(b) Nor as a gift from without, foreign to human nature, and added to it after man's creation,—for man is said to have possessed the divine image by the fact of creation, and not by subsequent bestowal.
As men, since Adam, are born with a sinful nature, that is, with tendencies away from God, so Adam was created with a holy nature, that is, with tendencies toward God. Moehler says: “God cannot give a man actions.” We reply: “No, but God can give man dispositions; and he does this at the first creation, as well as at the new creation (regeneration).”
(c) But rather, as an original direction or tendency of man's affections and will, still accompanied by the power of evil choice, and so, differing from the perfected holiness of the saints, as instinctive affection and child-like innocence differ from the holiness that has been developed and confirmed by experience of temptation.
Man's original righteousness was not immutable or indefectible; there was still the possibility of sinning. Though the first man was fundamentally good, he still had the power of choosing evil. There was a bent of the affections and will toward God, but man was not yet confirmed in holiness. Man's love for God was like the germinal filial affection in the child, not developed, yet sincere—“caritas puerilis, non virilis.”
(d) As a moral disposition, moreover, which was propagable to Adam's descendants, if it continued, and which, though lost to him and to them, if Adam sinned, would still leave man possessed of a natural likeness to God which made him susceptible of God's redeeming grace.
Hooker (Works, ed. Keble, 2:683) distinguishes between aptness and ableness. The latter, men have lost; the former, they retain,—else grace could not work in us, more than in the brutes. Hase: “Only enough likeness to God remained to remind man of what he had lost, and enable him to feel the hell of God's forsaking.” The moral likeness to God can be restored, but only by God himself. God secures this to men by making “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, ... dawn upon them” (2 Cor. 4:4). Pusey made Ps. 72:6—“He will come down like rain upon the mown grass”—the image of a world hopelessly dead, but with a hidden capacity for receiving life. Dr. Daggett: “Man is a ‘son of the morning’ (Is. 14:12), fallen, yet arrested midway between heaven and hell, a prize between the powers of light and darkness.” See Edwards, Works, 2:19, 20, 381-390; Hopkins, Works, 1:162; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:50-66; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 14:11.
In the light of the preceding investigation, we may properly estimate two theories of man's original state which claim to be more Scriptural and reasonable:
A. The image of God as including only personality.
This theory denies that any positive determination to virtue inhered originally in man's nature, and regards man at the beginning as simply possessed of spiritual powers, perfectly adjusted to each other. This is the view of Schleiermacher, who is followed by Nitzsch, Julius Müller, and Hofmann.