XXVII. The First Adam and the Second Adam
How largely the idea of racial sin bulked in the mind of Paul appears in his treatment of the man Adam, and the primal sin which Adam committed and whose effects “the second Adam” obliterates. “Through one man” — viz., Adam, whose historical character as being the first-created man Paul unquestioningly assumes — “sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned.” (Romans 5:12.) The way to salvation was closed by Adam, and reopened by Jesus as “the second Adam”. The first man was the first sinner; and thus death, which is the wages or consequence of sin, began, and has ever since continued to reign in the world. As Dr. Denney says, (Commentary onRomans 5:12.) “Paul uses ‘death’ to convey different shades of meaning in different places, but he does not explicitly distinguish different senses of the word; and it is probably misleading rather than helpful to say that in one sentence (here, for example) ‘physical’ death is meant, and in another (Romans 7:24, e.g.) ‘spiritual’ death. The analysis is foreign to his mode of thinking. All that ‘death’ conveys to the mind entered into the world through sin.” Dr. Denney adds that, in the second part of this verse, Romans 5:12, Paul explains “the universality of death”: it rests upon the universality of sin. For us, however, who are attempting to rethink in modern terms the thought of Paul, it is absolutely necessary to attempt to distinguish in the process of our thought what side of the idea “death” should be determining and dominant in our mind, when we re-form or re-express a Pauline principle. Paul, as Dr. Denney says, never consciously defined to himself, or thought of defining, the different senses in which he seems to use the word: he had the whole idea “death” in his mind when he used the word. Yet, when he speaks of “death” as the wages of sin and as the lot of the wicked, he must have been conscious that this death is something different from its appearance as a stage in the path of righteousness, or even as the earthly end of that path. (John’s phrase “the second death” may perhaps indicate a certain consciousness, common in the early Church, that the word has more than one meaning (Revelation 2:11;Revelation 20:6;Revelation 20:14;Revelation 21:8).) “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain”: such “death” is not the lot of the wicked: it is simply a process in the transformation of his body into the spiritual body like that of Christ. So when he says, “I through the law died unto the law that I might live unto God,” he regards the death through which he passed as the end of the older stage in his experience and the entrance on the new life: through death he enters on life. In this same passage, Romans 5:12, he seems to regard “death” as the removal from God, the final exclusion from God, the definite separation from God, which is consummated at the physical death, but has been going on throughout the career of sin. This is the “second death” of which John speaks. His words in Romans 5:12, however, have been interpreted as an assertion that all men sinned in Adam and fell with Adam. What does this mean? Why should we now be punished in respect of anything that Adam has done, or rewarded in virtue of anything that Jesus has done? That is a question which rises first in any human mind; but the question is wrongly put, and the point of view implied in it is false. Paul does not say that all men are punished because Adam sinned, or because they were made guilty in Adam’s guilt, but that all men, in proportion as (or because) all have during their own life sinned, (“On the ground that,” or “in the proportion that,” seems to be the strict senseἐφʼᾦπάντες ἥμαρτον. “On condition that” is the most typical sense ofἐφʼᾦ, and the use here naturally arises out of that, and is nearly identical in force with it. Death got power over them on condition that (or in so far as) they sinned.) are punished through the death which began with Adam. The sin of Adam inflicted incalculable injury on the human race, not by implicating all men in itself, but by involving them in its consequences. Such is the fact of the world: such is the experience of life: such is the law of nature. Every day it is exemplified. The innocent suffer from the sins in which they have no share. The nation as a whole may be ruined by the folly or the crime of one man. This is the fact to which we must accommodate our life, and from which we must start in our philosophy. Paul saw in it the opening for the grace and kindness of God to show itself. If we suffer through the sin of the first Adam, it is in order that the second Adam may have scope for the infinite power and mercy by which He rescues all men, and justifies the Divine plan. In the first place, Adam is the typical man, i.e. a fair and typical specimen of the genus man: not less, but if anything more favourably situated than the ordinary man. With every advantage, with no inherited taint, he failed, and with him all men fail, because it is impossible that they should succeed where he could not succeed. Subsequent generations of men have in themselves less chance of success than he, because they are born and nurtured amid surroundings already corrupted. Paul holds fast by the old Hebrew doctrine that the children suffer in the sin of their parents for generations. Sin affects society, brings disease, physical and moral, into the nation, causes a racial deterioration through which the descendants of Adam have all suffered. History is the record of the stages through which the initial disobedience to law has worked out its consequences. Social and medical science trace the laws according to which those consequences are worked out. Adam is the test case, according to Paul’s view. If he failed, none of his descendants can succeed through their own effort and initiative. In the second place, if it be objected that this was an insufficient test, and therefore unfair, that objection misses Paul’s meaning. Paul does not rest his argument simply on the one test case of Adam. He appeals to all history and experience. Throughout the whole passage, , he has laboured to prove that all have sinned, and failed to attain righteousness; and in Romans 5:12 he briefly sums up that proof in the phrase “for that all have sinned”. His purpose in Romans 5:12 is not to argue that all are guilty of sin in virtue of Adam’s primal sin, but that, as death came over all men through Adam’s sin, so life becomes the portion open to all men through Christ’s triumph in death over death. The death of Christ proved to be His triumph over death, and His triumph is the triumph of mankind.
Reference to Paul’s words elsewhere makes this quite plain. Compare 1 Corinthians 1:21 : “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”. In this chapter of Romans the same statement is repeated in the immediate sequel: Romans 5:15, “By the trespass of the one the many died”; Romans 5:17, “By the trespass of the one death reigned through the one”. Men all die with Adam, because all sin: i.e., men all fail to attain righteousness, and need a Saviour.
Since the typical and representative man failed, and human nature is thus shown to be in its own power incapable of resisting sin, the only cure lies in another representative man, who triumphs over sin. This second typical man is Jesus: He must be in the fullest sense man, otherwise His case will not prove anything for other men or help them in any way: He stripped Himself of His high dignity and became the representative man; and He proved what men can attain to in virtue of the Divine nature which is in them. It is an essential part of Paul’s teaching, that there is in man this Divine element, which can grow until it dominates his whole nature. What man needs is some force to start him out of the inertia of sin on the course of growth towards the Divine truth. As we have already seen, Paul finds this force simply in Faith, in the belief that it can be done because Christ has shown that it is done. For that growth towards the truth it is necessary that the man should, as Paul expresses it, die to sin: i.e., he must cease to move on in the way towards sin, and begin to move in the opposite direction towards righteousness. The beginning to do this is already accepted as salvation: the seed that is planted contains in it already the mature tree. The man who has once believed in that possibility has got the driving force which will impel him on in the course, hard as it is; and this force is the fact that Jesus died for each individual man, separate and single, and by dying to the world of transience and mutation resumed His Divine personality.
It is not strictly correct to say that the appearance of Jesus as a figure in human history brought the Divine nature nearer to man. It only brought the Divine nature more within the cognisance of human faculties and perceptive powers. Thus this event seemed to bring God closer to man, because it made the cognisance of God by man easier. So far as I can understand the thought of Paul, he assumes this as fundamental truth. Jesus becomes real to us, a real power for us, only in so far as the belief in the power of His death enters into us, and becomes part of our living self with the force that a great idea and an intense enthusiasm exert on the nature and action of the man who feels them. Ultimately He becomes, through the progress of our spiritual life, the whole of our living self: “it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me”. The human self and the human nature is identified with the Divine nature, and yet the human personality and self-identity remains. This is eternal life in Paul’s doctrine. This is salvation.
