There are several controversies among theologians that do more than make our heads spin. Sometimes they even tempt us to roll our eyes. We suspect that the argument in view is a result of having too much time on our hands, or being of a morbid spirit about things that cannot be proven. Even in the case of matters that might not be settled this side of eternity, it worth pondering whether or not this automatically means that reflection upon the subject can bear no fruit. One such debate is between what is called the Creationist position and the Traducianist position. This debate is about how sin is passed on to all of those born to Adam’s race. It is not my purpose here to resolve that debate, but to at least introduce it.

The Basics of the Question

Creationism says that our souls are created directly by God in each case, while the body is generated ordinarily within nature. This raises the difficulty of how God can do this without also creating the sinful nature anew. 

Traducianism emphasizes the soul being connected to our parental line. Here the problem of God’s connection to the sinful nature is resolved. Sin is inherited by each member of Adam’s race. On the other hand, it leaves one either with the difficulty of the origin of the soul or else the sinful nature reduced to the material realm, even implying that sin has independent substance.  

 What does the Bible say to resolve this? There is no single verse—or even some set of verses—that will resolve this for us in a neat and tidy way. One must draw inferences, and in this case, lots of them! 

 For example, Creationism appears to have more biblical support in passages like Psalm 139. There God is clearly described as the direct fashioner of each individual soul. The reality is, however, that it is not the purpose of that Psalm to resolve this dispute. It is leaving aside the matter that another Psalm would force upon us: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (51:5).

 We could reason that since neither sin’s nature nor its guilt is fundamentally a physical entity, either view would be consistent with the doctrines of original sin and the imputation of Adam’s nature and punishment. Therein lies some good news to this debate. Some of the inferences we make can remind us that neither emphasis is devastating to orthodoxy in itself. It can become so if the emphases are pressed beyond their breaking point. 

An Obvious Objection With a Not So Easy Answer

 To the objection that God cannot create more souls after Adam without creating an evil principle, we respond first with the words of Brakel, that, “the soul, coming into existence in union with the body and from the first moment forming a human being, is not more noble than the souls of the generating parents and thus is without the image of God. God was not obligated to restore this image to the soul after man had cast it away. It is therefore written in Genesis 5:3, ‘And Adam … begat a son in his own likeness, after his image,’ and thus not after the image of God.”1

 The bottom line in the debate between Traducianism and Creationism is that when God creates a soul, immediately united to a body, to comprise the full human nature, this requires no “miracle” in the same sense as the Virgin Birth was a miracle. God creates each person, immediately subjecting that creation to the secondary causes intrinsic to the nature of that being. In the case of the children of Adam and Eve, that means secondary causes that are wholly submerged in the sinful nature. But if I were to submerge a flower in sulfuric acid, there is no contradiction between the nature of the flower being other than acid and the nature of the acid being alien to the flower and yet permeating and disintegrating the flower. They would both be true. Naturally the analogy breaks down. I cannot create a flower out of nothing. I cannot speak one into existence. But if I could, it is difficult to see how I could not speak it into existence submerged in the acid, just as easily as I could speak it into existence outside of the acid. 

Objection 1. But this “acid” is a substance, even if the corruption it causes in the flower is not. So it is a false analogy, since the sinful nature was said to not be a substance, but a corruption of substance. Therefore, if God creates a soul “in” this sinful nature, then he creates the corruption as well.

Reply Obj. 1. What is false is not the analogy itself but the assumptions of the one failing to attend to it. True, the acid in the analogy was a substance. However that is not what was analogous in the analogy. Its corruption was, but not that the sinful nature is a substance requiring creation. After all, even in the analogy, the acid did not require immediate creation as did the flower. So in the same way, the sinful nature is already present in the line of Adam. 

I offer this reply not as a defense of Creationism in full, but to at least give an idea of how it can be considered coherent against what is really its greatest difficulty to overcome.

Why Does This Matter?

 Besides the question of how the sinful nature is passed on from Adam to each one of us, one will eventually wonder how that would apply to Jesus Christ in his human nature. And is that the very thing that the Virgin Birth was designed to overcome? Think of it this way. For roughly the same reasons that Adam and Eve were sinless at the creation, the miracle of the Virgin Birth, in addition to being a sign to us, ensured that God created the human nature of Christ in such a way that his human nature was perfect from the first. This will be the case even of those aspects of the fall which really do affect the body. Since all genetics are information in any event, any model of the Virgin Birth ought to be able to take into account ex nihilo creation of Christ's total humanity. 

 However, that morally perfect human nature does not depend on any moral perfection in Mary. As to the Roman Catholic doctrine ​​of the Immaculate Conception, we reply that in addition to being unsupported by Scripture, it is much ado about nothing. It moves the same problem of Mary’s sin a step back to her parent’s sin. Moreover, God is able to create all of the genetic structure of the human Jesus without recourse to the chromosomes of the father's line (which all Christians affirm about the Virgin Birth) but also in a way that does not pass on the sin of Mary (which is not biological anyway). So much of this is a sign to us rather than anything that constrains God's method of acting.

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1. Wilhelmus à Brakel. The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:394