Traditional Dogmatics avoids determining the idea of sin by comparison with the life-portrait of Christ or with the instruction He gave in the righteousness of the Kingdom of God, by affirming the iustitia originalis of our first parents before they sinned. In this connection we still have a divine of modern times recording of the progenitors of the human race that their self-consciousness was a pure unclouded consciousness of God, their will positively good, and the inclination of their heart childlike love to God. The higher these predicates run, the more profound appears to be the state of sin which has come about in them and their descendants through the transgression of the known prohibition of God. The record in Genesis, however, partly contains no trace of this characterisation of our first parents, and partly contains its very opposite; and it is foreign to Paul’s knowledge of Scripture as well, certain as it is that the comparison he draws between the first and the second Adam is as far as possible from indicating that the first was originally the counterpart of the second (1 Cor. xv. 45–47). But the theology which carries back to the beginning of human history that normal condition which Christianity has first made possible for man, and declares it to be the natural state of human life, entails upon itself the disadvantage of having to conceive the Person of Christ as an anomalous phenomenon in human history. For on that basis Christ can be understood only as the Bearer of God’s operation against sin. But if sin is a fortuitous and abnormal fact in human history, we are bound to pass the same judgment even on Christ Himself. Thus the plan of orthodox Dogmatics serves to make the historical appearance of Christ unintelligible. But if, on the contrary, in the Christian religion Jesus Christ is the standard of His believers’ view of the world and estimate of self, then in Dogmatics His Person must be regarded as the ground of knowledge to be used in the definition of every doctrine.

Hence even the dogmatic doctrine of man must not be filled up by adducing elements from the Biblical creation-document, but by that spiritual and moral conception of man which is revealed in the life-course of Jesus, and His intention to found the Kingdom of God. The doctrinal statements in the Confessions, too, regarding the original state of man, have no other significance than that of antedating the Christian ideal of life. When this fact is recognised, they are seen to be characteristic representations of the Catholic and the Evangelical conceptions of that ideal. In other words, the Evangelical doctrine of iustitia originalis expresses the thought that the Christian ideal should form an element of the conception of man. On the other hand, the Catholic interpretation of the subject, according to which original righteousness was added to human nature as a gift of grace, implies that the Christian ideal falls outside the essential constitution of man. Therefore the alleged marks of the perfect Christian life, namely, renunciation of the family, of private property, and of the entire circuit of personal honour, are not demanded from all Christians, but only from monks; and what they are expected to lead under these conditions is not a human life, but the vita angelica. The Evangelical assumption, on the other hand, that our first parents were created with righteousness as the content of their nature, is an expression of the fact that the Christian ideal falls within the limits of man’s constitution, and that in Dogmatics the general nature of man ought to be interpreted in the light of this standard. Conceived in this fashion, the idea of iustitia originalis is confessionally important and dogmatically significant; it is in comparison a matter of indifference that no ground exists for supposing that our first parents were endowed with this attribute.

This supposition is also rejected when Schleiermacher strives to view the sending of Christ for the purpose of redemption as at the same time the completion of God’s creation of man (p. 128). This is an important step towards vindicating the conception of Christ’s Person as the all-round principle of knowledge in Dogmatics. To be sure the expression used by Schleiermacher is not altogether felicitous. Since we usually define the idea of creation by distinguishing it from Divine preservation and government, the expression suggests the idea that it is intended to cover the birth of Jesus, and nothing more. But that cannot be the point in question, since Jesus in respect of His birth is not distinguisable from any other man. His unique worth lies in the manner in which He mastered His spiritual powers through a self-consciousness which transcended that of all other men, and by His will brought them all to bear upon His personal destination. Now, as this activity of His personal force must be conceived as embraced by the peculiar operation of God in Him, it ought to be acknowledged that in Him we have a manifestation of Divine creation; but, in that case, in ” Divine creation ” we include what we otherwise distinguish from it as preservation and government. Further, it must be taken into account that the transformation of the human race which is traceable to the peculiar work of Christ fulfils itself in individuals, whose existence is due to natural descent, in a manner compatible with their freedom, while to be free and to be created are contrary notions. Thus the expression chosen by Schleiermacher is paradoxical. What is meant by it is more suitably expressed by saying that the common destiny of men, through which they attain their distinction from nature and their lordship over the world, was first realised in its full compass in the self-consciousness of Christ, and through Him made manifest and effective. As compared with earlier known degrees of possible moral fellowship and spiritual freedom over against nature, Christ experienced the latter in perfect measure, and realised the former to the highest imaginable extent, inasmuch as He passed His life in the vocation of founding the Kingdom of God, without once deviating from it — and both in the strength of a fellowship or unity with God such as no one before Him had ever known.

The Christian ideal of life, as the opposite of which we have to conceive sin, includes two different kinds of functions, the religious and the moral—trust in God, by which we rise superior to the world, and action prompted by love towards our neighbour and tending to produce that fellowship which, as the summum bonum, represents at the same time the perfected good. When we make it our personal end—as far as time and place and calling demand or permit—to second and assist all others in respect of their true destiny, we act from a good will and according to the law of God. In the conception of sin there will therefore have to be distinguished the two sides which are respectively opposed to these functions. Now this view is indicated in the Confessio Augustana, Art. II., and in its Apology when, as the content of universal or inherited sin, there is brought forward first man’s being sine metu, sine fiducia erga deum, while in the second place concupiscentia is mentioned. Probably both expressions denote the religious defect, which brings the moral defect in its train.² At all events the emphasis laid upon these religious defects introduces an innovation in the hitherto accepted tradition, which is in harmony with other features of the Reformers’ view as a whole. Stress has already (p. 170) been laid on the fact that if the principal thing in Christian perfection is reverence and trust in God, the opposite of both must be affirmed as the leading characteristic of sin; and further, that the Lutheran doctrine of poenitentia can issue in the regaining of faith only provided what is pre-eminently regarded in sin is its anti-religious side. Augustine knows nothing of these considerations, inasmuch as he defines original sin simply as concupiscentia, selfish desire. Now, as the Reformers prove, it is indeed possible to find in this conception likewise an anti-religious attitude towards God, and to give specific expression to it accordingly. But yet Augustine and all his successors have not taken this step. And the explanation of this circumstance is to be found in the fact that Augustine assumes the moral law as the original dispensation between God and men, a dispensation which is violated by the entrance of sin. Luther, however, recognised the kind providence of God and man’s trust in it as the basal form of religion, in which men lived and moved before the fall. Accordingly, a defect in reverence and in trust in God, or indifference and mistrust of Him, was proved to be the basal form of the sin of our first parents, and, if that sin is transmitted to all men, as the basal form of original sin, which then has as a special consequence selfish desire directed against the claims of the moral society. We can interpret sin exhaustively if we use this doctrinal position as a clue, for its worthlessness can only be measured by the perverted attitude which the sinner adopts towards God. For the point of importance is to distinguish sin from wrong-doing and crime. A given action, in the light of human society and the law of the State, is a wrong and a crime. But the same action is sin when it springs from indifference towards God, as the Benefactor and Governor of human life. By bringing out this aspect we stamp sin as a religious idea, as a characteristic value-notion.

§ 41. A more complete estimate of the anti-moral aspect of sin than is expressed in the conception of the concupiscentia of each individual, is to be found by comparing it with the common good which, according to Christian standards, ought to be realised through the co-operation of all. The good in the Christian sense is the Kingdom of God, in other words the uninterrupted reciprocation of action springing from the motive of love—a Kingdom in which all are knit together in union with every one who can show the marks of a neighbour; further, it is that union of men in which all goods are appropriated in their proper subordination to the highest good. Now sin is the opposite of the good, so far as it is selfishness springing from indifference or mistrust of God, and directs itself to goods of subordinate rank without keeping in view their subordination to the highest good. It does not negate the good as such; but, in traversing the proper relation of goods to the good, it issues in practical contradiction of the good. Now, if we are to find in the conception of the Kingdom of God the standard for the full determination of sin as its opposite, then sin cannot be completely represented either within the framework of the individual life, or in that of humanity as a natural species. The subject of sin, rather, is humanity as the sum of all individuals, in so far as the selfish action of each person, involving him as it does in illimitable interaction with all others, is directed in any degree whatsoever towards the opposite of the good, and leads to the association of individuals in common evil. This definition, which is in the closest formal agreement with Schleiermacher (vol. i. p. 503), transcends the dilemma which hovers between Pelagius and Augustine, and to which the problem of sin has always been restricted. Pelagius recognises exclusively the individual will as the form of sin. He reflects, indeed, on the fact that through example and imitation sin comes to be something common to many. But example operates only when one receives and welcomes it from another, and thus by the path described the dissemination of sin does not transcend the limits of the individual will. Moreover, the imitation of moral or immoral actions is a rare phenomenon in maturer years. It is limited, rather, to the stage of childhood and youth, and consequently it cannot be a universal basis for the fellowship of sin. But even though that fellowship came into existence by means of example and imitation, yet it would rather imply merely a similarity of all individuals in possessing a sinful will: sin would thus be proved to be something logically, but not really, common. On the other hand, Augustine takes the subject of sin to be humanity as a natural species, in its original embodiment in the person of the original parent, the first sinner. Now since the sin pertaining to the whole race is conceived as marked by the highest possible degree of worthlessness—a degree which no actual sin can possibly enhance—since, further, the individual members of the race, unless conceived as acting, are absolutely independent of each other as persons, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin has for its outcome the thought that each individual descendant of our first parents is of necessity burdened with the highest degree of sin, and that in this respect all men are alike (p. 132). Since in relation thereto no notice whatever is taken of the interaction of actual sins, Augustine’s form of doctrine no more than that of Pelagius succeeds in giving expression to the idea of the fellowship of many persons in sin; what it expresses is their similarity in this respect—only that this similarity is transferred to another point than that favoured by Pelagius. Nor is the tenor of the Augustinian doctrine corrected at any stage of orthodox theology, as for instance by consideration being given in the doctrine of redemption to the thoroughgoing reciprocation which marks sinful action throughout the human race. Rather do we invariably find the idea of redemption or reconciliation formed exclusively in view of original sin and the actual sins of the individual.

Granted, then, that the conception of original sin is an intrinsically clear and necessary thought, yet, to say the least, it cannot express the highest possible sense of sin. Actual sins are more than manifestations or accidents of original sin in the individual. If we first of all realise how superficial a view of things it is which limits itself to the categories of being and appearance, substance and accident, we shall find it necessary to lay less stress on the Augustinian formula of original sin. Individual actions, which are traced back to the will as their source, are not phenomena of will which may or may not exist without changing its nature; rather, through actions, according to the direction they take, the will acquires its nature and develops into a good or an evil character. This view is directly opposed to that which is expressed in the conception of original sin. Nevertheless, it is the principle which governs our practical judgment of evil, and apart from which we never set ourselves to counteract evil in ourselves or in others. In the first place, on it rests every kind of responsibility for evil which we impose upon ourselves. Only if we discern in the individual action the proof-mark of the independence of the will, can we ascribe to ourselves, not merely individual actions, but likewise evil habit or evil inclination. But this is tantamount to denying that the individual action is the involuntary accident of a determining force of inborn inclination. Even if we find radical evil working within us to the extent affirmed by Kant, responsibility for it can only be vindicated if it is assumed to be the result of the empirical determination of the will, for it can be derived neither from the natural origin of every man, nor from a pretended intelligible act of freedom (vol. i. p. 449). Secondly, education is possible only on the presupposition that existing bad habits or evil inclinations have come to exist as the products of repeated acts of will. On the other hand, from the standpoint of original sin education is quite unthinkable. Education strives to direct the child to the good as a whole, by offering inducements to what is good in all the particular relations of life, and by severally combating all bad habits. It rests on the presupposition that there exists in the child a general, though still indeterminate, impulse towards the good, which just falls short of being guided by complete insight into the good, and has not yet been tested in the particular relationships of life. This is the exact opposite of the tendency of the child’s will to evil and of the determining power of evil, as asserted in the doctrine of original sin. Thirdly, the assumption we make of distinct degrees of evil in individuals—an assumption rendered indispensable by practical considerations—is incompatible with the dogma of original sin, which asserts of all the descendants of Adam an equally high degree of sinful inclination, and that the highest possible, namely, that they have fallen into universal and obstinate resistance to the Divine good, and into the possession of the devil. Nevertheless, from the degree of wickedness which we call devilish we distinguish vice, selfish and insolent imperiousness, vain and astute indifference to common moral ends, and, lastly, self-seeking forms of patriotism, pride of rank, and family zeal, which indeed are based upon particular moral goods, but pursue them in a way which comes into contradiction with universal morality.

