Summary of Romans 5:1-11

Now that we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him we have gained access into this grace in which we stand, and we boast of the hope of reaching the glory of God. Furthermore, we can even boast about our troubles. For from trouble well accepted, we get patience, and patience brings tested virtue, and tested virtue brings hope. Hope will not let us down, for the love of God has been given into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us.

When we were still unable to help ourselves, at the suitable time, Christ died for us who were ungodly. It is barely possible that someone would die for a righteous man. Perhaps someone might do that. But God has proved His love for us because when we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So now all the more, now that we have been justified in His blood, will we be saved from God's anger through Him. For if when we were still enemies, the death of His Son reconciled us to God, now being reconciled, we will be saved by His life. In fact, we can even boast over God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now been reconciled.

Comments on 5:1-11

Christ gives us access to God. If one has ever tried to reach an important man, even just the president of a large corporation, he will find it difficult to get beyond the rows of secretaries. But we can reach the Father. So we have hope of reaching final salvation. Even our troubles can be a source of benefit. In 2 Corinthians 4:17 Paul says in this respect: "That which is light and momentary in our troubles, is producing for us, beyond all measure, an eternal weight of glory." If this is true of things that are light and short, what of things that are heavy and long-running? And Romans 8:18 says: "I judge that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Romans 8:28: "God makes all things work together for good for those who love Him." It means that everything but sin can be turned into a means of likeness to Christ. Even anxiety, if we handle it properly,can be valuable. For Jesus Himself suffered from anxiety from knowing through the vision of God in His soul, what was to happen to Him: Lk 12:50 and Jn 12:27.¹² If we were to sum up St. Paul's picture of the whole of Christian life it would be this: A person is saved and made holy, if, and to the extent that, one is a member of Christ, and like Him. Now in His life there were two phases: first, a hard life, suffering and death, second, eternal glory. The more we are like Him in this first phase, the more will we be like Him in the second, in eternal glory. So even anxiety, well handled, can be a means of likeness to Christ.

We notice too that when Paul says trouble gives patience, patience tested virtue, and virtue gives hope -- the thought does not fit well with the Lutheran notion of infallible salvation by just once "taking Christ as your personal Savior." In that framework, what need is there of patience, virtue, and of building hope?

When Paul says the love of God is given us, he means the Holy Spirit is given, for He is the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father. He is given to us in that He comes to the soul and transforms it by grace, making it basically capable of the direct vision of God in the next life. He also gives guidance and many other things.

The next thought is tremendous. Yes, it would be rare indeed for someone to be willing to die for another even if the other were a very good person. What if the other is a sinner! Yet Christ did die for us when we could not help ourselves, when we were still sinners. Paul says that thus God proved His love. Love is a will or wish for the well-being or happiness of another for the other's sake. Now if someone starts out to bring this about, but a small obstacle stops him, that is a small love. If it takes a great obstacle to stop him, that is a great love. If even an immense obstacle will not stop him, the love is immense. What then was the love of Christ who went to so horrible a death to make possible eternal happiness for us! This really is proving His love.

Paul next says that now that He has done this, has earned all graces for us, could we imagine Him holding back on what He has Himself earned? Of course not.

Sadly, some old theologians, as we have seen already, did think He might withhold the grace of final perseverance even from someone who had lived a good life up to that point, for no reason. That is a sad error, which contradicts the teaching of St. Paul on final perseverance in 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, Philippians 1:6 and 1 Corinthians 1:8-9. In fact, the founder of that school of thought, Domingo Bañez thought God did not really will the salvation of all. He denied what is revealed in 1 Timothy 2:4: "God wills all to be saved."¹³ Logically, this was a denial of the love of God for us, since to love is to will good to another for the other's sake. So when God says He wills our salvation, He is saying He loves us. Some of that school also said that if God wills good to another, without adding "for the other's sake" that is love. They meant this: all humans are destined to hell by original sin. God wants to show mercy and justice. To show mercy, He will rescue a small percent of our race. But He would do that not for the sake of those whom He would rescue -- He would pick them blindly. So He would not really love anyone -- He would just use these people, not love them. Of course that is a monstrous error, which amounts to a denial of God's love. But, as St. Paul says here, God has proved His love. And since Christ earned all graces for us, He will not deny us the graces which He earned at such cost, and which we need, without a fault on our part.

Summary of Romans 5:12

There is a parallel: just as through one man, Adam, sin came into the world, and through it came death, and so death came on all, inasmuch as all have sinned [so through one man, the new Adam, all will be made just].

Comments on 5:12

We are taking this one verse separately, because the comments needed are long.

First we added to our summary some words in square brackets, since Paul did not finish his sentence here. Yet it is obvious what he meant.

