The Doctrine of the Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Rom. 5:12-21)

 

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The interpretation of these verses has been hotly debated throughout the history of the church, especially in the last two or three hundred years.  And I have debated in my mind the best way to approach them.  I think the reason why these verses are so variously interpreted is because the doctrine which they seem to preach is not something that natural reason is willing to bow to.  The doctrine taught in these verses is in fact one of those things that if the Scripture hadn’t taught it, I’m not sure even I would believe it.  It is the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.

So here is what I am going to try to do this morning. I think the best way forward here is to proceed from the general to the particular. First, I want to give you a statement of the doctrine itself, so that we know what we are talking about, and so our minds can be clear as to what I am referring to by the imputation of Adam’s sin to others when we get to the text.  Second, I want to come to the text, and to look at it from a bird’s eye view, and to try to show you the overall structure of the passage and the flow of thought.  Then I want to come back to verses 12-14 and 18-19 in particular and to show how these verses support and prove the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his seed.  And that leaves one final thing.  We still at this point will not have shown how this passage fits in with the overall flow of the messages of Romans, and this is where I want to end, because it is here that we will see the relevance and the practical application that this truth can have on our lives.  For those of you taking notes, I want to proceed in this order: doctrine, development, defense, and direction.  In other words: the statement of the doctrine, the development of the logic of the text, the defense of the doctrine from the text, and the direction it affords for our lives.

Doctrine in the text

The statement of the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity assumes first that God so constituted the human race that Adam was placed as the covenant head, or the federal head, the representative of the human race, so that while he was in a state of probation in the time of his innocence, so was all mankind who were represented in him.  There is a covenantal union between Adam and his seed.  In fact Paul puts it like this to the Corinthians, “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21-22).  We are “in Adam,” united to him by covenant and creation.  This means that his acts were not just personal acts but official acts.  And this means that when he sinned and fell from a state of innocence, he plunged all the human race into a state of sin and misery.  His sin was imputed, or laid to the account of, himself and all his posterity.  

As theologian Charles Hodge reminds us, to say that Adam’s sin is imputed to us, to the human race descending from him, doesn’t mean that we committed Adam’s sin.  Nor does it mean that we were the agents of his acts or that we are morally criminal for his transgression, nor that Adam’s sin is the ground for personal guilt and remorse.  Rather, it means “simply that in virtue of the union between him and his descendants, his sin is the judicial ground of the condemnation of his race, precisely as the righteousness of Christ is the judicial ground of his justification of his people.”[1]   I think a way to illustrate this is to think of a situation with a husband and wife who are united in a covenant of marriage, so that if the husband racks up enormous debts, the wife can be liable to the penalties incurred from the non-payment of those debts.  The law of course doesn’t consider the wife as to have personally created the debts, but that in virtue of the union existing between her and her husband, she is liable to the consequences of his actions.  

What is the consequence of Adam’s sin to the human race?  It is separation from God, and that means death, and death not just in terms of physical death, but death in all its dimensions: physical, moral, and spiritual.  One of the primary consequences of Adam’s fall is what theologians call original sin, by which they mean the corruption of human nature, since man is now separated from God.  We are all now born, not in a state of grace and favor with God, but, as the apostle Paul puts it to the Ephesians, we are “by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Eph. 2:3).

This is what our Baptist forefathers have believed from the beginning of the Baptist movement in Great Britain in the 17th century.  For example, this is the way the First London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1646 put it: “In the beginning God made all things very good; created man after His own image, filled with all meet perfection of nature, and free from all sin; but long he abode not in this honor; Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to seduce first Eve, then by her seducing Adam; who without any compulsion, in eating the forbidden fruit, transgressed the command of God, and fell, whereby death came upon all his posterity; who now are conceived in sin, and by nature the children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subject of death, and other miseries in this world, and forever, unless the Lord Jesus Christ set them free.”[2]

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 says, in paragraph three of chapter 6: “They [that is Adam and Eve] being the root, and by God's appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed, to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.”[3] 

The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it succinctly in this way (in the answer to the question, “Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression?”): “The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression.”[4]

So this is the doctrine of Adam as covenant head of the human race, which resulted in the fall of the human race when he fell into sin.  His sin was imputed to them, so that death in all its consequences is now the heritage of the human race.

