17: Original Sin, Imputation, and Inability

Socrates was, as usual, after definitions. In particular he wanted definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This business of finding definitions was, for him, an existential question. His life, and even the state of the “life hereafter” depended upon it. He was being tried for corrupting the youth of Athens, and death might be the penalty.

When Socrates met Euthyphro it seemed as though the end of his quest had come. Euthyphro knew all the definitions that men and gods had given. But Socrates wanted a definition of holiness, regardless of what men or gods say about it. So he died without the desired definitions. For him the good is good in itself, and god or the gods must look up to it as such. For him man was the center and final reference point of all predication.

Paul, the apostle, was also in search of definitions. He too wanted definitions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. For him too the finding of definitions was a matter of life and death. When Paul met Christ the end of his search had really come. Christ was God. In the Scriptures as the Word of Christ his Lord, Paul found himself defined by God. Henceforth his mind was subject to the mind of Christ. Paul had found, or rather had been found of God. For him the true, the good, and the beautiful are what they are by his Creator’s and his Redeemer’s ordinance. The holy is holy because God says it is holy.

At this point a new search for a new kind of definitions began for Paul. His chief concern was now to learn how great was the grace of Christ to him, how great was the love of God that sent his Son into the world to save not only him but also a numberless host of others with him, to be members of the body of Christ. Here was corporate salvation.

Here “the gift of grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many” and here “they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:15,17). “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21).

Sinners are constituted righteous by the righteousness of one, even Jesus Christ. Here was imputed righteousness. And on its basis, Paul knew, he had true ability to serve his Saviour.

The Analogy. Having seen the vision of corporate salvation in Christ, Paul also sees the vision of corporate sin. All men have sinned in Adam. Through the “offense of one many be dead.” Judgment was “by one to condemnation.” By “one man’s offence death reigned by one.” “For as by one man’s disobedience many were constituted sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be constituted righteous” (Rom. 5:19).

1. Original Sin. So deep, says Paul, is the nature of our sin that, as death comes to Adam for his sin, death comes also to all men “for that all have sinned.” Thus Paul speaks of “the one sin and the sin of all.” “We must not tone down either the singularity or the universality” (J. Murray, Epistle to the Romans, Vol. I, p. 186).

We cannot ask: When does the individual become a sinner? “For the truth is that each person never exists as other than sinful. He is eternally contemplated by God as sinful by reason of the solidarity with Adam, and, whenever the person comes to be actually he comes to be as sinful” (J. Murray, The Imputation of Adam’s Sin, p. 90).

Paul’s sense of guilt is deepened, not reduced, because of this his view of original sin.

2. Imputed Sin. Paul says that all men were in Adam “constituted sinners” as believers are in Christ “constituted righteous” (ibid., p. 88). There is “as truly an imputation of the disobedience of Adam as there is of the obedience of Christ” (ibid.). God contemplates all men as actually one with Adam in his sin. There is “as truly an imputation of the disobedience of Adam as there is of the obedience of Christ. As the latter imputation is not that of the benefit accruing follows upon the imputation, so the former must not be conceived as the liability entailed but the liability as flowing from the imputation” (ibid.). Thus “the kind of relationship which Adam sustains to men is after the pattern of the relationship which Christ sustains to men” (p. 39; cf. 1 Cor. 15:22, 45–49).

3. Inability. Only when the Church, with Paul, confesses its sin as being corporate and imputed does it sense its spiritual inability. Due to the fall in Adam “we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil” (Westminster Confession). The natural man “is able to perform moral acts, good as well as evil” which are “as to the matter of them” prescribed by the moral law (C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 261). But the natural man, due to his false motivation and aim cannot “perform any act in such a way as to merit the approbation of God” (p. 264). Man cannot regenerate himself, and as unregenerate he is under the wrath of God.

The Contradiction. What would Socrates have said about all this: definitions of grace and sin given to man by sheer authority—original sin, imputed sin, and spiritual inability? Out with one and all of them!

In modern times no one has expressed the Socratic attitude more pointedly than did Immanuel Kant. For Kant human personality is altogether a law unto itself. Its autonomy is its freedom.

Kant’s moral consciousness is, for him, the ultimate source of the distinction between good and evil. Kant, as well as Socrates, wants to discover the nature of sin regardless of what God says about it.

The Synthesis. 1. Pelagius. In addition to open opposition to its confession of sin, the Church has always faced the problem of the synthesizers. Holding to an essentially Socratic view, Pelagius insisted that sin “consists only in the deliberate choice of evil. It presupposes knowledge of what is evil, as well as the full power of choosing or rejecting it” (ibid., p. 153). Away then with solidaric sin, with imputed sin, and with spiritual inability.

The Pelagian view was too obviously anti-Christian to be tolerated as such in the Christian Church. But soon the process of synthesis began again. The semi-Pelagians sought for a compromise between the Socratic and the Pauline views.

2. Roman Catholicism. Then in terms of a framework of theology itself taken in part from Aristotle and in part from the Scripture, the Roman Catholic church developed a further refinement of synthesis in its view of sin. Since man, as first created, was in part composed of matter, this fact implied an inherent defect in man as such. God therefore gave man at the outset a superadded gift. Conceivably man could exist without this gift. And even without this gift he would, though defective, not be, properly speaking, sinful.

Accordingly, in the course of time Romanist theology, while teaching original sin, imputation, and inability, toned down the meaning of these doctrines in terms of the Aristotelian notion of negation (H. Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, Vol. III, pp. 84–85).

