Imputation: A Narrative Perspective

In his new book on the Federal Vision, Guy Waters claims, “It appears, then, that Leithart has called into question the historic Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.”

I don’t. But Waters is right to sense that I’m interested in ways of formulating the doctrine that stick close to the narrative of Genesis and Paul’s commentary on that narrative in Romans 5. My question is something like, What could we conclude about how Adam’s sin affected his posterity if all we had was Genesis 1-4? I know that Scripture says more about the subject, but this is a kind of heuristic device to force close reading of the text.

Imputation of sin is, I think, an important challenge for Reformed theologians, since the doctrine of original sin, much less the doctrine of the imputation of sin, sticks in the craw of many believers, not to mention unbelievers. I’m not suggesting that we accommodate theology to the wishes and instincts of unbelievers, or the unformed instincts of believers, but the question of whether we are setting up unnecessary stumbling blocks is worth asking.

Oliver Crisp has an article in the recent International Journal of Systematic Theology that raises the kinds of questions I have tried to examine, very briefly and inconclusively, in several blog posts (you can find them if you like). Crisp explores various Reformed formulations of the doctrine of original sin. There are some problems with his article (eg, he questions the justice of God imputing sin to someone, without asking whether he’s using a biblical conception of justice), but he raises some challenging issues about the plausibility and justice of the doctrine, and specifically about our ability to demonstrate the plausibility and justice of God’s actions.

How to address these challenges? Emphasizing the narrative dimension is critical, I think. Not the whole story, by any means, but an important aspect of the story. After all, the story of sin and its consequences is first narrated to us in the Bible, long before Paul treats it in a more “systematic” fashion in Romans.

What does the narrative perspective give us? It introduces the time dimension into the question that I think helps resolve various problems. Is it just for the sin of one man to be “charged” to everyone? That’s a difficulty for some partly because they are thinking about it atemporally. Two men are standing at some distance in space; one commits a crime; the other is clobbered for it. How is that just?

But Adam and me, or Cain, are not standing at some distance in space, but are at different moments of time. If the imputation of Adam’s sin is a matter of historical sequence, then this kind of “imputation” is just the way things are. Rehoboam was stupid and broke the united kingdom. For centuries after, every king and all the people suffered the consequences of his original sin, even though they didn’t commit the sin themselves. (Some might have tried to reunite the kingdom, but that would have required some sort of “atonement” to be made, some satisfaction of past wrongs.) A man chooses Path A rather than Path B; if it’s the wrong choice, his whole family suffers the consequences.

Sticking with the narrative, it’s clear that Cain and Abel suffer consequences because of Adam’s sin – there are those scary cherubim standing between them and the tree of life. This is a doctrine of imputation: Adam sins; his sons don’t commit the same sin; but his sons are treated as if they had. History doesn’t re-start with the birth of Cain; Adam’s sin has consequences for all his posterity. He takes the path that brings him under the reign of Sin and Death; and because of his position in history, all his descendants suffer the consequences.