There are two immediate ramifications: (1) We can’t excuse our sin, as people commonly do, by appealing to our humanity. “I’m only human” is not a justification; it’s precisely the problem. (2) It brings to a screeching halt every attempt at trying to rescue ourselves by exerting moral effort. Moral improvement cannot alter the core problem of spiritual heredity and federal reality. A “moral” child of Adam is still a child of Adam.
History stands as witness to the tragic fact that the seemingly unimaginable is both possible and even habitual. It is possible for the church to lose the gospel. Core biblical truths can get eroded by incessant cultural pressures and buried under legal tendencies. Such is the case with the truth presented clearly in Romans 5:12–21. In these ten verses, Paul roots the great crisis of fallen man and the astounding cure of the gospel in the realities of federal headship and imputation. These concepts have been largely lost to American evangelicalism.
Sociologist Christian Smith has detailed with painful clarity the ways that Americans think of Christianity in internal, sentimental, and individualistic categories.1 Paul’s gospel, on the other hand, is a federal gospel—a gospel based on the principle of representation—in which the most significant realities are external, objective, and representative. Paul views both the human crisis and the gospel cure in corporate categories. The core human problem is that we are born “in Adam” and are recipients of the imputed guilt, inherited corruption, and inevitable devastation of his sin.2 The gospel solution is for us to be found in a second Adam and to receive the righteousness, holiness, and eternal life rooted in His obedience.
The first thing we need to know is that the “bad news” is far worse than most people imagine. Paul makes it clear that the great crisis of mankind is not merely that we sin individually but that we are corporately “in Adam” (1 Cor. 15:22) and are caught in the net of his sin, his condemnation, and his death. We have a classification problem, not just a moral condition. Our moral problem is the fruit and evidence of our fatal paternal problem. We are all born “in Adam” and subject to his crime, corruption, and condemnation.
Paul raises the universal reality of human death (Rom. 5:12, 14) as patent evidence of our corporate crisis. Everyone dies.
