Appendix C
Ezekiel 18 and Corporate Guilt
Does Ezekiel deny the principle of corporate guilt? He says:
What mean ye, that ye use this proverb, … The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. … Behold, all souls are Mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die. …
The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. (Ezekiel 18:2, 4, 20; compare Jeremiah 31:29, 30; KJV).
Ezekiel discusses a good man who does everything right, but who has a son who does everything wrong. Then he discusses how the wicked man’s son “seeth all his father’s sins … and doeth not such like … He shall not die for the iniquity of his father” (verses 14-17). Sin and guilt are not passed on genetically. The prophet’s point is to recognize the principle of personal responsibility. The son need not repeat his father’s sins unless he chooses to. He can break the cycle of corporate guilt by means of repentance.
But Ezekiel does not suggest that any righteous man is righteous of himself, nor does he deny the Bible truth of justification by faith. Any righteous man must be righteous by faith; apart from Christ he has no righteousness of his own. The wicked man is the one who rejects such righteousness by faith. The prophet does not deny that “all have sinned,’ and “all the world … [is] guilty before God” (Romans 3:23, 19). Apart from the imputed righteousness of Christ, therefore, all the world is alike guilty before God.
The son who saw his father’s sins and repented is delivered from the guilt of those sins by virtue of Christ’s righteousness imputed to him, but he is not intrinsically better than his father. There is a sense in which the son’s repentance is a corporate one: he realizes that had he been in his father’s place he could have been just as guilty. He does not think he could not do such sins. He humbly confesses, “There but for the grace of God am I.” Now he chooses the path of righteousness. Ezekiel is not denying the truth of corporate repentance; he upholds it.