EVOLUTION AND THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN

When the theory of human evolution was first enunciated, the Catholic Church unofficially, at least, condemned it; then there was a period of silence, during which it was privately taught that Adam and Eve might have evolved from a lower species (one still had to believe that there was only one set of First Parents). Now, however, when there is almost incontrovertible evidence that human evolution from many sets of ""first parents"" did occur, the Church is being forced to take a hard look at its traditional doctrine of Original Sin--a dogma which has always presupposed that, at one point in the dimness of preliterary history, a first, single human couple begat the human species. In this book Father Trooster makes an interesting first step in the formulation of a new interpretation. After explaining the two views of Original Sin (the traditionalist and the evolutionist) and examining in detail the two scriptural texts on which the dogma is founded (Genesis and Romans), he reconciles the hitherto opposing views by suggesting that the ""sinful state"" in which man is born is, basically, the sinful world, in whose sins he as a human being, participates. An interesting thesis, and one which should make a noise in the halls of American Catholicism at this time, although it was first formulated and published in 1963 in an (untranslated) Dutch work by P. Schoonenberg.