4.04. Man's Probation and Apostasy

Man’s Probation and Apostasy Adam and Eve as Mutably Holy by Creation

“Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, through the temptation of Satan transgressed the commandment of God in eating the forbidden fruit and thereby fell from the estate wherein they were created (Genesis 3:6-8; Genesis 3:13; Ecclesiastes 7:29; 2 Corinthians 11:3)” (Westminster Larger Catechism 21). In this statement, it is not meant that the external act of eating the forbidden fruit was the whole of the first transgression and constituted the whole of human apostasy. A part is put for the whole. The full statement would be that “our first parents transgressed the commandment of God by lusting after and eating the forbidden fruit.” This is evident from the prooftext cited by the Westminster divines: “When the woman saw that the tree was a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat” (Genesis 3:6). According to the inspired account, the first sin began with a lustful desiring of the heart, which is the same thing as a sinful inclining of the will. The possibility of such a lustful desiring or wrong inclining in Adam’s will supposes its mutability: “God created man male and female, with righteousness and true holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it: and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change” (Westminster Confession 4.2; Westminster Larger Catechism 17).

Adam was holy by creation, but not indefectibly and immutably so. The inclination of his will, though conformed to the moral law, was mutable, because his will was not omnipotent. When voluntary self-determination is an infinite and self-subsistent power, as it is in God, the fall of the will is impossible. But when voluntary self-determination is a finite and dependent power, as it is in man or angel, the fall of the will is possible. A will determined to good with an omnipotent energy is not “subject to change”; but a will determined to good with a finite and limited force is so subject. By reason of the restricted power of his created will, Adam might lose the righteousness with which he was created, though he was under no necessity of losing it. His will had sufficient power to continue in holiness, but not so much additional power as to make a lapse into sin impossible. By the terms of the covenant of works, perseverance and indefectibility in holiness were made to depend upon Adam’s own decision. In this respect they differed from the believer’s perseverance and indefectibility under the covenant of grace, which are infallibly secured by the operation of the Holy Spirit. The regenerate man is “kept from falling” (Jude 1:24; Ephesians 1:10; John 10:28 -; 1 Thessalonians 4:17; Revelation 21:4). God imparted such a measure of grace to holy Adam as enabled him to continue inclined to the Creator if he would; but not such a measure of grace as to preclude inclining to the creature if he would. The power to the contrary, the possibilitas peccandi¹[Note: 1. possibility of sinning] or power to originate sin, belonged to Adam’s will because of its finiteness. The use of this power was left wholly to him. He might continue to believe and trust in God, in which case he would persevere in holiness and obtain indefectibility as his reward; or he might believe and trust in Satan, in which case he would apostatize and lose holiness. The already existing power to incline rightly and to persevere in this inclination was real and true freedom and did not need this additional power to incline wrongly in order to be such. The power to originate sin was not requisite in order to make Adam a free agent, but to make him a probationary agent. (See supplement 4.4.1.)

Consequently, the paradisaical state, though a holy and happy state, was not equal to the heavenly state. It had not the safety and security of the latter. Eden differed from heaven as holiness differs from indefectibility of holiness, as a mutable perfection differs from an immutable. The perfection of holy Adam was relative, not absolute. It differed from that of God, who by reason of his omnipotence and infinity cannot fall from holiness (James 1:13); from that of the elect angels, who were kept from falling by a special measure of grace that was not granted to the fallen angels, whose perseverance like that of Adam was left to themselves; and from that of redeemed men, who like the elect angels are preserved by special grace (Howe, Man Created Mutable, 6).

God created man with relative perfection, or the possibility of sinning, for the purpose of placing him in probation. Had the Creator given Adam indefectibility in the outset by bestowing upon him that extraordinary measure of grace which infallibly secures perseverance in holiness, Adam’s own strength of will would not have been tested. In this case, God would have prevented the use of the power to the contrary by intensifying the existing self-determination to holiness. Adam would have been kept from falling by God and would not have kept himself.²[Note: 2. WS: The possibility of sinning must not be confounded with the tendency to sin. The possibility of sinning is merely the power to originate sin ex nihilo by the act of self-determination. The tendency to sin implies that the originating or self-determining power has been inwardly exerted, though it may not have been externally. A tendency to sin is an inclination to sin. It is a propensity of the heart and a disposition of the will. The possibility of sinning is innocent; the tendency to sin is sinful.]

The object of this probation was that Adam, by resisting Satan’s temptation and persevering in holiness, might secure by his own work indefectibility or immutable perfection. This was to be an infinite reward for standing the trial of his faith and obedience. God did not place Adam in a state of probation from mere curiosity to see if he would fall or from malevolence to cause him to fall, but from the benevolent desire that Adam, in the exercise of the ample power with which he was endowed, might merit and obtain as the recompense of his fidelity a final and everlasting deliverance from the possibility of sinning. The possibility of sinning is in itself an evil. It is one of the perils of finite freedom. To be delivered from it is an infinite and eternal good. The cry in Wesley’s hymn, “Take away the power of sinning,” is the cry of the Christian heart. A will that is so strongly determined to holiness, by its union with the divine will, that it is beyond the hazard of apostasy is a greater good than a will which though holy is exposed to this hazard. Everlasting holiness is better than temporary; immutable perfection is more desirable than mutable; heaven is more blessed than paradise. (See supplement 4.4.2.) The righteousness which Adam had by creation did not merit indefectibility. God owed nothing at the instant of creation to a creature whom he had just originated from nonentity, to whom he had given holiness and whom he was upholding by his power. He had a right to terminate Adam’s existence and reduce him to nonentity again if he so pleased. A creature, from the very definition of a creature, cannot bring the Creator under an obligation, except so far as the latter by covenant and promise permits him to do so. Witsius (Covenants 1.4.12) cites

Durandus’s reasoning, which Bellarmine was unable to refute: “What we are and what we have, whether good acts, habits, or practices, are all of them from the bounty of God, who both gives freely and preserves them. And because no one after having given freely is obliged to give more, but rather the receiver is the more obliged to the giver; therefore from good habits, acts, or practices given us by God, God is not bound by any debt of justice to give anything more.”

Says Calvin (1.15.8):

Adam could have stood if he would, since he fell merely by his own will, because his will was flexible to either side and he was not endued with constancy to persevere. If any object that he was placed in a dangerous situation on account of the imbecility of his will, I reply that the station in which he was placed was sufficient to deprive him of all excuse. For it would have been unreasonable that God should be confined to this condition, to make man so as to be altogether incapable either of choosing or of committing any sin. It is true that such a nature would have been more excellent; but to expostulate with God as though he had been under any obligation to bestow this upon man were unreasonable. Why he did not sustain him with the power of perseverance remains concealed in his own mind. Yet there is no excuse for man; he received so much that he was the voluntary procurer of his own destruction; but God was under no necessity to give him any other than a mutable will, midway between sin and indefectibility (medium et caducam).

