Dr. Sproul discusses the "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" document. There is further discussion on the imputation of Adam's sin to the entire race with an investigation into the consequence and universality of original sin and of death. This section ends with an overview of covenant theology and the covenant of works.

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.) (Rom. 5:12–19)

This is the inerrant Word of God, superintended and inspired by the third person of the Trinity. It is the Word of God and is His unvarnished truth preserved for us. Let us pray.

Father, we turn our attention now to this passage that explores the magnificent riches of the superiority of the new Adam through His victory, wherein He has proven so great a benefit to those who belong to Him, in stark contrast to the progeny of Adam who suffered from his failure. Help us to plumb the depth of these things that are set forth here for our understanding. For we ask it in the name of Christ. Amen.

The Famous Five Points

Forty years ago, I was teaching a course in theology at a Christian college in Massachusetts, and we came to the section of theology called soteriology, which is that dimension of theology that focuses attention on salvation and how it is acquired. Part of that course involved a brief excursion covering the so-called famous five points of Calvinism.

The five points are summarized by the popular acrostic T-U-L-I-P, which stands for the fairest flower in God’s garden, in sharp contradistinction from the Arminian flower, which is the daisy. You pluck the daisy’s petals, saying, “He loves me, He loves me not.” But Calvin did not summarize his theology by five points, nor did he think the essence of Reformed theology could be reduced to five points. Reformed theology, as evidenced in our confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, is far greater in scope than those specific five points of Calvinism.

The reason they arose to a certain notoriety was that there was a Reformed institution in Holland in the early seventeenth century where a few professors, led by Arminius, registered a protest of five specific doctrines of historic Reformed theology, and their action of protest was called a “remonstration.” This earned these gentlemen the title Remonstrants, because they were remonstrating.

These men were remonstrating about those five peculiar points within historic Reformed theology with which they disagreed. The controversy led ultimately to the Synod of Dordrecht, in which the protest of the Remonstrants was condemned along with the Arminian doctrine that they were espousing.

The Depths of Original Sin

Fast forward to my experience forty years ago in teaching these five points to students in a classroom. I started at the beginning of the TULIP with T, which stands for total depravity. We talked about this and looked at chapter 3 of Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he spells out in great detail the extent of human corruption.

I had about thirty students in this class, and I explained the doctrine of total depravity to them, showing them that sin is not simply tangential to our existence. It is not a simple marring or blemish on our exterior. Rather, sin penetrates to the very radix, to the very core of our humanity, despoiling us in our bodies, minds, wills, and every aspect of our being, leaving us in a state of moral inability. So much are we captivated by this bondage to sin that we no longer have within us the moral capacity to incline ourselves to the things of God.

I labored all that for these college students, and at the end of the section on the T of TULIP, I asked for a show of hands. I took a straw vote to see how they were doing. I said: “How many of you are persuaded of this doctrine? Your grade is not dependent on whether you agree with my teaching here or not. You have to know what it is, but if you don’t agree with it, that’s okay with me. You won’t suffer at my hand. How many of you agree with it?”

There was no hesitation. Every hand went up. I said, “Now, you’re sure?” They all answered in the affirmative. I asked, “Are you sure that you’re sure?” They said yes again. So, I went up into the left-hand top of the blackboard corner. I wrote the number thirty. Then I wrote a message to the janitor that said “Please do not erase,” and we broke for the weekend.

We came back the following Monday, and I started on the U of TULIP, unconditional election. When I got through that section, I asked how many believed this doctrine, and there was quite a bit of attrition. I had to erase that number thirty and diminish it to around twenty-five. Once we got to limited atonement, there was wholesale abandonment of their previous convictions.

I said to the students: “If you really understand the T of total depravity, the rest is simple. The rest is automatic. If you understand the doctrine of total depravity, even if the Bible didn’t teach unconditional election, you would have to believe it. If it didn’t even teach limited atonement, you’d have to believe it. If you didn’t believe irresistible grace, you’d have to assume it if you really understood the nature of our fallen condition.”

There is a reason that I wrote a book called Willing to Believe, in which I examined the various historical positions where the church has struggled over the doctrine of original sin. Virtually every church in history has confessed the belief that there is such a thing as original sin. However, when we begin to define the contents of original sin, the depths of original sin, that is when the controversies emerge. In that book, I examine the position of Pelagius, semi-Pelagianism, Augustinianism, Luther’s view, Calvin’s view, dispensationalism, Arminiansm, and the various arguments that go along the way. I am warning you that I wrote a fairly large book on this subject, and that is why it is going to take me a while to get through this. I cannot rush through this—it is too important.

