028. QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER 11.

QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER 11.

1. What is the Pelagian and Socinian notion of depravity?

2. What other erroneous opinion has obtained on the subject?

3. What is the true doctrine upon this subject?

4. Is man by nature totally depraved?

5. What distorted view of this doctrine have its opponents generally presented?

6. Does total depravity imply depravity in every possible sense, and to the greatest possible extent?

7. In what respects may depravity be understood to be total?

8. Wherein appears the absurdity of representing total depravity as implying depravity in every possible sense and degree?

9. What two positions, already established, form the basis of the first argument?

10. How does it appear that Adam was the natural head and representative of his posterity?

11. Do his posterity stand chargeable with the personal obliquity of his offense?

12. In what two senses is sin taken, according to Dr. Watts?

13. How does it appear that our relation to Adam, our guilt, and our subjection to the penalty of the law, are inseparably connected?

15. What passages are brought from the Old Testament to prove this doctrine?

16. From the New Testament?

17. Do experience and observation confirm this doctrine?

18. What five obvious facts are here appealed to?

19. How have Pelagians and Socinians endeavored to account for these facts?

20. How does it appear that they only shift, without solving the difficulty?

21. If men were naturally holy, what kind of example might we reasonably expect to be most prevalent? If the moral character of man were naturally indifferent to good and evil, what might we expect to be the state of actual character?

22. How does it appear that education cannot account for these facts?

Admitting the influence of education to be ever so great, what would be the great difficulty still remaining?

CONSIDERED.

HAVING contemplated the evidences by which the doctrine of the innate depravity of man is sustained, we propose in the present chapter an examination of several difficulties with which the opposers of this doctrine have considered it encumbered.

I. It has been urged by the advocates of original innocence, that this doctrine of total depravity makes God directly the author of sin, by alleging that he has judicially infused into the nature of man a positive evil, taint, or infection, which descends from Adam to all his posterity. To this we reply, that although some advocates of the doctrine have so expressed themselves as to give seeming ground for this objection, yet a close attention to the proper definition of depravity will entirely free the doctrine from any difficulty from this quarter. The doctrine of the native depravity of man, as taught in the Scriptures, does not imply a direct infusion of positive evil from the Almighty. The positive evil here implied is rather the necessary consequence of a privation of moral good: as it has been aptly expressed by some, it is “a depravation resulting from a deprivation.” This view of the subject is sustained by the following remarks from Arminius: “But since the tenor of the covenant into which God entered with our first parents was this, that if they continued in the favor and grace of God, by the observance of that precept and others, the gifts which had been conferred upon them should be transmitted to their posterity by the like divine grace which they had received; but if they should render themselves unworthy of those favors, through disobedience, that their posterity should likewise be deprived of them, and should be liable to the contrary evils: hence it followed that all men who were to be naturally propagated from them, have become obnoxious to death temporal and eternal, and have been destitute of that gift of the Holy Spirit, or of original righteousness. This punishment is usually called a privation of the image of God, and original sin. But we allow this point to be made the subject of discussion: besides the want or absence of original righteousness, may not some other contrary quality be constituted as another part of original sin? We think it is more probable that this absence alone of original righteousness, is original sin itself, since it alone is sufficient for the commission and production of every actual sin whatever.” The scriptural view of the subject is, that Adam by sin forfeited the gift of the Holy Spirit for himself and his posterity, and this privation, as a necessary consequence, resulted in the loss of holiness, happiness, and every spiritual good, together with real involvement in all the evil implied in spiritual death. As death, with putrefaction and corruption, flows directly from the privation of natural life, so moral evil or depravity immediately and necessarily results from the absence of spiritual life. So we perceive there was no necessity for the direct infusion of moral evil by the Almighty. It was only requisite for the Holy Spirit to be withdrawn, and moral evil, like a mighty torrent when the floodgate is lifted, deluged and overwhelmed the soul. The following, upon the subject of the “retraction of God’s Spirit from Adam,” is from Mr, Howe: “This we do not say gratuitously; for do but consider that plain text, Galatians 3:13 : ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree; that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.’ If the remission of the curse carry with it the conferring of the grace of the Spirit, then the curse, while it did continue, could not but include and carry in it the privation of the Spirit. This was part of the curse upon apostate Adam - the loss of God’s Spirit. As soon as the law was broken, man was cursed, so as that thereby the Spirit should be withheld - should be kept off otherwise than as upon the Redeemer’s account, and according to his methods it should be restored. Hereupon it could not but ensue that the holy image of God must be erased and vanished.”

