I have heard it said twice recently that we come into the world as sinners. I take great issue with this. Let me explain why. Almost all, if not all, Christians agree that we have a “sin nature”, and that means we have a tendency or propensity to sin. Further, we all agree that it started with the first people – Adam and Eve according to the Genesis 3 account. Every one of us, except for Jesus Christ, becomes a sinner. Since God made all of us, does that make him the author of sin? No. He made man in His image, and after creating mankind He stated that His creation was very good. Man, starting with Adam, became a sinner because he chose to sin. God gave us the freedom to disobey Him (He did not make us robots), and we all end up disobeying Him by violating conscience or clear commands from scripture.

Thus, starting with Adam, we all have disobeyed Him. We did what we wanted rather than what we knew we ought to do. He created Adam as a grown man but innocent, then Adam chose to violate God’s command and sinned. He created the rest of us as innocent infants, then, when we reached the age of accountability, we also chose to sin. Whether Adam or us, when we sinned, it was our choice, not God’s. If God had chosen for us, He would have chosen not to sin.

Now suppose, as some say, that we come into the world as sinners. Since God is our Creator, what does that say about God? It says He created us as sinners at birth. In other words, He is the originator or author of our sin. That, of course, is absurd. How could God then say that His creation including mankind was very good? Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, “Behold, I have found only this, that God made people upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” Romans 7:9 says, “I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin came to life, and I died.”

So, where does this notion that we come into the world as sinners come from? It is from a wrong interpretation of the Genesis 3 account of Adam and Eve’s sin, and a wrong interpretation of Paul’s reference to the Genesis 3 account in Romans 5:21.

Let’s examine these scriptures to understand what they really mean. The Genesis account of the Fall is in Genesis 3. We know that Adam and Eve were created sinless by God and fellowshipped with Him in the Garden of Eden for a period of time. God gave them a command, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” At a moment when God was not with them, Satan, through the serpent, tempted them to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, and they ate it and sinned. Adam and Eve’s sin, the first sin on earth, is referred to as “The Fall.” As a result, they became aware of good and evil recognizing they were naked and ashamed. Also, aware of their sin, God caused consequences for the serpent, Satan, Eve, Adam, and creation itself.

For the serpent, it was crawling on its belly eating the dust of the earth. For Satan, it would be his defeat through the future Messiah who would crush him and sin. For Eve (and all women that follow), it was pain in child-bearing and submission to Adam (their husbands). For Adam (and all men that follow), it was that he would have to earn a living by the sweat of his brow doing painful and hard work – no longer in a paradise like Eden, and that he would die and his body would return to the dust from which God created it. For creation, the ground was cursed, producing thorns and thistles (In contrast to the paradise of the Garden of Eden he had been living in).

The question for us is, “Did God cause yet another consequence – that all descendants of Adam and Eve would be born as sinners?” It’s not there. It does not say that nor does the Genesis account even imply that. Just like Adam and Eve, we become sinners when we sin. They started out innocent, and then they sinned. We too start out innocent, and then we sin.

This brings us to the other scripture Christians quote to support that we are born sinners. That is Paul’s statement in Romans 5:12, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Does this say we are all born as sinners because of Adam’s sin? No, it says that Adam died and returned to dust because of his sin and, likewise, we all die and return to dust because of our sin.

The notion that we are born sinners goes back to a misinterpretation of Romans 5:12 by Augustine, who lived from 354 to 430 A. D. and influenced such people as John Calvin and Martin Luther. According to Christian historians, Augustine did not know Greek, and relied on an interpretation of Romans 5:12 by Ambrosiaster, who was the first to introduce a translation of Romans 5:12 that substituted the language of all being in death “because all sinned” to “in him all sinned”. They say this was a mistranslation of Romans 5:12, and Augustine’s primary formulation of original sin was based on it, including the notion that we participated in Adam’s sin and are guilty at birth.

