Chapter 5 engages proposals that deny the importance of a historical Fall. I begin with Kant’s account of radical evil. An influential reading is this. Every human being who reaches the age of reason freely subordinates the moral law to self-interest. Next is Karl Barth’s “christologized” version of radical evil: the Fall is the universal act of unbelief in Christ. I argue that the reduction of original sin to the universality of actual sin is insufficiently inclusive. Neither infants nor the severely mentally disabled choose wrongdoing. Schleiermacher separated original sin from the Fall in a different way. Original sin is the corporate act of humanity. The “force” of sin is present in infants, albeit in germinal form, and when they mature they lack God-consciousness and tend to sinful self-love. Schleiermacher’s view leads to a problematic conclusion. Either sin is numerically one, or sin is merely environmental, external to the will. Schoonenberg defends a similar view but stresses human freedom. McFarland intriguingly proposes a synthesis of Maximus’s and Augustine’s accounts of the fallen will, while arguing that we can avoid etiological explanations of sin altogether. I argue, however, that we have to choose: we need either to explain why original justice is theologically unnecessary or to defend it in some form.

Critics of divine determinism sometimes claim that determinists make God the author of sin. This chapter takes up the question of whether this is true. I begin by disambiguating the claim, focusing on reading the charge as equivalent to the claim that God causes sin. I begin by considering a reply to this objection rooted in the claim that evil is a mere privation. According to this particular reply, sin is composed of the positive act of being (which God does cause) and a defect, which is a mere privation. This defect, the reply claims, is not caused by God, nor by an act of a human agent, but instead by a privation. I present three arguments for thinking that this reply is insufficient. I then suggest that divine determinists consider a more robust reply built off of the same analysis of evil and sin, but which claims that privations, lacking all being, cannot be caused at all.