Development of the text

Now we will want to see if this text in Romans 5 does indeed teach this doctrine.  If you look at the preceding statements and look for the Scriptural support for this doctrine, they will uniformly refer to this text among others.  In fact, Romans 5 and 1 Cor. 15 are the two primary Biblical texts used for the statement and defense of this doctrine.  But we want to see if this is in fact that case.  Does Romans 5 teach that Adam is the covenant head of the human race, so that his sin impacts all of his posterity in the sense that the guilt of his fall is the guilt of us all?  Or, as the old children’s rhyme put it, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”  Is this what Romans 5 teaches?  I believe it does.  

But before we look at the defense of the doctrine from the text, we need to orient ourselves in the text itself.  Let’s try to see how Paul develops his thought here.  What is the big picture?  What’s Paul doing here?

We will come back to this first word, “Wherefore” (12), which connects these verses to the preceding part of Romans.  But from this point, let’s see how Paul’s argument is developed.   I want to argue that Paul does three main things in these verses.  He compares Christ and Adam (12-14, 18-19), he contrasts Christ and Adam (15-17), and then finally he summarizes his thoughts as well as ties up some loose ends (20-21).

First, he develops a comparison between Adam and Christ.  He does this in verses 12, and 18-19.  Now you will notice in verse 12 that the apostle begins a comparison: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”  But Paul doesn’t complete it.  You have the “as by one man” which you then expect to be followed up with an “even so” or “in like manner” or something like that.  But that doesn’t happen in verse 12, and it doesn’t happen in verses 13-17 either!  Rather, the comparison is restated and finished in verses 18-19: “Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.”

Now you will notice where the comparison lies.  It lies between the one offence of the one man, who is Adam (12-14), and the one righteousness of the one man, Jesus Christ (15).  We will see in a bit what are the implications of that comparison, but for now I just want you to see it.  

Now what is happening in verses 13-17?  What interrupted the comparison that Paul began to make in verse 12 and didn’t finish until verses 18-19?  If you have the KJV, you will notice that the translators put a parenthesis at the start of verse 13, and they don’t close it until the end of verse 17, so they understand the intervening verses to be parenthetical.  Now this too is hotly disputed, but I think they are right.  And I think Paul is doing two basic things in this parenthesis.  Paul is clarifying preceding statements here.

First, in verses 13-14, he is explaining what he meant by the last part of verse 12: “and so death spread to all men, for that all have sinned.”  Notice how verse 13 starts; “for…”. He is clarifying what is meant by the fact that death spread to all men because all sinned.  He does this in verses 13 and 14.  He is not completing the comparison between Adam and Christ in these verses, but rather he is explaining how death could come to all men, and how death could be universal, especially in the period of time between Adam and Moses.

Then, in verses 15-17, Paul is responding to the last part of verse 14, where he claims that Adam is a type of Christ: “who is the figure of him that was to come.”  Adam is a type of Christ.  There is this comparison.  But in verses 15-17, the apostle wants us to know that even though Adam is like Christ in some ways, in other ways they are quite different.  So here in these verses you have Adam and Christ contrasted.  Note the language here: “not as,” “much more,” and so on. There are ways in which Christ is not like Adam and vice versa (“not as), and ways in which what Christ did far transcends (“much more”) what Adam did.  So we see the contrast as well as the comparison between Adam and Christ.

Finally, in verses 20-21, the apostle is summarizing his argument as well as tying up a loose end.  In verses 13-14, Paul excludes the law of Moses as the explanation for the universality of sin and death.  So in these verses he does explain how the law of Moses relates to sin and death, and the explanation is that the law came in to make sin abound and to increase sin.  But “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (20), and the apostle argues that even as Christ has overcome the effects of Adam’s fall into sin, even so he has overcome the effects of the entrance of the law of Moses into the world as well, so that grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (21).

Defense from the text

Now the question is, does this passage teach that Adam is the covenant head of the human race so that his first sin in terms of its guilt and consequences becomes the sin of the human race?  We can see that Adam and Christ are compared and contrasted here.  But the question is, How are the compared and contrasted?  In what ways are they alike and in what ways are they different? 

