Original Sin

Romans 5:12 in the BSB reads: 'Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.' Two things in that English are the translators' choices. 'Because all sinned' takes the last Greek clause causally and gives no footnote to the older 'in whom' reading discussed below. And 'so also' makes the sentence read as complete, where many commentators think Paul has opened a comparison with 'just as' and never states the other half, since the Greek words are better rendered 'and so'. Either way, he turns aside to the law and to the asymmetry between the trespass and the gift, and only in verse 18 does he state the comparison with Christ: as one trespass brought condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness brought justification and life for all men. Verse 19 restates it in the language the whole argument now runs on, one man's disobedience and one man's obedience, the many made sinners and the many made righteous.

The clause at issue is the last one in verse 12. The Greek is eph' ho, a preposition with a relative pronoun. The Latin Vulgate rendered it in quo, and in quo can mean in whom. Ambrosiaster, an anonymous fourth-century Latin commentator on Paul whom Augustine used, glossed it exactly that way: in whom, that is, in Adam, all sinned. So a Latin reader met a verse saying that all humanity sinned in Adam, which is a statement of inherited guilt on the face of it. A Greek reader met something looser. Modern translators overwhelmingly take eph' ho causally, because or since, as the BSB does, and Joseph Fitzmyer's Anchor Bible commentary on Romans lists something close to a dozen proposals that have been made for it, settling on a resultative sense, with the result that all sinned.

Be careful with what follows from this, in both directions, because both overstatements are common. It is not true that Augustine's doctrine of original sin rests on a mistranslation and collapses without it. Augustine argued the doctrine from several other places: the practice of infant baptism, which the churches of his day performed with a rite of exorcism and which he pressed as evidence that infants were held to need deliverance from something; the universality of death, including the death of infants who had committed no act; Psalm 51:5, which the BSB renders 'Surely I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me'; Job 14:4, 'Who can bring out clean from unclean? No one!'; Ephesians 2:3, that we were by nature children of wrath; and John 3:5-6. Remove in quo and the argument is weakened at one point and stands at several others. One caution about Psalm 51:5: the BSB's 'I was sinful when my mother conceived me' states the Augustinian reading in its own words. The Hebrew is shorter and the King James Version keeps it closer, 'in sin did my mother conceive me'. It can be read as the psalmist's inherited condition, or as the poetry of a man confessing that his sinfulness goes back as far as he can trace it without any claim about a transmitted guilt, or even as speaking of the mother's circumstances. The verse does not by itself decide between the Augustinian and Eastern accounts, and the BSB's wording should not be taken as if it did.

It is equally untrue that the Latin makes no difference. It made a very large one, because it put the doctrine into the text of the verse itself rather than into an inference from the passage, and because the Latin West read Paul that way for a thousand years while the Greek East did not. A great deal of what looks like a straightforward disagreement between Eastern and Western Christians about human nature begins as a difference in what their Bibles said at one clause, and that is worth knowing before you conclude that one side was simply less faithful to scripture than the other.

One further observation before the history. Paul's own emphasis is the reverse of the one the later argument took. He is not building an anthropology; he is showing that what Christ did has the same structure as what Adam did and a far greater effect, which is the whole force of the repeated 'much more' in verses 15 and 17. The doctrine of original sin is a conclusion drawn from a passage about salvation. Keeping that order in view is the best protection against the version of the doctrine that leaves a congregation crushed, since Paul's point in writing it was that grace increased all the more.

Augustine of Hippo did not invent the doctrine, and he did not set out to construct one. He was a bishop who baptised infants, who had written in the Confessions about a moral inability he could describe from the inside, and who was pushed into systematic statement by a controversy he did not start. His mature position, argued across On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, On Nature and Grace, On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin, and the long war with Julian of Eclanum, holds this. Adam was created upright, with the ability not to sin. By his sin the whole race, which was in him and descends from him by ordinary generation, contracted both guilt and corruption: guilt, so that every human being comes into the world already under condemnation, and corruption, so that the will is no longer free to choose God, being bound by disordered desire, which Augustine called concupiscence. This condition is transmitted by propagation, not by imitation, and it is why infants need baptism though they have committed no act. The remedy is unmerited grace, which does not merely assist a will already turning towards God but creates the turning, and which is given according to God's election and not according to foreseen merit. His texts are Romans 5:12 as his Latin gave it, Psalm 51:5, Job 14:4, Ephesians 2:3, John 15:5, and above all 1 Corinthians 4:7, 'What do you have that you did not receive?', which he said had converted him from his own earlier position and which he quoted for the rest of his life. He is also perfectly capable of being quoted against himself on free will, because his early anti-Manichaean works defend it vigorously, and he acknowledged the shift in the Retractations.

