The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

Genesis 3 is a story about the etiology of death, making death the primary predicament in our post-Eden condition, how does death relate to human sinfulness? Again, as we’ve seen in the account above, sin, death, and the devil are deeply intertwined. So the issue here isn’t to displace the importance or role of sin in bringing about death, but to embed our understandings of human moral failure within a richer theological matrix. In the matrix used by the Orthodox, what we have inherited from Adam and Eve is less a moral stain than the mortal condition, a world and a body infected with death. Rather than original sin—a moral depravity and incapacity passed on from generation to generation—we have a death-infected world created by a primal act of disobedience. Thus the Orthodox don’t speak of original sin but of an ancestral sin, a primal event where death was introduced into the world. The condition we inherit from Adam and Eve is less moral than mortal.