I think there are several distinctions we need to preserve here. Adam was not self-sufficient, but neither was he created with a deficient nature that needed a supernatural corrective before he could obey. He possessed original righteousness and a real ability to render the obedience God required. That ability belonged to his created nature, although its exercise was never independent of God.
Van Mastricht and the Puritans help us distinguish three things: Adam’s original moral ability, his continuing dependence upon God, and the further gift of confirmation in righteousness. Confusing these produces problems on both sides of this discussion.
the lapse preceded and allowed the sin
Evan, I appreciate your subsequent clarification that you are distinguishing exposure to temptation from becoming sinful. That matters, and I would not charge you with teaching that Adam was already corrupt before his first sin. Nevertheless, calling the removal of protection from temptation Adam’s lapse confuses two different things.
God’s permitting a trial is not itself the creature’s fall. Adam’s fall was his sinful departure from God, not simply his being confronted with an opportunity to disobey. Nor did God first deprive him of the righteousness or ability necessary to resist that temptation.
Van Mastricht addresses precisely this question:
For he had the strength by which he was able, and by which he had stood in actuality all the way to the point of the fall, and this strength was by no means withdrawn from him before the beginning of sin.
That is
Theoretical-Practical Theology, volume 3, book 4, chapter 1, §XX. Adam did not merely possess sufficient ability at some earlier point. He still possessed it when he first sinned.
William Ames makes the same essential point. In chapter 14 of
A Puritan Theology, under “Grace and Merit,” Beeke and Jones explain that Ames understood Adam to have persisted in the garden by grace, but expressly denied that this grace was withdrawn before his transgression:
grace was not taken from him before he had sinned.
Their reference is Ames,
The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, p. 50. Notice that Ames neither denies divine assistance nor makes its prior withdrawal the explanation for Adam’s sin.
We should also distinguish Adam’s first inward transgression from the subsequent outward act of eating. Van Mastricht recognizes sinful inward movements before the outward act was completed. His point is that Adam was not first deprived of necessary assistance and then made sinful as a consequence. The departure from uprightness began in his own sinful turning, not in a prior corruption imposed upon him. See book 4, chapter 1, §§VI–VII.
What, then, do we mean by Adam’s natural ability?
We mean more than the bare possession of understanding and will. Fallen people still have those faculties. Adam possessed them in moral uprightness, with his understanding, will, and affections rightly ordered toward God.
In
A Puritan Theology, chapter 14, under “The Moral Law and Imago Dei,” Beeke and Jones quote John Ball’s description of the divine image as:
divine qualities breathed from the whole Trinity…enabling and fitting him to obey the will of God entirely, willingly, [and] exactly.
Their discussion of Thomas Goodwin makes the same point. Adam’s faculties were inclined toward knowing, serving, and loving God. His knowledge and holiness fitted him to recognize God as his supreme good. Original righteousness was not merely an absence of sinful acts on Adam’s record. It was a positive moral endowment.
Van Mastricht likewise says that original righteousness was:
natural to man, insofar as it was owed to his integral nature in such a way that it could not be morally whole without it.
See volume 3, book 3, chapter 9, §XLIV. This does not make righteousness something Adam supplied for himself. God created him righteous. It means that righteousness belonged to the integrity of the nature God created, rather than being a corrective superadded to an inherently disordered nature.
Consequently, Adam’s ability was not merely the ability to remain innocent so long as nothing tempted him. He had the moral equipment necessary to obey when obedience was tested. His failure does not establish that God had failed to equip him.
Ball and Goodwin also distinguish Adam’s faith in his Creator from the saving faith by which fallen sinners receive Christ. Their discussion appears under “Adam’s Faith” in the same chapter. Adam did not require regeneration before he could believe God’s word. He already possessed the upright nature which fallen people have lost.
The ability to obey, however, is not the same thing as confirmed perseverance.
Van Mastricht answers the allegation that God withdrew grace before Adam sinned:
We deny that this was done before sin was committed, although we do not deny that he refused to give a second, confirming grace, which was not owed.
That is volume 3, book 4, chapter 1, §XIX. In the same section, he distinguishes sufficient assistance, by which Adam could have avoided sin, from the further assistance which would have secured his actually avoiding it.
Not bestowing confirming grace is not the same thing as withdrawing Adam’s existing ability to obey.
Beeke and Jones state the corresponding Puritan distinction at the beginning of “The Fall” in chapter 14:
Whatever graces Adam received from God, he did not receive the grace of perseverance in the covenant of works.
Their discussion of Samuel Rutherford distinguishes Adam’s condition under the covenant of works from the perseverance secured in the covenant of grace. Adam was able not to sin, but he was not immutably confirmed in goodness.
That is the relevant distinction. Mutability is not corruption. The absence of confirmation is not the absence of sufficient ability. A creature can be genuinely upright without possessing an infallible guarantee that he will remain upright.
This also means that Adam’s failure cannot be explained simply by his being under the covenant of works. That covenant required obedience from someone who possessed the ability to render it. It did not require an already-disabled man to accomplish what his original constitution made impossible. His failure was a culpable transgression, not the discovery of a defect in God’s workmanship.
