atonement amounts to, viz., child sacrifice and blood magic. Both practices were, incidentally, prohibited by the OT/Tanakh.

 

God takes no pleasure in death and destruction, but he will mete it out if justice demands it. This is what the Israelite Law is all about: obedience to God's will. God commanded that sacrifices be offered not because he is a bloodthirsty pagan deity, but because he wanted to enforce discipline on his people. They had to sacrifice as an act of obedience, of submission to God's commands.

The writer of Hebrews, a Christian, says that the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins, which is true: it is not the sacrifice, but God himself, who takes away sins. It was only by Christ's blood shed on the cross that we could be saved. That's why we say that the Israelite law was fulfilled in Christ. The perfect sacrifice was required for forgiveness.

 

I’ve already shown how the OT/Tanakh refutes the notion that blood sacrifice is necessary for atonement. Speaking theologically, an omnipotent God does not need a sacrificial framework of any kind in order to act mercifully; he can simply forgive at will. Morally speaking, substitutionary atonement is unjust, and contradicts the aforementioned passage from Ezekiel: each person’s sin is his or her own.

 

Rubbish!

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—
I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.
Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow's cause. Isa.1:11-17

And then only if we accept that we, as human beings ALL have the potential to commit that murderous act of killing even God's only Son in front of Him. We are ALL capable of justifying our own murderous conduct given the circumstances condusive to our acting that way. It happens all the time right down through history, and its time WE as individuals refused to allow ourselves TO DO IT. Because God has NEVER WANTED SACRIFICES, God wants us to "Love One Another".

No! Obedience to God's command to "Love One Another" is all that's required for forgiveness. God is reconciled with the world and no longer holds their sins against them. That is the only command that God still requires obedience to.
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Most of us have more than enough of our own sin, so we don't need any help from Adam on that account. Like @Invictus I have more than a few problems with people who insist on penal substitutionary atonement as the only acceptable theory, though I will happily acknowledge that there is some biblical warrant for some sense of substitutionary atonement. I kind of like Anselm in Cur Deus Homo where he argued that only God could, and only humankind needed to, so God became man, that justice and mercy might be reconciled. Whilst I recognise that many easterners find this wanting, their notion of Christus Victor Is a profound and helpful contribution to the discussion.

I think that @Tiffy has short-sold the commands, for we also have follow me, wash one another's feet, do this as my anamnesis, so and do thou likewise, may they be one even as we are one. I don't doubt that all these can fall under the umbrella, Love one another, however on its own without more context it sounds more like attitude than action.

The question is better asked, Is God's love for us unconditional?

 

Which is a useless thought bubble. It can be found, when you interpret it in a way that we are given the tools to use in the NT. Things that were unclear and sealed, confusing and impossible to understand, are now clear.

Read Zechariah without the NT and half of it is impossibly arcane. Read Hosea 6 without the NT and you’ll come to a completely pointless conclusion. Read the Psalms on the messiah and you’ll think David was writing about himself. Ezekiel 47 is an unfulfilled prophecy about literal rivers before Jesus.

Reading the OT as if Jesus has not yet come and did not teach what he taught is only interesting in so far as getting into the headspace of what it would have been like to be a first century Jew. As lessons for doctrine today it’s like trying to read a physics textbook after removing both of your eyes. “Look what lessons we can learn from this textbook without any eyes!” - nothing worth talking about.

 

But this is a vital skill for exegeting the Old Testament, because it explains the persecution Christ and early Christians suffered. Second Temple Judaism, as I have said before, is very different from the modern Jewish practice -- you have to understand the Jewish faith in context, and to do that you have to understand both their theology and their practice. That's why the writer of Hebrews is supposed by many to be a Hellenist rather than a Palestinian Jew -- he knows Jewish worship and habits, but applies the same sort of Hellenistic rationalism that Paul uses in his epistles (which is why the letter was ascribed to Paul for so long, despite its obvious stylistic difference).

The writer of Hebrews summarizes in Heb. 9:16-22 that blood sacrifice is necessary:

Emphasis mine.

But then he explains that only Christ can truly achieve the sacrificial perfection needed in Heb. 9:23 and following. It was Christ's sacrifice, his shedding of blood, that truly opened the way for forgiveness of our sins. It was offered as propitiation to the Holy God's wrath (1 John 2:2), and was indeed the only sacrifice that could effect such propitiation.

Christians must always read the OT through the lens of the NT, but all too often we behave as though it's an entirely different God acting in the OT -- a vengeful, bloody, Bronze Age deity who was replaced with a meeker, milder, "nicer" God in the NT. This is a deadly fallacy; in fact, it is the Marcionite heresy. God himself decreed the Old Testament Law; therefore it must be good and just because God himself is good and just. It was Israel's inability to follow the law that made the sacrifice of Jesus necessary, and it was original sin (so we say) that was the cause of this inability to follow the law. We are corrupt in nature; we cannot do good even if we try with all our might. That's why this discussion is so important from a theological standpoint.

We dare not say that the Levitical laws were bad or wrong -- they were decreed by God himself. We are the insufficient, flawed components in that system, not the elements of the Law. We -- in our fallen and wicked nature -- are the reason God required a perfect sacrifice to propitiate his wrath.

