Into the Wardrobe

A review of , by Alan Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College.

People may like to check this out. Andrew says he never got a reply from Fox.
It always seems to me that the biggest problem with Augustine's view is this idea of sexual transmission. Curiously enough it lead to a division amongst conservative protestant theologians at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Darwinism at that time was in decline and many favoured some form of Lamarkism which fits well with Augustine's ideas because it says aquired characteristics can be inherited. Those who stuck with Darwin began to adopt a federal view of the fall, seeing Adam as our divenely chosen representative. This fits in better with any view that does not see Adam as the biological father of the human race and so has been adopted by many since.

I think we have to be clear that even the darkest Calvinist was never suggesting that God's image in man had been completely wiped out. The Eastern Church talks about ancestral sin which seems to mean that we are biased towards sin because we are born into a sinful environment. I would like to see those references to father's before Augustine who held his view and see if they were hinting at something more like this view than Augustine's. Also whether they were eastern or western. Jerome for example has a fairly gloomy view of human sexuality as Luther was fond of pointing out.

Lewis says somewhere that there are two reasons for being a democrat: the first is to think people are so good they deserve power; the second is to think they are so bad that those in power need the restraint of democracy. As you may guess he opts for the second.

There's a long passage in David Stern's Jewish New Testament Commentary where he looks at various versions of the doctrine of original sin and concludes that most Jews will only feel comfortable with the weaker versions of the doctrine. I can't remember what conclusion he comes to for himself (he's a 'messianic Jew') He certainly wants a weaker than Augustinian version. My intuition is that Augustine got this one wrong but I'd find it hard to pin down where beyond dismissing his idea of biological inheritance of sin as being out of step with current biological theory.