Chapter 4

The Two Adams

Romans 5:18–19

The Text on the Table

Here is one short sentence, with one small word in it, used twice. Read it slowly.

“Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” (Romans 5:18)¹

The word is “all.” It shows up two times. The first time, it names the people who fell in Adam. The second time, it names the people who are set right in Christ. Paul lines the two up on purpose. As the first group, so the second. One trespass, and “all” are condemned. One righteous act, and “all” are given life.

Now let me ask a plain question. Who is the first “all”? Almost every Christian answers the same way. It is the whole human race. Every person born since Adam has been touched by his fall. No one gets a pass. That is what Paul means by “condemnation for all men.”

So here is the honest follow-up. If the first “all” is the whole race, why would the second “all” be smaller? Paul wrote one sentence. He used one word. He set the two halves in plain balance. The natural reading is that the second “all” is just as wide as the first.

This is where the hope of the gospel begins. Not in a feeling. Not in a wish. In the grammar of a single verse.

I did not always read it this way. For years I quietly shrank the second “all.” I made it mean “all who believe in this life.” Most readers do the same, and they do it without noticing. But once you see the balance Paul built, it is hard to unsee. The reach of the cure matches the reach of the disease.

This chapter is about that balance. I will not pretend one glance settles it. Able readers have pushed back, and I will take their pushback seriously later on.² But I want to start where Paul starts. Two men. Two acts. One race. And a little word, used twice, that carries more hope than most of us have dared to believe. This chapter owns that word. When later chapters lean on the scope of “all,” they will point back here.

The Text in Context

Verse 18 does not stand alone. It caps a longer stretch of careful argument. Here is the whole passage.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 5:12–21)

Notice first what kind of writing this is. It is not a parable or a vision. It is Paul reasoning. He builds a case step by step. When a careful writer reasons like this, his words are chosen with care. So the words are worth slowing down over.

Then look at the shape of it. Paul keeps using a “this, so that” form. In Greek it is the pair often written “as … so” (Greek hōs … houtōs).³ One side sets up the other. Adam does a thing, so a result falls on many. Christ does a thing, so a result falls on many. The form ties the two sides together. You cannot pull them apart without breaking the sentence.

Now the little word itself. “All” is the plain Greek word for “all, every” (Greek pas). It appears twice in verse 18. On its own it means the whole of something, not a slice of it.⁴ A writer can narrow it. He can say “all in the house” or “all who are weary.” But then he adds the narrowing words. Verse 18 has none. It just says “all men,” and then “all men” again.

The flow of the letter settles what the first “all” means. Paul has spent three chapters proving one point. Jew and Gentile alike are under sin. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). “Every mouth” is stopped, and “the whole world” is held accountable to God (Rom. 3:19). No reader of Romans thinks that first “all” leaves anyone out. It sweeps in every last person. That is the whole point of the argument up to here. So when Paul writes that one trespass brought condemnation for “all men,” he means what he has been saying all along. Everyone. The question, then, is what he does with the very same word in the very same sentence when he turns to Christ.

Paul also has a second word for the same crowd. In verse 19 he switches from “all” to “the many” (Greek hoi polloi). The little word “the” matters here. “The many” is not a smaller group than “all.” It is a way of saying “the mass of people,” the whole crowd set against the one man who acted for them.⁵ The same “many” were made sinners by Adam and made righteous by Christ.

Keep one more pair of words in view. In verses 15 and 20 Paul does not say grace merely matched sin. He says it overflowed. The verbs mean “super-abound” and something like “super, super-abound” (Greek perisseuō and huperperisseuō).⁶ Hold that thought. It will matter a great deal in a moment.

The Heart of the Case

1. The little word, used twice

Start with the simplest point, because it is also the strongest. Paul used one word, twice, in one sentence. Nothing in the sentence tells us to read it two different ways. So the burden falls on anyone who wants to. If you make the first “all” wide and the second “all” narrow, you owe us a reason from the text. A hunch will not do. A prior belief about how many are saved will not do. You need something in the words.

The old Greek scholar Marvin Vincent put it in a single line. Writing on the twin sentence in First Corinthians 15, he said, “What the all means in the one case it means in the other.”⁷ That is not a universalist trick. It is a rule of plain reading. The same word, in the same sentence, in a matched pair, points to the same crowd.

