In the heady days of summer 1776, the Declaration of Independence, crafted and signed in Philadelphia, was publicly read in towns and villages across the American colonies. In Massachusetts, the governing authorities ordered that the Declaration be sent to ministers of every denomination and required every minister to read it to the congregants “as soon as divine Service is ended, in the afternoon, on the first Lord’s Day after they shall have received it.”
Philadelphia was ground zero for the political earthquake that sent history-altering tremors across the Atlantic, but alongside the political earthquake was a seismic shift in theology. Throughout church history, “the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42) has been preserved, lost, recovered, and then threatened again. Like links in a chain, the essential doctrines of the faith depend on one another. When one link is removed, the whole chain is at risk. An often forgotten link in that chain is the doctrine of original sin. In 1776, that crucial link was weakening.
In Boston, no one welcomed the public reading of the Declaration more than Charles Chauncy. As pastor of the First Church of Boston, arguably the most important church in New England, Chauncy enjoyed considerable influence. For years, he’d argued for American independence from Britain, and his reputation grew on both sides of the Atlantic as a patriot preacher. A graduate of Harvard and the great-grandson of Harvard’s second president, he was firmly positioned in Boston’s elite ruling class. Through sermons and writings, he shaped public opinion in favor of the patriot cause. Historian Norman Gibbs refers to Chauncy as the “theologian of the American Revolution.”
Chauncy would serve as the pastor of First Church for 60 years, and at the beginning his preaching conformed to the orthodox faith he’d inherited. But then something changed. In the 1750s, Chauncy began to drift from the Puritan heritage entrusted to him. By the end of his life, Chauncy had embraced universal salvation. In his view, a loving God would ultimately receive every person into heaven, whether he or she received Christ or rejected him. The Unitarian Universalist Association today credits Chauncy with sparking “a new American liberal theological tradition: American Unitarianism.”
While the debate continues about how far Chauncy moved from orthodox Christianity, the consensus is that he’s a key transitional figure in the theological shift. If he didn’t widely open the door of the church to theological liberalism, he certainly unlocked it.
What happened in the 1750s that led to Chauncy’s departure from sound doctrine? He abandoned the Reformed doctrine of original sin.
Initially, Chauncy kept his changing views private. For years, the doctrine of original sin had been attacked in England and America, most notably through the writing of John Taylor in 1750. In the preface to his 1784 book arguing for universal salvation, Chauncy praised Taylor:
Had it not been for his Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin . . . I should never, I believe, have been able to have composed this work. . . . It was his example and recommendation that put me upon studying the Scriptures in that free, impartial, and diligent manner, which led me into these sentiments.
That same hermeneutical approach led Chauncy to deny the Reformed doctrine of original sin, penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), and eternal hell.
In January 1776, Thomas Paine disparaged the doctrine of original sin in Common Sense, provoking a defense from John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration. In early summer 1776, Witherspoon wrote that Paine’s criticisms of original sin were “without the shadow of reasoning,” and the only adequate explanation for the “visible state of the world in every age” is Scripture’s declaration “that the imagination of the heart of man is only evil from his youth, and that continually” (emphasis original).
At the time, James Madison was practicing law in Virginia. Just five years earlier, he was studying at Princeton under Witherspoon. At Princeton, the future “Father of the Constitution” adopted much of Witherspoon’s views on human nature. He would later write in the Federalist Papers,
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
The result was a limited government that separated powers and provided an elegant system of checks and balances. Because humanity is fallen, no one can be trusted with unchecked power.
The doctrine of original sin clearly informed the founding of the United States, but by summer 1776, Taylor’s argument against it was gaining devastating traction.
Taylor’s Opponents
In America prior to 1776, Taylor’s most famous opponent was Jonathan Edwards, whose massive response to Taylor was his last work. In The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, Edwards answered Taylor’s arguments point by point. Edwards’s assessment of Taylor’s hermeneutical method was that expressions had been “strained, words and phrases racked,” and “strange figures of speech . . . invented and with violent hands thrust into the Apostle’s mouth.”
Edwards was born just three years before Benjamin Franklin, but he died in 1758. Therefore, we can’t be certain whether Edwards would have joined Chauncy and Witherspoon in the “Black-Robed Regiment” of ministers in America who promoted the American Revolution from pulpits and in pamphlets. However, most of his followers, including his son, Jonathan Edwards Jr., were patriots and members of the Black-Robed Regiment.
