Matt_za ☦️ 🇿🇦🇬🇷

'First of all, let us examine the words of the Apostle Paul to the Romans (5:12): “As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all sinned.” If “in whom” is understood as “in which”, it is unclear what this “which” refers to. To the one man? The words stand too far apart. To the world? Possibly. To death? That too is possible, for in Greek “death” (θάνατος) is masculine. We take up the Russian translation and at once see the treacherous italics, where, as has already been said, Catholic and Lutheran conjectures are mostly to be found: “because in him all sinned.” Were this interpretation correct, it would be the chief, and perhaps the only, basis for the juridical theory and for ascribing to God a blood-feud against a whole race. “As from an infected spring,” we read in the textbook, “flows corrupted water,” and so on. But permit me: a spring and its water are one thing; living, morally responsible people are quite another. It is not by our own choice that we are Adam’s descendants, so why should we bear the guilt of his disobedience? To make Christ’s redemption our own we must struggle hard; can it be, then, that the condemnation of all on account of Adam befell men apart from the guilt of each one of them? The Apostle says here that the gift was poured out more richly than the condemnation (Rom. 5:15), whereas the juridical interpretation yields the very opposite.' - Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky, The Dogma of Redemption, 1917