Original Sin:

In the book of Genesis we see that at the beginning humans were created in the image of God, male and female. This image allowed them to reflect God’s character, His love, justice, mercy, grace and much more. Being in God’s image means that Adam and Eve where to image God into all of the earth. This is a supernatural grace that is given to accomplish all that it means to be made in God’s image. St. Thomas Aquinas calls it, “Original Righteousness.” He explains it like this, “Man was originally constituted by God in such a condition that his body was completely subject to his soul. The faculties of the soul were subject to reason without any rebelliousness and man was subject to God. In consequence of the perfect subjection of the body to the soul, no passion could arise in the body that would in anyway conflict with the soul’s dominion over the body. Therefore neither death nor illness had any place in man.”

In this original righteousness Adam and Eve were innocent and could neither die nor suffer as long as they did not sin

After creating humans God tells Adam and Eve that they are not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. The tree was put there so that they could choose God by their own free-will, so that they would not be robots. (Robots by definition can’t love by a free-choice. For humans to truly love God they have to be able to choose it). The Tree has this name, not because it had the power to give knowledge about what is good and evil, but because if one were to eat of it they would learn through that experience the difference between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience.

In Genesis 3, Satan tempts Eve to eat of the Tree by telling her that she will be like God knowing Good and Evil. Satan wants her to commit the same sin that he did. Is. 14:14 says this about Satan’s sin, “I will make myself like the Most High.” After his rebellion Satan was removed from the presence of God because of his pride. Pride became the cause of the removal of all supernatural grace that God had given Satan, thus leaving him in conflict with God forever. (Satan is in conflict with God with no chance or reconciliation because he is a pure spirit, i.e. no body, who had seen God in heaven in all His glory. His pride is eternal in time since he saw God in His glory and rejected it. As spirit he understood the reality of his choice completely and it eternally changed him with no hope of repentance.)

Eve listened to Satan and ate the fruit and then gave some to her husband who also ate. Just as the pride of Satan caused him to be removed from the supernatural grace of God, so the pride of Adam and Eve removed them from the supernatural grace that God had originally given them. This removal of grace from their lives is what caused all to go wrong and damaged relationships with themselves, with each other and mostly with God. That supernatural grace which allowed them to “walk with God” before they sinned was taken away. As a result Adam and Eve no longer had all their desires in order as God had originally created them. They now had disorder desires and passions. This meant that the soul no longer could control the body as it was intended and brought corruption to the will and to the human body. Sickness, death, broken relationships and selfish desires became the result. (Just read Gen. 4-11).

Original sin though does not mean that we are guilty for Adam and Eve’s sin, but we feel the effects. God said that a person is punished for their sins, not the sins of their father (look at Ez. 18). Thus we are not guilty of Adam’s original sin, i.e. God does not punish us for Adam’s sin. But the consequence that we feel is that the supernatural, special, grace that was in the Garden of Eden is not transmitted from generation to generation. And so for all time-that is, ever since the sin of the first parent all men come into the world bereft of Original Right(continued)