The Origin And Reality Of Sin
To understand redemption we must understand that from which we need to be saved, and this takes us back to the brief account in Genesis of the Edenic “seed plot”, where the primeval sin was committed by our first parents, Adam and Eve, who suffered as a consequence “shame, a defiled conscience and mortality. As their descendants, we partake of that mortality that came by sin, and inherit a nature, prone to sin. But by our own actions we become sinners and stand in need of forgiveness of sins before we can be acceptable before God” (Cooper-Carter Addendum, Unity Booklet, p. 14) .
Adam’s fall is an appropriate place to start our consideration, for “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men …” (Romans 5:12) . Yet these truths are no more important than the words that follow, “for that all have sinned”. Paul has laboured, particularly in the first three chapters of this epistle, to stress that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) . And we must, in ourselves, feel the impact of this great truth, for, knowing God’s law, we have “sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression”. It will not do for us to say, “We sin because Adam fell”, for we know that we cannot say when we are tempted, “I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin …” (James 1:13-15).
True, experience seems to teach that we have inherited a nature prone to sin, we are possessed with desires to do forbidden things disproportionate to our powers of self-control, which Bro. Carter suggests came as a consequence of the Edenic transgression (Unity Booklet, pp.29-30), but the propensity is inflamed and increased each time we commit a sin until, God forbid, it may by indulgence become a part of us.
No doubt Adam sinning made it easier for his descendants to sin, or more difficult to resist temptation; but the fall of Adam did not make, in any mechanical sense, others to sin, who would otherwise have been righteous; nor does God regard men as sinners simply because their father sinned. We are made sinners, not at birth, but when, as responsible beings, we are amenable to judgment (wrath or reconciliation) and “fall short of the glory of God”; which is what the Cooper-Carter addendum is stressing when it says ” … by our own action we become sinners and stand in need of forgiveness of sins before we can be acceptable before God”.
When Adam became a sinner “Judgment came upon him unto condemnation” (Romans 5:16) i.e. death reigned upon him (v.17) and his descendants (v.18); mortality (a condition, subject to death) was thus his punishment and, because we are his heirs, our subsequent misfortune. Adam, by transgressing the Divine commandment, had come under “the law of sin and death” which said in effect, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die”. Mortality thus became a condition of his being, which he was powerless to remove.
Bro. J. J. Hadley makes a point that may well be considered here:
It is into this mortal condition that all Adam’s descendants are born . . . We speak of it sometimes for brevity’s sake as the “Adamic Curse” or the “Adamic Condemnation”. These are permissible descriptions, but it should be remembered they are not the words of Scripture. Another non-scriptural term, often employed, speaks of our having “a condemned nature”, and here, it appears to us, is the employment of a needless metaphysical phrase which, instead of explaining anything, needs itself to be explained. It should, therefore, be avoided. (The Nature and Sacrifice of Christ, p.9).
A Sentence Which Defiled
The B.A.S.F., -clause 5, says —
That Adam broke this law, and was adjudged unworthy of immortality, and sentenced to return to the ground from whence he was taken — a sentence which defiled and became a physical law of his being, and was transmitted to all his posterity.
Some have read this to mean that the Divine sentence was carried into effect by the implantation of a physical law of decay which works out dissolution and decay. Others object to this on the ground that no new physical law operated upon Adam after he fell, but simply that when he was denied access to the tree he was deprived of that which would have sustained him in life and have arrested the innate processes of decay. But really they both come to the same thing. If in his novitiate Adam had been in possession of something that would have arrested the processes of decay and afterwards lacked that something, then a law came into operation which would otherwise have been inoperative, and the condition Adam was in was a new and different one from that which he had been in previously.
But there is a whole world of difference between what was intended by the phrase, “the implantation of a physical law” and the erroneous concept of “a physical implantation”, as put forward by the “Andrewists” in Australia, which, in itself, is an object of God’s wrath. Because people cannot handle figure and prefer to deal with literal, concrete terms which they can visualise and understand, there has ever been a tendency to shift the adjective “physical” from the abstract “law” (a principle) across to the noun “implantation”.
To avoid this confusion, Bro. Roberts amended the B.S.F. to read “a sentence which defiled and became a physical law of his being”. The word “implantation” has now gone, but the confusion remains; and the Andrewist notion of “physical implantation” is kept alive by those who now shift the adjective across to the word “defiled”, and hold that Bro. Thomas and Bro. Roberts taught “physical defilement”, i.e. that there was a physical change in Adam’s nature (as distinct from a change in the condition of that nature) brought about by the fall which renders man, by virtue of his physical nature, apart from transgression, “a child of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3) . Does this imply a change of animal species, say, from a sort of neanderthal Adam to a homo sapiens Adam; with the flesh of Adam’s posterity now as abhorrent in the eyes of God as the most heinous of crimes?