From Adam to Christ

Let me give you some further background before we go back to the text. In the previous message, I spent time explaining the competing views and theories of how we are related to Adam’s fall. We explored the doctrine of realism, which argues that the reason the Bible says we all sinned in Adam is because we were really there; our souls preexisted our births and bodies, so we were actually present, alive and well, back in the garden, and we sinned there together with Adam. I talked about various nuances of realism, then rejected realism in favor of the doctrine of federalism.

There is potential for us to focus our attention on our relationship to the fall of Adam and Eve and the sinful nature with which we are born so much so that we miss the context of what Paul is talking about here to the Romans. Remember, chapter 5 is not a dangling participle hanging out here all by itself with no relationship to what came before it and what is coming after it.

Here in Romans 5, Paul is laboring further critical implications of the doctrine of justification. In a real sense, the entire epistle of Romans is Paul’s explanation of the full-orbed significance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. In chapter 5, he is giving us the contrast between our state of ruin that has been brought about through Adam. Through one man’s sin, one man’s transgression, one man’s offense, the whole world has plunged into this radical condition of original sin. But through another Man’s obedience, we are justified. The contrast here is between Adam and Christ, and it all has to do with justification.

A Doctrinal Hill to Die On

Let me give you some even further background. Some years ago, as I have already mentioned, the evangelical world was shocked by an initiative called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), where well-known members of the Christian evangelical community joined forces with representatives of the Roman Catholic community to declare their joint effort in combating common grace issues, such as issues of cultural relativism, the destruction of marriage and the family, abortion, and others.

Historically, Protestants have always argued that it is a perfectly legitimate thing to join hands with people of any theological persuasion in those arenas of common grace, ministering to the very basic human needs of people, shelter, health, and so on. However, the document they produced went beyond this joint activity in the arena of common grace and declared to the world that these two groups shared a common faith in the gospel.

I was called by the press the day the ECT document was released. They asked, “What do you think of this?” I said, “This is a total betrayal of the Protestant Reformation and of evangelicalism.” I, with John MacArthur, Alistair Begg, Jim Boice, and several other evangelical leaders, publicly protested against this document. We protested it because we saw in it the compromise of the gospel of justification by faith alone.

Our concern provoked a second Evangelicals and Catholics Together article, in which they said, “We all agree that faith is necessary for justification.” At the end of the document, it said that there were other matters that still needed to be discussed, such as imputation. I responded to the architects of that particular document and said: “If you don’t have justification by faith alone, you don’t have the gospel. If you don’t have imputation, you don’t have justification by faith alone.”

At this point, they were horrified. They said: “We can’t do anything to please you. You keep raising the bar, moving the goal post.” I responded: “I haven’t moved anything. Since the sixteenth century—and since Paul wrote Romans and Galatians—if you don’t have sola fide, you don’t have the gospel, and absolutely essential to justification by faith alone is the doctrine of imputation.”

You may be thinking: “It’s fine for you theologians to worry about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but why can’t we just all get along? Why can’t we not be exercised about these minor details?” This apparently minor detail of imputation is the article upon which we live or die, upon which our eternal life is at stake. That is why the theologians get exercised about it, and woe betide the theologian who does not get exercised about it. It is just too important.

I was talking to someone recently who asked me, “As you grow older”—that person was careful not to say, “As you grow old”—but the question was this: “As you grow older, do you find that it’s easier to tolerate more error in the church than when you were young?” I answered, “I’ll tell you this: I have learned over the years that the more you study the things of God, the more theology you are engaged in, the more you begin to realize the difference between those things that are essential and those things that are livable errors that you can get along with.”

As long as I have lived so far, I am not ready to give up on the deity of Christ or negotiate that, and God forbid that I would ever negotiate sola fide, justification by faith alone. And if I am not going to negotiate that, then I am not going to negotiate imputation.

After the first two editions of ECT, those of us who were opposed to the initiative met with those who were involved in it, and I brought forth a proposal. I said that what we really needed was another document called Evangelicals and Evangelicals Together, where we would meet among ourselves as evangelicals—not with Romans Catholics—and assure the evangelical community of what we believe in to show that we have not negotiated the gospel.

