Fr. Stephen De Young: And it’s not just— To answer one of the criticisms from the other side, it’s not just that God made it possible for you to be saved, and now you go do it yourself, because we’re still talking about grace here; we’re still talking about God’s action. God is— You can’t become righteous or become holy on your own, but you can choose to cooperate with God in you becoming holy. We become, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5:9, God’s coworkers. God is working in the world to save it, transform it. Christ is making all things new, as he says in the book of Revelation. He’s transforming and transfiguring the whole world. We can cooperate with what he’s doing and be a part of it, and in so doing we’re also transformed and made new. Or we can not cooperate, fight against it, and resist it, and then we end up destroying ourselves.

But, yeah, that’s what St. Paul is teaching here. There’s nothing here about guilt or some kind of criminal trial, where you’re guilty of this and now you’re going to be punished. [Laughter] There’s nothing about punishment. You’ve got to import those ideas. And there’s not a good place in the Scriptures to import them from, because they’re not there in the Old Testament. As we saw, they’re not there with the original story of Adam and Eve in the garden that St. Paul’s referring to, so you can’t import them from there. You’ve got to import them from somewhere outside of the Scriptures to get that idea.

I hate to sound like I’m picking on St. Augustine, and I don’t want to…

C1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: He did, but— And I don’t want to go on a big digression about St. Augustine, but unfortunately in a lot of areas, he just marks—partially because of his linguistic abilities and things like that and the way things worked out in Western history, and who came after him and how they used his work and all these sort of things—he really did become this pivot point on a lot of these doctrinal issues, where they went in sort of the wrong direction. So he is a saint. [Laughter] He is a Father of the Church. I’m not imputing his personal character. It’s just unfortunately, historically, he is sort of the pivot on some of these things, and a lot of it was what people after him did with what he wrote, not him himself.

So St. Paul continues: “For if by one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” So what’s the contrast here? Death and life, not guilt and innocence. [Laughter] Not any of these things. It’s death and life. Adam’s sin and our sin brings death; Christ brings life—eternal life.

C1: Very dense. Very theologically dense verses.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And you know that phrase, “reign in life,” remember: death reigned. Death reigned from Adam to Moses, but we reign in life with Christ, not life reigns over—notice the difference. Death reigns over us. Sin and death make us passive; they control us and destroy us, whereas the life that comes through Jesus Christ empowers us so that we reign with Christ in life.

“Therefore, as through one man’s offense”—and notice those are added words—“judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation. Even so, through one man’s righteous act, the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.” So through the one man’s offense, judgment now is required, which brings condemnation. Through Christ’s one act, referring to his death and his resurrection, through his willing offering himself to death, now life comes. Life comes as a free gift to all men.

“For as by one man’s disobedience, many were made sinners, so also by one man’s obedience, many will be made righteous.” This is parallel. And notice in his last words: “Through disobedience, many were made sinners.” That’s active. It doesn’t say, “Many were made guilty of sin.” People became sinners, meaning they’re sinning, and so that means the same on the other side. “So also, by one man’s obedience”—by Christ’s obedience—“many will be made righteous.” So that means being righteous is not just a passive thing either. It’s not guilt and innocence or, as many of our Protestant friends would have it, guilty, condemned, now you have the righteousness of Christ.

C1: Because you said you have the righteousness of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, given to you and holy, so now you’re—boom—righteous. But these people are becoming righteous in the same way that they became sinners.

C1: Yeah, you’re positively evil or positively righteous.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the reason it’s “will be made righteous” is because, again, you don’t do it under your own power. It’s not by, like, imitating Christ and being obedient to him, now you’ve earned your way to becoming, but you’re cooperating with God, who is making you righteous and making you holy. And we’ll get into that more; he’s going to expand on that more a little later, St. Paul. But notice those are parallel.

