Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse

verse on the podcast The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, so we'll get started in just a moment.

And when we get started, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans

Chapter 5, verse 12, which, as I just mentioned, microphone is easily one of the most controversial

passages in the Bible.

And the reinterpretation of this passage by St. Augustine is really one of the major

turning points in terms of the trajectory taken by Western theology

over against Eastern theology.

And so that Western theology in this case includes both Roman Catholics and Protestants.

So it is an important passage we're about to get into.

And there's a little bit of a turn here, so I'll be brief in sort of catching us up,

in that St. Paul is really sort of beginning a new section here with chapter 5, verse 12.

As we've seen, and as we've mentioned,

this letter is being written by St. Paul

to the church in Rome after the return

of the Jews who had been expelled by Claudius

from the city of Rome.

And so there's been a period of probably a couple of years

where the Gentile church has been operating on its own without any synagogues,

...