This brings up the scripture of King David from Psalms 51:5, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” This is wrongly interpreted in two ways. First, that David’s mother conceived in sin either means she was unmarried when she conceived or that married couples who have sex to make a baby are sinning. That is not what God meant in that scripture. What makes sense that provides for conception by a married woman not to be a sin? It is that the mother, a sinner, has conceived. She was a sinner before she conceived not because she conceived. So, the baby is brought forth into an atmosphere, a world that is sinful by a sinful mother. Second, what does “shapen in iniquity” mean? If you say it means I was created sinfully or I was made a sinner by my creator, then you make God the author of sin – which He would never do, so this interpretation is not allowed. Psalms 139:14 says that we were “awesomely and wonderfully made.” What else could it mean? Similar to the first point, it means I was shapen in the womb of a sinner or in the womb of one who commits iniquity.

Finally, I want to reference the highly regarded Christian Theology by evangelical scholar Millard J. Erickson. He examines the issue considering the works of Pelagius, Arminius, Augustine, and Calvin. After summarizing and agreeing with aspects of both positions – much of which is based on an interpretation of Romans 5, Erickson states (pages 638-639), “We must now ask whether the doctrine of original sin can be conceived of and expressed in a way which will somehow do justice to all of these factors.” He then proceeds to do just that. He begins by noting the parallelism that Paul draws in Romans 5 between Adam and Christ. He says, “Paul asserts that in some parallel way what each of them did has its influence on us (as Adam’s sin leads to death, so Christ’s act of righteousness leads to life). What is the parallel? If, as we might be inclined to think, the condemnation and guilt of Adam are imputed to us without there being on our part any sort of conscious choice of his act, the same would necessarily hold true of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and redeeming work. But does His death justify us simply by virtue of His identification with humanity through the incarnation and independently of whether we make a conscious and personal acceptance of His work? And do all men have the grace of Christ imputed to them, just as all have Adam’s sin imputed to them? The usual answer of evangelicals is no; there is abundant evidence that there are two classes of persons, the lost and the saved, and that only a decision to accept the work of Christ makes it effective in our lives. But if this is the case, then would not the imputation of guilt based upon the action of Adam, albeit Adam as including us, require some sort of volitional choice as well? If there is no ‘unconscious faith,’ can there be ‘unconscious sin?’ And what are we to say of infants who die? Despite having participated in the first sin, they are somehow accepted and saved. Although they have made no conscious choice of Christ’s work (or of Adam’s sin for that matter), the spiritual effects of the curse are negated in their case.”

He continues, “The current form of my understanding is as follows: We all were involved in Adam’s sin, and thus receive both the corrupted nature that was his after the fall, and the guilt and condemnation that attach to his sin. With this matter of guilt, however, just as with the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, there must be some conscious and voluntary decision on our part. Until this is the case, there is only a conditional imputation of guilt.” By this, he means the imputation of guilt is conditioned on making the voluntary choice. He goes on, “Thus, there is no condemnation until one reaches the age of responsibility. If a child dies before he or she is capable of making genuine moral decisions, there is only innocence, and the child will experience the same type of future existence with the Lord as will those who have reached the age of moral responsibility and had their sins forgiven as a result of accepting the offer of salvation base upon Christ’s atoning death.”

This agrees with my view that, although we inherit Adam’s sin nature, we are innocent (not sinners) until we reach the age of accountability and commit our first sin. We do not come into the world (we are not created) as sinners, we come in as innocent infants. God is not the author of sin. He created me innocent even though I inherited Adam’s sin nature. That nature eventually led me to sin, and I became a sinner at that point.

My Christian friends and I agree that we have a sin nature. They say we are born as sinners, which I refute in the arguments above. I say it is that, because we have free will in a fleshy body, we have a propensity to sin, and we all will sin. Sin is doing what we want rather than what we ought when they are at odds. Our flesh wants complete freedom – free from demands of conscience or scripture. For we Christians, the law of our mind (law of God) drives us to do what is right and obey God, but the law of sin (our sinful nature) is at war (as Paul says) with the law of our mind, and we end up sinning at times when we did not intend to – in a moment of weakness.

This issue/distinction is very important because the wrong interpretation makes God the author of sin, impugning His character. Though God made us with a free will in a body of flesh, when we sin it is our choice – not God’s and not what God wanted us to do.