The New Theology

by R. J. Campbell

"The tissues of the life to be,
We weave with colours all our own;
And in the field of destiny
We reap as we have sown."

There is nothing horrific about this law of the spirit. In a true and real sense it is our own law; we make it. Being what we are, we cannot let ourselves off. Pain is at once the consequence of sin and the token of our divine lineage. But there is nothing individualistic about this sinning and suffering. All the love in the universe comes to the help of the soul that tries to rise. It will even enter the prison house along with it and accept the cross in the endeavour to hasten the emancipation of the sinbound soul. In fact, it must do so, for as long as there is any sin to be done away, love cannot have its perfect work. This it was which brought Jesus to earth, and this it is which turns every follower of Jesus into a saviour. Love must strive and suffer with sin until God is all in all.

+The spiritual resurrection.+—It follows from this that the true resurrection is spiritual, not material, and this is the sense in which the word is most frequently employed in the New Testament. In the fourth gospel Jesus is represented as saying, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." This is a great saying, and the writer of this particular gospel meant every word of it in the sense I have just indicated. He makes the eternal Christ the speaking terms of the earthly Jesus and tells us that the uprising of this eternal Christ within the soul of the penitent sinner is the real resurrection.

+The resurrection of Jesus.+—But this subject of the resurrection demands a further examination. We have already seen how inconsistent popular Christian doctrine is about the matter, and yet Christianity started with the belief in a resurrection of our Lord, a belief which has continued down to the present day. What are we to say about this?

We may as well admit at the outset that the gospel accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are mutually inconsistent and that no amount of ingenuity can reconcile them. Matthew speaks of a Galilean appearance, and says nothing about the ascension. Luke says a great deal about the Jerusalem appearances, nothing about Galilee, and tells us that the ascension took place from Bethany. The end of St. Mark's gospel has been lost, and the last few verses are a summary of the accounts in the other gospels concerning the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord. John's version is, of course, less historical than the synoptists, and puts the last appearance at the sea of Tiberias. A minute discussion of the problem thus raised would be unprofitable for our present purpose, but I hope we can take for granted the broad fact that without a belief in a resurrection of some kind Christianity could not have made a start at all. It is almost indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world believed Him to be dead and buried. The earliest apostolic utterance on the subject in the New Testament is the familiar passage from 1 Cor. xv: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas, then of the twelve: After that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." This statement is clear enough and almost unquestionably authentic. It places beyond doubt what the apostolic church thought of the resurrection of Jesus. The little group of disciples must somehow have become convinced that their Master was not really dead, but alive and reigning in the world unseen, interested as much as ever in the work His followers were doing, and spiritually present with them in the doing of it. This conviction had immediate and important spiritual results. It gave these simple men a new and greater confidence in Jesus and in the power of the life He had lived. They saw that this life was, after all, the strongest thing in the universe. They realised that in the end nothing could stand against them; evil could do it no real harm, for God was behind it. Even before the crucifixion they had looked upon Jesus as the Son of God in a higher and more spiritual sense than that title had been used before, but now henceforth they thought of Him as such in a higher way still. According to Paul He was "declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead." If we try to put ourselves in the place of these first Christians, we shall realise better the effect of the resurrection upon their feelings and behaviour. Let us suppose that we had known Jesus in the flesh, that we had learned to understand a little of the moral and spiritual beauty of the ideal revealed in His life, and that afterward we had seen Him die in blood and shame; I think it would have taken a good deal to convince us that evil had not gained the day. Now suppose after this we had absolute proof—I will not say how—that our Master was still alive, and that His spirit was with us and helping us, would it not make a very great difference to our outlook upon life and our confidence in God? We could not but feel the littleness of the power that had tried to destroy Jesus, and we should not be afraid of it any more. This is precisely what appears to have happened in the experience of these Galileans. Defeat and failure were somehow turned into victory and success; they had seen Jesus again.

