§ 3. The Three Principal Views of Death—the Pagan, Jewish, and Christian.
There are three principal views of death—the Pagan view, the Jewish view, and the Christian view.
Paganism, in all its various forms, is chiefly distinguished by its transferring to the other life the tastes, feelings, habits of this life. The other world is this one, shaded off and toned down. It is gray in its hue, wanting the color of this world; and is really inferior to it, and only its pale reflection. To the gods of Olympus the doings of men are matters of chief interest. Tartarus and the Elysian Fields are occupied [pg 290] by lymphatic ghosts, misty spectres, unsubstantial and unoccupied. When a living man enters, like Ulysses, Æneas, or Dante, they throng around him, delighted to have something in which they can take a real interest. “Better be a plough-boy on earth than a king among the ghosts.” This expresses the Pagan idea of the other world. This world is more real than the other, to the Pagan.
Judaism, in its view of hereafter, is much more positive. It began with no idea of a hereafter. Nothing is taught concerning a future life by Moses, and little is to be found concerning it even in the prophets. The explanation is simple. Men hard at work in the present do not think much of the future; and the work of the Jews was to be servants of Jehovah and doers of his law here. However, all men must think a little of the region beyond death. When the Jews thought of it, they projected their law upon its blank spaces. It was a place where Jehovah would vindicate his law—where the just should be happy, the unjust miserable. The perplexity which tormented Job, David, and Elijah—namely, that bad men should succeed in this world and good men fail—was to find its solution there. Judgment was the Jewish idea of hereafter—a judgment to come. “I have a hope toward God, as they themselves also allow,” said Paul, speaking of the Pharisees, “that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, of the just, and also of the unjust.”
The Christian view of death is, that it is abolished—it has ceased to be anything. The New Testament distinctly says, “who has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light.”[32] Death, to a Christian, is but a point on the line of advancing being; a door through which we pass; [pg 291] a momentary sleep between two days. In the same sense the Saviour says, “He that liveth and believeth on me shall never die.”
So also he spoke of Lazarus as being only asleep, and said of the daughter of Jairus, “She is not dead, but sleepeth.”
Certainly Jesus could not have spoken of death in this way if he regarded it as the awful and solemn thing which most believers consider it. If it is the moment that decides our eternal destiny, which shuts the gate of probation, which terminates for the sinner all opportunity of repentance and conversion, for the saint all danger of relapse and fall,—then death is surely something, and something of the most immense importance.
But Christ has really destroyed death both in the Pagan and in the Jewish feeling concerning it. He destroys the Pagan idea of death as a plunge downward from something into nothing, a descent into non-entity or half-entity, a diminution of our being, a passage from the substantial to the shadowy and unreal.
For, according to Christianity, we do not descend in death; we ascend into more of reality, into higher life. Death is a passage onward and upward.
The proof of this we find in the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection.
The meaning of the resurrection of Christ is not, as has been often supposed, that after death he came to life again, but that at death he rose; that his death was rising up, ascent. This we shall show in a future section of this chapter.
One power of Christ's resurrection was to abolish the fear of death. It brought life and immortality to light. It showed men their immortality.
The fear of death is natural to all men, but it is easily removed. The smallest and lowest power of the resurrection is shown in removing it.
The fear of death is natural. It consists in this—that we are, in a great part of our nature, immersed in the finite and perishing. “When we look at the things which are seen,” which “are temporal,” we have an inward feeling of instability—nothing substantial. Therefore it is said, “In Adam all die,” for the Adam, the first man in all of us, is the animal soul. “The first man is of the earth, earthy.” The law of our life is, that it comes from our love. When we love the finite, our life is finite. But besides the finite element in man, the animal soul, or Adam, is the spiritual element, or Christ, the life flowing from things unseen, but eternal.
Christ has abolished death. There is now to the Christian no such thing as death, in the common sense of the term. The only death is the sense of death, the fear of death, which insnares and enslaves. Jesus delivers us from this by inspiring us with faith. We rise with him when we look with him at the things unseen. Faith in eternal things brings into the soul a sense of eternity. Death is only a sleep: outward death is the sleep of the bodily life; inward death is the sleep of the higher life. We awake and rise from the dead when Christ gives us life; and when he, who is our life, shall appear, we shall also appear with him.
The philosopher Lessing says, “Thus was Christ the first practical teacher of the immortality of the soul. For it is one thing to conjecture, to wish, to hope for, to believe in immortality as a philosophical speculation—another thing to arrange all our plans and purposes, all our inward and our outward life, in accordance to it.”
Jesus also destroys the Jewish idea of death, as a passage from a world where the good suffer and the bad triumph, to a world where this state of things is reversed. The kingdom of heaven, with him, begins here, in this world. Judgment is here as well as hereafter. The Jew lived, and all Judaizing [pg 293] Christians live, under a fearful looking for of judgment after death. The Christian sees that judgment is always taking place; that Christ is always judging the world; that God's moral laws and their retributions are not kept in a state of suspense till we die—that they operate now daily. The Christian knows that heaven and hell are both here, and he expects to find them hereafter, because he finds them here. He believes in law, but not in law only. He believes in something higher than law, namely, love—the love of a present, helpful Father, of a friend near at hand, of an inspiration from on high, of a God who forgives all sins when they are repented of, and saves all who trust in him. He is not under law, but under grace.