Covenant of Works

God graciously entered into a covenant with holy Adam and with his posterity in him to the effect that if he obeyed the command not to eat of the forbidden fruit he should receive as his reward indefectibility of holiness and blessedness. This is proved by Genesis 2:17 : “In the day you eat thereof you shall surely die”; which implies the converse: “If you do not eat thereof, you shall surely live.” The “life” here implied and promised is a good additional to what Adam already had; otherwise it would not be a reward. Adam already had spiritual life, namely, holiness and happiness; but it was mutable. The additional good, therefore, must have been immutable holiness and happiness. He was to have had spiritual life as indefectible. He was to have passed beyond all possibility of apostasy and misery. This covenant is denominated “the covenant of works”: “These women are [represent] the two covenants” (Galatians 4:24); one of works and the other of grace (Romans 9:4); “but they like man (margin: Adam) have transgressed the covenant” (Hosea 6:7). The consent implied in the covenant of works was by acquiescence on the part of man, like that between child and parent and between the citizen and the state. Assent cannot be righteously or wisely refused to that which is both equitable and advantageous. Adam, being holy, would not refuse to enter into a righteous engagement with his maker; and being intelligent he would not decline an improvement in his condition (see Howe, Man Created Mutable). The merit to be acquired under the covenant of works was pactional. Adam could claim the reward, in case he stood, only by virtue of the promise of God, not by virtue of the original relation of a creature to the Creator. Upon the latter basis, he could claim nothing, as Christ teaches in Luke 17:10. The probationary statute was a positive precept. It was not sinful per se to eat of the tree of knowledge, but only because God had forbidden it. The Eden statute was, thus, a better test of implicit faith and obedience than a moral statute would have been, because it required obedience for no reason but the sovereign will of God. At the same time, disobedience of this positive statute involved disobedience of the moral law. It was contempt of authority, disbelief of God and belief of Satan, discontent with the existing state, impatient curiosity to know, pride and ambition (Anselm, Why the God-?Man 1:21). The “tree of knowledge” was an actual tree bearing fruit in the garden. It might have been a date tree or any other kind of tree and still have been the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because, when once God had selected a particular tree in the garden and by a positive statute had forbidden our first parents to eat of it, the instant they did eat of it they transgressed a divine command and then knew consciously and bitterly what evil is and how it differs from good. The tree thus became “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” not because it was a particular species of tree but because it had been selected as the tree whereby to test the implicit obedience of Adam. (See supplement 4.4.3.) Nature of the First Sin The first sin was unique in respect to the statute broken by it. The Eden commandment was confined to Eden. It was never given before or since. Hence the first Adamic transgression cannot be repeated. It remains a single solitary transgression, the “one”sin spoken of in Romans 5:12; Romans 5:15-19. The first sin was willful and wanton in a high degree, because committed under circumstances that made it easy not to commit it (Charnock, Holiness of God, 477 [ed. Bohn]). Adam was holy and had full power to remain so. And, still more, the temptation that assailed him was much weaker than that which now assails his posterity. Fallen man is now tempted by solicitation addressed both to innocent desire and susceptibility and to sinful desire and susceptibility; but unfallen man was tempted by a solicitation addressed only to innocent desire and susceptibility. Holy Adam had no rebellious inward lust to which Satan could appeal; none of that selfish and sinful desire which St. James speaks of when he says that a man “is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed” (James 1:14). The only subjective susceptibility in Adam which Satan could address was the natural and innocent desire for the fruit of the tree of knowledge considered as “good for food and pleasant to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6). This was a desire and susceptibility founded in the created relation between the nature of man and that of the tree. The other desire for the fruit as “making wise like the gods” (3:6) was forbidden desire, and forbidden desire is sin (20:17; Matthew 5:28; Romans 7:7). Forbidden and sinful desire was not provided for in the creative act, and the established relation between man’s nature and the outward object as permitted and innocent desire was. Adam was not created with a desire for that knowledge of good and evil which would make him like the “gods,” that is, like Satan and his angels. Such a kind of knowledge as this is falsehood, not truth, and to desire it is wrong and sinful. “You shall not covet” is a command that prohibits such a species of desire. On the contrary, Adam was created with a desire for true knowledge, and this desire was satisfied by the knowledge of God which he possessed as made in his maker’s image. He was created “in [true] knowledge and true holiness.” If Adam was already lusting after the spurious knowledge of good and evil and was already proudly desiring to be like the “gods” when Satan suggested the temptation to eat of the fruit, this would have proved that he was already fallen and would have very greatly increased the force of the temptation and made it far more difficult for him to refrain from eating of it. But he was not lusting after and desiring this kind of knowledge when Satan proposed that he should eat of the fruit. This kind of rebellious, disobedient desire required to be originated by Adam himself, as something not previously existing in his submissive heart and obedient will. God had not implanted any such wrong desire as this. This proud and selfish lust for a false and forbidden knowledge had to be started by Adam himself, as something entirely new and aboriginal. It was not a primary God-created desire of the finite will, but a secondary self-originated one. It was not the product of the creative act, but of voluntary self-determination.

Such being the facts in the case, it is evident that inward lust or sinful desire did not contribute to the force of temptation in the instance of unfallen Adam as it does in that of his fallen posterity, nor can it be postulated as helping to explain his fall. Sinful desire was begun by an act of pure self-determination and therefore could not have been the cause of this act. Unfallen Adam was not “drawn away of his own lust and enticed,” as his fallen posterity now are. He willfully and wantonly yielded to an external suggestion of Satan which had by no means the violent strength of an internal desire. To disobey the command of God under the stress of no greater temptation than this was willfulness and wickedness in a high degree. That a holy and happy being, not dragged down in the least by inward lust, with full power to remain holy and happy, should by an act of sheer self-determination convert himself into a sinful and miserable being, under a moderate temptation like that in Eden, was strange and not to be expected. The fall of Adam was intrinsically improbable. A spectator would have prophesied that the holy and happy man would continue in holiness and happiness and not plunge into sin and misery.

