Man Before and After the Fall

The Angels

      “Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into the world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.  And this infection of nature doth remain, yea even in them that are regenerated: whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek “phronema sarkos,” which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire of the flesh, is not subject to the law of God.  And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized, yet the apostle doth confess that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin” (Art. ix.).  “The condition of man after the fall is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good 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” (Art. x.).  “Item docent quod post lapsum Adae omnes homines secundum naturam propagati nascantur cum peccato, hoc est, sine metu Dei, sine fiducia erga Deum, et cum concupiscentia; quodque hic morbus seu vitium originis vere sit peccatum, damnans et afferens nunc quoque aeternam mortem his qui non renascuntur per baptismum et Spiritum Sanctum” (Conf. Aug. p. i. 2).  “De libero arbitrio docent quod humana voluntas habeat aliquam libertatem ad efficiendam civilem justitiam et deligendas res rationi subjectas.  Sed non habet vim sine Spiritu Sanctu efficiendae justitiae Dei seu justitiae spiritualis, quia animalis homo non precipit ea quae sunt Spiritus Dei (1 Cor. 2:14); sed haec fit in cordibus quum per verbum Spiritus Sanctus concipitur (ibid. 18).  De causa peccati docent quod tametsi Deus creat et conservat naturam, tamen causa peccati est voluntas malorum, videlicet diaboli et impiorum, quae, non adjuvante Deo, avertit se a Deo” (ibid. 19).  “Assuunt (Pontificii) et alias sententias, naturam non esse malam.  Id in loco dictum non reprehendimus; sed non recte detorquetur ad extenuandum peccatum originis” (Apol. Conf. 43).  “Damnamus Manichaeos qui negant homini bono ex libero arbitrio fuisse initium mali.  Damnamus etiam Pelagianos qui dicunt hominem malum sufficienter habere liberum arbitrium ad faciendum praeceptum bonum” (Conf. Helv. 1566, c. 9).  “Homo perfectissima Dei in terris imago, primasque creaturarum visibilium habens, ex anima et corpore constans: quorum hoc mortale, illud immortale est: cum esset sancte a Deo conditus, sua culpa in vitium prolapsus, in eandem secum ruinam genus humanum totum traxit, ac eidem calamitati obnoxium reddidit.  Atique haec lues, quam originalem vocant, genus totum sic pervasit ut nulla ope irae filius inimicusque Dei curari potuerit. ... Unde sic homini liberum arbitrium tribuimus ut, qui scientes et volentes agere nos bona et mala experimur, mala quidem agere sponte nostra queamus, bona vero amplecti et persequi nisi gratia Christi illustrati, excitati atque impulsi non queamus” (Conf. Helv. 1581).  “Deus nequaquam est auctor ullius peccati, sed fons et auctor omnis boni, osor vero et ultor mali.  Peccatum originis non tantum justitiae nuda carentia, sed etiam in pravitate, seu pronitate ad malum ex Adamo in omnes propagata consistit” (Decl. Thor. iii.).  “Etsi in renatis peccatum originis quoad culpam et reatum gratuita remissione deletur, et quoad privitatem magis magisque per Christi gratiam mortificatur, manent tamen in ipsis, quamdiu in carne vivunt, ejus privitatis reliquiae, vid. pravae inclinationes et motus concupiscentiae, quae proinde vere et proprie peccatum dicitur, non tantum quatenus est poena et causa peccati, sed etiam quatenus et ipsa cum legi Dei tum Spiritui gratiae repugnat” (ibid.).

§ 28.  Creation of Man

      With the various interpretations of which the first chapter of the Book of Genesis has been the subject, dogmatic theology has little concern.  Its sole interest is to secure the idea of a proper creation, an original act in the first instance whereby matter was created ex nihilo, and subsequent successive acts whereby the various species which exist were called into being. [See § 19.]  The first verse of the chapter may refer to the former, or it may be understood of cosmical arrangements of unknown antiquity, fitting our world for a race of happy beings, amongst whom sin found an entrance and reduced their abode to the condition described in verse 2, when the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  On the latter supposition, the earth was restored by a succession of creative acts to be again a paradise of happy beings, no longer, however, of angelic nature, but of a nature “a little lower” in itself “than that of the angels” (Ps. 8:5), though immeasurably superior to them in that it was to be eventually taken into union with the Divine.

      When five days of creation (whatever the duration of a creative “day” may have been) had thus restored the earth from the ruin in which it had become involved, man was formed on the last day to occupy the habitation prepared for him.  There is a marked distinction between the language used in reference to his creation and that of the inferior species.  A simple fiat of the Almighty gave them being, but man is the subject of a consultative or deliberative process (Gen. 1:26), whether with the older divines we are to conceive the three Persons of the Holy Trinity as uniting in the work, or, with later ones, [As Delitzsch Psychology, Creation, s. ii.  Comp. Job 38:7.] the elect angels, already bearing the image of God, as taken into the Divine counsels.  In chapter i. man is described in his ethical and cosmical aspects; he is the head and lord of creation, and bears the image of God.  In chapter ii. the subject is resumed, and material details are supplied.  His body was formed of the dust of the ground (verse 7), thus connecting him with the visible universe, and especially that portion of it which was to be the theatre of his fall and his redemption; formed not as the clay, or the marble, is fashioned into the likeness of a man, but organized from within by the assimilation of the earthly elements, which, under the plastic hand of God, lost their original forms and grew into that wonderful piece of mechanism which constitutes the human frame.  Thus on its first page the Bible contradicts the Manichean or Platonic theories, which consider the body either as like all matter, the production of an inferior deity, or as a clog and impediment to the aspirations of the soul.  Man’s material nature proceeded directly from God; formed of dust and therefore capable of resolution into dust (Gen. 3:19), but also capable of a future renovation (1 Cor. 15:44); the first element of his being in order of creation, the last in order of restitution (Rom. 8:23).  Into this body God Himself breathed “the breath of life,” the symbolical action representing, not as in a somewhat parallel instance (John 20:22), the communication of the Holy Ghost in His hypostatical character, but the gift of a created spirit, the source and seat of all that distinguishes the human soul from that of the brutes, but which as yet was destitute of the principle of individuality.  The spirit thus infused proceeded to ally itself with a distinct form of animal life, vegetative and sensitive, not essentially differing from that of the lower animals, and man became “a living soul”; [חַיָּה נֶפֶשׁ.  This term is applied in the Old Testament to the life of brutes, and does not of itself denote anything peculiar to man (Gen. 9:4).  It is otherwise with the expression חַיּים נִשְמַת “breath of lives,” which is not interchangeable with the former.  The soul of man, as distinguished from that of brutes, has a spiritual element which connects it with the Divine nature.] but a self-conscious soul, possessing all that is comprised in the term personality.  Adam being thus created, the process was not repeated in the case of the helpmeet provided for him: from man woman was formed, in the way of derivation, the spirit-soul passing with the material element; and thus as the man is the image and glory of God, the woman is the glory of the man, and through him, or mediately, the image of God (1 Cor. 11:7).

      But this Scriptural account of the creation of man has been pronounced by high authorities incompatible with the discoveries of modern science.  The antiquity of man, it is said, extends backwards far beyond the received chronology of 6,000 years; the plurality of races contradicts the notion of the descent of mankind from a single pair; and a special act of creation is rendered unnecessary by the theory of the transmutation of species.  With respect to the first of these objections, it may be observed that the precise period of man’s creation is a matter of little moment to the Christian faith.  The received chronology may, or may not, be erroneous; man may have existed 20,000 years ago instead of 6,000; the difference would in nowise affect the religious aspect of the question.  It might throw some doubt upon the accuracy of the Biblical narrative as regards matters of chronology, or rather perhaps of current interpretations of the narrative, but this is all.  It is therefore unnecessary to inquire how far geological or other evidence tends to invalidate, or to establish, the apparent meaning of Scripture on this point.  It is otherwise with the objections last named.  If mankind did not spring from a single pair, the truth of the narrative is substantially affected; the subsequent statements of the Old Testament (Gen. 9:19, 10:32; Deut. 32:8; Mal. 2:10) are convicted of error; S. Paul was mistaken when he declared that God “made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26); the doctrine of original sin becomes involved in difficulties; and the corresponding doctrine of restitution by One man, the Head of redeemed humanity, redeemed out of all nations and tongues (Rev. 7:9), loses its significance.  But when we examine the proofs alleged, they seem of no great stringency.  It is chiefly the colour of the skin, or diversities in the shape or size of the skull, in the protuberance or depression of certain parts of the body, or in the degrees of mental and moral culture which different races of men exhibit, on which the stress is laid.  There is, no doubt, a marked difference between the physical and mental characteristics of the negro or the bushman and the European; but are they specific?  Are they such as it is impossible to account for by the gradual influence of climate or modes of living; by variations in the type at first sight but afterwards more marked, as two diverging lines, however small the initial angle, soon place a great distance between each other?  Until ethnology is able to frame a positive answer to these questions, we must hesitate to accept its surmises as subversive of the express statements of Scripture.  Amidst all the varieties of race the essential organs of the body are found the same, and so is the moral nature, though its voice may be silenced, or utter a perverted verdict.  Everywhere men think, reason, feel alike.  Under auspicious circumstances, the intellect of the negro has proved itself equal to that of the European.  Everywhere, too, where the light of the Gospel has not penetrated, the moral state of man resembles the picture drawn in such somber colours by the Apostle in Romans 1.  The objector may fairly be asked whether his hypothesis of several centers of creation, independent of each other, does not greatly augment the difficulty of accounting for this universal moral degradation of humanity.  The entrance of sin into the world must always remain a mystery; but whereas Scripture deduces its prevalence from one act of disobedience on the part of the primeval pair, this theory has to admit a fall at every centre, the results of which unite all men in a common ruin.  For distinct acts of creation are not denied; the different races are not supposed, as of old, to have sprung out of the ground: and as each pair must be supposed to have been created, like Adam and Eve, in the image of God, each must have fallen from this original righteousness in order to account for the existing state of man.  To say the least, the Scriptural account has the advantage in point of simplicity.

      Still more opposed to revelation is the theory which has received the name of Evolutionism.  According to it there is no need for the interposition of a creative fiat to account for the variety of existing species, with man at their head all has proceeded by a natural law of development.  From a dark abyss of life, a Miltonic chaos without form, gradually emerged, through vast periods of time, a few primitive types; and these, through the instinct of self-preservation and the survival of the fittest, in the lapse of further vast periods, separated themselves into the species of plants and animals which we now see; each ascending in the scale of complex organization until we reach the summit, the human race.  We behold, therefore, in the ape, or the gorilla, our ancestors of a remote generation.  The scientific merits, or validity, of this theory must be left to natural philosophers to estimate; it cannot be said, in its grosser form at least, to have gained universal acceptance even amongst these.  We may ask, How did life first come to be breathed at all into a germ of lifeless matter? and we may remark that, as far as observation extends, while species have become extinct, no instance occurs of the transmutation of one into another. [Whatever diversity there may be, and there sometimes is great diversity, among the individuals of a species, this does not constitute a new species.]  The attempts to combine species have resulted, as is well known, in sterility.  Its inconsistency with Scripture is our immediate concern.  Scripture tells us, with marked emphasis, that God made everything on the earth after its kind (Gen. 1:24–5), but this theory leaves no room for the agency of a personal Creator after the first production of matter; Scripture establishes a specific distinction between man and the inferior animals in that he was created in the image of God, and endowed with the capacity of knowing, loving, and serving God, but this theory makes the difference one only of degree, and the religious faculty an accident of human nature, not its distinguishing characteristic.

§ 29.  Dichotomy or Trichotomy?

      From an early period it has been a subject of debate whether Scripture ascribes a dipartite or a tripartite nature to man.  Plato, it is well known, considered the soul as consisting of three parts (το λολιστοκον the undying, το θυμοειδες and το επιθυμητικον the mortal); but as he did not consider the body an essential part of man, his division is a mere logical one, and has little bearing on the present subject.  A nearer approach to Scripture appears in Plotinus, who made man to consist of σωμα, ψυχή, and νους.  Probably the earlier Greek Fathers, especially those of Alexandria, were influenced by these philosophic speculations, and Clement, Justin Martyr, and others, drew a distinction between the soul and the spirit of man; and for some time Trichotomy was the prevailing doctrine of the Eastern Church.  But the use made of it by Apollinaris, who substituted the Logos for the human spirit in Christ, led to a suspicion of its tendency, and the simpler view of a dipartite nature, body and soul, began to take its place.  In the West this latter from the first prevailed.  Tertullian rejected the tripartite division, and was followed by Augustine, whose authority in this, as in other points, became decisive.

      According to the usus loquendi of Scripture, both in the Old and in the New Testament, the word “soul” (ψυχή) signifies not merely the animal life, but the whole man, no doubt however with an especial reference to his inward nature.  “Let every soul,” S. Paul writes, “be subject to the higher powers” (Rom. 13:1).  It is also used of the immaterial part of man as distinguished from his corporeal, as when our Lord contrasts soul with body (Matt. 10:28), and speaks of His own soul as sorrowful even unto death (ibid. 26:38).  Soul and body is the usual division of man’s nature in Scripture, which thus appears to favour dichotomy.  But there are passages in which not only is the word “spirit” (πνευμα) used for soul, but in which a trichotomy seems distinctly intimated.  The former are easily explicable.  When the dying Stephen commends his spirit (πνευμα) to Christ (Acts 7:59), or when we read of the spirits (πνεύμασι) of just men made perfect (Heb. 12:23), or of the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:19), it is obvious that “spirit” means in such passages the same as the more ordinary term “soul,” viz., the immaterial part of man when separate from the body: the distinction, if any, seems to be that soul is spirit in union with the body, spirit is soul in a separate state of existence.  Spirit expresses the essential nature of the soul, which it has in common with the angels and with God Himself who is described as spirit (John 4:24); its immateriality therefore, and its power to survive the stroke of death. Soul is spirit embodied.  But from the interchange of the terms it is plain that no essential distinction is intended.  The other passages present more difficulty.  S. Paul prays for the Thessalonians that their “whole body, soul, and spirit may be preserved blameless” unto the coming of Christ (1 Thess. 5:23); and by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews the Word of God is described as “piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, joints and marrow” (Heb. 4:12): in either case a trichotomy seems to be implied.  But if, as even the advocates of this view admit, soul and spirit do not form distinct elements of man’s immaterial nature – that is, are separable only in thought, so that we never can conceive of man’s soul without spirit, or his spirit without soul – what after all do these Biblical expressions describe but the same essence under different aspects, and in different relations?  It is to be noted that in the New Testament whenever the word “spirit,” or “spiritual,” is used in reference to Christians, there is an implied reference also to the Holy Ghost who dwells in them; as appears most plainly in the distinction which the Apostle draws between the mere “natural” (unregenerate) man (ψυχικος) and the regenerate man (πνευματικος) (1 Cor. 2:14, 15).  The natural man has a soul with all its essential faculties; but inasmuch as it is only active towards the world and self, while it is inactive towards God and spiritual things, the man himself takes his position accordingly.  In this state the faculty of the soul which distinguishes it from that of the brutes, viz., of knowing and loving God, is not indeed lost or extinct, but it is dormant, and cannot be roused into activity without a special influence from above.  As soon as this takes place, and the soul’s relation to God becomes its governing one, the man assumes another name, and becomes a πνευματικος.  But the name appears given him not to denote philosophical distinctions, or because there was originally implanted in him a πνευμα as well as ψυχη, but because the author of the new spiritual life is no other than the Holy Ghost Himself.  There is no objection to this faculty of the one indivisible soul, when thus quickened from above, being called the πνευμα; and in fact the inspired writers do so call it, and so far are trichotomic; but it may be doubted whether they mean to establish an essential triparite nature of man.  They write theologically, not as natural philosophers.  When S. Jude describes certain persons as “sensual” (ψυχικοι), “having not the spirit” (πνευμα μη έψοντες) (verse 19), he can hardly have meant that they were lacking in an essential constituent of human nature, but rather (as our translators rightly perceived) that they had not the Spirit of God.  S. Paul therefore in Thess. 5:23, prays that the whole Christian may be sanctified; his body in the connection of its members with the world, his soul in its twofold relation, as related to the same world sensitively, morally, intellectually, and as related towards God spiritually (σωμα, ψυχή, πνευμα); and more seems hardly capable of being drawn from the passage.  The Word of God (Heb. 4:12), like a sharp sword, pierces to the discovering of sin in the inner man, not only as the latter is related to the world (ψυχή), but as it is related to God (πνευμα); dissects and judges the very new nature itself: both so keenly that it is as if a sword penetrated not merely up to the bone, but through it to the marrow.  On the whole, it seems that the word “soul” in Scripture means one spiritual essence, but endowed with diverse faculties, and capable of being viewed in different relations: technically (if we may so speak) this essence, so long as it is unrenewed, is called ψυχή; when born again of the Spirit it is called πνευμα; but the essence itself, or substratum, remains one and the same.

§ 30.  Image of God – Original Righteousness

      According to the inspired writer, man was created in the image and after the likeness of God (Gen. 1:26); what are we to understand by these expressions?  Was the body, or the soul of man, or both together, the seat of this likeness?  Those who, like Tertullian, invested God Himself with a certain corporeity, supposed that the body was framed thereafter; but this conception was too gross to hold its ground in the Church, though it was revived in the tenth century by the obscure sect of the Anthropomorphites.  Others, with more reason, saw in the words a prophetic allusion to the Incarnation; Christ’s body being the prototype after which man’s was formed.  But there are difficulties connected with this view.  Our Lord’s body while He was upon earth can hardly be called the pattern after which Adam’s was created; and as regards His glorified body, the true ideal of humanity, S. Paul draws a distinction in this point between the first and the second Adam: the former, he tells us, was made “a living soul,” the latter “a quickening spirit”; the first man “was of the earth, earthy,” the second man “the Lord from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:45–7).  Even if this description be held to refer to Adam fallen, not to Adam as he came from the hand of the Creator, it seems to imply that the glorified body of Christ is something specifically different from that in which Adam was created, and that even if Adam had never fallen, some change must have taken place in his bodily organization in order to its becoming “a spiritual body”; which, no doubt, may have been his final destination.  Although, therefore, the body may have to some extent represented (as the heathen poets observed), or shared in (as e.g., in the matter of immortality), this dignity, yet primarily the image of God must be supposed to have belonged to the soul, and to have consisted in those features in which the soul bore a resemblance to its Creator.

      The first of these, and the foundation of all the rest, was the gift of personality, or self-consciousness – the consciousness of what we call ourselves, and of its unbroken continuity amidst the various changes, mental and bodily, which we undergo, and the power of making it a subject of reflection.  The lower animals appear either to be wanting in this faculty, or to possess it only in a very limited measure.  God is a Spirit – absolute Personality; man possesses derived and relative personality.  But this cannot be supposed to exhaust the notion of the image of God, for the fallen angels have not lost the gift of personality though they have lost the image.  The Protestant Confessions therefore, as we have seen, on the neutral basis of personality, build the further conclusion that the first man was created in a state of moral perfection, and, as this could not exist without fellowship with God, in a state in which the knowledge, fear, and love of God existed without any intervening cloud of sin.  This doctrine was worked out in detail.  The natural appetites were perfectly subject to the law of reason, so that no conflict could arise between them.  Adam’s knowledge of God was not like ours, partial and obscure (1 Cor. 13:12), but direct and full; his holiness had no stain; his will was coincident with the Divine.  Secondary prerogatives were immortality, and dominion over the other creatures; to the latter of which exclusively the Socinians reduce the idea of the image of God.

      Substantially the theologians were in the right; for it is impossible to conceive any positive imperfection in that which a God of infinite holiness pronounced, when He beheld it, very good (Gen. 1:31).  But it may be a question whether they sufficiently distinguished between the perfection of an initial state and that of a final one: between virtue, as it were, in the crude material, and virtue confirmed through trial and victory over evil; between the natural impulse and the habit, the latter being usually formed by repeated acts of will.  That Adam’s original righteousness needed such a confirmation may be inferred from the trial to which he was actually subjected; and that it was not guaranteed from diminution or loss, is equally evident from the result of the trial.  It was an inchoate righteousness, yet perfect of its kind; and had he withstood the temptation, it would have proceeded to a higher quality, until at length the probation being complete, the possibility of not sinning would have been exchanged for the impossibility of sinning.  This relative imperfection of his original state no more implies a positive defect than the essential sinlessness of Christ excluded the possibility of His being tempted, and not only so, but the necessity of it in order to His being “perfected” in His capacity of Redeemer (Heb. 2:10, 5:9).

      All the Protestant Confessions agree in describing the original state of man as not one of indifference between good and evil, still less of actual sin and its concomitant death; they agree too in denying the necessity of a fall, whether through the weakness of the nature thus created, or as a step towards the realizing its idea.  And in the former point they dissent from the doctrine of the Romish Church, that original righteousness was not natural to Adam, but a super-added gift, gratia gratum faciens, which might be and was withdrawn at the fall, and yet leave man in no worse a position than Adam was in before he received the gift.

      The source of this doctrine is to be sought in the Pelagian tendencies which prevailed in the Western Church in the Middle Ages, and which naturally aimed at extenuating the effects of the fall.  It found a congenial home in the scholastic theology, and appears therein under a twofold form: some, as Duns Scotus and his followers, holding that the gift was conferred subsequently to man’s creation; others, as Aquinas and his school, making it coincident therewith.  But both agreed in considering it a matter of “grace,” i.e. not of nature, something added over and above to the nature considered in and by itself.  The Council of Trent, having regard to this difference of view, avoided in its decree on the subject the use of the word “created,” substituting for it constituted; and indeed the real point in controversy can hardly be gathered from its decisions.  The Catechism of the Council is more explicit: “As for the soul of man, God formed it after His image and likeness, and conferred upon it the power of free will; the appetites and impulses of the soul He so attempered that they should always obey the dictates of reason.  Then He added the excellent gift of original righteousness, etc.”  The image of God in Adam is here described as something separable from his original righteousness; and if so, it may remain in man after, through the fall, he has lost the latter gift.  Bellarmine, as is his wont, expounds without reserve the doctrine of his Church, and pushes it to its consequences.  Man, he observes, consists of flesh as well as spirit, and these are naturally opposed the one to the other; consequently, from the very nature of matter, a strife must have arisen between the opposite inclinations, which could only be kept under by the “golden rein” of the superadded gift of original righteousness.  This lost by the fall, the strife which had been forcibly repressed immediately recommenced; and this is now our present condition.  But as it could not have been called sin in Adam, but only the inevitable result of his compound nature, so it cannot be called sin in us; and the Creator is no more accountable for it than the smith is accountable for the rust which accumulates on the sword he has made; not he, but the material is in fault.  (Bellarmine overlooks the fact that the smith does not create his material; could he do so, he would make it proof against rust.)  The conclusion is, that Adam, apart from the superadded gift, was precisely what fallen man now is, and fallen man what Adam would have been but for that gift; if the image of God and free will belonged to Adam in puris naturalibus, they equally belong now to his posterity.

      Apart from the ulterior object of this doctrine, viz., to exalt unduly the spiritual powers of fallen man, it may seem to be more a question of words than anything else.  For, on the one side, it is admitted that, though Adam may be conceived as created in puris naturalibus, his condition never was actually such; the gift of original righteousness having been added at once to the morally indifferent substratum of nature.  And on the other side, the Protestant, it is admitted that an image of God still in some respects, and partially, exists in man; it is blurred, and in its chief characteristic obliterated, but there remain vestiges (reliquiae) of it; thus much must be conceded from Scripture itself, which, in Gen. 9:6 and James 3:9, presupposes even in fallen man an image, or remains of an image, of God.  Personality and conscience have not been extinguished by the fall.  Nevertheless, the doctrine must be pronounced both exegetically and dogmatically erroneous.  Exegetically, for it is founded on a distinction between the words “image” and “likeness”; the former, it is argued, signifying the abstract nature, the latter the more positive idea of resemblance; which distinction is not borne out by the usage of Scripture.  Dogmatically, for it represents God as creating an intelligent nature which needed a remedy for inherent defects, defects which now, when the remedy is removed, lead inevitably to sin; which seems, not indirectly, to make God the author of sin.  This difficulty cannot be evaded by alleging “the condition of matter”; unless, indeed, it is held that matter existed independently of God, and He had to make the best of a bad material.  If matter was created, on whom is the fault of its being able to resist and overcome the spirit to be laid?  But further, it seems an error at all to introduce the idea of “grace,” or supernatural aid, into that of the original state of man, except in the sense in which all gifts of God, therefore creation itself, are of grace.  This is an error from which Protestant divines themselves are not free, as, e.g., when they speak of “sacraments” in paradise.  Grace, in Scripture, means free favour, or free aid, to the fallen; the term is inapplicable to Adam’s state before the fall.  To apply it to Adam unfallen, is to transfer the religion of redemption into Paradise, a state with which it has nothing to do.  Nor does there seem occasion to admit that, though the notion of a superadded gift is to be rejected, Adam may have been favoured with special gracious influences of the Holy Spirit; nor does it seem safe to argue to Adam’s original state from such passages as Ephes. 4:24 and Col. 3:10, in which the “new man” of the regenerate is said to be formed after the image of God.  The work and the result of regenerating grace must be considered as of another and a higher quality than that of original righteousness; it is more than a mere restitution.  The error of the Romish Church consists in transferring the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is strictly supernatural, to the natural creation of man, where it could have no place and must necessarily give rise to unfounded theories.

      According to the Protestant view, original righteousness, in the sense of perfect conformity to the will and law of God, was natural to the first man before his fall; natural, not as constituting the essence of his nature, for this remains in fallen man, but as belonging to the conception of it, which the Creator framed to Himself in intending to create it.  Hence it is described as “a debt to the nature”; it was due to it, regard being had to the archetype in the Divine mind, and to the end proposed, eternal felicity, which could not be attained without it.  How otherwise, indeed, could it have been transmitted to Adam’s posterity, as no doubt it would have been, had he not sinned?  Supernatural grace cannot be tied to such a law.  The distinction, therefore, which Protestant theologians draw between the “essential” and the “accidental” image of God in man, must not be misunderstood as a concession to the Romish doctrine; it is merely another mode of saying that man has not ceased to be man because he has lost original righteousness; that this latter was not so much a right nature, as rectitude of nature.  It was a quality, and so far accidental as all qualities must be; but the same Word of power which said, “Let us make man” (Gen. 1:26), made him also in the moral image of God.  Since the impossibility of sinning now comes to man first through Christ, to this extent Adam’s original state may be admitted to have been an imperfect one.

§ 31.  Freedom –Immortality

      With personality, or the faculty of self-consciousness, free will, or the power of self-determination, is necessarily connected; and accordingly Adam must be supposed to have had this endowment conferred upon him.  His obedience was neither that of external compulsion, nor did it proceed from blind instinct as in the lower animals; it was the result of choice.  But, his nature being supposed to have remained in its integrity, the choice was a matter of moral necessity; just as there is a moral necessity of the elect angels acting according to the will of God, while acting with perfect freedom.  His freedom was a real, and not merely a formal, one; not the equilibrium of a moral neutrality, but the freedom of the will from the bondage under which it now labours.  Man still has will, but it is biased by tendencies which he has no natural power to overcome; in Adam’s original condition there was no such impediment.  Yet he was capable of temptation as Christ Himself was; and as his righteousness was merely that of the first creation, it did not include the impossibility of his being overcome by the temptation; it was a posse non peccare, not a non posse peccare.  The former denotes his advantage over his posterity, the latter the prerogative of the future glorified Church.

      Was Adam created free from the law of mortality?  It seems so.  He was not created immortal, as the event proved; immortality, in its absolute sense, belongs to God alone (1 Tim. 6:16); but he was created with the possibility of not dying.  To suppose that he was subject to death in the course of nature would be inconsistent with the whole spirit of the Mosaic narrative, and not less so with the Apostolic doctrine that death is the consequence and the penalty of sin (Rom. 5:12).  Geology proves that death reigned over the inferior creation long before the appearance of man, but the extension of this reign to the human race must be considered as something abnormal.  On the other hand, a so-called “natural immortality” can hardly be maintained, even when the phrase is applied, as it usually is, to the soul alone.  Scripture supposes that the soul survives its separation from the body, but on the question of its inherent immortality it is silent; the body too, in one sense, survives its separation from the soul, for no particle of matter is ever annihilated.  Butler has done his best for the philosophical argument, but probably most readers of the “Analogy” have felt that the first chapter is the least satisfactory of that celebrated treatise.  An uncompounded substance cannot indeed perish by dissolution, but this does not prove that it may not perish in some other way; e.g. by the exhaustion of its vital forces.  Surmises and probabilities on this subject are one thing, assurance is another; and from no quarter does assurance come of immortality in the true sense but from the Gospel of Christ, and this includes that of the body as well as that of the soul.  Adam was capable of death, but it was his destination not to die, as is clearly intimated by the appointment of the tree of life in Paradise.  Whatever we are to understand by it, it was plainly the symbol and means of immortality; and from the prohibition to partake of it after the fall, it must be inferred that previously thereto it would have been a prophylactic against disease and death.  On the future that awaited Adam and his posterity, if sin had not entered, Scripture throws a veil.  The common opinion is that the paradisaical state would in due time have been exchanged for a heavenly; that men would have put on, by a painless process, the spiritual body in which Adam was certainly not created (1 Cor. 15:47), but which was in tended for him; and that successive generations would have been thus translated after their appointed sojourn on earth.  It may, however, be doubted whether this is not an instance of the common tendency to confound creation with redemption, by adapting what the Apostle teaches respecting the change which those who shall be alive at Christ’s coming must undergo (1 Cor. 15:51), to the state of man before the fall.

§ 32.  Traducianism or Creationism?

      An essential distinction between the original state of man and that of the redeemed in Christ is that in the former the bodily life was sustained by natural means, and the race propagated by natural descent (Gen. 1:28); while “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matt. 22:30).  In connection with the doctrine of original sin, which, as our Article declares, is an inherited defect, and not a mere imitation of Adam, and which has its primary seat in the soul, it became in early times a debated question whether the soul, like the body, is propagated from parent to child, or whether a special act of creation implants it in each individual.  The former is Traducianist, the latter the Creationist theory.

      Origen’s theory of the pre-existence of souls, which he considered were created simultaneously with the angels, is well known; it has been revived in modern times by such philosophers as Kant and Schelling, and such theologians as J. Müller, who applies it to explain the doctrine of original sin.  But, on account of its foreign origin (the Platonic philosophy), and its lack of Scriptural foundation, it never obtained general recognition in the Church.  Traducianism found a strong defender in Tertullian, as might have been expected, from his inability to conceive spiritual substance, not excluding God Himself, without corporeity of some sort; and according to Jerome, it was the prevailing tenet of the Western Church, though he himself inclined to the other view.  Augustine confesses that he could arrive at no certain conclusion on the subject; and contents himself with pointing out the difficulty of explaining the inherited taint of sin on the Creationist hypothesis.  T. Aquinas makes a distinction between the “sensitive” soul and the “intellectual”; the former he holds to be propagated, the latter to be created.  After the Reformation the Lutheran Church became almost exclusively Traducianist, while the Reformed, for the most part, adopted the Creationist theory.

      The question must be cleared from the ambiguity which attaches to the word “creation,” accordingly as it is used in its strict, or in a looser sense.  In its strict sense it denotes production out of nothing (creatio prima), secondary causes being excluded; and this is what is intended in Creationism.  But it is sometimes applied to the Divine cooperation with secondary causes in the propagation of existing species (creatio mediata), and in this lower sense it is not denied by the Traducianists.  The Divine cooperation, they admit, is necessary to the act of propagation; but it exercises itself through that act, just as in other species of animals; the soul does not come into existence through a simple fiat of the Almighty.  The Creationists, on the other hand, dispense in the matter with secondary agency.  Both parties appeal to Scripture, but with no very certain result.  On the Creationist side reference is made to Gen. 2:7; which proves, indeed, that of the first man the soul was created ex nihilo; but, as one of the ablest defenders of the theory himself admits, decides nothing as to the souls of his descendants; for in like manner the body of Adam was formed directly by God out of the dust, and yet it is admitted on both sides that our present bodies come into existence by propagation.  Also to Eccles. 12:7 (“and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it”), which does not define how God gives it; and, above all, to Heb. 12:9, which describes God as the “Father of spirits,” as distinguished from the “fathers of our flesh”.  But it is doubtful whether this latter passage will bear such an interpretation.  The fathers of our flesh are our earthly fathers, and by flesh is meant not the body alone, but the whole man: the “Father of spirits” is God, so called because He is the Creator of purely spiritual beings (the angels) as well as of men, and especially because the regenerate man (πνευματικος) stands through Christ in a filial relation to God.  It is very improbable that by the word “spirits” should be meant souls as distinguished from bodies.  Yet in a modified sense Creationism may find a support in the passage.  Whatever is spiritual, whether in essence (as that of angels), or by the new birth (as in the regenerate), bears a special relation to God as its Author; who, therefore, in the case of the human soul, may be supposed as specially cooperating with the secondary instruments.  But more than this does not seem to be contained in it.  To supply the place of Scripture evidence, recourse is had to philosophical considerations.  If the soul is propagated, it must be from both parents or from one; and again, in its totality or in part only.  If from both, two souls would coalesce into one, which is absurd; if from one, the other would be excluded from the process.  If the soul is propagated in its totality, the parents would be left without one; if in part, then it is divisible.  It must be propagated either from the body or the soul (of the parents); if the former, it is material, if the latter, the difficulty just mentioned recurs.  The soul is not immortal if it does not exist independently (per se); but it cannot thus exist if it is propagated.  The Traducianists found little difficulty in replying to these arguments.  Both parents, they said, are here considered as but one cause, for propagation cannot take place without both.  Not the soul alone, or the body is propagated, but the whole man: it is a maxim in the schools of philosophy, generationem esse totius compositi.  Neither does the soul of the parent, nor any part of it, pass into the child; it is endowed with a prolific power by force of the Divine command and blessing, “Be fruitful and multiply,” etc.  The posterity of Adam, if he had stood, would have been immortal, even as regards their bodies, though there is no doubt these would have come into being by propagation: immortality, therefore, and being propagated are not incompatible.  But they were less successful in explaining their own view; and were compelled to fall back upon negations, or upon the incomprehensibility of the process, or, after all, upon physical conceptions.  A favourite illustration was that of a torch communicating light to a torch; but this involves physical separation.

