So, in your view, in the third trimester fetuses start sinning, because of the way they respond to stimuli. Before this time, they are not sinning, because they do not respond to stimuli. This is correctly representing your idea?

I can only understand this in terms of sinful tendencies. How do you understand it?

Yes. They are incapable of responding to stimuli in sinful ways before a certain time because they haven't developed enough as a human to do so.

Rosangela, I cannot understand why you believe having sinful tendencies (defects, weaknesses, imperfections) makes people just as guilty in the sight of God as actually indulging them in sinful ways (thoughts, words, actions).

Mike,

I don't believe having sinful tendencies makes people *just as guilty* in the sight of God as actually indulging them. I believe inherited sinful tendencies are sins of ignorance until you become aware of them, and that you just become aware of them when they manifest themselves in sinful actions, thoughts or words.

Yes, sinful nature, common to all of us, is degenerate and condemned for its sinfulness. Each wicked unbeliever ending up in hell is punished there for his own sin and sinfulness, alongside Satan.


Thank you for quoting the official church position on Christ's humanity. No more books favouring that view came out after Roy Adam's "The Humanity of Christ" (1994)...

"Touched with Our Feelings", by the late Prof. Jean Zurcher of our Collonge Seminary in France, and of the Euro-Africa Division BRI, in Switzerland, came out in 1999 through the Review (it was translated from his original French), documenting the change by the church on Christ's humanity from sinful to sinless, in 1949.

The church's position is wrong in interpreting Ellen White as it does, therefore. The official position is a variation on the 1949 position, since that position is now the other minority of the three positions in the church. It is critical to gospel truth to hold to the original, true position - as our current leading scholars concede it is the original position.

Note, Tom, Christ tasted death for every man.

The condemnation every man is under is not from personal guilt but from being a sinful human: that requires eternal death to extinguish it and free us from it - free & redeem us from our sinful human nature which is condemned.

This is the basic legal bondage we have which Rom 7:1-4 deals with: Christ took our sinful nature as his own, and died the death due it, freeing us from our sinfulness to his righteousness - living to God, despite being trapped in our flesh still. Thus he lived by faith, and so do we.

Rom 7 is about the two Adams. They are similar for their positions as heads of the same race, not for sharing the innocency of Adam's created humanity: Christ was born under the law - that involves sinful flesh.

The main point of this chapter is that Adam's fall into sin affected all men, and Christ's meritoriously righteous life affected all men. It's not just a gift for all men, it's given to all men: "came upon all men."

The German Quarterly says about Rom 5:18 particularly is that there's nothing "automatic" in salvation. Clearly there is, actually, as by grace we saved through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus - without our involvement! We automatically have a Saviour, who is Saviour of the world, too.

The depth of Rom 5 is simply that Adam caused by his action a condemnation for his descendants, and Christ, the second Adam, justified the world by his action, in his person. Therefore, sinners may believe, since in Christ they are linked by his sinful humanity which he took to become a man to their Redeemer.

The only justification the Bible speaks about is justification by faith.

Many places in Scripture speak of the corporate work which Christ did for humanity. I think Prescott, in the 1895 GCB, was the first Adventist to speak of the different ways "justification" is used in Scripture.