Section V.—Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity.

We have seen that all mankind are sinners; that all men are by nature

depraved, guilty, and condemnable; and that the transgression of our first

parents, so far as respects the human race, was the first sin. We have

still to consider the connection between Adam’s sin and the depravity,

guilt, and condemnation of the race.

(_a_) The Scriptures teach that the transgression of our first parents

constituted their posterity sinners (Rom. 5:19—“through the one man’s

disobedience the many were made sinners”), so that Adam’s sin is imputed,

reckoned, or charged to every member of the race of which he was the germ

and head (Rom. 5:16—“the judgment came of one [offence] unto

condemnation”). It is because of Adam’s sin that we are born depraved and

subject to God’s penal inflictions (Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered

into the world, and death through sin”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of

wrath”). Two questions demand answer,—first, how we can be responsible for

a depraved nature which we did not personally and consciously originate;

and, secondly, how God can justly charge to our account the sin of the

first father of the race. These questions are substantially the same, and

the Scriptures intimate the true answer to the problem when they declare

that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22) and “that death passed unto all men,

for that all sinned” when “through one man sin entered into the world”

(Rom. 5:12). In other words, Adam’s sin is the cause and ground of the

depravity, guilt, and condemnation of all his posterity, simply because

Adam and his posterity are one, and, by virtue of their organic unity, the

sin of Adam is the sin of the race.

Amiel says that “the best measure of the profundity of any

religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and of the

cure of sin.” We have seen that sin is a state; a state of the

will; a selfish state of the will; a selfish state of the will

inborn and universal; a selfish state of the will inborn and

universal by reason of man’s free act. Connecting the present

discussion with the preceding doctrines of theology, the steps of

our treatment thus far are as follows: 1. God’s holiness is purity

of nature. 2. God’s law demands purity of nature. 3. Sin is impure

nature. 4. All men have this impure nature. 5. Adam originated

this impure nature. In the present section we expect to add: 6.

Adam and we are one; and, in the succeeding section, to complete

the doctrine with: 7. The guilt and penalty of Adam’s sin are

ours.

(_b_) According as we regard this twofold problem from the point of view

of the abnormal human condition, or of the divine treatment of it, we may

call it the problem of original sin, or the problem of imputation. Neither

of these terms is objectionable when its meaning is defined. By imputation

of sin we mean, not the arbitrary and mechanical charging to a man of that

for which he is not naturally responsible, but the reckoning to a man of a

guilt which is properly his own, whether by virtue of his individual acts,

or by virtue of his connection with the race. By original sin we mean that

participation in the common sin of the race with which God charges us, in

virtue of our descent from Adam, its first father and head.

We should not permit our use of the term “imputation” to be

hindered or prejudiced by the fact that certain schools of

theology, notably the Federal school, have attached to it an

arbitrary, external, and mechanical meaning—holding that God

imputes sin to men, not because they are sinners, but upon the

ground of a legal fiction whereby Adam, without their consent, was

made their representative. We shall see, on the contrary, that (1)

in the case of Adam’s sin imputed to us, (2) in the case of our

sins imputed to Christ, and (3) in the case of Christ’s

righteousness imputed to the believer, there is always a realistic

basis for the imputation, namely, a real union, (1) between Adam

and his descendants, (2) between Christ and the race, and (3)

between believers and Christ, such as gives in each case community

of life, and enables us to say that God imputes to no man what

does not properly belong to him.

Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say that “imputed righteousness and

imputed sin are as absurd as any notion that ever took possession

of human nature.” He had in mind, however, only that constructive

guilt and merit which was advocated by Princeton theologians. He

did not mean to deny the imputation to men of that which is their

own. He recognized the fact that all men are sinners by

inheritance as well as by voluntary act, and he found this taught

in Scripture, both in the O. T. and in the N. T.; _e. g._, _Neh.

1:6_—“_I confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have

sinned against thee. Yea, I and my father’s house have sinned_”;

_Jer. 3:25_—“_Let us lie down in our shame, and let our confusion

cover us; for we have sinned against Jehovah our God, we and our

fathers_”; _14:20_—“_We acknowledge, O Jehovah, our wickedness,

and the iniquity of our fathers; for we have sinned against

thee._” The word “_imputed_” is itself found in the N. T.; _e.

g._, _2 Tim. 4:16_—“_At my first defence no one took my part: may

it not be laid to their account,_” or “_imputed to them_”—μὴ

αὐτοῖς λογισθείη. _Rom. 5:13_—“_sin is not imputed when there is

no law_”—οὐκ ἐλλογᾶται.

Not only the saints of Scripture times, but modern saints also,

have imputed to themselves the sins of others, of their people, of

their times, of the whole world. Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions,

quoted by Allen, 28—“I will take it for granted that no one is so

evil as myself; I will identify myself with all men and act as if

their evil were my own, as if I had committed the same sins and

had the same infirmities, so that the knowledge of their failings

will promote in me nothing but a sense of shame.” Frederick

Denison Maurice: “I wish to confess the sins of the time as my

own.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 87—“The phrase

‘solidarity of humanity’ is growing every day in depth and

significance. Whatever we do, we do not for ourselves alone. It is

not as an individual alone that I can be measured or judged.”

Royce, World and Individual, 2:404—“The problem of evil indeed

demands the presence of free will in the world; while, on the

other hand, it is equally true that no moral world whatever can be

made consistent with the realistic thesis according to which free

will agents are, in fortune and in penalty, independent of the

deeds of other moral agents. It follows that, in our moral world,

the righteous can suffer without individually deserving their

suffering, just because their lives have no independent being, but

are linked with all life—God himself also sharing in their

suffering.”

The above quotations illustrate the belief in a human

responsibility that goes beyond the bounds of personal sins. What

this responsibility is, and what its limits are, we have yet to

define. The problem is stated, but not solved, by A. H. Bradford,

Heredity, 198, and The Age of Faith, 235—“Stephen prays: ‘_Lord,

lay not this sin to their charge_’ (_Acts 7:60_). To whose charge

then? We all have a share in one another’s sins. We too stood by

and consented, as Paul did. ‘My sins gave sharpness to the nails,

And pointed every thorn’ that pierced the brow of Jesus.... Yet in

England and Wales the severer forms of this teaching [with regard

to sin] have almost disappeared; not because of more thorough

study of the Scripture, but because the awful congestion of

population, with its attendant miseries, has convinced the

majority of Christian thinkers that the old interpretations were

too small for the near and terrible facts of human life, such as

women with babies in their arms at the London gin-shops giving the

infants sips of liquor out of their glasses, and a tavern keeper

setting his four or five year old boy upon the counter to drink

and swear and fight in imitation of his elders.”

(_c_) There are two fundamental principles which the Scriptures already

cited seem clearly to substantiate, and which other Scriptures

corroborate. The first is that man’s relations to moral law extend beyond

the sphere of conscious and actual transgression, and embrace those moral

tendencies and qualities of his being which he has in common with every

other member of the race. The second is, that God’s moral government is a

government which not only takes account of persons and personal acts, but

also recognizes race responsibilities and inflicts race-penalties; or, in

other words, judges mankind, not simply as a collection of separate

individuals, but also as an organic whole, which can collectively revolt

from God and incur the curse of the violated law.

On race-responsibility, see H. R. Smith, System of Theology,

288-302—“No one can apprehend the doctrine of original sin, nor

the doctrine of redemption, who insists that the whole moral

government of God has respect only to individual desert, who does

not allow that the moral government of God, _as_ moral, has a

wider scope and larger relations, so that God may dispense

suffering and happiness (in his all-wise and inscrutable

providence) on other grounds than that of personal merit and

demerit. The dilemma here is: the facts connected with native

depravity and with the redemption through Christ either belong to

the moral government of God, or not. If they do, then that

government has to do with other considerations than those of

personal merit and demerit (since our disabilities in consequence

of sin and the grace offered in Christ are not in any sense the

result of our personal choice, though we do choose in our

relations to both). If they do not belong to the moral government

of God, where shall we assign them? To the physical? That

certainly can not be. To the divine sovereignty? But that does not

relieve any difficulty; for the question still remains, Is that

sovereignty, as thus exercised, just or unjust? We must take one

or the other of these. The whole (of sin and grace) is either a

mystery of sovereignty—of mere omnipotence—or a proceeding of

moral government. The question will arise with respect to grace as

well as to sin: How can the theory that all moral government has

respect only to the merit or demerit of personal acts be applied

to our justification? If all sin is in sinning, with a personal

desert of everlasting death, by parity of reasoning all holiness

must consist in a holy choice with personal merit of eternal life.

We say then, generally, that all definitions of sin which mean _a_

sin are irrelevant here.” Dr. Smith quotes Edwards,

2:309—“Original sin, the innate sinful depravity of the heart,

includes not only the depravity of nature but the imputation of

Adam’s first sin, or, in other words, the liableness or

exposedness of Adam’s posterity, in the divine judgment, to

partake of the punishment of that sin.”

