Keeping Our Wesleyan Standards
Faithful & Teachable:
Petitions 1321-1326
August 26, 2026
Dear delegates,
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thank you for taking time to consider Petitions 1321–1326. I know they raise serious questions. They should. For more than 1,600 years the Western Church has taught that Adam’s sin affects all humanity. Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15 are usually cited in support of that teaching. John Wesley’s sermon “Original Sin” also reads Scripture this way. So the first questions most Methodist theologians will ask are fair ones:
“Are you arguing that there is no corruption of human nature from Adam’s sin, and that humans are responsible only for their own actual sins? If so, how is that different from what Pelagius argued?”
Those questions deserve a careful answer. I do not take them lightly, and I do not ask the church to revisit a received doctrine without strong scriptural grounds.
Let me say clearly what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that human beings are naturally good. I am not arguing that we can choose the good without the help of God. Pelagius was wrong to suggest that we can. Wesley was right to resist any gospel that makes grace unnecessary. We need prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. We need repentance, new birth, and growth in holy love. Nothing in these petitions is meant to weaken that gospel.
What I am asking is whether our present language about inherited guilt, infant damnation, and a lost deathless paradise is the most faithful way to say what Scripture actually says. If Holy Scripture is “the primary rule and authority for faith, morals, and service” (BODD ¶104), then later Western formulations must remain open to correction by the canon itself.
There is a further reason these petitions are offered. They are not offered because the church should teach less about sin. They are offered so that our doctrinal standards will remain faithful to Scripture while remaining able to hear Genesis more clearly as Mesopotamian studies continue to illuminate the text.
Biblical scholars working in the ancient Near Eastern setting of Genesis 1–11 ― including Old Testament Professor John Walton ― are showing that Genesis arose in the ancient Mesopotamian world. Geological, geographical, botanical, and linguistic evidence within the biblical text supports the conclusion that historical Adam and his descendants lived in the region of ancient Sumer-Akkad. Within that cultural setting, Genesis 1–3 functions as a parable: an archetypal account of every human being invited into sacred space, offered God’s wisdom, and prone to replace that wisdom with our own. It no longer appears to be a lesson in inherited guilt or a fallen creation that lost a deathless paradise.
If that Mesopotamian reading continues to gain clarity, the church will need doctrinal language that can receive it without breaking the gospel. Language that requires inherited Adamic guilt, infant damnation, or a Greco-Roman lost-paradise “Fall” will lock the GMC into Augustine’s Greco-Roman interpretation of Genesis, which he himself said was not infallible. But language drawn from Jesus’ own teaching will never fail. That is why the petitions ask us to define sin from the Two Greatest Commandments. That definition is not a softer view of sin. It is a more direct one. It comes from Jesus. It supports repentance, grace, and Christian Perfection. It also does not force every believer to accept an ancestral over an archetypal understanding of Adam before they can confess Christ.
Because this is a large request, I will:
present the teaching of Scripture,
identify the basis and the weaknesses of the received doctrine,
explain why a more careful restatement matters as the GMC proclaims Christ and Christian Perfection among the nations, and
offer language that I believe stays closer to the whole of Scripture and to our Wesleyan way.
I write as a John Wesley Fellow with AFTE, with an MA in Theology from Asbury Theological Seminary and a PhD in Theology from Asbury’s affiliate program with the London School of Theology, Middlesex University. I also hold a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. I am ordained in the Global Methodist Church and serve in the Trinity Conference. My ministry is focused on removing unnecessary obstacles to faith (https://www.scienceandlight.com/). I have also served in anti-human trafficking ministry since 2020.
The truth claims commonly bound up with the Western doctrine of Original Sin include these:
God created a deathless paradise that was lost through the sin of Adam and Eve about 6,000 years ago (circa 4000 BCE).
Creation is no longer “good” as God declared in Genesis 1; biological death, predation, and thorns are punishment for that first sin.
Infants and children are cursed into perpetuity by Adam’s sin, born wicked, and die damned unless they are baptized (see Wesley’s Treatise on Baptism).
