Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Herbert Haag: Romans 5 does Not teach Original Sin



The concept of sin or death as inherited is not mentioned at all by Paul (84). Of sin he says that it came into the world (eiselthen) and reached (dielthen) all men. Sin came into the world (Heb. 10:5, eiserchomenos; John 1:9, erchomenon eis ton cosmon). Its power of expansion reached all men, and so death came to all men. Physical death cannot be the primary meaning of the universal death which is the consequence of sin Paul uses it in its meaning, for contemporary Jewish views, as a sign of loss of a life of communion with God. In verse 21, eternal life (zoe aionios) is explicitly opposed to death (thanatos). “Death” might be taken in the whole section as a paraphrase of “sin.” Thus Paul can say at one time that the sine of Adam had as its consequence the sinfulness (hamartia) of all (v. 12); at another time the death of all (vv. 15, 17); at another time the judgment (katakrina) of all (v. 18); and the opposite of judgment is “life-giving justification” (diakaiosis zoes: v. 18). If we were to understand death here as physical death the Adam-Christ antithesis would lose its points because Christ did not remove physical death from the world. Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that Paul, in Romans 5:12, refers to Wisdom 2:24 where as we have seen death means “eschatological death” (In I. Cor. 15:21f., Paul sees death in the light of the final victory of God’s kingdom [cf. v. 28])).

The last phrase of verse 12, “eph ho pantes hemarton,” has played a decisive role in the traditional teaching on original sin. Its role was determined by the Latin translation “in quo omnes peccaverunt,” “in whom all have sinned.” “In quo” can only be understood to refer to Adam and this resulted in the doctrine that in Adam all men have sinned. From Augustine to humanism, about a thousand years, this reading was uncontested in the Latin church. Today, Erasmus’ realization that the Greek “eph ho” has the sense of “because” or “considering that” is generally accepted. Therefore we should translate this phrase: “Through one man sin entered in the world and through sin, death, and thus death has passed to all men because all men have sinned.”

Through the sin of Adam death and sin began to rule in the world. Their power truly brought men under their rule. And because all men were sinners all became liable to death. Nothing justifies us in understanding “sin” in the phrase “since all have sinned” other than the way we have understood it in the first phrase “sin entered the world,” namely, sin as an evil deed wilfully committed. Even in the rushing torrent of sin the personal decision of each man was maintained. In reality, the idea of the passive participation of all Adam’s descendants in the sin of Adam is far from Paul’s mind, and it is not permissible to read this idea into verse 12 by understanding “because all have sinned” in the sense of “because all (in Adam) have become sinful.” The verb hamartano, when used by Paul—or in the entire Bible for that matter—always carries the sense of an action. Verses 13ff. cannot be made to say what most exegetes read into it: Between Adam and Moses there were no formal sins, only material sins which consequently did not count as sins. Nevertheless, men died; that is, they were punished with Adam’s punishment for sin, because they, although without personal guilt, shared in Adam’s sin.

S. Lyonnet has convincingly shown that the apostle was quite unaware of this modern problem (Recherches de Science Religieuse, 44 [1956], pp. 75-84; Dictionnaire de la Bible, VII, pp. 551-558). His thought is rather this: all men, after Adam sinned, are subject to death because all have committed sinful deeds (v. 12cd). But we know that between Adam and Moses there was sin in the world (13a). The objection runs: without the law, which had then not yet been given, sin could not be imputed to anyone according to Paul’s own teaching (4:15). We should, then, expect that men in those times did not die; that is, were not subject to the punishment of sin (v. 13b). But, in reality, death had power over men in the time between Adam and Moses, even if they had not, like Adam, acted against a direct prohibition of God (5:14a). This proves for Paul that there was no time after Adam at which man did not commit individual, personal sins (hamartesantas). There seems to be no teaching of original sin here. (Herbert Haag, Is Original Sin in Scripture? [trans. Dorothy Thompson; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969], 97-100)