The watchword of a large class of theologians—popularly called

“New School”—is that “all sin consists in sinning,”—that is, all

sin is sin of act. But we have seen that the dispositions and

states in which a man is unlike God and his purity are also sin

according to the meaning of the law. We have now to add that each

man is responsible also for that sin of our first father in which

the human race apostatized from God. In other words, we recognize

the guilt of race-sin as well as of personal sin. We desire to say

at the outset, however, that our view, and, as we believe, the

Scriptural view, requires us also to hold to certain

qualifications of the doctrine which to some extent alleviate its

harshness and furnish its proper explanation. These qualifications

we now proceed to mention.

(_d_) In recognizing the guilt of race-sin, we are to bear in mind: (1)

that actual sin, in which the personal agent reaffirms the underlying

determination of his will, is more guilty than original sin alone; (2)

that no human being is finally condemned solely on account of original

sin; but that all who, like infants, do not commit personal

transgressions, are saved through the application of Christ’s atonement;

(3) that our responsibility for inborn evil dispositions, or for the

depravity common to the race, can be maintained only upon the ground that

this depravity was caused by an original and conscious act of free will,

when the race revolted from God in Adam; (4) that the doctrine of original

sin is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts—the facts of

heredity and of universal congenital ills, which demand an ethical ground

and explanation; and (5) that the idea of original sin has for its

correlate the idea of original grace, or the abiding presence and

operation of Christ, the immanent God, in every member of the race, in

spite of his sin, to counteract the evil and to prepare the way, so far as

man will permit, for individual and collective salvation.

Over against the maxim: “All sin consists in sinning,” we put the

more correct statement: Personal sin consists in sinning, but in

Adam’s first sinning the race also sinned, so that “_in Adam all

die_” (_1 Cor. 15:22_). Denney, Studies in Theology, 86—“Sin is

not only personal but social; not only social but organic;

character and all that is involved in character are capable of

being attributed not only to individuals but to societies, and

eventually to the human race itself; in short, there are not only

isolated sins and individual sinners, but what has been called a

kingdom of sin upon earth.” Leslie Stephen: “Man not dependent on

a race is as meaningless a phrase as an apple that does not grow

on a tree.” “Yet Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln show how a man may

throw away every advantage of the best heredity and environment,

while another can triumph over the worst. Man does not take his

character from external causes, but shapes it by his own willing

submission to influences from beneath or from above.”

Wm. Adams Brown: “The idea of inherited guilt can be accepted only

if paralleled by the idea of inherited good. The consequences of

sin have often been regarded as social, while the consequences of

good have been regarded as only individual. But heredity transmits

both good and evil.” Mrs. Lydia Avery Coonley Ward: “Why bowest

thou, O soul of mine, Crushed by ancestral sin? Thou hast a noble

heritage, That bids thee victory win. The tainted past may bring

forth flowers, As blossomed Aaron’s rod: No legacy of sin annuls

Heredity from God.” For further statements with regard to

race-responsibility, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:29-39 (System

Doctrine, 2:324-333). For the modern view of the Fall, and its

reconciliation with the doctrine of evolution, see J. H. Bernard,

art.: The Fall, in Hastings’ Dict. of Bible; A. H. Strong, Christ

in Creation, 163-180; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.

(_e_) There is a race-sin, therefore, as well as a personal sin; and that

race-sin was committed by the first father of the race, when he comprised

the whole race in himself. All mankind since that time have been born in

the state into which he fell—a state of depravity, guilt, and

condemnation. To vindicate God’s justice in imputing to us the sin of our

first father, many theories have been devised, a part of which must be

regarded as only attempts to evade the problem by denying the facts set

before us in the Scriptures. Among these attempted explanations of the

Scripture statements, we proceed to examine the six theories which seem

most worthy of attention.

The first three of the theories which we discuss may be said to be

evasions of the problem of original sin; all, in one form or

another, deny that God imputes to all men Adam’s sin, in such a

sense that all are guilty for it. These theories are the Pelagian,

the Arminian, and the New School. The last three of the theories

which we are about to treat, namely, the Federal theory, the

theory of Mediate Imputation, and the theory of Adam’s Natural

Headship, are all Old School theories, and have for their common

characteristic that they assert the guilt of inborn depravity. All

three, moreover, hold that we are in some way responsible for

Adam’s sin, though they differ as to the precise way in which we

are related to Adam. We must grant that no one, even of these

latter theories, is wholly satisfactory. We hope, however, to show

that the last of them—the Augustinian theory, the theory of Adam’s

natural headship, the theory that Adam and his descendants are

naturally and organically one—explains the largest number of

facts, is least open to objection, and is most accordant with

Scripture.

I. Theories of Imputation.

1. The Pelagian Theory, or Theory of Man’s natural Innocence.

Pelagius, a British monk, propounded his doctrines at Rome, 409. They were

condemned by the Council of Carthage, 418. Pelagianism, however, as

opposed to Augustinianism, designates a complete scheme of doctrine with

regard to sin, of which Pelagius was the most thorough representative,

although every feature of it cannot be ascribed to his authorship.

Socinians and Unitarians are the more modern advocates of this general

scheme.

According to this theory, every human soul is immediately created by God,

and created as innocent, as free from depraved tendencies, and as

perfectly able to obey God, as Adam was at his creation. The only effect

of Adam’s sin upon his posterity is the effect of evil example; it has in

no way corrupted human nature; the only corruption of human nature is that

habit of sinning which each individual contracts by persistent

transgression of known law.

Adam’s sin therefore injured only himself; the sin of Adam is imputed only

to Adam,—it is imputed in no sense to his descendants; God imputes to each

of Adam’s descendants only those acts of sin which he has personally and

consciously committed. Men can be saved by the law as well as by the

gospel; and some have actually obeyed God perfectly, and have thus been

saved. Physical death is therefore not the penalty of sin, but an original

law of nature; Adam would have died whether he had sinned or not; in Rom.

5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “all

incurred eternal death by sinning after Adam’s example.”

Wiggers, Augustinism and Pelagianism, 59, states the seven points

of the Pelagian doctrine as follows: (1) Adam was created mortal,

so that he would have died even if he had not sinned; (2) Adam’s

sin injured, not the human race, but only himself; (3) new-born

infants are in the same condition as Adam before the Fall; (4) the

whole human race neither dies on account of Adam’s sin, nor rises

on account of Christ’s resurrection; (5) infants, even though not

baptized, attain eternal life; (6) the law is as good a means of

salvation as the gospel; (7) even before Christ some men lived who

did not commit sin.

In Pelagius’ Com. on _Rom. 5:12_, published in Jerome’s Works,

vol. xi, we learn who these sinless men were, namely, Abel, Enoch,

Joseph, Job, and, among the heathen, Socrates, Aristides, Numa.

The virtues of the heathen entitle them to reward. Their worthies

were not indeed without evil thoughts and inclinations; but, on

the view of Pelagius that all sin consists in act, these evil

thoughts and inclinations were not sin. “Non pleni nascimur”: we

are born, not full, but vacant, of character. Holiness, Pelagius

thought, could not be concreated. Adam’s descendants are not

weaker, but stronger, than he; since they have fulfilled many

commands, while he did not fulfil so much as one. In every man

there is a natural conscience; he has an ideal of life; he forms

right resolves; he recognizes the claims of law; he accuses

himself when he sins,—all these things Pelagius regards as

indications of a certain holiness in all men, and

misinterpretation of these facts gives rise to his system; he

ought to have seen in them evidences of a divine influence

opposing man’s bent to evil and leading him to repentance. Grace,

on the Pelagian theory, is simply the grace of _creation_—God’s

originally endowing man with his high powers of reason and will.

While Augustinianism regards human nature as _dead_, and

Semi-Pelagianism regards it as _sick_, Pelagianism proper declares

it to be _well_.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:43 (Syst. Doct., 2:338)—“Neither the

body, man’s surroundings, nor the inward operation of God, have

any determining influence upon the will. God reaches man only

through external means, such as Christ’s doctrine, example, and

promise. This clears God of the charge of evil, but also takes

from him the authorship of good. It is Deism, applied to man’s

nature. God cannot enter man’s being if he would, and he would not

if he could. Free will is everything.” _Ib._, 1:626 (Syst. Doct.,

2:188, 189)—“Pelagianism at one time counts it too great an honor

that man should be directly moved upon by God, and at another, too

great a dishonor that man should not be able to do without God. In

this inconsistent reasoning, it shows its desire to be rid of God

as much as possible. The true conception of God requires a living

relation to man, as well as to the external universe. The true

conception of man requires satisfaction of his longings and powers

by reception of impulses and strength from God. Pelagianism, in

seeking for man a development only like that of nature, shows that

its high estimate of man is only a delusive one; it really

degrades him, by ignoring his true dignity and destiny.” See

_Ib._, 1:124, 125 (Syst. Doct., 1:136, 137); 2:43-45 (Syst. Doct.,

2:338, 339); 2:148 (Syst. Doct., 3:44). Also Schaff, Church

History, 2:783-856; Doctrines of the Early Socinians, in Princeton

Essays, 1:194-211; Wörter, Pelagianismus. For substantially

Pelagian statements, see Sheldon, Sin and Redemption; Ellis, Half

Century of Unitarian Controversy, 76.

