E. The old and the new solidarity (5:12–21)
E. The old and the new solidarity (5:12–21)
The portrayal of Christ as the ‘last Adam’, the counterpart of the ‘first Adam’, is a prominent feature of Paul’s Christology. It is not peculiar to him among the New Testament writers, and we cannot even be sure that it was original with him, but he develops it more fully than any other, especially in Romans 5:12–21 and in his discussion of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45–49.
The idea of God’s man as the fulfiller of God’s purpose is a recurring one in the Old Testament: he is ‘the man of thy right hand, the son of man whom thou hast made strong for thyself for whose prosperity and victory prayer is offered in Psalm 80:17. When one man fails in the accomplishment of God’s purpose (as, in measure, all did), God raises up another to take his place—Joshua to replace Moses, David to replace Saul, Elisha to replace Elijah.
But who could take the place of Adam? Only one who was competent to undo the effects of Adam’s fall and become the inaugurator of a new humanity. The Bible—and, indeed, the history of the world—knows of one man only who has the necessary qualifications. Christ stands forth (in Carlyle’s rendering of Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg) as
‘the proper Man
Whom God Himself hath bidden’.
And for those whom he has set right with God the old solidarity of sin and death, which was theirs in association with the first Adam, has given way to a new solidarity of righteousness and life in association with ‘the last Adam’.
Paul rounds off the argument of the letter thus far by drawing a parallel and antithesis between Adam and Christ. Adam is for Paul a counterpart or ‘type’ of Christ. As death entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, so new life comes in through Christ’s obedience. As Adam’s sin involves his posterity in guilt, so Christ’s righteousness is credited to his people.
To Paul, Adam was more than a historical individual, the first man; he was also what his name means in Hebrew—‘humanity’. The whole of humanity is viewed as having existed at first in Adam. Because of his sin, however, Adam is humanity in alienation from God: the whole human race is viewed as having originally sinned in Adam. In the fall narrative of Genesis 3 ‘all subsequent human history lies encapsuled’;20 its incidents are re-enacted in the life of the race and of each member of the race.21
Paul was apparently conversant with what is widely called the Hebrew concept of corporate personality,22 and his thought could readily oscillate on the one hand between the first Adam and sinful humanity, and on the other hand between Christ, ‘the second man’, and the community of the redeemed. And very properly so: our solidarity with our fellows is a reality which we tend to overlook in the assertion of our individual independence. ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ John Donne’s oft-quoted words express a permanent truth. Because we live in separate bodies we tend to think that all other aspects of our personality are equally separate and self-contained, but they are not.
Here, however, two different kinds of solidarity are distinguished. A new creation has come to birth: the old ‘Adam-solidarity’ of sin and death has been broken up, to be replaced by the new ‘Christ-solidarity’ of grace and life. Yet the break is not as sharp and clear-cut as might be thought: at present there is an overlap between the two. ‘As in Adam all die’ applies in the physical realm to believers as much as ‘so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ does, so long as this mortal existence endures. But here and now they have the assurance that, because they are ‘in Christ’, they will indeed be ‘made alive’, because here and now through faith in him they have received from God that justification which brings life in its train. ‘In God’s sight’, said Thomas Goodwin, seventeenth-century President of Magdalen College, Oxford, ‘there are two men—Adam and Jesus Christ—and these two men have all other men hanging at their girdle strings.’
The obedience of Christ to which his people are here said to owe their justification and hope of eternal life is not confined to his death. His death was the crown and culmination of that ‘active obedience’ which characterized his life throughout its course. It was a perfectly righteous life that he offered up in death on his people’s behalf. The righteous life in itself would not have met their need had he not carried his obedience to the point of death, ‘even death on a cross’; but neither would his death have met their need had the life which he thus offered up not been a perfect life. Paul’s language here echoes the words of the fourth Servant Song: ‘by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities’ (Isa. 53:11).
So, if the fall of Adam brought all his posterity under the dominion of death, the obedience of Christ has brought a new race triumphantly into the realm of resurrection life.
‘But’, says someone, ‘in all this discussion of Adam and Christ, have you not forgotten Moses? Where does he come in? Surely the introduction of the law (roughly midway between Adam and Christ, according to the chronology of MT) means that there are three ages, inaugurated respectively by Adam, Moses and Christ, and not just two, inaugurated respectively by Adam and Christ?’