All these grades of habitual sin we include in the vast complexity of sinful action when we form the idea of the kingdom of sin. And indeed we can only regard ourselves as sharing its guilt when we not only attribute to ourselves our own sinful actions as such, but at the same time calculate how they produce sin in others also, although we may possess no complete or distinct idea of the extent of these effects. On the other hand, we also feel the reaction of this power of common sin, not only through example or the production in us of sinful opposition to the sins of others, but especially by the blunting of our moral vigilance and our moral judgment. For whereas the Kingdom of God as the supreme end rises above all that falls within the compass of the world, and is destined to regulate and embrace every relationship of life, a bondage and a false dependence on the world are the fruit of that friendship for the world which runs counter to that final end. This form of sinful federation with others, however, affects everyone, at least in this way that we become accustomed to standing forms of sin, at any rate in others, and acquiesce in them as the ordinary expression of human nature. To be sure, no individual, from where he is placed, surveys more than a narrow section of this federation of humanity, and his feeling of worthlessness is further modified by the influences of different stages of life, rank, calling, and his degree of personal culture. But wherever, within the domain in which the Christian view of the world prevails, the idea is formed at all according to the standard of the value of the Kingdom of God, it will be qualitatively identical. The special causes by which each man is led to form the common conception serve in comparison actually to strengthen our conviction of the gravity of the sinful fate into which human life conducts us. For in moral matters those motives are always the most effective in which the general principle attaches itself to the individual’s particular situation and particular experiences. Now it is without doubt a merit in Schleiermacher to have formed the above conception of common sin, in which are to be included all particular actions (vol. i. p. 503). Only he did wrong in inserting it under the traditional heading of original sin, to which it bears very little resemblance. This proceeding, however, is due to the fact that he undertook to expound Dogmatics as a representation of the system accepted by the Church—which it ought not to be.

Nothing is better calculated to emphasise the difference between the idea of common sin, as conceived to include all sinful actions, and the idea of original sin, than a knowledge of the motive which first prompted Luther to adopt the Augustinian conception. For his reasons were not the same as those which led Augustine to formulate the notion of original sin. To the latter it presented itself as a means whereby the sacramental character of infant baptism might be upheld. But with this Luther was not at all concerned, as may be seen from his official declarations on the subject of infant baptism, which partly exclude and partly evade the Augustinian point of view.³ Augustine’s doctrine of original sin found favour with Luther more as a ground for the negation of human merit before God, and as an argument against the freedom of the will.⁴ This, however, is both to exaggerate and to minimise the idea of sin. For to assert the doctrine of original sin in order to refute the validity of merits before God is just as appropriate as it would be to use a boulder to kill a gnat. On the other hand, this affirmation of the doctrine in its present application serves rather as an argument for human weakness than for human guilt. In Augustine’s teaching, however, the latter is the point of supreme importance. But this aspect of sin, which unquestionably enters into the connotation of ” the kingdom of sin,” can never be proved to belong to original sin; the two, in fact, are mutually exclusive. This can easily be demonstrated if only we recall Augustine’s line of thought. He first deduces inherited sin from the natural relation between children and their sinful parents. This, however, does not involve any guilt on the part of the former. Consequently, to prove that the quality of guilt is theirs, he affirms that Adam’s descendants have an active share in the guilt of their first parents, by dint of combining his erroneous exegesis of Rom. v. 12 with Heb. vii. 9, 10. Granted that this position is true, then the sin with which men enter upon life is not inherited at all, but belongs to each in virtue of his pre-existence. Hence inherited sin and personal guilt cannot be combined in thought without inaccuracy or a sacrificium intellectus. And this is confirmed by the literature of asceticism. Anselm and Johann Arndt alike, when treating of hereditary sin, regard it as misery, deformity, loathsomeness; guilt, however, they never connect with anything but actual sins.⁵

Now, however strongly the guilt of original sin may be expressed in the second Article of the Confessio Augustana, yet this very Article seems to awaken doubts regarding the admissibility of the doctrine. It has been shown above p. 333) how momentous it was for Luther’s religious theory as a whole that he should have affirmed the characteristics sine metu, sine fiducia erga deum alongside of concupiscentia. If, then, original sin be really the basal conception of sin, the next step called for was to describe these manifestations of indifference and mistrust towards God as characteristics of original sin. But Melanchthon in his Apology stops short of so including the said defects in original sin that the attribute of guilt could be proved to attach to them. He rightly deems it an omission on the part of the Scholastics that they do not speak of these defects inherent in the status of sin.⁶ But he finds it possible to assert them as attributes of original sin only by accepting the negative definitions of it framed by the Scholastics in direct divergence from Augustine. Now, so far as original sin has to be verified in the newly-born, what Melanchthon uses the formula sine metu, sine fiducia erga deum to express is either a defect which in the case of children is necessarily blameless, or a positive something which he cannot prove.⁷ By comparing certain statements in the New Testament (1 Cor. ii. 14; Rom. vii. 5), however, he reaches all that can really be ascertained in the matter, namely, that the anti-religious aspect of sin, in so far as it implies guilt, not merely is present in single actions, but is habitual.⁸ But Melanchthon here no longer maintains that this antipathy towards God is inherited, not acquired in the individual’s life-time. We cannot, therefore, escape receiving the impression from this discussion, that if those characteristics of sin are to be accepted as constitutive for the idea of sin and as grounds of its worthlessness judged by the religious standard, original sin can no longer be maintained as the basal form of this idea. Or, if it is still sought to maintain this, then the above defects in religion fall under the heading of actual sins, which alone, along with original sin, enter into consideration. As regards the latter alternative, Luther’s Smalcald Articles (iii. 1) confess that the Catholic opponents of the Augsburg Confession are in the right. Original sin is only described metaphysically as corruptio naturae, and amongst its effects —the mala opera—the religious defects are very strongly emphasised in the first place, and that with a greater wealth of description than is bestowed later on the moral offences. This bears out the great importance we have ascribed to this conception of sin for Luther’s religious theory as a whole. But the very authors of the Formula of Concord showed themselves incapable of understanding this side of the subject, and in the Lutheran theology all sympathy with these positions has disappeared, although apart from them the doctrine of poenitentia is unintelligible. For it is really a disjunctive relation that obtains between the two statements —(1) that concupiscentia, i.e. immoral desire contrary to the law of God, constitutes, in the form of original sin, the basal form of the conception of sin, and (2) that it is the indifference and mistrust towards God which are involved in unlawful and criminal conduct that mark such conduct as sin according to the religious standard. Theologians have taken their stand upon the first view, and therefore they have lost sight of the other valuable idea of the Reformers, just as they ceased to realise that trust in God is the practical expression of justification (p. 181). For another reason why these anti-religious functions do not harmonise with the idea of original sin is that they are not coincident, but occupy different planes. Want of reverence towards God involves, no doubt, want of trust in Him, but in the status of sin we may also discern a want of trust in God coexisting with reverence towards Him. From this too we may learn that these defects indicate forms of active sin. But these forms must be regarded as the basal forms of sin and as determinative of its worth, if we are to have a correct and complete interpretation of sin at all. For if by concupiscentia we understand selfish desire contrary to the moral law, then this presupposes indifference and mistrust towards God, just as the recognition of that Divine law must be based upon the religious functions of reverence and trust. But if these anti-religious functions can be proved to be merely habitual, not hereditary defects, then by laying the emphasis upon them we wreck the notion of original sin.

The transmission of spiritual endowments, qualities of temperament, and emotional traits, which, guided by the resemblance between parents and children, we trace back to natural descent, carries with it no clear idea of how these capacities, apart from their action, can be set in a wrong direction and invested with guilt. Still less is it true to experience to say that every man begins life with that extreme measure of opposition to God which would result in eternal damnation. By assuming this, Augustine was led to commit an error in the formal expression he gave to the idea of original sin, because as a Platonist he made the conditionedness of knowledge a measure of the conditionedness of the will. In the sphere of knowledge contradiction arises when predicates which are furthest removed from one another in the series of predicables, and so far stand opposed, are affirmed of the self-same object at the same time and in the same respect. But contradiction in the will, or sin, arises even when some aim is striven after or some particular good realised which is not duly subordinated to the universal good, since the latter should be realised in every act of will. Accordingly sin, unlike the notion of logical contradiction, does not come to exist in the first instance as the extreme opposite of the good which ought to be realised; moral contradiction, rather, comes about even when the will does not do, or does something other than, what corresponds to the perfect good. Even a particular deviation from obligatory truth for a selfish purpose is sin; we do not need to wait for a general conscious intention to be untruthful and to suppress the truth. But in the conception of original sin this general tendency to untruthfulness as such is as distinctly predicated of each individual as the like tendency to oppose every other form of the good. Accordingly, the conception is quite useless as a guiding principle in judging our own conduct, just because the intensity of our consciousness of moral opposition to the good is much less, and exaggerations of that kind could only serve to make us untrue to ourselves.

The notion of original sin, regarded as the expression of a bias exhibiting the extremest opposition to the good as a whole, which exists in every individual by a natural necessity, and as expressing likewise a corresponding degree of personal guilt of the highest kind, does not secure to us the complete Christian conception and estimate of actual sin in its entirety, and is negatived by the practical self-judgment which we exercise in regard to our own sin. This notion, therefore, in the form in which it has hitherto been discussed, is likewise useless for the purpose of making the idea of the kingdom of sin more distinct or intelligible. The kingdom of sin, however, is a substitute for the hypothesis of original sin which gives due prominence to everything that the notion of original sin was rightly enough meant to embrace. For Luther’s view, that the doctrine of original sin is revealed in Scripture, is based upon an inaccurate exegesis of particular expressions. It may be taken as beyond doubt that the personal confession in Ps. li. 7 cannot form the basis of any universal doctrinal truth. Further, the predicate “children of wrath” (Eph. ii. 3) refers to the former actual transgression of those who now, as Christians, have the right to apply to themselves that Divine purpose of grace which is the very antithesis of wrath (vol. ii. p. 147). Finally, Augustine’s exegesis of Rom. v. 12 is admittedly false. Paul does not say that all have sinned in the person of Adam; and this thought finds no more support in the grammatical and rhetorical aspects of his language, than does the inference that all the descendants of Adam consequently begin their individual life with a sinful bias and the deepest guilt. What Paul was actually thinking of when he wrote this verse and its parallel in ver. 19, not only is still a matter of dispute amongst exegetes, but perhaps is incapable of being determined at all. But in that case the theological norm of the older school itself makes it impossible to maintain the dogma of original sin. For dogmas can be based only on clear statements of Scripture. But what is clear in Paul’s presentation of the subject is rather the fact that he says not a word about the transmission of sin and the inheritance of bias by natural generation.