Hence, the origin of sin has somewhat of the characteristic of caprice. It was not a natural or a rational act, but unnatural and irrational. Sin is “the mystery of iniquity.” The fall of man cannot be rationalized, that is, explained on natural and rational grounds. This would require that it be accounted for not by pure self-determination but by the operation of the law of cause and effect. In the physical world, a fact can be explained and made to look rational by pointing to a foregoing cause for it that is different from the fact itself. But the fact of sin cannot be so explained and rationalized. There was no prior sinful act or sinful inclination of Adam by which to account for the fact of his apostasy. The sinful self-determination of Adam’s will was both the cause of the first sin and the first sin itself. Sin is self-caused and therefore cannot be an effect proper of a cause proper, because an effect is different from its cause. “Let no one,” says Augustine (City of God 12.7), “look for an efficient cause of the evil will; for it is not efficient, but deficient, since the evil will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect. To seek for an efficient cause of sin [out of the will and other than the will] is like attempting to see darkness or hear silence.” Again he says (City of God 14.2), “God made man upright and consequently with a good inclination. The good inclination, then, is the work of God. But the first evil inclination, which preceded all of man’s evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the good work of God to its own work, than any positive work; the will now not having God, but the will itself, for its end” (see also Concerning Free Will 2.20). And this action of Adam’s will in apostatizing was not only self-determination, but self-determination with no good and sufficient reason. The good reasons were all against it. Self-determination to evil is contrary to pure reason. Sin is the divorce of will from reason. Says Müller (Sin 2.173-75):

We must acknowledge that evil is in its nature inconceivable and incomprehensible; that is to say, is the product of arbitrariness (Willkühr), and arbitrariness is a violation of right reason and true sequence. The inexplicableness of evil is contained in the very conception of evil. The incomprehensibleness of its origin arises not so much from the limitedness of our knowledge as from the nature of evil itself. Hence its inexplicableness does not dwindle and disappear with the increase of our knowledge; and at no future stage of development and growth in wisdom do we pass from this incomprehensibleness to an insight into a higher necessity of evil. On the other hand, the purer and more perfect our moral and religious knowledge becomes, the more attentively we listen to the solemn voice of our inmost consciousness and to the word of divine revelation, the more thoroughly do we perceive evil to be contrary to nature and to reason and thoroughly unaccountable and groundless.

Death as the Consequence of the First Sin The death threatened in Genesis 2:17 was physical, spiritual, and eternal. That it was physical is proved by the following: “Unto dust you shall return” (3:19); “death reigned from Adam to Moses” (Romans 5:14); “Adam died” (Genesis 5:5). Physical death as a mortal principle befell Adam immediately, though he did not actually die on the day he sinned. When a man is smitten with mortal disease he is a dead man, though he may live some months. Adam’s body immediately became a mortal body. Symmachus translates the Hebrew by thnētos esē (you shall become mortal) (cf. Edwards, Original Sin in Works 2.403). That the body of Adam was not mortal by creation is proved by the threatening of death in Genesis 2:17, which implies that as things then were there was no liability to death. No sin, then no death. Also by 3:22: God “drove out the man from the garden lest he take of the tree of life and live forever.” This implies that in the original plan provision was made for the immortality of the body. After the transgression, it was necessary to prevent the immortality of the body by a special act of God. “In my opinion,” says Augustine (Concerning the Guilt and Remission of Sins 1.3), “Adam was supplied with sustenance against decay from the fruit of the various trees and with security against old age from the tree of life.” In Revelation 2:7 the Holy Spirit promises to him “that overcomes” the privilege of “eating of the tree of life which is in the center of the paradise of God.” Complete redemption places man beyond the possibility of death, either physical or spiritual. See also Romans 8:11; Romans 8:23, where the glorified body is connected with the sinless perfection of the soul. The perfection of unfallen Adam’s body, also, excluded an inherent mortality. (See supplement 4.4.4.) The difference between the immortal body of holy Adam and the mortal body of fallen Adam is that prior to the fall the human body was not liable to death from internal causes, but only from external. It had no latent diseases and no seeds of death in it. Neither had it inordinate and vicious physical appetites, such as craving for stimulants, gluttonous appetite for food, licentious sexual appetite, etc., all of which tend to destroy the body. It could, however, be put to death. If it were deprived of food or air, it would die. It was not a celestial body like that of the glorified saints, but a body of flesh and blood. The question was raised in the patristic church whether Christ’s body previous to his resurrection was like that of unfallen Adam or of fallen (Smith, Hagenbach §103; Schaff, History §143). Christ was weary and hungry and thirsty; but it is never said that he was sick with any bodily disease. And he certainly had no inordinate physical appetites. That he might have had a diseased and dying body is compatible with his sinless perfection. For although a sinless soul like that of our Lord deserves an undying and immortal body, yet he might have voluntarily submitted to that part of the “curse” of sin which consists in a diseased and dying body, without thereby becoming a partaker of sin itself (Galatians 3:13). This original immortality of the body, like Adam’s moral perfection, was mutable and relative only. It might be lost. In case he fell from holiness, his body would be affected by his sin. The seeds of mortality would be implanted, the organism would begin to die from the moment of its birth, and the temperate physical appetite would become intemperate and inordinate. On the contrary, if Adam stood probation, that possibility of being put to death (posse mori)³[Note: 3. to be able to die] which was associated with Adam’s relative perfection would become an impossibility (posse non mori),⁴[Note: 4. to be able not to die. To describe the state of being unable to die, I believe that Shedd should have given the Latin as non posse mori, which would be translated “unable to die.”] like that connected with the glorified body of Christ and the resurrection body of believers. These latter not only have no seeds of death in them, but they cannot be put to death by external agency. Says Augustine (Concerning the Guilt and Remission of Sins 1.2), “If Adam had not sinned, he would not have been divested of his body, but would have been clothed upon with immortality and incorruption, that ‘immortality might have been swallowed up of life’; that is, that he might have passed from the natural body into the spiritual body.” The mere possibility of death is not the same as a tendency to death. Unfallen Adam might have the former, but not the latter. A tendency implies the germinal base or seed of the thing. There is a possibility that every man may have all the physical diseases; but there is no tendency to all of them in every man. That the death threatened was spiritual is proved by Romans 5:18, where it is opposed to “spiritual life” (so also in Romans 5:21; Romans 6:23; 2 Timothy 1:10). The description of the consequences of apostasy discloses mental characteristics that belong to spiritual death, namely, terror and shame before God (Genesis 3:8; Genesis 3:10; Genesis 3:24).⁵[Note: 5. WS: Wesley held that the death caused by the first sin was spiritual, not physical; yet that it brought physical death upon the brutes; Southey, Wesley, chap. 20.]

That the death was endless is proved by the texts that represent it as the contrary of life, because the life is unquestionably endless (Romans 5:18; Romans 5:21; Romans 6:23). Also by the texts that prove endless punishment (pp. 889-90).