So the parallel is death and life, sinning and being made righteous. He’s flipped those. Remember, before he had death reigning and making us passive, parallel to reigning in life, where we’re active. Now he has sinners, which is active—going out and sinning—compared to being made righteous, which is passive—because the truth is that there’s synergy, there’s co-working, in both of those. You didn’t choose to be mortal when you were born. So death was already reigning over you from conception. So you already had the effects of Adam’s sin, in the sense of being mortal, being subject to corruption, all of these things, and then we chose to sin. We cooperated with it. We cooperated with death.

The same is true on the other side. God is making is righteous. He’s making us holy; that’s what sanctification is. He’s doing these things, and we are called to cooperating with him, faithfully, in the same way St. Paul elsewhere is going to talk about: “Previously, you offered yourselves as slaves to sin,” which is interesting. Offering yourself as a slave is interesting language. You voluntarily made yourself subject to involuntary servitude! [Laughter] He says, “Now offer yourselves to Christ and to righteousness.”

C1: Right. Well, slavery— As a slave, as subject to authority. You’re choosing death as an authority over you.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s now controlling your actions, but you voluntarily put yourself in that position. In the same way now, voluntarily put yourself under Christ’s authority. To quote Bob Dylan, since we were talking about the ‘60s, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” [Laughter]

“Moreover, the law entered, that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more. So that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” So what does it mean that the law entered so that offense might abound? Remember how I was using “offense”: “offense” means to sit in the likeness of Adam. You know the rule; you choose to break it. So by the law being added, offenses abound. There was still just as much sin without it, but now that the law is there, now it’s offenses! [Laughter]

And so that means now there’s what? There’s an awareness of sin, and there’s an awareness of the need for and the means of repentance for that sin. So now offenses abound, “but where sin abounded, grace abounded much more,” because where sin was known, where it was realized and where there was the means of repentance, repentance and grace of God is working. That’s what grace is. God is working: to forgive, to heal, to transform.

C1: To overcome them.

Fr. Stephen: “So that, as sin reigned in death,” over everybody after Adam, “even so, grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” So the reason God allowed that sin to continue to progress and why he then adds the Torah and then has the Gospel preached, so that now all those Gentiles’ sins, as the Gospel preached, now become offenses and are now liable to judgment, is so that there can be repentance, grace, forgiveness, and so that in the way sin had been ruling before the law, before the Gospel of Jesus Christ came, sin was reigning over them through death, now, through that repentance and through God’s grace and forgiveness and transformation of people, now that grace can come to reign over the world, because he transforms it in Christ.

So the last bit here, in terms of this passage, is, as many have pointed out— We have at least an absolute parallel here, meaning everything St. Paul says about Adam and sin and death is at least as true, if not more true, about Christ and righteousness and eternal life. At least: more so, is really what St. Paul is saying.

So this has been a passage that another group of people, other than our Augustinian friends, have sometimes used to try to argue for universalism, including our friend, Karl Barth, that Adam sins, death reigns, death comes to everybody: everybody dies—so now Christ comes, Christ is obedient: hey, everybody—everybody lives.

Here’s the problem. [Laughter] What that does is it welds together two different issues. It welds together a certain idea of judgment and the idea of life and death in a way that’s not totally dissimilar from what Augustine does, because it says: Well, if—if people are set free from death, then that means God isn’t going to judge them. And the problem is the judging in this context is, again, this negative view of judgment, as punishment of sins. When, as we’ve seen what judgment is correctly— So everyone gets judged; it’s just a good thing for some people and a bad thing for others when the judgment comes. Judgment is being corrected and being straightened out.

So they’ve welded those things together. The truth is—and we saw this back in the gospel of John very clearly—who rises from the dead in the resurrection? When Christ returns and the dead are raised, who rises from the dead? It’s not really a trick question.

C1: Oh! Ev— Doesn’t everyone get to come forth?

Fr. Stephen: Everybody, yeah! Everybody! Exactly, everybody! [Laughter] Yeah, everybody rises from the dead.

C1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Everybody! That’s why I said it wasn’t a trick question. So Christ says in St. John’s gospel; he says, “The time is coming and now is when all who lie in the graves—all who lie in the graves—will hear the voice of the Son of Man, and he who hears will live: those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.”

