Jonathan Edward’s The Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) was written in response to Dr. John Taylor’s Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to a Free and Candid Examination (1741), which presents the Arminian arguments for actual sins rather original sin. Being a thoroughbred Calvinist and “the last Puritan” (as J. I. Packer calls him), Edwards was solidly committed to the Augustinian/ Reformation doctrine of original sin, which in his day as it is in our’s is a major offense to many, if not most, people. Pascal once observed that the doctrine seems an offense to reason but once one accepted it it makes total sense of the entire human condition. John Gertsner comments that Edwards’ work, Original Sin , “may be the most profound articulation and defense of that Reformed doctrine ever written.” Edwards’ reason for going after Taylor was his deep, abiding concern that Taylor’s Arminian theology would destroy the Scriptural basis of the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone:
In this paper I will give particular focus on Edwards’ unique and, I think, helpful philosophical and theological insights on the imputation of Adam’s sin and guilt to us.
The doctrine of original sin (first coined by Augustine) doesn’t so much refer to the first or original sin committed by Adam as it does to the result of the first sin i. e. the corruption of the human race and the fallen condition into which we are all born and in which makes natural men “enemies of God”. In short, the classic doctrine, while maintaining that God made Man upright (Eccles. 7:29), holds the entire race is corrupt and culpable. Edwards also viewed the Fall as the loss of the spiritual nature (original holiness and righteousness) that belonged to the human race as the created imago dei. Therefore, Man has a twisted heart prior to any actual sin. This inner sinful disposition or motivation is the root of all sin and it derives to everyone of the human race in a mysterious but real way through our first parent, who was our representative before God.
The doctrine is therefore the basis for the familiar formulation: we are not sinners because we sin but rather we sin because we are sinners. (“Surely I was sinful at # birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” Ps. Ps. 51:5). The Westminster Confession brilliantly captures the results of the Fall:
Edwards subscribed to this Reformed understanding but he perhaps moved into the doctrine more deeply and with a more unique, fresh perspective than perhaps anyone save Augustine. He writes of two principles God implanted in Man. One, the “natural” (or call the flesh) is self love, passions, natural appetites etc. The other refers to as “divine” (or Spirit) which is the image of God and is the superior principle that is to dominate the heart or affections. When Man sinned, the divine principle left the heart and the “Holy Spirit, that divine inhabitant, forsook the house.” When that happened, Man was given over to his inward, private affections. Consequently, the “natural principle”, not the “divine”, now reigned, cosmic treason occurred, God is forsaken and the imago dei is shattered. Thus , it is God’s absence from us i. e. the withdraw of His Spirit, not His presence, which explains sin.
By original sin, Edwards meant that “innate sinful depravity of the heart” Consistent with classic doctrine, Edwards believed, not that we tend always to sin, but we always have a disposition to sin. Evidence for this innate tendency of corruption as the prevalent, universal condition of man, Edwards contended, is readily found in observation, experience and Scripture. On the other hand, Taylor to support his moralism supposedly looked at the same evidence and saw a preponderance of good and virtue in the tendencies of the race to support. Taylor’s conclusion, like that of other Arminians, suggests that it is not necessarily the evidence about the twisted heart of man that is want but either the sufficient strength of the lens through which it is examined or the absence of spiritual lens at all.
Edwards argues that we humans are born into and retain only a physical nature which is completely “bereft” of the “things of religion”. We are by nature totally depraved, that is every part of our being is permeated with sin - it is at our core - and we are alienated from God. Our will (which Edwards defines as the mind choosing) is so corrupted that we cannot by nature choose God apart from His affecting grace. Although we have a rational capacity, it is corrupted in spiritual things and cannot see sin for what it is.
In his Freedom of the Will, Edwards argued that we are free to always choose according to our strongest desire at the moment of choosing. The problem is that in our fallen state we cannot choose God because we do not desire Him. We have freedom to choose what we would have but we will not have God in our lives. We do not have liberty to choose God because our nature lacks Edwards’ divine principle.
