St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

by Charles Gore

It is worth noticing in passing that 'original sin' is not a fixed quantity derived from one lapse of the original man, but is a moral weakness continually reinforced by every actual transgression, and, on the other hand, reduced in force by moral resistance and self-control. Individuals start at very different levels of depravity. Only it would appear that practically in no man but One is there any reason to believe the fundamental nature immaculate.

IV.—But it will be said 'You have not yet touched upon a big central contradiction between religion and science. According to the Christian doctrine mankind is derived from a single specifically human pair, made human by a special inspiration of the Divine Spirit. According to the theory of evolution, a certain species of apes under specially favourable conditions gradually advanced to become what might be called man, though of a very low type.' To this I am inclined to make reply thus: Christianity is really bound up with maintaining four positions—(1) the reality of moral freedom; (2) the fact of sin, properly so called as distinct from imperfection; (3) its practical universality, at least as an inherited tendency; and (4) the unity of the human race in such sense that the same postulates may be made with regard to all men, and the same capacity for moral redemption (more or less) assumed to be in them. Now, as regards the first three of these positions enough has been said already, and the last of them does not appear to be at present in dispute between science and religion. St. Paul says, 'God made of one' (or 'of one blood,' for this reading is possibly right) 'every nation of men' (Acts xvii. 26). And of one blood, if not of one individual, all men are, according to the present conclusions of biological science. A recent work on ethnology, by Mr. Keane (Cambridge Geographical Series), speaks thus:—'The hominidae are not separately evolved in an absolute sense—i.e. from so many different anthropoid precursors, but the present primary divisions are separately evolved from so many different pleistocene precursors, themselves evolved through a single pliocene prototype from a single anthropoid precursor[[12]].'

It does not seem to me, then, that Christianity is really bound up with anything more than the unity of the human race, which science also strongly asserts. But to pass from these positions, which may be regarded as certain, to something more conjectural (apart from any question of the literary character of Genesis iii), we may argue thus: Sin is a fact having the same character universally in human history, though the sense of sin has varied greatly, reaching back as far as human history extends. This would lead us to suppose that it goes back to the roots of the race. It suggests some original fall, some tainting of the race in its origin. I do not see, then, anything absurd or contrary to evidence in such a hypothesis as this.—The Divine Spirit is assumed to be at work in all the development of the world. The 'laws of nature' are but His methods. At a certain moment a new thing had emerged in the universe hitherto inorganic. It was the fact of life. It was new[[13]]. But it was in continuity with what had gone before. This principle of life had its great development, vegetable and animal. It had attained a form in certain anthropoid apes such as we are familiar with in men. Suppose then that the Divine Spirit breathes Himself, again in a new way, into one single pair or group of these anthropoid animals. There is lodged in them for the first time a germ of spiritual consciousness, continuous with animal intelligence, and yet distinct from it. From this pair or group humanity has its origin. If they and their offspring had been true to their spiritual capacities the animal nature would have been more rapidly spiritualized in motives and tendencies. Development—physical, moral, spiritual—would have been steady and glorious. Whereas there was a fall at the very root of our humanity; and the fall was repeated and reiterated and renewed, and the development of our manhood was tainted and spoiled. There was a lapse into approximately animal condition, which is dimly known to us as primitive savagery. So that the condition of savage man is a parody of what God intended man in his undeveloped stages to be, just as the condition of civilized man in London and Paris is a parody of what God intended developed man to come to. And there have been long and dreary epochs when men have seemed to lose almost all human ideals and divine aspirations; when, in St. Paul's phrase, they were 'alive without the law,' living a physical life unvisited by the remorse consequent upon any knowledge of better things. And there have been, on the other hand, epochs and special occasions of spiritual opportunity and spiritual restorations. And so, on the whole, side by side with the continually deteriorating effect of sin, has gone on the slow process of redemption, the undoing of the evil of sin and the realization of the divine purpose for man. Such an idea of human history, partly only hypothetical, partly assured, conflicts with no scientific ethnology, and is but a restatement of old-fashioned Christianity in all that has religious importance.

V.—Of course, in all this I am assuming that the doctrine of sin and of the Fall in its true importance has a much securer basis than the supposition that Genesis iii is literal history. The doctrine of the Fall is, as I have said, not separable from the doctrine of sin, or the doctrine of sin from that of moral freedom. It rests upon the broad basis of human experience, especially upon Christian experience, which is bound up with its reality. Most of all it rests, for Christians, on the teaching of Christ. For Christ's teaching and action postulate throughout the doctrine of sin. But that doctrine in its turn goes back upon the Old Testament, which is full of the truth that the evils of human nature are due, not to its essential constitution, but to man's wilfulness and its results; that the disordering force in human nature has been moral, the force of sin; that human history represents in one aspect a fall from a divine purpose, a fall constantly reiterated and renewed in acts of disobedience. These constant acts of disobedience are in part caused by an evil heart in human nature, and this in its turn exhibits the fruits of past sins. Granted this, the story in Genesis iii, whether it be historical or whether (as not only many modern Christians, but some of the greatest of early Christians, have thought) it be not an historical account of a single event, but a generalized account of what is continually happening, has, at any rate, vital spiritual truth. The character of its inspiration is apparent. Teach a child what sin is, first of all on the ground of general Christian experience and the teaching of Christ, and then read to it the story of Genesis iii, and the child must perforce recognize the truth in a form in which it cannot be forgotten. There in that story all the main points of truth as to the meaning of sin are suggested, and the main sources of error precluded. Sin is not our nature, but wilfulness; sin is disobedience to the divine law, the refusal of trust in God; there is such a thing as being tempted to sin, and yielding to it, and then finding that we have been deceived, being conscience-stricken and fearing to face God; and the curse of our manhood springs from nowhere ultimately but our own evil heart. And if our sins lay us under an outward discipline, which is God's punishment, yet in the very discipline lies the hope of our recovery. God the destroyer is also the God who promises redemption. Thus all that we most need to know about God and man, about obedience and disobedience, about temptation, about the blessing and the cursing of human nature, about conscience good and bad, is to be found in the story of Genesis iii, written in language suitable to the childhood of the individual and of the race.

