4.05. Original Sin

Original Sin Preliminary Considerations

“The sinfulness of that estate (status or condition) whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of the whole nature: which is commonly called original sin; together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 18).

According to this doctrinal statement, there are three particulars under the general head of sin: (1) the guilt of the first sin, (2) the corruption of nature resulting from the first sin, and (3) actual transgressions or sins of act which result from corruption of nature. The first part of the sinfulness of man’s estate or condition is the guilt of the first sin. The first sin of Adam, strictly and formally considered, was the transgression of the particular command not to eat of the tree of knowledge. This was a positive statute and not the moral law. It tested obedience more severely than the moral law does because the latter carries its own reason with it, while the former containing no intrinsic morality appealed to no reason except the mere good pleasure of God. To disobey it was to disregard the authority of God and involved disobedience of all law. The guilt of Adam’s first sin is the guilt of transgressing the law of Eden explicitly and the moral law implicitly: “The rule of obedience revealed to Adam, besides a special command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, was the moral law” (Westminster Larger Catechism 92).

Adam’s Sin as Twofold: Internal and External The first sin of Adam was twofold: (a) internal and (b) external. The internal part of it was the originating and starting of a wrong inclination. The external part of it was the exertion of a wrong volition prompted by the wrong inclination. Adam first inclined to self instead of God as the ultimate end. He became an idolater and “worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Then, in order to gratify this new inclination, he reached forth his hand and ate of the forbidden fruit: Our first parents fell into open disobedience, because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil inclination (voluntas) preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil inclination but pride? And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons him to whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes an end to itself. The wicked desire to please himself secretly existed in Adam, and the open sin was but its consequence. (Augustine, City of God 14.13)

Edwards (Original Sin in Works 2.385) directs attention to the internal part of Adam’s first sin in the following manner. His opponent Taylor had said that “Adam could not sin [externally] without a sinful inclination.” Edwards replies that “this is doubtless true; for although there was no natural sinful inclination in [holy] Adam, yet an inclination to that sin of eating the forbidden fruit was begotten in him by the delusion and error he was led into, and this inclination to eat the forbidden fruit must precede his actual eating.” Edwards considers the rising of this sinful desire and inclination to be the first sin itself. There was not a first sin prior to it of which the sinful inclination was the effect; but the very inclining away from God to the creature was Adam’s fall itself and that of his posterity in him:

I am humbly of the opinion that if any have supposed the children of Adam to come into the world with a double guilt, one the guilt of Adam’s sin, another the guilt arising from their having a corrupt heart, they have not so well conceived of the matter. The guilt a man has upon his soul at his first [individual] existence is one and simple, namely, the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God. This and the guilt arising from the first corruption or depraved disposition of the heart are not to be looked upon as two things, distinctly imputed and charged upon men in the sight of God. It is true that the guilt that arises from the corruption of the heart as it remains a confirmed principle and appears in its subsequent operations is a distinct and additional guilt; but the guilt arising from the first existing [the start or origination] of a depraved disposition in Adam’s posterity, I apprehend is not distinct from their guilt of Adam’s first sin. For so it was not in Adam himself. The first evil disposition or inclination of the heart of Adam to sin was not properly distinct from his first sin, but was included in it. The external act he committed was no otherwise his, than as his heart was in it, or as that action proceeded from the wicked inclination of his heart. Nor was the guilt he had double, as for two distinct sins: one, the wickedness of his heart and will in that affair; another, the wickedness of the external act caused by his heart. His guilt was all truly from the act of his inward man; exclusive of which the motions of his body were no more than the motions of any lifeless instrument. His sin consisted in wickedness of heart, fully sufficient for and entirely amounting to all that appeared in the act he committed.¹[Note: 1. WS: Hodge (Princeton Essays 1.150, 168) thinks that Edwards here “abandons” the doctrine of immediate imputation which “he maintains in two-thirds of his work on original sin” and adopts mediate imputation. But Edwards, in this place, explicitly imputes the guilt of the first rising of evil desire as well as of the corruption resulting from it; and this rising of evil desire he says was the first sin, which was inseparable from its consequence, namely, corruption of nature. Had Edwards asserted that only the corruption as the effect, but not the rising of evil desire itself as the cause of the effect, is imputed, he would have been liable to the charge of holding mediate imputation.] (Original Sin in Works 2.481) (See supplement 4.5.1.) The internal part of Adam’s first sin was the principal part of it. It was the real commencement of sin in man. It was the origination from nothing of a sinful disposition in the human will. There was no previous sinful disposition to prompt it or to produce it. When Adam inclined away from God to the creature, he exercised an act of pure self-determination. He began sinning by a real beginning, analogous to that by which matter begins to be from nothing. In endowing Adam with a mutable holiness, God made it possible, but not necessary, for Adam to originate a sinful inclination and thereby expel a holy one. The finite will can fall from holiness to sin if it is not “kept from falling” (Jude 1:24) by God’s special grace, because it is finite. The finite is the mutable by the very definition.

Since this first inclining of the human will had no sinful antecedent, it is denominated “original” sin. There is no sin before it by which to explain it. Says Lombard (2.22.12):

If it be asked whether inclination (voluntas) preceded that first sin, we answer, in the first place, that inasmuch as that first sin consisted both of inclination (voluntas) and of outward act (actus), inclination preceded outward act, but another evil inclination did not precede the evil inclination itself; and, second, that through the persuasion of Satan and by the arbitrary decision (arbitrio) of Adam that evil inclination was produced by which he deserted righteousness and began iniquity. And this inclination (voluntas) itself was iniquity. The following dialogue in Anselm’s On the Fall of the Devil 27 is to the same effect:

Disciple: Why did the wicked angel will what he ought not to have willed?

Master: No cause preceded this wrong act, except it were that the angel could so will.

Disciple: Did he then will wickedly because he was able to?

Master: No, because the good angel had the same power, but did not will wrongly. No one wills wrongly merely because he can so will.

Disciple: Why then does he will wrongly?

Master: Only because he will. The wicked will has no other cause but this, why it determines to sin. It is both an efficient and an effect in one. (See supplement 4.5.2.) The internal part of Adam’s first sin was “voluntary” not “volitionary.” It was will as desire, not will as volition; will as inclining, not will as choosing. The fall was the transition from one form of self-motion to another form of self-motion, and not the beginning of self-motion for the first time. The fall was a self-determining to evil expelling an existing self-determination to good. It was inclining away from one ultimate end to another, not choosing between two ultimate ends to neither of which was there any existing inclination. Adam before he fell was self-determined to God and goodness. Consequently, in the garden of Eden, he had not to choose either good or evil as two contraries to both of which his will was indifferent. By creation, he was positively inclined to good. The question put before him in the probation and temptation was whether he would remain holy as he was or begin a new inclination to evil; not whether, having no inclination at all, he would choose either good or evil. His act of apostasy, if it occurred, was to be an act of new and wrong desire in place of the existing holy desire, of new and wrong self-determination in place of the existing and right self-determination. The fall was a change of inclination, not the exertion of a volition. The internal part of Adam’s first sin is described in Genesis 3:1-6. According to this narrative, Eve first listened to the crafty query of Satan whether God could have given such a command; then she entered into a discussion with him; then she believed him. All this internal agency of the soul occurred prior to plucking and eating the forbidden fruit. But this listening, discussing, and believing on the part of Eve occurred because she was secretly desiring the forbidden knowledge by which she would “be as the gods” (3:5). Lust for that false knowledge which Satan had promised explains these mental processes. Dalliance with temptation always implies a desire for the tempting object. Had Eve continued to desire and to be content with that true knowledge which she had by creation, she would have abhorred the false knowledge proposed by the tempter, and this abhorrence would have precluded all parleying with him and all trust in him. A comparison of the manner in which our Lord dealt with the same tempter is instructive. Christ, in the wilderness, entered into no parley and debate with Satan, as Eve did in paradise. He did not dally with temptation, because no desire for what God had forbidden arose within him. The second Adam did not lust, like the first Adam, after the false good presented by the tempter. The first two of Satan’s suggestions he instantaneously rejects, giving reasons therefor in the decisive language of Scripture. And the third and more blasphemous suggestion he thrusts away with the avaunt of abhorrence. There was not the slightest swerving from God, the faintest hankering after prohibited good, in the most secret soul of our Lord. His will from center to circumference, both as inclination and volition, both in desire and act, remained steadfast in holiness. Christ met Satan’s temptation with aversion and loathing. Eve met it with inclination and liking. The history of the rise of evil desire or lust is given by divine inspiration. Along with the listening, the debating, and the believing on the part of Eve, there was, according to the narrative in Genesis, a yet more important activity that occurred in the soul of Eve prior to the eating of the forbidden fruit: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (3:6). Eve looked upon the tree of knowledge not only with innocent, but with sinful desire. She not only had the natural created desire for it as producing nourishing food and as a beautiful object to the eye, but she came to have, besides this, the unnatural and self-originated desire for it as yielding a kind of knowledge which God forbade man to have. She “lusted” after that “knowledge of good and evil” which eating of the fruit would impart. This knowledge was not the true wisdom and spiritual knowledge which Adam and Eve already had by creation and which is the intellectual side of holiness, but it was the false knowledge which “the gods,” that is, Satan and his angels, had acquired by apostasy.²[Note: 2. WS: If it be objected to this explanation of the term gods in this place that inGenesis 3:22the knowledge is described as like that of God himself (“one of us”), the reply is that there are two ways of knowing evil: the one as Satan knows it, namely, by personal sinfulness and self-consciousness; the other as God knows it, namely, by the intuition of omniscience without personal sinfulness and self-consciousness. The knowledge can therefore be spoken of from either point of view. As prohibited, it must have been as a bad knowledge, that is, the knowledge of “the gods” in the bad sense, the knowledge which Satan and his angels had.] This lusting of Eve for a knowledge that God had prohibited was her apostasy. This was the self-determining and inclining of her will away from God as the chief end and chief good to self and the creature as the chief end. To desire what God has forbidden is to prefer self to God, and this is to sin. This concupiscence was the beginning of sin in her will. It was the same thing, in kind, with the concupiscence which God forbids in the tenth commandment. The command not to covet or lust is a command not to desire anything that God has forbidden. God has forbidden theft. To inwardly desire another man’s property is theft. God has forbidden murder. To be inwardly angry at a fellowman is murder. God has forbidden adultery. To inwardly desire another man’s wife is adultery. In like manner, God had forbidden to Adam satanic knowledge of good and evil. To inwardly desire it was the first sin. Achan’s sin began with inward desire or lust: “When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonian garment and two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold, then I coveted them and took them” (Joshua 7:21).

All this internal action of the soul of Eve, then, occurred prior to the outward act of plucking and eating. Says Fisher (Catechism Q. 3), “Were not our first parents guilty of sin before eating the forbidden fruit? Yes: they were guilty in hearkening to the devil and believing him before they actually ate it. Why, then, is their eating of it called their first sin? Because it was the first sin finished (James 1:15).” “The first sin,” says Pictet (Theology 4.2), “commenced when Eve began to doubt whether she had rightly understood the intention of God in forbidding the fruit of the tree. Afterward, when she ought to have consulted God upon this subject, she believed the devil, who said that they should not die; in the next place, she was flattered with the hope held out to her by Satan of knowing all things and being equal to God; and at last, she reached forth her hand to the fruit.” “From the account in Genesis,” says Hodge (Theology 2.128), “it appears that doubt, unbelief, and pride were the principles which led to this fatal act of disobedience. Eve doubted God’s goodness, she disbelieved his threatening, she aspired after forbidden knowledge.”³[Note: 3. WS: The lustful looking of Eve is indicated in Luther’s version ofGenesis 3:6(Lange’s Commentary in loco).]

The account given in Genesis 3:1-6 favors the supposition that Eve had the colloquy with Satan by herself, as Milton represents it in his poem. The woman alone entered into the discussion with Satan of a subject that ought not to have been discussed at all. “And when,” continues the narrative, “the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant (ta˒ăwâ)⁴[Note: 4. úÌÇàÂåÈä] to the eyes and a tree to be desired (neḥmād)⁵[Note: 5. ðÆçÀîÈã] to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat; and gave also unto her husband and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6). St. Paul (1 Timothy 2:14) affirms that “Adam was not deceived [by Satan], but the woman being deceived by him fell into the transgression (en parabasei gegone).”⁶[Note: 6. ἐν παράβασει γέγονε] This implies that Adam did not believe the tempter’s assertion that a good would follow the eating of the forbidden fruit and that death would not be the consequence. According to St. Paul, Adam was seduced by his affection for Eve rather than deceived by the lie of Satan. He fell with his eyes wide open to the fact that if he ate he would die. But in loving his wife more than God, he “worshiped and served the creature instead of the Creator” and like Eve set up a different final end from the true one. The account in Genesis 3:6 describes (a) the innocent physical desire of man’s unfallen nature for the fruit of the tree of knowledge and (b) the rising of sinful moral desire for it: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant (ta˒ăwâ)⁷[Note: 7. úÌÇàÂåÈä] to the eyes.” This denotes merely the correlation between the created qualities of man’s physical constitution and this particular product of God’s creation. It was not wrong, but perfectly innocent, to perceive that the tree was good for food and to desire it as such and to be pleasantly affected by the beauty of it. This divinely established relation between man’s physical nature and that of the tree of knowledge constituted the subjective basis for the temptation. Had the tree been repulsive to the sight and taste, its fruit would not have been employed by Satan as a means of solicitation. Up to this point in the description, the phraseology is the same as that in 2:9 respecting all the trees in the garden: “Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant (neḥmād)⁸[Note: 8. ðÆçÀîÈã] to the sight and good for food.” All the physical products of God, the tree of knowledge included, were agreeable and pleasant objects for the newly created and sinless man. (See supplement 4.5.3.) But the account in Genesis 3:6 further adds that the tree of knowledge came to be for Eve a tree “to be desired (neḥmād),⁹[Note: 9. ðÆçÀîÈã] to make one wise.” The sinful moral desire here mentioned is different from the innocent physical desire spoken of in the preceding part of the verse. It was a mental hankering after the fruit as imparting to the eater a kind of knowledge which God had forbidden to man. This is something new and different from the innocent craving belonging to man’s sensuous nature. To desire the fruit simply as food and as a beautiful object was innocent. But to desire a knowledge of good and evil such as the “gods” had, which the eating of it would communicate, was rebellious and wicked, because this kind of knowledge had been prohibited. The word neḥmād,¹⁰[Note: 0 10. ðÆçÀîÈã = to be desired] descriptive of Eve’s longing after the prohibited knowledge, is the same employed in the tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17), which the Septuagint renders by ouk epithymēseis.¹¹[Note: 1 11. οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις = you shall not lust] Eve’s evil desire was also the same in kind with the epithymia¹²[Note: 2 12. ἐπιθυμία = lust] of St. Paul, which he declares to be hamartia¹³[Note: 3 13. ἁμαρτία = sin] (Romans 7:7). It was also the same in kind with the epithymia¹⁴[Note: 4 14. ἐπιθυμία = lust] mentioned in James 1:14 : “Every man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed.” The self-willed origination and rising of this desire for a knowledge that God had forbidden was the fall of Eve. It was a new inclination of her will to self, directly contrary to that inclination to God with which she had been created. As regeneration is denominated a “birth” of the soul because of the totality of the moral change, so apostasy may be called a “birth” of the soul for the same reason. By the fall, the children of God became the children of Satan (John 8:44; Matthew 13:38). Each “birth” alike is an entire revolution in human character: one upward the other downward. As regeneration is the origination by the Holy Spirit of holy desire and inclination, so apostasy was the origination by Adam of sinful desire and inclination. God had not forbidden the existence of the desire for the fruit as “good for food and pleasant to the eye,” and had this continued to be the only desire in Eve in regard to the tree, she would have remained sinless as she was created. But God had forbidden the desire for the fruit as fitted “to make one wise” with the knowledge of good and evil. The instant the desire “to be as gods” arose in Eve’s heart, she sinned. God’s command, in its full form, was “you shall not lust after but abhor the knowledge of good and evil; you shall not choose but refuse it.” The prohibition in the instance of the Eden statute, as in that of the tenth commandment, included both the inward desire and the outward act, both inclination and volition. If a man hates his brother, he violates the sixth commandment, even if he does not actually kill him (Matthew 5:22). So, too, if when Eve had desired the forbidden knowledge, she had been prevented from reaching out the hand and plucking the fruit, she would still have transgressed the Eden statute. Obedience to God required that she abhor and reject the knowledge proffered by Satan. But to lust after it was to prefer and love it. Even, therefore, if she had been forcibly stopped from completing, or as St. James (1:15) phrases it “finishing” the sin of desiring, by the outward act of eating, she would still have been guilty of disobeying God, for the divine command is to choose the good and refuse the evil (Deuteronomy 30:19). The holiness of Immanuel, which is true holiness, is described as “refusing the evil and choosing the good” (Isaiah 7:16). But whoever desires the evil that is prohibited “chooses” it and thereby refuses the good that is commanded. Had Eve continued to desire and love the true knowledge which she already had by her creation in the divine image, this desire and love would have been the rejection and abhorrence of the false knowledge offered in the temptation. But when she began to desire and love the false knowledge, this was the rejection and hatred of the true knowledge. And this was apostasy. Neutrality or indifference was impossible in the will of Eve or any will whatever. For her to incline to self was to disincline to God, to desire false knowledge was to dislike true knowledge, to choose the evil was to refuse the good, to love the creature was to hate the Creator. The rising of her evil desire, consequently, was the expulsion of her holy desire; the starting of her new sinful self-determination was the ousting of her existing holy self-determination. She could not have two contrary desires or inclinations simultaneously. Hence the universal command, “You shall not covet”; that is, “You shall not desire anything that God has forbidden”; because this is the same thing as to dislike and hate what God has commanded. (See supplement 4.5.4.) This evil inclining and desiring is denominated “concupiscence” in the theological nomenclature. In the Augustinian and Calvinistic anthropology, it includes mental as well as sensual desire; in the Pelagian anthropology, it is confined to sensual appetite. Says Calvin (2.1.9):

Man has not only been ensnared by the inferior appetites, but abominable impiety has seized the very citadel of his mind, and pride has penetrated into the inmost recesses of his heart; so that it is weak and foolish to restrict the corruption which has proceeded thence to what are called the sensual appetites. In this the grossest ignorance has been discovered by Peter Lombard, who when investigating the seat of it says it is in the flesh according to the testimony of Paul in Romans 7:18, not indeed exclusively, but because it principally appears in the flesh; as though Paul designated only a part of the soul and not the whole of our nature which is opposed to supernatural grace. Now Paul removes every doubt by informing us that the corruption resides not in one part only, but that there is nothing pure and uncontaminated by its mortal infection. For, when arguing respecting corrupt nature, he not only condemns the inordinate motions of the appetites, but principally insists on the blindness of the mind and the depravity of the heart (Ephesians 4:17-18).

Says Luther on Galatians 5:17 : “When Paul says that the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, he admonishes us that we must feel the concupiscence of the flesh, that is to say, not only carnal lust but also pride, wrath, slothfulness, impatience, unbelief, and such like” (see Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, locus 15, for definitions from the elder Calvinists).

Concupiscence is different from natural created appetency or desire. Hunger and thirst are not evil concupiscence. They are instinctive, constitutional, and involuntary. Gluttony on the contrary is voluntary, not constitutional. It is not pure instinctive craving for food. There is will in it. It is the inclining and desire of the will for a more intense pleasure from eating food than the natural healthy appetite provides for. Innocent hunger makes use of the appointed food, and when satisfied it rests. If a man simply quiets his hunger with bread convenient for it, he does not have or exhibit concupiscence. But if he craves sensual pleasure from eating and gratifies the craving by tickling the palate, he has and exhibits concupiscence or evil desire.

Concupiscence is not natural and innocent appetite intensified. It is not a difference in degree, but in kind. A starving man is not concupiscent, though his desire for food is intense to the very highest degree. His famine-struck craving for food is not a gluttonous craving for sensual pleasure. It is purely physical. But gluttony is the mental in the physical. Gluttony is the will’s selfish inclination manifested in a bodily appetite. It is the will in the senses.

These remarks apply to thirst and the sexual appetite. As created and constitutional, neither of these is evil concupiscence. But as mixed with will and moral inclination-the form in which they appear in drunkards who “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” and “whoremongers and adulterers whom God will judge”-they are sinful concupiscence.¹⁵[Note: 5 15. WS: Cf. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics 2.249; Augustine, Unfinished Work 5; Concerning Nature, Healthy and Corrupt.] Concupiscence is not confined to the sensuous nature. There is concupiscence or lust of the reason as well as of the sense. Pride and ambition is a lust of the mind: “We had our conversation in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires (thelēmata)¹⁶[Note: 6 16. θελήματα] of the flesh and of the mind (tōn dianoiōn)”¹⁷[Note: 7 17. τῶν διανοιῶν] (Ephesians 2:3). According to 2 Corinthians 7:1 there is a “filthiness of the flesh and the spirit (pneumatos).”¹⁸[Note: 8 18. πνεύματος]

The external part of Adam’s first sin was the act of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. After the sinful inclination had arisen, a sinful volition followed: “When the woman saw that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat” (Genesis 3:6).

Imputation of Adamic Guilt This first sin in both of its parts, internal and external, is imputed to Adam and his posterity as sin and guilt because they committed it. The evil desire and the evil act were the desiring and acting of the human nature in the first human pair. The biblical proof of this fundamental and much disputed position is found in the following: “Death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12); “through the offense of one (man) many be dead (apethanon)”¹⁹[Note: 9 19. ἀπέθανον] (5:15); “the judgment was by one (offense) unto condemnation” (5:16); “by one man’s offense (or by one offense) death reigned by one” (5:17); “by the offense of one (Lachmann and Tischendorf have ‘one offense’), judgment came upon all men to condemnation” (5:18); “by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners” (5:19); “in Adam (tō adam)²⁰[Note: 0 20. τῷ ἀδάμ] all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22). The very important discussion of St. Paul in Romans 5:12-19 teaches (1) that the death which came upon all men as a punishment came because of one sin and only one and (2) that this sin was the one committed by Adam and his posterity as a unity. Three explanations have been given of hēmarton²¹[Note: 1 21. ἥμαρτον = sinned] in this passage: (1) It is active in its meaning and denotes the first sin of Adam and his posterity as a unity: his posterity being one with him by natural union or else by representation or by both together; (2) it is active in its meaning and denotes the first sin of each individual after he is born (in this case, hēmarton²²[Note: 2 22. ἥμαρτον = sinned] does not denote Adam’s first sin); and (3) it is passive in its meaning, signifying, either “to be sinful” or “to be reckoned as having sinned” (Shedd on Romans 5:12-19). That hēmarton²³[Note: 3 23. ἥμαρτον = sinned] is active in its signification is proved (a) by the fact that eph’ hō pantes hēmarton²⁴[Note: 4 24. ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον = in whom all sinned] means the same as dia tēs hamartias²⁵[Note: 5 25. διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας = through sin] in the preceding context and hamartias²⁶[Note: 6 26. ἁμαρτίας = sin] is active in signification; (b) by the invariable use of the word hēmarton²⁷[Note: 7 27. ἥμαρτον = sinned] elsewhere (Matthew 27:4; Luke 15:18; John 9:2; Acts 25:8; Romans 2:12; Romans 3:23; Romans 5:14; Romans 5:16; Romans 6:15; 1 Corinthians 7:28; Ephesians 4:26; 1 Timothy 5:20; 1 Peter 2:20); (c) by the invariable signification of the substantive hamartia²⁸[Note: 8 28. ἁμαρτία = sin] (a verb has the same meaning as its noun); and (d) by the interchange of hamartia²⁹[Note: 9 29. ἁμαρτία = sin] with paraptōma,³⁰[Note: 0 30. παράπτωμα = transgression] which is active in meaning (Romans 5:16-21). (See supplement 4.5.5.)