Try it with an everyday sentence. “Just as my bicycle has two wheels, so my motorcycle has two wheels.” The “as … so” form only works if both sides line up.⁸ You cannot say, “Just as my car has four wheels, so my motorcycle has two wheels.” That is not a comparison. It is two unrelated facts stuck together with the wrong glue. Paul knew how the form worked. He used it on purpose. “As in Adam … so in Christ.” The two sides balance, or the sentence falls apart.

This is the point this chapter guards. The scope of “all” is set here, and later chapters will build on it. When I reach the great verse that says God will be “all in all,” the same rule will apply.⁹

2. Grace is not weaker than sin

Now pick up the thread from verses 15 and 20. Paul is not content to say grace ties the score. He says grace wins by more. Where sin abounded, grace “abounded all the more.” His verbs pile up. Grace overflows. It super-abounds. It runs past the ruin and keeps going.¹⁰

Feel the weight of that. If most of the race is finally lost, then in the end the fall reaches more people than the rescue does. Adam wins the numbers game. Sin has the wider reach, and grace has the smaller. But Paul says the reverse. He says grace has the wider reach. So a reading that leaves most of humanity lost turns Paul’s sentence upside down. It makes “much more” mean “much less.”¹¹

The Bible scholar F. F. Bruce saw this clearly, and he reached back to John Calvin to say it. Calvin held that “the grace of Christ belongs to a greater number than the condemnation contracted by the first man,” because “Christ is much more powerful to save than Adam was to ruin.”¹² Notice who is speaking. This is not a fringe voice. Calvin was no universalist. Yet he read the balance of the passage and would not let grace come out the loser.

Some try a way around this. They say the “much more” is not about reach but about certainty. It means the rescue is more sure, not more wide. But that reading breaks down fast. Everyone dies in Adam. That result is already one hundred percent sure. Even Douglas Moo, a careful critic of the universal reading, grants that what we get from Adam is “inescapable.”¹³ You cannot get more certain than what is already certain for all. So “much more” cannot mean “more certain.” It has to mean more. More reach. More people. More grace than there was ruin.

3. The same shape shows up again

Paul makes this same move in another letter. Writing to Corinth, he says, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Same two men. Same “as … so.” Same little word, twice. I will not open that passage fully here, because it belongs to the next chapter and I want to give it the room it deserves.¹⁴ But notice that Paul reaches for the Adam-and-Christ frame more than once. It is not a stray thought. It is a settled way he pictures the whole story.

The frame rests on a simple idea. Adam and Christ each stand in for a whole crowd. What the one does counts for the many joined to him. This is why we all share in Adam’s fall without ever choosing it. No one signs up to be “in Adam.” We are born there. And that fact sets a trap for the narrow reading. If “in Christ” here meant “people who made a choice,” then to keep the balance, “in Adam” would have to mean “people who chose Adam.” But no one chose Adam. So the two crowds are matched at the root. The same “all” who were placed in Adam are placed, by Christ’s act, in reach of Christ.¹⁵

Hunter Coates makes the grammar plain. In “in Christ all shall be made alive,” the phrase “in Christ” does not shrink the word “all.” It tells us how the life comes, not to whom. The life comes by way of Christ. The “all” stays “all.”¹⁶ And Coates points out that the earliest readers heard it this way too. Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa all took the two “all”s to mean the same whole crowd.¹⁷

Gregory saw the whole human race as one body. Adam is the old head. Christ is the new head. And the body, in the end, is gathered up into the new head, not left half in and half out. That is an ancient reading of these very texts, not a modern softening.

4. What “justification and life for all” means (and does not mean)

Now I need to be careful, because a fair critic will press right here. Does “justification and life for all” mean everyone is automatically saved, with or without faith? No. That is not what I am claiming, and it is not what the text says.

Watch the tenses in Paul. Some of what he describes is already done. Christ has already acted. The one righteous act is finished. In that sense, at the cross, the whole race was included in what Christ did.¹⁹ But there is also a “not yet.” No single person tastes the life until it is received. Paul says believers “receive” the gift (Romans 5:17). And here the word for “receive” can be passive, like taking in a gift you did not earn (Greek lambanō).²⁰ Vincent read it that way: not “those who believingly accept,” but simply “the recipients.” Just as we passively received death from Adam, we passively receive life from Christ.

