Q16. Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression?
A. The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression.
We should open off with an objection. This is an objection that only arose once the assumptions of ancient Pelagianism had taken root again in the modern church. It comes in reaction to where Paul says, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). What many focus on is the last words—because all sinned. So in other words everything Paul says before becomes conditioned those last words.
To say it one more way—the Pelagian objects—“All that Paul means by sin coming into the world through this man is something like an open door to the devil, and then sin and death spread more like a virus. Sin is ‘airborne’ and affects us all from the outside. It is each man’s sin that is added up to all men’s sins in the aggregate.”
But this is to ignore the wider context even of this section of Scripture, let alone other passages that deal with the same subject matter. New Testament scholar Guy Waters gives a helpful summary of the two main passages where Paul deals with this, one being Romans 5:12-21 and the other being 1 Corinthians 15:20-23, 44-49. “In both these passages,” Waters says,
“Paul offers a sustained comparison of the persons and actions of Adam and Jesus Christ. Adam and Christ are representative men whose actions have determined the eternal destinies of those whom each represent … [and here is the logic of the context] If Paul understands Jesus’s representative work in covenantal terms, and if Paul understands Jesus and Adam to be parallel as representative persons, then we are bound to understand Adam’s representative work in covenantal terms.”1
All Human Beings Were Represented by Adam
The first words remind us that this was God’s way—THE COVENANT BEING MADE WITH ADAM. It was God’s idea and it was his rule. You cannot say that you believe in the sovereignty of God (or really, You cannot say that you believe in God being God at all) if you deny to him to right the make such a covenant and to place all in it. At the end of the day, what we have here is a window into God authoring the whole story. And all complaints against Adam’s representative role must reduce themselves to a complaint that God writes us into that larger narrative.
So what was the nature of this representation? Here the answer continues, NOT ONLY FOR HIMSELF, BUT FOR HIS POSTERITY. Adam could not sit down at the table with God as an equal party. The terms were sovereignly delivered to him. But Adam did agree; and he agreed for us. In those words of Genesis 2:16-17, he received the terms on your behalf and mine. Several arguments could be offered that Adam agreed to it, but on a common sense level, if he had not agreed to it, then this would have only moved back the first sin to this failure to obey. Since the terms of the covenant were not optional, it follows that any disagreement (whether in thought, word, or deed) would have been a sin before the first sin, and so would have itself been the real first sin. But no such sin is even hinted. Therefore Adam fully agreed to this.
The Confession uses the language of our first parents, “They being the root of mankind” (VI.3). So is this representation something “organic,” for lack of a better term. Is it a living relationship where what is passed on is passed on simply and solely “by ordinary generation,” as VI.3 of the Confession continues? What we want to say is that this “root” is both living and legal, or we might say, organic and forensic. And both are encompassed by the concept of a covenant. So Watson says, that Adam’s sin is ours “By imputation … [and] by propagation.”2 Turretin puts it best where he says,
“For the bond between Adam and his posterity is twofold: (1) natural, as he is the father, and we are his children; (2) political and forensic, as he was the prince and representative head of the whole human race. Therefore the foundation of imputation is not only the natural connection which exists between us and Adam (since, in that case, all his sins might be imputed to us), but mainly the moral and federal (in virtue of which God entered into covenant with him as our head). Hence Adam stood in that sin not as a private person, but as a public and representative person — representing all his posterity in that action and whose demerit equally pertains to all.”3
This is the true meaning to the Psalmist’s lament, “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). As we saw last time, the root of this sin was not fundamentally sensual. David is not saying that his mother’s conception of him was sinful as such, but that David, as much as all of his ancestors, stand in a stream of sin. There is no other line after Adam from which to be conceived.
Hodge set forth a six-point argument for the fact of Adam’s representation of his whole race. I will list the first four, and five and six have to do with naturally revealed truths and are not as much part of the fabric of the questions which follow: “(1.) Because everything said to him had as much reference to his posterity as to Adam himself … (2.) In the second place, it is an outstanding undeniable fact, that the penalty which Adam incurred has fallen upon his whole race … (3.) Not only did the ancient Jews infer the representative character of Adam from the record given in Genesis, but the inspired writers of the New Testament [e.g. Rom. 5:12, 1 Cor. 15:22] … (4.) This great fact is made the ground on which the whole plan of redemption is founded. As we fell in Adam, we are saved in Christ. To deny the principle in the one case, is to deny it in the other.”4
All Human Beings Fell in Adam
We begin with the scope of who is affected: ALL MANKIND. Elsewhere Paul says this: “ For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21-22). Here are two “alls,” or two human races. But before we can get to the second, we must deal with the first. All mankind is in Adam. Calvinism speaks of “total depravity.” There are a few things that the “total” in total depravity; but the first totality to bear in mind is that totality of the human race. This follows from what we have plainly seen, that, “he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).
