The true test of a theory is, not that it can itself be explained, but that it is capable of explaining. The atomic theory in chemistry, the theory of the ether in physics, the theory of gravitation, the theory of evolution, are all in themselves indemonstrable hypotheses, provisionally accepted simply because, if granted, they unify great aggregations of facts. Coleridge said that original sin is the one mystery that makes all other things clear. In this mystery, however, there is nothing self-contradictory or arbitrary. Gladden, What is Left? 131—“Heredity is God working in us, and environment is God working around us.” Whether we adopt the theory of Augustine or not, the facts of universal moral obliquity and universal human suffering confront us. We are compelled to reconcile these facts with our faith in the righteousness and goodness of God. Augustine gives us a unifying principle which, better than any other, explains these facts and justifies them. On the solidarity of the race, see Bruce, The Providential Order, 280-310, and art. on Sin, by Bernard, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
D. This theory finds support in the conclusions of modern science: with regard to the moral law, as requiring right states as well as right acts; with regard to the human will, as including subconscious and unconscious bent and determination; with regard to heredity, and the transmission of evil character; with regard to the unity and solidarity of the human race. [pg 625] The Augustinian theory may therefore be called an ethical or theological interpretation of certain incontestable and acknowledged biological facts.
Ribot, Heredity, 1—“Heredity is that biological law by which all beings endowed with life tend to repeat themselves in their descendants; it is for the species what personal identity is for the individual. By it a groundwork remains unchanged amid incessant variations. By it nature ever copies and imitates herself.” Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 202-218—“In man's moral condition we find arrested development; reversion to a savage type; hypocritical and self-protective mimicry of virtue; parasitism; physical and moral abnormality; deep-seated perversion of faculty.” Simon, Reconciliation, 154 sq.—“The organism was affected before the individuals which are its successive differentiations and products were affected.... Humanity as an organism received an injury from sin. It received that injury at the very beginning.... At the moment when the seed began to germinate disease entered and it was smitten with death on account of sin.”
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 134—“A general notion has no actual or possible metaphysical existence. All real existence is necessarily singular and individual. The only way to give the notion any metaphysical significance is to turn it into a law inherent in reality, and this attempt will fail unless we finally conceive this law as a rule according to which a basal intelligence proceeds in positing individuals.” Sheldon, in the Methodist Review, March, 1901:214-227, applies this explanation to the doctrine of original sin. Men have a common nature, he says, only in the sense that they are resembling personalities. If we literally died in Adam, we also literally died in Christ. There is no all-inclusive Christ, any more than there is an all-inclusive Adam. We regard this argument as proving the precise opposite of its intended conclusion. There is an all-inclusive Christ, and the fundamental error of most of those who oppose Augustinianism is that they misconceive the union of the believer with Christ. “A basal intelligence” here “posits individuals.” And so with the relation of men to Adam. Here too there is “a law inherent in reality”—the regular working of the divine will, according to which like produces like, and a sinful germ reproduces itself.
E. We are to remember, however, that while this theory of the method of our union with Adam is merely a valuable hypothesis, the problem which it seeks to explain is, in both its terms, presented to us both by conscience and by Scripture. In connection with this problem a central fact is announced in Scripture, which we feel compelled to believe upon divine testimony, even though every attempted explanation should prove unsatisfactory. That central fact, which constitutes the substance of the Scripture doctrine of original sin, is simply this: that the sin of Adam is the immediate cause and ground of inborn depravity, guilt and condemnation to the whole human race.
Three things must be received on Scripture testimony: (1) inborn depravity; (2) guilt and condemnation therefor; (3) Adam's sin the cause and ground of both. From these three positions of Scripture it seems not only natural, but inevitable, to draw the inference that we “all sinned” in Adam. The Augustinian theory simply puts in a link of connection between two sets of facts which otherwise would be difficult to reconcile. But, in putting in that link of connection, it claims that it is merely bringing out into clear light an underlying but implicit assumption of Paul's reasoning, and this it seeks to prove by showing that upon no other assumption can Paul's reasoning be understood at all. Since the passage in Rom. 5:12-19 is so important, we proceed to examine it in greater detail. Our treatment is mainly a reproduction of the substance of Shedd's Commentary, although we have combined with it remarks from Meyer, Schaff, Moule, and others.
Exposition of Rom. 5:12-19.—Parallel between the salvation in Christ and the ruin that has come through Adam, in each case through no personal act of our own, neither by our earning salvation in the case of the life received through Christ, nor by our individually sinning in the case of the death received through Adam. The statement of the parallel is begun in
Verse 12: “as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” so (as we may complete the interrupted sentence) by one man righteousness [pg 626]entered into the world, and life by righteousness, and so life passed upon all men, because all became partakers of this righteousness. Both physical and spiritual death is meant. That it is physical is shown (1) from verse 14; (2) from the allusion to Gen. 3:19; (3) from the universal Jewish and Christian assumption that physical death was the result of Adam's sin. See Wisdom 2:23, 24; Sirach 25:24; 2 Esdras 3:7, 21; 7:11, 46, 48, 118; 9:19; John 8:44; 1 Cor. 15:21. That it is spiritual, is evident from Rom. 5:18, 21, where ζωή is the opposite of θάνατος, and from 2 Tim. 1:10, where the same contrast occurs. The οὔτος in verse 12 shows the mode in which historically death has come to all, namely, that the one sinned, and thereby brought death to all; in other words, death is the effect, of which the sin of the one is the cause. By Adam's act, physical and spiritual death passed upon all men, because all sinned. ἐφ᾽ ᾦ = because, on the ground of the fact that, for the reason that, all sinned. πάντες = all, without exception, infants included, as verse 14 teaches.
Ἥμαρτον mentions the particular reason why all men died, viz., because all men sinned. It is the aorist of momentary past action—sinned when, through the one, sin entered into the world. It is as much as to say, “because, when Adam sinned, all men sinned in and with him.” This is proved by the succeeding explanatory context (verses 15-19), in which it is reiterated five times in succession that one and only one sin is the cause of the death that befalls all men. Compare 1 Cor. 15:22. The senses “all were sinful,” “all became sinful,” are inadmissible, for ἁμαρτάνειν is not ἁμαρτωλὸν γίγνεσθαι or εἶναι. The sense “death passed upon all men, because all have consciously and personally sinned,”is contradicted (1) by verse 14, in which it is asserted that certain persons who are a part of πάντες, the subject of ἥμαρτον, and who suffer the death which is the penalty of sin, did not commit sins resembling Adam's first sin, i. e., individual and conscious transgressions; and (2) by verses 15-19, in which it is asserted repeatedly that only one sin, and not millions of transgressions, is the cause of the death of all men. This sense would seem to require ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἁμαρτάνουσιν. Neither can ἥμαρτον have the sense “were accounted and treated as sinners”; for (1) there is no other instance in Scripture where this active verb has a passive signification; and (2) the passive makes ἥμαρτον to denote God's action, and not man's. This would not furnish the justification of the infliction of death, which Paul is seeking,
Verse 13 begins a demonstration of the proposition, in Verse 12, that death comes to all, because all men sinned the one sin of the one man. The argument is as follows: Before the law sin existed; for there was death, the penalty of sin. But this sin was not sin committed against the Mosaic law, because that law was not yet in existence. The death in the world prior to that law proves that there must have been some other law, against which sin had been committed.