Turretin (9.9.16) denies that hēmarton³¹[Note: 1 31. ἥμαρτον = sinned] signifies “to be sinful”: “The word hēmarton cannot properly refer to the disposition of sin or to habitual or inhering corruption. Rather, it properly denotes some actual sin, and that past, which can be no other than the very sin of Adam. Indeed, it is one thing to be or to be born a sinner, but another thing actually to sin”³²[Note: 2 32. Verbumἥμαρτον (hēmarton = sinned) proprie non protest trahi ad habitum peccati, vel ad corruptionem habitualem et inhaerentem, sed proprie peccatum aliquod actuale notat, idque praeteritum, quod non potest aliud esse quam ipsum Adami peccatum; aliud quippe est peccatorem esse vel nasci, aliud vero reipsa peccare.] (so also Witsius, Covenants 1.8.31). Edwards (Original Sin in Works 2.448) denies that hēmarton³³[Note: 3 33. ἥμαρτον = sinned] signifies “to be regarded as sinners”:

There is no instance wherein the verb sin, which is used by the apostle when he says “all have sinned,” is anywhere used in our author’s [Taylor’s] sense, for being brought into a state of suffering, and that not as a punishment for sin or as anything arising from God’s displeasure. St. Paul is far from using such a phrase to signify a being condemned without guilt or any imputation or supposition of guilt. Vastly more, still, is it remote from his language, so to use the verb sin and to say man “sins” or “has sinned,” hereby meaning nothing more nor less than that he by a judicial act is condemned.

Unless, therefore, St. Paul departed from the invariable Scripture use of the word hēmarton³⁴[Note: 4 34. ἥμαρτον = sinned] when he asserts that death as a just punishment, passed upon all men “because all sinned,” he employs the word sinned actively. And if he does depart here from the invariable Scripture meaning of hēmarton,³⁵[Note: 5 35. ἥμαρτον = sinned] he is the only inspired writer that does so; and this is the only instance in his own writings in which he does so-his use of the verb hamartanein³⁶[Note: 6 36. ἁμαρτάνειν = to sin] in scores of other instances being the ordinary use. But while hēmarton³⁷[Note: 7 37. ἥμαρτον = sinned] in Romans 5:12 is active in signification, it does not denote the transgressions of each individual subsequent to birth, and when no longer in Adam, but the transgression of Adam and Eve inclusive of their posterity. This is proved by the following considerations: One and but one sin is specified as the ground of the penalty of death. This is asserted five times over in succession in 5:15-19. In 5:12 hēmarton³⁸[Note: 8 38. ἥμαρτον = sinned] unquestionably refers to the same sin that is spoken of in 5:15-19. In Romans 5:14 some who die, namely, infants, “did not sin after the similitude of Adam’s first transgression.” That is, they did not repeat the first sin. They must, therefore, have sinned in some other manner because they are a part of the “all” (pantes)³⁹[Note: 9 39. πάντες] who sinned and because they experience the death which is the wages of sin. The only other conceivable manner of sinning is that of participation in the first sin itself. But participation in Adam’s first sin is not the repetition of it by the individual. From these considerations, it is evident that the word sinned in Romans 5:12 is active in its signification; but the action is specific, not individual-the action of the common nature in Adam prior to any conception and birth and not the action of the individuals one by one after conception and birth. The passive signification given to hēmarton⁴⁰[Note: 0 40. ἥμαρτον = sinned] is twofold: (a) to be sinful (Calvin) and (b) to be reckoned as having sinned (Chrysostom). The first has never had much currency. The last has been extensively adopted by Semipelagian and Arminian theologians and also by many later Calvinists. The objections to this explanation are the following:

1. It is contrary to invariable usage. This would be the only instance in the New Testament in which the verb hamartanō⁴¹[Note: 1 41. ἁμαρτάνω = I sin] would have such a meaning.

2. Had St. Paul intended to bring in the notion of regarding or treating as sinners, this would require the combination of hamartanein⁴²[Note: 2 42. ἁμαρτάνειν = to sin] with einai,⁴³[Note: 3 43. εἰναί = to be] and he would have used the compound form pantes hēmartēkotes hēsan⁴⁴[Note: 4 44. πάντες ἡμαρτηκότες ἦ σαν = all were regarded as sinners] as does the Septuagint in Genesis 43:9; Genesis 44:32 (hēmartēkōs esomai);⁴⁵[Note: 5 45. ἡμαρτηκὼς ἔσομαι = I will be (regarded as) a sinner]1 Kings 1:21 (esomai egō kai salōmōn hamartoloi).⁴⁶[Note: 6 46. ἔσομαι ἐγω καὶ σάλωμων ἁμαρτολοί = I and (my son) Solomon will be counted sinners]

3. The passive signification excludes Adam and Eve from the pantes⁴⁷[Note: 7 47. πάντες = all] who sinned. They, certainly, were not “reckoned” to have sinned.

4. According to the passive signification, hēmarton⁴⁸[Note: 8 48. ἥμαρτον = sinned] would denote God’s action, not man’s; God’s act of imputing sin, not man’s act of committing it. But it is the sinner’s act, not that of the judge, which is the reason for punishment.

5. It destroys the logic. All die because all are reckoned to deserve death. This is one reason for death, but not the particular one required here. The argument demands a reason founded upon the act of the criminal, not of the judge. To say that all die because all are condemned to die is to give no sufficient reason for death. For the question immediately arises why they are condemned to die.

6. It tends to empty thanatos⁴⁹[Note: 9 49. θάνατος = death] of its plenary biblical meaning as including hell punishment. A qualified meaning is given to it in order to make it agree with the qualified meaning given to hēmarton.⁵⁰[Note: 0 50. ἥμαρτον = sinned] The withdrawment of grace is said by some later Calvinists to be the only penalty inflicted upon original sin, the positive pains of hell being due only to actual transgression. Historically, this passive signification was forced upon hamartanō⁵¹[Note: 1 51. ἁμαρτάνω = I sin] by those (Chrysostom and the Greek fathers) who asserted that the first sin was not imputed as culpable. Arminian writers like Whitby and John Taylor follow Chrysostom. The total guilt of the first sin, thus committed by the entire race in Adam, is imputed to each individual of the race because of the indivisibility of guilt. If two individual men together commit a murder, each is chargeable with the whole guilt of the act. One-half of the guilt of the murder cannot be imputed to one and one-half to the other. Supposing that the one human nature which committed the “one offense” (Romans 5:17-18) became a family of exactly a million individuals by propagation, it would not follow that each individual would be responsible for only a millionth part of the offense. The whole undivided guilt of the first sin of apostasy from God would be chargeable upon each and every one of the million individuals of the species alike. For though the one common nature that committed the “one offense” is divisible by propagation, the offense itself is not divisible nor is the guilt of it. Consequently, one man is as guilty as another of the whole first sin, of the original act of falling from God. The individual Adam and Eve were no more guilty of this first act and of the whole of it than their descendants are; and their descendants are as guilty as they. The same principle applies also to the indivisibility of merit. The merit of Christ’s obedience is indivisible, and the whole of it is imputed to every individual believer alike. A million believers do not each obtain by imputation a millionth part of their Redeemer’s merit. One believer is as completely justified by gratuitous imputation as another, because all alike receive by faith the total worthiness and desert of their Lord’s obedience, not a fractional part of it. As the unmerited imputation of Christ’s obedience conveys the total undivided merit of this obedience to each and every believer, so the merited imputation of Adam’s disobedience conveys the total undivided guilt of this disobedience to each and every individual of the posterity. The first sin of Adam, being a common, not an individual sin, is deservedly and justly imputed to the posterity of Adam upon the same principle upon which all sin is deservedly and justly imputed, namely, that it was committed by those to whom it is imputed. “All men die, because all men sinned,” says St. Paul. Free agency is supposed as the reason for the penalty of death, namely, the free agency of all mankind in Adam. This agency, though differing in the manner, is yet as real as the subsequent free agency of each individual. The imputation either of Adam’s sin or of Christ’s righteousness must rest upon a union of some kind. It is just to impute the first sin of Adam to his posterity, while it would be unjust to impute it to the fallen angels because Adam and his posterity were a unity when the first sin was committed, but Adam and the fallen angels were not: “It hardly would have been just for the crime of one angel to be imputed to another, or the sin of one man to be accounted to another, on the supposition that they were each created separately just as angels. But there is a unity of nature, on which the covenantal unity was supported”⁵²[Note: 2 52. Haud justum fuisset unius angeli crimen alteri imputari, vel unius hominis peccatum alterius censeri, posito quod singuli seorsim essent creati sicut angeli. Sed est unitas naturae, cui unitas foederalis erat innixa.] (Leydecker, “Synopsis,” 164 in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, locus 15). The fact that the fallen angels have committed individual transgressions of their own would not justify imputing a common race-transgression to them. Again, it is just to impute Christ’s righteousness to a believer, but not just to impute it to an unbeliever, because the former has been united to him by faith and the latter has not. The popular explanation of the imputation of Adam’s sin-that under divine government children inherit the poverty and disease of their vicious parents-is inadequate. Divine government does not punish the children of vicious parents for their inherited poverty and disease. If Adam’s posterity merely inherited moral corruption, but were not punished for it, this explanation would be pertinent. But inherited corruption is visited with divine retribution according to Ephesians 2:3. And this requires participation in the origin of it. Men must sin in Adam in order to be justly punished for Adam’s sin. And participation requires union with Adam.

There is a similar fallacy in citing the biblical instances in which innocent individuals suffer for the sins of guilty individuals in proof that Adam’s posterity though innocent of his sin are punishable for it. To suffer in consequence of the sin of another is not the same as to be punished for it. The sufferings that came upon the descendants of Ham because of his individual sin were not retributive, like those which come upon the whole human race because of the one specific sin of Adam or like those which come upon an individual for his own transgressions. Ham’s descendants have suffered for centuries on account of their ancestor’s sin, but have not been under eternal condemnation on account of it. They are exposed to eternal death in common with the rest of mankind because of the sin in Adam and of their own individual sins, but not because of the individual sin of Ham. The same is true of the sin of Korah in relation to his family. In reference to all individual transgressions, Ezekiel 18:20 asserts that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of his father”; that is, he shall not be punished for it, though he may suffer for it. Suffering and affliction are sovereign acts of God and may or may not be connected with the individual sin of a secondary ancestor, according to his good pleasure; but punishment is a judicial act that is necessary and necessarily connected with the specific sin of the first ancestor and the individual sins of the person himself. (See supplement 4.5.6.) The imputation of Adam’s sin rests upon a different kind of union from that upon which the imputation of Christ’s righteousness rests. The former is founded upon natural union: a union of constitutional nature and substance. The possibility of an existence, a probation, and a free fall in Adam has been considered under the head of traducianism. The entire human species as an invisible but substantial nature acts in and with the first human pair. Traducianism is true only in anthropology and with reference to apostasy. It has no application at all to soteriology and redemption. There is no race-unity in redemption. All men were in Adam when he disobeyed; but all men were not in Christ when he obeyed. All men are propagated from Adam and inherit his sin. No man is propagated from Christ or inherits his righteousness. Apostasy starts with the race. Redemption starts with the individual. All men fall. Some men are redeemed. Union in Adam is substantial and physical, in Christ is spiritual and mystical (Westminster Larger Catechism 66); in Adam is natural, in Christ is representative; in Adam is by creation, in Christ is by regeneration; in Adam is with man as a species, in Christ is with man as an individual; in Adam is universal, in Christ is particular and by election (Shedd on Romans 5:19). The theory of Schleiermacher, Rothe (Steinmeyer, History of Christ’s Passion, 15), and Nevin as criticized by Hodge supposes that Christ united himself with the entire human nature. This is an error. In the incarnation, the Logos assumed into union with himself only a fractional part of human nature, namely, that flesh and blood which was derived from the virgin. There was no union in the incarnation with the human race as a whole. This would have required the Logos to have united with the human nature as it was in Adam, prior to any division and individualization of it. Furthermore, in regeneration, Christ is united with only a particular individual who has been elected and separated (Galatians 1:15) from all other individuals. The principal objection to the tenet of the participation of the posterity in the first sin is that the individual has no self-conscious recollection of such an event and that he cannot be held responsible for an act of which he is not self-conscious and cannot remember. The reply to this is that upon any theory, no individual man is self-conscious of and remembers the first act of sin. Neither Pelagianism nor Semipelagianism, neither Socinianism nor Arminianism, has any advantage in this respect over Augustinianism and Calvinism. Neither does creationism have any advantage over traducianism. Upon any theory that recognizes the fact of sin in man, the first act of sin is not observed by self-consciousness at the time of its occurrence. No man remembers the time when he was innocent and the particular first act by which he became guilty before God.

Guilt is caused by self-determination, not by self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not action, but vision; and it is action, not the sight of an action that constitutes crime. A man is wrongly inclining all the time to self and the creature, but he is not self-conscious all the time that he is wrongly inclining. If it be said that he might become self-conscious that he is so inclining, this does not prove that such a self-consciousness is necessary in order to responsibility for the wrong inclining. Even if he does not become self-conscious of his wrong inclining (as he may not for days and weeks), this does not destroy the fact that he is so inclining. It is the inclining, not the self-consciousness of inclining, which constitutes the free action of his will; and it is this free action which constitutes the sin and guilt. This is true also of the momentary volition, as well as of the abiding inclination. If a man commits a murder, it is not necessary that at the time when he stabs his victim he should have that clear apprehension of the enormity of the act which he subsequently has in order to be chargeable with murder. Sins of thoughtlessness are as truly sinful as deliberate sins (Leviticus 5:17-18; Luke 12:48). Men generally are not self-conscious of the “secret sins” (Psalms 19:12; Psalms 90:8) of feeling and desire which they are committing inwardly all the time. The purpose of preaching the law is to produce the self-consciousness of sin. The “darkness” in which, according to St. Paul (Ephesians 4:18), men “walk” is the thoughtless unconsciousness in which they live and act. It is a proverb that man sins more the less that God and sin are in his thoughts. The clearness of the self-consciousness is not the measure of the intensity of the self-determination. The two may be in inverse proportion. The will may be vehemently resolute and determined to a particular end, and yet the understanding be very blind to the will’s activity. It is frequently the case that great strength and energy in voluntariness are accompanied with great obtuseness and stupidity in moral perception. The most wicked and devilish men are oftentimes the most apathetic and hardened of men. The will is awake and full of force, but the conscience is asleep. When the sinner is convicted by the truth and Spirit of God, he does not excuse or extenuate his guilt on the ground of his past unconsciousness in sin. Even the heathen, when convinced of the abominations of idolatry and of selfish lust in its varied forms, do not plead “the ignorance that was in them because of the blindness of their hearts” in excuse for having “given themselves over to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:17).

It is on this ground that Samuel Hopkins contends that infants are moral agents:

Many have supposed that none of mankind are capable of sin or moral agency before they can distinguish between right and wrong. But this wants proof which has never yet been produced. And it appears to be contrary to divine revelation. Persons may be moral agents and sin without knowing what the law of God is or of what nature their exercises are and while they have no consciousness. (Works 1.233)

Hamilton (ed. Bowen, 13-14) contends that there are agencies of the soul deeper than self-consciousness. Pascal, in the fourth of his Provincial Letters, shows the consequences of the position of the Jesuit that “nothing is voluntary but what is accompanied with deliberation and clear consciousness of the nature of the act.”⁵³[Note: 3 53. WS: See Ritschl, History of Justification, 390-410 (trans. Black); Shedd, Theological Essays, 243-54.]

There was, comparatively, more self-consciousness attending the first sin for the posterity, if it was committed by them in Adam, than can be found upon any other theory. The first sin of every man must have been committed either (a) in Adam, (b) in the womb, or (c) in infancy. We cannot conceive of any relation to or connection with self-consciousness in the last two cases. We can in the first, for the individuals Adam and Eve were self-conscious. So far as they were concerned, the first sin was a very deliberate and intensely willful act. The human species existing in them at that time acted in their act and sinned in their sin, similarly as the hand or eye acts and sins in the murderous or lustful act of the individual soul. The hand or the eye has no separate self-consciousness of its own, parallel with the soul’s self-consciousness. Taken by itself, it has no consciousness at all. But its union and oneness with the self-conscious soul in the personal union of soul and body affords all the self-consciousness that is possible in the case. The hand is coagent with the soul and hence is particeps criminis⁵⁴[Note: 4 54. a partner in crime] and has a common guilt with the soul. In like manner, the psychico-physical human nature existing in Adam and Eve had no separate self-consciousness parallel with that of Adam and Eve. Unlike the visible hand or eye, it was an invisible substance or nature capable of being transformed into myriads of self-conscious individuals; but while in Adam and not yet distributed and individualized, it had no distinct self-consciousness of its own, any more than the hand or eye in the supposed case. But existing, and acting in and with these self-conscious individuals, it participated in their self-determination and is chargeable with their sin, as the hand, and eye, and whole body is chargeable with the sin of the individual man. As in the instance of the individual unity, everything that constitutes it, body as well as soul, is active and responsible for all that is done by this unity, so in the instance of the specific unity: everything that constitutes it, namely, Adam and the human nature in him, is active and responsible for all that is done by this unity.

Original Sin as a Corruption of Nature The second part of “the sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell” consists in “the want of original righteousness and the corruption of the whole nature.” This part of human sinfulness stands to the first in the relation of effect to cause. Human nature in Adam and Eve inclined from holiness to sin, and as a consequence that nature became destitute of its original righteousness and morally corrupt.

It is easy to see how this negative destitution of righteousness and positive inclination to evil, with all the moral corruption attending it, should be imputed as guilt, provided it be conceded that the first sin is really committed and righteously imputed. If it is just to impute the cause, it is certainly just to impute the effect. But, on the contrary, it is impossible to see why the corruption of nature should be imputed as sin if the first sin is not. It is improper to impute the effect when the cause cannot be imputed.⁵⁵[Note: 5 55. WS: “Sin,” as Müller (Sin 2.163) remarks, “must begin, not in a state, but in an act.” Yet the first act of sin, it must be remembered, causes and produces a state of sin.]

It is here that the illogical character of the theory of mediate imputation is apparent. This was first advanced by Placaeus in 1640. To relieve, as he supposed, the Calvinistic doctrine of original sin of some of its difficulties, he maintained that the corruption of nature which is inherited from Adam is chargeable upon each individual as sin and guilt, but the act of transgressing the probationary statute given in Eden is not chargeable. This is to be imputed only to Adam and Eve as individuals. A man is guilty and punishable for his evil heart, but not for Adam’s first sin. His own personal corruption is imputable, because it is personal; but the act of another person is not imputable, because it is another’s act. Placaeus would impute Adam’s sin as a state, but not as an act; the “corruption of nature,” but not the “guilt of the first sin” in the Westminster formula. This theory made a greater difficulty than it relieved. The corruption of nature, according to Placaeus himself, is the effect of Adam’s first sin. Why should the effect be imputed and not the cause? Such a kind of imputation looked unreasonable and, as the Helvetic Consensus Formula says, “imperiled the whole doctrine of original sin.” It would be difficult to retain the imputation of the corruption of nature by this method; and both the first sin and corruption would cease to be imputed. The Synod of Charenton in 1644 condemned the view of Placaeus and also charged him with denying the imputation of Adam’s sin. He objected to this, saying that he did not deny the imputation of Adam’s sin altogether, but only when stated in a certain manner: For in these words [in the decree of the synod] either the view expounded was not Placaeus’s or it was badly stated. For he never simply denied the imputation of Adam’s first sin and never wished to deny it. Since he would affirm a certain kind of imputation of the first sin and deny another kind, his view is not represented if he is said to deny-simply and without offering any distinction-the imputation of Adam’s first sin.⁵⁶[Note: 6 56. Illis enim verbis [in the decree of the synod] aut exposita non est Placaei sententia, aut male exposita est. Is enim primi peccati Adae imputationem nunquam simpliciter negavit, nunquam negatam voluit. Cum igitur imputationem primi illius peccati quandam affirmet, quandam neget, non exponitur ejus sententia, si dicitur simpliciter, et nulla distinctione adhibita, primi peccati Adae imputationem negare.] (Placaeus, Concerning Imputation 1.3) The criticism of Turretin (9.9.5) upon this is as follows: To break the force of the statement of the Synod of Charenton, Placaeus distinguished between immediate or antecedent imputation and between mediate or consequent imputation. The former he calls that imputation [of Adam’s sin] by which the first act of Adam was imputed immediately to all his posterity, Christ only excepted, and antecedently to any inherent corruption. The latter, he calls that imputation [of Adam’s sin] which follows upon seeing in the posterity that hereditary corruption derived to them from Adam and which is brought about by it [hereditary corruption] as the means or medium [of the imputation]. The first “immediate” imputation Placaeus rejects, the second “mediate” imputation he accepts; and upon this ground contends that he does not reject the imputation of Adam’s sin absolutely and without qualification.

But, as Turretin proceeds to say: This distinction does in fact do away with the imputation of Adam’s [first] sin altogether. For if the sin of Adam is imputed to us only in this mediate manner, according to which we are constituted guilty before God and made liable to penalty, on account of a hereditary corruption which we derive from Adam, there is no real and proper imputation of Adam’s [first] sin, but only of inherent corruption. This the synod intended to prevent and proscribe by distinguishing original sin into two parts, namely, inherent corruption and imputation proper [i.e., the imputation of the first sin itself]-a thing that could not be done, if imputation cannot be except upon the ground of a foregoing corruption of nature. For it is one thing to be exposed to the wrath of God on account of inherent and hereditary corruption and quite another thing to be exposed to this wrath on account of Adam’s first act of sin. The phrase original sin in Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 18 comprises both the first sin and the corruption of nature: Adam’s sin both as an act and a resulting state of the will. Edwards (Original Sin, introduction) remarks that original sin “is vulgarly understood in that latitude as to include not only the depravity of nature, but the imputation of Adam’s first sin.” The whole truth of the doctrine of original sin includes the imputation of both the first sin and the ensuing corruption. The first sin of Adam and his posterity is immediately imputed to them as sin, antecedently, in the order of nature, to inherent corruption, because it was their voluntary act. And then the resulting inherent corruption is imputed as sin; not, however, as in Placaeus’s theory, through itself as the medium of the imputation, but through the medium of the first sin, because this was the cause of it. Both the cause and the effect, both the first sin and the corruption caused by it, are imputed to Adam and his posterity. The phrase original sin is sometimes employed to denote only the corruption of nature in distinction from the sins of act that proceed from it. In this use of the term, original sin is equivalent to the scriptural phrases “evil treasure of the heart” (Mark 12:35), “corrupt tree” (12:33), “heart from which proceed evil thoughts” (7:21), “stony heart” (Ezekiel 11:19), “carnal mind” (Romans 8:7), “flesh” (8:4), among others.

It is also equivalent to the theological phrases corrupt nature, sinful inclination, evil disposition, and apostate will. When the term nature is applied to sin, it does not denote nature in the primary but the secondary sense. In the primary sense, nature denotes a substance and one that is created by God. In this sense, Augustine denies that sin is nature and asserts that it is intentio (Shedd, History of Doctrine 2.82; Theological Essays, 220). Howe (Oracles 2.24) remarks that “that evil heart, that nature, not as it is nature but as it is depraved nature, is now transmitted.” When “nature” signifies created substance, it is improper to call sin a nature. Aristotle (Politics 1.2) says: “What every being is in its perfect state, that certainly is the nature of that being, whether it be a man, a horse, or a house.” Sin is imperfection and therefore not “nature” in this sense. But there is a secondary meaning of the word. In this use of it, “nature” denotes “natural inclination” or “innate disposition.” In this sense, sin is a “nature,” and the adjective natural is applicable to the corruption of sin. In the same sense, holiness is called a “nature” in 2 Peter 1:4. Believers are “partakers of a divine nature” by being regenerated and coming to possess a holy disposition or inclination: “It is true that sin is a nature, but then it is a second nature, a state of degeneration” (Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine §107). Calvin (on Ephesians 2:3) says: “Since God is the author of nature, how comes it that no blame attaches to God if we are lost by nature? I answer, there is a twofold nature: The one produced by God and the other is corruption of it. We are not born such as Adam was at first created” (see Formula of Concord 1.12; Calvin 2.2.12).