3. The Reformation. Over against this Roman Catholic view the Protestant Reformation recovered and developed the scriptural view of grace and with it the scriptural view of sin. Instead of viewing sin as, even in part, due to any limitation of being, the Reformers thought of Adam as created without any defect and of his sin as a willful transgression of the known will of God. The deep sense of guilt expressed in the Protestant confessions rests upon this truly ethical concept of the relation of man to God.

4. Modern Theologians. But within the Protestant churches a contest has broken out. This time the dispute concerns the question of what constitutes a truly ethical relation of man to God. Building on Kant’s view of the autonomous moral self, modern theologians hold that the historic Protestant view of sin and grace is anything but ethical.

To be truly ethical, these modern theologians contend, man must be thought of as truly free. And how can he be truly free unless autonomous?

With his “ethical” view of man and God, the modern theologian reinterprets the biblical view of original sin, of imputation, and of inability. The modern theologian seeks, to be sure, to be biblical and Christological in his view of sin. But the Christ in terms of whom grace and sin are interpreted is himself first reinterpreted according to the demands of an independent moral consciousness.

5. Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is well known that Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology, violently rejects as unethical the idea that God should have made “the destiny of the whole human race contingent upon a single moment, the fortunes of which rested with two inexperienced individuals, who, moreover, never dreamt of its having such importance” (The Christian Faith, p. 301). For Schleiermacher “what is now innate sinfulness was something native also to the first pair” (p. 301). Thus finite being is, as such, assumed to be inherently defective. Schleiermacher’s supposedly ethical view of man thus appears to be more fully controlled by a nonbiblical metaphysic than does the Romanist view.

6. Albrecht Ritschl. Albrecht Ritschl seeks to be more truly Christological in his theology than Schleiermacher. In reality the framework of Ritschl’s theology is more obviously patterned after the requirements of Kant’s autonomous moral consciousness than is that of Schleiermacher. The ideas of solidaric, imputed sin and inability in the biblical sense are ruled out, together with Adam as the first man through whom sin came into the world.

7. Karl Barth. Much more complicated is the question of Karl Barth’s concept of original sin, imputation, and inability. Barth’s aim is to offer a Theology of the Word. He wants to build on Reformation “principles.” But the Kantian idea of free personality rules supreme in Barth’s theology.

Barth seeks to be far more truly Christological in his approach to all questions of theology than were Schleiermacher and Ritschl. But he will not submit his thinking to the Christ who died for sinners once for all in history. And Barth will not submit his thinking to this Christ as he speaks once for all in Scripture.

Barth has no room for the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to sinners on the basis of his finished work on Calvary. Barth’s view of substitutionary atonement rests on the idea that all men have from all eternity been participant in the being of God through Christ. Thus in his case it is once again a non-Christian metaphysic that chokes the biblical view of grace.

And Barth’s view of sin is patterned after his view of grace. When we deal with a passage such as we find in Romans 5, Barth avers, we must not speak of Adam and Christ but of Christ and Adam. Paul is primarily speaking of the righteousness of God.

The original relationship of every man is to Christ. “Jesus Christ is the secret truth about the essential nature of man, and even sinful man is still essentially related to Him” (K. Barth, Christ and Adam, 1st ed., p. 86). “In Christ the relationship between the one and the many is original, in Adam it is only a copy of that original. Our relationship to Adam depends for its reality on our relationship to Christ” (pp. 58–59).

This primacy of Christ over Adam, according to Barth, involves this: that “sin is subordinate to grace, and that it is grace that has the last word about the true nature of man” (p. 43). Human nature appears in both Adam and Christ, but “the humanity of Adam is only real and genuine insofar as it reflects and corresponds to the humanity of Christ” (p. 34). “We are real men in our relationship to Adam, only because Adam is not our head and we are not his members, because above Adam and before Adam is Christ. Our relationship to Christ has an essential priority and superiority over our relationship to Adam” (p. 34). It is because of this basic priority of Christ “human existence as con-constituted by our relationship with Adam in our unhappy past as weak, sinners, godless, enemies, has no independent reality, status, or importance of its own” (p. 30).

Barth has, therefore, no more room for the biblical teachings on original sin, imputation, and spiritual inability than do Schleiermacher and Ritschl. The supposedly ethical view of human personality precludes, in the case of all three of these typically modern theologians, the truly biblical and therefore truly ethical view of sin and its effects. For on the non-biblical view human personality must act in a vacuum.

Modern theologians either reinterpret or openly reject the biblical view of sin. So, for example, Paul Tillich speaks of the “literalistic absurdities” of the traditional Protestant view (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, p. 40). But what is the foundation on the basis of which Tillich makes this charge? He makes it on the basis of his idea of Christ as the New Being. But he knows very well that “the quest for the New Being presupposes the presence of the New Being as the search for truth presupposes the presence of truth” (p. 80). Tillich cannot identify his New Being with a Christ that is really present to man. Thus it appears again that unless we take our definition of sin from the Christ as speaking directly in Scripture we have no intelligible foundation even for our basic hostilities.

Bibliography: K. Barth, Church Dogmatics; Christ and Adam; H. Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek; G. C. Berkouwer, De Zonde, Vols. I, II; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology; J. Murray, The Imputation of Adam’s Sin; A. Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation; F. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith.

Professor of Apologetics

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

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