The Soul That Sinneth

The exiles had a bitter proverb: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." It meant: we are only suffering for what our fathers did; our fate is not our own. God answers through Ezekiel with startling force: stop saying it. "All souls are mine… the soul that sinneth, it shall die," and "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father." Each person stands before God for his own life, and the wicked who turns is spared while the righteous who falls away is not. The early church read this as a charter of personal responsibility, and it bears directly on one of the hardest questions in theology: what exactly do we inherit from Adam? Chrysostom and Tertullian in their own words below, with a plain restatement.

The Fathers' words are verbatim and attributed (Chrysostom and Tertullian, in the Nicene/Post-Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, public domain; selected from the running prose, footnote apparatus omitted). The box marked "In plain terms" is our own restatement, never the Fathers' words.

Where the traditions diverge

Ezekiel's principle, each answers for his own sin, raises a famous and still-live question: if "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father," in what sense do we inherit anything from Adam? Here the church genuinely divides, and it is worth stating fairly.

First, the common ground that both sides hold against the ancient error of Pelagius: no one is born a blank slate. Humanity fell in Adam; we inherit a corrupted, death-bound nature, we cannot save ourselves, and we need the grace of Christ from the start. Chrysostom himself says it plainly of Romans 5: when Adam fell, "even they that had not eaten of the tree did from him, all of them, become mortal." We are born into death and disorder. That much is not in dispute.

The divergence is over guilt. The Eastern and earlier Greek reading, often called ancestral sin, is that we inherit Adam's corruption and mortality but not his personal guilt; we become guilty by our own sins, exactly as Ezekiel says. The Western tradition after Augustine, carried into the Reformed confessions, holds original sin to include inherited guilt as well, that all humanity somehow sinned "in Adam" and so even infants bear his guilt. A piece of the difference is textual: Augustine worked from a Latin rendering of Romans 5:12, "in whom [Adam] all sinned," while the Greek is better translated "because all sinned," which points to our own sinning rather than guilt inherited in Adam. Ezekiel 18, with its flat refusal to let the son bear the father's iniquity, sits most easily with the older, ancestral-sin reading: we are born fallen, mortal, and bent toward sin, yet the sins we will answer for are our own. That is not Pelagianism, which denies the fall's corruption altogether; it is the conviction that we inherit Adam's death but own our guilt. The Augustinian and Reformed view is held by serious, godly Christians and reads Romans 5 with weight; this is a real and respectful disagreement, not a settled heresy on either side. But for a study of drift it is worth noticing which reading the plain words of Ezekiel, and the Greek Fathers nearest the apostles, actually support. (See Adam and Christ, the fall and the first promise, and the security of salvation.)

Patristic text from Chrysostom's Homilies on John (on John 9), with reference to his Homilies on Romans (Homily X), and Tertullian's Against Marcion (Book II), in the public-domain Nicene/Post-Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, selected from the running prose with footnote apparatus omitted; nothing added or paraphrased within the quotation marks. Scripture in the King James Version; the plain-language lines are our own restatement. This passage in the Study Bible; Ezekiel 18 at BibleHub.