      Traducianism is most in accordance with the language of Scripture, as when Adam is said to have begotten a son in his own likeness, after his image (Gen. 5:3); which can hardly refer to the body merely.  It seems also to agree better with S. Paul’s doctrine of the first and second Adam, as the respective heads of fallen and regenerate humanity.  It may appeal to the creation of Eve, which was not like Adam’s, ex nihilo, but by a derivative process; and to the statement of Scripture that God rested on the seventh day from works of creation (Gen. 2:2), which though it does not exclude the idea of creatio mediata, does seem to imply that creation in the strict sense then ceased; not indeed as a power or idea inherent in the Godhead, but in reference to this world of ours.  The reply that the creation of souls is not a new thing, because Adam’s was created, seems hardly to deserve notice.  But above all, the Traducianist may ask, as Augustine of old, how the transmission of a sinful nature is to be explained on the other hypothesis?  If God creates each soul directly, it must be supposed pure as it comes from the Creator; is it consistent with His goodness to allow it to become subsequently contaminated by union with an infected body, as pure water suffers defilement by being poured into a filthy vase?  Can we suppose that an immaterial substance is capable of being contaminated by a material?  If, as Romanists hold, original sin is merely a defect, the loss of original righteousness, the difficulty may be lessened, but is by no means removed; for why should God implant a pure soul in a defective organization?  In short, it is difficult to see how a rigid Creationist theory can avoid making God the Author of sin.  It may be added that the principal seat of sin surely is the soul, not the body; but if, as all admit, sin is transmitted from the parents, it seems as if the subject in which sin inheres must, in some inexplicable manner, share in the transmission.

      Neither hypothesis can claim either sure warranty of Scripture or ecclesiastical consent; but as pious opinions they are an expression of facts which must in some way be combined, if we are to gain an adequate view of the subject.  Creationism is opposed to the tendency to consider each individual as he comes into the world a mere repetition of the type of the species, without individual characteristics or a distinct personality; or to merge the individual in the race.  Our own consciousness, and the varieties of mental and moral endowment which men exhibit, testify against this notion.  It is not without a ground of reason that popular language ascribes the genius of a Newton or a Shakespeare to a direct gift of heaven.  Traducianism, on the other hand, represents the principle of organic connection of the whole race under one head, the first Adam, as the leaves of a tree proceed from one stem; it refuses to consider mankind as a collection of atoms, without a common root: and it can claim not only its relative share of philosophical truth, but its agreement with the general tenor of Scripture.  A modified hypothesis on either side may lead to a combination of both; which perhaps is as near an approach to truth as the subject admits of.

§ 33  The Angels

      From Scripture we learn that the fall of man was occasioned by a temptation proceeding from a being not of his own rank in creation; and this seems naturally to lead to the question, What does Scripture teach respecting the order of intelligent beings thus for the first time presented to our notice?  This topic is usually treated of under the head of Creation, or that of Divine Providence, inasmuch as the angels, not less than man, declare the glory of the Creator, and are represented as His ministers in the providential administration of the world; but as connected with the history of redemption it seems not inappropriately to claim a place between the original state of man and his fall.

      In considering the nature and offices of angels, we may put aside the ethical distinction between them, as good and bad, as beneficent or malignant; for this distinction was not an original one, but superinduced by events subsequent to their creation.  As distinguished on the one hand from God, and on the other from man, both the good and the bad possess common characteristics.  And it is important thus to consider them collectively, or as they were intended to be, in order to avoid the appearance of an original dualism in any department of the universe; if there are evil angels they became such – whereas all were at first good.  Moreover, the unfallen angels themselves are not in the same state as they were when created; a change has passed over them for the better, as over the others for the worse.  The question now before us is, What is an angelic nature, as such?

      We have first to ask whether a real personality is to be ascribed to the angels, or whether they are merely personifications of natural forces or phenomena, such as a rude or poetical age might invent.  Our Lord and His Apostles, it is said, accommodated themselves to popular notions, but their language is not to be interpreted literally, any more than ours is when we speak of elves or fairies?  Now, it is true that the creation of the angels is rather presupposed in Scripture than expressly mentioned; and it is also true, that in some instances they seem to be merely personifications of the power of nature, as when the Psalmist describes them as “spirits” (i.e., winds) and as “flames of fire” (Ps. 104:4); or when an angel is said to have endued the pool of Bethesda, at certain times, with healing powers (John 5:4).  But to the majority of passages no such explanation applies, for they consist chiefly of plain historical narration.  Angels appear on special errands: to the Virgin (Luke 1:26), to Joseph (Matt. 1:20), to Zacharias (Luke 1:11), to the shepherds (Luke 2:9), to the keepers of the Lord’s sepulchre (Matt. 28:4), to the women at the same place (Luke 24:4), to Cornelius (Acts 10:3).  They are mentioned as ministering to our Lord (Matt. 4:11), and as strengthening Him in His last temptation (Luke 22:43).  They announce to the gazing disciples their Master’s ascension (Acts 1:10); they release Peter from prison (ibid. 12:7); they assure Paul of safety when in danger of shipwreck (ibid. 27:23).  In the Old Testament they appear more sparingly, and not so often under their proper denomination, but still very distinctly.  They guard the way of the tree of life in Paradise (Gen. 3:24); they conduct Lot out of Sodom (ibid. 19:15); they appear to Jacob on his journey (ibid. 28:12).  It is impossible to understand all this of mere poetical imagery, and the plain sense of Scripture is that they exist as a distinct order of intelligent beings.  That Christ and the Apostles could have sanctioned a popular error without dropping a word of caution that they were not to be understood literally, is incredible.

      The titles which these superior beings bear in Scripture are descriptive rather of their offices and qualities than of their nature.  The word angel (מַלְאָ) signifies a messenger, or one who executes the Divine behests: poetically, they are called “sons of God” (Job 1:6, 38:7), as, in the writer’s view, specially related to God, and “sons of the mighty” (Ps. 89:6), as excelling in strength.  Cherubim and Seraphim are of the nature of proper names; the meaning and etymology are doubtful; but to judge from the material symbols under which they are represented (Ezek. 10, Isa. 6), they seem to signify dignity and might.

      Angels are represented as assessors in the court of heaven (1 Kings 22:19), and as being very numerous (Ps. 68:17, Rev. 5:11).  Gradations of rank appear to exist among them (Ephes. 1:21, Col. 1:16), though not worked out after the fanciful manner of Dionysius the Areopagite, who arrays them in nine orders, subdivided into three classes, with different functions.  It is an archangel that rebuked Satan (Jude 9), and who is represented as with a host of subordinate angels waging a successful war with him (Apoc. 12:7).  In the later books of the Old Testament traces are found of the notion that nations have their respective tutelary archangels: thus Michael appears as the guardian angel of Israel (Dan. 12:1).

      On these notices of Scripture the statements of the theologians are founded, which it must be confessed in some instances exceed the limits of what is written.  An angel is defined to be a spiritual substance, i.e. without body, finite, complete, and endowed with true personality.  They are finite as created beings, and complete as distinguished from the soul of man, which, though a spiritual substance, is, if separate from the body, incomplete, i.e. needs the body as its complement.  Opinions in the Early Church varied as to the incorporeity of angels; many taught that they had bodies, but of an ethereal nature; but it was generally held that they are incorporeal.  When therefore they assumed a visible form, as in Gen. 18, this was an accidental union, for a certain time and purpose, not part of their proper hypostasis, as the body of a man is an essential part of his nature.  The properties common to both good and bad angels are partly negative, such as indivisibility, invisibility, immutability, immortality, and illocality: as simple spiritual substances they are, like the human soul, indivisible, as such too they are invisible; they are not liable to changes which we undergo, e.g. they do not increase in size, nor do they grow old; they are not liable to death, nor are they confined in space like a material body.  The positive properties are knowledge, freedom of will, power, endless duration, a definite whereabouts (που, ubi), and rapidity of movement.  These definitions seem framed to give us the conception of a being inferior to God, as every creature must be, and yet superior to man.  Their knowledge and power far exceed ours, yet they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent; they are not eternal, but aeviternal, i.e. though they had a beginning they have no ending; they are not circumscribed in space as our bodies are, and yet they are not omnipresent, they must be spoken of as in a certain place and not elsewhere at the same time; their agility is inconceivable, and yet they cannot pass from one point of space to another except in an interval of time, however small.  As spirits, that is persons in the highest sense of the word, they possess knowledge and free will; the latter in common with man; the former of a kind and measure far transcending human.  And as their faculties, compared with the Divine, are limited, so are the effects which they can produce; they cannot, e.g., create or generate anything; nor can they change the essential nature of things; nor can they perform true miracles.  In what manner, and to what extent they can operate on the minds of men – to us the most important point – cannot be certainly gathered from Scripture, and is not satisfactorily explained by writers on the subject.  It is agreed that they have no immediate access to the rational soul, a prerogative which belongs to God, and can act upon it only mediately, by raising impressions or fomenting evil passions; nor can they exercise constraint on the will (Jas. 4:7); but how they can operate through impressions (phantasmata), or by presenting objects of unlawful desire, is not explained, and perhaps is inexplicable.  In our Lord’s temptation the evil spirit is represented as appealing to sense, and in the way of direct colloquy.

      Many subtle questions have been raised by the schoolmen on this subject, as, e.g., At what particular time the angels were created?  Whether more than one angel can be in the same place?  Of what kind is their knowledge?  How they communicate with each other? etc.: respecting which J. Gerhard well remarks, “De his omnibus ita disserunt ut merito quis quaerat quam nuper sint de coelo delapsi” (loc. vi. sq.).

Nescire velle quae Magister maximus

Docere non vult, erudita inscitia est.

§ 34.  Continuation.  Good and Bad Angels.  Satan.

      The angels collectively were created in the image of God, and perhaps in a higher sense than that in which Adam was; not merely with an abstract power of will to choose and follow the good, but with a will directed towards the good, and furnished with all the moral and intellectual gifts which were sufficient in themselves to ensure their continuance in the favour of their Creator.  Yet they were not, as the event proved in respect to some of their number, without the possibility of sinning; not a proximate, but a remote possibility – one, that is, which might never have become fact.  In short, all that goes to form our conception of Adam’s original state, equally applies to that of the angels.  Scripture declares that God, on a survey of creation, which must have included the angels, pronounced everything good; and that the angels who fell did so by willfully abandoning their first estate and own habitation (Jude 6).

      From this presumed analogy between the original state of man and that of the angels the question arose whether as in the former a superadded gift of righteousness, so in the latter a special act of “grace,” was necessary to its perfection.  By the schoolmen this was generally affirmed, but the grace was supposed to be coincident with the act of creation, so that the angels were never actually in a state of moral indifference.  T. Aquinas draws a distinction between the “natural blessedness” of the angels, and the supernatural, which consists in the vision of God; and confines the necessity of an act of grace to the latter.  An angel, he argues, could not, any more than ourselves, attain to this vision, i.e. eternal life, without Divine grace; according to the Apostle’s statement (Rom. 6:23), “Gratia Dei, vita aeterna.”  Hence, he continues, the more probable opinion is that they were created “in grace”.  Being so created, they determined, by an act of choice, their future position; and by this act in the right direction the good angels merited their ultimate blessedness.  When did this act in either direction take place?  Directly after their creation; that is, the good angels and the bad became so instantaneously, and “remain for ever so; so that, properly speaking, no state or condition of angels as such, and without reference to their choice and its consequent separation, actually existed.  The whole of this theory, which was adopted by the Romish theologians, is open to the objections which lie against the corresponding one in reference to the creation of man it has no foundation in Scripture, and it introduces the term “grace” in a connection foreign from the proper idea thereof.  Only so much of it is retained by the Protestant writers as seems to have some Scriptural basis.  The angels, like man, were created in positive righteousness; but by an act of choice, when and how exercised we know not, a separation between them took place.  By that act of choice, those whom the Scripture calls the “elect” angels (1 Tim.. 5:21), or “angels of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), were confirmed in their goodness: they were admitted to “the vision of God,” which precludes the possibility of their falling away: their service is perfect freedom, but the highest kind of freedom, which consists in a moral impossibility of their choosing otherwise: nor can we say that other gifts and rewards were not, in the exuberance of the Divine goodness, conferred upon them.  By a corresponding act, the rest excluded themselves for ever from participation in this blessedness.  For when they chose evil, evil became their nature in a sense in which this cannot be predicated of man when he fell.  Hence the common opinion is that they are beyond recovery.  Not merely on account of the heinousness of their sin, whatever it may have been, in itself or from the circumstances accompanying it, such as that it was committed by a nature superior to that of man, and not at the prompting of another; but because the depravation of nature which ensued was complete.  If they could repent, they would no doubt find mercy; but their state can only be paralleled by that described by our Lord in Matt. 12:31, 32, which perhaps, as regards any man in this life, is to be considered rather as an hypothesis than as a fact.  All their faculties have suffered correspondingly; their intellect, e.g., has become darkened, proofs of which are thought to be found in Satan’s ignorance that Jesus was the Son of God, or, if he knew it, in his supposing that the Son of God could be tempted to commit sin (Matt. 4:3–10); and his prompting Judas to betray Christ to death (John 13:2), which, in fact, proved the destruction of his own kingdom.

      The employments of the good angels are described as partly contemplative and partly active.  They are represented as surrounding the throne of God, and singing His praises (Ps. 103:20, Isa. 6:3, Rev. 5:11); and also as ministering spirits (in what manner is not declared) to the heirs of salvation (Heb. 1:14).  On all important occasions in the history of redemption, angels appear on the scene; at the giving of the Mosaic law (Acts 7:53), at the birth of Christ (Luke 2:13), at His second coming (Matt. 25:31), and at the gathering in of His elect (ibid. 13:41).  They share in the joy of the Redeemer over repentant sinners (Luke 15:10); they are present in the assemblies of Christians (1 Cor. 11:10); they convey the souls of the pious departed to their rest (Luke 16:21).  Though not interested in them as man is, they make the mysteries of redemption their earnest study (1 Pet. 1:12).  That a guardian angel is assigned to each believer is a pious opinion which may derive some support from our Lord’s words (Matt. 18:10); but whatever hints Scripture may furnish on this subject, it gives no prominence thereto, nor does it ever encourage us to look to angels for guidance or help in the emergencies of life.  Why should it, when the Christian has a right to rely upon His over-ruling providence and ever-present succour, whom the angels themselves worship as their Creator?  That the subject of angelic agency is wholly without dogmatical import for us is too much to say; but that it may be abused to superstitious practices Scripture itself intimates (Col. 2:18), and experience proves.

      The error of the Colossians has, in fact, often reappeared in the Church.  S. Paul warns them, among other things, against “angel worship,” which he traces to the tendency of human nature to add to what is revealed, and to pry into mysteries placed beyond our ken.  After the return of the Jews from Babylon, the doctrine of angels became more prominent in the popular belief, and the sect of the Essenes is particularly mentioned in connection with it.  From Jewish converts it probably passed into the early Christian Churches, and in the Colossian Church, at least, in such a form as to imperil the simplicity of the Christian faith.  But though many speculations on the subject are met with in the early Fathers, no further trace, if we except one ambiguous passage in J. Martyr, occurs of the existence of angel worship, or invocation, in the Church.  It was on the favourable soil of Gnosticism that these illicit doctrines chiefly flourished.  The Church of Rome, therefore, can allege no patristic tradition for her decisions on this point: still less can she allege Scriptural authority.  The angel whom Jacob invoked (Gen. 48:16), and with whom he wrestled (ibid. 32:26), was not a created angel; nor can any conclusions be founded on such ambiguous passages as Job 5:1 or Rev. 1:4.  Rev. 19:10 is not ambiguous, nor the corresponding passage, 22:8, 9, and in them the Apostle himself records the Divine warning which he received not to render worship save to God only.  Nor will the distinction between Latreia and Dulia avail to justify the practice; the distinction is not in itself a Scriptural one, nor can there be an intermediate worship between that due to God (cultus religiosus), and the respect due to eminent, but created, dignity or virtue.  All created distinctions vanish in presence of Deity; and as worship is the prerogative of Deity, there can be, if the word is used in its proper sense, no degrees in it.

      The evil angels are represented in Scripture (i.e., the New Testament) as endeavouring to the utmost of their power (which, however, is limited), to thwart the gracious purposes of God in the redemption of mankind; and it contains not a few indistinct notices of their forming a kind of community under a supreme head, who bears the name of Satan.  It is he who is said to have tempted Christ (Matt. 4:10), to have prompted Judas in his sin (John 13:2), to have filled the heart of Ananias (Act 5:3), to have hindered the Apostle in a proposed journey (1 Thess. 2:18), to have “buffeted” him with some unknown bodily ailment (2 Cor. 12:7).  He is described as tempting the saints (1 Thess. 3:5), as going about like a roaring lion (1 Pet. 5:8), as counteracting the effect of the Word of God (Luke 5:12), as sowing tares among the wheat (Matt. 13:39), as the instigator of persecution against the Church (Rev. 2:10).  To destroy his power was the special object of Christ’s coming (Heb. 2:14).  He is the spirit who works in the disobedient (Ephes. 2:2), and who blinds the minds of them that believe not (2 Cor. 4:4).  To the unbelieving world he stands in a special relation as its patron and prince (John 12:31, 14:30).  For him and his angels there is reserved the lake of fire and brimstone (Rev. 20:10, Matt. 25:41).  A description of better defined outline it is difficult to imagine.  But, as we have said, Satan does not stand alone in his opposition to Christ: he is Beelzebub, “the prince of the devils” (Matt. 12:24); he is ruler over “a kingdom” (ibid. 26); his angels are mentioned as well as himself; Christians are warned against the wiles of the devil (Ephes. 6:11), and also are enjoined to put on the armour of God if they would wage a successful war against “principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world” (ibid. 12, 13).  In short, over against the Kingdom of God, of which Christ is the Head, and for the coming of which we are taught to pray (Matt. 6:10), stands a kingdom of darkness, of which Satan is the head, and from which it is our privilege as Christians to be delivered.

      And yet modern thought has very generally arrived at the conclusion that this whole doctrine of Satan, which, it is allowed, the letter of the New Testament seems to favour, has no foundation in fact; that the Satan of Christ and the Apostles is a mythical personage, the offspring of Jewish superstition; or a mere personification of the abstract principle of evil; or the poetry of symbol, suitable for liturgical use, but not of any moment as a doctrine.  It is urged that the Old Testament contains few traces of the doctrine; that in the New Testament it is indeed presupposed, but not distinctly propounded; that it is difficult to conceive the fall of a being created in righteousness; equally so to conceive how a being of supernatural powers of intellect can maintain a warfare against the Most High, in which he must know he will be defeated; but if he does not know this, so foolish an antagonist is not to be dreaded by us; that why some angels should have fallen and others not is inexplicable; that inasmuch as Satan can do nothing without the Divine permission, and, in the event, without furthering the Divine designs, his enmity against God would be better gratified by his remaining inactive; and that a kingdom, or community, of evil spirits cannot exist, for Satan must ever be divided against himself.

      As regards the Old Testament, it must be admitted that it is not so explicit as the New on this subject.  The doctrine of Satanic agency, in fact, passes through several stages in the inspired volume; and so far from this being otherwise than natural, it is only what we should expect.  As long as redemption was a matter of promise it was not proper that the power and malignity of him whose head the Saviour was to bruise (Gen. 3:15) should be revealed; there would be no use, and there might be harm, in inducing men to brood upon the spiritual dangers that surrounded them, while at the same time no clear revelation was given of the Almighty Redeemer in whom and by whom they were to be delivered.  A veil, therefore, is drawn over this somber subject until at the actual coming of the Seed of the woman it might be safely lifted.  The Satan of the Old Testament does not appear as the irreconcilable enemy of the Most High, but rather as His instrument, in inflicting not undeserved chastisement on the people of God; he is represented as in consultation with Jehovah respecting certain persons whom he is permitted to try, and as having limits assigned to his agency by a kind of pact or agreement (1 Kings 22:20, 21; Job 1:6–12).  In Zech. 3:1 he arraigns before the throne of Divine justice the sinful nation in the person of its High Priest Joshua; and is silenced, not as having brought a false accusation, but as having overlooked the abounding grace of God (vers. 1–4).  Notwithstanding this, his true nature is sufficiently disclosed to prevent us from ever confounding him with an angel of light.  If such an angel inflicts, at the command of God, temporal chastisement (2 Sam. 24:16, 2 Kings 19:35), yet he never appears as tempting men to commit sin in order to have matter of accusation against them, or as taking a malignant satisfaction in proving, as in Job’s case, how infirmity cleaves to the best of men; which is the aspect under which Satan appears in the Old Testament narratives.  In the New Testament this disposition deepens into a positive enmity towards God and man.  Is this reserve in the Old Testament merely of an economical character, or does it represent a fact, viz., that the state of the fallen angels admitted, as that of fallen man does, of a progression from bad to worse, until a climax was reached, at which the possessed of devils, speaking in their name, could exclaim: “What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God?” (Matt. 8:29).  It seems to be too hastily assumed that this law of progression (nemo repente fuit turpissimus) applies only to a being like man, composed of body and soul, and not to a pure spirit; so that from the first the fallen angels, with Satan at their head, were as deeply imbued with evil as ever they could be.  But they were, like man, creatures, and, like man, created in righteousness; does the difference of their nature preclude the supposition of a growth in obliquity similar to that which Scripture supposes, and experience proves, to end, in the case of man, in a state in which the unhappy subject exclaims: “Evil, be thou my good”?  However this may be, the Satan of the New Testament is a different being from that of the Old; though it is possible that not the nature, but the revelation of the nature has advanced pari passu with the revelation of Christ and His salvation.

      There is no doubt a real difficulty in conceiving how a created being can embody in himself the abstract principle of evil, that is, be absolutely evil.  As Augustine frequently reminds us, evil in a created nature is something rather privative than positive: the nature is in itself good, and never can be absolutely transformed into its opposite.  Hence, when Satan is introduced on the scene by poets, when he appears as an actual creation, the impression conveyed is that of a vicious and mocking man, as in the Mephistopheles of Goethe; an exaggerated Voltaire.  The Satan of Milton is not without qualities which, in their way, command respect; or at all events do not occasion loathing.  It seems that if the abstract principle of evil were to become actually existent, it would not be easy to avoid the dualism of the Manichees.  Relatively to his agents, viz. evil men, Satan may be considered as absolutely evil; but we cannot say that he is so relatively to God.

      The other objections seem of less weight.  The fall of a righteous being presupposes, it is urged, that he was already fallen, for how otherwise could sin gain an admittance?  The objection equally applies to man’s fall; and in both cases it may be replied, that the character did not produce the act, but the free volition in the wrong direction produced the character – according to the law that the first sinful act draws after it an endless series of consequences.  How can we reconcile Satan’s intellectual perspicacity with his continued resistance to God?  In the same way in which we reconcile, in the case of evil men, vast abilities with moral blindness and what Scripture calls folly.  These men display wonderful sagacity in the pursuit of their own selfish ends; but of wisdom, in the true sense of the word, a comprehensive view of what is best for themselves and others, they show themselves destitute.  If Satan possessed such wisdom, he would undoubtedly abandon his active resistance, and prefer inactivity; he would repent if repentance is possible to him.  If he perseveres in his antagonism, it is simply because of his lack of true perspicacity.  But a kingdom of evil spirits, it is urged, could not hold together; unless, we reply, there exists a bond of union which for a time at least is powerful enough to suppress individual obliquity.  But such a bond does exist, viz., a common enmity towards God and His people, and it is sufficient to produce union as long as the conflict goes on.  History supplies many such instances of a temporary combination amongst men, who but for the sinister tie that unites them would exterminate each other, or attempt to do so.  What the state of Satan’s kingdom may become, when at the consummation of all things there will remain no place for his opposition to Christ, and therefore no object superior to the gratification of individual license, is another question.

      The sacred history, as has been observed, discloses at the coming of Christ a greatly increased activity of Satan and his angels; as is particularly to be seen in the instances of demoniacal possession in the Gospels, of which the Old Testament furnishes few or no examples.  Demoniacal possession is divided into spiritual and corporeal; the former consisting in a moral obliquity so great and so universal as to suggest the idea of an actual indwelling of Satan in the soul.  Thus Satan is said to have entered into Judas (John 13:27), and to dwell in the swept and garnished chambers (Luke 11:26).  But in the absence of more direct Scripture evidence, it is hardly safe to press such passages to a more definite meaning than that – not without their own consent – some men seem to be specially under the influence of the evil one, and special instruments of his designs.  Bodily possession stands on firmer ground; it seems to have the letter of Scripture in its favour, and to be clearly recognized not only by the Apostles, but by Christ Himself (Matt. 10:8, 12:28), and by Christ when explaining the matter to the inner circle of His followers (ibid. 17:19–21).  The cases in the Gospels have peculiar features: on the one side they are allied to the forms of ordinary disease (epilepsy, dumbness and deafness, madness, even bodily weakness) (Luke 13:11), and the beneficent action of Christ is described as a “cure,” and “healing” (Matt. 12:22, Acts. 10:38).  On the other, they are ascribed to a supernatural origin, either to Satan, or more frequently to one or more of his subordinate angels (δαιμόνια); and the cure consists in these being “cast out”.  Shall we say that they were really nothing but ordinary diseases, and that our Lord spoke in the language of the time without intending to endorse its accuracy?  The subject is too serious, too closely connected with religion, to warrant such a supposition; and when we recollect the crimes which the perversion of the doctrine gave rise to in after ages, when it was believed that men and women could hold commerce with Satan for illicit purposes, it becomes impossible to believe that He to whom the future must have been known could have sanctioned an error so fruitful in evil consequences, if it had no foundation in fact.  It is commonly held that the unhappy subjects of this possession brought the calamity on themselves by indulgence in sin, especially sins of the flesh; this is possible, but the only instance of healing in which our Lord insinuates that the sufferer’s sin had been the cause of his malady does not belong to this class (John 5:14).  And in another instance He warns His disciples against hasty judgments of this kind (John 9:3).  The opinion, however, may find some support from 1 Cor. 5:5, in which the Apostle speaks of delivering certain offenders “unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh”; which seems something quite different from ordinary excommunication.  The demoniacs of the New Testament were sinners, no doubt, but rather objects of pity than specimens of matured impiety; they were not possessed of Satan in the same sense in which Judas was, and therefore were not beyond the reach of the Saviour’s healing power.  They were fearful examples of the power of Satan, not only over the souls but the bodies of men; but great caution is needed in every age of the Church, lest the revealed fact be confounded with semblances of it, which may belong to the sphere of nature; as appears from some chapters of early Church history, and from the curious catalogues of the signs of possession to be found in some of the older theologians.  We have reason to believe that since the coming of Christ this terrible malady has entirely or almost disappeared – at all events from within the pale of the Christian Church.

§ 35.  The Fall of Man

      Sin, according to Scripture, is no necessary factor in the education of the human race, for it came into the world through a hostile agency.  How this happened is described in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis.

      The narrative opens with the temptation of man, or, as perhaps it should rather be called, his trial.  It is not necessary to enter at length into the questions that have been raised respecting its details.  Whether they are to be understood literally, or, as even orthodox theologians have held, they are merely the symbolical clothing of a real fact, is of no more moment to the Christian than the issue of the geological speculations which have clustered round the account of creation.  It is enough for us to learn that though there was something in unfallen man which rendered it possible for him to sin, this was roused into activity by an appeal from without; nor does Scripture leave it doubtful from whom the solicitation proceeded.  If the original narrative does not expressly say that it was Satan, this omission is supplied in the New Testament.  Apoc. 12:9 is express to the point.  2 Cor. 11:3, compared with ver. 14 of the same chapter, makes it clear whom S. Paul understood by the serpent.  By the majority of commentators our Lord’s words in John 8:44 are referred to the temptation of Adam.  The tempter was a spirit already fallen, and the mystery of the origin of sin dates from a period anterior to the creation of man.

      It seems to have been formerly a question of some interest, what the sinful affection was in our first parents which led to the actual transgression.  Bellarmine, after Augustine, devotes two long chapters to prove that it was pride, in the prospect of becoming as gods, knowing good and evil; the Protestant theologians (Calvin, Luther, etc.) prefer to think it was unbelief (of the Divine warning, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt die”); apparently because this supposition better corresponds to what may be called the opposite pole, the doctrine of justification by faith.  The question is immaterial.  The real source of the primal transgression must be sought deeper; in the usurpation by the selfish principle of that place which supreme love to God was intended to, and did actually hitherto, occupy.  Once the true centre of man’s being was displaced, the whole periphery shifted itself; and both pride and unbelief were only symptoms of the inner disorganization that had taken place.  The senses became avenues of illicit desire (“when the woman saw that the tree was pleasant to the eye,” etc.); doubts of God’s goodness entered the heart; impatience to snatch an advantage which would doubtless have come in its due time prevailed; and – the sin was consummated.

“Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat

Sighing, through all her works gave signs of woe,

That all was lost—”

      The consequences of the first transgression are described in the narrative with sufficient distinctness.  Shame and fear took possession of breasts which had hitherto been strangers to these emotions.  “They knew that they were naked”; they became conscious of the loss of the original righteousness in which they had been created, and conscious of the result, in the emancipation of sensual desire from the control of reason and of the will; which led them to place a covering over bodily organs now no longer obedient to these higher faculties.  The Divine beneficence, recognizing the propriety of the sentiment, exchanged the poor original contrivance for a more complete and enduring investiture.  And with shame was conjoined fear; fear of the gracious Being whose approach had hitherto been the harbinger of holy and happy fellowship: “Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.”  In other words, the slumbering faculty of conscience, in this case accusing, awoke into energy; that Divine faculty which assents to the law of God while protesting against the law of sin in the members (Rom. 7:22, 23), and is the last to resign its authority, until finally stifled by continuance in sin.  And so Adam came to the knowledge of good and evil by the bitter experience of an irreconcilable strife between the two in his inner man.  And then followed the sentence.  It has been subject of comment that there is no express allusion in it either to the corruption of our nature through the Fall, or to the eternal penalty of sin; but as regards the former, our first parents were already conscious of it, and as regards the latter the poison and the antidote (Gen. 3:15) are in such close juxtaposition that the latter already seems to efface the former by its superior efficacy.  It is temporal penalties which appear on the surface; on the woman the pains of childbearing, on the man incessant toil for his living, on both temporal death.  The full meaning of this last penalty of sin was reserved for future revelations to disclose: here it is merely the dissolution of the body into its original dust that is specified.  The penalty was not inflicted at once; and therefore the commination in ch. 2:17 must be understood to mean an inevitable subjection to death.  The frame of man, sharing in the disorganization of his superior part, began to cherish in itself the seeds of his dissolution, and, however in those early ages postponed, the event came at last to all.  From this law of a sinful nature, which he inherits, even the believer in Christ is not exempt, unless he be one of those who shall be alive when Christ comes again: “the body is dead” (or subject to death) “because of sin” (Rom. 8:10); but since, in his case, death in its other and deeper significations has no existence, the dissolution of the body is but the mode of transition to a higher condition of humanity than Adam, even had he stood, would have enjoyed.

      Speculation, as might be expected, has been busy with the question why, if its fearful consequences were foreseen as they must have been, the fall of man was permitted?  If it was foreseen that he would fall, why was the tempter allowed to assail him? or why was not strength given to resist the temptation?  But these difficulties equally apply to the earlier entrance of sin into creation; and they have been met, as far as they can be, in a previous section (§ 22).  The origin of evil is inexplicable; but considered as sin, Scripture is express that God neither willed it nor needed it for the manifestation of His glory.  If He elicited good out of evil, that does not diminish the guilt of the evil.  Prevent it by an exercise of Almighty power perhaps He could not, without annihilating the free will with which it pleased Him to endow the reasonable creature.  And there was such “a facility of standing” in our first parents, as compared with us, that the blame of the catastrophe must be laid exclusively at their door.

§ 36.  Prevalence of Actual Sin

      The history of mankind, from the fall of Adam, is, as it is given in Scripture, emphatically the history of a sinful race.  So prominent is this characteristic that it almost seems as if it was the main object of the writers to inculcate the lesson.  Commencing with the fratricide of Cain, the antediluvian narrative terminates with such an excess of wickedness as could only be purged by the destruction, with a few exceptions, of the existing population of the world (Gen. 6).  Restored under a covenant of temporal mercies (Gen. 9), mankind again commenced its downward career, and only the confusion of languages put a stop to a presumptuous attempt, like that of the Titans of profane mythology, to wrest the scepter of supremacy from the Creator (Gen. 11).  Idolatry began to prevail to such an extent that the first actual step towards the accomplishment of the primeval prophecy was to sever the progenitor of the chosen people from the associations of home and kindred with which he was surrounded (Gen. 12).  Whole communities became notorious for hideous vices (Gen. 19).  The passage of the Israelites to the land of Canaan was marked at every stage by transgression.  The moral state of the peoples then occupying Canaan was such that a sentence of extirpation, never, however, fully carried out, was necessary to prevent, as far as might be, their contaminating the new settlers, far removed as the latter were from perfection.  The history of the chosen people for centuries is a record of anarchy and crime, together with repeated lapses into the impure and idolatrous worship of the surrounding nations.  The constant theme of the prophets is the sin of their own people.  The sins which the prophets denounced were exchanged, in our Lord’s time, for others less gross in appearance, but not less dangerous in their spiritual effect.  The picture which S. Paul presents of the heathen world as it then existed is drawn in the darkest colours (Rom. 1); and his statements are confirmed by contemporary evidence of profane authors.  No topic is more frequent in classical poetry than the corruption of later ages as compared with the (supposed) pristine sanctity of manners.  Ancient philosophers deplore the intractableness of the material on which they had to work.  Such is the account of Scripture, and such the confession of heathendom, as regards the moral condition of humanity.

      The same lesson is taught us in Scripture in a more indirect manner.  Hardly one even of the eminent characters whose biographies it contains – Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Peter, etc. – but breaks down in some point or other; and although in a few instances, such as those of Joseph and Daniel, no failure is expressly mentioned, it can hardly be doubted that they came under the same law of imperfection.  The Christian expiation for sin is declared to have been for the whole of mankind, who therefore must be supposed, without exception, to be implicated in transgression.  The change from the natural to the Christian state is never represented otherwise than as a change from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God (Acts. 26:18); with the Christian old things have passed away, and all things have become new (2 Cor. 5:17); he has emerged from a state of death in (actual) trespasses and sins to one in which the spiritual life is predominant (Ephes. 2:1–3).  In short, the somber background of the edifice of redemption is nothing short of this: “There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God: they are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable, there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10–12).

      Does experience confirm these statements? or has the condition of humanity changed since the Scriptures were written?  The history of the world, ever since the introduction of Christianity, is its condemnation.  No one sees Christian nations fully leavened with the influence of Christianity; no one finds in modern heathenism other than a transcript of S. Paul’s experience.  What is more, no one of mature age expects of human nature more than the most moderate attainments of virtue: the child confides implicitly, the youth is more wary, the man of experience, in his dealings with others, fences himself round with every expedient of precaution.  The Christian himself is the first to disclaim perfection, and to set it down to blind self-ignorance or Pharisaical pride if any one, even the holiest of men, should venture to say that he has no sin (1 John 1:8).  Nor can this verdict be retracted in favour of the unconscious age of infancy.  Relatively to us the babe is called innocent; but this amounts merely to the negative assertion that we do not know what is passing in its mind, there being a physical incapability of such manifestation.  The moment this incapacity begins to disappear the alleged innocence also disappears; sinful passions make their appearance, which too clearly point to an ominous development should circumstances favour it; the child, according to his faculties and opportunities, is a reproduction of what his parents are.  But it is not necessary to dwell further on a fact which is not denied, however it may be explained away or extenuated.  The Pantheist, while divesting sin of its proper character, and making it an essential factor in the constitution of the universe, does not contest its existence under the notion of a temporary discord in the great harmony into which he resolves it.  The Pelagian still less denies the fact, and only differs from the Church as regards the source to which he traces it.  What this source is forms the subject of the following section.

