A Different Word for What Adam Left Behind

Eastern Orthodox theology speaks of ancestral sin rather than original sin, and the choice of word marks a real difference in what is being claimed. Both traditions trace the doctrine to the same event, Adam and Eve's disobedience in the garden, and both hold that every human being since has been born into its consequences. Where the traditions part is over guilt. The Western account, worked out at length by Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century, holds that Adam's descendants inherit not only mortality but a share of Adam's own guilt, a legal stain passed down with the rest of human nature. Orthodox theology has never taught that a newborn child carries anyone else's guilt. What is inherited, on the Orthodox reading, is mortality itself and the corrupted condition that comes with it, a wounded human nature rather than a criminal record. Each person is held responsible only for sins they themselves commit. The practical difference shows up in how each tradition explains baptism. Where a Western account can describe baptism as washing away inherited guilt, an Orthodox account describes it as beginning the healing of a nature already broken by death, and the emphasis throughout Orthodox teaching on ancestral sin falls on divine compassion for a wounded creation rather than on divine wrath at an inherited crime.