Genesis 3:19 — “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return”: the verdict upon the whole man

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Genesis 3:19

Context: the last word of a judicial speech

The sentence stands at the close of a courtroom scene. After the transgression in the garden, God calls the three parties to account one after another: the serpent, the woman, the man. Each receives a verdict of his own, and each verdict strikes precisely the sphere in which the one addressed lives — the serpent the dust it is to eat, the woman the pain of childbearing, the man the ground from which he feeds himself. The series ends with the sentence that is our passage: with thorns, thistles, sweat, bread — and with dust.

This conclusion is no incidental addition but the bracket closing back on the scene of creation. Two chapters earlier it read: “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). Two magnitudes come together there — dust from the ground and the breath of life — and out of their coming together there arises not a container with contents, but a “living soul.” In 3:19 the movement is reversed and the starting point named: “for out of it you were taken.”

There is also a play on words that is lost in English. Man is called ʾādām, the ground ʾadāmāh; he is the earthling from the earth. The verse plays it out twice: back to the ʾadāmāh, because he was taken from it — and a few lines later God sends him out of the garden “to work the ground from which he was taken” (3:23). Origin, labour and end belong to one circle; man tills the stuff he is to become.

Decisive for everything that follows is what comes immediately after. God says: “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” (3:22). For this reason he is driven out and the way to the tree is guarded. The text therefore presupposes that continuing life was bound to a means lying outside man. Whoever already possesses immortality cannot have it taken away by a closed garden gate.

The passage is thus no treatise on the constitution of the soul — that question is not raised. But neither is it mute. It describes the beginning and the end of man in the same words and leaves nothing between the two that would be exempt from the return. Every doctrine that ascribes to man a naturally immortal component must therefore explain why the verdict does not mention it — at the very place where his end is under discussion.

The Socinian core thesis

The Socinian reading takes the verse for what it is: a statement about the whole man. The one addressed is not a body housing a soul, but a “you” — the same “you” that hid itself, that was questioned, that had to answer. Of this “you” it is said that it becomes dust. The sentence knows no exception and no remainder.

From this follows the first and most far-reaching thesis: man was not immortal and then became mortal; he was mortal from the beginning and was meant to become immortal. The Racovian Catechism states the grounds without pathos — formation from dust, dependence on food, appointment to procreation, access to a tree whose fruit had the power to prolong life. All of these are marks of a creature that must be preserved because it does not preserve itself.

With this the punishment is not made smaller but determined more precisely. It is not that an immortal nature is destroyed — that would be a contradiction — but that the mortal creature is deprived of the means that could have held off its death, and that its subjection to death becomes a certainty. The Catechism therefore distinguishes carefully between mortality and death: to be mortal means to be able to die; having to die is the consequence of the transgression; remaining forever in death would be what Scripture calls the second death.

And from this follows the second thesis, which carries the whole doctrine: immortality is not a possession but a gift, and the way to it had to be revealed. Fausto Sozzini begins his doctrine of justification at exactly that point — with a God who has resolved to bring his own “after this mortal life over into the immortal one, by raising them from the dead.” It is not that man outlasts death; God brings him out of it. What Genesis 3:19 closes, the resurrection opens — and it alone.

Exegesis: key terms and semantic field

Five expressions carry the interpretation: the dust, the word pair man and ground, the verb of returning, the “living soul” of 2:7 and the threat of death in 2:17. Each of them can be tested against other passages of Scripture, and the testing turns out unusually unanimous.

ʿāfār — dust, soil from the ground

The word denotes loose soil, dry crumbs, the dust of the road. It is not a philosophical term for “matter” as opposed to “spirit,” but a tangible word for what one can pick up in the hand and let fall again. When Job says, “Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust?” (Job 10:9), he is not speaking of a part of himself but of himself.

The same expression elsewhere grounds God’s compassion: “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). Sozzini cites this very sentence when he shows what the hope of forgiveness rests upon — on God’s clemency towards a frail creature. In Scripture, then, dust is not the inferior part of man, but man himself insofar as he is perishable.