At this point, I want us to look more closely at verses 12-14, because this is where the debate around this doctrine rages most fiercely.  And in particular, I want us to consider the interpretation of that last part of verse 12: “for that all have sinned.”  What is Paul saying there?  What does he mean? It is at this point that I think verses 13-14 are most helpful because they help us to see that what Paul means by “because all sinned” is not because all men sinned individually, but because all men sinned in Adam.  Augustine the fourth/fifth century bishop famously translated the last part of verse 12 as “in whom [Adam] all sinned.”  Well, that is not the right translation, but it is the correct interpretation of those words.  Why do I say that?  Two main reasons: the clarification of verses 13-14 and the comparison of verses 18-19.

The Clarification of verses 13-14.

What is the function of verses 13-14?  First, these verses support the central affirmation of verse 12, namely, the universality of death.  Verse 12 comes to us in two parts.  The statement that because one man sinned, death entered into the world, parallels the statement that because all men sinned, death spread to all men.  But this last statement needs explanation.  Is the spread of death to all men independent of Adam’s sin, or does it depend in some sense upon Adam’s sin?  This is what verses 13-14 clarify.

In particular, I think Paul is saying that Adam’s sin is what ultimately explains the universality of death, rather than our individually sinning.  In other words, the phrase “because all sinned” doesn’t mean “because all men individually sinned” but rather “because all men sinned in Adam.”  When Adam sinned, we sinned.  Verses 13-14 help us to see why this is the case.

What these two verses do is to eliminate alternative explanations.  How do you explain the universality of death?  In Paul’s audience, two likely explanations for the universality of death would have been either sinning against the law of Moses or sinning against the law of conscience.  But in verse 13, the apostle tells us that the law of Moses can’t explain it, “for until the law [of Moses, see verse 14] sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.”  The law of Moses can’t explain the universality of death, because sin is only imputed (and punished) in the presence of the law that is violated.  On the other hand, when the law is absent, sin can’t be imputed and punished (cf. 4:15).  But sin was clearly imputed and punished in the period between Adam and Moses (see the Flood, for example), and so the law of Moses, which hadn’t been given yet, can’t explain the universality of such death.[5] 

But then someone else might explain it by the law of conscience (or the law of nature, as Hodge expresses it), God’s law written on the heart.  This would explain God’s judgment upon the world of the ungodly in the days of Noah.  But Paul argues in verse 14 that even this is not enough.  For, he says, “death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude [likeness] of Adam’s transgression.”  

What does he mean “after the likeness of Adam’s transgression”?  We answer that question by understanding how Adam sinned.  How did he sin?  The answer is that he sinned deliberately against an express commandment of God.  So to not sin after the likeness of Adam’s transgression means to not sin deliberately against an express command of God.

Who falls in that category?  It is not enough to point to the law of conscience, for, as Paul has already explained in chapters 1-2, this is still the known law of God in the heart.  Rather, I think Paul is referring to that category of person who dies without ever sinning consciously and deliberately.  Infants certainly belong to such a category, but they are not the only ones, and I would argue that many mentally handicapped people would also fall in this category (perhaps the reason why Paul did not specify infants).  But they still die.  Why do they die?  Why does death reign over them when death is always portrayed in the Bible as the fruit of sin (cf. 6:23)?  It reigns over them because Adam sinned and brought death into the world and in him all sinned and so death spread to them also.

The Comparison of Verses 18-19.

Paul’s sustained argument in the following verses supports this interpretation.  In verses 15-19, the apostle maintains that judgment, condemnation, and death are the result of the one sin of the one man Adam.  As John Murray points out, it would be wildly inconsistent with the apostle’s overall argument here to say in verse 12 that men die because they sin individually and then go on to say in the following verses without exception that they are judged, condemned, and die because of Adam’s sin when the following verses are supporting and teasing out the implications of his statement in verse 12.[6]   This is not to say, of course, that we don’t sin individually or that we aren’t judged and condemned for our individual sins.  We do sin and we are judged for our own sins.  In the Final Judgment, the sustained emphasis of Scripture overall is that it’s not Adam’s sin that is brought up before God, but our own sins by which we are condemned.  But Paul’s point here is on the effect that Adam’s sin has had on the human race and how to explain the universality of sin and corruption and death.

