Chapter XXVIII: Section V: Imputation Of Adam’s Sin To His Posterity (2)

(_c_) Notice that this “gracious” ability does not involve saving
grace to the recipient, because it is given equally to all men.
Nor is it more than a restoring to man of his natural ability lost
by Adam’s sin. It is not sufficient to explain why one man who has
the gracious ability chooses God, while another who has the same
gracious ability chooses self. _1 Cor. 4:7_—“_who maketh thee to
differ?_” Not God, but thyself. Over against this doctrine of
Arminians, who hold to universal, resistible grace, restoring
natural ability, Calvinists and Augustinians hold to particular,
irresistible grace, giving moral ability, or, in other words,
bestowing the disposition to use natural ability aright. “Grace”
is a word much used by Arminians. Methodist Doctrine and
Discipline, Articles of Religion, viii—“The condition of man after
the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself,
by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon
God; wherefore we have no power to do good works, pleasant and
acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing
us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we
have that good will.” It is important to understand that, in
Arminian usage, grace is simply the restoration of man’s natural
ability to act for himself; it never actually saves him, but only
enables him to save himself—if he will. Arminian grace is evenly
bestowed grace of spiritual endowment, as Pelagian grace is evenly
bestowed grace of creation. It regards redemption as a
compensation for innate and consequently irresponsible depravity.

(_d_) In the Arminian system, the order of salvation is, (1)
faith—by an unrenewed but convicted man; (2) justification; (3)
regeneration, or a holy heart. God decrees not to _originate_
faith, but to _reward_ it. Hence Wesleyans make faith a work, and
regard election as God’s ordaining those who, he foresees, will of
their own accord believe. The Augustinian order, on the contrary,
is (1) regeneration; (2) faith; (3) justification. Memoir of
Adolph Saphir, 255—“My objection to the Arminian or semi-Arminian
is not that they make the entrance very wide; but that they do not
give you anything definite, safe and real, when you have
entered.... Do not believe the devil’s gospel, which is a _chance_
of salvation: chance of salvation is chance of damnation.” Grace
is not a _reward_ for good deeds done, but a _power_ enabling us
to do them. Francis Rous of Truro, in the Parliament of 1629,
spoke as a man nearly frantic with horror at the increase of that
“error of Arminianism which makes the grace of God lackey it after
the will of man”; see Masson, Life of Milton, 1:277. Arminian
converts say: “I gave my heart to the Lord”; Augustinian converts
say: “The Holy Spirit convicted me of sin and renewed my heart.”
Arminianism tends to self-sufficiency; Augustinianism promotes
dependence upon God.

C. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_) That the will is simply the faculty of volitions. (_b_) That the power of contrary choice, in the sense of power by a single act to reverse one’s moral state, is essential to will. (_c_) That previous certainty of any given moral act is incompatible with its freedom. (_d_) That ability is the measure of obligation. (_e_) That law condemns only volitional transgression. (_f_) That man has no organic moral connection with the race.

(_b_) Raymond says: “Man is responsible for character, but only so
far as that character is self-imposed. We are not responsible for
character irrespective of its origin. Freedom _from_ an act is as
essential to responsibility as freedom _to_ it. If power to the
contrary is impossible, then freedom does not exist in God or man.
Sin was a necessity, and God was the author of it.” But this is a
denial that there is any such thing as character; that the will
can give itself a bent which no single volition can change; that
the wicked man can become the slave of sin; that Satan, though
without power now in himself to turn to God, is yet responsible
for his sin. The power of contrary choice which Adam had exists no
longer in its entirety; it is narrowed down to a power to the
contrary in temporary and subordinate choices; it no longer is
equal to the work of changing the fundamental determination of the
being to selfishness as an ultimate end. Yet for this very
inability, because originated by will, man is responsible.

Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:28—“Formal freedom leads the way
to real freedom. The starting-point is a freedom which does not
yet involve an inner necessity, but the possibility of something
else; the goal is the freedom which is identical with necessity.
The first is a means to the last. When the will has fully and
truly chosen, the power of acting otherwise may still be said to
exist in a metaphysical sense; but morally, _i. e._, with
reference to the contrast of good and evil, it is entirely done
away. Formal freedom is freedom of choice, in the sense of
volition with the express consciousness of other possibilities.”
Real freedom is freedom to choose the good only, with no remaining
possibility that evil will exert a counter attraction. But as the
will can reach a “moral necessity” of good, so it can through sin
reach a “moral necessity” of evil.