Of the Pelagian theory of sin, we may say:

A. It has never been recognized as Scriptural, nor has it been formulated

in confessions, by any branch of the Christian church. Held only

sporadically and by individuals, it has ever been regarded by the church

at large as heresy. This constitutes at least a presumption against its

truth.

As slavery was “the sum of all villainy,” so the Pelagian doctrine

may be called the sum of all false doctrine. Pelagianism is a

survival of paganism, in its majestic egoism and self-complacency.

“Cicero, in his Natura Deorum, says that men thank the gods for

external advantages, but no man ever thanks the gods for his

virtues—that he is honest or pure or merciful. Pelagius was first

roused to opposition by hearing a bishop in the public services of

the church quote Augustine’s prayer: ‘Da quod jubes, et jube quod

vis’—‘Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt.’ From

this he was led to formulate the gospel according to St. Cicero,

so perfectly does the Pelagian doctrine reproduce the Pagan

teaching.” The impulse of the Christian, on the other hand, is to

refer all gifts and graces to a divine source in Christ and in the

Holy Spirit. _Eph. 2:10_—“_For we are his workmanship, created in

Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we

should walk in them_”; _John 15:16_—“_Ye did not choose me, but I

chose you_”; _1:13_—“_who were born, not of blood, nor of the will

of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God._” H. Auber: “And

every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought

of holiness, Are his alone.”

Augustine had said that “Man is most free when controlled by God

alone”—“[Deo] solo dominante, liberrimus” (De Mor. Eccl., xxi).

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 320—“In Christ humanity is perfect, because in

him it retains no part of that false independence which, in all

its manifold forms, is the secret of sin.” Pelagianism, on the

contrary, is man’s declaration of independence. Harnack, Hist.

Dogma, 5:200—“The essence of Pelagianism, the key to its whole

mode of thought, lies in this proposition of Julian: ‘Homo libero

arbitrio emancipatus a Deo’—man, created free, is in his whole

being independent of God. He has no longer to do with God, but

with himself alone. God reënters man’s life only at the end, at

the judgment,—a doctrine of the orphanage of humanity.”

B. It contradicts Scripture in denying: (_a_) that evil disposition and

state, as well as evil acts, are sin; (_b_) that such evil disposition and

state are inborn in all mankind; (_c_) that men universally are guilty of

overt transgression so soon as they come to moral consciousness; (_d_)

that no man is able without divine help to fulfil the law; (_e_) that all

men, without exception, are dependent for salvation upon God’s atoning,

regenerating, sanctifying grace; (_f_) that man’s present state of

corruption, condemnation, and death, is the direct effect of Adam’s

transgression.

The Westminster Confession, ch. vi. § 4, declares that “we are

utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and

wholly inclined to all evil.” To Pelagius, on the contrary, sin is

a mere incident. He knows only of _sins_, not of _sin_. He holds

the atomic, or atomistic, theory of sin, which regards it as

consisting in isolated volitions. Pelegianism, holding, as it

does, that virtue and vice consist only in single decisions, does

not account for _character_ at all. There is no such thing as a

state of sin, or a self-propagating power of sin. And yet upon

these the Scriptures lay greater emphasis than upon mere acts of

transgression. _John 3:6_—“_That which is born of the flesh is

flesh_”—“that which comes of a sinful and guilty stock is itself,

from the very beginning, sinful and guilty” (Dorner). Witness the

tendency to degradation in families and nations.

Amiel says that the great defect of liberal Christianity is its

superficial conception of sin. The tendency dates far back:

Tertullian spoke of the soul as naturally Christian—“anima

naturaliter Christiana.” The tendency has come down to modern

times: Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 246—“It is only when

children grow up, and begin to absorb their environment, that they

lose their artless loveliness.” A Rochester Unitarian preacher

publicly declared it to be as much a duty to believe in the

natural purity of man, as to believe in the natural purity of God.

Dr. Lyman Abbott speaks of “the shadow which the Manichæan

theology of Augustine, borrowed by Calvin, cast upon all children,

in declaring them born to an inheritance of wrath as a viper’s

brood.” Dr. Abbott forgets that Augustine was the greatest

opponent of Manichæanism, and that his doctrine of inherited guilt

may be supplemented by a doctrine of inherited divine influences

tending to salvation.

Prof. G. A. Coe tells us that “all children are within the

household of God”; that “they are already members of his kingdom”;

that “the adolescent change” is “a step not _into_ the Christian

life, but _within_ the Christian life.” We are taught that

salvation is by education. But education is only a way of

presenting truth. It still remains needful that the soul should

accept the truth. Pelagianism ignores or denies the presence in

every child of a congenital selfishness which hinders acceptance

of the truth, and which, without the working of the divine Spirit,

will absolutely counteract the influence of the truth. Augustine

was taught his guilt and helplessness by transgression, while

Pelagius remained ignorant of the evil of his own heart. Pelagius

might have said with Wordsworth, Prelude, 534—“I had approached,

like other youths, the shield Of human nature from the golden

side; And would have fought, even unto the death, to attest The

quality of the metal which I saw.”

Schaff, on the Pelagian controversy, in Bib. Sac., 5:205-243—The

controversy “resolves itself into the question whether redemption

and sanctification are the work of man or of God. Pelagianism in

its whole mode of thinking starts from man and seeks to work

itself upward gradually, by means of an imaginary good-will, to

holiness and communion with God. Augustinianism pursues the

opposite way, deriving from God’s unconditioned and all-working

grace a new life and all power of working good. The first is led

from freedom into a legal, self-righteous piety; the other rises

from the slavery of sin to the glorious liberty of the children of

God. For the first, revelation is of force only as an outward

help, or the power of a high example; for the last, it is the

inmost life, the very marrow and blood of the new man. The first

involves an Ebionitic view of Christ, as noble man, not

high-priest or king; the second finds in him one in whom dwells

all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The first makes conversion

a process of gradual moral purification on the ground of original

nature; with the last, it is a total change, in which the old

passes away and all becomes new.... Rationalism is simply the form

in which Pelagianism becomes theoretically complete. The high

opinion which the Pelagian holds of the natural will is

transferred with equal right by the Rationalist to the natural

reason. The one does without grace, as the other does without

revelation. Pelagian divinity is rationalistic. Rationalistic

morality is Pelagian.” See this Compendium, page 89.

Allen, Religious Progress, 98-100—“Most of the mischief of

religious controversy springs from the desire and determination to

impute to one’s opponent positions which he does not hold, or to

draw inferences from his principles, insisting that he shall be

held responsible for them, even though he declares that he does

not teach them. We say that he ought to accept them; that he is

bound logically to do so; that they are necessary deductions from

his system; that the tendency of his teaching is in these

directions; and then we denounce and condemn him for what he

disowns. It was in this way that Augustine filled out for Pelagius

the gaps in his scheme, which he thought it necessary to do, in

order to make Pelagius’s teaching consistent and complete; and

Pelagius, in his turn, drew inferences from the Augustinian

theology, about which Augustine would have preferred to maintain a

discreet silence. Neither Augustine nor Calvin was anxious to make

prominent the doctrine of the reprobation of the wicked to

damnation, but preferred to dwell on the more attractive, more

rational tenet of the elect to salvation, as subjects of the

divine choice and approbation; substituting for the obnoxious word

reprobation the milder, euphemistic word preterition. It was their

opponents who were bent on forcing them out of their reserve,

pushing them into what seemed the consistent sequence of their

attitude, and then holding it up before the world for execration.

And the same remark would apply to almost every theological

contention that has embittered the church’s experience.”

C. It rests upon false philosophical principles; as, for example: (_a_)

that the human will is simply the faculty of volitions; whereas it is

also, and chiefly, the faculty of self-determination to an ultimate end;

(_b_) that the power of a contrary choice is essential to the existence of

will; whereas the will fundamentally determined to self-gratification has

this power only with respect to subordinate choices, and cannot by a

single volition reverse its moral state; (_c_) that ability is the measure

of obligation,—a principle which would diminish the sinner’s

responsibility, just in proportion to his progress in sin; (_d_) that law

consists only in positive enactment; whereas it is the demand of perfect

harmony with God, inwrought into man’s moral nature; (_e_) that each human

soul is immediately created by God, and holds no other relations to moral

law than those which are individual; whereas all human souls are

organically connected with each other, and together have a corporate

relation to God’s law, by virtue of their derivation from one common

stock.

