Here are the statments in which you discuss the Doctrine of Original Sin:
It brought forth the need to baptize babies.
I am not using the phrase Original Sin. I am defending the truth of the New Testament in revealing that sin came into the world through Adam.
And Paul wrote that long before Catholics had a need to baptize babies. This is a red herring argument.
"Therefore just as through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin, death; and thus death passed on to all men because all have sinned - " (Rom. 5:12)
It the NATURE (SIN) singular, that Paul says entered into the world.
This was a teaching the Apostle Paul had long before Catholicism developed traditions of enfant baptism. The development of the traditions neither necessarily makes them right nor Paul's teaching in Romans 5 wrong.
With the same logic I could say the message of the cross was developed by the Ku Klux Klan in order to burn crosses on the front lawns of black people and their white sympathizers.
Your first argument is just a big red herring. Let's look at your second argument then.
IMO, the implication is that we cannot control ourselves without the help of Jesus. Unfortunately that is contrary to what God told Cain and what is presented in the OT.
The Bible does not present man as being totally without self control.
It does reveal all as sinners in need of salvation from both the guilt of sin and the power of sin. And that regardless that we have some measure of self control.
God exhorting Cain to master sin does show that Cain had some self control. But it did not mean he needed no offering for sin because of that.
If sufficient self control was all that Cain needed then there probably would have been no need for an atoning sacrifice to begin with. Abel and Cain both offered some kind of expiatory sacrifice which in Abels' case, was accepted.
The existence of the worship of God in this way demonstrates what level of self control they retained did not close the gap between them and a righteous and holy God.
I would add that the self control retained in man is like a breaking system. The breaking system keeps man from going TOO FAR. Cain's anger against Abel may have been more tolerable. Cain's MURDER of Abel went too far.
In this case the self control was a breaking system not eradicating sinning but designed to prevent it from going too far.
We do forget that religions are not immune to outside influence.
The Original Sin Doctrine was influenced by Platonism according to this article: The Original View of Original Sin
Many of us know there was considerable mixture of Greek philosophical thought with Christian theology in those early centries. I consider it not really honest to exploit this as some do to "prove" that this or that doctrine had its origin in Plato.
Of course Catholicism was a huge mixture of pagan traditions with the New Testament. This was the leaven hidden in three measures of meal which leavened the whole lump, as Jesus prophesied
(Matt.13:33)
"Another parable He spoke to them: The kingdom of the heavens is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened."
This parable, many Bible students understand as a prediction that corrupting elements will be added sneakily into the New Testament teaching to bloat it up as leaven bloats of flour. The intention was to make the teaching of the kingdom more palatable and acceptable to the masses.
This is exactly what the Roman Catholic Church did. They added corrupting pagan teachings and ideas to the New Testament teaching to gain the masses, ie. Easter, Christmas, Mary worship, Holloween, and even some philosophical concepts of Greek philosophy.
The fact of the matter is that Paul wrote of sin entering into the world through one man - Adam, long before this mixture started in Roman Catholicism.
But Augustine did not devise the concept of original sin. It was his use of specific New Testament scriptures to justify the doctrine that was new. The concept itself had been shaped from the late second century onward by certain church fathers, including Irenaeus, Origen and Tertullian. Irenaeus did not use the Scriptures at all for his definition; Origen reinterpreted the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in terms of a Platonic allegory and saw sin deriving solely from free will; and Tertullian’s version was borrowed from Stoic philosophy.
I would be happy to review some church history before discussing all of this. However, none of it changes Paul's use of the contrast between Adam's disobedience and Christ's obedience.
I want to spend more time reading the Bible first. Then I can have some appreciation of what teachers of the past like Origen, Tertullian and Augustine were talking about, right or wrong.
I find that a lot of people don't know the Bible that well. But they go off and base skeptical arguments upon what Origen, Ireneus, Tertullian, and Augustine wrote. It often looks impressive and scholarly.
While the teachings of these men are interesting they are my secondary interest. The epistle to Rome by Paul draws a contrast between the first man and the second man, the first Adam and the last Adam. Each was a respective head of humanity. And Adam's transgression is juxtaposed against Christ's obedience. Adam's bringing man into sin and death is compared with Christ's bringing in His believers into justification and reigning in life.
The teachings may be called "Original Sin" or may be refered to as something else. I am not attemptiong to defend the Doctrine of Original Sin as I do not know all that the phrase may imply. Generally, I know it has something to do with sin entering into the world through Adam.
And the concept of TWO men being TWO heads of humanity, one pertaining to sin and death, and the other pertaining to life and righteousness - justification and sanctification - reigning through grace, is completely the New Testament's teaching.
This is the revelation come to us through the Apostle Paul. And it is not too hard to see in the Hebrew Bible where and how he derived these teachings. He really invented nothing. He revealed what was there in the light of the ministry of Christ.
So it seems the idea came first and the use of Paul as support came considerably later.
The Bible shows us the first man. The Bible shows us how the first man fell out of intimate fellowship with God through his disobedience.
