From Resurrection to Administration: How Salvation Became a System

Much of Western Christian theology assumes that humanity inherits sin or guilt from Adam. From this assumption flow doctrines such as juridical original sin, purgatory as penal satisfaction, indulgences, and the treasury of merit. This post argues that this assumption is neither patristic nor logically coherent. The early Church does not teach that Adam’s personal guilt is transmitted to his descendants. It teaches that what humanity inherits is death, corruption, and ontological weakness. Sin remains personal and voluntary. Death becomes universal. This distinction between death and guilt, and between ontological and juridical models of salvation, is not a minor disagreement. It determines how salvation itself is understood.

Across the Greek and early catholic tradition, a consistent baseline emerges. Adam introduces death and corruption into human existence. What is inherited is mortality and corruption, a diseased condition, not personal blame. Sin requires personal will and assent, and guilt cannot exist without voluntary action. Salvation must therefore be the destruction of death and the healing of human nature. In short, inheritance is a condition, not culpability. This is an ontological, medicinal, resurrection-centered account of salvation.

The early Fathers are explicit on this point. Irenaeus teaches that Adam became subject to death not because guilt was transmitted, but because humanity was created mortal. Sin introduces death, but death is what passes on. Athanasius describes humanity as naturally mortal and in danger of dissolution. The transgression does not transmit blame; it unleashes the reign of death. Christ comes to destroy death, not to redistribute guilt. Gregory of Nyssa states with precision that evil did not pass into our nature as guilt, but as corruption and mortality. John Chrysostom, commenting directly on Romans 5, asks what Adam transmitted to us and answers unambiguously: not sin, but death. Cyril of Alexandria distinguishes corruption from blame. Human nature falls sick; it is not born legally culpable. Theodoret of Cyrus states the principle explicitly: sin is a matter of the will and therefore cannot be inherited. What is inherited is death.

Across these witnesses, the logic is unified and non-juridical. Adam’s sin introduces death. Death spreads because all share Adam’s nature. Sin requires personal choice and action. Therefore guilt cannot be inherited. What humanity inherits is not culpability, but existential captivity.

With Augustine, especially in his mature anti-Pelagian writings, a different model appears. Adam’s guilt is said to be inherited by all. This guilt is transmitted through generation. Humans, including infants, are born legally culpable prior to any personal acts. Death is explained primarily as a penalty for inherited guilt. Salvation is framed chiefly as release from condemnation. In this model, inheritance becomes culpability, and death is downstream of that culpability. This is not a development of the earlier patristic view but a reversal of what is inherited.

This juridical shift fails logically when tested against the ontological framework already established. Guilt is a moral category and presupposes an act of will. Infants have no personal acts of will. Therefore infants cannot be guilty. Augustine nevertheless asserts infant guilt. This means either that guilt no longer refers to moral culpability and becomes a kind of inherited fate, or that the claim is incoherent. The earlier Fathers avoid this contradiction entirely by treating inheritance as mortality and corruption rather than blame.

Death also cannot be explained as a mere legal penalty. Even the righteous before Christ remain bound by death. Their holiness does not free them from mortality. The problem exists prior to any juridical framing. If death were primarily a penalty for guilt, then removal of guilt would remove death. But it does not. Therefore death is ontological, not merely punitive.

Inherited guilt also renders the Incarnation unnecessary in the patristic sense. If humanity’s core problem were juridical guilt inherited at birth, God could forgive by decree. No ontological union would be required. Yet the Fathers insist that without divine–human union, even the righteous have no hope, because death remains undefeated. Salvation requires immortality entering mortality. The Incarnation is not a legal workaround; it is the healing of human nature itself. A guilt-first model cannot explain why union with divine immortality is indispensable.

Once inherited guilt is assumed, a broader penal economy follows logically. Remaining punishments after forgiveness, purgatory as satisfaction, indulgences, and transferable merit all become thinkable. But all of these presuppose inherited culpability, quantifiable debt, and divisible salvation. The patristic framework rejects all three. These systems address punishment, not death. They are structurally mismatched to the patristic diagnosis, and they collapse because the premise that generated them is false.