§ 37.  Original Sin as the Root of Actual

      As every effect is supposed to have a cause, the actual sinfulness of man leads the mind beyond the outward phenomenon, and suggests the inquiry, “Whence can it proceed?”  The most elementary lessons of moral philosophy teach us that the essence of virtue or vice is to be sought, not in the mere act, but in what lies underneath it.  If the tree is known by its fruits, the fruits also presuppose a tree.  If it be replied, then, that it arises “from the imitation of Adam” (the Pelagian theory), several difficulties at once occur.  How can it arise from the imitation of Adam in the case of those who never heard of Adam, or read the story of the Fall; that is, the vast majority of mankind? who yet, as we have seen, are in no way superior to those who possess this knowledge.  If it be ascribed to the bad example of parents or of society, how did this bad example itself come into existence?  In the case of those who enjoy the light of revelation, and believe that sin marred the perfection of the universe before Adam was created, why should not the imitation ascend higher, until it reaches Satan himself?  Moreover, these latter possess another standard to frame themselves by, one of absolute sinlessness, and exhibited too in our nature; why should not the imitation frame itself on this model as well as on that of Adam?  Why should it be uniformly of one character?  If it be replied again that every man is endowed with free will, and that it is of the essence of free will to be able to choose, and that the first step determines the future path, this no doubt is in a certain sense true.  To fix the moment when the first deliberate act of sin takes place may be impossible; the child himself is probably never aware of it: but whenever it does occur, it is a momentous epoch in the moral history of the individual.  The will has consented, and the moral state can never again be as if this act had not taken place.  It may truly be said that in every depraved life a subordinate and relative fall of the man has preceded the formation of the habit.  But if the will is really free, or in a state of equilibrium, how comes it that the choice is invariable?  Why does not the will assert its freedom, in some instances at least, so as to resist temptation, and commence a career of holy obedience, which might issue in complete confirmation in holiness; as would have been the case with Adam had he stood?  If, further, it be urged, with Schleiermacher, [Glaubenslehre, § 67.] that the explanation lies in the fact that, by the very conditions of infancy, our sensual nature steals a march upon our spiritual, which advantage is always afterwards maintained; we may ask how it is that when our spiritual nature comes to its maturity, it does not, as the stronger, assert its supremacy, and subjugate its weaker companion in turn?  We are thus led to the conclusion that the actual sinfulness of mankind is but the visible symptom of a defect or depravation of nature, which is not any one sin, but the root of all sin; a constant quantity to be taken account of amidst the varieties of outward transgression; a preponderating inclination in one direction, impeding all effort in the other; not belonging to the original nature of man, but another nature in the sense in which we call habit a second nature; attaching itself to what is in itself good, but so interwoven with it as not to admit of perfect separation; and this is that “corruption of the nature of every man” (Art. ix.) to which the Church has given the name of original sin. [Original sin may bear a twofold sense; either as distinguished from “actual sins of men” (Art. ii.), or as connected with Adam’s sin.  In this part of the present section it is used in the former, in the latter part in the other sense. “Dicitur originale (peccatum), et quidem non ratione originis mundi aut hominis, sed (1) quia ab Adamo, radice et principio generis humani derivatum; (2) quia cum origine Adamigenarum conjunctum; (3) quia origo et fons est peccatorum actualium” (Hollaz, p. ii. c. 3, q. 12).]

      Such a depravation of nature is clearly recognized in Scripture.  When it is said in Gen. 8:21, that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” it is implied that the existence of the evil is coeval with the existence of “the heart”; i.e., man’s nature.  David in Ps. 51:5 professes, not that his mother contracted sinfulness in the act of conception and birth (an idea, as J Müller remarks, wholly foreign to Jewish ideas [Lehre von der Sünde, ii. 378.]), but that he himself from that moment of his conception was affected with sin.  The new birth which our Lord pronounces necessary to entrance into the kingdom of heaven (John 3:3) seems to involve far more than merely renunciation of actual sins.  S. Paul alludes to a kind of sin which was latent in him, and was only roused into activity, so that he became conscious of it, by being confronted with an external command (Rom. 7:8).  To the same effect are his statements respecting the opposition between the “flesh” and the “Spirit” (Gal. 5:7, Rom. 8:9); for by “the flesh” is meant not the material part of man as distinguished from the immaterial, but human nature in its unregenerate state, “the phronema sarkos, which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire of the flesh, which is not subject to the law of God” (Art. ix.).  The children of Christian parents, apart from the privileges which, as having been born within the pale of the Church, they enjoy, are pronounced by S. Paul to be of themselves unclean (ακάθαρτα), nor is there any point of time specified at which this disqualification commences (1 Cor. 7:14). [It is doubtful whether it is the children of Christian parents in general, or those of the mixed marriages specially mentioned in the passage, of whom the Apostle speaks.  But either way, the argument stands.  See Olshausen in loc.]  Of himself and his fellow converts from Judaism the same Apostle declares that, whatever advantages they may have enjoyed as Israelites (Rom. 9:4), they were “by nature children of wrath,” equally with Gentile believers (Ephes. 2:3); of which the plain meaning is that by nature, and before the outbreaks of actual sin, there was something in them which God could not look upon without displeasure.

      The testimony of Scripture confirms the conclusion to which we are led on grounds of reason, that, underneath the variety of sins which meet the eye, there exists in all men a natural propensity to sin, which is sure to bear its fruit – to some extent even where its power is broke by the operation of Divine grace.  It is impossible otherwise to explain the fact that in no recorded instance, save that of Him whose birth was supernatural, is a human life found to have been exempt from actual sin.

      Another exception is indeed claimed by the Church of Rome – that of the Virgin Mary.  The history of the doctrine of the immaculate conception is soon told.  At an early period vague notions prevailed respecting the prerogatives of the mother of our Lord, whom no Christian, any more than Scripture itself, hesitates to call “blessed among women” (Luke 1:42); and an impulse was given in this direction by the ecclesiastical sanction of the epithet θεοτόκος, as against the Nestorians.  But if the Virgin was “the mother of God,” can she be conceived of as affected with original sin?  If so, might not the taint be derived from the mother, as it would have been from an earthly father? or, in other words, to ensure our Lord’s perfect sinlessness, was it not necessary to maintain, in the case of the Virgin, an antecedent exemption from this taint?  The reasoning had an air of plausibility, and fell in with the general tendency of the age; but it remained for a long time unsanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities.  When, about the year 1140, the canons of Lyons instituted a festival in honour of the immaculate conception, they drew upon themselves for this innovation the severe censure of Bernhard of Clairvaux.  The dogma gradually, however, gathered strength, and became important enough to divide the opinions of the two great orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans; the former maintaining, the latter denying it.  The Franciscans could appeal to Duns Scotus, the Dominicans to Thomas Aquinas, as favouring their views respectively.  The question led to so much dissension in the Church that in 1477 Sixtus IV issued a Bull, in which he aimed at a compromise: he sanctioned the festival, and condemned those who called the doctrine heretical, but he forbore to pronounce an authoritative decision, and so far left the question open.  The dissension, however, continued, and reached such a pitch that Leo X contemplated taking steps to have the matter finally settled when the troubles of the Reformation broke out, and united all parties in the Romish Church against the common foe.  This state of things accounts for the hesitation of the Council of Trent, as described by Sarpi and Pallavicini, to promulgate any positive decree on the subject; and indeed the Fathers themselves were divided in opinion.  The hesitation is reflected in the actual decisions of the Council.  It is well known that the Pontificate of Pius IX distinguished itself by a final decision, and the Immaculate Conception is now an article of faith in the Church of Rome.

      It need hardly be observed that the doctrine has no foundation in Scripture.  The impression which the latter leaves on the mind is that Mary was not without actual infirmity (Luke 2:48, John 2:4), which is incompatible with the notion of her being free from original sin.  S. Paul makes no exception in her favour when he declares that all, save ONE, have sinned (Rom. 5:12).  Moreover, if her conception was immaculate, it seems that that of her parents must have been so too, and their parents in turn; and so on till we arrive at Adam, which subverts the received doctrine of original sin altogether.  It has been already seen that there is no necessity for the dogma in order to secure the perfect sinlessness of Christ.  In the practical system of the Romish Church, however, it has an appropriate, it may be said, a necessary, place.  In that system the intercession of Christ in His priestly office has given place to the intercession of the Virgin; it is to her that the worshipper is really directed to secure the acceptance of his prayers; it is through her intervention that spiritual blessings are expected.  But the instinctive feeling of the heart is that whoever discharges this office – not typically, as the Jewish High Priest, but in reality and truth – must be without sin; whoever appears before God for us, in the court of heaven, cannot need supplication for himself.  This feeling Scripture satisfies by revealing its appropriate object: “Such an High Priest became us who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (Heb. 7:26): when His functions are transferred to another, the latter naturally becomes invested with His prerogatives.

§ 38.  Original Sin as the Transmission of Guilt – Pelagian Controversy

      But how does this inherent tendency in man’s nature come into existence?  Why is it found in all men?  The explanation which Scripture gives, so far as it gives any, is that it is a transmitted evil, transmitted from father to son in the way of natural propagation; Adam after, and in consequence of, his fall, being the first link in the chain, the head and source of the universal depravation.  And so we affirm that “it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam” (Art. ix.).

      The passages which add this element to our previous knowledge are not numerous; but they are sufficiently plain.  When Adam is said to have begotten a son in his own likeness and after his image (Gen. 5:3), the idea of propagation from father to son is prominent; and of what character the likeness propagated was we may infer from the circumstances that before Adam fell he had no son at all, and even from the form of expression; not in the image of God (chap. 1:27), but in his own image he begat Seth.  David traces his inherent sinfulness to his having been born of human parents (Ps. 51:5).  But the principal passage is Rom. 5:12: “By one man sin entered into the world.”  This can hardly mean merely that Adam was the first of human beings to sin, but rather that through him the noxious element found entrance into a world hitherto free from it; and having thus entered, it affected all his posterity; the proof of which is that death, the penalty of sin, “passed upon all men,” whether actual sinners or not.  If the effect were produced simply by the imitation of Adam, it would apply only to actual sinners, since they alone are capable of such imitation; and then death should have been confined to them.  Since the fact is otherwise, as the case of infants proves, some other connection with Adam must be understood; and none other is conceivable but that of natural descent; which, in fact, embraces every individual of the human race, the infant of a day old as well as the adult.  To the same effect are our Lord’s words, John 3:6: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh”; that is, the unregenerate nature comes into being through natural birth.  An indirect proof, but of a cogent character, is furnished by the miracle of the Incarnation: if Christ alone was to be without sin and yet born of woman, this could only be effected by interrupting the chain of propagation from an earthly father.  More ought not to be extracted from these passages than they contain, but, on the other hand, not less.  Taken by themselves they do not explain the precise nature of the taint transmitted; nor whether the soul, the proper subject of sin, is the vehicle of transmission, or the body alone; nor do they affirm that all men being in Adam were parties to his sin; nor that the guilt of it is imputed to mankind: but they do imply that we are what we are by reason of our natural descent from Adam, or, in other words, that the depravation of our nature is hereditary.

      As soon, however, as Christian speculation directed itself to this subject it was confronted with great difficulties.  Can the corrupt tendency which we inherit from Adam be called sin in any proper sense of the word?  If guilt is to be connected with sin, it seems essential that it should be voluntary, the result of an act of the will; but here this element seems wanting.  Without his own consent an individual is born into the world, and finds himself impeded in his ascent heavenwards by a natural infirmity; and he is told that this is in itself sinful, and “deserving of God’s wrath and condemnation,” (Art. ix.).  Is it not rather a misfortune, like being born blind, or lame? and does it not rather palliate, than the reverse, the actual sin which necessarily follows from it; as congenital blindness or lameness is a valid excuse for omissions of duty which would be culpable if the organs or limbs were in a sound condition?  And this indeed is the mystery of original sin.

      The Eastern Church, to whose taste theological questions, in the strict sense of the word, were more congenial, aimed at little preciseness of language on this subject.  The general tendency of its teaching was to extenuate the effects of the Fall, and to make man the arbiter of his own destiny; a partial truth, indeed, everywhere presupposed in Scripture, but when exclusively dwelt upon liable to lead to error.  It is not surprising then to find expressions in many of the most distinguished Fathers of that Church, such as Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom, and even Athanasius himself, which bear a Pelagian aspect, though it would be unjust to ascribe to them any deliberate approval of Pelagianism as a system.  Origen attenuated the whole doctrine of an inherited taint from Adam by his theory of the preexistence of souls, which, according to him, were already sinful before they came into the world.  J. Damascenus, in his systematic treatise, “De Fide Orthodoxa,” avoids the subject altogether.  It was to the Western Church that Providence assigned the task of supplying this omission; but even in it the doctrine only gradually assumed a definite shape.  Tertullian, to whom we owe the phrase vitium originis, speaks of a corruption of nature “which is another nature”; yet the well-known passage of this author, dissuading from infant baptism, contrasts strongly with Augustine’s doctrine, one of whose principal arguments for original sin is founded upon this practice.  On the whole, however, the great writers of the Latin Church deliver a clear testimony on the real deterioration of man’s nature, and its connection with the Fall.  Augustine, in his work against Julian the Pelagian, was able to produce a long series of eminent Fathers – Irenaeus, Cyprian, Ambrose, Hilary – of whose meaning there could be no doubt, and by whom he was himself anticipated in many of his favourite arguments.  Whether he was equally successful in proving Chrysostom and Gregory to be on his side may admit of doubt.  Things were in this state – the doctrine substantially held, but not yet reduced to form – when Pelagius, or Morgan, a native of Britain, and Caelestius, his disciple, about A.D. 404, put forth a series of propositions in which is contained the system known by the name of Pelagianism.  According to Augustine they were as follows: that Adam was created mortal, and would have died whether he had fallen or not; that the sin of Adam injured himself only, and not the human race; that the Law is a means of salvation as well as the Gospel; that before the coming of Christ there existed men without sin; that newly born infants are in the same state in which Adam was before his fall; that neither through the death and sin of Adam does the race die, nor through the resurrection of Christ does it rise again.  These opinions were condemned in several Councils (Carthage, Milevis, Ephesus); but no authoritative statements, such as those relating to the Godhead or the Person of Christ, were promulgated on the subject.  But soon afterwards the controversy called Augustine into the field; that mighty champion of Divine truth, whose influence is to this day felt throughout the Christian Church, and to whom the Reformed Churches in particular look back as their spiritual progenitor.

      Pelagianism was rather a tendency than a distinct heresy, and in fact it did not issue in any formal schism.  It is simply the Christianity of human nature, or that reconstruction of the Gospel, scheme which approves itself to natural reason and superficial worldly observation; hence its constant reappearance in the Church, and its affinity with the Arminian and Unitarian systems.  All that was mysterious and inexplicable in the actual state of man, and in the statements of Scripture respecting it, was eliminated: and nothing remained but what was trite, and met the eye, or what flattered the pride of the human heart.  Of the propositions above stated, the second, fifth, and sixth were obviously directed against the Church doctrine that in Adam mankind, in some sense, fell, and that infants are born with a corruption of nature which is the source of actual sin, and which renders them objects of God’s displeasure.  And from the remarks previously made it will be seen that these are precisely the features of the doctrine which are difficult to explain or defend.

      The merits of Augustine as an opponent of these pernicious tenets – for pernicious they were, notwithstanding their apparent solicitude for the moral attributes of Deity – may be briefly summed up; he exposes, with admirable force, their contrariety to Scripture, but seems less successful in reconciling his own explanations with our natural notions of equity.  He insists upon the texts cited in the foregoing section, and especially on 2 Cor. 5:14 (from which it is doubtful whether he could extract the meaning he wishes); but when the Pelagian asks him to explain how sin can be properly ascribed to those (infants) who neither could actually sin, nor will to sin, he is obliged to fall back either upon a mystery, or upon the explanation that the voluntariness of Adam’s sin supplies the lack of that element in original sin; which is evidently in itself not a satisfactory explanation.  The fact of an original deterioration of nature, not fully removed even in the regenerate, he rightly infers from Rom. 7:14–25, but still fails to connect the idea of guilt with it.  And his whole argument from the existence of “concupiscence,” dominant in the natural, kept under but not extinct in the regenerate man, seems to labour under a defect.  S. Paul affirms in that passage that sin was at one time “dead” in him (verse 8), a mere latent potentiality, and this is properly original sin: the “lust” or “concupiscence” of which he proceeds to speak, and which he traces to the provocative operation of the law (verse 7), seems another thing, rather the effect of original sin than that sin itself.  A slumbering concupiscence hardly conveys an intelligible meaning, any more than in philosophy a quiescent force.  Augustine argues, with truth, that what even the regenerate have to struggle against must be sinful: that it did not, and could not, exist in Paradise; with less discrimination perhaps, that the particular form of it which he has in view cannot now be disjoined from the commanded, and in itself holy, act of procreation; in short, that “it hath of itself the nature of sin” (Art. ix.); but the question still remains, Is he not rather explaining a fruit of original sin than this very sin itself?  Does he carry his analysis back far enough so as to reach the dark, quiescent ground of which all forms of concupiscence are but manifestations, intermediate between it and the actual sin?  The great theologian, in fact, dwells almost exclusively on the positive aspect of original sin, whereas its real character is rather negative: it acts like a weight, or a drag, rather than like a stimulant; the operation of which is not felt at all in the unregenerate state, because the whole man moves under its influence, but of which the man immediately becomes conscious, as S. Paul did, when the law of the Spirit of life frees him from its uncontested mastery.  He becomes conscious of it as being “sore let and hindered” in his upward aspirations, as clogged with a weight which impedes his free motions, and causes him to fall behind in the race (Heb. 12:1); it is a pull downwards which, like gravity, acts steadily, even when conscious concupiscence may be absent.  And in proportion as it is seen in this its true nature, it becomes difficult to connect with it the idea of voluntariness, which reason seems to make an essential element of sin.  A defect which belongs to the nature as distinguished from individuals seems removed from the ground of personality and free choice: nature and necessity are convertible terms; and it seems as if we can as little connect the idea of guilt with what belongs to the human race as such as we can deem a beast of prey culpable on account of the savage dispositions with which it came into the world.

      It was obviously necessary, if the Pelagian was to be met effectively, that the doctrine of propagation should receive an extension of meaning, and mankind be brought into a still closer connection with the first man.  And Scripture seems to warrant such an extension.  For it not only declares, as we have seen, that by one man sin entered into the world, but further, that “all men sinned” (in him, as the context seems to require); that the “judgment was by one to condemnation” (of the whole); that “by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners”; that “in Adam all die” (Rom. 5:12, 16, 19; Cor. 15:22).  It seems implied in such passages as these not merely that sin entered the world through Adam, but that when Adam sinned all mankind, in some sense, sinned in him, and thus contracted guilt.  In fact they contain the rudiments of the theory of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity, with which Augustine’s name is especially associated, and which from him passed into the received teaching of the Western Church.  This theory he had already virtually enunciated when he attempted to secure the element of voluntariness in original sin by making Adam’s will the will of the race; but, in the progress of the Pelagian controversy his language became more definite, and the theory more complete.  Not that he was really the originator of it, for it is found in the writings of many of his predecessors, and he takes care to appeal to them in support of his own statements; but in his hands it first received systematic treatment, and a pointed application to the existing heresy.  This latter considered mankind as an aggregate of independent atoms, affecting each other only in the way of teaching or example; not as an organized whole, propagating itself along with its fundamental characteristics.  Each man comes on the stage of life free to stand or fall; and though placed in a disadvantageous position from the prevalence of evil in the world, a fact which cannot be denied, not otherwise incapacitated from working out his salvation.  Such a doctrine is not only inconsistent with Scripture, but with the analogy of nature.  No individual, at least in the case of civilized man, comes into the world otherwise than as a member of a community, which is distinguished from other communities by laws, customs, a national life, and a national temperament of its own; in the weal or the woe of the community he necessarily bears a part; its peculiarities are stamped upon him Races, nations, thus propagate themselves, and maintain a corporate life while individuals come and go.  No branch of a tree exists independently, or derives its nature from itself; no tree is a mere collection of branches; but an organized body, with a common nature or quality, which pervades the whole.  The Augustinian theory is merely the same fact applied to the spiritual condition of mankind.  We were all in Adam, Augustine says, as Levi was in the loins of his father Abraham (Heb. 7:9), and we all sinned in Adam; that is, his sin became, in some sense, ours, even as the righteousness of Christ is laid to the account of those who believe upon Him (Rom. 5:19).  Not only Adam’s sinful nature (the consequence of his fall), but Adam’s guilt (reatus), is transmitted by natural propagation, or, as Augustine calls it “contagion,” to his posterity.  Mankind is viewed as a whole, of which Adam was both the physical head and the moral representative: if he had remained upright, the advantage would have redounded to the whole, and in like manner his fall was the fall of the whole.  The actual transgression of Adam, Augustine argues, is indeed a bygone thing, but not its guilt, and the corruption of nature consequent upon it.  A crime committed is past, but the effect of it may remain; and though the crime could not have been committed without an exercise of will, the effect may continue apart from, and even against the will, as in the remorse which the criminal experiences.  And, indeed, it is true that a sin once committed may perpetuate itself in many ways long after the act has become a thing of the past; as bodily diseases, the result of a parent’s sin, and even corrupt moral dispositions, often, as observation proves, becomes hereditary, and exist in the descendants long after the original author has passed away.

      But Augustine does not stop even here.  In order effectually to connect the idea of guilt with original sin, he holds the latter to be in a real sense the penalty of sin, according to the principle, Peccatum poena peccati; so that the newly born infant not merely shares in Adam’s guilt, but also in the punishment thereof; which in Adam was the forfeiture of original righteousness, or original sin.  In Adam the depravation of his nature was strictly a punishment, because he sinned voluntarily; and in his posterity it bears the same character.  The idea of imputation here reaches its climax: mankind is so identified with the first man that its spiritual condition is a positive and not merely a natural penalty of the fact of connection.  When, however, Augustine attempts to establish this principle (Peccatum poena peccati) from Scripture, he is compelled to confine himself to cases of actual sin, in which no doubt it holds good.  He refers to the Apostle’s statement that because the Gentiles worshipped idols, therefore God gave them up to uncleanness (Rom. 1:24); and so the latter was both a sin itself, and also the punishment for a previous sin.  Saul, he observes, was both unrighteous himself, and also a token of God’s displeasure against Israel (“I gave thee a king in my anger,” Hos. 13:11).  Pharaoh’s hardness of heart was the punishment of his previous impiety.  And indeed, in the case of an adult, in whom original and actual sin are so intermingled that separation is impossible, the former may be conceived of as imbibing a quality which really belongs to the latter.  Original sin, however, should never be considered apart from the case of infants, in whom its specific nature is primarily to be sought for; and to affirm that infants, as, vicarious criminals, inherit it as a punishment not for their own but for Adam’s sin, was needlessly to complicate the question, and to put more into the statements of Scripture on the subject than they warrant.

      The use which Augustine makes of the practice of infant baptism to establish his conclusions is well known.  And as against the Pelagians it was an effective argumentum ad hominem.  For they too approved of infant baptism; and the argument was difficult to meet, Why do you baptize infants?  Since they have no actual sin, it can only be for the remission of original.  The Pelagian replied that it was necessary to secure for them the highest measure of bliss, the vision of God; but he failed to dislodge his adversary from his position.  As a general argument, however, it will hardly bear the stress placed upon it.  The point was to prove that in a newly born infant there is something which may be called sin; the reasoning was not valid that because the Church, on however good general grounds, adopted a modification of the original ordinance of baptism, this proved the fact, or explained the mystery; at best it was but a proof of the Church’s belief on the subject.  And this will appear plainer from the circumstance that Augustine argues from the accompaniments of infant baptism, common in that age but abandoned in our Church, as strongly as he does from the ordinance itself.  What means, he asks the Pelagian, the “exsufflation,” the “exorcism,” which we perform over infants at their baptism, if not that they are thereby delivered from the powers of darkness?  To what extent infant baptism, and much more exsufflation and exorcism, can produce certain warranty of Scripture for their use, and still more for their alleged effects, so as to bear the weight laid upon them in this controversy, is a question which does not seem to have occurred to him.

      It was not to be expected that Augustine’s opponents would fail to charge him with Manicheism, probably with an oblique allusion to his early aberrations.  If man is introduced into the world with sin, whence, asked the Pelagian, can that sin have proceeded?  Not from God, for He cannot be the author of sin; not from baptized and regenerate parents, for how can an unclean thing come from a holy? it remains that it must spring from a source independent of God, an evil principle co-eternal with God.  But the answer was at hand.  It rests upon the principle to which Augustine, as we have seen (§ 22), attaches so much importance, that evil has no independent existence, and is always found cleaving to something good, as the shadow to the substance.  Every nature, and therefore man’s nature, considered merely as such, comes from God, and is good; but to a nature good in itself evil may become attached, as in the case of Satan, and of Adam in paradise.  The faculty of will is a gift of God, and therefore good; but it may become as in Satan and the unregenerate, an evil will, and bring forth corresponding fruits.  In like manner, wedlock is a Divine institution and in itself holy; but the procreation of children affected with an original taint is an evil, which in consequence of Adam’s fall, has become connected with it: the parents transmit this evil, but they cannot transmit the gift of grace by which they themselves are regenerate, for such gift is not transmissible.  If the Pelagian argument were valid, and evil can only spring from evil as an independent substance, then children born in adultery must, by reason of their evil origin, be themselves evil; whereas the Pelagian himself exempts them, no less than children born in holy wedlock, from original sin. Augustine triumphantly retorts the objection on his opponent, and proves that the latter rather than he himself is a promoter of Manicheism.  Evil exists; if it cannot attach itself to what is good so far as that good is a creature of God, it must spring from evil, evil which exists as an independent nature; which is exactly what the Manichean wishes to see admitted.

      This may be the appropriate place to notice Augustine’s judgment respecting infants who die in infancy.  Since they bear the guilt of Adam’s sin, and also derive from Adam an inherent corruption of nature, these disqualifications for the kingdom of heaven must be removed; and they can only be removed by baptism.  Baptized infants then dying in infancy are certainly saved, but if they die unbaptized, it goes hard with them.  Admitted into the kingdom of heaven they cannot be; the most we can hope for is that their punishment will be comparatively light.  Such was the force of theory on a subject on which it is impossible to frame a theory; for Scripture is comparatively silent on the case of infants; how far the work of Christ affects them; what their regeneration is, if the word may be applied to them, and by what means it is effected; whether they will rise from the dead as infants, and other like questions which may be raised.  The humanity of later ages allowed natural feeling to prevail over theory, and piously believed all infants who died in infancy, whether baptized or not, to be safe in the bosom of their Father and their God.  It is to be noted, too, that though the Traducianist hypothesis evidently falls in better with his views, Augustine refrains from making use of it, deterred probably by the difficulties on either side of the question; on the one (Traducianism), of conceiving how an immaterial substance can be propagated, on the other (Creationism), of conceiving how God could create a soul pure, and then consign it to a defiled receptacle, sure to impart a taint to it.

      Pelagianism, vanquished in argument, held its ground as a tendency, and the hierarchical spirit of the middle ages, as in later times, instinctively leant towards it in preference to the Augustinian system.  It was rather, however, as regards the nature of original sin and its extent that Augustine’s teaching was departed from, than on the point of imputation; which continued, with some modifications, to be the received doctrine.  Anselm professes himself unable to understand how the sin of Adam can be so propagated as to render infants as liable to punishment for it as if they had committed it themselves.  His own theory is as follows: Adam sinned, in one point of view, as a person, in another as man (i.e., as human nature which at that time existed in him alone); but since Adam and humanity could not be separated, the sin of the person necessarily affected the nature.  This nature is what Adam transmitted to his posterity, and transmitted it such as his sin had made it; burdened with a debt which it could not pay, robbed of the righteousness, with which God had originally invested it; and in every one of his descendants this impaired nature makes the persons sinners.  Yet not in the same degree sinners as Adam was, for the latter sinned both as human nature, and as a person, while infants (newly born) sin only so far as they possess the nature; in confirmation of which view he cites, according to his interpretation of it, Rom. 5:14 (“them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression”).  The fiction of infants having the actual eating of the apple imputed to them (for Adam’s human nature as distinguished from himself did not eat it) is thus avoided, and it is their own mutilated or depraved nature that shuts them out from the kingdom of heaven.  The point on which he is not quite distinct is whether the defective nature in itself makes them sinners, or only because it necessarily (if they live) leads to actual sin.  But probably the former is his meaning.

      The works of this great theologian on this as on other points exercised a vast influence on his successors.  Accordingly his view is substantially reproduced by T. Aquinas.  “All men,” he says, “who are born of Adam may be considered as one man, so far forth as the nature which they inherit from their first parent is one: as in civil matters all the men who belong to a community are considered as one body, and the whole community as one man.  So the many men derived from Adam are, as it were, members of one body.  In the human body a crime which the hand perpetrates is not ascribed to the hand alone, but to the man of whom the hand is but a single member.  Original sin, in like manner, is not the sin of this or that person, except so far forth as he inherits a nature from Adam, and therefore it is called a sin of nature, as e.g. in Ephes. 2:3 (“We were by nature children of wrath”).”  The bold realism by which the nature of man abstracted from the person is made both by Anselm and Thomas susceptible of guilt is apparent; but so is the sagacity by which the weak point of the Augustinian theory is evaded, or concealed.

      The Protestant Confessions, with one exception, content themselves with simply tracing the depravation of human nature to Adam’s fall, and dwell principally on the nature and extent of that depravation; as might be expected, for this latter was the real point of debate between the Reformers and their opponents.  Our own Article (ix.) is an example of this reserve.  We learn from Sarpi that at the Council of Trent lively disputes arose on the question; and particularly that Ambrose Catharinus delivered a long address in which he stated his objections to the decisions about to be promulgated, and propounded a theory of his own.  Concupiscence and the privation of original righteousness, he contended, were in Adam rather the consequences of original sin than that sin itself; and that only which was sin in Adam can be sin in us.  How, then, do we derive sin from Adam?  A federal compact had been entered into between him as the head of the human race and God, by which his obedience was to be the obedience, and his transgression the transgression, of the whole ; and when he fell the whole consequently became involved in guilt.  Original sin, therefore, consists merely in imputation.  But this solution obviously fails: for the question at once occurs, Was Adam commissioned by his posterity to enter into this contract?  Was their consent previously obtained to it?  If not, it is difficult to see how the breach of it should involve them in guilt.  Nevertheless, Catharinus’s theory only represents the general tendency of Romanism, which is to limit the corruption of our nature as much as possible to a mere imputation.  Yet the assembled Fathers hesitated to endorse it, Scripture and the main current of ecclesiastical tradition being in their way.  The decree, as finally settled, admitted that original sin is not only such by imputation, but is something inherent, a fomes, or material, from which actual sin proceeds.  And this appears to be the received doctrine of the Romish theologians.

      What then, on the whole, is the result of these controversial discussions?  Pretty much, it must be confessed, to leave the matter where Scripture leaves it; a mystery, which, though it may not be denied or concealed, remains such in spite of all attempts to explain it.  The doctrine of imputation, in some sense, appears to be taught in Scripture; and even they who contend against it as supposed to be commonly held are obliged to invent a substitute of their own.  Thus Jeremy Taylor, who in his treatise on this subject perilously approaches the Tridentine teaching, after setting forth strongly the difficulties in the way of supposing that infants (dying in infancy) are condemned to perdition for a sin which they did not consent to, devotes a chapter to prove that “Adam’s sin is in us no more than an imputed sin.” [Further Explic.  § 2.]  In what sense?  “His sin is reckoned to us so as to bring evil upon us, because we were born of him, and consequently put into the same natural state where he was left after his sin.”  But this is no imputation at all, but, as Taylor remarks, a law of God’s natural government, viz., that children often suffer for the faults of their parents, while no one would think of calling them guilty of those faults.  The children of a spendthrift father do not enjoy the temporal advantages they otherwise might have done; this is to them a misfortune; but can their father’s sin be said, in any proper sense, to be imputed to them?  Not unless some further and deeper connection is established between them and their father, which is the very thing which Scripture does seem to establish between Adam and mankind.  In short, are not imputation and guilt correlative terms?  The difficulty does not seem removed by Taylor’s modification of the doctrine; perhaps is irremovable by any such expedient.  Anselm is a safer guide; and if his theory is accepted it may serve to explain, not indeed the mystery, but such statements on the subject as that of Art. ix, that what is in every infant by reason of his descent from Adam is “deserving of God’s wrath and damnation”.  Is it not, in fact, the nature and not the person that is regarded in all such statements?  Sin may be considered abstractedly from the person in whom it resides: in its own nature it is αμαρτία, or a missing of the mark, and ανομία, or contrariety to the Divine law.  In whomsoever, therefore, it is found, even as a latent potentiality, it must in itself be an object of God’s displeasure; but it does not follow that the person must be so, still less that the sentence on sin will in such a case be actually inflicted.  The fomes, or tendency, which if the infant lives will assuredly give birth to actual sin, cannot in God’s sight be a thing indifferent; but as it is only an objective guiltiness (to which the will has not consented, because the subject is incapable of will), it may be covered from God’s sight by an objective atonement (not appropriated by an act of will); so that the infant himself, if he dies as an infant, is not, and never has been, an object of God’s wrath.  But when the personality, as in adults, becomes developed, the case is different.  The inherited taint inevitably produces its fruits; in the language of Anselm, the nature corrupts the person; it is no longer possible to distinguish between original and actual sin; “Non inviti,” says Augustine, “tales sumus”; and the whole man is guilty.  By the work of regeneration this acquiescence of the fettered will is broken up, and the man becomes conscious of the law of sin in his members (Rom. 7:23), and successfully resists it; it still remains, however, as a perpetual drag upon him, and will do so until redemption is complete.  His consciousness of this tendency is not merely that of misfortune but of culpability, and he himself assents to the verdict of Scripture that even before original sin could issue in actual it was, in itself, properly sin (Rom. 7:7–11).  And yet it may fairly be maintained that in no case does original sin, considered in and by itself, carry with it the penalty of eternal condemnation.

