Bishop Kallistos Ware on Original Sin
The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; it is easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse their suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider.
It is here, in the solidarity of the human race, that we find an explanation for the apparent unjustness of the doctrine of original sin. Why, we ask, should the entire race suffer because of Adam’s fall? Why should all be punished because of one man’s sin? The answer is that human beings, made in the image of the Trinitarian God, are interdependent and coinherent. No man is an island. We are “members of one another,” and so any action, performed by any member of the human race, inevitably affects all the other members. Even though we are not, in the strict sense, guilty of the sins of others, yet we are somehow always involved.
-Bishop Kallistos Ware
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