SIR ROBERT ANDERSON
Secret Service
Theologian
HUMAN
DESTINY
"SALVATOR MUNDI"
THE author referred to in the preceding chapter
(Farrar) has publicly acknowledged that while preparing the sermons which form
the basis of his book, he was "largely indebted" to an earlier work on this
same subject. The volume alluded to is from the pen of a noted expositor of
Scripture, and it has obtained such a wide circulation, and is held in such
high authority in the controversy, that it is impossible to pass it by
unnoticed. "The Question Raised" is the title of the opening chapter. If, the
writer asks, Tyre and Sidon and the cities of the plain would have repented had
they seen the mighty works of Christ, are they never to see Him? Are they to be
damned for not having seen Him? Must there not be a "place of repentance" for
such in the under-world? Suffice it here to say that this question is
altogether wide of the real issue in this controversy, which is not whether the
destiny of all mankind is fixed at death, but whether all mankind shall yet be
saved, including those who have rejected the full revelation of the Gospel.
The author then proceeds to fix the "limits of the argument." The appeal is to
the Bible ; but before he will open the Bible he must insist that reason and
conscience are also to have a voice. That is to say, the question is what the
lawgiver has decreed against the criminal, and the criminal himself is
practically to formulate the answer. The next point is that the Old Testament,
the Book of Revelation, and the parables of our Lord, are all to be eliminated
from the inquiry. No one has a right to insist on such conditions, but yet they
might be accepted without endangering the issue, provided always, first, that
it is only the symbolic visions of the Apocalypse which are to be excluded and,
secondly, that the Scriptures themselves, and not the critic, shall decide what
is "parable" and what is not.
Next comes the inevitable protest against the
use of the words damnation," '' hell,'' and '' everlasting.'' Much of what is
said about the first of these words is true, and would be helpful if written in
any other connection. As for the second, he argues that whereas Hades and
Gehenna both refer to the intermediate state, "our word 'hell' denotes the
final and everlasting torment of the wicked," and therefore it should be
banished from our language altogether.
The fact is, that so far from this
being the only meaning of "hell," it is a meaning which the word scarcely
possesses at all in classical English. It is only they who believe that Gehenna
indicates the final state who have any right to object that "hell" is a
mistranslation.
A word about this Gehenna. The writer tells us how the
beautiful valley of Hinnom, under the south-western wall of Jerusalem, in time
"became the common cesspool of the city, into which offal was cast, and the
carcases of animals, and even the bodies of great criminals who had lived a
life so vile as to be judged unworthy of decent burial. Worms preyed on their
corrupting flesh, and fires were kept burning lest the pestilential infection
should rise from the valley and float through the streets of Jerusalem." Such
is the author's own description. And what is the moral he would draw from it?
That the offal and the carcases were thrown there to purify and fit them for
some high and noble use! It is amazing how any one can be so blind as not to
see in this a figure the most graphic and terrible of utter and hopeless
destruction.
Two more chapters being thus accounted for, in the fifth and
sixth the author takes up the words which are variously rendered in our English
Bible to express infinite duration. "If (he pleads) these words really carried
in themselves the sense of eternity or everlastingness, they could not possibly
have been applied," as, in fact, they were applied, to what was material or
transitory. Will the author specify any words which carry in themselves this
meaning, or indeed any meaning whatsoever?
What is true of most words is
true in a special degree of these; chameleon-like, they take a colour from what
they touch, and their significance must in every case be settled by the
subject-matter and the context. "Words are the counters of wise men, the money
of fools :" these teachers one and all seem to take them for more than
counters. Every tyro in philology is aware that it is the use of a word which
decides its meaning; and to be guided only by its derivation is as unwise as it
would be to accept a man of sixty on a character given to him when a schoolboy.
But yes, the author tells us there is a word "which unquestionably means 'for
ever.'" This word, however, occurs only twice in the New Testament, and in one
of these two passages, as he himself notices, it unquestionably does not mean
"for ever." *
But the author's disquisition upon the "Greek word aiön
and its derivative, must by no means be dismissed thus lightly. With other
writers such a discussion is mere skirmishing; here it is vital to his scheme.
