Man is presented in the Old Testament as a spiritual being, and as such he is, notwithstanding all limitations, akin to God who is Spirit. The greatest of those limitations, the most serious of all the barriers between man and God, is again and again declared to be moral evil. If men persist in it, there can be no knowledge of God in them, no revelation of Him to them. But this does not mean, as some theologians down to our own times have asserted, that the kinship of God and man has been broken by the sin of the first man for all his descendants. There is no exegetical warrant for the reading back into the story of Eden the Christian dogma of 'original sin'. Man may individually sin himself away from the very capacity to know God, but there is no such inevitability and personal responsibility in this result as the dogma of original sin implies. Both the word which the prophets declare and their frequent appeals for obedience to it imply the capacity of man to understand and to obey. The kinship of God and man means that Yahweh is the kind of God who does reveal Himself to man, and that man is the kind of being that is capable of response to the revelation. Such a divine nature and such a human capacity implies the common ground which is expressed by 'kinship', and we are fully justified in using the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language of the prophets, even though we are more conscious than they could be of its ultimate inadequacy.
- from page 190, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament