Reformation documents offer a number of images for corruption: it is a despoiled nature, a diseased root, a contaminated spring, a foul heart. 43 According to these documents, we are wrong at the core. A bad strain has gotten into the stock so that we now sin with the ease and readiness of people born to the task. After the fall we sin by second nature: we are “born sinners” as some folk are born athletes. This fact, empirical as well as biblical, lies behind a broad consensus on original sin. Although, partly because of the silence of Scripture, Christians of various theological orientations differ on central issues in the doctrine of original sin —for example, how a child acquires the fateful disposition to sin, whether this disposition is itself sin, how to describe and assess the accompanying bondage of the will44 —they agree on the universality, solidarity, stubbornness, and historical momentum of sin. That is to say, all serious Christians subscribe to the generic doctrine of corruption, the centerpiece of which is the claim that even when they are good in important ways, human beings are not sound.