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My second disagreement is about Jacobs's even more attractive political point: that original sin has a leveling effect. He notes an English aristocrat's revulsion at George Whitefield's preaching: "It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth." And he points to Whitefield's own record of coal miners' response to his open-air preaching: "[T]he white gutters made by their tears &#hellip; ran down their black cheeks." Original sin is a good word to the poor, bad news to tyrants, and a prescription for a politics more radical than any we've seen: a genuinely Christian democracy, inclusive of all the living and the dead, each equally bound up in a plight we cannot solve ourselves.

Jacobs thinks original sin does this leveling work in a way that other points of Christian anthropology do not. God's good Creation, humanity's crafting in the image of God, the charge to tend the Garden and to multiply: such prelapsarian pronouncements don't lift the luggage politically. They "should do so, but usually" do not, he writes. Somehow it works better for us to "condescend" than to try and lift up others to our level. Jacobs may be right, but I need more evidence for the claim than "the feeling most of us have, at least some of the time."

Jacobs offers loving exegesis of Augustine's running feud with Pelagius and with the heretic's even more clever successor, Julian of Eclanum. For Augustine's opponents, the Scriptures command holiness. Therefore it must be possible. Augustine sees in the apostle Paul a damning critique of this false optimism: What need, then, of divine grace? Further, Jacobs argues, Augustine's defense of universal depravity is "curiously liberating." Pelagius's call would result in us all being monks. Augustine's God, for Jacobs, "gives hope to the waverer, the backslider, the slacker, the putz, the schlemiel."

That's Jacobs's Augustine, awake to the tragicomedy of our situation&#mdash;in dire circumstances as we are, guilty prior to any fault of our own, with no answer except the one God has already given. We need more books like this one.

Jason Byassee, assistant editor of The Christian Century and an affiliate professor of theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Original Sin: A Cultural History is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

More reviews are in our books section.

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July 2008, Vol. 52, No. 7