So think of it like this. When Adam fell, the whole race did not feel it that instant, one by one. It came to each of us as we were born into his line. In the same way, the life Christ won for all does not land on each person the same instant either. It comes to each “in his own order,” as Paul says. Every person still must come to faith to enter it. The universal claim is not that faith is skipped. The claim is that, in the end, every person will come to that faith.²¹

George Sidney Hurd sharpens this with a small change of word order. Paul does not write “all in Christ.” He writes “in Christ all.” If you read it as “all who are already in Christ,” then of course the group is small right now, since not all have yet believed. But that is not the phrase. The phrase is “in Christ, all” who died in Adam will be made alive, once the whole story has run its course.²² The reach is the whole race. The timing is spread across the ages.

This is also why the “much more” matters so much for what Christ did. Hurd presses the point from the side of God’s purpose in creating at all. Would a good and all-knowing God set the whole human story in motion if He foresaw that most of the race would end in ruin? Hurd thinks not. A Father who counts the cost in advance, and who is stronger to save than the serpent was to spoil, does not begin a work He means to lose. On this reading Christ, the last Adam, “restored all that was lost in Adam and much, much more.”²³ What we have in Christ is not a patch on the damage. It is a greater glory than we would have had in the first Adam, even if he had never fallen. Christ was the promised seed since the garden, set to undo the whole ruin the serpent worked.²⁴ A rescue that saved most of the race would still be a real rescue. But it would not be “much more.” It would be much less.

5. What the larger hope actually claims here

Let me now say, in the clearest words I can, what this text does and does not teach.

It teaches that Christ’s saving act reaches as far as Adam’s ruining act. Every person included in the fall is included in the cure. That is the scope. It is the whole race.

It does not teach that anyone is saved apart from Christ. It does not teach that faith is optional. It does not teach that people are herded into heaven against their will, like cattle. The life is real life, freely received. The gift must still be opened.

So the hope this chapter defends is not “everyone floats home, no matter what.” It is this: the door Christ opened is wide enough for the whole race, and in the end every person will walk through it, freely, by faith. The Pauline scholar Richard Bell, writing in a leading journal, argued that these very verses do affirm a universal salvation, grounded in the way all people share both in Adam’s sin and in Christ’s righteous act.²⁵ Bell even noted that, once you follow the logic through, it stops mattering whether you first read “those who receive” as believers or as all people. In the end the two groups become the same group, because all come to Christ at last.²⁶

That is the seed of the whole book, planted in one verse. Adam’s reach and Christ’s reach are the same reach. And Christ’s is the stronger hand.

Where the Scholars Stand

It helps to see who reads this passage which way, because the lines do not fall where you might expect.

On the universal side, the reading has old and recent defenders. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa took the two “all’s as the same crowd, and Gregory built a whole picture of the race gathered into Christ.²⁷ George Sidney Hurd, Gerry Beauchemin, and Hunter Coates all make the case at length, and I have leaned on their work through this chapter.

Thomas Talbott has pressed the point with real force. Writing on this passage, he shows how precisely Paul fixes his own reference class. Paul does not float a vague “all.” He sets up one group of people, the descendants of Adam, and makes two matched statements about that same group. The people condemned in Adam are the people given life in Christ. Talbott traces the same pattern across three of Paul’s letters: Romans 5:18, Romans 11:32, and First Corinthians 15:22. In each text, two universal statements stand in contrast, and in each case the first “all” sets the scope of the second.²⁸

Even some non-universalist scholars have felt the pull. The reformed scholar Neal Punt conceded that “Romans 5:18 and its immediate context place no limitation on the universalistic scope of the second ‘all men.’” And Larry Lacy, writing a critique of Talbott, still granted that the most reasonable reading of the verse by itself would be a universal one. The grammar pushes hard, even for those who resist the conclusion.⁴¹

Robin Parry, writing as Gregory MacDonald, builds the case from the structure of Romans itself. Paul has spent three chapters proving that all have sinned (Rom. 3:23). Then, in 5:12–21, he shows that Christ’s rescue reaches as far as sin’s corruption. Parry presses a distinction that matters. Romans 5 does not speak of a salvation merely offered to all and waiting to be claimed. It speaks of a salvation achieved for all, which all will receive. Paul does not write “one act of righteousness is available for all men who respond.” He writes “one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” His stress falls on the power of grace. As the German scholar Käsemann put it, Paul’s teaching of all-powerful grace is “unthinkable without eschatological universalism.”⁴² David Bentley Hart, more recently still, has argued that Paul’s whole logic in these chapters falls apart if the second “all” is quietly shrunk to a few.⁴³

