What's really dramatically ironic about the whole thing is that the Western view
that Romans 5:12 teaches that humans are born morally guilty before God,
that is actually based on a defective Greek manuscript.
What does the Psalm 51:1-6 mean when the author says,
"I was conceived in iniquity"?
Well, it can't mean that the sexual act was iniquitous.
So, you know, the idea that the act of sex itself, to conceive the child, is sinful.
I don't think that's what the psalmist means, because that's part of the creation mandate.
This is how we get babies,
how we fulfill the original creation mandate to be fruitful and multiplied.
There's nothing inherently sinful about having children.
So, again, what I gravitate toward here is that we are created,
you know, we are conceived, and what that means is, humanly speaking,
we are sinners. We are never going to avoid sin. So, "as a sinner, I was conceived."
That doesn't mean we have guilt before God when we pop out of the womb,
or when we're in the womb.
It means that once we pop out of the womb and we're allowed to live, we're going to sin.
There's no escape from it. We cannot not sin. Again, if we're allowed to live anyway,
unless we're aborted, unless we are so intellectually impaired
that we have no moral accountability or something like that.
I mean, this is the whole topic of "infant salvation",
which I get into in my Romans 5:12 series on my website,
my long blog series of years ago.
You know, I don't see, it's really interesting, I've actually revisited Romans 5:12
because, you know, I'm toying with the idea of, there are things ahead of it,
and I don't know if I'm going to beat cancer, I don't know how long I'm going to live.
But one of the things, if I do live long enough, that I feel like I probably ought to do,
is take that blog series and make a short book about infant salvation.
And what's really dramatically ironic about the whole thing is that the Western view,
the view that I grew up with as a Christian,
once I became a Christian and actually understood some theology,
that Romans 5:12 teaches that humans are born morally guilty before God,
that is actually based on a defective Greek manuscript
that Augustine was using because it had been translated into Latin,
which I didn't know when I was going through the blog series.
And I found that by reading a couple lengthy articles from a Greek Orthodox perspective.
As we know, Augustine was a Latinist. He knew some Greek, he hated Greek,
he did his work in the Latin translation.
Well, the Latin translations have to come from somewhere.
They came from Greek texts and the Greek text that Jerome was using was defective.
And Augustine was using that text and basically the church
has now gone down this rabbit hole of "original guilt",
not original sin, but original guilt before God, for centuries.
It's also why the Greek Orthodox tradition doesn't hold this doctrine and it never did
because they had the better manuscript data.
There are other Protestant traditions, there's some in the Baptist tradition
that have rejected original guilt for Romans 5:12 as well.
You know, it's not just the Greek Orthodox, there are Protestants
who have objected to this doctrine historically, but it's the dominant Christian doctrine.
So I just don't buy it. I don't think Romans 5:12 teaches it.
I don't think it makes any sense, for a number of reasons.
You can go to the blog series and read through all that stuff.
I'm sorry it's not more orderly than it could be,
but that was just, I don't even know what got me onto the subject years ago,
but it's there, it's still there on my website.
But I think what Psalm 51 is describing is consistent with the idea
that we are born unable to not sin. We are born to be sinners.
But if you believe in federal headship, that Adam was our moral representative,
well that's great. Now God has made everyone guilty for the sin of one.
So God just makes us guilty because of what somebody else did.
Is that really what Romans 5 teaches?
If you look at Romans 5:12, it doesn't say that guilt passed upon all men.
It says death passed upon all men. Not guilt, death. It's as plain as day.
But we've inserted guilt there and come up with this doctrine of federal headship.
The other view is this notion of that we were somehow present,
every human being was somehow present "in Adam",
and that we all participated with Adam in his sin, and that's why we're guilty.
I'm sorry, but human beings do not exist inside of the male.
We know this to be factually true because of science.
We can reproduce human life in a petri dish.
There's no doubt that this is the case. We have no doubt on how we get children.
We've got genetic material from one parent and another parent. They come together,
they create a fertilized egg, and then that can be called a human being.
That's when you get a complete human with the right number of chromosomes,
all this stuff. That does not exist in the male. You got to have male and female.
Okay, so that view doesn't work either.
Otherwise, we base really the bulk of our theology on something that is indefensible.
And I'm not going to do that. That's ridiculous.
So all of this is resolved if we actually just look at what Romans 5:12 says.
«Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin;
and so death passed upon all men.»
The result of which, you know, there's different ways to translate eph’ hō,
okay, in Greek there.
But one of it is the result of which is that everyone sins.
Okay, that's the way the Greek Orthodox treat the passage
based upon, again, the Greek manuscript evidence.
You know, again, Protestants, the Protestant side, because we follow Augustine,
because we're Latinists, we're not following the Greek New Testament here,
and neither did Augustine, he's following a defective text.
Wind up in this doctrinal la-la land
that, you know, we've just been there for centuries, and it doesn't make any sense.
And we wind up having people guilty for something they never did,
or somehow people being in Adam, which is impossible.