'That suggested by Dr. Sanday and Mr. Headlam, from whose weighty opinion it is here ventured to diverge, is an equally important element to be "supplied." Indeed, it may be asked whether the idea of inherited sinfulness, as the cause of death to all who come between Adam and Moses, does not call at least as loudly for explicit mention, if St. Paul's full meaning be expressible in terms of it, as that signified by Bengel's ad- dition of "in Adam"? Would it not be equally novel to the reader, so far as our knowledge of the thought of" that age goes, and more remote from the actual language of the verse and its context '? ' {The Fall and Original Sin, p. 261).
Reserving for subsequent treatment the wider issue of whether this is or is not an inherited ten- dency to evil, we must meanwhile look at the ex- planation Tennant himself oti'ers of this verse.
(iv.) Though he rejects the realistic explana- tion in any form, either as already mentioned or as presented in Augustine's theory ' which makes human nature a certain quantum of being and treats descent from Adam as a division of this mass of human nature into parts ' (Stevens, The Pardine Theology, 1892, p. 136 f.), he accepts the following explanation :
' Much more probable, in the opinion of the present writer, is the suggestion that, in his identification of the race and Adam, St. Paul was using a form of thought occurring by no means ex- clusively in the particular verse of his writings with which we are here concerned. Stevens has appropriately named it "mjstical realism." "It is characteristic of Paul's mind, "says this writer, "to conceive religious truth under forms which are determined by personal relationship. These relations, especially the two just specified (that of unregenerate humanity to Adam, and of spiritual humanity to Christ), may be tenned mysticalin the sense of being unique, vital, and inscrutable ; they are real in the sense that sinful humanity is conceived as being actually present and participant in Adam's sin . . ." (op. cit. p. 32 f., and elsewhere). This mystical realism is a style of thought, a rhetoiical mode ; it is not a philosophy : the realism is only figu- rative. St. Paul identifies the race, as sinners, with Adam in the same sense that he identifies the believer with Christ. " The moral defilement of man is represented as contracted in and with the sin of Adam " (op. cit. p. 37). . . . This attractive in- terpretation of St. Paul's meaning has the great virtue of ex- plaming his words, which involve so many difficulties when taken, as they generally have been, with too much literalness, as only a particular case of a mode of speech which is character- istic of the apostle. And so long as it is not so far pressed as to lose sight of the undeniable connexion between the apostle's teaching and the somewhat indefinite belief which he inherited from Jewish doctors as to the connexion between the Fall and human sin and death, it would seem to supply the best key to the thought of this difficult passage' (TAe Fall and Original Sin, pp. 262-3).
If it be the case that, as Tennant maintains, Jewish thought assigned the cor maligiitim or the yezer hara to Adam even before his Fall as well as to his descendants, and so did not teach a moral corruption of man's action as a result of the Fall (see op. cit, pp. 264-5), it does appear more likely that St. Paul did not hold the doctrine, and that ac- cordingly it cannot be here introduced to explain his meaning. If this alternative must be excluded, although the writer is not finally convinced that it must, the explanation Tennant accepts does appear the most probable among all the others already mentioned. It must be frankly admitted that we cannot reach certainty on this matter, and it does not seem at all necessarj^ for a modern reconstruc- tion of Christian doctrine that we should. What- ever St. Paul's view of the Fall and its consequences may have been, seeing that it rests ultimately on a narrative which modern scholarship compels us to regard as a myth, however purified and elevated in the new context given to it in the record of the Divine revelation, and is infiuenced directly by contemporary Jewish thonuht, it cannot be regarded as authoritative for our Christian faith, however great may be its historical interest as an instance of the endeavour of a great mind to find a solution for a great problem.
3. the doctrine of the Fall and modern Chris- tian thought. — iUthough the writer holds the con-
viciion that it is not necessary for the Christian theologian to try and save as much as he dare of the wreckage of the doctrine of the Fall, after the storm of literary and historical criticism has passed over it, a few sentences may be added in closing this article as to the relation of modem Christian thought to the doctrine.
(a) What has already been urged must be re- peated : that the teaching of the OT regarding sin and salvation does not rest at all on the narrative in Gn 3, but on the reality of human experience and the testimony of human conscience ; that the teaching of Jesus about man as the child of God, though lost, has not this doctrine as its foundation, but comes from the moral insight and spiritual dis- cernment of the sinless Son of God and Brother of men ; that, apart from a few casual allusions in the rest of the NT, the two passages which have been considered in Ko 5 and 1 Co 15 are the only express statements of the connexion of sin and death with the Fall ; and that when we look more closely at the mode in which the classical passage in Ro 5 is introduced we find that its primary in- tention is not to prove either man's sinfulness or to otier an explanation of its origin, but to demon- strate the greater efficacy of Christ's obedience than of Adam's transgression in their consequences for the race. These are surely weighty reasons ■why modern Christian thought should no longer assign to the doctrine of the Fall the prominence hitherto accorded to it.