All humans have inherited Adam’s sin, and therefore human nature is entirely wicked and totally depraved.
It is right, then, to remember the fifth-century debate between Augustine and Pelagius. Both men were trying to account for sin and grace. Both, I will argue, said more than Scripture will support. Pelagius underestimated our need for grace. Augustine, reading Genesis through a later Latin and Greco-Roman frame, developed claims about inherited guilt and infant damnation that sit in tension with the Old Testament, with Jesus’ teaching about children, and with the Jewish world in which Jesus and the apostles actually lived.
That is why three questions matter as we read Augustine and Wesley:
Is Scripture being heard in its own context, or is a verse being lifted out of context to carry a later doctrine?
Are texts that stand against inherited guilt being given equal weight?
Are we honoring the Jewish reading of the Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles would have known, or a later frame imposed upon it?
When those questions are asked, several tensions appear at once.
The first is Ezekiel 18. This is not a single proverb that can be set aside as “open to interpretation.” The LORD spends an entire chapter refusing the claim that children inherit a parent’s guilt. God explains it with concrete examples of generation after generation so that no one can miss the point.
The people were quoting a proverb: “The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2). That proverb is the doctrine of inherited guilt in popular form. God answers, “you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel.” Then he explains why: “For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child… The one who sins is the one who will die” (18:3–4).
If the chapter stopped there, a later interpreter might still say the meaning is uncertain. It does not stop there. God illustrates.
A righteous father lives justly. He will live (18:5–9).
That righteous man has a violent, unjust son. The son dies for his own deeds, not for his father’s righteousness (18:10–13).
That wicked son has a son who sees his father’s sins and rejects them. The righteous son will not die for his father’s sin. “He will surely live” (18:14–17).
Then God answers the objection that was already in the room: “Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?” Because the son has done what is just and right. “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child” (18:19–20).
After that, God adds the other half of the same teaching: a wicked person who turns will live; a righteous person who turns to sin will die (18:21–24). Judgment follows a person’s own way, not an ancestor’s account. The chapter ends as it began: “I will judge each of you according to your own ways… Repent and live” (18:30–32).
That is the shape of the argument. It is example, then example, then example, then the explicit rule, then the call to repent. A teaching that all humanity inherits Adam’s guilt asks us to keep the very proverb God told Israel to stop quoting.
I am not offering a private theory when I say this. I am asking us not to reduce Ezekiel 18 to a single line that can be waved away. If Holy Scripture is our primary authority, a chapter this explicit should constrain our doctrinal language, not be treated as a difficult footnote. I will not paste the entire chapter here only because of length. I ask every delegate to read Ezekiel 18:1–32 in full before deciding that inherited guilt is required by Scripture. The examples are the teaching.
A second tension appears in the Ten Commandments. The LORD does speak of consequences that touch later generations, but he does not describe an unlimited curse on all children because of Adam. He says he visits the iniquity of parents “to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,” and shows steadfast love “to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5–6). That is a far more limited and morally specific statement than a perpetual curse on every infant. If we say that all children are damned by Adam’s sin until baptism, we are saying more than this text says.
A third tension appears in Scripture’s language about children. When Israel shed the blood of sons and daughters in idolatrous sacrifice, the Scriptures call that blood “innocent” (Psalm 106:37–38; Jeremiah 19:4–5). Jesus does not treat children as already wicked. He says the kingdom belongs to such as these, and that we must become like little children (Matthew 19:14; Matthew 18:1–5). He warns those who cause little ones to stumble (Matthew 18:6–10). Our Lord does not welcome the wicked into the kingdom as models of readiness for heaven. His teaching is much closer to the older Jewish understanding that children are not yet morally accountable in the same way adults are, even though they will need wisdom, formation, and grace as they grow.