ʾādām and ʾadāmāh — the earthling from the earth

The likeness of names is deliberate. Man is named after the ground from which he was formed, and the curse strikes him where his name comes from: “cursed is the ground because of you” (3:17). The punishment therefore does not alter the composition of man but his relation to the stuff he is made of — toilsome labour, meagre yield, and in the end the giving back.

Ecclesiastes states the same finding as an observation: “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return” (Ecclesiastes 3:20), and before that: “For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other” (3:19). This is not resignation but the sober taking up of what Genesis 3:19 says about the creature.

šûb — “to return,” not “to move on”

The verb denotes returning to a place where one has already been. Precisely in this lies its weight: man does not go somewhere else, he goes back. That presupposes that there was a state before life, and names it as the same one that sets in after life. A continued existence in a new place is not what this word says — it is the express counter-concept to it.

The Psalter describes the same process from God’s side: “When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust” (Psalm 104:29). And Elihu sums it up in Job: “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust” (Job 34:14-15). The breath belongs to God and returns to him; man returns to the dust — and ceases.

næfæš ḥajjāh — “a living creature”

In 2:7 man is not equipped with a soul; he becomes one: “and the man became a living creature” — Hebrew næfæš ḥajjāh. The same word pair stands in the preceding chapter of the animals: of the creatures of the waters, the birds and the beasts of the field, all of which are called “living creatures” (1:20-21, 24). The expression therefore denotes the animate creature as a whole, not an immortal component within it.

From there the Old Testament manner of speaking explains itself — the one that gives the later doctrine so much trouble: that a næfæš can die (Leviticus 21:11 speaks literally of a “dead soul”), that Ezekiel says, “The soul who sins shall die” (18:4), and that the Psalm describes the death of a man thus: “When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish” (Psalm 146:4). Whoever reads 2:7 rightly reads 3:19 without a break.

môt tāmût — “dying you shall die”

The threat of 2:17 is doubled in Hebrew: “dying you shall die.” It announces nothing other than what 3:19 carries out — the return to the dust. Of a separation of the soul from the body, of a continued existence under altered conditions, or of a tormenting, there is no word in the whole verdict. The punishment is announced in the same language in which it is pronounced.

This is also why Paul can call death “the wages of sin” and set eternal life over against it as “the free gift of God” (Romans 6:23). The two members are opposites: where death means the end of life, life is the gift. If one presupposes that man cannot cease in any case, then both members are reinterpreted — death into a change of place, life into a quality of the same unceasing existence.

Comparison of the interpretations

The Racovian Catechism on the passage

The Catechism treats the question not in an appendix but at the threshold: before there can be any talk of the way of salvation, it must be settled why man needs it. To the question why man is subject to death it gives an answer in two members — and it is the first that makes all the difference:

“For a twofold reason. The first is that man was created mortal from the beginning, that is, as one who not only could die by his nature, but who also, if he were left to his nature, would inevitably have to die — although he could be kept alive continually by divine grace.”

Racovian Catechism, “The Mortality of Man”

Note the precision of the closing clause. Man was mortal and could be kept alive — both at once. This asserts neither that death was decreed from the beginning, nor that man possessed immortality as his property. He was a creature whose continuance came from outside. Precisely this intermediate position is what Genesis 3 describes: a tree of life in the garden, and afterwards a guarded way to it.

Asked how this can be proved, the Catechism answers with four observations, all of which come from the first chapters of Genesis and none of which makes any metaphysical presupposition:

“First, from the fact that he was formed out of the dust; then, that as soon as he was created he had need of food; third, that he was appointed by God himself to the begetting of offspring, which would have no place in an immortal nature. Moreover, if Adam had been created immortal, there would have been no sense in granting him the tree of life, whose fruit had the power to prolong life.”

Racovian Catechism, “The Mortality of Man”

The third and fourth arguments deserve particular attention. He who does not die needs no offspring; begetting is the way in which mortal beings continue. And he who cannot die is not served by a tree whose fruit prolongs life. Both institutions — procreation and the tree of life — are expressly named in the text, and both presuppose a creature that is finite by nature.

