If a child may not be unholy before he voluntarily transgresses, then, by parity of reasoning, Adam could not have been holy before he obeyed the law, nor can a change of heart precede Christian action. New School principles would compel us to assert that right action precedes change of heart, and that obedience in Adam must have preceded his holiness. Emmons held that, if children die before they become moral agents, it is most rational to conclude that they are annihilated. They are mere animals. The common New School doctrine would regard them as saved either on account of their innocence, or because the atonement of Christ avails to remove the consequences as well as the penalty of sin.
But to say that infants are pure contradicts Rom. 5:12—“all sinned”; 1 Cor. 7:14—“else were your children unclean”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath.” That Christ's atonement removes natural consequences of sin is nowhere asserted or implied in Scripture. See, per contra, H. B. Smith, System, 271, where, however, it is only maintained that Christ saves from all the just consequences of sin. But all just consequences are penalty, and should be so called. The exigencies of New School doctrine compel it to put the beginning of sin in the infant at the very first moment of its separate existence,—in order not to contradict those Scriptures which speak of sin as being universal, and of the atonement as being needed by all. Dr. Park held that infants sin so soon as they are born. He was obliged to hold this, or else to say that some members of the human race exist who are not sinners. But by putting sin thus early in human experience, all meaning is taken out of the New School definition of sin as the “voluntary transgression of known law.” It is difficult to say, upon this theory, what sort of a choice the infant makes of sin, or what sort of a known law it violates.
The first need in a theory of sin is that of satisfying the statements of Scripture. The second need is that it should point out an act of man which will justify the infliction of pain, suffering, and death upon the whole human race. Our moral sense refuses to accept the conclusion that all this is a matter of arbitrary sovereignty. We cannot find the act in each man's conscious transgression, nor in sin committed at birth. We do find such a voluntary transgression of known law in Adam; and we claim that the New School definition of sin is much more consistent with this last explanation of sin's origin than is the theory of a multitude of individual transgressions.
The final test of every theory, however, is its conformity to Scripture. We claim that a false philosophy prevents the advocates of New School doctrine from understanding the utterances of Paul. Their philosophy is a modified survival of atomistic Pelagianism. They ignore nature in both God and man, and resolve character into transient acts. The unconscious or subconscious state of the will they take little or no account of, and the possibility of another and higher life interpenetrating and transforming our own life is seldom present to their minds. They have no proper idea of the union of the believer with Christ, and so they have no proper idea of the union of the race with Adam. They need to learn that, as all the spiritual life of the race was in Christ, the second Adam, so all the natural life of the race was in the first Adam; as we derive righteousness from the former, so we derive corruption from the latter. Because Christ's life is in them, Paul can say that all believers rose in Christ's resurrection; because Adam's life is in them, he can say that in Adam all die. We should prefer to say with Pfleiderer that Paul teaches this doctrine but that Paul is no authority for us, rather than to profess acceptance of Paul's teaching while we ingeniously evade the force of his argument. We agree with Stevens, Pauline Theology, 135, 136, that all men “sinned in the same sense in which believers were crucified to the world and died unto sin when Christ died upon the cross.” But we protest that to make Christ's death the mere occasion of the death of the believer, and Adam's sin the mere occasionof the sins of men, is to ignore the central truths of Paul's teaching—the vital union of the believer with Christ, and the vital union of the race with Adam.
B. It rests upon false philosophical principles, as for example: (a) That the soul is immediately created by God. (b) That the law of God consists [pg 610] wholly in outward command. (c) That present natural ability to obey the law is the measure of obligation. (d) That man's relations to moral law are exclusively individual. (e) That the will is merely the faculty of individual and personal choices. (f) That the will, at man's birth, has no moral state or character.
See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 250 sq.—“Personality is inseparable from nature. The one duty is love. Unless any given duty is performed through the activity of a principle of love springing up in the nature, it is not performed at all. The law addresses the nature. The efficient cause of moral action is the proper subject of moral law. It is only in the perversity of unscriptural theology that we find the absurdity of separating the moral character from the substance of the soul, and tying it to the vanishing deeds of life. The idea that responsibility and sin are predicable of actions merely is only consistent with an utter denial that man's nature as such owes anything to God, or has an office to perform in showing forth his glory. It ignores the fact that actions are empty phenomena, which in themselves have no possible value. It is the heart, soul, might, mind, strength, with which we are to love. Christ conformed to the law, by being ‘that holy thing’ (Luke 1:35, marg.).”
Erroneous philosophical principles lie at the basis of New School interpretations of Scripture. The solidarity of the race is ignored, and all moral action is held to be individual. In our discussion of the Augustinian theory of sin, we shall hope to show that underlying Paul's doctrine there is quite another philosophy. Such a philosophy together with a deeper Christian experience would have corrected the following statement of Paul's view of sin, by Orello Cone, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1898:241-267. On the phrase Rom. 5:12—“for that all sinned,” he remarks: “If under the new order men do not become righteous simply because of the righteousness of Christ and without their choice, neither under the old order did Paul think them to be subject to death without their own acts of sin. Each representative head is conceived only as the occasion of the results of his work, on the one hand in the tragic order of death, and on the other hand in the blessed order of life—the occasion indispensable to all that follows in either order.... It may be questioned whether Pfleiderer does not state the case too strongly when he says that the sin of Adam's posterity is regarded as ‘the necessary consequence’ of the sin of Adam. It does not follow from the employment of the aorist ἥμαρτον that the sinning of all is contained in that of Adam, although this sense must be considered as grammatically possible. It is not however the only grammatically defensible sense. In Rom. 3:23, ἥμαρτον certainly does not denote such a definite past act filling only one point of time.” But we reply that the context determines that in Rom. 5:12, ἥμαρτον does denote such a definite past act; see our interpretation of the whole passage, under the Augustinian Theory, pages [625-627].
C. It impugns the justice of God:
(a) By regarding him as the direct creator of a vicious nature which infallibly leads every human being into actual transgression. To maintain that, in consequence of Adam's act, God brings it about that all men become sinners, and this, not by virtue of inherent laws of propagation, but by the direct creation in each case of a vicious nature, is to make God indirectly the author of sin.
(b) By representing him as the inflicter of suffering and death upon millions of human beings who in the present life do not come to moral consciousness, and who are therefore, according to the theory, perfectly innocent. This is to make him visit Adam's sin on his posterity, while at the same time it denies that moral connection between Adam and his posterity which alone could make such visitation just.