(b) That upon the basis of this covenant God accounts men as sinners who are not sinners. But God judges according to truth. His condemnations do not proceed upon a basis of legal fiction. He can regard as responsible for Adam's transgression only those who in some real sense have been concerned, and have had part, in that transgression.
See Baird, Elohim Revealed, 544—“Here is a sin, which is no crime, but a mere condition of being regarded and treated as sinners; and a guilt, which is devoid of sinfulness, and which does not imply moral demerit or turpitude,”—that is, a sin which is no sin, and a guilt which is no guilt. Why might not God as justly reckon Adam's sin to the account of the fallen angels, and punish them for it? Dorner, System Doct., 2:351; 3:53, 54—“Hollaz held that God treats men in accordance with what he foresaw all would do, if they were in Adam's place” (scientia media and imputatio metaphysica). Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 141—“Immediate imputation is as unjust as imputatio metaphysica, i. e., God's condemning us for what he knew we would have done in Adam's place. On such a theory there is no need of a trial at all. God might condemn half the race at once to hell without probation, on the ground that they would ultimately sin and come thither at any rate.” Justification can be gratuitous, but not condemnation. “Like the social-compact theory of government, the covenant-theory of sin is a mere legal fiction. It explains, only to belittle. The theory of New England theology, which attributes to mere sovereignty God's making us sinners in consequence of Adam's sin, is more reasonable than the Federal theory” (Fisher).
Professor Moses Stuart characterized this theory as one of “fictitious guilt, but veritable damnation.” The divine economy admits of no fictitious substitutions nor forensic evasions. No legal quibbles can modify eternal justice. Federalism reverses the proper order, and puts the effect before the cause, as is the case with the social-compact theory of government. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 27—“It is illogical to say that society originated in a contract; for contract presupposes society.” Unus homo, nullus homo—without society, no persons. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 351—“No individual can make a conscience for himself. He always needs a society to make it for him....” 200—“Only through society is personality actualized.” Boyce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 209, note—“Organic Interrelationship of individuals is the condition even of their relatively independent selfhood.” We are “members one of another” (Rom. 12:15). Schurman, Agnosticism, 176—“The individual could never have developed into a personality but for his training through society and under law.” Imagine a theory that the family originated in a compact! We must not define the state by its first crude beginnings, any more than we define the oak by the acorn. On the theory of a social-compact, see Lowell, Essays on Government, 136-188.
(c) That, after accounting men to be sinners who are not sinners, God makes them sinners by immediately creating each human soul with a corrupt nature such as will correspond to his decree. This is not only to assume a false view of the origin of the soul, but also to make God directly [pg 616] the author of sin. Imputation of sin cannot precede and account for corruption; on the contrary, corruption must precede and account for imputation.
By God's act we became depraved, as a penal consequence of Adam's act imputed to us solely as peccatum alienum. Dabney, Theology, 342, says the theory regards the soul as originally pure until imputation. See Hodge on Rom. 5:13; Syst. Theol., 2:203, 210; Thornwell, Theology, 1:343-349; Chalmers, Institutes, 1:485, 487. The Federal theory “makes sin in us to be the penalty of another's sin, instead of being the penalty of our own sin, as on the Augustinian scheme, which regards depravity in us as the punishment of our own sin in Adam.... It holds to a sin which does not bring eternal punishment, but for which we are legally responsible as truly as Adam.” It only remains to say that Dr. Hodge always persistently refused to admit the one added element which might have made his view less arbitrary and mechanical, namely, the traducian theory of the origin of the soul. He was a creatianist, and to the end maintained that God immediately created the soul, and created it depraved. Acceptance of the traducian theory would have compelled him to exchange his Federalism for Augustinianism. Creatianism was the one remaining element of Pelagian atomism in an otherwise Scriptural theory. Yet Dr. Hodge regarded this as an essential part of Biblical teaching. His unwavering confidence was like that of Fichte, whom Caroline Schelling represented as saying: “Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit, Zweifle an der Sterne Licht, Leser, nur an meiner Wahrheit Und an deiner Dummheit, nicht.”
As a corrective to the atomistic spirit of Federalism we may quote a view which seems to us far more tenable, though it perhaps goes to the opposite extreme. Dr. H. H. Bawden writes: “The self is the product of a social environment. An ascetic self is so far forth not a self. Selfhood and consciousness are essentially social. We are members one of another. The biological view of selfhood regards it as a function, activity, process, inseparable from the social matrix out of which it has arisen. Consciousness is simply the name for the functioning of an organism. Not that the soul is a secretion of the brain, as bile is a secretion of the liver; not that the mind is a function of the body in any such materialistic sense. But that mind or consciousness is only the growing of an organism, while, on the other hand, the organism is just that which grows. The psychical is not a second, subtle, parallel form of energy causally interactive with the physical; much less is it a concomitant series, as the parallelists hold. Consciousness is not an order of existence or a thing, but rather a function. It is the organization of reality, the universe coming to a focus, flowering, so to speak, in a finite centre. Society is an organism in the same sense as the human body. The separation of the units of society is no greater than the separation of the unit factors of the body,—in the microscope the molecules are far apart. Society is a great sphere with many smaller spheres within it.
“Each self is not impervious to other selves. Selves are not water-tight compartments, each one of which might remain complete in itself, even if all the others were destroyed. But there are open sluiceways between all the compartments. Society is a vast plexus of interweaving personalities. We are members one of another. What affects my neighbor affects me, and what affects me ultimately affects my neighbor. The individual is not an impenetrable atomic unit.... The self is simply the social whole coming to consciousness at some particular point. Every self is rooted in the social organism of which it is but a local and individual expression. A self is a mere cipher apart from its social relations. As the old Greek adage has it: ‘He who lives quite alone is either a beast or a god.’ ” While we regard this exposition of Dr. Bawden as throwing light upon the origin of consciousness and so helping our contention against the Federal theory of sin, we do not regard it as proving that consciousness, once developed, may not become relatively independent and immortal. Back of society, as well as back of the individual, lies the consciousness and will of God, in whom alone is the guarantee of persistence. For objections to the Federal theory, see Fisher, Discussions, 401 sq.; Bib. Sac., 20:455-462, 577; New Englander, 1868:551-603; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 305-334, 435-450; Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:336; Dabney, Theology, 341-351.
5. Theory of Mediate Imputation, or Theory of Condemnation for Depravity.
This theory was first maintained by Placeus (1606-1655), professor of [pg 617] Theology at Saumur in France. Placeus originally denied that Adam's sin was in any sense imputed to his posterity, but after his doctrine was condemned by the Synod of the French Reformed Church at Charenton in 1644, he published the view which now bears his name.