In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation.
This is precisely what I affirm:
I believe, like Winman that babies are born innocent. I adhere to something akin to what is called "Original Sin"....but rather we distinguish that from this imputation of what I (and some others) call "Original Guilt".
Babies are not born guilty of anything. They aren't "sinners". But they inherit a nature and environment and flesh (which is weakness and susceptible to insurmountable temptation) which will inevitably result in transgression of the Law.
The Bible is EVERYWHERE telling men how they have "
GONE ASTRAY", they have "
TURNED EVERYONE" to his own way.
"For all
HAVE SINNED and fallen short..."
James maps out how our OWN SINS ultimately kill us:
James 1:3 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:
Jam 1:14 But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
Jam 1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
This warning is toothless if Original Guilt is true, because Spiritual Death is merely some
fait-accompli for which we can simply thank Adam. James could not rightly say that "...But every man is tempted, when he is
drawn away of his own lust, and enticed...... when it is finished,
bringeth forth death". Except to say that due to Adam's transgression you are born dead in sin anyway, so this particular series of events is an explanation of a scenario which never ACTUALLY plays out in the real World at all. Because (given Original Guilt) all of mankind already "died" once and only once under Adam, so
your own sins never actually
cause your Spiritual demise.
What ever an assumption of Original Guilt is, no man is really going to hell for any of their
own sins per se except (perhaps) for their unbelief.
But I think the assumption of GUILT is super-imposed onto "Original Sin" such that one imagines one cannot exist without the other.
It is telling that the Old Testament is essentially
devoid of any teaching of Original Guilt. It is a construct of 3rd and 4th Century Catholicism. No rabbi or Orthodox Jew
imagines for one second that the Old Testament teaches anything akin to the notion of "Original Guilt" idea that infants are somehow
guilty of anything.
And Winman is also correct in that:
The assumption of Original Guilt has brought about (and still does) all manner of crazy errors which we heap onto the Scriptures in order to patch up the holes it creates:
From Infant Baptism....
to these deranged ideas that there is some special class of "elect infants" that God gives a special dispensation to such that they are saved by grace utterly devoid of faith.
Or that God simply gives a "special" grace to all infants not provided for adults. (again completely without having any faith).
Or even that all infants by necessity go to Hell because of their inherited guilt etc...
These are all imagined constructs nowhere suggested in Scripture which we feel forced to develop to patch up the problems an assumption of Original Guilt creates.
Men are inherently weak and susceptible to temptation and also placed into a fallen and decrepit environment such that all of us inevitably choose our own path and it is to sin........But
THAT is why we are guilty. It isn't some mystical "guilty-gene" that males only pass to their progeny, or any other medieval superstition.
Baptists have come far in throwing off the superstitions of Catholicism....some have (thankfully) thrown that last vestige of insanity off as well, and I believe more Baptists are doing so every day. We need to complete the break from Romanism and ditch that particular Augustinian error.