'universalism'--the teaching that there are to be none finally lost--is
an instance of wilfulness. To speak of that which lies beyond death,
even in the case of the worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place
'Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain--which must not be,'
is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the
New Testament.
{214}
It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament an expectation
of a final unity of the whole universe in God, and that we find it hard
to conceive the relation of lost souls in hell to this final unity.
Certainly all legitimate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited
revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open. Certainly we
know in part--the partialness of our knowledge can hardly be
exaggerated. But we must be true to both elements in what is disclosed
to us; and Dr. Martineau has reminded us[3] how deeply 'the belief in a
separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribution of men into
only two classes of good and bad, friends and enemies of God,' though
'at first sight nothing can appear more unnatural and defiant of all
fact,' is yet bound up with 'the inward look' of moral evil and the
fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to be true to
say that a really Christian Theism, and a really Christian doctrine of
human freedom, are inseparable from the belief in the possibility of
wilful sin leading to final ruin.
'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement';
and this judgement in the case of those of us who have wilfully
hardened themselves, or remained loveless and love-rejecters, in face
of the real offer of God to man in Christ Jesus, is a divine
condemnation which takes effect in an eternal punishment, the
bitterness as well as the justice of which the soul realizes, and
which--if it does not necessarily mean an everlasting continuance of
personal consciousness--is yet final and irreversible, and unspeakably
awful[4].
[1] _Summa_, pars. 1, qu. 75, art. 6, 'Respondeo dicendum, quod necesse
est dicere, animam humanam, quam dicimus intellectivum principium, esse
incorruptibilem.'
[2] See Dr. Agar Beet's _Last Things_ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898), pp.
194 ff, and Gladstone's _Studies Subsidiary to Butler_ (Oxford, 1896),
part ii. pp. 260 ff.
[3] See _Types of Ethical Theory_ (Oxford, 1885), ii. pp. 60 ff.
[4] The only passage in the New Testament which strongly suggests an
_everlasting_ persistence of personal consciousness of pain, is Rev.
xx. 10, 'Shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.' This is
explicit enough. But I am persuaded that all the numbers and
expressions for periods of time in the Apocalypse are strictly
symbolical. 'A thousand years,' 'forty and two months,' 'three days
and a half,' 'day and night for ever and ever,' are expressions which
have to be translated into some moral equivalent before they can be
made the basis of literal teaching. Thus 'day and night for ever and
ever' describes in a picture the _completeness_ of the final overthrow
and the anguish of the enemies of the Lamb. The symbolical character
of the expression is further indicated by 'the beast' and 'the false
prophet'--themselves symbolical figures--being with the devil the
subjects of the torment.
Some will say that the deterrent effect of the doctrine of hell depends
upon its being held to be a state of strictly endless conscious
torment. I do not believe this is the case. The language of the New
Testament is full enough of deterrent horror if we are faithful to it.
And after all, this is all we have a right to be.
{215}
NOTE D. See vol. i. pp. 143 ff.
DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT.
I have endeavoured above to sketch the positive conception of the
Atonement, as St. Paul seems to put it before us. Christ inaugurates
the church of the new covenant, the new life of union with God. He
lays its basis in a great act of reparation to the righteousness of
God, which 'the old Adam' had continually outraged. This act of
reparation lies in a moral sacrifice of obedience, carried to the
extreme point by the shedding of His blood. This is the great
propitiation in virtue of which God is enabled, without moral
misunderstanding, to forgive freely the sins of any one who comes in
faith to unite himself to Christ, and set him free to begin the new
life.
The subject is a divine 'mystery,' and we shall never adequately probe
it. Nay more, one man's thought will rightly seem inadequate to
another, who has gained, or thinks he has gained, some special avenue
of insight into {216} the divine depths. But when we pass from special
points of view, which are necessarily more or less individual, and can
never become certainties for men in general--when we pass on to the
ground of what should be the common church belief, the statement of the
original revelation, it is not, it seems to me, liable to any of the
familiar moral objections, or indeed a subject of any special
difficulty. The difficulties experienced by the moral consciousness of
our age have been due to gross and unnecessary misunderstandings, of
which the following are, perhaps, the most considerable.
(1) The propitiation has become separated from the new life, for which
it merely prepares the way. It has been elevated, with disastrous
moral results, from a means to an end. Christ's work _for us_ has been
treated apart from His work _in us_, in which alone it is realized. He
alone can act _for_ all men, because He only can be their new life
within. But on this see vol. i. pp. 141 f, and _Ephes._ pp. 54 ff.
