Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

4. The Federal Theory, or Theory of Condemnation by Covenant.

The Federal theory, or theory of the Covenants, had its origin with Cocceius (1608-1669), professor at Leyden, but was more fully elaborated by Turretin (1623-1687). It has become a tenet of the Reformed as distinguished from the Lutheran church, and in this country it has its main advocates in the Princeton school of theologians, of whom Dr. Charles Hodge was the representative.

According to this view, Adam was constituted by God's sovereign appointment the representative of the whole human race. With Adam as their representative, God entered into covenant, agreeing to bestow upon them eternal life on condition of his obedience, but making the penalty of his disobedience to be the corruption and death of all his posterity. In accordance with the terms of this covenant, since Adam sinned, God accounts all his descendants as sinners, and condemns them because of Adam's transgression.

In execution of this sentence of condemnation, God immediately creates each soul of Adam's posterity with a corrupt and depraved nature, which [pg 613] infallibly leads to sin, and which is itself sin. The theory is therefore a theory of the immediate imputation of Adam's sin to his posterity, their corruption of nature not being the cause of that imputation, but the effect of it. In Rom. 5:12, “death passed unto all men, for that all sinned,” signifies: “physical, spiritual, and eternal death came to all, because all were regarded and treated as sinners.”

Fisher, Discussions, 355-409, compares the Augustinian and Federal theories of Original Sin. His account of the Federal theory and its origin is substantially as follows: The Federal theory is a theory of the covenants (fœdus, a covenant). 1. The covenant is a sovereign constitution imposed by God. 2. Federal union is the legal ground of imputation, though kinship to Adam is the reason why Adam and not another was selected as our representative. 3. Our guilt for Adam's sin is simply a legal responsibility. 4. That imputed sin is punished by inborn depravity, and that inborn depravity by eternal death. Augustine could not reconcile inherent depravity with the justice of God; hence he held that we sinned in Adam.

So Anselm says: “Because the whole human nature was in them (Adam and Eve), and outside of them there was nothing of it, the whole was weakened and corrupted.”After the first sin “this nature was propagated just as it had made itself by sinning.”All sin belongs to the will; but this is a part of our inheritance. The descendants of Adam were not in him as individuals; yet what he did as a person, he did not do sine natura, and this nature is ours as well as his. So Peter Lombard. Sins of our immediate ancestors, because they are qualities which are purely personal, are not propagated. After Adam's first sin, the actual qualities of the first parent or of other later parents do not corrupt the nature as concerns its qualities, but only as concerns the qualities of the person.

Calvin maintained two propositions: 1. We are not condemned for Adam's sin apart from our own inherent depravity which is derived from him. The sin for which we are condemned is our own sin. 2. This sin is ours, for the reason that our nature is vitiated in Adam, and we receive it in the condition in which it was put by the first transgression. Melanchthon also held to an imputation of the first sin conditioned upon our innate depravity. The impulse to Federalism was given by the difficulty, on the pure Augustinian theory, of accounting for the non-imputation of Adam's subsequent sins, and those of his posterity.

Cocceius (Dutch, Coch: English, Cook), the author of the covenant-theory, conceived that he had solved this difficulty by making Adam's sin to be imputed to us upon the ground of a covenant between God and Adam, according to which Adam was to stand as the representative of his posterity. In Cocceius's use of the term, however, the only difference between covenant and command is found in the promise attached to the keeping of it. Fisher remarks on the mistake, in modern defenders of imputation, of ignoring the capital fact of a true and real participation in Adam's sin. The great body of Calvinistic theologians in the 17th century were Augustinians as well as Federalists. So Owen and the Westminster Confession. Turretin, however, almost merged the natural relation to Adam in the federal.

Edwards fell back on the old doctrine of Aquinas and Augustine. He tried to make out a real participation in the first sin. The first rising of sinful inclination, by a divinely constituted identity, is this participation. But Hopkins and Emmons regarded the sinful inclination, not as a real participation, but only as a constructive consent to Adam's first sin. Hence the New School theology, in which the imputation of Adam's sin was given up. On the contrary, Calvinists of the Princeton school planted themselves on the Federal theory, and taking Turretin as their text book, waged war on New England views, not wholly sparing Edwards himself. After this review of the origin of the theory, for which we are mainly indebted to Fisher, it can be easily seen how little show of truth there is in the assumption of the Princeton theologians that the Federal theory is “the immemorial doctrine of the church of God.”