Milton, Par. Lost, 9:414—“Where likeliest he [Satan] might find The only two of mankind, but in them The whole included race, his purpos'd prey.” Augustine, De Pec. Mer. et Rem., 3:7—“In Adamo omnes tune peccaverunt, quando in ejus natura adhuc omnes ille unus fuerunt”; De Civ. Dei, 13, 14—“Omnes enim fuimus in illo uno, quando omnes fuimus ille unus.... Nondum erat nobis singillatim creata et distributa forma in qua singuli viveremus, sed jam natura erat seminalis ex qua propagaremur.”On Augustine's view, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2; 43-45 (System Doct., 2:338, 339)—In opposition to Pelagius who made sin to consist in single acts, “Augustine emphasized the sinful state. This was a deprivation of original righteousness + inordinate love. Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilarius, Ambrose had advocated traducianism, according to which, without their personal participation, the sinfulness of all is grounded in Adam's free act. They incur its consequences as an evil which is, at the same time, punishment of the inherited fault. But Irenæus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, say Adam was not simply a single individual, but the universal man. We were comprehended in him, so that in him we sinned. On the first view, the posterity were passive; on the second, they were active, in Adam's sin. Augustine represents both views, desiring to unite the universal sinfulness involved in traducianism with the universal will and guilt involved in cooperation with Adam's sin. Adam, therefore, to him, is a double conception, and = individual + race.”
Mozley on Predestination, 402—“In Augustine, some passages refer all wickedness to original sin; some account for different degrees of evil by different degrees of original sin (Op. imp. cont. Julianum, 4:128—‘Malitia naturalis.... in aliis minor, in aliis major est’); in some, the individual seems to add to original sin (De Correp. et Gratia, c. 13—‘Per liberum arbitrium alia insuper addiderunt, alii majus, alii minus, sed omnes mali.’ De Grat. et Lib. Arbit., 2:1—‘Added to the sin of their birth sins of their own commission’; 2:4—‘Neither denies our liberty of will, whether to choose an evil or a good life, nor attributes to it so much power that it can avail anything without God's grace, or that it can change itself from evil to good’).” These passages seem to show that, side by side with the race-sin and its development, Augustine recognized a domain of free personal decision, by which each man could to some extent modify his character, and make himself more or less depraved.
The theory of Augustine was not the mere result of Augustine's temperament or of Augustine's sins. Many men have sinned like Augustine, but their intellects have only been benumbed and have been led into all manner of unbelief. It was the Holy Spirit who took possession of the temperament, and so overruled the sin as to make it a glass through which Augustine saw the depths of his nature. Nor was his doctrine one of exclusive divine transcendence, which left man a helpless worm at enmity with infinite justice. He was also a passionate believer in the immanence of God. He writes: “I could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert not thou in me; rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are are all things.... O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless, till it find rest in thee.—The will of God is the very nature of things—Dei voluntas rerum natura est.”
Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, Introduction, very erroneously declares that “the Augustinian theology rests upon the transcendence of Deity as its controlling principle, and at every point appears as an inferior rendering of the earlier interpretation of the Christian faith.” On the other hand, L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 69, 368-397, shows that, while Athanasius held to a dualistic transcendence, Augustine held to a theistic immanence: “Thus the Stoic, Neo-Platonic immanence, with Augustine, supplants the Platonico-Aristotelian and Athanasian transcendence.” Alexander, Theories of the Will, 90—“The theories of the early Fathers were indeterministic, and the pronounced Augustinianism of Augustine was the result of the rise into prominence of the doctrine of original sin.... The early Fathers thought of the origin of sin in angels and in Adam as due to free will. Augustine thought of the origin of [pg 621]sin in Adam's posterity as due to inherited evil will.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 161—“To this day in Catholicism inward and living piety and the expression of it is in essence wholly Augustinian.”
Calvin was essentially Augustinian and realistic; see his Institutes, book 2, chap. 1-3; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:505, 506, with the quotations and references. Zwingle was not an Augustinian. He held that native vitiosity, although it is the uniform occasion of sin, is not itself sin: “It is not a crime, but a condition and a disease.” See Hagenbach, Hist. Doct. 2:256, with references. Zwingle taught that every new-born child—thanks to Christ's making alive of all those who had died in Adam—is as free from any taint of sin as Adam was before the fall. The Reformers, however, with the single exception of Zwingle, were Augustinians, and accounted for the hereditary guilt of mankind, not by the fact that all men were represented in Adam, but that all men participated in Adam's sin. This is still the doctrine of the Lutheran church.
