Doctrine of Man (Part 14): Paul’s References to Adam in Romans 5

Paul’s References to Adam in Romans 5

Last time I argued that in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul may be moving beyond the parameters of the merely literary Adam to touch the historical Adam. He seems to say that in Adam we all die in the sense that we share a common mortal human nature with the man in the story. But insofar as he thinks of that man as chronologically prior to Christ he's placing him within real history. I think that we'll see that implication is confirmed as we turn now to the second crucial New Testament passage on Adam – Romans 5:12-21. Let's read this passage together.

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— sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

In this key passage, Paul extends his typology of Christ as the eschatological Adam from 1 Corinthians 15. Now, our interest in interpreting this theologically rich passage, perversely perhaps, is not in the benefits won for mankind by Jesus Christ through his obedience and death, but rather in what Paul asserts concerning Adam. In the series of contrasts drawn between Adam and Christ, our focus is in each case on the initial clause of the relevant sentence.

There has, of course, been enormous theological controversy about how to understand such expressions as “many died through one man’s trespass” (verse 15), “the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation” (verse 16), “because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man” (verse 17), “one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men” (verse 18), and “by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners” (verse 19).

Paul does not explain just how Adam’s sin is transmitted to his progeny. On the one hand Paul may mean that in virtue of Adam’s representative status or our corporate solidarity with Adam or some such notion, Adam’s sin in the Garden is imputed to each of us his progeny. That is to say, we are guilty before God in virtue of Adam’s wrongdoing and so under the condemnation of death. Whether the notion of imputation of sin is palatable to modern sensibilities is irrelevant to the interpretive question concerning this passage.

Now it is evident that if this interpretation of Paul’s teaching is correct, then the historicity of Adam and his fall immediately follows. For the sin of a non-existent person cannot be imputed to me such that I am held objectively guilty before God and liable to damnation. The sin of a purely literary Adam can have no effect on the world outside the fiction. The prominent commentator on the book of Romans, Douglas Moo, has rightly argued as follows:

The effects of Adam’s act in history (universal sinfulness and death) would seem to demand an Adam who sinned in history. I might, for instance, compare or contrast Aslan (from Chronicles of Narnia) with Christ to make a general theological point (as Aslan died for Edmund on the stone table, Christ died for us on the cross), but my listeners would be quite confused if I claimed that the White Witch introduced into our world a condition that Christ has saved us from. And the confusion would be quite natural: I would be positing events in our history caused by, respectively, a fictional character and a real character. Adam, as Paul makes clear, functions on the same historical plane as Moses, the law, and Christ (of whom he is the ‘type’).[1]

The imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity requires, then, I think, a historical Adam. If Paul’s doctrine involves such imputation, then it follows that he is teaching the historicity of Adam and his fall into sin.

But is that in fact Paul’s doctrine? Perhaps; but there is plenty of room for doubt that it is. The question is how to relate verse 12cd “as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” to verse 18a “one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men.” Moo rightly insists that some explanation is needed for why “people so consistently turn from good to evil of all kinds.”[2] Nobody thinks that everybody sins simply by sheer coincidence. Moo says, “Paul affirms in this passage that human solidarity in the sin of Adam is the explanation – and whether we explain this solidarity in terms of sinning in and with Adam or because of a corrupt nature inherited from him does not matter at this point.”[3]

I disagree with Moo on this. It seems to me that it is crucial that we understand that the first alternative (the imputation of Adam’s sin to us) in fact does nothing to explain why people consistently turn from good to evil and consistently sin, for imputation is purely a legal or forensic notion which has no effect whatever upon a person’s moral character. Moo himself later explains, “Paul is insisting that people were really ‘made’ sinners through Adam’s act of disobedience just as they are really ‘made righteous’ through Christ’s obedience. But this ‘making righteous’. . . means not to become ‘morally righteous’ people but to become ‘judicially righteous’ – to be judged acquitted, cleared of all charges.”[4] Similarly, he says, “People can be ‘made’ sinners in the sense that God considers them to be such by regarding Adam’s act as, at the same time, their act. . . . It seems fair, then, . . . to speak of imputation here.”[5] So he says, “We are dealing with a real, though forensic, situation:  people actually become sinners in solidarity with Adam–by God’s decision; people actually become ‘righteous’ in solidarity with Christ–again, by God’s decision.”[6] Such forensic (or judicial) transactions cannot explain why people consistently turn from good to evil. Just as the pardon of a condemned criminal does nothing to make him suddenly into a morally virtuous person but simply renders him no longer legally guilty, so also the imputation of legal guilt from Adam to us does not transform the moral character of an otherwise blameless person. So I don’t think that the doctrine of imputation suffices to answer Moo’s question as to why people consistently sin.