No, says Paul. The law has no permanent significance in the history of redemption. It was introduced as a temporary measure for a practical purpose. Sin was present in the world ever since Adam’s fall, but the law served the purpose of bringing sin right out into the light of day, so that it might be more clearly recognized for what it really is. It is not merely that in the presence of specific laws sin takes the form of specific transgressions of these laws; the presence of law can positively stimulate sin. An express prohibition may tempt people to do what is prohibited, whereas they might never have thought of doing it if the prohibition had not brought it to their attention. Paul shows sound insight into human nature. There is substance in the old story of the parishioner who objected to the recitation of the Ten Commandments in church ‘because they put so many ideas into people’s heads’.
But the law introduced no new principle into the situation; it simply revealed more plainly the principle of sin which was already present. The gospel, on the other hand, has introduced a completely new principle—the principle of God’s grace. However fast the operation of law stimulates sin and causes it to increase, faster still does the grace of God increase and remove the accumulation of sin.23
12. As sin came into the world through one man and death through sin. The ‘one man’ is Adam; the reference is to the story of ‘man’s first disobedience’ in Genesis 3. Cf. Wisdom 2:23–24,
God created man for incorruption,
and made him in the image of his own eternity,but through the devil’s envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his party experience it.
The same point is made in the outcry of 2 Esdras 7:118: ‘O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.’ Ben Sira characteristically draws a misogynistic moral from the narrative: ‘From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die’ (Ecclus. 25:24; see p. 153). But none of these writers sees anything of the deeper significance in the fall of man which is now unfolded by Paul.
Death spread to all men because all men sinned. Does this mean that all have sinned in their personal lives (which is apparently the meaning of the words in 3:23) or that all sinned in Adam’s primal sin? In support of the latter it might be argued that human beings are mortal before they commit any sin, so that the mortality of the race is the result of the original racial sin. This seems to be implied by verse 14, where those who lived between Adam and Moses are said to have died even if they did not sin in the manner of ‘the transgression of Adam’. The construction, with the underlying thought, is paralleled in 2 Corinthians 5:14: ‘one has died for all; therefore all have died’—where, however, it is the racial implication of Christ’s death, not of Adam’s fall, that Paul has in view. It is not simply because Adam is the ancestor of mankind that all are said to have sinned in his sin (otherwise it might be argued that because Abraham believed God all his descendants were necessarily involved in his belief); it is because Adam is mankind.
For a defence of the other interpretation—that the reference is to all having sinned in their personal lives—see Cranfield, ad loc.: after a careful examination of various interpretations of the words ‘because all sinned’ he concludes that this interpretation is ‘most probable’.24
Paul does not conclude his sentence with a ‘so’ clause to match the ‘as’ clause at the beginning of verse 12. His mention of death as spreading to all humanity because of sin leads him to introduce the long parenthesis of verses 13–17; after the parenthesis, instead of providing the principal clause for which the reader has been waiting, he repeats the ‘as’ clause of verse 12 in different words in verse 18 and follows up the new ‘as’ clause with a balancing ‘so’ clause. An apodosis in correlative terms to the protasis (the ‘as’ clause) of verse 12 would be worded more or less like this: ‘so through one man God’s way of righteousness was introduced, and life by righteousness.’
13. Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. Once sin gained an entrance into the human family, death followed. The sentence on Adam, ‘in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Gen. 2:17), was executed on his descendants, even although, until the law was given, there was no positive commandment for them to break as there had been for Adam.
But sin is not counted where there is no law. (Cf. 4:15.) Yet sin was all-pervasive, and mortal in its effect, even in the absence of any positive commandment with penalty attached. Sin manifests itself in the form of specific transgressions when there are specific commandments to be transgressed. Later Jewish tradition regarded the seven commandments to Noah in Genesis 9:1–7 as binding on all the Gentiles. Paul makes no reference to them. But the oldest form of the tradition recognized that six of them were already creation ordinances (the only new one being the ban on eating flesh with blood in it); and in Paul’s eyes it was in disobedience to the creation ordinances that the death-deserving ungodliness of the pagan world consisted (1:18–32).