The theory of Adam's Natural Headship regards humanity at large as the outgrowth of one germ. Though the leaves of a tree appear as disconnected units when we look down upon them from above, a view from beneath will discern the common connection with the twigs, branches, trunk, and will finally trace their life to the root, and to the seed from which it originally sprang. The race of man is one because it sprang from one head. Its members are not to be regarded atomistically, as segregated individuals; the deeper truth is the truth of organic unity. Yet we are not philosophical realists; we do not believe in the separate existence of universals. We hold, not to universalia ante rem, which is extreme realism; nor to universalia post rem, which is nominalism; but to universalia in re, which is moderate realism. Extreme realism cannot see the trees for the wood; nominalism cannot see the wood for the trees; moderate realism sees the wood in the trees. We hold to “universalia in re, but insist that the universals must be recognized as realities, as truly as the individuals are” (H. B. Smith, System, 319, note). Three acorns have a common life, as three spools have not. Moderate realism is true of organic things; nominalism is true only of proper names. God has not created any new tree nature since he created the first tree; nor has he created any new human nature since he created the first man. I am but a branch and outgrowth of the tree of humanity.
Our realism then only asserts the real historical connection of each member of the race with its first father and head, and such a derivation of each from him as makes us partakers of the character which he formed. Adam was once the race; and when he fell, the race fell. Shedd: “We all existed in Adam in our elementary invisible substance. The Seyn of all was there, though the Daseyn was not; the noumenon, though not the phenomenon, was in existence.” On realism, see Koehler, Realismus und Nominalismus; Neander, Ch. Hist., 4:356; Dorner, Person Christ, 2:377; Hase, Anselm, 2:77; F. E. Abbott, Scientific Theism, Introd., 1-29, and in Mind, Oct. 1882:476, 477; Raymond, Theology, 2:30-33; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:69-74; Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 129-132; Ten Broeke, in Baptist Quar. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-26; Baldwin, Psychology, 280, 281; D. J. Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 186; Hours with the Mystics, 1:213; Case, Physical Realism, 17-19; Fullerton, Sameness and Identity, 88, 89, and Concept of the Infinite, 95-114.
The new conceptions of the reign of law and of the principle of heredity which prevail in modern science are working to the advantage of Christian theology. The doctrine of Adam's Natural Headship is only a doctrine of the hereditary transmission of character from the first father of the race to his descendants. Hence we use the word “imputation” in its proper sense—that of a reckoning or charging to us of that which is truly and properly ours. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:259-357, esp. 328—“The problem is: We must allow that the depravity, which all Adam's descendants inherit by natural generation, nevertheless involves personal guilt; and yet this depravity, so far as it is natural, wants the very conditions on which guilt depends. The only satisfactory explanation of this difficulty is the Christian doctrine of original sin. Here alone, if its inner possibility can be maintained, can the apparently contradictory principles be harmonized, viz.: the universal and deep-seated depravity of human nature, as the source of actual sin, and individual responsibility and guilt.”These words, though written by one who advocates a different theory, are nevertheless a valuable argument in corroboration of the theory of Adam's Natural Headship.
Thornwell, Theology, 1:343—“We must contradict every Scripture text and every Scripture doctrine which makes hereditary impurity hateful to God and punishable in his sight, or we must maintain that we sinned in Adam in his first transgression.” Secretan, in his Work on Liberty, held to a collective life of the race in Adam. He was [pg 622]answered by Naville, Problem of Evil: “We existed in Adam, not individually, but seminally. Each of us, as an individual, is responsible only for his personal acts, or, to speak more exactly, for the personal part of his acts. But each of us, as he is man, is jointly and severally (solidairement) responsible for the fall of the human race.” Bersier, The Oneness of the Race, in its Fall and in its Future: “If we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves, it is because our neighbor is ourself.”
See Edwards, Original Sin, part 4, chap. 3; Shedd, on Original Sin, in Discourses and Essays, 218-271, and references, 261-263, also Dogm. Theol., 2:181-195; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 410-435, 451-460, 494; Schaff, in Bib. Sac., 5:220, and in Lange's Com., on Rom. 5:12; Auberlen, Div. Revelation, 175-180; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 3:28-38, 204-236; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:269-400; Martensen, Dogmatics, 173-183; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 262 sq., cf. 101; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 135; Bp. Reynolds, Sinfulness of Sin, in Works, 1:102-350; Mozley on Original Sin, in Lectures, 136-152; Kendall, on Natural Heirship, or All the World Akin, in Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1885:614-626. Per contra, see Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:157-164, 227-257; Haven, in Bib. Sac., 20:451-455; Criticism of Baird's doctrine, in Princeton Rev., Apr. 1880:335-376; of Schaff's doctrine, in Princeton Rev., Apr. 1870:239-262.