Pelagius was a British ascetic teacher, resident in Rome from around 380 until Alaric's sack of the city in 410 drove him to Africa and then to Palestine. State his position as his own defenders state it, because the caricature is easier to refute than the man. God's commands imply the ability to obey them; a command to do what cannot be done would impugn God's justice, and Pelagius took his stand on Deuteronomy 30:11-14, that the commandment is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach, and on 1 John 5:3, that his commandments are not burdensome. Human nature is God's good creation and remains good; the capacity for choice is itself a gift of grace and the greatest of them. Grace is not a fiction in his system, and this is where he is most often misrepresented: it includes creation with free will, the gift of the law, the teaching and example of Christ, and the forgiveness of sins in baptism, and Pelagius insisted that no one is saved without it. What he denied was that Adam's sin altered the nature of his descendants. Adam injured the race by setting a bad example that habit has made almost universal, and Christ heals it by setting a better one and forgiving what habit has done. Infants therefore come into the world in the condition Adam was created in; they are baptised for other benefits, not to remit a guilt they do not have. His concern was moral and pastoral, and it was a real concern: he saw Roman Christians excusing their conduct on the ground that human nature could not do better, and he heard Augustine's prayer in the Confessions, give what you command and command what you will, as the theological form of that excuse. Augustine himself reports, in On the Gift of Perseverance, that it was that sentence, quoted aloud by a bishop at Rome, which Pelagius could not bear. The named difficulty with his account was pressed at once and is textual. If Adam harmed his descendants only by example, Romans 5:19 becomes hard to read, since Paul says the many were made sinners by one man's disobedience and not by their imitation of it; and a view on which every person starts where Adam started has to explain why not one of them has finished where Adam was meant to.

Two of his associates matter to the story. Caelestius was the more radical and the more incautious, and it was his propositions, including that Adam would have died even if he had not sinned and that newborn infants are in the state Adam was in before the fall, that were condemned at Carthage in 411 or 412 and that shaped what the councils actually anathematised. Julian of Eclanum was the most formidable, an Italian bishop who refused to sign the condemnation, and who pressed Augustine for the last dozen years of Augustine's life with objections that have never quite gone away: that inherited guilt makes God unjust, punishing where there was no act; that Augustine's account of concupiscence makes marriage and procreation the vehicle of sin and so treats God's own creation as unclean; and that the whole scheme is a relapse into the Manichaeism Augustine had left. Augustine answered at enormous length and was still answering Julian when he died in 430. His replies should be recorded with the objections. On justice, he held that Julian's argument assumes each person is an isolated individual, which the solidarity of Adam and of Christ in Romans 5 does not allow, and he turned the question round: let Julian explain, on his own premises, why infants suffer and die at all, since on that account they have done nothing. On marriage, he pointed to his own treatise On the Good of Marriage, written years earlier, which defends marriage as genuinely good, and argued that concupiscence is a disorder inside a good thing rather than the thing itself. On Manichaeism, he answered that the Manichees held evil to be a substance and the body to be evil, and that he denied both. You will not understand why the doctrine remains contested unless you have felt the force of Julian's first objection, and you will not understand why it survived unless you have seen that Augustine had answers to give.

A difficulty of evidence has to be flagged, and the brief for this course is explicit that where we are unsure we say so. Most of what survives under Pelagius's name comes to us through his opponents. His commentary on the Pauline epistles survived by being transmitted under Jerome's name, and his Letter to Demetrias of 413 survives; his On Nature is known almost entirely from the passages Augustine quotes in order to refute them, and his On Free Will similarly. That is a bad situation for anyone trying to be fair. Twentieth-century reassessments by Robert F. Evans and B. R. Rees argued that Pelagius was more orthodox and less systematic than the heresiarch of the textbooks, and Ali Bonner's The Myth of Pelagianism, published in 2018, argues further that the ascetic ideas labelled Pelagian were widespread in the Latin church and that Pelagianism as an organised movement is largely a construction of the polemic against it. That thesis is contested. What is not contested is that we do not have enough of Pelagius in his own voice, and a teacher who tells you confidently what Pelagius really thought is telling you more than the sources support.

