Part 5 — Chapter III. Sin, Or Man's State Of Apostasy. (continued 4)

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, [pg 595]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.

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(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 [pg 597]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. [pg 598]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 [pg 599] 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 [pg 600]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 [pg 601]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 [pg 602] 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 [pg 603]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, [pg 604]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 [pg 605]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, [pg 606]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 [pg 607] 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 [pg 608]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 [pg 609] 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 occasionof 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 [pg 610] 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 [pg 611] 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 [pg 612] 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 [pg 613] 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 [pg 614]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.”