On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §243 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 4: Quinta close; misnames tertia; Resp. 1

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If then God in supreme mercy and wisdom deferred executing that threat, hanging it on another judgment after soul and body part, we must grant Adam was not Dead as the law's threat required. So the threat of spiritual death as privation of righteousness is not to be read as I take that threat—which I judge a worse evil than eternal death itself.

Garissoles. A "third" reason is added. If the law threatened Adam with death as privation of righteousness, he would have died as God threatened—which is false, since he is not to be counted among the damned. And since that death covers eternal, bodily, and spiritual: he who never felt eternal death, nor at once felt temporal, how did he at once incur spiritual death—privation of righteousness? Reply 1. Whoever dies the death of privation of righteousness and stays in it to the end is counted among the damned. Not so Adam: by faith in the blessed seed he was raised from that spiritual death into spiritual life, as with all the elect whom God is pleased to make alive in Christ when dead in sins (Eph. 2).

Latin

Si igitur Deus pro summa sua misericordia & sapientia comminationis illius executionem distulit, ac suspendit ex alio judicio post separationem animae a corpore futuro, fatendum est Adamum non fuisse, prout ferebat legis comminatio, Mortuum. Itaque comminationem illam de spirituali morte posita in privatione justitiae non esse intelligendam, quam ego arbitror ipsa morte aeterna deterius malum esse. GAR. Additur & tertia ratio. Si lex Adamo mortem sitam in privatione justitiae comminabatur, Adamus, prout Deus comminatus erat, mortuus fuerit, quod falsum; cum inter damnatos non sit computandus. Item, cum mors illa aeternam, corporalem, & spiritualem complectatur, qui nunquam sensit aeternam, nec statim sensit temporalem, quomodo spiritualem, nempe privationem justitiae, statim incurrisset? Respond. 1. Qui mortuus est morte sita in privatione justitiae, si in ea perseveret, usque ad finem, inter damnatos computandus est. At non ita factum Adamo, qui fide in semen benedictum ex illa morte spirituali in vitam spiritualem excitatus est, ut fit omnibus electis, quos mortuos in peccatis placet Deo vivificare in Christo, Ephes. 2.

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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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