What surprised me, when I first dug in, was how many non-universalists concede the grammar. Marvin Vincent, no universalist, said the two “all’s mean the same thing. Adam Clarke, a Methodist commentator, wrote that the same persons are meant in both halves of the verse, and that Paul’s wording could not stand if Christ’s work reached only a few. Clarke was not a universalist either. He read it in an Arminian way: Christ’s work covers all, but each must accept it.²⁹ Even F. F. Bruce and John Calvin, as we saw, would not let grace end up with the smaller share.

On the other side stand able critics who read the second “all” as limited. Douglas Moo grants that Adam’s reach is universal, yet holds that “justification and life” go only to those who believe. He reads the parallel as one of pattern, not of head count.³⁰ This is a serious reading, held by serious people, and I will take its strongest form up in a moment.

Michael McClymond, writing the most thorough recent theological case against universalism, presses a related argument. He says Parry reads Romans 5:12–21 “out of context” by skipping the opening of the chapter, where Paul writes that “we have been justified by faith” (Romans 5:1). If faith is the condition right there in the same passage, the “all” of verse 18 should be read through that lens. McClymond also notes that Parry does not give enough weight to what he calls the “qualifying phrase” in verse 17, “those who receive the abundance of grace.”⁴⁵ I take this seriously. It is a fair point that a responsible reading must sit verse 18 inside the whole flow of Romans 5. But I do not think it closes the case. Paul opens the chapter by addressing believers, the people who have already come to faith. That is his audience, not the limit of Christ’s reach. And the logic of his own argument presses further: what Christ did is “much more” than what Adam did. To say that “justified by faith” narrows the second “all” is to assume that faith stays forever smaller than sin. This book argues the reverse: that all will, in the end, come to that faith.

I want to be honest about one more line, because this book cares about it. Some who read these texts as universal go further than I will. They say the whole race must be saved, as a matter of logic, and that no free will could finally refuse God. That is not my claim, and it is not what Romans 5 requires. I keep human freedom real. So I hold the universal reach of Christ’s act as strong, well-grounded hope, not as a chain of logic that forces God’s hand or man’s. The book draws that line carefully, and I point the reader to where it is drawn in full.³¹

The Strongest Reply

The main objection to this chapter is clear and worth stating at full strength. James De Young makes it as well as anyone. He grants that the first “all” is the whole race, condemned in Adam. But he holds the second “all” is smaller. In his book, commenting on the matching verse in First Corinthians, he writes that “the ‘all’ (‘in Christ all will be made alive’) must refer only to those who have believed in Christ.”³² And on the wider set of texts he states the rule directly: “‘all’ really means ‘many’ or ‘all who believe.’”³³

His reasoning runs like this. Verse 17 is what De Young calls “the most important verse in the passage.” It names the recipients: “those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness.” The word “receive” means someone must act. Not all act. So the crowd who get life in Christ is smaller than the crowd who die in Adam. The parallel, on this view, is about a kind of thing (one man’s act affecting many), not about an equal count on both sides.

I take this seriously. It is not a silly reading. But I think it concedes more than it means to, and it strains the grammar at the key point.

Begin by granting the true part. Yes, the life comes through faith. Yes, no one enters it without believing. I hold that as firmly as any critic does. But watch what this grants and what it does not. It grants that faith is the door. It does not show that the door stays shut for most forever. The whole claim of this book is that every person will, in the end, come to that faith. So “the life comes through faith” is not an answer to the universal hope. It is part of it. De Young’s point tells us how people are saved. It does not tell us how many will finally be saved.

Then there is the grammar, which resists the split. To read one “all” wide and the other narrow, in the same balanced sentence, you need a reason from the text. De Young’s reason comes from outside the sentence, from other verses about believing. But you cannot let an outside belief quietly rewrite one word inside a matched pair. Vincent’s rule still holds: what the “all” means in one case, it means in the other. And Paul’s “much more” still points the wrong way for the narrow reading, since it makes grace the winner, not the runner-up.