The Catechism then puts the counter-question to itself: how this is to be reconciled with those passages of Scripture according to which man was created in the image of God and for immortality, and death came into the world through sin. On the first point the answer runs:

“As for that testimony which declares that man was created in the image of God, it must be known that the image of God does not signify immortality.”

Racovian Catechism, “The Mortality of Man”

The grounds are again a finding of Scripture, not a dogmatic proposition: Scripture still ascribes the image of God to man long after he is subject to death — in the case of Noah (“for God made man in his own image,” Genesis 9:6) and in James (3:9). If the image were immortality, it would have had to be extinguished after the fall. What it actually denotes is shown by the context of 1:26: dominion over the fish, the birds, the livestock, the whole earth.

On the third point, the appeal to Romans 5:12, the Catechism distinguishes two things that in controversy usually run into each other:

“In that passage the Apostle is not treating of mortality but of death itself, and indeed of eternal death. But immortality differs greatly from death, and indeed from eternal death, since someone can be mortal and yet never have to die, let alone that it would be necessary for him to remain forever in death.”

Racovian Catechism, “The Mortality of Man”

The distinction is sharp and relieves the text of a burden it does not bear: being mortal, having to die and remaining forever in death are three different things. Adam was the first from the beginning; through the transgression the second was added; the third is the threat from which the gospel sets free. And the second cause the Catechism names unmistakably: “This, that the first man transgressed the manifest commandment of God, to which the threat of death was attached. From this it further came about that he drew his whole posterity with him into the same bondage to death.”

Overview of the writings of Sozzini

Created mortal — made immortal

Whoever calls man mortal must say what the hope rests upon. It is exactly at this point that Fausto Sozzini begins his account of justification: not with a nature that outlasts death, but with a decree of God that reaches out beyond death. The first sentence of his summary runs:

“God, out of his highest and sole goodness, once resolved to forgive all sins to all who come to understanding and thenceforth renounce worldly desires, living soberly, justly and piously in the present world, and to bring them after this mortal life over into the immortal one, by raising them from the dead.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De iustificatione), First Summary

Two expressions carry the whole anthropology. “After this mortal life” — it is man who is mortal, not a part of him. And “by raising them from the dead” — the transition to immortal life is not a continuing to exist but an action of God upon the dead. Sozzini goes on in the same place to say that God, for this very reason, raised the one whom he had set before us as our example “from the dead on the third day after his killing” and “thereafter transferred him into heaven to immortal life.” The example is not a survival but a resurrection.

From this the Racovian Catechism draws the historical conclusion: the promise of eternal life was not yet given in the law of Moses.

“there was no such promise of eternal life in the law of Moses. This was first revealed to us through Christ, who indeed abolished death, but brought life and incorruptibility to light through the gospel.”

Racovian Catechism, “Eternal Life in the Old and New Covenant”

The sentence takes up a phrase from the second letter to Timothy (1:10) and makes it a principle of division: what had to be brought to light lay previously in darkness. Were immortality an endowment of human nature, it would not be an object of revelation but of self-observation — and the gospel would have nothing to communicate at this point. That it does have something to communicate is the strongest confirmation that Genesis 3:19 is meant literally.

This also says what the Socinian doctrine does not assert. It does not deny the continuance of man — it relocates its ground. It is not the constitution of the creature that carries the hope, but the faithfulness of him who made the creature and can call it back. Whoever says that man is dust therefore says nothing bitter, but something precise: he says that everything reaching beyond this end is a gift.

Logical arguments

The following considerations are ordered by weight: they begin with the immediate wording and end with the consequences for the doctrine as a whole.

