In "Are Souls Inherited?" (Post Nuance, October 21), Jonathan Tomes prefers creationism, the view that God immediately creates each rational soul, but he gives traducianism a fairer hearing than it usually gets. He grants that the soul's indivisibility does not refute every spiritual productive cause. He grants that the creationist proof-texts need interpretation, that original sin does not settle the mechanism, and that Quenstedt's "whole human being" generation is a real third option. Those concessions carry further than his conclusion does. Once they are granted, creationism rests on a single premise about what finite causes can do, a premise Scripture does not teach. And the burdens Tomes assigns to traducianism, on guilt and on Christ, fall at least as heavily on creationism. Reformed witnesses in the Commonplace library say so.
Begin with Scripture, where Tomes is already cautious. Robert Dabney went further and argued that the creationist texts prove too much. Of Ecclesiastes 12:7: "if the language proves that the soul of a man of our generation came immediately from God's hand, like Adam's, the antithesis would equally prove that our bodies came equally from the dust, as immediately as Adam's."1 Of Hebrews 12:9, the text Zanchi leaned on, he said that sarx "never means, in his language, our bodies as opposed to our souls."2 Meanwhile other texts name parents as authors of the whole person. Genesis 46:26 counts the souls that came out of Jacob's loins. Genesis 5:3 says Adam begat a son in his own image, and Dabney asked: "How could this be, if Adam's parental agency did not produce the soul, in which alone this image inheres?"3 Peter Martyr Vermigli, no traducian, conceded the exegetical point. Augustine left the question "indifferent," and the traducian view "can not be confuted, and ouerthrowen by the holy scriptures." The schoolmen reject it, he observed, leaning "only to Phisicall naturall reasons."4 That is Tomes's conclusion as well: the contest is metaphysical.
So consider the metaphysics. Tomes locates the decisive premise in Aquinas's account of finite agency: no creature can produce subsistent being without a subject to work on. He admits a traducian may challenge it. Dabney did: "Of course, spirits cannot be generated by separation of substance and new compoundings. But whether processes of propagation may not be possible for spiritual substance which involve none of this, is the very question, which can be neither proved nor disproved by us, because we do not comprehend the true substance of spirit."5 The creationist premise needs exactly the knowledge of spirit that no one claims to have. Dabney did not pretend the traducian has a mechanism. He held only that "divine power, (in bringing substance out of nihil into esse) and human causation may both act, in originating the being and properties of the infant's soul."6 That is the position Tomes credits to Quenstedt, and it has a Reformed pedigree. A. A. Hodge gives the traducian formula in the words of David Pareus of Heidelberg: not "that soul is begotten from soul, nor body from body, but the whole man from the whole man."7 It is a claim about what parents do, which Scripture states and philosophy has not ruled out.
Original sin is where the weights shift. Tomes says neither theory gains here, since both need a moral account of Adam's headship. But the two moral accounts are not equally hard. The creationist must say why a soul made fresh by God enters the world already corrupt. Dabney put the problem sharply. If each soul has "an antecedent holy existence, independent of a human father," then "why is not that soul as independent of Adam's Fall, thus far, as Gabriel was?" And if God's act of joining that pure spirit to an impure body is the occasion of its depravity, "it comes very near to making God the author of its fall."8 Tomes himself concedes that Turretin, the best creationist on this point, does not explain how the contrary habit arises. The traducian has no gap of that kind. The Westminster Confession calls our first parents "the root of all mankind" before it says how the guilt and corruption pass.9 Boston held both kinds of union at once: "we were in him representatively, being represented by him, as our moral head ... we were in him seminally, as our natural head."10 On traducian terms the seminal union is the whole person, soul included.
Tomes's sharpest objection to Shedd is that realism needs God's appointment to explain why Adam's first sin is imputed and later sins are not, so substance alone does not do the work. Jonathan Edwards would not have counted that against it: "there is no such Thing as any Identity or Oneness in created Objects, existing at different Times, but what depends on GOD's sovereign Constitution."11 And again: "all Oneness, by Virtue whereof Pollution and Guilt from past Wickedness are derived, depends intirely on a divine Establishment."12 If every created identity is constituted by God, then a realist who appeals to God's appointment is not borrowing a premise from the federalist. Tomes's demand for a unity that grounds guilt prior to any appointment is a demand no theory can meet.
Then there is Christ. Tomes notes that Shedd answers the Christological objection by the miraculous sanctification of the humanity the Son assumed, and he calls that answer in need of "further Christological defense." It has a long Reformed defense already, written by creationists. John Owen: Christ was "made of a woman," but "that portion whereof he was made was sanctified by the Holy Ghost, that what was born thereof should be a holy thing."13 William Perkins named "the sanctifying of that masse or lumpe which was to be the manhood of Christ" as a distinct part of the conception.14 The traducian needs nothing more than what Owen and Perkins already taught. Christ's descent from Mary is not a problem for the theory; the Spirit sanctified what was taken.
Tomes is right on several points. Any account that divides a parent's soul is finished. Edward Reynolds, quoting Lactantius, said that from "so spirituall and incomprehensible a substance nothing can issue forth or be severed."15 Traducianism stands only as the generation of the whole person, never as partition. Tomes is also right that descent explains nature, not character. Even creationists put it plainly: "the parents grace is a personal excellency, and so cannot be transmitted: Even as learned parents do not conveigh learning to their children."16 What a traducian claims parents pass on is human nature in its fallen condition, not their virtues or vices, and certainly not a lineage's spiritual rank. Finally, the mainstream Reformed view was creationist: Turretin, Burgess, Flavel. Even Dabney ended by calling the subject "an insoluble mystery."17 The traducian claim here is not certainty. It is that the case is closer than Tomes's verdict allows.
Tomes's standard is that a theory of origin must name its causes and not let a mystery do the work of an argument. Hold creationism to the same standard. Its decisive premise about finite causes is philosophical, and its account of how a newly created soul is corrupt still has the gap Tomes found in Turretin. The traducian names two causes acting together: God, who sustains generation, and parents, who beget a whole child. Scripture already speaks that way, from Adam's son in his image to the souls out of Jacob's loins. Tomes ends by saying that family resemblance cannot prove the soul is inherited. Agreed. But the case for traducianism never rested on resemblance. It rests on Scripture's way of speaking about generation, and on an account of original sin with no gap in it.
Notes
- Robert Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272590. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272592. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272584. Read ↩
- Peter Martyr Vermigli, Commentary on Romans (1568), ch. 5, passage 574303. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272594. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272597. Read ↩
- A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, ch. 18, passage 513591. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passages 272587–272588. Read ↩
- Westminster Confession of Faith, VI.3. Read ↩
- Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, State II, p. 82. Read ↩
- Jonathan Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), ch. III, p. 346. Read ↩
- Edwards, Original Sin, p. 346. Read ↩
- John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, passage 369097. Read ↩
- William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbol or Creed of the Apostles, p. 158. Read ↩
- Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1640), ch. 32, p. 394. Read ↩
- Anthony Burgess, A Treatise of Original Sin (1658), pt. III, sect. II, p. 394. Read ↩
- Dabney, Systematic Theology, passage 272595. Read ↩