These words, he declares, "so far from denoting either that which is above
time, or that which will outlast time, are saturated through and through with
the thought and element of time." This needs looking into. The heathen
philosophers and poets had probably no thought of "Eternity" as distinguished
from time. Their conception was limited to the aeon which includes all time,
but that these words were used to express that conception is admitted. It is
further admitted that the New Testament unfolds an "economy of times and
seasons," many "ages" heading up in one great "age" within which all the
manifold purposes of God in relation to earth shall be fulfilled. Here again
these same words are applicable and are used. But revelation has taught men a
higher conception of eternity than the heathen ever grasped. How then could
such a conception be expressed in the language of ancient Greece, a language
formed upon and moulded by the thoughts of a heathen nation? To invent a word
is impossible, and yet words are but counters. Therefore when translating the
sacred Hebrew into Greek the Rabbis could only take up some of the counters
ready to their hand, and, as it were, restamp them to mark a higher value than
they had formerly possessed. Thus, when they came on statements such as that of
the 9oth Psalm, "From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God," they could but
fall back on this very word aeon.*
Now the New Testament is written in the
language of the Septuagint version of the Old; not in the language of heathen
Greece, but in that language as moulded and elevated by contact with the
God-breathed Scriptures. Many a word had thus gained a fuller or a higher
meaning than ordinarily pertained to it. The question here, therefore, is not
what is the meaning of aeon and aiönios in the classics, but what was the
thought of the inspired writers in such passages as that above quoted. The
"aeonian" scholarship of Christendom has recognised that they are used to
express eternity in the fullest sense, and this conclusion is wholly unaffected
by our author's bold denial of it.
But let us for the moment accept the
author's theory, and see what it will lead to. Brushing aside all other
considerations, let us come at once to the foundations of our faith, and see
how they will bear this new "doctrine of the aeons." If it be true, the
sacrifice of Calvary is no longer what we dreamed it was, the climax of a
Divine purpose formed in a bygone eternity when the Word was alone with God,
and the supreme and final display for all eternity to come of God's great love
to man. The author will tell us that "the historical cross of Christ was but a
manifestation within the bounds of time and space of the eternal passion of the
Father"-a passion which "must continue to manifest itself in appropriate forms
through all the ages and changes of time." And lest charity should put an
innocent interpretation on this language, and thus destroy his argument, he
repeats his thought in still plainer words: "If God has once shown that He will
make any sacrifice for the salvation of the guilty, must not that be always
true of Him? Must He not continue to manifest His blended severity and mercy in
the ages to come?" As we hear the Cross of Christ thus lowered and degraded, we
cannot but demand, What part then can it have in man's redemption? and as far
as the author can enlighten us the answer must be, practically none. He shall
speak for himself. Here is his new Gospel of "the larger hope."
"The
Scriptures, then, have much to teach us of the future, though not much of the
final, estate of men. And what they teach, in so far at least as we have been
able to gather it up, comes to this. No man is wholly good, no man wholly bad.
Still some men may fairly be called good on the whole, although much sin
and imperfection still cleaves to them and others may fairly be called bad
on the whole, although there is still much in them that is good, and still
more which is capable of becoming good. When we die, we shall all receive the
due recompense of our deeds, of all our deeds, whether they have been good or
whether they have been bad. If by the grace of God we have been good on the
whole, we may hope to rise into a large and happy spiritual kingdom, in which
all that is pure and noble and kind in us will develop into new vigour and
clothe itself with new beauty; in which also we shall find the very discipline
we need in order that we may be wholly purged from sin and imperfection ; in
which we may undo much that we have done wrongly, do again and with perfect
grace that which we have done imperfectly, become what we have wished and aimed
to be, achieve what we have longed to achieve, attain the wisdom, the gifts and
powers and graces to which we have aspired; in which, above all, we may be
engaged in errands of usefulness and compassion, by which the purpose of the
Divine love and grace will be fully accomplished. If we have been bad on the
whole we may hope - and we ought to hope for it - to pass into a painful
discipline so keen and searching that we shall become conscious of our sins and
feel that we are only receiving the due reward of them; but since there has
been some good in us, and this good is capable of being drawn out and
disentangled from the evil which clouded and marred it, we may also hope, by
the very discipline and torment of our spirits, to be led to repentance, and,
through repentance, unto life; we may hope that the disclosures of the
spiritual world will take a spiritual effect upon us, gradually raising and
renewing us till we too are prepared to enter the Paradise of God and behold
the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power: we may hope that our
friends who have already been redeemed will pity us and minister to us,
bringing us not simply a cup of cold water to cool our tongue, but words of
instruction and life. And as for the great mass of our fellow-men, we may hope
and believe that those who have had no chance of salvation here will have one
there; that those who have had a poor chance will get a better one; that
those who have had a good chance and lost it will get a new but a
severer chance, and even as they suffer the inevitable results of their folly
and sin will feel 'the hands that reach through darkness, moulding men.'