This difference is visible even in the reading of Romans 5. Earlier Greek exegesis tends to read the passage as teaching that death spreads to all, that humanity becomes corrupt through mortality, and that all therefore sin personally. Augustine reverses the causal chain by making inherited guilt primary and death the penal consequence. Only the earlier reading coheres with the Fathers’ ontology and with the necessity of the Incarnation.

The contrast can be stated simply. In the early Fathers, Adam introduces death, death corrupts nature, corruption leads all to sin personally, and Christ destroys death and heals humanity. In Augustine, Adam transmits guilt, guilt incurs condemnation, condemnation explains death, and Christ primarily satisfies legal debt. Only the first model is coherent with the universality of death even among the righteous, the insistence that guilt presupposes will, the necessity of divine–human union, and a resurrection-centered gospel.

The early Church teaches that the human problem is ontological mortality and corruption, that the solution is divine–human union, that salvation is resurrection and immortality, and that Christ is the conqueror of death, not the administrator of penalties. Inherited sin is not the patristic doctrine. Inherited mortality is. Once this is recognized, the treasury of merit, indulgences, and juridical purgatory are not merely questionable. They are addressing a problem the early Church did not believe existed.

This is where Firmicus Maternus becomes decisive. His argument does not begin with Adam or inherited sin, but with the limits of human holiness itself. Firmicus insists that death is an inescapable condition of human nature. No degree of righteousness, obedience, or faith can overcome it from within humanity. Death continues to rule unless God Himself intervenes.

That is why Firmicus deliberately names the greatest figures imaginable: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These are not marginal examples. They represent the highest possible human righteousness. His point is not that they lacked holiness, but that their holiness accomplished nothing against mortality. They died like everyone else. Death still held them.

From this, Firmicus draws an unavoidable conclusion. If the holiest humans could not free themselves from death, then their righteousness did not exceed their own need. They possessed no excess holiness, no surplus merit, and no redemptive power that could be applied beyond themselves. Holiness that cannot liberate its possessor from death cannot exist as surplus power.

This strikes at the very foundation of the idea of a treasury of merit. The concept presupposes that saints accumulate more righteousness than they personally require, leaving a remainder that can be stored and distributed. But Firmicus’ argument makes such a remainder impossible. Merit that cannot conquer death even in its possessor cannot be transferred to others. It cannot be banked, dispensed, or applied as a remedy.

The passage asks the decisive question: what reward could their merits bring, if they too were held bound by the ineluctable noose of mortality? The answer is implicit. There is no surplus, no excess, and nothing transferable. The entire logic of stored merit collapses at this point.

Firmicus therefore redirects salvation away from moral accumulation and toward ontological transformation. Only God uniting Himself to human nature can defeat death. Salvation is not a reward passed along by holy people; it is a change in what it means to be human. Death must be undone at its root, not offset by accumulated righteousness.

This also clarifies the role of the saints. They are not mediators of salvation. They do not possess independent redemptive power. They are recipients of salvation, exactly like everyone else. Their holiness bears witness to faithfulness, not to surplus salvific capacity.

Once this is understood, the appeal to saints as dispensers of merit loses its foundation. The saints do not stand above humanity as benefactors with stored resources. They stand within humanity as those who awaited the same deliverance. The problem they faced was not lesser punishment, but death itself. And death was only overcome when divine immortality entered human nature.

This is the logic Firmicus forces upon us. Holiness without divine union cannot defeat mortality. If holiness cannot defeat mortality, it cannot generate surplus merit. And if surplus merit does not exist, then the entire economy built upon it has nothing to draw from.

At this point the argument reaches the question of merit itself.

If salvation truly requires divine–human union, then something important follows that may not be immediately obvious. Death cannot be overcome by accumulated virtue. Mortality is not canceled by moral surplus. Salvation cannot function as a quantitative transaction in which righteousness is tallied, stored, and later applied. What is being described is not a moral accounting system, but a transformation of what human nature is. Once salvation is understood this way, merit simply does not operate as redemptive currency. It cannot be stored, transferred, or applied, because it is not what saves in the first place. The treasury model assumes that salvation works like credit, where excess righteousness can be banked and redistributed. But that assumption no longer fits the framework we have been tracing.

