The Formation of Christendom, Volume IIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity; Christianity -- Miscellanea
to make his corruption intense and more complicated in the state of fall.
It has not been our purpose in this sketch to dwell upon those who, like
Adam himself after his fall, accepted the divine assistance offered to
them, and the promise of a future Restorer, and who, living a life of
penance, kept their faith in God. Such an assistance was offered not only
to Adam but to his whole race, and such a line of men there always was; of
whom Abel was the type in the world before the flood; Noah after the
flood, as the second father of the whole race; Abraham, the friend of God
and father of the faithful, in whose son Isaac a people was to be formed,
which, as the nations in their apostasy fell more and more away from the
faith and knowledge of the true God, should maintain still the seed of
promise out of which the Restorer should spring. But before that Restorer
came, the heathenism—of which we have been speaking in the former chapter,
and of which we have been giving the solution above—was in possession of
all but the whole earth, and the captivity of man to his spiritual foe, on
account of which that foe is called “the Ruler” and “the God” “of this
world,” which is said “to lie in the malignant one,”(56) was all but
universal. This universality denoted that the fulness of the time(57)
marked out in the providence of God was come.
For Adam, in his first creation, and in the splendour of that robe of
sonship(58) in which he was invested, had been the figure of One to come:
his figure as an individual person, his figure as father and head of a
race; his figure likewise, when the race itself is viewed as summed up in
one, as one body. Let us take each of these in their order.
What was the counterpart of Adam, as an individual person, in the new
creation? It was the Eternal Son Himself assuming a human soul and body,
and bearing our nature in His divine personality. Over against the
creature invested with sonship stood the uncreated Son, invested with a
created nature. For the grace of the Holy Spirit given by measure, and
depending for its continuance on the obedience of the creature, was the
Fountain of Grace Himself ruling the creature by a union indefeasible and
eternal; for grace communicated grace immanent in its source. For the son
gratuitously adopted was the Son by nature, making, by an inconceivable
grace, the created nature assumed to be that not of the adopted but of the
natural Son. In a word, the figure was man united to God; the counterpart,
the God-man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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