We are not charged with Adam's Sin

There is no solid biblical support for the “federal headship” view that argues that “as our representative, when Adam sinned, we all sinned.” This view goes on further to claim that Adam’s sin actually appears on our transgression debit ledger. I really don't know how people simply overlook how this view thoroughly impugns the character of God. God does not charge one person with the sin of another. May it never be.

Nor does the "our representative" analogy even work, at least not very well. If our representative in government is guilty of malfeasance he or she (let’s naively assume) would be removed from office and jailed. However the people who elected the ne’er-do-well are not charged with the same crimes. That would be injustice. This injustice is precisely what is leveled against the character of God by those who hold to this variation of federal headship. 

The analogy does work if you say that we suffer the consequences of the sins of our representative. We, for example, would suffer the consequences of a representative who was negligent in, just to pull something out of the aether, the handling of a  global pandemic. And we indeed suffered the dire consequences of Adam’s sin, i.e., our moral DNA was corrupted  to the point where it doesn’t really matter in a salvific sense if we are charged with Adam’s sin, because we’ll drown it out by committing beacoup of our own, even before we are out of our nappies. However the principle is still important: God will not charge you with someone else’s sin, representative or not.

Proponents of this view like to point to a symmetry that is only roughly present and treat as if it were a perfect symmetry. Namely they will point to passages like this:

So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. (Rom 5:18),

which is certainly written with symmetry in mind. But it is only a perfect symmetry if you are a Universalist, because while the transgression (through the inheritance of corrupted moral DNA) did indeed result in the condemnation of all, only a subset of the “all” will be justified. Justification for all manner of men, surely, but not universally.

One verse earlier the same “symmetric” argument is made, but the imperfection of the symmetry is made explicit:

For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. (Rom 5:17)

The righteousness of the One does not balance, in some symmetric sense, the transgression of the other. No, in some divine moral calculus it completely obliterates the transgression.

A final breakdown of the symmetry is that we suffer the consequences of Adam’s sin whether we like it or not (and I don’t like it at all!) while the justification must be accompanied by, regardless of your soteriology, a positive response of the will (even for Calvinists.)  

I blame the Platonic fixation with perfect geometric shapes. When Platonism is applied to theology bad stuff always happens. In this case a symmetry that is only presented illustratively is elevated, because Plato would be pleased, to possessing an unwarranted meaningful perfection and resulting in a bad doctrine.

Well, that's my opinion.