Section V.—Imputation Of Adam's Sin To His Posterity.
We have seen that all mankind are sinners; that all men are by nature depraved, guilty, and condemnable; and that the transgression of our first parents, so far as respects the human race, was the first sin. We have still to consider the connection between Adam's sin and the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of the race.
(a) The Scriptures teach that the transgression of our first parents constituted their posterity sinners (Rom. 5:19—“through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners”), so that Adam's sin is imputed, reckoned, or charged to every member of the race of which he was the germ and head (Rom. 5:16—“the judgment came of one [offence] unto condemnation”). It is because of Adam's sin that we are born depraved and subject to God's penal inflictions (Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”). Two questions demand answer,—first, how we can be responsible for a depraved nature which we did not personally and consciously originate; and, secondly, how God can justly charge to our account the sin of the first father of the race. These questions are substantially the same, and the Scriptures intimate the true answer to the problem when they declare that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22) and “that death passed unto all men, for that all sinned” when “through one man sin entered into the world” (Rom. 5:12). In other words, Adam's sin is the cause and ground of the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of all his posterity, simply because Adam and his posterity are one, and, by virtue of their organic unity, the sin of Adam is the sin of the race.
Amiel says that “the best measure of the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and of the cure of sin.” We have seen that sin is a state; a state of the will; a selfish state of the will; a selfish state of the will inborn and universal; a selfish state of the will inborn and universal by reason of man's free act. [pg 594]Connecting the present discussion with the preceding doctrines of theology, the steps of our treatment thus far are as follows: 1. God's holiness is purity of nature. 2. God's law demands purity of nature. 3. Sin is impure nature. 4. All men have this impure nature. 5. Adam originated this impure nature. In the present section we expect to add: 6. Adam and we are one; and, in the succeeding section, to complete the doctrine with: 7. The guilt and penalty of Adam's sin are ours.
(b) According as we regard this twofold problem from the point of view of the abnormal human condition, or of the divine treatment of it, we may call it the problem of original sin, or the problem of imputation. Neither of these terms is objectionable when its meaning is defined. By imputation of sin we mean, not the arbitrary and mechanical charging to a man of that for which he is not naturally responsible, but the reckoning to a man of a guilt which is properly his own, whether by virtue of his individual acts, or by virtue of his connection with the race. By original sin we mean that participation in the common sin of the race with which God charges us, in virtue of our descent from Adam, its first father and head.
We should not permit our use of the term “imputation” to be hindered or prejudiced by the fact that certain schools of theology, notably the Federal school, have attached to it an arbitrary, external, and mechanical meaning—holding that God imputes sin to men, not because they are sinners, but upon the ground of a legal fiction whereby Adam, without their consent, was made their representative. We shall see, on the contrary, that (1) in the case of Adam's sin imputed to us, (2) in the case of our sins imputed to Christ, and (3) in the case of Christ's righteousness imputed to the believer, there is always a realistic basis for the imputation, namely, a real union, (1) between Adam and his descendants, (2) between Christ and the race, and (3) between believers and Christ, such as gives in each case community of life, and enables us to say that God imputes to no man what does not properly belong to him.
Dr. E. G. Robinson used to say that “imputed righteousness and imputed sin are as absurd as any notion that ever took possession of human nature.” He had in mind, however, only that constructive guilt and merit which was advocated by Princeton theologians. He did not mean to deny the imputation to men of that which is their own. He recognized the fact that all men are sinners by inheritance as well as by voluntary act, and he found this taught in Scripture, both in the O. T. and in the N. T.; e. g., Neh. 1:6—“I confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee. Yea, I and my father's house have sinned”; Jer. 3:25—“Let us lie down in our shame, and let our confusion cover us; for we have sinned against Jehovah our God, we and our fathers”; 14:20—“We acknowledge, O Jehovah, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers; for we have sinned against thee.” The word “imputed” is itself found in the N. T.; e. g., 2 Tim. 4:16—“At my first defence no one took my part: may it not be laid to their account,” or “imputed to them”—μὴ αὐτοῖς λογισθείη. Rom. 5:13—“sin is not imputed when there is no law”—οὐκ ἐλλογᾶται.
