God imputes to men only their own acts of personal transgression; he does not impute to them Adam's sin; neither original vitiosity nor physical [pg 607] death are penal inflictions; they are simply consequences which God has in his sovereignty ordained to mark his displeasure at Adam's transgression, and subject to which evils God immediately creates each human soul. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “spiritual death passed on all men, because all men have actually and personally sinned.”
Edwards held that God imputes Adam's sin to his posterity by arbitrarily identifying them with him,—identity, on the theory of continuous creation (see pages 415-418), being only what God appoints. Since this did not furnish sufficient ground for imputation, Edwards joined the Placean doctrine to the other, and showed the justice of the condemnation by the fact that man is depraved. He adds, moreover, the consideration that man ratifies this depravity by his own act. So Edwards tried to combine three views. But all were vitiated by his doctrine of continuous creation, which logically made God the only cause in the universe, and left no freedom, guilt, or responsibility to man. He held that preservation is a continuous series of new divine volitions, personal identity consisting in consciousness or rather memory, with no necessity for identity of substance. He maintained that God could give to an absolutely new creation the consciousness of one just annihilated, and thereby the two would be identical. He maintained this not only as a possibility, but as the actual fact. See Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1901:149-169; and H. N. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.
The idealistic philosophy of Edwards enables us to understand his conception of the relation of the race to Adam. He believed in “a real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe ... the full consent of the hearts of Adam's posterity to the first apostasy ... and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them, but it is truly and properly theirs, and on that ground God imputes it to them.” Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 2:435-448, esp. 436, quotes from Edwards: “The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple, viz.: the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God.”Interpret this by other words of Edwards: “The child and the acorn, which come into existence in the course of nature, are truly immediately created by God”—i. e., continuously created (quoted by Dodge, Christian Theology, 188). Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 310—“It required but a step from the principle that each individual has an identity of consciousness with Adam, to reach the conclusion that each individual is Adam and repeats his experience. Of every man it might be said that like Adam he comes into the world attended by the divine nature, and like him sins and falls. In this sense the sin of every man becomes original sin.” Adam becomes not the head of humanity but its generic type. Hence arises the New School doctrine of exclusively individual sin and guilt.
Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 2:25, claims Edwards as a Traducianist. But Fisher, Discussions, 240, shows that he was not. As we have seen (Prolegomena, pages 48, 49), Edwards thought too little of nature. He tended to Berkeleyanism as applied to mind. Hence the chief good was in happiness—a form of sensibility. Virtue is voluntary choice of this good. Hence union of acts and exercises with Adam was sufficient. This God's will might make identity of being with him. Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 sq., says well, that “Edwards's idea that the character of an act was to be sought somewhere else than in its cause involves the fallacious assumption that acts have a subsistence and moral agency of their own apart from that of the actor.” This divergence from the truth led to the Exercise-system of Hopkins and Emmons, who not only denied moral character prior to individual choices (i. e., denied sin of nature), but attributed all human acts and exercises to the direct efficiency of God. Hopkins declared that Adam's act, in eating the forbidden fruit, was not the act of his posterity; therefore they did not sin at the same time that he did. The sinfulness of that act could not be transferred to them afterwards; because the sinfulness of an act can no more be transferred from one person to another than an act itself. Therefore, though men became sinners by Adam, according to divine constitution, yet they have, and are accountable for, no sins but personal. See Woods, History of Andover Theological Seminary, 33. So the doctrine of continuous creation led to the Exercise-system, and the Exercise-system led to the theology of acts. On Emmons, see Works, 4:502-507, and Bib. Sac., 7:479; 20:317; also H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 215-263.
