We object to this theory that
(a) It rests upon a pantheistic basis, as the sense-theory rests upon dualism. The moral is confounded with the physical; might is identified with right. Since sin is a necessary incident of finiteness, and creatures can never be infinite, it follows that sin must be everlasting, not only in the universe, but in each individual soul.
Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson are representatives of this view in literature. Goethe spoke of the “idleness of wishing to jump off from one's own shadow.” He was a disciple of Spinoza, who believed in one substance with contradictory attributes of thought and extension. Goethe took the pantheistic view of God with the personal view of man. He ignored the fact of sin. Hutton calls him “the wisest man the world has seen who was without humility and faith, and who lacked the wisdom of a child.”Speaking of Goethe's Faust, Hutton says: “The great drama is radically false in its fundamental philosophy. Its primary notion is that even a spirit of pure evil is an exceedingly useful being, because he stirs into activity those whom he leads into sin, and so prevents them from rusting away in pure indolence. There are other and better means of stimulating the positive affections of men than by tempting them to sin.” On Goethe, see Hutton, Essays, 2:1-79; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:490; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 279-331.
Carlyle was a Scotch Presbyterian minus Christianity. At the age of twenty-five, he rejected miraculous and historical religion, and thenceforth had no God but natural Law. His worship of objective truth became a worship of subjective sincerity, and his worship of personal will became a worship of impersonal force. He preached truth, service, sacrifice, but all in a mandatory and pessimistic way. He saw in England and Wales “twenty-nine millions—mostly fools.” He had no love, no remedy, no hope. In our civil war, he was upon the side of the slaveholder. He claimed that his philosophy made right to be might, but in practice he made might to be right. Confounding all moral distinctions, as he did in his later writings, he was fit to wear the title which he invented for another: “President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Society.” Froude calls him “a Calvinist without the theology”—a believer in predestination without grace. On Carlyle, see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 131-178.
Emerson also is the worshiper of successful force. His pantheism is most manifest in his poems “Cupido” and “Brahma,” and in his Essays on “Spirit” and on “The Over-soul.”Cupido: “The solid, solid universe Is pervious to Love; With bandaged eyes he never errs, Around, below, above. His blinding light He flingeth white On God's and Satan's brood, And reconciles by mystic wiles The evil and the good.” Brahma: “If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame or fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”
Emerson taught that man's imperfection is not sin, and that the cure for it lies in education. “He lets God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a Deity in the concrete, nor a superhuman Person, but rather the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendental cult.” His view of Jesus is found in his Essays, 2:263—“Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine, or the coarsest blasphemer, helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.” In his Divinity School Address, he banished the person of Jesus from genuine religion. He thought “one could not be a man if he must subordinate his nature to Christ's nature.” He failed to see that Jesus not only absorbs but transforms, and that we grow only by the impact of nobler souls than our own. Emerson's essay style is devoid of clear and precise theological statement, and in this vagueness lies its harmfulness. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xii—“Emerson's pantheism [pg 565]is not hardened into a consistent creed, for to the end he clung to the belief in personal immortality, and he pronounced the acceptance of this belief ‘the test of mental sanity.’ ” On Emerson, see S. L. Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 97-123.
We may call this theory the “green-apple theory” of sin. Sin is a green apple, which needs only time and sunshine and growth to bring it to ripeness and beauty and usefulness. But we answer that sin is not a green apple, but an apple with a worm at its heart. The evil of it can never be cured by growth. The fall can never be anything else than downward. Upon this theory, sin is an inseparable factor in the nature of finite things. The highest archangel cannot be without it. Man in moral character is “the asymptote of God,”—forever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. The throne of iniquity is set up forever in the universe. If this theory were true, Jesus, in virtue of his partaking of our finite humanity, must needs be a sinner. His perfect development, without sin, shows that sin was not a necessity of finite progress. Matthews, in Christianity and Evolution, 137—“It was not necessary for the prodigal to go into the far country and become a swineherd, in order to find out the father's love.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 141—“It is not the privilege of the Infinite alone to be good.” Dorner, System, 1:119, speaks of the moral career which this theory describes, as “a progressus in infinitum, where the constant approach to the goal has as its reverse side an eternal separation from the goal.” In his “Transformation,”Hawthorne hints, though rather hesitatingly, that without sin the higher humanity of man could not be taken up at all, and that sin may be essential to the first conscious awakening of moral freedom and to the possibility of progress; see Hutton, Essays, 2:381.
(b) So far as this theory regards moral evil as a necessary presupposition and condition of moral good, it commits the serious error of confounding the possible with the actual. What is necessary to goodness is not the actuality of evil, but only the possibility of evil.
Since we cannot know white except in contrast to black, it is claimed that without knowing actual evil we could never know actual good. George A. Gordon, New Epoch for Faith, 49, 50, has well shown that in that case the elimination of evil would imply the elimination of good. Sin would need to have place in God's being in order that he might be holy, and thus he would be divinity and devil in one person. Jesus too must needs be evil as well as good. Not only would it be true, as intimated above, that Christ, since his humanity is finite, must be a sinner, but also that we ourselves, who must always be finite, must always be sinners. We grant that holiness, in either God or man, must involve the abstract possibility of its opposite. But we maintain that, as this possibility in God is only abstract and never realized, so in man it should be only abstract and never realized. Man has power to reject this possible evil. His sin is a turning of the merely possible evil, by the decision of his will, into actual evil. Robert Browning is not free from the error above mentioned; see S. Law Wilson, Theology of Modern Literature, 207-210; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 433-444.
This theory of sin dates back to Hegel. To him there is no real sin and cannot be. Imperfection there is and must always be, because the relative can never become the absolute. Redemption is only an evolutionary process, indefinitely prolonged, and evil must remain an eternal condition. All finite thought is an element in the infinite thought, and all finite will an element in the infinite will. As good cannot exist without evil as its antithesis, infinite righteousness should have for its counterpart an infinite wickedness. Hegel's guiding principle was that “What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, remarks that this principle ignores “the riddle of the painful earth.” The disciples of Hegel thought that nothing remained for history to accomplish, now that the World-spirit had come to know himself in Hegel's philosophy.