On the other hand, Paul distinctly asserts that, in consequence of the one transgression of Adam, death is appointed by Divine decree for all his posterity, as a doom which has the value of a penal sentence. The sin of individual persons, as Paul declares, then arises only because the doom of death is already valid for all individuals in virtue of the Divine judgment.⁹ For, as he adds, were the actual sin of each individual in all cases a transgression of a Divine command or prohibition, death would necessarily prevail as its consequence. But sin had no such character during the whole epoch which preceded the Mosaic legislation; therefore the fact that in that epoch all men were subject to death was not dependent on their own sin. Now, however, as Paul assumes, death is in every case the consequence of sin; if it is not brought about by one’s own sin, it must be incurred by another’s. And this according to the Biblical record can only be the transgression of Adam; hence the doom of death imposed upon all men is dependent on the sin of Adam. Paul, however, does not look upon the relation between this cause and that effect as being mediated by the law and bond of natural descent. He takes the mediating factor to be the positive Divine appointment (ver. 16). But the question is whether, after all, another consideration should not lead us to take Paul’s words as involving likewise the transmission of the sinful condition from the father of the race to his posterity. For he speaks of Adam’s single actual transgression as the means by which sin entered the human race. By sin he means just the phenomenon in its entirety, and accordingly he speaks of the first action of a sinful kind as inaugurating that state as a whole which is distinctly perceptible in the later phenomena of universal transgression. But he still does not say that sin, which in its comprehensive sense becomes real on the first act of transgression, becomes universal otherwise than by the active transgression of every descendant of Adam. In the statements which follow, it is never anything but the diffusion of the doom of death that he connects with Adam’s transgression, until at last, in the concluding 19th verse, he comes to speak of the sinful state of “the many,” which, in his opinion, is latent in Adam’s disobedience.

Now, as the comparison in ver. 19 is really an explanation of the previous comparison (in ver. 18), it necessarily expresses, in both its clauses, a relation different from that expressed in ver. 18. In the latter Paul is speaking of the consequences of death and of life which have flowed, and are to flow, to all men from Adam and Christ. This thought, then, cannot be repeated in ver. 19. This of itself is enough to prove Dietzsch wrong in translating κατεστάθησαν by “are made” (gemacht werden), and he is further wrong in making the second clause refer to the perfecting of moral righteousness, to which believers attain as a future consequence of their oneness with Christ. For the future tense is only meant to express the logical necessity of the inference from the analogy of the facts compared, and the righteousness of “the many” is the righteousness by faith established by God’s decree. Ver. 19, therefore, serves to explain ver. 18 thus: the effects of death and of life flow from Adam and Christ respectively, in virtue of the value-content subsisting in the disobedience of Adam and the obedience of Christ apart from these effects. The value-content of Christ’s obedience lies in the fact that it constitutes those who believe in Him righteous by the judgment of God and for that judgment (vol. ii. p. 327). This being so, we are now in a position to ascertain the sense of the first clause of the verse. The value-content of Adam’s disobedience consists in this, that his descendants are constituted sinners by the judgment and for the judgment of God. The relations between the parallel sets of conditions being such as we have described, we are at once dispensed from choosing between the possible meanings of καθιστάναι distinguished by Dietzsch (namely, to represent or demonstrate as, to treat as, to assign a place to, to make). Since it is God who judges that believers are righteous, and righteous for Him, it is impossible that this relation can be merely apparent, but not real. Hence, if God, by conjoining Adam’s descendants with the father of the race in the common doom of death, decrees that all men are sinners, then for Him that predicate must belong to them not merely in appearance but in reality. An evidence of the correctness of this argument Paul sees in the fact that the doom of death is imposed upon men by Divine judgment before they have sinned on their own account. Now, if we looked merely to the law that death is a characteristic mark of the status of sin, we might frame a human judgment to the effect that God, by decreeing death prior to sin of the individual’s own, invests Adam’s descendants with no more than the semblance of being sinners. But human judgment cannot be taken as a criterion in this matter. On the contrary, what is signified by the decree of death, which we perceive in operation prior to the individual’s own commission of sin, is that by the judgment of God Adam’s descendants are really constituted sinners for God’s judgment. Now, while this very conjoining of Adam’s posterity with himself by God’s judgment is valid for God’s judgment, yet it is to be observed that revelation gives us no further light upon the point. We must neither regard it as mere empty appearance, nor strive to read its secret by the hypothesis of the natural entail of sin.

Paul was manifestly led to this exegesis of the Mosaic record by his interpretation of justification through Christ. True, the nature of the passage in Romans is such as to indicate a desire on his part to elucidate the process of justification through Christ by means of the analogy between it and the process of death in Adam’s race. Genetically, however, it was undoubtedly the converse relation that obtained; Paul’s exegesis in regard to Adam was due, by analogy, to his conviction of the worth of Christ. So we must conclude —not merely because the Apostle’s estimate of Christ is the foundation of all that goes to form his religious conception of the world, but also because the idea of justification in Christ is as distinct as the idea of mankind’s sinfulness in Adam is obscure. The fact that God counts as righteous, by His judgment and for His judgment, the community which is bound up with Christ, is at the same time a revealed truth for the Christian faith, inasmuch as the specific character of that faith rests solely on the fact that God in Christ regards believers as righteous before Him. On the other hand, the fact that God, in decreeing death to the descendants of Adam, counts them as sinners in relation to Himself before they have committed sin on their own account, remains mysterious and obscure unless some key to this conception can be found from the other side. Now the correctness of the former thought needs no elucidation whatever from the analogy of the Adamic humanity. Our justification through Christ being so certainly a datum of our religious conviction, the mystery formulated by Paul, that God should regard the descendants of Adam as sinners, can lay little claim to rank as equal in value to the truth of our justification in Christ. And finally, since Paul neither asserts nor suggests the transmission of sin by generation, he offers no other reason for the universality of sin or for the kingdom of sin than the sinning of all individual men. For the sinful bias, which he discovered as present in himself when the negative commandment drew him into his first conscious act of sin (Rom. vii. 7–11), is not described by him as inherited, and can with perfect reason be understood as something acquired.

Sin is not an end in itself, not a good, for it is the opposite of the universal good. It is not an original law of the human will, for it is the striving, desiring, and acting against God. In the individual it comes to be the principle of the will’s direction, for it establishes itself as the resultant of particular appetites and propensities. For as a personal bias in the life of each individual it originates, so far as we are able to observe, in sinful desire and action, which, as such, has its sufficient ground in the self-determination of the individual will. But as it actually exists in each individual and in all collectively, the normal conditions of spiritual life in men, as single individuals and as mutually associated, furnish it with materials for operating according to law in a way which is foreign to it in and for itself. This is the fact which the doctrine of original sin is meant to represent, though it does so in an exaggerated fashion and with means of explanation which are inadequate when it is adduced as proof of the bondage of the will. But the “law of sin” in the will is a result of the necessary reaction of every act of the will upon the direction of the will-power. Accordingly, by an unrestrained repetition of selfish resolves, there is generated an ungodly and selfish bias. Through involuntary reflex action, which a will unconfirmed in the good way exerts upon our experience of the influences received from others, sin is transmitted from one to another. And here we have to think not only of the facts of compliance and weakness which appear in the imitation of a bad example, but also of manifestations of that strength of impassioned resistance to will which itself misses the proper standard of action. Both these forms of temptation to sin are kept in view by Jesus and Paul in their warnings against σκάνδαλον. This term presupposes that a person, who is seduced by the conduct of another and ensnared thereby, has not developed the corresponding sinful intention in himself. This holds good even of the conduct and the lot of Jesus Himself, which, in virtue of the fact that neither His adherents nor His opponents had a true understanding of Him, became to them the occasion of a sinful misapprehension of Him, or of a sinful decision against Him (Mark vi. 3, xiv. 27, 29; Matt. xi. 6, xv. 12. xvii. 27; Gal. v. 11; 1 Cor. i. 23; Rom. ix. 33; 1 Pet. ii. 8). In this form, then, the innocent person gives an impetus to the consummation of sin, which has first of all been so far prepared for by varying degrees of ignorance and self-will that the impulse to sin finds an entrance. And vice versa the indiscreet and careless manner in which we behave towards others is for them an occasion of sin, whether it consist in weak compliance (Matt. xvi. 23; Mark ix. 42; 1 Cor. viii. 13; Rom. xiv. 13, 21, xvi. 17; Rev. ii. 14), or in impassioned resistance (2 Cor. xi. 29). In the former case one incurs the danger of acting against his convictions, and consequently, of committing sin (Rom. xiv. 23). But in the other case also the very first step bespeaks the danger of a selfish and uncharitable tendency, unless moral watchfulness is maintained against it (1 John ii. 10). This whole web of sinful action and reaction, which presupposes and yet again increases the selfish bias in every man, is entitled “the world,” which in this aspect of it is not of God, but opposed to Him. It is not necessary that everyone should be implicated in this sinful web, to the extent of contributing to it his own share of wickedness and untruth, for the selfish bias can also be associated with the appreciation of particular goods, with family pride, the spirit of caste, and patriotism, or with loyalty to the Church’s creed. For the Church, as constituted by law and infested with partisanship, is not the Kingdom of God at all. The legal organisation of the Church is not the Christian religion, but belongs to the world, and like it is to be distinguished from the Kingdom of God (§ 35). And if anyone would be convinced of the necessity of again inculcating the doctrine of σκάνδαλον, which has disappeared from theology since the time of Chemnitz, let him but survey from this point of view the present position of Church parties and their public organs.

§ 42. The notion sin expresses a religious and universal-ethical estimate of what is otherwise distinguished, according to a legal or particular-ethical standard, as misconduct, intentional or unintentional wrong-doing, crime, vice, baseness, or wickedness. On the other hand, the notion evil, which even Schleiermacher (vol. i. p. 507) brings into the closest causal connection with sin, and which, in its entirety, he designates as Divine punishment, is as such of no religious import. It is not our relation of subordination to God, but always some claim born of our freedom, that furnishes a standard for what we call evil. For since we have experience of our freedom in the conception and execution of our ends, evil signifies the whole compass of possible restrictions of our purposive activity. Now, as these restrictions may arise both from natural events and from the will of human beings, Schleiermacher divides evils into social or immediate, and natural or mediate. I leave on one side, in the first instance, the predicates which accompany this division, for they have been evoked by a combination of the notions of evil and sin from which I dissent. But the two kinds of evil assumed by Schleiermacher are not co-ordinate. For all social evil proceeds from the will of others only by operating upon us through their natural organism. Were the hatred and calumny of others not natural events, no social evil would ever come into existence at all. Hence evil is always a natural event. Its division into species depends on the fact that, as a restriction of our freedom, it is sometimes merely the result of mechanical causes, while in other cases it takes its rise in the will. But in the case of the latter species of evil we must regard as the ground of possible restrictions of freedom not merely the will of others, but also our own will, and that too both in the form of deliberate intention and of carelessness. For a man’s own freedom is limited by natural events not only when others or he himself wills something which they ought not, but also when they do not will some definite good which they ought to will. An illness contracted by anyone deliberately or through negligence takes its rise in the will no less than an intentional or unintentional injury done by others to his health or honour. Hence evil is in all cases a natural event, restricting us in the use of our freedom, and in the conception and realisation of our purposes. It originates either in merely natural causes, and therefore, being non-purposive, is accidental; or else it has its roots in the will. In the latter kind of evil it is either one’s own or another’s will that is operative intentionally or negligently. Social evil is thus only a part, though a very extensive part, of the second class of evils.