      That all difficulties thus disappear would be too much to affirm and it is not surprising to find a theologian like J. Müller, dissatisfied with the traditionary explanations, resorting to others of his own.  It may be doubted, however, whether the one he has chosen will find general acceptance.  He can account for the combination of a natural, and therefore so far necessary, evil tendency in man with the sense of guilt on account of it – both of them facts which Scripture and experience establish – only on the hypothesis of a voluntary fall of souls before they came into their present state of existence. [Lehre der Sünde, ii. c. 4.]  Such a fall, he contends, and the faint recollection of it as a voluntary one – according to the Platonic notion that all knowledge is recollection – are sufficient to account for the facts.  The speculation is ingenious; but as Scripture is silent on any such preexistent fall, it is but a speculation.  It is better to confess our inability to explain or reconcile things which we are obliged to admit than to indulge in theories which merely float in the air.

§ 39.  Original Sin as the Corruption of Nature – Pelagian Controversy.

      The extent of the depravation of man’s nature through the Fall is a different question from that respecting the mode of its transmission or the guiltiness attaching to it; and it was the one which occupied by far the larger space in the controversy on the subject between the Reformers and their opponents.  It has been already observed that the tendency of the Eastern Church was to take a mild view of man’s present condition; and even Augustine, in controversy with the Pelagians, insisted rather upon the fact of original sin than upon the degree in which it affects our nature.  The Pelagians held, as we have seen, that newly born infants are in the same state in which Adam was before his fall, and that by the Law salvation may be obtained as well as by the Gospel; in other words, that there is no real depravation of nature in man as he is.  Augustine could not prove the existence of original sin without at the same time impugning these tenets; but his line of argument did not lead him to make them a subject of special examination; and whether as a consequence of this, or from the prevailing tendency of the Christianity of the middle ages, they survived, in a modified form, their author; and one of the first tasks of Luther and his coadjutors was to rescue the truth on this point from the Pelagian glosses of the schoolmen, and to bring the doctrine of the Church into harmony with Scripture and experience.

      It became an admitted doctrine of the schools, contrary to that of Augustine, that the original righteousness of Adam in Paradise consisted in certain supernatural gifts of grace, which were added to his essential nature, and which might be withdrawn, leaving that nature in no worse a position than it was when created.  This doctrine appears in its least objectionable form in T. Aquinas, who so closely connects the superadded gift with the creation of man, that they can only be separated in idea, and thus secures to himself the power of making original sin something more than a mere imputation.  But Duns Scotus, his rival, adopted it without reserve; in which, indeed, he could plead the authority of Anselm, who reduces the notion of original sin to a mere privative one.  The question came under discussion at the Council of Trent; and the Dominicans and Franciscans, as was usually the case, took opposite sides.  The former relied on Thomas, the latter on Anselm; and the decree ultimately agreed upon seems of the nature of a compromise between the two.  Original sin is declared to have passed, in some sense, from Adam to his posterity; but it is also declared to be not merely forgiven but eradicated in and by baptism, and that the “concupiscence,” which is admitted to remain in the baptized, is not properly sin, but is called so because it proceeds from, and leads to, sin.  What is it then in the unbaptized?  The Council is prudently silent on this point; for it is evident that a thing which is not sin in the baptized, and yet is common to them and the unbaptized, cannot be sin even in the latter; which, in truth, is the doctrine of Bellarmine, who does not scruple to affirm that “the state of man after the Fall differs from that of Adam in puris naturalibus (i.e. as created) only as deprivation differs from nakedness; and that human nature is no worse, if original guilt be put out of view, nor does it labour under greater ignorance and infirmity, than when first created, and before the addition of the supernatural gift.”  The utmost that can be allowed is that it suffers from a certain “languor,” or debility, which, however, does not interfere with its power of meriting a bestowal of grace (grace of congruity).  This was the doctrine, with its consequences in the practical system of the Church, which the Reformers found commonly accepted, and which led to the strong counter-statements which we find in the Protestant Confessions.  Man, as in the Pelagian system, became practically his own Saviour; the statements of Scripture respecting the radical nature of the disease were set aside, or explained away; superficial distinctions were drawn between venial and mortal sin, while the deep root of all sin lay undisturbed; and, as a consequence, the necessity of the atoning work of Christ was proportionably impaired, or its application made dependent on the interposition of the Church in her sacramental ordinances.  For it is evident that if man can save himself, the work of Christ assumes a casual character; i.e. it may be necessary to one and not to another; it is not necessary to the race.

      The Confession of Augsburg declares that “since the Fall, all men are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence; and that this defect is truly sin, and issues in eternal death in the case of those who are not regenerated by baptism and the Holy Spirit.”  The Papal confutation replied that to be without fear and trust in God is a description that applies only to actual sin; which drew from Melanchthon the further explanation that it is the innate power to love God, and not merely the act, which is denied to the natural man; and that concupiscence forms part of the definition because when man is unable to rise to communion with God, he necessarily concentrates his affections on lower objects, himself and the world.  Since original righteousness was natural to man and not an additional gift of grace, to be deprived of it necessarily involved a change, which the word “corruption” was chosen to describe.  This word properly means not annihilation but alteration; a deterioration of the form in which a nature reaches its ideal.  In the present case it means that though the substance of man remains the same, his nature, through the Fall, has lost its original form, and become, in fact, another nature.  And the property of this other nature is to be ignorant of God, to be averted from Him, to place self on the throne which God ought to occupy, to act, when it becomes active, in opposition to His holy law; in short, to be in itself sinful, which is what the doctrine of Rome persistently denies.  And it is evident from what has already been remarked (§ 37) that nothing short of this view of man’s unregenerate state satisfies the statements of Scripture respecting it.  The natural and the spiritual man; the flesh and the Spirit; the first Adam and his seed and the second Adam and his seed; are contrasts which pervade the whole teaching of S. Paul, and to express which the ideals of “debility” or partial deterioration, are inadequate.  The nature of man itself needs to be re-formed, its corruption to be reversed; which is what Scripture means by the new birth, or the new creation.  And thus are to be understood the strong expressions which occur in some of the Protestant Confessions.  “Even if man,” says the “Lutheran Formula Concordiae,” “should never think, speak, or do anything wrong, nevertheless his nature and person are sinful; that is, infected, tainted, and totally corrupt before God, with original sin, which, like a spiritual leprosy, lurks in the deepest recesses of the heart.”  They represent the reaction from that type of doctrine which would make original sin to consist merely in the imputation of Adam’s transgression, or in the deprivation of a superadded righteousness (carentia justitiae originalis). And no doubt the pendulum in its swing may have gone somewhat too far in the opposite direction.

      They are certainly not to be understood, as Möhler would understand them, viz., as implying either that human nature has lost one of its essential faculties, the capability of knowing God, a positive quality of evil taking its place; or that original sin has become of the essence of human nature.  The word “faculty” may be used in a twofold sense, to signify either capacity or power; the brute has no capacity for religion, man in his worst estate has; but the capacity may be in abeyance.  Fallen man is still a reasonable creature, possesses conscience, retains, in some sense, the image of God (§ 30); nothing essential to human nature has been lost by the Fall.  What is wanting is the proper direction of his faculties; and every one of them suffers from this perversion.  Like the word “faculty,” the word “integrity” admits of a double sense; it may mean either that the sum total of the parts is complete, or that each of the parts is in its normal condition.  It is in the latter sense, not the former, that the Protestant doctrine of original sin denies the integrity of human nature.  And thus is to be understood the quam longissime of our Art. ix.  Man is gone from original righteousness as far as he possibly can consistently with his remaining, in all essential points, man.  The spiritual leprosy has infected all his faculties, but destroyed none; sin is an inseparable accident, but still an accident, of his nature.  The Protestant Churches had occasion to insist upon this, for, in truth, some of their teachers had spoken incautiously on the subject.  Flacius, about A.D. 1560, had maintained against Strigel and others that original sin has become of the substance of man, and in his “Clavis Scripturae,” a work otherwise of great merit, he openly defended this proposition.  The question had been long ago fully discussed by Augustine, and determined as only it can be, that all evil, even in the devil, presupposes an originally good nature of which it is the depravation; that it is a fault (vitium) not an essence, an accident not a substance; and that fallen man is still, as regards the essential constituents of human nature, what he was when created.  If sin has actually become the substance of man, how can man expect a future state of bliss wherein sin shall no longer exist; that is, wherein he shall exist deprived of a part of his essence?  From such a doctrine the Lutheran Church took care to dissociate itself.  “Although,” says the Form. Conc., “in our present state we cannot visibly separate between our nature in itself and original sin in itself, yet the nature or substance of fallen man, the man himself in whom original sin dwells, and this sin, are not one and the same thing; just as in a leper the man and his leprosy are distinct things.  A distinction must be observed between our nature, as it is created and preserved by God, and the original sin which is an accident of it.”  It remarks, very justly, that the opposite opinion interferes with the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation; for if sin is of the essence of our nature, Christ either did not assume that nature, inasmuch as He had no sin, or if He did He must have had sin; either alternative leading to error.  But while this error is repudiated, all the Protestant Churches maintain, as against Rome, that original sin – the fomes as the Council of Trent calls it – is not merely privative in its nature, but positively evil; issuing, unless regenerating grace destroys its dominion, in an alienation from God which is not the less real even where it does not exhibit itself in open violations of the Divine law.

      This may be an appropriate place to consider what is the full import of the sentence pronounced upon Adam in Gen. 3.  It has already been observed (§ 35) that, on the surface, the narrative seems only to speak of the death of the body (including the temporal inflictions which culminate in it); but this is far from exhausting the meaning of the word “death,” as it is applied in the later Scriptures.  In the Old Testament it signifies very commonly Scheol, or the place of departed spirits, which even to the pious Hebrew conveyed the idea of desolateness and inactivity; a shadowy existence, not unlike that which Homer assigns to his heroes after their departure from this life (Ps. 6:5, Isa. 38:18).  In the New Testament it is used in a spiritual sense, to denote the state of the unregenerate man; as when the Apostle reminds the Ephesians and Colossians that they were once dead in sins (Ephes. 2:1, Col. 2:13); or, in the parable, the returning prodigal is represented as having been, in his unrepentant state, dead (Luke 15:24).  And this meaning is to be distinguished from that which the word bears in several passages of the Apocalypse; in which “the second death” closes this dispensation, in the final condemnation of the wicked.  Now what is the idea which the expression “spiritual death” suggests?  Not merely that this state is the consequence, or punishment, of sin; but that in itself it is a state loathsome, and without power of self-recovery.  Sin is the death of the soul, and so it must have been in Adam’s case, but for the regenerating grace which the Church piously believes to have been immediately vouchsafed to our first parents.  And what was the result of sin in him we must suppose is transmitted to those “naturally engendered of his offspring”; so that they too, antecedently to the new birth, are dead in sin.  What description could have been chosen more calculated to convey to us the fearful depravation of nature and the spiritual helplessness of the natural man, consequent on Adam’s sin?  The nature is not merely “wounded,” or debilitated, but in such a condition that it naturally engenders corruption; and it must remain in this condition, separated from the source of spiritual life as in natural death the soul is separated from the body, unless the quickening word of Divine power approaches, and the dead hear the voice of the Son of God, and hearing live (John 5:25).  Yet this language of Scripture must not be pressed to its (apparently) logical conclusions, without taking into account other statements which modify, or perhaps it would be more correct to say restrict, its sphere.  If unregenerate man is dead in sins, it may be argued, he must be supposed incapable of moral virtue, of either approving it in others, or striving after it himself; but to maintain this seems inconsistent with the facts of history, and the common judgment of mankind.  Whence sprang the heroic deeds and sentiments of an Aristides, a Camillus, or a Scipio? whence the moral judgments and efforts of philosophers like Plato, or of practical reformers like Socrates?  Whence, in short, the natural tendency of man to coalesce into communities which can only subsist as long as outward crime is restrained, and which, according to the ancient conception of a state, ought to be schools of virtue?  These facts seem to prove not only that sin has not become of the essence of man, but that the corruption of his nature is by no means total.

      Of the difficulty connected with the state of the virtuous heathen, a twofold explanation may be given.  One is, that their good qualities, or the comparative absence of bad ones, did, in fact, proceed from an operation of Divine grace, but not saving grace; grace sufficient to restrain the outbreaks of sin, and to foster the moral virtues necessary to man’s temporal wellbeing.  Every good and perfect gift, we are told, natural therefore as well as spiritual, comes from above (James 1:17); and there is a divine light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world ( John 1:9).  Or it may be said that these virtues are the remains (reliquiae) of the Divine image impressed upon Adam and not quite obliterated by the Fall; by reason of which man still has natural perceptions of right and wrong, and approves of what is right, though he may fail to practice it (video meliora, etc.).  Practically they come to the same thing, viz., that there is a sphere of moral action and even sentiment which belongs even to fallen man, and in which he can display qualities which, in themselves, are deserving of admiration.  This sphere is described in the Protestant Confessions as that of res civiles, or justitia civilis; that is, though of Divine appointment, and so far good, it is of the earth earthy, and is different in kind from the spiritual.  The State, no less than the Church, is an ordinance of God (Rom. 8); and by repressing crime, and giving scope to the moral virtues and affections, of which the heathen proved themselves not destitute, it was, and is, in a real sense, though not in the same sense as the Mosaic law, a schoolmaster to lead to higher things.  There was a dispensation of heathendom as well as of revealed religion; and God never wholly severed the connection between Himself and man.  And the difference between a Camillus and a Catiline was, in this lower sphere, immense.  But none of these virtuous faculties, or instincts, or achievements, could, or did, raise man to the higher element of the spiritual life, love to God and true holiness.  They were all vitiated in this point of view by self-love, or the desire of human approbation; they were not, in the specific sense of the words, the fruit of the Holy Spirit; they were splendida vitia, as they have been not inaptly termed.  The tree, Augustine says, bears corresponding fruits: a corrupt tree (the unregenerate heart) may indeed produce the wild fruit of morality, but not the divine fruit of grace.  The natural man possesses the capacity of knowing God – otherwise he would be incapable of redemption – and therefore moral faculties and instincts; and one natural man may be superior to another in moral perception and practice: but none of these things affects the whole condition of the natural man as such in reference to God; which, until regenerating grace transforms it, remains so far totally corrupt.  Scripture by no means ignores the differences that exist on the lower level of moral disposition: of some of the Pharisees and Scribes Christ says that they would neither enter the kingdom of heaven themselves nor permit others to do so (Matt. 23:13), and of another Scribe that he was not far from the kingdom of God (Mark 12:34); yet all were equally outside the kingdom.  In short, the natural moral faculties are active only in reference to the things of this world; they are dead in reference to the life of God in Christ.  It is in a sense thus restricted that the statements of Scripture, and of the Protestant Confessions, on this point are to be taken; but in this restricted sense they only affirm what experience amply proves.

      So deeply has original sin struck its roots in human nature that it continues to exist, and in its proper quality, even in the regenerate (Art. ix.).  This is one of the principal points of difference between the Romish and the Protestant doctrine on this topic.  The Council of Trent, as we have seen, declares that original sin is not merely forgiven, but extirpated in baptism; so that what remains in the baptized has not the nature of sin.  The “concupiscence” which, it is admitted, does remain is nothing but what Adam was affected with before the Fall, when it was restrained by the bridle of superadded grace; this restraining power is now replaced by the grace of baptism, and concupiscence is either brought under a necessary law of nature, or it is reduced to a mere deterioration of nature [This relative deterioration of nature, of which concupiscence is the symptom, is not denied by Bellarmine: only he denies that it is, in itself, sin.  “Non est quaestio inter nos et adversarios, sine humana natura graviter depravata per Adm peccatum.  Id enim libenter fatemur” (De amiss. grat. lib. v. 5).]; nay, it may assume a salutary character as supplying material for the exercise of virtue.  How then does it come from sin? as the Council asserts.  It is not easy to see.  What Adam, still upright, possessed, if transmitted by natural propagation, can hardly be transmitted sin; nor can it well be regarded as the punishment of Adam’s sin when it belongs to the constitution of human nature, and existed before actual sin.  Nor is it less difficult to see why it should lead to sin, as the Council also admits.  Let it be granted that as in Adam so in us it supplies the fomes, or material, out of which, in the absence of restraining grace, sin may spring; still as in Adam it was kept in check by such grace, so it is in us by the restored gift in baptism.  Such are the difficulties in which the Council involved itself in its attempts to transfer the seat of sin from the affections to the outward manifestation, and yet to avoid coming into open collision with Scripture and Christian feeling.

      The Protestant Confessions, our own among the number, hold not only that concupiscence remains in the regenerate, but that in them not less than in the unregenerate it has the nature of sin.  In the unregenerate it is not removed either as regards its guilt or its dominion; and such a state is nothing but what Scripture describes under the terms, “the carnal mind,” “the flesh,” the “old man,” the “natural man”.  In the regenerate the guilt is wholly removed through the merits of Christ, and the dominion broken, but the evil still remains, though no longer as the ruling principle; the conflict between the flesh and the Spirit is experienced even by the Christian, and draws forth from him the daily prayer for forgiveness (Matt. 6:12); the fallen nature is in process of being healed, but the complete cure is not to be expected in this life.  It was the great merit of Augustine to have established this truth, against the Pelagians of his day, on irrefragable evidence of Scripture; and of the Reformation to have recovered it primarily from Scripture, but also from the writings of the great Father, against the Pelagian tendencies of the schoolmen.  There is indeed some little ambiguity in Augustine’s language on the subject, and it may seem doubtful in sundry passages whether he considers concupiscence merely as a penalty of Adam’s sin (malum poena), or as sinful in itself (malum culpa); but on the whole his meaning, as the subject unfolds itself to him, becomes clear.  “The concupiscence of the flesh,” he says, “against which the good Spirit strives” (therefore in the regenerate), “is sin, because it involves rebellion against the law of the mind; it is also the punishment of sin, because it was the fruit of one man’s disobedience; and it is the cause of sin, in case it meets with no resistance.” [Cont. Jul. lib. v. 3.]  Still more distinctly, referring to his statement that though the guilt of concupiscence is remitted in baptism the thing itself remains, [De Nup. i. 25.] “You seem,” he says, “to suppose me to have meant that the nature of concupiscence is in the baptized so changed that it is no longer culpable (soluto reatu quo ipsa rea est), whereas my meaning was that it no longer renders the person culpable; as in the case of homicide if you should hear that it was remitted you would not infer that the crime itself had been pronounced no crime, but that the person who had committed it was absolved.” [Cont. Jul, lib, vi, 27.]  That is, concupiscence even in the regenerate is sin, because its nature is to be contrary to the Divine law; but it does not, when resisted, affect the condition of the believer in the sight of God as a justified man.  And this is precisely the doctrine of the Protestant Churches.

      The great passage of Scripture on which Augustine and his followers relied was Rom. 7:14–25.  S. Paul therein, from his own experience, describes most graphically the conflict which goes on in the regenerate man.  “I am,” he says, “so far as I am not wholly regenerate, carnal, sold under sin; my actual attainments fall short of my aim, and too often I do what I hate. I approve of the requirements of the law as holy, just, and good; I delight in it after the inward man, but though to will is present with me, how to render perfect obedience I find not, for in me, that is my flesh, or carnal nature not yet wholly crucified with Christ, dwells no good thing.  I am conscious of a law, or tendency, in my members, or flesh, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to itself, so that I am compelled to cry out, Oh, wretched man, who shall deliver me from this body of death?  I thank God, that though helpless in myself, I am delivered through the grace of Christ; delivered not from the existence, but from the dominion of the tyrant.  It is therefore no longer I, the redeemed man, that do it, but the sin that dwells in me; it is this and not my emancipated will that produces the disorder.  Nor does the conflict interfere with my position forensically in the sight of God.  So far as I am flesh, indeed, I serve the law of sin, but with the mind, the inner man, I serve the law of God; and walking not after the flesh, but after the Spirit, there is no condemnation to me who am in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1).  This interpretation of the passage being assumed to be the correct one (and there were few dissentient opinions on the subject in the early Church), it expresses the whole of what the Reformers contended for in their controversial statements as against Rome.*

            [*It is a hopeful sign that Augustine’s interpretation of this famous passage, so long considered as untenable, has been revived by commentators of some note, such as Philippi, Delitzsch (Psych. v. 6), Thomasius, and Von Hoffman, referred to by Delitzsch, l.c.  The history of its exegesis would fill a volume; a sketch of it may be found in Tholück’s “Commentary”.  It was no superficial study of it that led to Augustine’s final judgment: “Ego prius eum aliter intellexeram, vel potius non intellexeram: quod mea quaedam illius temporis etiam scripta testantur.  Non mihi enim videbatur Apostolus de se ipso dicere potuisse, ego autem carnalis sum, cum esset spiritualis: et quod captivus duceretur sub lege peccati quae in membris erat ejus.  Ego enim putabam ista dici non posse nisi de iis quos ita haberet carnalis concupiscientia subjugatos. ... Sed postea melioribus et intelligentioribus cessi, vel potius ipsi, quod fatendum est, veritati, ut viderem in illis Apostoli verbis gemitum esse sanctorum contra carnales concupiscentias dimicantium” (Cont. Jul. vi. 23).]

§ 40.  Freedom of the Will – Pelagian Controversy

      From the extent of human corruption as described in the Protestant Confessions naturally follows the impossibility of man’s passing from a state of nature to a state of grace by his own inherent strength, and apart from Divine assistance.  One of the tenets of Pelagius, as Augustine tells us, was “that that cannot be called free will which is not self-sufficient (i.e., self-determining), since each man is able to do, or to abstain from doing, what he pleases; and that our victory (in the spiritual conflict) is not from Divine help, but from the exercise of free will.”  Pelagius did not deny that grace in some sense is necessary to a spiritual change, but Augustine charges him, and justly, with equivocation in the use of the word.  By “grace” Pelagius understood every natural gift of God, e.g. free will itself, and every external aid vouchsafed, such as the precepts of the Divine law; only not a supernatural influence, operating on the heart to sway its affections.  As a corollary, the exercise of free will in a right direction constituted a claim on the Divine assistance, and, as the schoolmen afterwards taught, grace de congruo was its due reward.

      The answer of Augustine was substantially the same as that which has been given by Edwards and others, viz., that Pelagius confounded the faculty of will with its power to act independently of any determining cause.  Fallen man has the faculty of will, as he has other moral and intellectual faculties; and if he is free from external compulsion, since he does not act (like irrational agents) from inward necessity, as, e.g., the plant grows by the necessity of its nature, he must will what he pleases to do.  In this sense every one possesses free will.  But this does not determine the question whether it is in his power to direct his will so that it shall embrace whatever objects may be presented to it; for example, spiritual objects as contrasted with those of an inferior order.  If he serves sin he does it willingly – non inviti tales sumus; and if he serves God he does it willingly: but has he the power to do the one or the other, as he pleases?  Augustine replies in the negative: “Which of us maintains that through the sin of the first man free will has disappeared from the human race?  Liberty, indeed, has disappeared through sin, but that which belonged to Paradise, viz., the liberty of possessing perfect righteousness and with it immortality; on which account human nature needs Divine grace, according to the Lord’s saying, ‘If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be truly free,’ that is, to live holily.  For free will is so far from being in abeyance in the sinner that the essence of his sin consists in his sinning voluntarily, and with a pleasure in it.  It is by free will that men refuse the yoke of righteousness; by the grace of the Saviour alone they become free from that of sin.  Since men, unless made sons of God, do not live a holy life, how can Pelagius ascribe to free will what is not given except by the grace of God, as S. John says, ‘As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God’?  If they reply that they received Him by free will, and then, as a reward, had the privilege of adoption conferred on them, let them say what else to receive Him is but to believe on Him, and what else is to believe on Him but to come to Him; and then let them ponder Christ’s words, ‘No man can come to Me except the Father draw Him.’  He surely is drawn to Christ to whom it is given to believe on Him; whence it follows that to receive the privilege of adoption, to receive Christ, to come to Him, and to believe on Him, are simultaneous; and since to believe on Him is a gift of grace, adoption is so too.  Free will, therefore, cannot merit the privilege, because there is no freedom for good, where the Deliverer has not made free; but in the other case free will does operate, the sinner indulging his sin with a deceptive feeling of pleasure.”  In this passage, which may serve as a specimen of the numerous similar ones in his anti-Pelagian treatises, Augustine, as will be seen, draws a distinction between the abstract faculty of will, which he allows not to be extinct in fallen man, and the agent who wills; and the direction in which the agent wills is determined by the presence, or the absence, of a previous gift of grace, or, in other words, by the answer to the question whether he is regenerate or not.  The unregenerate man is in a state of slavery as regards the objects of his will, and though he sins willingly, he enjoys no real freedom, which he first attains when he comes under the regenerating power of the Holy Ghost.  His meaning will be clearly seen from another passage from the book “De Gratia Christi”: “Pelagius holds that we have a possibility implanted in us by God which, like a fruitful root, may develop itself in either direction, and at the will of the possessor issue either in the blossoms of virtue or the thorns of vice.  He does not perceive that in making one and the same thing the root both of good and evil, he teaches contrary to evangelical truth.  For the Lord says that a good tree cannot produce evil fruit, nor an evil tree good fruit.  Whence, if the two trees, the good and the evil, are two men, a good and an evil one, what is a good man but a man of good will, that is, a tree of good root, and an evil man but a man of evil will, that is, a tree of evil root?  But he becomes a good tree when he receives the grace of God, and an evil tree when he makes himself evil by falling away from the supreme good.”  In other words, antecedently to any discussion respecting the nature or the freedom of the will, a prior question has to be determined, viz., What is the man himself, a πνευματικός or a ψυχικός?  If the latter, however freely he may appear to act, he is an evil tree which can bear nothing but evil fruit; his carnal nature, as a whole, is still dominant, and as long as it is so his will acts accordingly, and they that are thus in the flesh cannot please God (Rom. 8:8).

      The Pelagian doctrine was not more offensive to Christian instinct, and destructive of true piety and indeed true morals, than it was opposed to the plain statements of Scripture.  In reference to the “superior hemisphere,” i.e. – the spiritual duties of loving and serving God, the intellect of man, in his natural state, is said to be darkened (Rom. 1:21, Ephes. 4:18), nay, to be darkness itself (Ephes. 5:8); his mind is blinded by the god of this world (2 Cor. 4:4); to the natural man the things of the Spirit are foolishness; he can neither receive nor know them (2 Cor. 2:14); of himself and his brother ministers S. Paul declares that what they did know on these matters was to be ascribed exclusively to Divine teaching (2 Cor. 3:5).  The will likewise of the natural man, as a motive power, is described as spiritually inoperative.  The heart is stony (Ezek. 36:26); the unregenerate man is a slave of sin (Rom. 6:17), and the reason is because the carnal mind is not and cannot be subject to the law of God (Rom. 8:7); no man can come to Christ except the Father draw him (John 6:44); the natural man is dead in sins (Ephes. 2:1).  As long as this state prevails, how can the will cooperate with God in the work of regeneration?

      Yet it must be confessed that triumphantly as Augustine refutes his opponent on this point, his own system hardly assigns due weight to other statements of Scripture which seem to imply the existence of some spiritual power in fallen man.  He notices, as every candid controversialist must, the numerous passages in which invitations, exhortations, warnings, promises, are addressed to sinners, as if they had the power to comply with them, and as if the blame of their noncompliance must rest on themselves.  “Why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 18:31); “Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life” (John 5:40).  His explanation is correct as far as it goes, but not exhaustive.  He observes that such passages are “paedagogical,” i.e. are intended to convince the sinner of his helplessness, and by the exhibition of the Divine requirements to suggest what he ought to pray for; just as S. Paul describes the Law of Moses as a “schoolmaster to lead men to Christ,” from its effect in awakening a sense of sin and the need of a Saviour.  “By the law of works God says, Do what I command.  But the law commands in order that faith may know how to act; that is, that he to whom the commands are addressed, if he has no power, may know what to seek; but if he has power, and obeys, may know through whose gift it is that he has power.”  “Free will avails nothing except for sinning, if the way of truth is not revealed; and even when man’s duty and proper aim are set before him, no action follows unless the truth becomes loved; and that it does so is the fruit not of free will, but of the Holy Spirit who is given to us.”  “The Pelagians think that there is some weight in their objection, ‘God would not command what He knows is not in man’s power to accomplish’; but let them consider that these precepts, though we cannot fulfill them, teach us what we ought to seek from Him.”  “The Apostle, writing to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 3:12), enjoins charity; blames them for their want of it; prays that they may abound in it.  Learn, O man, by the commands what thou oughtest to have; by the reproof that it is thine own fault that thou hast it not; by the prayer whence thou mayest receive it.”  But is nothing more than this to be inferred from the passages in question?  They seem evidently to imply a measure of responsibility on man’s part, at least when favoured with Divine revelation, for the choice he makes when the issues of life and death are plainly proposed to him.

      We thus stand face to face with the great problem which, since Augustine’s time, has never ceased to occupy the minds of thoughtful inquirers, and which seems no nearer its solution than it was a thousand years ago.  How are we to reconcile the doctrine of grace as plainly taught in Scripture with what seems equally plainly taught, the power of man to shape his spiritual destinies?  Or, to put the question in another form, why is it that exhortations, invitations, etc., can be addressed to fallen man which we consider it would be improper and useless to address to the fallen angels?

      The older theologians attempt an alleviation of the difficulty by a distinction between a passive and an active receptivity in reference to the Divine admonitions and invitations.  By the former is meant what man can receive or do irrespectively of Divine aid.  Thus he could not be addressed at all as Scripture addresses him if he were not a reasonable being, possessing understanding and conscience; he is not a stone nor a brute; the bare materials of human nature are still his, and it is on them that regenerating grace operates.  An essential element of human nature has not, as Möhler charges Protestants with teaching, by the Fall been extinguished.  Nor, again, can it be denied that, as regards the “inferior hemisphere,” or the sphere of morality as distinguished from that of religion, he possesses a power to do what natural conscience dictates, and to abstain from what it condemns; though even this power exists only in a debilitated form, and is much impeded by sinful passions.  Moreover, Scripture implies a power in man to resist the appeals of Divine grace though not to yield to them; he can keep the heart shut though he cannot open it.  For he lies under no disability as regards sin, and is himself a free agent here as well as has the will free; which is not the case as regards the love and fear of God.  Scripture everywhere recognizes a difference in the hearers of the Word, according as some suffer themselves to be drawn by grace – trahit Deus sed trahit volentem – while some refuse the voice of the charmer charm he never so wisely.  Some are “of the truth,” exhibit a candour and docility which predispose them to “hear the voice of Christ” (John 18:37); others are of such an opposite spirit that they would even prevent inquirers from entering the kingdom (Matt. 23:13).  The soil on which the good seed falls varies in quality (Matt. 13:3–8), and there are characters which “are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:34), which certainly cannot be said of all sinners.  Religion seems to root itself in some natures more easily than in others.  To what is the difference to be ascribed?  Some would reply that it springs from a prevenient act of grace, which is the source of these favourable dispositions themselves.  This may be so; but it is important to note that in many of the cases in Scripture the better disposed were equally with the less outside the kingdom of God, though no doubt some of them were farther from it than others.  In the visible Church, as in heathendom, these moral differences may exist in a high degree without passing the boundary which separates nature and grace.  They do, however, prove that the reaction of natural conscience against hereditary corruption never ceases until conscience itself is seared with a hot iron, and that grace has a natural ally even in fallen man; which the preacher may reckon on as more or less active.  The death of the soul is, after all, a sleep from which there may be an awakening (Ephes. 5:14).  And perhaps this constitutes the essential distinction between fallen man and the fallen angels, as regards capacity of recovery.  Until that sin, whatever it may be, by which the sinner places himself beyond the reach of mercy (Matt. 12:32) is committed, the capacity for redemption, involving the religious faculty, the moral sense, and whatever else distinguishes man from brutes and devils, exists in every man, and it is in his power either to cherish or to extinguish it.  He may attend the means of grace and hear the Word, he may keep himself from fleshly lusts which war against the soul (1 Pet. 2. and so far assume a favourable attitude towards the summons to repent and believe; but this is neither regeneration nor a coefficient in the bringing about thereof: what is produced on this ground is but the wild fruit of nature until the creative power of grace sublimates it into another nature.  It is, in the language of Augustine, the adjutorium sine quo the work of grace is not effected – the necessary material on which it works, but not the adjutorium quo it is effected [See De Corrept. 34.]; the condition of the result but not the result itself.  The radical change may still be wanting.  There may be a great difference between a Socrates or a Marcus Aurelius and a Nero, as regards justitia civilis, and it must neither be denied nor undervalued; but it is only a relative one, and sinks into nothing when compared with that between the natural and the spiritual man.  And this is proved by the facility with which natural virtue may, and often does, pass into dispositions alien to Christianity.  Patriotism becomes a narrow hatred and jealousy of other nations, generosity exhibits itself at the ‘expense of justice.  Above all, the stoical virtue of a Cato almost invariably terminates in self-complacency, a temper the furthest removed of all from that of the Christian.  The taint of self-esteem infects all these splendida vitia, and renders them worthless as religious acts.  Nor can unaided nature expel the taint, or, as Augustine says, make the tree good.  It is only the regenerate man that is a real worker with God, and even he not as on a coordinate level, or as an independent source of good.  The receptivity of the natural man is a reality, not a name; God deals with the unconverted as persons, reasonable, reflecting, morally endowed persons; but the receptivity itself needs to be quickened and purified by grace before it can fully discharge its function.  And this is the fact which Pelagian tendencies in every age deny, or overlook.  Particular acts of will Pelagius was willing to admit might need Divine assistance to perfect them; but that the carnal nature itself, the “old man” of S. Paul (Rom. 6:6), must be exchanged for a new one he persistently denied.

      The decisions of the Council of Trent on this subject cannot be acquitted of the charge of ambiguity ; as Sarpi insinuates not unintended, in order that all parties might be satisfied. [Histoire, lib. ii. 80.]  It anathematizes those who hold that grace is only given to make holiness and eternal life easier of attainment, as if free will without grace could achieve the same result but with greater difficulty; those, too, who maintain that without the help of the Holy Spirit man can believe, repent, or love, so as to receive the gift of justification [Sess. vi., Canons, 1–3.]; with all which Protestants fully agree.  “If any one,” it proceeds, “shall say that free will, when moved by God, does not, cooperate with such motions in disposing and preparing man for the gift of justification, and that it cannot refuse assent to them if it will, but, like an inanimate object, is merely passive in the work; or if any one shall say that free will was lost by the Fall, and is extinct, or is only a name without reality, let him be anathema.”  Certainly it cannot be said that the Fall has annihilated the faculty of will, for every one’s consciousness tells him the contrary; nor can the work of conversion take place without involving an exercise of the active principles of our nature, such as, fear, desire, hope, etc.  But the question is whether man, apart from preventing grace, as he certainly has the capacity of religion, has also the power of evoking from himself an appetency towards God, which, as it were, reaches forth its hand to God, to be laid hold of by Him and drawn up to higher things?  If this is what the Council means by the cooperation of free will with the Divine solicitations (and it must be suspected that this is its meaning), it approaches the Pelagian, or semi-Pelagian, error long ago exposed by Augustine.  Such an appetency itself, that Father would say, is the fruit of grace, and no man has a desire to cooperate with God until God gives the will; that is, breaks the chain of a sinful nature.  “Without our cooperation God produces in us a will towards good, but when we do will, and will to act, He cooperates with us.”  Human nature, that is, left to itself, cannot will to turn to God, or make any advances in that direction; if it does so, this is owing to a prevenient act of grace which gives the power to do what is commanded (dat quod jubet).  The Protestant Confessions may and do recognize in the natural man a reaction of the original nature against its corruption, which is more or less active under the means of grace; and even in the heathen a feeling of the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.  But in itself this is not religion; it is merely the protest of conscience against the dominant tendency; and as in the visible Church so amongst the heathen, if ever this protest passed into the higher sphere of a new nature – and that there may be and have been saved even amongst the heathen no one is concerned to deny – it was the product not of unaided nature but of Divine grace.  It is obvious that as regards this point there is no real distinction between the doctrine of Augustine and that of Calvin in subsequent times.