(_a_) Neander, Church History, 2:564-625, holds one of the fundamental

principles of Pelagianism to be “the ability to choose, equally and at any

moment, between good and evil.” There is no recognition of the law by

which acts produce states; the power which repeated acts of evil possess

to give a definite character and tendency to the will itself.—“Volition is

an everlasting ‘tick,’ ‘tick,’ and swinging of the pendulum, but no moving

forward of the hands of the clock follows.” “There is no continuity of

moral life—no _character_, in man, angel, devil, or God.”—(_b_) See art.

on Power of Contrary Choice, in Princeton Essays, 1:212-233; Pelagianism

holds that no confirmation in holiness is possible. Thornwell, Theology:

“The sinner is as free as the saint; the devil as the angel.” Harris,

Philos. Basis of Theism, 399—“The theory that indifference is essential to

freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action

is atomistic, every act disintegrated from every other; that character, if

acquired, would be incompatible with freedom.” “By mere volition the soul

now a _plenum_ can become a _vacuum_, or now a _vacuum_ can become a

_plenum_.” On the Pelagian view of freedom, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of

Sin, 37-44.

(_c_) _Ps. 79:8_—“_Remember not against us the iniquities of our

forefathers_”; _106:6_—“_We have sinned with our fathers._” Notice

the analogy of individuals who suffer from the effects of parental

mistakes or of national transgression. Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,

2:316, 317—“Neither the _atomistic_ nor the _organic_ view of

human nature is the complete truth.” Each must be complemented by

the other. For statement of race-responsibility, see Dorner,

Glaubenslehre, 2:30-39, 51-64, 161, 162 (System of Doctrine,

2:324-334, 345-359; 3:50-54)—“Among the Scripture proofs of the

moral connection of the individual with the race are the visiting

of the sins of the fathers upon the children; the obligation of

the people to punish the sin of the individual, that the whole

land may not incur guilt; the offering of sacrifice for a murder,

the perpetrator of which is unknown. Achan’s crime is charged to

the whole people. The Jewish race is the better for its parentage,

and other nations are the worse for theirs. The Hebrew people

become a legal personality.

“Is it said that none are punished for the sins of their fathers

unless they are like their fathers? But to be unlike their fathers

requires a new heart. They who are not held accountable for the

sins of their fathers are those who have recognized their

responsibility for them, and have repented for their likeness to

their ancestors. Only the self-isolating spirit says: ‘_Am I my

brother’s keeper?_’ (_Gen. 4:9_), and thinks to construct a

constant equation between individual misfortune and _individual_

sin. The calamities of the righteous led to an ethical conception

of the relation of the individual to the community. Such

sufferings show that men can love God disinterestedly, that the

good has unselfish friends. These sufferings are substitutionary,

when borne as belonging to the sufferer, not foreign to him, the

guilt of others attaching to him by virtue of his national or

race-relation to them. So Moses in Ex. 34:9, David in Ps. 51:6,

Isaiah in Is. 59:9-16, recognize the connection between personal

sin and race-sin.

“Christ restores the bond between man and his fellows, turns the

hearts of the fathers to the children. He is the creator of a new

race-consciousness. In him as the head we see ourselves bound to,

and responsible for others. Love finds it morally impossible to

isolate itself. It restores the consciousness of unity and the

recognition of common guilt. Does every man stand for himself in

the N. T.? This would be so, only if each man became a sinner

solely by free and conscious personal decision, either in the

present, or in a past state of existence. But this is not

Scriptural. Something comes before personal transgression: ‘_That

which is born of the flesh is flesh_’ (_John 3:6_). Personality is

the stronger for recognizing the race-sin. We have common joy in

the victories of the good; so in shameful lapses we have sorrow.

These are not our worst moments, but our best,—there is something

great in them. Original sin must be displeasing to God; for it

perverts the reason, destroys likeness to God, excludes from

communion with God, makes redemption necessary, leads to actual

sin, influences future generations. But to complain of God for

permitting its propagation is to complain of his not destroying

the race,—that is, to complain of one’s own existence.” See Shedd,

Hist. Doctrine, 2:93-110; Hagenbach, Hist. Doctrine, 1:287,

296-310; Martensen, Dogmatics, 354-362; Princeton Essays, 1:74-97;

Dabney, Theology, 296-302, 314, 315.

2. The Arminian Theory, or Theory of voluntarily appropriated Depravity.

Arminius (1560-1609), professor in the University of Leyden, in South

Holland, while formally accepting the doctrine of the Adamic unity of the

race propounded both by Luther and Calvin, gave a very different

interpretation to it—an interpretation which verged toward

Semi-Pelagianism and the anthropology of the Greek Church. The Methodist

body is the modern representative of this view.

According to this theory, all men, as a divinely appointed sequence of

Adam’s transgression, are naturally destitute of original righteousness,

and are exposed to misery and death. By virtue of the infirmity propagated

from Adam to all his descendants, mankind are wholly unable without divine

help perfectly to obey God or to attain eternal life. This inability,

however, is physical and intellectual, but not voluntary. As matter of

justice, therefore, God bestows upon each individual from the first dawn

of consciousness a special influence of the Holy Spirit, which is

sufficient to counteract the effect of the inherited depravity and to make

obedience possible, provided the human will coöperates, which it still has

power to do.

The evil tendency and state may be called sin; but they do not in

themselves involve guilt or punishment; still less are mankind accounted

guilty of Adam’s sin. God imputes to each man his inborn tendencies to

evil, only when he consciously and voluntarily appropriates and ratifies

these in spite of the power to the contrary, which, in justice to man, God

has specially communicated. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for

that all sinned,” signifies that physical and spiritual death is inflicted

upon all men, not as the penalty of a common sin in Adam, but because, by

divine decree, all suffer the consequences of that sin, and because all

personally consent to their inborn sinfulness by acts of transgression.

See Arminius, Works, 1:252-254, 317-324, 325-327, 523-531,

575-583. The description given above is a description of

Arminianism proper. The expressions of Arminius himself are so

guarded that Moses Stuart (Bib. Repos., 1831) found it possible to

construct an argument to prove that Arminius was not an Arminian.

But it is plain that by inherited sin Arminius meant only

inherited evil, and that it was not of a sort to justify God’s

condemnation. He denied any inbeing in Adam, such as made us

justly chargeable with Adam’s sin, except in the sense that we are

obliged to endure certain consequences of it. This Shedd has shown

in his History of Doctrine, 2:178-196. The system of Arminius was

more fully expounded by Limborch and Episcopius. See Limborch,

Theol. Christ., 3:4:6 (p. 189). The sin with which we are born

“does not inhere in the soul, for this [soul] is immediately

created by God, and therefore, if it were infected with sin, that

sin would be from God.” Many so-called Arminians, such as Whitby

and John Taylor, were rather Pelagians.

John Wesley, however, greatly modified and improved the Arminian

doctrine. Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:329, 330—“Wesleyanism (1) admits

entire moral depravity; (2) denies that men in this state have any

power to coöperate with the grace of God; (3) asserts that the

guilt of all through Adam was removed by the justification of all

through Christ; (4) ability to coöperate is of the Holy Spirit,

through the universal influence of the redemption of Christ. The

order of the decrees is (1) to permit the fall of man; (2) to send

the Son to be a full satisfaction for the sins of the whole world;

(3) on that ground to remit all original sin, and to give such

grace as would enable all to attain eternal life; (4) those who

improve that grace and persevere to the end are ordained to be

saved.” We may add that Wesley made the bestowal upon our depraved

nature of ability to coöperate with God to be a matter of grace,

while Arminius regarded it as a matter of justice, man without it

not being accountable.

Wesleyanism was systematized by Watson, who, in his Institutes,

2:53-55, 59, 77, although denying the imputation of Adam’s sin in

any proper sense, yet declares that “Limborch and others

materially departed from the tenets of Arminius in denying inward

lusts and tendencies to be sinful till complied with and augmented

by the will. But men universally choose to ratify these

tendencies; therefore they are corrupt in heart. If there be a

universal depravity of will previous to the actual choice, then it

inevitably follows that though infants do not commit actual sin,

yet that theirs is a sinful nature....As to infants, they are not

indeed born justified and regenerate; so that to say original sin

is taken away, as to infants, by Christ, is not the correct view

of the case, for the reasons before given; but they are all born

under ‘the free gift,’ the effects of the ‘righteousness’ of one,

which is extended to all men; and this free gift is bestowed on

them in order to justification of life, the adjudging of the

condemned to live....Justification in adults is connected with

repentance and faith; in infants, we do not know how. The Holy

Spirit may be given to children. Divine and effectual influence

may be exerted on them, to cure the spiritual death and corrupt

tendency of their nature.”