(2) The idea of injustice has been introduced into the 'transaction' of
the Atonement, and has been the most fruitful source of
difficulty;--but quite unnecessarily. There is a story that when
Edward VI was a child, and deserved punishment, another boy was taken
and whipped in his place. This monstrously unjust transaction has been
taken by Christian teachers as an illustration of the Atonement; and it
is truly an illustration of the Atonement as they misconceived it. But
the misconception is gratuitous: there is no real resemblance in the
two cases. For first, what is represented to us in the New Testament
is not that Jesus Christ, an innocent person, was punished, without
reference to His own will, by a God who thus showed Himself indifferent
as to whom He punished so long as some one suffered. But He, being
Himself very God, the Son of the Father, the administrator of the {217}
moral law and judge of the world, of His own will became man, and
suffered what the sin of the world laid upon Him, in order that He
might lift the world out of sin. Voluntary self-sacrifice for others
is at least not to be described as injustice. At least we rejoice to
recognize that God accepts such self-sacrifice. It is to vicarious
self-sacrifice like our Lord's that the human race owes the greater
part of whatever moral progress it has hitherto made.
Secondly, God is not represented as imposing any specially devised
punishment on His only Son in our nature. As the matter is stated in
the New Testament, He required of Him obedience, the obedience proper
to man; and, if we regard sympathy with our fellow men as a part of our
duty to God, we may say obedience only. Thus, 'Lo, I come to do thy
will, O God' is the one cry of the Christ. In His simple acceptance of
the whole of human duty lies the moral essence and value of His
sacrifice. All the physical and mental sufferings of Christ came out
of His fulfilment of the human ideal, Godward and manward, and were
involved in it. He died because obedience to the terms of His
mission--'the word of truth, and meekness, and righteousness'--in a
world of sin such as this is, involved dying. 'He was obedient'
without reserve--'unto death, even the death of the cross[1].' The
value of the bloodshedding lies in this, so far as Scripture enables us
to judge--that it represents utter obedience under conditions which
human sin, the sin of Jews and Gentiles, laid upon Him: and it was in
this sense, which does not leave out of consideration the mental
torment caused to His sinless spirit by contact with sin[2], that He
'bare our sins in his body {218} on the tree,' and that 'the Lord made
to light on him the iniquity of us all.' What is ascribed to the
Father is that He 'spared not' His only Son by miraculously exempting
Him from the consequences of His mission; and that He foresaw,
overruled, and used for His own wise and loving purposes the sin of
men[3].
Thirdly and lastly, the Christ (as represented in the New Testament)
did not suffer in order that we might be let off the punishment for our
own sins, but in order to bring us to God. 'By his stripes we
are'--not excused punishment, but--'healed.' In fact, there are two
distinguishable punishments for sin. There is the spiritual
punishment, which is involved in being morally alienated from God,
which may become irreversible and eternal, but which is gone when the
moral alienation is gone. From this Christ delivers us in making us at
one again with the Father, but He Himself did not endure it. God
forbid that we should imagine such a thing! Besides this there is the
temporal penalty which our sins bring as inevitable consequences upon
ourselves and upon the race. All these consequences of human sin the
sinless Christ bore for us, but not that we might be let off {219}
bearing them. We must bear them too--both the death of the body and
the chastisement of particular sins. Christ bore the punishment of
sins that were not His own, in order that in our case the punishments
of sins which are our own might, through His bringing us back to God,
be converted into healing chastisements and gracious penances. The
record of God's dealings with His saints is still, as in Ps. xcix. 8,
that they are heard, forgiven and punished.
How gratuitously then the idea of injustice has been introduced into
the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice for us becomes evident when once it
is brought within the scriptural limits. Christ suffered voluntarily.
He suffered simply what was involved in becoming man in a world of sin.
He suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us
back to God, that so we might have grace to bear our own sufferings and
share His.
This alone, it seems to me, is what the New Testament certainly
teaches. And the matter of most importance is that, ridding our minds
of distracting and often needless difficulties, we should drink in,
with heart and intelligence alike, the full force of what is certainly
part of the Gospel--the doctrine of the one, full, perfect, and
sufficient atonement with the Father, won for us by the self-sacrifice
of the Christ.
[1] Phil. ii. 8; Hebr. x. 5-9.
[2] The perfect Man perfectly realized the misery and horror of the
sins on behalf of which He suffered. How much is involved in this in
the way of detailed realization of each individual sin of each
individual sinner, is a matter on which we have no clear grounds for
exact statement.
[3] I believe that nothing more than this is really suggested by
Scripture. The phrase, 'made _sin_ for us' (2 Cor. v. 21), means, I
believe, according to the clear use of the word in the LXX, 'made a
_sin-offering_ for us.' The same words in the Hebrew stand for sin and
sin-offering, and the use of the Greek follows: see especially (in LXX)
Lev. iv. 31, 'It is the sin (= sin-offering) of the assembly;' 24, 'It
(the goat) is a sin;' 29, 'He shall lay his hand upon the head of the
sin;' vi. 25, 'This is the law of the sin'; viii. 14, 'The bullock of
the sin.' Cf. Hos. iv. 8, &c.