The Council of Trent (DS 1514) defined that the words of St. Paul: "Must not be understood in a sense different from the way the whole Church diffused throughout the world, has always understood them." Now this clearly means that these words contain the doctrine of original sin. But the Council did not pinpoint precisely which words contain that doctrine. It is evident the Council did not refer to the last clause "inasmuch as all have sinned." For the Greek Fathers understood these words very differently from what the Western Fathers did. So there is no question of what the whole Church has always held on those words. The Latins translate: in quo omnes peccaverunt. In quo would seem to refer to Adam. In what sense could one say that all are in Adam? Not at all clear unless one speaks of solidarity, and that would hardly cover here. The Greek Fathers on the other hand take them as meaning "the condition being fulfilled, all have sinned" as if to mean that we have all ratified the sin of Adam. So the Council did not at all decide between the two ways of understanding the clause. But we can say that the Greek Fathers, who still spoke the same language, have made the better version.

So we will take the first part of the statement as referring to original sin even though the Council did not pinpoint the words that are critical. For in itself, sin could mean just the personal sin of Adam, or could mean also the effects in us, i.e., original sin. Similarly, death could mean physical death, or spiritual death or both.

Pope John Paul II in a General Audience of October 1, 1986 explained: "In context, it is evident that original sin in Adam's descendants has not the character of personal guilt. It is the privation [lack of what should be there] of sanctifying grace in a nature which, through the fault of the first parents, has been diverted from its supernatural end. It is a 'sin of nature', only analogically comparable to 'personal sin.'"

Here is the thought: God gave to our first parents, among other things, the gift of sanctifying grace by which they shared in the divine nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). God intended they should pass that gift on to us. But they lost it, or rather, discarded it by sin. So they did not have it to pass along. Hence the children of Adam arrive in this world without that gift, which they should have (cf. the "privation" mentioned by John Paul II above). If we compare two persons: first, an adult who has just committed a mortal sin on his own, and second, the new baby, there is something the same, something different. Both lack what should be there, namely, sanctifying grace. But the adult lacks it by his own personal fault. In the baby there is no fault. To use the same word twice, in senses part the same, part different is an "analogical use." Hence the Pope said it was "analogically comparable" to personal sin.

Besides sanctifying grace, God had given to our first parents not only basic human nature, but also preternatural gifts. These were freedom from death and a coordinating gift. (Some prefer to call it the Gift of Integrity). We mean this: Basic humanity without anything added would have many drives, in both body and spirit. These drives would not be evil, but they would tend to disorder, each one going mechanically after its own object, with no regard for the other drives or for the needs of the whole person. To keep the drives easily under control, a coordinating gift would be needed. God clearly gave that. Genesis makes it evident. For after the fall, God called: "Adam, where are you?" Adam replied: "I hid myself because I was naked." God said: "How did you find that out if you did not eat the forbidden fruit." It is evident. Before the fall Adam was also naked, but it did not bother him -- after the fall it did. The difference is that before the fall he had a coordinating gift which made it easy to keep the sex drive, the most rebellious of all, in its proper place. After the fall he had lost it, and that drive began to act unreasonably. Hence he felt ashamed and felt the need for cover. (We can see that without such a coordinating gift there would be -- and there is -- a need of mortification, to try to tame the drives).

How far down did our humanity go because of the fall? It surely lost that coordinating gift. But was there any additional loss? Luther said we became totally corrupt, hence his book, On the Bondage of the Will. Luther was wrong. John Paul II, in a General Audience of October 8, 1986 explained: ". . . according to the Church's teaching it is a case of a relative and not an absolute deterioration, not intrinsic to the human faculties . . . not of a loss of their essential capacities even in relation to the knowledge and love of God." Really, this is what we would expect, given the wonderful goodness and love of God. He would hardly take our nature down still further than the loss of the coordinating gift. So when we say that the "mind was darkened and the will weakened" we mean it only in this relative sense of which the Pope speaks, not in an absolute sense. That means: mind and will are weaker than they would have been with the coordinating gift. But they are not weaker than they would have been if God had started our race with only the essentials of human nature.

It is sometimes noted that there is no clear mention of original sin in the Old Testament, and hardly anything in the intertestamental literature. However even if the Jews did not see it, the fact is there to see if one reflects. God had intended that our first parents should pass on these added things to us. They did not have them to pass on. And they lost God's favor [which amounts to grace]. So their children arrive in the world not being in God's favor. That is basically what original sin means.

