Verse 9
9. Furthermore The parallelism of the divine Fatherhood with the human tells infinitely for the former, and for the rightness of the chastisement. The human is often capricious, the divine always right.
Fathers of our flesh… Father of spirits Here appears a clear distinction between the origin of our flesh, or bodies, in the course of nature from our parents, and the origin of our spirits, above nature, from God. Not without some apparent reason have some of the earliest and greatest Christian doctors distinguished between the vegetable, the animal, and the spiritual elements in our natures. The first, man shares in common with all vegetable nature, being the vis formativa, the formative energy, the organizing principle, the plastic power which forms the body according to its type; which is simply the divine agency, as cause of causes, acting under form of finite causations and successions. It implies no thought or personal intelligence in the organism itself. Next comes the animal soul, a sensibility of the five senses to external objects, with powers of association, and impulses to action in accordance with the forces of impressions. Both these are the offspring of the course of nature. Above them, and embracing and absorbing them into itself, is the spirit, whereby man is cognizant of the Infinite, and knows God, and is conscious of himself, and learns his own immortality. As this comes from God alone, so human parents are only the fathers of our flesh, while God is the Father of spirits. And these views, perhaps, furnish a settlement of the dispute between the Traducianists, who believed that the entire human soul is born of the human parent, and the Creationists, who held that all souls are created. The human spirit is created, the vegetable and animal elements in man are born. And physiology seems to show that the human embryo passes through these three stages. See notes on 1 Corinthians 15:44.
In subjection… and live Live, namely, that spiritual life which depends upon our obedient subjection unto the Father of spirits.
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