Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and the Punishment thereof
“This their sin God was pleased, in His wise and holy counsel, to permit.”
I don’t believe “pleased” is the best word to use here. How can we say God was pleased to permit their transgression, when in Genesis 6 we read that “…the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth”?
Adam and Eve, and their progeny, “became…wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body”.
As sinners because of the fall, our souls are defiled, our “mind and conscience” according to the epistle of James. Our bodies are defiled in that they are subject to disease and death, but we should be careful here that we don’t say too much; the Word became flesh.
“They, being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed.”
I certainly believe all men are born with a sinful, human nature, inherited from Adam, i.e., Adam’s sin, together with all of its consequences and penalties, is transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. As Cyril of Alexandria observed, “Since [Adam] produced children after falling into this state, we, his descendants, are corruptible as the issue of a corruptible source”. But if this is the case, how is it that souls are created?
Turretin: “Now although it is curious to inquire and rash to define why God infuses a soul tainted with sin and joins it to an impure body, it is certainly evident that God did not will (on account of the sin of man) to abolish the first sanction concerning the propagation of the human race by generation. Thus the order of the universe and the conservation of human nature demanded it.”
