Okay hedrick, thank you for the quote correction. Why then are we guilty? By what fault are we guilty of the punishment of Adam and Eve?
Original Sin, properly understood in the Western Theological tradition is not our being punished for Adam's sin, but our inheriting the human nature of Adam which is intrinsically broken and fallen. We have inherited Adam's "fallenness".
The Augustinian doctrine was expounded directly in contrast to the things Pelagius was saying. While Pelagius did not explicitly deny the necessity of grace, Augustine argued it was the inevitable consequence of Pelagius' doctrine. Pelagius argued that that it was, in theory, possible for a person to live a holy and godly life through effort and abstain from sin (not that Pelagius said anyone had actually
done this, only that it was theoretically possible). Thus Pelagianism, in Augustine's mind--and ever after in the minds of Western theologians--claimed that human beings could under their own strength achieve righteousness and holiness, thereby rendering the reconciliation needed in Jesus, uniting us to God and His grace, unnecessary. For Augustine, it wasn't simply a matter of
personal sin, but an issue of our very human nature, that there was something intrinsic about the nature of man due to the Fall that separates us from God and turns us inward toward ourselves and our own selfish desires--what later Western theologians such as Thomas Aquinas call concupiscence. This innate problem in the essential fabric of our humanity requires external grace from God, and union with Jesus by His atoning (reconciliatory) work through dying and rising thereby reuniting us with God and bringing us into the sanctifying and transformative work of God.
Now, it is very possible that Pelagius has been misunderstood (particularly in the West, since in the East the Augustinian-Pelagian controversy was regarded as minor or insignificant). Particularly, Pelagius' chief concern was Christian moral behavior, as a Christian monk from Britain visiting Rome he was deeply depressed by the moral laxity of Christians there, and believed that the emphasis should be placed on seeking to live a moral life that is pleasing to God; in that capacity he took umbrage with Augustine's theology in which he accused Augustine of being under the influence of Manichaean determinism and that Augustine's doctrine didn't place enough emphasis on human effort to live righteously, thereby implicitly encouraging moral laxity in the Christian life.
However, the point is that Original Sin does not mean our being guilty for Adam eating a fruit from a tree, but about our intrinsic disconnection from life with and in God by a natural and essential compulsion toward satisfying ourselves (again, concupiscence); and that it is not merely personal sin that we need salvation from, but rather a fundamental overhaul of our very human nature--and thereby necessitating external grace that comes from God, and union to God and the life of God by being reconciled in Jesus.
Now, as you may have noticed I've several times emphasized this as a Western theology. That's important, because as I noted the Augustinian-Pelagian debate was fundamentally only a Western issue, and it was never something that important in the East. Augustinian theology was never influential in the East, whereas Augustinian theology--coupled with Thomist and Scholastic theology--forms much of the basis of Western theology (though, in Protestantism, influenced/reformed/modified by the theological teachings of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, et al; as well as their theological descendants).
In the East, rather, they call it Ancestral Sin, that is, Adam's sin was the first sin and by consequence the world itself now endures under the yoke of sin and death; it has created an environment where sinning is inevitable. It's less about our human nature having been tarnished by the Fall and more about the world having been brought under the yoke of the devil and sin; and the necessity of being ransomed, liberated from that yoke by the atoning work of Jesus--this also helps explain (though, perhaps only in part) why East and West hold to different views on the Atonement, namely that in the West it is viewed through a moral or judicial lens, whereas in the East it is viewed more through a medical lens.
-CryptoLutheran