Did Our Pioneers Teach Such Physical Defilement?
That this was not the case may be readily seen from the following extract from a letter Bro. Thomas wrote to Bro. Roberts (published in The Christadelphian, August 1869, p.216) :
“Our flesh is the same as Adam’s before he sinned . . . His flesh, undefiled by sin, is constitutionally the same as the flesh of his posterity, defiled legally thereby. The Christ Deity veiled Himself in the Adamic nature, defiled by sin, in order that he might condemn to death the nature which, though created very good, had been legally defiled by transgressing the Eden Law. This purpose would have been defeated if he had veiled himself in a clean nature.”
N.B. Bro. Thomas here refers to “defiled nature” and “clean nature” in a “legal” sense; and not a physical sense. Physically, Bro. Thomas says, clean flesh and defiled flesh are constitutionally the same. We are therefore pleased to see that the Cooper-Carter Addendum placed the word “defiled” against the noun “conscience”. To be quite clear on this point, and lest there should be any misunderstanding, let us repeat: The sentence did not change the natural flesh and blood nature the man and woman possessed before transgression; yet we can allow that there were attendant physical, or physiological, effects within that nature, e.g. Eve was to bring forth children in sorrow (Gen. 3:16; John 16:21) and Adam was to eat bread in the sweat of his face. Further, he was to experience sorrow and eventually return to the dust of the ground.
Nazarene and Andrewist Errors
Last month we suggested that the antidote to error on the subject of the nature of man is the fact that man as revealed in the Scriptures is a unity — a body of dust activated by the breath of God (Gen. 2:7) . When theorists attempt to separate from that unity an element that they then regard as an entity in itself they have the beginnings of a heresy. Few people realise that the main premises of the Nazarene and Andrewist errors are practically the same, although by process of reasoning they come to quite different conclusions. Regarding our “condemnation in Adam” as a physical condition in itself that was inherited from the defiled nature of Adam as a result of his sin, both schools have gone on to regard the “condemned nature” as involving the individual imputation of “guilt” for all his descendants. The Nazarenes (“clean flesh”) claim that Christ, by his miraculous begettal, derived a “free life” from God in order to escape the “moral” consequences of Adam’s sin; whereas the Andrewites (“sin-in-the-flesh”) urge that sacrifice was as necessary for Christ as for his brethren to secure the removal of the “guilt” with its “legal decree”. The difference between the Nazarene and Andrewist conception of this “guilt” may thus be expressed by the words “moral” and “legal” respectively.
J. J. Andrew, in his pamphlet entitled Sin and its removal (p.8) defines the difference thus: Nazarene teaching — “Moral guilt involving death, and requiring the giving up of a “free life” to take it away”. His own teaching — “Constitutional or federal [elsewhere defined as ‘legal’] guilt, or a physical defilement involving death, and requiring the sacrifice of an obedient Son of God, made of sinful flesh, to effect a cleansing”.
The distinction is that of “moral” and “legal” guilt; but the latter term does not improve upon the former, for it advances unreasonably the proposition that a man is held to be legally responsible to God for that for which he is not morally accountable.
But the “sin-in-the-flesh” theory of J. J. Andrew in the 1890s was no more acceptable to the Central Christadelphian brethren than had been the Renunciationist (“clean flesh”) teaching of Edward Turkey two decades before. Bro. G. F. Lake wrote in “The Christadelphian”, 1895, p.274:
Man needs justification by the sacrifice of Christ because he is a sinner and not because God has imputed to him the “legal” liability of the sin of Adam. The latter is a mere phrase — a sound. And how awful to say that the wrath of God abides upon every child of the flesh because of that! The matter is made worse by the declaration that men “have no moral guilt” as to the offence of Adam, only a “legal” one. It suggests that God’s wrath abode upon Christ because of his agonising death.
Yet there are some in Australia who, whilst claiming to adhere to Central Christadelphian teaching, accept the Andrewist premises, but reject the conclusions on Resurrectional Responsibility because they are so obviously unscriptural. They claim that Christ shed his blood to deliver himself from the condemnation inherited from Adam, not realising, as J. J. Andrew points out in his pamphlet of May 1895, that the logical conclusion to this admission is that every other member of the human race must, for the same object, require the blood of Christ.
Yet Bro. Roberts, in the Roberts-Andrew Debate (see Unity Booklet) clearly points out that blood, throughout the Scriptures, is shed only in relation to actual sins: “as far as Christ was concerned the shedding of his blood was not necessary, except as an act of obedience”.
