Facts and
Theories as to a Future State
APPENDIX -
ANNIHILATIONISM 1.
EDWARD WHITE: "LIFE IN
CHRIST"
EDWARD WHITE’S "Life in Christ" has been here and
there referred to in the body of the present book. But a volume of five hundred
and thirty-eight well-filled pages, by one who is considered the father of
"Conditional Immortality" in England, may well demand a more extensive notice.
It can be, after all, but brief, and the main points have been already dealt
with; so that in much, a mere reference to this will be sufficient. Our review
will be strictly supplementary.
His "first book" treats of "the nature
of man, as considered under the light of science only; "so that we shall not
have much to consider here.
He summarizes the evidence as to the reality of
"mind in animals", and its mortality in them; as to evolution, and man’s
derivation from the beasts, along with the proof from geology of his antiquity;
and he concludes, -
"The sum of this argument is, that by the unassisted
light of science and history we are able to reach no coherent or satisfactory
conclusion as to the origin of mankind, its relation to the animal races, or
its future destiny." "The phenomena are such as will consist with the
hypothesis of a nature whose destiny depends on its moral qualities, and, above
all, a nature which has suffered some deflection, which science may dimly
divine without being able to elucidate or to remedy."
He next passes
before us "the numbers and intellectual conditions of mankind," and then
reviews "the orthodox doctrine on" its "nature and destiny;" following with a
chapter "on the possibility that Christians have erred on the doctrine of human
destiny."
Into all this I do not propose to enter. Scripture, and
Scripture alone, is what here concerns us. The only possible use of it all is
to make us more closely and earnestly scrutinize what is there declared; and as
Mr. White, with the full weight of all this pressing upon him, has made known
to us the opposite conclusions to which he has come from what he allows is
"supported by the general authority of nearly all Christians for at least
fourteen (!) centuries," we had better reserve our space for their examination.
His last chapter, "On the immortality of the soul," we cannot, however,
pass over quite in this way, for it is the foundation of all that follows, and
here, spite of the caption of this "first book," he appeals to Scripture.
Here too we pass over the metaphysical arguments. A more promising one, he
rightly says, -
"has, in all ages, been derived from the moral instincts
of mankind." "No stress of physiological evidence on the structure and
development of the brain, on the relation of the human brain to that of
animals, on the dependence of thought on cerebral machinery, avails completely
to silence the ‘oracle of God’ within the heart, which tells us that
‘it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment."’
He urges that while this is moral evidence of survival or revival, it
does not carry with it an equal probability of eternal survival. But he seems
to forget that the fact of the survival of death removes the only objection of
which we are aware to eternal survival. Death it is which raises the question,
and that question is really answered.
We shall not dispute, however,
that for absolute certainty we must have the voice of revelation. He is surely,
however, entirely astray when he asserts, as usual with those of his school,
but more boldly, "that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is never
once explicitly delivered throughout the whole range of Jewish and Christian
Scriptures"! That "they who kill the body cannot kill the soul" is an explicit
statement. But, as we have seen, Christians, by so generally ignoring the true
constitution of man, and overlooking the spirit as that which is his
characteristic and essential attribute, have allowed the question to be wrongly
put. Survival after death is everywhere recognized in the Old Testament; and
the spirit departs to God that gave it. The spirit, as spirit, is immortal:
there maybe a question of the soul, for the beast has soul. But God is spirit,
and the God and Father of spirits. The angels too are spirits, and therefore
"sons of God." And man is thus also the "offspring of God," and it is just
after death that he is called a "spirit."
It is too bold, then, to
affirm that "no single expression of Scripture can be pointed out in which
man’s natural immortality is affirmed directly or indirectly"! Boldness
may in in many cases carry the day, but not in Scripture; and Scripture has in
this case, as I have said elsewhere (pp. 73-75), moulded the very language of
men. And so has it governed their thoughts, more truly than Mr. White will
admit. So that there is no need of pleading divine government as working
through error, or by the truth in error, in the way he pleads - truly, no
doubt, but not to the purpose here.
So ends Mr. White’s first
book. The second will detain us longer: its subject is, "The Old-Testament
Doctrine on Life and Death."
To begin with, he tells us, strangely, that,
"partly" because of the hardness (blindness) of their hearts, Moses was
permitted to write many things imperfectly beside the old law of divorce. To
ask for science at his hands, or even for strict conformity to all the facts,
is to forget that darkness is necessarily the swaddling-band of mind awakening
from nothingness."
The account of creation he calls, thus, a "noble
poem", though happily "there is no valid reason known to the writer why we
should not accept the history of Adam, and Eve as a true narrative." Yet he
would not "deny that there may have been previous human races upon the earth,
as there had been previous animal races."
Coming to the creation of
man, his first observation is, - .
"that, according to Moses, man
was not formed within the precincts of paradise, where grew the tree of life,
but was created from the dust of the ground in the territory outside it, where
animal life abounded, and where, as we now learn from fossil geology, death had
reigned over all organized existence from the beginning of the creation. . . .
This circumstance seems to point to the conclusion that if the creature so made
enjoyed loftier prospects than those of the animals, to whose organization his
own bore so strong a resemblance, this was not from the original constitution
of his nature as eternal, but from superadditions of grace bestowed on a
perishable being."
