Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

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.