The Immaculate Conception, then, means that Our Lady started life with, not without, sanctifying grace. This was given her in anticipation of the merits of Christ.¹⁴ In that same document, Pius IX wrote: "The Fathers and ecclesiastical writers . . . in commenting on the words, 'I will put enmity between you and the woman, and your seed and her seed' have taught that by this utterance there was clearly and openly foretold [praemonstratum] the merciful Redeemer of the human race . . . and that His Most Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, was designated [designatam], and at the same time, that the enmity of both against the devil was remarkably expressed. Wherefore, just as Christ the Mediator of God and man, having assumed human nature, destroying the handwriting of the decree that was against us, in triumph affixed it to the cross, so the most holy Virgin, joined with him in a most close and indissoluble bond, together with Him and through Him exercising eternal enmity against the poisonous serpent, and most fully triumphing over him, crushed his head with her immaculate foot." He also said that even at the start, her holiness was so great that "none greater under God can be thought of, and no one but God can comprehend it."¹⁵

What about evolution of the human body? Pope Pius XII, in Humani generis, 1950 (DS 3896) said that the Church does not prohibit studying this belief, with care, provided that one does not say evolution is certain, and provided that one holds that human souls are immediately created by God. From this we gather that evolution is not clearly contrary to Scripture and the Magisterium. Considering the literary genre of Genesis, all we would need to hold is that God in some special way -- without saying which way -- produced the first human pair. He could have established natural laws to bring about the evolution of the body until it was suitable to have a human soul. This suitability need not be extremely strict. Before birth when the fetus is imperfectly formed, there is already a human soul. And after birth, it is several years before bodily development permits the use of reason, for which the human soul had the capability all along.

We note this: St. Augustine centuries ago, in his De Genesi ad Litteram 6.12.20 rejected a simplistic view of the formation of Adam: "That God made man with bodily hands from the clay is an excessively childish thought." For God does not have hands, he said. St. John Chrysostom in his Homily on Genesis 2.21 called the rib episode a case of synkatabasis, divine adaptation to our needs: "See the condescendence of divine Scripture, what words it uses because of our weakness. . . . do not take what is said in a human way." Pope John Paul II suggested a way to take it: "The man (Adam) falls into the 'sleep' in order to wake up 'male' and 'female'. . . . Perhaps . . . the analogy of sleep indicates here not so much a passing from consciousness to subconsciousness as a specific return to non-being . . . that is, to the moment preceding the creation, in order that, through God's creative initiative, solitary 'man' may emerge from it again in his double unity as male and female."¹⁶

The evidence from natural science for evolution is usually much overstated. A conference was held over ten years ago at the Field Museum, Chicago, of 160 of the world's top paleontologists, anatomists, evolutionary geneticists, and developmental biologists. They decided Darwin was wrong in that he supposed many intermediate forms between species, e.g., between fish and birds. They admitted that the fossil record does not give even one certain case of such intermediates. They did not, however, discard evolution even though they admitted the evidence was not there. Instead they opted for "punctuated equilibria," the belief that a species might stay the same for millions of years, then by a fluke, leap up to a much higher form of the same sort. If they had evidence this actually happened, it was not mentioned in the report in the Research News section of Science.¹⁷ Some mention the high vertical columns exposed in the Grand Canyon, in which lower forms, such as Trilobites, are found lower, and higher and higher forms as one goes up. But all admit that canyon was once a sea bottom, and the simpler things would naturally settle lower. Further, the presence of these forms in a column does not offer any evidence at all that one thing came from another. Some also mention that all bodies grow in spurts. This is true, but they do not become a new species, as evolution would require.

Further, Science News,¹⁸ in an article "Why is Sex?" reports: "'Sex is the queen of problems in evolutionary biology' wrote Graham Bell, an evolutionary biologist at McGill University in Montreal in 1982. Why such a thing exists at all, he says, is 'the largest and least ignorable and most obdurate' of life's fundamental questions." It does not really fit with the notion of natural selection.

A related question is that of polygenism, the idea that all humans came from several pairs, not from one pair. On this Pius XII wrote in Human generis: "Christians cannot embrace that opinion . . . since it is by no means apparent how this view could be reconciled with things which the sources of revelation and the acta of the Magisterium of the Church teach about original sin, which comes from a sin really committed by one Adam, and which, being transmitted by generation, is in each one as his own."¹⁹ On reading this, those who do intend to follow the Church are divided. Some say this is final, no room is left to consider polygenism. Others say that we must notice that the Pope says it cannot be considered since it is not evident how this could fit with Scripture and Magisterium. They say he meant to leave the door open, if a way could be found to reconcile the theory with these sources.