But it is hard to see what the geological argument
adds to the physiological. Had not the dust of the garden itself, for aught we
know, as many fossils in proportion to its extent as that outside of it? Had
the tree of life any effect upon the garden, or upon the animal life within it?
Was it not for man alone that it existed? Clearly it proclaimed that man had
not immortality in himself, but in dependence, and conditionally. And whoever,
with any glimmer of intelligence in Scripture, could claim any thing else? But
man may be "mortal," and die, and yet not all die, as even Mr. White believes.
His affinity to the beasts by one side of his nature is fully and freely
acknowledged. The question is only, Is there another side?
Next, we
have the objection that -
"the animation of man by the breath of God
proves the immortality of his ‘soul’ no more than a similar asserted
animation of brutes proves the immortality of their ‘soul.’
‘Thou sendest forth Thy Spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the
face of the earth. Thou takest away Thy Spirit, they die and return to their
dust.’ " (Ps. civ.)
It is evident that Mr. White has quoted from
memory here, and that his memory has deceived him. The passage reads thus:
"Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou
sendest forth Thy Spirit, they are created," etc. (Ps. civ. 29, 30.) The
difference is plain. As our author has quoted it, it might look as if
God’s Spirit was in the beast while living, and taking it away was their
death, a doctrine worthy of Christadelphianism itself, however. Does Mr. White
believe that the Spirit of God is in the beast? Scripture denies that He is
even in merely natural men, and never teaches that He is their life. How could
He be, then, the life of the brute?
The real quotation transposes the
two sentences, affirms the sending of the Spirit as necessary indeed for
creation, but only the taking away of their breath for dying. Was it the
identity of these two words in the Hebrew ruach that caused the illusion in the
mind of Mr. White? But he will own, surely, that "their ruach" could not be the
Spirit of God. In Gen. ii., the word used, as we have seen elsewhere, is not
ruach, but nishmath, the constructive form of n’shamah, of which I have
elsewhere spoken. (p. 52 n.)
That the phrase "living soul" does not
convey the notion of an "ever-living spirit" - as Mr. White goes on to say - I
fully agree; and that it is applied to the beasts, we have already seen (p.
56). I object entirely, however, to its being (as in his note, p. 90)
translated "living animal," and the justification of it there by a reference to
the common translation of Gen. i. 20, is carelessness itself. "Creature that
hath life" is not the translation thereof "living soul." "Life," in that
passage, represents "soul," and there is nothing at all answering to "living."
Thus, if you interpret "living soul" by this, you would have to say, not
"living creature," but "living life," which even a materialist would a little
hesitate at. I by no means charge Mr. White with materialism; but his
blundering on such a point is inexcusable.
His comment upon the
apostle’s reference to Gen. ii. 7 (in i Cor. xv. 44-47) is nearly that of
Dr. Thomas. (p. 55.)
He says, -
"Here, then, we have the authority of
St. Paul for deciding that when Moses described the result of the animation of
Adam by the Divine Breath, so far from designing to teach that thereby an
Immortal spirit was communicated to him, the object was to teach exactly the
contrary, that he became a ‘living creature, or animal,’ neither
possessed of eternal life in himself, nor capable of transmitting it. And the
phrase ‘living soul’ is chosen, not to distinguish him from the rest
of the creation, but to mark his place as a member of the animal world whose
intellectual powers partake of the perishableness of their material
organizations."
Here, all that favours Mr. White’s view is
introduced by him into the apostle’s argument. It is indeed true that he
does not and could not bring forward man’s being a living soul to
distinguish him from the rest of the creation, and it is a mistake entirely for
any one to use it for this. On the other hand, it is evident that he has not
before him the question of immortality at all. Contrasting, as he is, the first
and the last Adams, he does quote the phrase "living soul" to put it in
opposition to "a life-giving Spirit." And of course the first Adam was "neither
possessed of eternal life in himself, nor capable of transmitting it." Who ever
thought he was? No, he was a living soul with a soulic body. Paul does not
speak of the divine in-breathing. He needed not to consider it. Man’s
class (though having a spirit) was not with those called spirits, as the angels
are, but on a lower plane - that of a "living soul" (comp. p. 74). But it does
not in the least follow that the apostle meant to class man with the beasts, or
ignore what was higher in him. Rather, is it not among beings having spirit
that he is affirming his place as a living soul? Scripture never levels man
with the beast. "Without understanding," he is "like the beasts that perish."
(Ps. xlix. 20.) But he never is a beast.
Just as much - and as little -
truth is there in Mr. White’s statement "that God ‘breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life,’ so far from being intended to indicate the
immortal perpetuity of his nature, is specially chosen to mark his dependence
on the atmosphere for his continued life." He does not realize the perfection
and comprehensiveness of God’s blessed Word. It is quite true that
man’s breath being in his nostrils marks his "present evanescence," and
that in this way Isaiah appeals to it (Isa. ii. 22); but that touches not the
significance that "God breathed," - that, as Elihu says, the "inspiration of
the Almighty gave him life." (Job xxxiii. 4.) Figurative as the language may
be, and full of a mystery which does not yet discover itself, it should be
plain that God thus communicates to man something by which he is in kinship
with God as the beast never is. He "created him in His image," - possessing
spirit from the "Father of spirits." This simply and naturally interprets the
expression, more concisely and fully than Mr. White’s effort just
afterward.