(_c_) Park: “The great philosophical objection to Arminianism is
its denial of the _certainty_ of human action—the idea that a man
may act either way without certainty how he will act—power of a
contrary choice in the sense of a moral indifference which can
choose without motive, or contrary to the strongest motive. The
New School view is better than this, for that holds to the
certainty of wrong choice, while yet the soul has power to make a
right one.... The Arminians believe that it is objectively
uncertain whether a man shall act in this way or in that, right or
wrong. There is nothing, antecedently to choice, to decide the
choice. It was the whole aim of Edwards to refute the idea that
man would not _certainly_ sin. The old Calvinists believe that
antecedently to the Fall Adam was in this state of objective
uncertainty, but that after the Fall it was certain he would sin,
and his probation therefore was closed. Edwards affirms that no
such objective uncertainty or power to the contrary ever existed,
and that man now has all the liberty he ever had or could have.
The truth in ‘power to the contrary’ is simply the power of the
will to act contrary to the way it does act. President Edwards
believed in this, though he is commonly understood as reasoning to
the contrary. The false ‘power to the contrary’ is _uncertainty_
how one will act, or a willingness to act otherwise than one does
act. This is the Arminian power to the contrary, and it is this
that Edwards opposes.”

(_e_) Whedon, On the Will, 338-360, 388-395—“Prior to free
volition, man may be unconformed to law, yet not a subject of
retribution. The law has two offices, one judicatory and critical,
the other retributive and penal. Hereditary evil may not be
visited with retribution, as Adam’s concreated purity was not
meritorious. Passive, prevolitional holiness is moral rectitude,
but not moral desert. Passive, prevolitional impurity needs
concurrence of active will to make it condemnable.”

D. It renders uncertain either the universality of sin or man’s responsibility for it. If man has full power to refuse consent to inborn depravity, then the universality of sin and the universal need of a Savior are merely hypothetical. If sin, however, be universal, there must have been an absence of free consent; and the objective certainty of man’s sinning, according to the theory, destroys his responsibility.

Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:86-89, holds it “theoretically possible
that a child may be so trained and educated in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord, as that he will never knowingly and
willingly transgress the law of God; in which case he will
certainly grow up into regeneration and final salvation. But it is
grace that preserves him from sin—[common grace?]. We do not know,
either from experience or Scripture, that none have been free from
known and wilful transgressions.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and
Spir. Freedom, 26-33—“It is possible to walk from the cradle to
the grave, not indeed altogether without sin, but without any
period of alienation from God, and with the heavenly life
developing along with the earthly, as it did in Christ, from the
first.” But, since grace merely restores ability without giving
the disposition to use that ability aright, Arminianism does not
logically provide for the certain salvation of any infant.
Calvinism can provide for the salvation of all dying in infancy,
for it knows of a divine power to renew the will, but Arminianism
knows of no such power, and so is furthest from a solution of the
problem of infant salvation. See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin,
2:320-326; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 479-494; Bib. Sac. 23:206;
28:279; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:56 _sq._

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

This theory is called New School, because of its recession from the old Puritan anthropology of which Edwards and Bellamy in the last century were the expounders. The New School theory is a general scheme built up by the successive labors of Hopkins, Emmons, Dwight, Taylor, and Finney. It is held at present by New School Presbyterians, and by the larger part of the Congregational body.

According to this theory, all men are born with a physical and moral constitution which predisposes them to sin, and all men do actually sin so soon as they come to moral consciousness. This vitiosity of nature may be called sinful, because it uniformly leads to sin; but it is not itself sin, since nothing is to be properly denominated sin but the voluntary act of transgressing known law.

God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does not impute to them Adam’s sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam’s transgression, and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and personally sinned.”

Edwards held that God imputes Adam’s sin to his posterity by
arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of
continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God
appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for
imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and
showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is
depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies
this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three
views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous
creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe,
and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that
preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions,
personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory,
with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that
God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of
one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He
maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact.
See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner,
in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his
conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in “a
real union between the root and the branches of the world of
mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the
universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam’s posterity to
the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is
not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly
and properly theirs, and _on that ground_ God imputes it to them.”
Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards:
“The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one
and simple, _viz._: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt
of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”
Interpret this by other words of Edwards: “The child and the
acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are
truly immediately created by God”—_i. e._, continuously created
(quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan
Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each
individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach
the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his
experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes
into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins
and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original
sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type.
Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin
and guilt.

Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But
Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen
(Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little of
_nature_. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the
chief good was in happiness—a form of _sensibility_. Virtue is
voluntary _choice_ of this good. Hence union of _acts_ and
_exercises_ with Adam was sufficient. This God’s will might make
identity of _being_ with him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._,
says well, that “Edwards’s idea that the character of an act was
to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the
fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral
agency of their own apart from that of the actor.” This divergence
from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons,
who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices
(_i. e._, denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and
exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that
Adam’s act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his
posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he
did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them
afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be
transferred from one person to another than an act itself.
Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine
constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but
personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33.
So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system,
and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons,
see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B.
Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.

N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that
there is no imputation of Adam’s sin or of inborn depravity. He
called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the
doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man’s acts and
exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power
of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of
Augustinians, he never lost it. Man “not only can if he will, but
he can if he won’t.” He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He
said: “Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but
also: “Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”; “If I were as
eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as
he.” Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference
or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet
in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error
of Pelagius was not in asserting that man _can_ obey God without
grace, but in saying that man does _actually_ obey God without
grace.” There is a part of the sinner’s nature to which the
motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is
neither holy nor unholy, _viz._, self-love, or innocent desire for
happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under
the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can
suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give
his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does,
or does not do; but the _moral_ inability can be overcome only by
the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of
the truth. On Dr. Taylor’s system, and its connection with prior
New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.

This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions:
1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by
divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a
holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it
not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy
choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner
can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of
self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew
the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn
to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor’s Views,
see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see
Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also,
Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and
Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most
fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight,
Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than
Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor’s. All three
of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so
strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying
the imputation of Adam’s sin or of our hereditary depravity. These
are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual
sin.

Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered
state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is
the _immediate_ occasion of sin, while Adam’s transgression is the
_remote_ occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil
tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and
therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given
in the text is intended to represent the common New England
doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although
the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to
emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual
sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with
individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this
individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567;
8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian
Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.

Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School
interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death
was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of
his posterity proved that they too had sinned.” Thus death is
universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but
because of the individual sins of Adam’s posterity. Pfleiderer,
Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts
the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not
personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite
of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it
is guilty abnormity.”

To the New School theory we object as follows:

A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (_a_) That sin consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by man’s individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin is not itself sin. (_b_) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a part of each man’s nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God. (_c_) That physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of Adam’s transgression. (_d_) That infants, before moral consciousness, do not need Christ’s sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (_e_) That we are neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.

If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses,
then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before
he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian
action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right
action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must
have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die
before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude
that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New
School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of
their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to
remove the _consequences_ as well as the _penalty_ of sin.

But to say that infants are pure contradicts _Rom. 5:12_—“_all
sinned_”; _1 Cor. 7:14_—“_else were your children unclean_”; _Eph.
2:3_—“_by nature children of wrath._” That Christ’s atonement
removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied
in Scripture. See, _per contra_, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where,
however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all the
_just_ consequences of sin. But all _just_ consequences are
penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School
doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at
the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to
contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal,
and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that
infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this,
or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are
not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience,
all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as
the “voluntary transgression of known law.” It is difficult to
say, upon this theory, what sort of a _choice_ the infant makes of
sin, or what sort of a _known law_ it violates.

The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the
statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point
out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain,
suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense
refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of
arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man’s
conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find
such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim
that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with
this last explanation of sin’s origin than is the theory of a
multitude of individual transgressions.

The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to
Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates
of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul.
Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism.
They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into
transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will
they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another
and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is
seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the
union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea
of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as
all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam,
so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we
derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from
the latter. Because Christ’s life is in them, Paul can say that
all believers rose in Christ’s resurrection; because Adam’s life
is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to
say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul
is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of
Paul’s teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his
argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that
all men “sinned in the same sense in which believers were
crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the
cross.” But we protest that to make Christ’s death the mere
_occasion_ of the death of the believer, and Adam’s sin the mere
_occasion_ of the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of
Paul’s teaching—the _vital union_ of the believer with Christ, and
the _vital union_ of the race with Adam.

B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (_a_) That the soul is immediately created by God. (_b_) That the law of God consists wholly in outward command. (_c_) That present natural ability to obey the law is the measure of obligation. (_d_) That man’s relations to moral law are exclusively individual. (_e_) That the will is merely the faculty of individual and personal choices. (_f_) That the will, at man’s birth, has no moral state or character.