This becomes clearer when attention is paid to how the saints themselves are portrayed. The direction of dependence is unmistakable. The saints are not shown as generating salvation; they are shown as awaiting it. Their hope does not rest on what they have accumulated, but entirely on God’s intervention. Nothing within human righteousness, no matter how great, could resolve the problem of death. Once that is seen, the idea that saints possess independent salvific capital collapses. They do not assist others by excess righteousness, nor do they participate in redemption as co-sources. They stand in the same position as all humanity: beneficiaries, not suppliers.

Seen this way, the Incarnation leaves no conceptual room for a treasury of merit. The argument reaches a simple but decisive conclusion. Only by uniting divine immortality to human frailty could death be conquered. That kind of salvation is singular, not distributable. Christ does not add merit to a pool; He changes the condition of humanity itself. When salvation is ontological rather than transactional, there is nothing to dispense. There is no punishment ledger to balance, no surplus righteousness to allocate, and no remaining deficit to offset. The treasury of merit depends on a legal fiction in which salvation is divisible and transferable.

At that point, the conclusion follows directly from the passage’s own reasoning. The saints’ merits could not save themselves. Therefore, no treasury of merit can exist.

The treasury collapses not because saints are unholy, but because human righteousness has no transferable salvific value. The passage makes this unavoidable by insisting that even the holiest remained powerless until God Himself entered human nature. Salvation is not stored righteousness. It is resurrected humanity.

Once the treasury of merit collapses, indulgences necessarily collapse with it. Indulgences do not stand on their own. They depend entirely on a chain of assumptions that only make sense if merit functions as transferable salvific currency.

For indulgences to work, several things must already be true. Sin must leave behind temporal punishment even after forgiveness. That punishment must be reducible or removable. The reduction must occur by applying merit. That merit must come not only from Christ but also from the saints. And the Church must possess authority to dispense this merit. If even one of these assumptions fails, indulgences fail. What the earlier argument has shown is that the first assumption already fails.

The passage under discussion does not frame the human problem in terms of punishment, debt, or satisfaction. It identifies one problem repeatedly and emphatically: the ineluctable noose of mortality. This is decisive. The problem is not unpaid punishment. It is not remaining consequences. It is not a juridical debt that lingers after forgiveness. The problem is death itself. Indulgences address punishment. The passage addresses mortality. They are not answering the same question, which means indulgences are misaligned from the start.

Merit does not alter human nature. Merit does not weaken death. Merit does not function as a redeeming currency. If merit could not free the saint himself, then it cannot shorten punishment, be transferred to another, or be dispensed by an institution (I mean who keeps score?)

Indulgences also require salvation to be divisible. They only make sense if salvation is gradual, quantifiable, and reducible into units of punishment that can be remitted in part. But the passage defines salvation in a fundamentally different way. Salvation is God linking human frailty with divine immortality. That is not incremental. It is not partial. It is not measurable. One is either bound by mortality or liberated by divine union. There is no intermediate state in which reductions apply.

The logic of the Incarnation leaves nothing for indulgences to do. The argument is binary. Without divine union, everyone remains under death. With divine union, death itself is destroyed. Indulgences presume something else entirely: that death has already been resolved, but punishment remains. The passage allows no such remainder. If death is undone, punishment loses its meaning. If death is not undone, indulgences are powerless. Either way, indulgences are redundant or useless.

This exposes the deeper conflict between administration and ontology. Indulgences assume that merit can be applied externally, that grace can be mediated juridically, and that salvation can be administered.

When human nature itself must be transformed.

No external application can accomplish this. Immortality cannot be administered. It can only be participated in.

The human problem is mortality, not residual punishment. Merit cannot overcome mortality. Saints possess no surplus redemptive value. Salvation is ontological, not transactional. Therefore indulgences address a problem that does not exist.

The same logic also explains why juridical purgatory fails. As conceived in Western scholastic theology, purgatory presupposes that the soul is already saved yet still carries remaining punishment or debt, that this debt must be satisfied through suffering, that satisfaction unfolds over time, and that the process is quantitative and remissible. This is a legal model of salvation, not a metaphysical one.

Mortality is not a penalty layered on top of salvation. It is the condition that must be destroyed. A system designed to resolve punishment cannot address death.