1. The verdict addresses the person, not a part. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” — the same “you” that hid itself, that was questioned, that answered. Whoever distinguishes here between body and soul imports into the text a distinction that the text nowhere makes in the verdict.
2. The verse is the reversal of 2:7. There dust and the breath of life come together, and man becomes a living creature; here the two come apart. What arose by composition ceases by dissolution. A third, indissoluble component occurs in neither sentence.
3. The tree of life would otherwise be without purpose. God expressly drives man out so that he may not “eat, and live forever” (3:22). Continuing life therefore hung on a means outside man. One cannot deprive a being immortal by nature of its immortality by means of a guarded garden path.
4. Man needed food from the beginning. Even before the transgression he is assigned what he is to eat (2:16). A being that must be preserved is not incorruptible of itself — and the Catechism counts exactly this among its proofs.
5. The appointment to procreation presupposes finitude. “Be fruitful and multiply” (1:28) is issued before the fall. Offspring is the way in which mortal creatures continue; in an immortal nature it would, as the Catechism writes, have “no place.”
6. The image of God remains after the fall. The image of God is ascribed to Noah when death has long held sway (9:6), and likewise in James 3:9. If the image were immortality, it would have been extinguished with the fall. According to 1:26 it denotes dominion over the creatures, not incorruptibility.
7. The threat and its execution speak the same language. What was announced was “dying you shall die” (2:17); what is executed is the return to the dust. Nowhere is the punishment reinterpreted as a separation, a transfer or a continued existence under other conditions — except by the interpreters.
8. The rest of the canon reads the verse literally. Ecclesiastes 3:20 (“all are from the dust, and to dust all return”), Psalm 104:29, Psalm 146:4 and Job 34:14-15 repeat the sentence without making an exception. Four books, the same testimony.
9. In the New Testament immortality is a message, not a presupposition. Christ has “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). What is brought to light was not manifest before — and what man possessed by nature would need no revelation.
10. The resurrection would otherwise be dispensable. Paul rates it so highly that without it even those who have fallen asleep would have “perished” (1 Corinthians 15:18) and the mortal must first “put on” what is immortal (15:53). Both make sense only if immortality does not already belong to man.
11. Otherwise the antithesis of Romans 6:23 does not hold. “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.” If it is presupposed that no one can cease, then it is no longer death and life that stand opposed, but two modes of unceasing existence — and the sentence loses its edge.

Biblical cross-references

These passages deepen the interpretation in the light of the whole biblical testimony:

Genesis 2:7

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” The contrast with 3:19 is exact: what comes together here comes apart there. And man becomes a living soul — he does not receive one. Cf. the entry on Genesis 2:7.

Genesis 3:22-24

“Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” The sentence stands three lines after our passage and is its strongest commentary: eternal life was bound to a means that could be taken from man. The Catechism makes it its fourth argument.

Ecclesiastes 3:19-20

“For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other… All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” The Preacher quotes Genesis 3:19 in substance and expressly extends it to the comparison with the beast — the same origin, the same end.

Psalm 146:4

“When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.” The verse joins the two together: the return to the earth and the ceasing of thought. It is thereby the most precise Old Testament interpretation of our passage. Cf. the entry on Psalm 146:4.

Job 34:14-15

“If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust.” The breath belongs to God and is withdrawn; man returns to the dust. That the spirit goes “to God” does not mean, in this language, that man lives on.

Psalm 104:29

“When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.” The Psalm speaks of all creatures — animals and human beings — in the same words and describes life and death as God’s giving and taking of the breath. Cf. the entry on Psalm 104:30.

Ecclesiastes 9:5

“For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.” What Genesis 3:19 says of the substance, this verse says of consciousness. Together they yield the Old Testament picture of death, in which no room remains for a waking intermediate state. Cf. the entry on Ecclesiastes 9:5.

1 Timothy 6:16

“…who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light.” Paul expressly ascribes immortality to God alone — as that which distinguishes him. Were it at the same time the endowment of every human being, the sentence would lose its sense. Cf. the entry on 1 Timothy 6:16.

1 Corinthians 15:53-54

“For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” The image of putting on presupposes that immortality comes from outside and is received at a definite moment — at the resurrection, not at birth. Cf. the entry on 1 Corinthians 15:53-54.

Romans 2:7

“Glory and honour and immortality to those who by patience in well-doing seek for eternal life.” Incorruptibility appears as the goal of the seeking, not as the endowment of the seeker. One does not seek what one already has.

