II.—Objections to the Augustinian Doctrine of Imputation.
The doctrine of Imputation, to which we have thus arrived, is met by its opponents with the following objections. In discussing them, we are to remember that a truth revealed in Scripture may have claims to our belief, in spite of difficulties to us insoluble. Yet it is hoped that examination will show the objections in question to rest either upon false philosophical principles or upon misconception of the doctrine assailed.
A. That there can be no sin apart from and prior to consciousness.
This we deny. The larger part of men's evil dispositions and acts are imperfectly conscious, and of many such dispositions and acts the evil quality is not discerned at all. The objection rests upon the assumption that law is confined to published statutes or to standards formally recognized by its subjects. A profounder view of law as identical with the constituent principles of being, as binding the nature to conformity with the nature of God, as demanding right volitions only because these are manifestations of a right state, as having claims upon men in their corporate capacity, deprives this objection of all its force.
If our aim is to find a conscious act of transgression upon which to base God's charge of guilt and man's condemnation, we can find this more easily in Adam's sin than at the beginning of each man's personal history; for no human being can remember his first sin. The main question at issue is therefore this: Is all sin personal? We claim that both Scripture and reason answer this question in the negative. There is such a thing as race-sin and race-responsibility.
B. That man cannot be responsible for a sinful nature which he did not personally originate.
We reply that the objection ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture. These assert that we are responsible for what we are. The sinful nature is not something external to us, but is our inmost selves. If man's original righteousness and the new affection implanted in regeneration have moral character, then the inborn tendency to evil has moral character; as the former are commendable, so the latter is condemnable.
If it be said that sin is the act of a person, and not of a nature, we reply that in Adam the whole human nature once subsisted in the form of a single personality, and the act of the person could be at the same time the act of the nature. That which could not be at any subsequent point of time, could be and was, at that time. Human nature could fall in Adam, though that fall could not be repeated in the case of any one of his descendants. Hovey, Outlines, 129—“Shall we say that will is the cause of sin in holy beings, while wrong desire is the cause of sin in unholy beings? Augustine held this.”Pepper, Outlines, 112—“We do not fall each one by himself. We were so on probation in Adam, that his fall was our fall.”