The doctrine of original sin clearly informed the founding of the United States.
Edwards scholar George Marsden speculates that Edwards “probably would have found a religious rationale, as almost all his disciples did, for supporting the Revolutionary cause.” Furthermore, the Great Awakening, led by men like Edwards, created conditions conducive to challenging the existing power structure in America. In 1776, Edwards had been dead for 18 years, but his influence on the American Revolution lived on in his spiritual heirs. So did his influence on the state of theology in America and across the Atlantic.
Augustus Toplady continued Edwards’s defense of original sin. As an Anglican living in England, he was likely not a fan of the Declaration of Independence. But Toplady had other things on his mind in 1776, the year he published the hymn for which he’s best remembered, “Rock of Ages”:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me from its guilt and power.
The double cure provided by Christ’s vicarious death corresponds with the Westminster Confession’s statement that in the fall, “the guilt of this sin was imputed . . . and corrupted nature conveyed to all [Adam and Eve’s] posterity.” Therefore, the cure for original sin is deliverance from the penalty of sin (God’s wrath that our guilt deserves) and deliverance from the power of sin (our impure sin nature) through Christ’s blood.
We know Toplady’s views because around this time he wrote “A Short Essay on Original Sin,” defending the Augustinian-Reformed doctrine of original sin. With urgency and passion, he implored the reader, “Beg the Lord to shew you the depth of your fall. Free grace, finished salvation, imputed righteousness, atoning blood, unchangeable mercy, and the whole chain of evangelical blessings, will then be infinitely precious to your heart.”
Essential Doctrine
To press Toplady’s analogy, the doctrine of original sin is an early link in the chain of Christian doctrines. If this one link is removed, the church is in danger of losing other cardinal doctrines––the very sine qua non of Christianity. A chain lying on the garage floor can appear intact after a link is removed, but when the chain is tested by use, the missing link becomes tragically obvious.
Pastors, churches, or denominations that abandon the doctrine of original sin may continue for years to confess the doctrines that necessarily follow from original sin, but when those doctrines become unfashionable, they too will be doubted, debated, and denied. The same approach to Scripture that leads away from original sin also leads away from any doctrine that we fallen people consider unreasonable to our minds and unseasonable to our times.
Original sin isn’t merely one doctrine among many. It shapes how we read the entire biblical story of humanity’s fall and Christ’s redemption. When this doctrine is abandoned, the rest of theology begins to shift with it. As seminary professor Carl Beckwith has said, “Tell me your view of sin and I’ll tell you your view of grace.” Anthropology determines soteriology.
For example, consider the relationship of the doctrine of original sin to the doctrine of PSA. Both doctrines rest on the principle of imputation. Our representative stands in our place, and we experience the consequences of his decision. So the first Adam’s guilt is imputed to us, our guilt is imputed to the last Adam, and, thankfully, the last Adam’s righteousness is imputed to us upon our faith in him.
In “Rock of Ages,” Toplady affirmed that “the blood” saves the believer “from . . . guilt.” In his writing, Toplady confessed that “the death of Christ was a vicarious punishment” and it was a “real, adequate atonement for sin.” On the cross, the punishment we deserve fell on Jesus. This is the classic Reformed position that Edwards defended and Chauncy discarded.
Original sin isn’t merely one doctrine among many. It shapes how we read the entire biblical story of humanity’s fall and Christ’s redemption.
Once Chauncy rejected the doctrine of original sin, with its imputation of Adam’s guilt to us, he followed the same logic in moving away from PSA, with its imputation of our guilt to Christ.
Eventually, he settled on a view of the atonement similar to the moral government theory. On the cross, Chauncy reasoned, Jesus was giving us a picture of God’s displeasure with sin, not a payment for the penalty of sin that satisfied God’s justice. Set on this course of exalting God’s love to the exclusion of God’s wrath, Chauncy eventually arrived at universal salvation. Surely this loving God couldn’t send anyone to eternal hell.
In 1776, Chauncy declared his independence from the authority of Great Britain. By 1784, he effectively declared his independence from the authority of Scripture.
