Reinhold Niebuhr's Doctrine of Original Sin

In On Niebuhr, Langdon Gilkey recounts how Reinhold Niebuhr dramatically refashioned the classical doctrine of original sin to the point where, as Niebuhr states, "all 'literal' elements of the story are now gone" (pg. 134). "Adam and Eve are now for him symbols of the human condition, not any longer causes of that situation. The Fall thus has ceased to point to a historical event in the past and has become a symbol, a description of our perennially disrupted state, and one that discloses to us the deepest levels of that state. . ." (ibid).

Gilkey (pp. 136-37) beautifully summarizes Niebuhr's innovative refashioning of the doctrine of original sin:

"If Adam is a symbol or our bondage and not its historical cause, how are we to understand this situation? What now is 'original sin'? Or, put another way, what is the cause of our ills that replaces the historical fall? Of course, as Augustine pointed out, there is no cause of our sin in the sense of an external factor that necessitates it, as a material cause necessitates an effect. We sin through our will and thus somehow freely; we could love (and avoid sin) if we willed to do it, but we do not so will it, even if we wish we could. Something, therefore, is awry. Our wills are not themselves; and though it is our will that is at fault, we cannot seem to do anything about it. What is amiss?

"Niebuhr's answer—which is also traditional—is that the prior 'sin' driving us to the actual sins we each commit concerns our relation to God. In effect that underlying sin (original sin) consists in a break in that central relationship to God. In the literal story, or course, that break was established by Adam's act; now it is shifted into our own spiritual depths where the self establishes itself.

But the self lacks the faith and trust to subject itself to God. It seeks to establish itself independently. . . .By giving life a false center, the self then destroys the real possibility for itself and others. Hence the relation of injustice to pride. . . . The sin of inordinate self-love thus points to the prior sin of lack of trust in God. . . . The anxiety of freedom leads to sin only if the prior situation of unbelief is assumed. That is the meaning of Kierkegaard's assertion that sin 'posits itself'.(Niebuhr, pg. 252)

"'Original sin', the sin that precedes, undergirds, and compels our sins on the surface of life, is thus for Niebuhr a lack of trust in God, which represents the break in that relationship that constitutes our humanity. This lack of trust, therefore, sets everything off-kilter. It spurs our anxious contingency to secure itself; in effect it causes us to make ourselves the center of our world; and thus it drives us to be unjust to others. This is, says Niebuhr, the 'unbelief' that leads to pride. Pride in this case is pride in relation to God,the claim to be self-sufficient and in no need of the divine. And this pride over against God, 'defiance of God', leads to pride in its other forms, pride of power, intellectual pride, and moral and spiritual pride. Hence this 'original sin' is at once unbelief (lack of trust), rebellion, and idolatry; replacing God with the self or with its group, in effect, the creator with the creature. Therefore, original sin is the defiance of the first commandment to love and honor God alone and not the creature; and its consequence is the breaking of the second commandment, to love our neighbor as ourselves. The unbelief and rebellion that in the tradition were associated with Adam's historical act of defiance are now moved forward to characterize the inner and fundamental relation of each person to God. For Niebuhr we are each as close to original sin as were Adam and Eve; they are symbols of what we do."

Langdon Gilkey (2001). On Niebuhr: A Theological Study. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1996, c. 1941, 1964). The Nature and Destiny of Man: a Christian Interpretation, Vol. 1. Louisville: Westminster Charles Knox.

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