      The same question gave rise to what has been called the Synergistic controversy in the Lutheran Church, and is substantially that at issue between the Calvinists and Arminians of a later age.  Melanchthon appears, in his later years, to have modified his views, or at least his statements, on the inability of the natural man, and, in contrast with the strong expressions of Luther in his treatise “De Servo Arbitrio,” to have taught that man had an independent power of meeting the approaches of Divine grace; that is, bridging over, to some extent, the interval between the natural and the spiritual man.  A school of Philippists, as they were called after Melanchthon, sprang up after his death, advocating this view; and a lively controversy arose between its adherents (Pfeffinger, Strigel, etc.), and the more rigid interpreters of the Augsburg Confession.  The latter obtained the ascendency, and procured the promulgation of a confession of faith, called the Formula Concordiae, A.D. 1579, which was largely subscribed by the Lutheran Churches, though not universally, and is the fullest and clearest exposition of the later orthodox Lutheran faith.  What this was on the question of free will may be judged from the following extracts: “We condemn the doctrine of the Synergists, who pretend that human nature in reference to spiritual things is only grievously wounded, but not quite dead.  And that, although free will is too feeble to initiate conversion to God, or obey the law, yet if the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Gospel offers us His grace, remission of sins, and eternal life, then the human will can by its own power, however enfeebled, meet God, and prepare itself for the reception of grace.  We believe that in man’s nature since the Fall, and prior to regeneration, not even a spark of spiritual power remains, by which he can prepare himself for Divine grace, or contribute anything to his own conversion, and that his will is only free to do what is displeasing to God.  Before he experiences the regenerating influences of the Holy Spirit man can do no more towards procuring them than if he were a stock or a stone.  Nay, he is worse than a stock or a stone, because he can, and does, despise and resist the Divine commands.”  In other words, he is capable of regeneration, which a stone is not, nor yet a brute, nor the fallen angels; but the first movement towards it must come, not from himself, but from above; which, as we have seen, is precisely the doctrine of Augustine.  So unfounded is the notion sometimes, as it appears, entertained that the Lutheran doctrine on this subject is milder than that of the Churches supposed to have been under Calvin’s influence.  The contrary is the fact.  Although there is no substantial difference between the two great Reformers in their view of fallen human nature, yet Calvin’s statements on the subject are by no means so sweeping as those of Luther, and the Helvetic Confession of 1566 even contains expressions which seem directed against certain modes of speaking familiar to the German Protestants.  It admits that the faculties of understanding and will still exist in man, so that he is very far from being a stone or a stock; and contents itself with affirming that these faculties have been so impaired since the Fall that they are no longer capable of what they were previously to that event.  And our own Confession is equally moderate in its statements.  It adopts the Augustinian doctrine that “works done before the inspiration of Christ” – the splendida vitia of the early Father – do not deserve grace de congruo (Art. xiii.); nay, “have the nature of sin,” as not springing from the right motive, not being the genuine fruit of the new nature which comes through grace.  They are not done as “God hath willed and commanded them to be done,” with a single eye to His glory, but either from the mere promptings of the moral nature not extinct in man, or for selfish ends, or from a stoic temper of self-sufficiency; they are defective, in scholastic language, quoad substantiam actus, in the form, if not the material of the act.  What Augustine and the Reformers meant is that antecedently to individual differences in relation to the hearing and reception of the Word, which may be great and manifold, there is a disability which belongs not to each man as an individual with a history of his own, but to human nature as such, and which can be removed only by our being transplanted from the wild olive into the new stock.  This fundamental truth of Scripture being secured, both Augustine and his successors might have safely admitted more than they have done as regards the power of natural conscience, and the moral differences of hearers of the Word; things plainly implied in many parts of Scripture (Matt. 13:12, Acts 7:51), and matters of daily experience.  With the latter the pressing necessity of the time was to erect a barrier, as far as might be, against the rampant Pelagianism of the dominant Church, which threatened to reduce the Gospel to little more than a system of natural religion: to future ages they left the task of attempting to harmonize the statements of Scripture on the subject.

      Besides its dogmatical bearings, this subject has, as is well known, largely attracted the attention of the philosophical inquirer.  According to Milton, these discussions date from a remote antiquity.  Whatever corrections Calvin’s own system may demand, Calvinism as compared with Arminianism has no need, on philosophical ground, to shrink from the contest.  The principal point at issue, viz., whether the will is self-determining, or comes under the general law of causality – or, in other words, whether the will is ever in a state of equilibrium between opposite objects, so that contingency is essential to its real freedom – has been subjected to the keen analysis of Jonathan Edwards, and the Arminian tenet exposed in all its inconsistency.  If the word “will” is used for the faculty of volition, to ask whether contingency attaches to it is to ask whether a man chooses to do what he does choose to do, or whether in the act of choosing a certain course of action he can choose another the opposite thereof.  If will is used, as it probably is in this connection, for the agent willing, then it conveys no very exalted idea of a man that when good and evil are placed before him he is supposed to have no bias or tendency one way or the other, so that it is impossible to predict with any certainty what he will do or not do under given circumstances; that his actions are the sport of chance, and himself “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed” ( James 1:6).  It would follow, too, that men could not be pronounced either virtuous or vicious on account of settled dispositions of character; whereas in common opinion and language these are the very things that enhance their virtue or vice.  We do not think the less of a man of whom we say that, in our opinion, it is impossible that he should commit an unjust or a mean action; nor do we mean to extenuate a man’s viciousness when we say that it is just what we should have expected of him; that he could not, according to his nature, have acted otherwise.  On the contrary, it is the presumed nature prompting the action that determines our estimate; and in proportion to the certainty we feel that they will act in one way or the other is the praise or blame which we attach to men.  That is, a moral necessity is the condition of a perfectly virtuous state.  We believe that the elect angels now, and the saints in future glory, will be incapable of sinning; but that surely does not interfere with the perfect freedom of their service.  Or to ascend higher still, it is morally impossible that God can act otherwise than with perfect holiness and wisdom; but He is not the less absolutely free.  As of old in the Pelagian, so in the Arminian scheme, it is not remembered that prior to, and as it were behind, the will is the nature; and that according as the nature is, the will, by a moral necessity, exerts itself: free in sinning if it is that of the old nature we derive from Adam; free in holiness if it is that of the new one derived from Christ.  And thus, though in strict propriety of language inability means a want of power to do what we have the will to do, and refers primarily to physical restraint or defect, yet when applied to fallen man it means the absence or inefficiency of the will itself, or moral inability consequent on the depravation of nature through the Fall; the result of which is that man “cannot turn and prepare himself to faith and calling upon God.”

      If it be said that these objections only prove that the Arminian scheme involves self-contradiction while they leave the difficulties on the other side untouched, this no doubt is to some extent true.  What is called Calvinism has also its own difficulties, and perhaps insoluble in our present state of knowledge.  Either system, carried out to its logical consequences, lands us in conclusions which it is not easy to reconcile with the language of Scripture, in its apparently plain meaning.  But the most unsatisfactory of all methods of adjustment is to explain away or attenuate passages which, if they do not imply the necessity of prevenient grace to sway the will by rectifying the nature, must be dismissed as having no certain meaning at all.

      The subject of the preceding sections is of vital moment as regards our apprehensions of the nature and object of Christianity.  No one who considers the tendencies of modern thought can fail to see that the question of the corruption of human nature lies at the root of the divergencies of opinion and statement which we meet with in the controversial discussions of the day.  And it is equally evident that to extenuate, to ignore, or to deny the effects of the Fall, as they have been usually understood in the Church, is a prominent feature of certain aspects of Christianity which have attracted notice of late.  Sometimes it is assumed that man has only to be placed under a system of external discipline, whether it be the natural providential history of the world, or a special dispensation like the Law of Moses, in order to reach the ideal of his nature; and further that the moral gains of one age are taken up by another as the basis of still further improvement, until at length by a natural development the race attains “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephes. 4:13) [“Essays and Reviews”: Essay i., “On the Education of the World.”]; on which hypothesis there ought, at this advanced period, to be little or no sin, at least in such nations as have enjoyed this spiritual education.  The birth taint which every man in every age, according to Scripture, brings with him into the world, and with no decreasing intensity of virulence, and which is as much proof now as ever it was against all engines of assault but one, is here ignored as a factor to be taken into account.  Sometimes the example of Christ and the moral precepts of the Gospel are extolled as the wheat, while its mysterious doctrines are the chaff; as if example and instruction are all that man needs to enable him to emerge from the ruins of the Fall.  Sometimes, at the opposite pole, the radical change which is admitted as necessary is described as a magical effect, not necessarily involving or leading to any moral renovation of the heart; a gift indeed of grace, but neutral in character and result, which may or may not consist with an habitually sinful state.  Under the former system man never did need a new creation; under the latter, a member of the visible Church does not need it because, whatever be his moral condition, he once received it for good.  Under either system Pelagianism finds a natural footing.  Under either aspect Christianity sinks from being a Divine method of redemption from fearful evils to a system either of mere naturalism or of crass supernaturalism.  And under either system, in different measure – much more it must be admitted under the former than under the latter – the atoning work of the Redeemer suffers a depreciation, and becomes obscured.  The Person and work of this Redeemer will next engage our attention.

Person and Work of Christ

      “The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance; so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God and very man” (Art. ii.).  “As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also it is to be believed that He went down into hell” (Art. iii.).  “Christ did rise again from death, and took again His body, with flesh, bones and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature; wherewith He ascended into heaven, and there sitteth, until He return to judge all men at the last day” (Art. iv.).  Christ, in the truth of our nature, was made like unto us, sin only except, from which He was clearly void, both in His flesh and His spirit; sin, as S. John saith, was not in Him” (Art. xv.).  “Item docent quod Verbum, hoc est, Filius Dei assumpserit humanam naturam in utero beatae Mariae Virginis, ut sint duae naturae, divina et humana, in unitate personae inseparabiliter conjunctae” (Conf. Aug. iii.).  “Agnoscimus ergo in uno atque eodem Domino nostro Jesu Christo duas naturas vel substantias, divinam et humanam, et has ita dicimus conjunctas et unitas esse ut absorptae aut confusae aut immixtae non sint; sed salvis potius et permanentibus naturarum proprietatibus, in una persona unitae vel conjunctae, ita ut unum Christum Dominum non duos veneremur: unum, inquam, verum Deum et hominem, juxta divinam Patri, juxta humanam vero nobis hominibus consubstantialem, et per omnia similem, peccato excepto” (Conf. Helv. xi.).  “Who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men” (Art. ii.).  Vere passus, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, ut reconciliaret nobis Patrem, et hostia esset non tantum pro culpa originis, sed etiam pro omnibus actualibus hominum peccatis” (Conf. Aug. iii.). “Qui, ut solus est Mediator, Intercessor, Hostia, idemque et Pontifex, Dominusque et Rex noster, ita hunc solum agnoscimus, et toto corde credimus redemptionem, expiationem, protectionem” (Conf. Helv., A.D. 1536, xi.).  Quid deinde valet nomen Christi?  Hoc epitheto melius etiamnum exprimitur ejus officium.  Significat enim unctum esse a Patre in Regem, Sacerdotem, ac Prophetam” (Cat. Genev.).

PART  I – The Person of Christ

§ 41.  Incarnation of the Logos

      It is not necessary here to recapitulate the arguments by which the Deity of the Son is established. [§ 25.]  But the Word became flesh (John 1:14); forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself took part of the same (Heb. 2:14); He was made of the seed of David according to the flesh (Rom. 1:3), made of a woman (Gal. 4:4); so truly that if any confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh he is a deceiver and an antichrist (2 John, 7); in a word, in the Person of Jesus Christ the Son of God, became incarnate.

      The idea of an incarnation is not foreign to the history of religion.  Communion with the Deity, which is the essence of all religion, leads to the conception of union with Him, which, accordingly, appears under various guise in many of the forms of religion which preceded Christianity.  Sometimes, as in the Nirvana of Buddhism, under the notion of final absorption into the Deity; sometimes, as in the Greek mythology, under that of the Apotheosis of heroes and sages, who after death were supposed to be promoted to the ranks of the gods.  The second person of the Hindu trimurti, Vischnu, assumes many material forms, and among them (as Krishna) that of humanity.  The distinctions, however, between the forms which this vague instinct assumed in heathenism, and the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, are great.  Either, as in Hinduism, the incarnation is not permanent, Krishna on his return to heaven laying aside his humanity, and the Nirvana extinguishing humanity altogether; or, as in the West, it is not God that stoops to man, but man that is exalted to God.

      It may seem as if the Old Testament not only did not reveal a proper incarnation (the mere Theophanies are not such), but rather, in its ritual and prophetic teaching, insists upon the barrier which sin had raised between fallen man and his Creator.  And consistently with its ethical and pedagogical character it could not do otherwise.  The ancient Hebrew was perpetually reminded that only by a special interposition of Jehovah could this barrier be removed.  But in reality the Mosaic dispensation supplied the true basis of the idea of an Incarnation, in that it was a religion of revelation to prepare the way for redemption.  Under it God entered into covenant with the chosen people, made Himself their tutelary God and their King, gave them an elaborate ritual, and a moral law which is the transcript of His own moral nature; and placed on record, through the instrumentality of the Jewish lawgiver, the primitive history of the human race and of the Divine communications which had from time to time been made to it.  Thenceforward, in the history of Israel and in prophecy, the designs of God towards fallen man become more and more unfolded, until the prophetic voice, having fulfilled its office, ceases, and a period of silent expectation ensues.  All this is something very different from the revelation of God in nature, in which, though reason may discern the footsteps of Deity (Rom. 1:19), the Deity Himself retires from view behind the laws which He has impressed on matter; here, on the contrary, we have God revealing Himself in history, under type and prophecy, by signs and wonders, through appointed organs; manifesting Himself to man as the latter was capable of receiving it, and becoming in a sense incarnate before the incarnation itself.  But only in a fragmentary and imperfect manner – πολυμέρως και πολυτρόπως (Heb. 1:1) – not by the union of Himself with man in the person of a Redeemer.  This consummation, however, was thus foreshadowed, and when it did arrive it was seen to be nothing but what the prophetic intimations had been long preparing the way for.  In the person of Christ all previous manifestations of God are summed as in an epitome; the scattered rays are here concentrated in a focus; and for this reason we can expect no further, or more complete, revelation of God (John 1:18).  It may be observed that it was only on theocratical ground that the true conception of an Incarnation could take root and grow up.  Philosophical Judaism never attained to it.  The Wisdom of the Apocryphal books, and the Logos of Philo, are nothing but personifications of a Divine attribute or emanation; not the personal indwelling of God in man.  Matter is with Philo, as with the Gnostic sects, the source of evil, and to attain the end of his being man must be unclothed of his body.  To such a habit of thought it was quite repugnant that God should condescend to assume a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. [On Philo’s theories, see Dorner, Ent. Gesch., P. i. pp. 21, etc.]

      In the prologue of S. John’s Gospel (1:3), as in other passages of Scripture (Heb. 1:2), the Logos appears as a Mediator between God, in His abstract essence, and creation: through Him the worlds were made.  And it is the same Logos that communed with the Patriarchs, led the Israelites through the wilderness (1 Cor. 10:4), spoke through the prophets (1 Pet. 1:11), and presided over the fortunes of the nation ; so that when the final crisis was at hand, He could say of Jerusalem, How often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not” (Matt. 23:37).  We can see how fitting it was that the Mediator between fallen man and God should be the same who had been Mediator in a lower sense; that the Alpha should be the Omega (Rev. 1:8); the actual creator of nature its actual restorer (Rom. 8:21); the first Adam have for his counterpart the second man, the Lord from heaven (1 Cor. 15:47).

      Was the first Adam, or the second, the prototype of humanity?  The latter opinion has been held by some who by the “image of God” in which Adam is said to have been created (Gen. 1:26), understand the foreseen Incarnation of the second Person of the Holy Trinity.  The question is involved in a more general one, viz., would the Incarnation have taken place if man had not sinned?  Was it a necessary factor in the consummation of man’s destiny, or a remedy for the effects of the Fall?  If regarded in the latter light, it is urged, it assumes the character of a mere contingent provision, for sin itself cannot, except on the supralapsarian hypothesis, [Calvin. Instit. lib. iii. 7.  So Schleiermacher, though from another point of view, maintains that the original plan of the world comprised the necessity of sin for the sake of redemption (Glaubenslehre, s. 81).] be supposed a necessary element in the Divine counsels.  We should be compelled, too, to believe that the entrance of sin into the world procured for man a greater blessing than could have been attained without it; according to the old saying, O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem!”  And when the purposes of redemption are accomplished, why should not the Incarnate Son revert to His previous condition, and become once more a λόγος άσαρκος, on the principle that cessante causa cessat effectus? which, however, is not the orthodox belief.  These considerations have led some distinguished writers to the conclusion, Etiamsi homo non peccasset Deus tamen incarnatus fuisset, licet non crucifixus. [Martensen, Dog. ss. 89, 131.]

      The contrary opinion, however, has prevailed, [“Quamquam Deus peccato non existente potuerit incarnari; convenientius tamen dicitur quod si homo non peccasset, Deus incarnatus non fuisset, cum in sacra Scriptura ubique incarnationis ratio ex peccato primi hominis assignetur” (Thos. Aqui. p. iii. q. 1, art. 3).] and, as it should seem, on good grounds.  Scripture seldom, if ever, assigns any other ground for the Incarnation than to carry out the purposes of redemption: though it may be thought to extend the benefits thereof to other orders of creatures than man (Ephes. 1:10, Col. 1:20).  But independently of this, the theory itself is of suspicious tendency.  If Christ, irrespectively of redemption, is to be considered as the ideal Man, the head of humanity, the “King of men” as the phrase sometimes runs, there seems a danger of the distinction between nature and grace becoming obliterated, and a door being opened for the doctrine of the restitution of all men.  Adam, as he was created, was the head of unfallen humanity, and if he had continued in his uprightness, would doubtless both himself have advanced in holiness, and propagated a race of sinless beings, to whose spiritual progress no limits can be assigned.  But would humanity thus unfallen ever have attained the perfection which humanity restored does in Christ?  According to Scripture, Christ, the second Adam, is the head of redeemed humanity (Ephes. 1:22), and the gifts of regeneration and resurrection in the likeness of His glorified body are described as the fruit of His sufferings unto death, and of His subsequent exaltation.  And we cannot suppose that these blessings are not in their nature superior to what would have, under any circumstances, accrued to man through an incarnation, even if man had never fallen, and Christ had never suffered and risen again.  Regeneration is something more than creation, and the future glory of the saints a higher condition than that of Paradise. [See preceding section.]  The body, in short, of which Christ the Redeemer is the Head is not humanity in general, but the Church which He purchased with His own blood (Acts 20:28).

§ 42.  Twofold State (Humilitationis et Exaltationis)

      Whatever view may be taken of the question just mentioned, when Christ is considered as a Redeemer, His incarnation assumes a special character.  For as a Redeemer He must be made in the likeness of sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3), though without sin, and identify Himself with all the conditions of human existence as it is.  He must be born of woman, be subject to the innocent infirmities of our nature, to suffering, temptation, and death; and, further, He must be born in a particular nation, be “of the seed of David,” and, as a Jew, submit to the ordinances of the law (Gal. 4:4).  Only by thus “taking hold” [According to one rendering of επιλαμβάνεται (Heb. 2:16).]of fallen humanity in the points in which it contrasts with humanity before the Fall, could He be its Redeemer, according to the maxim, What is not assumed cannot be healed. [Το απρόσληπτον και αθεράπευτον.]  He not only emptied Himself by becoming incarnate (Phil. 2:7), but His human nature was in the form of a servant, and it was not until He had become obedient to the death of the cross, after a life of suffering, that God exalted Him and gave Him a name above every name (ibid. 8, 9).

      Thus the doctrine of the twofold state, which occupies so large a space in later Protestant theology, though comparatively unnoticed by the earlier writers, has Scriptural foundation, and indeed suggests itself to the most cursory reader of Scripture.  Briefly, it expresses the distinction between our Lord’s life upon earth and His present life at the right hand of God; the former was one of humiliation, the latter is one of glory.  It is usual, in describing each state, to assign to them respectively certain events – on the one hand, conception, birth, suffering, and death; on the other, resurrection, descent into hell, ascension; but it has not been sufficiently noted that the true ground of the distinction is the change which it implies in the human nature of the Saviour.  The body of Christ before His resurrection was similar in all essential points to ours, subject to natural infirmities and sustained by the usual means; the body with which He rose was, as S. Paul calls it, a spiritual and glorified body, whatever may be the precise conception we form of it (1 Cor. 15:44, Phil. 3:21), and as such exempt from the defects incident to the “body of our humiliation”.  The topic is concerned exclusively with what took place after the incarnation, and has nothing to do with the exinanition, or kenosis, of the Logos in assuming human nature; which is a point that must be considered by itself.  Christ, the incarnate Logos, as He appears in the sacred history, advanced from that portion of His mediatorial work which consisted in suffering and death to that portion of it which consists in the application of His merits and the exercise of priestly and royal functions; in the execution of which latter He is in a state of glory as compared with the preceding humiliation.  But it is a mediatorial office which He is still discharging, and does not this imply, even at present, a certain exinanition of the Logos? and that this is to last until the number of the elect is accomplished?  This, certainly, may be thought implied in the remarkable passage 1 Cor. 15:28; from which, however, on account of its great obscurity, no positive conclusion can be hastily drawn.  The humiliation therefore of the incarnate Logos must not be confounded with His exinanition; the latter is an act of the Holy Trinity terminating, in scholastic language, in the Person of the Son, the former belongs to the man Christ Jesus.  And the resurrection, or, as the Lutherans hold, the descent into hell, forms the point of transition from the one state of the mediator Christ to the other; the radical distinction, however, being the exchange of an earthly for a glorified spiritual body.

(Status Humiliationis.)

§ 43.  Born of a Woman – Growth in Wisdom and Stature

      The birth of Christ, including His conception in the womb, was in the way of nature.  He did not, as the Valentinians held, merely pass through the Virgin like water through a canal.  And as His birth was natural, so was His human nature a real one, and not the phantom of the Docetics.  The Word of life incarnate could be seen and handled (1 John 1:1); could suffer hunger, thirst, and weariness (Luke 4; John 4:6); His flesh could be torn with stripes and pierced by the nails and the spear; and He could die on the cross.  His soul could experience joy and sorrow (Luke 10:21, Matt. 26:38); He loved and was grieved (Mark 10:21, 3:5); He could reason out of the Scriptures, and refute the cavils of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt. 22:15–46).  He passed too through the ordinary stages of growth and development, both bodily and mental.  So Scripture declares, in the very few notices it contains of His private life.  As an unconscious babe He lay in the manger; He grew, like other children, in stature as in wisdom (Luke 2:52); at twelve years of age He astonished the doctors of the law with His precocious remarks (ibid. 46).  With the exception of His visit to the temple, Scripture passes over in silence the interval between His birth and His public appearance; and we can only conjecture that He lived with His parents, and, as tradition runs, followed His reputed father’s occupation.  It was, no doubt, so appointed, in order that no place might be left for the legends which usually attach themselves to the infancy and childhood of remarkable men; and of which the Apocryphal Gospels are full.  From the insipid and grotesque incidents with which these productions abound we may gather what the Canonical writers would probably have indulged in had they not written under a special Divine superintendence.  Scripture draws a holy veil over the life of our Lord, until the time came for His manifestation in Israel.  Another reason may be given for this reticence, viz., that the Saviour’s own consciousness of His mission advanced by gradual stages, and was not fully possessed by Him until He received the unction of the Holy Ghost (Matt. 3:16).  If Christ’s manhood was a reality, and subject to the ordinary laws of humanity, it could hardly be otherwise than that the knowledge of His Divine origin, and of His appointed work, should keep pace with the expansion of His human intelligence, which, as we know, is dependent on the growth of the animal frame.  As a babe He lay unconscious in the manger, like other babes; as a child the only visible distinction between Him and other children must have been His freedom from childish faults; at the age of twelve the consciousness of a peculiar relation to the Father begins to appear, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49).  But not sufficiently distinct, any more than His mental faculties were mature, for His public ministry; and accordingly He passes again into retirement until He had attained the fullness of manhood.  During these years, no doubt, the ceremonial law and prophecy, both pointing to Himself, and now illuminated by the power of the indwelling Logos, were His study; so that when He began to teach publicly it excited surprise that “this man should know letters, having never learned” (John 7:15).  When His recognition of Himself as the Messiah was at length complete, but not until then, He emerged from the privacy of the home at Nazareth.  Thus did the Logos submit to the conditions of ordinary human development, permitting, so to speak, the human nature a certain power over Himself, to limit the full exhibition of the Divine glory in accordance with natural laws.  Nor did the process stop with His baptism at Jordan.  It was not, e.g., until the close of His ministry that the necessity and imminence of His death appear to have become distinctly perceived, and were foretold to His disciples (Matt. 16:21).  Every natural stage of humanity, in short, infancy, childhood, youth, and manhood, was hallowed by the Saviour Himself passing through it; and under the same law of natural progress to which we are subjected.

§ 44.  Tempted, Yet Without Sin

      Christ not only grew in wisdom and stature like other men, but underwent the ordinary process of discipline by which virtue is matured and attains its due reward; He grew ethically as well as physically and intellectually.  He rendered meritorious obedience, and earned the crown by enduring the cross (Heb. 12:2).  The τελείωσις of which the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks (5:9) implies a previous state of relative imperfection: what can this be in One whom we believe to have been sinless?  It must be considered as negative, not positive; as analogous to the imperfection of the first Adam before he underwent his trial.  Virtue, to prove itself such, must be tried; and the severer the trial the greater the result if resistance to sin is successful.  The second Adam, like the first, must pass through the furnace.  He must be tempted and overcome the temptation, endure sufferings which culminated in death, “learn obedience by the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:8), and so become “perfect” (Heb. 2:10) in a different sense from that in which He was before.  He attained the perfection of a proved and triumphant virtue as distinguished from a state of untried innocence. And thus He became fitted, from His own personal experience, to be “a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God.”

      The sufferings which our Lord underwent from sympathy with the condition of fallen man (“In all their affliction He was afflicted,” Isa. 63:9) must be distinguished from those which He encountered in the exercise of His mission, and, so to speak, brought upon Himself.  These latter are what properly formed His probation.  And they may be classed under the two heads of direct temptation to evil, and indirect temptation to forsake the path of duty.  With the former the Saviour came into conflict immediately after the anointing of the Holy Ghost (Matt. 4:1).  Must we not suppose that the temptation daily presented itself to Him to abandon the task He had undertaken; or can we wonder if the struggle at the last was almost more than His human nature could bear? (Luke 22:44).  It would be idle to contend that the Saviour was not in both ways tempted, that He did not really experience solicitations to sin.  He must have done so if He was capable of appeals through the senses and the understanding, and if He felt a natural shrinking from pain and death; and how otherwise could He have been a man like unto us?  But whether we are to consider this liability to temptation as affecting His sinlessness depends upon the view we take of the proper seat of sin.  The essence of sin lies in the consent of the will to what conscience pronounces wrong, and if this consent is withheld, felt solicitations, coming from without, do not of themselves partake of the nature of sin.  Our first parents could not avoid seeing the fruit, and hearing the arguments of the tempter; perhaps experiencing a momentary inclination to disobedience; but had the will been sufficiently strong in its union with the Divine will to repel the temptation at once, they would not have fallen.  So it actually was in our Lord’s case.  Relief from bodily hunger, reliance on Divine protection, even temporal dignity, are not in themselves improper objects of desire: whether they become so depends on the circumstances under which they present themselves to the mind.  In our Lord’s temptation they would have been sinful, both as suggested by Satan, and as inconsistent with the Divine plan of a suffering and crucified Messiah.  A momentary attraction towards these things may have been felt by Him, but it was instantly repelled through the power of the indwelling Logos.  In like manner the prospect of an ignominious death must have been unspeakably painful, and the temptation to decline it equally strong; but not the less perfect was His submission to the Divine will: “if it be possible,” expresses the conflict; “not My will, but Thine be done,” the victory (Matt. 26:39).

      Liability, then, to temptation is not in itself sinful; and it was indispensable to the attainment of that moral perfection (τελείωσις) by which the Saviour merited His crown of glory.  In pouring out His soul “with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him” (Heb. 5:7), He learned what it was to be tempted, and so gained a fellow feeling with those that are tempted, as well as furnished a real example to them.  But though the outworks were assaulted, the citadel itself remained intact.  In each moment of trial the Divine will in unity with the human asserted its supremacy; and the potuit non peccare of the first Adam came, in the case of the second, to be eventually exchanged for the non potuit peccare.

      But can we feel sure that, under these temptations, Christ was actually without sin?  Such is the faith of the Church; but is it well founded?  The question is of vital moment, for however He might still be an example, a Redeemer from sin, He could not be if He had sins of His own to atone for.  A moral elevation never before attained by man the unbeliever is willing to concede to Him, but to the Christian a sinless Saviour can alone be a real one.  The Gospel history furnishes ample materials for our arriving at a conclusion on this momentous question.  The testimony of enemies naturally first claims our attention.  No charge against the moral character of Jesus was ever substantiated by them.  The witnesses suborned could not agree (Mark 14:56); Pilate appealed to the people to say what evil He had done, but received no reply (Matt. 27:23); Pilate himself was convinced of His innocence (ibid. 24).  The thief on the cross bore similar testimony (Luke 23:41).  The impression produced by Him on those who for nearly three years had been in constant intercourse with Him comes next to be considered; and here the confession of Judas the traitor that he had betrayed “the innocent blood” (Matt. 27:4) carries peculiar weight.  Had this man been able to allege any obliquity of aim or conduct in his Master, he would doubtless have pleaded it as a palliation of his crime, but he was unable to do so.  The disciple most intimate with Him declares that in Him was no sin (1 John 3:5).  Another describes Him as the Holy One and the Just (Acts 3:14), as the Lamb of God “without blemish and without spot” (1 Pet. 1:19, 2:22).  The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews pronounces Him “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners” (Heb. 7:26, 47).  And such, surely, is the impression which every unprejudiced reader of the Gospels receives.  The character of Christ, as portrayed in them, stands alone in the annals of history.  It is not merely that He propounded a pure system of morals; He was Himself the living transcript of it, a perfect example of what He taught.  Where else shall we find such a union of majesty and humility, of hatred of sin and love to the sinner, of strength of purpose and boundless tenderness, of patience under suffering and active benevolence of patriotism and the widest human sympathies?  In the greatest saints of the Old Testament, even in the most eminent of Christ’s Apostles, we find an alloy of human infirmity; not so in Christ Himself.  For the first time in history we behold in its perfection that combination of morality and religion which constitutes holiness; a term which has no proper counterpart in heathen antiquity. [This topic is fully discussed in Ullmann’s beautiful work, “Die Sündlosigkeit Jesu,” Zweiter Abschnitt.]

      But it may be objected that the contemporaries of Christ could see only His outer life, and only a fragment of that, the greater part having been passed in obscurity; His sinlessness in the sight of God, and before He appeared in public, may yet admit of question.  With respect to the former point, His inner purity, His own testimony is of the greatest moment.  If bystanders could not read His heart, He Himself must be supposed acquainted with it.  It is to be observed then that Christ, while reproving sin in all its forms, and insisting upon the duty and the efficacy of confession of sin, is never found confessing His own sins, or praying for forgiveness.  In the prayer which He taught His disciples, and which contains a petition for forgiveness, He does not rank Himself with them: “After this manner pray ye.”  He challenges His enemies to lay any sin to His charge (John 8:46); and this is not to be understood merely of the outward act, but of sin in the abstract (αμαρτία), the sinful impulse. [See Lücke’s Commentary on this passage.]  But no even ordinarily religious man, who knew himself to be a sinner, would claim a prerogative which to claim would in that case be itself a sin (1 John 1:8), or argue gross spiritual blindness.  His coming to John’s baptism has been alleged as a proof that, like other Jews, He needed repentance; but in truth the narrative points the other way.  To say nothing of the Baptist’s indirect testimony to His having no sin to repent of (“Comest Thou to me?”) – a testimony doubly valuable as coming from one who had probably been intimate with Jesus from His childhood – Jesus in His reply does not ground His request on the consciousness of sin, but on the duty of complying with divinely appointed ordinances (Matt. 3:15).  Made under the law, He was circumcised, though the symbol in His case lost its proper meaning ; and similarly He submitted to John’s baptism, which to Him was only the inauguration of His public ministry (Matt. 3:16).  With respect to the other point, our ignorance of His previous life, it is enough to remark that moral perfection such as that which the Gospels exhibit could not, without a special miracle, appear all of a sudden, and per saltum.  Each stage of advancement presupposes a former one, and the final result is always founded upon a previous history.  As is the seed sown, such is the harvest.  And if it be further urged that Christ may have attained the moral eminence which all ascribe to Him as He appears in the Gospels in the same way as ordinary men, viz., through inward conflict, sometimes overcome by sin, but on the whole overcoming, until the measure of holiness of which He was capable was attained, we reply that, apart altogether from original sin, one actual sin consented to leaves indelible traces behind it: the wound may be healed, but the scar remains.  No man who, even for a moment, consents to an act of sin, inward or outward, can be the same man as he was before; and hence in the case of ordinary Christians sinlessness: in this life is impossible.  If Christ had not been without sin in His private life He could not have been what He was in His public.

      Christ, it is said, Himself disclaims the title of good (“Why callest thou Me good?” Mark 10:18).  But the meaning of His reply depends upon that of the inquirer in his use of the word “good”; and nothing is plainer than that the ruler used it without any true perception of what it implies, in a superficial manner, and as a mere compliment; corresponding to his imperfect apprehension of his own sinfulness.  In that sense our Lord refused the epithet, intimating further that if it was to be applied to Him at all, it must be so in the highest sense, even as it is applicable to God: which far from implying a consciousness of sin rather implies the reverse. [The approved reading in S. Matthew removes all difficulty; but there is no reason to question the authenticity of S. Mark’s and S. Luke’s version.  See Alford on Matt. 19:16.]

