Adam’s Sin and Ours—What Paul Really Said in Romans 5:12

By Dr Brian H. Thomas

Few doctrines of the Christian faith enjoy as much simultaneous empirical confirmation and conceptual confusion as that of original sin.

Despite the universal evidence that all people are sinners, Christians through the ages have struggled to define exactly what original sin means, and to defend it rationally and ethically.

The key text is Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (NASB, my emphasis).  Theologians have grappled with the Greek phrase eph hō that is rendered above as “because.”

Augustine, influenced by the Latin Vulgate, understood eph hō to mean “in whom,” referring to Adam.  How could this be so?  One explanation was that all of humanity was literally in Adam, in some kind of real physical union such that we were all literally present and participating in Adam’s sin.  It is a moot point whether this makes any kind of sense in terms of metaphysics, human nature, or ethics, because there is a consensus that the Greek eph hō cannot mean “in whom.”

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Wesley Among the Fathers

By Dr Roland Chia

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is arguably one of the most theologically complex and creative figures in 18^th-century England.

Scholars almost unanimously agree that it would be a misnomer to describe Wesley as a “systematic theologian” because of the disparate and somewhat diffused character of his corpus. But to give Wesley the polite designation of “practical theologian”, as some scholars are wont to do, is not only to create a distorting caricature but also to be scathingly dismissive of his theological genius.

To be sure, Wesley’s overall theological approach has proved very difficult to classify, making it frustratingly challenging to “locate” him in the Christian tradition. To simply pigeonhole Wesley’s theology as “Anglican”, or “Arminian”, or even “Protestant” is to reduce the polyphonic character of his thought to a dull monotone.

Wesley scholars are beginning to appreciate Wesley’s creative retrieval of some of the most important insights of the early Church Fathers, especially the theologians who wrote before the Council of Nicaea that took place in A.D. 325.

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