In his book, The Plan of Salvation, Warfield lays out the following:

We will ask, however, an American divine to explain to us the sacerdotal system as it has come to be taught in the Protestant Episcopal Churches.60 "Man," we read in Dr. A. G. Mortimer’s "Catholic Faith and Practice," "having fallen before God’s loving purpose could be fulfilled, he must be redeemed, bought back from his bondage, delivered from his sin, reunited once more to God, so that the Divine Life might flow again in his weakened nature" (p. 65). "By his life and death Christ made satisfaction for the sins of all men, that is, sufficient for all mankind, for through the Atonement sufficient grace is given to every soul for its salvation; but grace, though sufficient, if neglected, becomes of no avail" (p. 82).[footnote 61] The Incarnation and the Atonement affected humanity as a race only [footnote 62]. Some means, therefore, was needed to transmit the priceless gifts which flowed from them to the individuals of which the race was comprised, not only at the time when our Lord was on earth, but to the end of the world. For this need, therefore, our Lord founded the Church" (p. 84).¹

The above is not all that interesting to me, what is interesting is Warfield’s footnote 62 on page, 109, which reads:

Query: Is there any such thing as the "race" apart from the individuals which constitute the race? How could the Incarnation and Atonement affect the "race" and leave the individuals which constitute the race untouched?

Warfield was part of the empiricist-common sense realist school or tradition of Princeton. For him, a universal so defined as a mere abstraction is useless as it contains no meaningful content. What is also interesting is that the sentiment of Warfield’s opponent is the very sort of sentiment a lot of modern 5-Point calvinists invoke when they transmute the meaning of John’s “kosmos” (John 3:16 and 1 John 2:2) into something like species or humanity or some cognate.²

Read the rest of this entry »