On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §245 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 4: non mirum; temporal deferral

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Garissoles. 2. No wonder Adam at once lost righteousness by the sin, and yet was not damned to eternal death, nor felt bodily death at once. He fell into spiritual death at once—God willing it—lest, if no kind of death had struck him at once, Satan's promise (you will not die at all) should look truer to Adam than God's threat (you will die the death); and lest Adam, growing old in sin, should never think of serious repentance and return to God. The sting of present punishment pricked him so that he might repent and come back to the God he had left by rebellion.

Bodily death he did not meet at once, so that time to repent might be given him—there is none after death. He would have paid that penalty the very day he sinned, had God not, for Christ's coming Satisfaction, chosen to give the human race space for repentance (so the Learned Man says in his Disputation on Adam's fall, last thesis). Eternal death he never met at all, because he was among God's elect, over whom hell has no claim. (Apocalypse.)

Latin

GAR. 2. Nihil in eo mirum quod Adamus & statim a peccato privationem justitiae incurrit, & nec aeterna morte damnatus est, nec temporalem statim sensit. In spiritualem statim incurrit, ita volente Deo, ne si statim in eum non incurrisset ulla species mortis, videri posset Adamo verior Satanae promissio, non moriemini omnino, quam Dei comminatio, morte moriemini; & in peccato consenescens Adamus de seria poenitentia & conversione ad Deum forte non cogitasset: sed pupugit eum praesentis poenae sensus, ut ad Deum resipiscendo rediret, quem rebellando deseruerat. Mortem vero temporalem non statim incurrit, ut poenitendi tempus ipsi concederetur, quod nullum est post mortem. Hanc poenam eodem quo peccavit die Adamus luisset, nisi visum fuisset Deo ob futuram Christi Satisfactionem, spatium dare generi humano ad agendam poenitentiam, inquit Vir Doctus Disput. de lapsu Adami Thes. ultima. Denique aeternam omnino non incurrit, quia erat inter electos Dei, in quos infernus nihil habet juris. Apocal.

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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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