From the connection between the general notion of evil and the restriction of our freedom, it follows that that notion depends in every case solely on our own judgment. Accordingly, Schleiermacher’s distinction of mediate from immediate evil is invalid. According to him, evils arising from mechanical causes, i.e. natural evils, are to be reckoned evils because the world appears different to the sinner from what it did to the originally perfect man. But in judging that an accidental fire, or a flood which ruins our property, is an evil, no thought either of sin or of a comparison with the original perfection of mankind is implied, but rather the presupposition that we have need of property, not only as a means of subsistence, but also to enable us to serve our generation in our calling. Social evil, e.g. slander, is of essentially the same character. The feeling that our freedom has been violated by it is due solely to our forming a judgment to that effect, since we might quite well judge that the slander of contemptible men does not impair our freedom or our honour. That the notion of evil is subjectively conditioned is also proved in cases which come under the first class, by the fact that one man feels as evils those accidental bodily sufferings which another, through having grown accustomed to them or owing to an effort of will, no longer experiences as restrictions of his freedom. Hence occurrences substantially identical may count as evils to one man and not to another. Finally, the distinction between merited and unmerited evils enters into the ordinary mode of estimating evils, and that in such a way as to affect each of the two principal classes. Evils which arise from mechanical causes are partly unmerited, and partly merited, should it be felt that the possible means of prevention have not been employed. Evils which arise from our own will are always merited, so far at least as that term merely denotes their source, and is not taken as indicating the ethical value of the actions by which the evil has been occasioned. For should a man, e.g. a soldier, be compelled by his occupation to neglect his health, or should he draw down upon himself the hatred of other men just through his veracity and advocacy of the good, then the evils which follow are ethically unmerited. Again, evils brought upon a man by himself may be accounted ethically merited, as for instance, should a man ruin his health by intemperance, or evoke the hostility of others by violating their rights. What is alone of importance here is that a man should be practised in forming moral judgments on any given case. Where this is lacking, the very distinction between ethically non-merited and merited evil is not fully made out. But even the judgment that we are personally culpable in respect of certain evils has per se no connection with the religious judgment of self, for the guilt in this case is measured merely by reference to the fact that our own will, by commission or omission, is the cause or partial cause of restrictions of freedom which it experiences itself.

Hence the notion of evil has no direct relation to the notion of sin. It is not a religious conception like the latter. For the notion of sin is determined by comparison with God, to Whom reverence and trust are due, and by the religious estimate of the universal moral law; the notion of evil, on the other hand, by the relative standard of the freedom of the individual. In point of fact the notion of evil is so much a relative one, that evils may be turned into goods or into means towards moral good, which could never be the case with sin. For the limitations which in certain quarters of the globe nature puts upon the preservation of human life and man’s instinct to enjoy natural objects, are the cause of that richer and fuller ethical development of humanity which could not be attained in a more favourable environment. In the same way the limitations which arise from social life, and by which men are disciplined or discipline themselves, come to be transformed into benefits. Now these experiences would be altogether impossible were evil an entity as distinct and objectively defined as sin. So far, however, as any relation obtains between the two, it can only be indirect and restricted in degree. It was impossible for the older theology to ignore this way of looking at the subject. For although all evils, as Divine penalties, were from the outset attributed to sin, and though the two were regarded as coincident in extent, yet it had to be acknowledged not only that evils lose their penal value for believers, but also that death no longer wears the character of an evil, but is rather deemed a means of release (p. 44). This exception itself forbids us to adhere to the objective theory of the interconnection of sin and evil as being the rule; while the transformation of evils into goods proves true not only in the case of those who are regenerate in the Christian sense, but even in the case of every energetic and genuine character. Since the fact rather is (p. 46) that the specifically religious feeling of guilt is bound up with our reckoning some particular evil which befalls us as a Divine punishment, that is enough to demonstrate that it is an error to think of evil in its entirety as the equivalent of Divine punishment.

Schleiermacher has not made these relations any clearer, but rather succeeded in confusing them, by blending in a peculiar way his own observation—which does not, indeed, extend far enough—with a complaisant accommodation to tradition. He points out the relative character of, at least, natural evil, though social evil, too, partakes of the same nature. He bases that conclusion principally on the fact that natural evil arises out of the opposition between the world and man, which opposition was originally designed as a stimulus to the activity of the God-consciousness and an incentive to moral resolution, but which, by reason of the impotence of the God-consciousness in a state of sin, now leads to restrictions of life. For otherwise Schleiermacher adopts in the most unqualified fashion the old doctrine that all evil is the penalty of sin, in the sense that by God’s dispensation it is bound up with wickedness in the general order of things. He modifies the import of this proposition only so far as to say that the totality of evil is the correlative of sin considered as the conjoint act of mankind, and is coincident therewith. For, as he holds, it is a Jewish and pagan error, which Jesus Himself rejected, to suppose that the amount of evil corresponds, in the case of every individual, to that of sin (vol. i. p. 507). To this representation I reply that the entrance of universal sin has in no wise had the effect of abolishing and neutralising the original character of the opposition between the world and us, which was to serve as a restriction, and yet as a stimulus to the development of freedom. Thence it follows, therefore, that, as has been laid down already, the conceptions of evil and sin are not properly kindred. To be sure, not merely in the Greek and the Hebrew, but also in the Christian, religion, it is reckoned that an opposite religious and moral attitude in men involves an opposite relation to the world, i.e. either lordship over it or restriction by it, and that, too, at God’s instance. Within Christianity this is an antithetical inference from the knowledge we have that the good, as the warp and woof of the Kingdom of God, is the final end of God in the world. From this point of view the idea of Divine penalties is legitimate and necessary. But the application of this notion in experience is not so simple as unscrutinised theological tradition would lead us to expect. For evil in general cannot be known to be a Divine punishment of sin in the case of an individual or of the entire race. The view of evils as punishments is conditioned, rather, by the specifically religious consciousness of guilt; not merely by the judgment that we have incurred a restriction of our freedom by our own act, but by the judgment that the act in question has contradicted the Divine moral law. Further, the only way in which we can charge ourselves with guilt for the aggregate of evils in society, is by judging that by sinful action we partly help to produce this aggregate, partly adopt it. But let this interpretation of general evils as personal punishment extend the individual’s consciousness of guilt never so far, the coincidence asserted between evil generally and punishment for sin still remains unproved. It is true that the feeling of guilt is a sufficient motive for our estimating evils as penalties inflicted on ourselves, but it is not a principle which justifies us in imputing as Divine punishments to others the evils which they experience. Jesus’ example shows that the Christian view of the world is distinguished from that which belongs to pre-Christian religions just by the fact that evils, which affect others, are never to be regarded as being connected with their sin. Destructive natural events, such as pestilences, deluges, congenital infirmity, or even acts of military violence, are, in the religious theories of ancient nations, regarded objectively as Divine punishments, people’s minds being awakened by such experiences also to careless offences which they might have committed against law or ceremonial duty. Nevertheless, in consequence of Christ’s express declarations (John ix. 1–3; Luke xiii. 1–5), a member of the Christian society will decline to have evils of that kind set down to him by others as Divine punishments. When a pastor, whose zeal has found Dogmatics but an evil counsellor, undertakes to make use of such calamities as occasions for castigatory sermons to his congregation, he excites legitimate irritation, and lays himself open to the judgment of Jesus, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” For the judgment, that those who are visited by a signal calamity have sinned in a signal manner, is a pagan and Jewish error, and, should it be propounded in Christian society, a proof that a changed heart is still lacking. True, the acceptance of Divine teleology seems to demand that we should ascribe, though not to evil in every case, at least to a signal and conspicuous instance, the significance of a special Divine intention to punish. “But who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counsellor?” In such cases the Christian view of the world comes out, rather, when we infer from our consciousness of reconciliation that God is educating us in patience and humility and in manifestation of that sympathy which becomes Christians.¹⁰ But when the notion of educative penalties is employed in this way, we abandon the indiscriminate application of the dubious proposition, that all evils are Divine punishments in a detrimental sense.

This dogmatic prejudice, of which even Schleiermacher was unable to rid himself, rests on the fact that in traditional Dogmatics too narrow a scope is ascribed to reconciliation. For if it is restricted to deliverance from guilt and the penalties of sin, then such a view either demands the assumption that all evils were and are punishments for sin, or it provides the reconciled with anything but a secure and free attitude towards all the evils of life, particularly towards those which experience does not permit us to reckon penal. Where that narrow interpretation of reconciliation is maintained, it leads in practice to people’s torturing themselves with the attempt to put a penal construction upon all evils which befall them, lest alongside of the consciousness of reconciliation there should exist in their experience a wide domain shadowed by alien necessity. In theology we should have at the same time the corresponding position—a position which it is impossible to prove from the general notion of evil. But reconciliation is not merely the ground of deliverance from the guilt of sin, and from evils in some way merited; it is also the ground of deliverance from the world, and the ground of spiritual and moral lordship over the world. Through reconciliation, too, we come to cherish a different estimate of self, and are changed in disposition, as well as in our whole attitude of character towards unmerited evils, which are due to the fact that the created spirit is implicated in the organised system of nature—that system being understood in the sense in which it actually forms a precondition of social life amongst men. Since the effects of reconciliation are thus different in degree, the difference between evils recognised in our customary judgments, may or rather must be accepted by the Christian view of the world and theology, to wit, that only a part of them is to be referred, qua punishment, to individual or common sin. The principle thus adduced, it is true, has still to be proved. But it had to be asserted here, partly because it confirms, as a just presupposition, the distinction—commonly made in spite of Dogmatics—between the scope of Divine punishment and that of evils, and partly because the formation of the theological system generally is determined by regard to the ideas of the Kingdom of God and reconciliation. Otherwise we expose ourselves to the danger of setting up false premises, and reaching false conclusions regarding these leading conceptions of Christianity.

The religious and theological estimate of death will likewise have to conform to the explanations now given of the relation between sin and evil. Although the older school, following Paul, held that the universal destiny of death was the objective result of the first sin, yet it was compelled by the idea of reconciliation to add that, for those whose sin is forgiven, death has no longer the value of punishment, but serves as a means of their release (p. 46). This addition contains the important implication, that, in the religious view of the world which prevails in Christianity, death at all events does not count as the greatest evil, that the estimate which is formed of it stands in no direct relation to the consciousness of transgression which even one who is reconciled may have, that, on the contrary, the destiny of death at most stands in relation to the power of sin to which men are subject in the state previous to conversion (Rom. viii. 10, 38). In the case of the reconciled there is not that fear of death which is an evidence of the bondage in which mankind lay before the time of Christ, and which testifies to man’s recognition of an affinity between his own sin and death (Heb. ii. 15). When the topic of death has to be dealt with in Christian theology, we must start from the light shed upon it by the authentic Christian view of the world, and not from impressions native to pre-Christian religions. It must be added that, viewed in the light of the certainty of eternal life, which is attached to reconciliation, death may indeed seem hard enough to each individual, but it will no longer appear as the sheer opposite of that purposeful life in which the soul is conscious of its worth (Rom. xiv. 8). As such the pre-Christian nations regarded it, a view which directly corresponds to the deficiency or uncertainty of their hope concerning the restoration of life after death. The Old Testament spokesmen for the people of Israel partly lamented death as a natural fate, and partly connected it with sin, inasmuch as in both cases they chafed at the contradiction it involved to the religious destination of man to communion with God. The Christian and the Old Testament views, accordingly, are opposed to one another and mutually exclusive. They are independent of each other, just as the religion of reconciliation rises above the highest manifestations of that Old Testament piety which strives after reconciliation. For the Psalmists especially chafed at the fate of death, just because the religious thought of Israel had moved them to form a higher estimate of the vocation of man, while yet it afforded them no assurance of reconciliation with God and the world.