N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, agreed with Hopkins and Emmons that there is no [pg 608]imputation of Adam's sin or of inborn depravity. He called that depravity physical, not moral. But he repudiated the doctrine of divine efficiency in the production of man's acts and exercises, and made all sin to be personal. He held to the power of contrary choice. Adam had it, and contrary to the belief of Augustinians, he never lost it. Man “not only can if he will, but he can if he won't.” He can, but, without the Spirit, will not. He said: “Man can, whatever the Holy Spirit does or does not do”; but also: “Man will not, unless the Holy Spirit helps”; “If I were as eloquent as the Holy Ghost, I could convert sinners as fast as he.” Yet he did not hold to the Arminian liberty of indifference or contingence. He believed in the certainty of wrong action, yet in power to the contrary. See Moral Government, 2:132—“The error of Pelagius was not in asserting that man can obey God without grace, but in saying that man does actually obey God without grace.” There is a part of the sinner's nature to which the motives of the gospel may appeal—a part of his nature which is neither holy nor unholy, viz., self-love, or innocent desire for happiness. Greatest happiness is the ground of obligation. Under the influence of motives appealing to happiness, the sinner can suspend his choice of the world as his chief good, and can give his heart to God. He can do this, whatever the Holy Spirit does, or does not do; but the moral inability can be overcome only by the Holy Spirit, who moves the soul, without coercing, by means of the truth. On Dr. Taylor's system, and its connection with prior New England theology, see Fisher, Discussions, 285-354.
This form of New School doctrine suggests the following questions: 1. Can the sinner suspend his selfishness before he is subdued by divine grace? 2. Can his choice of God from mere self-love be a holy choice? 3. Since God demands love in every choice, must it not be a positively unholy choice? 4. If it is not itself a holy choice, how can it be a beginning of holiness? 5. If the sinner can become regenerate by preferring God on the ground of self-interest, where is the necessity of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart? 6. Does not this asserted ability of the sinner to turn to God contradict consciousness and Scripture? For Taylor's Views, see his Revealed Theology, 134-309. For criticism of them, see Hodge, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1868:63 sq., and 368-398; also, Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology. Neither Hopkins and Emmons on the one hand, nor Taylor on the other, represent most fully the general course of New England theology. Smalley, Dwight, Woods, all held to more conservative views than Taylor, or than Finney, whose system had much resemblance to Taylor's. All three of these denied the power of contrary choice which Dr. Taylor so strenuously maintained, although all agreed with him in denying the imputation of Adam's sin or of our hereditary depravity. These are not sinful, except in the sense of being occasions of actual sin.
Dr. Park, of Andover, was understood to teach that the disordered state of the sensibilities and faculties with which we are born is the immediate occasion of sin, while Adam's transgression is the remote occasion of sin. The will, though influenced by an evil tendency, is still free; the evil tendency itself is not free, and therefore is not sin. The Statement of New School doctrine given in the text is intended to represent the common New England doctrine, as taught by Smalley, Dwight, Woods and Park; although the historical tendency, even among these theologians, has been to emphasize less and less the depraved tendencies prior to actual sin, and to maintain that moral character begins only with individual choice, most of them, however, holding that this individual choice begins at birth. See Bib. Sac., 7:552, 567; 8:607-647; 20:462-471, 576-593; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 407-412; Foster, Hist. N. E. Theology.
Both Ritschl and Pfleiderer lean toward the New School interpretation of sin. Ritschl, Unterricht, 25—“Universal death was the consequence of the sin of the first man, and the death of his posterity proved that they too had sinned.” Thus death is universal, not because of natural generation from Adam, but because of the individual sins of Adam's posterity. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 122—“Sin is a direction of the will which contradicts the moral Idea. As preceding personal acts of the will, it is not personal guilt but imperfection or evil. When it persists in spite of awaking moral consciousness, and by indulgence become habit, it is guilty abnormity.”
To the New School theory we object as follows:
A. It contradicts Scripture in maintaining or implying: (a) That sin consists solely in acts, and in the dispositions caused in each case by man's individual acts, and that the state which predisposes to acts of sin is not itself sin. (b) That the vitiosity which predisposes to sin is a part of each man's nature as it proceeds from the creative hand of God. (c) That [pg 609] physical death in the human race is not a penal consequence of Adam's transgression. (d) That infants, before moral consciousness, do not need Christ's sacrifice to save them. Since they are innocent, no penalty rests upon them, and none needs to be removed. (e) That we are neither condemned upon the ground of actual inbeing in Adam, nor justified upon the ground of actual inbeing in Christ.