+Theories of resurrection.+—But how are we to account for this new-found confidence of theirs that they had really once more looked upon the face of Jesus? The subject has been discussed so exhaustively that no possible explanation of it has been left altogether untouched. Such a unique event as the raising of a physical body from death is one which the average western mind of the present day would reject as incredible if we had never heard it before, consequently there exists a widespread tendency among liberal Christians to try to account for primitive Christian belief in the resurrection of our Lord in some other way. Thus we have the hallucination theory, the apparition theory, the swoon theory, and others of a similar character. I should suppose that most thinkers who take the point of view of the New Theology would hold one or other of these explanations or some modification of them, but I confess I have never been able to do so. It seems to me that no such explanation of the universally held Christian conviction that the physical body of Jesus actually rose from the tomb is sufficient to account for it. The passage already quoted from 1 Cor. xv is alone enough to illustrate this statement. It is clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic idealism, and monistic idealism recognises no fundamental distinction between matter and spirit. The fundamental reality is consciousness. The so-called material world is the product of consciousness exercising itself along a certain limited plane; the next stage of consciousness above this is not an absolute break with it, although it is an expansion of experience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that individual self-consciousness persists beyond the change called death, it only means that such consciousness is being exercised along another plane; from a three-dimensional it has entered a four-dimensional world. This new world is no less and no more material than the present; it is all a question of the range of consciousness. It is this view, the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that leads me to believe that less than justice has been done by liberal thinkers to the theory of the physical resurrection of Jesus. What is the physical but the common denominator between one finite mind and another? It is a mode of language, an expression of thought as well as a condition of thought. Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional world trying to converse with a being still limited to a two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think may have happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. The three-dimensional body would behave in a manner altogether unaccountable to the two-dimensional watcher. The latter, knowing only length and breadth, and nothing of up or down, would see his three-dimensional friend as a line only. The moment the three-dimensional solid rose above or sank below his line of vision, it would seem to have disappeared like an apparition, although as really present as before. To the two-dimensional mind it would seem as though the solid were a ghost. Does this throw any light upon the mysterious appearances and disappearances of the body of Jesus? The all-important thing after Calvary was to make the disciples aware, beyond all dispute, that Jesus was really alive, more alive than ever, and that His murderers had been helpless to destroy Him. When we remember that to the ordinary Jewish mind the thought of personal immortality was anything but clear, and that to many of them death was synonymous with annihilation, we can see how enormous was the change that had to be wrought in the mental attitude of those who had seen Jesus die a violent and bloody death. To see Him return triumphant was the one thing required to counteract their feeling that all was lost, and the best means of demonstrating this victory over death was to enable them to behold Him in the body with which they were already familiar and which they loved so well. For, after all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of language, a mode of communication between mind and mind; it was no more and no less a thought-form than an apparition would have been, and, from the point of view of monistic idealism, it is no more difficult to believe in the reanimation of a physical body than in the use of any other thought-form to express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have a being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that—

"Life is ever lord of death,
And love can never love its own."

This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naïvely regarded heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the under-world, the shadowy home of the departed, in a state of existence which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may as well say so.

+Paul's mystical view of resurrection.+—But we should do Paul an injustice if we were to limit the value of his utterances by his views about the resurrection of the human body. I have already pointed out that Paul employs physical symbols in a mystical way, and in nothing was this more so than in his use of the idea of a resurrection. With him, as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issuing-forth, of the Christ or divine man within the soul. When he speaks in this way he allows the thought of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight. Thus he writes: "If we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection." "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." "If then ye be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God…. For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Even if this last sentence is not Paul's own it has a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought the great apostle seems to have escaped the limitations of his early Pharisaism. He ceases to speak of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think of death as the gateway to the immediate presence of his dearly loved Master. "For I long to depart and to be with Christ which is far better." Here, surely, we are listening to the voice of Paul the aged.

The moment we succeed in disentangling ourselves from all literal and limiting New Testament statements about the connection between sin and physical death, the physical resurrection, the distant Judgment Day, and such-like, we find ourselves in a position to appreciate the beautiful spiritual experience in which these very terms become symbols of inner realities of the soul. Till we can do this, New Testament language is sure to be a hindrance to any true apprehension of the moral value of the gospel of Christ. The only salvation we need trouble about is the change from selfishness to love, "We know that we have passed from death unto life because we love." This change is equivalent to a resurrection, the uprising of the eternal Christ within us. It is also an ascension, the uplifting and uniting of the soul to the eternal Father. But such a resurrection and ascension may be preceded by a great deal of pain when the soul is shedding the husk of selfishness. There is no dodging the consequences of sin; that is absolutely impossible. A saviour may suffer with and for the sinner, but the sinner must suffer too. The suffering is not a mark of God's anger, but of his love; so far from salvation being a means of screening us from it, the pain is a means by which the salvation takes effect. It is the true self asserting its dominion over the false. Heaven and hell are states of the soul, and the latter implies the former. It is life that suffers, not death. When a guilty soul awakens to the truth, hell begins, but it is because heaven wants to break through. The aim and object of salvation are not the getting of a man into heaven, but the getting of heaven into him. There is nothing horrifying about the law of retribution, although it is inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of our divine origin, our own true being asserting itself against the fetters of evil. But it is the Christ that saves us, not the retribution; the retribution only shows that the Christ is there, and that from the Calvary caused by sin, and from the tomb in which the true self lies buried, He will rise in glorious majesty in the soul and unite us in the bonds of love to the eternal divine humanity which is God.