One Man's Trespass

{It's the weekend, which, this time of year, means football and--for me--more blogging about Original Sin.  For anyone who may have lost count, the following is Part 14...}

As we have seen, it took Judaism about 2000 years to belatedly discover the flaw in the ointment of God’s creation; or, if you will, the worm in the apple of God’s eye.  Christianity was quicker to figure it out; in fact, Paul had set down the doctrine of Original Sin only a couple of decades after the term “Christians” came into use.  In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, composed around 56-58 CE, he wrote:

“Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned…many died through one man’s trespass…for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation…because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man…one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men…by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners…”

Neither Paul nor his immediate followers ever used the phrase “Original Sin”; that would be added later.¹ He unquestionably made, though, the first clear statement on record to the effect that Adam’s sin was seminal, precedent-setting, and determinative.  Surprisingly, though, Paul didn’t say that much more on the subject; he had other, and tastier, fish to fry.²

Like Augustine after him, Paul was much vexed by his own (and humanity’s) conflicted will.  Later in Romans, he cries out, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do!”  He then issues this memorable plea: “Wretched man that I am!  Who will save me from this body of death?”  But unlike the forlorn author of 2 Esdras who (as we saw) made similar complaints about the human condition, Paul’s question is rhetorical; the answer, he already believes, to “Who will save me…?” is “Christ Jesus”.  And it is that answer, not the preceding question or even humanity’s sinful condition, which is Paul’s ruling passion.

It’s essential to realize that Paul, often criticized for his pessimism, was in fact an optimist; for him, the bad news of the human predicament that so concerned 2 Esdras was more than offset by the Good News of “Christ Jesus”—as personally experienced by Paul himself on the road to Damascus—and by the expectation of the imminent coming of God’s Kingdom.  Paul, of course, did not live to see that Kingdom come, nor has anyone else to date; and as the years and decades and centuries have rolled indefatigably on, too often Paul’s eagerly proclaimed Good News has been overshadowed by the seemingly ubiquitous bad.  Jesus has come to be seen by many as either a figure from the past or a hope for the unspecifiable future, while man’s sinfulness has continued to be an ever present reality.  Christianity, like Judaism (and all humanity, really) before it, quickly became bogged down in history with no end in sight; accordingly, the notion of Original Sin became useful (to some) for its continuing explanatory power.  In light of both the failed eschatology—expectations of the end of the world—of the early Church and the persistent imperfection of even baptized Christians: it could only be that Adam’s Fall had been so great, and his descendants mired so deep in sin, that even the personal intervention by God Himself in the form of Jesus had not undone the damage of the primal transgression.

But all of that was long after Paul, and none of it was anticipated by him.  His sights were set on what he believed was the soon-to-arrive Kingdom; it never occurred to him that history was just getting started.  When he asserted (also in Romans), “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth up to the present time,” he was saying that the groaning and the labor pains were about to end.  Adam was the old and Christ Jesus was the new; Paul mentioned Adam only to serve as a contrast with Christ, not as a continuing template for Fallen humanity.  Unlike Augustine, Paul was not constructing an anthropology; he was establishing a triumphant Christology.³  Adam was only a foil, a straw man, introduced by Paul only to be quickly discarded, having served his limited purpose.  It would be up to later Christian theologians to set the straw man back on his feet and make, if not an idol, at least a fetish out of him.

Adam, to restate it, was the antithesis against which Paul’s affirmative thesis—“the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many”—was set and contrasted.  Adam, as sinful Man, illuminated by contrast the point Paul wanted to make: that God had acted (and was acting) graciously, generously, toward our salvation.  For Paul, Adam’s sin existed and was worth noting only to set the stage for Christ’s redemptive life, death, and resurrection.  Far from being a gloomy, sin-obsessed misanthrope, Paul was actually a rapturously lyrical herald of Good News.  Hear him out:

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize Good News when you hear it.  Such a breathtaking proclamation of love and hope surely reduces Adam’s sin to a trivial misdemeanor; in fact, it all but dismisses it entirely—“…the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us,” wrote Paul.  The “glory” to which he referred was also to be revealed in us, thereby replacing the “sin which dwells within [us].”  Without denying the often harsh statements that Paul made about the human condition and the human proclivity toward sin, it is vitally important to keep in mind the hopefulness that was his last word: the old Adam is obsolete, Christ the new Adam has appeared, and the world has been utterly and forever transformed.

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¹ The phrase itself, though not the doctrine, is attributed to Irenaeus, the second-century Bishop of Lyons who was involved in a controversy with certain Gnostics about the origin of Evil: the Gnostics blamed the Creator and Irenaeus, like Paul, blamed Adam.

² Paul repeats his charge about Adam in 1 Corinthians: “as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.  For as in Adam all die…”   None of this adds to what he wrote in Romans so far as Adam’s primal guilt is concerned.

³ Bernard Ramm (OFFENSE TO REASON) explains that “Paul is not [in Romans] primarily dealing with the indictment of humanity as sinful.  He is instead declaring the glorious redemption in Christ.”  To the extent that one can read, say, Romans 1:17-3:20 as constituting such an indictment—presented by Paul, admittedly, with a certain relish—it remains crucial to remember that, for Paul, mankind is ultimately acquitted by virtue of God’s graciousness in Christ Jesus.  It is true that Paul believes that humanity deserves condemnation, and escapes it through no merit of its own; but the fact remains that, however the verdict is arrived at, we are acquitted.  Later theologians, while not necessarily disputing the acquittal, would choose to pile on more and more evidence of humanity’s guilt: the greater our guilt, as we shall see, the greater God’s grace in forgiving us.