Sin of Adam

“ The Atonement of Broader Scope than Making Satisfaction for Adam's Sin: So far the Atonement has been considered only with reference to its effect upon the transgression of Adam. It is, however, of much broader scope than that. Not only must the sin of Adam be atoned, but satisfaction must be made for the sins of every man, if the integrity of the moral government of the world is to be preserved. Man is just as helpless with reference to his own, individual sins, as Adam was with reference to his sin. Man when he sins by breaking the laws of God, sins of course against divine law ”

“ In exact accordance with the doctrine that the sin of Adam is man's sin, and the guilt of Adam man's guilt, is that boundless and unimaginable grace that the Incarnate Word did not merely assume an individual human nature, but espoused in that assumption the whole nature ”

“ We are not responsible for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of generations? ”

“ The fact that they have committed actual transgression of their own will not justify the imputation of Adam's sin to them, any more than the fact that the posterity of Adam have committed actual transgressions of their own would be a sufficient reason for imputing the first sin of Adam to them. Nothing but a real union of nature and being can justify the imputation of Adam's sin ”

“ XIII.—And if the Roman empire did not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ. This is false, therefore its contradictory is true. The falsehood of the consequent is seen thus. Since by the sin of Adam we were all sinners, as the Apostle says:—"Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned,"—then, if Christ had not made satisfaction for Adam's sin by his death, we should still by our depraved nature be the children of wrath. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All men, without exception, are one with Adam; only believing men are one with Christ. The imputation of Adam's sin is not an arbitrary act in the sense that, if God so pleased, he could reckon it to the account of any beings in the universe, by a volition. The sin of Adam could not be imputed to the fallen angels, for example, and punished in them, because they never were one with Adam by unity of substance and nature. ”

“ But when you transgressed My commandment, sorrow and misery came to you in this land."
5 And Adam cried and said, "O Lord, do not cut me off for this, neither punish me with heavy plagues, nor yet repay me according to my sin; for we, of our own will, transgressed Your commandment, and ignored Your law, and tried to become gods like you, when Satan the enemy deceived us." ”

“ So Adam ate of the tree of disobedience, and was banished by his maker from that paradise of delight, and, in lieu of those happy days and that immortal life, fell alas! into this life of misery and woe, and at the last received sentence of death. Thenceforth the devil waxed strong and boastful through his victory; and, as the race of man multiplied, he prompted them in all manner of wickedness. So, wishing to cut short the growth of sin, God brought a deluge on the earth, and destroyed every living soul. But one single righteous man did God find in that generation ”

“ I began to wonder how God could be just and make a creature, whom He knew in advance would do what Adam is alleged to have done, and knew in advance the dreadful consequences that would follow it, not only to Adam himself, but to all the unborn generations yet to people the world. Especially was I perplexed to understand how God could be just and visit all the consequences of Adam's sin on his entire posterity for uncounted generations when they were and could be in no way responsible for it and could not help it. ”

“ I was further taught, that I was, in some way, answerable for Adam's sin,—that God made Adam the federal head of all mankind, and that all were bound by what he did;—that if he had done right, all would have come into the world pure, and good, and happy, and sure of eternal life; but that through his sin, we wore all born, not only utterly depraved, but guilty and liable to eternal damnation.
Then followed strange things about satisfaction to offended justice, trust in Christ's merits and righteousness, justification, regeneration, and sanctification, all mysteries as dark to me as night. ”

“ But we claim that it is unjust that any should suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of the guilt of Adam's sin is to contradict the main principle of the theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ might have taken it, when he took our nature. ”

“ This is the only way men can by any possibility be guilty of the original sin. Because they sinned in Adam, therefore they return to the dust from which Adam came -- says the apostle, "in whom all sinned". ”

“ This nature is what Adam transmitted to his posterity, and transmitted it such as his sin had made it, burdened with a debt which it could not pay, robbed of the righteousness with which God had originally invested it; and in every one of his descendants this impaired nature makes the persons sinners. Yet not in the same degree sinners as Adam was, for the latter sinned both as human nature and as a person, while new-born infants sin only as they possess the nature.”—more briefly, in Adam a person made nature sinful; in his posterity, nature makes persons sinful. ”

“ But as Adam, when he transgressed, took into his system a leaven of evil affections, so by participation all who were born of him, and the whole race of Adam, partook of that leaven, and ever since it has grown and increased, until the affections of sin have so developed in men that they have come to fornications and lasciviousnesses and idolatries and murders and other wrong things, until humanity is all leavened with evil. ”