Cause of the First Sin

Adam and Eve fell from the state of holiness by an act of self-determination, as the efficient cause: “Being left to the freedom of their own will, our first parents transgressed and thereby fell” (Westminster Larger Catechism 21). They also fell by the external temptation of Satan addressed to their innocent susceptibility, as the occasional cause: “Through the temptation of Satan, they transgressed” (Westminster Larger Catechism 21). On the freeness of the first sin, see Charnock, Holiness of God, 476-77 (ed. Bohn).

Adam and Eve were already holy and did not need to originate holiness. In being holy, that is, enlightened in their understanding and rightly inclined in their will, they had plenary power to continue and persevere in holiness. The temptation by Satan had no power to force their decision. To fall under these circumstances was as free and unnecessitated an act of self-determination as can be conceived of. As previously remarked, it was a species of voluntary caprice which cannot be made to look rational or natural. All sin after the first sin is explicable by selfish inclination and strong evil propensities concurring with outward temptation. But the first sin had not these antecedents. There was nothing but an external temptation addressed to an innocent susceptibility: This sin was aggravated in being committed when man had full light in his understanding; a clear copy of the law in his heart; when he had no vicious bias in his will, but enjoying perfect liberty; and when he had a sufficient stock of grace in his hand to withstand the tempting enemy; in being committed after God had made a covenant of life with him and given him express warning of the danger of eating the forbidden fruit. (Fisher, Catechism Q. 15)⁶[Note: 6. WS: Cf. Howe, Oracles 2.24; Augustine, City of God 14.12, 14; 21.12, 15.]

If the will of Adam and Eve had been in a state of indifference, the probability of the fall would have been far greater, because the resistance of an undetermined will is less than that of a determined holy will. Under the circumstances, the fall of the holy pair was unlikely. That it occurred proves that it was a very willful act: wanton and gratuitous. It was also an extremely guilty act, because of being committed against great light and under no great stress of temptation. (See supplement 4.4.5.) The trial of man upon the Pelagian and Semipelagian theories was very disadvantageous compared with his trial upon the Augustinian and Calvinistic. An indifferent and undecided will is extremely liable to succumb to temptation. A will positively inclined to holiness can very readily resist temptation. It is, therefore, a defect in Müller’s theory (Sin 2.70) and also in Howe’s that the human will at the instant of its creation is regarded as “created without any determination to good; it was made in that state of liberty as to be in a certain sort of equipoise, according as things should be truly or falsely represented to it by the mind or understanding” (Howe, Oracles 2.22). If this was the original condition of Adam when subjected to temptation and probation, he was unfavorably placed by his Creator.

“Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God” (Westminster Larger Catechism 14). “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). “All have deviated (exeklinan)”⁷[Note: 7. ἐξέκλιναν] (3:12). “Sin is lawlessness (anōia)”⁸[Note: 8. ἀνομία] (1 John 3:4). Sin is “the work of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19-21). Sin is “the carnal mind and enmity toward God” (Romans 8:7). The intrinsic and inmost characteristic of sin is its culpability or guilt. Guilt is desert of punishment. Sin is damnable and punishable before the moral law. Consequently, sin must be the product of free agency. Necessitated sin is a contradiction. The primary source and seat of sin, therefore, is the will, because this is the causative and originating faculty of the soul: “Our first parents being left to the freedom of their will fell.” From this inmost center of the soul, it passes into the understanding and through the entire man. The inclination and affections having become contrary to what they were by creation, the understanding is darkened and the conscience benumbed.

Some theologians explain the origin of sin by the understanding, rather than the will. Eve was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14). Deception is cognitive. The human mind by creation was enlightened so that it knew God and divine things spiritually. But it was not omniscient. It was capable therefore of being deceived by an apparent good, namely, the knowledge of good and evil. The tempter addresses his temptation to the understanding: “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” This was a plausible temptation to a creature already knowing much and capable of knowing more. But this does not account for the first sin. For this temptation through an apparent good ought to have been repelled and might have been by an act of the will. Eve ought to have remained content with the knowledge she already possessed by creation. By self-determination, she should and could have continued to be satisfied with her maker’s arrangement and refused this promised increase of knowledge. Had she done so, she would have remained unfallen and sinless. In this way, it appears that the proximate and efficient cause of the first sin was the will rather than the understanding. It was not necessary that unfallen Eve should incline or self-determine in accordance with an apparent good. Even though her understanding did perceive a species of good in the forbidden knowledge of good and evil, yet her still holy will could have rejected it. Her understanding had no power to compel her will by means of an apparent or seeming good. This is expressed in the lines of Dante:

Then through the glowing air was sweetly sent A strain so ravishing to mortal sense, It made me Eve’s audacity lament: That when both heaven and earth obedient were, Woman alone, and she but just created, Refused the veil of ignorance to bear; To which had she submitted patiently, O how extended, how much antedated Had been these joys ineffable.

-Purgatory 29.22 The deception of the understanding is a misjudgment of the understanding that does not of necessity carry the will with it. Free will can reject a seeming good as well as a real good, can decide against a false judgment as well as against a true one. Furthermore, a deceived understanding is rather an effect of an evil will than its cause. A false judgment results from a sinful inclination rather than from the converse. Error in the head comes from error in the heart. When the will has once substituted self and the creature for God and the Creator as its ultimate end, then false judgments respecting what is good and what is happiness and what is true knowledge immediately arise. Then finite objects take on a false appearance and are deemed to be the summum bonum:⁹[Note: 9. the highest good] “When once man surrenders himself to the sway of that perverted principle which makes his own satisfaction the aim of all his endeavors, there will necessarily spring from this foul root a multitude of erroneous notions as to what this satisfaction consists in” (Müller, Sin 1.165). But if the will continues true in its primary created determination to God as the chief end, the understanding is not thus hoodwinked, but sees through all the deceptions of temptation and rejects them. (See supplement 4.4.6.)

