Romans 5:15, Commentary
Aug 4th, 2009 by Micah Tillman | Start the Discussion |
[ Romans 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5: Intro, 1-11, 12, 12-14, 15, 16-21, Summary ]
I know I should get back to working out the distinction between decision and consent, but I really want to get through Romans 5 — I want to see what I have to believe about the Doctrine of Original Sin.
(I know, I got into this series on Romans because of the Doctrine of Total Depravity, but that doctrine is a consequence — according to Reformed Theologians — of the DOS.)
So, please forgive me as I move on to the next few verses in Romans 5.
____
15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
____
5:15 — Paul here is in the middle of a series of anti-similes.
In v. 14 he said that even people who committed sins that were unlike Adam’s (either because they didn’t involve eating a forbidden fruit, or because they didn’t involve going against an explicit command/Law) suffered the same consequence (death).
(Sin is — most fundamentally — an ontological [not legal/judicial/forensic] issue, in other words, and therefore has consequences whether or not any judge is around to pass judgment.)
In v. 15, Paul is contrasting Adam and Jesus (of which he said in v. 14 that Adam was a type). The work of Adam — sin — has a consequence (i.e., death) totally unlike the work of Christ’s (i.e., life).
____
Paul is emphasizing in v. 15 the fact that his hearers’ relationship to Adam puts them all on a level (puts them all in the same boat, as I keep saying), and so does their relationship to Christ.
They have no excuse for dividing themselves along the lines of who inherited the Law (the Jewish members) and who didn’t (the Gentile members), because faith and sin are both historically and ontologically prior to Law.
And they have no excuse for dividing themselves along the lines of who is a descendant of Abraham and who isn’t, because (1) they are all descendants of Abraham (in that they have all become righteous in the same way as Abraham — by faith), (2) they are all descendants of Adam (both physically and spiritually), and (3) they are all saved by Christ.
____
Now the question for us is: what does it mean that “the many died through the one man’s trespass”?
First, there is no word “through” in the Greek of the verse, that I can tell.
The word seems to be “gar” — “for”/”because,” and is preceded by an “if” (actually, a “be,” as in — it would seem — “Be x such-and-such, then y must be such-and-such”).
____
Therefore, it seems to me that the Complete Jewish Bible renders it best:
For if, because of one man’s offence, many died, then how much more has God’s grace, that is, the gracious gift of one man, Yeshua the Messiah, overflowed to many!
(Cf. also the NCV rendering, and the NIRV rendering.)
____
Also, note that Paul doesn’t say “all died because of one’s sin” but “the many died because of one’s sin.”
The term there is hoi polloi, “the many,” as in “the masses” or “the common folk” or “the people” (as contrasted with the political rulers).
Ultimately it comes to the same thing, but it’s just interesting to note.
____
Now, the question is why the many should die as a consequence (”because”) of Adam’s sin. If it was Adam, not the many who sinned, why should the many suffer the consequences?
The answer is that it has nothing to do with “imputation” or “punishment,” since the entire point Paul is making is that sin has the natural, logical, automatic consequence of death, in and of itself, without any legal stuff (law, judgment, declaration) by God having to be involved.
In other words, everyone dies because Adam’s sin created the ontological circumstances that lead everyone to die (not because God sees/declares everyone as being guilty of Adam’s sin).
It’s as if Adam’s sin cut off the oxygen supply to the world, and therefore everyone suffocates at birth.
____
Adam, in sinning, cut himself and his world off from God. He turned off the connection. And thus the many who came after him come from a person who was disconnected from God, and are born into a world that is disconnected from God.
So perhaps that means everyone now starts off disconnected from God (not because God arbitrarily declared it to be so ["imputed sin" or "judged" us for Adam's sin], but just because that’s how things work, given the kind of self-propagating spiritual/physical beings that humans are, and the ontological physical/spiritual structure of the world in which we live.)
____
Furthermore, as Paul said earlier, “death spread to all because all have sinned.” Everyone disconnects him- or herself from God, anyway.
We all make Adam our spiritual father in imitating his sinning, just like we can make Abraham our spiritual father in imitating his faith.
____
Or, perhaps we could say, everyone consents to his or her being disconnected from God (a condition in which they are born, whether they like it or not) by sinning themselves.
After all, you’d have to think that people who are born disconnected from God into a world disconnected from God are much more likely to live lives that disconnect them from God (i.e., lives of sin) than people who are born connected to God in a world connected to God.
____
Therefore, no one is any better off than anyone else, whether Jew or Gentile. And the same way out of our predicament — through Christ — is offered to everyone.
Both your basic situation and your salvation put you all on an equal footing, Paul is telling the ethnically-divided Roman church.
____
[ Romans 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5: Intro, 1-11, 12, 12-14, 15, 16-21, Summary ]