“ If the original sin extends its effects to the latest generations of Adam, so the atonement will extend its effects to all his posterity, and redeem them from these consequences. But you may inquire, If we are to be redeemed from Adam's sin and its consequences, unconditionally, by the atonement, shall we not be restored into the condition Adam was in before he fell? I answer, You will be. What condition was he in? He was an immortal being, and you will be restored to immortality, whether you be Saints or sinners. The decree has gone forth that every man is to be raised to immortality. ”

“ As the first Adam brought sin on the race, the second Adam has put it away by the sacrifice of Himself. Men are lost now, not because of Adam's sin, nor because they were born into a race of sinners, but for the sin which they presumptuously and wilfully commit, or because by unbelief they contract themselves out of the benefits of Christ's death. ”

“ ADAM’s turning from God, to hear the voice of his own reason and imagination, and the suggestions of a satanical serpent, was that which created in him a new hardened heart, bold enough to eat of the forbidden tree. Now this rise of the first sin, demonstrates how the matter stands between God and every sinner, to the end of the world. The whole nature of God, his one unalterable will and work, stands in the same full opposition and contrariety to every work of sin in every man, as it did to Adam’s first transgression. ”

“ The Son of God is standing with outstretched arms to receive the father of our race,—the being whom He created, who sinned against his Maker, and for whose sin the marks of the crucifixion are borne upon the Saviour's form. As Adam discerns the prints of the cruel nails, he does not fall upon the bosom of his Lord, but in humiliation casts himself at His feet, crying, “Worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain!” ”

“ Paul also explained clearly, that Adam's sin had made all men sinners; and that therefore all men deserved the wrath of God; but that Christ, by His sufferings and death, had undone the evil brought upon all mankind by Adam, and purchased for them forgiveness and justification. ”

“ After all the preaching and writing about eternal death, damnation, hell-fire and brimstone as a result of Adam's sin, I could not find any such doctrine taught in the story of the fall, nor anywhere else in the Old Testament, and but very vaguely, if at all, in the New.
The story in Genesis cannot be construed by any reasonable rules of interpretation to mean or involve any other punishment on Adam or his posterity, for his sin, beyond physical death. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" is the final climax of the penalty. ”

“ Sin is due to man's weakness. It is a negative, not a positive, thing, an incident of finiteness. But conscience and Scripture testify that it is positive as well as negative, opposition to God as well as non-conformity to God.
Emmons was really a pantheist: “Since God,” he says, “works in all men both to will and to do of his good pleasure, it is as easy to account for the first offence of Adam as for any other sin.... There is no difficulty respecting the fall of Adam from his [pg 586] original state of perfection and purity into a state of sin and guilt, which is in any way peculiar.... ”

“ That is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat—that God should be just in punishing all mankind for Adam’s sin, and yet unjust in punishing one little child for its parents’ sin. If the one is just the other must be just too, I think. If you believe the one, why not believe the other? Why? Because Adam’s curse and “original” sin, as people call it, is a good and pleasant excuse for laying our sins and miseries at Adam’s door; but the same rule is not so pleasant in the case of filth and fever, when it lays other people’s miseries at our door. ”

“ According to this theory, every human soul is immediately created by God, and created as innocent, as free from depraved tendencies, and as perfectly able to obey God, as Adam was at his creation. The only effect of Adam's sin upon his posterity is the effect of evil example; it has in no way corrupted human nature; the only corruption of human nature is that habit of sinning which each individual contracts by persistent transgression of known law. ”

“ And it includes individuals most incapable of a conscious act of transgression such as Adam's was; it includes the heathen, and the infant, and the imbecile. Therefore wherever there is human nature, since Adam fell, there is sin, in its form of guilt. And therefore, in some sense which perhaps only the supreme Theologian Himself fully knows, but which we can follow a little way, all men offended in the First Man—so favourably conditioned, so gently tested. The guilt contracted by him is possessed also by them. ”

“ By the sin of Adam, he thought human nature was corrupted beyond recovery; man’s acts can only be bad; but Jesus Christ covers the soul with His infinite merits, which, as it were, conceal all trespasses from the eye of the just God; if sinful man expresses his firm ‘belief’ in this merciful dispensation, God will not punish him, though the sin is not taken away, but merely covered ”

“ First, Adam's sin, which the scriptures call the fall, was racial, in that it involved all the race of Adam in its consequences, bringing upon them both a spiritual and a physical death, the nature of which has already been explained. [A] Man's individual sin is more limited in its consequences though for a time his personal sins may involve the happiness of others in their consequences, yet ultimately they will be narrowed down to personal results; affecting the actual sinner's personal relationship to God, to righteousness, to truth, to progress, to happiness. ”

“ Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt. ”