One more article:
The Roman Catholic Church was the first to articulate the doctrine of original sin as a state of inherited guilt. Inspired first by the reactionary theology of St. Augustine of Hippo and solidified by later councils and theologians, Roman Catholics took a distinctly different theological path from Orthodox Christians. The Roman Catholic Church’s teaching of original sin states that each human being at the moment of conception shares in the guilt of Adam's sin of disobedience. In the medieval Western Catholic Church, original sin was believed to be transmitted in a physical sense through conception. There are notable implications for the doctrine of original sin. If original sin is true, then human nature is bad—not only positionally, but fundamentally bad. Not only do we bear the guilt of our first parents upon our souls, we inherited a corrupted ontology and therefore an inability to do anything good. Adam’s guilt changed human nature itself into something dirty, pitting nature against grace. If human nature is inherently depraved, what does this mean for the Incarnation? How could God take on human flesh? Did Christ inherit Adam’s guilt and corrupted nature? Of course not, and therefore bad theology begets bad theology.
Heterodox theology #1: The doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary put forth by Roman Catholicism conveniently sidesteps the problem of God taking on a corrupted human nature by guaranteeing the nature of His mother to be free from the stain of original sin transmitted through the corrupted seed of an earthly father. This is a logical outworking of the doctrine of original sin. While the Orthodox Church believes that Mary was full of grace from her childhood, we do not need to “fix” her humanity prior to the Annunciation to explain our Christology, because the early Church never taught this doctrine of original sin in the first place.
Heterodox theology #2: The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement stems from the same legal categories created by the doctrine of original sin in western theology. Original sin belongs to a legal paradigm in which the wrath of God against humanity for Adam’s sin must be satisfied so that we can be saved from eternal hellfire. God’s justice and love, however, cannot be separated from each other because our relationship with God is based on freedom, not necessity. While the atonement of Christ is certainly an Orthodox concept, the salvation of humanity cannot happen through a simple act of forgiveness or juridical payment plan. Salvation can only happen through gradual destruction of the devil and our passions by working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12).
Heterodox theology #3: The doctrine of limbo also sidesteps the problem of original sin for the unbaptized in Roman Catholic theology. A rather nuanced concept, humanity’s “loss of original justice” still results in separation from God and eligibility for punishment according to Roman Catholic theology. Thus, even though they may not technically inherit Adam’s guilt, unbaptized infants who die are relegated to an eternity in limbo, functionally implicating the traditional Roman Catholic understanding of original sin—a doctrine which ultimately dies the death of a thousand qualifications. What differentiates that gulf between heaven and hell for each person, however, is the accumulation of guilt due to a personal, not inherited, loss of justification. At any rate, the more we choose to speculate about the intricacies of salvation and damnation, the more doctrines we must use to support our speculation. God’s grace cannot be measured with scales.
The Orthodox picture of fallen humanity is far less somber than that of Roman Catholicism. Although the Orthodox Church does teach that humanity is damaged by sin, our depravity is not total, consummate, or inherent to human nature—we retain our reason and free will (Imago Dei). The personal consequences for moral deviation are spiritual death and physical death, but the universal consequences for humanity are physical death, disease, and difficult labor. Death is the consequence of breaking communion with God, not a judgment, because created beings cannot continue to exist without God. Since Adam and Eve are linked to humanity, and humanity is linked to creation, all of nature is subjected to the same death and corruption. We inherited a cosmos where sickness and death reign. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it, “Even though we are not guilty of the sins of others, yet we are somehow always involved.”
The Fall of Adam and Eve also created an inclination for humanity to move away from God. While Adam and Eve did not possess a mature holiness, they did possess innocence and potential for holiness, which were lost after the Fall. The theologians of the Church speak of a corruption of human nature which is the result of a loss of the indwelling grace of God—and humans sin because we are willingly yoked to the power of death and its consequences rather than to God’s nurturing grace.
According to St. Maximos the Confessor, the problem is that our natural will has become a gnomic will, meaning that we can now waver between choices. The gnomic mode is what inclines us to sin against nature. Even after heaping guilt upon his own soul, a person’s nature is not mutilated beyond recognition. The corruption of human nature from sin is a sickness or illness. A woman with cancer is ill, but she herself is not fundamentally bad. A boy with paralyzed legs cannot walk, but he himself is no less of a human than anyone with functioning legs. In the same way, sin is not the tainting of a nature but corruption within an individual.
Building upon classic Orthodox theology of God, Patriarch Meletios Pegas (1549-1601) put it this way: although the “energies” of a person’s soul are spoiled by sin, the person’s “essence” is not. Just as the distinction between essence and energies is of vital importance to an Orthodox understanding of God, it can also assist in explaining humanity’s inclination to sin without inheriting the guilt of our first parents. Sin is not who we are, but what we do.
The doctrine of original sin as originally articulated by the Roman Catholic Church and later by Protestants is not simply a case of semantics, but an erroneous anthropology resulting from theological reactions and misunderstandings. This doctrine has wide implications for anthropology—sin, grace, free will, baptism, and theosis. How we understand the effects of the Fall directly bears on our soteriology. The Orthodox position on original sin (“ancestral sin”) is that humanity inherited only the consequences of sin from Adam and Eve, rather than their guilt. Baptism restores God’s grace to humans so that we have the ability to overcome sin and death and finish the song of humanity.
http://orthodoxyandheterodoxy.org/20...ef-comparison/