This matters pastorally. The church should be able to say, without hesitation, that God loves infants and children, that they are not to be spoken of as if they were already the moral equivalent of unrepentant adults, and that adults bear a holy responsibility to protect them and to teach them the love of God and neighbor. We can say that without denying that every person who comes of age to moral responsibility will need to repent from sin and seek God’s mercy.
A fourth tension appears in the claim that creation is no longer “good,” and that biological death, predation, and thorns are punishments for Adam’s sin. From Genesis 4 through Malachi, Adam and Eve are not treated as the explanation for a ruined cosmos. Scripture never mentions a lost deathless paradise as the key to the rest of the canon. Job 38–41 describes the created order as God’s own work, including features of the world that later theology has often labeled “fallen.” Genesis 1 still says that what God made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Paul can still say that God’s power and divine nature have been “clearly seen” from the goodness of what God has made (Romans 1:20). Those statements are difficult to hold together with a view that creation itself has become a punishment.
Science, read humbly, can help us see why pain, predation, and ecological limits are not best understood as arbitrary penalties. They belong to the way a living world is sustained. I have written and spoken about this in “God’s Providential Care: Science and Theology on the Purpose of Pain.” The deeper issue, however, is theological: whether we will read Genesis through a later lost-paradise lens, or through the text’s own world. I have tried to trace that contrast in “Unthinking Old Narratives: Augustinian vs Mesopotamian Paradigms in the Science-Religion Debate.”
Augustine was a serious Christian thinker, and the church owes him a real debt. It is also fair to remember that he read Genesis as a Latin-speaking former Manichaean and Neo-Platonist, without knowing Hebrew, and at a time when he could not yet work easily with the Greek. The Latin Vulgate that Augustine used often translated adam / ha-adam in Genesis 1–3 as a proper name more quickly than the Hebrew invites. Jewish readers have long heard those chapters as an archetypal account of humanity: all of us are invited into God’s presence and wisdom; all of us reach for a wisdom of our own; all of us know the grief of exile from God’s presence. “Death” in that world is not only refers to the stopping of breath. It also represents broken relationship with God. That is why Paul can tell living people they were “dead” in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). Jews already knew that the human being was formed from dust before any sin is named in Genesis 2. Mortality is part of our human identity from the beginning; relational death is what sin brings.
Even the phrase “mother of all the living” (Genesis 3:20) should be read with care. In the same narrative world, “father of all” means the first to take up a way of life, as with Jabal and Jubal who were the first to raise livestock and play musical instruments (Genesis 4:20–21). Paul can call Abraham “the father of all who believe” among the uncircumcised (Romans 4:11) without making Abraham the biological ancestor of every Gentile believer. This “mother of all” idiom in Genesis is not used to suggest that Eve is the genetic mother of every later human being, but rather the first to live in covenantal relationship with God.
This helps us hear Paul more generously. In Romans and in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul joins Adam, sin, death, and Christ. He did that to reach Jewish and Gentiles at once.
Paul was a Jewish Pharisee, trained by Gamaliel. Amongst Jews, Adam was understood as a representative figure of all humanity’s failure: each of us is invited into God’s wisdom, and each of us turns from it. According to Jewish understanding, “death” was not only the stopping of breath. It was also broken relationship with God. That is why Paul could tell living people they were “dead” in their trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). From the Jewish perspective, Christ restores the one who sins back to Life with God.
But Paul was also an apostle to the Gentiles. Many Gentiles did not share Israel’s law, and they did not feel the force of their sin guilt in the same way. What they did feel was the fear of biological death and the hope of a life beyond it. Some believed Adam was their first ancestor according to non-canonical fall stories, and heard his sin was the reason they die. Paul knew that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead, and that those who belong to him will also be raised. So Paul could proclaim, truly, that all who put their faith in Christ will share his resurrection and his life.
In other words, Jews and Gentiles could hear Paul’s words about Adam differently and still be brought together in Christ. However, the later church kept only the Gentile ancestral reading and lost sight of the Jewish archetypal understanding of Adam. That is one reason Christians who love Jesus now divide over whether every human being descended from a single human couple about 6,000 years ago.
