On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §241 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 4: Quinta — non mortuus prout minatus

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Fifth proof (I put the rest off for another place). If the law threatened Adam with death as privation of righteousness, then—on your view—Adam died just as God had threatened. That looks false to me. First, you yourself, I take it, grant that Adam's first sin was forgiven; otherwise he would be counted among the damned. So he did not die just as God had threatened. Forgiveness of sin and punishment according to the law cannot both stand.

Second, by the death named in the threat you mean bodily death and eternal death as well as spiritual. Truth and justice in the threat would then require that on the very day he broke the law he die bodily, eternally, and spiritually. Yet that day he suffered neither bodily nor eternal death, and eternal death he never underwent and never will. Why could spiritual death's penalty not be forgiven Adam as eternal death's was—or at least deferred?

Latin

Quinta denique ratio, (caeteras enim differre, & in alium locum conferre satius erit.) Si lex Adamo mortem sitam in privatione justitiae comminabatur, Adamus (ut tu asseris) prout Deus minatus fuerat, Mortuus est. Id autem mihi falsum videtur. Nam primo, Tu, opinor, fateris Adamo condonatum fuisse primum illud peccatum, numerando alioquin inter damnatos: non igitur, prout Deus minatus fuerat, mortuus est. Pugnant enim haec duo, condonari peccatum & puniri secundum legem. Deinde, Tu per mortem denunciatam comminatione tam mortem corporis & aeternam intelligis, quam spiritualem illam. Pertinebat igitur aeque ad veritatem comminationis & justitiam, ut, quo die legem violavit, eodem tam corporea & aeterna morte, quam spirituali moreretur. Tamen eodem die neutram passus est, aeternam autem nunquam subiit, aut subibit. Cur non potuit Adamo mortis spiritualis aeque ac aeternae poena condonari? aut saltem differri?

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Josué de la Place (Placeus) on the imputation of Adam's first sin: chapters 1 to 12 and 14, and the later disputation up to its chapter on Romans 5:14, from the Latin. The rest is not yet translated.

Josué de la Place (c. 1596–1655), known in Latin as Placeus, was pastor at Nantes and from 1633 professor of theology at the Academy of Saumur, the school of Cameron and Amyraut.

On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin argues the distinctive Saumur thesis: Adam's sin reaches his posterity only mediately, through the inherited corruption — never by immediate reckoning of a sin they did not commit. Fellow Reformed theologians rejected the view, but the book remains its classic statement.

Part only: Chapters 1–12 and 14, and the disputation up to Romans 5:14

Datec. 1645–1655 AD (written after the 1645 Synod of Charenton, and read in draft by Drelincourt by 10 December 1653; printed posthumously at Saumur, 1661; Reformed / Amyraldian circle)

The English is made from the 1661 Saumur Latin of chapters 1 to 12 and 14 and part of the later disputation. No earlier English was copied.

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Translated from Latin (Saumur 1661) (Latin)
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Also checked machine-read text of the 1661 volume (Latin)

We have not yet re-checked this work against its source. We made this study translation with AI help. No scholar has yet certified it as faithful and complete. Open Latin on any section, or the Latin source link, to see the source text. It is not a critical edition.

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