CHAPTER VI.

THE SINFULNESS OF MANKIND, OR INBORN SIN.

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The abnormal condition of the race as a consequence of Adam's transgression suggests a question which the previous chapter recognizes, but has not fully considered. How is it that men from age to age have a perverse moral nature and become sinners? On what principle is this evil of universal experience, this presupposition of Christian redemption, to be understood?

An answer to the question may be introduced by briefly reviewing the import of the different terms by which the condition of the race has been denoted.

The abnormal attitude of the race has been called depravity, natural depravity, sinfulness, inherited sinfulness, original sin, inborn sin. All these terms have a measure of validity; each expresses some one particular aspect of the universal calamity; but some embody a deeper conception than others of the connection between the first transgression and the perverted condition of human nature, and are therefore better adapted to the purposes and needs of anthropology.

Original sin, as used by Augustine and by medieval theology, refers to the wilful deed of Adam and Eve, the first act of disobedience. The first sin conditions all subsequent sinning. As used by Calvinism the term expresses the moral corruption and the condemnation of Adam's posterity as the divinely inflicted penalty incurred by the commission of the first sin. "The guilt of this sin

was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity.' Or as Hodge states it: "The guilt of Adam's first sin was directly charged to the account of the human race in mass, just as it was charged to himself, and punished in the race by desertion and depravity, just as it was punished in him."

Depravity fixes attention chiefly on the perverseness of human nature. The term expresses the abnormal character of the natural man' in all periods of his history, affirming the fact of a radical predisposition to turn from the highest Good toward all forms of moral evil; but 'depravity' does not necessarily imply that the radical predisposition to turn against God is the only moral characteristic of the natural man.'

Sinfulness is in one respect equivalent to depravity. It implies the false moral status of the race in contrast with its true moral status. But sinfulness has more positive force; for it means to say that man in his present abnormal state is disposed wilfully to assert himself against God, against all forms of moral law. It is accordingly a term of deeper and broader significance.

Inherited sinfulness, Erbsünde, or angeborne Sünde, expresses the additional thought that the sinfulness of the individual is connate, being derived by the child from its parents by birth, in and with the derivation of its individual existence.

Inborn sin is the equivalent of inherited sinfulness, but more expressive of the law of human life by virtue of which sinfulness has become universal. This is the term employed by the Heidelberg Catechism; for its doctrine

Confession of Faith, XLVIII.

2 Outlines of Theology, p. 358.

both of the fall and of redemption is predominantly organic.' 'Inborn sin' expresses the fact that every person, by virtue of descent from a sinful parentage, has a nature predisposing him in his relation to God and to his fellowmen to will and to do wrong. The law of sin is an alien principle immanent in the human constitution, active in and with the law of generation. This term by implication sets aside the doctrine of an external imputation of the penalty of Adam's sin to his posterity.

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To find an answer to the question: How is it that from age to age all men have a depraved nature and are subject to the penalty of sin? we must, in opposition to Pelagianism,' emphasize the solidarity of the

'Heid. Cat., Q. 10.

*

'Dr. Schaff gives us a lucid and comprehensive, yet compact statement, concerning Pelagius and Pelagian anthropology in his Church History. Cf. Vol. III., 146, from which I quote several passages: "The Latin church, under the influence of Augustine, advanced to the system of a divine monergism, which gives God all the glory, and makes freedom itself a result of grace; while Pelagianism, on the contrary, represented the principle of a human monergism, which ascribes the chief merit of conversion to man, and reduces grace to a mere external auxiliary. * Pelagius starts from the natural man, and works up, by his own exertions, to righteousness and holiness. Augustine despairs of the moral suficiency of man, and derives the new life and all power for good from the creative grace of God. To the former Christ is merely a teacher and example, and grace an external auxiliary to the development of the native powers of man; to the latter He is also Priest and King, and grace a creative principle, which begets, nourishes, and consummates a new life. The one loves to admire the dignity and strength of man; the other loses itself in adoration of the glory and omnipotence of God. Pelagianism begins with self-exaltation and ends with the sense of selfdeception and impotency. Augustinianism casts man first into the dust

Adamic race. Mankind is an organism. Individuals are not independent units, accidentally associated; all are members of one vital constitution developed from the same stock, realizing the same physical and ethical type and informed by the same law of life.

The vitiated nature of the primeval family becomes the nature of their posterity by the law of human generation, and this vitiated nature realizes itself in the members of the race by the spontaneous action of personality.

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1. Adam in Eden was not merely a man among men, and they possessing the same human nature. Adam was the only man.

The first man and woman were not only individual persons; they were husband and wife. They were the original matrimonial pair, and this pair was mankind in embryo. By the law of creation the whole of the family constitution was embodied in the primeval family. The original matrimonial union was the mysterious germ of all other men and women and of every subsequent family organization.

In the primeval family the divine idea of mankind became a reality on the first plane of its existence; and in this organic constitution were enveloped all the possibilities, corporeal and psychological, whether intellectual or ethical or religious, which have wrought themselves out and become manifest in the actual history of the world.

Inasmuch as the probation of the primeval family was the probation of the Adamic race, the temptation to trans

of humiliation and despair, in order to lift him on the wings of grace to supernatural strength. The former starts with the proposition: Intellectus praecedit fidem; the latter with the opposite maxim: Fides prae cedit intellectum."

gress the divine will was a temptation addressing the entire race potentially embodied in the primeval family. In this first human pair the Adamic race stood confronted by the tempter; not the individual members of their posterity, but the constitution of the race. The same order of personal existence which was individualized in the union of the first human pair is individualized in every human family. So far forth the first man and all other men are identical. The same in kind, his posterity differs from him only in the form of individuation. There is but one humanity, the essential characteristics of all nations, families and individuals being the same. In the animal kingdom there are different species; but in the human kingdom all races and nations are the same species.

2. If we accept the organic solidarity of the Adamic race, it follows that the transgression and the consequent fall of the primeval family was the fall of mankind. The whole of humanity was active in the ethical decadence and in the overt act of wilful disobedience.

Human nature and human personality are a unity. Personality presupposes and embraces the ethico-spiritual nature in which personality stands, and the ethicospiritual nature asserts itself in the volitions of personality. It was not the union of two natureless persons that committed the first transgression, but it was the personal constitution, the totality of which was embodied in the first human pair, that voluntarily accepted a foreign will as law and thereby asserted itself against God. If the primeval family had stood firm in the original communion of love with God, the ethico-spiritual constitution which the primeval family individualized would by its steadfast volition of the right also have stood firm in the original