What Paul calls “sin” and personifies as “Adam” or the “old man” (Romans 5:12ff., 1 Corinthians 15:21ff.), many of us today might call the “human tragedy.” Whatever term you use, Paul believed Christ named the normal human situation as an entrapment, even a slavery, and, like Jesus, Paul tried to give us a way out of what he saw as ephemeral, passing, oppressive, and finally illusory. His vision was not cosmetic but revolutionary, and we miss that if we make him into a mere moralizer or “church man.”
