Original Sin? Initial Wound
Exploring the implications of Contextual Conditions
I grew up in a Christian tradition that rejected the idea of Original Sin, a mainstay of many Christian Theological traditions. The rejection of Original Sin as a theological foundation came from a doggedly strong idea that sprang from the concept of free will and robustly staunch individualism, powerful ideologies that were likely as much or more derived from American cultural as from the Bible. Of course, the anti-original sin stance was exclusively stated as a theological over cultural stance.
I have never had much use for the doctrine of Original Sin as my Christianity has evolved over time. It has never made much sense to me as a moral framework. The idea that I lost before I began, was guilty before I could have agency, and was wrong as a pre-condition to my existence is something I have found to be at least demoralizing and uninspiring, but also just inconsistent with how think things went down with humans as their moral consciousness evolved. Perhaps I am overly influenced by my American culture to accept such a doctrine.
That said, the story of Adam and Eve, whether actual people or brilliant allegory, is a powerful story of humanity, replete with some sense of original intent as well as original moral rupture. If we were to focus on the moral rupture, perhaps we could arrive at the idea of Original Sin. However, when we get to the next generation, Cain and Abel, we do not find the necessity of Original Sin, but we do see how the Initial Wound presented Cain with the possibility of continued sin, which would result in continued wounds - and it did.
God told Cain that sin was “crouching at the door” in Genesis 4:7, not that he was already sinful. The moral construction on the moment was not that he was sinful, but that he could be, or even more so that sin was personified or animalized and has some predatory intentions for him. His feelings of rejection, inferiority, and his overall grievance that his offering was not as good as his younger brother’s offering was not sinful, but rather exposed the wound he may have already had. It may be that he was not experiencing Original Sin, but instead suffered from Initial Wound.
Cain grew up with parents who had at one time had a sense of mutuality and shared labor in their home, their garden home, but also no longer lived as such. Cain’s parents endured under the shame of their moral rupture, a condition under which they were still intimate, but also blamed others for their moral problems. All Cain ever witnessed was relational hierarchy, not relational mutuality. He learned to position himself relative to the other, at this moment Abel, his younger brother. Within the relational hierarchy assumption, he had to place himself above or below Abel. There was no role model for mutuality as that had dissolved prior to his existence.
Cain suffered under the “curse” as it were not because he was guilty of sin, but because he was the son of parents whose moral rupture resulted in an intimacy rupture between them that moved them from the peaceful place of mutuality to the hostilities of hierarchy. It was all Cain witnessed; it was all Cain could imagine.
Sin, as it were, had been crouch ing at Cain’s door long before his anger got the best of him and he murdered his brother. It was crouching and awaiting to see whether he would agree to the hierarchy assumption. He agreed; sin pounced.
There is a significant difference between the ideas of Original Sin and Initial Wound. Original Sin implies guilt before agency while Initial Wound implied conditions under which humans are born. Cain’s parents suffered prior to his birth, suffered during his birth, and suffered after his birth. He wasn’t born into sin, but he was born into suffering.
As we all are.
While I still can’t find my way to Original Sin, Initial Wound makes a whole lot of sense. It is in this Initial Suffering, a condition we find ourselves in before we can even be aware. We find that our free will develops while suffering. It is under these conditions we find our humanity and identity.
In the recovery community and in other places there is a saying, “hurt people hurt people.” There is a grace in it. If the idea of Initial Wound holds any water, we are all hurt people. We can all hurt people. We can all transgress another. We can all sin. Sin is crouching at all of our doors.
What is Initial Wound, exactly? I would say Initial Wound is the chronic anxiety that exists within and between people. When I refer to anxiety, this is not the diagnostic category from the DSM, but instead an inherent condition afloat with culture that pre-exists our arrival and outlasts our departure. Initial Wound is the pre-conditoin to all of our decisions. While I fully and completely believe that humans are created in the image of God (Imago Dei), that inherent identity is born into the condition in of an Initial Wound that this beautiful Imago Dei is subjected to.
While the creation story pre-exists the Initial Wound, and the resurrection story gives hope for meaningful and glorious existence after the effects of the Initial Wound are mitigated, the between times are marked by the Initial Wound. We live in these times.
The incarnation of God, the human Jesus, was born to the Initial Wound. He wasn’t subject to Original Sin - again, I don’t think any of us is - but he experienced the chronic anxiety that we all experience. Jesus felt worry, fear, embarrassment, humiliation, exclusion, being misunderstood, and all manner of uncertainties and insecurities. It is in the life of Jesus we find at least to responses to the Initial Wound that he dealt with: stewardship and transcendence.
Stewarding Initial Wound:
Stewarding Initial Wound asks how a person will conduct themselves on a day to day basis while wounded, while embedded within a massive contextual wound. We did not ask for this wound. It is not our fault that it exists. While existing within it, other people have contributed to it. In response to this massive historical and global (universal) wound, each of us has contributed to the wounds of others and to the wounds we carry. And before we were able to consent, we were complicit with it in that we are born into a river with a swift current before we knew how to swim and would wear us out were we to swim against it. Stewarding Initial Wound is the discipline of de-triangling ourselves out of complicity with something that is so much larger than ourselves - as much as we possibly can while having the grace to know “we didn’t start the fire.”
We are always under the condition of sin crouching at the door, but we still have agency. We do not have to open the door to sin, to hurting other people, to transgressing God. It takes a lot of stewardship, of intentional decision-making to keep sin on the other side of that door.
Transcending Initial Wound:
Transcending Initial Wound asks the following question: How much shit is love going to put up with? The answer Jesus gave was, “all of it.” If the crucifixion is compelling, even in what may seem like an irrepeatable way, it is that love does not balance injustice by way of direct action (and MLK has shown us direct action is powerful), but in transcendent action (which I also think MLK did). Rather than forcing someone else to act justly, love in its most extreme expression acts in such a way as to draw out the worst expression from injustice to expose how hideous that injustice is and thus prick the hearts of the witnesses as they see the cruelty in action. Crucifixion exposes injustice better than any other argument - but it is expensive.
Love is expensive. Transcending Initial Wound is expensive. However, I will object to my own statement. It is actually the wound itself that is exacting the cost, not love. Love pre-existed the wound and will outlast the wound. The Wound is temporary and that is why it hurts so much. It was never supposed to be this way. The measure of the suffering is the human divinity that objects to what was never supposed to be the case. We were not made to be wounded. We were made capable of healing, but that is categorically different than to have a pre-existent vocation of suffering. In fact, the ability to heal is evidence that we were not meant for this, a back up or redundancy system that moves into action not because we were meant for suffering, but rather we were meant to be whole.
Transcending Initial Wound is aspirational for any one of us, not completable. We can seek to transcend it as much as we possibly can in this time, for the purpose of constructing a less wounded world for who come next. Will we leave a little less of the Initial Wound for those who come behind us? That is a fair and transcendent question.
My own Christian faith informs me that at best I can make a down payment on mitigating Initial Wound and then Jesus takes over the payments. More than that, there is time when the costs of suffering this Initial Wound are completed. A new Heaven. A new Earth. An actual and sustained Shalom is not a dream, but an inevitable reality.