Now it is a defect in theology, due to a mechanical use of Scripture, that not the New Testament, but the Old Testament, estimate of death has been employed in fixing the standard conception. For the Christian view of the subject is thereby forced to occupy the position of an exception to that standard. This proceeding is quite analogous to the way in which the legal requital of human conduct has been put forward as the principle of the Divine world-order, while the Christian régime of reconciliation and the Kingdom of God, which is of an exactly opposite kind, is linked on to that principle by way of exception (§ 33). True, Paul deduced the existence of the universal destiny of death from the sin of Adam. Nevertheless, the mere fact that this idea was framed by the Apostle does not straightway qualify it to become a theological principle. It is not a necessary element in the Christian view of the world, which, with perfect correctness, decides that death is neither an obstacle to blessedness, nor an object to be feared, since Christ has reconciled men and risen from the dead. Moreover, the Christian view of the world as such does not call for any theory regarding the origin of death. Paul formed his conception of the matter, too, solely by way of inference from the principle of reconciliation and eternal life, his exegesis of the Old Testament record serving him as a medium. But a position which is only related inferentially to the Christian view of the world, cannot claim to rank, as a theological principle, above the essential content of the Christian view. There is now this further fact, that not everyone can convince himself that the theory which Paul arrived at, of the dependence of death upon Adam’s transgression, is correct. Are such persons any the less able to adopt the estimate of death which springs from the Christian idea of reconciliation? That cannot be justly affirmed. Nay rather, our judgment, that we must indeed die, but that we die unto the Lord (Rom. xiv. 8), is entirely unaffected whether we regard that destiny as a dispensation of nature, or as the consequence of Adam’s transgression. For in both cases the theory is excluded that death is a consequence of our own sin. And that is the point of importance if the expectation of death is not to collide with our consciousness of reconciliation, if the dread of death is not to continue, and cause the reconciled to doubt whether death is for them an ascent to the level of eternal life with God, where we are set free from the burden of the transitory.

For the rest, Paul has expressed his view about the doom of death imposed on Adam’s descendants in such a way that it forms no obstacle to the Christian theory, of which he himself is a classical representative. If there is no condemnation to those who are Christ’s, not even the condemnation of death, death is in their case only a phenomenon belonging to their life as associated with an earthly body, and their spirit is life unaffected thereby (Rom. viii. 1, 10). This excludes precisely the Old Testament idea of death as the end of personal life, the utter stultification of the created spirit. But the point of importance for theology is, that this latter should not be assumed to be the normal and universal significance of death in the determinate counsel of God, since nothing can be theologically formulated as the determinate counsel and dispensation of God, but what comes to view in connection with the eternally chosen community of the Kingdom of God. Otherwise theology never succeeds in grasping the unity of the world-order, but can only affirm two successive and mutually contradictory decrees of God, the first of which has for its import the universal condemnation of men to death, while the second is directed to the restoration of a section of mankind to life, and thus has the form of an exceptional decree. Even Paul lends no countenance to a representation such as this. For he declares that God has shut up Jews and Gentiles together unto disobedience that He might have mercy upon them all (Rom. xi. 32). If even the judgment of the Jews turns upon Paul’s well-known reading of the character of the Mosaic law, then the similar judgment of the Gentiles can only be understood in the light of that more comprehensive Divine purpose which led to the original sentence of death upon men. The fact, therefore, that this action on God’s part is described in the Christian revelation as a means or a precondition of grace, suggests that the right interpretation of God’s earlier economy is to be found in its connection with His final purpose.

It has thus far been granted that the penal purpose of God is the source of a narrower circle of evils, those, namely, conditioned by the religious feeling of guilt. But this idea of a Divine purpose to punish requires to be more precisely defined. It cannot, of course, be framed where there is no recognition of a Divine government of the world, or of the conception of the Divine authority of the moral law. Still, in the religions of civilised peoples we do find that certain evils are wont to be regarded as Divine punishments. This way of looking at the matter proceeds upon the idea of a reciprocal legal relation existing between men and God, an idea which in the case of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Israelites derives its origin from the fact that these peoples regarded the State as, even in a religious sense, the highest good. Now, although Christ’s express declarations (p. 356) warn us against taking the degree of evil, in legal fashion, as an indication of the degree of transgression on the part of those afflicted, yet the traditional theology is content to set up the characteristic idea of retribution as a perfectly adequate expression of the penal value of an evil. The superficiality of this view becomes manifest in the case of the theologians of the Aufklärung, who, while willing to recognise the orthodox representation, yet do not find it corroborated by experience, and hence feel compelled to abandon it, and substitute in its stead the quite differently constituted notion of educative punishments (vol. i. p. 403). If this procedure be erroneous, then the error must in part be attributed to orthodoxy, which has never subjected the legal conception of punishment to a critical examination, and hence has been unable accurately to define it in its Christian usage. Now, punishment in its legal sense is a deprivation, entailed by the authority of civil society, upon one who has acted contrary to his legal obligations, in order that the absolute claims of civil society may be affirmed (p. 247). But the Christian religion is not a legal federation between God and man. To apply, therefore, the legal conception of punishment to certain evils within the scope of our religious view of the world, cannot be right.

This want of perspicuity, however, is due solely to the fact that, after all, the Christian religion bears a certain analogy to law—an analogy, however, which does not hold good in respect of all the essential characteristics of the latter. For in point of fact law always involves a contraction of personal freedom, but its object therein is to guarantee the moral independence of each individual in relation to everyone else. The prerogative of every member of civil society consists in the right he has to take full advantage of all permissible, or not legally proscribed, means for the development of his moral personality. Accordingly, the personal right of each finds its scope in the sphere of what is permissible, which exists alongside of the sphere of legally prescribed and proscribed activity. Now the idea of a right, possessed by men in relation to God, is framed in consideration of what God permits to them, with a view to their making good their own proper individuality over against Himself. At both the stages of Biblical religion there comes out clearly the conception, that in the fellowship granted or permitted to men by Divine grace we earn the enjoyment of independent personality, just as it is in that fellowship that the idea of God comes to assume its proper form. It is in this sense of the word ” right ” that the Israelites, on the ground of their having been chosen by God, possess the priesthood, as representing the right to approach God. And in the same sense dogmatic theologians frame the idea of a right of Divine sonship, as belonging to those who are reconciled in Christ through the grace of God. Comparing, then, the implications of this notion with the characteristics of the general legal conception, we see that they accord with each other in expressing personal independence. But personal right in civil society has reference to the material of allowable actions, whereas the right of men over against God depends on the form of Divine permission, inasmuch as the determining impulse of Divine grace makes its appeal to their freedom. Further, in civil society what is called personal right is the antithesis of legal obligation, whereas in the religious sphere one’s right in relation to God is also a comprehensive expression which covers one’s whole duty towards Him. Finally, in civil society each member is conscious of his personal right as contradistinguished from every other, whereas the right implied in the priesthood and the right of Divine sonship are bestowed respectively upon the individual Israelite and Christian, in virtue of his reckoning himself part of the entire religious community, and thinking and acting in harmony with it. And thus the thought of right in relation to God, as expressing personal independence, is counterbalanced by the relations of religious subordination to Him.

Now, if the notion of punishment, which is indigenous to the region of law, is to possess validity in the domain of the Christian view of the world and Christian self-judgment, then, as has previously been inferred (p. 355) from the meaning of the Kingdom of God. as the Divine final end in the world, our experiences of evil, speaking generally, will be linked by God to wicked conduct. But since a multitude of evils have the value for men of being means of education and trial, or carry with them the glory of martyrdom, it is not possible for others to determine, in a particular case, which evils have the significance of retributive penalties. We decided, therefore, that a feeling of unrelieved guilt is the only thing which enables the individual, if he thinks about God at all, to recognise his condition as penal, and set it to his own account. Now we find this confirmed when the deprivation of the right of Divine sonship is interpreted as a Divine punishment. To begin with, this form of expression is only the Christian phase of the previously (p. 53) discussed idea of Divine punishment, understood as an experience of separation from God. For the loss involved in such separation is estimated in the light of the right, bestowed upon the Israelites, to approach God. The result of our present inquiry was thus foreshadowed by our earlier analysis of the interpretations of Divine punishment which have become fused in theological tradition. But at the same time our present conclusion serves in several ways both to confirm and to give point to the suggestions we have made towards a definition of the forgiveness of sins. First, by means of the comparative or relative notion of the forfeiture of the right of access to God or of Divine sonship, the hypothesis of a graduated series of penal states is confirmed to this extent, that in particular instances it will be easier or harder to regain the privilege of access to God or of Divine sonship. In any case, either the notion of Divine penalties is irrational, or else we must abandon the supposition that all the penalties of God are objectively equal in severity, and that every sin is in itself deserving of eternal damnation. Secondly, the above notion of Divine punishment goes to confirm the position that external evils can be demonstrated to be Divine penalties only from the point of view of the subjective feeling of guilt (§§ 10, 11). For the right of access to God or of Divine sonship cannot be thought of as forfeited, unless the forfeiture is consciously recognised as such by the individual affected by it. The sense of having forfeited one’s right of Divine sonship, which forces one to regard an experience of external evils as a Divine penalty, is the feeling of guilt that separates from God. Again, then, the accuracy of our previous investigations is confirmed by the idea of Divine punishment here set forth. Thirdly, it follows that the unrelieved feeling of guilt is not so much one penal state among others, but is itself actually that of which all external penal evils are but the concomitant circumstances. Even in the older school of theology it was maintained that the feeling of guilt should be connected with Divine penalties, but this supposition it was impossible to prove by the modes of thought to which they confined themselves. But if the forfeiture of rights in the sphere of law becomes real even when the sentence of punishment is passed, and does not require for its existence the execution of sentence by forfeiture of the property or of the customary freedom of the convicted person, then Divine punishment must be constituted precisely by the consciousness of guilt, as being an index of the forfeiture of access to God or of Divine sonship.