Still less is the origin of sin to be sought for in the sensuous nature of man-a theory at one time considerably current in Germany and which has received a thorough examination by Müller (Sin 1.295-34). The great objection to it is that it finds the source of sin outside of the voluntary faculty. Man’s sensuous nature is not his will; sarx¹⁰[Note: 0 10. σάρξ = flesh] is not pneuma.¹¹[Note: 1 11. πνεῦμα = spirit] Sense is not causative and originative in its working. Consequently, sin does not begin in the lower physical nature and ascend to the will and reason but vice versa. The will and reason fall first in the order. The soul sins and then the body becomes vitiated. In respect to its having no sinful antecedent out of which it is made, sin is origination ex nihilo. Sin is the beginning of something from nothing, and there is this resemblance between it and creation proper. In holy Adam, there was no sinful inclination or corruption that prompted the first transgression. Adam started the wicked inclination itself ex nihilo, by a causative act of self-determination. The first sin was an act of origination, not of selection or choice. If the first sinful act were one of choice between good and evil, this would require an existing indifference toward both and the absence of inclination. But if it was a self-determining and causative act, this would be compatible with an existing holy inclination. The will, in this case, passed or “lapsed” from one inclination to another by the inherent energy of self-motion that originated something new. As in regeneration, a new holy inclination originated by the Holy Spirit expels the existing sinful inclination, so in apostasy a new sinful inclination originated by the human will expels the existing holy inclination (p. 521). But sin differs from creation proper, in that it is not a substance. Creation originates beings and things; but sin is neither a being nor a thing. Yet it is not “nothing” in every sense of the term nothing. Anselm denominated it essentia and denied that it is substantia. But essentia is too strong a term for sin. Habit and accident are better terms. These are the terms employed by the Reformed theologians. Inasmuch as sin is a habitus inhering in the will and infecting the understanding, it is not a strict nonentity. To commit sin is not to do nothing. To do evil is to do something (cf. Turretin 9.1). Neither is sin a “property” of a substance, because properties necessarily belong to a substance. Sin is an “accident,” that is, a characteristic that may or may not belong to a spiritual substance: When we say that God is the cause of all things, we mean of all such things as have a real existence [i.e., substances]; which is no reason why those things themselves should not be the cause of some accidents, such as actions are. God created man and some other intelligences superior to man with a liberty of acting; which liberty of acting is not itself evil, but may be the cause of something that is evil. (Grotius, Christian Religion 1.8)

“Sin is not something substantial, as Flacius Illyricus, scarcely different from Manicheism, ultimately was establishing concerning the original fall. The proximate material of sin is the very practice (hexis) or bad action itself”¹²[Note: 2 12. Peccatum non est quid substantiale, ut Flacius Illyricus, haud procul a Manichaeismo, saltem de originale labe statuebat. Materia peccati proxima est ipsamet velἕξις vel actio vitiosa. (Note, however, the alternate meaning for hexis that Shedd cites below.)] (Maresius, System 6.6, 8). The term hexis¹³[Note: 3 13. ἕξις = being in a permanent condition] is used by Plato and Aristotle to denote the habitual disposition of a faculty of the mind in distinction from the substance of the faculty itself. “Sin,” says Calvin (2.1.11), “is rather an adventitious quality or accident than a substantial property originally innate.” (See supplement 4.4.7.) The first sin of man, though proximately and formally the violation of the Eden statute, was ultimately and implicitly the violation of the whole moral law. The contempt of divine authority in transgressing the commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge was the contempt of divine authority generally: “He who offends in one point is guilty of all” (James 2:10). Hence sin is defined as “the transgression of law” or lawlessness (1 John 3:4). The moral law violated by the free will of man is both written and unwritten: the law of nature and the Decalogue (Romans 2:14-16). The points of difference between them have been specified under the head of revelation (pp. 85-86). The two laws are originally and essentially the same. The ethics of man’s rational nature as he came from the Creator’s hand and of the Decalogue are identical. The now existing difference between the two is due to apostasy. Says Ursinus (Christian Religion Q. 92): The natural law does not differ from the moral in nature not corrupted; but in nature corrupted, a good part of the natural law is darkened by sins, and but a little part only concerning the obedience due to God was left remaining in man’s mind after the fall: for which cause, also, God has in his church repeated again and declared the whole sentence and doctrine of his law in the Decalogue. Therefore the Decalogue is a restoring and reentering or reinforcing of the law of nature; and the law of nature is a part only of the Decalogue.

Such being the connection between the unwritten and written law, it follows that sin in the heathen is the same in kind with sin in Christendom. Free and responsible human will, in both instances, transgresses a common law and ethics. The difference between the violation of the unwritten law and the written is one of degree only: “As many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law” (Romans 2:12). (See supplement 4.4.8.) S U P P L E M E N T S

4.4.1 (see p. 536). Respecting the freedom of Adam and the possibility of his remaining holy as created, Stillingfleet (Origines 3.3) remarks as follows: “Adam had a power to stand, in that there was no principle of corruption at all in his faculties; but he had a pure and undefiled soul which could not be polluted without its own consent. God cannot be said to be the author of sin, though he did not prevent the fall of man; because he did not withdraw before his fall any grace or assistance which was necessary for his standing. Had there been, indeed, a necessity of supernatural grace to be communicated to man at every moment in order to continue him in his innocency; and had God before man’s fall withdrawn such assistance from him without which it were impossible for him to have stood it would be very difficult to free God from being the cause of the fall of man. But we are not put to such difficulties for acquitting God from being the author of sin. For if God made man upright, he certainly gave him such a power as might be brought into act without the necessity of any supervenient act of grace to elicit that habitual power into particular actions. God would not, certainly, require anything from the creature in his integrity but what he had a power to obey; and if there were necessary further grace to bring the power into act, then the subtracting of this grace must be by way of punishment to man; which it is hard to conceive for what it should be before man had sinned; or else God must subtract this grace on purpose that man might fall, which would follow on this supposition, in which case man would be necessitated to fall. But if God did not withdraw any effectual grace from man whereby he must necessarily fall, then though God permitted man to use his liberty, yet he cannot be said to be in any way the author of sin, because man still had a power of standing if he had made a right use of his liberty.” Similarly Augustine (Rebuke and Grace 28) declares that “God made man with free will, and if he had willed by his own free will to continue in the state of uprightness and freedom from sin in which he was created, assuredly without any experience of death and of unhappiness he would have received by the merit of that continuance the fullness of blessing with which the holy angels also are blessed, that is, the impossibility of falling any more and the knowledge of this with absolute certainty.” This indefectibility, which would have been the reward of Adam’s rejecting the temptation of Satan and continuing in the holiness in which he was created, Augustine describes in Rebuke and Grace 33: “We must consider with attention in what respect these pairs differ from one another, namely, to be able not to sin and not to be able to sin; to be able not to die and not to be able to die; to be able not to forsake good and not to be able to forsake good. For the first man was able not to sin, was able not to die, was able not to forsake good. Are we to say that he who had such a will could not sin? Or that he to whom it was said, ‘If you shall sin you shall die by death,’ could not die? Or that he could not forsake good, when by sinning he would forsake this and so die? Therefore the first liberty of the will was to be able not to sin, the last will be much greater: not to be able to sin; the first immortality was to be able not to die, the last will be much greater: not to be able to die; the first will the power of perseverance, to be able not to forsake good, the last will be the felicity of perseverance [i.e., indefectibility], not to be able to forsake good. But because the last blessings will be preferable and better, were those first ones, therefore, either no blessings at all or mere trifling ones?”

