We regard this theory of the Natural Headship of Adam as the most satisfactory of the theories mentioned, and as furnishing the most important help towards the understanding of the great problem of original sin. In its favor may be urged the following considerations:
A. It puts the most natural interpretation upon Rom. 5:12-21. In verse 12 of this passage—“death passed unto all men, for that all sinned”—the great majority of commentators regard the word “sinned” as describing a common transgression of the race in Adam. The death spoken of is, as the whole context shows, mainly though not exclusively physical. It has passed upon all—even upon those who have committed no conscious and personal transgression whereby to explain its infliction (verse 14). The legal phraseology of the passage shows that this infliction is not a matter of sovereign decree, but of judicial penalty (verses 13, 14, 15, 16, 18—“law,” “transgression,” “trespass,” “judgment ... of one unto condemnation,” “act of righteousness,” “justification”). As the explanation of this universal subjection to penalty, we are referred to Adam's sin. By that one act (“so,” verse 12)—the “trespass of the one” man (v. 15, 17), the “one trespass” (v. 18)—death came to all men, because all [not “have sinned”, but] sinned (πάντες ἥμαρτον—aorist of instantaneous past action)—that is, all sinned in “the one trespass” of “the one” man. Compare 1 Cor. 15:22—“As in Adam all die”—where the contrast with physical resurrection shows that physical death is meant; 2 Cor. 5:14—“one died for all, therefore all died.” See Commentaries of Meyer, Bengel, Olshausen, Philippi, Wordsworth, Lange, Godet, Shedd. This is also recognized as the correct interpretation of Paul's words by Beyschlag, Ritschl, and Pfleiderer, although no one of these three accepts Paul's doctrine as authoritative.
Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 2:58-60—“To understand the apostle's view, we must follow the exposition of Bengel (which is favored also by Meyer and Pfleiderer): ‘Because they—viz., in Adam—all have sinned’; they all, namely, who were included in Adam according to the O. T. view which sees the whole race to its founder, acted in his action.” Ritschl: “Certainly Paul treated the universal destiny of death as due to the sin of Adam. Nevertheless it is not yet suited for a theological rule just for the reason that the apostle has formed this idea;” in other words, Paul's teaching it does not make it binding upon our faith. Philippi, Com. on Rom., 168—Interpret Rom. 5:12—“one sinned for all, therefore all sinned,” by 2 Cor. 5:15—“one died for all, therefore all died.” Evans, in Presb. Rev., 1883:294—“by the trespass of the one the many died,” “by the trespass of the one, death reigned [pg 623]through the one,” “through the one man's disobedience”—all these phrases, and the phrases with respect to salvation which correspond to them, indicate that the fallen race and the redeemed race are each regarded as a multitude, a totality. So οἱ πάντεσ in 2 Cor. 5:14 indicates a corresponding conception of the organic unity of the race.
Prof. George B. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 32-40, 129-139, denies that Paul taught the sinning of all men in Adam: “They sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross. The believer's renewal is conceived as wrought in advance by those acts and experiences of Christ in which it has its ground. As the consequences of his vicarious sufferings are traced back to their cause, so are the consequences which flowed from the beginning of sin in Adam traced back to that original fount of evil and identified with it; but the latter statement should no more be treated as a rigid logical formula than the former, its counterpart.... There is a mystical identification of the procuring cause with its effect,—both in the case of Adam and of Christ.”
In our treatment of the New School theory of sin we have pointed out that the inability to understand the vital union of the believer with Christ incapacitates the New School theologian from understanding the organic union of the race with Adam. Paul's phrase “in Christ” meant more than that Christ is the type and beginner of salvation, and sinning in Adam meant more to Paul than following the example or acting in the spirit of our first father. In 2 Cor. 5:14 the argument is that since Christ died, all believers died to sin and death in him. Their resurrection-life is the same life that died and rose again in his death and resurrection. So Adam's sin is ours because the same life which transgressed and became corrupt in him has come down to us and is our possession. In Rom. 5:14, the individual and conscious sins to which the New School theory attaches the condemning sentence are expressly excluded, and in verses 15-19 the judgment is declared to be “of one trespass.” Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, of Rochester, says well: “Paul teaches that Adam's sin is ours, not potentially, but actually.” Of ἥμαρτον, he says: “This might conceivably be: (1) the historical aorist proper, used in its momentary sense; (2) the comprehensive or collective aorist, as in διῆλθεν in the same verse; (3) the aorist used in the sense of the English perfect, as in Rom. 3:23—πάντες γὰρ ἥμαρτον καὶ ὑστεροῦνται. In 5:12, the context determines with great probability that the aorist is used in the first of these senses.” We may add that interpreters are not wanting who so take ἥμαρτον in 3:23; see also margin of Rev. Version. But since the passage Rom. 5:12-19 is so important, we reserve to the close of this section a treatment of it in greater detail.
