For readers unfamiliar with Lutheranism, a little background will help. Confessional Lutherans believe in election. The Formula of Concord teaches that God chose his people for salvation in Christ before the foundation of the world, and that their salvation rests entirely on his grace. But Lutherans also believe that Christ died for every human being without exception and that God sincerely wills the salvation of all.1 That leaves an obvious question. If Christ’s death actually paid for the sins of every person, why are some people lost?
Many Lutherans, especially in the Missouri Synod tradition, answer by dividing justification into two categories. The first is objective (or universal) justification: because Christ atoned for the sins of the whole world, God declared the whole world forgiven when he raised Christ from the dead. The second is subjective justification: the individual receives that verdict through faith. On this view every person has already been justified in the first sense, but only believers possess it in the second sense, and those who die in unbelief lose a forgiveness that was truly theirs. Not every Lutheran is comfortable with this language, and it has been debated within Lutheranism itself, but it is a common position, and it is the one I want to examine here.
Jordan Cooper defends this idea in The Great Divide, appealing mainly to Romans 5:18:
Christ’s resurrection as his justification is seen in 1 Timothy 3:16, which states that Jesus was ‘vindicated (έδικαιωθη) by the Spirit.’ This vindication is spoken of in Romans 5, wherein Paul parallels Christ’s universal act of redemption and Adam’s universal act of bringing death and sin into the world. He writes, ‘Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all’ (Rom 5:18). There is a clear parallelism in this text, wherein Adam brings sin and death to a group of people (being all people), and Christ brings righteousness and life to this same group. If this is Paul’s intent, then there is clear precedence for saying that in some sense, all are justified due to the work of Christ.2
Everything here hangs on one sentence: “Adam brings sin and death to a group of people (being all people), and Christ brings righteousness and life to this same group.” Cooper assumes this, but it is the very thing he needs to prove, and the repetition of “all” in Romans 5:18 doesn’t prove it. Nobody disputes that πάντας means “all.” What I want to know is whether “all men” under Adam and “all men” under Christ are the same set of individuals. I don’t think Romans 5 allows that reading.
Cooper begins with 1 Timothy 3:16, where Paul says Christ was ἐδικαιώθη ἐν πνεύματι, “vindicated by the Spirit.” First Timothy 3:16 uses the ordinary verb for “justify” to describe Christ: he was “vindicated” or “justified in/by the Spirit.” Christ obviously was not pardoned from sin, since he had none. The language therefore speaks of his vindication as the righteous Son. But notice what the text does not say. It says Christ was vindicated. It says nothing about every human being being justified in that act. Cooper would need a further argument to get there. The text that actually ties Christ’s resurrection to our justification is Romans 4:25, where he “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” The verse before it tells us whose justification Paul has in mind: righteousness “will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” (Rom 4:24). The “our” of verse 25 is the “us who believe” of verse 24.
Romans 5 opens its comparison with Adam. Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, “and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (5:12). Death reigned from Adam to Moses, and Adam was “a type of the one who was to come” (5:14). The rest of the passage follows from this. Paul compares two representative men, Adam and Christ, and what comes to the people each one represents. He makes the same comparison in 1 Corinthians 15, where Christ is “the last Adam” (15:45).
I’ll grant that Paul’s vocabulary alone won’t settle this. He uses the same words on both sides. “All men” shows up on both sides of verse 18, and “the many” on both sides of verses 15 and 19. On Adam’s side, “the many” who died is plainly all humanity. If we looked only at the words Paul uses, the Lutheran reading would seem strong. Paul goes further, though. He tells us what each head actually does for the people who belong to him, and on that point the universal reading cannot survive.
Look first at verse 17: “For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” The Greek is οἱ τὴν περισσείαν τῆς χάριτος καὶ τῆς δωρεᾶς τῆς δικαιοσύνης λαμβάνοντες, “those receiving the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness.” Paul describes the people on Christ’s side in a way he never describes anyone on Adam’s side. Nobody has to receive anything in order to die in Adam. And Paul says those who receive the gift of righteousness “will reign in life,” which is a strange thing to say of a status that might come to nothing.
Verse 18 comes next. The Greek is compressed and has no main verb in either half:
δι᾽ ἑνὸς παραπτώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς κατάκριμα, “through one trespass unto all men unto condemnation”
δι᾽ ἑνὸς δικαιώματος εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἰς δικαίωσιν ζωῆς, “through one act of righteousness unto all men unto justification of life”
The ESV supplies the verbs: “as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” The parallel is deliberate and strong, but matching wording by itself doesn’t show that the two groups have the same members. Paul explains what he means in the very next verse.
