The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

are rather fond of it than otherwise, to the best of their knowledge and
belief. We have not proposed to ourselves a general review of Dr. Shedd's
book, but simply to look at it with reference to its statements in regard to
our own Church. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid an allusion to what
strikes us an extreme statement in apparent conflict with sound Theology.
It is in his declaration that "sin is in the strictest sense a creature." “The
original act of self-will is strictly creative from nothing." Dr. Shedd here
seems to labor to show that he is not speaking in a popular and rhetorical
way, but that over against such a style of language, he wishes to be
understood rigidly--sin is a creature--but God is not its creator. Man is as
really and as strictly a creator as God is--and sin is his creature. Such
language, if pressed, seems inconsistent with the nature of God, of man, of
sin, and of creature. It denies that God is the alone Creator of all things; it
maintains, almost after a Manichean style, that evil is a primal principle and
that a man is the Ahriman of it; it makes sin an objective reality, not the
condition or act of a subject, and elevates the mutilation and disease of the
creature to a rank in being with the creature itself. No more than the
surgeon creates by cutting off the leg of a man, does man create sin by a
self-originated destruction of his original righteousness, on which follows
that inordinate state of the natural reason and appetites which theologians
call concupiscence. The impulse to theft, to lying, to impurity, is not a
substance, not a creature, but is the result of inordinate desire in which selflove
now unchecked by original righteousness and kindled by the fomes of
the self-corrupted will, reveals itself It is not a creature, but a moral
phenomenon of the creature--desire and purpose are not creatures, but
exercises of the faculties of the creature. If sin be strictly a creature, it must
be the creature of God, and this part of Dr. Shedd's theory really would
make God the author of sin, an inference, which, we are sure, no one could
more earnestly resist than himself. The finite will can corrupt the creatures,
but it cannot add to them.