Romans 5:12

διὰ τοῦτο refers to that whole conception of Christ's relation to the human race which is expounded in chaps. Romans 3:21 to Romans 5:11. But as this is summed up in Romans 5:1-11, and even in the last words of Romans 5:11 (through Him we received the reconciliation) the grammatical reference may be to these words only. ὥσπερ : the sentence beginning thus is not finished; cf. Matthew 25:14. There is a virtual apodosis in the last clause of Romans 5:14 : ὅς ἐστιν τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος; the natural conclusion would have been, “so also by one man righteousness entered into the world, and life by righteousness”. Cf. Winer, p. 712 f. By the entrance of sin into the world is not meant that sin began to be, but that sin as a power entered into that sphere in which man lives. Sin, by Divine appointment, brought death in its train, also as an objective power; the two things were inseparably connected, and consequently death extended over all men (for διῆλθεν, cf. Ps. 87:17, Ezekiel 5:17) ἐφʼ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον. The connection of sin and death was a commonplace of Jewish teaching, resting apparently on a literal interpretation of Genesis 3 Cf. Sap. Romans 2:23 f. ὁ θεὸς ἔκτισεν τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπʼ ἀφθαρσίᾳ … φθόνῳ δὲ διαβόλου θάνατος εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον. Cf. also Sir 25:24, Romans 6:23; 1 Corinthians 15:56. Paul no doubt uses death to convey various shades of meaning in different places, but he does not explicitly distinguish different senses of the word; and it is probably misleading rather than helpful to say that in one sentence (here, for example) “physical” death is meant, and in another (chap. Romans 7:24, e.g.) “spiritual” death. The analysis is foreign to his mode of thinking. All that “death” conveys to the mind entered into the world through sin. The words ἐφʼ ᾧ πάντες ἡμαρτον, in which the πάντες resumes πάντας of the preceding clause, give the explanation of the universality of death: it rests upon the universality of sin. ἐφʼ ᾧ means propterea quod as in 2 Corinthians 5:4 and perhaps in Philippians 3:12. Winer, 491. But in what sense is the universality of sin to be understood? In other words, what precisely is meant by πάντες ἥμαρτον ? Many interpreters take the aorist rigorously, and render: because all sinned, i.e., in the sin of Adam. Omnes peccarunt, Adamo peccante (Bengel). This is supported by an appeal to 2 Corinthians 5:14, εἷς ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀπέθανεν · ἄρα οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον : the death of one was the death of all; so here, the sin of one was the sin of all. It seems to me a final objection to this (grammatically quite sound) interpretation, that it really makes the words ἐφʼ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον meaningless. They are evidently meant to explain how the death which came into the world through Adam's sin obtained its universal sway, and the reason is that the sin of which death is the consequence was also universally prevalent. The sense in which this was so has been already proved in chap. 3, and the aorist is therefore to be taken as in Romans 3:23 : see note there. Because all men were, in point of fact, sinners, the death which is inseparable from sin extended over all. To drag in the case of infants to refute this; on the ground that πάντες ἥμαρτον does not apply to them (unless in the sense that they sinned in Adam) is to misconceive the situation: to Paul's mind the world consists of persons capable of sinning and of being saved. The case of those in whom the moral consciousness, or indeed any consciousness whatever, has not yet awakened, is simply to be disregarded. We know, and can know, nothing about it. Nothing has been more pernicious in theology than the determination to define sin in such a way that in all its damning import the definition should be applicable to “infants”; it is to this we owe the moral atrocities that have disfigured most creeds, and in great part the idea of baptismal regeneration, which is an irrational unethical miracle, invented fry men to get over a puzzle of their own making.