But it is striking enough that of the spirit of man, which
alone "knoweth the things of a man," he knows, apparently, really nothing. A
shallow sentence or two, abundantly refuted already (pp. 44-53), are all that
he has to say with regard to what is the characteristic feature of man, - the
very thing which constitutes him that. It is no wonder, then that he should
find in him nothing but a "superior order" of beast, and it is natural that
with him, therefore, death should end all for such a being. He does not see,
moreover, that the statements in the early chapters of Genesis need and find
supplement and elucidation in the after-statements of Scripture, which here, as
in other matters, is a progressive revelation. In this, its foundation, the
book before us is essentially defective and poor - poverty itself.
With
this imperfect induction, Mr. White proceeds to consider the death threatened
to Adam, in which I can find nothing but what has been already carefully
considered. (pp. 180-186.) The "method of redemption," with which he follows
it, we must reserve our examination of until it is presented in detail, and
with its arguments, for the rest of his book is but the development of it. Nor
need we review his chapter on the serpent, and demonology in general, in which
he is, moreover, for the most part orthodox. It is singular, however, that he
is not content to deal with the story of the serpent as he has done with the
creation of man. Rightly enough, he connects it with the general doctrine of
Scripture, and has no difficulty in going beyond the statements of Moses, whose
"pen" - in this case, he can allow, - "was perhaps stayed by a superior will."
But why not, then, in what lies in such near connection with it?
As to
sacrifice, he sees nothing more in it than the taking away of life, - "death
like that of the beasts which perish." The burning of the sin-offering outside
the camp, and without an altar, has for him no significance. He levels the
antitype with the type, and from the darkness of the "shadow" infers a doctrine
of darkness by which to interpret the New-Testament light. Here too we must
reserve our judgment.
Concerning the death threatened under the law,
and the Old-Testament doctrine of judgment and of the life to come, I need add
nothing really to what is already said. Mr. White’s examination cannot be
considered careful, and all his main points have been fully answered. There is
much in the usual style of writers of his school, as where he takes pains to
enlighten us as to the meaning of "carcasses" (p. 170), and that the death of a
worm is extinction; so that (a triumph indeed of criticism,) "their worm shall
not die" actually proves the non-eternity of torment!
One would think
it proved only the will of the writer, and the feebleness of argument that can
find comfort in help so feeble.
A chapter on the doctrine of the Pharisees
and Sadducees closes the second book. There is little to say about it, as our
author adds nothing to the preceding argument. (Chaps. xi., xii.) Paul’s
"I am a Pharisee" he does not notice, and the Lord’s "Ye have no life in
yourselves" he does not understand The doctrine of "eternal life" there is no
need to dwell on here.
His third book brings us to the New-Testament
doctrine; and his first chapter treats of the "Incarnation of the Life; or, the
Logos made flesh that man may live eternally." As to the incarnation itself,
there is of course, no dispute. As to the rest of the chapter, the only
question is as to Mr. White’s identification, as is inevitable by one of
his school, of immortality and eternal life.
His arguments are the
ordinary ones, and in the ordinary style also. He catches at the phrase
"immortal soul" even to show that by the confession of those who use it, the
"natural and proper sense of dying" is ceasing to exist. "An immortal soul is a
soul that will not die; and to die there is taken for ceasing to exist, not for
being miserable." That is true, and cheerfully admitted. It is a protest
against Sadduceanism, wherever found, and therefore is expressed in
corresponding language. What difficulty here? The argument is merely ad
captandum, as so many from the same quarter are. The "death" of the body, -
the death of the beast, - the death of the materialist, - the soul does not
die; and it is no wonder if faith should affirm against sense in this respect,
using the term as sense would use it. Language is not the hard mathematical
unit that Mr. White would make it. There is a certain flexibility in it,
without which it would scarcely meet the requirements of daily life. It strikes
one that our author must have rather frequent troubles with his dictionary, if
he applies at least the same keen-edged criticism to other subjects than the
present.
So as to the words "destroy," "perish," and similar terms. Our
author takes such words as applying to material things, and naively asks, Why
not take them in the same sense when they are applied to immaterial? "A
figurative sense of words," he quotes from Dean Alford, "is never admissible
except when required by the context." Well, when destruction is applied to a
wall and to a man, is there no difference of context? All this is a mere
attempt to take the fort by coup de main, instead of honest demolition of its
walls and bulwarks. It has been tried too often to succeed now, except by the
grossest carelessness of its defenders.
Life is not mere existence in
any language; still less is eternal life merely eternal existence. All that
need be said on that point has been already said, and whether Scripture be
applied to it or not, this is still the one great point in dispute. Even where
the Lord says of the believer, "I will raise him up at the last day," Mr. White
sees but the fact of eternal existence, as if the wicked would not be also
raised. The real meaning is a very different one. It is to assure them that the
full blessing was not to come, as they imagined, in the immediate future, or to
men dwelling upon the earth, to which the hopes of Israel were so completely
attached, but in resurrection and a life beyond.
The eating of
Christ’s flesh too, with him, speaks of life, and "the blood" too "is the
life." Immortality is the one grand point throughout. He does not see that the
flesh and blood apart speak of atonement accomplished, and its fruit to be
enjoyed by faith.