C2: I’ve also heard there was Catholic doctrine that they believe that Christ descended into Hades before he was resurrected.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get into that later. [Laughter]

C2: That’s just what I heard.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll get into that. We do, too, but we’ll get into what that means later. We mean something different, too, though.

Christ has defeated death, the reign of death, for everyone, for all humans. In the same way that death came to reign over all humans through Adam, St. Paul is saying death no longer reigns over all humans through Christ. Every human being who has ever lived is going to be raised from the dead, but then there is the judgment.

C2: And those who hear him, his words, live in life?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

C2: So live in eternally in death. Well, live eternally—

Fr. Stephen: Right, so the judgment happens after that. This adjustment happens after that, where the wicked who have prospered suffer loss, where those who have been afflicted are vindicated; the righteous are vindicated out of the world. That happens after the resurrection.

This is an important distinction, because we’re going to come to other passages, in St. Paul’s writings and elsewhere, that people want to bring forward this idea of universalism, because there are statements that talk about everyone, like here: this is talking about everybody.

C2: All are risen from the dead.

Fr. Stephen: Those are talking about—and here in the context, it’s clearly life and death, death and life, death through Adam, life through Christ—that those universal statements are talking about the fact that everyone is set free from death. Everyone is set free from not just death, and that’s not the focus of this passage—when we get into 1 and 2 Corinthians, we’ll talk more about this, and Galatians. Everyone is set free from the dominion of the devil, because the devil, the demonic powers, rule over this world through what?

C2: Fear and death.

Fr. Stephen: Sin and death. Yeah, the fear of death, sin. That’s how they rule. Christ has defeated them.

C2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: It’s Christ who judges the living and the dead, not the demons. They don’t own anybody. Sorry, tollhouses. [Laughter] They don’t judge anybody. Christ judges everyone, because he’s the Lord of all, because he’s defeated them.

So there are these elements that are universal, and so it shouldn’t surprise us when we see universal statements regarding life and death, regarding the defeat of the demonic powers. And so in particular, when we get to the place in the pastoral epistles where St. Paul says that Christ is the Savior of all men, especially those who believe, this is what it’s talking about.

C2: Huh!

Fr. Stephen: He saved everyone from death and the devil. But those who believe, even more so. [Laughter] They participate in the fullness of who Christ is and what he has done by following him. But there are universal, cosmic elements to what Christ has done. God is redeeming his creation, the whole world, and everyone is raised up on the last day. St. Paul is pointing to that here, and that’s why he makes the broad, sweeping statements.

C1: Okay, so they are freed from sin… Those who lived in sin are then freed from, well, the wages of sin. They’re freed from the wages of sin—is that right?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

C1: Okay, so from that point, what? I mean, do they—? Are they—?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it would be better to say, they don’t— As Ecclesiastes puts it, they don’t die like dogs. I love dogs, but they don’t all go to heaven. Sorry.

C3: Aw!

C1: So pit bulls are obviously going.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, but there’s a fundamental difference. There’s a fundamental difference, and it’s not because animals don’t have souls. Guess what? They do. [Laughter] Several places in Scriptures talk about animals having souls. St. Gregory Palamas wrote a whole treatise on the fact that animals have souls. That’s not the difference.

C1: Oh! Okay.

Fr. Stephen: The difference is God himself did not— God did not make dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, sheep in his image. He did not become incarnate as any of those creatures, and so those creatures are not going to be raised up on the last day. They die and they’re dead. And Ecclesiastes in one of its most— Ecclesiastes is a great book, because it’s just depressing all the way through. [Laughter] It’s like a Smiths album in the Bible. [Laughter] Yeah, it’s The Cure’s Disintegration in the middle of the Wisdom literature. And in one of its most depressing moments, it says men just die like dogs.

But that’s not true. But it’s because of being created in the image of God—Christ being the image of God—created in and by Christ, the Logos, as you’re reading. And Christ becomes incarnate as one of us, and Christ raises us up on the last day. So that’s what every person, no matter how sinful…

C1: They do get raised from the dead.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

C1: To live forever as a…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well? Yeah!

