B. MAN AFTER THE FALL

(De Statu Peccati)

A revival of the tenets of the ancient Gnostic sect of the Ophites (“the brotherhood of the serpent”) 12 represents sin as the exaltation of mankind. This is the very interpretation of sin by which Satan seduced our first parents. Gen. 3:5: “Ye shall not surely die … ye shall be as gods [R. V.: God], knowing good and evil.” Schiller sees in the Fall “the most fortunate and the greatest event in the history of mankind.”13 Hegel expressed it in these words: “The state of innocence, this paradisaic state, is the brutish state. Paradise is a park where only beasts, and not men, can abide. The fall into sin is therefore the eternal myth telling how man becomes a man.” 14 Similar views regarding the Fall and sin are voiced here in America. Strong furnishes ample evidence for this from the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, Schurman, and others. From the humanistic and pantheistic viewpoint, sin is regarded as the necessary transitional stage or the background for virtue. Sin, even in the form which it took in the infidel Thomas Paine, is, taken as a whole, necessary for the perfection of the world.15 These men have reached the general conclusion that, as Strong remarks, “the Fall was a fall up and not down” and, we say it again, repeat Satan’s lie as to the effect of sin (Gen. 3:5).

According to Scripture, sin is not the exaltation of man which produced his happiness, but is the deepest degradation and the one great calamity that has come upon mankind; all other evils are solely the consequence of sin. And man’s experience confirms this truth. All this humanistic-pantheistic talk about sin as the necessary transitional stage leading to “moral freedom” and to the evolution of “true humanity” is disproved by the voice of man’s conscience. The human conscience has properly been called the invincible foe of pantheism and every other form of atheism. Man simply is unable to convince himself that sin was the passageway to “true humanity,” representing “advancements” and constituting “the most fortunate event in the history of mankind.” For, on account of his sin, man has an evil conscience before God; because of his sin he feels just as “happy” as Adam and Eve were when after the Fall they “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the Garden” (Gen. 3:8). But by the grace of God an exceedingly great and fortunate “event in the history of mankind” has come to pass for us fallen sinners — the incarnation of the Son of God, the purpose of which is to richly restore to us, by His substitutionary satisfaction, what we have lost through the devil’s seduction in the fall of our first parents. And in this divine restoration only he will share who will not permit Satan to deceive him again in the matter of the Fall and of sin, but who gains the right view of these things from God’s Word. The Christian doctrine therefore necessarily contains the locus de peccato.

This doctrine will be treated under the three heads: a) de peccato in genere, b) de peccato originali, c) de peccatis actualibus. We shall have occasion to meet also the modern antitheses.