So verses 13-14 eliminate personal sinning as the reason why all die.  Rather, the sustained emphasis of Paul upon the one sin of the one man points us to Adam as the origin of human sin and death.  His sinning was the sinning of us all.  In virtue of the union of the human race with Adam, his sin is imputed to us, and so every human being from the beginning is separated from God and alienated from him.  

And the comparison of Christ and Adam in verses 18-19 cements this claim.  Note again what Paul says in verses 18-19: “Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.  For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.”  Here we have the comparison between Christ and Adam.  What does the verse say about Christ?  It says that by the righteousness of Christ the free gift of salvation comes upon all men who are united to him (which is by faith) unto justification of life.  Now how do I become justified?  By personal righteousness?  No!  By mimicking Jesus in living a perfectly spotless and obedient life?  No!  If that’s the case, then we are all doomed.  As the apostle has already demonstrated in chapters 3-4, we become righteous before God, not by our own righteousness, but through the righteousness of God imputed to those who believe in his Son.

You see, Jesus is the Second Adam (1 Cor. 15:47) and the Last Adam (45).  Just as Adam was the covenant head of the human race by virtue of creation, Christ is the covenant head of all those who believe in him, who belong to the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).  And this means that the redemptive acts of Christ, his obedient life and his substitutionary death, can be imputed to us so that we can benefit from them so that we can be legally declared righteous before God and be forgiven of our sins.  We are made righteous by an imputed righteousness, by the righteousness of God, not by our own righteousness.

And this means that for the comparison between Adam and Christ to be apt, when Paul says, “by the offence of one [Adam] judgment came upon all men to condemnation,” he doesn’t mean that we copy Adam’s sin and therefore are condemned, but that we are condemned in Adam.  His sin is imputed to us.

So the clarification of verses 13-14 and the comparison of verses 18-19 conclusively show that Paul was teaching the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.

Now as I said, this is a difficult doctrine.  It is difficult to accept if you just rely on human reason to get yourself places.  This is where we have to embrace the Biblical teaching even if we can’t answer every question arising about it. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some answers to questions, especially when it comes to the justice of God in all this.  And of course all this leads inevitably to the question of the justice of God in all of this.  How is it right for God to treat me as condemned for another man’s sin?  

One answer is that it is right for the very reason that God has so constituted the human race so that Adam is our federal head and representative.  What Adam did is done for all of us.  As the Creator, God certainly has a right to constitute the human race so that it is representative in its first man.  

However, there are some other things we can say as well.  First, the fact that God has so constituted the human race so that it can be legally represented by another means not only that we can sin in Adam but also that we can be made righteous in Christ.  How is it that the righteousness of another man can be counted as my own?  It is just because God has constituted Christ as the federal head and representative of all who belong to him in the covenant of redemption.  If, on the other hand, it is not just for God to condemn me for the sin of my federal head Adam, it is also not just for God to justify me for the righteousness of my federal head Christ for the same principle is operative in both cases.  In other words, there would be no way for me to be saved.  If we all stand on own individually before God, like stalks of corn in a field, we have no hope to be saved once we have sinned.  We would be like the angels who fell, who became demons.  On the other hand, if we can stand in union with another, like branches on a tree, there is hope for sinners before God.  Christ is the vine, and we are branches so that we partake of his grace and righteousness, just like branches on a vine partake of the life of the vine.

Another thing we can say is that although we have to acknowledge mystery here, this actually has great explanatory power for the human condition.  Truth is that which corresponds to reality and the reality is that human death and corruption and sin are universal.  To say that the ultimate explanation for our sin and corruption is our environment, or the example of others isn’t a satisfying explanation.  That might explain the presence of sin and death, but it wouldn’t explain the universality of sin and death.  But Adam as the covenant head of the human race whose sin is the sin of all does explain the university of sin and death.

To the atheist or secularist who objects to the justice of this, we would ask what is the alternative?  The alternative of the modern worldview is that there is no such thing as universal corruption of human nature because there is no such thing as a fixed human nature.  It’s just the artifact of human evolution which is constantly subjecting everything to change.  Death is just a part of the evolutionary process.  There is nothing either right or wrong about it, nothing incorruptible or corrupt about the world.  But we know this isn’t true.  In other words, the secularist has to tell us to ignore reality and to imagine that what we see is just an illusion.  It is the Christian position that is consistent with reality and truth.