See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 _sq._—“Personality is inseparable
from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is
performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up
in the nature, it is not performed at all. _The law addresses the
nature._ The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject
of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural
theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral
character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the
vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are
predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter
denial that man’s nature as such owes anything to God, or has an
office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact
that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no
possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with
which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being ‘_that
holy thing_’ (_Luke 1:35_, marg.).”

Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School
interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is
ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our
discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show
that underlying Paul’s doctrine there is quite another philosophy.
Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience
would have corrected the following statement of Paul’s view of
sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267.
On the phrase _Rom. 5:12_—“_for that all sinned,_” he remarks: “If
under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of
the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither
under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death
without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is
conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the
one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in
the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that
follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether
Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that
the sin of Adam’s posterity is regarded as ‘the necessary
consequence’ of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the
employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is
contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered
as grammatically possible. It is not however the only
grammatically defensible sense. In _Rom. 3:23_, ἥμαρτον certainly
does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of
time.” But we reply that the context determines that in _Rom.
5:12_, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our
interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory,
pages 625-627.

C. It impugns the justice of God:

(_a_) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain that, in consequence of Adam’s act, God brings it about that all men become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation, but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make God indirectly the author of sin.

(_b_) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly innocent. This is to make him visit Adam’s sin on his posterity, while at the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his posterity which alone could make such visitation just.

(_c_) By holding that the probation which God appoints to men is a separate probation of each soul, when it first comes to moral consciousness and is least qualified to decide aright. It is much more consonant with our ideas of the divine justice that the decision should have been made by the whole race, in one whose nature was pure and who perfectly understood God’s law, than that heaven and hell should have been determined for each of us by a decision made in our own inexperienced childhood, under the influence of a vitiated nature.

On this theory, God determines, in his mere sovereignty, that
because one man sinned, all men should be called into existence
depraved, under a constitution which secures the certainty of
their sinning. But we claim that it is unjust that any should
suffer without ill-desert. To say that God thus marks his sense of
the guilt of Adam’s sin is to contradict the main principle of the
theory, namely, that men are held responsible only for their own
sins. We prefer to justify God by holding that there is a reason
for this infliction, and that this reason is the connection of the
infant with Adam. If mere tendency to sin is innocent, then Christ
might have taken it, when he took our nature. But if he had taken
it, it would not explain the fact of the atonement, for upon this
theory it would not need to be atoned for. To say that the child
inherits a sinful nature, not as penalty, but by natural law, is
to ignore the fact that this natural law is simply the regular
action of God, the expression of his moral nature, and so is
itself penalty.

“Man kills a snake,” says Raymond, “because it is a snake, and not
because it is to blame for being a snake,”—which seems to us a new
proof that the advocates of innocent depravity regard infants, not
as moral beings, but as mere animals. “We must distinguish
automatic excellence or badness,” says Raymond again, “from moral
desert, whether good or ill.” This seems to us a doctrine of
punishment without guilt. Princeton Essays, 1:138, quote
Coleridge: “It is an outrage on common sense to affirm that it is
no evil for men to be placed on their probation under such
circumstances that not one of ten thousand millions ever escapes
sin and condemnation to eternal death. There is evil inflicted on
us, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, antecedent to our personal
transgressions. It matters not what this evil is, whether temporal
death, corruption of nature, certainty of sin, or death in its
more extended sense; if the ground of the evil’s coming on us is
Adam’s sin, the principle is the same.” Baird, Elohim Revealed,
488—So, it seems, “if a creature is punished, it implies that some
one has sinned, but does not necessarily intimate the sufferer to
be the sinner! But this is wholly contrary to the argument of the
apostle in _Rom. 5:12-19_, which is based upon the opposite
doctrine, and it is also contrary to the justice of God, who
punishes only those who deserve it.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin.
2:67-74.

D. Its limitation of responsibility to the evil choices of the individual and the dispositions caused thereby is inconsistent with the following facts:

(_a_) The first moral choice of each individual is so undeliberate as not to be remembered. Put forth at birth, as the chief advocates of the New School theory maintain, it does not answer to their definition of sin as a voluntary transgression of known law. Responsibility for such choice does not differ from responsibility for the inborn evil state of the will which manifests itself in that choice.