Because of this problem, the traditional doctrine of Original Sin postulates not just imputed guilt but also a corrupted character inherited from Adam.[7] Now the postulation of a corrupted human nature inherited from Adam would explain why people consistently sin – they have a corrupt and fallen nature that they have inherited from Adam. Such an interpretation of Romans 5 requires a historical Adam just as certainly as does the doctrine of imputation. For if we have a corrupted human nature inherited from Adam, then Adam has had real world effects and therefore cannot be simply a literary character. So if this interpretation is correct – if this is Paul’s doctrine – then, once again, his teaching implies the existence of a historical Adam.

I hope you're grasping the alternatives. The one is that Adam's sin is legally imputed to me so that I am reckoned to be guilty and liable to punishment because of what Adam did. The other alternative says, it's not necessarily imputation; rather, when Adam sinned he bestowed upon all of his descendants a corrupt nature so that they have a propensity to sin and that explains why sinning is universal throughout the human race. The traditional doctrine of Original Sin weds both of these alternatives together – that there is both the imputation of guilt coupled with the inheritance of a corrupted nature.

Does Paul, though, teach that we have inherited a corrupted human nature from Adam? As Professor Moo observes, the doctrine is, perhaps surprisingly, nowhere to be found in Romans 5:12-21. We tend to read it there, but in fact when you look at the passage it is nowhere to be found in that passage. That occasions the question: is there no other third alternative to imputation or corrupted nature for explaining why sin is so universal among the human race?

Of course there is another alternative! Our inherent self-seeking animal nature in combination with the web of corruption in which we are born and raised suffices to explain why sin is universal among humanity. That explains why all have sinned. It is worth noting in passing that when in Romans 1-3 Paul develops his doctrine of the universality of sin and condemnation of all men before God, he makes no appeal at all to the doctrine of Original Sin in any form. In Romans 5:12-21, then, Paul is, on this view, describing how the sin of Adam unleashes the power that results in all persons’ sinning, with the result that they are condemned to a spiritual death.

A moment’s reflection reveals that this interpretation of Paul’s Adam Christology also requires that Adam be a historical person. For sin and spiritual death are said to enter the world through him and to affect in turn all his descendants, including us. Paul’s expressions “before the law was given” and “from Adam to Moses” show that he is denominating real epochs of human history as affected by Adam’s act. An action that is wholly internal to a fiction cannot have effects outside the fiction; only an action that is external to the fiction can have real world effects. It follows that Adam and his sin are not just believed by Paul to be historical, but are actually asserted by Paul to be historical. He is saying that Adam opened the floodgate through which sin came into the world and then spread to all men.

It should be evident, I think, that my argument for taking Paul to assert that Adam was a real person of history is not defeated by simply distinguishing between the literary Adam of Genesis 2 and 3 and the historical Adam. For the argument is not based on Paul’s contrasting Adam with Christ, a literary figure with a person of history, but rather on the real world causal effects of Adam’s sin. It is impossible, for example, for Hamlet, though an individual in Shakespeare’s play, to have real world effects because Hamlet does not exist in the real world but exists only in the play, that is to say, in the play Hamlet exists (unlike, for example, Macbeth’s vision of a dagger). Paul thus teaches that Adam was a real person of history. This view accords with the genealogies that structure the primeval history in the book of Genesis, as we have seen, for the genealogies treat Adam and his descendants as real people.

Well, let's wrap up now.

The several references by New Testament authors to mythological or pseudepigraphal figures caution us to avoid overly easy proofs of Old Testament historicity on the basis of New Testament authority. Such figures can be merely literary and illustratively employed. Similarly, some New Testament references to Adam and other figures and events of the primeval history may describe merely the story world of Genesis, requiring at most truth-in-the-story. But in 1 Corinthians 15 and especially I think in Romans 5 we do have clear assertions of the historicity of Adam. What is asserted of the historical Adam in these key passages does not, however, really go beyond what we have already affirmed on the basis of our genre analysis of the primeval history in Genesis 1-11, namely, that there was a progenitor of the entire human race at some time in the past through whose disobedience moral evil entered the world. I think the New Testament simply underlines or ratifies what we already learned from our study of Genesis.

Whether we understand Paul to teach that Adam’s sin was imputed to every one of his descendants or that Adam’s sin corrupted human nature and thus affected all of his progeny or that Adam’s sin opened the floodgates to sin which then infected all who came after him, Adam is regarded by Paul as a historical person whose actions affect the course of history. We might prefer not to settle the question of just how Adam’s sin affects all mankind. Since Paul did not himself seek to explain this relationship, maybe we should just refrain as well. Still, it remains the case that Adam’s sin is, in Paul’s thinking, in some sense the fount of the sin and spiritual death that beset our world, and that suffices for the affirmation of a historical Adam.