Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, so we’ll get started in just a moment, and when we get started we’ll be picking up in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter five, verse twelve, which, as I just mentioned, off-microphone, is easily one of the most controversial passages in the Bible. And the reinterpretation of this passage by St. Augustine is really one of the major turning points in terms of the trajectory taken by Western theology over against Eastern theology, and so that Western theology in this case includes both Roman Catholics and Protestants. So it is an important passage we’re about to get into. And there’s a little bit of a turn here, so I’ll be brief in sort of catching us up, in that St. Paul is really beginning a new section here with chapter five, verse twelve.

As we’ve seen and as we’ve mentioned, this letter is being written by St. Paul to the Church in Rome after the return of the Jews who had been expelled by Claudius from the city of Rome, and so there’s been a period of probably a couple of years where the Gentile Church has been operating on its own, without any synagogues, without any Jewish members, and now that the Jewish members are coming back into the city, St. Paul is concerned that the Church might end up splitting into a Jewish church and a Gentile church, and he wants to prevent that. So he’s been talking about the nature of justification. We’ve talked about what that means a little bit. He’s been talking to them about the last judgment. He’s been talking to them about the Torah and what role it correctly played in Jewish life and the role that it plays in Christian life.

And he’s been primarily talking, so far—and that’s why I say there’s a bit of a turn here— So far he’s been primarily talking about, at least in the last couple of chapters, about Abraham and about how Abraham was declared to be righteous based on his faithfulness, even before he was circumcised. And St. Paul has been using circumcision as sort of a symbol for the Torah as a whole, particularly the Pharisaic party within Judaism had been arguing that the way that one is established to be one of the righteous, one of those on Christ’s right hand when he comes to judge the living and the dead, is by having kept the commandments of the Torah, specifically the ones directed at the Jewish people, like circumcision, like keeping kosher, like observing the Jewish feasts, like tassels on garments and types of clothing and this sort of thing, not primarily the moral aspects but all of these details: this is what makes you one of the righteous. That was one argument. The other argument was that simply being Jewish, simply being from Israel, being a descendant of Abraham, made you one of God’s people and therefore you were one of the ones that was going to be vindicated when Christ returns.

So St. Paul’s been opposing both of those. He’s been opposing the idea that that’s what the Torah’s for and that that’s how that works, and doing that through this idea that Abraham was considered their father, was considered to be righteous and the friend of God before circumcision and well before the Torah, hundreds of years before the Torah as a whole. And on the other side that the people who are really the children of Abraham are the people who are faithful to God’s promises in the way that Abraham was.

And we talked about how faith, as it’s being used here, really means faithfulness, that it involves actions. Abraham didn’t just say, “Oh, thanks, God. Yeah, I believe you, that you’re going to give me this land on the other side of the world,” and sit there in Ur. He got up and went. And the example of David in the psalms that St. Paul used: David wasn’t just being thankful because God had chosen him at random to forgive his sins; David was repenting of his sins: he was doing something. He had received the promise from God that if he repented, he would be forgiven, which is a promise he didn’t deserve, just like Abraham didn’t deserve or do anything to earn the land that God was giving him. But faith, the idea of faith and belief, includes action based on that belief. Abraham got up because he believed God, and took his family to the other side of the world to this land that he was going to be given. David repented because he believed that God would judge him for his sins, but that he would forgive him if he repented and so he repented; he took that action.

So all of that, then, brings us to Romans 5:12, where he’s going to turn from Abraham as an example; he’s going to go all the way back to Adam, and he’s going to be talking about the whole period— This isn’t all out of left field in the sense that he’s now completely changed the argument. He’s still talking about the Torah and how it functions, but now he’s going all the way back to talk about the whole period from the beginning of the world and Adam up to Moses when the Torah was given. That whole period of time, he’s going to talk about that, because this gives us a picture of what the world without the Torah was like, which he’s going to use to try to argue for, based on that, what the purpose of the Torah is and is not.

So unless there are any questions or comments or accusations or anything else, we’ll go ahead and get started in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, chapter five, verse twelve.