The outcome was decided by councils and by imperial politics together, and both should be recorded. Pelagius was acquitted by a synod at Diospolis in Palestine in 415 after explaining his statements. The African bishops pressed the matter, and the Council of Carthage in 418 issued canons affirming that Adam's sin brought death, that infants are baptised for the remission of an original sin contracted by generation, and that grace is not merely knowledge of what to do. Pope Zosimus, who had initially been favourable to Caelestius, confirmed the African position, and an imperial rescript backed it. The Council of Ephesus in 431, which everyone remembers for Nestorius, also condemned the followers of Caelestius, which is how the condemnation became part of the ecumenical record. Pelagius himself disappears from history after about 418 and we do not know how or where he died.

The controversy did not end in 418; it moved to southern Gaul and changed shape. Monks in Marseilles and the surrounding region accepted everything the councils had said about original sin and the necessity of grace, and balked at Augustine's doctrine of predestination and of grace that cannot be resisted. John Cassian, whose Conferences shaped Western monasticism, argued in the thirteenth Conference that God's grace and human will cooperate, that God sometimes initiates the movement towards himself and sometimes strengthens a beginning that has arisen in a person, and that a doctrine which makes every first stirring God's alone empties the exhortations of scripture of their sense. Their texts were the ones that assume a real address to a will: Deuteronomy 30:19, choose life; Ezekiel 18:23 and 33:11, that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked; Matthew 23:37, that Jesus longed to gather Jerusalem's children and they were unwilling; 1 Timothy 2:4, that God wants everyone to be saved; and Revelation 3:20. Vincent of Lerins, in the Commonitorium, supplied the methodological objection, his famous rule that what is to be held is what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone, and his target was widely understood to be Augustinian innovation. Faustus of Riez argued the position at length a generation later. Prosper of Aquitaine defended Augustine against them.

The Second Council of Orange met in 529 under Caesarius of Arles and settled the Western question, and it is worth knowing exactly what it settled because it is routinely misdescribed in both directions. Orange is emphatically Augustinian on grace. Its canons hold that the fall injured the whole person, body and soul; that free will was so weakened by Adam's sin that no one can love God as he ought, believe, or do any good pertaining to salvation without grace preceding; and canon 5 condemns by name the view that the beginning of faith and the very desire to believe are ours by nature rather than by the gift of grace. That is the Massilian position struck down precisely where it stood. Canon 7 says that without the illumination of the Holy Spirit no one can think or choose anything good in the order of salvation. The council was confirmed by Pope Boniface II in 531 and became the standing Western doctrine of prevenient grace.

And then Orange stops. Its concluding definition states that the council not only does not believe that some have been predestined to evil by divine power, but pronounces anathema on anyone who does. It affirms that in every good work it is God who begins, and it says that all the baptised, with Christ's help and cooperation, can and ought to fulfil what belongs to their salvation if they will labour faithfully. So Orange affirms Augustine on prevenient grace, the bondage of the fallen will and the priority of God in every good act, and declines to affirm predestination to damnation or a grace that cannot be resisted. Anyone who tells you Orange simply ratified Augustine has not read the last page, and anyone who tells you Orange rejected Augustine has not read the canons. Both the Reformed and the Catholic traditions claim it, and both can quote it accurately.

A word about the label. Semi-Pelagianism is not what Cassian or Vincent or Faustus called themselves, and the term does not appear in antiquity at all. It was coined in the sixteenth century, appears in the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577, and came into heavy use in the controversies over grace between Dominicans and Jesuits at the end of that century. Historians of the period now generally prefer Massilians, from Marseilles, or semi-Augustinians, on the ground that the men so labelled began from Augustine and disagreed with him about one thing, rather than beginning from Pelagius and conceding some ground. Use the term if you like, since everyone will know what you mean, but know that it is a polemical retro-fit and that calling a position semi-Pelagian is an argument rather than a description.

Two things are being claimed when the West says original sin, and they can be separated. Original corruption is the claim that every human being comes into the world with a nature disordered towards evil, unable of itself to turn to God. Original guilt is the further claim that every human being comes into the world already liable to condemnation for Adam's act, before doing anything. Almost the whole Christian tradition affirms the first in some form. The second is where the traditions divide, and it is the one Julian of Eclanum attacked and the one Ezekiel 18:20 is always quoted against.