The two genealogies of Jesus show the same pastoral difference toward Adam. Matthew writes for a Jewish audience formed by Israel’s story. He traces Jesus to Abraham because that is the line of promise and covenant they already know they belong to. They do not need a line to Adam in order to see why Jesus is theirs. Luke writes with Gentile hearers in view. They have no inheritance in Abraham and no share in the Law by birth. But they think of Adam as their first ancestor and the source of biological death, so Luke carries Jesus’ line all the way to Adam so that they can see their own need through Adam, and their own salvation, in Christ. Otherwise a Gentile might wonder why a “Jewish Messiah” had anything to do with Gentiles.
The focus of both Gospels is Christ. Paul uses Adam to bring both groups to Jesus. We do not honor that missionary wisdom by freezing only one understanding of Adam into our unalterable standards of faith. A person should not have to settle the precise relationship between archetypal Adam or ancestral Adam before being welcomed as a disciple in the GMC. Salvation comes from Jesus Christ alone.
Wesley inherited the Anglican form of this Western reading, and the Anglican form had itself inherited much from earlier Latin theology. Wesley’s concern was holy. He did not want a flattering view of human nature that made grace optional. I share that concern. I do ask us to look again at some of the texts most often used to carry the later doctrine.
Psalm 51:5 is David’s confession after his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah. It is right that he speaks with anguish. It is less clear that one man’s penitential cry should be made the measure of every infant. David wrote many psalms after he was anointed by the Holy Spirit, and they do not teach that every child is conceived under Adam’s guilt.
Psalm 8 says God made human beings “a little lower than the angels” and crowned them with glory and honor. That psalm stands with Genesis 1:26–28. It does not require an Enlightenment optimism about human goodness. It does suggest that the faith of Israel, in David’s time, could still speak of humanity with dignity rather than as a ruined nature from the womb.
“There is none righteous, no, not one,” in Romans 3, is Paul’s use of hyperbole from Psalm 14. Psalm 14 is about the fool who says there is no God. The same psalm also speaks of God’s presence “in the company of the righteous” (Psalm 14:5). Scripture elsewhere names people as righteous: Abel, Noah, Abram, Lot, Job, Zechariah and Elizabeth, John the Baptist, Simeon. Proverbs assumes and teaches that the righteous and the wicked both exist. Paul himself can say that some Gentiles do by nature what the law requires, because the law is written on their hearts (Romans 2:13–15). None of this makes us saviors of ourselves. It does make it harder to say that Scripture knows only total inherited wickedness from birth.
The older Jewish understanding of sin is closer to Jesus’s teaching than a doctrine of inherited guilt is. Sin is broken relationship with God and neighbor. Thoughts, words, actions, and inactions either honor love, or wound it. That is why Jesus joins Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 together as the two great commandments. That is also why a restatement of sin in terms of agape love is not a departure from the Methodist way. It is a return to the center of Jesus’ teaching and Wesley’s aim of Christian Perfection as holy love.
I suggest we keep the Jewish account of human nature that fits this whole canonical picture. Human beings have an inclination toward the good and an inclination toward evil. Only by God’s grace and wisdom do we choose the good. Children need to be taught the love of God and neighbor before they are treated as fully accountable in the way adults are. That is not sentimental. It is a way of taking formation, repentance, and grace seriously.
Why does this matter for the Global Methodist Church?
We are no longer writing only for the Western inheritance of the faith. We are a global church. Many Christians in Orthodox and other ancient communions have not taught inherited Adamic guilt in the Augustinian sense, yet they have not denied sin or the need for Christ. If our standards require a Greco-Roman reading of Genesis, we may bind consciences beyond the requirements of the gospel message. If our standards speak in the language of Jesus, Scripture itself can remain the book by which ordinary believers — in many cultures and with many levels of schooling — can learn to repent from sin and love others as themself.