These results throw further light on the interpretation, which occurs in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, of the estate of death in which men stand. Hitherto we have had to leave undecided the question as to how far God, in decreeing death upon the descendants of Adam before they sinned, constituted them sinners in relation to Himself (p. 347). While it is impossible that this decree carries with it anything of the nature of mere appearance, we had for all that to forego the more precise determination of the fact denoted by the decree of universal death prior to the sin of individuals. Now, if this doom be called a penal sentence, it is a fair question whether that does not signify that God, in thus antecedently decreeing death to Adam’s race, apart from the physical aspect of dying, has really carried out His purpose that mankind should not attain to access to God and Divine sonship, but should remain apart from Him with their consciousness of guilt unrelieved. This would also be the purport of the statement, that in the disobedience of our first parent God has represented the multitude of his descendants as sinners both by His judgment and for His judgment, has represented them, i.e., as those who ought not to have any proper fellowship with Him. This conjecture is corroborated by the parallel statement regarding the significance of Christ’s obedience. For the relation of the justified to God as expressed in terms of that great fact is, according to 1 Pet. iii. 18, precisely that of vouchsafed access to God. Hence the penal state of all mankind who lived before Christ, which Paul recognises in the sentence of death antecedently passed upon them, and which, arguing from the conditions of justification in Christ, he infers as the counterpart of the other, consists in their being debarred from that fellowship with God which was to be first rendered possible through Christ. Now, although the estimate of the religious community of Israel which Paul adds in his well-known view regarding the design of the Mosaic law stands, as we see by comparing it with the Epistle to the Hebrews, in considerable need of amendment, yet the debarring of the Gentiles from communion with God is an observation true to fact. The singular element in all this is to be found in the fact that Paul combines the Divine intention of it with the sentence of death passed on Adam’s posterity, and that he maintains the existence of a penal condition previous to the actual demerit of individuals. To say the least, that is inexact; for personal demerit is necessary in order that even an evil common to all may be recognised through the subjective consciousness of guilt as a personal punishment. But there will be the less need to repudiate these observations as offending against the incontestable meaning of the Pauline passage, seeing that Paul himself, in another reference in the same Epistle, attributes the alienation of the Gentiles from God to their own demerit. Both representations are attempts on Paul’s part to place himself in the true attitude to a historical problem which necessarily obtruded itself with special force on the Apostle to the Gentiles; nor can we take exception to the diversity in his solutions of the problem, for the point at issue does not concern the essence of the Christian religion, but only a derivative question.

§ 43. The older school, with their assertion that all evils are Divine punishments, awaken in our minds the impression of their professing to have a complete insight into all parts of the Divine world-order. But even Schleiermacher, while he rejects, indeed, the distributive evidence adduced for that thesis, has overstepped the bounds of his competence as a Christian theologian in maintaining, as a general principle, that the totality of evil in the world is coextensive with the existence of sin, regarded as a conjoint act of the whole human race. This thesis, for one thing, goes beyond all possible experience, and, moreover, it is explicitly disproved by the very words of Jesus which Schleiermacher has adduced, those, namely, concerning the man born blind. As Jesus’ disciples, according to His teaching in this context, we ought in the case of certain evils not to raise at all the question regarding their connection with sin. But as regards this point the Christian theologian, as such, is not differently situated from the individual Christian. That sort of omniscience which the older divines actually claim on this as on so many points, and which is customarily expected of a theologian by believers who have been spoiled by false dogmatic teaching, always serves only to compromise the Christian faith in the eyes of others, who adhere indeed to Christianity, but will not accept a system of words in exchange for religion. A theologian can as little maintain conscientiously the quantitative coextension of all evils with all sins, as he can solve with real success the other classical problems which belong to this region of thought. Who knows, for example, what are the reasons why God permits and endures at all, as a phenomenon extending over the whole human race, the sin which runs counter to His own final end? And besides, it would certainly be an act of presumption to maintain, with Zwingli, that sin, in its whole extent, is called into existence by God as the necessary presupposition of the redemption which He has decreed from eternity, and as the opposite of the good, by experiencing which men are to acquire the knowledge of, and taste for, the good. If we know that the final end of the human race, or the highest good, is realised through the bringing in of the Kingdom of God, and if we possess in this principle that practical guidance which each Christian man needs for salvation, we must refrain from passing any positive judgment which would imply that God has condemned the rest of mankind, whether as guilty or as innocent—even though this hypothesis appears to be, logically, the reverse-side of the former conviction. As theologians, we are justified in explaining the practical conditions of our spiritual and moral life, on which depends our estimate of its intrinsic content and its relative place in the world, as following by logical necessity from our knowledge of the character of God as revealed in the Christian religion; but no principle of logic warrants our interpreting the various aspects of the apparently aimless and really adverse phenomena of human life, which surround the luminous domain of our religious and moral duty, by the hypothesis of a positive eternal condemnation of the human race by God (p. 130). On the other hand, the pretended dogmatic omniscience and infallibility, which spring from the rationalistic principle which is at the root of all orthodoxy, are fitted only to lead theological knowledge into error, as also to repel the sound religious sense which, resting on experience, repudiates such dogmatic propositions as stand outside of all relation to possible experience.

The assertion that sin is infinite in its nature, even when removed by the redemptive work of Christ, is the result of a purely rational inference. How ill-grounded this proposition is, we see from the way in which Thomas introduces it. “ In sin,” he says, “ there are contained two elements. On the one hand, sin consists in turning away from unchangeable and infinite good. On one side, therefore, sin is infinite. On the other hand, sin consists in unregulated turning towards changeable good. In this respect sin is finite, especially as the act of turning is itself also finite. For the acts of a created being as such cannot be infinite ” (vol. i. p. 65). Thomas decides for the adoption of the former of these views of sin, because he likewise measures the worthlessness of sin by the fact that it violates the infinite majesty of God; for even in human affairs, he says, an offence is all the more heinous, the greater the person against whom the offence is committed. This presupposition, the validity of which is also accepted by Protestant orthodoxy, has already been refuted in the most convincing manner by Duns (vol. i. p. 74). For either the “ infinity of sin ” is to be understood objectively, in which case we land ourselves in Manichaeism; or the idea is a subjective impression, in which case it means only that we cannot with all our efforts of imagination arrive at, nor with all possible intensification of our own consciousness of guilt represent exhaustively, the extent of sin in space and time, and its power to disturb the orderly course of human history. But for that reason sin, as a product of the limited powers of all men, is yet limited, finite, and quite transparent for God’s judgment. And, moreover, that that formula of Thomas is indirectly expressed in Paul’s leading train of thought, and that the death to which the posterity of Adam are doomed is equivalent to eternal death, can neither be proved exegetically nor brought into harmony with the view of Paul as a whole. For he excludes from the posterity of Adam who are doomed to death the community of those who are to be saved, for whom death is merely a passing experience, and he adds the explicit proviso that, in the case of those who are lost, it is the refusal to believe in Christ which gives death the intensified character of eternal destruction (Rom. viii. 10; 2 Cor. ii. 15, 16). Inasmuch as the σωζόμενοι in Paul’s sense can at no stage of their existence and in no respect be conceived as ἀπολλύμενοι, there can be nothing less in accord with his authority than the assumption of a change in the decree of God, such as orthodox Lutheran Dogmatics is guilty of in the proposition: God has in Adam condemned all the posterity of Adam, and afterwards brings some of them to blessedness on account of their faith. As the latter decree is thrown back into eternity, the proposition comes to mean that God eternally resolves to bless those whom in a temporal decree He condemns for ever with Adam. This manifest absurdity is accepted also by the Reformed theology, since the point of distinction between the two theologies—whether or not God’s election is conditioned by the faith which He foresees—is here of no account. Quite consistently with his theological dependence on Luther, Calvin has allowed himself to be led into adopting this view, by the fact that for Luther both the doctrine of predestination and that of original sin have value only as evidences for the bondage of the human will—and that as co-ordinate arguments, completely independent of one another. As Luther had no intention at all of constructing a theological system from the point of view of the idea of election, he contented himself with establishing the bondage of the will in relation to salvation by affirming that God in His first decree placed the whole of mankind under the ban of original sin, and in a decree subsequent in time, according to His own secret election, restored a portion of mankind, contrariwise, to blessedness. One who believes that he may proceed thus in theological science of course shuts his eyes to the contradiction which is expressly contained in the above formula. But even Calvin has not clearly grasped the fact that his doctrine of providentia, to say nothing of that of electio, demands at the very outset a quite different conception of common sin from that which was taken over from Augustine. Just here we can see very clearly that, as I have shown elsewhere on different grounds,¹¹ the theological system of Calvin was not developed from the principle of the idea of election.

Mediaeval theology, however, presents a series of classical authorities the tendency of whose views is that the notion of sin can only in a modified way be referred to the elect, or the redeemed, if the unity of the religious view and the connectedness of the theological system are to be maintained. In this series the place of precedence must be assigned to Abelard, in so far as he refutes the idea that redemption through Christ’s death means purchase from the power of the devil, by maintaining that the predestined, to whom redemption applies, have, on the very ground of their Divine election, never been under the power of the devil (vol. i. p. 49). For, inasmuch as the devil represents the extreme, that is, the definitive degree of sin, those persons cannot be reckoned as his who belong by eternal election to God. Duns Scotus accepts the view which was quite rightly formulated by Thomas, namely, that sin, in virtue of its origin from created will, is something finite in its nature, and to this he adds that to maintain that sin is intrinsically infinite would be Manichaean. But while Duns accepts the terminology of Thomas so far as to allow that the “ infinity of sin ” may be maintained in a certain external sense, in virtue of its opposition to the infinite God, he explains at the same time that the punishment for deadly sin may be called infinite in the merely external sense, that is, when the will persists finally in sin, but not because God could punish sin in no other way (vol. i. p. 74). Therefore, the full extent of the penalty of condemnation is reserved by Duns solely for those who persist finally in sin. And yet for this reason the endless punishment to which they are doomed is not, strictly speaking, infinite, because the final resolve to persist in sin also remains within the limits of created being. All the more evident is it that that sin is finite which finds forgiveness through the intrinsically finite merit of Christ.

The following arguments of John Wessel¹² move within the bounds of a more concrete theological theory. On the lines of Isa. liii. 4, he explains the pain which Jesus took upon Himself, as the Lamb of God, as the penal suffering destined for us. As such, it is equivalent to the penalty which each single person has incurred. But as penalty is always incurred exclusively in one’s individual capacity, and its measure to be determined by the degree of individual sinfulness, therefore the purpose of Jesus, when He took upon Himself our penal suffering, must be judged by the measure of the penalty which is due to each individual. At the last judgment He will urge against all the damned the valid charge that He took upon Himself as much suffering as would suffice in God’s judgment for the absolution of their penalties, but that they despised Him. But for the individual elect, He has undertaken only so much suffering as serves for the remission of the limited penalties which were destined for each of them. The measure of this punishment, it is true, is hidden from the eyes of men. But no one of the redeemed has of himself merited eternal damnation, seeing that they have not fallen into the stiff-necked sin of the despisers of grace, but merely into the sin of weakness and ignorance, and that their deadly sins are not sins unto death. In the foregoing exposition, this Augustinian takes no account at all of the absolute worthiness of punishment of original sin—a principle which also he nowhere else maintains;¹³ rather, he starts from the idea that every punishment is determined by individual guiltiness, and stands in quantitative correspondence therewith. Thence he concludes that, if Christ in His suffering has taken upon Himself the punishment due to all men, even the damned, therefore in His purpose to suffer He has discriminated the quanta of punishment due to every individual man. That is indeed a piece of psychological violence, the harshness of which, however, only shows that the conception of a universal purpose to endure punishment in the stead of others cannot but make shipwreck alike on the qualitative and the quantitative conditions of the notion. But yet it was a profoundly significant insight into Biblical motives of thought, which led Wessel to distinguish between the degrees of sin which either admit or exclude the possibility of redemption. Quite similar to Wessel’s distinction is that which Staupitz¹⁴ has brought out between the man who is a sinner for a certain time, and therefore is punished for a certain time, and the man who is a sinner always, and therefore is punished always. If now we recognise as valid the fact of Divine Providence, it follows that the sin of the elect is temporal and not eternal, and accordingly also to be punished with merely temporal penalties, which, however, have then the value of educative punishments, intended to purify the elect from their stains.

