United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If this be so, the doctrine of a necessary holiness must be admitted; for surely nothing can be more necessary to us, nothing can take place in which we have less to do, than the act by which we are created. This then is the question which we intend to examine: whether that which is concreated with a moral agent, can be his virtue or his vice?
Christianity the Only Real and True Religion. Religion is man's filial relation to, and union with, God. Natural religion is the concreated relation of Adam and Eve in their state of innocence toward their Creator. Fallen man, though he still lives, and moves, and has his being in God, is, in consequence of his sinful nature, atheos, without God, and hence without true and real religion.
We might point out many other errors and inconsistencies in which that argument is involved; but to avoid, as far as possible, becoming prolix and tiresome, we shall proceed to consider his second argument in favour of a necessary or concreated holiness.
This natural concreated disposition is, says he, neither our virtue nor our vice! “That ingratitude, or the want of natural affection,” says he, “shows a high degree of depravity, does not prove that all gratitude and natural affection possesses the nature of true virtue or saving grace.” “We see, in innumerable instances, that mere nature is sufficient to excite gratitude in men, or to affect their hearts with thankfulness to others for favours received.” “Gratitude being thus a natural principle, ingratitude is so much the more vile and heinous; because it shows a dreadful prevalence of wickedness, which even overbears and suppresses the better principles of human nature.
This completes the process. God now gives his guilty creature over to these vain imaginations of naturalism, materialism, and idolatry, and to an increasingly darkening mind, until in the lowest forms of heathenism he so distorts and suppresses the concreated idea of the Deity that some speculatists assert that it does not belong to his constitution, and that his Maker never endowed him with it.
Here, as well as in various other places, Edwards speaks of gratitude and other natural affections as the better principles of our nature; to be destitute of which he considers a horrible deformity. But, however amiable and lovely, he denies to these natural affections, or dispositions, the character of virtue; because they are merely natural or concreated dispositions.
The natural concreated disposition of Adam, he supposes, was morally right in the highest sense of the word, because he was so made as to relish and delight in the glorious perfections of the divine nature. Our first answer to this is, that it is contradicted by the reason and moral judgment of mankind in general, and, in particular, by the reason and moral judgment of Edwards himself.
But if it had any concreated dispositions at all, they must be either right or wrong, either agreeable or disagreeable to the nature of things.
This argument, we say, just as clearly shows that sin is impossible, or that it must have been concreated with man, as it shows the same thing in relation to virtue. If we maintain his argument, then, we must either deny the possibility of moral evil or make God the author of it.
Word Of The Day