§ 1. Scriptural Doctrine.
The Scriptural account of the origin of man is contained in Gen- esis i. 26, 27, " And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness : and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him ; male and female created He them." And Gen. ii. 7, " And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul."
Two things are included in this account ; first that man's body was formed by the immediate intervention of God. It did not grow ; nor was it produced by any process of development. Sec- ondly, the soul was derived from God. He breathed into man "the breath of life," that is, that life which constituted him a man, a living creature bearing the image of God.
Manv have inferred from this lancruao-e that the soul is an ema- nation from the divine essence ; particula spiritus divini in cor- pore inclusa. This idea was strenuously resisted by the Christian
4 PART II. Ch. I. — origin OF MAN.
fathers, and rejected by the Church, as inconsistent with the na- ture of God. It assumes that the divine essence is capable of division ; that his essence can be communicated without his attri- butes, and that it can be degraded as the souls of fallen men are degraded. (See Delitzsch's " Biblical Psychology " in T. and T. Clark's " Foreign Library," and Auberlen in Herzog's " Encyclo- padie," article " Geist der Menschen.")
§ 2. Anti' Scriptural Theories.
Seathen Doctrine of Spontaneous Greneration.
The Scriptural doctrine is opposed to the doctrine held by many of the ancients, that man is a spontaneous production of the earth. Many of them claimed to be yiyyevets, aurdx^ovcs, terrigena. The earth was assumed to be pregnant with the germs of all living organisms, which were quickened into life under fa voiirable circum- stances ; or it was regarded as instinct with a productive life to which is to be referred the origin of all the plants and animals living on its surface. To this primitive doctrine of antiquity, mod- ern philosophy and science, in some of their forms, have returned. Those who deny the existence of a personal God, distinct from the world, must of course deny the doctrine of a creation ex niJiilo and consequentlv of the creation of man. The theological view as to the origin of man, says Strauss, " rejects the standpoint of natural philosophy and of science in general. These do not admit of the immediate intervention of divine causation. God created man, not as such, or, ' quatenus infinltus est, sed quatenus per elementa nascentis telluris explicatur.' This is the view which the Greek and Roman philosophers, in a very crude form indeed, presented, and against which the fathers of the Christian Church earnestly contended, but which is now the unanimous judgment of natural science as well as of philosophy." ^ To the objection that the earth no longer spontaneously produces men and irrational animals, it is answered that many things happened formerly that do not happen in the present state of the world. To the still more obvious ob- jection that an infant man must have perished without a mother's care, it is answered that the infant floated in the ocean of its birth, enveloped in a covering, until it reached the development of a child two years old ; or it is said that philosophy can only establish the general fact as to the way in which the human race originated, but cannot be required to explain all the details, i DogmatOc, vol. i. p. 680.