Viewed as natural corruption, original sin may be considered with respect to the understanding. It is blindness: “a light to open blind eyes” (Isaiah 42:7); “recovering of sight to the blind” (Luke 4:18); “know not that you are blind” (Revelation 3:17); “the god of this world has blinded their minds” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Many texts speak of regeneration as “enlightening” (2 Corinthians 4:6; Ephesians 5:14; 1 Thessalonians 5:5; Psalms 97:11). And many texts call sin “darkness” (Proverbs 4:19; Isaiah 60:2; Ephesians 5:11; Colossians 1:13; 1 John 2:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:4; Ephesians 4:18 [“having the understanding (dianoia)⁵⁷[Note: 7 57. διάνοια] darkened”]; Romans 1:28 [“reprobate mind (noun)]”).⁵⁸[Note: 8 58. νοῦν]

Sin blinds and darkens the understanding by destroying the consciousness of divine things. For example, the soul destitute of love to God is no longer conscious of love, of reverence is no longer conscious of reverence, etc. Its knowledge of such affections, therefore, is from hearsay, like that which a blind man has of colors or a deaf man of sound. God, the object of these affections, is of course unknown for the same reason. The spiritual discernment spoken of in 1 Corinthians 2:6 is the immediate consciousness of a renewed man. It is experimental knowledge. Sin is described in Scripture as voluntary ignorance: “This they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old” (2 Peter 3:5). Christ says to the Jews: “If I had not come and spoken unto them they had not had sin”-the sin of “not knowing him that sent me” (John 15:21-22). But the ignorance in this case was a willing ignorance. They desired to be ignorant.

Another effect of original sin upon the understanding as including the conscience is insensibility. It does not render conscience extinct, but it stupefies it: “having cauterized their own conscience” (1 Timothy 4:2). A third effect is pollution: “even their reason (nous)⁵⁹[Note: 9 59. νοῦς] and conscience (syneidēsis)⁶⁰[Note: 0 60. συνείδησις] are polluted” or stained (memiantai)⁶¹[Note: 1 61. μεμίανται] (Titus 1:15); “they became vain in their reasonings” or speculations (dialogismous)⁶²[Note: 2 62. διαλόγισμους] (Romans 1:21). The pollution of reason is seen in the foolish speculations of mythology. The myths of polytheism are not pure reason. The pollution of conscience is seen in remorse. The testifying faculty is spotted with guilt. It is no longer a “good conscience” (Hebrews 13:18 [kalēn syneidēsin];⁶³[Note: 3 63. καλήν συνείδησιν]1 Peter 3:16; 1 Peter 3:21; 1 Timothy 1:5; 1 Timothy 1:19; Acts 23:1 [syneidēsin agathēn])⁶⁴[Note: 4 64. συνείδησιν ἀγαθήν] or a “pure conscience” (1 Timothy 3:9 : syneidēsis kathara).⁶⁵[Note: 5 65. συνείδησις κάθαρα] It is an “evil conscience” (ponēra syneidēsis):⁶⁶[Note: 6 66. πονήρα συνείδησις] a conscience needing cleansing by atoning blood “from dead works” (Hebrews 9:14). Dead works, being no fulfillment of the law, leave the conscience perturbed and unpacified.

Considered with respect to the will, original sin is (a) enmity (Romans 8:6; James 4:4 [“the friendship of the world is enmity toward God”]; Deuteronomy 1:26 [“they rebelled against God”]; Job 34:37; Isaiah 1:1; Isaiah 30:9; Isaiah 45:2; Ezekiel 12:2); (b) hatred (Romans 1:29; Psalms 89:23; Psalms 139:21; Exodus 20:5; Proverbs 1:25; Proverbs 5:12; John 7:7; John 15:18; John 15:23-24); (c) hardness of heart or insensibility (Exodus 7:14; Exodus 7:22; 2 Kings 17:14; Job 9:4; Isaiah 63:17; Daniel 5:20; John 12:20; Acts 19:9; Hebrews 3:8; Hebrews 3:15; Hebrews 4:7); (d) aversion (John 5:40 [“you will not (ou thelēte),”⁶⁷[Note: 7 67. οὐ θέλητε] you are disinclined]; Revelation 2:21); (e) obstinacy (Deuteronomy 31:27 [“stiff-necked”]; Exodus 32:9; Psalms 75:5; Isaiah 26:10; Isaiah 43:4; Acts 7:51; Romans 10:21); (f) bondage (Jeremiah 13:23; Mark 3:23; John 6:43-44; John 8:34; Romans 5:6; Romans 6:20; Romans 7:9; Romans 7:14; Romans 7:18; Romans 7:23; Romans 8:7-8; Romans 9:16; 2 Peter 2:14).

Corruption of Nature as Guilt

Original sin, considered as corruption of nature, is sin in the sense of guilt: “They [the Lutherans] condemn the Pelagians and others who deny that the flaw (vitium) of our origin is sin”⁶⁸[Note: 8 68. Damnant Pelagianos et alios, qui vitium originis negant esse peccatum. (Vitium can also mean “sin, offense, vice.”)] (Augsburg Confession 2); “every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God does in its own nature bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and made subject to death, temporal and eternal” (Westminster Confession 6.6); “corruption of nature does remain in those that are regenerated, and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and all the motions thereof are truly and properly sin” (Westminster Confession 6.5). Semipelagian, papal, and Arminian anthropologies differ from the Augustinian and Reformed by denying that corruption of nature is guilt. It is a physical and mental disorder leading to sin, but is not sin itself.⁶⁹[Note: 9 69. WS: Shedd, History of Doctrine 2.35-42, 180-86; onRomans 7:15-17; Müller, Sin 2.400.]

Corruption of nature is guilt because …

1. The Scriptures do not distinguish between sin proper and improper. Hamartia⁷⁰[Note: 0 70. ἁμαρτία = sin] as denoting the principle of sin is exchanged with paraptōma⁷¹[Note: 1 71. παράπτωμα = transgression] denoting the act of sin and vice versa (Romans 5:13; Romans 5:15-17; Romans 5:19; Romans 5:21).

2. Hamartia⁷²[Note: 2 72. ἁμαρτία = sin] is the equivalent of epithymia⁷³[Note: 3 73. ἐπιθυμία = lust, desire] and sarx:⁷⁴[Note: 4 74. σάρξ = flesh] “I had not known sin, except the law had said, You shall not lust” (7:7; cf. 8:3, 5).

3. The remainders of corruption in the regenerate are hated as sin by the regenerate himself (7:15) and by God, who slays them by his Spirit (8:13).

4. Evil desire is forbidden in the tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17; cf. 1 John 2:16). The tenth commandment, which the Septuagint renders ouk epithymēseis,⁷⁵[Note: 5 75. οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις = do not lust/covet] prohibits that internal lusting which is the chief characteristic of the corrupt nature. It is also forbidden by Christ in his exposition of the seventh commandment (Matthew 5:28): “Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15).

5. Corruption of nature is guilt because it is the inclination of the will. It is “voluntary” though not “volitionary.” It is conceded that the inclination to murder is as truly culpable as the act of murder: “The thought (zimmâ)⁷⁶[Note: 6 76. æÄîÌÈä] of foolishness is sin” (Proverbs 24:9).

6. Corruption of nature is guilt, upon the principle that the cause must have the same predicates as its effects. If actual transgressions are truly and properly sin, then the evil heart or inclination which prompts them must be so likewise. If the stream is bitter water, the fountain must be also. If the murderer’s act is guilt, then the murderer’s hate is.

7. If corruption of nature or sinful disposition is not guilt, then it is an extenuation and excuse for actual transgressions. These latter are less blameworthy, if the character which prompts them and renders their avoidance more difficult is not self-determined and culpable.

8. If corruption of nature is not culpable, it is impossible to assign a reason why the dying infant needs redemption by atoning blood. Christ came “by water and blood,” that is, with both expiating and sanctifying power (1 John 5:6). But if there be no guilt in natural depravity, Christ comes to the infant “by water only” and not “by blood,” by sanctification and not by justification. Infant redemption implies that the infant has guilt as well as pollution. The infant has a rational soul; this soul has a will; this will is inclined; this inclination, like that of an adult, is centered on the creature instead of the Creator. This is culpable and needs pardon. It is also pollution and needs removal.

9. God forgives original sin as well as actual transgression when he bestows the “remission of sins.” The “carnal mind” or the enmity of the heart is as great an offense against his excellence and honor as any particular act that issues from it. Indeed, if there be mutual goodwill between two parties, an occasional outward offense is less serious.

Says Thirlwall (Letters, 46):

Suppose two friends really loving one another, but liable now and then to quarrel. They may easily forgive the occasional offense, because their habitual disposition is one of mutual goodwill; but should the case be the reverse-hatred stifled, but occasionally venting itself by unfriendly acts-how little would it matter though they should forget the particular offense, if the enmity should continue at the bottom of the heart. This illustrates the guilt of sin as a state of the heart toward God, and the need of its forgiveness and removal. (See supplement 4.5.7.) With the Scriptures, the theologians assert that corruption of nature is sin:

We must not only abstain from evil deeds, but even from the desire to do them. Christ commanded not only to abstain from things forbidden by the law, but even from longing after them. Our Lord forbade concupiscence itself, as well as the act of adultery. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.13) The command not to lust condemns the beginnings of sin, that is, unruly desires and wishes, no less than overt acts. (Tertullian, Concerning Modesty)

[Augustine defines sin to be] something coveted, said, or done contrary to God’s law.⁷⁷[Note: 7 77. Aliquid concupitum, dictum, factum, contra legem dei.] (Turretin 9.1.3)

[Augustine] sometimes denominates concupiscence infirmity, teaching that it becomes sin in cases where action or consent is added to the conception of the mind; but sometimes he denominates it sin; as when he says, “Paul gives the appellation of sin to this from which all sins proceed, that is, to carnal concupiscence.” (Calvin 3.3.10)

If lust which wars against the soul (1 Peter 2:11) be already sin (Exodus 20:17; Matthew 5:28), then must the act of sin be regarded as augmenting its degree. (Nitzsch, Christian Doctrine §111) By the precept concerning the tree of knowledge, man was taught that God is Lord of all things and that it is unlawful even to desire, but with his leave. Man’s true happiness is placed in God alone, and nothing is to be desired but with submission to him. (Witsius, Covenants 1.3.21) The irregular pleasure proceeding from the sensualized mind, inasmuch as it is corrupt, is sin; because it ought to have been subject to reason and moves in an undue manner contrary to reason. (Hales, quoted by Davenant, Justification 2.214) To root out the pernicious error of self-righteousness, our Lord gives the spiritual intention of the law and declares that the law had regard to the regulation of the heart with all its first motions and actings. For he asserts that the first motions of concupiscence, though not consented to, much less actually accomplished, are directly forbidden in the law. This he does in his exposition of the seventh commandment. He also declares the penalty of the law upon the least sin to be hellfire, in his assertion of causeless anger to be forbidden in the sixth commandment. (Owen, Justification, 17) Have we felt any evil desire in our heart? we are already guilty of concupiscence and are become at once transgressors of the law; because the Lord forbids us not only to plan and attempt anything that would prove detrimental to another, but even to be stimulated and agitated with concupiscence. The curse of God always rests on the transgression of the law. We have no reason, therefore, to exempt even the most trivial emotions of concupiscence from the sentence of death. (Calvin 2.8.58) The law says, “Do not lust.” And so, even if you do not give assent to the lust which inflames you, this very impulse of your flesh is sin nevertheless.⁷⁸[Note: 8 78. Lex “ne concupiscito” inquit. Itaque et si cupiditate, quae te incendit, non assentiaris, ipse tamen carnis tuae impetus peccatum est.] (Bullinger) Original Sin as Voluntary Inclination The position that original sin is voluntary inclination has been maintained in anthropology from the beginning of speculation upon the subject. Augustine argues as follows with Julian: “Says Julian, ‘If sin is from will, then it is an evil will that produces sin; but if from nature, then an evil nature produces sin.’ I quickly reply that sin is from will. Then he asks ‘whether original sin is also from will.’ I answer, certainly, original sin also, because this was transmitted from the will of the first man” (Concerning Marriages 2.28.2). Turretin defines sin as “an inclination, action, or omission opposing God’s law”⁷⁹[Note: 9 79. Inclinatio, actio, vel omissio pugnans cum lege dei.] (9.1.3). Ursinus, speaking of corruption of nature in infants, says that “infants want not the faculty of will, and though in act they do not will sin, yet they will it by inclination” (Christian Religion, Original Sin Q. 7). Rivetus asserts that “concupiscence is a voluntary inclination”⁸⁰[Note: 0 80. concupiscentia est inclinatio voluntaria] (Explication of the Decalogue, v. 15). William of Auxerre, quoted by Davenant (Justification 2.214), asserts that “the movement of wrong desire in man is a voluntary act, and it is sin, even when it moves before the reason has had time to exercise its judgment.” Says Charnock (Holiness of God, 476), “There is no sin but is in some sort voluntary; voluntary in the root or voluntary in the branch; voluntary by an immediate act of the will [volition] or voluntary by a general or natural inclination of the will [self-determination]. That is not a crime, to which a man is violenced without any concurrence of the faculties of the soul to that act.” Says Owen (Vindication of the Gospel, 6): “Original sin, as peccatum originans,⁸¹[Note: 1 81. originating sin] was voluntary in Adam; and as it is originatum⁸²[Note: 2 82. originated] in us is in our wills habitually [as a habitus] and not against them, in any actings of it or them. The effects of it, in the coining of sin and in the thoughts of men’s hearts, are all voluntary” (cf. Indwelling Sin 6.12). Says Howe (Oracles 2.24):

We must understand that an evil inclination or a depraved nature is that which does first violate the law of God; and so that it is not infelicity only to be ill inclined, but it is sin: sin in the highest and most eminent sense thereof. It is the habitual frame and bent of the soul which the law of God does in the first place direct. So that the empoisoned nature of man, the malignity of the heart and soul, is that which makes the first and principal breach upon the law of God.

It must be remembered that sin in its entire history is inclination and self-determination. While it is true that the first sin of Adam is the fall of the human race and decides its eternal destiny apart from redemption, yet it must not be supposed that after the first act of Adam, all self-determination ceases. Original sin as corruption of nature in each individual is only the continuation of the first inclining away from God. The self-determination of the human will from God to the creature, as an ultimate end, did not stop short with the act in Eden, but goes right onward in every individual of Adam’s posterity, until regeneration reverses it. As progressive sanctification is the continuation of that holy self-determination of the human will which begins in its regeneration by the Holy Spirit, so the progressive depravation of the natural man is the continuation of that sinful self-determination of the human will which began in Adam’s transgression. In connection with the doctrine that the corruption of nature is the same as the free inclination of the will, a position of Edwards is sometimes misunderstood and misapplied. Edwards (Will 4.1) asserts that “the virtuousness or viciousness of a disposition consists not in the origin or cause of it, but in the nature of it.” This position cannot be understood without taking into view the error which Edwards was combating. He was opposing the view of Arminian writers Taylor, Whitby, and others that a disposition or inclination cannot be chargeable as guilt unless it has been originated by a volitionary act preceding it. Their doctrine of the will implied that inclination can be produced by volition, and must be in order to responsibility for the inclination. This Edwards denies: “It is agreeable to the natural notions of mankind that moral evil, with its desert of dislike and abhorrence, and all its other ill deservings, consists in a certain deformity in the nature of certain dispositions of the heart and acts of the will and not in the deformity of something else, diverse from the very thing itself which deserves abhorrence, supposed to be the cause of it.” That is to say, the disposition of the heart or inclination of the will is in its own quality and nature an evil disposition and does not get its evil quality from “something else”-namely, a volition that went before it and caused it. If a man is inclined or disposed to sin, this inclination or disposition is itself sin. It is not necessary that he should, previously to the inclining, resolve to incline or choose to incline in order that the inclination should be sinful. The inclining itself is sin and guilt:

Thus, for instance, ingratitude is hateful and worthy of dispraise, according to common sense, not because something as bad or worse than ingratitude was the cause that produced it; but because it is hateful in itself by its own inherent deformity. So the love of virtue is amiable and worthy of praise, not merely because something else went before this love of virtue in our minds which caused it to take place there (for instance our own choice [volition]-we chose to love virtue and by some method or other wrought ourselves into the love of it), but because of the amiableness and condecency of such a disposition and inclination of the heart. In other words, Edwards here teaches that a man does not choose to incline, but he inclines; he does not choose to love, but he loves. The first thing in the order is not a volition and then after this a disposition or inclination; but the first thing is a disposition or inclination and then a volition.

Now it is only with reference to the relation of a volition to a disposition or inclination that Edwards lays down the position that “the virtuousness or viciousness of a disposition lies not in the origin of it, but in the nature of it.” He does not carry the position any further than this. When the volition is left out of the account and only the disposition or inclination is considered, Edwards teaches that this must have a free origin or else it is not sin. The whole purpose of his celebrated argument to prove that Adam and his posterity were one agent in the origin of sin is to show how the sinful disposition is the working of spontaneity or unforced inclination. When it comes to that act of will by which man inclines to sin, Edwards affirms that man is the self-moved and guilty actor and author of it. In his treatise on the will (4.1), he remarks as follows:

If any shall still object and say: Why is it not necessary that the cause should be considered in order to determine whether anything be worthy of blame or praise? Is it agreeable to reason and common sense that a man is to be praised or blamed for that which he is not the cause or author of and has no hand in? I answer, such phrases as “being the cause,” “being the author,” “having a hand in,” and the like are ambiguous. They are most vulgarly understood for being the designing voluntary [volitionary] cause or cause by antecedent choice: and it is most certain that men are not in this sense the causes or authors of the first act of their wills [i.e., of their inclination or disposition], in any case; as certain as anything is or ever can be; for nothing can be more certain than that a thing is not before it is nor a thing of the same kind before the first thing of that kind; and so no choice before the first choice. As, however, the phrase being the author may be understood, not of being the producer by an antecedent act of will [i.e., a volition], but as a person may be said to be the author of the act of the will itself by his being the immediate agent or the being that is acting or in the exercise of that act; if the phrase being the author is used to signify this, then doubtless common sense requires men’s being the authors of their own acts of will in order to their being esteemed worthy of praise or dispraise on account of them. And common sense teaches that they must be the authors of external actions in the former sense, namely, their being the causes of them by an act of will or choice [volition], in order to their being justly blamed or praised; but it teaches no such thing in respect to the internal acts of will themselves.⁸³[Note: 3 83. WS: Edwards defines inclination as the “leading act” of the will. See p. 512.]

In this last remark, Edwards concedes that a volition precedes an outward act and is the cause of it. The Arminian position in respect to volitionary action is true up to this point. An external act is not sinful or holy unless preceded by a volition. But with reference to that internal action of the will which is denominated its inclination or disposition, he holds that the Arminian position is not true. There is no need of a volition to precede this in order to make it sinful or holy; but it is so in its own nature, because it is the spontaneity of the man, because it is the action of “the immediate agent or the being that is acting or in the exercise of the act.”⁸⁴[Note: 4 84. WS: The Arminian and the Calvinistic views of freedom are contrasted in the following statement of Edwards: “Natural sense does not place the moral evil of volitions and dispositions in the cause of them, but the nature of them. An evil thing’s being from a man in the sense of from something antecedent in him is not essential to the original notion we have of blameworthiness; but it is its being the choice of the heart. When [on the other hand] a thing is from a man in the sense that it is from his will or choice, he is to blame for it because his will is in it: so far as the will is in it blame is in it, and no further. Neither do we go any further in our notion of blame to inquire whether the bad will be from a bad will: there is no consideration of the original of that bad will: because, according to our natural apprehension, blame originally consists in it [i.e., the bad will]”; Will in Works 2.174.]

When the question “is man the responsible author of his sinful inclination not by an antecedent volition to incline but by a present actual inclining?” is asked, Edwards answers in the affirmative: As a person may be said to be the author of the act of the will itself, not by an antecedent act of will [i.e., by a foregoing volition], but by his being the immediate agent or the being that is acting or in the exercise of that act; if the phrase being the author is used to signify this, then, doubtless, common sense requires men’s being the authors of their own acts of will in order to their being esteemed worthy of praise or dispraise on account of them.

Edwards’s objection to the doctrine that the will chooses to choose or chooses its choices-namely, that it supposes “a choice before the first choice” and that this is as absurd as that “a thing is before it is” or that there is “a thing of the same kind before the first thing of the same kind”-implies that there is such a thing as a “first choice.” But since he employed the term choice indiscriminately to include all the action of the will, the first choice with him meant an inclination or disposition of the will, not a volition (proper). There is no action of the will that precedes its inclination or disposition. Consequently, this is the primary action, the “first choice” of the will. The other action of the will in volitions (proper) is second choice. This “first choice” of the will in spontaneously inclining Edwards denominates a “leading act,” an “original act,” the “first determining act” (Will 3.4). The word act in this instance means activity or self-motion or self-determination, not in the Arminian sense of self-determination, which is a volition coupled with power to the contrary and is really indetermination not self-determination, but self-determination in the Calvinistic sense of spontaneously inclining or in the sense of “the immediate agent or the being that is acting or in the exercise of the act,” as Edwards phrases it.

Again, that Edwards held the inclination or disposition of the will to be voluntary agency is proved by his position that the inclination or disposition is an object either of command or of prohibition. A man is commanded to have a holy inclination and forbidden to have a sinful one. He is so commanded when he is commanded to love God with all his heart. Love is inclination. He is prohibited from having a sinful inclination when he is prohibited from lust in any form. The tenth commandment prohibits a sinful inclination. But commands and prohibitions are addressed to the will and require or forbid something that is truly voluntary. The following is the phraseology of Edwards upon this point: “The will itself [i.e., the inclination of the will], and not only those actions which are the effects of the will [inclination], is the proper object of precept or command. That is, such or such a state or act of men’s wills is in many cases properly required of them by command; and not merely those alterations in the state of their bodies or minds only that are consequences of volition.” Again he remarks: “The will itself [i.e., the inclination] may be required, and the being of a goodwill is the most proper, direct, and immediate subject of command” (Will 3.4; 4.13).

