[Cronos]

Lev 5:1-4 describes sacrifices for wilful sins. Yes, some exceptions are wilful but most are not.

True -- however, Original Sin or Original Stain as I prefer to call it is NOT a wilful sin.

Cronos: Also, the sacrifice of Christ IS for unwitting sin (Adam's) -- repentence is still necessary in the Christian world for our non-venial sins. We are not Calvinists to believe that we should not repent.
Kosta: I am glad you noticed that. The Protestants seem to compeltely miss that point

Yes -- and that's a very good point, God asks us to repent for our wilful sins, He tells us to do penance for these wilful sins. The sins that were NOT wilful, there had to be a sacrifice.

So the idea in the OT was, to put it in bad English "you do bad, you do penance. If you don't know you have "bad" stain, then a sacrifice is necessary"

This of course is translated into NT-speak as "If you sin, you must do penance, but the major sin, the Original one, so to speak, that needed a sacrifice. This was a sin of the highest nature and it needed a sacrifice of the highest nature, namely Christ.

[kosta50]

The Apostolic Church always saw Christ's sacrifice as liberating mankind from the bondage of the ancestral sin, an unwitting trap—a pit into which Adam and Eve fell and trapped all their descendents—in the form of obligate death. Christ broke the gates of hell and defeated death, theater liberating mankind of its hold.

But man still remains responsible for his own sins and can, ultimately, be lost because of them unless he repents. The participation in the life of the Church is geared towards repentance and spiritual healing through sacraments.

Thus, the Church accurately inherited the concept of sacrificial necessity for unwitting sins and retained the necessity of active repentance for willfully committed sins.

The Protestants, on the other hand, created a man-friendly theology according to which one's own sins count for naught once you declare your faith in Christ.