Did the American Restoration Movement (Stone-Campbell Movement) Have a Position on Original Sin?
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I am not an expert on this subject but I've recently asked a more general question about the Restoration Movement and have done some research. Since no one has attempted an answer yet I will offer one.
The article Theological Anthropology in the Restoration Movement: Past and Present by Ron Highfield states:
In the Campbell-Rice debate, Alexander Campbell had occasion to reflect on his childhood struggle with, and rejection of, the" Calvinist" doctrine of the damnation of non-elect infants who die in infancy.' According to the mature Campbell... all infants are of the elect.' Campbell rejected the Augustinian-Calvinist view of original sin and election. Calvinism, according to Campbell, is "crazy at this point."
This implies that Campbell's mature writings affirmed that children are not born with Original Sin. But he was not naive about human nature either.
Man has strayed away from God and nature, and has become a preternatural being... his soul is harassed with the tumult of a thousand passions, lusts, appetites, and elements that war against his soul. If there were no sin in human nature, there could be none in obeying all its passions."
The second generation Restoration preacher Robert Milligan warned against "the extremes of Augustinianism on the one hand, which detracts too much from the powers of man, and Pelagianism on the other hand."
Another early view was represented by David Walk who was baptized in 1862:
The certainty of physical death to all his descendants is the one necessary consequence of Adam's transgression... As for the rest, Adam could sin, and we can sin; nor can I see any difference between his condition and ours... Till man sins, he is just such a being, morally, as Adam was before he sinned.
So while the early Restoration Movement may have believed in Original Sin in a general since, meaning that Adam's sin had real consequences for human nature, its founder and early teachers did not endorse the idea that Original Sin resulted in the total depravity of humankind as taught by Augustine and reiterated by Calvin and Luther. Especially they taught that children who have not sinned personally are not liable to punishment in the afterlife. I offer this conclusion tentatively hoping for either confirmation or expansion from experts.
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