I volunteered to teach 8th grade Catechesis beginning at the end of September. The students are very bright, and very unenthusiastic about the subject matter, despite clearly having a lot of excellent questions and thoughts about their faith. Last week, one of my students asked me a stumper, and I need to think out loud about how to explain it so I figured it would be appropriate here.
The question went something like this: “Because Baptism washed away our Original Sin, when we sin after that doesn’t that take away our excuse?” In other words: If the sin of Adam is the reason we are fallen beings, when we are baptized doesn’t that undo that?
This question touches on a couple areas, so let’s go through them.
What is Original Sin?
Original sin is the knowledge of evil. God created Adam and Eve in a pristine, sinless state, and only conditioned that they should not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Adam and Eve of course both ate of that fruit, and so Nature fell.
Think of it this way: God created Creation in a sinless state–by sinless, you can say “perfectly ordered”. By our free choice, sin was introduced into Creation. Creation cannot be perfectly ordered “except for this one bit”–creation is either perfectly ordered or it is not. The first sin was infinitely damaging because it disordered the entire cosmos. Thus our human natures are fallen, animals don’t listen to us, the weather and earth can swing between extremes to our detriment–everything is fallen. Call this paragraph the “metaphysics explanation”–this is probably not suitable for 8th graders.
The first thing that came to mind was an analogy which is also not suitable for 8th graders, but I will explain it here so you know what I am trying to do when I talk about the analogy that I think is suitable for 8th graders later. The first analogy was that of virginity–JMSmith discussed this at the orthosphere when he suggested that the “fruit of the tree of knowledge” was “knowing” in the biblical sense and not the intellectual sense–although it accomplishes both. So when a woman is a virgin, she has preserved her purity. When a woman is married and consummates that marriage, she ceases to be a virgin henceforth. If she consummates a relationship outside of a marriage, a sin, she still ceases to be a virgin. She can be forgiven in the sacrament of reconciliation, but she cannot return to virginity. The key concept here is that there is a physical, created nature of things that can be lost, even when the spiritual damage is forgiven.
The 8th-grade appropriate explanation I thought I would use is that of a Tree. Suppose you find a great big 100-year Oak tree. Consider this tree the pristine starting point of creation. The sin of Adam was to cut down that tree. The tree cannot be restored to it’s natural, pristine, created state–human intervention has felled the tree. Because Adam and Eve were our first parents, it is as if our souls are carved from that tree. My soul–my plank of wood–was carved from the fallen tree, it cannot be conceived of separately from that. Because my plank of wood is from the fallen tree, it is a fallen plank of wood.
How To Explain Baptism
All of us have planks of wood from this first fallen tree. Christians are baptized, which obtains for them “the remission of all sins, original and actual”. The remission of original sin is almost like grafting our plank onto a new tree that is life in Christ. By the sacrament, the graft is completed, but by our care and attention the plank can have life again and can grow and bear fruit. A neglected graft can still wither and die–this is why following the sacrament of Baptism (the graft) is Confirmation (the care and attention). The plank is still a fallen plank, but it has the potential for new life in the tree to which it has been grafted. Baptism is a commitment to the future, which is why it is important that the parents of baptized infants be committed to raising their children in the faith.
What is Actual Sin, then?
Actual sin is a deed which harms our soul. Again, consider the irreversibility of Original Sin. If I hammer a nail through my plank of fallen wood, that is like sin. I’ve put a hole in the plank just like through sin I’ve damaged my soul. The Sacrament of Reconciliation allows the nail to be removed: the hole will still remain, but the nail is gone and because my plank has been grafted onto the tree of Life, it can still grow and flourish. If my plank was filled with nails, there would be much less tree to grow and flourish so it would be harder, that is why it is important to make sure we remove all the nails from our planks. That is why the sacrament is called reconciliation and not restoration: we acknowledge we made a mistake by hammering a nail through our plank, and we promise never to do it again. We have not been restored, only reconciled.
The work of restoration is done through Purgatory. The tree of life is a perfect tree, so we must ensure there are no holes in any of the planks which have been grafted there. By purgation our souls are restored to their pristine nature–our fallen plank has all the holes removed, and is finally incorporated as a part of the tree of Life.
What does all this mean?
Original sin affected our nature–all of nature. Baptism eliminated the separation caused by original sin, by grafting us onto the tree of life; Baptism cannot un-cut-down the original tree of Creation. That is why we have a new tree in Christ. Through Christ, our fallen nature can be perfected if we join our will and our efforts to His. Our fallen nature means we are still capable of sin, but our graft to Christ means we are also capable of heroic virtue which restores life.
This has helped me think about how to answer my student, so I consider this a mission accomplished. I hope this is helpful for you as well.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 