Capacity and ability are not the same. The capacity to seek the good comes from the original creation of man in an upright state in the image of God. In his fallen state man's capacity is wholly debilitated by the corruption of the fall, hence inability. Original man was created with the capacity and the accompanying ability to live forever. After the fall, this obviously has changed. The invalid who cannot walk possesses the capacity to walk, as does all mankind, yet the ability to do so is removed due to the nature of the invalid's condition. Until a miracle occurs (Acts 3:6), the invalid remains in their state of immobility via his legs. Just so for the unregenerate. Until God first does a work (Eze. 36:26), no one possesses the moral ability to seek the good. The unbeliever is not morally wounded, but actually morally dead, in need of spiritual resurrection via the power of God the Holy Spirit. This is the consequence of Adam's sin, our sin.
We are doubly sinners; by imputation and transmission of the guilt. The sin and guilt of Adam's sin is imputed to his posterity.
We all are constituted sinners by Adam's act of disobedience. It's not that we share in Adam's substance and that our individual being is a subdivision of Adam's substance so that we sinned "with Adam" because we have "a bit of Adam" in each of us. More simply, when God creates a soul, the guilt and sin of Adam is imputed to the person. Imputation goes along with a Creationist view of the soul.
The imputation of Adam's Sin is immediate—God imputes the sin and guilt of Adam's sin to every soul created. Unlike some mediate view, God does not wait until we commit sin and then impute the guilt of sin upon us after we sin, rather we are born in sin and bear the guilt of Adam's sin. This is based upon the fact that there is a comparison of the guilt of Adam's Sin with the righteousness we have in Christ. The symmetry of Adam and Christ in Romans 5 is important. If we believe that a person is not actually guilty and corrupt until they sin then it would erroneously correspond to a view of Christ's righteousness that would require some mediate action on the part of the person responding to the Gospel. I will explain this further in what follows.
Romans 5:12
" Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—"
Note the order which Paul keeps here, for Paul says, that sin preceded, and that from sin death followed. There are indeed some who will argue that we are so lost through Adam’s sin, as though we perished through no fault of our own, but only, because Adam had sinned for us.
But Paul distinctly affirms that sin extends to all who suffer its punishment. And this Paul afterwards more fully declares, when subsequently he assigns a reason why all the posterity of Adam are subject to the dominion of death—because we have all, Paul says, sinned. But to sin in this case, is to become corrupt and vicious, for the natural depravity which we bring, from our mother’s womb, though it brings not forth immediately its own fruits, is yet sin before God, and deserves His vengeance. This natural depravity is that sin which is know as original sin.
Just as Adam at his creation had received for us as well as for himself the gifts of God’s favor, so by falling away from the Lord, Adam in himself corrupted, vitiated, depraved, and ruined our nature. Having been divested of God’s likeness, Adam could not have generated progeny other than what was then like himself. Hence we have all sinned; for we are all imbued with natural corruption, and so are become sinful and wicked.
It is error to attempt to gloss, as do Pelagian leaning sorts, to elude the words of Paul to mean that sin descended by imitation—that is, we sin and are therefore become sinners—from Adam to the whole human race. This would necessarily imply that Our Lord, the Second Adam, would in this case become only the exemplar and not the cause of righteousness. After all, to take Paul's discussion of the First and Second Adams in Romans 5 to mean we are not sinners until we sin—possessing now, sin, what we did not possess beforehand—then it would follow that we must actually possess the righteousness of Christ in order to be counted as righteous. Clearly this is contrary to Paul's teachings.
Thus, we may easily conclude that Paul speaks not of actual sin, for if everyone for himself contracted guilt, why did Paul form a comparison between Adam and Christ? It then follows that our innate and hereditary depravity is what is here referred to by Paul in Romans 5:12.
Worth a read:
The Imputation of Adam's Sin: John Murray: 9780875523415: Amazon.com: Books
AMR
