Why Do People Suffer for a Sin Adam Committed So Long Ago?
The Bible teaches that intimate fellowship with God was broken when Adam and Eve made the free choice to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. With that act of disobedience, sin entered the world. Genesis chapter three outlines the consequences of their actions, to include a new, corrupted nature and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. That corrupted nature was handed down to their children and has been handed down to every person ever since. Two major theories purport to explain how Adam’s corrupted nature is transmitted - these are federal headship and natural headship/seminal generation. Closely related to the second is traducianism.
Federal Headship. Federal Headship holds that Adam was appointed by God as the representative head of the human race; thus, his obedience or disobedience was imputed to his descendants. It is not unlike the leader of a country declaring war on another. Although the people did not declare war on their neighbors, they are at war nonetheless. War has been declared on their behalf.
Natural Headship/Seminal Generation. Natural headship or seminal generation theorizes that all of humanity was present in Adam when he sinned, and thus sinned with him. Adam was, if you will, the point of singularity for all mankind when he sinned. In him was the seed of the entire human race. We are the actualized potential that was in him. In this scenario, a line of descent representing man’s sinful nature would be drawn directly from Adam to me, bypassing all the intermediate generations.
Traducianism. Traducianism is primarily about the origin of the soul. Traducianism holds that the soul is passed along to each of us from our parents. Like hair and eye color and other physical characteristics, our immaterial characteristics, or soul, are also transmitted through natural generation. Our sin nature, a part of the immaterial aspect of our souls, is therefore passed along thusly. In this scenario, the line of descent representing our sin natures would follow generational lines from one descendant to the next through posterity. Boiled down, via natural headship we were present with Adam when he sinned and so sinned too. Via traducianism, our sin nature is inherited.