It is important to notice by reference to the connection in what sense Edwards uses the term choice or volition. Sometimes the term denotes volition in distinction from inclination; sometimes it denotes inclination considered as voluntary agency. Had he appropriated the terms choice and volition to only one form of the will’s activity, he would have been less liable to misapprehension. The charge of fatalism urged by some against Edwards arises from a failure to observe, that while Edwards taught that volitions necessarily agree with the inclination and have no power over it, he also taught that the inclination itself is free not necessitated agency. In the instance of a holy inclination, it was either created or recreated by God. In the instance of a sinful inclination, it was self-originated in the fall of Adam. The inclination of the will is free spontaneity in both instances. In the former, it results from God working in the will to will; in the latter, it is the will in its solitary self-motion. The dictum of Edwards to which we have referred is misapplied, sometimes, by writers whose view of sin and the will is substantially that of Edwards. They agree that a man is responsible for his sinful volitions, because they issue from his sinful inclination; but when asked why a man is responsible for his sinful inclination, instead of answering that this had a free and self-determined origin in Adam, they take refuge in the dangerous position that the sinfulness of an inclination does not depend upon its origin but upon its nature and that it is of no consequence how it originated: “Malignity is evil, and love is good, whether concreated, innate, acquired, or infused. A malignant being is a sinful being, if endowed with reason, whether he was so made or so born” (Hodge, Theology 2.808). In this statement, holiness and sin are made to hold precisely the same relation to God and the human will, when in fact they hold totally different relations. All four of these adjectives will apply to “love,” but only two of them to “malignity,” namely, “innate” and “acquired.” God creates a holy inclination or disposition whenever he creates a holy will in man or angel; and he recreates a holy inclination whenever he regenerates a sinner. Holiness is good and meritorious, “whether concreated, innate, acquired, or infused.” But then it is meritorious only in a relative sense. Since God is the ultimate author of holiness in both the creation and the regeneration of the will, to him belongs the glory of it. Man is not the originating agent, when holy inclination is the instance. God works in him to will. But the case is wholly different in the instance of an evil disposition or inclination. Man is the sole author, here. The demerit here is absolute, not relative. The doctrine of created holiness is true, but not of created sin; of infused holiness, but not of infused sin. To say that God can “create” and “infuse” a malignant inclination is to contradict the explicit teaching of Scripture, which asserts that God cannot sin and that he hates sin with an infinite hatred. God cannot create and infuse what he hates and punishes. And it shocks alike the moral sentiment of the natural man and the holy reverence of the renewed man. An evil inclination may be “innate” or “acquired.” But it cannot be “created” or “infused.” There may be a created merit, but not a created demerit. God can create and infuse holiness, but not sin. The testimony of Scripture and of consciousness is to this effect. When David in Psalms 51:1-19 is brought to a sense of the wickedness of his heart or sinful disposition, he never dreams of referring this disposition to God as its Creator and Author. He imputes his inborn depravity to himself. He acknowledges that the demerit of it is absolute. It is the creature’s agency and the creature’s only. He describes it as “innate,” but not as “created” or “infused” by God. He derives it from his mother, but not from his maker. But when David rejoiced over his own holy disposition and that of the people to honor God in the erection of a temple, his utterance is very different: “Whom am I, and what is my people that we should be able to offer so willingly after this sort? For all things come of you, and of your own have we given you” (1 Chronicles 29:14). (See supplement 4.5.8.)

Because holiness can be created and infused, it does not follow that sin can be, unless it can be shown, first, that the demerit of sin is only a relative demerit, as the merit of holiness is only a relative and gracious merit; and, second, that God’s creative agency can be exerted in the origination of sin in the same manner that it is in the origination of holiness, namely, by direct spiritual efficiency and operation. When it is said that “malignity is evil,” it is meant of course that it is morally evil, that is, damnable and punishable. The punishableness of it is what constitutes it evil. It is not evil in the sense that poverty or sickness are evils. To say, therefore, that such a form of evil as sin can be understood without looking at the origin of it is self-contradictory. A malignant disposition is morally evil, that is, damnable and punishable, only in case it is guilt. If it is misfortune, it is not moral evil at all. If therefore it is not the product of the human will solely, but the product of God working in the human will, if it is “created” and “infused,” it is certainly neither damnable nor punishable. Auctor mali non ultor mali.⁸⁵[Note: 5 85. The author of evil is not the avenger of evil.] It is no answer to say that a holy disposition is commendable and rewardable, and yet this is created and infused. The merit in this case, we repeat, is gracious and pactional and does not rest upon any absolute and primary obligation in God to reward. God in this case rewards his own grace and his own work in his creature. But the demerit of a sinful disposition is absolute, and its reward necessary, that is, resting upon an absolute and primary obligation in God as just to punish sin. God in this case does not punish his own cooperating agency in a creature’s will or visit with judicial infliction his own work.

Thus it appears that the “nature” of man’s sinful inclination or disposition cannot be determined except by knowing its “origin.” If it originates in one way, it is not sin; if in another, it is sin. Suppose that a judge should say to a jury: “You are not to look at the origin of this act of killing, but only at the nature of it; killing a man is killing a man, whatever may be the source from which the act originated.” The reply would be that it is impossible to determine the nature of the act in this instance without tracing it to its origin. Killing is of the nature of murder, only in case it originates in a murderous inclination and purpose. The nature depends upon the origin. In like manner, it is impossible to decide that a particular human disposition or inclination is of a culpable and damnable nature until it has been decided whether God or man is the author of it. The very epithet original applied to Adam’s first sin implies that its origin is a feature that is vital to the understanding of it, that its nature cannot be determined but by examining its first source. The term original when applied to sin implies that it originates in man. But the very same term when applied to righteousness implies that it originates in God: “In all agency, whether of good or evil, much is wont to be attributed to this: who was first in it? In point of good, the blessed God has no competitor; he is the undoubted first fountain of all good and is therefore acknowledged the supreme good. In point of evil (namely, moral) there is none prior to the devil, who is therefore eminently called the evil or wicked one” (Howe, Living Temple 2.8).

Original sin is to be distinguished from indwelling sin. The latter is the remainder of original sin in the regenerate. Its workings are described in Romans 7:14-25; Romans 8:1-27 (Shedd, Commentary in loco). It is not, like original sin, a dominant and increasing principle in the believer, but a subjugated and diminishing one. Indwelling sin is the minuendo movement of sin. “It has a dying fall.” Original sin is the crescendo movement:

Original sin does not remain in the same manner after regeneration as it remained before; for there are two remarkable differences. In the unregenerate, it occupies all the faculties of the soul peaceably and rules in their mind, will, and affections; but in the regenerate, it neither dwells peaceably, because grace from above is infused into them, which daily opposes this disease, and more and more expels it from every faculty of the soul; nor does it rule over them, because grace prevailing and predominating restrains it and sends it as it were under the yoke. The other difference is that in the unregenerate it has the guilt of eternal death annexed to it; but in the regenerate it is absolved from this fruit, for the sake of Christ the mediator. (Davenant, Justification, 15)

Says Luther (Table Talk: Of Sins): “Original sin after regeneration is like a wound that begins to heal; though it be a wound, yet it is in course of healing, though it still runs and is sore. So, original sin remains in Christians until they die, yet itself is mortified and continually dying. Its head is crushed to pieces, so that it cannot condemn us.” Indwelling sin is denominated “the law in (not of) the members” (Romans 7:23); original sin is denominated “the law of sin and death” (8:2). (See supplement 4.5.9.) Original Sin and Moral Inability The bondage of sin is defined in Westminster Larger Catechism 25. It describes the corruption of nature, called original sin in distinction from actual transgression, as that corruption “whereby man is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all that is spiritually good.” The Westminster Confession describes this corruption as that “whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” The creeds of the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches are equally explicit upon this point.⁸⁶[Note: 6 86. WS: Calvin 2.2.5; Shedd, History of Doctrine 2.164-77; Theological Essays, 235-43; Sermons to the Natural Man, sermon 11.] For the scriptural proof, see p. 502. This introduces the subject of the inability to good of the apostate will, respecting which the following particulars are to be noted: (a) the inability relates to spiritual good and (b) the inability is self-caused and voluntary. In the Westminster statement, the inability and opposition of the will relates to all that is “spiritually good.” Spiritual good is holiness, and holiness is supreme love of God and equal love of man. The creed statement therefore is that apostate man, alone and of himself, is unable to love God with all his soul and his neighbor as himself. He cannot start such an affection as this in his heart. He cannot originate within his will an inclination or disposition that is “spiritually good.” The inability relates to voluntary action in distinction from volitionary, to self-determination to an ultimate end in distinction from the choice of particular means. The doctrine in question does not imply that fallen man is unable to be moral; but that he is unable to be spiritual, holy, and religious. St. Paul teaches (Romans 2:14) that some unregenerate pagans practice morality; that they “do by nature the things contained in the law,” that is, some things contained in the law (ta tou nomou),⁸⁷[Note: 7 87. τὰ τοῦ νόμου] not all things.⁸⁸[Note: 8 88. WS: Had St. Paul intended to teach that these virtuous heathen do all things required by the law, he would have said ton nomon poiē (τὸν νόμον ποιῇ = he keeps the law), as inGalatians 5:3.] Their obedience is fractional and imperfect. Under the natural stimulus of conscience, they refrain more or less from vice and live more or less virtuously, as compared with others around them. But this morality is not supreme love of God and perfect obedience of his law. St. Paul denies that these virtuous heathen are spiritually good and holy when he affirms that, if tested by the law that requires supreme love of God, “every mouth must be stopped and all the world become guilty before God” (3:19); that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (3:23); and that “there is none righteous, no, not one” (3:10).

Again, this inability and opposition to all that is “spiritually” good does not imply that fallen man is destitute of certain natural and instinctive affections that are attractive and beneficent.⁸⁹[Note: 9 89. WS: On the natural instincts and the moral and religious affections, see p. 511.] First in the list are family affections. The love of the parent for the child, of the children for the parents, of brothers and sisters for each other, is an amiable sentiment and oftentimes leads to great self-sacrifice. But the self-sacrifice is for the brother or sister, not for God. Family affection may and often does exist without any supreme love of God. It may and often does lead to disobedience of God. The workings of natural affection must be subordinated to the claims of Christ in order to become religious affection or “spiritually good”: “He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 11:37). When the two come in conflict, the instinctive human affection if allowed sway is positively idolatrous and irreligious.

Second are social affections. Man is instinctively interested in his fellowman and performs many acts of self-sacrifice and generosity toward him. The sailor will share his last crust with his fellow sailor; the fireman will risk his own life for a fellow creature whom he never saw before and will never see again. But both actions may be performed, and often have been, by one who takes the name of God in vain and breaks every other commandment of the Decalogue whenever he is tempted to it. The self-sacrifice in this instance, also, is for man, not for God. The act in this case is one of gallantry or courage, and the common sense of man never denominates it a spiritual and holy act. Men call it “noble” and reward it by some token of admiration: a silver cup or a purse of money. They would not think of so rewarding a spiritual or holy act, like that of the martyr who dies for his faith in Christ or of the missionary who lays his bones among the savages to whom he has preached the gospel.

Third are civil affections. Man is by his constitution a political animal, as Aristotle denominates him. He is interested in the nation and country to which he belongs by reason of his birth. This patriotic feeling, like social and family affections, rises up instinctively and uniformly in every man, the unregenerate as well as regenerate. This, too, like the others, is not spiritual and holy in its nature. The most intense patriotism may be accompanied with atheism and unbelief and immorality. Such patriotism is expressed in the sentiment: “My country-right or wrong.”

Fourth, the esthetic feeling is not spiritual or religious. A love for the beautiful in art has nothing of holy virtue in it: “Who will affirm that a disposition to approve of the harmony of good music or the beauty of a square or equilateral triangle is the same with true holiness or a truly virtuous disposition of mind?” (Edwards, Nature of Virtue). Good taste is not piety and religion. A refined voluptuary is oftentimes a good judge in fine art; and even a coarse sensualist may be. Turner, one of the first painters that England has produced, was an example of the latter. Good taste may be spiritualized and elevated by being associated with and subordinated to a higher affection. But until this is done, it is of the earth earthly. It terminates only on that which is finite and temporal; and anything that terminates solely upon earth and time is unspiritual and unreligious. The same is true of the love of literature and science. Human discipline and culture is not holiness of heart and spirituality of mind. In all these instances, we have to do with a portion of man’s constitution that is outside of the voluntary nature. We are concerned with instinct, using the term in a wide sense, not with will. In its narrow and common signification, instinct signifies only the impulse of animal nature in brutes. But it may be used to denote all the constitutional impulses of human nature. Man did not lose esthetic impulse and feeling by the apostasy of his will; neither did he lose family, social, or civil affections. When he inclined away from God he did not incline away from art, science, the family-state, society, government, and country. His instinctive and constitutional interest in all these objects continued after the apostasy. His will was revolutionized, but not his instinctive nature. His love of God was gone, but not his love of family, country, beauty. Man continued to take pleasure in finite objects and relations, but lost delight in infinite and eternal objects and relations. The foundation of all these affections is natural instinct, not will. They are constitutional, not voluntary; physical, not moral. Their source and basis is physical, using the term etymologically and broadly, to denote that which belongs to the physis⁹⁰[Note: 0 90. φύσις = nature] or created nature of man. The family affection is founded in blood and lineage. A father does not love and toil for another man’s son. The patriotic affection springs from flesh and birth. An Englishman will not lay down his life for a Frenchman. Aristotle notices this. He founds the state upon the family, and the family he founds upon the sexual relation and affection, which manifests itself “not through voluntary choice, but by that natural impulse which acts both in plants and animals, namely, the desire of leaving behind them others like themselves” (Politics 1.2). The esthetic feeling, also, is founded in the created constitutional nature, but in the mental not the animal side of it. It does not depend, like family and patriotic affection, on affinity in blood and birth.

There is nothing voluntary in the love of a parent for his child, in the love of a citizen for his country, in the love of the artist for beauty. They are not the inclination of the will. This is proved by the fact that the apostasy of the will does not radically change them. If they belonged to the will, they would be converted into their contraries when the will is. When man began to be destitute of love to God, he would begin to be destitute of love for his family and his nation. In becoming an enemy of God and holiness, he would become an enemy of his family, society, culture, and art. In becoming disinclined and averse toward the Creator, he would become disinclined and averse toward these forms of the creature also. In the Westminster statement, the disability or inability is connected with the disposition and inclination of the will. Man is “indisposed to all spiritual good and inclined to all [spiritual] evil.” It follows from this that the cause and seat of the inability in question is in the action and state of the voluntary faculty. It is moral or willing inability: “For the will is a slave to sin, not unwillingly but willingly. For indeed, the ‘will’ (voluntas) is not called the ‘unwill’ (noluntas)”⁹¹[Note: 1 91. Nam servit voluntas peccato, non nolens sed volens. Etenim voluntas non noluntas dicitur.] (Second Helvetic Confession 9). In denominating it “moral” inability, it is not meant that it arises merely from habit or that it is not “natural” in any sense of the word nature. A man is sometimes said to be morally unable to do a thing, when it is very difficult for him to do it by reason of an acquired habit, but not really impossible. This is not the sense of the word moral when applied to the sinner’s inability to holiness. He is really and in the full sense of the word impotent. And the cause of this impotence is not a habit of doing evil which he has formed in his individual life, but a natural disposition which he has inherited from Adam. The term moral, therefore, when applied to human inability denotes that it is voluntary in distinction from created. Man’s impotence to good does not arise from the agency of God in creation but from the agency of man in apostasy.

Whether, therefore, it can ever be called “natural” inability will depend upon the meaning given to the term nature. (a) If nature means that which is created by God, there is no natural inability to good in fallen man. But if nature means “natural disposition” or “natural inclination,” there is a “natural” inability to good in fallen man. (b) Again, “natural” sometimes means something which is born with man in distinction from that which he acquires after birth, something in man at birth, yet not caused by birth. In this sense, man’s inability to good is “natural.” It is innate inability. The Scriptures sometimes employ the word in this sense: “The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them” (1 Corinthians 2:14); “and were by nature (physei;⁹²[Note: 2 92. φύσει] i.e., by birth) children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3); “conceived in sin and shaped in iniquity” (Psalms 51:5). In this last passage, “conceived” is not synonymous with “created” and must be carefully distinguished from it. So, also, in Romans 9:11 : “The children being not yet born” does not mean “the children being not yet created.” As opposed, therefore, to what is natural in the sense of created by God, man’s inability is moral, not natural; but as opposed to what is moral in the sense of acquired by habit, maninability is natural. When “natural” means “innate,” we assert that inability is “natural.” When “natural” means “created,” we assert that inability is “moral,” that is, voluntary. (See supplement 4.5.10.)

Owing to this ambiguity in the signification of the terms natural and moral, the elder Calvinistic theologians did not use either term exclusively to denote the sinner’s inability to good. Sometimes they employ one and sometimes the other and explain their meaning. The creeds of the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches frequently use the word natural and assert entire inability with great decision and unanimity: “When God converts a sinner, he frees him from his natural bondage under sin” (Westminster Confession 9.4).⁹³[Note: 3 93. WS: Cf. Formula Consensus Helvetica, 737 (ed. Niemeyer). For Turretin’s account of the distinction; see 10.4.39.] (See supplement 4.5.11.) The elder Edwards differs from the old Calvinists in two particulars: (1) in refusing to denominate the bondage of the human will “natural inability” and (2) in denying that “moral inability,” by which term exclusively he designates the sinner’s bondage, is “inability proper.” As these positions bring Edwards into contradiction with himself and open the way for a different anthropology from that contained in his writings generally and particularly in his treatise Original Sin, we direct attention to them. His view is contained in the following statements: “Natural inability alone is properly called inability” (Will in Works 2.104); “no inability which is merely moral is properly called by the name inability” (Will in Works 2.103).⁹⁴[Note: 4 94. WS: In Works 2.102 Edwards, however, speaks doubtfully on this point: “If moral inability can truly be called inability.” Cf. his doubt whether it is proper to call God a part of “being in general.” See nature and definition of God on pp. 176-77.]

In his treatise Will (in Works 2.104), Edwards defines “natural inability” as the want of the requisite mental faculties. Consequently, “natural ability” for him is the possession of the requisite mental faculties viewed apart from their moral state and condition. In so viewing them, he differs from the elder Calvinists, who regarded a mental faculty and its moral condition as inseparable. Edwards conceives of the will abstractly and separate from its inclination and, as so conceived, contends that it is “naturally able” to obey the law of God. The elder Calvinists denied that the will can be so conceived of.

“Natural inability,” says Edwards, “arises from the want of natural capacity or from external hindrance.” A man would be naturally unable to obey the divine law if he were destitute of any of the faculties of the human soul or if he were prevented from obeying the divine law by external force. Now, argues Edwards, inasmuch as man is not destitute of either understanding or will and is not compelled to sin by outward circumstances or by another being, it cannot be said that man is naturally unable to obey the divine law. This is true of the fallen man as well as of the unfallen.

Again, Edwards defines “natural inability” with reference to inclination or disposition. If a man is inclined to do a thing and is prevented, he is naturally unable. “We are said,” he remarks (Will in Works 2.15), “to be naturally unable to do a thing when we cannot do it if we will [i.e., are inclined], because what is most commonly called nature does not allow it or because of some impeding defect or obstacle that is extrinsic to the will, either in the faculty of understanding, constitution of body, or external objects.”

There are two criticisms to be made upon this statement. In the first place, if “the impeding defect or obstacle in the faculty of understanding” should amount to the total absence of reason, it would not be possible for a man to have an inclination to obey. An idiot or an insane person is not a moral agent and is incapable of moral inclination. If, however, Edwards means only a deficiency in intelligence that hinders the man in acting out his inclination-as when a man, though inclined to a right course, does not know what is the best means of accomplishing it-then, in this case, the will or inclination would be taken for the deed, and this would not be an instance of inability. In the second place, if a man is inclined to obey God, but is prevented in a particular instance from performing the outward service by sickness or by imprisonment-by “constitution of body” or by “external objects”-he is regarded by God, who always looks upon the truth or reality of things, as an obedient servant: “If there be a willing mind (prothymia),⁹⁵[Note: 5 95. προθυμία] it is accepted according to what a man has and not according to what he has not” (2 Corinthians 8:12). The inclination is the obedience; and Edwards supposes the inclination. This case, also, is not an instance of inability to obey the divine law. “The very willing is the doing,” says Edwards himself (Will in Works 2.17).

Edwards’s denial of “natural inability” is equivalent inferentially and indirectly to the assertion of “natural ability.” But he nowhere formally and directly asserts “natural ability” and in one instance directly and explicitly denies and combats it:

It will follow on our author’s principles that redemption is needless and Christ is dead in vain. For God [according to him] has given a sufficient power and ability, in all mankind, to do all their duty and wholly to avoid sin. Yea, this author insists upon it that when men have not sufficient power to do their duty, they have no duty to do. These things fairly imply that men have in their own natural ability sufficient means to avoid sin and to be perfectly free from it, and so from all the bad consequences of it. And if the means are sufficient, then there is no need of more; and therefore there is no need of Christ’s dying, in order to it. (Original Sin in Works 2.464) The explanation is this. Edwards was combating the doctrine of Whitby and Taylor that apostate man has plenary power to keep the divine law. Consequently, he had no motive to advocate the doctrine of ability in any form. His great object in the controversy was to establish the doctrine of inability. When, however, he is pushed by his opponents with the objection, that if there be no power in fallen man to keep the divine law there is no obligation to keep it, instead of recurring, as the elder Calvinists did, to the fall in Adam and the loss of ability by a free act of will,⁹⁶[Note: 6 96. WS: So Ursinus (Christian Religion Q. 8) argues: “They who cannot but sin are unjustly punished; but the unregenerate cannot but sin: therefore God does unjustly punish them. Answer. They who necessarily sin are unjustly punished, except that necessity come voluntarily and by their own will. But men have drawn upon them that necessity voluntarily in the first parents and themselves do willingly sin. Therefore God does justly punish them.”] Edwards meets the objection by asserting that fallen man is under no “natural inability” to keep the divine law and in this way implies that he has a “natural ability” to keep it. But when his definition of the “natural ability” thus indirectly attributed to fallen man is examined, it proves not to be efficient and real power, but only a quasi ability that is incapable of producing the effect required in the objection, namely, perfect obedience. In this way, he evades the objection of his opponent rather than answers it. “It is easy,” he says (Will in Works 2.17), “for a man to do the thing if he will [is inclined], but the very willing [inclining] is the doing. Therefore, in these things to ascribe a nonperformance to the want of power or ability is not just, because the thing wanting is not a being able, but a being willing. There are faculties of mind and capacity of nature and everything sufficient but a disposition; nothing is wanting but a will [inclination].” But this amounts only to the truism that the sinner is able to obey the law of God if he is inclined to obey it and avoids the point in dispute. For the real question is whether the sinner can originate the “thing that is wanting” in order to obedience, namely, “a being willing” or a disposition to obey. Edwards always and everywhere asserts that he cannot; but for the purpose of meeting the objection that if the sinner is unable to obey he is not obligated to obey, he contends that it is improper to call the inability to “be willing” or inclined an inability, because the mere existence of the faculty of will without the power to change its disposition constitutes ability. “To ascribe a nonperformance,” says Edwards, “in these things, to the want of power is not just; because the thing wanting is not a being able, but a being willing. There are faculties of mind and a capacity of nature and everything sufficient but a disposition.” But the absence of a disposition to obey is fatal. The presence of a disposition to obey is necessary in order to obedience. No man can obey the divine law without being willing or inclined to obey it; and Edwards asserts over and over again that the sinner is unable to incline himself to obedience. A man destitute of an inclination to obey the divine law cannot obey it merely because he has the abstract faculty of will. Volitionary acts can be performed, but since they do not proceed from a right inclination, they are not obedience. The sinner’s so-called natural ability, consisting of everything except a “disposition” to obey, consists of everything necessary to efficient power except efficiency itself. The ability to obey is an ability to incline, because it is the inclination of the will that constitutes true obedience. Consequently, if inclining to good is not within the competence of the sinner, he is unable to obey. In order, therefore, that a man destitute of an inclination to obey the divine law may be said without any equivocation to be “able” to obey, he must be able to originate such an inclination. The question that settles the question respecting “ability” and precludes all evasion is this: Has fallen man the ability to start and begin that right inclination of will which is the essence of obedience and without which it is impossible to obey the law of God? If so, he has without any ambiguity the “ability” to perfectly obey the divine law. But if not, he is unable to obey it, and this impotence is properly called inability. In answering this question, Edwards is explicit in the negative and stands upon the position of Augustine and Calvin in respect to the bondage and helplessness of the apostate will (see Edwards, Will in Works 2.101; Endless Punishment in Works 1.615-16). (See supplement 4.5.12.)