B. It permits whatever of truth there may be in the Federal theory and in the theory of Mediate Imputation to be combined with it, while neither of these latter theories can be justified to reason unless they are regarded as corollaries or accessories of the truth of Adam's Natural Headship. Only on this supposition of Natural Headship could God justly constitute Adam our representative, or hold us responsible for the depraved nature we have received from him. It moreover justifies God's ways, in postulating a real and a fair probation of our common nature as preliminary to imputation of sin—a truth which the theories just mentioned, in common with that of the New School, virtually deny,—while it rests upon correct philosophical principles with regard to will, ability, law, and accepts the Scriptural representations of the nature of sin, the penal character of death, the origin of the soul, and the oneness of the race in the transgression.
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:196-232, favors the view that sin consists simply in an inherited bias of our nature to evil, and that we are guilty from birth because we are sinful from birth. But he recognizes in Augustinianism the truth of the organic unity of the race and the implication of every member in its past history. He tells us that we must not regard man simply as an abstract or isolated individual. The atomistic theory regards society as having no existence other than that of the individuals who compose it. But it is nearer the truth to say that it is society which creates the individual, rather than that the individual creates society. Man does not come into existence a blank tablet on which external agencies may write whatever record they will. The individual is steeped in influences which are due to the past history [pg 624]of his kind. The individualistic theory runs counter to the most obvious facts of observation and experience. As a philosophy of life, Augustinianism has a depth and significance which the individualistic theory cannot claim.
Alvah Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 175 (2d ed.)—“Every child of Adam is accountable for the degree of sympathy which he has for the whole system of evil in the world, and with the primal act of disobedience among men. If that sympathy is full, whether expressed by deed or thought, if the whole force of his being is arrayed against heaven and on the side of hell, it is difficult to limit his responsibility.”Schleiermacher held that the guilt of original sin attached, not to the individual as an individual, but as a member of the race, so that the consciousness of race-union carried with it the consciousness of race-guilt. He held all men to be equally sinful and to differ only in their different reception of or attitude toward grace, sin being the universal malum metaphysicum of Spinoza; see Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 113.
C. While its fundamental presupposition—a determination of the will of each member of the race prior to his individual consciousness—is an hypothesis difficult in itself, it is an hypothesis which furnishes the key to many more difficulties than it suggests. Once allow that the race was one in its first ancestor and fell in him, and light is thrown on a problem otherwise insoluble—the problem of our accountability for a sinful nature which we have not personally and consciously originated. Since we cannot, with the three theories first mentioned, deny either of the terms of this problem—inborn depravity or accountability for it,—we accept this solution as the best attainable.
Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 20—“The whole swing of the pendulum of thought of to-day is away from the individual and towards the social point of view. Theories of society are supplementing theories of the individual. The solidarity of man is the regnant thought in both the scientific and the historical study of man. It is even running into the extreme of a determinism that annihilates the individual.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 43—“It was never less possible to deny the truth to which theology gives expression in its doctrine of original sin than in the present age. It is only one form of the universally recognized fact of heredity. There is a collective evil, for which the responsibility rests on the whole race of man. Of this common evil each man inherits his share; it is organized in his nature; it is established in his environment.”E. G. Robinson: “The tendency of modern theology [in the last generation] was to individualization, to make each man ‘a little Almighty.’ But the human race is one in kind, and in a sense is numerically one. The race lay potentially in Adam. The entire developing force of the race was in him. There is no carrying the race up, except from the starting-point of a fallen and guilty humanity.” Goethe said that while humanity ever advances, individual man remains the same.