Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Christ’s death for man, by showing the worth of humanity, has
recreated ethics. “Plato defended infanticide as under certain
circumstances permissible. Aristotle viewed slavery as founded in
the nature of things. The reason assigned was the essential
inferiority of nature on the part of the enslaved.” But the divine
image in man makes these barbarities no longer possible to us.
Christ sometimes looked upon men with anger, but he never looked
upon them with contempt. He taught the woman, he blessed the
child, he cleansed the leper, he raised the dead. His own death
revealed the infinite worth of the meanest human soul, and taught
us to count all men as brethren for whose salvation we may well
lay down our lives. George Washington answered the salute of his
slave. Abraham Lincoln took off his hat to a negro who gave him
his blessing as he entered Richmond; but a lady who had been
brought up under the old regime looked from a window upon the
scene with unspeakable horror. Robert Burns, walking with a
nobleman in Edinburgh, met an old townsfellow from Ayr and stopped
to talk with him. The nobleman, kept waiting, grew restive, and
afterward reproved Burns for talking to a man with so bad a coat.
Burns replied: “I was not talking to the coat,—I was talking to
the man.” Jean Ingelow: “The street and market place Grow holy
ground: each face—Pale faces marked with care, Dark, toilworn
brows—grows fair. King’s children are all these, though want and
sin Have marred their beauty, glorious within. We may not pass
them but with reverent eye.” See Porter, Human Intellect, 393,
394, 401; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:42; Philippi, Glaubenslehre,
2:343.
2. Moral likeness to God, or holiness.
In addition to the powers of self-consciousness and self-determination
just mentioned, man was created with such a direction of the affections
and the will, as constituted God the supreme end of man’s being, and
constituted man a finite reflection of God’s moral attributes. Since
holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, this must of necessity be
the chief attribute of his image in the moral beings whom he creates. That
original righteousness was essential to this image, is also distinctly
taught in Scripture (Eccl. 7:29; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).
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