voluntary and responsible life of everyman … which by virtue of the judicial sentence passed on it … is the sin of every man, the corruption which he brings on himself so that as the one who does so … he is necessarily and inevitably corrupt’.31 In this connection, it is important that Barth treat the scriptural account of Adam and the fall as saga rather than history. To read it in such a way is to suggest that ‘it is the name of Adam the transgressor which God gives to world-history as a whole’.