Alex,
Sorry for the delay, I've been out of town for a few days. This conversation has moved on to things more important than homosexuality. Your opinion that there is no original sin is compelling, in fact this was very controversial in the ancient church. Pelagius, a British monk advocated that there was no o.s. Augustine opposed him and the church decided Augustine's position was correct.
My understanding is that when God created man he created man in his own image yet quite different. God is good. As the way, truth and life all good and truth is bound up and God and God could not be anything but good and true since goodness and truth exist in him and emanate from him. The reflexive property: truth is truth. By the transitive property a God who is Good can not be anything but good. When God created man and His angels, these creatures were able to choose either the true (God) or the untrue (themselves, since truth was not their essence). This was a freedom of will, a freedom so great that it compromised itself: Adam chose to limit his freedom of will trough a free act of will.
It seems true that the more one knows of the consequences of her actions, the freer the choice. This means that only an omniscient God is perfectly free. I think that one can also choose freely when one realizes that a choice has an uncertain outcome; one chooses uncertainty. I don't really know but I would surmise Adam, namer of creation, had enough intelligence that the experience of being formed and nurtured by God (a God who created for him a wife, think of that!) would give him a solid idea of God's goodness and a limited idea of what the negation of that might be. Of course, his knowledge of either could not be full until he experienced both extremes. God seemed to say, "So you want to know good and evil, sin and know cruelty, die, and know pain. Even then I will redeem you." I descend into the possibly false, sorry.
You are right that there is a great moral and aesthetic beauty to man's fallen condition, but this comes only from God's grace. God has turned man's evil into his good. Still, I shiver to think what he could of done with an unfallen humanity. Without WWII there would have been no Churchill and without the Holocaust's horror Schindler would not be the hero he is. Still, these goods, brightly as they shine in the darkness, fall far short of justifying the horrors that birthed them.

Evil has no positive existence,it is merely the absence of good, since God could create no evil. That we inherit the curse of original sin (which is the natural evil in human nature) merely means God has departed from us, which makes us absent of the good and thereby "evil." The extent to which we are good is no longer absolute but only partial. At moments we are able to understand and enact this good, to bring God into our lives, but he no longer fills us.

The fact that we inherit this curse is indicative of the importance of the body and reproduction, a Christian truth that was slandered by platonic philosophy of the ideals supremacy over the physical. God created the physical as well as the spiritual and will resurrect our bodies. Just as we have a physical inheritance we have a spiritual one and we are just as much spiritual as physical children of Adam. It is not logical that something greater could emerge from something lesser, consequently, when Adam and Eve sinned they lost the ability to birth sinless children. It would be a mockery of reproduction if each new generation was injected with a new shot of moral perfection. Instead we are given the chance to confront this sinfulness and be redeemed from it by the death of a sinless man.
No matter how one slices it, whether man is free, bound, sinful or not, he should be humble, since he did not create himself. Aquagensis will lead one to an absurd humility with no object but material forces. Understanding of sin and redemption will lead one to joyful humility. (Disclaimer: I often fall far short of living by these truths, which perhaps argues for their truth and my humility).

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [6:58 PM]

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