It will be observed that Watson’s Wesleyanism is much more near to

Scripture than what we have described, and properly described, as

Arminianism proper. Pope, in his Theology, follows Wesley and

Watson, and (2:70-86) gives a valuable synopsis of the differences

between Arminius and Wesley. Whedon and Raymond, in America,

better represent original Arminianism. They hold that God was

under _obligation_ to restore man’s ability, and yet they

inconsistently speak of this ability as a _gracious_ ability. Two

passages from Raymond’s Theology show the inconsistency of calling

that “grace,” which God is bound in justice to bestow, in order to

make man responsible: 2:84-86—“The race came into existence under

grace. Existence and justification are secured for it only through

Christ; for, apart from Christ, punishment and destruction would

have followed the first sin. So all gifts of the Spirit necessary

to qualify him for the putting forth of free moral choices are

secured for him through Christ. The Spirit of God is not a

bystander, but a quickening power. So man is by grace, not by his

fallen nature, a moral being capable of knowing, loving, obeying,

and enjoying God. Such he ever will be, if he does not frustrate

the grace of God. Not till the Spirit takes his final flight is he

in a condition of total depravity.”

Compare with this the following passage of the same work in which

this “grace” is called a debt: 2:317—“The relations of the

posterity of Adam to God are substantially those of newly created

beings. Each individual person is obligated to God, and God to

him, precisely the same as if God had created him such as he is.

Ability must equal obligation. God was not obligated to provide a

Redeemer for the first transgressors, but having provided

Redemption for them, and through it having permitted them to

propagate a degenerate race, an adequate compensation is due. The

gracious influences of the Spirit are then a debt due to man—a

compensation for the disabilities of inherited depravity.”

McClintock and Strong (Cyclopædia, art.: Arminius) endorse

Whedon’s art. in the Bib. Sac., 19:241, as an exhibition of

Arminianism, and Whedon himself claims it to be such. See

Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:214-216.

With regard to the Arminian theory we remark:

A. We grant that there is a universal gift of the Holy Spirit, if by the

Holy Spirit is meant the natural light of reason and conscience, and the

manifold impulses to good which struggle against the evil of man’s nature.

But we regard as wholly unscriptural the assumptions: (_a_) that this gift

of the Holy Spirit of itself removes the depravity or condemnation derived

from Adam’s fall; (_b_) that without this gift man would not be

responsible for being morally imperfect; and (_c_) that at the beginning

of moral life men consciously appropriate their inborn tendencies to evil.

John Wesley adduced in proof of universal grace the text: _John

1:9_—“_the light which lighteth every man_”—which refers to the

natural light of reason and conscience which the preincarnate

Logos bestowed on all men, though in different degrees, before his

coming in the flesh. This light can be called the Holy Spirit,

because it was “_the Spirit of Christ_” (_1 Pet. 1:11_). The

Arminian view has a large element of truth in its recognition of

an influence of Christ, the immanent God, which mitigates the

effects of the Fall and strives to prepare men for salvation. But

Arminianism does not fully recognize the evil to be removed, and

it therefore exaggerates the effect of this divine working.

Universal grace does not remove man’s depravity or man’s

condemnation; as is evident from a proper interpretation of _Rom.

5:12-19_ and of _Eph. 2:3_; it only puts side by side with that

depravity and condemnation influences and impulses which

counteract the evil and urge the sinner to repentance: _John

1:5_—“_the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness

apprehended it not._” John Wesley also referred to _Rom.

5:18_—“_through one act of righteousness the free gift came unto

all men to justification of life_”—but here the “all men” is

conterminous with “the many” who are “_made righteous_” in _verse

19_, and with the “_all_” who are “_made alive_” in _1 Cor.

15:22_; in other words, the “_all_” in this case is “all

believers”: else the passage teaches, not universal gift of the

Spirit, but universal salvation.

Arminianism holds to inherited sin, in the sense of infirmity and

evil tendency, but not to inherited guilt. John Wesley, however,

by holding also that the giving of ability is a matter of grace

and not of justice, seems to imply that there is a common guilt as

well as a common sin, before consciousness. American Arminians are

more logical, but less Scriptural. Sheldon, Syst. Christian

Doctrine, 321, tells us that “guilt cannot possibly be a matter of

inheritance, and consequently original sin can be affirmed of the

posterity of Adam only in the sense of hereditary corruption,

which first becomes an occasion of guilt when it is embraced by

the will of the individual.” How little the Arminian means by

“sin,” can be inferred from the saying of Bishop Simpson that

“Christ inherited sin.” He meant of course only physical and

intellectual infirmity, without a tinge of guilt. “A child

inherits its parent’s nature,” it is said, “not as a punishment,

but by natural law.” But we reply that this natural law is itself

an expression of God’s moral nature, and the inheritance of evil

can be justified only upon the ground of a common non-conformity

to God in both the parent and the child, or a participation of

each member in the common guilt of the race.

In the light of our preceding treatment, we can estimate the

element of good and the element of evil in Pfleiderer, Philos.

Religion, 1:232—“It is an exaggeration when original sin is

considered as personally imputable guilt; and it is going too far

when it is held to be the whole state of the natural man, and yet

the actually present good, the ‘original grace,’ is

overlooked....We may say, with Schleiermacher, that original sin

is the common deed and common guilt of the human race. But the

individual always participates in this collective guilt in the

measure in which he takes part with his personal doing in the

collective act that is directed to the furtherance of the bad.”

Dabney, Theology, 315, 316—“Arminianism is orthodox as to the

legal consequences of Adam’s sin to his posterity; but what it

gives with one hand, it takes back with the other, attributing to

grace the restoration of this natural ability lost by the Fall. If

the effects of Adam’s Fall on his posterity are such that they

would have been unjust if not repaired by a redeeming plan that

was to follow it, then God’s act in providing a Redeemer was not

an act of pure grace. He was under obligation to do some such

thing,—salvation is not grace, but debt.” A. J. Gordon, Ministry

of the Spirit, 187 _sq._, denies the universal gift of the Spirit,

quoting _John 14:17_—“_whom the world cannot receive; for it

beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him_”; _16:7_—“_if I go, I will

send him unto you_”; _i. e._, Christ’s disciples were to be the

recipients and distributers of the Holy Spirit, and his church the

mediator between the Spirit and the world. Therefore _Mark

16:15_—“_Go ye into all the world, and preach,_” implies that the

Spirit shall go only with them. Conviction of the Spirit does not

go beyond the church’s evangelizing. But we reply that _Gen. 6:3_

implies a wider striving of the Holy Spirit.

B. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining: (_a_) that inherited moral

evil does not involve guilt; (_b_) that the gift of the Spirit, and the

regeneration of infants, are matters of justice; (_c_) that the effect of

grace is simply to restore man’s natural ability, instead of disposing him

to use that ability aright; (_d_) that election is God’s choice of certain

men to be saved upon the ground of their foreseen faith, instead of being

God’s choice to make certain men believers; (_e_) that physical death is

not the just penalty of sin, but is a matter of arbitrary decree.

(_a_) See Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:58 (System of Doctrine,

2:352-359)—“With Arminius, original sin is original _evil_ only,

not _guilt_. He explained the problem of original sin by denying

the fact, and turning the native sinfulness into a morally

indifferent thing. No sin without consent; no consent at the

beginning of human development; therefore, no guilt in evil

desire. This is the same as the Romanist doctrine of

concupiscence, and like that leads to blaming God for an

originally bad constitution of our nature....Original sin is

merely an enticement to evil addressed to the free will. All

internal disorder and vitiosity is morally indifferent, and

becomes sin only through appropriation by free will. But

involuntary, loveless, proud thoughts are recognized in Scripture

as sin; yet they spring from the heart without our conscious

consent. Undeliberate and deliberate sins run into each other, so

that it is impossible to draw a line between them. The doctrine

that there is no sin without consent implies power to withhold

consent. But this contradicts the universal need of redemption and

our observation that none have ever thus entirely withheld consent

from sin.”

(_b_) H. B. Smith’s Review of Whedon on the Will, in Faith and

Philosophy, 359-399—“A child, upon the old view, needs only growth

to make him guilty of actual sin; whereas, upon this view, he

needs growth and grace too.” See Bib. Sac., 20:327, 328. According

to Whedon, Com. on _Rom. 5:12_, “the condition of an infant apart

from Christ is that of a sinner, _as one sure to sin_, yet never

actually condemned before personal apostasy. This _would_ be its

condition, rather, for in Christ the infant is regenerate and

justified and endowed with the Holy Spirit. Hence all actual

sinners are apostates from a state of grace.” But we ask: 1. Why

then do infants die before they have committed actual sin? Surely

not on account of Adam’s sin, for they are delivered from all the

evils of that, through Christ. It must be because they are still

somehow sinners. 2. How can we account for all infants sinning so

soon as they begin morally to act, if, before they sin, they are

in a state of grace and sanctification? It must be because they

were still somehow sinners. In other words, the universal

regeneration and justification of infants contradict Scripture and

observation.

(_c_) Notice that this “gracious” ability does not involve saving

grace to the recipient, because it is given equally to all men.