We may pass over the following chapter which takes up
the question of "justification of life." There is nothing in it which really
affects the present argument. We are neither Pharisees, Galatians, nor
Antinomians, and can meet perfectly, as it seems to us, all such errors without
the help of "Conditional Immortality." We shall have to dwell, however, at some
length upon the next chapter, in which the central doctrine of atonement is
discussed.
Many questions" says Mr. White, "have been discussed in
relation to our Lord’s death. . . . Did Christ die only in the sense in
which other men die? Was His death the curse of the law? Was it some
modification of that curse? Did Christ suffer a pain and misery of the same
sort and of equal weight with that threatened to Adam in the day of his
creation? Did He bear some commuted penalty, which, in consideration of His
divine nature, was accounted a sufficient expiation?"
We shall answer
these questions first, before we review the answer which Mr. White gives. The
Lord was truly the substitute of His people, bore their sins, endured their
penalty; not, as many say now, a "substitute for penalty," nor yet a
"commuted," nor even an "equivalent" penalty, but the very penalty itself.
Nothing else, if we have read the Scripture right, could have been true
atonement - could have satisfied and proclaimed divine righteousness, or put
away, therefore. our guilt. And why? Because atonement does not lie in so much
suffering endured, a measurement of compensation, a commercial calculation.
This is too often what is considered to be its essence by those who have
rightly insisted upon real wrath-bearing on the cross; and this is what has
been striven against by those who have denied it. The truth is far otherwise;
and the statement of it at once removes a load of difficulty, and reconciles
many things that seem opposed.
The penalty upon man as a sinner was not
arbitrary, but necessary, the requirement of the divine nature itself. What was
governmentally imposed indeed, was, and could be, nothing else than what the
holiness of God required: otherwise it would have been a false representation
of Him who governs.
To abate this demand was impossible, then, even
though a surety had to answer it. An arbitrary penalty could be, of course, as
arbitrarily modified or set aside. The demand of holiness could not be, without
a stain upon the holiness itself.
But it is a great mistake, and one
which many beside Mr. White are committing, to look at the doom denounced on
Adam as if it were in itself the whole thing. The judgment, as we see it in
fact and in the doctrine of the apostle (Rom. v. 12-21), was the judgment of a
race, in the head of it. It was preliminary, not final; nor therefore the full
individual judgment when it comes. And this last is, because individual,
different in character according to the individual, although necessarily wrath
upon all unsaved.
The eternity of the doom at last has been wrongly
based by many. Judgment is eternal, not necessarily because sin as an infinite
wrong must have an infinite punishment; that at least might be debated, and
from Scripture could scarcely be established; but because the sinner remains a
sinner, and the wrath upon him necessarily remains. There is not, and cannot
be, any more open rebellion; all bow necessarily under the hand of God, and
there are no more sins to suffer for; mercy has limited punishment to the
reward of what was "done in the body" strictly, and punishment is in this way
truly corrective.-.a restraint.
Thus "it is appointed unto men once to
die, but after this the judgment," and these are the two things needed to be
borne for men. Of these, death, though necessary, is the far smaller part.
Judgment, the bearing of wrath, is seen in the "outer darkness," away from the
presence of God who is "Light," and in the fire of the sin-offering or of the
lake of fire. On the one hand, He who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,
turns away His face; on the other, He who is Light, and to whom nothing is hid,
manifests Himself in wrath against the unrepentant. Yet there may be "many
stripes" or "few," as the Lord has expressly said.
Death and wrath -
the curse - were the two elements of the vicarious suffering of the cross,
borne in reverse order: death the smaller, not the greater - yet implying, if
weighed, the other. If God sets aside thus His creatures from the place which
at first He gave them, it is in judgment He has done this. "For all our days
are passed away in Thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told." (Ps.
xc. 9.) Thus it is that death is the divine stamp upon sin, and as such the law
presses it; as such the Lord bears it. To suppose it all would be to miss the
meaning of death itself.
Thus we shall easily, I trust, see now the
defect and the excess of Mr. White’s statements "St. Paul says,
‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for
us, as it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’ (Gal.
iii. 13.) The construction of this sentence, and the quotation of one of the
curses of that law (the law of Moses viewed as a repetition of God’s
eternal law), render it indubitable, that Christ bore the curse of the law in
the sense of dissolution. For if the curse of the law, in which we are by
nature ‘children of wrath,’ were everlasting misery, there would be
an incongruity between the two parts of the apostle’s statement.
‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law (everlasting misery),
being made a curse for us;’ - not, however, that distinctive curse of the
law, but a different one, - that of death by ‘hanging on a tree.’
Thus it would seem that there are two distinct curses of the law, - everlasting
suffering due to the immortal soul, and death by hanging on a tree or
otherwise; and that, although the curse under which we lay was, according to
this theory, the former, the curse which Christ bore was the latter, which
notwithstanding availed to delivered us from the former."
No doubt
there has been some ground given for this reproach. There has been confusion in
many minds between the penalty incurred by the race now and the final
individual one; and between that which Christ had to bear for our salvation and
that of those finally unsaved. But we can have little difficulty in discerning
between things so radically different, and thus the failure of Mr. White’s
argument to touch the true orthodox position. The curse of the law was not
"eternal misery," and it was not, moreover, as he defines it, in this case
"death by hanging on a tree or otherwise." There is no "otherwise." Could you
read into the old law which the apostle quotes: "Cursed is every one that
hangeth on a tree, or dies otherwise? Clearly not. It is of the very essence of
his statement that the form of the death the Lord died marked it out as a death
of curse. And who that considers the strangeness of that special denunciation
of one so dying, but must see that it was essentially prophetic, contemplating
from the time of its utterance just that one death which has now given it
significance and glorified it forever?
