[1] MAN

[C] MAN: supplementary materials

C1. Sin: various views (Question 34)

a. Alternate Views:

Augustine: All persons possess an inherent, hereditary depravity, which involves both guilt and corruption. We are offensive to God’s holiness because of deliberate acts of transgression and the absence of right affections.
Strong: Sin is selfishness. It is preferring one’s own ideas to God’s truth. It is preferring the satisfaction of one’s own will to doing God’s will. It is loving oneself more than God. It may manifest itself as sensuality, unbelief, or enmity to God.
Origen: Sin enters the world as the result of the transgression of Adam and Eve in paradise. This sin was the result of temptation of Satan in the form of a serpent (Jn 8:44; Ro 16:20; 2Co 11:3), who sowed in man’s heart the seeds of distrust and unbelief. The action was man’s eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This act was sinful simply because God had forbidden it. It clearly showed that man was not willing to subject his will unconditionally to the will of God, and comprised several elements. In the intellect, it was unbelief and pride, in the will as the desire to be like God (the same reason of Satan’s fall), and in the affections an unholy satisfaction in eating of the forbidden fruit. As a result of it, man lost the image of God, became guilty and utterly corrupt, and fell under the sway of death (Gen 3:19; Ro 5:12; 6:23).

b. Wrong Views:

Pelagian (Pelagius): Adam’s in injured only himself. All persons are born into the world in the same sate in which Adam was created. They have a knowledge of what is evil and the power to do all that God requires. Sin, therefore, consists only in the deliberate choice of evil.
Dualism (Greek philosophy and gnosticism): Man has a spirit derived from the kingdom of light, and a body with its animal life derived from the kingdom of darkness. Sin is thus a physical evil, the defilement of the spirit by its union with a material body. Sin is to be overcome by destroying the influence of the body on the soul.

C2. Dispensationalism (Question 37) a. The history of mankind is divided into 7 dispensations: (1) Innocence: time before Adam’s Fall (Gen 1:28-3:6)

(2) Conscience: up to the end of the Flood (Gen 4:1-8:14)

(3) Government: Noahic covenant to the Tower of Babel (Gen 8:15-11:9)

(4) Promise: to before Mount of Sinai (Gen 11:10 to Ex 18:27)

(5) Mosaic Law: up to the descent of the Holy Spirit (Ex 19:1 to Ac 1:26)

(6) Grace: to before the millenium (Ac 2:1 to Rev 19:21)

(7) Millenium: second coming of Christ and millenium (Rev 20:4-6)

b. Dispensationalists hold that God’s revelation to man differs in different dispensations and that God treats people from different dispensations differently. Most significantly, they believe that the church is entirely distinct from Israel as an entity. Some believe that the Old Testament is written for Israel, not for the church. (Some even include the gospel of Matthew which was written for the Jews.) This position is too extreme.