Nor is it more than a restoring to man of his natural ability lost

by Adam’s sin. It is not sufficient to explain why one man who has

the gracious ability chooses God, while another who has the same

gracious ability chooses self. _1 Cor. 4:7_—“_who maketh thee to

differ?_” Not God, but thyself. Over against this doctrine of

Arminians, who hold to universal, resistible grace, restoring

natural ability, Calvinists and Augustinians hold to particular,

irresistible grace, giving moral ability, or, in other words,

bestowing the disposition to use natural ability aright. “Grace”

is a word much used by Arminians. Methodist Doctrine and

Discipline, Articles of Religion, viii—“The condition of man after

the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself,

by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon

God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and

acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing

us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we

have that good will.” It is important to understand that, in

Arminian usage, grace is simply the restoration of man’s natural

ability to act for himself; it never actually saves him, but only

enables him to save himself—if he will. Arminian grace is evenly

bestowed grace of spiritual endowment, as Pelagian grace is evenly

bestowed grace of creation. It regards redemption as a

compensation for innate and consequently irresponsible depravity.

(_d_) In the Arminian system, the order of salvation is, (1)

faith—by an unrenewed but convicted man; (2) justification; (3)

regeneration, or a holy heart. God decrees not to _originate_

faith, but to _reward_ it. Hence Wesleyans make faith a work, and

regard election as God’s ordaining those who, he foresees, will of

their own accord believe. The Augustinian order, on the contrary,

is (1) regeneration; (2) faith; (3) justification. Memoir of

Adolph Saphir, 255—“My objection to the Arminian or semi-Arminian

is not that they make the entrance very wide; but that they do not

give you anything definite, safe and real, when you have

entered.... Do not believe the devil’s gospel, which is a _chance_

of salvation: chance of salvation is chance of damnation.” Grace

is not a _reward_ for good deeds done, but a _power_ enabling us

to do them. Francis Rous of Truro, in the Parliament of 1629,

spoke as a man nearly frantic with horror at the increase of that

“error of Arminianism which makes the grace of God lackey it after

the will of man”; see Masson, Life of Milton, 1:277. Arminian

converts say: “I gave my heart to the Lord”; Augustinian converts

say: “The Holy Spirit convicted me of sin and renewed my heart.”

Arminianism tends to self-sufficiency; Augustinianism promotes

dependence upon God.

C. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_)

That the will is simply the faculty of volitions. (_b_) That the power of

contrary choice, in the sense of power by a single act to reverse one’s

moral state, is essential to will. (_c_) That previous certainty of any

given moral act is incompatible with its freedom. (_d_) That ability is

the measure of obligation. (_e_) That law condemns only volitional

transgression. (_f_) That man has no organic moral connection with the

race.

(_b_) Raymond says: “Man is responsible for character, but only so

far as that character is self-imposed. We are not responsible for

character irrespective of its origin. Freedom _from_ an act is as

essential to responsibility as freedom _to_ it. If power to the

contrary is impossible, then freedom does not exist in God or man.

Sin was a necessity, and God was the author of it.” But this is a

denial that there is any such thing as character; that the will

can give itself a bent which no single volition can change; that

the wicked man can become the slave of sin; that Satan, though

without power now in himself to turn to God, is yet responsible

for his sin. The power of contrary choice which Adam had exists no

longer in its entirety; it is narrowed down to a power to the

contrary in temporary and subordinate choices; it no longer is

equal to the work of changing the fundamental determination of the

being to selfishness as an ultimate end. Yet for this very

inability, because originated by will, man is responsible.

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:28—“Formal freedom leads the way

to real freedom. The starting-point is a freedom which does not

yet involve an inner necessity, but the possibility of something

else; the goal is the freedom which is identical with necessity.

The first is a means to the last. When the will has fully and

truly chosen, the power of acting otherwise may still be said to

exist in a metaphysical sense; but morally, _i. e._, with

reference to the contrast of good and evil, it is entirely done

away. Formal freedom is freedom of choice, in the sense of

volition with the express consciousness of other possibilities.”

Real freedom is freedom to choose the good only, with no remaining

possibility that evil will exert a counter attraction. But as the

will can reach a “moral necessity” of good, so it can through sin

reach a “moral necessity” of evil.

(_c_) Park: “The great philosophical objection to Arminianism is

its denial of the _certainty_ of human action—the idea that a man

may act either way without certainty how he will act—power of a

contrary choice in the sense of a moral indifference which can

choose without motive, or contrary to the strongest motive. The

New School view is better than this, for that holds to the

certainty of wrong choice, while yet the soul has power to make a

right one.... The Arminians believe that it is objectively

uncertain whether a man shall act in this way or in that, right or

wrong. There is nothing, antecedently to choice, to decide the

choice. It was the whole aim of Edwards to refute the idea that

man would not _certainly_ sin. The old Calvinists believe that

antecedently to the Fall Adam was in this state of objective

uncertainty, but that after the Fall it was certain he would sin,

and his probation therefore was closed. Edwards affirms that no

such objective uncertainty or power to the contrary ever existed,

and that man now has all the liberty he ever had or could have.

The truth in ‘power to the contrary’ is simply the power of the

will to act contrary to the way it does act. President Edwards

believed in this, though he is commonly understood as reasoning to

the contrary. The false ‘power to the contrary’ is _uncertainty_

how one will act, or a willingness to act otherwise than one does

act. This is the Arminian power to the contrary, and it is this

that Edwards opposes.”

(_e_) Whedon, On the Will, 338-360, 388-395—“Prior to free

volition, man may be unconformed to law, yet not a subject of

retribution. The law has two offices, one judicatory and critical,

the other retributive and penal. Hereditary evil may not be

visited with retribution, as Adam’s concreated purity was not

meritorious. Passive, prevolitional holiness is moral rectitude,

but not moral desert. Passive, prevolitional impurity needs

concurrence of active will to make it condemnable.”

D. It renders uncertain either the universality of sin or man’s

responsibility for it. If man has full power to refuse consent to inborn

depravity, then the universality of sin and the universal need of a Savior

are merely hypothetical. If sin, however, be universal, there must have

been an absence of free consent; and the objective certainty of man’s

sinning, according to the theory, destroys his responsibility.

Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:86-89, holds it “theoretically possible

that a child may be so trained and educated in the nurture and

admonition of the Lord, as that he will never knowingly and

willingly transgress the law of God; in which case he will

certainly grow up into regeneration and final salvation. But it is

grace that preserves him from sin—[common grace?]. We do not know,

either from experience or Scripture, that none have been free from

known and wilful transgressions.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and

Spir. Freedom, 26-33—“It is possible to walk from the cradle to

the grave, not indeed altogether without sin, but without any

period of alienation from God, and with the heavenly life

developing along with the earthly, as it did in Christ, from the

first.” But, since grace merely restores ability without giving

the disposition to use that ability aright, Arminianism does not

logically provide for the certain salvation of any infant.

Calvinism can provide for the salvation of all dying in infancy,

for it knows of a divine power to renew the will, but Arminianism

knows of no such power, and so is furthest from a solution of the

problem of infant salvation. See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,

2:320-326; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 479-494; Bib. Sac. 23:206;

28:279; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:56 _sq._

3. The New School Theory, or Theory of uncondemnable Vitiosity.

This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old

Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were

the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the

successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is

held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the

Congregational body.

According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral

constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so

soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be

called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself

sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act

of transgressing known law.

God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does

not impute to them Adam’s sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical

death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in

his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam’s transgression,

and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In

Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies:

“spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and

personally sinned.”

Edwards held that God imputes Adam’s sin to his posterity by

arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of

continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God

appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for

imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and

showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is

depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies

this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three

views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous

creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe,

and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that

preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions,

personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory,

with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that

God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of

one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He

maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact.

See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner,

in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his

conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in “a

real union between the root and the branches of the world of

mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the

universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam’s posterity to

the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is

not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly

and properly theirs, and _on that ground_ God imputes it to them.”

Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:

“The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one

and simple, _viz._: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt

of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”

Interpret this by other words of Edwards: “The child and the

acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are

truly immediately created by God”—_i. e._, continuously created

(quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan

Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each

individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach

the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his

experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes

into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins

and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original

sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type.

Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin

and guilt.

Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But

Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen

(Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little of

_nature_. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the

chief good was in happiness—a form of _sensibility_. Virtue is

voluntary _choice_ of this good. Hence union of _acts_ and

_exercises_ with Adam was sufficient. This God’s will might make

identity of _being_ with him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._,

says well, that “Edwards’s idea that the character of an act was

to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the

fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral

agency of their own apart from that of the actor.” This divergence

from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons,

who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices

(_i. e._, denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and

exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that

Adam’s act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his

posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he

did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them

afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be

transferred from one person to another than an act itself.

Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine

constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but

personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33.

So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system,

and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons,

see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B.

Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.

