Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said: “My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say: ‘Our father who art in hell’; for [pg 476]they are only children of the devil.” Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
II. Unity of the Human Race.
(a) The Scriptures teach that the whole human race is descended from a single pair.
Gen. 1:27, 28—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; 22—“and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”; 3:20—“And the man called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” = even Eve is traced back to Adam; 9:19—“These three were the sons of Noah; and of these was the whole earth overspread.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 110—“Logically, it seems easier to account for the divergence of what was at first one, than for the union of what was at first heterogeneous.”
(b) This truth lies at the foundation of Paul's doctrine of the organic unity of mankind in the first transgression, and of the provision of salvation for the race in Christ.
Rom. 5:12—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned”; 19—“For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous”; 1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”; Heb. 2:16—“For verily not of angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham.” One of the most eminent ethnologists and anthropologists, Prof. D. G. Brinton, said not long before his death that all scientific research and teaching tended to the conviction that mankind has descended from one pair.
(c) This descent of humanity from a single pair also constitutes the ground of man's obligation of natural brotherhood to every member of the race.
Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth”—here the Rev. Vers. omits the word “blood” (“made of one blood”—Auth. Vers.). The word to be supplied is possibly “father,” but more probably “body”; cf. Heb. 2:11—“for both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one [father or body]: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, In the midst of the congregation will I sing thy praise.”
Winchell, in his Preadamites, has recently revived the theory broached in 1655 by Peyrerius, that there were men before Adam: “Adam is descended from a black race—not the black races from Adam.” Adam is simply “the remotest ancestor to whom the Jews could trace their lineage.... The derivation of Adam from an older human stock is essentially the creation of Adam.” Winchell does not deny the unity of the race, nor the retroactive effect of the atonement upon those who lived before Adam; he simply denies that Adam was the first man. 297—He “regards the Adamic stock as derived from an older and humbler human type,” originally as low in the scale as the present Australian savages.