Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.[pg 473]An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.
Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong:“Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man camethroughthe brute, he did not comefromthe brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.”See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.
An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed“by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.”All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”
The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse:“There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.”That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's placeinnature, but not for man's placeabovenature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.”But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals“appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts”(461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.
Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.”Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.”Sir Wm. Thompson:“That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.”Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of“the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that“that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,”and that“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.”See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603,[pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.
(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.
Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.
Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are:Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father[Abraham]?hath not one God created us?”Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”;15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns;John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”;John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly.Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience;Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”;Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.”Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we werecreatedin Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have beencreated anewin Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop:“God neverbecomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes areconciledandcomplacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.”Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”
Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are:John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”;Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”;2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”;Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”;3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family[marg.“fatherhood”]in heaven and on earth is named”(= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159);Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”;4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”;1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God;[pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.”The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.Gal. 4:1-7intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child“differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,”and needs still to“receive the adoption of sons.”Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only“servants”who“abide not in the house forever”(John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to“become”his children (Mat. 5:45).
The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view,John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil”= the Fatherhood of God is not universal;Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”;John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.”Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to‘another gospel’(Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an‘anathema’(Gal 1:8.)”
But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does notbecomethe Father, butisthe heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.”A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called‘children of wrath’(Eph. 2:3), or‘of perdition’(John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.”We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38;John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”;2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).
Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said:“My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say:‘Our father who art in hell’; for[pg 476]they are only children of the devil.”Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.