Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Traducianism holds that man, as a species, was created in Adam. In
Adam, the substance of humanity was yet undistributed. We derive
our immaterial as well as our material being, by natural laws of
propagation, from Adam,—each individual man after Adam possessing
a part of the substance that was originated in him. Sexual
reproduction has for its purpose the keeping of variations within
limit. Every marriage tends to bring back the individual type to
that of the species. The offspring represents not one of the
parents but both. And, as each of these parents represents two
grandparents, the offspring really represents the whole race.
Without this conjugation the individual peculiarities would
reproduce themselves in divergent lines like the shot from a
shot-gun. Fission needs to be supplemented by conjugation. The use
of sexual reproduction is to preserve the average individual in
the face of a progressive tendency to variation. In asexual
reproduction the offspring start on deviating lines and never mix
their qualities with those of their mates. Sexual reproduction
makes the individual the type of the species and gives solidarity
to the race. See Maupas, quoted by Newman Smith, Place of Death in
Evolution, 19-22.
John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, is a Traducian. He has no
faith in the notion of a soul separate from and inhabiting the
body. He believes in a certain corporeity of the soul. Mind and
thought are rooted in the bodily organism. Soul was not inbreathed
after the body was formed. The breathing of God into man’s
nostrils was only the quickening impulse to that which already had
life. God does not create souls every day. Man is a body-and-soul,
or a soul-body, and he transmits himself as such. Harris, Moral
Evolution, 171—The individual man has a great number of ancestors
as well as a great number of descendants. He is the central point
of an hour-glass, or a strait between two seas which widen out
behind and before. How then shall we escape the conclusion that
the human race was most numerous at the beginning? We must
remember that other children have the same great-grandparents with
ourselves; that there have been inter-marriages; and that, after
all, the generations run on in parallel lines, that the lines
spread a little in some countries and periods, and narrow a little
in other countries and periods. It is like a wall covered with
paper in diamond pattern. The lines diverge and converge, but the
figures are parallel. See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:7-94, Hist.
Doctrine, 2:1-26, Discourses and Essays, 259; Baird, Elohim
Revealed, 137-151, 335-384; Edwards, Works, 2:483; Hopkins, Works,
1:289; Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 161; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych.,
128-142; Frohschammer, Ursprung der Seele, 59-224.
With regard to this view we remark:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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