Evangelical Inheritance
Chauncy’s influence eventually won the day in many New England churches as well as in his alma mater, Harvard College. Harvard long ago abandoned its original mission of training ministers in the Reformed faith. In 1805, when Harvard appointed a Unitarian, Henry Ware, as a professor of divinity, the theological drift appeared irreversible. Many generations have passed since Harvard championed the doctrines of original sin and PSA.
Despite a faithful remnant, by 1825 many Congregational churches in New England joined the newly established American Unitarian Association, and by then any similarity to orthodox, apostolic Christianity was merely cosmetic. In that environment, doctrines like original sin and PSA had zero chance of survival. In 1961, the American Unitarian Association was folded into the Unitarian Universalist Association, currently headquartered in Chauncy’s hometown of Boston. Today, like most mainline churches and denominations, Unitarian Universalist churches are either dead or dying.
In the years after 1776, the doctrine of original sin found safe harbor in the churches and denominations that remained faithful to their evangelical roots. Today, Edwards is widely considered one of the founding fathers of evangelicalism. In America and the United Kingdom, Toplady’s “chain of evangelical blessings” is most likely to be found within evangelical churches.
In the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon preached that “in Adam we died, because in Adam’s sin we were regarded as sinners.” In the 20th century, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones declared, “It was Adam’s disobedience and sin that has put us all into the position of, and leads God to regard us as, sinners. . . . We are all regarded by God judicially as sinners and that this is so because of Adam’s sin.” In the 21st century, John Piper affirmed that “behind all our depravity and all our guilt and all our sinning, there is a deep mysterious connection with Adam whose sin became our sin and whose judgment became our judgment.”
Toplady’s “double cure” for original sin is still esteemed among evangelicals, while only a minority of evangelicals now hold to the doctrine of original sin. Alarmingly, nearly a third of these same evangelicals deny Christ’s deity. The lessons of 1776 are increasingly relevant 250 years later.
Toplady’s “double cure” for original sin is still esteemed among evangelicals, but will it endure? According to the 2025 State of Theology Survey, only a minority of evangelicals now hold to the doctrine of original sin. Alarmingly, nearly a third of evangelicals deny Christ’s deity, and more than half of them believe the Holy Spirit is a force but not a personal being. The lessons of 1776 are increasingly relevant 250 years later.
Preserve the Chain
To demonstrate that relevance, consider how Toplady’s “whole chain of evangelical blessings” is germane to current theological issues. For example, the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Book of the Year in 2025 was John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way. In his review of Practicing the Way, Kevin DeYoung notes several commendable strengths of the book before making an important observation:
In a revealing section, Comer quotes from the Eastern Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware, who explains that original sin means “we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good.” He goes on to say that we are “conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being” (92). This is an accounting of original sin that has more in common with Pelagius than with Augustine. There is no language here of inherited guilt and depravity, only a warped environment that makes it hard to do good. Given this understanding of original sin, practicing the way may not require a new nature at all.
Also in 2025, Comer recommended Andrew Remington Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death. Rillera’s unabashed aim is to argue against PSA. Despite the substantial criticisms the book received from evangelical scholars, Comer not only recommended it but posted on Instagram that “this seems to be the final biblical/exegetical knock out blow to PSA.”
Comer eventually retracted his statement and offered further explanation. But why make such a statement in the first place? Why so apparently eager to dispose of PSA? In Comer’s theology, the link of PSA in “the chain of evangelical blessings” appears weakly connected if not already absent.
Only a minority of evangelicals now hold to the doctrine of original sin.
What was true in 1776 is true today. When the link of original sin is removed, other essential doctrines are at risk. Our sin originates in our union with the first Adam, so we come into the world legally guilty, spiritually dead, and physically dying. Our only hope is in union with the last Adam, who bore our guilt, makes us spiritually alive, and guarantees our physical resurrection. The sin of the first Adam necessitates the sacrifice of the last Adam. But when the cause is effectively denied, the cure is eventually discarded.
History has shown this pattern before, from John Taylor to Charles Chauncy, from 18th-century New England to the present day. If the church wishes to preserve “the whole chain of evangelical blessings,” it must once again recover the doctrine of original sin—not as an embarrassing relic of the past but as the indispensable foundation of the gospel itself. That’s one of the overshadowed lessons we can take away from the summer of 1776.
The Gospel Coalition