The Eastern Orthodox tradition speaks of ancestral sin, propatorikon hamartema, and it must be given in its own terms rather than as a Western doctrine with a piece missing. Its starting point is not a courtroom but a sickbed. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, sets the frame: humanity was made from nothing and given a share in the Word, and in turning away it turned back towards corruption and non-being, so that the human problem is phthora, corruption and death, and the Word became flesh to destroy death by dying. On that frame, what Adam bequeathed to his descendants is mortality and the corruption that comes with it. Inheriting death, human beings live in fear of it, and out of that fear come the passions, the grasping and the self-protection out of which actual sins are committed. So sin is universal, it is traced to Adam, and human nature is genuinely damaged, and none of that requires anyone to be guilty of another man's act. John Chrysostom, preaching on Romans 5:19, takes 'the many were made sinners' to mean that they became liable to punishment and subject to death through him, not that they are charged with his transgression; and in his baptismal instructions he says plainly that the church baptises infants although they are not defiled by sin, listing the many other gifts baptism gives. The Greek text also reads differently at the crucial clause: eph' ho is taken causally, and in a reading traced by John Meyendorff through Theodoret and later Greek commentators, the antecedent is death, so that all sinned because of death rather than death passing to all because of sin. That reading rests on the Greek and cannot be seen in the BSB's English, which prints 'because all sinned'. Read that way, Romans 5:12 states exactly the Eastern position.

Modern Orthodox writers have put this with force. Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church and John Meyendorff's Byzantine Theology both treat the Augustinian construction as a Western development built on a Latin text, and John Romanides argued the case at length in The Ancestral Sin in 1957. Maximus the Confessor's distinction between the blameless passions, hunger and weariness and mortality, which Christ assumed, and the culpable passions which he did not, does much of the work in the background. The positive content is theosis: salvation is healing and the gift of incorruption rather than the reversal of a verdict, which is why the East reads the same atonement texts with a different centre of gravity. This is a coherent system with its own patristic pedigree, developed largely before the Greek East had read Augustine at all, since he was not translated into Greek in any quantity until the thirteenth century. It is not Western doctrine minus a clause.

Two honest complications belong here, and leaving them out would flatter the account. First, the East is not uniform. Under heavy Western pressure in the seventeenth century, Orthodox confessional documents adopted more Latin language: the Confession of Dositheus, issued by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, speaks of original sin diffused to all and holds that infants need baptism on that account, and Peter Mogila's Orthodox Confession a generation earlier is similarly Westernised. Modern Orthodox theologians generally treat that period as a captivity to be undone, but the texts exist and are part of the tradition's own record. Second, the distance from the West is smaller than slogans suggest. The East baptises infants, prays over mother and child in ways that presuppose something needing to be set right, insists that no one can turn to God without grace, and holds that human nature is really and not slightly damaged. What it does not hold is inherited personal guilt. That is one disagreement, sharply drawn, inside a great deal of agreement, and describing it as the East denying original sin misses both halves.

It is worth noticing, before the next section, that the three Western families also differ from one another on this exact point, and that one Western tradition, the Anabaptist, lands close to the Eastern answer while having no historical connection with it whatever. Inherited guilt is not a line between East and West. It is a line that runs through the West as well.

If Adam's sin is charged to his descendants, on what basis? Three answers have been given inside the Reformed tradition, and they are worth knowing because they are the clearest available illustration of how a doctrine gets refined under pressure. The space they take here is a function of the question and not of a preference for that tradition: the communions that do not hold inherited guilt, or do not hold it as a charge imputed from outside, never had to answer it, so there is no Orthodox or Anabaptist or Wesleyan theory of imputation to set alongside these three and it would be an invention to supply one.

Realism holds that the charge is just because Adam's posterity really sinned in him. Human nature existed as a single undivided whole in Adam and has since been individuated into persons, so that when he acted, the nature that is now yours acted. Augustine himself said something like this, writing that we all were in that one man since we all were that one man. Its text is Hebrews 7:9-10, where Levi is said to have paid the tenth through Abraham because he was still in the loin of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him, which is precisely the reasoning realism needs and which scripture there applies to an inherited act. W. G. T. Shedd argued it at length in his Dogmatic Theology and A. H. Strong defended a version of it; realism ordinarily travels with traducianism, since both require the whole person to come from the parents. The objection it must answer is that if we really sinned in Adam we should also be guilty of the sins of every intervening ancestor, and that the Hebrews passage is an argument about priesthood making a rhetorical point rather than a metaphysical claim about how natures work.