Pascal (Provincial Letters 2) illustrates this equivocation respecting “natural ability” (a distinction employed by the Jesuits) in the following manner: A man setting out on a journey is encountered by robbers who wound him and leave him half dead. He sends for aid from three neighboring surgeons. The first on examining his wounds pronounces them mortal and tells him that God alone can restore him. The second tells him that he has strength enough to carry him back to his dwelling and that he will recover by the force of his system. The patient, perplexed between the two, calls upon the third surgeon. This latter after examination sides with the second surgeon and ridicules the opinion of the first. The patient naturally supposes that the third surgeon agrees with the second; and in fact receives in reply to his inquiries an assurance that he has strength sufficient to prosecute his journey. The poor man, however, conscious of his weakness, asks on what his conclusions are founded? “Because,” said he, “you still have your legs, and the legs are the natural organs for walking.” “But,” says the sick man, “have I strength to make use of them; for they seem to me useless, in my state of weakness?” “Certainly not,” replied the doctor; “and in reality you never will walk, unless God shall send you supernatural aid to sustain and lead you.” “What!” cries the patient, “have I not then in myself sufficient strength for walking?” “Very far from it,” replied the surgeon. “Your opinion then is entirely opposed to the second surgeon respecting my state?” “I confess it is,” he replied. When “ability” is attributed to the human will, it is naturally understood to mean the power to use and control the energetic force of the faculty. Inclining to an ultimate end is the energy of the will, and its most important activity. But if the sinful will is unable to incline to God as the supreme end and good, it is improper to say that it has a “natural ability” to do this because “ability” properly denotes efficient power. The man in Pascal’s illustration who “still had his legs” but had lost the power to use them could not properly be said to be able to walk; and the man who “still has a will” but is unable to incline it to good cannot properly be said to be able to obey. If when Edwards replied to his opponent that “it is easy for a man to do the thing if he will,” he had added that “it is easy for a man to will,” this would have been an unequivocal assertion of ability. But Edwards not only denied that it is easy for the sinner to will rightly, but asserted that it is impossible.

Ability must not be confounded with capability or power with capacity. The sinner is capable of loving God supremely, but not able to love him supremely; and probably this is all that is intended by many who assert “natural ability.” Capacity implies possibility only, as when it is said that man has the capacity for all the diseases to which flesh is heir. But something more than capacity is requisite to warrant the assertion that he is able to have them all. The ability to have all the diseases of the human body would require the germ of them all. A man is not able to have smallpox unless he has the contagion or been inoculated with it. But he is capable of having smallpox without either contagion or inoculation. Adam before the fall had the capacity to sin rather than the ability, the possibility not the propensity. It is, therefore, more strictly proper to say that it was possible for holy Adam to sin than to say that he had the ability to sin. Accurately speaking, the ability to sin is inward sin itself; and the ability to be holy is inward holiness itself. Hence Augustine attributed to the unfallen Adam the posibilitas peccandi⁹⁷[Note: 7 97. the possibility of sinning] and denied the potestas.⁹⁸[Note: 8 98. (the) power (of sinning)] In moral things, the ability implies the inclination and tendency. (See supplement 4.5.13.)

Consequently, in ethics and religion, moral ability is the only kind of power that is properly designated by the term ability. In reference to obedience and disobedience, holiness and sin, if there is not moral or voluntary ability, there is no ability at all. And moral or voluntary ability cannot be separated from inclination. No inclination, no ability. If inclination, then ability. A man who is able to love God supremely is inclined to love him. A man who is able to steal is inclined in his heart to theft. In common parlance we say of a bad man: “He can do anything; he can lie, he can steal.” This is the same as saying: “He is a thief, he is a liar.” If we say that he is capable of lying, we do not say so much as when we say he is able to lie.

“Natural ability” is, properly, only physical force. It is the power of matter, not of mind. A man has the natural ability to lift one hundred pounds. This is the power of matter, of his body. But we can think of this kind of power as not exerted and as never exerted. The man may have this species of ability and yet never lift a hundred pounds weight. In the case of natural ability, we can abstract and separate the faculty from its exercise and use. The faculty, in the instance of natural ability, is the body of the man. We say that there is in this body the ability or power to lift one hundred pounds weight. Whether this ability shall be exerted depends not upon the body but upon the man’s will. But the man’s body and the man’s will are distinct and separate substances and faculties. We can therefore conceive of this natural or physical ability as inactive and doing nothing until a volition employs it. We can conceive of natural power or ability without any effect produced by it. But in the instance of moral or voluntary power or ability, we cannot thus abstract and separate the faculty from its use and exercise and conceive of it as inert and producing no effect. The faculty in this case is not the body, but the will itself. But the will cannot be inactive and inert, as matter may be. It is inclined and active by its very idea and definition. There is no conceivable separation, therefore, in this instance between the faculty and its use and exercise, as there is in the instance of the body and the volition that uses the body. Moral or voluntary power is necessarily in exercise. A man may be naturally able to lift a hundred pounds and yet not do it. But a man may not be morally able to love God and yet not do it. The ability to an act in this latter case is one with the act itself. Ability to incline is inclination itself. Ability to love is love itself. Ability to hate is hatred itself. In the instance of natural ability or physical power, the ability is in one subject, and the use or exercise of it in another subject. The natural force is in the bodily limbs, and the moral force that exerts and uses it is in the will. But in the instance of moral ability or voluntary power, there is only one subject, namely, the human will. The will is the faculty, and the inclining of the will is the use and exercise of the faculty. We cannot, therefore, conceive of the will as being inert and inactive until another agent makes it active. Neither can we conceive of the will as inactive until some act of its own makes it active. Edwards was unquestionably correct in denying that the will can be started out of indifference and inaction by its own antecedent volition. But we can conceive of this in the instance of natural or physical power. We can conceive of the body as inert and inactive until another agent than itself, namely, the soul, makes it active by an antecedent volition. In the instance of moral ability, the faculty of will and its use and exercise are inseparable. If there be a will, it is necessarily in action; it is necessarily inclined. We cannot say that it is able to incline, not yet having inclined. It can pass from one inclination to another; but it cannot exist an instant with no inclination at all. Consequently, if the will is able to do a thing, it is doing it. But in the instance of natural ability, the faculty and its exercise are separable. If there be a body, it is not necessarily exerting its physical force. In this case, we can say that it is able to do a thing and yet is not doing it.

It is ambiguous and misleading, therefore, to apply the term natural ability to a moral faculty like the will, as it confessedly would be to apply the term moral ability to a physical faculty like the human body. No one would attribute to the human body a moral ability to swim; and no one should attribute to the human will a natural ability to love or obey, because a natural ability may not be in use and exercise. Andrew Fuller (Memoir, 15 [ed. Bohn]) quotes from Gill the distinction between a thing “being in the power of our hand and in the power of our heart.” Natural ability is the power of the hand; moral ability is the power of the heart. Referring to Descartes’s distinction between the act of the will that terminates on the will itself and the act of the will that terminates on the body, natural ability would designate the latter and moral ability the former. Obedience of the divine command “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” is the product of moral, not of natural ability.

Edwards asserts “moral inability” and defines it to be either the absence of right inclination or the presence of wrong inclination: A man may be said to be morally unable to do a thing when he is under the influence or prevalence of a contrary inclination or has a want of inclination. Moral inability consists either in want of inclination or the strength of a contrary inclination. It may be said, in one word, that moral inability consists in the opposition or want of inclination. A man is truly morally unable to choose⁹⁹[Note: 9 99. WS: “To choose” here means “to incline” or “to be willing.” It does not mean “to exert a volition,” for a man is able to exert a volition “contrary to a present inclination.”] contrary to a present inclination. A child of great love to his parents may be unable to be willing to kill his father. (Will in Works 2.15-16, 101-2) This is the inability meant in the Westminster statement that “man is utterly indisposed and disabled to all that is spiritually good.” And this species of inability is real inability. It is not a figure of speech, but an impotence as helpless and insuperable by the subject of it, as natural inability. The substantive inability has its full and strict meaning. The adjective moral does not convert the notion of impotence into that of power, but only denotes the species of impotence. It is true that the “cannot” is a “will not,” but it is equally true that the “will not” is a “cannot.” The sinful will is literally unable to incline to good apart from grace.

Notwithstanding his assertion that moral inability is improperly called inability, Edwards strenuously maintains that moral inability is utter and helpless impotence. This is the self-contradiction in his theory: “By reason of the total depravity and corruption of man’s nature, he is utterly unable, without divine grace, savingly to love God, believe in Christ, or do anything truly good” (Works 2.177). He also asserts the same thing in his doctrine of moral necessity: “Moral necessity may be as absolute as natural necessity-that is, the [moral] effect may be as perfectly connected with its moral cause, as a natural necessary effect is with its natural cause. When I use this distinction of moral and natural necessity, I would not be understood to suppose, that if anything comes to pass by the former kind of necessity, the nature of things is not concerned in it, as well as in the latter” (Will 1.4). Edwards means that the connection between the volition and the inclination is as necessary or as much founded in the nature of things as that between a physical effect and its physical cause. Given a wrong inclination, wrong volitions must follow. If the disposition of the will be vicious, the volitions of the will cannot be virtuous, any more than the fruit can be grapes if the root is that of the thistle.

Now in thus asserting that moral necessity is properly called necessity, Edwards is inconsistent in denying that moral inability is properly called inability. For the sinner’s moral necessity of sinning is the very same thing as his moral inability to obedience. If, therefore, Edwards was willing to say that moral necessity is as real and absolute as natural necessity, he should have been willing to say that moral inability is as real and absolute as natural inability. If the term necessity is properly applicable to moral necessity, the term inability is properly applicable to moral inability. Necessity is a stronger term than inability, and it is singular that while Edwards was not afraid to employ the former in connection with voluntary action, he should have shrunk from the latter. The same general argument that proves that moral necessity, taken in its full unambiguous sense, is consistent with the freedom of the will would prove that moral inability, taken in its full unambiguous sense, is likewise consistent with it. The nature of Edwards’s answer to the Arminian objection that if there is not ability in the sinful will there is no obligation resting upon it explains the inconsistency. Instead of denying, with the Calvinistic creeds generally, the Arminian premise that all inability however brought about is inconsistent with obligation, he concedes it and endeavors to show that there is ability. (See supplement 4.5.14.)

Moral necessity is asserted by Augustine and Calvin. It means that necessity in the moral character of the volitions which arises from a habitus of the will, from a bias or disposition of the voluntary faculty. A holy will has a holy habitus and is thereby under a moral necessity of exerting holy volitions: “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit.” Hence St. Paul denominates the spiritual man “a servant (slave) of righteousness” (Romans 6:18). St. John asserts that “whosoever is born of God cannot sin” (1 John 3:9). A sinful will has a sinful habitus and is thereby under a moral necessity of exerting sinful volitions: “You were servants (slaves) of sin” (Romans 6:17); “whosoever commits sin is the servant (slave) of sin” (John 8:34). A holy will is unable to disobey; and a sinful will is unable to obey.

Fatalism has been charged upon this doctrine of moral necessity, but erroneously. Were the sinful disposition of the will itself necessitated, the charge would be well founded. Were the sinful inclination the necessary effect of some antecedent act or arrangement of God, as the volition is the necessary effect of the antecedent inclination, man would not be responsible for sin. But it is not. The sinful inclination is the abiding self-determination of the human will. Its origin is due to an act of freedom in Adam; and its continuance is due to the unceasing self-determination of every individual of the posterity. Each individual man prolongs and perpetuates in himself the evil inclination of will that was started in Adam. Sinful inclination began freely in the one sin of the whole race and is continued freely in the millions of individual inclinations in the millions of individuals of the race. Had sinful inclination been created and infused by God, then as the sinful volitions are referred to the inclination as their cause, the sinful inclination must have been referred to God as its cause. The doctrine of moral necessity means only that the volitions must necessarily be like the inclination. It does not mean that the inclination itself is originated and necessitated by God. A habitus or disposition in the will intensifies and confirms free voluntary action, instead of weakening or destroying it. For a habitus is a vehement and total self-determination. But that which promotes determination by the self of course precludes compulsion by that which is not self. Hence the bondage of the will to sinful inclination does not destroy either the voluntariness or the responsibility of the will. The enslaved will is still a self-determining faculty; the bondage of sin is a responsible and guilty bondage, because proceeding from the ego, not from God. Calvin (2.2.5) maintains this in the following manner:

Bernard subscribing to what is said by Augustine, thus expresses himself: “Among all the animals, man alone is free; and yet by the intervention of sin, he also suffers a species of violence; but from the will, not from nature, so that he is not thereby deprived of his innate liberty.” For what is voluntary is also free. And a little after, Bernard says, “The will being, by I know not what corrupt and surprising means, changed for the worse is itself the author of the necessity to which it is subject; so that neither necessity, being voluntary, can excuse the will, nor the will, being fascinated (illecta), can exclude necessity.” For this necessity is in some measure voluntary. Afterward he says that we are oppressed with a yoke, but no other than that of a voluntary servitude; that therefore our servitude renders us miserable and our will renders us inexcusable; because the will, when it was free, made itself the slave of sin. At length he concludes, “Thus the soul, in a certain strange and evil manner, under this kind of voluntary and free yet pernicious necessity, is both enslaved and free; enslaved by necessity, free by its will [inclination]; and, what is more wonderful and more miserable, it is guilty because free; and enslaved wherein it is guilty; and so therein enslaved wherein it is free.” From these passages, the reader clearly perceives that I am teaching no novel doctrine, but what was long ago advanced by Augustine, with the universal consent of pious men and which for nearly a thousand years after was confined to the cloisters of monks. But Lombard, for want of knowing how to distinguish necessity from coercion, gave rise to a pernicious error. The moral inability of the sinner, then, is the inability to incline rightly from a wrong state of the will, to convert sinful into holy inclination. He is already sinfully inclined. This sinful inclination is moral spontaneity or self-determination to an ultimate end. From the standpoint and starting point of evil, it is impossible to incline or self-determine to God. The sinner may exert volitions and make resolutions in hope of producing another inclination, but they are failures. A holy inclination cannot be originated by this method. This is moral inability. What are the grounds of it? The finiteness and limitation of the created will is a ground. Holy inclination, we have seen (see pp. 496-97), must be given in creation. Neither man’s nor angel’s will can be first created without character and from this involuntary state originate holy inclination. The beginning, therefore, of holiness must always proceed from God. It can no more be originated by the creature than the spiritual substance itself of the will can be. But if this is true of man as finite and of angel as finite, it is still more so of man as sinful. When he is already preoccupied by a sinful inclination, it would be still more impossible for him to originate a holy inclination. The mutability of the finite will is the possibility of falling from holiness to sin, not the possibility of rising from sin to holiness. If the will of man or angel becomes evil, it is evil immutably, apart from regenerating grace. When holy, it can change its inclination by its own energy without the coagency of God. But when sinful, it cannot do this. The finite will is mutably holy, but immutably sinful, so far as its own force is concerned. The derivative nature of finite holiness is a second ground of moral inability. Holiness is a concreated quality of man like intelligence or rationality. But concreated qualities are incapable of self-origination. We perceive immediately that man cannot be the author of his own intellectuality. He cannot be created without the ideas of space and time, of God and self, in brief, without innate ideas, and then originate them by his own power. He cannot come from the creative hand an idiot without reason and then rationalize himself. Rationality and intelligence are derived characteristics, and therefore they are beyond man’s power to produce. In like manner, holiness is a derived characteristic and therefore cannot be man’s product. The creature cannot do the Creator’s work. It would be absurd to say that matter can be created lacking one of the necessary properties of matter, say, impenetrability, and can then originate for itself the lacking property. But it would be a like absurdity to affirm that man or angel can be created lacking one of the necessary characteristics of moral perfection, namely, holiness, and can then originate it. This reasoning does not hold good in regard to sin. Man can be created without sin and afterward originate it himself for three reasons:

1. Because sin is not a derivative quality. Sin starts in the finite will, not in the infinite. If it were derived from God, it would not be damnable and therefore not sin.

2. Because sin is not an element in moral perfection. Everything that comes from the Creator’s hand must be perfect after its kind. A created moral being must have created moral perfection. This implies holiness and excludes sin.

3. Because sin is not a primary and normal characteristic of human nature. It does not enter into the idea and ideal of man. Sin, unlike holiness, does not belong to man as man. The human will can originate sin because it is a secondary and abnormal quality. God is the author of the normal, but the creature is the originator of the abnormal. All that belongs to man as ideal and perfect must come from God; but all that belongs to man as fallen and imperfect must come from man himself. Hence man can originate sin but not holiness. The adorableness of a self-originated holiness is a third proof of moral inability. If man or angel were the sole and ultimate author of holiness in himself, his holiness would be underived and self-subsistent, and he would deserve the glory due to such holiness. Strictly self-originated holiness is worthy of worship. But the testimony of the Christian experience is against this: “By the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). The testimony of the angelic consciousness is also against this. The seraphim cried, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts” (Isaiah 6:3). The trisagion attributes absolute and original holiness only to God. The testimony of Christ is against this: “None is good but one” (Luke 18:19). If man or angel should begin a holy inclination, his merit before God and law would be absolute and not relative. This contradicts 17:10: “When you shall have done all those things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants.” God in this case would be under an original and primary obligation to the creature. The reflex action of sin upon the will itself is a fourth ground of moral inability. Self-determination to evil destroys self-determination to good. The voluntary faculty, like every other faculty of the soul, cannot escape the consequences of its own action. Self-determination to sin reacts upon the will and renders it unable to holiness. The slavery of the will is an effect of the will upon its self. Whosoever commits sin in and by this very voluntary act becomes the slave of sin (John 8:24). Says Augustine (Confessions 8.5): My will the enemy held and thence had made a chain for me and bound me. For of a perverse will comes lust; and a lust yielded to becomes custom; and custom not resisted becomes necessity. By which links, as it were, joined together as in a chain, a hard bondage held me enthralled. And that new will, to serve you freely and to enjoy you, O God, which had begun to be in me, was not able to overcome my former long-established willfulness. In these spiritual things, ability is one with will, and to will is to do; and yet the thing is not done. Whence is this strange anomaly (monstrum)? The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to be moved, and such readiness is there that command is scarce distinct from obedience. The mind commands the mind, its own self, to will; and yet it does not will. It commands itself, I say, to will and would not command unless it willed; and yet what it commands is not done. But it will not entirely; therefore does it not command entirely. For it commands only so far forth as it wills. The will commands that there be a will [inclination]; not another’s will, but its own will. But it does not command entirely; therefore, what it commands does not take place.

Says Samuel Hopkins (Works 1.233-35):

It is certain that every degree of inclination contrary to duty, which is and must be sinful, implies and involves an equal degree of difficulty and inability to obey. For indeed, such inclination of the heart to disobey and the difficulty or inability to obey are precisely one and the same. The kind of difficulty or inability, therefore, always is great according to the strength and fixedness of the inclination to disobey; and it becomes total and absolute [inability], when the heart is totally corrupt and wholly opposed to obedience. Nothing but the opposition of the heart or will of man to coming to Christ is or can be in the way of his coming. So long as this continues and his heart is wholly opposed to Christ, he cannot come to him; it is impossible and will continue so, until his unwillingness, his opposition to coming to Christ, be removed by a change and renovation of his heart, by divine grace, and he be willing in the day of God’s power. The excess of will to sin is the same as defect of will to holiness. The degree of intensity with which any being inclines to evil is the measure of the amount of power to good which he has thereby lost. If the intensity be total, the loss is entire. Sin is the suicidal action of the human will. To do wrong destroys the power to do right. This is illustrated in the effect of a vicious habit in diminishing a man’s ability to resist temptation. But habit is the continual repetition of wrong self-decisions, every one of which reacts upon the will as a faculty and renders it less strong and energetic to good. No man can do a wrong act and be as sound in his will and as spiritually strong after it as he was before it.

Again, the totality of the depravity of the will destroys moral ability or ability to good. The whole and not a mere part of the will is determined. Consequently, when a self-determination to a final end has occurred, there is no remainder of uncommitted power in reserve, as it were, behind the existing determination, by which the direction of the will may be reversed. This total and intense determination to evil is inability to good. The debilitating effect of self-determination upon the will itself is too often overlooked. When cause and effect are in different subjects, the impotence of the cause itself after its own action is always taken into account; but when, as in the case of a sinful inclination, cause and effect are in one and the same subject, namely, the human will, the impotence of the cause itself after its own action is not always noticed or is practically denied. If, for illustration, one man kill another man, all know that the murderer cannot restore the murdered man to life. The cause cannot undo its effect when they are in different subjects. But the same is true when a man kills himself. Here the cause and the effect are in one and the same subject. Now this is true also of the human will in reference to the sin of which it is the cause. Sin is the effect of free will as the cause; and because the will originates sin, it is assumed that the will can nullify sin, can destroy what it originated. But the effect in this instance is as much beyond the power of the cause, when once the cause has acted, as in any other instance. A man certainly cannot undo the guilt of his sin, and neither can he undo the inclination to sin.

Says the younger Edwards (Against Chauncy, 13): A certainty that has been established by the will of man with respect to the will itself as effectually binds that will and is equally inconsistent with its liberty [to the contrary] as if that certainty were established by any other cause. Suppose the will of any man shall establish in itself a certain and unfailing bias to any particular action or series of actions; it cannot be pretended that this fixed bias already established is any more consistent with liberty [to the contrary] and moral agency in the man in whom the bias exists than if it had been established by any other cause. If a man were to cut off his own leg, though he might be more blamable for the act of cutting it off than he would be for the same act performed by another, yet the effect, as to his subsequent ability to walk, would be the very same.¹⁰⁰[Note: 00 100. WS: Shedd, Sermons to the NaturalMan 1:1;Man 1:11;Man 1:14.]

But if man, either unfallen or fallen, cannot begin a holy inclination, how is it that he can begin an evil one? If he cannot be the ultimate and meritorious author of holiness, how can he be the ultimate and ill-deserving author of sin? Why may there be a power to the contrary downward from a holy position, but no power to the contrary upward from a sinful position? Why can man ruin, but not save himself?

Because of the difference between self-determination to holiness and self-determination to sin. The first is relative, the last is absolute self-determination. Relative self-determination is self-determination with a divine element in it; absolute self-determination is self-determination without a divine element in it. The former is self-determination under divine impulse and actuation; the latter is solitary self-determination without divine impulse and actuation. Holiness in man is divine-human: the product of God working in the creature to will and to do. Sin in man is human simply and only: the product of the finite will uninfluenced and unimpelled. Augustine, as quoted by Calvin (2.2.4), defines liberum arbitrium¹⁰¹[Note: 01 101. free will] as “a power of reason and will by which good is chosen when grace assists and evil is chosen when grace is wanting.” Aquinas, as quoted by Neander (History 4.481), says that holy “free will is not an independent causality. God works in the finite will in the way that the nature of it requires that he should; although, therefore, he changes the inclination of man to another direction, nevertheless, by his almighty power he causes that man should freely will the change which he experiences; and thus all constraint is removed. For to suppose otherwise, that the man willed not the change which is a change in his will, would be a contradiction.” The difference between the two kinds of self-determination is marked in language. The noun sin has an active verb to correspond with it; the noun holiness has none. Sin is “sinning” or “to sin”; but holiness is not “holying” or “to holy.” Only the passive is employed in the latter case: “to be holy” or “to become holy.” But both the active and passive are employed in the former. Man is willing in holiness; and he is willing in sin. But the willingness in the first case is complex. God works in man to will (Php 2:13). The willingness in the second case is simple. Man works alone. In the first instance, the human will harmonizes with the divine; in the second, it antagonizes. In the first instance, the voluntariness is recipient: “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7); “you have received the spirit of adoption” (Romans 8:15). In the second instance, the voluntariness is originant. The question arises whether the divine element in holy self-determination does not, in reality, destroy the self-determination. If God creates voluntary spontaneity when he creates a holy man or recreates it when he regenerates him, is it in either case real and genuine spontaneity? Must not the human will act alone and independently in order to act voluntarily; and is not the sinful will the only free will, because it is not influenced by God in its action? The answer is in the negative: (a) Because revelation teaches this agency of God in and on the finite will and at the same time teaches that the resulting holiness is true freedom: “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36); (b) because consciousness reports that the holy inclination is spontaneous and unforced; and (c) because if the human will in order to act freely must not experience any influence or impulse from God, then all divine influence is necessitating. And the same is true of human influence.

