Tag: federal theology

Is Original Sin a Legal Fiction?

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

Lane Keister responds to Roman Catholic criticisms that justification by faith alone depends on an understanding of the imputed righteousness of Christ that turns salvation into a “legal fiction” — we are righteous but not really because, in the words of John Kinnaird, it is not real and personal.

That post got me wondering about what Rome does with the transfer of sin from Adam to the human race. So what do Roman Catholics — or Protestants who insist on real and personal holiness — teach about the sin of Adam imputed to new born infants? Is it a legal fiction to view them as sinners (as Paul does Rom 5:12 — “all sinned”)? After all, the Council of Orange affirmed original sin this way:

CANON 2. If anyone asserts that Adam’s sin affected him alone and not his descendants also, or at least if he declares that it is only the death of the body which is the punishment for sin, and not also that sin, which is the death of the soul, passed through one man to the whole human race, he does injustice to God and contradicts the Apostle, who says, “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

Likewise, the Baltimore Catechism affirms that Adam’s sin affected all mankind:

45. Q. What evil befell us through the disobedience of our first parents? A. Through the disobedience of our first parents we all inherit their sin and punishment, as we should have shared in their happiness if they had remained faithful.

And even more recently, John Paul II taught some kind of “fiction” when it came to the affects of Adam’s sin on the rest of the human race:

How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man”. By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” – a state and not an act.

I understand that neither of these catechisms use the language of imputation, though the notion of inheritance is in the forensic Friday ball park. Even so, the magisterium has some explaining to do if you can swallow the idea that humans come into the world with the guilt of Adam’s sinful estate and then object to Protestants drawing a line between the imputation of Adam’s sin and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. If you want to be a Pelagian about sin, fine. But if you don’t want to be Pelagian about depravity, then don’t be semi-Pelagian about justification.

"The Stakes Have Never Been Higher"

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Really?

According to ABC News, and its report on the resignation of Bruce Waltke from Reformed Theological Seminary, both sides agree that the stakes are indeed that high. Higher than the Scopes Trial? I was glad that they did not bring up William Jennings Bryan and his difficult testimony before Clarence Darrow’s badgering. But from what I could tell, the stakes this news reporter discovered are completely beside the point.

The way the press usually treats these things, it is a case of intolerance versus open mindedness, or science versus dogma, or a religious group’s retrenchment and inability to cope with modern ideas versus a community of faith that swims along quite elegantly in the waters of modern knowledge. And they can generally find religious scholars like Pete Enns and Randall Balmer who, siding more with the reporters than their fellow believers, will back up this set of contrasts (but who actually should know that there are more than two sides since they are experts on religion and the reporters aren’t).

This set of tensions could apply to the Waltke-RTS situation, but they don’t. The major contention has been the historicity of Adam, not whether he emerged from an evolutionary process. And beyond that, the questions have been largely theological, not scientific: what happens to the doctrine of original sin or federal headship if Adam was simply a mythical figure? And what happens to Paul’s two-Adam construction of covenant theology if one of those Adams is an ethereal character of unknown identity who may have hooked up with the mother of all humanity (that mother being confirmed by geneticists and anthropologists and thus supplying the evidence necessary for the unity of the human race).

So have the stakes ever been higher for federal theology? I’m not so sure. I’d need the help of historical theologians to make that call.

But to the idea that if Christians do not accept the idea of evolution they run the risk of becoming a cult, I wonder if Waltke or his supporter Enns, or ABC’s expert interviewee, Balmer, ever considered what belief in the resurrection of Christ makes the church look like before the scientifically knowledgeable world. Granted, the Genesis account of God’s creation of the parents of the human race may from a scientific perspective be hard to believe. I, frankly, am not sure that the naturalistic accounts of human origins are any easier to understand or believe. Be that as it may, do the Christians advocating evolution – and I am not going to give them too hard a time since one of my favorite theologians (sorry, Gary), Benjamin Warfield was one of them – really think the idea of Christ’s resurrection makes Christians soft, cuddly, and scientifically mainstream?

The stakes have been what they’ve always been. The Bible contains a lot of events and ideas that are hard to believe, whether you are scientific or not (think of all the premoderns who saw and heard Christ and did not believe). If not for the longevity of Christianity in Europe and North America, reporters might actually think that Christianity resembles Mormonism more than it does the Unitarian Church.

But for the record, when a three-time presidential nominee and one of the nation’s leading attorneys square off in courtroom proceedings that are broadcast nationally – which is what happened in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 – the stakes are pretty high, higher I’d say than the recent unpleasantness between Waltke and RTS. (And those stakes had more to do with majority rule and local government than with reason versus faith — but that’s another story.)