Pascal: “It is astonishing that the mystery which is furthest removed from our knowledge—I mean the transmission of original sin—should be that without which we have no true knowledge of ourselves. It is in this abyss that the clue to our condition takes its turnings and windings, insomuch that man is more incomprehensible without the mystery than this mystery is incomprehensible to man.” Yet Pascal's perplexity was largely due to his holding the Augustinian position that inherited sin is damning and brings eternal death, while not holding to the coördinate Augustinian position of a primary existence and act of the species in Adam; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:18. Atomism is egotistic. The purest and noblest feel most strongly that humanity is not like a heap of sand-grains or a row of bricks set on end, but that it is an organic unity. So the Christian feels for the family and for the church. So Christ, in Gethsemane, felt for the race. If it be said that the tendency of the Augustinian view is to diminish the sense of guilt for personal sins, we reply that only those who recognize sins as rooted in sin can properly recognize the evil of them. To such they are symptomsof an apostasy from God so deep-seated and universal that nothing but infinite grace can deliver us from it.
I. That a constitution by which the sin of one individual involves in guilt and condemnation the nature of all men who descend from him is contrary to God's justice.
We acknowledge that no human theory can fully solve the mystery of imputation. But we prefer to attribute God's dealings to justice rather than to sovereignty. The following considerations, though partly hypothetical, may throw light upon the subject: (a) A probation of our common nature in Adam, sinless as he was and with full knowledge of God's law, is more consistent with divine justice than a separate probation of each individual, with inexperience, inborn depravity, and evil example, all favoring a decision against God. (b) A constitution which made a common fall possible may have been indispensable to any provision of a common salvation. (c) Our chance for salvation as sinners under grace may be better than it would have been as sinless Adams under law. (d) A constitution which permitted oneness with the first Adam in the transgression cannot be unjust, since a like principle of oneness with Christ, the second Adam, secures our salvation. (e) There is also a physical and natural union with Christ which antedates the fall and which is incident to man's creation. The immanence of Christ in humanity guarantees a continuous divine effort to remedy the disaster caused by man's free will, and to restore the moral union with God which the race has lost by the fall.
Thus our ruin and our redemption were alike wrought out without personal act of ours. As all the natural life of humanity was in Adam, so all the spiritual life of humanity was in Christ. As our old nature was corrupted in Adam and propagated to us by physical generation, so our new nature was restored in Christ and communicated to us by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. If then we are justified upon the ground of our inbeing in Christ, we may in like manner be condemned on the ground of our inbeing in Adam.
Stearns, in N. Eng., Jan. 1882:95—“The silence of Scripture respecting the precise connection between the first great sin and the sins of the millions of individuals who [pg 636]have lived since then is a silence that neither science nor philosophy has been, or is, able to break with a satisfactory explanation. Separate the twofold nature of man, corporate and individual. Recognize in the one the region of necessity; in the other the region of freedom. The scientific law of heredity has brought into new currency the doctrine which the old theologians sought to express under the name of original sin,—a term which had a meaning as it was at first used by Augustine, but which is an awkward misnomer if we accept any other theory but his.”
Dr. Hovey claims that the Augustinian view breaks down when applied to the connection between the justification of believers and the righteousness of Christ; for believers were not in Christ, as to the substance of their souls, when he wrought out redemption for them. But we reply that the life of Christ which makes us Christians is the same life which made atonement upon the cross and which rose from the grave for our justification. The parallel between Adam and Christ is of the nature of analogy, not of identity. With Adam, we have a connection of physical life; with Christ, a connection of spiritual life.
Stahl, Philosophie des Rechts, quoted in Olshausen's Com. on Rom. 5:12-21—“Adam is the original matter of humanity; Christ is its original idea in God; both personally living. Mankind is one in them. Therefore Adam's sin became the sin of all; Christ's sacrifice the atonement for all. Every leaf of a tree may be green or wither by itself; but each suffers by the disease of the root, and recovers only by its healing. The shallower the man, so much more isolated will everything appear to him; for upon the surface all lies apart. He will see in mankind, in the nation, nay, even in the family, mere individuals, where the act of the one has no connection with that of the other. The profounder the man, the more do these inward relations of unity, proceeding from the very centre, force themselves upon him. Yea, the love of our neighbor is itself nothing but the deep feeling of this unity; for we love him only, with whom we feel and acknowledge ourselves to be one. What the Christian love of our neighbor is for the heart, that unity of race is for the understanding. If sin through one, and redemption through one, is not possible, the command to love our neighbor is also unintelligible. Christian ethics and Christian faith are therefore in truth indissolubly united. Christianity effects in history an advance like that from the animal kingdom to man, by its revealing the essential unity of men, the consciousness of which in the ancient world had vanished when the nations were separated.”
If the sins of the parents were not visited upon the children, neither could their virtues be; the possibility of the one involves the possibility of the other. If the guilt of our first father could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him, then the justification of Christ could not be transmitted to all who derive their life from him. We do not, however, see any Scripture warrant for the theory that all men are justified from original sin by virtue of their natural connection with Christ. He who is the life of all men bestows manifold temporal blessings upon the ground of his atonement. But justification from sin is conditioned upon conscious surrender of the human will and trust in the divine mercy. The immanent Christ is ever urging man individually and collectively toward such decision. But the acceptance or rejection of the offered grace is left to man's free will. This principle enables us properly to estimate the view of Dr. Henry E. Robins which follows.
H. E. Robins, Harmony of Ethics with Theology, 51—“All men born of Adam stand in such a relation to Christ that salvation is their birthright under promise—a birthright which can only be forfeited by their intelligent, personal, moral action, as was Esau's.” Dr. Robins holds to an inchoate justification of all—a justification which becomes actual and complete only when the soul closes with Christ's offer to the sinner. We prefer to say that humanity in Christ is ideally justified because Christ himself is justified, but that individual men are justified only when they consciously appropriate his offered grace or surrender themselves to his renewing Spirit. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 312—“The grace of God is as organic in its relation to man as is the evil in his nature. Grace also reigns wherever justice reigns.” William Ashmore, on the New Trial of the Sinner, in Christian Review, 26:245-264—“There is a gospel of nature commensurate with the law of nature; Rom. 3:22—‘unto all, and upon all them that believe’; the first ‘all’is unlimited; the second ‘all’ is limited to those who believe.”
R. W. Dale, Ephesians, 180—“Our fortunes were identified with the fortunes of Christ; in the divine thought and purpose we were inseparable from him. Had we been true and loyal to the divine idea, the energy of Christ's righteousness would have drawn us upward to height after height of goodness and joy, until we ascended from this earthly life to the larger powers and loftier services and richer delights of other and diviner [pg 637]worlds; and still, through one golden age of intellectual and ethical and spiritual growth after another, we should have continued to rise towards Christ's transcendent and infinite perfection. But we sinned; and as the union between Christ and us could not be broken without the final and irrevocable defeat of the divine purpose, Christ was drawn down from the serene heavens to the confused and troubled life of our race, to pain, to temptation, to anguish, to the cross and to the grave, and so the mystery of his atonement for our sin was consummated.”