Man can originate sin because sin is imperfection. The infinite will cannot originate imperfection: “God’s work is perfect” (Deuteronomy 32:4; 2 Samuel 22:31; Psalms 18:30). This is one of the differentia between the Creator and the creature. Infinite, uncreated, and eternal will cannot cause any defective thing; but finite, created, and temporal will can. Sin is defective because it has less of being in it than holiness has. There was once a time when it was not; but holiness always was. Sin has no positive and eternal right to be; holiness has such a right. Sin is not necessary in the universe of God; had God so decreed, the created will would never have originated it. But holiness is necessary. Because of these facts, the Schoolmen defined sin as a negation, a defect rather than an effect. To originate it is not the sign of power but of weakness. Hence the possibility of sinning is not an excellence but a deficiency. It is one of the limitations of the finite. That it does not belong to God does not prove that God is not free or that he has less power than a man or angel has, any more than the impossibility of having a physical disease or of dying proves that God is inferior to man. The possibility of doing an evil thing is weakness rather than power. (See supplement 4.5.15.) Moral Inability and Moral Obligation The foundation of man’s obligation to perfectly obey the divine law was the holiness and plenary power to good with which he was endowed by his Creator. Because God made man in his own image, he was obliged to sinless obedience. Moral obligation rested upon the union and combination of the so-called natural ability with the moral. It did not rest upon the first alone. Not a will without any inclination, but a will with a holy inclination, was the basis of the requirement of sinless obedience. The possession of a will undetermined would not constitute man a moral agent. God did not make man without moral character and then require perfect obedience from him. When man was created and placed under law, he was endowed not only with the faculties of a man, but with those faculties in a normal condition. The understanding was spiritually enlightened, and the will was rightly inclined. He had both “natural” and “moral” ability. He had real and plenary power to obey the law of God. In the beginning of man’s moral existence, ability must equal obligation. And the ability did equal it. Kant’s dictum-“I ought, therefore I can”-was true of holy Adam and his posterity in him. If at the instant man came from the hand of God he had been unable to obey, he would not have been obligated to obey: The law was not above man’s strength when he was possessed of original righteousness, though it be above man’s strength since he was stripped of original righteousness. The command was dated before man had contracted his impotency, when he had a power to keep it, as well as to break it. Had it been enjoined to man only after the fall, and not before, he might have had a better pretense to excuse himself, because of the impossibility of it; yet he would not have had sufficient excuse, since the impossibility did not result from the nature of the law, but from the corrupted nature of the creature. It “was weak through the flesh” (Romans 8:3), but it was promulgated when man had a strength proportioned to the commands of it. (Charnock, Holiness of God)

Obligation being thus founded upon the Creator’s gifts cannot be destroyed by any subsequent action of the creature. If he destroys his ability, he does not destroy his obligation. If man by his own voluntary action loses any or all of the talents entrusted to him, he cannot assign this loss as a reason why any or all the talents, together with usury, should not be demanded of him in the final settlement (see Christ’s parable of the talents): “God’s commandments are not the measure of our powers but the rules of our duty. They do not teach what we are now able to do, but what we ought to do, and what we were able to do at one time”¹⁰²[Note: 02 102. Praecepta dei non sunt mensura virium, sed regula officii; non docent quid nunc possumus, sed quid debeamus, et quod olim potuerimus.] (Turretin 10.4.23). Heidelberg Catechism 9 thus represents the subject: “Does not God, then, wrong man by requiring of him in his law that which he cannot perform? A. No; for God so made man that he could perform it; but man through the instigation of the devil, by willful disobedience, deprived himself and all his posterity of this power.”

It is objected that if man is unable to keep the law he is not obligated to keep it. This depends upon the nature of the inability and its cause.

If man were destitute of reason, conscience, will, or any of the faculties of a moral being, he would not be obligated. If he were internally wrought upon by an almighty being and prevented from obeying, he would not be obligated. If he were prevented by any external compulsion, he would not be obligated. If he had been created sinful, he would not be obligated. If he had been created indifferent either to holiness or sin, he would not have been obligated. None of these conditions obtain in the case of man. He was created holy, with plenary power to keep perfectly the moral law, and therefore was obligated to keep it. At the point of creation, ability and obligation were equal. But if after creation in holiness and plenary power, any alteration be made in the original ratio between ability and obligation by the creature’s voluntary agency, this cannot alter the original obligation. If ability is weakened by an act of self-determination, obligation is not weakened. If ability is totally destroyed by self-determination, obligation is not destroyed. The latter is the fact in the case. There is a total inability, but it is not an original or created inability. It came to be by man’s act, not by God’s: “Man’s inability to restore what he owes to God, an inability brought upon himself, does not excuse man from paying the satisfaction due to justice; for the result of sin cannot excuse the sin itself” (Anselm, Why the God-?Man 1:24). The principle that if a moral power once possessed is lost by the voluntary action of the possessor he is not thereby released from the original duty that rested upon it is acknowledged by writers upon ethics. Aristotle (Ethics 3.5) remarks that it is just in legislators: to punish people even for ignorance itself, if they are the cause of their own ignorance; just as the punishment is double for drunken people. For the cause is in themselves; since it was in their own power not to get drunk, and drunkenness is the cause of their ignorance. And they punish those who are ignorant of anything in the laws which they ought to know and which it is not difficult to know; and likewise in all other cases in which they are ignorant through negligence, upon the ground that it was in their own power to pay attention to it. But perhaps a person is unable to give his attention? But he himself is the cause of this inability, by living in a dissipated manner. Persons are themselves the causes of their being unrighteous by performing bad actions and of being intemperate by passing their time in drunken revels and such like. When a man does those acts by which he becomes unjust, he becomes unjust voluntarily [i.e., by the action of his own will]. Nevertheless, he will not be able to leave off being unjust and to become just whenever he pleases. For the sick man cannot become well whenever he pleases, even though it so happen that he is voluntarily sick owing to an incontinent life and from disobedience to physicians. At the time indeed, it was in his own power not to be sick; but when he has once allowed himself to become sick, it is no longer in his power not to be sick; just as it is no longer in the power of a man who has thrown a stone to recover it. And yet the throwing of it was in his own power, for the origin of the action was in his own power. In like manner, in the beginning it was in the power of the unjust and the intemperate man not to become unjust and intemperate; and therefore they are so voluntarily. But when they have become so, it is no longer in their power to avoid being unjust and intemperate.… And not only are the faults of the soul voluntary, but in some persons those of the body are so likewise, and with these we find fault. For no one finds fault with those who are disfigured and ugly by birth, but only with those who are so through neglect of gymnastic exercise or through carelessness. The case is the same with bodily weakness and mutilation. For no one would blame a man who is born blind or who is blind from disease or a blow, but would rather pity him. But everybody would blame the man who is blind from drunkenness or any intemperance. For those faults of the body which are in our own power originally and which result from our own action, we are blamable. The assertion of Plato (Laws 5.731) that “the unjust man is not unjust of his own free will; because no man of his own free will would choose to experience the greatest of evils,” if it were true, would relieve the unjust man of obligation. The ethics of Plato in such an assertion is defective. He, however, contradicts himself, because elsewhere he teaches the guiltiness of the unjust man. Even in this very connection (Laws 5.734), he reasons in a self-contradictory manner. The temperate life, he says, is pleasant and the intemperate is painful, “and he who would live pleasantly cannot possibly choose to live intemperately. If this be true, the inference clearly is that no man is voluntarily intemperate, but that the whole multitude of men lack temperance in their lives, either from ignorance or from want of self-control or both.” But “want of self-control” is voluntariness. The probability is that Plato in the above extract employs “voluntary” in the sense of “volitionary.” In secular commercial life, the loss of ability does not release from obligation. A man is as much a debtor to his creditors after his bankruptcy, as he was before. The loss of his property does not free him from indebtedness. He cannot say to his creditor, “I owed you yesterday, because I was able to pay you; but today I owe you nothing, because I am a bankrupt.” It is a legal maxim that bankruptcy does not invalidate contracts. That obligation remains fixed and immutable under all the modifications of ability introduced by the action of the human will is proved by the case of the drunkard and the habit which he has formed. The drunkard is certainly less able to obey the law of temperance than the temperate man is. But this law has precisely the same claim upon him that it has upon the temperate. The diminution of ability has not diminished the obligation. If obligation must always keep pace with the changes in the ability, then there are degrees of obligation. The stronger the will is, the more it is obliged; the weaker it is, the less is it bound by law. In this case, sin rewards the sinner by delivering him from the claims of law. The most vicious man would be least under obligation to duty.

It is objected that if the apostate will is unable to perfectly obey the divine law it is not free. The reply to this objection requires a definition of finite freedom, both negatively and positively. Negatively, finite freedom is not …

1. Freedom of omnipotence (Owen, Arminianism, 12): There are many things out of man’s power, but this does not prove that he is necessitated within his own proper sphere of action.

2. Freedom of independence: This species of freedom requires self-existence and self-sustenation. It is beyond the reach of an influence from another being. It is pure aseity (aseitas) or self-sufficiency.

3. Freedom from the internal consequences of voluntary action: The formation of a habit is voluntary; but when the habit has been voluntarily formed, it cannot be eradicated by a volition.

4. Freedom from the external consequences of voluntary action: The objective fact caused by the will cannot be destroyed by the will. The suicide cannot restore himself to life; the homicide cannot reanimate his victim.

5. Freedom from action itself: The will is not free not to act at all. The will must will something, as the mind must think something. Inaction of the will is impossible, like inaction of the understanding.

6. Freedom from the regulation and restraint of law: Even in God, freedom is not unbridled almightiness unregulated by other attributes. God can do all that he wills to do, but there are some things which he cannot will because certain of his attributes prevent: for example, logical contradictions and sinful acts. Freedom in God is rational freedom. Kant denominates the practical reason the will, because, ideally, the will is one with reason. “Subjection (douleia)¹⁰³[Note: 03 103. δουλεία] to righteousness” (Romans 6:19) is “obedience from the heart” or spontaneity (6:17) and also “glorious liberty” (8:21). The moral law is “a law of liberty” (James 2:25). The believer is “free indeed” (John 8:34).

7. The possibility of willing contrary to what is already being willed: The possibility of willing the contrary is an accident, not the substance of freedom. It may be associated, temporarily, with an existing self-determination for the purpose of testing the strength of it, but not for the purpose of making the self-determination any more self-determined than it is already is in its own nature. Freedom is the present actual willingness and not the power to will something else in addition to the present actual willingness. Suppose, for illustration, that a man thinks of only one single act, say, to walk to a certain tree before him. No other act is in his mind. He walks spontaneously to this tree. Here, he does not choose between two actions, but he self-determines to one action. He walks to the tree and is free in so doing, not because he could have walked away from the tree if the thought of so doing had occurred to him, but because he actually walked to the tree proprio motu¹⁰⁴[Note: 04 104. by his own movement] and without compulsion.

8. Indifference or freedom from a bias or inclination: A bias or inclination of the will is the central and dominant self-determination of the will. The stronger the bias, the more intense is the self-determination and hence the more intense the freedom. The more the will is self-determined and inclined, the farther off it is from indifference; and hence indifference is not the characteristic of freedom.

9. Mere liberty of performing an outward act: Edwards, in his polemics against the Arminian, finds the substance of freedom in this.¹⁰⁵[Note: 05 105. WS: Will in Works 2.17. So also does Locke, Understanding 2.8, 21; and Hobbes, Works 2.410.] According to this, a man is free to worship God only when he is permitted to act out his inclination and to worship externally; and if he is not so permitted, he is not free to worship God. But the truth is that if he has the inclination to worship he is a free worshiper, whether he is allowed to put his inclination into volition and act or not. He is the Lord’s freeman and a true worshiper, by virtue of his spontaneous inclination itself. “Fool,” says the lady in Comus, Fool do not boast:

You cannot touch the freedom of my mind With all thy charms, although this corporal rind You have immanacled, while Heaven sees good. The same truth is embodied in the fine lines of Lovelace, written while confined in prison:

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.

-Percy, Reliques And on the other hand, if a man has an evil inclination, say to earthly ambition and power, he is free in sin, that is, self-determinedly sinful, whether he is permitted to carry it out in volition and act or not. Shut him in prison, so that he can take no part in earthly affairs, he is still Satan’s freeman by virtue of the inclination of his will. The reason of this is the fact that the subjective energy of the human will is all that a man can call his own and be responsible for. The realization of this personal inward energy in outward act depends upon others and especially upon the providence of God, but not upon the man himself. The circumstances of a man are no part of his spontaneous self-determination, and he is not responsible for them. He is not free in regard to them. As in the case supposed, a man may have the inclination to worship God, but his surroundings prevent. These surroundings are no part of his voluntary agency and ought not to be taken into account in determining whether he is a free agent. If the subjective personal energy of his own will, as seen in his inclination, is truly free from compulsion and really spontaneous, he is free, whether he can give it outward form in a particular act or not. Says Calvin (2.4.8): The ability of the human will is not to be estimated from the event of things, as some ignorant men are accustomed to do. For they imagine that they disprove the freedom of the human will, because even the greatest monarchs have not all their desires fulfilled. But the ability of which we are speaking is to be considered as within man and not to be measured by external success. For in the dispute concerning free will, the question is not whether a man notwithstanding external impediments can perform and execute whatever he may have determined in his mind, but whether in every case his understanding exerts freedom of judgment (judicii electionem) and his will freedom of inclination (affectionem voluntatis). If men possess both of these, then Attilius Regulus when confined in the small extent of a cask stuck round with nails will possess as much free will as Augustus Caesar when governing a great part of the world with his rod. To the same effect, Edwards (Will 3.4) remarks that if the will [i.e., the inclination] fully complies, and the proposed effect does not prove, according to the laws of nature, to be connected with his [executive] volition, the man is perfectly excused; he has a natural inability to the thing required. For the will [inclination] itself, as has been observed, is all that can be directly and immediately required by command; and other things only indirectly, as connected with the will. If, therefore, there be a full compliance of will [inclination], the person has done his duty, and if other things do not prove to be connected with his [executive] volition that is not owing to him. (cf. Reid, Intellectual Powers 3.4.1) Defined positively, finite freedom is …

1. Self-determination in the sense of moral spontaneity-not self-determination and power to the contrary, but self-determination alone, pure, and simple: The first is true, the last is spurious self-determination and should be denominated indetermination.

2. Freedom from compulsion, either internal or external: “God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty that it is not forced to good or evil” (Westminster Confession 9.1).

3. Freedom from physical necessity or the operation of the law of cause and effect: “God has endued the will of man with that natural liberty that it is not by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil” (Westminster Confession 9.1).

Physical necessity is seen in the sequences of physical cause and effect. There is no freedom in such a series of sequences because there is no true beginning and first start. The cause is itself an effect of a foregoing cause, and this again is the effect of another foregoing cause and so backward indefinitely: causa causae causa causati.¹⁰⁶[Note: 06 106. The cause of a cause is the cause of the thing caused.] No responsible cause can be found in such a line of antecedents and consequents, because as fast as the responsibility is found in a particular cause, it is thrown back upon the cause of this cause. No real and true author or beginner is found until the chain terminates in God, who is not a part of the chain, but the Creator of it. All physical and material events and phenomena must be referred to the Prime Mover. There is no real author and no first cause within the chain of nature itself. But in the sphere of mind, the case is different. The law of cause and effect operating in matter has no operation in the human will. This latter is the faculty of self-motion. Even when the Holy Spirit works in it “to will and to do,” the motion is still self-motion-spiritual not physical, voluntary not necessitated. In the origin of sin, the will cannot refer its action back to a physical cause and thus convert it into a mere effect and transfer its responsibility to a foregoing cause of its agency. In respect to sin, it is itself a true originating cause. It begins its own movement ab intra,¹⁰⁷[Note: 07 107. from within] by an act of self-determination. There is a first inclining of the will to the creature, and away from the Creator, which is not the effect of a foregoing sin, but is the original nisus or start of self-will. And in the origin of holiness, though the will must refer its action back to God, yet not to him as a physical cause producing a physical effect. Holy inclination is the activity of mind, not of matter. It is not produced by the operation of the law of cause and effect, because the divine Spirit works in the human will in accordance with the nature of mind, not of matter.

If this be the true definition of freedom, it follows that the apostate will is free in being inclined or self-determined and that this inclination to evil constitutes an inability to good. The sinner is at once voluntary in sin and impotent to holiness. He is enslaved by himself to himself. He cannot love God supremely, because he loves himself supremely. He cannot incline rightly, because he is inclining wrongly. He is spontaneously and freely evil and therefore is unable to be spontaneously and freely good. Self-determination is a hazardous endowment. It may be an evil as well as a good. When free will is wicked will, it is a curse. (See supplement 4.5.16.) The answer to the question “can the sinner repent if he will?” depends on the meaning of the term Will: whether it denotes inclination or volition. Can the sinner repent if he incline? Yes. But the inclining is the repentance itself. So that this answer is the truism “he can repent, if he repents.” Can the sinner repent, if he choose or resolve? No. A volition of the will cannot produce an inclination of the will. If a man inclines to repent, he repents in so inclining; but if a man resolves to repent, he does not repent in so resolving.

It is objected that if the sinner has no power to obey the law he has nothing to do in the matter of religion. He may say with Macbeth, If chance will have me king, why let chance crown me, Without my stir. This does not follow. Because the sinner cannot do the primary work, it does not follow that he cannot do the secondary. He has a very important work to do, namely, to discover his inability. A wide field is open here for his agency. (a) He can compare his character and conduct with the requirements of the law; this tends to convince him of his inability to perfectly obey the law: “I have seen an end of all perfection; your commandment is exceeding broad” (Psalms 119:96). (b) He can try to obey the law; this will convince him of his inability still more. A sinner has power under common grace to find out that he has no power to the “spiritually good.” This is a preparative work to regeneration. The discovery that he is “without strength” leads to the discovery that “Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). When he is weak then he is strong. God has appointed certain means to be employed by common grace prior to his exercise of regenerating grace, not meritoriously, but as congruous or adapted to the end. The sinner is to use them. Says Howe (Decrees 3.7): Where there is not as yet the light of a saint, there is that of a man, and that is to be improved and made use of in order to our higher light; and if there be that self-reflection to which God has given to every man a natural ability, much more may be known than usually is. It belongs to the nature of man to turn his eyes inward. Men can reflect and consider this with themselves: Have I not an aversion toward God? Have not worldly concernments and affairs, by the natural inclination of my own mind, a greater room and place there than heaven and the things of heaven? Are not other thoughts more grateful? And have they not a more pleasant relish with me than thoughts of God? Men, I say, are capable of using such reflections as these. And therefore of considering: This can never be well with me. If there remain with me a habitual aversion to God, who must be my best and eternal good, I cannot but be eternally miserable. If I cannot think of and converse with him with inclination and pleasure, I am lost. If my blessedness lie above, in another world, and my mind is carried continually downward toward this world, I must have a heart attempered to heaven, or I can never come there. Well, then, let me try if I can change the habit of my own mind, make the attempt, make the trial. The more you attempt and try, the more you will find that of yourselves you cannot; you can do nothing of yourselves, you do but lift a heavy log, you attempt to move a mountain upward, when you would lift at your own terrene hearts. Then is this consideration obvious: I must have help from heaven, or I shall never come there. Therefore fall a-seeking, fall a-supplicating, as one that apprehends himself in danger to perish and be lost, if he have not another heart, a believing heart, a holy heart, a heavenly heart.¹⁰⁸[Note: 08 108. WS: See also Howe, Blessedness of the Righteous, 18; Boston, Fourfold State 2.3.1-3; and especially Owen, Holy Spirit 3.2.]

It is objected that if the sinner’s ability to keep the moral law depends upon the sovereign grace of God he must wait God’s time. The reply is that God’s time is now and therefore excludes waiting for it: “God says, I have heard you in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succored you: behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2); “God limits (horizei)¹⁰⁹[Note: 09 109. ὁριζεῖ] a certain day: saying, Today if you will hear his voice harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 4:7). God offers the Holy Spirit as a regenerating Spirit this very instant, but confines the offer to this very instant. Nowhere in revelation does God offer to pardon sin or regenerate the soul at a future time. This work is always described as to be done in the sinner’s heart, now, this very moment. No future redemption is promised. The sinner excuses himself from faith and repentance by saying, “I cannot believe. I am unable to repent.” He is to be made to feel the truth of his statement, not to be told that his statement is untrue. He needs to become conscious of that inability which in words he asserts, but not in sincerity. The difficulty in the instance in which this objection of inability is urged is that the sinner does not really believe what he says. He does not realize his inability; but he perceives that to urge it is a good verbal objection, an argumentum ad hominem¹¹⁰[Note: 10 110. an argument relying on personal abuse] for the preacher. In this case, the work of the preacher is to make the objector eat his own words and seriously feel the truth of his assertion. And in doing this, he will bring out the important fact that the sinner’s inability is guilty because self-originated, that the sinner is the sole author of the inability.

It is objected that the doctrine of inability is incompatible with commands and exhortations to believe, repent, and obey the law of God. It is said that we would not command a dead man to rise from the grave or a man without legs to walk. To this it is to be replied that we would so command if God bade us to utter this commandment in a given instance and promised to accompany the word from our lips with his own omnipotent and creative power. Christ’s command to preach the gospel to men “dead in trespasses and sins” and who “cannot come unto the Son except the Father draw them” (John 6:44) is coupled with the promise to accompany the truth with the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the sinner’s ability is exposed to great objections:

1. It contradicts consciousness. The process of “conviction” is a growing sense of inability to everything spiritually good in heart and conduct. Sinful man cannot be made conscious of ability. This form of consciousness has never been in the human soul.

2. The tenet undermines the doctrine of atonement. It is conceded that the sinner has no ability to make atonement for his guilt; it would follow from this theory of ability that he is not obligated to make one, in other words, that punitive justice has no claims upon him.

3. The tenet conflicts with the doctrine of endless punishment. If the power to the contrary belongs inalienably to the apostate will, self-restoration in the future world is possible, and endless punishment is not certain. The Alexandrine theologians Clement and Origen founded their denial of endless punishment upon this view of the will. If the sinner is able at all times to believe and repent, he may do so at any time, and under the impressions of the other world it is probable that he will. Clement and Origen founded the final recovery of Satan and his angels, together with fallen man, in the future world upon the abiding existence of free will to good. It is no reply to this objection to say that the lost man can, but certainly never will repent. If latent power be given in the premise, the natural inference is that it will be used, not that it will not be. Suppose that previous to the fall it had been said, “Adam has the power to sin, but he certainly never will sin.” Suppose that it were said, “Gunpowder has the inherent power of self-explosion, but it certainly never will explode.” To say that it was certain that Adam would use his power to sin because it was decreed that he would use it is not to the point; because this is inferring the certainty as relative to the divine decree, not as relative to the power of the human will, which is the matter in dispute.

4. The tenet of ability encourages the sinner to procrastination and neglect of the gospel offer. If he believes that from the very nature of free will he has the power to believe and repent at any moment, he will defer faith and repentance. A sense of danger excites; a sense of security puts to sleep. A company of gamblers in the sixth story are told that the building is on fire. One of them answers, “We have the key to the fire escape,” and all continue the game. Suddenly one exclaims, “The key is lost”; all immediately spring to their feet and endeavor to escape. While there was the belief of security, there was apathy; the instant there was a knowledge of insecurity, there was action.

5. If the law can be perfectly obeyed by “natural ability” or by will without right inclination, then “moral ability” is superfluous. But if the law cannot be obeyed except by the union of natural and moral ability or by will with right inclination, then either alone is insufficient. The following propositions comprise the substance of the Augustino-Calvinistic doctrine of inability. (1) There is a free self-determination or inclining to evil in the sinner’s will. (2) There is an inability of the sinner to self-determine or incline to good that results from his self-determining or inclining to evil. This inability is culpable because it is the product of the sinner’s agency. (3) The Holy Spirit reoriginates self-determination or inclination to good in the sinner’s will. (4) The sinner’s will is wholly, not partially, dependent upon the divine Spirit for a holy self-determination or inclination. (5) God has elected an immense “multitude whom no man can number” to be the subjects of his regenerating power.

