A famous and much discussed short passage on sin and salvation from St Paul's Letter to the Romans (5:12-15) has had a huge, and some would argue malign, impact on the history of Christianity.
For it was here, above all, that Christian thinkers thought they had found clear evidence for what came to be known as 'the Fall', or 'Original Sin', brought into human history by our 'first parents'.
Christians weren't of course the first people who tried to find an explanation for the presence of sin and evil and suffering and death in a world believed to have been created by a good, all-powerful God.
Before them, people in the Jewish tradition, from which Christianity sprang, had clearly thought deeply about this question as well.
The story of what came to be called the 'fall' of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis (although the term 'fall' itself is not found there) was written by Jewish thinkers as a way of at least stating the problem, if not actually solving it.
In fact it cannot be solved with mere words. Christian belief can only make two seemingly contradictory assertions, neither of which can be abandoned without Christianity itself being undermined: that we believe the world to have been created solely by a good God, and yet we know that there is evil and suffering in the world, traditionally 'explained' - or 'explained away', Christianity's critics might claim - by the presence of 'original sin'.
It is belief in 'original sin' that the modern world still finds difficult, if not impossible, to swallow, and has turned away in many cases from Christianity as a result
How these two factors or elements in the Christian view of the human condition can be reconciled with one another, no-one has ever managed to work out.
It's not surprising then if it's precisely belief in 'original sin' that the modern world found and still finds difficult, if not impossible, to swallow, and has turned away in many cases from Christianity as a result.
The reputation of St Augustine, the time-honoured champion of 'original sin', has suffered correspondingly in this process.
For many just honestly cannot accept either that a good God would permit so much suffering in the first place or that there is something in the human situation or predicament that human beings can't put right by themselves, given enough time and effort and goodwill.
A possibly more ominous critique of the Christian view of sin and grace, however, can be found in the French-Jewish philosopher, of Lithuanian origin, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).
In the words of the late Dutch theologian Frans Jozef van Beeck (1930-2011), Levinas "contrasts Judaism's mature, morally responsible faith in the God of the Torah with what he sees as Christianity's immature, morally evasive reliance on an Incarnate Saviour-God - a God of pure comfort and forgiveness".
The charge that divine forgiveness, which Christianity undeniably proclaims, infantilises human beings and absolves them of their ethical responsibilities is one that may not be intellectually refutable.
The good news in this is that in God's mercy and goodness, all the sin and evil and suffering of this world will somehow not have been in vain
Yet being irrefutable is not necessarily the same thing as being true. Christianity, however, it must be conceded, has clearly emphasised how indispensable childlike qualities are for its adherents: "Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3).
Yet while Christian faith has traditionally claimed that all are in need of God's grace for salvation, and that grace can only be accepted with childlike trust, St Paul in the passage mentioned earlier seems to be going a step further.
For he doesn't only imply that all need God's grace for salvation - which in itself is what any Christian thinker would be expected to claim - but he also says, perhaps more interestingly, that the gift of salvation, to borrow his own terms, "considerably outweighs the fall".
This is an extraordinary claim. It would seem to imply that what salvation will ultimately amount to will somehow be more than it would have been had there never been any 'fall' to begin with.
The good news in this is that in God's mercy and goodness, all the sin and evil and suffering of this world will somehow not have been in vain, that God can use even evil for a good purpose and create something unexpectedly consoling out of it that otherwise might not have been possible.
Now that most certainly doesn't mean that sin and evil are to be swept under the carpet in some cavalier fashion or are not really to be taken seriously any more, but it does mean, and Christian faith appears to be encouraging us to accept, that there is a purpose and a meaning to everything that happens, even to sin and evil.
This in turn rests on the belief that deeper than anything that can happen in this world, deeper even than evil, is the goodness and power of God who creates everything and can even use obstacles to the divine will to bring the world to salvation.
Hence the notion of the 'fall' as the 'happy fault' (felix culpa) of Adam, proclaimed in the Exultet in the Easter Vigil.
Whether this aspect of St Paul's teaching, which has become fixed in Christian belief, can alleviate the troubling question raised by Emmanuel Levinas may well be an issue that cannot be settled in this world, but it may also identify the neuralgic point, so to speak, that marks the parting of the ways of the early Christian church from its mother religion, Judaism.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor
