by Denny » Mon 28 Apr 2008, 22:17:02
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'D')enny, why are you still being punished for the sin of Adam if you have been saved? Why are you still suffering under the curse of Adam?
I guess you'll have to take up that question with the big guy. We were equipped for a paradise but now find ourselves in a world of toil and pain and too often, poverty. So, I am not sure if its a matter of us being willfully punished or a matter that our wills are not conditioned for the circumstances we now find ourselves in, since the banishment from Eden, especially oour vulnerability to the snares of Satan. But, without that sin of Adam, there would be no need for our Christ.
As the Easter vigil prayer goes:
"What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.
O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead! "
More on the nature of original sin, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
article #407:
The consequences of original sin and of all men's personal sins put the world as a whole in the sinful condition aptly described in St. John's expression, "the sin of the world". (Refer to article #300.) This expression can also refer to the negative influence exerted on people by communal situations and social structures that are the fruit of men's sins.
[417] Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called "original sin".
[418] As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin (this inclination is called "concupiscence").
[419] "We therefore hold, with the Council of Trent, that original sin is transmitted with human nature, "by propagation, not by imitation"
Now, regarding baptism, while it buys for us the salvific grace, it does not rid us from the effects of sin, the erosion of our wills rooted in original sin:
[1263] By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin. In those who have been reborn nothing remains that would impede their entry into the Kingdom of God, neither Adam's sin, nor personal sin, nor the consequences of sin, the gravest of which is separation from God.
[1264] Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, "the tinder for sin" (fomes peccati); since concupiscence "is left for us to wrestle with, it cannot harm those who do not consent but manfully resist it by the grace of Jesus Christ."