4.4.2 (see p. 536). Anselm (Concerning Free Will 1) argues as follows respecting the undesirableness of the power to sin:

Master: To sin is to do something that is injurious and dishonoring, is it not?

Disciple: Certainly.

Master: Consequently, that will which is unable to deviate from the rectitude of not sinning is freer than that will which is able?

Disciple: Nothing seems more rational.

Master: Do you think that which if added diminishes liberty, and subtracted increases it, should be regarded as a necessary element in liberty?

Disciple: I cannot so think.

Master: The power to sin, therefore, which if added to the will diminishes liberty, and if taken away from the will increases liberty, is no part of liberty.

Disciple: Nothing is clearer.

According to the Pelagian idea of freedom, as indifference and indetermination involving the power to the contrary, the power to sin is as necessary to liberty as the power to act holily; and writers of this school commonly represent it as one of the excellences and prerogatives of a free moral agent. But if freedom be defined, with Augustine and Anselm, as self-motion pure and simple, it is evident that freedom would not be increased by the addition of a power to sin, because this would be no increase of the self-motion which already exists in self-motion to good. And neither would the self-motion of sin be augmented in the least by the addition to it of the power to be holy. To add a contrary motion to an existing motion is certainly no increase of the existing motion, and if the existing motion is free self-motion such addition is no addition of freedom.

4.4.3 (see p. 538). Augustine’s explanation of the tree of knowledge is as follows: “Adam and Eve were forbidden to partake of one tree only, which God called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to signify by this name the consequence of their discovering what good they would experience if they obeyed the prohibition or what evil if they transgressed it. They are no doubt rightly supposed to have abstained from the forbidden tree previous to the malignant persuasion of the devil and to have used all which had been allowed them and therefore among all the others and before all the others the tree of life. For what could be more absurd than to suppose that they partook of the fruit of other trees, but not of that which had been equally with others granted to them and which by its special virtue prevented their animal bodies from undergoing change through the decay of age and from aging unto death? But they were forbidden, as the test of absolute obedience, the use of a tree which, if it had not been for the prohibition, they might have used without suffering any evil effect whatever; and from this circumstance it may be clearly understood that whatever evil they brought upon themselves, because they made use of it contrary to the prohibition, did not proceed from any noxious or pernicious quality in the fruit of the tree, but wholly from their violated obedience” (Forgiveness and Remission 2.35).

Matthew Henry (on Genesis 2:8-9) explains as follows: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was so called not because it had any virtue in it to father or increase useful knowledge, for surely then it would not have been forbidden; but (1) because there was an express positive revelation of the will of God concerning this tree, so that by it Adam might know moral good and evil. What is good? ‘’Tis good not to eat of this tree.’ What is evil? ‘’Tis evil to eat of this tree.’ The distinction between all other moral good and evil was written in the heart of man by nature, but this which results from a positive law was written upon this tree. (2) Because in the event it proved to give Adam an experimental knowledge of good by the loss of it and of evil by the sense of it. As the covenant of grace has in it not only ‘believe and so be saved’ but also ‘believe not and be damned’ (Mark 16:16), so the covenant of innocency had in it not only ‘do this and live,’ which was sealed and confirmed by the tree of life, but ‘fail and die,’ which Adam was assured of by this other tree; so that in these two trees God set before Adam ‘good and evil,’ the ‘blessing and the curse’ (Deuteronomy 30:19). These two trees were as two sacraments or symbols.”

4.4.4 (see p. 541). Augustine (Forgiveness and Baptism 1.21) thus explains the text “in the day you eat thereof you shall surely die”: “When Adam sinned then his body lost the grace whereby it used in every part of it to be obedient to the soul. Then there arose in men appetites common to the brutes, which are productive of shame and which made man ashamed of his own nakedness. Then, also, by a certain disease which was conceived in men from a suddenly infected and pestilential corruption, it was brought about that they lost that stability of life in which they were created, and by reason of the mutations which they experienced in the stages of life the disease issued at last in death. However many were the years they lived in their subsequent life, yet they began to die on the day when they received the law of death, because they kept verging toward old age.” Similarly Charnock (God’s Patience) remarks: “So it is to be understood, not of an actual death of the body, but the desert of death and the necessity of death: ‘You will be obnoxious to death, which will be avoided if you do forbear to eat of the forbidden fruit; you shall be a guilty person and so come under a sentence of death, that I may when I please inflict it upon you.’ Death did not come upon Adam that day because his nature was vitiated; he was then also under an expectation of death, he was obnoxious to it, though that day it was not poured out upon him in the full bitterness and gall of it; as when the apostle says, ‘The body is dead because of sin,’ he speaks of the living, and yet tells them the body was dead because of sin; he means that it was under a sentence and so a necessity of dying, though not actually dead.”

4.4.5 (see p. 543). Charnock (Holiness of God, 476) describes the ease with which the first sin might have been avoided: “God cannot necessitate sin. Indeed sin cannot be committed by force; there is no sin but is in some sort voluntary; voluntary in the root or voluntary in the branch; voluntary by an immediate act [volition] of the will or voluntary by a general or natural inclination of the will. The plain story of man’s apostasy from God discharges God from any part in the crime as an encouragement and excuses him from any appearance of connivance, when he showed him the tree he had reserved as a mark of his sovereignty and forbade him to eat of the fruit of it; he backed the prohibition with the threatening of the greatest evil, namely, death; and in that couched an assurance of the perpetuity of his felicity if he did not rebelliously reach forth his hand to take and ‘eat of the fruit.’ Though the ‘goodness of the fruit for food and its pleasantness to the eye’ (Genesis 3:6) might allure him, yet the force of his reason might have quelled the liquorishness of his sense, and the perpetual thinking of and sounding out of the command of God had silenced both Satan and his own appetite. What inward inclination in him to disobey can we suppose there could be from the Creator, when upon the very first offer of the temptation Eve opposes to the tempter the prohibition and threatening of God and strains it to a higher peg than we find God had delivered it in? For in 2:17 it is ‘you shall not eat of it’; but she adds (3:3) ‘neither shall you touch it,’ which was a remark that might have had more influence to restrain her. Had our first parents kept this fixed upon their understandings and thoughts, that God had forbidden any such act as the eating of the fruit and that he was true to execute the threatening he had uttered, of which veracity of God they could not but have a natural notion, with what ease might they have withstood the devil’s attack and defeated his design! There is no ground for any suspicion of any encouragements, inward impulses, or necessity from God in this affair. A discharge of God from complicity in this first sin will easily imply a freedom of him from all other sins which follow from it. God does not encourage or excite or incline to sin. How can he excite to that which when it is done he will be sure to condemn? How can he be a righteous judge to sentence a sinner to misery for a crime actuated by a secret inspiration from himself? Iniquity would deserve no reproof from him, if he were in any way positively [and efficiently] the author of it. Were God the author of it in us, what is the reason that our own conscience accuses us for it and convinces us of it? Conscience, being God’s deputy, would not accuse us of it if the sovereign power by which it acts did incline or force us to it. The Apostle Paul execrates such a thought (Romans 9:14).”