We met with members of the committee that were involved with ECT for over a year and wrote a document called “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration” that had about thirty affirmations and denials in which we agreed on what was essential to the gospel and denied any kind of errors associated with that. Then we had a celebration at the CBA convention in front of six thousand people, introduced this document, and then I wrote the book that served as a commentary on it called Getting the Gospel Right.

It was interesting to watch what happened in the theological community, particularly in the evangelical world, in response to that document regarding the celebration of the gospel. In the affirmations and denials—of which I wrote the working draft, so I know what the authorial intent was in it—there is a statement I ensured was present that affirms imputation as essential to the gospel. In response, many in the evangelical world were willing to say: “We believe in these articles of affirmation and denial except for one. Get rid of that term imputation.”

There is a growing movement called the “new perspective on Paul” that has been pervasive throughout the Christian community, even the evangelical community, that denies the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us as the grounds for our justification. You may not even be aware of this. This may not touch where you live. But I can tell you that the church is in flames over this issue of imputation right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Imputation has not been an issue among evangelical Christians like this since the sixteenth century.

I have labored this introduction for this reason. There is no place in the Bible where the doctrine of imputation is set forth more clearly and centrally then it is here in Romans 5. I also labored the point of how we all sinned in Adam because I can find no other way to make sense out of the way Paul says in Romans 5 that we sinned in Adam than to understand this assertion putatively, meaning the way in which we sinned in Adam was by imputation. Paul labors the point that Adam’s sin is reckoned, transferred, or imputed to the entire human race. We know that he is talking about imputation because he spends time on this remarkable contrast that just as one man’s offense and sin was putatively reckoned to the entire human race, so another Man’s righteousness, in a similar manner, was imputed to all who believe.

The Reign of Sin and Death

It is interesting to me that even though there is an ongoing controversy between Arminians and Calvinists about the extent of original sin, one thing these groups agree on is that Adam’s sin produced a ruinous effect for the entire human race. There is no way we can avoid the thrust of what Paul is teaching in Romans 5 regarding the consequences of the fall of Adam and Eve.

When we speak of original sin, we are not speaking about the original sin. We are not speaking about the first sin. Rather, original sin refers to the result of the first sin, the ruination and corruption visited to the entire human race. We are recognizing that we are born in a state of sin. As David declares:

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin did my mother conceive me. (Ps. 51:5)

We are born sinners from the get-go. The fact that we are born in this fallen condition is what we are referencing by this term original sin; it is the consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve, which is visited upon the whole human race.

Paul makes an argument tying the universal extent of Adam’s sin to the universality of death in the human race. That is how he argues. Let us look at that briefly again in Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

At first glance, you may read that and say, “Adam sinned, and then everyone after Adam sinned. Adam died as a result of his sin, and everyone since Adam has died because all have sinned.” But here is where it is important to make another distinction. The business of theologians is to make distinctions, and an important one is the distinction between original sin and actual sin.

Actual sin occurs when we actually do something that transgresses the law of God. We looked at this briefly last time, but we are looking at it from a little different perspective this time. Actual sin occurs when I violate the law of God. But I am born in a state of original sin. A baby in the crib, though it bears the weight of original sin, does not bear the weight of the guilt of actual sin, because actual sin requires a conscious awareness of right and wrong and an actual violation of law. The infant in the crib does not know anything about the law of God.

You might say, “Wait a minute. Besides the law published at Sinai that is delivered by Moses, there is still the law that God plants in the heart, and that law that is part of lex naturalis, the law of nature, which we learn from nature itself without ever hearing about the Ten Commandments.” It is true that God reveals His law in other ways and places than the Ten Commandments. But still, for sin to be involved in that, one must have some kind of discernment, some kind of conscious understanding of the prohibition, which we are saying the infant does not have. Until a person reaches whatever age we might call the age of accountability, though he is by nature a sinner, he has not yet committed actual sin.

If that is the case, if there is a period of time between birth and accountability before a person commits actual sin, why is it that people die? How do we account for babies dying in infancy? Since death is the punishment for sin and an infant is incapable of actual sin, how is it possible for the infant to die in his crib? The only way that makes sense is the way Paul argues here: death reigned from Adam to Moses. Before there was any law in the world, there was still sin as a result of the imputation of Adam’s sin.

Posse non Peccare, Posse non Mori

At one point in this study of Romans, we looked briefly at Augustine’s treatment of original sin. I will repeat it with a little bit of embellishment now. In Augustine’s debate with Pelagius, Augustine argued that in creation, before the fall, Adam had two abilities. He had what Augustine called the posse peccare, the possibility or ability of sinning. The word peccare means “to sin.” We get the word impeccable from it to refer to someone without any stain or blemish. We talk about little sins using the word peccadillos, also coming from the Latin root peccare, which means “to sin.”