One last thing that I think it’s important to say is that though God has the right as the potter over the clay to constitute Adam and Christ as federal heads of humanity, men do not.   Human justice, by the Bible’s own account, is to be carried out according to the principle of individual responsibility.  In the Law of Moses, for example, fathers are not to be put to death for the sins of the son nor sons for the sins of the father.  The doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin, in other words, is not the standard for human law courts – again, by the Bible’s own account.[7]

But still a lot of this might seem a bit academic.  What is the relevance of it all to us?  And that is how I want us to end today.  This doctrine can give us a good push in the right direction, spiritually speaking.

Direction by the text

This is where I want to come back to the first word in verse 12: “Wherefore.”  Here is where the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s to his posterity and the comparison of that to Christ and the imputation of his righteousness to the elect is connected to the preceding part of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  And what I want to point out is that Paul is continuing to give us a real basis for our hope in Christ.  The application of this passage, therefore, is not to understand it so that it makes us clever theological disputants, but to understand it so that we become Christians whose hope in Christ for their eternal future is unassailable.  And if you are that kind of Christian, you are going to be a very happy and holy person.  Now how does Romans 5:12-21 help us to be hopeful and happy and holy?

We’ve seen that the theme of Romans 5-8 is the assurance of salvation and the hope that the believer has in Christ.  “Wherefore” in verse 12 means that Paul is continuing this theme and developing it along the lines of this comparison and contrast between Christ and Adam.  How does this promote hope and happiness and holiness?

It does it because what Paul demonstrates here is that our Lord has gone to the bottom of the human problem and the human condition.  He did not just die and give his life a ransom and an atonement to deal with symptoms.  He goes to the root of sin, to its origin, to its beginning in Adam, and he deals with that.  Sin and death began in Adam.  Sin entered the world and death by sin, and death spread to all me because all sinned in Adam (12).  If you are going to deal with sin definitively and defeat it, you are going to have to chase it back to its den.  And the den from which sin emerged is the Fall of mankind in Adam.  Paul is saying that our Lord has gone into that den and slain the lion there.

How did he do it?  How does Jesus Christ rescue us from Adam and all the dreadful consequences of sin?  He does it by uniting us to himself.  He takes us out of Adam, as it were, and puts us in a new category, makes us a new people, a new humanity.  United to Christ, we are saved by his death which purges our sins and by his life which keeps us in grace and brings us to heaven.  Paul develops this especially in terms of the future resurrection of the body in 1 Cor. 15: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:45-49).

Jesus has dealt with sin at its root.  He saves us from the condemnation that Adam brought upon his posterity.  And that means that he saves us from all the consequences of sin.  He saves us from the dreadful choices that we make as sinful human beings.  He saves us from Adam’s sin, and he saves us from our sin.  He unites us to himself and in him makes us the possessors of all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places.  And that means that we can have total confidence in the salvation that Jesus Christ gives to all who turn from their sins and put their trust in him.  Yes, it is true that sin reigns unto death through Adam.  But it is also true that grace reigns through righteousness through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 5:21).  The offence abounds but grace much more abounds (20).  

So we can have hope in Christ, hope that is untouchable by the changes and the vicissitudes of our times.  And if we have that hope, it can give you joy even in the presence of grief and pain.  And if we have that hope, it can make you a holy man or woman, even as we struggle with the remnants of corruption within us.  

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[1] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Anthropology (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1986 [reprint]), p. 195.

[2] See https://nobts.edu/baptist-center-theology/confessions/First_London_Baptist_Confession_of_Faith_1646.pdf

[3] See https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-6 

[4] See https://prts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Shorter_Catechism.pdf 

[5] Some want Paul to be saying here that there was a law operative (just not the Law of Moses) and to guess at what law Paul was talking about.  But I don’t think that’s the point.  The point here in verse 13 is not that there was a law other than the law of Moses that caused men to die, though that is true.  The point is very simply that the law of Moses can’t explain the presence of sin and death before it was given.  There is no need to read more into the verse than that.

[6] John Murray, The Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Philipsburg: P&R, 1959), p. 11.

[7] This article was really helpful in clarifying this for me: https://old-baptist-test.blogspot.com/2025/03/divine-justice-issues-xi.html