And continuing to verse 28, "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply..." So, when God blessed man and gave him the command to be fruitful, He was speaking of multiplication of bodies not souls? Where is that in the text?
Where is the command to make souls? There is nothing in this text that says mankind can make a soul. There is only a command to do what God has designed mankind to do—be fruitful and multiply. If we define the
imago dei (image of God) in the Lutheran sense, consisting ONLY of knowledge, righteousness and true holiness,
and it was wholly lost in the fall (Lutheran theology), HOW can it be multiplied by man if it was wholly lost by man? <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/shrug.gif" alt="" />
Does God continue to form man from the dust of the ground or does God now employ other means (biological reproduction)? If God uses other means to propagate the body, what in the text prevents Him from using other means to propagate the soul?
How can man multiply that which he, in the Lutheran definition, no longer has? God in the wonder of His creation has allowed us procreative powers of the body, however He still maintains the power to create and ONLY He may create a soul.
The Apology defines the image of God as “the knowledge of God, righteousness, and truth.” Are we agreed that unregenerate man has lost the image of God as defined in the Apology?
NO, the Apology is correct ONLY in part. You need the second half of the equation—what in the image was retained. The imago dei in the narrower sense, consisting of knowledge, righteousness and true holiness,
was wholly lost at the fall, but the imago dei in the wider sense, which includes man’s "intellectual power, natural affections and moral freedom," was retained (Berkhof). The image of God (which cannot be lost) was the spiritual, immortal, rational substance of the soul, with the powers of knowing and freely willing: the divine image, which can be lost, lay for knowledge in wisdom, for the will and its effects in true righteousness and holiness.
If we speak about the image of God from the Lutheran perspective after the fall there is nothing left to speak about, for the image of God never left the Garden (except in Christ, and then we need to discuss the Christology problems again...). If however the image of God continued in any form after the fall, one must abandon the Lutheran understanding of it.
Gen. 5:1-3 states that God created Adam in His likeness and that Adam begat Seth in his (Adam’s) likeness. The likeness of Adam passed on to Seth through procreation includes a horrible corruption of the entire nature (Romans 5:12). All people begotten in the natural way are shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin (Ps. 51:5). Thus God uses procreation in His creation of souls to fulfill His curse (Gen. 2:17). But He Himself does not create sin (1 John 3: 7, 8).
Finally, the Scripture. As Paul Harvey says, now the rest of the story.
Genesis 5
1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2 male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
3 And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
First, thanks for proving creationism, not Traducianism. Second, once again it is stressed that God is the one that created man and woman (vs 1 & 2). Third,
AFTER the Fall, Seth was born. Fourth, Adam
begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, however in Lutheranism the “image of God” (“the knowledge of God, righteousness, and truth”) in man was ALREADY lost. Thus, what image is vs 3 speaking about? We are left once again with the Reformed view of the image of God in the broad and narrow sense (see above). This disproves Traducianism, for there is nothing in the Lutheran sense to pass down from generation to generation.
We will get to the error of the rest of your explanation later--i.e. inherited corruption vs. imputed ... (which actually was already addressed in the example of
Eve).