Augustine said that in creation, Adam and Eve were made with the ability to sin, the posse peccare. But they also had the ability to not sin. They were not fallen. They were not corrupt. Adam and Eve had the true power to resist temptation and not to fall into sin, so they also had the posse non peccare, the power or ability to not sin.

Here comes the addition to what we talked about previously. Looking at it from the perspective of mortality and death, Augustine argued this way: Just as Adam and Eve in creation had the posse peccare and the posse non peccare, they also had the posse mori and the posse non mori. That is, they had the ability to die, the posse mori. They were not created immortal. They could die under certain circumstances. But death was not necessary to our original parents, because had they obeyed the command of God, they would not die. They still had the ability to live forever, the posse non mori.

Adam and Eve had these twin abilities: the ability to sin and the ability to not sin; the ability to die and the ability to not die. After the fall, and what we are getting at in original sin, Adam’s progeny lost the posse non peccare, the ability to not sin. Since the fall, no human being has the power within himself to live a perfect life. No one can live without sinning, just as no one can live without dying.

Augustine said that after the fall, the curse of the fall is that we are now in a state of non posse non peccare, where it is not possible for us to not sin. That is difficult because it is a double negative. It is not possible for us to not sin. Likewise, we have the non posse non mori, the inability to not die. What Augustine is explaining here is our basic humanity. When you go to heaven and have your full glorification, then you have the non posse peccare and the non posse mori. You will not be able to sin or die. That is what we are looking forward to.

Give Me the Imputation of Christ or Give Me Death

We have seen the situation before the fall and after the fall. Paul is arguing here that because of Adam’s sin, not only does sin become universal, but death is universal as well. Why is that so? Because the guilt of Adam is reckoned, counted, and imputed to the whole human race.

We are dealing unassailably with the doctrine of imputation, imputation in its worst of all possible manifestations: the imputation of guilt from one person to all those he represents, which leads us to the ruination of our present estate as fallen and corrupt sinners. But in contrast to that is imputation in the best of all possible manifestations: the imputation of someone else’s righteousness to us.

Do not dismiss this as a theological technicality. It is the very essence of the gospel that someone else’s righteousness counts for you. If you get rid of imputation, then you have no basis for any hope when standing before the judgment seat of God. You either stand before God’s judgment with your righteousness or with someone else’s.

If I have to stand before God with my righteousness, which the Bible says is nothing but filthy rags, I have no hope. Take away the imputation of my Savior’s righteousness to my account, and there is no good news left to the gospel. I am on my own. What I can bring to the table is not enough to escape the wrath of a holy God. That is why I say this: Give me the imputation of Christ or give me death. I am happy, proud, and honored to die on that hill.

The Covenant of Works

There is another issue tightly related to the issue of imputation in the ongoing controversy of our time, and it has to do with the covenant of works. Some of you know that historic Reformed theology often goes by the nickname of “covenant theology.” That is usually in counter distinction from the modern theology called “dispensationalism.”

Dispensationalism divides redemptive history into seven different timeframes, into seven different ways in which God judges people. They want to “rightly divide” the Word of truth, meaning they divide up the Bible into these seven different timeframes instead of looking at the structure in which the Bible itself is written. The structure in which the Bible is written to us is the structure of covenant. It is all through the Scriptures.

You see the kairotic moment, if you will, in the Old Testament when God made a covenant with Noah. After He destroyed the world by the flood, God promised never to do it again. He put His rainbow in the sky.

Then God called Abraham out of the land of paganism, out of Ur of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia. He said to Abraham: “I will be your God. I will make you the father of a great nation. I will bless you that you may be a blessing to the whole world.” In the framework of that promise there is a covenant that God made with Abraham.

Then God called to Himself a people, and Abraham’s covenant was passed to Isaac and Jacob. Then Jacob’s descendants were called into bondage, and God brought these descendants of Abraham together and added to the covenant He made with Abraham by giving them the Ten Commandments and the blessings and curses that follow the law. God made a covenant with David and his house, the promise to restore his kinship forever.

Over and over, we see covenants established by God in the Old Testament, but the first one we meet is the covenant of works, the covenant God made with Adam and Eve on behalf of the whole world in their time of probation. In that covenant, He set before them the promise of blessedness: They could eat of the Tree of Life and live forever if they were obedient. But in that probation, they were told that they must not touch the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, lest they die.