Not death alone, but death
enshrouded with all that could make death terrible, - death in its true
character for the sinner: not death as the doom of the race merely; not death
as a babe or a saint might endure it, but such a death as the awful midday
darkness symbolized, such as the anguished cry of agony declared it, - "My God!
my God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
Wrath, but not eternal wrath: who
could think of that? Yet for another it would have been eternal He with whom
the fire of God could bring out nothing but sweet savour, - He who was (not
disobedient, but) "obedient unto death, even the death of the cross;" He who in
the days of His flesh offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying
and tears unto Him that was able to save Him out of death" was heard for His
piety" (Heb. v. 7, mg.), and "raised up from the dead by the glory of the
Father" (Rom. vi. 4). The glory of God not only permitted this, but required
it: as the sixteenth psalm expresses the faith of the blessed Offerer, "Thou
wilt not abandon my soul to sheol; neither Thou wilt suffer Thine Holy One to
see corruption."
Not eternal wrath could there be upon a "Holy One;"
nor was it necessary for atonement that there should be an exact calculation of
what suffering the sins of men would involve for them! Its value was otherwise;
it was in the vindication of eternal righteousness in the very penalty
necessitated by sin, - not arbitrarily inflicted, but necessitated. "Thou art
holy" (Ps. xxii 3), proclaimed by the perfect substitute in the very place of
penalty, is satisfaction; the infinite satisfaction; for human sin.
I
agree, then, with Mr. White that "it is not necessary to suppose that the
Saviour endured an amount of suffering equal to that collectively deserved by
the elect, or by the whole race of mankind." Scripture has no such thought., I
do not, on the other hand, accept his own curious reason, that "He was a
propitiation for the race, regarded as one individual - the first Adam, whose
sin comprised the germ of all subsequent transgressions." Assuredly this is
reasoning without the Word.
"Literal death" was not either the whole curse
of the law or all that the Lord suffered - very far from it. The thought leaves
out the burning of the sin-offering without the camp, which the apostle dwells
upon in Heb. xiii., as absolutely necessary that He might sanctify the people
with His own blood, and which the place of the cross, outside the city of God,
bore testimony to, externally. True, that "without shedding of blood is no
remission," but only the blood of a victim so offered could be brought by the
high-priest into the sanctuary for sin. This teaching leaves out, therefore,
what is essential for atonement. Could it be thought that it was merely
"literal death" which weighed the Lord down in agony in the garden, or made the
cross the abyss of suffering that it was? It would be lowering the blessed One
below the level of the thousands of His own people who have sung His praise out
of the flame itself!
Mr. White, alas, knows not the cross in what it
really was. He knows not either what "imparted its sacrificial efficacy to the
blood of the Lamb." This he makes out to be His deity - an error in which he is
following others, no doubt, though pressing to an extreme their doctrine. But
in its every form it is unscriptural. That the glorious fact of Christ’s
deity gives even His manhood a significance is of course true, and is brought
before us even in relation to sacrifice in those offerings of birds in which
the heavenly character of Him who makes atonement is set before us. Yet while
this is true, and must not be overlooked or slighted, there is not the
slightest reason to show from Scripture that "His deity gave a purging efficacy
to the endurance of ‘the curse of the law’" (p 242). On the contrary,
what gave effect was that endurance itself on the part of One in whom the fiery
trial brought out nothing but sweet savour to God, the fragrance of perfect
obedience even to such a death.
Thus "it became Him of whom are all
things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make
the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." (Heb. ii. 10.) Thus
indeed "it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul." Every passage
which speaks of atonement and its efficacy insists upon the work as in itself
efficacious, and upon the humanity, not the deity, of the Offerer. And the
passage which Mr. White quotes is no exception to this: "How much more shall
the blood of Christ, who, through the [an] Eternal Spirit, offered Himself
without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works." (Heb. ix. 13.)
This does not at all say that "it was the union of an ‘Eternal
Spirit’ with the humanity which imparted its sacrificial efficacy to the
blood of the Lamb" (p. 241). It is not of Incarnation that the passage speaks,
or could speak, but of the Spirit of God which rested on the Man Christ Jesus.
How incongruous would be the thought of Christ’s manhood offering itself
to God through the Godhead! How simple that of "the Man, Christ Jesus,"
offering Himself through the Holy Ghost to God! And what Mr. White contends for
can as little be found elsewhere as in his one proof-text.
"A
difficulty" now "suggests itself" for our author, "in bar of the conclusion
that Jesus Christ bore the curse of the law. It is objected that the curse
denounced to our first parents was, according to us, death forever, -
dissolution without hope of a resurrection; and that therefore the threatening
did not take effect upon the Redeemer." He owns that this would be valid "if
the Saviour had been simply human. . . . But the Saviour was divine. As man,
identified with human nature, He died; and His death became a sin offering; as
God, He could not die. As man, He was ‘made under the law;’ as God,
He was above the law laid on creatures. And therefore when the curse had taken
effect upon the manhood, it was still open to the divine Inhabitant absorbing
the Spirit into His own essence to restore the ‘destroyed temple’
from its ruins; and taking possession of it in virtue of His divinity (not
legally, as a man,) to raise it up on the third day. He arose, therefore, as
the divine Conqueror of death, ‘God over all, blessed for evermore,’
and was thus ‘declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the
Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead’ (Rom. i. 4)."