C1: The way that they have always lived, to continue that trajectory.

Fr. Stephen: To continue the trajectory they’ve begun.

C1: So the… To give them what they would have gotten if they’d allowed Adam to eat of the tree of life after he said.

Fr. Stephen: Right, essentially, yes.

C1: Okay. To eventually become—

Fr. Stephen: There is— This life is the period of rep— This life in this world is the period of repentance we’ve been given by God by being exiled from the tree of life. But the time comes— So that’s different than the angelic beings, who were— Once they rebel, that’s it. That’s it forever. They don’t get that. They don’t get this material, mortal life in this world. St. John of Damascus says that’s the difference, why they can’t repent. We get this, but once this is over, that opportunity is gone. And so if we remain on that negative trajectory at the judgment, we’re confirmed in it. If we get on the other trajectory, at the judgment we’re confirmed in it.

C1: And it’s just an eternal slide into darkness for them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That’s why the picture in the book of Revelation is that they’re cast into the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels: it wasn’t prepared for humans.

C1: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: This place wasn’t prepared for humans; it was prepared for the devil and his angels.

C4: Also the devil is separate. He’s in a prison, too.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But the devil and his angels. But because they’ve become like him, that’s where they end up, too, because they followed him in his rebellion. This is what the Fathers are talking about, like when St. Isaac the Syrian said that this life is given to us for repentance; don’t waste it on vain pursuits. This is our opportunity to follow Christ. This is our opportunity to change, to repent, to grow in the knowledge of the Lord. And we look at cat pictures on Facebook. [Laughter] That’s the best example I can come up with of a vain pursuit. [Laughter]

C4: The entirety of human knowledge is in our pockets, and yet we’re all still going…

Fr. Stephen: We’re all still looking at pictures of cats and funny videos of people falling down. But so this is telling us to have a different view of… And this is what St. Paul is really doing here when he’s talking about righteousness and justification. He’s calling on us to have a different view of our life here and what its purpose is.

C1: Am I to understand also that this pursuit of holiness continues also afterward?

Fr. Stephen: Right. It continues after our death, because we as finite creatures, there’s an infinite distance between us and God, which means we can continue to grow in the knowledge and the wisdom and in our perception of the glory of God for all eternity. We’re never going to get to the point where we’re like: “I know it all. I’ve seen it all. I comprehend all of God’s mysteries.” That goes on. That progress goes on forever.

And this goes back to what we were already talking about, in terms of the difference between us and our Protestant and Roman Catholic friends. Salvation is not a static state that you achieve. [Laughter] “Now I’m saved. Now I go to heaven, and in heaven I am in this static state.” It is dynamic. It’s something we’re doing and experiencing throughout this life and into the life of the world to come. It’s not a static state, either one we achieve all at once or a state of grace that we work to get into and then fall back out of and then try to get back into, in the Roman Catholic system. It’s not this flat state. And in the Roman Catholic system, eternity is the beatific vision where you’re just sort of staring at God in this static state. It’s not static! It’s dynamic. This is one of the big emphases of St. Maximus the Confessor., whom I know you’ve been reading. It’s that God creates everything in motion, in motion towards himself, not static.

C1: Things in motion not yet at rest, and things got to be their own end, or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Contra-Plato, where everything at rest is good and everything in motion is bad. [Laughter]

C1: Yeah, that’s it. This was actually the first one, from his Ambigua, “On the Beginning and End of Rational Creatures.”

Fr. Stephen: So, all of that said, which was quite a lot, we’ll go ahead and end here, since we’re at a chapter break. That’s probably enough for tonight. We didn’t get through many verses, but as I said at the beginning, this is a very important passage in terms of defining the whole trajectory of theology in the West in terms of their—I’ll just say it—misinterpretation of it and importation of foreign categories, and then on the other side our understanding of salvation and what it is and how it happens. Thank you, everybody!

C3: Thank you.