Actual transgressions are the particular sins that proceed from original sin. They are the individual’s sins of act in distinction from his inherited nature and inclination. Original sin is one; actual sin is manifold. “Actual” in this connection is not the contrary of “imaginary.” Actual transgressions are accompanied with more or less of self-consciousness.

Actual transgressions are (a) interior, namely, a particular conscious doubt in the mind or a particular conscious lust in the heart. These are single manifestations of the general inclination. The worship of the creature or idolatry (Romans 1:25) is the generic corruption, and an internal actual transgression is the outworking of this in a particular ambitious purpose or a proud aspiration or a malignant emotion, etc. And actual transgressions are (b) exterior, namely, theft, lie, homicide, suicide, etc. The depravity or corruption of nature is total: Man is “wholly inclined to evil, and that continually” (Westminster Larger Catechism 25); “God saw that every imagination of the thoughts of man was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). There can be but a single dominant inclination in the will at one and the same time, though with it there may be remnants of a previously dominant inclination. Adam began a new sinful inclination. This expelled the prior holy inclination. He was therefore totally depraved, because there were no remainders of original righteousness left after apostasy, as there are remainders of original sin left after regeneration. This is proved by the fact that there is no struggle between sin and holiness in the natural man like that in the spiritual man. In the regenerate, “the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh” (Galatians 5:17). Holiness and sin are in a conflict that causes the regenerate to “groan within themselves” (Romans 8:23). But there is no such conflict and groaning in the natural man. Apostasy was the fall of the human will, with no remnants of original righteousness. Regeneration is the recovery of the human will, with some remnants of original sin.

Total depravity means the entire absence of holiness, not the highest intensity of sin. A totally depraved man is not as bad as he can be, but he has no holiness, that is, no supreme love of God. He worships and loves the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25).

S U P P L E M E N T S

4.5.1 (see p. 551). Edwards (Original Sin in Works 2.385n) makes Adam’s sin to be the union of an evil inclining to an end with an evil choice of a means: “Although there was no natural [created] sinful inclination in unfallen Adam, yet an inclination to that sin of eating the forbidden fruit was begotten in him by the delusion and error he was led into, and this inclination to eat the forbidden fruit must precede his actual eating.” Strictly speaking, however, the sinful inclination (desire) was not “to eat the forbidden fruit” as fruit, but to obtain the forbidden knowledge of good and evil. This inclination or desire for the selfish end prompted the choice of means for obtaining it, that is, the volition by which the fruit was plucked and eaten. Edwards here, as in other places, confounds inclination with volition and speaks of “an inclination to eat,” which properly was only a decision to eat. An inclination is something permanent; a volition is instantaneous and transient and is indifferent toward the means it employs. Eve desired the forbidden knowledge. This was the main thing with her. She had no desire for the fruit as fruit to satisfy hunger. If she could have obtained the knowledge by any other means she would have chosen it just as readily.

Owen also (Arminianism in Works 5.123-36 [ed. Russell]) describes Adam’s sin as the union of inclination and volition, of an evil desire with an evil act: “In the ninth article of our (English) church, which is concerning original sin, I observe especially four things: First, that it is an inherent evil, the fault and corruption of the nature of every man. Second, that it is a thing not subject or conformable to the law of God; but has in itself, even after baptism, the nature of sin. Third, that by it we are averse from God and inclined to all manner of evil. Fourth, that it deserves God’s wrath and damnation, all of which are frequently and plainly taught in the word of God. Respecting the first point: It is an inherent sin and pollution of nature, having a proper guilt of its own, making us responsible to the wrath of God, and not a bare imputation of another’s fault to us, his posterity. David describes it as the being ‘shaped in iniquity and conceived in sin.’ Neither was this peculiar to him alone; he had it not from the particular iniquity of his next progenitors, but by an ordinary propagation from the common parent of us all. The Scriptures cast an aspersion of guilt or desert of punishment on this sinful nature itself, as in Ephesians 2:1-3 : ‘We are dead in trespasses and sins, being by nature children of wrath.’ They fix the original pravity in the heart, will, mind, and understanding (Ephesians 4:18; Romans 12:2; Genesis 6:5). They place it in the flesh or whole man (Romans 6:6; Galatians 5:16), so that it is not a bare imputation of another’s fault but an intrinsic adjacent [associated] corruption of our nature itself, that we call by this name of original sin. In respect of our wills, we are not innocent [but guilty] of the first transgression; for we all sinned in Adam, as the apostle affirms. Now all sin is voluntary, say the Remonstrants, and therefore Adam’s transgression was our voluntary sin also, and that in divers respects: First, in that his voluntary act is imputed to us as ours, by reason of the covenant which was made with him in our behalf; but because this, consisting in an imputation, must be extrinsic to us; therefore, second, we say, that Adam being the root and head of all humankind, and we all branches from that root, all parts of that body of which he was the head, his will may be said to be ours; we were then all that one man, we were all in him, and had no other will but his; so that though that [will] be extrinsic unto us considered as particular persons, yet it is intrinsic, as we are all parts of one common nature; as in him we sinned, so in him we had a will of sinning. So that original sin, though hereditary and natural, is no way involuntary or put into us against our wills. It possesses our wills and inclines us to voluntary sins. Scripture is clear that the sin of Adam is the sin of us all, not only by propagation and communication (whereby not his singular [individual] fault, but something of the same nature [with it] is derived unto us), but also by an imputation of his actual transgression unto us all, his singular [individual] transgression being by this means made ours. The grounds of this imputation are (1) that we were then in him and parts of him and (2) that he sustained the place of our whole nature in the covenant God made with him. When divines affirm that by Adam’s sin we are guilty of damnation, they do not mean that any are damned for his particular act, but that by his sin and our sinning in him, by God’s most just ordination we have contracted that exceeding pravity and sinfulness of nature which deserves the curse of God and eternal damnation. It must be an inherent uncleanness that actually excludes out of the kingdom of heaven (Revelation 21:27), which uncleanness the apostle shows to be in infants not sanctified by an interest in the covenant.” In the same manner with Owen, the Formula of Concord 1 prohibits the separation of the first sin from the corruption produced by it: “We reject and condemn that dogma by which it is asserted that original sin is merely the liability and debt arising from another’s transgression, transmitted to us apart from any corruption of our nature.”

One school of later Calvinists, on the contrary, explains the corruption of nature in each individual soul to be the effect of two sovereign acts of God: (1) The imputation to it of the vicarious sin of Adam as its representative; (2) the punitive withholding of divine influences at the instant of its creation ex nihilo, on the ground of this imputation. Hodge, for example (Princeton Essays 1.146, 149), says: “According to the common view of immediate imputation, the sin of Adam [as their representative] is imputed to all his posterity as the ground of punishment antecedently to inherent corruption, which in fact results from the penal withholding of divine influences.… The punishment we suffer for Adam’s sin is abandonment on the part of God, the withholding of divine influences; corruption is consequent on this abandonment.” According to this view the corruption of nature is the result not of Adam’s agency but of the agency of God in the two acts above mentioned. It does not naturally and inevitably result from the act of Adam in disobeying the Eden statute. The elder Calvinists, on the contrary, holding to the substantial union of Adam and his posterity, explain this corruption of the individual soul as the natural and inseparable consequence of Adam’s transgression in Eden, thereby making it to be the culpable and punishable product of Adam and his posterity, as a unity, in their fall from God. Owen is an example in the extract just given: “The Scriptures cast an aspersion of guilt or desert of punishment on this sinful nature itself-this original pravity in the heart, will, mind, and understanding-so that it is not a bare imputation of another’s fault, but an intrinsic adjacent [associated] corruption of our nature itself that we call by this name of original sin. Adam’s transgression was our voluntary sin also: First, in that his voluntary act is imputed to us as ours by reason of the covenant which was made with him in our behalf; but because this consisting in an imputation must be extrinsic to us therefore, Second, we say that Adam being the root and head of all humankind, and we all branches from that root, all parts of that body of which he was the head, his will may be said to be ours; we were all that one man, we were all in him, and had no other will but his; so that though that [will] be extrinsic unto us considered as particular individual persons, yet it is intrinsic as we are all parts of one common nature; as in him we sinned, so in him we had a will of sinning. So that original sin, though hereditary and natural, is in no way involuntary, or put into us against our wills. When divines affirm that by Adam’s sin we are guilty of damnation, they do not mean that any are damned for his particular act [as an individual representing not including his posterity], but that by his sin and our sinning in him, by God’s most just ordination we have contracted that exceeding pravity and sinfulness of nature which deserves the curse of God and eternal damnation.” It is impossible to make this view of the relation of corruption in the individual to the sin of Adam mean that “inherent corruption results from the penal withholding of divine influences” and not from Adam’s act of transgression.

4.5.2 (see p. 552). Howe (Vanity of Man as Mortal) argues in the same way as Anselm respecting the simple self-motion and self-origination of the will’s inclination or willingness and the irrationality of seeking any other cause of self-motion than the self. Speaking of the unwillingness of the Christian to die and his assigning as the reason that he is “unassured of heaven,” he says, “it is not so much because we are unassured of heaven, but because we love this world better, and our hearts center in it as our most desirable good. Therefore we see how unreasonable it is to allege that we are unwilling to change states because we are unassured. The truth is that we are unassured because we are unwilling; and what then follows? We are unwilling because we are unwilling. And so we may endlessly dispute round and round, from unwillingness to unwillingness. But is there no way to get out of this unhappy circle? In order to it, let the case be more fully understood. Either this double unwillingness must be referred to the same thing or to divers, either to itself or to something else. If to the same thing, it is not sense, it signifies nothing. For having to assign a cause of their unwillingness to quit the body, to say it is because they are unwilling is to assign no proper cause. But if they refer the unwillingness to something else than itself and say that they are unwilling to leave the body because they are unwilling to forsake earth for heaven, this is a proper cause.” A cause, in the proper sense of the term, is something different from the effect. But when unwillingness is said to be caused by unwillingness, the so-called cause and effect are not different things but the very same. The truth is that when anything is self-caused it is taken out of the category of cause proper and effect proper and brought into that of free will or self-determination. Hence, to ask for a cause of sin that is other than the self-inclining of the will is to make sin like an effect in the natural world; in other words, no sin at all.

4.5.3 (see p. 555). A kind of good in certain respects can be perceived in an object presented as a temptation to a holy being, without there being a sinful lust for it. Besides the instance of unfallen Eve and the fruit of the tree of knowledge as “good for food” and “pleasant to the eye,” that of Christ and his temptation is in point. When “all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them” were presented to him as an object of temptation, he could perceive a species of good in earthly power and dominion without desiring it ambitiously and lusting after it for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. He could view it unselfishly as affording its possessor the means of influence and usefulness among mankind and might desire it only as such, without longing for it as the means of self-glorification.

4.5.4 (see p. 556). Milton represents Adam as perceiving that the inward desire of Eve for the forbidden knowledge was lustful and therefore of the nature of sin:

Bold deed have you presumed, adventurous Eve, And peril great invoked, who thus has dared, Had it been only coveting to eye That sacred fruit, sacred to abstinence.

-Paradise Lost 9.920

4.5.5 (see p. 558). It is a favorite device of rationalism to explain Paulinism by rabbinism. It is contended that the peculiarities of St. Paul’s conception of Christianity proceed from his training in the rabbinic theology. Edersheim (Life of Jesus 1.165-66) refutes this by showing the essential difference between the Old Testament and the rabbinic conception of the Messiah and his redemption: “The general conception which the rabbis had formed of the Messiah differed totally from what was presented by the prophet of Nazareth. Thus, what is the fundamental divergence between the two may be said to have existed long before the events which finally divided them. It is the combination of letters which constitutes words, and the same letters may be combined into different words. Similarly, both rabbinism and what by anticipation we designate Christianity might regard the same predictions as messianic and look for their fulfillment; while at the same time the messianic ideal of the synagogue might be quite other than that to which the faith and the hope of the church have clung.

“The Messiah and his history are not presented in the Old Testament as something separated from or superadded to Israel. The history, the institutions, and the predictions of Israel run up into him. He is the typical Israelite, nay, typical Israel itself; alike the crown, the completion, and the representative of Israel. He is the Son of God and the servant of the Lord, but in the highest and only true sense which had given its meaning to all the preparatory development. This organic unity of Israel and the Messiah explains how events, institutions, and predictions which initially were purely Israelitish could with truth be regarded as finding their full accomplishment in the Messiah. From this point of view the whole Old Testament becomes the perspective in which the figure of the Messiah stands out. And perhaps the most valuable element in rabbinic commentary on messianic times is that in which it is so frequently explained that all the miracles and deliverances of Israel’s past would be reenacted, only in a much wider manner, in the days of the Messiah. Thus the whole past was symbolic and typical of the future. It is in this sense that we would understand the two sayings of the Talmud: ‘All the prophets prophesied only of the days of the Messiah’and ‘the world was created only for the Messiah.’ In accordance with all this the ancient synagogue found references to the Messiah in many more passages of the Old Testament than those verbal predictions to which we generally appeal. Their number amounts to upward of 456 (75 from the Pentateuch, 243 from the Prophets, and 138 from the Hagiographa), and their messianic application is supported by more than 558 references to the most ancient rabbinic writings. But comparatively few of these would be termed verbal predictions. Rather would it seem as if every event were regarded as prophetic, and every prophecy, whether by fact or by word (prediction), as a light to cast its sheen on the future, until the picture of the messianic age in the far background stood out in the hundredfold variegated brightness of prophetic events and prophetic utterances. Of course there was danger that, amid these dazzling lights or in the crowd of figures, the grand central personality should not engage the attention it claimed, and so the meaning of the whole be lost in the contemplation of the details. This danger was the greater from the absence of any deeper spiritual elements. All that Israel needed: ‘Study of the law and good works,’ lay within the reach of everyone; and all that Israel hoped for was national restoration. Everything else was but means to these ends; the Messiah himself only the grand instrument in attaining them. Thus viewed, the picture presented would be of Israel’s exaltation, rather than of the salvation of the world. To this and to the idea of Israel’s exclusive spiritual position in the world must be traced much that otherwise would seem utterly irrational in the rabbinic pictures of the latter days. But in such a picture there would be neither room nor occasion for a Messiah Savior, in the only sense in which such a heavenly mission could be rational or the heart of humanity respond to it. The rabbinic ideal of the Messiah was not that of ‘a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of his people Israel’-the satisfaction of the wants of humanity and the completion of Israel’s mission-but quite different even to contrariety. On the other hand, it is equally noteworthy that the purely national elements, which well nigh formed the sum total of the rabbinic expectation, scarcely entered into the teaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God. And the more we realize that Jesus did so fundamentally separate himself from all the ideas of his time, the more evidential is it of the fact that he was not the Messiah of Jewish conception, but derived his mission from a source unknown to or at least ignored by the leaders of the people.

“But still, as the rabbinic ideas were at least based on the Old Testament, we need not wonder that they also embodied the chief features of the messianic history. Accordingly, a careful perusal of their Scripture quotations shows that the main postulates of the New Testament concerning the Messiah are fully supported by rabbinic statements. Thus, such doctrines as the premundane existence of the Messiah, his elevation above Moses and even above the angels, his representative character, his cruel sufferings and derision, his violent death and that for his people, his work on behalf of the living and the dead, his redemption and restoration of Israel, the opposition of the Gentiles, their partial judgment and conversion, the prevalence of his law, the universal blessings of the latter days, and his kingdom-can be clearly deduced from unquestioned passages in ancient rabbinic writings. Only, as we might expect, all is there indistinct, incoherent, unexplained, and from a much lower standpoint. Most painfully is this felt in connection with the one element on which the New Testament most insists. There is, indeed, in rabbinic writings frequent reference to the sufferings and even the death of the Messiah, and these are brought into connection with our sins-as how could it be otherwise in view of Isaiah 53:1-12 and other passages?-and in one most remarkable comment the Messiah is represented as willingly taking upon him all these sufferings, on condition that all Israel-the living, the dead, and those yet unborn-should be saved. But there is only the most indistinct reference to the removal of sin by the Messiah in the sense of vicarious sufferings. In connection with what has been stated one most important point must be kept in view. So far as their opinions can be gathered from their writings, the great doctrines of original sin and of the sinfulness of our whole nature were not held by the ancient rabbis. Of course, it is not meant that they denied the consequences of sin, either as concerned Adam himself or his descendants; but the final result is far from that seriousness which attaches to the fall in the New Testament, where it is presented as the basis of the need of a Redeemer, who as the second Adam, restores what the first had lost.” The difference between St. Paul’s conception of the Messiah, of the fall and original sin, of vicarious atonement, and of the nature of redemption and the rabbinic conception as enunciated by a writer deeply versed in rabbinic learning is fundamental. Had the apostle not been lifted out of and beyond his early rabbinic training by the “revelations” and inspiration subsequent to his conversion, of which he repeatedly affirms he was the subject, he never could have made that statement of Christian doctrine which goes under his name and which, next to the gospels, has exerted more influence than any other part of Scripture in shaping Christianity and Christendom.

4.5.6 (see p. 562). Graves (Pentateuch 3.3) refers the divine threatening to “visit the sins of the fathers upon the children” to the sufferings in this life, which God in an extraordinary manner sometimes inflicted upon violators of the Mosaic statutes and regulations, and not to the retributions of the future [eternal] state, which, though well known and taught by Moses, were not presented and employed by him as the sanctions of his legislation. “The only circumstance,” he says, “that makes this denunciation appear severe or unjust is the supposition that the sanctions of a future state are understood; which it would certainly be repugnant to divine justice to suppose should be distributed according to such a rule as this. But this objection vanishes the moment we are convinced that the punishment here meant relates only to outward circumstances of prosperity or distress in the present life. Because if such a direct and visible sanction was necessary in the particular system of providential administration by which God thought fit to govern the Jewish race, it is evident that any inequality as to individuals would be certainly and easily remedied in a future life; so that each should receive his final reward exactly according to his true merit in the sight of God, and thus ‘the judge of all the earth do right.’

“Now it seems undeniable that such an immediate and visible sanction was a necessary part of the Jewish polity, so far as this required a providential distribution of national rewards and punishments. These affecting the great mass of the people and extending through such portions of time as were necessary to give them their full efficacy in forming the national character could not be confined within the limits of a single generation or exclude from their operation each private family in succession, as the heads of that family might drop off whose conduct had originally contributed to swell the mass of national guilt or contribute to the progress of national improvement. This is illustrated in the case of Achan, whose children were involved in the punishment of his violation of the divine command (Joshua 7:24), and in the punishment inflicted in consequence of the idolatries of Jeroboam, Baasha, and Ahab, involving their entire posterity.

“But the operation of this sanction was not confined to the participation of national rewards or punishments; it certainly affected individuals who violated the commands to which it was annexed, even though such violation was confined to themselves and could not therefore draw down any national chastisement. Let it be recollected that the great crime, the temporal punishment of which was to extend to the third and fourth generation, was idolatry-that source of all profaneness and pollution which under the Jewish polity was not only a violation of that religious duty for which the children of Israel were set apart from every nation under heaven, but was besides the highest crime against the state, which acknowledged Jehovah as supreme sovereign, the sole object of civil allegiance as well as of religious worship. To introduce idolatry was therefore to subvert the foundation of the social union and engage in the foulest treason and the most audacious rebellion. The supreme sovereign therefore denounced against such treason and rebellion not only condign punishment on the offender himself, but the extension of this punishment to his family and immediate descendants; a principle recognized by many of the most civilized states in which the crime of treason is punished not only by death but by the confiscation of property and the taint of blood; a principle which when carried into execution by a human tribunal may operate in particular instances with unmerited or excessive severity, but which in the Jewish theocracy was applied in every instance by unerring justice. ‘For the deity,’ as Warburton well observes, ‘though he allowed capital punishment to be inflicted for the crime of lese majesty on the person of the offender by the delegated administration of the law, yet concerning his family or posterity he reserved the inquisition of the crime to himself and expressly forbade the magistrate to meddle with it in the common course of justice. The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the father; every man shall be put to death for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16). We see the operation of this law in 2 Kings 14:5-6, where we are told that Amaziah, king of Judah, as soon as the kingdom was confirmed in his hand, slew his servants which had slain the king, his father. But the children of the murderers he slew not, according unto that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the Lord commanded, saying, The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin. Now God’s appropriating to himself the execution of this law would abundantly justify the equity of it, even supposing it had been given as a part of a universal religion; for why was the magistrate forbidden to imitate God’s method of punishing but because no power less than omniscient could in all cases keep clear of injustice in such an inquisition?’

“Maimonides also understands that this visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children is aimed at idolatry: As to that character of God of visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, know that this relates only to the crime of idolatry; as may be proved from the Decalogue, which says, On the third and fourth generation of them who hate me; for nobody is said to hate God but an idolater; as the law expresses (Deuteronomy 12:31), Every abomination to the Lord which he hates have they done unto their gods. And mention is made of the fourth generation, because no man can hope to see more of his progeny than four generations.

“Thus the principle of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations, by extending the temporal judgments denounced against the perpetration of idolatry to the immediate posterity of the idolater, is perfectly consistent with divine justice; because it interferes not with that final retribution at which every man shall be rewarded according to his works. That this sanction of the Jewish law was not to be understood as a general principle of the divine economy under every form of civil society and every degree of religious improvement, but merely as a necessary part of that administration of an extraordinary providence by which the Jewish law was sanctioned and upheld during the earlier periods of its existence, has been proved by Warburton from a circumstance which infidel writers have laid much stress upon, as an instance of contradiction between different parts of Scripture, when in truth it was only a gradual change in the divine system, wisely and mercifully adapted to the gradual improvement of the human mind. Toward the conclusion of this extraordinary economy, observes Warburton, when God by the later prophets reveals his purpose to give them a new dispensation, in which a future state of rewards and punishments was to be substituted in place of an immediate extraordinary providence, as the sanction of religion, it is then declared in the most express manner that he will abrogate the law of punishing children for the sins of their parents (Jeremiah 31:29-33; Ezekiel 11:19-21; Ezekiel 18:1 ff.).

“In this way, in the Jewish system, a people of gross and carnal minds and shortsighted views, slow to believe anything they could not themselves experience and therefore almost incapable of being sufficiently influenced by the remote prospect of a future life and the pure and spiritual blessedness of a celestial existence, were wisely and necessarily placed under a law which was supported by a visible extraordinary providence, conferring immediate rewards and punishments on the person of the offender; or which laid hold of his most powerful instincts, by denouncing that his crimes would be visited upon his children and his children’s children to the third and fourth generation. And this proceeding was a necessary part of that national discipline under which the Jews were placed and was free from all shadow of injustice. Because when the innocent were afflicted for their parents’ crimes, as Warburton has well observed, it was by the deprivation of temporal benefits, in their nature forfeitable. Or should this not so clearly appear, yet we may be sure that God, who reserved to himself the right of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, would perfectly rectify any apparent inequality in the course of his providential government over the chosen people in another and a better world by repaying the innocent who had necessarily suffered here with an eternal and abundant recompense.” That all this class of sufferings which result from the individual sins of immediate ancestors are not penal and retributive, like the suffering that results from the sin of Adam, is also proved by the fact that the whole penalty threatened for sin in the legal covenant was physical and spiritual death; and this comes upon every man because of Adam’s sin, not because of the sins of secondary ancestors. Furthermore, men are not twice punished: once for Adam’s sin and again for their immediate parents’ sins. And again, this class of sufferings is not universal but extraordinary and special. Penalty proper is common and universal and falls upon all the posterity of Adam in the same way and without exception; but the sufferings that befell the family of Korah were uncommon and exceptional and distinguished them from the rest of the families of Israel. The same is true of the sufferings which have come upon the descendants of Ham for their father’s sin. The descendants of Shem and Japhet have escaped them.