The saints before Christ expose this failure most clearly. I point to the most righteous figures imaginable and insist that their faith was real and their righteousness immense, yet they remained bound all the same. The question remaining is not what purification they still required, but what hope of salvation they could have had at all. Their problem was not lingering moral residue. It was ontological captivity. If purgatory were the solution, divine incarnation would not have been necessary. Their purification could have occurred independently of God entering human nature.

Juridical purgatory also presumes a middle state in which salvation is secured but unfinished. It presents only two realities: humanity bound by death and humanity united to divine immortality. There is no third state in which one is saved but still fundamentally incomplete through suffering. Either death reigns, or it is conquered.

Once salvation is understood as God linking human frailty with divine immortality, nothing remains for purgatory to accomplish. This act destroys death, heals human nature, and fulfills hope. Once this union occurs, there is no debt left to pay, no punishment left to purge, and no temporal process required. Purgatory assumes salvation removes guilt but leaves nature partially broken.

Time-based purification also contradicts resurrection logic. Juridical purgatory depends on duration, gradual satisfaction, and measurable progress. Yet death is overcome, not managed. Immortality is bestowed, not earned incrementally. Mortality cannot be worked off. It must be abolished.

And this is why the apostles taught repentance, not penance. Repentance is a turning away from sin in order to receive forgiveness, so that the Holy Spirit may cleanse the soul from within and bring about rebirth.

Taken together, the patristic witness is consistent. Adam’s sin introduces death. Death spreads because all share Adam’s nature. Sin requires personal will and action. Therefore guilt cannot be inherited. What humanity inherits is not culpability but existential captivity. Once this framework is accepted, juridical original sin collapses, purgatory as penal satisfaction collapses, indulgences collapse, and transferable merit collapses with them. All of these systems assume inherited guilt, remaining punishment, and quantifiable debt. The Fathers identify the problem as death, not debt.

The early Church teaches an ontological problem and an ontological solution. Mortality and corruption are healed by divine–human union. Salvation is resurrection and immortality. Christ is the conqueror of death, not the administrator of penalties.

“Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

(John 3:5)

Because John 3:5 makes rebirth by the Spirit the sole condition for entering the kingdom, not post-mortem purification. One is either born or not born; there is no partially born state. Purgatory assumes an intermediate condition of salvation-yet-unfinished, but the verse allows no such category. Entrance depends on ontological rebirth, not on time, suffering, or satisfaction.

There is a reason the early ecumenical councils were so restrained in their doctrinal definitions, and why they repeatedly warned against adding to what had already been confessed. Their concern was not merely disciplinary. It was theological. Truth, once stated at the level of reality itself, does not require constant supplementation. It stands because it corresponds to what is. Error, by contrast, must be propped up. Once a premise is misidentified, further explanations become necessary to manage the consequences of that mistake.

The earliest conciliar statements are striking for their economy. They define who Christ is and what He has done, and then they stop. They do not elaborate mechanisms. They do not construct systems to handle residual problems. They do not legislate processes to correct what salvation has supposedly left unfinished. This restraint makes sense if salvation is ontological and complete. There is nothing to manage once death has been destroyed.

By contrast, once inherited guilt is introduced, further doctrines become unavoidable. Guilt requires satisfaction. Satisfaction introduces quantity. Quantity introduces remainder. Remainder requires administration. Administration demands authority and mechanisms. Each step generates the need for the next. The system grows not because truth is unfolding, but because earlier assumptions must be stabilized by later ones.

This helps explain why later doctrines feel increasingly technical and procedural. They are not clarifications of a single reality, but compensations for a shift in first principles. When the problem is misnamed, solutions multiply. When salvation is reduced to legal resolution rather than ontological transformation, it must be continually supplemented to account for what it cannot actually heal.

The early councils did not forbid additions because they feared development as such. They resisted additions because they understood that the faith, once articulated at its proper depth, does not need reinforcement. Resurrection does not require appendices. Divine–human union does not require administrative extensions. Death conquered does not leave behind a trail of unresolved paperwork.

In that light, the later proliferation of doctrines is not a sign of theological richness, but of conceptual strain. It suggests a structure bearing weight it was never designed to carry. Truth can remain simple without being shallow. Falsehood, once introduced, must grow increasingly complex just to remain standing.