Nor does any of this remove the fall from God’s decree. In the same section, Beeke and Jones discuss Patrick Gillespie’s distinction between divine determination and compulsion. The certainty of the event under God’s decree did not turn Adam into an unwilling instrument. Van Mastricht likewise distinguishes the certainty of the fall from a necessity arising from Adam’s nature. God ordained a voluntary transgression, not an involuntary movement masquerading as a choice. See Van Mastricht, book 4, chapter 1, §§XIX–XX.
Within time, Adam acted alone.
I would qualify this statement as well. Adam was the genuine creaturely agent of his obedience, but divine providence does not stop at keeping the creature in existence. God sustains and governs the creature’s actions as well.
In chapter 10 of
A Puritan Theology, “The Puritans on Providence,” Beeke and Jones quote Edward Corbet:
We cannot utter one word, think one thought, turn our eye, or move a finger, without the concurrence of his power who gives life and breath, and all things.
Concurrence means that God’s operation and the creature’s operation are not competing explanations. Adam really acted, and his action really depended upon God. The Creator’s causality does not displace the creature’s causality.
Van Mastricht is equally explicit. In his discussion of original righteousness, he says that its actual exercise required:
another kind of second grace, one whereby that first grace would be excited, and would pass from potency into act, and be conserved
See volume 3, book 3, chapter 9, §XXXIV. We cannot fairly enlist him for the proposition that Adam’s righteous activity required no divine assistance that could be called grace. He expressly uses that terminology.
Anthony Burgess likewise insists that Adam could not persevere without God’s help. Beeke and Jones explain that Burgess acknowledged disagreement about whether this assistance should properly be called grace, but did not deny the assistance itself. See chapter 14, “Grace and Merit.”
The correction, therefore, is not that every reference to grace before the fall is mistaken. The Puritans used the word in different senses. God’s generosity in creating Adam, His assistance to an upright creature, His unowed confirmation, and His saving mercy toward a guilty sinner must be distinguished.
Adam’s original righteousness was natural to him as created; his dependence upon God was continuous; and his perseverance was not infallibly secured. All three statements belong together.
because he deserved to live
There is an important truth here, provided we are speaking of the right established by God’s covenant promise. God would certainly be faithful to His promise. But that must not become a claim that Adam’s obedience possessed an intrinsic worth which put God in his debt independently of the covenant.
In chapter 14, Beeke and Jones explain how Francis Roberts distinguished God’s right to command obedience from His free decision to promise a reward. God could have required the duty without promising that reward. John Owen likewise understood the promised reward to exceed the worth of the obedience considered in itself.
Van Mastricht makes the corresponding point in volume 3, book 3, chapter 12, §XXXII. God freely condescended to bind Himself by His promise. The obligation to fulfill that promise rests upon God’s faithfulness, not upon an antecedent right possessed by the creature.
We should therefore distinguish the generosity of establishing the covenant from the works condition within it. Recognizing the former does not turn the covenant of works into the covenant of grace. Conversely, affirming the works condition does not require denying God’s generosity.
Van Mastricht gives a particularly useful comparison in volume 4, book 5, chapter 1, §XXVI:
The first presupposed perseverance as a condition, the second confers the same as a benefit.
That is a much more precise contrast than simply saying that one covenant involved dependence upon God and the other did not.
the intra-trinitarian covenant
The eternal agreement concerning redemption should also be distinguished from God’s covenantal dealings with sinners in time. Chapter 15 of
A Puritan Theology explains both the distinction and the historical variation in terminology. Some divines distinguished the covenant of redemption from the covenant of grace; others spoke of eternal and temporal aspects of the covenant of grace.
Van Mastricht himself uses the latter terminology in volume 4, book 5, chapter 1. The issue is therefore not whether someone may use “covenant of grace” for the eternal transaction, but whether the definition also accounts for God’s covenant with sinners in Christ.
Finally, the original post’s comparison between Adam and Christ needs correction at these words:
Christ is not merely another created human person placed under probation. He is the eternal Son who assumed a true human nature. His obedience was genuinely human and voluntary, but the person obeying was the divine Son.
Chapter 21 of
A Puritan Theology, “Puritan Christology,” emphasizes that the Son assumed human nature, not a separately existing human person. It also explains how Goodwin and Owen upheld the reality of Christ’s human obedience and His dependence upon the Holy Spirit.
Van Mastricht expressly denies that Christ could sin, because that would mean that the God-man could become a sinner. See volume 4, book 5, chapter 10, §XXV. His inability to sin does not make His obedience involuntary, His humanity unreal, or His temptations fictitious.
The central point throughout is this:
Adam fell from a genuinely upright nature through his own willing transgression. He did not first lose the ability to obey and then sin because that ability had been removed. At the same time, his created ability never made him independent of God.
The Puritan answer is not autonomous nature on one side or a morally deficient creature maintained by a corrective grace on the other. It is an upright but mutable creature, fully dependent upon his Creator, whose obedience was required but whose perseverance was not secured as it is for those united to Christ.