4.5.7 (see p. 569). Augustine teaches that original sin is guilt in the following extracts: “We understand the apostle to declare that ‘judgment’ is predicated ‘of one offense unto condemnation’ entirely on the ground that even if there were in men nothing but original sin, it would be sufficient for their condemnation. For however much heavier will be their condemnation who have added their own sins to the original offense (and it will be the more severe in individual cases, in proportion to the sins of individuals), still, even that sin alone which was originally derived unto men not only excludes from the kingdom of God, which infants are unable to enter (as the Pelagians themselves allow) unless they have received the grace of Christ [in baptism] before they die, but also alienates from salvation and everlasting life, which cannot be anything else than the kingdom of God, to which fellowship with Christ alone introduces us” (Forgiveness and Baptism 1.15). “The human race lies under a just condemnation, and all men are the children of wrath. Of which wrath the Lord Jesus says: ‘He that believes not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him.’ He does not say it will come, but it ‘abides on him.’ For every man is born with it; whereupon the apostle says: ‘We were by nature the children of wrath even as others.’ Now as men were lying under this wrath by reason of their original sin, and as this original sin was the more heavy and deadly in proportion to the number and magnitude of the actual sins which were added to it, there was need of a mediator, that is, of a reconciler who by the offering of one sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the law and the prophets were types, should take away this wrath” (Enchiridion 33). “Infants who have not yet done any works of their own, either good or bad, will be condemned on account of original sin alone, if they have not been delivered by the Savior’s grace in the laver of regeneration [i.e., baptism]. As for all others who, in the use of their free will, have added to original sin sins of their own commission and who have not been delivered by God’s grace from the power of darkness and admitted into the kingdom of Christ, they will receive judgment according to the desert not of original sin only, but also of the acts of their own will” (Letter 215 to Valentinum).

4.5.8 (see p. 575). Job (10:15) refers his holiness to God, but his sinfulness to himself as the author: “If I be wicked woe unto me; and if I be righteous, yet will I not lift up my head.” Leighton (Theological Lectures, 10) concisely states the doctrine thus: “If you are sinful and act sinfully, blame yourselves; if you are holy and act holily, praise God.”

4.5.9 (see p. 577). Calvin thus distinguishes original from indwelling sin (4.15.10-12): “Original sin is the pravity and corruption of our nature which first renders us obnoxious to the wrath of God and then produces in us the ‘works of the flesh.’ Two things are to be distinctly observed. First, that our nature being so entirely depraved and vitiated, we are on account of this very corruption considered as convicted and condemned in the sight of God, to whom nothing is acceptable but righteousness, innocence, and purity. And therefore even infants themselves bring their own condemnation into the world with them, who though they have not yet produced the fruits of their iniquity, yet have the seed of it within them; even their whole nature is, as it were, a seed of sin and therefore cannot but be odious to God. By baptism, believers are certified that this condemnation is removed from them; since the Lord promises us by this sign that a full and entire remission is granted both of the guilt which is to be imputed to us and of the punishment to be inflicted on account of that guilt. They also receive righteousness such as the people of God may obtain in this life, that is, only by imputation, because the Lord in his mercy accepts them as righteous and innocent.

“The other thing to be remarked is that this depravity never ceases in us, but is continually producing new fruits-these ‘works of the flesh,’ which are like the emission of flame and sparks from a furnace or streams of water from an unfailing spring. For concupiscence never dies nor is altogether extinguished in men, till by death they are delivered from the body of death. Baptism, indeed, promises us the submersion of our pharaoh and the mortification of sin; yet not so that it no longer exists or gives us no further trouble; but only that it shall never overcome us. For so long as we live immured in this prison of the body, the relics of sin will dwell in us; but if we hold fast by faith the promise which God has given us in baptism, they shall not domineer or reign over us. But let no one deceive himself, let no one indulge himself in his sin, when he hears that sin always dwells in us. These things are not said in order that those who are already too prone to do evil may securely sleep in their sins, but only that those who are tempted by their corrupt propensities may not faint and sink into despondency; but that they may rather reflect that they are yet in the right way and may consider themselves as having made some progress when they experience their corruption diminishing from day to day, till they shall attain the mark at which they are aiming, even the final destruction of their depravity, which will be accomplished at the close of this mortal life. In the meantime let them not cease to fight manfully and press forward to complete victory. In all this we say nothing different from what is clearly stated by Paul in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans.”

4.5.10 (see p. 580). Respecting the use of the term nature when applied to original sin, the Formula of Concord 1 thus defines: “We must carefully observe the various significations of the word nature, the ambiguity of which the Manicheans abusing disguise their error and lead many simple men into error. For sometimes nature signifies the substance itself of man, as when we say: God created human nature. But sometimes by the word nature is understood the disposition, condition, defect, or vice of a thing implanted and inherent in its nature, as when we say: It is the serpent’s nature to strike; man’s nature is to sin and is sin. In this latter signification, the word nature denotes, not the substance itself of man, but something which inheres and is fixed in his nature or substance. As respects the Latin words substantia and accidens, since these are not expressions of Holy Scripture and moreover are not understood by the common people, we should abstain from them in public assemblies where the unlearned multitude are taught; and in this matter account should be taken of the more simple and untaught. But in schools and among learned men (to whom the signification of these words is known and who can use them correctly and without abuse, properly discriminating the essence of anything from that which has been added to it from without and inheres in it by way of accident), they are to be retained in the discussion concerning original sin. For by means of these terms the distinction between the work of God and the work of the devil can be explained with the greatest clearness. For the devil cannot create any substance, but can only by way of accident and under the permission of God deprave a substance created by God.”

4.5.11 (see p. 580). Turretin (10.4.39) gives the following account of the distinction between natural and moral inability: “The inability of sinful man is not to be denominated moral simply in distinction from natural, since that is called morally impossible by moral philosophers which arises from custom rather than from nature and is indeed difficult to be done, but nevertheless is sometimes done and cannot be reckoned among the things that are absolutely impossible; while the inability of the sinner is innate and insuperable. Neither is it to be denominated natural simply, since that is natural on account of which we are called neither good nor evil, while it is certain that this inability is something vicious and culpable. Nor is it natural in distinction from voluntary, as there is a natural inability in a stone or a brute to speak, since our inability is especially voluntary (maxime voluntaria). Nor is it natural as arising from a lack of natural faculty or power, like the inability of a blind man to see, of a paralytic to walk, of a dead man to rise from the grave; because our inability does not exclude but always supposes in man the natural powers of intellect and will.

“It is better, therefore, to denominate the sinner’s inability both natural and moral, in different respects. It is moral (1) objectively because relating to moral duties, (2) originally because it originates from moral corruption spontaneously brought in by the sin of man, and (3) formally because it is voluntary and culpable, overflowing into the disposition (habitum) of the corrupt will. It is also natural (1) originally because it is congenital with us and by nature-not as nature was created by God but as nature is corrupted by man-as we are said by St. Paul to be ‘by nature children of wrath’ and by David to be in iniquity and conceived in sin,’ as poison is natural in a serpent and rapacity in a wolf; (2) subjectively because it infects our whole nature and causes the deprivation of that power of well-doing which was bestowed upon the first man and constituted original righteousness, and (3) effectually (eventualiter) because it is unconquerable and insuperable, not less than the merely natural inability of a blind man to see or a dead man to rise. For sinful man is no more able to convert himself than a blind man to see or a dead man to rise from the grave. As therefore this inability is rightly called moral and voluntary to indicate the responsibility and guilt of man and render him inexcusable, so it is well denominated natural to express the greatness of his corruption and demonstrate the necessity of divine grace, because, as it is congenital to man, so it is insuperable by him and he cannot shake it off but by the omnipotent energy of the Holy Spirit.”

4.5.12 (see p. 583). The equivocation and self-contradiction in Edwards’s doctrine of “natural ability and inability” are seen by analyzing the following extract from his work on the will given on p. 597: “If the will [i.e., the inclination] fully complies, and the proposed effect does not prove, according to the laws of nature, to be connected with his [executive] volition, the man is perfectly excused; he has a natural inability to the thing required. For the will [inclination] itself, as has been observed, is all that can be directly and immediately required by command; and other things only indirectly, as connected with the will. If therefore there be a full compliance of will [inclination], the person has done his duty.” Edwards here declares that the person who “has a natural inability to the thing required” because he is prevented by the “laws of nature” from executing his inclination by volitions has nevertheless “done his duty” by the inward inclining and “complying” of his will. This shows that “natural inability,” as Edwards defines it, does not prevent the performance of man’s duty to God. If this be so, then “natural inability” is of little consequence. It may exist, and yet the whole duty of man be performed notwithstanding. And on the other hand, if “natural ability” be as Edwards conceives of it the mere possession of a will apart from its hostile inclination toward God, such an ability is not adequate to the performance of the duty of loving God supremely. In this case, also, “natural ability” is valueless, because the duty of man cannot be performed by it. This shows that Edwards, in order to meet the exigencies of his argument with his Arminian opponents, employs the term ability is a false sense and not in its true and common signification of real efficient power.

Anselm (Why the God-?Man 2:17) directs attention to the two meanings of “power,” according as reference is had to inclination or to volition: “We found when considering the question whether Christ could lie that there are two senses of the word power in regard to it: the one referring to his disposition, the other to the outward act; and that though he had the power to lie externally and verbally, he was so disposed (a seipso habuit) that he could not lie inwardly and from inclination.” But in this instance there is no equivocal use of “ability” in the sense of quasi power. The ability of Christ to vocalize the words of a lie was real ability; and his inability to incline to lie was real inability.

4.5.13 (see p. 584). The question between the advocate of ability and the advocate of inability is whether sinful man is able to love God supremely because he so wills or inclines under the regenerating operation of the Holy Spirit or whether he so inclines because of his own inherent power. Is ability the effect of human or of divine power? The advocate of inability contends that ability to love and obey God is the result of enabling the fallen will by regenerating it, that ability is the effect of divine actuation of the will. The Westminster Confession, which agrees with all the Calvinistic creeds upon this point, represents “enabling” or ability as the result of inclining the will and inclining as the result of the operation of the divine Spirit in the will: “Effectual calling is the work of God’s almighty power and grace, whereby, by savingly enlightening the minds of his elect and renewing and powerfully determining their wills, they are made willing and able freely to answer his call and to accept and embrace the grace offered therein” (Westminster Larger Catechism 67). Apart from the “powerful determining of the sinful will” in effectual calling, there is no power in the natural man to incline the will from sin to holiness. Edwards asserts this with great energy, both in his doctrinal and controversial writings. In his “Reply to Williams” (Works 1.246-47), for example, he argues that an unconverted person has no right to enter into covenant with God in his own strength and to promise to keep it by his own inherent power or ability, because he cannot keep his covenant and fulfill his promise: “The promises and oaths of unregenerate men must not only be insincere, but very presumptuous, upon these two accounts. (1) Because herein they take an oath to the Most High, which it is ten thousand to one they will break as soon as the words are out of their mouths by continuing still unconverted. To what purpose should ungodly men be encouraged to utter such promises and oaths before the church, for the church’s acceptance? How contrary is it to the counsel given by the wise man in Ecclesiastes 5:2; Ecclesiastes 5:4-6. (2) When an unconverted man makes such a promise he promises what he has not to give or what he has not sufficiency for the performance of-no sufficiency in himself nor any sufficiency in any other that he has a claim to or interest in. There is indeed a sufficiency in God to enable him; but he has no claim to it. If it be true that an unconverted man who is morally sincere may reasonably on the encouragement [given by God to all men indiscriminately in the promises of common grace] promise immediately to believe and repent, though this be not in his own power, then it will follow [according to Williams’s affirmation that ‘God will never be worse than his encouragement’] that whenever an unconverted man covenants with such moral sincerity as gives a lawful right to the sacraments [according to Williams and the halfway covenant party], God never will fail of giving him converting grace that moment to enable him from thenceforward to believe and repent as he promises.” In Religious Affections (Works 3.71), Edwards finds “ability” in “inclination” alone: “This new spiritual sense and the new dispositions that attend it are no new faculties but are new principles of nature. By a principle of nature in this place I mean that foundation which is laid in nature, either old [and sinful] or new [and holy], for any particular manner or kind of exercise of the faculties of the soul or a natural habit or foundation for action giving a personal ability and disposition to exert the faculties in exercises of such a certain kind.” This implies that if there be no “foundation for any particular manner of exercise of the faculties of the soul,” that is, no habit, disposition, or inclination of the will; there is no ability to exert the faculties. Only a holy disposition is able to love and obey God; only a sinful disposition is able to hate and resist him.

4.5.14 (see p. 587). Calvin and the Reformed theologians generally assert the “necessity” of sinning in the case of the fallen will (see the extract from Ursinus on p. 582 n. 96 [Note: . 96 96. WS: So Ursinus (Christian Religion Q. 8) argues: “They who cannot but sin are unjustly punished; but the unregenerate cannot but sin: therefore God does unjustly punish them. Answer. They who necessarily sin are unjustly punished, except that necessity come voluntarily and by their own will. But men have drawn upon them that necessity voluntarily in the first parents and themselves do willingly sin. Therefore God does justly punish them.”] ). Edwards does the same as the extract on p. 586 shows. But it is not the necessity of compulsion which is the more common signification of the term, but the necessity produced by voluntary action and the certainty which results from a voluntary state of the will. Edwards (Will 4.3) describes it: “Men in their first use of such phrases as these, ‘must, can’t, can’t help it, can’t avoid it, necessary, unable, impossible, unavoidable, irresistible,’ etc., use them to signify a necessity of constraint or restraint, a natural necessity or impossibility, or some necessity that the will has nothing to do in; which may be whether men will or no; and which may be supposed to be just the same, let men’s inclinations and desires be what they will.” Given an evil inclination, and evil thoughts, purposes, and actions are necessary in the sense of certain and invariable, but the evil inclination itself is not necessary in the sense of compelled. This is self-originated and is the simple self-motion of the will. Christ teaches this truth when he says that “a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Matthew 7:18). “The fallen will,” says Calvin (2.3.5), is so bound by the slavery of sin that it cannot excite itself, much less devote itself to anything good; for such a disposition is the beginning of a conversion to God, which in the Scriptures is attributed solely to divine grace. Thus Jeremiah prays to the Lord to convert or turn him if he would have him turned (Jeremiah 31:18). When I assert that the will being deprived of its liberty [to good] is necessarily drawn or led into evil, I should wonder if anyone considered it as a harsh expression, since it has nothing in it absurd, nor is it unsanctioned by the custom of good men. It offends those who know not how to distinguish between necessity (necessitatem) and compulsion (coactionem). But if anyone should ask them whether God is not necessarily good (necessario bonus) and whether the devil is not necessarily evil (necessario malus)-what answer will they make? For there is such a close connection between the goodness of God and his deity that his being God is not more necessary than his being good. But the devil is by his [voluntary] fall so alienated from communion with all that is good that he can do nothing but what is evil. But if anyone should yelp (obganniat) that little praise is due to God for his goodness which he is compelled (cogatur) to preserve, shall we not readily reply that his inability to do evil arises from his infinite goodness and not from the impulse of violence [compulsion]. Therefore if a necessity [infallible certainty] of doing well impairs not the liberty of the divine will in doing well; if the devil, who cannot but do evil, nevertheless sins voluntarily, who then will assert that man sins less voluntarily, because he is under a necessity of sinning [that springs from the state of his will]?” In the above extract Calvin speaks of the fallen will’s “being deprived of its liberty.” He means liberty to good, not liberty in the abstract and unqualified sense. For he says that Satan “sins voluntarily.” The action of the fallen will is free agency in the sense of self-motion; but this free action in sin effectually opposes and precludes free action in holiness. One free act prevents another free act. In interpreting the creeds of the Reformation and the systems of the elder divines, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between liberty and ability (for the two things are inseparable) to good and between liberty and ability to evil. They invariably deny to the fallen will liberty to good, but not liberty to evil in the sense of enforced self-determination to evil.

Owen (Saints’ Perseverance, chap. 6) explains in the same manner: “God can effectually and infallibly as to the event cause his saints to continue trusting in him without the least abridgment of their liberty. If by [the word] necessitated to continue trusting, not the manner of God’s operation with and in them for the compassing of the end proposed and the efficacy of his grace, whereby he does it, be intended, but only the certainty of the issue, rejecting the impropriety of the expression [namely, necessity], the thing itself we affirm to be here promised of God.”

Anselm (Why the God-?Man 2:5) explains “how although a thing may be necessary God may not do it by a compulsory necessity.” He says, “When one does a benefit from a necessity to which he is unwillingly subjected, little thanks are due to him or none at all. But when he freely places himself under the necessity of benefiting another and sustains that necessity without reluctance, then he certainly deserves great thanks for the favor. For this should not be called necessity but grace, inasmuch as he undertook it not with constraint but freely.” When God has voluntarily promised a thing, then he is under a necessity of fulfilling his promise; but he was under no necessity to promise. In like manner the sinner has voluntarily fallen from God and thus came under the necessity of sinning, but was under no necessity of falling from God.

Luther (On the Bondage of the Will, chap. 44) thus distinguishes the two significations of necessity: “We should carefully distinguish between a necessity of infallibility [certainty] and a necessity of coercion; since both good and evil men, though by their actions they fulfill the decree and appointment of God, yet are not forcibly constrained to do anything but act willingly.”

Edwards, in the following extract, seemingly teaches not only that the lost are in a helpless and necessitating self-bondage, but are destitute of liberty and moral agency. His opponents contended that lost men and angels are still in a state of trial, because they still had the power to the contrary. “If,” says Edwards, “the damned are in a state of trial, they must be in a state of liberty and moral agency, as the advocates of future redemption will own; and so, according to their notion of liberty, must be under no necessity of continuing in their rebellion and wickedness, but may turn to God in their thorough subjection to his will, very speedily. And if the devils and damned spirits are in a state of probation and have liberty of will and are under the last and most extreme means to bring them to repentance, then it is possible that the greatest part, if not all of them, may be reclaimed by those extreme means and brought to repentance before the day of judgment. And if so, how could it certainly be predicted concerning the devil, that he ‘should be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and false prophet are, and should be tormented day and night, forever and ever’? And how can it be said that when he fell, he was cast down from heaven and ‘reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day’?” In this extract Edwards, taking the words as they read, teaches that the lost are not “in a state of liberty and moral agency” and that consequently they are under “a [compulsory] necessity of continuing in their rebellion and wickedness.” But he is using terms in the sense of his opponents and adopting “their notion of liberty.” By “liberty and moral agency” they meant power to the contrary, and by “necessity of continuing in wickedness,” he himself does not mean physical necessity but the self-bondage of the will, which is insuperable by the will. In denying free moral agency to the sinner, as his opponents defined it, he does not deny it as he himself defined it, in the sense of “being the immediate agent or the being that is acting or in the exercise of the act” (Will 4.1). The radical difference between the Augustino-Calvinistic definition of freedom and moral agency on the one side and the Semipelagian and Arminian on the other must ever be kept in mind when Edwards and other Calvinists deny “freedom and moral agency” to the fallen will. His intention is to deny that the sinful will can reverse its inclination and become holy by its own energy, but not that the sinful inclination itself is the unforced agency and movement of the will, for which the sinner is responsible. Both Augustine and the elder Calvinists, however, were more careful than Edwards was to avoid such seeming denials of free moral agency to the sinner, because they did not, even for the sake of argument, temporarily adopt their opponents’ idea of the will and moral agency, but rigorously stuck to their own idea and definition of it as simple self-determination without power to the contrary. The self-determination in sin enabled them to affirm liberty and responsibility in sin; and the want of power to the contrary enabled them to affirm bondage and inability in sin.

Augustine (Enchiridion 30) asserts the sinner’s freedom in sinning and denies his freedom to good because of the bondage produced by the sinning: “It was by the evil use of his free will that man destroyed both it and himself. For as a man who kills himself must of course be alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases to live and cannot restore himself to life, so, when man by his own free will sinned, then sin begin victorious over him the freedom of the will [to good] was lost. ‘For of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.’ This is the judgment of the Apostle Peter. And as it is certainly true, what kind of liberty, I ask, can the bond slave possess except when it pleases him to sin? For he is freely in bondage who does with pleasure the will of his master. Accordingly, he who is the servant of sin is free to sin. And hence he will not be free to do right until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness [as Paul argues in Romans 6:18-20; Romans 6:22]. And this is true liberty, for he has pleasure in righteous action; and it is at the same time a holy bondage, for he is subject to the will of God. But whence comes this liberty to do righteousness, to the man who is in bondage to sin and ‘sold under sin,’ except he be redeemed by him who has said, ‘If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed’? And before this redemption is wrought in a man, when he is not yet free to do righteousness, how can he talk of the freedom of his will and his good works, except he be inflated by that foolish pride of boasting which the apostle restrains when he says, ‘By grace are you saved, through faith’?” This passage, which might be paralleled with scores like it from Augustine’s writings, contains his doctrine of free will and of freedom. The following are the principal points:

1. Freedom in willing is the actual self-motion or inclining of the will. It excludes indifference, because indifference implies that the will is not yet self-moving and inclining. Freedom is action; indifference is inaction.

2. A distinguishing characteristic of self-motion and inclination is pleasure. The holy will enjoys obedience; the sinful will enjoys disobedience. This evinces the freedom of the self-motion of the will; for were there compulsion there would be no enjoyment. The agent would not be conscious of doing as he pleases.

3. Right self-motion is incompatible with simultaneous wrong self-motion, and the converse. Free action in one direction is inability in respect to the other. Good inclination precludes evil inclination. The servant of sin is free in sinning, but not free to do right, because of his freedom in sin. His bondage to sin is the effect of his self-motion in sin.

4. Freedom to sin may be affirmed, and freedom to holiness denied. Sinful inclination is as really inclination as holy inclination, but it is false freedom because it conflicts with the moral law. When, therefore, Augustine and Calvin deny freedom to the sinner, as they often do, they do not deny his self-motion and voluntariness in sin, but his ability to the contrary, or his power to reverse and change his self-motion (cf. Shedd on Romans 6:18-20; Romans 6:22).

4.5.15 (see p. 592). That “sin is a privation, a defect rather than an effect,” may be thus illustrated. Sickness is the mere defect of health; the absence of health. But health is not the mere defect or absence of sickness. Health is the normal and right condition of the body, the positive state having its own positive characteristics. Sickness is the abnormal and wrong condition of the body, which is marked not by a set of positive characteristics antithetic to those of health, but only of negative characteristics which consist in the absence of the positive. For illustration, indigestion is the absence of certain properties that make up digestion, not the presence of certain other properties that make up indigestion. Simply ceasing to digest is indigestion; it is not necessary to introduce some new physical processes in order to indigestion, but merely to stop some old ones. Augustine (Enchiridion 13-14) thus explains the subject: “Every being, even if it be a defective one, insofar as it is a being is good and insofar as it is defective, is evil. Good and evil are contraries, but evil cannot exist without good or in anything that is not good. Good, however, can exist without evil. For a man or an angel can exist without being wicked; but nothing can be wicked except a man or an angel; and so far as he is a man or an angel [i.e., a creature of God] he is good; so far as he is wicked he is an evil. Nothing can be corrupted except what is good, for corruption is nothing else but the destruction of good.”

4.5.16 (see p. 598). Sin is idolatry, that is, creature worship. This is St. Paul’s definition in Romans 1:25 : “Men worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator.” All forms and aspects of sin are reducible to this. And this is the inclining of the human will to self as the ultimate end, because self is the particular creature in which selfishness is most interested. All other creatures are subordinate and subservient to this one. This idolatry is both freedom and bondage: “Whosoever [freely] commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34); “of whom a man is [voluntarily] overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage” (2 Peter 2:19). This sin is freedom because it is the uncompelled self-motion of the will; it is bondage because the will is unable to reverse its self-motion. Man is responsible and guilty for this creature worship because he originates and perpetuates it by self-determination; and he is helpless and ruined by it because he cannot overcome and extirpate his central self-determination by his superficial volitions and resolutions.