(_b_) The uniformity of sinful action among men cannot be explained by the existence of a mere faculty of choices. That men should uniformly choose may be thus explained; but that men should uniformly choose evil requires us to postulate an evil tendency or state of the will itself, prior to these separate acts of choice. This evil tendency or inborn determination to evil, since it is the real cause of actual sins, must itself be sin, and as such must be guilty and condemnable.

(_c_) Power in the will to prevent the inborn vitiosity from developing itself is upon this theory a necessary condition of responsibility for actual sins. But the absolute uniformity of actual transgression is evidence that the will is practically impotent. If responsibility diminishes as the difficulties in the way of free decision increase, the fact that these difficulties are insuperable shows that there can be no responsibility at all. To deny the guilt of inborn sin is therefore virtually to deny the guilt of the actual sin which springs therefrom.

The aim of all the theories is to find a decision of the will
which will justify God in condemning men. Where shall we find such
a decision? At the age of fifteen, ten, five? Then all who die
before this age are not sinners, cannot justly be punished with
death, do not need a Savior. Is it at birth? But decision at such
a time is not such a conscious decision against God as, according
to this theory, would make it the proper determiner of our future
destiny. We claim that the theory of Augustine—that of a sin of
the race in Adam—is the only one that shows a conscious
transgression fit to be the cause and ground of man’s guilt and
condemnation.

Wm. Adams Brown: “Who can tell how far his own acts are caused by
his own will, and how far by the nature he has inherited? Men do
feel guilty for acts which are largely due to their inherited
natures, which inherited corruption is guilt, deserving of
punishment and certain to receive it.” H. B. Smith, System, 350,
note—“It has been said, in the way of a taunt against the older
theology, that men are very willing to speculate about sinning in
Adam, so as to have their attention diverted from the sense of
personal guilt. But the whole history of theology bears witness
that those who have believed most fully in our native and strictly
moral corruption—as Augustine, Calvin, and Edwards—have ever had
the deepest sense of their personal demerit. We know the full evil
of sin only when we know its roots as well as its fruits.”

“Causa causæ est causa causati.” Inborn depravity is the cause of
the first actual sin. The cause of inborn depravity is the sin of
Adam. If there be no guilt in original sin, then the actual sin
that springs therefrom cannot be guilty. There are subsequent
presumptuous sins in which the personal element overbears the
element of race and heredity. But this cannot be said of the first
acts which make man a sinner. These are so naturally and uniformly
the result of the inborn determination of the will, that they
cannot be guilty, unless that inborn determination is also guilty.
In short, not all sin is personal. There must be a sin of nature—a
race-sin—or the beginnings of actual sin cannot be accounted for
or regarded as objects of God’s condemnation. Julius Müller,
Doctrine of Sin, 2:320-328, 341—“If the deep-rooted depravity
which we bring with us into the world be not our sin, it at once
becomes an excuse for our actual sins.” Princeton Essays, 1:138,
139—Alternative: 1. May a man by his own power prevent the
development of this hereditary depravity? Then we do not know that
all men are sinners, or that Christ’s salvation is needed by all.
2. Is actual sin a necessary consequence of hereditary depravity?
Then it is, on this theory, a free act no longer, and is not
guilty, since guilt is predicable only of voluntary transgression
of known law. See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 256 sq.; Hodge, Essays,
571-638; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:61-73; Edwards on the Will,
part iii, sec. 4; Bib. Sac., 20:317-320.

4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.

The Federal theory, or theory of the Covenants, had its origin with Cocceius (1608-1669), professor at Leyden, but was more fully elaborated by Turretin (1623-1687). It has become a tenet of the Reformed as distinguished from the Lutheran church, and in this country it has its main advocates in the Princeton school of theologians, of whom Dr. Charles Hodge was the representative.

According to this view, Adam was constituted by God’s sovereign appointment the representative of the whole human race. With Adam as their representative, God entered into covenant, agreeing to bestow upon them eternal life on condition of his obedience, but making the penalty of his disobedience to be the corruption and death of all his posterity. In accordance with the terms of this covenant, since Adam sinned, God accounts all his descendants as sinners, and condemns them because of Adam’s transgression.

In execution of this sentence of condemnation, God immediately creates each soul of Adam’s posterity with a corrupt and depraved nature, which infallibly leads to sin, and which is itself sin. The theory is therefore a theory of the immediate imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, their corruption of nature not being the cause of that imputation, but the effect of it. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “physical, spiritual, and eternal death came to all, because all were regarded and treated as sinners.”