The last quotation is incorrect. Mr. White has - unwittingly, of
course, but it shows great want of care in quoting Scripture - inserted "His"
where it is not found. Another mistake would have been evident if he had
consulted the Greek: it is literally "by resurrection of dead persons," and can
scarcely apply as he has made it. I believe that the resurrection of Lazarus
and others is what is spoken of; for resurrection is divine work, and the Lord
speaks of this as what was to glorify the Son of God (Jno. xi. 4). At any rate,
it is not "His resurrection," and another of these solitary proof-texts has
failed Mr. White.
And what does he mean by the "divine Inhabitant
absorbing the Spirit into His own essence"? That the Lord’s human spirit
was absorbed into Deity? I do not wish to make him responsible for so strange a
doctrine, and yet I do not know what else the word can mean. I will pass it,
therefore, now. That the Lord rose in another condition of life than that out
of which He had passed in death is of course true; and that His death was the
end judicially of the old creation, I do not doubt. That His spirit did not
die, that His soul was in hades, but not left there, show clearly that, even to
His manhood, death was not extinction. The "curse of the law" was not that, -
did not involve it.
We may pass over the rest of Mr. White’s
third book. Much of it scarcely touches our present subject. Some things that
do, as the Lord’s preaching to the spirits in prison, have been already
sufficiently examined. In much too we are glad to be able to express agreement
with him. He does not, by any means, represent the wide divergence from
orthodoxy found in many of the writers of the school to which he belongs. But
we shall find nearer agreement with them in the fourth book, in which we come
directly to the consideration of the "doctrine of future punishment" On this
account, also, there will be the less to take up here.
In fact, in the
whole discussion of Scripture-terms which fills the next chapter, I can find
nothing that has not already been examined. They are presented after the usual
manner, - what is temporal confounded with what is eternal, what is material
with what is spiritual. In such massing of texts an effect is produced wholly
disproportionate to their real value. The mind is dazzled and thrown off its
guard; and when with this a strong appeal is made to the sensibilities at the
same time, it is no wonder if many are insnared.
But how is it, it may
be asked, that Scripture seems to lend itself in this way to these doctrines?
Or why is it, to put the question more correctly, that these terms, "death" and
"destruction," are used in so many forms with reference to the future of the
wicked? I answer, the object is surely to put an end to that false hope, which,
even in the face of all this testimony, is so ready to assert itself, that
eternity has yet a gospel for those unsaved here. No words are so effectual to
dispel so dangerous an illusion as these and similar ones. True, that when
applied to the present time, they are not completely so, for God can say as to
Israel He says, "O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in Me is thy help"
(Hos. xiii. 9). But "eternal destruction" forbids hope altogether. Again, "to
him that is joined to all the living there is hope" (Eccles. ix. 4), but the
dead are beyond recall. When, then, in eternity also, after the full review of
the "things done in the body," the judgment of God confirms in a "second death"
the sentence of the first, what hope is left? None - none whatever! Yet the
second death is not extinction: it is the "lake of fire" (Rev. xx. 14, and see
p. 193).
When Mr. White comes at last to examine the "principal texts
supposed to teach the everlasting duration of sin and misery" it is evident
that he is himself uneasy. Yet he says plainly, -
"The question is, whether
these few passages, taken in the popular sense, are to give the law to the
interpretation of the general current of Scripture language on future
punishment; or whether the plain and natural sense of this general language is
to determine the force of the few disputed quotations" (p. 391).
Surely
this is not the issue. The "natural sense" in Scripture is to rule every where,
and, so read, the Word of God will never be found in contradiction to itself.
It is already an argument that the case is gone against one when he proposes to
take the testimony of the witnesses in a non-natural sense.
But the
Word of God is not in the full sense that for Mr. White. It may contain it; but
the Copernican astronomy has upset the Ptolemaic and the Bible one already.
Modern geology has had a similar triumph in its own sphere. And when we come
even to what might be considered its own peculiar field, we are told that, -
"The indefensible method of citing the books of the Bible as if some one
had beheld an angel inditing them in succession; without consideration of their
individual history, of the degree of confidence due to the fullness of each
writer’s information, of the POSITIVE MARKS OF DEFECTIVE KNOWLEDGE, OR
MISCONCEPTION in some, will serve the cause of truth no longer" (p. 393).
What hope, then, of certainty at all? For how many are able critically to
weigh such evidence as this? And who that has discovered the blunders of the
inspired writers in things accessible to us will confide in them for
revelations of things wholly beyond us? It is the Lord who asks, "If I have
told you of earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell
you of heavenly things?"
But Mr. White has evidence: -
"We may
read, for example, with general confidence the gospel of Matthew.
notwithstanding the omission of one sentence in the middle of Christ’s
last discourse on Olivet (the same discussion in which later occurs the kolasin
aionios[everlasting punishment] of xxv. 46) - an omission supplied by St. Luke
(xxi. 24), ‘And Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles, until the
times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.’ And in consequence of that fault of
St. Matthew, or his Greek translator, we shall not unduly [!] question the
accuracy of the other reports of Christ’s teaching in this gospel.