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—for until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of him who was to come.

We’ll pause there. This is, again, chewy; it’s going to take us a bit to go through it. [Laughter] But to set the stage, these verses that we just read are the origin of the entire idea of original sin in the West, the way St. Augustine understood, in particular understood these verses. That was then built upon by people who came after him and developed into the idea of original sin that’s held by both Catholics and Protestants, our Catholic and Protestant friends, to this very day.

So we’ll go through it now a little more slowly. “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world—” Well, who’s the one man?

Q1: Adam?

Fr. Stephen: Adam. So you have the first man: through him sin comes into the world. Sin doesn’t come into existence—because, remember, there was somebody who tempted him and Eve. So there was already rebellion going on in terms of angelic beings, but it comes into this world through Adam—through Adam, when he sins.

“And death through sin.” Well, that’s how death came into the world. Because Adam sinned, he becomes mortal. He becomes subject to death. That’s what God warned him about beforehand, remember? He said, “The day you eat of this tree, you will surely die.” So that’s how death comes into the world for humans, at least, minimally. For humans, it comes through Adam’s— Sin comes into the world; it brings death.

“And thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.” So everybody who’s lived since then has died, and it’s because of sin. All have sinned. St. Paul then—

And they put this in parentheses, which is okay—it’s kind of a parenthetical comment. In the Orthodox Study Bible, they put it in parentheses: “For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” So we know there’s sin in the world between Adam and Moses. Obviously, you can read Genesis. There’s plenty of sinning going on! [Laughter] Especially leading up to the flood. So there’s sin and depravity in the world, and it’s bringing death everywhere it goes. St. Paul makes the point now: sin is not reckoned when there’s no law. Now remember this is the point he had made earlier in Romans when he was speaking to the Gentiles. When he starts speaking to the Gentiles in chapter one, he says, “Now the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” Why? Because in former times, as he also said in Acts 17 to the Athenians— In former times God has overlooked—he’s been patient with—your sins. Gentiles have been out there sinning, but they didn’t receive the law. And so God has been being patient with them; he’s been letting it slide as it were up until now. But now that they’re hearing the Gospel preached to them, now they’re accountable for it. That’s the point he made back in Romans 1. So this is the same point he’s making here, that, until there’s a commandment, you don’t know— you don’t necessarily know where the lines are in terms of what sin is.

Q2: I have a question regarding verse 13. The commentary specifically says, okay, “Until the law came, sin worked freely in the world. From Adam to Moses, people suffered from mortality and committed sin,” just like you said. “They were accountable to God for their sin under natural law. But without the written law, the seriousness of their sin remained clouded.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is where I’m going. [Laughter] No, it’s okay. Not exactly what this says, because the natural law thing is a little iffy.

So it wasn’t reckoned against them, but, as he says, “Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of him who was to come.” So what is “sinning in the likeness of Adam”? Well, God specifically told Adam, “Don’t do this,” and Adam went and did it. So that’s— You’re transgressing a commandment. You have a law, it’s been given to you, and you’re breaking it. And so St. Paul is saying these people, they didn’t have the law, so sin wasn’t— Yes, this is this period which he mentioned before where God was being patient with them and not bringing the full judgment on them. But St. Paul is saying: they still died—because they sinned.

Q1: Because they sinned.

Fr. Stephen: Because that’s the consequence of sin, is death. If you go and play in the street, you might get hit by a car. It doesn’t matter if someone told you not to play in the street or not. It’s not like: “Well, no one told me, so now it’s impossible for a car to hit me.” [Laughter] So no one had been told— Even though St. Paul hasn’t gotten to them yet, he will, coming up here in a little bit, make this point more specifically by— He’s sort of telegraphing where he’s going in terms of: Why, then, was the Torah given to Moses? One of the reasons, as we’ve already talked about, was to point out sin so that you could avoid it and/or repent of it, because the Torah includes, remember, the whole sacrificial system, this whole system for managing and dealing with sin when it happens. And so St. Paul’s kind of telegraphing that. So, yeah, there was no Torah during this time. God was being patient with people, but they still died, because that’s the consequences of sin. So sin, and therefore death, have come into the world through Adam.