Fisher, Discussions, 355-409, compares the Augustinian and Federal
theories of Original Sin. His account of the Federal theory and
its origin is substantially as follows: The Federal theory is a
theory of the covenants (_fœdus_, a covenant). 1. The covenant is
a sovereign constitution imposed by God. 2. Federal union is the
legal ground of imputation, though kinship to Adam is the reason
why Adam and not another was selected as our representative. 3.
Our guilt for Adam’s sin is simply a legal responsibility. 4. That
imputed sin is punished by inborn depravity, and that inborn
depravity by eternal death. Augustine could not reconcile inherent
depravity with the justice of God; hence he held that we sinned in
Adam.

So Anselm says: “Because the whole human nature was in them (Adam
and Eve), and outside of them there was nothing of it, the whole
was weakened and corrupted.” After the first sin “this nature was
propagated just as it had made itself by sinning.” All sin belongs
to the will; but this is a part of our inheritance. The
descendants of Adam were not in him as individuals; yet what he
did as a person, he did not do _sine natura_, and this nature is
ours as well as his. So Peter Lombard. Sins of our immediate
ancestors, because they are qualities which are purely personal,
are not propagated. After Adam’s first sin, the actual qualities
of the first parent or of other later parents do not corrupt the
nature as concerns its qualities, but only as concerns the
qualities of the _person_.

Calvin maintained two propositions: 1. We are not condemned for
Adam’s sin apart from our own inherent depravity which is derived
from him. The sin for which we are condemned is our own sin. 2.
This sin is ours, for the reason that our nature is vitiated in
Adam, and we receive it in the condition in which it was put by
the first transgression. Melanchthon also held to an imputation of
the first sin conditioned upon our innate depravity. The impulse
to Federalism was given by the difficulty, on the pure Augustinian
theory, of accounting for the non-imputation of Adam’s subsequent
sins, and those of his posterity.

Cocceius (Dutch, Coch: English, Cook), the author of the
covenant-theory, conceived that he had solved this difficulty by
making Adam’s sin to be imputed to us upon the ground of a
covenant between God and Adam, according to which Adam was to
stand as the representative of his posterity. In Cocceius’s use of
the term, however, the only difference between covenant and
command is found in the promise attached to the keeping of it.
Fisher remarks on the mistake, in modern defenders of imputation,
of ignoring the capital fact of a true and real participation in
Adam’s sin. The great body of Calvinistic theologians in the 17th
century were Augustinians as well as Federalists. So Owen and the
Westminster Confession. Turretin, however, almost merged the
natural relation to Adam in the federal.

Edwards fell back on the old doctrine of Aquinas and Augustine. He
tried to make out a real participation in the first sin. The first
rising of sinful inclination, by a divinely constituted identity,
_is_ this participation. But Hopkins and Emmons regarded the
sinful inclination, not as a _real_ participation, but only as a
_constructive_ consent to Adam’s first sin. Hence the New School
theology, in which the imputation of Adam’s sin was given up. On
the contrary, Calvinists of the Princeton school planted
themselves on the Federal theory, and taking Turretin as their
text book, waged war on New England views, not wholly sparing
Edwards himself. After this review of the origin of the theory,
for which we are mainly indebted to Fisher, it can be easily seen
how little show of truth there is in the assumption of the
Princeton theologians that the Federal theory is “the immemorial
doctrine of the church of God.”

Statements of the theory are found in Cocceius, Summa Doctrinæ de
Fœdere, cap. 1, 5; Turretin, Inst., loc. 9, quæs. 9; Princeton
Essays, 1:98-185. esp. 120—“In imputation there is, first, an
ascription of something to those concerned; secondly, a
determination to deal with them accordingly.” The ground for this
imputation is “the union between Adam and his posterity, which is
twofold,—a natural union, as between father and children, and the
union of representation, _which is the main idea here insisted
on_.” 123—“As in Christ we are constituted righteous by the
imputation of righteousness, so in Adam we are made sinners by the
imputation of his sin.... Guilt is liability or exposedness to
punishment; it does not in theological usage imply moral turpitude
or criminality.” 162—Turretin is quoted: “The foundation,
therefore, of imputation is not merely the _natural_ connection
which exists between us and Adam—for, were this the case, all his
sins would be imputed to us, but principally the _moral_ and
_federal_, on the ground of which God entered into covenant with
him as our head. Hence in that sin Adam acted not as a private but
a public person and representative.” The oneness results from
contract; the natural union is frequently not mentioned at all.
Marck: All men sinned in Adam, “_eos representante_.” The acts of
Adam and of Christ are ours “_jure representationis_.”