Verse 19 opens with γάρ, “for,” so it explains verse 18: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” On Adam’s side, ἁμαρτωλοὶ κατεστάθησαν οἱ πολλοί, “the many were constituted sinners.” On Christ’s side, δίκαιοι κατασταθήσονται οἱ πολλοί, “the many will be constituted righteous.” Paul uses the same verb on both sides, and in both cases it describes an actual result. Adam’s disobedience really made his people sinners, and Christ’s obedience really makes his people righteous. The chapter ends by saying that “as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:21). So on Christ’s side Paul moves from the gift of righteousness to justification of life, then to being constituted righteous, and finally to eternal life. That explains why verse 18 calls it δικαίωσιν ζωῆς, “justification of life.” Life is where this justification ends up.
Here Cooper’s reading gets into trouble. If the “all men” on Christ’s side are numerically the same as the “all men” on Adam’s side, then those same individuals are constituted righteous, reign in life, and receive eternal life. Logically, that gives you universalism. A universal justification that leaves most of its recipients condemned doesn’t come from the passage at all. Cooper rejects universalism, so he adds the words “in some sense.” There is not any room in the text for a weaker sense on Christ’s side. Adam’s trespass brought real condemnation and real death, and death reigned (5:14, 17). Paul says twice that Christ’s work is “much more” (5:15, 17). A justification that fails to save most of the people it justifies would accomplish less than Adam’s condemnation did, and Paul’s “much more” rules that out.
The Lutheran reply is to distinguish an objective justification, declared over all people at the resurrection, from a subjective justification received by faith. I take that to be what “in some sense” is doing. The difficulty is that Paul never calls an accomplished but unreceived benefit “justification.” In Romans a person is justified by faith. God is “the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:26). “One is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (3:28, cf. 3:30). God “justifies the ungodly” as the one who “believes in him” (4:5). Romans 5 itself opens the same way: “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1), and by faith “we have also obtained access” into grace (5:2). Paul starts the chapter with those justified by faith who now have peace with God, and he says nothing there about every human being already being justified. Later he ties justification to glorification with no gap between them: “those whom he justified he also glorified” (8:30). Paul has no category for a justified person who isn’t glorified, or for a justified person who is still under condemnation (8:1, 33-34).
Why, then, does Paul say “all men” at all? The context gives a good answer. The first four chapters of Romans deal with Jew and Gentile. In 5:12-21 Paul shows that Adam’s headship reaches back before Moses (5:13-14) and covers the whole race, and that Christ’s headship is just as wide. Christ’s people come from all humanity and not from Israel only. Paul often uses “all” this way, meaning all without distinction (Rom 3:22-23; 10:12-13). He does the same in 1 Corinthians 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” In the next verse he defines that second “all”: “then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (15:23). In both passages the context sets the limits of the group3, and in both the context is two heads and the people who belong to each.
The Westminster Confession puts it carefully: “God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect; and Christ did, in the fulness of time, die for their sins, and rise again for their justification: nevertheless they are not justified, until the Holy Spirit doth in due time actually apply Christ unto them” (WCF 11.4). This keeps everything true in Cooper’s first point. Christ was vindicated in his resurrection, and his resurrection is the ground of his people’s justification. The benefit belongs to those for whom he acted, and it becomes theirs when the Spirit unites them to Christ through faith.
So Romans 5:18 has to be read with the verses around it. Adam’s one trespass brings condemnation on all whom he represents, and Christ’s one act of righteousness brings justification of life to all whom he represents. Verse 17 calls them those who receive the gift of righteousness, verse 19 says they are constituted righteous, and verse 21 says they come to eternal life. If Cooper wants the same individuals in both “alls,” he owes us an explanation of why those same individuals are not the ones Paul says are made righteous and brought to eternal life. According to Paul, each of the two Adams has his own people, and what each one did really comes upon those who belong to him.
https://bookofconcord.org/solid-declaration/election
Jordan Cooper, The Great Divide: A Lutheran Evaluation of Reformed Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 169.
The word “all” means the sum total of the particulars belonging to the group under discussion. It does not, by itself, identify what those particulars are. Context does that. Therefore, “all” should never simply be assumed to mean “all people without exception.” It means all of the relevant group, whatever that group happens to be in context. This is a recurring mistake in Arminian, Lutheran, and hyper-preterist argumentation. The lexical meaning of “all” is confused with the scope of its referent. The proper exegetical question is not, “Does all mean all?” Of course it does. The question is, “All of whom?”