The Cause Of The Trouble
In all this sorry strife of words, when legalistic minds insist on pursuing these mystifying tracks (cf. Unity Booklet, pp.70-71) and condemning all who will not assent, without reservation, to their legal abstractions and explanations of metaphysical matters — e.g. that “the origin of the propensities is the first principle of the Truth and ought clearly to be made a fellowship matter” — what are we to do with the sincere and respected brother who wrote to us in June 1968:
“And what are we to think of a brother (like the present writer) who, although he can honestly claim to accept the spirit of the document [the B.A.S.F.] and nearly all of the letter, would have preferred a form of words other than that which says that God’s sentence defiled Adam’s being? Not that he objects to the proposition that Adam’s being was defiled; he prefers the view that the act of sin caused the defilement. What then of such a brother? He does not want to quarrel with anyone over this difference. He would have preferred not to trouble people by raising the matter, but those who insist upon an unqualified assent to the Statement [B.A.S.F.] are, in effect, seeking a quarrel with him. Logically, they are forcing him either to say, with tongue in cheek, ‘I accept the Statement without reservation,’ or to resign … The issue is a serious one. Some brethren insist that a strict application of the Statement of Faith provides the answer to our problems. If they pursue their policy (and that depends in a large measure on the encouragement they get from other brethren) they will not separate the sheep from the goats, but there is a separate the sheep from the brethren) they will not separate he sheep from the goats, but there is a real danger that they will cause a new rift in the brotherhood. They are bound to alienate some who, while they share their anxiety about modern trends, cannot, in conscience, subscribe to their unscriptural and unreasonable policy. It is the policy that is unscriptural, the attitude to the document, and not the document itself.”
We believe, with Bro. Carter (Unity Booklet, p.71) that the Andrewist teachings, along with those of the Nazarene Fellowship, have a show of logic, but lead only to strife about legal abstractions. Those who pursue them live in a fantasy world, of words. “That men are objects of divine anger because they are flesh”, was described by Bro. Collyer 70 years ago as the most outrageous statement made in the controversy on Adamic condemnation. To that we subscribe. Yet brethren in Australia, with legalistic bent, are today vociferously demanding that all subscribe without qualification to statements such as:
“Jesus needed to be brought nigh to God by his own blood” (yet cf. Ephesians 2:12, 13); or “that Christ was made a curse for us in being made of flesh and blood” (cf. Gal. 3:13). “He needed to offer for himself.” Paul’s words in Hebrews 7:26,27 (i.e. the Aaronic High Priest as a type of Christ) require that there must be an anti-type of the Aaronic High Priest offering first for his own sins. It cannot mean personal transgression on Christ’s part, but it must have an anti-type nevertheless. Christ, in the Psalms, speaks of them himself: Refer Psalm 40:12 — “For innumerable evils have compassed me about; mine iniquities have taken hold on me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head”. Again, refer to Psalm 69.5 — “0 God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sin (Hebrew, my guiltiness) is not hid from Thee”. These Psalms are quoted in the New Testament as being Messianic (Hebrews 10:5-10; John 2:17). These scriptures, of course, refer to the native weakness of the flesh wherewith Christ, like us, was encompassed. It was only with great difficulty that he was able to completely control it.” etc. etc.
What a contrast in expression and teaching such words form with the recent article in “The Christadelphian”, August 1971, pp.358-363, “For Whom Christ Died”, which offers in simple language the meaning of the death of Christ, setting out the Christadelphian understanding of the teaching of the Word of God. Would that more could adopt the devotional approach of our English brethren! And how true the words of the Committee on p.358:
… understanding has often been clouded by the use of non-scriptural phrases, or even words of scripture abstracted from a context, to be bandied about in discussion. The truth is that slogans are a counter feit coinage in the exchange of Scriptural ideas. So, phrases like “clean flesh”, “free life”, “defiled Christ”, and even the hyphenated phrase “sin-in-the flesh”, carrying their own emotional overtones, not to mention shades of meaning, for different people who use them, have degraded the discussion of a majestic theme into a wrangle and barred the way to a common understanding of Scriptural truth.”
We propose to give little room to such nebulous and contentious terms in the subsequent articles in this series. For well did Bro. Carter observe that these contentions have embittered and estranged brethren who could have found harmony and co-operation by accepting the facts of Scripture testimony. And sadly we are bound to agree with him that
“when these legalistic minds insist on pursuing such mystifying tracks, and condemning all who will not follow them, we can only let them go their own way while we seek the sound paths of Scripture truth” (Unity Booklet, p.71) .
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One