N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that

there is no imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity. He

called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the

doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man’s acts and

exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power

of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of

Augustinians, he never lost it. Man “not only can if he will, but

he can if he won’t.” He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He

said: “Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but

also: “Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”; “If I were as

eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as

he.” Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference

or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet

in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error

of Pelagius was not in asserting that man _can_ obey God without

grace, but in saying that man does _actually_ obey God without

grace.” There is a part of the sinner’s nature to which the

motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is

neither holy nor unholy, _viz._, self-love, or innocent desire for

happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under

the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can

suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give

his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does,

or does not do; but the _moral_ inability can be overcome only by

the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of

the truth. On Dr. Taylor’s system, and its connection with prior

New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.

This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions:

1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by

divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a

holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it

not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy

choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner

can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of

self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew

the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn

to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor’s Views,

see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see

Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also,

Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and

Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most

fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight,

Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than

Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor’s. All three

of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so

strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying

the imputation of Adam’s sin or of our hereditary depravity. These

are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual

sin.

Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered

state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is

the _immediate_ occasion of sin, while Adam’s transgression is the

_remote_ occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil

tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and

therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given

in the text is intended to represent the common New England

doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although

the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to

emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual

sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with

individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this

individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567;

8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian

Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.

Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School

interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death

was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of

his posterity proved that they too had sinned.” Thus death is

universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but

because of the individual sins of Adam’s posterity. Pfleiderer,

Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts

the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not

personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite

of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it

is guilty abnormity.”

To the New School theory we object as follows:

A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (_a_) That sin

consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by

man’s individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin

is not itself sin. (_b_) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a

part of each man’s nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God.

(_c_) That physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of

Adam’s transgression. (_d_) That infants, before moral consciousness, do

not need Christ’s sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no

penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (_e_) That we are

neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified

upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.

If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses,

then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before

he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian

action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right

action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must

have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die

before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude

that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New

School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of

their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to

remove the _consequences_ as well as the _penalty_ of sin.

But to say that infants are pure contradicts _Rom. 5:12_—“_all

sinned_”; _1 Cor. 7:14_—“_else were your children unclean_”; _Eph.

2:3_—“_by nature children of wrath._” That Christ’s atonement

removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied

in Scripture. See, _per contra_, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where,

however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all the

_just_ consequences of sin. But all _just_ consequences are

penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School

doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at

the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to

contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal,

and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that

infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this,

or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are

not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience,

all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as

the “voluntary transgression of known law.” It is difficult to

say, upon this theory, what sort of a _choice_ the infant makes of

sin, or what sort of a _known law_ it violates.

The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the

statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point

out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain,

suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense

refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of

arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man’s

conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find

such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim

that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with

this last explanation of sin’s origin than is the theory of a

multitude of individual transgressions.

The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to

Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates

of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul.

Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism.

They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into

transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will

they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another

and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is

seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the

union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea

of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as

all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam,

so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we

derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from

the latter. Because Christ’s life is in them, Paul can say that

all believers rose in Christ’s resurrection; because Adam’s life

is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to

say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul

is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of

Paul’s teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his

argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that

all men “sinned in the same sense in which believers were

crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the

cross.” But we protest that to make Christ’s death the mere

_occasion_ of the death of the believer, and Adam’s sin the mere

_occasion_ of the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of

Paul’s teaching—the _vital union_ of the believer with Christ, and

the _vital union_ of the race with Adam.

B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_)

That the soul is immediately created by God. (_b_) That the law of God

consists wholly in outward command. (_c_) That present natural ability to

obey the law is the measure of obligation. (_d_) That man’s relations to

moral law are exclusively individual. (_e_) That the will is merely the

faculty of individual and personal choices. (_f_) That the will, at man’s

birth, has no moral state or character.

See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._—“Personality is inseparable

from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is

performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up

in the nature, it is not performed at all. _The law addresses the

nature._ The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject

of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural

theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral

character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the

vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are

predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter

denial that man’s nature as such owes anything to God, or has an

office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact

that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no

possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with

which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being ‘_that

holy thing_’ (_Luke 1:35_, marg.).”

Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School

interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is

ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our

discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show

that underlying Paul’s doctrine there is quite another philosophy.

Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience

would have corrected the following statement of Paul’s view of

sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267.

On the phrase _Rom. 5:12_—“_for that all sinned,_” he remarks: “If

under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of

the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither

under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death

without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is

conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the

one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in

the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that

follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether

Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that

the sin of Adam’s posterity is regarded as ‘the necessary

consequence’ of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the

employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is

contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered

as grammatically possible. It is not however the only

grammatically defensible sense. In _Rom. 3:23_, ἥμαρτον certainly

does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of

time.” But we reply that the context determines that in _Rom.

5:12_, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our

interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory,

pages 625-627.

C. It impugns the justice of God:

(_a_) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which

infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain

that, in consequence of Adam’s act, God brings it about that all men

become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation,

but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make

God indirectly the author of sin.

(_b_) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon

millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral

consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly

innocent. This is to make him visit Adam’s sin on his posterity, while at

the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his

posterity which alone could make such visitation just.

(_c_) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a

separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral

consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more

consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should

have been made by the whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who

perfectly understood God’s law, than that heaven and hell should have been

determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced

childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.

On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that

because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence

depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of

their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should

suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of

the guilt of Adam’s sin is to contradict the main principle of the

theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own

sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason

for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the

infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ

might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken

it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this

theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child

inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is

to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular

action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is

itself penalty.

“Man kills a snake,” says Raymond, “because it is a snake, and not

because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new

proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not

as moral beings, but as mere animals. “We must distinguish

automatic excellence or badness,” says Raymond again, “from moral

desert, whether good or ill.” This seems to us a doctrine of

punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote

Coleridge: “It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is

no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such

circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes

sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on

us, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, antecedent to our personal

transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal

death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its

more extended sense; if the ground of the evil’s coming on us is

Adam’s sin, the principle is the same.” Baird, Elohim Revealed,

488—So, it seems, “if a creature is punished, it implies that some

one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to

be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the

apostle in _Rom. 5:12-19_, which is based upon the opposite

doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who

punishes only those who deserve it.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin.

2:67-74.

D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual

and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following

facts:

(_a_) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not

to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New

School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a

voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does

not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which

manifests itself in that choice.

(_b_) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the

existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose

may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires

us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to

these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination

to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin,

and as such must be guilty and condemnable.

(_c_) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing

itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for

actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is

evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility

diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the

fact that these difficulties are insuperable shows that there can be no

responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore

virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.

The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will

which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such

a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die

before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with

death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such

a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according

to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future

destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of

the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious

transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man’s guilt and

condemnation.

Wm. Adams Brown: “Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by

his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do

feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited

natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of

punishment and certain to receive it.” H. B. Smith, System, 350,

note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older

theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in

Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of

personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness

that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly

moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had

the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil

of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”

“Causa causæ est causa causati.” Inborn depravity is the cause of

the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of

Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin

that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent

presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the

element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first

acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly

the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they

cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty.

In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a

race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for

or regarded as objects of God’s condemnation. Julius Müller,

Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity

which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once

becomes an excuse for our actual sins.” Princeton Essays, 1:138,

139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the

development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that

all men are sinners, or that Christ’s salvation is needed by all.

2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity?

Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not

guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression

of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays,

571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will,

part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.

The Federal theory, or theory of the Covenants, had its origin with

Cocceius (1608-1669), professor at Leyden, but was more fully elaborated

by Turretin (1623-1687). It has become a tenet of the Reformed as

distinguished from the Lutheran church, and in this country it has its

main advocates in the Princeton school of theologians, of whom Dr. Charles

Hodge was the representative.

According to this view, Adam was constituted by God’s sovereign

appointment the representative of the whole human race. With Adam as their

representative, God entered into covenant, agreeing to bestow upon them

eternal life on condition of his obedience, but making the penalty of his

disobedience to be the corruption and death of all his posterity. In

accordance with the terms of this covenant, since Adam sinned, God

accounts all his descendants as sinners, and condemns them because of

Adam’s transgression.

In execution of this sentence of condemnation, God immediately creates

each soul of Adam’s posterity with a corrupt and depraved nature, which

infallibly leads to sin, and which is itself sin. The theory is therefore

a theory of the immediate imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, their

corruption of nature not being the cause of that imputation, but the

effect of it. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all

sinned,” signifies: “physical, spiritual, and eternal death came to all,

because all were regarded and treated as sinners.”

Fisher, Discussions, 355-409, compares the Augustinian and Federal

theories of Original Sin. His account of the Federal theory and

its origin is substantially as follows: The Federal theory is a

theory of the covenants (_fœdus_, a covenant). 1. The covenant is

a sovereign constitution imposed by God. 2. Federal union is the

legal ground of imputation, though kinship to Adam is the reason

why Adam and not another was selected as our representative. 3.