Nevertheless, it is certain that that omission, leaving the discourse to end
with the unqualified words, ‘Verily, I say unto you, This generation shall
not pass till all these things be fulfilled" (xxiv. 34), has thereby created
one of the chief stumbling-blocks to faith in the New Testament, - .it being
clear that Christ’s second advent did not occur in ‘that
generation,’ but will take place at the end of those ‘times of the
Gentiles’ our Lord’s reference to which St. Matthew unwittingly
omitted, and St. Luke has happily supplied."
Yet it cannot be supposed
that Mr. White is ignorant that the passage in question has been otherwise
explained, and he vouchsafes no reason for rejecting the explanation. He is
doubtless aware that {genea} is given in the lexicons as "a race," as
well as "a generation," and that in Phil. ii. 15 it is translated "nation,"
that the English word even is used in another sense than the ordinary one, as
where it is said, "This is the generation of them that seek Him" (Ps. xxiv. 6),
or, "Thou wilt preserve them from this generation forever" (xii. 7), or, "I
should offend against the generation of Thy children" (lxxiii. 15). I see no
reason to doubt that the Lord spoke of the unbelievers among the Jews, who will
not, in fact, pass away until the Lord appears, - "blindness in part" having
happened unto Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles is come in" - that is,
for this whole dispensation. In this case, there is really no difficulty
whatever, the use of the term being precisely the same as in Ps. xii. 7 already
quoted, and elsewhere; and there is no need for any supplementing of the text
at all.
Yet upon such a slender basis as this Mr. White can say, -
"I cannot conceal my conviction that the path of duty and of wisdom in dealing
with such documents as the gospels, demands this practical conclusion: - If
they offer to us any statements of Christ’s doctrine, by excess or defect
conspicuously disagreeing with the facts, or with the plain sense of His
teaching as recorded by the same or other historians, resolutely to refuse to
allow such exceptional misreports or omissions to interfere with the truth
which has been learned by a wider survey of the evidence."
And he goes
on to announce his belief in the various degrees of inspiration of the writers
of the Bible: -
"It forms no part of the present writer’s belief that
each contribution to the collection which we combine in one volume, and call
the Bible, has been preserved from every tinge of educational thought, from
every defect in statement, from every reflection of surrounding opinion or
faith. The receiving mind somewhat colours perhaps every communication.
"And for our own part, we are well resolved that no isolated
‘text’ of any synoptic gospel shall overthrow our faith in the
lessons learned from the massive records of a revelation extending from one end
of man’s history to the other," etc., etc.
These views are general
enough, as we have already seen, among those who hold with the doctrines of our
author. It is, of course, an. indirect confession that if we are to hold the
absolute inspiration, of Scripture, we cannot hold the views he advocates. And
this we may well accept as truth. It prepares us also for the treatment which
the texts to which he refers will receive at his hands.
The first of
these is Matt. xxv. 46; and he allows that there is in the Greek text
"absolutely no various reading of any account in the most ancient manuscripts;"
but, he adds, it must always be remembered that the nearly uniform testimony of
antiquity is that the original of Matthew’s gospel was in Hebrew, and that
it is uncertain how much authority attaches to any particular expression in the
Greek translation"!
This is to set aside the unanimous testimony of the
ancients to the book we possess, of which Olshausen says, -
"While all the
fathers of the Church relate that Matthew had written in Hebrew, yet they
universally make use of the Greek text as a genuine apostolic composition,
without remarking what relation the Hebrew Matthew bears to our Greek gospel.
For that the earlier ecclesiastical teachers did not possess the gospel of St.
Matthew in any other form than we now have it, is established."
I quote
from Dr. Thomson’s article in Smith’s Dictionary, who adds, "The
original Hebrew of which so many speak, no one of the witnesses ever saw. And
so little store has the Church set upon it, that it has utterly perished." That
Mr. White should set more store by it for his purpose is not hard to
understand. A doubt is one of the easiest things to insinuate, one of the
hardest to refute. By entertaining a doubt, man fell; and it is Satan’s
favorite weapon still.
In a note is suggested another doubt, "not as a
basis of argument, but as a matter of interest" (!) "and those who know the
weight assigned by Von Tischendorf to similar examples will be ready to allow
it a certain degree of importance" - as what? as a matter of interest, or as
argument? Who does not see that the argumentative force is what gives it
"interest," and nothing else? - "that the two most ancient, and several more
modern manuscripts of the Italic version . . . . here have distinctly, in ver.
46, ‘These shall go away, ad ignem aternum, into the eternal
fire,’ not ad suppliciurn æternum, into eternal punishment."
Unfortunately, those who value Tischendorf’s judgment in the
matter are well aware that he did not sanction, and that no editor of the Greek
Testament has sanctioned, any doubt as to the reading here. And many know also
that by the end of the fourth century the Latin version was in such a confused
and chaotic state as to necessitate Jerome’s revision (the Vulgate). It is
to the fourth century that the two manuscripts in question are referred.
After all this, Mr. White consents to the "supposition that the Greek
was the original, and that Matthew wrote what we find in these expressions."