G. W. Northrup makes the order of the Federal theory to be: “(1)
imputation of Adam’s guilt; (2) condemnation on the ground of this
imputed guilt; (3) corruption of nature consequent upon treatment
as condemned. So judicial imputation of Adam’s sin is the cause
and ground of innate corruption.... All the acts, with the single
exception of the sin of Adam, are divine acts: the appointment of
Adam, the creation of his descendants, the imputation of his
guilt, the condemnation of his posterity, their consequent
corruption. Here we have guilt without sin, exposure to divine
wrath without ill-desert, God regarding men as being what they are
not, punishing them on the ground of a sin committed before they
existed, and visiting them with gratuitous condemnation and
gratuitous reprobation. Here are arbitrary representation,
fictitious imputation, constructive guilt, limited atonement.” The
Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:30, claims that Kloppenburg (1642) preceded
Cocceius (1648) in holding to the theory of the Covenants, as did
also the Canons of Dort. For additional statements of Federalism,
see Hodge, Essays, 49-86, and Syst. Theol., 2:192-204; Bib. Sac.,
21:95-107; Cunningham, Historical Theology.

To the Federal theory we object:

A. It is extra-Scriptural, there being no mention of such a covenant with Adam in the account of man’s trial. The assumed allusion to Adam’s apostasy in Hosea 6:7, where the word “covenant” is used, is too precarious and too obviously metaphorical to afford the basis for a scheme of imputation (see Henderson, Com. on Minor Prophets, _in loco_). In Heb. 8:8—“new covenant”—there is suggested a contrast, not with an Adamic, but with the Mosaic, covenant (_cf._ verse 9).

In _Hosea 6:7_—“_they like Adam_ [marg. “_men_”] _have
transgressed the covenant_” (Rev. Ver.)—the correct translation is
given by Henderson, Minor Prophets: “_But they, like men that
break a covenant, there they proved false to me_.” LXX: αὐτοὶ δέ
εἰσιν ὡς ἄνθρωπος παραβαίνων διαθήκην. De Wette: “Aber sie
übertreten den Bund nach Menschenart; daselbst sind sie mir
treulos.” Here the word _adam_, translated “man,” either means “a
man,” or “man,” _i. e._, generic man. “Israel had as little regard
to their covenants with God as men of unprincipled character have
for ordinary contracts.” “Like a man”—as men do. Compare _Ps.
82:7_—“_ye shall die like men_”; _Hosea 8:1, 2_—“_they have
transgressed my covenant_”—an allusion to the Abrahamic or Mosaic
covenant. _Heb. 8:9_—“_Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the
house of Judah; Not according to the covenant that I made with
their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them
forth out of the land of Egypt._”

B. It contradicts Scripture, in making the first result of Adam’s sin to be God’s _regarding and treating_ the race as sinners. The Scripture, on the contrary, declares that Adam’s offense _constituted_ us sinners (Rom. 5:19). We are not sinners simply because God regards and treats us as such, but God regards us as sinners because we are sinners. Death is said to have “passed unto all men,” not because all were regarded and treated as sinners, but “because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

For a full exegesis of the passage _Rom. 5:12-19_, see note to the
discussion of the Theory of Adam’s Natural Headship, pages
625-627. Dr. Park gave great offence by saying that the so-called
“covenants” of law and of grace, referred in the Westminster
Confession as made by God with Adam and Christ respectively, were
really “made in Holland.” The word _fœdus_, in such a connection,
could properly mean nothing more than “ordinance”; see Vergil,
Georgics, 1:60-63—“eterna fœdera.” E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theol.,
185—“God’s ‘covenant’ with men is simply his method of dealing
with them according to their knowledge and opportunities.”

C. It impugns the justice of God by implying:

(_a_) That God holds men responsible for the violation of a covenant which they had no part in establishing. The assumed covenant is only a sovereign decree; the assumed justice, only arbitrary will.

We not only never authorized Adam to make such a covenant, but
there is no evidence that he ever made one at all. It is not even
certain that Adam knew he should have posterity. In the case of
the imputation of our sins to Christ, Christ covenanted
voluntarily to bear them, and joined himself to our nature that he
might bear them. In the case of the imputation of Christ’s
righteousness to us, we first become one with Christ, and upon the
ground of our union with him are justified. But upon the Federal
theory, we are condemned upon the ground of a covenant which we
neither instituted, nor participated in, nor assented to.