And the evidence is very strong that something happened constitutionally in man's being at that time. It was not simply a matter of one man disobeying God. It seems a matter of man's nature being poisoned by an evil foreign element of some kind.
Even God's reference to sin crouching at the door of Cain's heart and having a "desire" for Cain, exposes sin as a kind of living evil presence of some sort -
"If you do well, will not [your countenance] be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and his desire is for you, but you must rule over him." (Genesis 4:7)
Sin there is something seemingly alive, devious, crouching, seeking opportunity. It is very much like what Paul wrote in Romans 7 only written centries before.
It is the same divine revelation.
Augustine’s outlook on sex was distorted by ideas from the world outside the Bible. Because so much philosophy was based on dualism, in which the physical was categorized as evil but the spiritual as good, some philosophers idealized the celibate state. Sexual relations were physical and therefore evil.
That's interesting. But it has no effect on both Genesis and Romans revealing something constitutionally has gone wrong in man's nature since the sin of Adam.
Particularly we see God pronouncing in a negative way that man is flesh and His Spirit will not strive with him forever:
"And Jehovah said, My Spirit will not strive with man forever, for he indeed is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years." (Gen 6:3)
I believe that something more is indicated in this passage than simply that man is physical. We know that God created man partly a physical being and partly a spiritual one. The passages indicates to me that the something has changed in man to cause him to ever strive in conflict with the Spirit of God in transgression, evil, iniquity.
Left with no redemption, this nature only strives more and more with God and becomes worse and worse. For the downward decline of it resulted in the earth being filled with violence and man's thought and imagination being only continually evil. The judgment of the flood had to come.
Sin indeed entered into the world through Adam.
Apparently once the idea that sexual relations even in marriage were bad (not a Jewish concept). Their philosophy created a little bit of a problem when it came to Jesus, so they had to create another story to keep Jesus "clean". Immaculate Conception
Red Herring Argument. It has no effect on Romans 5 or Genesis history of society's decline into sin and death from Adam's disobedience.
Augustine’s association with Neoplatonic philosophers led him to introduce their outlook within the church. This had its effect in the development of doctrine. For example, Jesus was considered immaculately conceivedwithout sin in that His Father was God. But because His mother, Mary, had a human father, she suffered the effect of original sin. In order to present Jesus Christ as a perfect offspring without any inherited sin from either parent, the church had to find a way to label Mary as sinless. They did this by devising the doctrine of her immaculate conception, though this inevitably leads to further questions.
Isaiah 53 presents the Messiah as the perfect offering who made Himself an offering for the sins of the people.
And
Isaiah 9:6 says the child born is the Mighty God and the son given is the Eternal Father.
You cannot refer to Augustine's borrowing from Plato so many centries latter to erase what both the Old Testament and New Testament clearly taught.
While some of your observations are interesting and could be checked out they have no effect of sin entering into the world through Adam as the Scripture reveals.
Then we get to the need for baptizing babies.
And the Klan latter got the need to burn crosses in the America South. That is not the fault of the Bible.
You have some extended "guilt by association" arguments here.
Other babies were not so fortunate. Some eight centuries later the Catholic theologian Anselm extended the implications of Augustine’s concept of original sin and claimed that babies who died, did so as sinners; as sinners, they had no access to eternal life but were condemned to eternal damnation.
More Red Herrings. And you are just appealing to all that you don't like about Catholicism.
Of course the babies that are baptized don't necessarily refrain from sinning.
None of it changes the fact that humans have good inclinations and bad inclinations. We can go either way and we can change back and forth. We are still responsible for our actions.
They just made the issue more complicated. I think it's a guy thing.
If the Bible taught that we were not responsible for our actions there would be no need for a Savior from the guilt of our sins. There would be no guilt. Since there would be no guilt there would be no need for reconciliation to God.
Saying that we are all constituted sinners by a sin nature never was meant to absolve man from responsibility. My experience is that some forms of humanist self righteousness always boasts that to be more responsible is to disbelieve in the New Testament salvation through Christ.
This thread like the one on there being no spiritual death in the Old Testament, seems just another elaborate defense of a self righteous religion of self justification through works.
This time you seem to want to appeal to some documentary hypothesis and hijack Judaism to dress this Humanism in sacred religious garb.
We heard before of "no spiritual death" in the Old Testament. Now we hear of Judaism not needing any teaching of Original Sin. And you are very diligent to present "Origina Sin" as including all the ends and outs of infant baptism and dubious Catholic dogmas enfluencing ideas about sex and the destiny of all children.
I think you are creating a big strawman.
Are you doing all this just so you can brand your kind of Humanism as "Judaism" ?
As far back as Jeremiah's prophecy, the importance of the Sabbath is held by God in
Jeremiah 17:20-24. If the Jews were to enquire why on earth the Sabbath was so important to God the answer would be concerning creation as spoken in Exodus 20:11.
I am not sure what mental hoops I have to jump through about the Documentary Hypothesis in order to arrive at the concept that the resting of God on the seventh day is not important to Judaism.
You just have someone theory about when passages were written and by who in Genesis. It is far from conclusive though it may be popular with higher textural critics.
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