He then attempts (for the most part after the usual manner) to
overthrow the natural force of the passage, in which to follow him would
necessitate a recapitulation of a large proportion of the arguments already
given in this book. I can find nothing that has not been fully met. Nor need I
take up his comment upon Mark iii. 29, which he reads, with Tischendorf,
"guilty of an eternal sin." The thought is strange to me, but I have no other
objection, and found nothing upon the disputed reading.
The next
passage which he considers is Mark ix. 44-50. "The original state of the text
here," he says, "seems hopelessly doubtful." But on the contrary, the omission
of the repetitions in vers. 44-46 leaves its teaching absolutely untouched. The
forty-ninth verse is by some editors deprived of its latter clause, although
the context speaks strongly for its retention. Here also the omission does not
touch the doctrine. Mr. White speaks of a "mass of contradictory evidence" as
to both clauses; but he does not seek to justify this, says, "it matters not,
for no valid argument for immortality in sin and suffering can be drawn hence
under any reading."
He relies upon two main arguments: -
"(1) The argument for endless sin and sorrow hence derived is based
upon that very understanding of the verb to die against which the argument
itself is directed. The eternal suffering is supposed to be proved by the
words, ‘their worm dieth not’ But" dieth" here is taken in the sense
of ‘ceaseth to be,’ - not in the sense of being miserable or being
unholy."
Certainly an "unholy" worm would be a somewhat incongruous
idea, and we freely concede also to Mr. White that "to die" never means "to be
miserable." We concede that the death of a worm is its ceasing to be, and on
this account, no doubt, teleuta is used (and not apothneskei,) as Mr. White
himself observes: for this word has this as its primary sense. He seeks to rob
it of its force indeed by a reference to the Hebrew of Isa. lxvi. 24, where
"the worm’s death is represented by tamuth, the same verb which describes
the death of the sinner elsewhere." This, however, concludes nothing. for the
Lord’s words in Mark are not a mere citation of Isaiah, as he supposes.
But we also allow that if he can prove that a man is no more than a worm, his
death can only be what a worm’s death is.
Mr. White’s second
argument is again from the supposed citation of Isaiah. In the Old-Testament
prophet, the language has reference to "carcasses," and literal worms and fire:
he therefore argues that the words in Mark speak of a like physical extinction.
I have elsewhere (p. 310-314, and comp. 250, 251,) sufficiently
examined this. The truth is, that the earthly scene is typical of one beyond
the earth, just as was the valley of Hinnom of the New-Testament gehenna.
And now we come finally to the passages in the Apocalypse, which Mr.
White is anxious to interpret by something else. He first of all adduces its
"less obscure portions, chaps. ii. and iii.; and in chap. ii. 23 finds in the
threatening "I will kill her children with death," "the strongest expression to
denote absolute extinction." If he had compared chap. vi. 8, he would perhaps
be more doubtful. The sword and hunger and death and beasts of the earth
answer, without question, to God’s "four sore plagues" in Ezek. xiv. 21:
"the sword and the famine and the noisome beast and the pestilence," where the
Septuagint as in many other places translates "pestilence" - death,
thanaton. If this is the strongest expression to be found for "absolute
extinction," then the cause of Conditional Immortality has assuredly no cause
for triumph. Perhaps Mr. White may find more reason than he has done why "this
is one of the many phrases used in Scripture . . . . which modern preachers
never dream of employing in ‘warning the wicked man.’ "
He
then passes to the end of the book, brings in anticipatively the argument as to
the lake of fire, the casting in of Death and Hades (to be "put an end to"),
and the "generic likeness" between the first and second death. All this has
been fully looked at (pp. 193, 322.) He next asks, "Shall the gospel [St. John]
be interpreted by the key of the mystical Apocalypse; or shall the sense of the
Apocalypse be fixed by the gospel?" Then a few lines dismiss Rev. xiv. 10, 11,
as "allowed by nearly all commentators to predict earthly and terminable
judgments on the supporters of the apostasy," and he finds the fulfillment in
the judgment of Babylon in the eighteenth chapter. Which (until some proof is
attempted) it is sufficient to deny.
Rev. xx. 10 detains him a little
longer. He says, as to the expression "forever and ever" ("to the ages of
ages"), -
"There can be no doubt that the terms of duration here employed
are sometimes used to denote an absolute eternity, as in relation to the nature
of Deity. There is as little doubt that they are as frequently used to denote a
very limited duration. The alternative meaning must be decided by the nature of
the subject, or by other declarations" !!
So that "who liveth forever
and ever" might mean, "who liveth for a very limited duration," only being
spoken of the Lord God Almighty, we know it must here mean just what it says!
"Forever and ever" is thus like an algebraical x, the symbol of an unknown
quantity, which must be gathered from the company it keeps. Still, it seems
strange that "who liveth forever and ever," - which must be, interpreted by the
"nature of the subject," "liveth as long as He liveth" should be given as
descriptive of God! Does not the feeblest mortal live as long?
No, we
cannot accept this, Mr. White; and having gone carefully and conscientiously
through all the passages, we feel abundantly able to deny that "for the ages of
ages" means any thing less than strict eternity. Mr. White undertakes no proper
examination, furnishes nothing in proof but what has been answered again and
again, and, as usual, carries us lightly over a number of Scriptures in the two
pages following. I can only refer my readers to the previous chapters of this
book for what I have not space to review again.
Go to
Appendix Two
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