VI.—But once more, and for the last time, the biologist will reply, 'You are not going to get off so easily. The fact of physical death is inextricably interwoven into the structural growth of the world long before men appeared. But Christianity regards it as a mere consequence of human sin.' This is not the case. Long before science had investigated the early history of life on our globe, Christian teachers both in East and in West—St. Augustine as well as St. Athanasius—had taught that death is the law of physical nature, that it had been in the world before man, and that 'man was by nature mortal,' because, as being animal, he was subject to death. How, then, do they interpret the language of Scripture? In this way: They hold that if man had been true to his spiritual nature, the supernatural life, the life in God, would have blunted the forces of corruption, and lifted him into a higher and immortal state.

Certainly, in some sense, death, as we know it, for man, is regarded, especially in the New Testament, as the penalty of sin. But then what do we mean by death? If sin is said to have introduced human death, Christ is constantly said to have abolished it. 'This is the bread that cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.' 'Whosoever believeth on me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus abolished death.' Sin, then, we may suppose, only introduced death in some sense such as that in which Christ abolished it. Christ has not abolished the physical transition from this world to the invisible world, but He has robbed it of its terror, its sting, its misery. Apart from sin we may suppose man would not have died; that is, he would never have had that horrible experience which he has called death. There would have been only some transition full of a glorious hope from one state of being to another.

We are again in the region of conjecture. All that I am here interested in asserting is that Christianity never has held to the position that human sin first introduced death into the world. What it has taught is that human death, as men have known it, with its horror and its misery, has represented not God's intention for man, but the curse of sin.

VII.—Now I have endeavoured to face and meet the points which are urged in the name of science against the Christian doctrine of the Fall. I have endeavoured to point out that what is essential to Christianity is to believe in the reality of moral freedom, and the consequent reality of sin, as something which need not have been in the individual, or in the race considered as a unity. This is all that Christianity is really pledged to maintain. In maintaining this we are maintaining what is absolutely essential to the moral well-being of the race, and, moreover, what has the deepest roots in man's moral experience and in the teaching of Christ. In holding this we hold the doctrine of the Fall, a doctrine, that is, that man's condition has been throughout a parody of the divine intention, owing to the fact of sin tainting and spoiling his development from the root. But Christianity is not in any kind of way pledged against the doctrine of development, only against the doctrine which no reasonable science can hold, that the actual development of man has been the best or only possible one. Nor, I have urged, can it be reasonably said that the Christian doctrine of sin and of the Fall is bound up with one particular interpretation of Genesis iii. All, then, that we must admit in the way of collision between Christianity and science is, on the one hand, that Christianity is not intended to teach men science, and that when there is any great advance in human knowledge it takes a little while for Christianity to extricate itself from the meshes of the language and ideas belonging to one stage of scientific knowledge, and to assimilate the terms and ideas of the new. But, on the other hand, there is perennial and necessary warfare between Christianity and materialistic science, or a science which denies the reality of moral freedom. And as to Christianity giving up what is proper to its own ground—its teaching about freedom and sin and the Fall, and God's purpose for man, and the love shown in his redemption—to give up this is to give up what is the best and deepest motive of human progress, and what is most surely certificated by the witness of Christ and the spiritual experience of Christendom. Indeed all schemes of human improvement are shallow and inadequate, which do not deal with man as what, in fact, he has been proved to be, a sinful, that is a fallen, being, needing not only education but redemption.

Before leaving this attempt to show that there is no necessary conflict between biological and theological science, it is important to call the attention of the intelligent public to the fact that what formerly appeared to be the solid consistency of the 'Darwinian' creed, has been broken up into a state not far removed from chaos. It has become apparent how very little way has really been made towards showing what have been the actual factors in evolution—how the fact of evolution through variation has actually occurred. Thus Mr. Bateson[[14]] remarks, 'If the study of variation can serve no other end, it may make us remember that the complexity of the problem of specific difference is hardly less now than it was when Darwin first showed that natural history is a problem, and no vain riddle.' What is the cause of variations occurring? What law do they exhibit in their occurrence? Do variations occur with a certain degree of sudden completeness[[15]]? Or how are we to explain the maintenance of variations, which in a more developed stage are to be very useful, before they can be shown to be useful at all? What is the place held in evolution by 'natural selection'? What, if any, the place held by use-inheritance? Is the factor of 'mimicry,' supported by Darwin, an important or even real factor in evolution? What is to be the issue of the controversy between the biologist and the physicist on the question of the time required for organic development? Are we to suppose that organic development at the beginning proceeded very much more rapidly than at a later stage? Or even that it exhibited laws of which we have no experience now, such as would admit of a 'natural' development of life out of what is not living? All these, and many more questions, appear to be so completely open that, granted the general theory of continuous evolution as against special creation, hardly anything as regards the factors or causes of evolution can be said to be scientifically settled. Thus on such subjects as the origin of the human race, its exact relation to an animal ancestry, and the right interpretation of the fact of sin, before science can make demands on theology, there must be more agreement in her own camp.