?ass to the discussion of St. Paul's doctrine of the 'all.
2. St. Paul's doctrine of the Fall.— Although the classical passage on the subject is Ro 5'-''^', yet there are references to Adam in 1 Co IS'^'* ^^' ^- ** which may be briefly examined in so far as they present doctrine supplementary to that in Ro 5.
(a) 1 Co 15^'- ^^ states tlie same doctrine. The contrast is emphasized in v.^^ by the description of the first Adam, in accordance with the account of his creation in Gn 2^, as living soul, while Christ, the last Adam, is a life-giving spirit. Adam was given life by the breath or spirit of God, but could not impart any ; Christ not only has life, but gives it. The psychic order of tlie first Adam necessarily preceded the pneumatic order of the last (1 Co 15'*'^): so far there is no moral censure of the first Adam implied, and the Apostle's statement corrects an error into which theological speculation on man's primitive condition often fell. 'The Apostle,' says Godet (ad loc), 'does not share the notion, long regarded as orthodox, that humanity was created in a state of moral and physical perfection. . . . Independently of the Fall, there must have been progress from an in- ferior state, the psychic, which he posits as man's point of departure, to a superior state, the spiritual, foreseen and determined as man's goal from the first' (quoted by Findlay, EGT, ' 1 Cor.,' 1900, p. 938). This inferior state did not include for St. Paul the cor malignum, which Jewish thought assigned to Adam. It is not so certain that the next statement, ' The first man is of the earth, earthy : the second man is of heaven ' (v.'*^), refers only to physical origin, and does not indicate moral character.
Xol/c6s, as Ph 3'^, Col 3^ suggest, seems to have a moral connotation. But even if this be so, it does not make certain that St. Paul assigned the yezer hara to the unfallen Adam, as, since the reference in the ' second man from heaven ' is not to the pre-existent Wojrd, but to the Risen Lord, the contrast is between Adam fallen as the source of death to mankind and Christ risen as the foun- tain of its eternal life. If v,^^ be not merely a prediction, but an exhortation, as many ancient authorities attest (see RVm), this moral reference becomes certain. This whole passage, accordingly, does disprove the view that man's primitive con- dition was one of such perfection that there was no need of progress ; but it offers no support to the assumption that St. Paul regarded Adam's
position as so inferior morally that the Fall would to him appear as inevitable. As Ro 5'^ shows, he assigns to Adam a greater moral culpability than to his descendants before the Law was given, for he transgressed a definite commandment of God. Nor does St. Paul's doctrine of the flesh (q.v.) justify any such assumption about the moral de- fect of man's state before the Fall, as it is not a physical, but an ethical, conception, and relates to mankind as it is for man's present experience, not to any previous state of man. If we cannot, therefore, identify the flesh with the yezer hara of unfallen man, unless we leave in St. Paul's system the antinomy of a two-fold origin of sinful- ness, one individual, the other racial, we are forced to conclude that in some way he did connect the presence of the flesh in sinful mankind with the entrance of sin at the Fall.
(b) The further discussion of this topic brings us to the closer consideration of Ro 5^^'^^. (a) The purpose of the passage must be clearly kept in view. St. Paul is not proving man's universal sinfulness — he has done that by an empirical proof, a historical induction, in chs. 1-3 ; nor is he concerned to explain the origin of sin. He assumes as not needing any proof that man's sin- fulness is the result of Adam's fall. From that fact he deduces the conclusion that one person can be so related to the race as to be the author to it of both sin and death. If that be so in the case of Adam, it can be and is so in the case of Christ as the Author of righteousness and life, and even so much more as Clirist is superior to Adam. The purpose of the passage is to show that Christ can and does bring more blessing to man than Adam has brought curse. We go beyond what St. Paul's own intention warrants in asserting that his doc- trine of salvation in Christ rests on, and falls to the ground without, his teaching on the Fall. As his proof of the sinfulness of mankind is empirical, so his certainty of salvation in Christ is rooted in his experience, and not in the opinions he shared with his contemporaries regarding the origin of sin. It is important at the outset of this discus- sion to assert this consideration, as it will relieve us of the painful anxiety, which many exponents of this passage hitherto have felt and shown, to justify in some sense or another this story of the Fall, in spite of the origin criticism now assigns to it, as an essential constituent of Christian theo- logy-