NOTE E. See vol. i. p. 196.
EVOLUTION AND THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE FALL.
There is a wide-spread and popular notion that a marked contradiction
exists between the biological theory {220} of evolution and the
Christian doctrine of the Fall, which may be stated and examined under
several heads:--
I.--'According to the theory of evolution man began his career at the
bottom, emerging from purely animal life, and slowly struggled upwards
to his present level of attainment. According to the Christian
doctrine, on the contrary, he was created perfect, and then
subsequently fell into sin and accompanying misery. Thus, according to
one theory, man began at the bottom; according to the other, he began
at the top.'
Now there is no doubt that when so stated the evidence is all in favour
of the scientific point of view, and against the Christian. But such a
contrast requires the greatest modification on both sides before it can
be taken as truly representing the facts. Thus, it is not the case
that the Bible suggests that man was created perfect, i.e. perfectly
developed, and that his later course has been simply the effect of the
Fall, i.e. a downward course. Leaving first out of account Gen. i-iii,
we notice that the Bible is conspicuously, and in marked contrast to
the religious books of other nations, the book of development. It
looks continuously and systematically forward, not backward, for the
perfecting of man. It traces the beginning of civilization in Abel,
the keeper of sheep, Cain, the tiller of the ground, in Jabal, 'the
father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle,' in Jubal, the father
of music, 'of all such as handle the harp and pipe,' in Tubal Cain, the
first forger of brass and iron work; it indicates the origin of
religious worship (in some sense) at the time of Enoch, and the origin
of building with the tower of Babel. The names of Noah, Abraham,
Moses, Samuel, David, &c., represent stages of advance along the line
of a chosen people; and later on it appears also that upon the chosen
people centres a hope for all nations, and a purpose is discovered in
universal history. The special {221} intellectual qualities of various
races or civilizations, as of Egypt and Tyre, are recognized by some of
the prophets, and recognized as part of a divine purpose for the
world[1]. The Bible then is the book of development; it looks forward,
not backward. But it is also true that all this development is
represented as having been (we may say) a second-best thing. It has
not been according to God's first purpose. There has been a great and
continual hindrance, which has consisted in a persistent rebellion or
sin on man's part against God; and this again has had its root in a
certain perversion of the heart of mankind which is regarded as
approximately universal. If we now take into account again the first
three chapters of Genesis (which, however, have left much less trace
than is commonly supposed in the Old Testament as a whole[2]) we find
that they describe an original act of rebellion on the part of the
first human pair, which is there spoken of as at least entailing
external consequences of a penal sort upon their descendants--that is
death, pain, and the loss of Paradise; and that later, especially in
the teaching of St. Paul, the universal moral flaw in human nature
(original sin) is also represented as having its source in this initial
act of rebellion.
Sin is therefore, according to our Christian scriptures, something
unnatural to man: the violation of his nature by his rebellion; and it
is a continual element of deterioration. But the idea that man was
created perfect, i.e. so as not to need development, is not suggested.
No doubt theologians, from the age of Augustine down to recent times,
have done something more than suggest it. Thus Robert South supposes
that 'an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the
rudiments of Paradise'; and Milton implanted the idea in the {222}
imagination of Englishmen; but it is in no way suggested by the Bible,
and was expressly repudiated by the earliest Christian theologians in
east and west. Thus, in answer to the question whether Adam was formed
perfect or imperfect, Clement of Alexandria replied, 'They shall learn
from us that he was not perfect in respect of his creation, but in a
fit condition to receive virtue.' And Irenaeus says that it was in the
power of God to make men perfect from the beginning, but that such an
initial perfection would be contrary to the law of human nature, which
is the law of gradual growth[3]. We must therefore modify the
statement of Christian doctrine from which we started, thus:--_Man has
been slowly led, or has slowly developed, towards the divine ideal of
his Creator; but his actual development has been much less rapid and
constant than it might have been, owing to the fact of sin from which
he might have been free_.
Now, can it be fairly said that science can take any legitimate
exception to such a statement? The progress of man which
anthropological science discloses is very broken, very partial; if
development of some sort is universal, progress is very rare, distinct
deterioration not uncommon. Science, like poetry and philosophy, must
bear witness to the disappointing element in human nature, of which He
was so conscious of whom it is said that 'He did not trust himself to
man, because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning
man, for he himself knew what was in man'--the sad secret of human
untrustworthiness and unsatisfactoriness[4].
Again, can science assert that this actual development of man, so
thwarted and tainted and partial, has been the only possible
development, and that there could not have been a better? If it cannot
say this, there is in the {223} general view of human progress and
deterioration no antagonism between religion and science.
