THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
who is not diverted by other motives to act contrary to valid maxims, which reminds of Goethe’s dictum: ‘Freedom is the possibility to perform the rational under all circumstances.” Such freedom may be proved only individually, by the voice of conscience, repentance, and the sense of responsibility. A. Bolliger teaches that the rational will is a potency transcending time; it is accordingly a reflection and image of the divine freedom. The free act consists in the original act of the representative power of the subject in representing a consequent and antecedent in their causal relation. C. E. Luthardt teaches a formal freedom, consisting in the capability of alternative choice and a real material freedom of the power to execute. Real experience of necessity comes first with the consciousness of sin. All persons begin morally determined in a respective degree and real freedom results with the self-determination of man according to his divinely patterned nature.
III. Analysis of the Problem: The theological interest has as its object how to reconcile with religious faith in the omniscience and omnipotence of divine providence the moral duty to shun evil and the conscious capability to fulfil moral obligation. Cosmic necessity, or divine omnipotence, is apparently in conflict with individual responsibility. God being good and not coercing the ego to sin; therefore man must be free. God being perfectly good, omniscient, and almighty, the origin of sin becomes inexplicable, but if placed in free human will, the omnipotence and omniscience are jeopardized. The plan of salvation presupposes the moral reality and possibility of sinning and at the same time contradicts with the possibility also its reality. If everything depends upon human responsibility, man is too weak to bear the responsibility for the coming of the kingdom of God. If everything depends upon the sole effect of prevenient grace, man’s most positive feeling and most sacred certainty, that he is free and that naught is good in the world but to will the good, is delusion. Above all, the sense of guilt would be selfdeception. Not only would the origin of evil be an insoluble riddle, but evil itself would be an illusion. While bias lay with the opposite tendency from Augustine to Schopenhauer, the interest of modern psychology, introduced by the methods of Kant and Fichte, swings the balance in favor of the defense of internal validity of the consciousness of free-
om.
In all human action there is an incalculable and incontrollable element that awakens the impression that the action was exempt from the law of cause and effect. This impression is created by the belief in freedom, which is merely negative; but more important is the comparison of different representations of possibilities of conduct in the consciousness of the agent. This capacity of choice subsisting in
the sense of spiritual ability and accom-
1. The panied by the representation of the Nature of alternative possibility, is called formal Freedom. freedom or decision. The moral character is sensible of the impulse to do
good by inner necessity, especially when numerous and strong external inducements urge it to the contrary. The more the character is ordered morally,
i.e., the more the individually necessary is in accord with the universal objective good, the more urgent the bidding of the conscience to pursue the law of the good. The precept “I can” completes and lifts itself with, “I will what I shall.”” This power to perform the morally necessary that has been willed is called real freedom. The moral will feels free even if it is capable only of the good; i.e., if the alternative possibility ig merely hypothetical. The apparent limitation to the necessary good is amply compensated for by the consciousness of mastery. Exemption from, or superiority over, the law of causality, at first but seeming, is now positive reality; the mightiest and most irresistible of all causes is the wholly ethicized will in its constancy. Time may be discounted by a pledge for the future absolutely certain of fulfilment. This consciousness of freedom is a reality of psychological experience which can not be encroached upon by any metaphysical law of causality, which itself is a mere product of the nominative understanding. From this law it only follows that also the human will is part of the universe; man did not create himself; over him rules eternal necessity. But, on the contrary, of everything that is, this part of the universe is the freest. Only the world-ruling and worldcreating power has greater freedom than human will, which is not only most efficient, but feels most free when harmoniously obedient to the divine will. As long, therefore, as in consequence of natural imperfection and, still more, in consequence of the proportionate growth of sin and its gross effects, the standpoint of that perfect and conscious self-adaptation to God’s universal will and his plan of salvation is not attained by all, nobody has a right to take to account the wisdom and omnipotence of God, for defects which proceed from sin. Sin should and could be avoided; otherwise the consciousness of God would disappear to make way for a debased sense of causal, legal necessity. Its avoidableness follows immediately from the moral consciousness and the ethically qualified faith in God; and its unconditioned presupposition is the elementary consciousness of freedom. In explaining the morally evil, there must be no crossing beyond the boundaries of the conception of the freedom of the will. This derivation, however, suffices, making the idea of the freedom of the will of the utmost significance for dogmatic theology. The question of the origin of sin is no easier of explanation in the time of Adam than now, but is more important within the later ethical, psychological field. The old Evangelical resort of referring it to self-love is scarcely tenable, for Christ places this as the measure of love of neighbor, and it is the basic function of the neutral will, developing later into ethical bloom even to love of God. Will in its freedom is itself the possibility of sin; what is still necessary to its realization lies outside of the sphere of that which can be explained by cause and effect. For actual facts of the will the law of sufficient reason applying to things never suffices, because the innermost value of the personality of one can not be observed by another, not even by self. The best explanation of sin proves to be the psychologically true description after the actual fact. Fundamentally the problem of solution is an indi-
vidual one in the history of each person, and a universal generalization is impracticable.
The orthodox anti-Pelagian doctrine regards man not only in need of salvation, but also the saved one as being so addicted to original sin that it is permanently inherent throughout the whole life. This doctrine is objectively sustained by the observance
of the actual transmission and progress-
2. The ive propagation of sinful propensities Avoidabil- and tendencies and subjectively by the ity of Sin. consciousness of the servitude of sin
and the exclusive effectiveness of grace. The doctrine is supplemented by the faith confirmed in experience that God is able to utilize also the evil for his purposes. A correlate of this faith is the ineradicable peculiarity of mind to think under the category of cause and effect. It apparently follows that the individual sin is neither avoidable nor condemnable. On the contrary, Kant taught a “causality by freedom” which must be thought as quite different from mechanical causality. The will of man, as self-conscious, self-determining being, is determined by no external power. The Church, too, teaches that God from the beginning gave man freedom and returned it to those who are saved in Christ; and that the servant of sin, and still more the believer, chooses what line of conduct he will follow, so as to attain to respectable character, at least in civil virtues. This doctrine is supplemented by the ideal of a high degree of sterling solidity and godlike eminence, to be emulated by identification with lofty virtues (cf. Schleiermacher’s ‘“perseverance,” and Calvin’s “gift of perseverance’’). The deterministic theology answers that the man in sin “‘was able if he willed,” but he ‘could not will to beable.” This objection may be answered that the divine law is addressed to this very ability, and its truth can be maintained only by the presupposition of the real possibility that man can fulfil the will of God. Only thus can individual responsibility stand. Therefore every past sin, because condemnable, might have been altogether avoided; and every future sin must be judged as condemnable because it is avoidable. Sins not avoidable are at most the “unconscious faults,’’ which, however, do not escape aggregate condemnation. It may next be asked whether specific sinful acts apparently having their setting in the complexity of life were unavoidable, and to what limit the sinful state, which gave rise to specific sins, is condemnable; or more properly whether the antithesis between the avoidable and unavoidable, between responsibility and causal influence, is religious and ethical, psychological and metaphysical, or only philological, esthetic, and pedagogical. The problem affects the theory of “natural selection,’ and is pertinent to the consequences of the theory of heredity, but is vital to penology and pedagogy, and is determinative in palliation and criticism. From an analysis of social ethics, the fundamental characteristic of freedom, i.e., avoidableness of individual conduct, must be defended on two grounds; because it is a moral duty to respect the independent decision of the will in a fellow man as a particular good, which is preempted from the causal mechanism of nature, and because it is impossible to prove the unavoidableness by the practical