Sinfulness it not an externally imposed penalty that God has sentenced men to, as Augustine taught. Rather, St. Paul tells us it is an egocentric illness contracted from the parasites called corruptibility and death. Adam died because he sinned, and death spread to all men. Now we sin because we die, for the sting of death. Sin reigns in death, in our corruptibility and mortality. Death is the root; sin is the thorn that springs from it. Ii the end, the last enemy that shall be destroyed is the endless cycle of corruptibility and death, the seat of sin. Ontologically, Jesus Christ has already accomplished this by His own death and resurrection At the Second Coming, then, He shall terminate these enemies once and for all, freeing men from all taint of sin forever and raising us body and soul to incorruptibility and immortal life. Thus, without His resurrection in the first lace, there is no salvation. His resurrection destroys Satan and sin by destroying the source of their power: death and corruptibility. (George S. Gabriel, Introduction, in John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of our Ancestors Adam and Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century and the Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin [trans. George S. Gabriel; Ridgewood, N.J.: Zephyr Publishing, 1998, 2002], 10)
With regard to the question of how there could have been righteous men before the Crucifixion, St. Gregory Palamas writes, “No one was every reconciled with God without the power of the Cross . . . How is it possible for a man to be renewed in all things and reconciled with God according to the Spirit if son and carnal life have not been abolished? This is the Cross of the Lord, the destruction of sin . . . Many who were friends of God before the Law and after the Law were even acknowledged as such by God without the Cross having appeared yet. And David the king and prophet, having the certainty that there existed friends of God at that time, says, ‘But to me, exceedingly honorable are Thy friends, O God.’ (Ps. 138:16). But how is it that there were friends of God before the Cross? I shall show you . . . Just as before the man of sin, the son of perdition, even comes (I mean the Antichrist), the Theologian and beloved one of Christ says, ‘Beloved, even now is the Antichrist’ [here] (1 Jn. 2:18), likewise the Cross existed among those in earlier times before the Cross came to be constructed. For the great Paul, clearly teaching us that the Antichrist is in our midst without having yet come says, ‘For the mystery already worketh among us.’ (2 Thes. 2:7) Likewise the Cross of Christ was amidst the forefathers even before it cam to exist because the mystery was working in them. Not even mentioning Abel, Seth, Enos, Enoch, and Noah, and those up to Noah who were pleasing to God and those who were close after them, I will begin with Abraham who became the father of many nations—of the Jews by the flesh and of us by the faith. In order to begin with him who is our father in the Spirit, and with the good beginning associated with him and the first calling from God, let me ask what are the first words that God spoke to him? ‘Come out form your country and your people, and come unto the land that I shall show you.’ (Gen. 12:1) This saying contains within it the mystery of the Cross because it corresponds exactly with Paul who, boasting in the Cross, says, ‘the world has been crucified in me.’ (Gal. 6:14) In truth, for him who left his country never to return, his homeland and world according to the flesh has been put to death and destroyed, and this is the Cross. Again, according to the divine Paul, the Cross is our crucifying of the flesh and passions and desires (Gal. 5:24) Isaac was himself a type of Him who was affixed to [the Cross] when, like Christ, he was obedient to the father, even unto death . . . But to leave off from all those before the Law and during the Law, did not Christ Himself, for Whom and by Whom all things were made, say before the Cross, ‘He who does not take up his Cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me?’ (Mt. 10:38) Do you see how even before the Cross was pitched it was the Cross that saved? . . . This is what it means to crucify the flesh and the passions and desires: for man to cease from doing all that is displeasing to God . . . Such is the word of the Cross. It is such not only in the prophets before the Cross was completed but now also, after it was done, it is a great mystery and truly divine . . . For the Cross is both the form which we venerate and in the form of its word.” (Homily 11, On the Precious and Life-Giving Cross, “Forty-one Homilies,” Jerusalem 1857, pp. 53-62, in John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of our Ancestors Adam and Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century and the Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin [trans. George S. Gabriel; Ridgewood, N.J.: Zephyr Publishing, 1998, 2002], 92-93 n. 167)