Not only the saints of Scripture times, but modern saints also, have imputed to themselves the sins of others, of their people, of their times, of the whole world. Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions, quoted by Allen, 28—“I will take it for granted that no one is so evil as myself; I will identify myself with all men and act as if their evil were my own, as if I had committed the same sins and had the same infirmities, so that the knowledge of their failings will promote in me nothing but a sense of shame.” Frederick Denison Maurice: “I wish to confess the sins of the time as my own.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 87—“The phrase ‘solidarity of humanity’ is growing every day in depth and significance. Whatever we do, we do not for ourselves alone. It is not as an individual alone that I can be measured or judged.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:404—“The problem of evil indeed demands the presence of free will in the world; while, on the other hand, it is equally true that no moral world whatever can be made consistent with the realistic thesis according to which free will agents are, in fortune and in penalty, independent of the deeds of other moral agents. It follows that, in our moral world, the righteous can suffer without individually deserving their suffering, just because their lives have no independent being, but are linked with all life—God himself also sharing in their suffering.”
The above quotations illustrate the belief in a human responsibility that goes beyond the bounds of personal sins. What this responsibility is, and what its limits are, we have yet to define. The problem is stated, but not solved, by A. H. Bradford, Heredity, [pg 595]198, and The Age of Faith, 235—“Stephen prays: ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge’ (Acts 7:60). To whose charge then? We all have a share in one another's sins. We too stood by and consented, as Paul did. ‘My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn’ that pierced the brow of Jesus.... Yet in England and Wales the severer forms of this teaching [with regard to sin] have almost disappeared; not because of more thorough study of the Scripture, but because the awful congestion of population, with its attendant miseries, has convinced the majority of Christian thinkers that the old interpretations were too small for the near and terrible facts of human life, such as women with babies in their arms at the London gin-shops giving the infants sips of liquor out of their glasses, and a tavern keeper setting his four or five year old boy upon the counter to drink and swear and fight in imitation of his elders.”
(c) There are two fundamental principles which the Scriptures already cited seem clearly to substantiate, and which other Scriptures corroborate. The first is that man's relations to moral law extend beyond the sphere of conscious and actual transgression, and embrace those moral tendencies and qualities of his being which he has in common with every other member of the race. The second is, that God's moral government is a government which not only takes account of persons and personal acts, but also recognizes race responsibilities and inflicts race-penalties; or, in other words, judges mankind, not simply as a collection of separate individuals, but also as an organic whole, which can collectively revolt from God and incur the curse of the violated law.
On race-responsibility, see H. R. Smith, System of Theology, 288-302—“No one can apprehend the doctrine of original sin, nor the doctrine of redemption, who insists that the whole moral government of God has respect only to individual desert, who does not allow that the moral government of God, as moral, has a wider scope and larger relations, so that God may dispense suffering and happiness (in his all-wise and inscrutable providence) on other grounds than that of personal merit and demerit. The dilemma here is: the facts connected with native depravity and with the redemption through Christ either belong to the moral government of God, or not. If they do, then that government has to do with other considerations than those of personal merit and demerit (since our disabilities in consequence of sin and the grace offered in Christ are not in any sense the result of our personal choice, though we do choose in our relations to both). If they do not belong to the moral government of God, where shall we assign them? To the physical? That certainly can not be. To the divine sovereignty? But that does not relieve any difficulty; for the question still remains, Is that sovereignty, as thus exercised, just or unjust? We must take one or the other of these. The whole (of sin and grace) is either a mystery of sovereignty—of mere omnipotence—or a proceeding of moral government. The question will arise with respect to grace as well as to sin: How can the theory that all moral government has respect only to the merit or demerit of personal acts be applied to our justification? If all sin is in sinning, with a personal desert of everlasting death, by parity of reasoning all holiness must consist in a holy choice with personal merit of eternal life. We say then, generally, that all definitions of sin which mean a sin are irrelevant here.” Dr. Smith quotes Edwards, 2:309—“Original sin, the innate sinful depravity of the heart, includes not only the depravity of nature but the imputation of Adam's first sin, or, in other words, the liableness or exposedness of Adam's posterity, in the divine judgment, to partake of the punishment of that sin.”
