Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

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.”