Original sin

[6] The Jansenist movement, which the Roman Catholic Church declared heretical, also maintained that original sin destroyed freedom of will.

[7] Instead, the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that "Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle",[8] and the Council of Trent states that "whereas all men had lost their innocence in the prevarication of Adam [...] although free will, attenuated as it was in its powers, and bent down, was by no means extinguished in them.

"[9] For the Apostle Paul, Adam's act released a power into the world by which sin and death became the natural lot of mankind, a view which is evident in 2 Esdras, 2 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Moses.

[13] The late 1st- or early 2nd-century Didache's seemingly exclusive preference for adult baptism offers evidence that its author may have believed that children were born sinless.

[10]The first writings to discuss the first sin at the hands of Adam and Eve were early Jewish texts in the Second Temple Period, such as the Book of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon.

[4] They thus did not teach that human beings are deprived of free will and involved in total depravity, which is one understanding of original sin among the leaders of the Reformation.

Cyprian, on the other hand, believed that individuals were born already guilty of sin, and he was the first to link his notion of original guilt with infant baptism.

[34][35] Hilary of Poitiers did not clearly articulate a concept of original sin, though anticipates the views of Augustine, as he declared that all humanity is implicated in Adam's downfall.

He thought it was a most subtle work to discern what came first: self-centeredness or failure in seeing truth, as he wrote to the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum.

[38] The sin of Adam is transmitted by concupiscence, or "hurtful desire",[39] resulting in humanity becoming a massa damnata (mass of perdition, condemned crowd), with much enfeebled, though not destroyed, freedom of will.

[40] Augustine found the original sin inexplicable given the understanding that Adam and Eve were "created with perfect natures" which would fail to explain how the evil desire arose in them in the first place.

[42] This sentiment was echoed as late as 1930 by Pope Pius XI in his Casti connubii: "The natural generation of life has become the path of death by which original sin is communicated to the children.

In that view, sexual desire itself as well as other bodily passions were consequences of the original sin, in which pure affections were wounded by vice and became disobedient to human reason and will.

As long as they carry a threat to the dominion of reason over the soul, they constitute moral evil, but since they do not presuppose consent, one cannot call them sins.

[58] In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm of Canterbury explained that after the original sin of Adam and Eve, the sacrifice of Christ's passion and death on the cross was necessary for the human race to be restored to the possibility of entering Paradise for eternal life.

[60] Both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) represent a radical Augustinian shift: equating concupiscence with original sin, maintaining that it destroyed free will and persisted after baptism.

[63]The defining doctrinal statement of the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545–1563), while not pronouncing on points disputed among Roman Catholic theologians, opposes Protestantism in stating that "whereas all men had lost their innocence in the prevarication of Adam [...] although free will, attenuated as it was in its powers, and bent down, was by no means extinguished in them.

[71] Within man "is both the powerful surge toward the good because we are made in the image of God, and the darker impulses toward evil because of the effects of Original Sin".

[75] The first comprehensive theological explanation of this practice of baptizing infants, guilty of no actual personal sin, was given by Augustine of Hippo, not all of whose ideas on original sin have been adopted by the Catholic Church—the church has condemned the Protestant interpretation of Augustine characteristic of Luther and Calvin which involves total depravity, or a complete loss of freedom to will rightly.

[79] In Roman Catholic theology, the meaning of the word "concupiscence" is the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason.

Others held that unbaptized infants suffered no pain at all: unaware of being deprived of the beatific vision, they enjoyed a state of natural, not supernatural happiness.

On the other hand, while supporting a continuity in the Bible about the absence of preternatural gifts (Latin: dona praeternaturalia),[87] with regard to the ophitic event, Haag never makes any reference to the discontinuity of the loss of access to the tree of life.

[94] In covenant theology, Adam is regarded as the federal head of the human race, and so by his sin and Fall, the guilt of his sin is imputed to all his descendents, as Louis Berkhof states, drawing from Romans 5:18–19, "God adjudges all men to be guilty sinners in Adam, just as He adjudges all believers to be righteous in Jesus Christ.

"Original sin" stands for the fact that from a time apparently prior to any responsible act of choice man is lacking in this communion, and if left to his own resources and to the influence of his natural environment cannot attain to his destiny as a child of God.

According to Augustine and Calvin, humanity inherits not only Adam's depraved nature but also the actual guilt of his transgression, while Adventists look more toward the Wesleyan model.

[106]Early Adventist pioneers (such as George Storrs and Uriah Smith) tended to de-emphasise the morally corrupt nature inherited from Adam, while stressing the importance of actual, personal sins committed by the individual.

Augustine Casiday states that Cassian "baldly asserts that God's grace, not human free will, is responsible for 'everything [that] pertains to salvation' – even faith".

They teach that Adam was originally created perfect and sinless, but with free will; that the Devil, who was originally a perfect angel, but later developed feelings of pride and self-importance, seduced Eve and then, through her, persuaded Adam to disobey God, and to obey the Devil instead, rebelling against God's sovereignty, thereby making themselves sinners, and because of that, transmitting a sinful nature to all of their future offspring.

"[122] The church's founder Joseph Smith taught that humans had an essentially godlike nature, and were not only holy in a premortal state, but had the potential to progress eternally to become like God.

[125] Doctrine and Covenants 137:10 states that children who die prior to age eight are believed to be saved in the highest degree of heaven.