Wounded Nature, Not Borrowed Guilt

In Orthodox teaching, ancestral sin reshapes the whole doctrine of salvation rather than settling one point about a newborn's guilt. Because what is inherited is a nature already subject to corruption and mortality, a sickness rather than a sentence, redemption is not chiefly a legal acquittal. Orthodox theology calls the alternative theosis: the slow restoration of a nature to the likeness of God it was created to bear, worked out through cooperation with grace rather than through the discharge of a debt. Baptism begins that healing without erasing an inherited crime, since Orthodox theology holds there was no such crime to erase, only a wounded condition to begin curing. The consequence reaches further than the sacrament itself. Because the ancestral fault is corruption and death rather than a ledger of guilt, Christ's death and resurrection are understood chiefly as the defeat of that death, an emphasis that moves the center of the doctrine from a legal claim satisfied to a wound actually healed, and it is this shift in what redemption itself is doing, not only the status of an infant, that separates the Orthodox account from the Western one built on inherited guilt.