Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 60:240 (Oct 1903)
Article: Theodicy
Author: Jacob Cooper

BSac 60:240 (Oct 1903) p. 649

Theodicy1

Prof. Jacob Cooper

Transition From Necessary To Responsible Agents Reached In Man

By this gradual approach we are enabled at last to fix upon an agent who is responsible; because he can conceive and do the act, or abstain. Before its commission there was the alternative of doing or not doing. He has— with reverence be it spoken—as complete liberty of action as the Maker of the universe before the process of creation began. At one period there was nothing but himself, — God alone; the summing up of all potency and knowledge. He could change this condition or not; and did create as a voluntary act. When this process began, it was by the transference of his own energy into phenomenal forms. Even so in the case of the creature man, there is a time in his history when his capacities are all contained in his personality, either latent or in action. Before he commits any conscious act he is in a condition not to do it. This is as certain as anything in science. No fact in logic, no demonstration in mathematics, is more drastic as a proof than that a man is not guilty of an act before he purposes or determines to perform it. But when he conceives its possibility, when he determines its advisability, when he wills its execution, and when that conception, desirableness, and determination have been carried out in an overt act, he has transferred his own creative powers into that act; and it has become his alone, constituting a part of his char-

BSac 60:240 (Oct 1903) p. 650

acter. He has created the act, not by compulsion, but by-independent choice. Henceforth it is a part of his true record, written in letters which cannot be effaced from the tablet of his conscience. Now it is considered a part of the man himself; quite as much as, if not more than, his eye, his hand: even as much as his own personality. For he has transferred a portion of his nature, and by his will, into the act, which now has become a separate moment, that now can be seen, though it existed before only as a potentiality. Just as in the creation by the Supreme Being, that which before was Power, Wisdom, Goodness, but not apprehensible by the senses, becomes phenomenal. Along with the transference so that it could be seen, is also the formation of the sense-perceptions in the creature by which the phenomenal could be recognized.

The Performance Of A Voluntary Act Is Creative

The performance of a conscious, voluntary act is in reality a new creation. For the man who commits an act, good or bad, has transferred a part of his power into the production of the new thing, which did not exist before, even as the Omnipotent Creator did in the formation of a universe. But the bad man has not exhausted ...