In close agreement with these theologians is Zwingli, whose conception of Providence and election stands nearer to the theological type of Staupitz than can be affirmed of Luther. Zwingli,¹⁵ as is well known, defines the inherited propensity to sin as a malady, not as a condition of personal guilt. As, however, he finds therein the source and motive of all actual sins, he is by no means of the opinion that this innate disposition plays no part in bringing about eternal damnation. But, while he raises the question whether the malady of original sin delivers all men over to the penalties of eternal death, he attempts its solution only by bringing out the interrelations between sin and redemption. In order to make good the truth of both these conceptions, he opposes them first of all in this way: by original sin we are all lost, and by means of redemption we are restored to perfect life. The latter proposition, however, limits the former. The former is true only when we disregard the fact of redemption. This fact, however, being given, those are in error who maintain universal damnation on the ground of original sin. For the children of Christians are not condemned for original sin. They are, rather, through the character of the community established by the promise of grace, the objects of Divine favour. For Christian believers are only the extended community of the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, in regard to the last-named, whom God elected before his birth, it follows that original sin could not condemn him. For he who belongs to God stands to God in the relation of friendship. If so, then no condemnation takes place on account of innate qualities of character. Therefore, from the point of view of eternal election, in the positive community of salvation the hereditary propensity to sin is not in itself the ground of eternal damnation; it becomes such only when one brings down destruction on oneself by personal transgression of the law, and therefore by one’s own guilt of unfaithfulness towards God. In this statement we have an indirect admission of the idea expressed by Wessel and Staupitz, that he who belongs to the number of the elect practises actual sin only in a temporal degree, or in the degree of ignorance; for within this circle one never reaches the stage of contempt of salvation, or of intentional unfaithfulness. This view, it is true, is incompatible with the Augustinian representation of original sin as the sufficient ground of eternal damnation. If, therefore, the assumption of an hereditary transmission of sin be maintained at all, it can be understood only in Zwingli’s sense.

Johann von Lasco attempts to solve the same problem by the assumption that, within the mass of Adam’s posterity who were condemned with him, the grace of God which was proclaimed to men in the Protevangelium was imparted from the very beginning, by imputation of the eternally decreed redemption through Christ, to such men as do not reject Christ by their own voluntary contempt of Him; for He did not undertake His vicarious suffering for those also who prove themselves His despisers. Lasco, therefore, reckons as dating from Adam not only original sin, but also the existence of the Church of God, characterised by the note of faith in the promised redemption.¹⁶

Following the same path, I come, finally, upon the Lutheran von Oettingen,¹⁷ and that for this reason that, in complete harmony with my own position, he follows the methodological principle that the full extent of sin is recognisable only in relation to the Christian salvation, and possible only in opposition to it. Proceeding on these lines, Oettingen not only arrives at the principle that, presupposing the revelation of salvation, the degree of sin varies according to the definite capacity of appropriating salvation, but likewise maintains that eternal damnation is limited to the sin against the Holy Ghost, that is, to stiff-necked rejection of grace. In this assertion it is indirectly admitted that eternal damnation does not inherently depend on original sin; and thus one of the formal bases of traditional Lutheran as well as Calvinistic Dogmatics is given up. Oettingen, it is true, fails to draw this consequence. He seeks, rather, to create the impression that his position, which is an entirely novel one, was already in a certain measure foreseen by Luther. But the expression which he cites from Luther¹⁸ means only that all non-Christians, who are in the state of eternal damnation on the ground of original sin, remain in that state because they are not redeemed from it. Eternal damnation, in so far as it denotes a degree and a duration of punishment, is here attached a priori to original sin. From Luther’s subsequent comparison between damnation and redemption, we can conclude only that he admits a certain modification in the duration of eternal punishment, according as redemption has been either merely not appropriated or definitely rejected. But in Luther’s view the redeemed also formerly stood under the doom of the highest degree of punishment. Oettingen, therefore, is at variance not merely (as he alleges) with several of the Lutheran divines, but also with Luther himself, in limiting eternal damnation, as the punishment of the highest degree and of unbroken duration, to the sin against the Holy Ghost, and in measuring the degree of sin in general by the standard of active susceptibility to grace. Such being the case, I trust no one will doubt that the nature of original sin, if its existence be maintained at all, can be consistently determined only in Zwingli’s sense.

Now, it has been ascertained previously (vol. ii. pp. 241–246) that through all circles of thought in the New Testament there runs the idea of the graduated value of sin, the idea, namely, that sin, in so far as it can be forgiven or rendered inoperative through conversion, is to be distinguished from sin brought to its full intensity in the form of final decision against the Christian salvation, or that of incorrigible selfishness. This estimate of sin is formed in exact accordance with the gulf which separates sin from the Christian salvation; it stands likewise in analogy with the fundamental principle of the Mosaic law (vol. ii. p. 38), the scope of which is derived from a quite similar standard of value; it corresponds, finally, to the theological method of determining the conception of sin, the validity of which I maintained at the outset. This constant element in the religious view of things, which Jesus recognised as well as the writers of the New Testament, has been rendered ineffective by the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. The time has come at length to restore that principle to its rightful place.

The distinction between sin as ignorance and sin as final decision against recognised good, is thinkable first of all as related to the conception of sin in general. Sin in general is active and habitual opposition to God and to the good— the good which men discern, with some measure either of vague presentiment or of definite knowledge, to be the final end guaranteed by God for the human will. But, as has been argued above (p. 343), the worth or the worthlessness of sin is not determined by the logical notion of opposition, which would involve that the extremest possible opposition to good is realised in every instance of sin, or that all sin is conscious and thoroughgoing wickedness. If the nature of sin were to be determined in this sense, it would indeed have a very limited extent in actual experience. Sin is, rather, in all instances, opposition to the good, that conception being defined in the ethical sense, so that the least deviation from the good or even the simple omission of the good already forms opposition thereto; for the good must be unconditionally and completely realised by the will at every moment. Now ignorance, as experience teaches in the case of children, is a very significant factor in the origin and development of sin. Children when they enter upon the common spiritual life of men, are neither equipped with a knowledge of good or of the moral law, either as a whole or in its special details, nor endowed with an inclination to decide against the good as a whole. Rather, they must first learn to value the good in its special details, and amid the special relations of life in which they stand; for they are absolutely unable from the very outset of life to comprehend the good in its universal character. But now precisely in the case of children the will enters into the sphere of active operation with the evident expectation that it possesses unlimited influence over surrounding objects and circumstances. Such being the case, ignorance is the essential condition of the conflicts which arise between the will and the order of society regarded as the standard of the good, and also the condition of the fact that the will confirms itself in its opposition to the order of society. One cannot, it is true, understand how such a result must ensue. Sin has no real end, either for the individual life or for the advancement of the whole. Ignorance, also, is not the sufficient ground for the confirming of the will in sin; for the will and knowledge are not wholly commensurable with one another. Therefore, neither a priori nor yet in accordance with the conditions of experience, is it to be denied that there may be a sinless development of life. For it is likewise only by reckoning up the sum total of experiences that we arrive at our conviction of the universal prevalence of sin. With this, theology, too, ought to rest satisfied. For the hypothesis of an innate propensity to sin, even as Zwingli understands the idea, would also have to be established by means of observation; and even supposing the hypothesis established, nothing more would be reached thereby than what ordinary experience ascertains, even without such means of interpretation. And, finally, though the gradation we have recognised in active and habitual sin be regarded as holding good for different men, yet the sin which is inborn in all men could be viewed only under the form of ignorance. That even in this form a propensity of opposition to the good can be developed, experience teaches in the case of children—but then only if we presuppose that their will is put to the test. But how ignorance can be a sinful propensity, prior to all activity of the individual will, is unintelligible. Thus even the possibility of maintaining Zwingli’s hypothesis disappears.

The distinction which is made in the New Testament, between sin as ignorance and sin as final and thoroughgoing opposition to good, has a certain analogy to the current distinctions made between unintentional and intentional, and between venial and deadly sin. But the former distinction, unlike the latter ones, applies not to individual actions, but to habitual dispositions of will from which the individual actions proceed. That distinction, moreover, has not the significance of a standard to be applied in forming our judgment of other men, on the basis of a complete experience of the facts, just as the other distinctions with which we have compared it are recognised as standards for the practical judgments of the educator, the judge, and the Catholic father-confessor. For the distinction belongs undoubtedly to the sphere of religious thought, and therefore holds good in the first place as the standard for the judgment of God. Now, as we are not called upon as Christians to pass judgment on individual men, corresponding to or even forestalling the judgment of God, the recognition of this distinction signifies anything but the right to judge men as individuals, and to attribute to their sins the one or the other degree. Rather, as an element in the Christian view of the world, the distinction denotes the point of view from which the Divine redemption or reconciliation of sinners is possible, it being presupposed that there also exists a degree of sin which can only expect to be expelled from the Divine world-order. Now, inasmuch as the positive determination of men’s capacity for redemption must be reserved for God, we ought to be satisfied with comprehending all these instances of sin under the negative category of sin as ignorance. We cannot, certainly, avoid taking into consideration the fact that there fall under this category those sins, likewise, which present themselves to our human judgment as a thoroughly confirmed habit of hardening (Eph. iv. 17–19). But if we are to maintain our good faith that such men are not regarded by God as past redemption, the conclusion which suggests itself is that God looks upon their sin in a different light, namely, as ignorance. This predicate has a quite different importance, when viewed from the standpoint of Christianity, from the presupposition which bears the same name in the Mosaic law of sacrifice. For in the latter case account is always taken merely of individual actions, or of such conditions of bodily uncleanness as we must judge to be morally indifferent. By Christians, on the other hand, the sinful condition of others, in so far as it does not exclude the capacity for redemption, must be left to God’s decision, and His estimate of sin as ignorance must be accepted with due reverence. At the stage of Mosaic law, moreover, it remains uncertain how the relation of man to God in consequence of the sin of ignorance stands prior to the sin-offering, since the covenant grace of God still remains in force. On the other hand, as regards the sin which God views as ignorance, in virtue of its finding forgiveness through Christ, it is certain that in its character of enmity against God it excludes the relation of peace between men and God.

If, now, the question be raised how we have to conceive the relation of God to sin regarded as ignorance, above all one ought not to expect that theological knowledge, as such, will reach further in this direction than religious judgment. In regard to the point before us; our theology is only competent to show that the distinction between the two stages of sin is in harmony with our ruling conception of God. In general, our knowledge of how sin is related to the Divine world-order has very narrow limits indeed. We must guard against describing sin as an operation of God, and a harmonious element in His world-order, for in all instances sin is the opposite of good, and that which runs counter to the recognisable moral end of the world. It is an apparently inevitable product of the human will under the given conditions of its development, but, conscious as we are of our freedom and independence, is nevertheless reckoned by us as guilt. Nor can we, with Schleiermacher, mediate between these two lines of thought by holding that God regards sin, not as opposition to good, but merely as hitherto unattained moral perfection, whereas we must regard our imperfection as sin, in order to awaken in our minds the longing for redemption and perfection (vol. i. p. 536). For as our theological view must in nowise diverge from, or run in opposition to the religious view of Christianity, our judgment regarding sin must be in harmony with the Divine judgment. On the other hand, our estimate of sin as opposition to God is indeed a logical presupposition of faith in redemption, yet in itself no real ground for the production of this faith, but just as easily a ground for doubt, or even obdurate indifference.