When he looks forward to the other world, it is not as to a place where he goes to be sentenced by a stern and absolute judge, but where judgment and mercy go hand in hand, where law remains, but is fulfilled by love.
This is what Paul means when he says, “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The only real death is the fear of death—the Pagan fear of death, which is a dread of loss, change, degradation of being, to follow the dissolution of the body; and the Jewish fear of death, which is a fearful looking for of judgment, and the sting of which is sin. Christ abolishes both of these fears in every believing heart. He abolishes them in two ways—by the life and the resurrection. He is both resurrection and life: by inspiring us with spiritual or eternal life, he abolishes all fear of dissolution; and by showing us that he has ascended into a higher state by his resurrection, he gives us the belief that death is not going down, but going up. For, though “it doth not yet appear what we shall be, yet we know this, that when he shall appear, we shall be like him.”
But, unfortunately, Christians are still subject to the fear of death. This fear has been aggravated by the current teaching in pulpits professedly Christian. The fear of that “something after death” has been made use of to palsy the will; and conscience, as instructed by Christian teachers, has made cowards of us all; so that few persons can really say, “Thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
It is very certain that the Pagan view of death and the Jewish view of death still linger in the Church, and are encouraged by Christian teachers. Death is made terrible by false doctrine and false teaching in the Church. Christ has not abolished death to the majority of Christians. Christians are almost as much afraid of death as the heathen—sometimes more so.
Actual Christianity is a very different thing from ideal Christianity. Ideal Christianity is Christianity as seen and lived by Jesus; the gospel which he saw and spoke; the word of God made flesh in him. But actual Christianity is an amalgam; a portion of real Christianity mixed with a portion of the belief and habits of feeling existing in men's minds before they became Christians. The Jews took a large quantity of Judaism into Christianity; the Pagans a large quantity of Paganism. The Christian Church from the very beginning Judaized and Paganized. Paul contended against its Judaism on the one hand and its Paganism on the other. But Judaism and Paganism have always stuck to the Christian Church. She has never risen above them wholly to this day. They mingle with all her doctrines, ceremonies, and habits of life. The Romish Church has more of the Pagan element, the Protestant more of the Jewish. The mediatorial system of Rome is essentially Pagan. Its ascending series of deacons, sub-deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, cardinals, and pope in the Church below; and beatified and sanctified spirits, angels, and archangels in the [pg 295] Church above; its processions, pilgrimages, dresses, its monastic institutions, its rosaries, relics, daily sacrifice, votive offerings—everything peculiar to the Roman Church, existed before, somewhere, in Paganism. So Protestantism has taken from the Jews its Sabbath, its idea of God as King and Judge, its exclusion from God's favor of all but the elect, its view of the divine sovereignty, its doctrine of predestination, day of judgment, resurrection of the body, material heaven and material hell.
I do not mean to say that there is no truth in these things. There is, because there is some truth in Paganism and in Judaism. We are all Pagans and Jews before we become Christians. The Jewish and Pagan element is in every human soul, and in all constants in man there is truth. But the Pagan and Jewish truths are but stepping-stones to the higher Christian truth. The law and Paganism are school-masters to bring us to Christ. The evil is, that Christianity has not been kept supreme; it has often been sunk and lost in the earlier elements. As the foolish Galatians were bewitched, and relapsed from the gospel to the law,—turning again to weak and beggarly elements, desiring to be in bondage to them again, going back to their minority under tutors and governors,—so the Church has been relapsing, going back to weak and beggarly elements, not keeping Christianity supreme in thought, heart, and life, but letting Paganism or Judaism get the upper hand.
So it has been in regard to this subject. We Paganize and Judaize in our view of death. We reëstablish again what Christ has abolished. We make death something where Christ made it nothing. It is made the great duty of life to “prepare for death.” No such duty is pointed out in the New Testament. Our duty is to prepare every day to live; then, when we die, we shall be taken care of by God. We can safely leave the other world and its interests to Him who has shown himself so capable of taking care of us here.
The gloom of death has been heightened by artificial means. Mourning dresses, solemn faces, funeral addresses, the grave,—all have had an unnatural depth of awe added to the natural sense of bereavement. The Orthodox Church has deliberately and systematically Paganized and Judaized in what it has said and done about death. Its object has been always to make use of the great lever of fear of a hereafter in order to enforce Christian belief and action. Hence Death has been made the king of terrors, the close of probation, the beginning of judgment, the awful entrance to the final decision of an endless doom. All this is wholly unchristian, unknown to apostolic times, a relapse towards Paganism. It is utterly opposed to the great declaration that “Christ has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
What is called faith in immortality, therefore, is of two kinds: it is an instinct, and it is a belief. In the New Testament these are plainly distinguished. In the passage just quoted, it is said that Jesus “brought life and immortality to light.” Jesus himself says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” “He that believeth in me hath eternal life abiding in him, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Life is a matter of consciousness. It is a present possession, something abiding in us now.
Immortality, or the resurrection, is an object of intellectual belief. It is something future. We feel life; we believe in the resurrection.
We will pass on, in the next sections, to consider each of these.