Federalism, or representative headship, holds that Adam was appointed by God as the covenantal head of the race, so that his act counts for those he represents in the way an ambassador's signature counts for his nation. Its textual case is the structure of Romans 5 itself: the whole passage works by a parallel between two men, and if Christ's obedience is credited to those in him without their having performed it, then the parallel requires that Adam's disobedience be credited to those in him in the same manner. Verse 19 puts the two in the same grammatical frame. The position was developed by Johannes Cocceius and given its classic Reformed form by Francis Turretin and later by Charles Hodge, and it is what the Westminster Confession states at 6.3, that Adam and Eve being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed and the corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation. Its acknowledged difficulty is the fairness objection in its sharpest form, since nobody appointed Adam their representative, to which federalists answer that God appointed him and that the same objection would destroy the imputation of Christ's righteousness, which nobody in the argument wants to lose.

Mediate imputation holds that we inherit Adam's corruption directly, and are then held guilty on account of the corruption we have, so that guilt is real but mediated through the inherited nature rather than charged immediately for Adam's act. It was argued by Josue de la Place, known as Placaeus, a professor at the Reformed academy of Saumur, in the sixteen-forties. The French Reformed national synod at Charenton condemned a denial of the imputation of Adam's sin, and Placaeus replied that he had denied only immediate imputation and held the mediate form; the Formula Consensus Helvetica of 1675, drafted by Johann Heinrich Heidegger with Francis Turretin and Lukas Gernler, rejected mediate imputation explicitly in its canons on the subject. Its appeal is that it answers the fairness objection: nobody is condemned for an act performed before he existed, only for the actual condition he actually has. Its difficulty is the one its opponents pressed immediately, that it appears to break the parallel with Christ, since our righteousness is not mediated through a quality we already possess, and that a corruption which is not itself culpable cannot generate guilt.

Jonathan Edwards is usually treated as a fourth position rather than a version of any of these. In Original Sin, published in 1758, he argued that the union between Adam and his posterity is constituted by a divine establishment, a sovereign appointment that makes them one in the relevant sense, and he held that the imputation of the sin and the derivation of the corruption are not two successive steps but two aspects of one thing. Readers have disagreed ever since about whether that is realism with a different metaphysics or federalism with the fairness objection answered by relocating personal identity in God's constituting will.

Total depravity is the Reformed doctrine most often misunderstood, and the misunderstanding is easy to fix. It does not mean that every person is as bad as possible, or that no unbeliever does anything good, or that human beings are worthless. It means that sin extends to the whole of a person, mind, will, affections, conscience and body, so that no part remains uncorrupted and serves as a clean base from which a turn to God could be made. Total describes the extent, not the degree. The Canons of Dort say this explicitly in the third and fourth heads of doctrine: after the fall there remain in man glimmerings of natural light by which he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good order in society, but this light is insufficient for saving knowledge and he is incapable of using it rightly even in things natural and civil. Calvin says the same in the Institutes at 2.2.15-17, where the achievements of pagan lawyers, philosophers and physicians are credited to gifts of the Spirit, and Reformed theology developed the doctrine of common grace to say why the world is not as bad as its doctrine of the heart might suggest. It is also worth saying that the acronym by which the five points are now remembered is a twentieth-century American invention and not the language of Dort, whose own heading is about corruption and conversion.

The Roman Catholic settlement was fixed at the Council of Trent, whose fifth session in 1546 issued five canons on original sin. Adam's sin harmed not himself alone but his posterity, transmitting death and the sin which is the death of the soul. It is transmitted by propagation and not by imitation, and it is in each person as his own. It is remitted in baptism by the merit of Christ, and infants are rightly baptised for that reason. And canon 5 says something that mattered enormously in the sixteenth century: in baptism the guilt of original sin is truly taken away, not merely shaved down or left unimputed, so that there is nothing in the baptised that God hates. Concupiscence remains, and Trent grants that it comes from sin and inclines to sin, but says the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin because it is truly and properly sin in the reborn. The session also states that it does not intend to include the Blessed and Immaculate Virgin Mary in its decrees on original sin, which is the thread leading to the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. The Catechism gathers it at 404 and 405: original sin is called sin in an analogical sense, a sin contracted and not committed, a state and not an act; human nature is deprived of original holiness and justice and is wounded in its natural powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and death and inclined to sin, but it is not totally corrupted.