      The result of the inquiry is that if Jesus was not sinless, He not only fell below the saints of the Old Covenant, a David or a Daniel, and even heathen sages, in self-knowledge and humility, but instead of being what He claimed to be, the Light of the World, the way, the truth, and the life, born to bear witness to the truth (John 18:37), in short an infallible teacher and guide, He must be pronounced a blind leader of the blind, even if we acquit Him of conscious deception.  In short, the Christ of the Gospels must either be what they describe Him to be, or forfeit all claims to our attention.

      There seems to be no escape from this dilemma except in impugning the historical value of the Gospels, which accordingly is what the mythical theory of Strauss and his followers attempts to do.  The enthusiasm of the first converts, we are told, threw a halo round the central personage, and invested Him with ideal qualities which had only a scanty basis of fact.  But what can be more preposterous than to suppose that on Jewish soil and in the age of Christ a mythical system could have arisen?  Myth is intimately connected with polytheism, and the religion of Moses, monotheistic and severely ethical, could never have been favourable to such growths.  And in the age of Christ, when prophecy and inspired song had long ceased, and in place of them the didactic service of the synagogue had arisen, presided over by Rabbis whose literary activity was confined to the interpretation of the sacred books, and under the chilling pressure of a foreign yoke, what place was there for mythical formations?  The early legends of Rome might as well be supposed to have arisen in the age of Livy or Tacitus.  But further, nothing that we know of the culture or moral elevation of the Apostles, or the first converts, leads us to suppose that they could have imagined a character so original, and so consistent with itself throughout as that of Christ; that is, drawn it from their unaided resources.  This would be as great a miracle as the sinlessness of Christ itself.  In short, if the Gospel history be rejected, the appearance of such a character on the stage of life is simply inexplicable.  But the Gospel history gives us more information on the subject than merely a narrative of Christ’s ministry.

§ 45.  Miraculous Conception

      The sinlessness claimed for Christ seems to some minds incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, according to which every man naturally born, engendered of the offspring of Adam, comes into the world with sinful tendencies, which are sure in some form or other to manifest themselves.  Hence, it is argued, such perfection as is attainable by man cannot be exemplified in an individual; it is the property of the race.  The objection certainly would be strong, if Scripture did not give such an account of Christ’s birth as renders His sinlessness, far from being an inexplicable phenomenon, the natural result of the circumstances of the case.  The miraculous conception removes all difficulty.

      The title “Second Adam,” which in Scripture is applied to our Lord, implies not only His headship as regards the Church, but a peculiarity of origin as regards Himself.  As the first Adam came into existence by a direct exercise of miraculous power, while his descendants are propagated by a natural law, so we naturally expect something analogous in the case of the second Adam.  But this was not only appropriate; it was necessary.  For if the effects of sin were to be reversed in the new spiritual creation, it is evident that He who was to be the first link of the series must Himself be free from the common taint; and this could not be the case, except by a miracle, had He come into the world in the ordinary way.  That which is born of the flesh is, and must remain, flesh (John 3:6).  It was necessary, therefore, that as regards the person of the Redeemer an interruption should take place of the law of nature, and that though born of woman He should Himself inherit no original taint of sin.

      For a human being to come into the world without sin requires that his birth should be, in whatever sense, supernatural. [So much as this is granted by Schleiermacher himself (Glaubenslehre, s. 97, 2).]  This end, however, might, as a celebrated theologian (Schleiermacher) suggests, have been attained, even if Christ had had an earthly father, by a miraculous agency on the embryo in the womb, purging it from the taint of original sin.  But this suggestion, which is thrown out in order to dispense with the doctrine of the Church that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity became incarnate in Christ, is precluded by the expressed statement of Scripture that Christ had no earthly father, that, as prophecy had intimated, a virgin conceived and brought forth a son (Matt. 1:18, 23).  There is no reason to call in question the authenticity of the narrative – substantially the same in S. Matt. and S. Luke [It has been objected that neither by Christ nor by the Apostles is allusion made to these events.  But all the passages in which our Lord describes Himself, and the Apostles describe Him, as sent into the world from the Father, presuppose them.  Especially is the miraculous agency of Christ in His public life a natural result of this unseen miracle of miracles; it is in accordance with the mode of His birth.  Nor can we suppose the Apostle’s expression “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4) to be without emphasis.]; and the information was no doubt furnished by the Virgin herself, who survived the Ascension for some time.  And its dogmatical import is obvious.  If an embryo had been formed in Mary’s womb in the usual manner, previously to the union of the Logos with it, there would have been in existence potentially, if not actually, a human person with whom the Logos formed a union, which would lead to Nestorianism, or the doctrine of two persons in Christ; whereas the doctrine of the Church is that the Logos took not an existing man but human nature in the abstract into union with Himself. [Ου γαρ προϋποστάτη καθ’ εαυτην σαρκι ηνωθη ο Θειος Λόγος, αλλ’ ενοικήσας τη γαστρι της αγιάς Παρθένου, απεριγράπτως εν τη εαυτου υποστάσει εκ των αλνων της Αειπαρθένου αιμάτων, σάρκα εψυχωμένην ψυχη λογικη τε και νοερα υπεστήσατο, απαρχην προσλαβόμενος του ανθρωπείου φυράματος, αυτος ο Λόγος γενόμενος τη σάρκι υπόστασις (J. Damasc. De F. O. lib. iii. c. 2.]  It may be, as the theologian above mentioned adds, that the mere absence of earthly paternity is “insufficient” of itself to establish the Incarnation of the Logos, but at any rate it leaves room for it, which his hypothesis does not; and the question is simply, What does Scripture teach on the subject?  It tells us, then, that a Divine overshadowing Power took the place of earthly paternity; [Luke 1:35.  Πνευμα άγιον in this passage probably means, not the third person of the Holy Trinity, but, as in Rom. 1:4, the Divine nature itself, considered as holy and the source of all holiness.] in consequence of which the Word became flesh.  This is a very different thing from the mere fact of a sinless man appearing in the world, begotten as well as born like other men.  Nor is the objection valid that the absence of earthly paternity does not, after all, secure the desired end, since original sin must be supposed to descend from the mother as well as the father; and therefore, to complete the theory, we must hold the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and of her ancestors up to Adam. [Schleiermacher, l. c.]  For in this case the mother was merely passive, merely supplied the necessary materials for an Incarnation; and the object of the miraculous conception was that these materials should be purged of all taint of sin, so as to form a fit temple for the indwelling of Deity. [See J. Damasc. in the passage above quoted.  “Idem Spiritus singularissima praesentia et virtute Mariam semper virginem ad concipiendum mundi Salvatorem faecundam reddidit, semen prolificum ex castis ejus sanguinibus elicuit, ab omni adhaerente peccato purgavit, ipsi que Mariae virtutem praebuit qua conciperet ipsum Dei Filium” (Quenstedt, p. iii. c. 3, Memb. th. 12).]  But on other grounds also, viz., that the Word who assumed flesh could not be begotten in time, only be born of woman, and that paternity cannot be predicated of the operation, whatever it was, of the Holy Ghost in the Virgin’s womb, [See the note from Pearson, p. 187.] the idea of generation must be dissociated from the birth of Christ.  Thus do the miraculous conception and the sinlessness of Christ furnish support, the one to the other; and though it might seem as if the former were of minor importance, for a sinless being in the midst of sinful humanity would itself be a miracle, leading to conclusions beyond itself, yet when the explanation is added it is seen to be an adequate one.  On the other hand, if any admixture of actual sin could have been discovered in our Lord, it would have been of little moment that the mode of the Incarnation had been revealed; the foundation would be not merely without a superstructure, but out of harmony with the actual one.

(Status Exaltationis.)

§ 46.  Descent Into Hell

      The clause on this subject in the Apostles’ Creed is not, as is well known, found in the earlier forms thereof, and appears to have been first admitted about A.D. 400.  From its being placed between Christ’s burial and His resurrection, there can be little doubt that in the Creed it means the temporary sojourn of our Saviour’s soul in Hades, or the intermediate state.  To this effect is the Article of Edward VI: “The body of Christ lay in the grave until His resurrection: but His spirit, which He gave up, was with the spirits which were detained in prison, or in hell, and preached unto them, as the place of S. Peter testifieth.”  And by most of our writers no other descent seems to be understood. [Pearson, Art. V.  See also Horsley’s sermon on the subject.]  There is no doubt that the soul of Christ, when He expired on the cross, did pass into hell; i.e., not the final place of torment, but Scheol, or the intermediate state of the Old Testament.  If such passages as Ephes. 4:9 are of doubtful meaning, this cannot be said of S. Peter’s exposition of Ps. 16:10 (Acts 2:31); if Christ’s soul was not left in hell, it must have gone thither.  And with this agree our Lord’s words to the thief on the cross, “Today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43), or that division of Scheol which is assigned to the spirits of the just.  Thus having submitted to death, He was made like unto His brethren in this point also, and fulfilled the ordinary law of humanity, viz., that they on whom death passes are not at once transferred to their final destiny, but await in an intermediate state Christ’s second coming.  And it is supposed that the fact was made an Article of the Creed against the Apollinarian heresy which denied that our Lord had a proper human soul.

      It is open, however, to doubt whether this descent can properly form a part of our present subject, which is concerned with the twofold state through which Christ, in His whole proper person, passed to His final glory.  The soul of Christ, though never separated from the Logos, can hardly be said to be Christ Himself while apart from His body.  We must inquire then whether in Scripture any other descent is spoken of or implied.  And this appears to be the case.  In truth, the two famous passages 1 Pet. 3:19 and 4:6 seem to have been too hastily applied, as in the Article of Edward VI, to the Article in the Creed, whereas they may well bear a different meaning.  It is not as in Acts 2:31, the separate state of souls, but the resurrection of Christ, that the Apostle is principally referring to.  The Saviour, he tells us, was put to death “in the flesh” (in the body of His humiliation), but “quickened in spirit”; in which “He went and preached to the spirits in prison, which sometime were disobedient, in the days of Noah.”  The passage, in its obvious meaning, seems to refer to some migration of Christ subsequent to His resurrection, but whether at the moment of that event and before He came forth from the tomb, or at some other time during His forty days’ sojourn on earth is not specified.  A common interpretation of the passage makes it mean merely that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, inspired Noah to preach to the antediluvians while the ark was a preparing.  Noah, no doubt, was “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Pet. 2:5), but it is not easy to see what connection the death and resurrection of Christ have with Noah’s warnings.  But there are grammatical objections also to this interpretation.  The word “went” of our English version is not in the original a mere expletive, but a principal term and significant: πορευθεις, having set forth on His journey, He preached, etc.: and the word “sometime” (ποτε) is, as our version has it, connected with “disobedient,” not with “preached”.  On the whole, the passage seems to allude to an event which took place at the moment of, or after the resurrection, and which, therefore, is not identical with the descent into hell of the Creed.

      The object for which Christ is said to have thus appeared in Scheol was to preach to the antediluvian sinners, who in the days of Noah gave no heed to the patriarch’s warnings.  We can hardly suppose that our Lord visited them merely to confirm their sentence of condemnation; and indeed the word used (εκήρυξεν) does not usually bear that meaning.  If we may apply the passage 1 Peter 4:6 to the same event, it declares that “the Gospel was preached” (ευηγγελίσθη) to the dead.  But why to the antediluvians more than others?  This the real difficulty of the passage hardly admits of a satisfactory solution.  If they were penitents at the eleventh hour, it may have been to assure them of forgiveness; if they were not penitents, it may have been to offer them forgiveness on repentance.  Perhaps to the Apostle’s mind the human race presented itself under two great divisions, those who lived before the flood and those who lived after it.  When the world was repeopled by the descendants of Noah, they were placed under a covenant of temporal mercies (Gen. 9:15).  The antediluvian sinners thus seemed to lie under a disadvantage as compared with their successors: to rectify the inequality by announcing to them the greater mercies of the Christian covenant may seem not inconsistent with the Divine justice and goodness.

      If this exposition of the passage be allowed, it may lead to a modification of the doctrine that the redeeming power of ,Christ is absolutely confined to this life, not only in reference to those who have enjoyed and misused spiritual advantages, but also in reference to the countless multitudes who, through no fault of their own, have lived and died without ever having had an opportunity of hearing of the Saviour.  Dogmatical statements are on such a question out of place; but any hints of Scripture that under other conditions of existence a work of probation may still be going on, and the inequalities of this life rectified, are not to be summarily set aside.  If one visit of the Saviour to the abodes of the dead is recorded, there seems no reason why it should be considered a solitary instance, and not rather a specimen; at any rate, what occurred once may have occurred, and may occur, again.

      If the foregoing view of the descent into hell is correct, the Lutheran theologians are in the right in making it the first stage in the state of exaltation, whereas the Reformed usually reckon it to that of humiliation.  In fact, if the event took place at the moment of His resuscitation, the body in which He visited Scheol must have been a glorified one; a change which, as we have seen, marks the passing from one state to the other.  But the doctrine of the Lutherans that He went thither in order to triumph over Satan rests on no warranty of Scripture.

§ 47.  Resurrection, Ascension, Session at the Right Hand of God

      The resurrection of Christ is as well attested as any fact of history.  The testimony is the more valuable, inasmuch as it is that of persons who, instead of being predisposed to imagine or believe the fact. showed great reluctance to receive it even when the clearest proofs were offered (Mark 16:11, Luke 24:36–46).  But what our Article principally insists on is that our Lord, when He rose, did so with “body, flesh, and bones, and all, things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature” (Art. 4).

      The materials which we possess for forming a conception of the risen Saviour’s body are scanty, and not easy of adjustment.  All the accounts convey the impression that He rose not only with a real, but with the same body which had been laid in the grave.  With a real body, for on His first appearance to His disciples He set at rest their doubts as to His being a spirit by tangible proof of His possessing “flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39–43).  With the same body, for He showed them the print of the nails and of the spear (John 20:27).  Yet it is also evident that the resurrection body possessed a dominion over space and matter which did not previously belong to it, or which Jesus did not choose to exercise.  He passed through closed doors (John 20:19), and though He partook of food it does not appear that He was compelled to do so by the necessities of nature.  The miracle of the Ascension was an infringement of the law of gravity.  The resurrection body, in short, was not a natural, but a spiritual one (1 Cor. 15:44).  Was this change accomplished at once in all its perfection when He rose; or did it advance by gradual stages until the time when He was taken up?  The latter supposition seems the more probable.  The Saviour rose with an essentially glorified body; but this is not inconsistent with His having passed from one degree of glory to another until, the process being complete, He ascended to heaven.

§ 48.  Council of Chalcedon

      The elements, so far as Scripture furnishes them, of the great problem are now before us.  They are, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the Holy Ghost, His Incarnation in time, His real manhood, His sinlessness, and His Ascension to heaven in a real but glorified body.  Christ is God and Christ is man; this is the substance of the Christian faith, and perhaps in this state of being we shall never know much more.  But, as in the case of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, heresies soon made their appearance on the subject, and these gave rise to controversies and Councils which occupy a large space in Church history.

      The statements of the Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, which is understood to have fixed the orthodox doctrine on the Person of Christ, are as follows: “We acknowledge one and the same Christ to be perfect God and perfect man; of the same substance with the Father as regards His Godhead, and of the same substance with us as regards His manhood – in all things like unto us, sin only excepted: begotten of the Father from everlasting, but in the last days born of the Virgin (της θεοτόκου) subsisting in (al. of) two natures, without confusion, conversion, division, or separation (ασυγχύτως, ατρέπτως, αδιαιρέτως, αχωρίστως): the distinction between the natures not being destroyed by the union, but each preserving its own properties and both culminating in one Person and Hypostasis (έν πρόσωπον και υπόστασις): one and the same Christ, not divided into two Persons.  To the same effect is the language of the Athanasian Creed: “Our Lord Jesus Christ is God and man, God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; man of the substance of His mother, born in the world: perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting: who although He be God and man is not two, but one Christ: one not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God: one altogether not by confusion of substance but by unity of Person: for as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.”  Such definitions as these are obviously the result of protracted theological controversy.

      At the Council of Nice the Church finally severed itself not only from the Ebionite theories [A good account of these will be found in Dorner’s work “On the Person of Christ,” i. 296, etc.] which, under various forms, taught that Jesus of Nazareth was a mere man, the natural son of Joseph and Mary, but from the Arian heresy which denied his eternal Godhead.  The homoousios of the Nicene Creed secured the proper Deity of Christ.  His proper manhood had been sufficiently declared in the Apostles’ Creed.  But the further questions respecting the mode of union of the two natures in one Person, and of their relation to the Person, had been left in the undetermined state in which, for the most part, they are found in the writings of the early Fathers.  These questions now came to the front.  How could a unity of Person be secured with a duality of natures?  How could a singleness of nature be made consistent with the doctrine that the Word became flesh?

      Early in the fourth century Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, a man of piety and ability, and highly esteemed even by those who differed from him, propounded the theory which bears his name, and which has not by any means received the attention which it deserves.  Apollinaris was a strong opponent of Arius, but each, from different points of view, arrived at a similar conclusion.  Arius appears to have held that the human nature of Christ consisted merely of His body, with which the Word entered into union, so that He had no human soul. [Pearson on Creed, note 1 on Art. iii.  Under the term “soul” Arius understood what the trichotomists would call “soul and spirit”.]  And to this he was driven by the exigency of his position.  For since the Logos of Arius was a created being, and the soul of Christ, if He had one, must also have been created, the absurdity would arise of two created intelligences in one Person, a thing which is inconceivable.  But if the manhood of Christ consists merely of a body, this difficulty is evaded.  Apollinaris borrowed a part of his antagonist’s theory, but with the view of effectually guarding against his conclusions.  He assumed the trichotomic view of man’s nature, according to which he is composed of body, soul, and spirit, [See § 29.] and allowing Christ the possession of an animal soul, he made the Logos take the place of the spirit, or rational faculty. [Apollinaris appears not to have been the first to broach this theory.  It attributed to Justin Martyr.  See Hagenbach, D, G, s, 66.]  His motive was to obviate the Arian conception of Christ by investing the rational nature with the attribute of unchangeableness, and consequent sinlessness.  And no doubt his theory does this effectually.  But it stands or falls with the validity of the trichotomic division.  And independently of this, a body with a mere sensitive soul is not a man: such a being is incapable of temptation, and of moral and intellectual development.  The problem, in fact, was simplified by ignoring one of its main factors.  After some years of controversy, Apollinarianism was condemned at the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381, and its author deposed from his bishopric.  Nevertheless, the theory, however indefensible as it came from its author, remained as a leaven in the Church, reappearing in another form in the Eutychian and Monophysite controversies.  Had Apollinaris perceived that the object he had in view, viz., the non potuit peccare of the Saviour, might have been attained without robbing the human soul of its rational faculty, inasmuch as this faculty, the νους or πνευμα of man’s nature, has in itself an affinity with the Logos, he would probably have occupied a more important place in the history of this dogma than he does. [See Dorner, i. p. 1074.]

      About A.D. 428 Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, a Syrian by birth and a disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia, took occasion to side with one of his presbyters, Anastasius by name, who in his discourses had condemned the use of the word Θεοτόκος as applied to the Virgin Mary.  To Nestorius this term seemed to imply that the Virgin had given birth to Deity, thereby introducing into Christianity an idea proper to heathen mythology; in his opinion Χριστοτόκος was the fitting word to use. He found a vehement opponent in Cyril of Alexandria, and painful recriminations ensued.  Cyril assembled a council at Alexandria A.D. 430, and anathematized Nestorius.  Nestorius retorted by anathematizing Cyril.  The Emperor, in the hope of allaying the strife, summoned a general Council at Ephesus A.D. 431 which, presided over by Cyril, and in the absence of the Syrian bishops, condemned Nestorius and deposed him.  The sentence was carried into effect, and Nestorius ended his days in exile.  There is some difficulty in ascertaining the exact views of this unfortunate prelate; for we have to rely on the statements of opponents, who not infrequently attributed to him what were merely their own inferences from his teaching.  Thus he was accused of holding a duality of Persons in Christ, whereas he constantly disavowed any such doctrine, and even, towards the close of the contest, expressed his willingness to admit the term Θεοτόκος if accompanied with suitable explanations.  But whatever may have been the private views of its author, the essence of Nestorianism as a system consists in holding that the Logos, in becoming incarnate, united Himself to an existing human being; which necessarily leads to a double personality.  The Word did not assume a man into union with Himself, but became man; the incarnation and the existence of the human factor were coincident in time.  The Logos did not either find a man, or create one, and then as a secondary act unite Himself to this man; but in the very act of incarnation a man came into being who was both Divine and human.  Apart from this particular controversy, the schools of Antioch and Alexandria did really represent different tendencies.  The former insisted especially on the reality of the manhood, and its likeness to ours; the latter on the Godhead and the distinction between Christ and us.  The teaching of the former might issue in a double personality, that of the latter in Monophysitism.  Had Nestorius asked himself what he meant by the word Χριστοτόκος, which he wished to substitute for Θεοτόκος, he might have seen that either the change was needless, or that the word Χρίστος with him signified the manhood alone, not the whole Person, which it properly denotes.  On the same principle he ascribed the sufferings of Christ to the manhood alone, excluding the Logos from all participation therein.  He cannot, therefore, be acquitted of making, as Cyril remarks, the union a mere juncture (συνάφεια) of natures, otherwise wholly distinct, an inhabitation of the Logos in humanity, not a true incarnation.  Against such a mechanical union Cyril maintains a “physical” one (ενωσις φυσική); i.e. that in the act of incarnation the Logos so assumed the complex of predicates which constitute a human nature as that they cannot be applied to the manhood without at the same time being applied to the Godhead; which, of course, effectually precludes a double personality.  Yet it may be doubted whether Cyril’s own doctrine advances beyond making the humanity a complex of predicates, or a mere όργανον of the Logos, without a will of its own and a relatively independent mental and moral history.  The complex of predicates is held together only by the Logos, who forms the true personality and bond of union.  His favourite illustrations are physical; as the mixture of water and wine, or a piece of red hot iron; which latter, as Dorner remarks, [ii. 80.] makes for the Nestorian as much as for the Alexandrian doctrine, since, though the fire and the metal are in union, the qualities of the one are not imparted to the other.  The difficulties on either side probably led the Council to hesitate to endorse the anathema of Cyril, or to frame a new Creed; and on the arrival of John of Antioch with his attendant bishops, a formulary of a milder type which he had brought with him was proposed, which both Cyril and the Syrian bishops subscribed, though Nestorius was left out of the compromise.  In this formulary the title Θεοτόκος was retained; Christ was pronounced to be “perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul, and with a body begotten of the Father according to His Godhead, and of the Virgin Mary according to His manhood: as regards the former, of the same substance with the Father; as regards the latter, of the same substance with us for of the two natures a union took place.” [Δυο γαρ φύσεων ένωσις γέγονεν.  The Council evidently shrank from a more definite statement.]  Notwithstanding the condemnation of Nestorius, his followers multiplied and formed independent churches in the East, some of which still exist.  It was, as Dorner observes, the first schism which the Church proved herself unable to overcome; and this because she did not fully assimilate into her own system the element of truth which the doctrine contained, viz., the proper personality of the human nature. [ii. 86.]

      Each party continuing to propagate its views, the dispute broke out afresh, and from the opposite quarter.  Eutyches, the head of a monastery in Constantinople, was charged with teaching that after the incarnation there was but one nature in Christ.  This might, as in Cyril’s writings, be capable of a good interpretation; but Eutyches proceeded to explain the union of the two natures in a manner which was a virtual revival of Apollinarianism.  He does not seem to have held, as is commonly supposed, that the human nature was absorbed into the Divine; or that from the union of the two a third nature, neither the one nor the other, proceeded; but that the human nature became so altered in its qualities as to be no longer our nature, that is, not a true human nature.  He was condemned at a particular Synod held under Flavian, Patriarch of Constantinople, and deposed.  His cause, however, was warmly taken up by Dioscurus, the successor of Cyril, a man of violent and unscrupulous temper, who persuaded the Emperor to allow a Synod to be convened at Ephesus A.D. 449, which from the proceedings of Dioscurus at it has received the name of the “Robber-Synod”.  This Synod reversed the condemnation of Eutyches.  The passions of the contending parties rose to such a pitch that had it not been for the influence of Leo the Great of Rome the Eastern Church would probably have been rent in twain.  That sagacious prelate, who had allowed himself not unwillingly to be appealed to by Flavian, persuaded the Emperor Marcian to summon another Synod at Chalcedon, which formed the fourth General Council.  He had previously addressed to Flavian an epistle in which, with admirable dialectical and rhetorical skill, he expounded his views of the Person of Christ.  When the Council assembled, Leo’s epistle was publicly read and received with acclamation; Dioscurus was deposed; and the celebrated Confession of Faith which derives its name from the Council was promulgated.

      It would be neither pleasant nor profitable to attempt to unravel at length the tangled web of the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies; the last of importance which on this subject agitated the ancient Church, and, like the Nestorian, led to a permanent schism.  The Alexandrian school adhered to the traditions of Cyril, and Monophysitism had struck its roots deep in many other Churches of the East.  Peter, Patriarch of Antioch, surnamed Fullo, from his original occupation, took occasion from the sanction of the epithet Θεοτόκος by the Council of Ephesus to endeavour to introduce its counterpart “God was crucified for us” into the Trisagion of the Church.  Hence arose a controversy which, under the name of Theopaschitism, continued for some years.  The more moderate Monophysites contented themselves with maintaining that after the union the natures could be distinguished only in thought (εν επινοια), since, in fact, they coalesced into one nature, which however is not a simple, but a compound one.  But, in truth, it was rather the practical tendencies of Monophysitism than its theoretical errors which led to its final rejection.  The Council of Chalcedon had insisted upon the duplicity of the natures; the Monophysites seemed to disavow its authority ; this was one ground of contention.  The other, a more legitimate one, was that, at least in its extreme form, Monophysitism did really obscure the humanity of Christ to such an extent as to imperil its reality: the “one nature” of Dioscurus and his followers was the Divine nature with a semblance of humanity attached to it.  After vain attempts by the Emperors Zeno and Justinian I to find a middle ground on which both parties could meet, the more decided Monophysites separated themselves, choosing as their leader a monk named Jacob Baradaeus.  This remarkable man, after procuring for himself episcopal consecration, travelled through the East in the garb of a beggar, ordaining Monophysite bishops and presbyters, and founding Churches; and at his death left the sect in a flourishing condition in Syria and Mesopotamia.  From him they received the name of Jacobites.  The favour which the Saracen invaders naturally showed to the Monophysite tenets widened the breach between them and the Church; and independent Churches, still existing, were founded in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Armenia.  Those of the two former countries acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Alexandria; the Armenian Church is entirely independent.

      The controversy, under the form of Monothelitism, broke out again in the seventh century.  Sophronius, a monk of Alexandria, taking exception to the phrase “one energy” (μία ενέργεια) as applied to the miracles of Christ, signalized his accession to the patriarchate of Jerusalem by a confession of faith in which he strenuously maintained a duplicity of energy, corresponding to the duplicity of the natures.  Cyrus of Alexandria, his opponent, had the matter referred to Honorius of Rome, who counseled the avoiding altogether of the terms in debate, but incidentally remarked that the real point in dispute was not whether there was a singleness of energy, but whether there was a singleness of will in Christ.  He himself inclined to the latter opinion.  This gave rise to the Monothelite controversy, which ran through the usual stages of theological rancor.  Scripture appears plainly to ascribe two wills to Christ (“not My will, but Thine be done”); but the Monothelites were ready with a reply which is used by J. Damasc. himself in another connection, viz., that Christ in such passages did not speak in His own person but in ours, by way of instruction and example.  After the death of Honorius mutual excommunications and depositions took place, until at length Constantinus Pogonatus summoned a Council at Constantinople A.D. 680 (the sixth general one), at which, after the reading of an epistle from Pope Agathon, it was determined that as there are two natures in Christ so there are two wills, not opposed to each other, but the human subject to and always in harmony with the Divine.  Monothelitism, thus condemned, lingered for a time in the Syrian sect of the Maronites, but it died away in the Church.

      There is no more uninviting chapter of Church history, in its external aspects, than that which relates to this controversy.  The rancor of the disputants, their mutual anathemas, the unconcealed rivalry of the Sees of Rome and Constantinople, the political influences at work, leave a painful impression on the mind of the student, who on reading the account of some of the proceedings feels how true the statement is that even General Councils are “an assembly of men whereof all are not governed with the Spirit and Word of God” (Art. xxi.).  These reflections, however, will probably give place to others when the matter is considered on its own merits, and apart from the infirmities of the human agents.  The questions at issue were really of vital importance, which cannot be said of all ecclesiastical movements; and the decisions ultimately arrived at display a sobriety of judgment and a consistency with Scripture which lead to the conviction that in forming them the Church at large enjoyed the promised presence and assistance of her Divine Head (Matt. 18:20, 28:20).  It is important, however, to note the character of these decisions.  They were negative rather than positive, repellent of error rather than explanatory of the truth.  There were not two Persons in Christ, there was not one nature, nor one will and energy; the union took place without change, admixture, etc.  The Church laid down certain landmarks, or, to vary the image, buoys, beyond which it was not safe for speculation to venture; but wisely forebore to attempt a positive explanation of the mystery.  Within the channel marked out varieties of exposition are admissible; but they probably will only issue in disappointment.  For, in truth, the problem of the incarnation, like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is beset with difficulties which the finite mind of man seems incapable of grappling with.  We see here, emphatically, through a glass darkly.  An attentive reader of the history of the dogma will probably perceive that it involves three main questions: 1. That relating to the kenosis, or exinanition, of the Logos.  2. That relating to the hypostatical union.  3. That relating to the perichoresis, or interpenetration of the natures.

§ 49.  Kenosis, or Exinanition, of the Logos

      This point did not specially engage the attention of the early Church, which was occupied rather with the notions to be formed of the Person of Christ after the incarnation.  It came into greater prominence in the disputes between the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the seventeenth century; and in more recent times, but principally in Germany, it has drawn to itself the attention of many distinguished theologians.

      S. Paul tells us (Phil. 2:7) that Christ when He was in the form of God thought it not a thing to be snatched at or retained to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation (εαυτον εκένωσε); and on the meaning of these last words the controversy mainly turns.  By the Lutheran theologians they are understood of the Logos incarnate, and of the earthly life of Christ.  Being by virtue of the communication of Divine properties to the manhood, which took place from the moment of the conception, in the form of God, He yet laid aside His native dignity, and took upon Him the form of a servant; i.e., as it is explained, while retaining the possession of the Divine attributes (omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.) He forbore the use of them, hid them as it were under a veil, and only occasionally permitted glimpses of them to appear.  But the difficulties connected with this interpretation are very great.  It imposes on us the belief that Christ as a babe in the womb possessed omniscience without using it, which seems a contradiction, and exercised omnipotence while unconscious, as man, of His own personality.  Thus an air of unreality becomes attached to the manhood in that stage, and the same, to some extent, may be said of all the subsequent stages till the ascension.  Moreover, deliberately to renounce the exercise of powers latently possessed implies a conscious act of will; and the difficulty recurs, how are we to conceive Christ as a babe exerting such an act of will?  There seems, further, no room left for a real human development, for the Logos from the first absorbs the manhood into Himself, and the latter becomes a mere instrument, a Theophany, a dramatic representation. In short, the theory is plainly of Docetic tendency.  But a still more formidable difficulty remains.  The conception in the womb is itself assigned to the kenosis; but if so, where is the manhood which laid aside its inherent majesty?  It must be one antecedent to the conception, i.e. it must be a preexistent manhood, sharer of the Divine glory and attributes, which it abdicated in order to enter the Virgin’s womb.  And thus, in its natural result, the Lutheran doctrine seems to lead to the notion of a double manhood, one before time, the other in it.

      The preference then must be given to the interpretation generally adopted by the Reformed theologians, according to which the words “being in the form of God” refer to the Logos άσαρκος, or the second Person of the Holy Trinity before He became man [But see Dr. Gifford on the Incarnation, on the force of υπάρχων. – Ed.]; and the passage will then be to the effect that the Logos submitted to a self-limitation whereby it became possible for Him to enter into union with the manhood, without annihilating its natural properties, or interfering with its relatively independent development.  In other words, the act of incarnation itself, and irrespectively of the subsequent humiliations endured by the Saviour, was a kenosis.  What conception are we to form of this?

      There appear to be only two ways in which we can imagine such a kenosis to have taken place.  We may suppose that the Logos, in order to adapt Himself to the state of the embryo in the womb and the babe in the manger, a state devoid of self-consciousness, suspended for the time His own Divine self-consciousness, gradually recovering it as the babe grew according to the ordinary laws of humanity; a theory which has been maintained by distinguished names abroad. [Thomasius and his followers.]  By a free act of omnipotence and unbounded love, the Logos extinguished for the time being His personality, and became unconscious in the unconscious infant, partially conscious in the child, fully so in the man.  The first objection to this hypothesis is that it seems inconsistent with the ατρέπτως of the Council of Chalcedon, and tends to a temporary eclipse of the Holy Trinity; the personality of the second Person, which cannot really be separated from His nature, suffering pro tempore an extinction.  Moreover, instead of the Logos being Himself the active animating principle of the incarnation (which is the doctrine of the Church), He here becomes a mere impersonal nature on a level with the impersonal embryo; [The embryo is called άγιον, in the neuter gender (Luke 1:35).  Compare το γεννηθεν, Matt. 1:20.  See Martensen, Dog. s. 132.] and in order to obtain such an active principle presiding over the union of the natures, the Holy Ghost takes the place of the Logos.  This latter, indeed, is a characteristic of the Reformed theology as compared with the Lutheran.  It is plain that the union of two unconscious natures, neither of them exercising the functions of a true personality, seems hardly to come up to the idea of the incarnation, as it is represented in Scripture.  But if this theory is rejected, the only other conceivable mode of self-limitation is that which leaves the Logos in full possession of His active personality, but supposes that the fullness of the Divine nature was not at once communicated to the human, but gradually, according to the receptivity of the latter. [The theory of Dorner and others.  See Dorner, Theil ii. 1272.]  That is, the union was not, as the Lutheran divines teach, complete from the first, but was itself a process, involving successive acts; a continual efflux of the Divine nature into the human, not an act perfected at once.  The union kept pace with the growth of the manhood; being different in the babe from what it was in the man, and in the earthly life from what it is in the heavenly, and in the present heavenly life from what it will be when the time spoken of in 1 Cor. 15:28 arrives.  The Logos intra carnem was never during the earthly life present in His fullness as He is extra carnem; not because He had abdicated His essential Godhead, but because He had not communicated it to the manhood in all its fullness, nor could do so until the manhood was capax infiniti. [This capacity, according to Dorner and those of his way of thinking, was actually attained at the Ascension: so that Christ’s human nature is now fully partaker of the Divine attributes (Theil ii. 1200–64).  Dorner alleges the possibility of death, or the separation of soul and body, as a proof that the hypostatical union was not, during our Lord’s earthly sojourn, complete.]  There was a kenosis therefore of the Logos, so far as the man Christ Jesus was concerned, but none of His own essential nature.  The knowledge, e.g., which Christ possessed was Divine; not merely such a knowledge as Christians also possess, but Divine through the indwelling of the Logos: it was a knowledge sui genesis, and absolutely free from error: but it was not omniscience as an attribute of Deity.  The Logos exercised, so to speak, a measure of self-restraint in communicating this and the other Divine attributes, in tender condescension to the weakness for the time being of the human factor.  And thus Christ could and did say, “My Father is greater than I,” as well as “I and the Father are one” (John 14:28, 10:30); He could be, and was, ignorant of the day when the end should come (Mark 13:32).  This notion of the kenosis certainly avoids the difficulties connected with the former, but it involves one of its own hardly less formidable.  It involves the idea of a double consciousness in the Logos, viz., that belonging to Himself as a Divine Person and that belonging to Him as incarnate in Christ, which plainly, according to the theory, are not, or at least were not for a time, coincident.  And is such a double consciousness consistent with the unity of the Person, or rather of the personality, of Christ?  In truth this is a difficulty which meets us, more or less, in every attempt to explain the mystery.  Even if we suppose that this duality of consciousness is now at an end, the human nature having become capable of receiving the Godhead in all its fullness, must it not have existed during the state of humiliation?

