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As an unnerved Joseph said later, "Any Serb still left in Kosovo when the refugees return had better be packing his bags."

What we see illustrated here is that victims can become victimizers in a blink. Thus it has been throughout the millennia. In the refugee camps, there are gatherings in the evening where adults respond enthusiastically as children recite poems they have memorized about Serbian atrocities. Thus one generation after another teaches the children whom to despise.

But this is just ancient Balkan hatred, isn't it? We Americans wouldn't do anything like that, would we? Imagine, however, that an armed horde came into a beautiful American village and burned down the houses, made a special point of defacing the churches, rounded up the young men and shot them, and then rampaged through the streets trashing everything in sight. What if they then gave us and our grandparents and young children 10 minutes to get out, taking away all our personal documents, birth certificates, and family photos, and sent us off with no medicine, food, or water, through mountains more rugged than the Adirondacks with nothing on the other side except towns inhabited by people several notches down the socioeconomic scale? What attitude would you and I have then?

Suppose further that we were sitting around in refugee camps which had become "sweltering caldrons of hate," where there is nothing useful to do except commiserate about what the enemy has perpetrated upon us. Can any of us be sure that, in such a context, we would step forward, risking our own lives, to save a collaborator from our own countrymen? A lot depends on circumstances. We have never been in a situation like that, so how do we know what we would do?

Paul, in Romans, paints one of the most comprehensive pictures of human wickedness in the Bible. No one is excluded. "All human beings, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written, 'None is righteous, no, not one'" (3:9–10).

All of us are part of the human mob. This is a phenomenon to which Paul assigns the name of the first man, "Ad am." Somehow God's good creation has gone terribly wrong, and the entire human race is implicated.

Paul wants to make sure we understand this; he says it in five different ways. "Many died through one man's [Adam' s] trespass. … 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" (5:15–19).

Thus "Adam" is the name Paul gives to a development in human existence whereby we have all been taken captive by a power greater than we are, the power of sin and death. It is this power that motivates us, generation after generation, to hate black people or Serbs or Yankees or Tutsis or Jews or homosexuals. As one exhausted refugee said, "When will it ever end?"

The biblical answer is that it can never end unless there is an intervention from beyond this world order altogether. The psalmist understands the desperate predicament he is in; he cries out to God, "Rescue me from sinking in the mire; let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters. Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me" (Psalm 69:14–15). The trespass of Adam, Paul writes, has made captives of us all and the result is condemnation for all human beings. There is no hope of our race improving itself in any definitive way, except by the mercy of God. We all hope for good things to happen in the new millennium; some of these things are genuinely possible, like a cure for cancer, but human nature being what it is, it is also possible that our grandchildren will contract smallpox in a bioterrorist attack. Such is our world as Paul describes it for us.

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October 2 2000, Vol. 44, No. 11