As we continue to look at the different popular models on the imputation of sin, today’s post will focus on an evaluation of the Mediate imputation model. For an intro into this model, please see the previous post.
Evaluation of Mediate Imputation
The mediate view does well at emphasizing a personal corruption, but it fails because it omits imputed guilt and original sin. The mediate view provides an inadequate explanation on Romans 5, mainly in rendering the word “sinned” as a passive creating several problems. First, this would be the only instance this verb hamartanō would have such a meaning.[1] The passive would have required a different combination of words.[2] The passive excludes Adam and Eve who were not “reckoned” to have sinned.[3] The passive would denote “God’s act of imputing sin, not man’s act of committing it. But it is the sinner’s act, not that of the judge, which is the reason for punishment.”[4] It is illogical to say that all die because all are condemned to die is to give insufficient reason for death.[5] The mediate interpretation contradicts those passages of Scripture which refer the origin of human condemnation and human depravity, to the sin of our first parents, and which represent universal death, not as a matter of divine sovereignty, but as a judicial infliction of penalty upon all men for the sin of the race in Adam (Rom 5:16, 18).[6] The doctrine of mediate imputation denies the sentence of condemnation has passed upon all men for the sin of one, and affirms that the ground of that condemnation is inherent depravity.[7] We are accounted partakers of Adam’s sin only because we derive a corrupt nature from him. However, Scriptures say the reason why we are depraved is, that we are regarded as partakers of his sin, or because the guilt of that sin is imputed to us. The guilt in the order of nature and fact precedes the spiritual death which is its disciplinary consequent.
Mediate imputation denies inherited corruption as a consequence of punishment. “Punishment supposes guilt. If the loss of righteousness and the consequent corruption of nature are punishments, they suppose the antecedent imputation of guilt and therefore imputation is immediate and not mediate; it is antecedent and not consequent to or upon inherent depravity.”[8] It denies the participation of all men in Adam’s sin and provides no explanation of man’s responsibility for his inborn depravity.[9] Man’s inheritance must be seen in light of God’s judgment, which reflects the justice of God. Man is not only condemned for a sinfulness of which God is the author, but is condemned without any real probation, either individual or collective.[10]
Finally, mediate imputation changes the method of salvation and justification. The point Paul makes in Romans is that men are justified for a righteousness which is not personally their own. The mediate view destroys the parallel between Adam and Christ. “If we are partakers of the penal consequences of Adam’s sin only because of the corrupt nature derived by a law of nature from him, then we are justified only on the ground of our own inherent holiness derived by a law of grace from Christ.”[11] This leads to a doctrine of subjective justification, that a righteousness not within believers but wrought out for believers – the righteousness of another, even the eternal Son of God, and therefore an infinitely meritorious righteousness – is the ground of our justification before God.[12] Any doctrine which tends to invalidate or to weaken the Scriptural evidence of this fundamental article of our faith is fraught with evil greater than belongs to it in itself considered.[13] “The great principle insisted upon in support of this doctrine is that one man cannot justly be punished for the sin of another. If this be so then it is unjust in God to visit the iniquities of the fathers upon their children. Then it was unjust in Christ to declare that the blood of the prophets slain from the beginning should come upon the men of his generation.”[14]
[1] Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 559.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 560.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Strong, Systematic Theology, 618.
[7] Hodge, Systematic Theology, 210.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Strong, Systematic Theology, 618.
[10] Ibid, 618.
[11] Hodge, Systematic Theology, 212.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 213.
[14] Ibid.