§ 50.  Hypostatical Union (ένωσις υποστατικη – unio personalis)

      The doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon is that the Divine and the human natures are united in one Person, viz., the Person of the Logos; hence the term Unio personalis.  This union is distinguished from several other kinds.  It is not, says Hollaz, notionalis sive rationis, as when genus and difference make the species; not respective (σχετικη), as when two friends are said to have one soul; not accidental, of which whiteness and sweetness in milk, honey and water in mead (κατα σύγχρασιν), two beams in juxtaposition (κατα παράστασιν), the matter and grace of the sacraments, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the faithful, are examples; not essential, as when two imperfect substances go to make one nature, e.g., the soul and body in man, whereas in Christ two perfect natures are in union; but altogether singular and wonderful, a union of natures but not a natural one, a personal one, but not of persons.  It is called perichoristica, i.e., intimate and most perfect, denoting a mutual interpenetration of the things united.  He adds, very properly, that such a union can only be of substances in themselves, i.e., abstractedly, diverse in nature.  J. Damasc. mentions other kinds of union not to be confounded with this; κατα ταυτοβουλίαν as when there is a unity of will between two persons, καθ’ ομοτιμίαν as when God is said to have exalted the man Christ Jesus to like honour with Himself, καθ’ ομωνυμίαν merely nominal and καθ’ ευδοκίαν of goodwill.  The Council attempted no positive explanation of the manner in which the union of the natures in the Person took place.

      The technical words employed in these discussions, “Nature,” and “Person,” labour under an ambiguity which has led to much fruitless controversy.  The Logos must be held to have assumed not indeed a man but still a human nature; the totality of our nature but individualized in His person.  And this is what the Council means by affirming that Christ is a “perfect man,” for a complex of predicates, without will and intelligence, and a central Ego, would not be such.  By the two natures then we must understand concrete natures, God Himself subsisting in an individual man.

      Then with respect to the word “Person,” which the Council distinguishes from the “natures,” when it declares that two natures are combined in one Person, we may ask, What is the Person of the Logos apart from His nature, i.e. the Divine essence?  A mere mode of subsistence in the Godhead; not what we usually mean by the word, viz., an individual with an independent will, and real subsistence.  God the Son is God with the personal property of filiation, which is a mere relation in which He stands to the Father.  What we mean by personality belongs to the One God, the common “substance” or essence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not to the immanent relations of the Holy Trinity considered by themselves; just as in the case of an earthly father personality belongs to him as a man, not to his paternity, or the relation in which he stands towards his son.  Hence it will be seen that such a question as T. Aquinas has proposed, whether the union took place in the Person, or in the natures, has no proper meaning.

      The trinitarian hypostasis, or Person, of the Logos, without the connotation of His nature, i.e. the Godhead itself, does not seem capable of assuming a human nature.  The union was effected neither in the Person alone, nor in the nature alone, but in both; i.e., the incarnation was the work of the Holy Trinity so far as it was God who became flesh, but it terminated, in scholastic language, in the Person of the Son: in which latter sense it cannot be said that the Father, or the Holy Ghost, became incarnate.  Does it not seem to follow that if the Person of the Son is severed from His nature, while the two natures are to be considered as abstractions, not living realities, little place is left for a true personal subject, a thinking and willing agent, in the incarnate Logos?

      These remarks may serve to point out the difficulties that beset the subject.  The question the Church had to deal with was this: the true meaning of the words “Person” and “nature,” as used in this connection, being borne in mind, how were the natures to be brought into union so as to form the One Christ as He appears on the page of Scripture?  The illustration of the Athanasian Creed, from the compound nature of man, is not to the point.  The soul, the animating principle of the body, and which corresponds to the Divine nature in Christ, is not, like the Godhead, a complete nature in itself, but only a part of man’s nature; whereas the Divine nature is no part of any other, it exists a se, in the plenitude of its personality and attributes.  Shall we suppose the two natures so to combine as to form a mixed one?  But then Christ is neither God nor man, but a tertium quid.  Shall we suppose a process of absorption to take place?  But if the human nature is absorbed in the Divine, Christ has no real manhood: if the Divine in the human, He has no real Godhead, to say nothing of the impropriety of ascribing a change to what is absolutely unchangeable.  If, as we have seen, the natures are not mere abstractions, and this Scylla is to be avoided, how are we to keep clear of the Charybdis of a double personality in Christ?  If the natures are supposed to be united in the Person (unio personalis), which is in fact the received mode of explanation, is a Trinitarian Person, in its proper meaning, capable of such a function?  But it may be well to let one of the orthodox writers of the Church, a standard authority both in the East and West, John of Damascus, speak for himself in his attempt to frame a consistent theory.

      In his treatise on the Incarnation this writer, after speaking of the miraculous conception, thus proceeds: The Logos was not united to a human body already in existence, but dwelling in the womb of the Virgin while in his own person uncircumscribed he formed the subsistence (υπεστήσατο) of a body and a rational soul, the Logos Himself becoming the hypostasis of the human nature: so that there was simultaneously flesh – the flesh of the Logos – and flesh animated by a soul. [Άμα σαρξ άμα Θεου Λόγου σαρξ, άμα σαρξ έμψυχος (De F. O. lib. iii. c. 2).]  Wherefore we do not say that man was deified, but that God became man; for God perfect in nature became man perfect in nature, yet without coalescing into one.  If this latter were maintained Christ would be of the same substance neither with the Father, whose nature is simple, nor yet with His mother, whose nature was not compounded of Deity and humanity.  The errors of heretics proceed from their confounding the nature with the hypostasis.  When we speak of one nature of man, we mean that which is common to many hypostases (i.e. persons), viz. having a body and soul, each hypostasis possessing these two natures (or substances).  But as regards our Lord, since there never was, or can be, more than one Christ, there can be no such thing as a common Christ nature, a Χριστότης; but we have one Hypostasis in two perfect natures, the Hypostasis being on this account a compound one (σύνθετος).  As in the Holy Trinity the subsistence of three Persons does not affect the unity of the Godhead, nor is the Unity of the Godhead inconsistent with the subsistence of the three Persons, so a duplicity of natures is not inconsistent with the one Christ, for they are united in the Person (καθ’ υπόστασιν).  We do not affirm that the whole nature of the Godhead was united to all the persons of humanity, but that the whole nature of the Godhead was united to the whole nature of the manhood, όλος όλω.  The peculiar property of the Person of Christ, that wherein He differs from the Father and the Holy Ghost, from His mother and from us, is that He is at the same time God and man.  By the terms “perfect God” and “perfect man” we signify the fullness and completeness of the natures; in saying “wholly God” and “wholly man” we signify the individual singularity of the Person.  In the Holy Trinity the proper phrase is not άλλο και άλλο, but άλλος και άλλος; but as regards the Person of Christ it is άλλο και άλλο, not άλλος και άλλος. [De F. O. lib. iii. cc. 2–8.]  The following is of importance: “Although no nature is without an hypostasis, or essence without a person in whom it inheres, it does not follow that natures united to each other in an hypostasis should have each its own hypostasis; for they can unite into one hypostasis, both having one and the same.  The hypostasis of the Logos, being that of both natures, occasions the human nature neither to be without an hypostasis nor yet to have one of its own; both natures possess it in its totality, without division or separation.  The human nature was not made an hypostasis alongside the hypostasis of the Logos, but subsisting in the latter it may be called ενυπόστατος, i.e. owing its hypostasis to another, whereas ανυπόστατος would mean that it has no hypostasis at all, neither one of its own nor a borrowed one.” [De F. O. iii. c. 9.]

      The substance of this exposition is that the prime movement, towards the incarnation came from the Logos, i.e. God under the hypostatical character of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, not from the manhood; the former being the active, the latter the passive agent: that the two natures even after the union remain distinct: that there is, however, but one Christ, the unity of the Christ being secured by the union of the natures in the hypostasis of the Logos.  Thus far it is merely an expansion of the statements of the Council of Chalcedon, and no doubt fairly represents the accepted doctrine of the Church.  But when it is examined carefully, and with a view to its inner consistency, it is less satisfactory.  The natures remain distinct, i.e. as the writer explains it, Deity is not humanity, nor humanity Deity: this indeed is self-evident; but is he not attaching to the word “nature” that self-same abstract sense which, as we have seen, is quite inapplicable to the Divine nature, i.e. making it a complex of predicates instead of God Himself in His full personality?  Deity (Θεότης) did not unite itself to humanity, but the Logos became man in the actual man Christ Jesus.  The natures in the abstract sense appear in Christ as living realities; God, not Deity; an individual man, not humanity.  But if this be so, how can the natures thus understood be said to remain distinct after the union?  Do they not rather seem to unite so as to form the one God-man, as He actually appears on the sacred page?  It seems as if the ατρέπτως, ασυγχύτως, etc., of the Council refer not so much to the result of the union as to the mode in which it was effected; it was not effected by conversion, fusion, etc., but by the hypostatical assumption.  But this does not determine what view of Christ’s Person we are to take after the assumption; and if even then we are to consider the natures, in their proper sense, as distinct, it is not easy to see how we are to avoid the notion of a mere juxtaposition of the Logos and the man Christ, the συνάφεια which Cyril contends against, whereas S. John says that the Logos became flesh.  This is one difficulty that meets us.  And another is connected with the Damascene’s statement that the human nature has no proper hypostasis, or personality, of its own; that of the Logos fulfilling this function.  But a humanity without a central ego, the source of will and determination, seems a mutilated one; it seems at best but a mere instrument, or όργανον, of the Logos.  That is not the conception we form of the Christ of the Gospels.  According to this theory we seem to have in Christ a human nature defective in the property of personality, on the summit of which, to supply the defect, is placed the Divine personality of the Logos; apart from which common bond of union the natures would have a tendency to fly asunder.  But a human nature distinct from the Divine, and in order to keep it in union therewith, deprived of its own independent hypostasis, which is replaced by a Divine hypostasis, is a conception certainly not without its peculiar difficulties.  And these were felt, and attempts made to obviate them.  The assumption was made that personality did not in fact appertain to the perfection of a human nature.  T. Aquinas supposes an opponent to urge that the human nature in Christ cannot be supposed of less dignity than ours; and that to a perfect humanity it certainly does appertain to possess a proper personality, i.e. whenever the nature becomes individualized as it did in Christ.  His reply does not seem very satisfactory.  Personality, he says, only belongs to the perfection of a thing in so far as it belongs to its perfection to subsist by itself.  But this condition disappears if it subsists in another more exalted than itself; which is the case as regards the human nature in Christ.  The absence of its own personality is compensated by that of the Logos; it gains by the loss.  The human nature in Christ is more excellent than ours, just as the sensitive soul, which is common to man and the brute, is more excellent in the former by reason of its conjunction with an intelligent nature.  But the question relates not to the excellence of what a thing is joined to, but to the perfection of the thing itself which is joined; and the illustration does not determine whether an individualized human nature without a personality of its own can be considered a perfect one.  Another illustration which Aquinas uses betrays the weakness of his position.  Not every individual substance, he says, is a person, but only that which subsists by itself; the hand of Socrates, e.g., though an individual substance, is not a person, because it subsists only in something more perfect than itself, viz. Socrates.  If the human nature bears only the same relation to the Person which the hand of a man does to the man, it plainly occupies a very subordinate position in our conception of Christ.  In later times, after the Adoptionist controversy, the theory was fully carried out, and the general doctrine of Church writers was that the manhood in Christ is impersonal.  What J. Damasc. means by a “compound hypostasis” is not quite clear.  If it is only that the hypostasis of Christ is that of both natures, it is but repeating what he had already said; if that the human nature had, after all, a personality of its own, but that it was, in some sense, united to that of the Logos, the union of a Divine and a human personality into a compound one seems as difficult of comprehension as the union of a Divine and human nature into a compound nature.

      The same line of reasoning is pursued in reference to the duplicity of wills in Christ, and occasions the same difficulty.  Against the Monothelites J. Damasc. remarks that the faculty of will is a property not of the person but of the nature.  What we possess without learning it belongs to the nature, but we all possess the faculty of willing without learning it.  Man was created in the image of God, who is absolutely free, and therefore he must have a will.  If will were a matter of the person and not of the nature there would be three wills in the Holy Trinity, for there are three Persons; but inasmuch as there is but one Divine will, it must belong to the nature (i.e. the common essence) of the Godhead.  But since in Christ there is confessedly a duplicity of natures, it follows that there is also in Him a duplicity of wills.  Scripture attributes a real human will to Christ.  And the same may be said of the “energies” of Christ, which are twofold, corresponding to the natures.  It will be seen that throughout this reasoning the “nature” is not regarded as an abstraction, such as Deity or humanity, which as such can have no will, but as individualized in a person; and then arises the question, How are the wills to be held in union so as that the unity of the Person shall not be impaired?  The answer is, as before, that the wills are held together in the hypostasis, or Person, of the Logos.  “It is impossible to combine two wills into a compound one, any more than two natures; what name could we give it?  It would neither be Divine nor human.”  But how can the person of the Logos, a mere relation, operate apart from His nature, which is the real source of His will?  And if under His Person we include His nature, is not the whole tantamount to saying that the will of the Logos holds the will of the manhood in union? which, whether it be true or not, seems inconsistent with what J. Damasc. elsewhere says respecting the independence of Christ’s human will.  For the Divine will holding the human one in union must plainly be the dominant principle, and the human will can only exercise itself so far as that of the Logos permits.  And thus it seems deprived of the characteristic of a really free will, viz., self-originating power.  The Logos makes use of the human will much as the soul makes use of the body.

      It cannot be disguised that the general effect of the theory that the Trinitarian Person is the bond of union between the natures and the wills otherwise distinct, is to leave the natures without a real union and to assign an undue preponderance to the Divine aspect of the Redeemer’s person.  And since the mediatorial office of Christ as our High Priest rests on the truth of His human nature (Heb. 2:17), it cannot be matter of surprise that there should have been a tendency in mediaeval Christianity to lose sight of the Saviour as our advocate with the Father, and to set up other mediators in His place.  It may be doubted, too, whether such a manhood is capable of ethical development.  Could Christ be really tempted, resist the temptation, submit His will to that of the Father, learn obedience by what He suffered, become perfect through suffering, earn His crown of glory as a reward – all which Scripture attributes to Him – without a human personality, the seat of self-determining energy?  Or could He be an example and an encouragement to us?  The Councils and theologians have negatively guarded the essentials of the faith, but it can hardly be said that they have given us the full portraiture of God manifest in the flesh.  The difference of the natures in the abstract it is no doubt essential to maintain, but what we want to realize is the unity of the Person including the natures, the Person of the one Christ, God and man.

      As Nitzsch remarks, Syst. § 131: perhaps the point of departure has been taken too much from physical analogies, such as the soul and body, or the heated iron, which after all explain nothing; and too little from the descriptions which Scripture gives of the Christian life.  In Scripture the nature of God and the nature of man do not repel each other, like the opposite poles of a magnet, but rather have a mutual affinity.  Man was created in the image of God, and God from the beginning was actuated by a φιλανθρωπία (Tit. 3:4).  The union restored between fallen man and God, in and through Christ, is ethical rather than physical.  But very strong expressions are used concerning it.  “I live,” says S. Paul, “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20); “Christ is our life” (Col. 3:4); “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17)  The Holy Spirit bears witness with their spirits that Christians are sons of God (Rom. 8:14–16).  Prayer is the voice of the Spirit Himself in their heart (ibid. 26).  Yet Paul’s individuality stands out distinct on the inspired page, and is not interfered with by the presence of Christ in him.  He lived with the consciousness of perfect freedom, and yet his human life was continually taken up into the life of God.  Here is a union of God and man entirely removed from physical conceptions, and yet surely not the less real.  And it may aid us in our attempts to explain the incarnation, so far as it can be explained.  Christ stands out on the inspired page as a man like ourselves, with a human will, and human energies; tempted, resisting, suffering, victorious; but His human will, though real, yet being free from any taint of sin, was evermore, and immediately in each crisis, taken up into perfect union with that of the indwelling Logos.  From one point of view He is altogether Divine, and from another He is altogether human; and this probably is the mode in which most simple minded Christians receive the mystery.

§ 51.  Personal Propositions. Communication of the Attributes

(Propositiones personales.  Perichoresis. Communicatio idiomatum)

      The natures, however abstractedly distinct, cannot be supposed to be in mere juxtaposition, united by a Divine hypostasis which like a ring contains them within its circumference.  A communion between them of some sort there must be.  Leo had attempted to satisfy this requirement by his well-known Canon, “Each nature acts according to its own properties, but with the participation of the other”; e.g., Christ walked on the lake by virtue of His human nature to which alone walking belongs, but that He did not sink was owing to the participation of the Divine nature in the act.  But even this left the natures too far apart, and it was felt necessary to bring them into some closer relation.  The explanation of J. Damasc. is as follows:

      “The Logos made human properties His own, inasmuch as what belongs to His flesh belongs to Him, and imparts to His flesh (i.e. His human nature) Divine properties; according to the method of mutual communication (αντίδοσις), and by virtue of the interpenetration of the natures (περιχώρησις).  Thus the Lord of glory is said to have been crucified (1 Cor. 2:8), although His Divine nature could not suffer; and the Son of Man is said to be in heaven while upon earth in his human nature.  For it was one and the same that was Lord of glory and Son of Man.  And we acknowledge that to the same Person both the miracles and the sufferings belong; though by virtue of one nature (κατ’ άλλο) He performed the miracles, and by virtue of the other endured the sufferings.  When we contemplate the natures we call them Deity and humanity; but the one compound hypostasis we sometimes name Christ, i.e. both God and man, or God incarnate; sometimes, from one of its parts, God only or the Son of God, and man only or the Son of Man.  When we speak of the Deity (i.e. in the abstract) we do not attribute to it human properties; we cannot say it was created, or capable of suffering: nor, again, do we attribute to the humanity (in the abstract) Divine attributes, e.g. to have been uncreated.  But when we speak of the Person we attribute both the one and the other to Him: Christ died, Christ is in heaven (while upon earth); this Man is uncreated, and uncircumcised, etc.  This is what we mean by antidosis; either nature imparting to the other its own properties, by virtue of the unity of the Person and the Perichoresis.” [De F. O. lib. iii. cc. 3, 4.]  He speaks also of a certain deification (θέωσις) of the human nature, through its union with the Divine; which he explains as being “enriched with Divine energies”; as, e.g., in the miracles, it did not perform them by virtue of its own properties, but through its union with the Logos in His hypostasis, the Logos exerting His Divine power through the human nature. [De F. O. lib. iii. c. 17.  He extends this deification to the human will in Christ, from its union with the “Divine and omnipotent” will of the Logos.  But can a human will deified by union with an Omnipotent will be said to remain a human will in any proper sense?]  But this adds little to what he had previously said concerning the antidosis and the perichoresis.

      It may be doubted whether in all this J. Damasc. arrives at any real perichoresis of the natures.  At least, the examples he gives are merely those which were afterwards called “Personal propositions,” from their belonging rather to the Person which holds the natures in union than to the natures themselves.

      T. Aquinas does little more than reproduce the reasoning of his predecessor.  “Since the Person,” he says, “of the Son of God, which is correctly expressed by the Word ‘Deus,’ is the sustaining principle (suppositum) of the human nature which the word ‘Homo’ in the concrete denotes, it is plain that this proposition, Deus est homo, is true and proper, not only on account of the truth of the terms, but on account of the truth of the predication.”*  That is, in reference to this particular Man, the proposition holds good, Deus est homo; but, as he explains afterwards, [De Incarn. q. xvi. art. 5.] the natures in the abstract, Deity and humanity, exclude each other.

            [*De Incarn. q. xvi. art. 1.  The truth of the terms. i.e., the same Christ is truly God and truly man, therefore God is man; the truth of the predication, i.e. man may be truly predicated of God.  This may be the place to notice an ambiguity in the use of the word “hypostasis,” or “persona,” which J. Damasc. not infrequently falls into.  Sometimes he uses it, as T. Aquinas does here, to signify the suppositum, or sustaining principle (υπόστασις), of the human nature; that the human nature has the ground of its subsistence in the Logos.  At other times he seems to mean by it the central ego, the personality, of an individual; that is, of the Logos, so far as He can be considered an individual.  The former sense may be consistent with a true ego, or personality, of the human nature, hardly the latter.]

      The question concerning the adoration of Christ is treated in the same way by both writers.  “In what hypostasis,” asks J. Damasc., “dost thou worship the Son of God?  One incarnate nature in the hypostasis of the Logos; worshipped with one worship since the Person (πρόσωπον), though of two natures, is one.” [De Sanct. Trin. q. 5.]  So T. Aquinas. [De. Inc. q. xxv. art. 1.]  In other words, the human nature in the abstract is not an object of adoration, but the whole Person is; and this person is man as well as God; so that we may say, not that humanity but that this Man is to be worshipped.

      Shortly after the Reformation the differences between the Reformed and the Lutheran branches of the Protestant Church brought the question of the union of the natures into prominence.  Luther taught that Christ in His glorified body is present in the consecrated elements; Zwingli, and the Swiss churches in general, allowed only a spiritual presence.  Among the arguments employed by the latter against the Lutherans, a principal one was that ubiquity must thus be ascribed to the human nature, and this reopened the whole controversy respecting the communion of the natures.  The Reformed Confessions touch lightly on the subject.  We do not hold, says the Helv. Confession 1566, that the Divine nature in Christ suffered, or that Christ according to His human nature is omnipresent.  For the body of Christ, though glorified, has not laid aside its properties, or become absorbed in the Divine nature. [Augusti.  Lib. Symb. Eccl. Ref. p. 27.]  So the Heidelberg Cathechism: “Christ is true God and true man; therefore according to the human nature He is not on earth, but according to His Deity, majesty, grace, and Spirit, He is never absent from us.” [Ibid. p. 549.]  The Lutheran Confessions are more distinct.  We teach, says the “Formula Concordiae,” that though each nature retains its essential properties, so that, e.g., to be omnipotent, omnipresent, etc., are not properties of human nature essentially, and to be circumscribed, to suffer, to die, etc., are not properties of the Divine nature essentially (that is, that the one nature is not formally changed into the other), yet on account of the hypostatical union that of the natures is much more than a mere nominal one, [The antidosis of J. Damasc., and αλλοίωσις of Zwingli, against which Luther inveighs so vehemently.] otherwise it would be impossible to say, This man is God.  After the incarnation the human nature belongs to the Person not less than the Divine; therefore wherever Christ is, there He must be in His human nature.  But in His Divine Nature He is omnipresent; unless, therefore, we rend the Person asunder so must He be in His human nature.  Yet this does not mean that the human nature is locally expanded, so as to fill all places in heaven and earth; this cannot be said even of the Divine nature.  That the humanity is not receptive of Divine properties cannot be proved: does not Christ Himself say, “All power is given unto Me,” etc., and “Where two or three are gathered, etc., there am I”?  If the union of the natures were merely nominal, of what value would the atonement be? Whereas it was the participation of the Divine nature in Christ’s sufferings that rendered them efficacious to take away sin?

      Here then is a difference of no small moment amongst Protestants themselves.  On the Lutheran side it may be said, “You admit that the Person of the Logos constitutes that of the manhood; does, then, the nature pass with the Person or not?  If it does, the Divine attributes must sooner or later pass with it, for in God the attributes cannot be in re separated from the nature.  If it does not, the Person of the Logos apart from His nature is, as already explained, a mere relation.  Nor must we argue to the capacities of human nature from the actual condition of man born in sin and subject to death, but from human nature as it appears in the second Adam, and in its glorified state; of this manhood, though not of our present empirical one, it may be true that Finitum capax infiniti est.”  Had the Lutherans stopped here, it might not have been so easy to dislodge them from their position.  But they took up other ground hardly tenable, e.g. that the communication of the properties was complete from the moment of the incarnation, so that the babe Christ even in the womb was omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.  Only He forbore the use of these attributes.  It has already been observed how in the crucial instance of omniscience this theory must be modified, the possession and the use being here inseparable.  The Logos, in short, according to the Lutherans, is not and cannot be extra carnem.  Wherever He is, there is also the manhood which is now inseparable from the Person.  And in order to make this consistent with the nature of a real body, which must, if it become visible, be circumscribed in space, they invented the curious notion of an “illocal” presence (illocalis praesentia); i.e. a presence which, like the Divine omnipresence, is disconnected from the ideas of space and visibility.  When Christ, e.g., shall appear at the last day, it will be a manifestation in space of the illocal Presence, and as such come under the laws which govern a visible and tangible body.  Thus they hoped to obviate the absurd idea, attempted to be fastened on them by their opponents, of Christ’s body filling all space; which, even if it were conceivable, would be a very different thing from the Divine attribute of ubiquity.  If Christ becomes visible in space, it can only be as He was visible to the Apostles after His resurrection, viz., in a circumscribed body like ours.

      The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum was worked out by the Lutheran divines with scholastic precision.  It is defined to be not merely Verbalis or Intellectualis (as when genus communicates its properties to the species), but Realis (i.e. between two substances really distinct); nor, again exaequativa (i.e. the difference of the natures per se, or essentially, remains): nor multiplicativa (as when a man communicates according to the traducian theory, his soul to his son); nor transfusiva (as when wine is poured from one vessel into another, leaving the former empty); but συνδυαστική, i.e. between two natures perfectly and intimately united; yet not commixtiva (i.e. the properties of the natures are not commingled); nor essentialis (as between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity); but personalis et supernaturalis.  There are three kinds of it.  The first, when the properties either of the Divine or the human nature are attributed to the whole Person; e.g. Christ is begotten of the Father from everlasting, Christ was born of the Virgin Mary (genus idiomaticum).  The second, when the Son of God is said to have communicated the properties of His Divine nature to the human, really and truly, to be possessed and used in common (genus majestaticum).  The third, when in the work of Christ (atonement, etc.) either nature is said to operate according to its own properties but to a common result (genus Apotelesmaticum, θεανδρικη ενέργεια); e.g. when Christ is said to have died for sin, the dying properly belongs to the human nature, but the efficacy of the sacrifice is derived from the Divine; and they both combine to the result, viz. satisfaction for sin, and are ascribed to the one concrete Person, Christ.

      It was the genus majestaticum to which the Reformed theologians principally took exception, and not without reason.  They argued that no created being, which the human nature of Christ was admitted to be, however exalted and glorified, could be receptive of the infinite Being in all His fullness, that finitum never can be capax infiniti.  The Logos, therefore, in the Person of Christ must be supposed to be, more or less, in a state of self-limitation.  That if some Divine attributes, e.g. Omnipresence, were communicated, all must have been, for we cannot, except in thought, separate one class from another; and consequently eternity must be predicated of the incarnation, which yet we know, as a fact, took place in time.  That a real antidosis implies a communication of human properties to the Divine nature as well as of Divine to the human, which yet is incompatible with just views of the Divine nature, which being infinite, can admit of no additions.

      It will be seen that the Reformed type of doctrine is formed rather on the lines of the Council of Chalcedon and J. Damascenus, while the Lutheran aims at bringing the natures into union in themselves, and not merely through the connecting link of the Person.  And in order to secure some real communion between the natures, the Swiss theologians were compelled to introduce the Holy Ghost between the Logos and His human nature.  What the communicatio idiomatum is in the Lutheran theology the excellent gifts of the Holy Ghost are in the Reformed.  Such are, the power of working miracles, a knowledge far transcending ours, a relative independence of the ordinary laws of humanity, such as passing through closed doors, vanishing out of sight, etc.; which, however, are to be carefully distinguished from the Divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence.  The possession of these gifts was not denied by the Lutherans, but they asked whether the singularity of Christ’s Person could be secured by the impartation of spiritual gifts which, at least as regards their ordinary manifestations, are the property of every good man.  The result of the controversy may be briefly summed up: that neither type of doctrine succeeds in giving us a fully adequate representation of what we want – a Divine-human personality, a Theanthropus, one Christ both God and man.

PART  II – The Work of Christ

§ 52.  The Threefold Office

      The Person of Christ is the foundation of His work, but the work itself consists in the restoration of the normal relations between man and God.  As such it is properly described as a mediatorial work.  The word “Mediator” is used in the New Testament in a twofold sense – that of a peacemaker between two parties at variance (1 Tim. 2:5), and that of the founder of a religious polity, as when the Mosaic dispensation is said to have been given by the hand of a Mediator (Gal. 3:19); and in both it is applicable to Christ.  He came to effect a reconciliation between man and God separated by sin, and to establish a new spiritual polity, of which Himself should be the Head, and His Church the visible manifestation (Heb. 12:24, Phil. 3:20).  Everything connected with this mediatorial work belongs neither to the one nature nor to the other singly, but to both in conjunction, or to the Person of the Redeemer.  And it is described under a threefold aspect, as consisting of prophetical, sacerdotal, and kingly functions; a division which, though assailed by some modern writers, is of ancient date, and is founded not only on express statements of the New Testament, but on the typical appointments of the Old, in which the offices of the prophet, priest, and king formed the main pillars of the institution.  Since part of the ceremony by which persons were set apart to these offices was anointing with oil, the title Messiah, or Christ, was applied to the Saviour; the antitype being the anointing of Jesus with the Holy Ghost and with power (Acts 10:38), which event formed the point of transition from His private to His public life (Matt. 3:16).  Although these offices must not be exclusively assigned to particular periods of the life of Christ, as if, e.g., the work of atonement did not commence until the close; indeed the typical ones were, in the later times of the Jewish commonwealth, sometimes found united in the same person at the same time; yet in their main features they naturally fall into the order which they usually occupy in works on theology.

§ 53.  Prophetical Office

      Although Christ does not give Himself the name of prophet, yet He is so called in the New Testament; and this in accordance with ancient prophecy itself (Deut. 18:15).  And if His kingdom was to be founded, not, as that of Mahomet, on physical force, nor, as the Mosaic dispensation, on a typical and ceremonial law with its visible priesthood, nor yet on a magical effect of external ordinances, but on free conviction and the obedience of faith – if it was to be in its essence “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17) – it must rely on the spiritual weapons of instruction and persuasion.  By these methods Christ must win His way to the conscience, unfold the nature of true religion, sever from connection with Himself and His religion superstitious or merely political accretions, gain for Himself the title of teacher (ο διδάσκαλος); all which in fact formed also the main functions of the Jewish prophet.

      The prophetic ministry of Christ has been divided into immediate and mediate; or that which He exercised on earth in His own Person, and that which He continues to exercise through human ministers.  But since the latter is rather the office of the Holy Ghost, to whom also the inspiration of Holy Scripture is properly ascribed, it seems better to consider the prophetical office as commencing with the baptism in Jordan and ending with the Ascension.  As regards the New Testament gift of prophecy, it is manifestly part of the dispensation of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:10).  The matter of Christ’s teaching corresponded to the well known division of ancient prophecy into didactive and predictive matter.  To expound the meaning and comprehensiveness of the moral law; to insist on its superiority to ceremonial enactments; to expose the immoral casuistry by which its spirit had been superseded – this formed a large part of Christ’s teaching, as it had done that of the ancient prophets.  Thus far from destroying, He fulfilled (Matt. 5:17) and promulgated not a new law, but the meaning of the old.  But there is, withal, a marked peculiarity in the manner of His teaching.  While the prophets disclaim an independent mission, and speak of themselves as mere interpreters (προφήται), and unworthy, too, of the office (Isa. 6:5), Christ taught with authority, and from Himself; He spake what He knew, and testified what He had seen (John 3:11).  The predictive element, though not wanting, occupies a subordinate place; and necessarily so, for He who was the subject of ancient prophecy had come, and type and prediction had given place to the reality.  It was not to a future Messiah, but to Himself, as the way, the truth, and the life, that He directed the minds of His disciples.  His predictions relate chiefly to the establishment and progress of His Kingdom on earth, and partake, like ancient prophecy, rather of the character of intuition than of specific vaticination.  The curtain of time, as in the Apocalypse, when lifted, discloses the fortunes of the Church under symbolical representations, which refuse to be tied to the literal interpretation.  Or He speaks in parables, which contain in themselves a germinant fulfillment, by no means as yet exhausted.  And as Christ is the fulfillment, so He is the end of prophecy.  We expect no essential additions to revelation; even inspired Apostles only expanded the germs found in His discourses.  The prophetic gift in the Church is confined to exposition; and he who professes either to improve, or to add to, what Christ has delivered occupies a place outside the pale of Christianity.

      Although it is not stated of all the prophets of the Old Testament that they performed miracles as an evidence of their mission, it was a usual accompaniment of the prophetic function.  And in our Lord’s case this sign was very conspicuous.  But His miracles, like His teaching, had a character of their own.  They were not merely marvels, but works of beneficence, and of an eminently symbolical character; having their counterpart in the miracles of Divine grace, and naturally leading the mind from the cure of bodily ailment to that of spiritual.  They were performed, too, without effort; He spake the word and it was done, as if all nature confessed its Lord, and bowed to His will.  Miraculous powers of a similar kind continued in the Church for some time after the Ascension, but gradually disappeared as the new faith consolidated itself.  Miracles are the proper accompaniments of the introduction of a religion, but are out of place in its progress.  Christianity promulgated under miraculous attestation, and furnished with an inspired standard, is left to work out its history and its problems under the ordinary operation of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

§ 54.  Sacerdotal Office

      The sacerdotal office naturally follows the prophetical, for conviction of sin, which the prophets especially aimed at producing, is the first step towards a hearty reception of the atonement provided in the Gospel.  It has been matter of debate whether Christ was a Priest while upon earth, or first exercised the office after the Ascension.  The doubt seems to have arisen from the circumstance that to slay the victim was not on common occasions a necessary part of the priest’s office under the old covenant (Lev. 4:29), and the offering Himself as a sacrifice for sin was the main work of Christ in His state of humiliation.  But the doubt will disappear if it is remembered that in Scripture it is the sin-offering on the great day of atonement, with which that of Christ is almost exclusively compared, and on that day the High Priest not only carried the blood into the most holy place, but himself slew the sin-offering (Lev. 16).  This part of the High Priest’s office our Lord did unquestionably perform while on earth, what followed in the Jewish ritual being appropriated to Him in His glorified state.  His priesthood, then, is one and undivided, but partly fulfilled on earth, partly in heaven.  And it is usually considered under the two heads, corresponding to the functions of the Levitical High Priest, of offering atonement for sin, and making intercession for His people.