Edwards saw Adam as a representative through whom God covenanted with the entire human race, not only in a parental sense but more particularly in a federal sense. Adam as the federal head of the race was tested and when he sinned as the public person, he thus sinned for all of us. His fall, as well as his guilt, is ours. When God punished Adam by withdrawing His grace and communion and by giving him over to his own affections and desires, Adam lost or forfeited his original righteousness and the same consequences attend all his posterity. We follow after Adam willingly and like Adam hide ourselves from God, cover ourselves with our own works of righteousness and seek peace, as Edwards said, with false gods. Therefore no infusion of evil was necessary for us to sin in Adam. Edwards contended that it is privation of God’s divine love that explains man’s wickedness and therefore, its cause is internal, not external or environmental. No external act belongs to a person “otherwise...than as his heart was in it.” Yet because the human race’s heart is inclined to Adam’s act, his act is the race’s act as well. For Edwards all it takes is for God in response to Adam’s sin to withdraw special grace from him and create his posterity without it.
Edwards thought the most excruciating of all theological problems was how, in the case of Adam who was created fresh from the hand of God with holiness and righteousness, can a good tree can bear bad fruit. From whence did Adam’s disposition or inclination come? As much as this challenged Edwards’ acute intellect and as much as he labored with it, it is even more of an unfathomable mystery to us. But Edwards waded into its depths concluding based on Scripture that a perfectly righteous person, which Adam was, may will that which he knows to be unrighteous. Yet Edwards held fast to Scripture that God could not be and is not the author of the # sinner but the sinner is himself morally responsible for his choices. John Gertsner at this point helps place this gordian knot into some perspective at least by suggesting that “God intends the question of the origin of sin as an academic thorn in the flesh. There must be an answer to the question but no one has yet discovered it. Edwards mistakenly believed he had.” Edwards did, however, succinctly capture the essence of the pattern of sin and guilt in the following brilliant explanation:
And in like manner, depravity of heart is to be considered two in Adams’s posterity. The first existing of a corrupt disposition in their hearts is not to be looked upon as sin belonging to them, distinct from their participation of Adam’s first sin; it is as it were the extended pollution of that sin, through the whole tree, by virtue of the constituted union of the branches with the root; or the inheritance of the sin of that head of the species in the members, in the consent and concurrence of the hearts of the members with the head in that first act...But the depravity of nature, remaining an established principle in the heart of a child of Adam, and as exhibited in after-operation, is a consequence and punishment of the first apostasy thus participated, and brings new guilt. The first being of an evil disposition in the heart of the child of Adam,, whereby he is disposed to approve of the sin of his first father, as fully as he himself approved of it when he committed it, or so far as to imply a full and perfect consent of heart to it, I think, is not be looked upon as a consequence of the imputation of that first sin, any more than the full consent of Adam’s own heart in the act of sinning; which was not consequent on the imputation of his sin to himself, but rather prior to it in the order of nature. indeed the derivation of the evil disposition to the hearts of Adam’s posterity, or rather the coexistence of the evil disposition, implied in Adam’s first rebellion, in the root and branches, is a consequence of the union, that the wise Author of the world has established between Adam and his posterity: but not properly a consequence of the imputation of his sin; nay, rather antecedent to it, as it was in Adam himself. The first depravity of heart, and the imputation of that sin, are both the consequences of that established union: but yet in such order, that the evil disposition is first, and the charge of guilt consequent; as it was in the case of Adam himself.
In addition to the antipathy Arminians and others have toward to the doctrine of original sin and total depravity, there is their persistent objection to what they see as the inherent unfairness of judging anyone in another. The imputation of Adam’s guilt to his posterity is a real issue for them, although they do not seem to rail against the imputation of sinners’ guilt to an innocent Christ and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to guilty sinners. How Edwards dealt with the problem of Adam’s imputation was one of his most unique and original philosophical insights.