Objections and Socinian answers

1. “Only the body returns to the dust”

The objection would carry weight if the text made such a division. It does not. The one addressed throughout is the person: she heard, she ate, she hid herself, she answered, and to her is announced what lies ahead. Between the “you” that is to eat its bread by the sweat of its face and the “you” that becomes dust there is no change of subject — it is the same sentence.

Nor does the appeal to the breath that was breathed in hold. In 2:7 the breath is not introduced as an independent being, but as that which makes the form of dust alive; the result is that man became “a living creature.” Scripture uses the same expression of the animals (1:20-21, 24), and the same breath God takes away again according to Psalm 104:29 — from all creatures in the same manner. An immortal component is thereby not described.

Finally, one should note where this interpretation leads. If only the body is meant, then the announced punishment does not strike the guilty party but its shell, while the one who actually acted remains unharmed. But the seriousness of the verdict depends on its applying to the one who transgressed. The Socinian reading takes the verdict more harshly, not more mildly: it lets it strike the whole man — and therefore lets the rescue concern the whole man as well.

2. “Ecclesiastes 12:7 says the spirit returns to God”

The verse is to be noted, but it is to be read as its author means it. The same Preacher wrote three chapters earlier that it goes with man as with the beast, “as one dies, so dies the other; they all have the same breath” (3:19). If the returning spirit were a surviving self, the author would have contradicted himself within a single book — and on the very same matter.

What returns to God is the breath of life which he gave. That is exactly how Job describes it: “…if he should gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together” (34:14-15). The breath is the property of the giver, not a bearer of consciousness; it returns like something entrusted, not like a traveller. The Psalm says both in a single verse: “When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish” (146:4).

And the Preacher himself draws the conclusion that is decisive for the state of the dead: “But the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward” (9:5), and: “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going” (9:10). Whoever would set 12:7 against Genesis 3:19 must therefore also have 3:19 and 9:5 of the same book against him. The simpler reading takes all four passages together — and they yield a single picture.

3. “Man is God’s image, therefore immortal”

The Catechism answers not with an assertion but with a finding: “the image of God does not signify immortality.” The proof lies in the fact that Scripture still ascribes this image to man long after he is subject to death. After the flood God grounds the prohibition of bloodshed in the fact that he made man “in his own image” (9:6); James says of the people of his own day that they are “made in the likeness of God” (3:9). If the image were immortality, both would be impossible.

What the image denotes is stated by the very passage in which it is introduced: “Let us make man in our image… and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth.” The sentence explains itself through its own continuation — dominion, resting on reason and free decision. Precisely in this lies also the difference from the beast which the objection rightly wishes to maintain; it simply does not lie in incorruptibility.

Note, moreover, that the objection proves more than its advocates want. If the image of God were participation in what is essential to the original, then omnipotence, omniscience and eternity without beginning would also have to belong to man. Scripture ascribes none of these to him — and immortality it expressly ascribes in one place to God alone: “who alone has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16).

4. “If man were mortal by nature, death would be no punishment”

Here one must first distinguish what the objection runs together. To be mortal means to be able to die; having to die is something else; and remaining forever in death is again something else. The Catechism formulates the distinction expressly: “someone can be mortal and yet never have to die.” Adam was mortal from the beginning and could nevertheless “be kept alive continually by divine grace” — through the tree of life, to which access stood open to him.

The punishment is thereby neither empty nor slight. It consists in the mortal creature’s being deprived of the means of its preservation, and in death passing from a possibility into a certainty. That is exactly what the text relates: the way to the tree of life is guarded, “lest he… eat, and live forever” (3:22-24). The expulsion is not an addition to the punishment; it is its execution.

On Romans 5:12 itself the Catechism remarks that the Apostle there is treating “not of mortality but of death itself, and indeed of eternal death.” That is no evasion: in this chapter Paul sets Adam and Christ over against each other, and the gift that comes from Christ is not the mere continuation of earthly life but eternal life. The loss to which it corresponds is to be measured accordingly.