The watchword of a large class of theologians—popularly called “New School”—is that “all sin consists in sinning,”—that is, all sin is sin of act. But we have seen that the dispositions and states in which a man is unlike God and his purity are also sin according to the meaning of the law. We have now to add that each man is responsible also for that sin of our first father in which the human race apostatized from God. In other words, we recognize the guilt of race-sin as well as of personal sin. We desire to say at the outset, however, that our view, and, as we believe, the Scriptural view, requires us also to hold to certain qualifications of the doctrine which to some extent alleviate its harshness and furnish its proper explanation. These qualifications we now proceed to mention.
(d) In recognizing the guilt of race-sin, we are to bear in mind: (1) that actual sin, in which the personal agent reaffirms the underlying determination of his will, is more guilty than original sin alone; (2) that no human being is finally condemned solely on account of original sin; but that all who, like infants, do not commit personal transgressions, are saved through the application of Christ's atonement; (3) that our responsibility for inborn evil dispositions, or for the depravity common to the race, can be maintained only upon the ground that this depravity was caused by an original and conscious act of free will, when the race revolted from God in Adam; (4) that the doctrine of original sin is only the ethical interpretation of biological facts—the facts of heredity and of universal congenital ills, which demand an ethical ground and explanation; and (5) that the idea of original sin has for its correlate the idea of original grace, or the abiding presence and operation of Christ, the immanent God, in every member of the race, in spite of his sin, to counteract the evil and to prepare the way, so far as man will permit, for individual and collective salvation.
Over against the maxim: “All sin consists in sinning,” we put the more correct statement: Personal sin consists in sinning, but in Adam's first sinning the race also sinned, so that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22). Denney, Studies in Theology, 86—“Sin is not only personal but social; not only social but organic; character and all that is involved in character are capable of being attributed not only to individuals but to societies, and eventually to the human race itself; in short, there are not only isolated sins and individual sinners, but what has been called a kingdom of sin upon earth.” Leslie Stephen: “Man not dependent on a race is as meaningless a phrase as an apple that does not grow on a tree.” “Yet Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln show how a man may throw away every advantage of the best heredity and environment, while another can triumph over the worst. Man does not take his character from external causes, but shapes it by his own willing submission to influences from beneath or from above.”
Wm. Adams Brown: “The idea of inherited guilt can be accepted only if paralleled by the idea of inherited good. The consequences of sin have often been regarded as social, while the consequences of good have been regarded as only individual. But heredity transmits both good and evil.” Mrs. Lydia Avery Coonley Ward: “Why bowest thou, O soul of mine, Crushed by ancestral sin? Thou hast a noble heritage, That bids thee victory win. The tainted past may bring forth flowers, As blossomed Aaron's rod: No legacy of sin annuls Heredity from God.” For further statements with regard to race-responsibility, see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:29-39 (System Doctrine, 2:324-333). For the modern view of the Fall, and its reconciliation with the doctrine of evolution, see J. H. Bernard, art.: The Fall, in Hastings' Dict. of Bible; A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.
(e) There is a race-sin, therefore, as well as a personal sin; and that race-sin was committed by the first father of the race, when he comprised the whole race in himself. All mankind since that time have been born in the state into which he fell—a state of depravity, guilt, and condemnation. To vindicate God's justice in imputing to us the sin of our first father, many theories have been devised, a part of which must be regarded as only attempts to evade the problem by denying the facts set before us in the Scriptures. Among these attempted explanations of the Scripture statements, we proceed to examine the six theories which seem most worthy of attention.
The first three of the theories which we discuss may be said to be evasions of the problem of original sin; all, in one form or another, deny that God imputes to all men Adam's sin, in such a sense that all are guilty for it. These theories are the Pelagian, the Arminian, and the New School. The last three of the theories which we are about to treat, namely, the Federal theory, the theory of Mediate Imputation, and the theory [pg 597]of Adam's Natural Headship, are all Old School theories, and have for their common characteristic that they assert the guilt of inborn depravity. All three, moreover, hold that we are in some way responsible for Adam's sin, though they differ as to the precise way in which we are related to Adam. We must grant that no one, even of these latter theories, is wholly satisfactory. We hope, however, to show that the last of them—the Augustinian theory, the theory of Adam's natural headship, the theory that Adam and his descendants are naturally and organically one—explains the largest number of facts, is least open to objection, and is most accordant with Scripture.