The word order tells against the narrow reading as well. As Hurd noted, Paul writes “in Christ all,” not “all in Christ.” De Young reads it as though it said “all who are already in Christ.” That is the reading the text does not give.³⁴

There is a further move critics sometimes make, and it is worth naming. Feeling the weight of the numbers, some try to say that most people really are saved anyway, so the gap between the two “all’s is small. De Young at one point suggests well over half, maybe over seventy percent, of all people who have ever lived will be in heaven.³⁵ I understand the wish behind this. But it cuts against their own teaching. Jesus said few find the narrow gate in this life.³⁶ And the same critics hold that a person must be truly born again to be saved, which rules out most who merely claimed the name. You cannot have it both ways. Either few are saved, as Jesus said of the gate, or the door stays open past this life, as I am arguing. What you cannot do is keep the narrow gate and the crowded heaven at once.

One last small point. Some read “life” in verse 18 as mere resurrection to judgment, not saving life. But Paul’s word here is “justification of life,” a life that comes with being set right.³⁷ The whole passage is glad, not grim. It is about grace winning, not about a raising up only to be lost.

McClymond raises one more line worth naming. He notes what he calls “the reasonable surmise of N. T. Wright” that the “all” of Romans 5:18 means “all nations” or “Gentiles as well as Jews,” not every last person.⁴⁶ This is a clever reading. Paul does care deeply about Jew and Gentile across these chapters. But notice what it concedes. Even on Wright’s reading, the second “all” still has to match the first. If “condemnation for all men” means all people-groups, then “justification and life for all men” means the same people-groups. That is still a universal scope. And anyway Paul has already settled the meaning of his first “all” back in chapters 1–3: every mouth stopped, the whole world accountable (Rom. 3:19). That is not “all nations” in a corporate sense. It is all persons, one by one.

One larger objection deserves a word before I close, since it stands behind many of the smaller ones. Paul, the critic says, speaks of wrath and judgment in other places. He warns that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom. So he cannot mean, here, that every person is finally saved. Read him whole, the argument goes, and the plain sense of these two verses has to bend to fit the rest. Hunter Coates gives this line a name. He calls it the argument from a holistic view of Paul, and it is a fair thing to raise. My answer has two parts. First, this book does not skip the harder texts. Part Two takes them up one at a time, each in its own setting, and asks what each one really claims. I am not asking anyone to wave off the warnings. I am asking that we not let them silence the grammar of a verse that is itself part of Paul. Second, as Parry observes, there is no contradiction on the level of logic. Paul needs only to believe that one day all will come to faith, and every statement he makes fits together. Paul can hold that salvation comes only through faith, that not all presently believe, and that all will one day be made righteous.⁴⁴ Richard Bell, who has studied these very verses closely, grants that Paul holds hope and warning together in a way that does not smooth out easily. Yet Bell still finds that Romans 5:18 and 19 affirm salvation for all. The honest path is not to muffle one stream with the other. It is to hold both, let each say its piece, and weigh the whole case at the end of the book.³⁸

Conclusion, and the Line We Hold

So here is where we land. Paul set two men side by side. Adam and Christ. He used one small word for the crowd each man acted for, and he used it twice, in a sentence built to balance. The first “all” is the whole race. Nothing in the text shrinks the second. And Paul says the grace side does not merely tie the ruin side. It overflows past it. Christ is the stronger hand.

I do not rest the whole book on this one verse. I rest it on many texts read together, and this is only the first.³⁹ But it is a fitting place to begin, because the hope is right there in the grammar, plain enough for a child to see. Two “all’s in one breath. Why would we read the first one wide and the second one narrow?

I think of a woman I know, faithful and grieving, who has read this verse a hundred times and always felt she had to make the second “all” smaller. She wanted the larger hope, but feared she was only reading her wishes into the page. I would tell her this: the balance is not your wish. It is Paul’s sentence. You are not adding hope to the text. You are letting the text keep the hope it already holds.

And under it all is the character of God. A God who begins a good thing and finishes it. A God whose grace runs past the ruin and does not stop. The first Adam handed us a wound the whole race carries. The last Adam carries the whole race home. That is not too much to hope. On Paul’s own words, it is exactly what we should expect.