It is commonplace today for religious people to attack the idea of ‘original sin’. Apart from the unseemly connotations some, such as Matthew Fox, have employed the Genesis account to say that sin was not original, rather it was blessing. Sin thus came after blessing as the result of a subsequent fall. Interesting as such thinking is my concern is that we can all too easily lose the central theological insight of original sin. Namely that it is actually the idea of original sin that allows us to reject the notion of a temporally located fall. For in the idea of original sin the fall is inscribed into our very being. The fall is no longer something one can point to and say, “there is where it all went wrong”. In the theological category of original sin one must embrace that moment as ones own. In the theological category of original sin “the fall” becomes “a falling” (as Heidegger understood).

To explain what I mean let us take the almost ubiquitous claim within the church that there was once a type of pre-fall religious community (not in the sense of being perfect, but rather of a community before “the” fundamental mistake). For instance people often refer lovingly to the community of believers that existed before Paul came along and formed the church, or the church before Constantine converted to Christianity or Catholicism before Luther created a schism or the community that Luther founded that was perverted by later protestant sects etc. etc.

Here we witness the logic of anti-Semitism in its abstract form, namely the externalisation of blame onto someone/thing external to us that must be repelled/overthrown/overcome in order for the community to find peace again and a renewed homeostasis. In the anti-Semitic gesture one externalises the fall/obstacle by placing it onto another. Here we see the scapegoat mechanism at work in its most obvious form.

Against this logic of the scapegoat one can approach the notion of original sin as a countermeasure, one that forces us to re-inscribe the fall/obstacle into ourselves. In relation to the above example it can make us embrace the reality of concretely existing Christianity in all its problems as our own, rather than pointing to some external point in time. This does not mean that one cannot point to times when things went wrong within the church or political life. By no means. This is covered by the idea of sin. With ‘original sin’ one is simply prevented from pointing to some idealised perfection that we have lost and which we can return to and repeat in an identical manner – i.e. the common cry that we ought to return to the early church.

Instead, in original sin, the fall is inscribed into the very foundation of all concretely existing Christianity. The point then is not to attempt some kind of return to the early church, the church before it got caught up in X (Platonic concepts, state power etc.) but rather to return to the revolutionary event that gave birth to the early church. Fully embracing the fact that we will fail but working diligently to fail in a better way. We thus avoid the deadend of either sitting back and saying, “everything we create will end up just as bad as what currently exists”, or naively claiming that we can return to the way things used to be, before it all went wrong.

This opening can be seen in relation to Kierkegaard’s use of the term ‘repetition’. Here one attempts to repeat what has gone before but in a non-identical manner. Thus returning, not to the concrete reality of the early church, but rather to that which gave birth to it.

The result of this radical reboot will very likely take a form that is very different to what the church has looked like at other times. And what arises will look like a betrayal of so much of what has gone before. But true fidelity to Christianity involves a deep reservoir of courage that will help us return to the revolutionary source from which the concretely existing church arose. This is a sacrificial act as one is unlikely to find much support (financial, emotional) by walking this road. Indeed one is likely to be sidelined and attacked.

In response then to those who shout, “let us return to the early church”, we must resolutely respond by crying out, “no, let us return to the event which gave rise to the early church”