      The Levitical ritual first claims our notice.  If indeed the judgment of a modern writer, that “Jewish sacrifices rather show us what the sacrifice of Christ was not than what it was,” [Jowett, Com. vol. ii. 479.] is correct, the subject could have no interest for us.  This, however, is not the view which Scripture gives of them, and especially that great Epistle in which the subject is formally discussed.  The ceremonial law, we learn from the Epistle to the Hebrews, was both symbolical and prophetical.  As a system of symbol, or as Warburton calls it, “representation by action,” [Div. Leg. bk. iv. s. 4.] it conveyed present lessons of instruction.  The devout worshipper was constantly reminded of the Divine holiness, his own sinfulness, and the need of atonement.  But a mere symbol may terminate in itself, without prospective reference; and though suitable to the infancy of religion it naturally gives place, later on, to a more spiritual mode of instruction.  But Scripture describes this ritual as typical also (Heb. 10), ordained with reference to a more perfect dispensation in which it was to find its fulfillment; it was a prophetic symbol.  And this more particularly as regards its ordinances of sacrifice and priesthood.  Its uses therefore, towards an understanding of the atoning work of Christ must be very great.

      The rite of sacrifice appears in all nations as the earliest mode of Divine worship, and in Scripture is represented as coeval with the human race (Gen. 4:4).  Whether it was of human origin, dictated by the natural feelings of sinful man, or of express Divine appointment, may be doubtful; in the Mosaic law, at any rate, it receives Divine sanction, and appears under a new aspect.  It is in the ritual of the great day of atonement that the distinguishing features of the Mosaic institute are found concentrated.  On this occasion, when atonement was made for the nation in its corporate capacity, the High Priest as the representative of the priesthood, and through it of the whole people (for all Israel was in one sense “a kingdom of priests,” Exod. 19:6), alone entered the holy of holies with the blood of the sacrifices which he had offered, and which he sprinkled on the mercy seat, thus symbolically covering, or removing from God’s sight, the sins of the people.  The sin offering for the people contained special features.  In consisted of two goats, one of which was offered in sacrifice, and the other, after the imposition of the hands of the High Priest, was sent away alive into the wilderness, laden, as it is described (Lev. 16:22), with the iniquities of the children of Israel.  Of this expressive transaction the following seem to be the leading ideas.  In the first place, a power of expiation.  To no sacrifices previously mentioned in Scripture – not to that of Abel (Gen. 4:4), nor to that of Noah (Gen. 8:20), nor to that of Abraham (Gen. 15:9) – is this efficacy attached.  In the Mosaic sacrifices generally, and especially in this one, it is the declared object of the institution.  “On that day the priest shall make an atonement for you to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord” (Lev. 16:30): the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat covered or removed from the eye of God the impurity which rendered the people, and even the vessels of the tabernacle, unfit for His service.  Secondly, the atonement was the appointment of God Himself.  Not only was the declared expiatory power, but the whole ritual of the institution, in its minutest details, matter of revelation; so that no room was left for the unauthorized suggestions even of real piety, and the worshipper was reminded that the covering of sin was a mystery which reposed in the bosom of God.  He could not entertain the idea of propitiating an offended Deity, though the LXX usually render the Hebrew word by ιλάσκομαι, or its derivative ίλασμος; for the ritual represented Jehovah as taking the initiative, and Himself devising means whereby the barrier which intercepted the exercise of His mercy might be removed.  Thirdly, the atonement was effected through suffering, viz., the death of the victim.  That is, it was founded not merely on the announcement of the willingness of Jehovah to pardon on repentance, but on an expiatory act which He was pleased to accept; and expiation always involves the idea of suffering, and moreover of suffering as the punishment of sin.  It has been argued indeed that not the death, but the blood of the victim possessed the atoning virtue; and it is true that the sprinkling of the blood was the culminating point of the whole transaction.  But the blood was obtained only in one way, viz., through the death of the victim, and the two acts cannot be severed from each other.  The true view seems to be, that the expiation of sin was effected by the death, the covering of sin by the application of the blood, or as it is termed “the life” (the life being in the blood); which blood, or life, was no longer unclean, but fit to be presented to Jehovah.  Fourthly, the ceremony exhibited a vicarious element.  The sinner, excluded from theocratical privileges and condemned by the moral law, was permitted to substitute for himself an animal sacrifice, by which he recovered his theocratical standing.  And the details are not less significant.  In all cases of the sin offering the offerer (or the priest) was to lay his hand on the head of the victim, which forthwith became unclean because identified with the sinner, and as such was slain.  That is, a spotless victim, spotless physically, and morally so far as an animal is incapable of guilt; took the place of the sinner, and that spotless life presented at the mercy seat availed to hide sin from the eye of God.

      In most of the religions of antiquity we find priests as well as sacrifices, and both sprang from the same feeling, that of an existing barrier between sinful man and God, which called for a mediator if communication was to be restored.  And in order to confer permanency and dignity on the order, the principle of caste was commonly adopted; that is, the priestly function was attached to a certain tribe, or family, and passed from father to son irrespectively of moral or intellectual qualifications.  Such was the Jewish priesthood, though in this instance the tenure was subject to revocation in case of moral delinquency (1 Sam. 3).  At the head of the order stood the High Priest.  On his breast the names of the twelve tribes were borne; he only could enter the most holy place on their behalf; and yet he was one of themselves, encompassed with the same infirmities, and capable of feeling “compassion for the ignorant and those out of the way” (Heb. 5:2).

      Such are the impressions which any unprejudiced reader would gather from a study of the Levitical ritual.  And the question now is, Is the teaching of the New Testament accordant therewith, or of an opposite character?  The statements of Christ Himself first demand attention.  We are not, of course, to expect any systematic exposition of His atoning work when the atonement itself was not effected; this was reserved for the fuller revelation vouchsafed to his chosen ministers.  In our Lord’s discourses the atonement is either presupposed (as in the Lord’s prayer); or it is implied in casual sayings; or it is veiled under parable and allegory.  Yet His teaching contains the germ of what was afterwards more fully explained.  He describes Himself as the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep (John 10:15); as having come to give His life a ransom (λύτρον = כּפֶּר) for many (Matt. 20:28); as about to be lifted up (on the cross) in order to accomplish a spiritual deliverance analogous to the temporal wrought by the brazen serpent (John 3:14).  And above all, on the most solemn occasion conceivable, the last supper with His disciples, He compares the import of His death with that of the expiatory sacrifices of the Mosaic covenant: “This is My blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins” (Matt. 26:28).

      The Book of Acts does not add much to our information on the point before us.  Not so with the Epistles. S. Paul, after having proved the whole world under sin, declares that redemption from this state is by Jesus Christ, whom God hath openly proposed as a sin offering, or propitiation; thus vindicating His righteousness, which had seemed to be somewhat obscured by the passing over, without due retribution, of the sins of the ancient world.  And again, that One died for all, i.e. vicariously, and in Him all died (2 Cor. 5:14); that God was in Christ reconciling the, world to Himself, i.e., removing the impediment that existed to the exhibition of His mercy, and this by making Him who knew no sin, not a sin offering, nor a sinner, but a partaker of the very element of sin itself in its penalty (ibid. 21).  Christ is said to have purchased us out of the curse of the law, as slaves regained their liberty by payment of a ransom, by becoming a curse for us (Gal. 3:13).  In corresponding language S. Peter affirms that “Christ bare our sins in His own body on the tree,” and that with His precious blood we are redeemed (1 Pet. 1:18, 2:24).  Nor does S. John teach otherwise when he writes that the blood of Christ cleanseth (καθαρίζει, the proper term for legal cleansing, see Heb. 9:14) from all sin (1 John 1:7, 4:10).

      The Epistle to the Hebrews is a formal treatise on the subject, designed to show that the type must disappear now that the Antitype is come.  The Levitical sacrifices could never take away sin, but Christ in the end of the world has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. 9:26).  The Levitical priests came and went, but Christ is a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedek, that mysterious personage who appears suddenly on the page of history, without notice of his birth or his death, or the register of his family.  He entered into the Holy of holies above with His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption for us, and to appear for us in the presence of God (chaps. 7, 9).  The perfection of His sacrifice forbids its being ever repeated, for by one offering He has perfected for ever them that are sanctified, or cleansed (Heb. 10:14).

      With this plainly declared correspondence between the type and the Antitype, it is impossible to suppose that the language of the New Testament was framed merely in accommodation to Jewish habits of thought.  The contrary is evident, that the work of Christ was the original plan in the Divine mind, and the Jewish ritual was framed as a preparation for it.  If the Apostles, from their natural associations, wrote erroneously on this subject, the grave question arises, why was it ordered that Christianity should spring from a Jewish stock, and not from some religion free from such misleading associations?  Why were the first heralds of Christianity almost necessitated to give a false portraiture of it?  This is a difficulty which the Socinian has to meet, and it does not appear how it can be met.  On this hypothesis, too, neither can the Divine origin of the Jewish dispensation, nor the inspiration of the writers of the New Testament, be maintained.

§ 55.  Continuation Theory of Anselm

      Unlike the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, that of the atoning work of Christ did not form a prominent subject of controversy in the ancient Church: whence it arises that the three Creeds only declare in general terms that Christ suffered and was crucified for us.  Nor do the early Fathers enter very deeply into the subject.  The first speculations on it are connected with the Scriptural figures under which the atonement is described as the payment of a price, or a ransom.  “To whom,” it was asked, “was the price paid?”  A common answer was, “To the devil”; who through the Fall had acquired rights over man which he could not, without an equivalent, be fairly called on to surrender.  This curious theory was afterwards modified to signify, not payment to the devil, but still, as if he had some equitable claim, the overcoming of him by a crafty device.  By Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Great the human nature of Christ is compared to a bait concealing the hook of the Divine nature, which the devil swallowed, but to his own destruction.  Thus was he overreached in his subtlety.  It does not seem to have occurred to them that such a notion seems making the end justify the means, and that to allow the devil independent rights, which by some means must be satisfied, is to sanction a kind of Manichee or Gnostic dualism.  Yet this notion held its place for a long time both in the Eastern and the Western Churches.  “Since the enemy,” says J. Damascenus, “had tempted man by promising him equality with God, he in turn is tempted by the presentation of the flesh (of Christ).  It was only just that whereas man was overcome by the tyrant, the latter should be overcome by man, and that not by mere force (but on grounds of equity) man should be rescued from the power of death.”  In the eleventh century the treatise of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, entitled “Cur Deus Homo?” appeared, and formed an epoch in the history of the dogma.

      This great theologian, whose theory became the accepted one in the Western Church, introduces his pupil as professing himself unable to understand why an Omnipotent God should, in order to restore fallen man, have assumed our nature with its natural infirmities and died on the cross as a malefactor.  If it be said, to redeem us from sin, from wrath, and from the power of Satan, why could not all this have been effected by a simple fiat of the Almighty?  Among men, to attain an end through toil and suffering which might have been attained directly is deemed inconsistent with wisdom.  To remove these doubts it must be proved that the end could be attained in no other way.  And this is the problem which Anselm proposes to himself.

      He sets out with rejecting, in the person of the inquirer, the notion that anything is due to the devil (L. i. c. vii.) ; a sentiment which in his own person he emphatically repeats at the end of the treatise.  God, he continues, claims from man perfect obedience; sin consists in not rendering it, i.e. in robbing God of His due, and dishonouring Him.  The sinner, therefore, is a debtor, and a contumelious one; and it would be inconsistent with the attribute of Justice to cancel the debt without satisfaction: it must either be paid in full, or the penalty for non-payment be inflicted (c. xi.).  The alternative is demanded by the moral order of the universe (c. xii.).  The mercy of God cannot be exhibited at the expense of His holiness.  The question then is, Who is to pay the debt?  For that a restoration of man, to some extent, at least, is intended we may infer from the improbability that the end of his creation should be wholly frustrated, and especially from the consideration that the elect are intended to fill up the gap which sin made in the ranks of the angels.  If it be pleaded that the debt may be paid by repentance and good works, the answer is that we owe these to God already; but how is past sin to be atoned for? (c. xx.).  The greatness of sin must be estimated not by the mere act, but by the circumstances under which, and the Person against whom, it is committed (cc. xxi. xxii.).  To render an adequate satisfaction it would be necessary that man, as he allowed himself to be overcome by Satan, should overcome Satan in turn; and further should undo the damage he brought upon the race by working out a means of justification and life for the elect: neither of which, from his inherent weakness, he can do (cc. xxii. radii.).  This inability is no excuse, for man brought it on himself (c. xxiv.).  The case then would be hopeless if Christ be put out of view.  But matters assume another aspect, in the Scripture doctrine of redemption.  It has been shown that man’s debt never can be paid except by one who can render to God something greater than everything else except God; and He who can do this must be God.  But it must be rendered by man also, for it was man that sinned.  Therefore it must be rendered by One who is both God and man.  And such is Christ.  The Redeemer, being miraculously conceived, though born of woman, was without sin; and therefore not naturally liable to death.  But He voluntarily underwent death for our sakes, and thereby rendered to God the “something” which is of greater value than everything else except God.  The value of the death is to be measured by the preciousness of the life, than which nothing was more precious.  God could not justly demand a life from Christ; therefore the freewill offering in our stead redounds to our advantage.  In Christ man is sinless, overcomes Satan, is obedient unto death, gives up his spotless life to God; here is what we have been seeking for – full satisfaction for sin.  For the sinless sufferer justly claims a reward for what He thus, in obedience to the will of God, undeservedly underwent, and the reward which He receives is the salvation of the elect (L. ii.).

      Such in substance is the argument of the “Cur Deus Homo?” and such in substance must be every theory on the subject which aims at being Scriptural.  Not that any theory can be pronounced quite satisfactory, for the atonement is one of those subjects which human reason must ever fail fully to fathom.  The keynote of Anselm’s doctrine is the idea of “satisfaction,” and against the idea expressed by this word it is that Socinian and rationalist objections are principally directed.  The word itself does not occur in Scripture, and appears to have been first used by Tertullian and not in connection with the work of Christ [De Poen. cc. 5–10.  The “satisfaction” of Tertullian is what the sinner himself (by penitence, etc.) renders (Hagenbach, § 68, 5).]; but the terms “ransom,” “price,” “redemption,” and the like involve the idea, and cannot be supposed to have been adopted without reason.  When a slave was bought out of captivity, the price paid was a satisfaction to the owner for his loss when sin, in consequence of what Christ did and suffered, was remitted, satisfaction may be said to have been made to Divine justice.  All such terms are analogical: they do not pretend to explain the mystery as it is in itself, but so far as it can be explained to us, by figures with which we are familiar.  No price, or ransom, was really paid to God, but something analogous to what we understand by such a transaction took place when Christ died.  In like manner anger finds no place in God, but He is said to view sin in a manner analogous to what we feel when we receive an injury or insult; and He is propitiated as we should be if due reparation were made.  If the deep things of God, which only the Spirit of God knows as they are (1 Cor. 2:11), are to be in some measure brought down to our comprehension it can only be by analogical language, which, however differs from merely figurative in that it expresses facts in the Divine economy.

      The real point at issue is, Does the Atonement involve a change in God’s attitude towards man, or merely in man’s attitude towards God?  God is love, and immutability is part of our conception of Him; but the idea of the Divine wrath against sin does not necessarily trench upon these Scriptural representations.  For wrath in this connection is but holy love; love sorrowing and indignant at the perverted relation between the creature and his Creator; love not resting until the true relation is restored.  A God indifferent to moral obliquity and the misery it produces would indeed be an ominous conception; disguised as it might be under the mask of pure mercy or benevolence, it would in reality differ little from that of a malignant Deity.  A parent who feels indignant against the sin of a child, and shows it, does not the less love the child in so feeling and acting.  Now the whole tenor of Scripture is to the effect that through the vicarious sacrifice of Christ a change was wrought in God Himself of this nature, that whereas previously He could not, consistently with the perfection of His attributes, grant forgiveness on repentance, now He can.  The blood of the sin offering, covering the sin of Israel, symbolically represented this change, the blood of Christ effects the reality.  God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, i.e. expiating its sin (2 Cor. 5:19); and not until this was done could there be any preaching of an atonement or invitation to men to be reconciled to God (ibid. 5:20).  What men needed to be told was not that they should repent and turn to God, but that if they did so, God could be just and yet forgive.  Here, too, the language is analogical.  How the Atonement could have affected the mind of God towards man is a profound mystery; but we know thus much, that if an offender against us has expiated his offence by great suffering, this is a consideration which changes wrath into pity, and paves the way for our favourably receiving his overtures of reconciliation.  It was the sufferings of the prodigal son no less than his repentance that moved the father to grant forgiveness.  Something analogous to this Scripture declares to have been produced in the attitude of God towards man by the sacrifice of Christ.  It is true that redemption, in its full sense, involves the sinner’s also being reconciled to God; but the accepted expiation of the Redeemer, “while we were yet sinners” (Rom. 5:8), is the necessary condition of Christ’s saving work in us.  This is substantially what Anselm means by the term “satisfaction,” and the figure of a debt which has been paid.  And surely it is nothing more than the doctrine of the Apostle when he declares that the “handwriting of ordinances that was against us,” i.e. the law with its demands, was taken out of the way, being nailed to the cross, nailed in token of the debt’s having been cancelled (Col. 2:14).  In the case of the believer, the eye of God cannot rest on the requirements of the law without at the same time resting on the cross, which is the evidence of their having been satisfied.

      In Anselm’s mode of stating the argument, no doubt imperfections may be perceived, which, however, do not impair the essential solidity of the structure.  He is careful, for example, to impress upon us that to the Divine honour, so far as it relates to God Himself, nothing can be added, and nothing taken from it (c. xv.).  When the creature refuses obedience, he does what in him lies to dishonour God, but the sin and shame of the action terminates with the sinner himself.  But if God never can be dishonoured in Himself, how, it may be asked, can we speak of a debt as being due to Him?  The answer is not given by Anselm, but it is obvious.  It is due to God not merely as a Person, but as the Author and Upholder of the moral order of the universe, as a Lawgiver and a Judge.  The distinction holds good in common life.  A crime committed may not and does not dishonour the magistrate as a man, but it does dishonour the law of which he is the visible representative, and the penalty may be considered a debt due to him under this particular point of view.  It has been objected, too, that his reasoning wears too much of a commercial, or forensic, aspect, and does not assign sufficient prominence to the Divine love which prompted the sacrifice of the Son.  But the treatise was intended to be an answer to the particular question, Cur Deus homo? or why was the Incarnation necessary? and the author must be judged accordingly.  Yet it is a real defect that, in examining wherein the value of Christ’s work consists, he does not sufficiently insist on its ethical aspect, as the work of One who earned by obedience a crown for Himself and the salvation of His Church.  It is true that he points out that, unlike the legal sacrifices in which the victim was not a free agent, Christ was under no compulsion to suffer and die (c. ix.): He might have called down more than twelve legions of angels to rescue Him (Matt. 26:53): He offered Himself, a willing sacrifice, to God (Heb. 9:14).  But the interval between the Saviour’s birth and His death is passed over in silence, as if the life of Christ had little or no bearing on the work of atonement, whereas by S. Paul His obedience up to the culminating point of His death is made an important element (Phil. 2:8).  It may have been on account of these defects that Anselm’s doctrine was far from being at once accepted by the Church, and indeed seems to have made but little impression on his contemporaries and immediate successors.  Abelard opposed it, and made the essence of the Atonement to consist in its moral effect, the love of God therein exhibited drawing forth our love towards Him; in which he was followed by Peter Lombard and others.  Duns Scotus denied that the value of Christ’s sacrifice was infinite, as having been offered only by the human nature; consequently the debt was not fully paid, but God accepted it as an equivalent; thus anticipating the theory of Grotius in after times, commonly called that of Acceptilatio, a legal term signifying the creditor’s giving a discharge for the whole on receiving part of his debt.  But T. Aquinas, after expressing hesitation on some points, accepts the theory of Anselm as a whole, and from his authority, as well as from its intrinsic merits, it gradually prevailed, and forms the basis of the theology of the Reformation on this subject.

      The question debated by the older theologians, and commonly answered by them in the affirmative, whether Christ suffered exactly what we should have had to suffer but for His interference, e.g. the pains of hell, is an instance both of the influence and of the abuse of the theory of Anselm.  It was occasioned by the absence of the ethical element from this theory, and which is its great defect.  A mere debt is satisfied by being paid, no matter by whom or from what motives; but the value of Christ’s sacrifice depends upon other considerations than that of the lex talionis.  Scripture gives no countenance to the doctrine.  The consciousness of guilt which forms a necessary ingredient of the pains of hell could not in the case of Christ exist.  The exclamation on the cross, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” so much insisted on, does not bear out the inference; for the very form of it, “My God,” proves that whatever anguish the soul of Jesus at that moment experienced, total separation from God did not form part of it.  If what we had to suffer was literally exacted from Christ, and in our stead, why should most Christians be still subject even to temporal death?  Quantitative measurements are not applicable to this case.

§ 56.  Continuation – Active and Passive Obedience

      According to Anselm, Christ might seem to have been born only that He might die.  There is no doubt, indeed, that Scripture speaks of His death as the special act by which expiation was made for sin.  Had His expiatory sufferings stopped short of this, He would not have drained the cup which His Father had given Him to drink.  But previously to it He had lived above thirty years in the world, partly in private and partly in the exercise of His public ministry; and the question might, and did, arise, whether a connection existed between that spotless life and the work of atonement?  We need, it has been argued, a vicarious fulfilling of the law as well as a suffering of the penalty, and Christ rendered the former for us as well as endured the latter.  By His death we obtain pardon, by His righteousness eternal life.  A king may pardon a rebel, but it does not follow that the latter should be reinstated in more than his former position of favour and dignity.  The father in the parable not only forgave his repentant son, but put a new robe on him, a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.

      It may be questioned whether, as commonly stated, this doctrine is either Scriptural or safe.  Scripture nowhere treats of the atoning work of Christ under two distinct heads of suffering and righteousness, with two distinct benefits resulting therefrom; but rather of one great act by which sin was expiated.  But neither does it seem safe.  Redemption, in its full meaning, implies deliverance from the power as well as the penalty of sin; and to maintain that Christ’s work was vicarious for us in the former sense might lead to dangerous practical consequences.  At least, the statement needs to be carefully guarded.  It may possibly be so by discriminating between the mere sinlessness and the sinless sufferings of the Redeemer.  What rendered these sufferings of infinite value in the eye of God was the dignity of the sufferer, His perfect submission, and His absolute sinlessness: but the expiatory effect belonged to the sufferings themselves, not to the circumstances which rendered them altogether peculiar.  And thus though the whole life of Christ must be reckoned to His atoning work, and not any particular scene or act as the agony in the garden or the crucifixion, yet primarily it was as a life of unmerited suffering, as one of passive obedience, that it merited the power of expiation.

      Is, then, the imputation of the active obedience, the righteousness of Christ, an unscriptural idea?  By no means.  Only it belongs not to the article of atonement, but to that of justification; it is the privilege of the Church, not of the world.  To have Christ’s righteousness imputed to us, or what is equivalent in sense to be counted righteous for His sake, is far more than a mere expiation for sin: it involves the gifts of repentance, of faith, of adoption into the family of God, it corresponds to the robe and the ring with which the prodigal son was invested as tokens of reinstatement in his former privileges.  So far as it is not our own but counted to us it is vicarious, but not in the sense of being wrought for us irrespectively of our actual condition, as the atonement was wrought for us.  Christ’s righteousness is imputed only to those in whose hearts He dwells by faith.  And hence the remark is not without foundation that between the forgiveness of sin and the imputation of righteousness there is no real distinction.  Undoubtedly to him whose transgression is forgiven the Lord imputes not iniquity (Ps. 32:1, 2), but then forgiveness of sin is more than atonement for it.  Forgiveness implies the actual conversion of the sinner, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit assuring him of his adoption (Rom. 8:15), the process of sanctification begun.  It is merely a question of words whether we say that such a person has received forgiveness of sin or has the righteousness of Christ imputed to him; the thing meant is the same.  But we cannot say that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to those who have no vital union with Christ, or make this privilege coextensive with atonement or expiation.  To do so would indeed be to open the door to Antinomian tendencies.  It seems hardly correct therefore to apportion the satisfaction, in Anselm’s sense of the word, between Christ’s active obedience to the law and His passive obedience in suffering the penalty.  He “died for our sins” – this is one thing; He “rose again for our justification” (Rom. 4:25) – this is another.  “If when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by His life” (ibid. 5:10).

§ 57.  Continuation – Extent of the Atonement

      This question is not by any means so simple as is commonly supposed.  Numerous passages of Scripture can be cited in which what is called, though not very accurately, universal redemption appears to be plainly taught.  Thus the Baptist bare witness to Christ that He is the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world (John 1:29); God is said to have so loved the world as to have sent His Son that through Him it might be saved (ibid. 3:17); to have been in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19); to will that all men should be saved by coming to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4); Christ gives His flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51); it was appointed that by the grace of God He should taste death for every man (Heb. 2:9); One died for all (2 Cor. 5:14).  At first such passages seem decisive of the point at issue.  On a more careful examination, however, they will not appear so clear.

      That some limitation must be imposed on their meaning is obvious.  If they are to be taken as literally asserting that Christ purchased the salvation of all men, the doctrine of universal restitution seems to follow; for, it may be argued, how can He be conceived as failing to receive the reward for which He paid the price?  But further, the advocates of what is called particular redemption allege that the passages are all perfectly susceptible of a limited interpretation.  It is argued that they need mean no more than that, in contrast to the Jewish religion which was intended only for one nation, God under the Gospel dispensation proposed to Himself to gather a church out of all nations, kindreds, people, and tongues (Rev. 7:9), “the other sheep not of this fold” of whom Christ speaks in John 10:16.  That they sometimes contain their own limitation; as in John 3:16 the “world” is explained by the clause immediately following “whosoever believeth on Him,” viz., out of the world; in 1 Tim. 2:2, the mention of “kings and those in authority” makes it probable that by “all men” the Apostle meant of every class; and in 2 Cor. 5:14, “one died for all” must be understood by reference to the next words, “all died,” which do not apply to the whole world but only to those who by union with Christ in His death die to sin, i.e., to true believers.  That it is customary with the Apostle to use the word “all” when the context proves it cannot be taken literally.  Thus he says, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22); and again, “As by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life” (Rom. 5:18); in both passages the context proves that it is believers in Christ whom he has in view.  That where this mode of explanation fails, we must compare passages, and not enforce a construction on one which we cannot possibly apply to another.  Thus if Heb. 2:9, “That He should taste death for every man,” is cited, Cor. 12:7 must not be overlooked, in which S. Paul says that “the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal,” which plainly means to every believer.  Such are the arguments used in favour of the doctrine of particular redemption, as that term is understood by writers on the subject. [See Owen’s very able treatise, “The Death of Death in the Death of Christ,” vol. x., Johnston and Hunter’s edition.  If it were urged that in the typical dispensation the covering blood was applied to all Israel, the answer might be that this makes rather for “particular redemption,” since Israel, the elect nation, was a type not of the world but of the Church, the heavenly Jerusalem (Gal. 4:26, Heb. 12:23).]

      The impression, however, after all remains, that the passages in question cannot be fully explained on this hypothesis, and that Scripture does seem to connect benefits with Christ’s death which extend beyond the salvation of His elect, and affect the race.  If the holy angels are interested in it (Col. 1:20, Ephes. 3:15), why not mankind as a whole?  Perhaps some ambiguity has arisen from the use of the word “redemption” in this connection.  There is no doubt that this word, as used in Scripture, signifies salvation in all its fullness, and, like the words “elect” and “saints,” belongs to the Church, not to the world. [When S. Paul declares of himself and his fellow Christians that they had “redemption through His” (Christ’s) “blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Ephes. 1:7), can he be supposed to speak merely of a benefit which equally appertained to Herod, Pontius Pilate, or Judas Iscariot?]  To be redeemed by Christ is to be delivered from the captivity of sin and Satan, to be made a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.  And the question is, had Christ in dying for sin no special reference to, or foresight of, His Church to be redeemed, as compared with the whole race of mankind?  It is difficult to think so.  In dying for His Church He not only procured for it the general blessing of Atonement, but also all other spiritual blessings necessary to its salvation, e.g. effectual calling, forgiveness, and adoption (Art. xvii.).  He earned for Himself by His death the right and the power to send the Holy Spirit, without whose efficacious influence, even if the prison doors should be thrown open, the paralyzed inmates, who have learned to love their prison rather than liberty, would not and could not come forth, and the Saviour might be left without a Church, the reward of His sufferings and death.  In this sense, the term “particular redemption” only expresses an unquestionable truth; redemption in its fullness must be particular.  And in fact, the statement does not occur in Scripture that Christ died for the sins of the world.  The Arminian doctrine that the effect of the Atonement is merely that God was thereby enabled to offer to man a new covenant, viz., salvation on believing, is only half the truth, for it ignores what the Redeemer purchased for His Church, the mystical body of all faithful people, or true believers.  But if for the word “redemption” we substitute “atonement,” or “expiation,” this doctrine does contain a fragment of truth, which is overlooked by its opponents.  For if redemption is particular, it does not follow that atonement or expiation for sin should not be a universal benefit.  And this distinction, in truth, seems the only method of reconciling the various statements of Scripture on the subject.  The death of Christ placed mankind as a whole in a new and favourable position as regards God, though by many this position may never be realized or made their own; it was a propitiation not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2).  A public advantage was thereby secured, which however may become a savour of death unto death or of life unto life according as it is used (2 Cor. 2:16).  And is not this substantially the meaning of the assertors of particular redemption when they admit, as they do, the sufficiency of the Atonement for the sins of the world, or ten thousand worlds? [As, for instance, Bellarmine, who will not be supposed a partial witness: “Illae promissiones quae absolutae reperiuntur in Scripturis testantur sufficientiam pretii nostri, id est, meritorum Christi.  Fuit enim Christi passio, quoad sufficientiam, propitiatio pro peccatis, non solum nostris sed etiam totius mundi” (De Justif. lib. i. c. xi.).]  And on that sufficiency ground the right and the duty of ministers or missionaries to proclaim to all men that if they repent and believe they will be saved?  This proclamation could not be made if there had not been effected by the death of Christ a general expiation for our fallen race.  And thus the combatants may not be in reality so much at variance as they had supposed.  The most extreme Calvinist may grant that there is room for all if they will come in; the most extreme Arminian must grant that redemption, in its full Scriptural meaning, is not the privilege of all men.  And thus, too, some light may be thrown on the vexed question respecting the state of the heathen.  How can redemption be described as universal when it has never even been made known to countless millions?  Redemption cannot in any circumstances be described as universal; but if the death of Christ placed the race in a new relation towards God, it may, in some manner unknown to us, benefit those who never heard of Him.  And it were unduly to limit the most High to suppose that He has no other means of bringing men to Himself than by explicit faith in a preached Gospel.

      It has been questioned whether the intercession of Christ, as distinguished from His oblation of Himself, does not belong rather to the regal than to the sacerdotal office.  [Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, ss. 104, 105; Martensen, s. 169.]  Formally, no doubt, it is part of the latter, and a sublime instance of it though anticipatory, as it could not otherwise be, occurs in John 17, while the Saviour was yet on earth.  Yet, as it consists in virtually presenting His finished; atonement before God, in His glorified state, it seems to be more appropriately considered in connection with the assumption of the regal office, the exercise of which more especially belongs to that state.

§ 58.  Regal Office

      Under the typical dispensation there were kings, as well as prophets and priests, and prophecy pointed not only to a suffering, but to a conquering and triumphant Messiah.  God in His secret counsels had set His King upon His holy hill of Zion (Ps. 2:6); a King was to reign and prosper in whose days Judah was to be saved and Israel dwell safely (Jer. 23:5, 6); David (who had long before been gathered to his fathers) should be Prince over God’s people for ever (Ezek. 37:25).  Whatever might be the primary application of these prophecies, the image of a righteous theocratical King, as it presented itself to the mind of the seer, was too lofty to be satisfied even by the splendour of Solomon’s kingdom; and the faith of the pious Jew, especially in the later times of national decadence, must have been sustained by the hope of a further fulfillment.

      Christ did not decline the title of King when it was applied to Him in irony (John 18:37), and only explained that His kingdom was not of this world.  Even in the state of humiliation He exercised royal functions.  He called unto Him whom He would, and they came (Mark 3:13); and as it was the office of the Jewish King to represent and maintain the unity of the body politic, so Christ, before He ascended, laid the foundations of the visible Church, choosing Apostles, ordaining outward tokens of Church membership (Matt. 28:19, 26:27–29), conferring powers for the exercise of discipline (Matt. 18:15–19), and promising His presence with such societies to the end of time.  But with His ascension the plenary exercise of the regal office commenced.  It must not be confounded with the dominion which, as the Logos, He exercises over all creatures: the power which is now given unto Him in heaven and in earth is for mediatorial purposes, and dates from the ascension.  But as Mediator He reigns and must reign until all enemies shall be put under His feet (1 Cor. 15:25).  Against sin, the world, and Satan, He wages incessant warfare; not with the carnal weapons of temporal power, but with the spiritual ones befitting such a religion, and day by day His kingdom extends its boundaries.  In His Church He reigns by His Word and His Spirit, gathering in His elect from age to age, and conducting them to the end when He shall present them to Himself a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle (Ephes. 5:27).  At the end He will resign His mediatorial scepter as being no longer needed (1 Cor. 15:28); the present means of grace will be superseded by His immediate presence (Rev. 21:22); but the union of God and man, by virtue of which He is the Head of His Church, will remain indissoluble throughout eternity.

      The intercession of Christ may properly be considered under this head because it is not a mere deprecation on behalf of His people, but an efficacious pleading of His finished and accepted sacrifice.  Hence it is, that, in S. Paul’s view, the resurrection, which was a necessary condition of the ascension, is of vital moment (1 Cor. 15:17).  Had Christ merely died for our sin, what warrant should we have that the atonement was accepted, or that those sins, as well as “the accuser of the brethren,” might not rise up against us in the court of heaven, and demand satisfaction?  But the Saviour appears perpetually before God for us, opposing the virtue of His sacrifice to the accusations of the law and Satan, and claiming the just recompense of what He suffered on our behalf.  And with Him the Father is always well pleased.  Regarding Him in this capacity, the challenge of the Church throughout the ages is, “Who is He that condemneth?  It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” (Rom. 8:34).

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