Our guilt for Adam’s sin is simply a legal responsibility. 4. That

imputed sin is punished by inborn depravity, and that inborn

depravity by eternal death. Augustine could not reconcile inherent

depravity with the justice of God; hence he held that we sinned in

Adam.

So Anselm says: “Because the whole human nature was in them (Adam

and Eve), and outside of them there was nothing of it, the whole

was weakened and corrupted.” After the first sin “this nature was

propagated just as it had made itself by sinning.” All sin belongs

to the will; but this is a part of our inheritance. The

descendants of Adam were not in him as individuals; yet what he

did as a person, he did not do _sine natura_, and this nature is

ours as well as his. So Peter Lombard. Sins of our immediate

ancestors, because they are qualities which are purely personal,

are not propagated. After Adam’s first sin, the actual qualities

of the first parent or of other later parents do not corrupt the

nature as concerns its qualities, but only as concerns the

qualities of the _person_.

Calvin maintained two propositions: 1. We are not condemned for

Adam’s sin apart from our own inherent depravity which is derived

from him. The sin for which we are condemned is our own sin. 2.

This sin is ours, for the reason that our nature is vitiated in

Adam, and we receive it in the condition in which it was put by

the first transgression. Melanchthon also held to an imputation of

the first sin conditioned upon our innate depravity. The impulse

to Federalism was given by the difficulty, on the pure Augustinian

theory, of accounting for the non-imputation of Adam’s subsequent

sins, and those of his posterity.

Cocceius (Dutch, Coch: English, Cook), the author of the

covenant-theory, conceived that he had solved this difficulty by

making Adam’s sin to be imputed to us upon the ground of a

covenant between God and Adam, according to which Adam was to

stand as the representative of his posterity. In Cocceius’s use of

the term, however, the only difference between covenant and

command is found in the promise attached to the keeping of it.

Fisher remarks on the mistake, in modern defenders of imputation,

of ignoring the capital fact of a true and real participation in

Adam’s sin. The great body of Calvinistic theologians in the 17th

century were Augustinians as well as Federalists. So Owen and the

Westminster Confession. Turretin, however, almost merged the

natural relation to Adam in the federal.

Edwards fell back on the old doctrine of Aquinas and Augustine. He

tried to make out a real participation in the first sin. The first

rising of sinful inclination, by a divinely constituted identity,

_is_ this participation. But Hopkins and Emmons regarded the

sinful inclination, not as a _real_ participation, but only as a

_constructive_ consent to Adam’s first sin. Hence the New School

theology, in which the imputation of Adam’s sin was given up. On

the contrary, Calvinists of the Princeton school planted

themselves on the Federal theory, and taking Turretin as their

text book, waged war on New England views, not wholly sparing

Edwards himself. After this review of the origin of the theory,

for which we are mainly indebted to Fisher, it can be easily seen

how little show of truth there is in the assumption of the

Princeton theologians that the Federal theory is “the immemorial

doctrine of the church of God.”

Statements of the theory are found in Cocceius, Summa Doctrinæ de

Fœdere, cap. 1, 5; Turretin, Inst., loc. 9, quæs. 9; Princeton

Essays, 1:98-185. esp. 120—“In imputation there is, first, an

ascription of something to those concerned; secondly, a

determination to deal with them accordingly.” The ground for this

imputation is “the union between Adam and his posterity, which is

twofold,—a natural union, as between father and children, and the

union of representation, _which is the main idea here insisted

on_.” 123—“As in Christ we are constituted righteous by the

imputation of righteousness, so in Adam we are made sinners by the

imputation of his sin.... Guilt is liability or exposedness to

punishment; it does not in theological usage imply moral turpitude

or criminality.” 162—Turretin is quoted: “The foundation,

therefore, of imputation is not merely the _natural_ connection

which exists between us and Adam—for, were this the case, all his

sins would be imputed to us, but principally the _moral_ and

_federal_, on the ground of which God entered into covenant with

him as our head. Hence in that sin Adam acted not as a private but

a public person and representative.” The oneness results from

contract; the natural union is frequently not mentioned at all.

Marck: All men sinned in Adam, “_eos representante_.” The acts of

Adam and of Christ are ours “_jure representationis_.”

G. W. Northrup makes the order of the Federal theory to be: “(1)

imputation of Adam’s guilt; (2) condemnation on the ground of this

imputed guilt; (3) corruption of nature consequent upon treatment

as condemned. So judicial imputation of Adam’s sin is the cause

and ground of innate corruption.... All the acts, with the single

exception of the sin of Adam, are divine acts: the appointment of

Adam, the creation of his descendants, the imputation of his

guilt, the condemnation of his posterity, their consequent

corruption. Here we have guilt without sin, exposure to divine

wrath without ill-desert, God regarding men as being what they are

not, punishing them on the ground of a sin committed before they

existed, and visiting them with gratuitous condemnation and

gratuitous reprobation. Here are arbitrary representation,

fictitious imputation, constructive guilt, limited atonement.” The

Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:30, claims that Kloppenburg (1642) preceded

Cocceius (1648) in holding to the theory of the Covenants, as did

also the Canons of Dort. For additional statements of Federalism,

see Hodge, Essays, 49-86, and Syst. Theol., 2:192-204; Bib. Sac.,

21:95-107; Cunningham, Historical Theology.

To the Federal theory we object:

A. It is extra-Scriptural, there being no mention of such a covenant with

Adam in the account of man’s trial. The assumed allusion to Adam’s

apostasy in Hosea 6:7, where the word “covenant” is used, is too

precarious and too obviously metaphorical to afford the basis for a scheme

of imputation (see Henderson, Com. on Minor Prophets, _in loco_). In Heb.

8:8—“new covenant”—there is suggested a contrast, not with an Adamic, but

with the Mosaic, covenant (_cf._ verse 9).

In _Hosea 6:7_—“_they like Adam_ [marg. “_men_”] _have

transgressed the covenant_” (Rev. Ver.)—the correct translation is

given by Henderson, Minor Prophets: “_But they, like men that

break a covenant, there they proved false to me_.” LXX: αὐτοὶ δέ

εἰσιν ὡς ἄνθρωπος παραβαίνων διαθήκην. De Wette: “Aber sie

übertreten den Bund nach Menschenart; daselbst sind sie mir

treulos.” Here the word _adam_, translated “man,” either means “a

man,” or “man,” _i. e._, generic man. “Israel had as little regard

to their covenants with God as men of unprincipled character have

for ordinary contracts.” “Like a man”—as men do. Compare _Ps.

82:7_—“_ye shall die like men_”; _Hosea 8:1, 2_—“_they have

transgressed my covenant_”—an allusion to the Abrahamic or Mosaic

covenant. _Heb. 8:9_—“_Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that

I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the

house of Judah; Not according to the covenant that I made with

their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them

forth out of the land of Egypt._”

B. It contradicts Scripture, in making the first result of Adam’s sin to

be God’s _regarding and treating_ the race as sinners. The Scripture, on

the contrary, declares that Adam’s offense _constituted_ us sinners (Rom.

5:19). We are not sinners simply because God regards and treats us as

such, but God regards us as sinners because we are sinners. Death is said

to have “passed unto all men,” not because all were regarded and treated

as sinners, but “because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

For a full exegesis of the passage _Rom. 5:12-19_, see note to the

discussion of the Theory of Adam’s Natural Headship, pages

625-627. Dr. Park gave great offence by saying that the so-called

“covenants” of law and of grace, referred in the Westminster

Confession as made by God with Adam and Christ respectively, were

really “made in Holland.” The word _fœdus_, in such a connection,

could properly mean nothing more than “ordinance”; see Vergil,

Georgics, 1:60-63—“eterna fœdera.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol.,

185—“God’s ‘covenant’ with men is simply his method of dealing

with them according to their knowledge and opportunities.”

C. It impugns the justice of God by implying:

(_a_) That God holds men responsible for the violation of a covenant which

they had no part in establishing. The assumed covenant is only a sovereign

decree; the assumed justice, only arbitrary will.

We not only never authorized Adam to make such a covenant, but

there is no evidence that he ever made one at all. It is not even

certain that Adam knew he should have posterity. In the case of

the imputation of our sins to Christ, Christ covenanted

voluntarily to bear them, and joined himself to our nature that he

might bear them. In the case of the imputation of Christ’s

righteousness to us, we first become one with Christ, and upon the

ground of our union with him are justified. But upon the Federal

theory, we are condemned upon the ground of a covenant which we

neither instituted, nor participated in, nor assented to.

(_b_) That upon the basis of this covenant God accounts men as sinners who

are not sinners. But God judges according to truth. His condemnations do

not proceed upon a basis of legal fiction. He can regard as responsible

for Adam’s transgression only those who in some real sense have been

concerned, and have had part, in that transgression.