 

That’s a bit harsh. The text of the OT/Tanakh is either intelligible of itself or it has no definite content at all. Not only may we assume that the writers of the OT/Tanakh intended their work to be understood by their immediate audience, they explicitly say so (cf. Deut. 29:28-30:15). So, the question of whether Paul derived his teaching on original sin from the OT/Tanakh, or read the concept back into those texts, is a legitimate one from a historical perspective. Frankly the common understanding of the doctrine has never made a lot of sense anyway. One cannot with justice be condemned for failing to live up to a set of rules that one was incapable of following in the first place.

 

I think @Invictus has a real point. If you can't read the OT without reading Jesus into it, you will run the risk of eisegesis. And I am not saying that Jesus is not foreshadowed in the law and the prophets, however, what I am saying I need to start with the question before we get to the answer. That means in understanding the OT, we must be ready to acknowledge context and try to understand what it meant to the first readers.

The man on the corner hollering "Jesus is the answer" should be able to answer the question of the passerby who asks "and what sir is the question".

Liturgically we read the Old Testament first, contemplate that, and then allow that to inform us as we listen to the New Testament. The Old Testament informs the New Testament, and we run the risk of putting the cart before the horse when we start the other way around.

 

But that’s not what’s happening here. Old mate is saying “If we ignore the NT, then this is not clearly stated by the OT” as if that means anything interesting. Lots of things are unclear in the OT until we read the NT, and then they become clear. Lots of things were unclear to the Jews in the time of Jesus, but after the heard Him speak it became clear. That Original Sin is not explicit in the OT without support from the NT is not interesting - it’s still in there.

This is not true. Daniel didn’t even understand his own thoughts in the time he wrote them.

Paul’s learnings are intelligible from the OT, they’re just hard to see without the NT. The OT literally says scrolls will be sealed until the Messiah comes, we expect knowledge of God to be unlocked only after Jesus starts teaching.

 

For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

There are two ways of looking at this paragraph concerning the Law of God and its purpose for humankind.

(1) That The Law was entirely imposed and dictated word by word to Moses by God to regulate all human behaviour for all of time. i.e not one jot or tittle of it will pass away until ALL has been completed.
i.e. and I quote. "We dare not say that the Levitical laws were bad or wrong -- they were decreed by God himself. We are the insufficient, flawed components in that system, not the elements of the Law. We -- in our fallen and wicked nature -- are the reason God required a perfect sacrifice to propitiate his wrath". So Christ had to die because God has an anger management problem?

This leaves no purpose or reason for the incarnation of a Messiah and nothing new for him to teach us about God's will or nature to inform us. The Law , which was perfect since it came directly from God, would have been all that we needed. The rewards and punishments were all neatly laid out for us. God was in his heaven and all's well with the world.

(2) That The Law was inspired by God in the mind of Moses using the human material available to God at the time, to eventually lead the people of God to a cognitive condition whereby they could obtain the ability to properly understand God's will for humankind.

The first assumes that God does not change and therefore neither would his edicts, statutes and commands to humankind. The Law therefore still stands in its entirety, but some of it can be circumvented by faith in Jesus Christ so no longer applies to Christians. (We can eat lobster, pork and black pudding, but are still not allowed to murder our next door neighbour or speak in church if we are a woman, etc.).

The second assumes that knowledge of God's character and ways is progressively revealed to humankind in scripture and finally fulfilled through Jesus Christ and Grace, not through Moses and the Law, however perfect in achieving its actual purpose. The Law therefore was only a means to an end, a temporary fix, not God's final solution to the long term problem of human sin.

Depending upon which basic assumption (1) or (2) we have, that final sentence from the Hebrews passage quoted will be understood slightly differently.

Under basic assumption (1) it will mean that for sins to be forgiven God still demands that something must die, and it is God's idea that this should be so. No death = no forgiveness from God.

Under basic assumption (2) it may mean that the Law Moses said had come from God, actually was the nearest God could get, (through Moses) to expressing God's will for humankind to GET to a place where it could properly know God's will and character. The whole OT sacrificial system was clearly only a modification of Pagan ignorance concerning what God demanded of humankind before God would be willing to behave benevolently toward it, (in its obviously admittedly sinful condition). The whole system, even though it derived from Pagan superstition and still heavily bore all the hallmarks of Pagan sacrificial rites, was used by God to lead the Israelites to a mindset capable of understanding the teaching of its MESSIAH, who would ACTUALLY tell them the mind and will of GOD and finally completely release them from all of Moses's ritual obligations under the Law of Moses.

Indeed, under Moses's imperfect sacrificial system, deemed [the law], sin ALWAYS caused something to die, so that the life that was believed to be in the blood could be sprayed about willy nilly over everything, making a terrible mess and showing the people just how unpleasant a thing SIN IS. Forgiveness of sin ALWAYS requires someone to clean up the mess sin leaves.

Under Jesus Christ's PERFECT sacrificial act, there is no longer any need for the mess, because HE has cleansed us by teaching us the TRUTH about God.

For since the law was but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, they would not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Heb.10:1-4.

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Eph.5:25-27.

The word is the teachings of Christ, even Christ himself. We cannot even be followers of Christ unless we are willing, in some cases, to even BREAK the Law of Moses, for the sake of love.
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