Q1: Is there still judgment that takes place in this time? I guess it doesn’t matter for us?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, judgment— Remember what judgment is.

Q1: Oh, that’s right!

Fr. Stephen: Judgment is rectifying—

Q1: Maybe it’s a bad…

Fr. Stephen: So the flood was a form of judgment.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Of wiping the slate clean and putting everything back where it was supposed to be, for example. We’ve got to keep that idea of judgment in our mind, because part of the problem here, that I’ll talk about in a second, which is where St. Augustine’s understanding of this goes wrong, is the view that judgment is God punishing people: “You did bad; I’m going to punish you.” And so, yeah, there wasn’t that kind of judgment during this period—that kind of judgment—but that’s not what St. Paul’s talking about here, so let’s just get to it.

St. Augustine reads this, albeit in Latin, and understands the phrase, “death spread to all men, because all sinned.” He says, well, in his mind, “judgment is God punishing sin; death is the death penalty.”

Q1: I see.

Fr. Stephen: “God kills people for their sins.” And so when he reads this he says, “Well, wait a minute! If there was no law during this time—“and St. Paul seems to be saying that people couldn’t be convicted because they didn’t have a law that they transgressed”—why did they still die?” And so he reads it in reverse and says, “Oh, they still died because when Adam sinned, they all sinned.” So he says God holds every human being from conception guilty—he holds them to be guilty—of what Adam did, and will give them the death penalthy for it—as it develops later on, will send them to hell for it. So in the Roman Catholic system, infant baptism is because they believe baptism washes away the guilt of Adam’s sin. So in the Roman Catholic system, a baby that dies without being baptized goes to hell.

Q1: Ah, because of Adam’s sin.

Fr. Stephen: Because of Adam’s sin: God condemns them for Adam’s sin. Our Protestant friends, most of them—not all, but most of them—believe in baptismal regeneration, meaning that they don’t believe that baptism actually does that; but they do believe in this definition of original sin. They just believe it’s forgiven by Christ. And our Calvinist friends go further and argue that this guilt, this taint of Adam’s sin, causes human beings to be conceived and then born in a state of total depravity: they’re completely wicked in every way.

Q1: And only election spares an arbitrary few.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The people who are elect— In the Calvinist system, the people who are elect, who have been chosen by God: the Holy Spirit comes and regenerates them. They don’t believe it has anything to do with baptism. The Holy Spirit comes and regenerates them, and they’re born again. The Holy Spirit does it to them; it’s not something they do. And then the other people are just left that way, and so they go to hell. [Laughter]

So you can imagine, I have lots of problems all over with this, but there are several just basic biblical problems, so I’ll stick to those. Number one, in the garden of Eden, God says, “In the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” In the Hebrew it literally says, “Dying, you will die.” [Laughter] If you translate it very woodenly, literally: you’re going to die when you do this. He doesn’t say, “If you do this, I will kill you.” And after they do it, he doesn’t say, “Well, now I’ve got to kill them.” He says to his divine council, “Now they’ve become like one of us, knowing good and evil. If they eat from the tree of life, they’ll live forever in this state, in this wicked state.” If they had been allowed to eat from the tree of life, then sinful humans would be like demons; they’d be eternally wicked. And so God expels human beings from Eden, cuts them off from the tree of life so that they will die, so that they will be able to come to repentance. But nowhere in there does it say that he’s going to kill them to punish them for what they did.

So right off the bat, if God doesn’t kill people when they die, then if he didn’t kill Adam for Adam’s sin, he’s certainly not going to kill anyone else for Adam’s sin, if he didn’t kill Adam himself for it.

Q1: It sounds like this idea of death is a condition apart of God, apart from God.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the consequences of what happens when you sin. [Laughter]

Q1: Okay. It’s not an action that God is acting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he doesn’t have to.