Modern science is veering much away from polygenism today. Science News of August 13, 1983 reported that Allan C. Wilson of the University of California at Berkeley had studied mitochondrial DNA from all over the world. He concluded that all existing humans came from just one mother, living 350,000 years ago. His view met little acceptance at first. But now, Newsweek of Jan 11, 1988 reports²⁰ that Wilson's idea is widely accepted by scientists, except that they think she lived only 200,000 years ago. According to the same article, some scientists are now going to try to trace the father of all present humans, a much more difficult task. The mitochondrial DNA is transmitted only on the female line. Hence the conclusion covers only the mother. But we must add this: Even this theory does not rule out the possibility that even though all present humans came from one mother, there may have been other lines which died out.

Summary of Romans 5:13-21

Paul imagines an objection saying that up to the time when the Mosaic law was given, there was sin in the world, but it was not charged against anyone, since there was still no law. But Paul replies: in spite of that, it is true to say that death ruled in that period even over those who had not violated a revealed command as did Adam, who was a forecast of the man to come, Christ.

For the redemption, the grace, is not like the transgression. There was one transgression which led all to death, original sin. But now the grace of God and His gift in grace through Jesus Christ is abundant for all. Similarly, the gift of grace is different from what came through the one who sinned. On the one hand, judgment came after one sin, leading to condemnation. On the other hand grace came after many transgressions, leading to justification. For if sin reigned by the transgression of the one man, much more now those who receive the abundance of grace and justification will reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. Then, just as one man's transgression led all men to condemnation, now through the one act of justice by Jesus, all are led to justification and life. Just as by the disobedience of the one man, the first Adam, all were made sinners, so by the obedience of the one man, the New Adam, Jesus, all are constituted just. Law came in and transgression was abundant. But just as sin reigned through death, so also grace reigns through justification leading to eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Comments on 5:13-21

Paul opens with an imaginary objection which tries to claim that sins were not charged against anyone in the period when there was no revealed law, i.e., from Adam to Moses. Behind this is a distinction. Paul commonly observes a distinction between two Greek words, hamartia, which means a sin committed when there is no revealed law as yet, only the law on people's hearts of which he spoke in Romans 2:14, and parabasis, a sin committed when there is a revealed law. Now it is obvious, before the revealed law came, there could not be parabasis. But there could be hamartia. Paul replies by insisting that death did reign -- physical or spiritual or both -- during the period when there was no revealed law, i.e., from Adam to Moses. Paul says Adam was a type of the one to come. He means Christ was the New Adam. But there is this difference: the Old Adam got us into the harm of original sin. The New Adam reversed that damage, through the redemption.

It is interesting to notice that in 5:13-14 Paul sees that even though there could not be parabasis without a revealed law, there could be hamartia. But in Romans 7:9 he focuses out the fact that there could be hamartia in the same period, for he says that during that period "I was alive" spiritually, did not sin, since there was no revealed command.

Next Paul goes into several repetitions. All mean this: The redemption is more abundant than the fall. He is very insistent, saying it so many times, with small variations in language. The last time, in verse 19, he adds that the death of Christ was an act of obedience to the Father. Really, if it had been done without that, as a merely physical thing, it would have not redeemed anyone at all. It was His obedience that gave His death its value. That obedience was the covenant condition, the condition of the new covenant. It was needed for the interior attitude in sacrifice, and for rebalance of the objective order.

Today there is a sad error, that of Leonard Feeney, who took the old teaching that there is no salvation outside the Church, and twisted it by interpreting it his own way. In condemning his teaching²¹ the Holy Office pointed out at the start that just as we must avoid private interpretation of Scripture, so also we must avoid private interpretation of the official texts of the Church. If one interprets privately, as Feeney did, he can then make one text contradict the other. And he can then reject the ones he does not like. Feeney's error amounted to saying that if one does not get his name on the register of some parish, even if there was no fault at all, even if he never had a chance to hear of the Church, he goes to hell. This is a monstrous error! The Feenyites are apt to say they admit that before Christ people could be saved without joining the old people of God, the Jews. But that after Christ, things got so much worse. Then they can just go to hell, without any chance at all. Paul of course here insists, on the contrary, that the redemption did not make things worse, it made things better. The Redemption was superabundant. And Paul, as we saw, says it many times over.²²

In verse 20, Paul says law came in with the result that sin abounded. Sadly, many versions make it read: the law came in order that sin might abound. Can we imagine God giving a law with the purpose of making things worse? But we can say that that was the result, for sin got worse, because it was then a violation of a revealed command. And the very fact of hearing a no-no tempts perverse people to disobey. Behind the difference in the translations is this fact: The Greek conjunction here is hina. In fifth century B.C. Athens that could mean only purpose. It still could in Paul's day, but the language had changed -- all living languages change. So in Paul's day it could also mean result. We decide by the sense which translation is called for. (The same double possibility was available in Hebrew and Aramaic).