The Imputation of Adam's Sin: A Gospel Fundamental

Satan seeks to overthrow the Gospel through various devices. Many of them seek to produce denial of the Gospel through denials of prerequisites for understanding the Gospel aright. John Owen exposes one of those schemes, namely, the denial of the imputation of Adam's fall and sin to humanity, a welcome denial in the modern world, sadly, even among so-called brothers.

He says this in The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (vol. 5, Works, Banner of Truth, p. 21):

By some the imputation of the actual apostasy and transgression of Adam, the head of our nature, whereby his sin became the sin of the world, is utterly denied. Hereby both the ground the apostle proceedeth on in evincing the necessity of our justification, or our being made righteous by the obedience of another, and all the arguments brought in the confirmation of the doctrine of it, in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, are evaded and overthrown.

Obviously denying a historical Adam would do the job as well. And many seek to do just that. But if Owen gets it right, and I'm convinced he does, how then do we need to think about defending and contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints? What are the fundamentals? (Essentials would be different.) What needs to be regarded as foundational because it supports the superstructure of the Gospel? After all, Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection make no gospel sense in the biblical sense without biblical foundations and a certain story line.