The Lutheran settlement is severe on the corruption and precise about its limits. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, in its second article, says that since Adam's fall all who are naturally born are born with sin, that is, without fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence, and that this disease or original fault is truly sin, condemning and bringing eternal death to those not born again through baptism and the Holy Spirit. The Apology defends that language against the charge of exaggeration. Then in 1577 the Formula of Concord devotes its whole first article to the question, and the occasion is instructive: Matthias Flacius had pushed the language of total corruption so far as to say that original sin is the very substance of fallen humanity. The Formula rejects that flatly. Original sin is so deep a corruption that nothing sound remains in body or soul, and yet it is an accident and not the substance, because fallen human nature is still God's creature and his workmanship; to say otherwise would make God the creator of sin, would deny that Christ assumed our nature, and would imply that what is raised is not what was made. That is the sharpest boundary any confession draws in this whole area, and it is drawn against an overstatement from the Lutherans' own side.

The Wesleyan settlement begins by conceding the ground and then moves. John Wesley's treatise of 1757, The Doctrine of Original Sin According to Scripture, Reason and Experience, was written against John Taylor of Norwich, who had denied the doctrine, and it is as severe as anything in Calvin; his sermon on original sin calls the natural man's condition total corruption and makes it the point at which Christianity and heathenism divide. The Methodist Articles of Religion retain the Anglican language that the natural man is far gone from original righteousness and inclined to evil. What Wesley adds is prevenient grace, grace that goes before: because of Christ's death for all, a measure of grace is given to every human being, restoring conscience, some knowledge of God and the capacity to respond or to refuse. Hence his claim, in the sermon on working out our own salvation, that there is no one in a state of mere nature, and that what looks like natural free will is already the effect of grace. The texts are John 1:9, the true Light who gives light to everyone; John 12:32, drawing everyone to himself; Titus 2:11, grace bringing salvation to everyone; Romans 2:14-15; and Philippians 2:12-13. A note on the BSB here: it renders the Greek pas, 'all', as 'everyone' in these verses, which reads them in the universal sense the Wesleyan argument needs. The Reformed reading takes 'all' in these places to mean all kinds of people or all without distinction, pointing to contexts such as the prayer for kings and all in authority around 1 Timothy 2:4 and the Greeks who come to Jesus before John 12:32, and it holds that 'everyone' in English asserts more than the Greek word has to. That is a real exegetical question, and the English 'everyone' does not settle it for either side. The Remonstrance of 1610 had stated the underlying Arminian position, and Arminius in the Declaration of Sentiments affirms the bondage of the fallen will as strongly as Dort would. So the real Wesleyan disagreement with the Reformed is not about how bad the fall was. It is about whether the remedying grace is given to all and can be resisted. The named difficulty is that a grace universally given and therefore invisible is hard to demonstrate from any single text, and Reformed critics call it a postulate required by the system; Wesleyans answer that the texts above assert exactly that universality and that the Reformed reading has to restrict every one of them.

The Anabaptist settlement is the one most often left out of surveys and it belongs here. Sixteenth-century Anabaptists affirmed that human nature is corrupted by the fall and that no one can come to God unaided. What they denied is that infants bear condemning guilt: they held that children are covered by the atonement of Christ until they come to the knowledge of good and evil and are capable of responding, and therefore that baptism belongs to those who can repent and believe. That is the doctrinal foundation under believers' baptism, which is why the Schleitheim articles of 1527 restrict baptism to those who have learned repentance and amendment of life and the Dordrecht Confession of 1632 does the same. Balthasar Hubmaier argued the anthropology in two tracts on free will in 1527, holding that the will was bound by the fall and that Christ has restored to every person a real capacity to choose, and Menno Simons argued the case about children at length against both Lutheran and Reformed opponents. Both Lutherans and Reformed called this Pelagianism; the Anabaptists denied it and pointed to their own insistence that the restored capacity is Christ's gift and not a remnant of unfallen nature. Notice the convergence with the East on the one point of inherited guilt, arrived at independently and from different premises, and notice also that the Anabaptist argument and the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace are solving the same problem in nearly the same way.

What is settled, then, and what is not. Settled, across every tradition named in this lesson: that sin is universal, that it is somehow connected to Adam, that human nature is genuinely damaged and not merely badly habituated, that no one turns to God without grace preceding, and that the remedy is Christ and not effort. Not settled: whether the damage includes inherited guilt or only inherited corruption and mortality; whether the grace that remedies it is given to all or to some; whether it can be refused; and on what basis, if guilt is inherited, the charge is just. Those four questions are the live ones, they divide serious Christians, and the next lesson will show you what sin does once it is here, which is a question on which the traditions agree considerably more than they do on where it came from.