Fr Gareth looks at Scripture, Tradition and Science to help us understand why baptism is an important sacrament in our Church’s teaching and practice.
We might start by asking why the Catholic Church baptises anyone. All the Gospels mention how John the Baptist preached in the region of the River Jordan and called on sinners to come and be plunged into water “for the forgiveness of sins” – the word baptizo in Greek means “to plunge”.
In John chapters 3 & 4 we learn that Our Lord also instructed his apostles to baptise people. At the end of the Gospel according to Mark, the Risen Jesus declared “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved”. And in the final chapter of Matthew, the Risen Jesus instructed his apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Book of Acts recounts, in many places, how the apostles and deacons did just this. In some cases we read that a ‘household’ was baptised – twice in Acts 16, again in Acts 18 and by St Paul in I Corinthians 1.
The Bible never tells explicitly that any child was ever baptised. Much ink has been spilled in arguments over whether a ‘household’ implies children too, or whether the text in Mark requires a person to believe before receiving Baptism. Some of the Protestant Churches which broke away in the Reformation did so on precisely this point, regarding water baptism as meaningless until the person receiving it could express a personal faith. But the Catholic Church has always maintained that it is legitimate to baptise a child on the basis that they will be taught the Gospel as soon as they are old enough. Part of the justification is “tradition” – the apostles knew what Jesus expected and passed it on by actions rather than words. But we can look for other clues in Scripture.
St Augustine of Hippo, who lived 300 years after Christ, was the first known author to speak of “original sin”. For Augustine, this had two dimensions. One was to explain why human beings actually commit sin. The other was to assert that all human beings were conceived ‘tainted’ in some way because we are born of a sinful race. Two key sources for Augustine were the story of the Temptation of Eve and Adam in Genesis 3, and St Paul’s explanation in Romans 5 of how “just as all human beings sinned in Adam, so all can be saved in Christ”.
I am not going to explore the question of “why human beings sin” here. The irony of the account in Genesis 3 is that Eve and Adam were not tainted by original sin and yet they chose to disregard God’s instructions and give in to the serpent’s temptation. But what weight should we give to this account? Catholics are free to interpret the early chapters of Genesis as historical truth or a symbolic story – and evidence from archaeology and genetics makes it difficult to assert with integrity that all human beings alive today descend from one original couple.
There is a general principle in reading Scripture that we find the fullness of God’s revelation in the New Testament, while the Hebrew Scriptures present truth to us in ways that are sometimes obscure and veiled. So perhaps it is not surprising that when Pope Pius XII wrote Humani Generis in 1950, he anchored the Catholic Church’s position on original sin not in Genesis but in Romans.
How did St Paul, the author of Romans, come to understand these matters? Paul not only saw the Risen Christ at his conversion experience on the Damascus Road, he also drops hints in 2 Corinthians that he was caught up into heaven and learned many things. In any case, the early Christians came to accept Paul’s letter to the Romans as one which accorded with what they had learned from the Apostles, and worthy of being read in church.
In Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII set out to defend the Catholic doctrine on Original Sin in the light of developments in science. If human beings arose on earth through a process of evolution by natural selection, Romans required that there still be an original sinner. Could we believe that as a primitive population of just-human creatures arose in the process of evolution, multiple untainted creatures independently chose to sin? No, said the Pope. Or after the first sin, could there have been other human beings in the population who were not descended from the Original Sinner? Again, no said the Pope – for Romans reveals that “original sin … proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation [childbearing], is passed on to all.”
Fortunately, what the Pope was claiming is totally compatible with evolutionary biology. Every living creature contains a genetic code in their body’s cells which acts as a blueprint – the genome. Sometimes this code gets tweaked by various influences when a new child is conceived. If the tweak makes the offspring less likely to survive, that child might not live long enough to grow up and have children of their own. But if the tweak is favourable, that child will thrive, have more than the average number of children, and over the generations, that tweak will pervade the population. In particular it means that each genetic feature which makes us what we now are can be traced back to the various single ancestors in which those tweaks happened.
Now, to be able to sin requires us to have brains which have the capacity for language and reason, and our brain structure is controlled by our genome. So at some point in human history, a tweak (technically, a mutation) must have happened conferring just enough mental ability for a proto-human to appreciate, in some spiritual way, that certain actions were Right or Wrong. If this creature chose Wrong, even once in its lifetime, then all of its offspring would share the genetic heritage for a brain that could have some degree of moral awareness and the spiritual heritage of being children of the Original Sinner, which is precisely what Pope Pius XII was claiming.
Was the Original Sinner male or female? We cannot tell. In Genesis, Eve sins first and goes on to tempt Adam. We do well to remember that Adam was the name given to the first ‘human’ in Genesis before Eve was taken from his side to make Adam definitively male. In Romans, Paul focuses on all sinning ‘in Adam’. In part, he uses this language because the mechanism of human reproduction was not understood properly in his day. The Bible speaks of ancestors “in the loins” (see Hebrews 7) since it was believed that already within Adam’s seed was a tiny Abraham, and within Abraham a tiny Isaac, and so on such that King David, Elijah, and our Blessed Mother herself were already present within Adam’s body, like Russian dolls nested all the way down.
As an aside, what about Our Blessed Mother? Since 1854, the Catholic Church has definitively taught that she was the Immaculate Conception, that is, the taint of original sin was removed from her not by baptism but at the moment of her conception. But it was achieved by the same grace and power of Christ which cleanses infants. Evangelical Christians may object that Romans 3 declares that all people (except Christ) have sinned. We would answer that in the very moment she was tainted by original sin, she was also cleansed of it – and received an additional grace to help her resist actual sin throughout her earthly life. Indeed, here, science is a help: we now understand that Our Lady’s physical origin, her conception, was in the marital embrace of her parents, and she was not present in the loins of the original sinner.
We can assert with integrity that we can indeed speak of ‘original sin’ as a status, of being a descendent of the Original Sinner, and this makes it meaningful to claim that even an infant, on being baptised, can be ‘cleansed’ of original sin and joined to the Body of Christ. This is reflected in the prayers used in baptism. And while ‘Original Sin’ has also been used, historically, to refer to concupiscence, our temptability to sin, of course the church has never claimed that baptism will remove any child’s desire to be naughty – would that it could, for then we would have parents queuing at our door!
Revd Dr Gareth Leyshon is a parish priest in the South Wales Valleys, who read physics at Oxford and completed a doctorate at Cardiff (a study of the structure of distant galaxies) before entering seminary.