Q2: It’s not really his place.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s nature taking its course. As St. Paul is going to say coming up, “The wages of sin is death.” When somebody gives you your paycheck at the end of the workweek, you don’t say, “Oh, gee! Thank you!” [Laughter] Because you earned it; it’s the product of your work. And that’s what death is: it’s the product of your work; you earned it. Cause and effect. And God allows that to happen by cutting humanity off from the tree of life, because it’s better that we die and therefore be able to repent. This is why Christ’s resurrection is so important, his physical bodily resurrection. It’s because not only has God given us now the ability to repent, but he’s given us new life on the other side of death, a new and better life, not just this life forever, which would be hell, but life on the other side of death.

So that’s problem one with that view, is that God didn’t kill Adam to punish him for his sin, and so he’s certainly not going to kill anyone else to punish them for Adam’s sin. But now let’s look at this passage. Do you see anything about guilt in these verses we just read? Does the word ever appear?

Q3: No?

Fr. Stephen: Does the word “judge” or “condemn,” like “condemn to death”?

Q1: It says, “Judgment came to all men…”

Fr. Stephen: No, the verses we just read.

Q1: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll get to verse 18, yeah. No. It talks about how death came to everyone. It’s not talking about how everyone became guilty; it’s not talking about how everyone became condemned before God, which is how both the Roman Catholic view and the Protestant view interpret this, that this is St. Paul describing how all of us became guilty before God and in need of a savior, because what Christ primarily does in that system is get us off the hook for the guilt, for the sins we’re guilty of, keep us from being punished for them. But nowhere in these verses does it talk about guilt or us being guilty before God. In fact, the only place where it sideways talks about that is where St. Paul is saying, “Well, yeah, where there’s no law, sin is not imputed!” So he’s sort of saying those people weren’t held guilty, but they still died because they sinned. Sin spreads to everyone, and so everyone dies: that’s what he’s saying. It’s fairly clear.

And so this passage— Not only does the original in the Old Testament about Adam not teach anything about that, this passage is not talking about anything like that. So the issue, as we’re going to see here— Now we’re going to continue, because at the end he’s starting to segue; he said that Adam’s the type of this one who is to come, who is Christ. “Type” means like an image or parallel. So what he’s about to talk about Christ doing is going to be parallel to what he just talked about with Adam. So let’s— We’ll come back, but let’s read the next few verses.

“But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died—” So he doesn’t say, “through the one man’s offense many became guilty, many came under judgment.” Adam committed an offense. He had a commandment; he broke it. And through that offense, many died; death came to all humanity.

“—much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.” If this is true, how much more? Notice the parallel here: the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ. The grace of God; the grace of Jesus Christ—it’s the same grace. So this is St. Paul, again, not subtly telling us that Christ is God and he’s man. Just for people keeping track.

—abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the 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.

[Laughter] We’re going to go through it! Okay, so in the same way he starts out with: Look, Adam, he commits this one offense, and because of that everyone dies. Parallel is Christ: through him, through his grace— Remember what is grace? It’s the action of God. So through what Christ does, now, the gift abounds to many. And remember— The other thing you have to remember as you’re looking at this in the Orthodox Study Bible—it’s been a while since I pointed this out, but every word that’s in italics isn’t really there. Every word that’s in italics has been added to the English translation. So that’s kind of important, too. [Laughter] So the “that which came” is added and the “which came.” So if we kind of quasi-ignore those words, we get that the gift, the gift that comes to us through Christ, is not like the death that came through the one who sinned, Adam.

How is it different? St. Paul’s saying that it’s different; here’s how it’s different. The judgment that resulted from one person in condemnation, but the free gift for many offenses produces justification. So what’s justification and what’s judgment? Remember what we’ve been saying: judgment is when God corrects things, puts things back into a state of justice, puts things back into the way it should be. So judgment describes what happens to everyone in that situation. Judgment can be a positive thing: if you’re one of the poor, one of the oppressed, one of the weak, one of the suffering among God’s people, judgment is a good thing. If you’re one of the other people, it’s a bad thing, and that’s where it’s condemnation or wrath. So sin entering the world produces the need for God to come and judge the world. That’s why he has to come and put things back, because of sin. Sin enters the world through Adam; it spreads through Genesis 6-9. It spreads through all the world. Death reigns: that’s the language he uses. Death reigns over everyone.