This is an important point in apologetics. We will find ourselves at odds not only with explicit atheists and agnostics here, but also with so-called Progressive (or Liberal) Christianity. Some account must be made of the undeniable fact that wicked behavior is the norm, that societal downgrade is just the collective expression of this same norm. If the Christian doctrine were not true, then we would expect to find some “pocket of resistance,” or some group that had gotten together, quarantined the real source of this mess, started over and maintained an upward moral trajectory. But in fact we find the opposite.
Even G. K. Chesterton, who was no friend of Calvinism, understood this much.
“The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”5
So there is a total war over how this thing called “sin” has affected all.
We will get a chance to clearly distinguish between the inheriting of Adam’s nature and the imputing of Adam’s guilt. For now, let’s just keep things as simple and picturesque as this answer does. It says, DESCENDING FROM HIM BY ORDINARY GENERATION, SINNED IN HIM, AND FELL WITH HIM IN HIS FIRST TRANSGRESSION. Now this first expression, to have “sinned in him” is particularly offensive to our modern sensibilities. We will object that, “Nobody asked me!” and “I would have done better!” And it would be tempting for the orthodox to respond to this by asking, “Would you have done better?” The response is a potential distraction, as the claim of the Reformed doctrine is much more than that all would have done the same, or (given sin) we have no right to complain now. We must keep firmly in our minds the more necessary truth that no creature has a right to complain to begin with, even sin being removed from the picture.
Now the 1 Corinthians 15 passage is especially instructive in this way. It is not only a legal comparison that Paul makes when comparing Adam and Christ, as he does in Romans 5. But in 1 Corinthians 15, when speaking of the resurrection, Christ is called a “firstfruits” that represents the harvest of all of the believers. He represents them as an offering of a new creation unto God.
In his commentary, Leon Morris focuses on this repeated “firstfruits” idea in verses 20 and 23 to show the connection between Christ’s resurrection and the guarantee of ours. The firstfruits were brought by the head of the home, thus representing the whole family. So the resurrected Christ is like an offering, going before us, and “In a sense, it consecrated the whole harvest.”6
But there is more than this imagery that treats the resurrection representatively. Waters explains: “Paul speaks of the resurrection of Christ in comparison with Adam … Paul declares, ‘As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ (15:22) … The action of each representative person carries a corresponding result: ‘For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection from the dead’ (15:21).”7 Waters then goes on the show how verses 44-49 expand on this contrast: “Adam is ‘the first man Adam’ (15:45), ‘the first man’ (15:47). Jesus is ‘the last Adam’ (15:45), ‘the second man’ (15:47). This framework helps us understand Paul’s comparing and contrasting the ‘dead body of the believer and his resurrection body’ at 15:42-44a. These two bodies correspond to the two ages overseen by the two representative men, Adam and Christ, and the ‘two different modes of existence pertaining to them.’”8
Let us finally put together SINNED IN HIM and FELL IN HIM and that IN HIS FIRST TRANSGRESSION. And in order to do that, I want to circle back to those last words of Romans 5:12 that we opened with—because all sinned. We saw what the Pelagian assumption does with this. It divorces this from the words that came before it, and how “sin came into the world through one man.” What we are going to see now is that there is more context just after in verse 14. Waters makes the case that verse 14 strongly conditions the meaning of verses 12’s words “because all sinned.” Notice Paul’s words in verse 14, that,
“death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.”
The whole thing turns on this word “sinning.” This sinning of ours is connected to the sin and death that Adam’s sin brought into the world. But should we view this only to be Paul “moving on,” parenthetically, to distinguish between Adam’s original sin and our actual sins? That may seem reasonable at first glance. But does that fit the overall context of 5:12-21 where the dominant note is the contrast between Adam’s act and Christ’s act? Waters suggest this: “Paul says in 5:12 that ‘death spread to all men because all sinned,’ that is, they did not sin by imitating Adam (5:13-14), but they sinned when the one sin of their representative head was counted their own.”9 In short, the phrases “because all sinned” (v. 12) and “whose sinning” (v. 14) both refer to that representative sin of Adam in which all in him were counted as sinners.
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1. Waters, “The Covenant of Works in the New Testament,” in Covenant Theology, 80.
2. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 143.
3. Turretin, Institutes, I.9.9.11.
4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, II:121.
5. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image, 1990), 15.
6. Leon Morris, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 213.
7. Waters, “The Covenant of Works in the New Testament,” 80, 81.
8. Waters, “The Covenant of Works in the New Testament,” 83.
9. Waters, “The Covenant of Works in the New Testament,” 88.