As Paul talks about in our text in Romans 5, Adam and Eve were in the garden surrounded by the structure of an agreement, a promise of either destruction or blessing depending upon what they did or how they performed. That is why it is called a “covenant of works.” If they worked righteousness, they would live; if they worked disobedience, they would perish, and all their progeny with them. Is that clear? That is what is meant by the covenant of works.

In recent years, some people have raised a protest against that and said: “Reformed people talk about the covenant of works, then after that, the covenant of grace. Isn’t it true that any covenant that God ever makes with His creatures, even in their pre-fallen condition, is a gracious promise? God doesn’t owe His creatures any promise of redemption whatsoever. So, the fact that He enters into a covenant with Adam and Eve is a matter of grace to begin with.”

That is true, but that is not the point of the distinction between the covenant of works and of grace. The point of that distinction is that Adam and Eve failed the covenant of works, and when that failure took place, God did not destroy the human race, but added a promise to the original covenant, a promise of redemption that would come through the Seed of the woman, One who would crush the head of the serpent while His heel would be injured in the process. The promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to Moses, to David, and all the rest of the promises were God pouring out His blessing upon people on the basis of His preserving, redeeming, and saving grace.

Saved by Christ’s Works

I say to people—and this sometimes confuses them, so you have to be alert now—that the Bible teaches us that justification is by faith alone. Yet, on the other hand, keep in mind that, ultimately, there is only one way anyone will ever be saved in the presence of God, and that is through works. People say: “Did I hear him right? Did he say that the only way people will be saved is through works?” Yes, that is what I said.

It is not a question of whether we are going to be saved through works. The question is, By whose works will we be saved? It is through the works of the One who alone fulfilled the terms of the covenant of works. That is why I regularly labor the point that it is not just the death of Christ that redeems us, but it is the life of Christ that redeems us.

By one man’s disobedience, we are plunged into ruin, but by one Man obedience—the new Adam’s obedience—we are justified. To say that we are justified by faith alone is simply shorthand to say that we are justified by Christ alone. Justification by faith alone means that you cannot make it on the basis of your works, but you have to make it by trusting in someone else’s works. Luther called this an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is extra nos, outside of us.

Our works will never save us, but Christ’s works are perfect, and they meet all the requirements of the covenant of works. The new Adam arrives in history to fulfill that which the original Adam failed so miserably to do. By one man’s offense the world was plunged into ruin, but by another Man’s obedience, we are justified.

Do you see the connection there between the covenant of works and imputation? If you take away the covenant of works, if you take away imputation, you take away the significance of the perfect acts of Jesus’ obedience.

No Salvation Without Imputation

A few weeks ago, I mentioned John Piper’s book Contending for Our All, in which he gives a biographical sketch and analysis of three great Christian leaders. I commend this book to you. First of all, he talks about Athanasius, Athanasius contra mundum, Athanasius against the world, the hero in the Arian controversy in the fourth century. Secondly, he talks about the Puritan John Owen, who was a great Christian and a great theologian. The third person Piper chronicles in this book Contending for Our All is J. Gresham Machen, who was the founder of Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Machen had a brilliant mind. He left Princeton Theological Seminary when it became corrupt. When he was still relatively young, in his early fifties, I believe, Machen was asked to preach in the Dakotas somewhere over Christmas break, and due to his frail health, his colleagues at the seminary urged him not to make the arduous journey to the Dakotas for this preaching mission in the dead of winter. But Machen did not listen to his friends, and he boarded the train. He was alone. He went to the Dakotas, and there he became sick and, indeed, sick unto death. But the day he died, he sent a telegram to his dear comrade in the faith, John Murray. The telegram read, “Grateful for the perfect active obedience of Jesus.” On his deathbed, J. Gresham Machen was absorbed with what Paul talks about in this text—the perfect righteousness of Christ that is ours by imputation.

Without the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, there is no justification. Without justification, there is no gospel. Paul labors in this section how central Christ’s life of perfect obedience is, the only possible ground for our salvation, which comes by imputation. Let us pray.

Our Father, what a glorious gift it is to us, who have no righteousness of our own in which to boast, that You would impute to us the perfect righteousness of Your dear Son, who obeyed Your law for us. Father, we still tremble at the warnings of the law, but our tremblings are put to rest when we look to the gospel, when we look to Jesus for what He has wrought for us by His obedience. Thank you for the new Adam who redeems us. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.