Now, it is true that our moral goodness and our righteousness can be in the closest relationship, that someone good and holy is righteous per se. But still one must be careful to note that righteousness only stems from moral goodness by means of a judgment of God. One’s condition taken into account by the judge yields that person’s judicial state. Pollution becomes guilt because it passes through the judgment of God. If Adam had remained unfallen and kept the probation command, then God would have justified him—that is, God would have taken into account Adam’s holy and steadfast condition and would have had a state of immutable righteousness follow. Conversely, when Adam sinned, it was the condemnation of God that followed on the heels of this sin that transferred him from a state of rectitude into a state of damnation.
Geerhardus Vos | Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 4 (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–16), 138.
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Inwoo Lee
Inwoo Lee (BA, UCSD) earned his MA (Historical Theology) in 2020 from Westminster Seminary California and is author of “Righteous Before God: William Perkins’ Doctrine of Justification in Elizabethan England” (MA Thesis, Westminster Seminary California, 2020). He lives in the Great Seoul area, in South Korea with his wife Holly.
More by Inwoo Lee ›
I won’t lie. I have a question I’ve been asking myself for some time now but I haven’t shared it because I don’t hear it mentioned when it comes to Adam and the fall
We teach that Adam could have gained eternal heavenly life beyond his humanity of dust by his holy life, or life without or before the fall.
The question keep asking myself is. Wasn’t Adam as Holy and complete in the things regarding what God created him for until he wasn’t ?
Was there a timeline for him doing as God told him to go do in tending the garden to earn or receive eternal life before he did what God told him not to do ?
I just don’t think Adam was created to be anything but what he became. Adam wasn’t created to be a life giver to his offspring. I’m convinced the whole of it all was to bring forth Christ out of heaven to bring forth a creation created in Him, and dealing with the devil. He was already there before Adam was in the garden.
This emphasis or thought that Adam may have saved his race through his not partaking of the tree doesn’t fit with the drama of redemption with Jesus Christ up front and Adam a part of God’s design.
Surely so. Righteousness is not — at all — a cause-and-effect from some other existing quality in a creature, but as Vos says above, “righteousness only stems from moral goodness by means of a judgment of God.” This insight by Vos is welcome to correct the common assumption that righteousness by faith “occurs” by a cause-and-effect relationship when faith supposedly “causes” righteousness. But flirting with causation as sole explanation has a long history. It is what Laplace tried to use to Napoleon in saying of God, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”