II.--But it may be said, 'Science certainly does say that the actual
development of man has been the only possible development. Science
excludes the idea of sin in the sense of something which need not have
happened, because it excludes the idea of freedom or contingency
altogether. Good and bad characters are like good and bad apples--mere
facts of natural growth'; or more suggestively, 'Sin (so called) is
only the survival of brute instincts, which, from a higher condition of
evolution, men have come to be ashamed of.'
It cannot be made too emphatic that here is the real battle-ground of
religion and science to-day, though the fact is often concealed in
popular controversy. _I do not believe there is any real difficulty in
adjusting sufficiently the relations of religion and science as to the
Fall when once the idea of sin has been admitted--that is, the idea of
free, responsible action, with its correlative, the possibility of
wrong action which might have been avoided_. Christian and other
teachers have, no doubt, often failed to see how limited human freedom
is, but they have never been wrong in asserting that the reality of
freedom within limits is essential to Christianity and morality. Sin
is not a mere fact of nature. It is a perversion which ought not to
have been. This subject is not what is directly before us now; but the
heart of the controversy is here; and I will make the following very
brief remarks upon it.
(1) A theory that cannot be put into practice, or a theory that cannot
account for the facts, is a false or at least inadequate theory. Now
the theory of necessary determinism cannot be put into practice. To
believe that our own conduct is not really under our own control--that
the idea of responsibility is at bottom an illusion--is to destroy the
basis of human life and education. Even {224} the holders of the
theory admit that it must be kept out of sight in practice.
Further, it is a theory that cannot account for the facts--viz. for the
existence of the universal sense of responsibility; and the application
to human action of moral blame and praise, which penetrates the whole
of thought and language, and which holds too large a place in human
life to be a delusion. We are not ashamed of a physical accident, but
we are ashamed of telling a lie. And this difference is fundamental
and based on reality.
(2) The Christian assumption may be stated as follows: granted that we
cannot increase the sum of force which passes from external sources
into our system, and passes out again in manifold forms of human
action, yet within certain limits we can direct it for good or
evil--i.e. the 'voluntary' part of a man's action may be determined
from below, so to speak, by purely animal motives, or by rational and
spiritual motives. In the latter case, the action is of the proper
human quality, and stamps a rational and spiritual character upon all
that falls within its range. In the former case, it may be truly
regarded as a survival of the physical instincts of animal progenitors,
and no doubt it emerges as a part of the physical order of the world.
But, considered as human action, it represents a lapse, a culpable
subordination of the higher to the lower in our nature, a violation of
the law proper to manhood[5]. This is the point. St. John says, 'All
sin is lawlessness,' and (by the exact form of expression which he
uses) he implies also that all lawlessness is sin. Here, and here only
where voluntary action begins, do you see violation of law, and
therefore, within limits, a disturbance of the divine order--something
which ought to have been otherwise.
{225}
(3) The belief that the moral evil of our nature does not properly
belong to our nature but is its violation, and that if once the will be
set right it can be remedied, has been the secret of the moral strength
of Christianity. Christianity has said to all men, However corrupted
your nature, the corruption does not essentially belong to you. Give
your wills to God, and, if slowly, yet surely, if not fully in this
world, then beyond it, all can be set right. 'According to thy faith
be it unto thee.' And the practical power of this appeal, shows its
agreement with reality.
(4) On the other hand, it cannot be claimed that the theory is contrary
to any real scientific _knowledge_; for biology confesses that it knows
very little as to the actual methods by which force is redistributed in
human action. It is contrary only to some large and unverifiable
assumptions--assumptions which ignore the abstract character of
biological psychology, as of other sciences.
Now granted this reality of free voluntary action, it will hardly be
denied that history discloses to us a practically universal prevalence
of sin[6], in the present and in the past; and we can hardly fail to
perceive, lying behind actual sins, a tendency to sin--what Shelley
calls 'the ineradicable taint of sin,' a perverse inclination inhering
in the stock of our manhood, which is what theology calls original sin.
III.--But here a more modern objection occurs. Christianity assumes
that this moral flaw or taint, weakness or grossness, in human nature
is the outcome of actual transgressions, in other words that original
sin is due to actual sin, whereas the tendency of recent biological
science is to deny that acquired characters can be inherited, and
therefore to deny that any acts of any man or men could have any effect
on the congenital moral nature of their descendants; the taint or fault
in {226} human nature, must be a taint or fault in that original
substance which what is called man derived from his pre-human ancestry.
To this I reply:--This is no doubt the view which Professor Weismann
has made more or less prevalent. The substance of heredity
('germ-plasm') is taken to be a substance _per se_, which has always
occupied a special 'sphere' of its own, without any contact with that
of 'somatoplasm' further than is required for its lodgement or
nutrition; hence it can never be in any degree modified as to its
hereditary qualities by use-inheritance. It has been absolutely
continuous 'since the first origin of life.'