4.4.6 (see p. 544). The question whether the will or the understanding is the most central and whether the will follows the understanding or the converse is important in determining which is the true ego. Locke (Conduct of the Understanding, introduction) teaches that the will follows the understanding: “The agent determines himself to this or that voluntary action upon some precedent knowledge or appearance of knowledge in the understanding. No man ever sets himself about anything but upon some view or other which serves him for a reason for what he does. The will itself, how absolute and uncontrollable soever it may be thought, never fails in its obedience to the dictates of the understanding.” This remark is true of the action of the will as choosing the means to an end in volitions, but not as inclining to the ultimate end itself. When a person chooses to steal money he erroneously judges with the understanding that money is the chief good. This erroneous judgment of the understanding precedes and moves him to the volition by which he steals the money. But money appears to be the chief good to the understanding only because the inclination of the will tends to self and the creature as its ultimate end. Did the inclination of the will tend to God and infinite good as its ultimate end, holiness, not money, would be desired as the chief good, and the judgment of the understanding that it is such would follow accordingly. The understanding always judges according to the person’s abiding desire or inclination. If this latter is unselfish and right, the judgment is always correct. If it is selfish and wrong, the judgment is always erroneous. A reference to Adam as unfallen and fallen will illustrate this. Unfallen Adam discerned correctly between the greater and the inferior good. He was not deceived into judging the lesser good to be the greater. But fallen Adam was so deceived. How came he to be so? Not by an act of judgment that was prior to the change of his inclination and desire. So long as he was unfallen and inclined in his will to God as the chief good and desired him as such, he did not pass such a false judgment. He judged in accordance with his holy inclination and desire, and his judgment that God is the chief good was true. But when the inclination of his will underwent a revolution and he came to desire the creature, namely, his wife Eve, instead of the Creator as the chief good, then his judgment followed his inclination and he esteemed what he desired to be the summum bonum.¹⁴[Note: 4 14. the highest good] This demonstrates that the last dictate or judgment of the understanding is according to the will or inclination and not the will or inclination according to the last judgment of the understanding. Objects appear to the understanding as they agree or disagree with the dominant desire of the heart or inclination of the will. The following extract from Charnock (Goodness of God) is a clear statement of the fact that the will must have a good of some kind, real or seeming, true or false, as its end: “Nothing but a good can be the object of a rational appetite [i.e., the appetency of a rational self-moving soul in distinction from an instinctive necessitated animal soul]. The will cannot direct its motion to anything under the notion of evil, evil in itself, or evil to it; whatsoever courts it must present itself in the quality of a good in its own nature or in its present circumstances, to the present state and condition of the desire; it will not else touch or affect the will. This is the language of that faculty, ‘Who will show me any good?’ (Psalms 4:6), and good is as inseparably the object of the will’s motion as truth is of the understanding’s inquiry. Whatsoever a man would allure another to comply with, he must propose to the person under the notion of some beneficialness in point of honor, profit, or pleasure.” But whether a true or a false good shall be the end aimed at by the will depends upon the state and condition of the will and not upon the intrinsic quality of the true or the false good. If the will is holy in its inclination or appetency, the good aimed at by it will be the true good, and the good refused and rejected will be the false good. If the will is sinful in its inclination and desire, the good aimed at will be the false good, and the true will be rejected. The judgment of the understanding respecting the desirableness of the good, in each instance, is not a prior and independent one. It depends upon the existing bias of the will and follows it. Instead therefore of the maxim “the will follows the last dictate of the understanding,” the truth is that the last dictate of the understanding follows the will. The understanding will judge that wealth, honor, and pleasure are the good to be sought after, instead of “glory, honor, and immortality,” in case the inclination of the will is selfish and carnal and lusts after these. This judgment is a false one, but an actual and real one. It is the judgment of the natural man universally. On the contrary, the understanding will judge that “glory, honor, and immortality” are the summum bonum,¹⁵[Note: 5 15. the highest good] if the will is spiritually inclined to them, and this judgment is the true one. It is the judgment of the renewed man. In this way it appears that the will, not the understanding, is the most central and profound of the human faculties. It is the ego in its ultimate essence: “For the will is not merely the surface faculty of single volitions, over which the person has arbitrary control, but also that central and inmost active principle into which all the powers of cognition and feeling are grafted, as into the very core and substance of the personality itself” (Shedd, Literary Essays, 326; Theological Essays, 233-35). This was also Aristotle’s view, according to Neander (“Grecian and Christian Ethics,” Bibliotheca sacra, Oct. 1853: 806): “It is Aristotle’s great service to ethics that he has urged the principle that the free determination of the will is the lever of all moral development; that knowledge is not the first or original element, but the direction [inclination] of the will; that the judgment does not, as the primal power of the mind, determine the will, but the abiding decision of the will determines the judgment; that the man by his permanent determination of will forms his character, and this character having become what it is freely reacts upon the views and judgment of the man.”

Jeremy Taylor (sermon to the University of Dublin) quotes Aristotle’s view and endorses it as follows: “Said Aristotle, ‘Wickedness corrupts a man’s reasoning’; it gives him false principles and evil measure of things; the sweet wine that Ulysses gave to the Cyclops put his eye out; and a man that has contracted evil affections and made a league with sin sees only by those measures. A covetous man understands nothing to be good that is not profitable; and a voluptuous man likes your reasoning well enough if you discourse of bonum jucundum,¹⁶[Note: 6 16. pleasant good or a pleasant good thing] the pleasures of the sense; but if you talk to him of the melancholy lectures of the cross, the peace of meekness, and of rest in God, after your long discourse, and his great silence, he cries out, ‘What is the matter?’ He knows not what you mean. Either you must fit his humor or change your discourse. Every man understands by his affections more than by his reason. A man’s mind [inclination] must be like your proposition before it can be entertained; it is a man’s mind that gives the emphasis and makes your argument to prevail.

“Do we not see this by daily experience? Even those things which a good man and an evil man know, they do not know them both alike. A wicked man knows that good is lovely and sin is of an evil and destructive nature; and when he is reproved he is convinced; and when he is observed he is ashamed; and when he is done he is unsatisfied; and when he pursues his sin he does it in the dark: tell him he shall die and he sighs deeply, but he knows it as well as you: proceed and say that after death comes judgment, and the poor man believes and trembles; he knows that God is angry with him; and if you tell him that for aught he knows he may be in hell tomorrow, he knows that it is an intolerable truth, but it is also undeniable; and yet, after all this, he runs to commit his sin with as certain an event and resolution as if he knew no argument against it; these notices of things terrible and true pass through his understanding as an eagle through the air; as long as her flight lasted the air was shaken, but there remains no path behind her.