In answering Taylor on imputation, Edwards framed the concept of personal identity whereby Adam and his posterity are constitutionally united in the divine order of things. The issue of why human should bear responsibility for Adam’s sin is no more of a philosophical problem for Edwards than why humans should bear responsibility for their own past deeds. He said that God sovereignly orders and sustains unity and continuity of all created substances (and their effects) - in nature, in a person and in the race.
Edwards’ central point about imputation was that God in his dealings with Adam under the covenant of works (Gen 2: 16-17) “looked on his posterity as being one with him.” He further explains that man’s innate corrupt disposition is not a judicial punishment for Adam’s guilt but really is our own because of our participation (being one with) in the sinful inclination that preceded Adams’s sinful act, what Edwards called “extended pollution of that sin”. John Gertsner puts it this way, “there was a divinely constituted unity between Adam and those he represented. This constituted unity, being in tact, when Adam sinned, all sinned. The order of imputation is actually the same in Adam and in mankind: first, sin; second, imputation of guilt; third, pollution.” Adam’s case and ours are parallel, not sequential and are the same except the first appearance of evil and the first act are the same event which turned the heart away.
Edwards believed in a “real union between the root and the branches of the world of mankind, established by the author of the whole system of the universe...and the full consent of the hearts of Adam’s posterity to the first apostasy...and therefore the sin of the apostasy is not theirs merely because God imputes it to them but it is truly and properly theirs and on that ground God imputed it to them.” Edwards viewed depravity and imputation as stemming from this union of Adam and his posterity. God so identified Adam with us that his choice and act was our choice and act. We too would have, had we physically been there in the garden, told Eve “pluck the fruit and eat it!”
God dealt “more immediately” with Adam but he did so as the root of the whole tree and also with all the branches “as if they had been existing in their root.” Based then on unity and identity, the only difference between Adam’s sin and our own is that Adam’s is first and we are merely repeating what he did. While the acorn that comes from a century’s old giant oak is distinct from it, it bears in it, however, constant succession of common nature by continuous divine creation. As Edwards saw it, when God deals with the whole tree He has sovereignly chosen to deal with each individual branch as well. This is what Edwards says is meant in Scripture by the oneness or personal identity of Adam and his posterity. He argues that “God, according to an established law of nature, has in a constant succession communicated to it many of the same qualities...as if it were one.”
Likewise Edwards argued the mature person’s body is one with the infant body from which he or she developed and although its substance has changed greatly over time God sovereignly caused a “communication” between the infantile and the mature body so that he treats the individual as one body. He argued the same way for the mind and body in that when considered individually they are very different but by God’s contributions they are strongly united and become one. While we are not the same as our past existence, Edwards contends that God chooses to treat all new effects in us as a single identity resulting from His continuous creation. Since God chooses me to be the same as yesterday’s person I am also the same person as Adam. All the parts of the world “are derived from the fruit of the kind as from their root and fountain and the entire human race “partakes of the sin of the fruit apostasy.” There is unity and continuity in all created substance. In other words, just as there is by divine power a consistency and connectedness in all created entities and their derived effects so there is between sin and guilt past and sin and guilt present. Not only did we have a hand in Adam’s sin, but it was actually our sin. Edwards characterizes what happened this way:
Joseph Bellamy, Edwards’ intimate friend and neighbor, well states in his book, which Edwards endorsed, what in the final analysis stands behind the issue of imputation:
Ans. Let it be by Adam’s fall, or how it will, yet if you are an enemy to the infinitely glorious God, your maker, and that voluntarily, you are infinitely to blame, and without excuse; for nothing can make it right for a creature to be a voluntary enemy to his glorious Creator, or possibly excuse such a crime. it is, in its own nature, infinitely wrong; there is nothing, therefore to be said; you stand guilty before God. it is vain to make this or any other pleas, so long as we are what we are, not by compulsion, but voluntarily. And it is in vain to pretend that we are not voluntary in our corruptions, when they are nothing else but the free, spontaneous inclinations of our own hearts. Since this is the case, every mouth will be stopped, and all the world will become guilty before God, sooner or later.”