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

evangelical system grounds itself, where alone a just system in regard to
human restoration can be grounded; for the first question, when disease is
to be cured, is, What is that disease? Is it so trifling as to need no
physician"? Can a man heal it himself? Will it heal itself simply by the
general energy of the system? or is it radical true disease, mortal in its
tendency? Does it require for its treatment a physician of the highest order,
and remedies of the most exquisite adaptation and potency? To all of
these questions, with characteristic simplicity and practical force, our great
Confession replies, when it says: "Original sin is truly sin."
If it be asked, in what sense did our confessors use the word sin? we
reply, in what we have seen and shown to be its scriptural sense. Is it
asked what did they, and what do we, regard as its scriptural sense? we
reply, the language of the Confession tells us most explicitly what they
meant by true sin, and by that Confession in firm faith we abide. Yet it
may not be useless to give, as a further illustration of its meaning, the
definition of sin by Melanchthon, not only because of his relation to the
Confession as its composer, but yet more because in his purest and
happiest period, his definitions were as sound in their substance as they
were discriminating and felicitous in their form. It may be doubted
whether, before Melanchthon, in his Loci of 1535, any successful attempt
had been made to define sin generically. The definitions of the fathers are
either of specific sin, original or actual, or are too vague for the purposes of
science. Pelagius tried to show, from some of Augustine's definitions of
sin, that original sin is not really sin. What Augustine had said of sins of
act, Pelagius applied to sin of nature. Melanchthon, in his Loci of the
Second Era, 257 (1535-1541), says: "Sin in Holy Scripture does not merely
mean something done (factum aliquod), but it signifies also a perpetuated
fault (perpetuum vitium), that is a corruption of nature conflicting with the
law of God. Sin therefore, generically taken, is a perpetuated fault, or act,
conflicting with the law of God. Sin is divided into original and actual." In
the Loci of the Third Era (1543-1559), he says that in Scripture the
257 Corpus Reformatorum. xxi. 284, 378. In German: Do. xxii. 159.