Reformed theology Reformed Christianity, also called Calvinism, is a major branch of Protestantism that began during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. In the modern day, it is largely represented by the Continental Reformed Protestantism, Continenta ...

, the imputation of sin is the crediting of Adam's sin to the account of every individual human being. Under the framework of

covenant theology Covenant theology (also known as covenantalism, federal theology, or federalism) is a biblical theology, a conceptual overview and interpretive framework for understanding the overall structure of the Bible. It is often distinguished from dis ...

Adam Adam is the name given in Genesis 1–5 to the first human. Adam is the first human-being aware of God, and features as such in various belief systems (including Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam). According to Christianity, Adam ...

is considered as a "federal head" or representative of all of his progeny. His sinful act of eating the fruit from the

tree of the knowledge of good and evil In Christianity and Judaism, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (, ; ) is one of two specific trees in the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2–3, along with the tree of life. Alternatively, some scholars have argued that the tre ...

which was forbidden by God had consequences for all humanity. This is explained as the sin being imputed, or accounted, to individual humans. A person that has sin imputed to them becomes guilty of transgression before God for being in violation to his laws and is subject to his punishments in the life hereafter. Several theories have been proposed by Reformed theologians to explain how Adam's sin is transmitted to others. The "immediate imputation" view holds that when Adam sinned, all of humanity became sinful simply by that act, without further consideration. Under the "mediate imputation" view (due to Joshua Placaeus), humans inherited a proclivity to sin because of Adam's act. In recent years, theologians have begun to explain the transmission of original sin by socialization and character deformation rather than imputation.

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