We conclude upon this point with the following quotation from Mr. Watson’s Institutes. Speaking of Adam, he says: “He did sin, and the Spirit retired; and the tide of sin once turned in, the mound of resistance being removed, it overflowed his whole nature. In this state of alienation from God, men are born with all these tendencies to evil, because the only controlling and sanctifying power - the presence of the Spirit - is wanting, and is now given to man, not as when first brought into being as a creature, but is secured to him by the mercy and grace of a new and different dispensation, under which the Spirit is administered in different degrees, times, and modes, according to the wisdom of God, never on the ground of our being creatures, but as redeemed from the curse of the law by him who became a curse for us.”

II. In the next place, it is objected to this doctrine that “As we have souls immediately from God, if we are born sinful, he must either create sinful souls, which cannot be supposed without impiety, or send sinless souls into sinful bodies, to be defiled by the unhappy union, which is as inconsistent with his goodness as his justice. Add to this, that nothing can be more unphilosophical than to suppose that a body - a mere lump of organized matter - is able to communicate to a pure spirit that moral pollution of which itself is as incapable as the murderer’s sword is incapable of cruelty.” To this objection we reply, that however weighty it may have been considered by many, it rests entirely upon a vulgar assumption, which cannot be sustained, viz., that we have our souls immediately from God by infusion. That such is not the fact, but that they descend from Adam by traduction, we are led to believe from the following considerations:

1. It is said that God “rested on the seventh day from all his work” of creation; consequently it is unreasonable to suppose that he is still engaged in the creation of souls, as the bodies of mankind multiply upon earth.

2. Eve was originally created in Adam. God made Adam of the “dust of the ground,” and infused into his body a living soul; but when Eve was afterward produced, she was not properly created: she was made of a part of Adam’s body, and there is no account of God’s breathing into her the breath of life, as in the case of Adam. She was called woman because she was taken out of man. Now, as Eve derived her nature, soul and body, from Adam, why may not the souls of his posterity descend from him?

3. If we do not derive our souls by natural descent, neither can we thus derive the life of our bodies, for “the body without the spirit is dead.”

4. We read in Genesis 5:3, that fallen “Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image.” Adam was a fallen, embodied spirit; such also must have been his son, or he could not have been “in his own likeness.

5. Our Saviour said to Nicodemus: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” We have in another place shown that by the term flesh here in the latter instance, we are to understand our fallen, sinful nature. If so, it must include the soul. Again, it is written, “Ye must be born again.” Now, if the soul is not born with the body, how can its renovation in conversion be called being “born again?” Surely the body is not “born again” in conversion.

Some have thought that the doctrine of the traduction of human souls tends to Materialism. “But this arises,” says Mr. Watson, “from a mistaken view of that in which the procreation of a human being lies, which does not consist in the production out of nothing of either of the parts of which the compounded being, man, is constituted, but in the uniting them substantially with one another. Since, therefore, the traduction of the human soul is more rational and scriptural than its immediate creation, the objection to the doctrine of the native pollution of the soul, which we have been considering, is shown to be groundless.

We need not be told that the view here taken of this subject involves mysteries. This we admit. But is it therefore erroneous? Who can understand the mysteries of the new birth? and yet we receive the doctrine as true. Why, then, should we reject the doctrine of the natural descent of the soul, merely because we cannot comprehend how it is that all the souls as well as the bodies of his posterity were created in Adam, from whom they are derived by descent?

III. In the third place, the doctrine of the native total depravity of man has been objected to from the fact that there is frequently to be found much moral good in unregenerate men. In reply to this, we observe, that all the good claimed with justice as belonging to unregenerate men, can be satisfactorily accounted for without denying that all men are by nature totally depraved.

1. There may be much seeming good, much negative virtue, in society, originating from the fact that many of the various vices of mankind, from their very nature, to some extent counteract each other. Thus the passion of avarice may lead to the practice of industry. The love of fame may lead to acts of ostentatious benevolence, etc., but in such cases the principle of action is not spiritually good.

2. Selfish motives may frequently lead to acts of seeming virtue; a mere love of self-interest induces many to endeavor to secure for themselves a good character on account of the standing and influence which it will give them in society; all this may be perfectly consistent with the view we have presented of the native corruption of the soul.

3. In the next place, the character of man may appear much better than it really is, merely because surrounding circumstances have not called into open action the latent principles of the soul. The seed of evil may be there, but it may not come forth and exhibit itself, merely because those exciting causes calculated to call it forth to action have not been brought to bear.

4. But lastly, that acts really praiseworthy, and founded upon principles not wholly corrupt, have frequently been performed by the unregenerate, we are compelled to admit. But all this can be satisfactorily and fully explained without impugning the doctrine of total depravity. We are not left entirely to ourselves, and to the unbridled influence of our corrupt nature. Through the atonement of Christ, a day of grace is given to men, the Holy Spirit is sent to visit the hearts of sinners, “dead in trespasses and sins,” and the “true light lighteth every man that cometh into the world;” so that all that is spiritually and really good in principle among men, is to be attributed, not to nature, but to grace. It comes not through the first, but the second Adam.