14. Who was a type of the one who was to come. That is, Adam, the first man, is a counterpart (typos) of Christ, whom Paul elsewhere calls ‘the last Adam’ and ‘the second man’ (1 Cor. 15:45, 47). It is noteworthy that Adam is the only Old Testament character who is explicitly called a ‘type’ of Christ in the New Testament. There is a fitness in this, even if the typological relation between them involves as much contrast as resemblance; in Paul’s thought Christ replaces the first man as the archetype and representative of a new humanity:
Adam, descended from above,
Federal head of all mankind.
15. If many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. In both clauses ‘many’ is literally ‘the many’ (cf. verse 19), ‘the many’ being the great mass of mankind (like the twofold ‘all’ in 1 Cor. 15:22). See also Romans 11:32 (pp. 219–220). ‘The many’ can by no means denote a minority: on the contrary, it follows from these words, as Calvin put it, ‘that the grace of Christ belongs to a greater number than the condemnation contracted by the first man’. Calvin knew, indeed, of some who envisaged the elect as a minority, and who accordingly argued that Paul was here ‘merely debating a point’; his own reasoning, however, was ‘that if Adam’s fall had the effect of producing the ruin of many, the grace of God is much more efficacious in benefiting many, since admittedly Christ is much more powerful to save than Adam was to ruin.’25
16. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man’s sin. Through the one disobedient act of the primal sinner sentence of condemnation was passed; but the ‘free gift’ (charisma, as in 6:23; whereas dōrea, ‘gift’, is used in verses 15, 17, and the related dōrēma in verse 16a), bestowed after the commission of many sins, issues in God’s reversal of that adverse judgment and his conferment of a righteous status on many sinners.
17. The free gift of righteousness, i.e. the gift (dōrea) of justification received from God by believers.
Will … reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. When death reigns, human beings are its helpless victims; when Christ reigns, they share his risen life and royal glory (cf. 8:17).
18. One man’s trespass … one man’s act of righteousness. The RV rendering, ‘through one trespass … through one act of righteousness’, is grammatically as permissible as the RSV rendering, but RSV gives a better parallel to verse 19 (‘by one man’s disobedience … by one man’s obedience’). One man’s ‘act of righteousness’ (dikaiōma)26 is the crowning act of Christ’s life-long obedience (verse 19), when he yielded up his life; the second man’s act, which brought salvation, is contrasted with the first man’s ‘trespass’, which brought perdition.
To acquittal and life, lit. ‘to justification of life’. ‘Justification of life’ is justification which issues in life (just as condemnation issues in death). ‘Acquittal’ renders dikaiōsis, translated ‘justification’ in 4:25 (Paul might have repeated dikaiōma, translated ‘justification’ at the end of verse 16, but the intervening use of this word earlier in verse 18 in the sense of ‘righteous act’ may have moved him to use dikaiōsis here instead).
19. As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous. As in verse 15, the twofold ‘many’ is literally ‘the many’. The second clause here is probably a deliberate echo of Isaiah 53:11, where the obedient Servant causes the many (MT, LXX) ‘to be accounted righteous’.27 From the second clause, ‘the many’ is introduced into the first clause by way of balance (and the influence of Isaiah 53:11 may also be present in the twofold ‘the many’ of verse 15). ‘O the sweet exchange, O the inscrutable creation, O the unlooked-for benefits, that the sin of many should be put out of sight in one righteous man, and the righteousness of one should justify many sinners!’ (Epistle to Diognetus 9.5). The obedience of Christ accomplished more than Abraham’s could ever have done; by his passion and triumph he has won the right and power to beat back the hostile cosmic forces—to ‘retrieve the cosmic situation’, as C. K. Barrett puts it28—and ensure for his people participation in his victory.
20. Law came in, to increase the trespass. The verb ‘came in’ is literally rendered ‘came in beside’ in RV (NEB ‘intruded into this process’); it is used in Galatians 2:4 of the ‘false brethren’ who ‘slipped in’ or ‘infiltrated’ (pareiserchomai) as spies into the apostolic company. The sense of verse 20 reproduces that of Galatians 3:19: ‘Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions (NEB ‘to make wrongdoing a legal offence’), till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made.’ Law increased the trespass by providing opportunities for violating a multiplicity of specific commandments; there may be the further suggestion that it ‘also increases sin in the sense that it makes men sin more’.29 In any case, both epistles imply that the law of Moses is a parenthetic dispensation in the course of God’s dealings with the human race.