(_b_) That upon the basis of this covenant God accounts men as sinners who are not sinners. But God judges according to truth. His condemnations do not proceed upon a basis of legal fiction. He can regard as responsible for Adam’s transgression only those who in some real sense have been concerned, and have had part, in that transgression.

See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 544—“Here is a sin, which is no crime,
but a mere condition of being regarded and treated as sinners; and
a guilt, which is devoid of sinfulness, and which does not imply
moral demerit or turpitude,”—that is, a sin which is no sin, and a
guilt which is no guilt. Why might not God as justly reckon Adam’s
sin to the account of the fallen angels, and punish them for it?
Dorner, System Doct., 2:351; 3:53, 54—“Hollaz held that God treats
men in accordance with what he foresaw all would do, if they were
in Adam’s place” (_scientia media_ and _imputatio metaphysica_).
Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 141—“Immediate imputation is as
unjust as _imputatio metaphysica_, _i. e._, God’s condemning us
for what he knew we would have done in Adam’s place. On such a
theory there is no need of a trial at all. God might condemn half
the race at once to hell without probation, on the ground that
they would ultimately sin and come thither at any rate.”
Justification can be gratuitous, but not condemnation. “Like the
social-compact theory of government, the covenant-theory of sin is
a mere legal fiction. It explains, only to belittle. The theory of
New England theology, which attributes to mere sovereignty God’s
making us sinners in consequence of Adam’s sin, is more reasonable
than the Federal theory” (Fisher).

Professor Moses Stuart characterized this theory as one of
“fictitious guilt, but veritable damnation.” The divine economy
admits of no fictitious substitutions nor forensic evasions. No
legal quibbles can modify eternal justice. Federalism reverses the
proper order, and puts the effect before the cause, as is the case
with the social-compact theory of government. Ritchie, Darwin and
Hegel, 27—“It is illogical to say that society originated in a
contract; for contract presupposes society.” Unus homo, nullus
homo—without society, no persons. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to
Ethics, 351—“No individual can make a conscience for himself. He
always needs a society to make it for him....” 200—“Only through
society is personality actualized.” Boyce, Spirit of Modern
Philosophy, 209, note—“Organic Interrelationship of individuals is
the condition even of their relatively independent selfhood.” We
are “_members one of another_” (_Rom. 12:15_). Schurman,
Agnosticism, 176—“The individual could never have developed into a
personality but for his training through society and under law.”
Imagine a theory that the family originated in a compact! We must
not define the state by its first crude beginnings, any more than
we define the oak by the acorn. On the theory of a social-compact,
see Lowell, Essays on Government, 136-188.

(_c_) That, after accounting men to be sinners who are not sinners, God makes them sinners by immediately creating each human soul with a corrupt nature such as will correspond to his decree. This is not only to assume a false view of the origin of the soul, but also to make God directly the author of sin. Imputation of sin cannot precede and account for corruption; on the contrary, corruption must precede and account for imputation.

By God’s act we became depraved, as a penal consequence of Adam’s
act imputed to us solely as _peccatum alienum_. Dabney, Theology,
342, says the theory regards the soul as originally pure until
imputation. See Hodge on _Rom. 5:13_; Syst. Theol., 2:203, 210;
Thornwell, Theology, 1:343-349; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:485, 487.
The Federal theory “makes sin in us to be the penalty of another’s
sin, instead of being the penalty of our own sin, as on the
Augustinian scheme, which regards depravity in us as the
punishment of our own sin in Adam.... It holds to a sin which does
not bring eternal punishment, but for which we are legally
responsible as truly as Adam.” It only remains to say that Dr.
Hodge always persistently refused to admit the one added element
which might have made his view less arbitrary and mechanical,
namely, the traducian theory of the origin of the soul. He was a
creatianist, and to the end maintained that God immediately
created the soul, and created it depraved. Acceptance of the
traducian theory would have compelled him to exchange his
Federalism for Augustinianism. Creatianism was the one remaining
element of Pelagian atomism in an otherwise Scriptural theory. Yet
Dr. Hodge regarded this as an essential part of Biblical teaching.
His unwavering confidence was like that of Fichte, whom Caroline
Schelling represented as saying: “Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit,
Zweifle an der Sterne Licht, Leser, nur an meiner Wahrheit Und an
deiner Dummheit, nicht.”