To Florus 3.20

The case is settled. Still, I urge the reader to attend to what I now bring forward. Suppose someone openly professed what the advocate of inherited sin tries to establish by argument: suppose he declared war on God’s law, fearlessly despised the pronouncement we quoted, and asserted, by whatever means he could, that both requirements God wished observed were false. Suppose he did all he could to overthrow both sides of the pronouncement under discussion and fully believed that parents are and ought to be condemned for their children’s sins, and children for their parents’. Even a person like that could not establish the transmission of sin, even on his own assumptions. Why? Because even if the law’s pronouncement were proved false—the pronouncement testifying that relatives of this kind cannot be stained by each other’s crimes—it would remain unshaken that sin is not transmitted. The very fact that parental guilt passed to children and children’s guilt returned to parents would establish that birth was not what brought parents’ sins to children, since they also returned from children to parents, where birth could not be the cause.

Let the result of my argument be clear. Divine law has an inviolable authority, which no arguments of impiety can overthrow. Its decree prescribed with the greatest precision and completeness that declaring children guilty for their parents’ sin is a disgraceful opinion and a distortion of judgment, which it commanded us earnestly to avoid. This thunderbolt shattered the structure of inherited sin. Yet the faith we defend is protected by such strong defenses of truth that even the irreverence capable of denying God’s law cannot shake it (Deuteronomy 24:16).