Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 24.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Good morning, welcome to Defenders.

I hope that you found this section on the doctrine of sin to be as interesting

and stimulating as I have. Today we want to come to some evaluation of the doctrine of original sin.

Now I've been asked by some of our viewers to deliver my lesson a little bit more slowly

to help facilitate note-taking.

So I'm going to try to use a more measured pace in our lesson today.

The degree to which we're persuaded to adopt Augustine's view of original sin is going to depend upon our exegesis of Romans

chapter 5, 12 to 21. Augustine's doctrine was in fact based upon a mistranslation of Romans

512, where Paul says, therefore, as sin came into the world through one man and death

through sin, and so death spread to all men, and then Augustine's Latin text read, in whom all men sinned. That is to say, he thought that the text meant that

death spread to all men because in Adam all men sinned. But that's not how the original Greek text reads. Most commentators construe the Greek expression

F. Ho as a causal conjunction, because, and take all men sinned to refer to people's own individual acts of sin.

Paul says, then, that death spread to all men because all men sinned.

Douglas Mu, who is the author of a major commentary upon the book of Romans,

insists that some explanation is needed for why people so consistently turn from good to evil

of all kinds. No one thinks that every person just sins by sheer coincidence.

Moos says, and I quote, Paul affirms in this passage that human solidarity in the sin of Adam is the explanation. And whether we explain this solidarity in terms of

sinning in and with Adam or because of a corrupt nature inherited from him does not matter

at this point. End quote. Now, Moe's first alternative, sinning in and with Adam, in fact, does nothing to explain why people

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