"This, on the whole, I take to be the teaching of Scripture concerning
the lot of men in the age to come,-a teaching which enables us to see 'beneath
the abyss of hell a bottomless abyss of love.' And if it clash with some dogmas
that we have held and some interpretations which are familiar to us, it
nevertheless accords, not with 'the mind of Christ' only, but also with the
dictates of Reason and Conscience, the voices of God within the soul. It
presents no such sudden break in our life as, in the teeth of all probability,
we have been wont to conceive; no heaven for which we feel that even the
best of us must be unfit, no hell which is a monstrous offence to our
sense of justice. It promises to every man the mercy of justice, of a due
reward for all he has been and done; and, while it impresses on us the utter
hatefulness and misery of sin, it holds out to every one of us the prospect of
being redeemed from all sin and uncleanness by that just God Who is also a
Saviour. Nor does it less accord with the demands of Science than with
the dictates of Reason and the Moral Sense; for it carries on the evolution of
the human race through all the ages to come. And, therefore, let others think
as they will, and cherish what trust they will: but as for us, with the Apostle
of the Gentiles, our own Apostle, 'we trust in the living God Who is the
Saviour of all men.' "
* Throughout the quotation the italics are my
own.
I have reluctantly quoted at such length that the reader may be
enabled to judge what this doctrine implies. To refute the errors, expressed
and implied, of this book, would involve a treatise upon each one of the
fundamental truths of Christianity. If any can read the above extract unshocked
by the heathen darkness and contemptuous unbelief which characterise it, it is
idle to discuss the matter with them within the limits of the present volume.
If any one thinks this language too strong, let him turn back upon the
quotation and seek to find where there is room for redemption in the writer's
scheme. It is a deliberate and systematic denial of Christianity.
This is
not an isolated paragraph snatched from its context; it is the author's
recapitulation, the closing passage of his book. We read it again and again,
and study it with bewildered wonder. The question here is no longer of the doom
of the lost, but of the truth of Christianity. Of the vital and characteristic
truths of our religion there is not so much as one which it does not ignore or
deny. The righteousness of God, the grace of God, man's ruin, redemption
through the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the justification of the
believer by grace through redemption, eternal life as the free gift of God, the
resurrection of the just in the image of the heavenly, and of the unjust to
appear at the last great judgment - not a trace of one of these foundation
doctrines of our faith remains. And what is offered us instead? The weakness of
an easy-going deity who will strike an average between good and evil, sending
those who are "good on the whole" to a purgatorial paradise, and those who are
"bad on the whole" to a purgatorial hell. A redemption "to be achieved in due
time" for men with the aid of "the aeonial fire, which alone could burn out
their sins," and "the aeonial Spirit," who "will still be at work for the
regeneration of the race." Instead of eternal life, we have "the spiritual life
distinctive of the Christian aeons"; and eternal punishment is but "the
punishment which those inflict on themselves who adjudge themselves unworthy of
that life."
"This, on the whole," he takes to be "the teaching of Scripture
concerning the lot of men in the age to come." "The teaching of Scripture!" It
was not thus the Church's million martyrs read the mingled warnings and
promises of God. Such views are utterly opposed to the great creeds of the
Reformation and the older creeds of Christendom. The author's scheme renders
due homage doubtless to that miserable bantling of modern science, evolution;
but whether it accords with "the dictates of reason" we are not concerned to
discuss. It is enough to be assured that it is not Christianity - it is not
even a bastard Judaism; it is the most utter heathenism, concealed by the
thinnest possible veneer of Christian phraseology.
* Finding, perhaps,
that even in this infidel age the unchristianity of his book was too
pronounced, the author has published "a sequel," in which he attempts to
restate the question "as a part of the Christian doctrine of atonement." But
the "sequel" restates with increased definiteness his dogma of retribution,
which denies "the Christian doctrine of atonement" altogether. It then offers
as "a new argument" for his views, the theory that there is a "surface current"
and a "deeper current" in Scripture, the former of which is false, as Israel's
hope of the promised messianic kingdom! Next comes a disquisition on i Cor. v.
5 (as proving that "destruction may be a condition of salvation "), and on
demoniacal possession in connection therewith. As the result, the veneer is
somewhat strengthened perhaps, but the heathenism remains.
Chapter Four
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