If, therefore, God loves sinners (§ 39), inasmuch as His thoughts are directed to their redemption, He does not regard sin in general as imperfect good; rather, He regards that special form of sin which does not exclude redemption as an attribute of men which does not exhaust nor finally determine their worth for God. The question will be raised, whether it is conceivable that sinful men on such conditions should be objects of God’s love. Now, love is that will which accepts, as belonging to one’s own end, the task of advancing permanently the end of other personal beings of like nature with oneself (§ 34). Moreover, the possibility of love is in nowise bound up with its being reciprocated, that is, with the condition that the loved one also, under all circumstances, recognises the personal end of the lover as a permanent task of life, in the same way as the lover does to him. Rather, in their natural estimate of moral relationships, men are at one in the opinion that the love of a mother to the infant child which cannot respond to her love, and the love of a father to a lost son, represent a higher degree of love than that which is found in mutual friendship. Furthermore, this thought is affirmed in the Christian commandment to love one’s enemy (Matt. v. 44; Rom. xii. 20). That commandment would be absurd, were it the expression of the view that we ought to support our enemy in the aims in which he denies or combats our existence or our essential interests. But when we speak specifically of love towards our enemy, this means no more than that we show respect towards him as a moral personality, by maintaining his existence and desiring that his disposition should change. Hence, when Schoeberlein reduces the relation of God to sinful humanity to the respect shown by Him to their personal independence (vol. i. p. 651), what he thereby conceives is merely a modification of love, not something different from love in its nature. His hypothesis, however, is not in harmony with the original expression which is given to the motive of the Divine decree of redemption. Rather, in His purpose of redemption God loves the world, i.e. the sinners who are filled with enmity towards Him (Rom. v. 8; John iii. 16). If, now, we attempt to ascertain the meaning of this conception through the analogy of that love towards enemies which is possible to us, we find that in both cases the love is conditioned by the fact that we are able to distinguish, whether hypothetically or categorically, between the momentary direction of will which finds expression in the other’s enmity, and a permanent element in his personality which makes him worthy of love. In human affairs cases are met with in which one recognises an enemy as a man who is otherwise distinguished by very estimable qualities of character, as well as cases in which one can respect an enemy only in view of one’s desire for his complete change of mind. In the relation of God to men, who as sinners stand in a general attitude of opposition to the Divine final end, it is evident that only the latter case holds good. But now the question arises, whether, from the commandment that men should love their enemies, a competent conclusion can be drawn at all in reference to an analogous relation of the Divine will towards sinners. For love towards one’s enemies, in the hope of their conversion, could perhaps be enjoined as evidence of one’s own determination to refrain from the judgment that anyone is beyond conversion. But it is precisely from this point of view that the doubtfulness of the analogy comes to light. For, supposing that even in countless instances within human experience the act of blessing and interceding for one’s enemy finds no encouragement in the desired result of his conversion, the commandment of Christ would be useless and ineffectual as a means of virtue, were it not in the first place a direct consequence of the religious view of the world which belongs to Christianity (§ 39). But in the Christian view the love towards our enemy which we are commanded to cherish, is necessarily based on the corresponding trait of character in the idea of God. The love, therefore, which is the expression of the essential will of God revealed in Christianity, includes also love towards sinners as the ground of their conversion. For the change of heart, which holds good, in the case of human love towards one’s enemy, as a condition which lies beyond our power and therefore can only be kept hypothetically before our eyes, takes in the case of God’s love the place of the consequence intended by that love. But now, in so far as the change of heart which is to be brought about by God’s love towards sinners must be conceived under the form of freedom of the will, we cannot conceive that result as taking place when sin, regarded as enmity against God, has reached that degree of self-determination at which the will has deliberately chosen evil as its end. Where we can justly suppose such a case, there also we must regard the love of God as impossible. Therefore, the love of God can be conceived in relation only to such sinners as have not fallen into that degree of sin which excludes conversion of the will. It is just this negative relation that is expressed by the predication of ignorance—and nothing more. The presupposition of such a degree of sin in the case of others has just this much practical significance for us, that we ought to esteem them as capable of conversion. Theoretically, however, this assumption of sin as ignorance has the significance only of a standard for God—a standard, therefore, which is conceived only negatively, because its specific application does not belong to us. The thought, therefore, means that the love of God to sinners, as the motive of His purpose of redemption, and as the ultimate efficient ground of their conversion, cannot be extended to those persons in whom the purpose of opposition to the Divine order of good has come to full consciousness and determination. Whether there are such men, and who they are, are questions that lie equally beyond our practical judgment and our theoretical knowledge.

1. Sin, which alike as a mode of action and as a habitual propensity extends over the whole human race, is, in the Christian view of the world, estimated as the opposite of reverence and trust towards God, as also the opposite of the Kingdom of God— in the latter respect forming the kingdom of sin, which possesses no necessary ground either in the Divine world-order or in man’s natural endowment of freedom, but unites all men with one another by means of the countless interrelations of sinful conduct.

2. Of the evils which make themselves perceptible as hindrances to human freedom, those have the significance of Divine punishments—presupposing the Divine government of the world—which each individual, through his unrelieved consciousness of guilt, imputes to himself as such — that consciousness of guilt, as expressive of the lack of religious fellowship with God, being itself already the initial manifestation of punishment as the forfeiture of the privilege of Divine sonship.

3. In so far as men, regarded as sinners both in their individual capacity and as a whole, are objects of the redemption and reconciliation made possible by the love of God, sin is estimated by God, not as the final purpose of opposition to the known will of God, but as ignorance.

---

← Chapter IV. The Doctrine of God · Contents · Chapter VI. The Doctrine of Christ’s Person and Life-Work →

Footnotes

1. Cf. vol. i. pp. 163, 199, 214. Cf. also Spangenberg, Idea fidei fratrum, p. 246: “Although an individual, who turns to God from his heart, is immediately conscious of his sinful misery and forthwith obtains forgiveness, yet we must not think that he is sensible of his corruption all at once. For after pardon has been granted him, he is given more and more light from time to time; and so it happens that a man, after fifty years of faithfulness in the ways of the Saviour, is a much greater sinner in his own eyes than he was at the moment of his conversion.” ↩

2. Eichhorn, Die Rechtfertigungslehre der Apologie, in Stud. u. Krit., 1887, p. 420 ff. ↩

3. It is true, indeed, that Luther occasionally affirms quite unreservedly the eternal damnation of unbaptized children, but, on the other hand, he counts it to their advantage that they have not committed actual sins. The fact is that, speaking generally, Luther never took quite seriously to the above inference from original sin. In connection with this problem he utters a warning against seeking to penetrate into matters which God has not revealed; and hence he is not in favour of trying to solve the problem, as Augustine did, by purely theoretical arguments. He rather awakens hope in God’s mercy towards children who die unbaptized, and, in short, clearly puts aside in this question the interest which actuated Augustine. For Luther, therefore, baptism becomes in part an act which proclaims the promise of grace to children, partly an act by which they are dedicated to God (C. A. ix. Art. Smalc. iii. 5). Cf. Köstlin, Luther’s Theologie, ii. pp. 88-100, 375, 511. ↩

4. C. A. ii. : ” Damnant Pelagianos et alios, qui vitium originis negant esse peccatum, et ut extenuent gloriam meriti et beneficiorum Christi, disputant, hominem propriis viribus rationis coram deo iustificari posse.” ↩

5. Geschichte des Pietismus, ii. pp. 45, 70. ↩

6. Apol. C. A. i. 8: “Cum de peccato originis loquuntur, graviora vitia humanae naturae non commemorant, scilicet ignorationem dei, contemptum dei, vacare metu et fiducia dei, odisse iudicium dei, fugere deum iudicantem, desperare gratiam, habere fiduciam rerum praesentium etc. Hos morbos, qui maxime adversantur legi dei, non animadvertunt scholastici.” ↩

7. L.c. i. 29: “Hugo ait, originale peccatum esse ignorationem in mente et concupiscentiam in carne. Significat enim nos nascentes afferre ignorationem dei, incredulitatem, diffidentiam, contemptum, odium dei.” ↩

8. L.c. i. 31: “Facile iudicare poterit prudens lector, non tantum culpas actuales esse, sine metu et sine fide esse; sunt enim durabiles defectus in natura non renovata.” ↩

9. Cf. Dietzsch, Adam und Christus, p. 68 ff. The relative clause ἐφ’ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον refers to θάνατος. The preposition is here used as in Heb. ix. 15; 1 Thess. iii. 7; 2 Cor. vii. 4, ix. 6; Eph. iv. 26. ↩

10. Geschichte des Pietismus, ii. p. 543, iii. p. 68. ↩

11. Jahrb. für deutsche Theologie, xiii. p. 108. ↩

12. De magnitudine passionum x.: “ Hic dolor debitus noster dolor est, quem si vere agnus dei tollens peccata mundi pro nobis portavit, in tanta mensura portavit, quantus districto divinae iustitiae iudicio repositus pro omnibus omnium nostrum peccatis, quos redemit ex morte, languore et dolore. — Superat omnia divinarum legum necessitas, quibus statutum, nihil finaliter indecorum futurum in regno destinato. Non iam de suppliciis inferni quis obiiciat. Nullus enim per Christum redemtus unquam meruit tali supplicio cruciari, quia nullus redemtorum in illam obstinaciam obdurati cordis prolapsus est, sed infirmitate et ignorantia, non obdurata malitia contemtorum lapsorum in profundum. Licet igitur dicamus, multos mortaliter peccare in hac nostra humana infirmitate, nemo tamen per haec peccat usque ad mortem. Sunt igitur peccata nostra mortalia, sed non mortua, sicut nos mortales et non mortui. Quae autem mortalia tantum sunt, quanta poena divinis legibus reposita sit, non puto cuiquam notum esse mortalium. Iuste ergo in iudicio Iesus contra omnes perditos causabitur, tantam eius afflictionem pro eis assumptam, ut dei iudicio ad omnem poenam pro eorum peccatis abolendis sufficere iudicetur, et eos contempsisse. · Praeterea pro singulis salvandis tantum obtulit deo, quantum pro illius voluit abolitione. Voluit autem, quantum apti. Apti autem, quantum mundi et conformes Christo. Intentio enim Christi erat individua, quia solis praedestinatis, et limitata, quia praecise tantum, quantum cuique in suum locum et ordinem.” ↩

13. Cf. the art. on Wessel by H. Schmidt in Herzog’s R. E. vol. xvii. p. 742. ↩

14. Von der Vollziehung ewiger Erwählung, §§ 89–93. Opera, ed. Knaake, i. p. 156. ↩

15. De peccato originali declaratio, Opp. iii. p. 631 ff. ↩

16. Ep. ad Bullingerum (1544). Confessio ecclesiae Londinensis. Opera, ed. Kuyper, ii. pp. 587, 298. ↩

17. De peccato in spiritum sanctum (Dorpat, 1856), pp. 49, 146. ↩

18. Catech. maior, ii. 66: “ Quicunque extra Christianitatem sunt—in perpetua manent ira et damnatione. Neque enim habent Christum dominum, neque ullis spiritus sancti donis et dotibus illustrati et donati sunt.” Cf. Köstlin, Luther’s Theologie, vol. ii. p. 374. ↩