And the Catechism names the second cause of the bondage to death without any softening: that “the first man transgressed the manifest commandment of God, to which the threat of death was attached,” and thereby “drew his whole posterity with him into the same bondage to death.” The Socinian doctrine therefore does not dispute the connection between sin and death. It disputes only that sin transformed the nature of man — it took from him the preservation that was never his property.

5. “Without an immortal soul no comfort remains”

The comfort is not taken away but laid back where the New Testament lays it. Where Paul comforts mourners, he speaks not of an intermediate state but of the resurrection: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” — and the ground runs: “even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). The comfort hangs on the coming of the Lord, not on the constitution of the soul.

The language in which Scripture speaks of the death of believers fits this. Jesus says of the deceased Lazarus, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,” and only in response to the disciples’ misunderstanding does he say it plainly: “Lazarus has died” (John 11:11-14). Sleep is an image without consciousness and with an awakening; it is the exact opposite of a continued life. Cf. the entry on John 11:11-14.

A look at the promises themselves also speaks for this. On the day of Pentecost Peter says of David that he “died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29), and adds that David did not ascend into the heavens (2:34). Paul expects the crown “on that day” (2 Timothy 4:8), not on the day of his death. The fulfilment is dated throughout to the resurrection.

As for the magnitude of the comfort, finally, the Socinian answer is not the poorer one. It says that the whole man dies and the whole man is raised — that nothing therefore is lost of what God wills to call back, and that hope rests not on an indestructible remainder but on him who makes the dead alive. Sozzini said it in a single sentence: God has resolved to bring his own “after this mortal life over into the immortal one, by raising them from the dead.”

Related verses

The following passages support, deepen or contrast with the interpretation presented here:

• Genesis 2:7 — “the man became a living creature”: the key text on creation.
• Psalm 146:4 — the breath departs, the plans perish.
• Ecclesiastes 9:5 — “but the dead know nothing.”
• Ezekiel 18:4 — “the soul who sins shall die.”
• 1 Timothy 6:16 — “who alone has immortality.”
• John 11:11-14 — death as a sleep from which one is woken.
• 1 Corinthians 15:53-54 — immortality is put on, not possessed.
• Daniel 12:2 — those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.
• Acts 2:29 — David died and was buried.
• Psalm 6:6 — in death there is no remembrance of God.
• Luke 23:43 — the promise to the man crucified with him.
• Romans 5:12 — the death that spread to all men.
• 1 Corinthians 15:22 — in Adam all die, in Christ all will be made alive.
• Psalm 51:7 — the supposed original sin in David’s penitential psalm.

Summary

Genesis 3:19 is the last word of a judicial speech and at the same time the reversal of the creation sentence of 2:7. What came together there — dust from the ground and the breath of life — comes apart here; and the one addressed is not a part of man but the “you” that heard, ate, hid itself and answered. The verse names no remainder that would be exempt from the return, and the books that take it up — Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, Job — name none either.

From this the Racovian Catechism draws the conclusion that carries the whole Socinian anthropology: man was “created mortal from the beginning,” but could “be kept alive continually by divine grace.” The proofs are all taken from the text — formation from dust, dependence on food, appointment to procreation, and above all the tree of life, the guarding of which would be pointless if man possessed immortality. The transgression, then, did not destroy an immortal nature; it took from a mortal creature the means of its preservation and made death certain.

Sin is thereby not made light of but precisely determined. As the second cause of the bondage to death the Catechism expressly names the transgression of the commandment to which “the threat of death was attached,” and it distinguishes carefully between being mortal, having to die and remaining forever in death. From the last of these the gospel sets free — and only because the first holds true is the gospel a message and not a reminder of a possession already at hand.

What the verse takes from man it gives back in another form. According to the testimony of the New Testament, immortality was first “brought to light” through the gospel, and it is not held fast but put on, when this mortal puts on what is immortal. Sozzini therefore sought the ground of hope not in the constitution of the creature but in a decree of God: to bring his own “after this mortal life over into the immortal one, by raising them from the dead.” Whoever says that man is dust says nothing bitter — he says that everything reaching beyond this end is a gift.