“Now at the same time we see other persons, not so learned it may be, not so much versed in Scripture, yet they say a thing is good and lay hold of it; they believe glorious things of heaven, and they live accordingly as men that believe themselves; half a word is enough to make them understand; a nod is a sufficient reproof; the crowing of a cock, the singing of a lark, the dawning of the day, and the washing their hands are to them competent memorials of religion and warnings of their duty. What is the reason of this difference? They both read the same Scriptures, they read and hear the same sermons, they have capable understandings, they both believe what they hear and what they read, and yet the event is vastly different. The reason is that which I am now speaking of; the one understands by one principle, the other by another; the one understands by nature, and the other by grace; the one by human learning, and the other by divine; the one reads the Scriptures without, the other within; the one understands as a son of man, the other as a son of God; the one perceives by the proportions of the world, and the other by the measures of the Spirit; the one understands by reason, and the other by love.” The fact mentioned by St. Paul (1 Timothy 2:14) that “Adam was not deceived by Satan” as Eve was and yet apostatized from God proves that the first cause of sin is the self-determination of the will, not the misjudgment of the understanding. Says Augustine (City of God 14.11): “For as Aaron was not induced to agree in judgment with the people when they blindly wished him to make an idol and yet yielded to their constraint; and as it is not credible that Solomon was so blind as to suppose that idols should be worshiped but was drawn over to such sacrilege by the blandishments of women; so we cannot believe that Adam was deceived and supposed the devil’s word to be truth and therefore transgressed God’s law, but that he, by the drawings of kindred, yielded to the woman, the husband to the wife, the one human to the only other human being. The woman accepted as true what the serpent told her, but the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin. He was not on this account less culpable, but sinned with his eyes open. And so the apostle does not say ‘he did not sin’ but ‘he was not deceived.’ For he shows that he sinned when he says, ‘By one man sin entered into the world,’ and immediately after, more distinctly, ‘In the likeness of Adam’s transgression.’ ”

Kant (Practical Reason, 212 [trans. Abbott]) directs attention to the ambiguity of the expression sub ratione boni:¹⁷[Note: 7 17. under the idea/notion of the good] “It may mean: We represent something to ourselves as good, when and because we desire it; or we desire something because we represent it to ourselves as good, so that either the desire determines the notion of the object as a good, or the notion of the good determines the desire; so that in the first case sub ratione boni would mean that we will something under the idea of the good; in the second, in consequence of this idea, which, as determining the will, must precede it.”

4.4.7 (see p. 545). The Formula of Concord 1 rejects the doctrine that sin is the substance of the soul: “We condemn as a Manichean error the teaching that original sin is properly and without any distinction the very substance, nature, and essence of corrupt man, so that between his corrupt nature after the fall, considered in itself, and original sin, there is no difference at all, and that no distinction can be conceived between them by which original sin can be distinguished from man’s nature, even in thought. Dr. Luther, it is true, calls this original evil a sin of nature, personal, essential; but not as if the nature, person, or essence of man, without any distinction, is itself original sin; but he speaks after this manner in order that by phrases of this kind the distinction between original sin, which is infixed in human nature, and other sins, which are called actual, may be better understood.”

Augustine denies that sin is the substance of the soul and asserts that it is its agency: “That which we have to say on this subject our author [Pelagius] mentions when concluding this topic he says: ‘As we remarked, the passage in which occur the words, The flesh lusts against the Spirit, must needs have reference not to the substance [of the flesh] but to the works of the flesh.’ We, too, allege that this is spoken not of the substance of the flesh but of its works, which proceed from carnal concupiscence-in a word, from sin, concerning which we have this precept: ‘Not to let it reign in our mortal body, that we should obey it in the lusts thereof’ ” (Nature and Grace 66). “From the body of this death nothing but God’s grace alone delivers us. Not, of course, from the substance of the body, which is good; but from its carnal offenses. It was this that the apostle meant when he said, ‘I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members’ ” (Nature and Grace 62). “There is nothing of what we call evil if there be nothing good. But a good which is wholly without evil is a perfect good. A good, on the other hand, which contains evil is a faulty or imperfect good; and there can be no evil where there is no good. From all this we arrive at the curious result: that since every being, so far as it is a being, is good, when we say that a faulty being is an evil being we seem to say that what is good is evil, and that nothing but what is good can be evil. Yet there is no escape from this conclusion. When we accurately distinguish we find that it is not because a man is a man that he is an evil, or because he is wicked that he is a good; but that he is a good because he is a man, and an evil because he is wicked. Whoever, then, says, ‘To be a man is an evil’ or ‘To be wicked is a good,’ falls under the prophetic denunciation: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil!’ For he condemns the work of God, which is the man, and praises the defect of man, which is the wickedness. Therefore 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” (Enchiridion 13). This means that man as a substance is created by God and as such is good; man as an agent is sinfully self-moving and as such is evil.

Athanasius, also arguing against the Manichean hypothesis that sin is a substance and not the misuse or abuse of a creature’s will, compares this opinion to that of a person “who were to shut his eyes at noonday, and finding it dark should fancy that darkness is something as real as the light or that the substance of the light is changed into another substance of a quite contrary nature” (Oration against the Gentiles 7). There is a science of light, namely, optics, but no science of darkness, which evinces the nonsubstantiality of the latter. Darkness has no properties or qualities that can be examined by instruments and whose nature can be expressed in the terms of mathematics. It has no theory like that of emission or of undulation by which it can be explained. Nothing can be predicated of it of a positive nature. It can be defined only negatively as the absence of light. So, likewise, sin is not a substance, and neither is holiness. But while sin may be defined as the absence of holiness and darkness as the absence of light, holiness may not be defined as the absence of sin, nor light the absence of darkness. Holiness and light are positive conceptions; sin and darkness are negative.

4.4.8 (see p. 546). Leighton (Exposition of the Ten Commandments) thus states the relation of the written law to the unwritten: “At first the commandments were written in the heart of man by God’s own hand, but as the first tables of stone fell and were broken, so was it with man’s heart; by his fall his heart was broken and scattered among earthly perishing things that was before whole and entire to his maker; and so the characters of that law written in it were so shivered and scattered that they could not be perfectly and distinctly read in it; therefore it pleased God to renew that law after this manner by a most solemn delivery with audible voice and then by writing it on tables of stone. And this is not all, but this same law he does write anew in the hearts of his children.”