On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §310 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 6: Why the act, not the corruption that followed, is called imputed

Click or tap any sentence to jump there. The side buttons skip a paragraph.

But if the word 'as soon as' (quamprimum) was absent from those words in which it was conceived, why did the learned man insert and add it of his own? If in conceiving that covenant God used that word, whence does the learned man have it that it is to be taken in so precise a sense as to exclude the habit for this reason—that if not by some moment of time, perhaps by a moment of nature, actual sin was followed? comparison is instituted between Adam's actual disobedience and the ensuing habitual corruption, we shall see that this corruption was an effect of that disobedience, and so a penalty by God's just judgment of that actual sin. But penalty is not imputed; rather the sin which is the meritorious cause of that penalty. What wonder, then, if that disobedience was rather imputed than this corruption?

Latin

Quod si vox quamprimum abfuit ab illis verbis quibus conceptum fuit, cur eam vir doctus de suo inseruit & addidit? Si in concipiendo illo foedere Deus illa voce usus est, unde habet vir doctus eam significatione tam praecisa esse accipiendam, ut excludat habitum ideo, quia si non temporis forte aliquo naturae momento secutus est actuale peccatum? GAR. Si comparatio instituatur actualis inobedientiae Adami, & consecuta corruptionis habitualis, videbimus hanc corruptionem fuisse effectum illius inobedientiae, atque adeo poenam justo Dei judicio illius peccati actualis. Poena vero non imputatur, sed peccatum potius quod est illius poenae causa meritoria. Quid ergo mirum, si illa inobedientia potius imputata est, quam ista corruptio?

Report a mistake in this passage

About this text

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.

Printed text used

Translated from Latin (Saumur 1661) (Latin)
Also checked Text extract of Caput Primum (Latin)
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.

Report a mistake