St. Irenaeus clearly proclaims that the devil “unjustly led men into captivity.” (Refutation, 5, XX, 3) It is important to note that, according to information provided by St. Irenaeus, (Ibid., 3, XXIII, 1f.) Tatian believed that the descendants of Adam were saved from Adam himself was not. It is clear from this that while Tatian believed Adam deserved eternal damnation, he did not believe Adam’s guilt was inherited. This is why Adam’s righteous descendants were saved. Opposing this idea, Irenaeus says that not only Adam’s righteous descendants were unjustly held captive by the devil, but Adam, too, was unjustly held captive and, with the others, he was saved. Irenaeus says that it was not Adam whom God cursed but the serpent and the ground. (Ibid., 3, XXIII, 3; Gen. 3:14, 17) “It is altogether unreasonable for anyone to maintain that he who was so deeply wounded by the enemy and was first to suffer captivity was not set free by Him Who defeated the enemy, and that only his children whom he begat in the captivity itself were children whom he begat in the captivity itself were redeemed.” (Ibid., 3, XXIII, 2) This would have indicated a lack of power and justice on the part of God. God, however, “is lacking nothing in power nor in justice; He aided man and restored him to His own freedom.” (Ibid.) It is evident that both in the theology of Paul and in the thought of Irenaeus, the justice of God is revealed in the destruction of injustice accomplished through the imparting of life to the righteous who were unjustly held captive by the devil. “The Logos bound [Satan] surely as one banished from Himself, and He seized his spoils, in other words, the people who were held by him, whom he used unjustly for his own purposes. And verily he who unjustly led men captive is justly made a captive.” (Ibid., 5, XXI, 3. Cf. 3, XVIII, 7; XIX, 3; 4.XXII, 1; XL, 2) “Adam was defeated and deprived of all life. Therefore, when the enemy in turn was defeated, Adam received new life. And the last enemy, death, which from the beginning took sway over ma, is abolished . . . This could not have been accurate to say if the man over whom death had first taken sway had not been set free, for his salvation is the destruction of death. Therefore, when God imparts life to man, in other words, to Aam, death is destroyed at the same time.” (Ibid., 3, XXIIII, 7)
Elsewhere, Irenaeus writes, “The Logos of God, Who is all powerful and is in no way lacking in His justice, justly acted against apostasy and freed HIs own creatures from it. This was not by force—the manner by which apostasy subjugated us in the beginning when it insatiably seized those things that were not its own—but by persuasion, as is proper to the God of counsel, Who does not use force to acquire what HE wishes, so that justice may not be transgressed and HIs creation may not be destroyed. The Lord, Who redeemed us with His own precious blood and gave HIs soul for the souls and His flesh for our flesh, poured forth the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God with man, truly imparting God to man by the Spirit and uniting man with God through HIs own Incarnation, and granting immortality to us permanently through His own presence and by true communion with God.” (Ibid., 5, 1, 1) (John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of our Ancestors Adam and Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century and the Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin [trans. George S. Gabriel; Ridgewood, N.J.: Zephyr Publishing, 1998, 2002], 95-96)
. . . absent from the writings of the first Christians is the cosmology of Augustine and the West in general, according to which the justice of God is a prevailing presence and reality. For Augustine, mankind’s fall into the hands of the devil and death is by the will and justice of God because the entire human race shares Adam’s guilt. On the other hand, the writers of the first two centuries understood that justice is eschatological. God does not will the present unjust activity of Satan and man but only tolerates it so that those who would be saved can be tried and perfected through temptations. Because, above all, He desires the freedom of His rational creatures. Thus, not even as a punisher is God the cause of parasitic evil that prevails in the world. On the contrary, the cause of corruptibility and death are, first of all, the devil, and second, man’s ongoing cooperation with him that brought in evil through man’s departure from God. In the present world injustice rules. For this reason, “the present age and the future age are mutual enemies.” (Clement of Rome, Second Epistle to Corinthians, VI, 3) (John S. Romanides, The Ancestral Sin: A Comparative Study of the Sin of our Ancestors Adam and Eve According to the Paradigms and Doctrines of the First- and Second-Century and the Augustinian Formulation of Original Sin [trans. George S. Gabriel; Ridgewood, N.J.: Zephyr Publishing, 1998, 2002], 156)