I also believe this matters for people who love science and love Scripture. A required story of a deathless paradise lost 6,000 years ago, with all later death and predation as punishment, has become an obstacle for many who would otherwise hear the gospel. The petitions are meant to remove that obstacle without removing sin, the cross, or holiness.
For children, we can capture God’s proclamation of children’s innocence and Jesus’ view of their readiness for heaven even while explaining their need for God’s wisdom and salvation from sin:
“We believe infants are born without sin, yet children lack wisdom so they must be taught to love God and love others as themselves so they will know good from evil by the time they are morally culpable for sin at puberty. We believe we must repent from sin in a timely manner so we do not give room in our hearts for evil to grow. The darkness that comes from persistent unrepentant sinfulness can invite demonic influences into our lives and lead us into paths of total depravity. Therefore, the people of God are called to hold one another accountable in love as we live out our faith together and fulfill God’s will by loving God with our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies and also love others as we love ourselves.”
For creation, it may be more helpful to fully articulate our complex relationship with God’s good world like this:
“We believe that the order God established in creation is very good. Human beings can harm creation, physically and spiritually, by our sin. God therefore calls us to steward what he has made for the good of human beings, other creatures, and the living systems entrusted to our care.”
For sin itself, the language proposed in the petition on agape love remains, I believe, the surest scriptural center:
¶106 – AGAPE LOVE and SIN
We believe every human being is called to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as we love our self. Our Lord Jesus Christ connected love of neighbor to love of God while using the “agape” meaning of love, signifying total devotion to God and genuine care for neighbor as oneself. Jesus said these were the Two Greatest Commandments: there are no commandments greater than these, they sum up all the Law and the Prophets, and eternal life is given to those who live by them. Therefore, we believe love of God and neighbor is the fruit of faith that all of God’s people are called to produce.
However, when we reject this heavenly wisdom and fail to love God and our fellow human beings either by our thoughts, words, actions, or inactions, we sin. Sin that is not repented of leads to relational separation from God in this life and eternal separation from God in the afterlife.
Without the aid of divine grace and repentance from sin, we are unable to do works pleasing to God. Unless we are born again, we cannot see the kingdom of God. We are rescued from this desperate state by God’s forgiveness of our sin through the timeless atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit. Through the saving work of our Trinitarian God, we are no longer slaves to sin but free to live in holiness, doing what is good and rejecting what is evil.
This language still names our helplessness without grace. It still names the cross and the Spirit. It also teaches, with special clarity, that it is sin not to love the neighbor—including those whom other systems have taught people to despise. And it leaves room for the church to keep learning what Genesis 1–11 is saying in its own Mesopotamian setting, without making one understanding of Adam a condition of fellowship.
I do not ask delegates to accept every conclusion on my website before they can consider the petitions. I only ask that our standards not close the door on a more socio-historical reading of Genesis, and that they not say more about inherited guilt than Ezekiel 18, Exodus 20, the Gospels, and the larger canon will bear. The best way to remain both orthodox and teachable is to keep Jesus’ commandments at the center of our definition of sin.
Augustine remains one of the church’s great teachers. The point is not that we should dismiss him. The point is that we should not treat his reading of Genesis as more certain than he himself treated it. He knew how difficult those chapters are, and he refused to lock the church into one interpretation as if it were the faith itself.
Reflecting on that struggle, he wrote:
“With these facts in mind, I have worked out and presented the statements of the Book of Genesis in a variety of ways according to my ability; and, in interpreting words that have been written obscurely for the purpose of stimulating our thought, I have not rashly taken my stand on one side against a rival interpretation which might possibly be better.” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.20.40)
And again:
“In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.18.37)
If Augustine would not rashly take his stand on one side against a better reading of Genesis, the Global Methodist Church should not make his Greco-Roman interpretation of Genesis the foundation of our unalterable standards. We honor Augustine best by doing what he asked: letting Scripture correct us as better light comes. I offer these petitions in that spirit.
Beloved, I know this has been a long letter. Thank you for reading it.
Love in Christ,
Rev. Dr. Victoria Campbell