That means that when God comes to fix the world, when God comes to judge—we’ll use the flood as an example—that’s a lot of condemnation. Noah and his family—you’ve got seven people who are, in this situation, justified, who are vindicated. The whole rest of the world is condemned as a result of sin. So that’s what St. Paul is talking about when he says through this one offense and sin entering the world, this produced a lot of condemnation. But St. Paul then says the many offenses—all the sins humans commit—that produced the need for God to judge the world again, but, through Christ now, rather than that being like the time of the flood— where now we’re all going to be condemned, because all of us are wicked—through Christ now there’s this great many who are going to be justified, who are going to be vindicated, who are going to be saved. So he’s saying that’s the difference. And that’s what makes what happens through Christ a gift and grace.

Q1: This really changes the character of the way— To look at it from a Protestant point of view, radically changes it, because it’s like: “I’m going to save you from me delivering a right hook” to “I’m going to save you from just the natural consequences.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “I’m going to save you from self-destruction.”

Q1: Right! Yes! It’s sort of like this is just: “You’ve entered into the natural consequence of being a sinner. I’m going to save you from it.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Christ has stepped in, which he did not need to do—he could have, in all justice, just condemned all of us, let us go to perdition, but he steps in and makes now the many, a group of people who believe in him: makes them righteous, makes them the righteous, so that when the judgment happens there is this group now that is righteous, that is vindicated. So he turns judgment and condemnation into salvation. And, unlike with Adam— With Adam what happens is just this natural thing of the consequences playing out, but Christ is stepping in and giving this gift, which is parallel to the promises made to Abraham, which he didn’t do anything to deserve, but God stepped in and made them. And he appropriated them by his faithfulness, by believing and acting upon his belief. So the same thing is going on here. Christ has stepped in and prepared this gift. We act upon it by believing and taking action based on that belief. And so the people who believe and take action based on that belief are the people who are going to be vindicated when the judgment comes, not just people who happen to be ethnically descended from Abraham, not the people who have never eaten pork, not the people who wear tassels on their garments.

Q2: Not the people who are predestined to eternal life.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not that more either. We’ll get more into that when we get to Romans 9.

Q2: It really just does take the onus off, or it changes the character of the Protestants’ look at salvation, where it’s “Meet this category or else.” Or sort of like “For you to meet this category or to check this box or something like that, or I will act on you—well, I’ve decided not to act on you.” This view is: “You’re going to die. You’re going to go to hell. I’m trying to save you from that.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “God wills that none should perish, but that all should turn and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Q2: Which fits more— It seems to fit better with the entire character of what we know—

Fr. Stephen: —of God in Scripture.

Q2: Right. It’s a more true fit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so it’s almost the opposite in the sense that that view essentially is based—or those views, I should say, because it’s a whole bunch of Protestant and Roman Catholic views— are based on the idea that in salvation, God changes. God changes the way he looks at you. God changes the way he acts towards you. God was going to treat you like a sinner, but now he treats you like his son. Or God was going to— You were under wrath; now you’re under grace, God’s grace. Or somehow God has changed vis-à-vis you. But what St. Paul is actually saying here is that Christ has stepped in to change you.

Q2: To change us so that we don’t destroy us, we don’t destroy ourselves.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to change you.

Q4: You know, “God can change his mind to help us” is kind of what turned me into an atheist to begin with.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter]

Q2: When you think about it, it really places more of an onus upon us, in terms of: “Oh, I fit this category; therefore I changed his mind” to “There’s no—”

Fr. Stephen: There’s no box to check, there’s no bar to clear…

Q2: There’s no shortcut around this: You must become holy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q2: You must become holy, for your own sake.

Fr. Stephen: By following Christ, yeah.

Q2: So there’s no gizmos.

Fr. Stephen: This is the gift that he’s offered you. If you want to turn it down and go to your destruction… That’s not what he wants, but you’re free to do it.