Modern Skepticism / A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society

by Unknown

For we must not fail to remember that the two suppositions are mutually destructive. If Christ died, then the belief in His resurrection can only be explained on the theory that His subsequent appearance was unreal. If His subsequent appearance was unreal, then, to say the least, it is entirely gratuitous to deny the fact of His having died, because if He did not truly die, there is no discoverable reason why His supposed appearance after death should not have been real. We may choose which explanation we deem preferable. We cannot alternately or simultaneously adopt both.

I am not now called upon to prove more than what is clearly proved, that the existence of this one Epistle as the genuine work of St. Paul affords abundant evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was accepted as a fact by large numbers of men, some of whom, at least, can only have accepted it on evidence which seemed to them sufficient to counteract the adverse testimony of their experience, their reason, and their senses. And it is almost needless to observe that the belief in the resurrection as here depicted, involved also a belief in the burial[118] of Jesus Christ, in the main and essential features of His death,[119] that it was on the third day that He arose,[120] that His appearances after His resurrection were distinct and manifold,[121] and that the Apostle who depicted it had himself been among the most vehement opponents of this very belief in the person of the Lord, whose resurrection he proclaimed.[122] All this is established by the admission of this letter as genuine, and by the admission which cannot be denied, that the writer was giving a natural and plain statement of the truth, and not a fabricated or ideal narrative of fictitious occurrences.

That is to say, so far the testimony of this Epistle is in conformity with the framework of the Gospel history. If the four Gospels were lost to us, the life, and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ would still remain firmly and distinctly imbedded in the original faith of the Corinthian Church. We know from this letter that less than thirty years after the death of Christ, there was a very large body of men at Corinth who believed implicitly that He had risen from the dead, and that they knew that many persons were still alive who were eye-witnesses of the fact.

I ask you, then, very carefully to observe that this does not prove the fact. It only shows us conclusively that less than thirty years after the fact there were many persons who believed in it as such.

And let us put a parallel case. Suppose a person coming to London in the present day, and declaring that less than thirty years ago a certain man in a distant country who had been put to death as a malefactor, had risen from the dead the third day, and was still alive. What success think you would he meet with? Most assuredly there would not be half-a-dozen people who would believe him. But if, on the contrary, a new society should be formed, consisting exclusively of persons professing to believe all this, would not the circumstance be so remarkable as to lead us to infer that there must be some adequate cause for it? If the persons professing this belief were of all stations and classes, and many of them, as is proved by this Epistle, men of intelligence and discernment, should we not be constrained to confess that the only reasonable supposition was that there was something in the evidence which could not be lightly set aside? However strange and mysterious the tale might be, it could not be altogether a cunningly devised fable. There must be something at the bottom of it. No effect can exist without an adequate cause. Here is clear evidence of a very considerable effect existing. What was the cause of it? The cause alleged would doubtless be a sufficient cause, for truth is not only stranger, but mightier than fiction. And it may be fairly questioned whether, under all the circumstances, any other cause can be discovered which would be sufficient. There is so far, therefore, an antecedent probability that the cause alleged was the true cause.

Again, it is to be observed throughout all these Epistles of St. Paul that the resurrection of Christ was to him not a past influence, but a present power. If the evidence of the first Epistle to Corinth is less than thirty years after the death of Christ, the evidence of the second carries us back to nearly half that time. The writer speaks of himself as being in Christ more than fourteen years before.[123] This brings us virtually to not more than a dozen or fifteen years from the actual occurrence of the resurrection; and in all probability the Epistle to the Galatians carries us back even further still. Critics are divided as to the computation of the time mentioned in it. But if the "fourteen years after" of chap. ii. are to be added to the "three years" after which Paul "went up to Jerusalem to see Peter," then the whole period can be little less than twenty, and the extreme limit referred to scarcely more than ten years after the resurrection.[124] At that time, then, St. Paul himself fully and implicitly believed in it. At that time he had made great sacrifices for his belief in it. At that time, or shortly after, he had not improbably suffered privation and persecution because of it. But the faith which he held then he is found holding as tenaciously as ever fourteen or twenty years afterwards, holding it, in fact, so tenaciously that he is able to bring many others to share it with him. A man must be something more than an enthusiast who for fourteen years could retain a conviction so monstrous as this, if false, and at the end of that time could make more converts than before. Surely this is not the ordinary experience of mankind, that it is so easy to get men to believe as a fact, contradicting their own experience, what after all is no fact at all. It is one thing to win converts to our opinions or our principles, and quite another to gain credence for a fact that it is every one's interest to disprove.

For at that time what secondary advantage could there be in the profession of a faith which was universally despised, and which exposed its more prominent votaries to imminent peril, as the eleventh chapter of the second letter to Corinth abundantly shows. It is obvious that at fifteen years after the death of Christ many of the 500 brethren who were afterwards dead were still alive, and it is not too much to infer that St. Paul, from the position he held in the Church, was personally acquainted with many or most of them. He therefore personally must have had numerous opportunities of amply satisfying himself as to the truth of the fact which he proclaimed so persistently. But still it is evident that it possessed for him a power and an influence totally different from that of any ordinary occurrence or event. It was not the Christ who once rose, but the Christ who was risen that he proclaimed. His first rising from the grave was the work of a distinct moment of time. The influence of which He thereby revealed Himself as the centre and source was continuous and inexhaustible. It was this influence which the Apostle felt in his life. He could tell the Galatians in language it would be impossible to counterfeit, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me."[125] A declaration such as this is worth volumes of evidence; it is its own evidence; it bubbles up clear and sparkling from the very fountain and well-head of truth. No man could have said it who did not feel it, and no man could have felt it, and not known that what he felt was an intense reality, defying all explanation except on the hypothesis that the central core of it was truth, and not falsehood. If an influence thus operating on the life was derived from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there must have been something very unusual in that death, and something more than a mistake or an illusion in that rising again to set such a force in operation. No other man's death would produce the same effect, (who cares for the death of Socrates?) and no other man's resurrection, whether alleged or proved, could do so; but if this man's death and resurrection did produce it, as it plainly did, then the result speaks for itself. The Epistle to the Galatians, though written more than eighteen centuries ago, is a standing witness to it. There is no wonder that such an influence was felt then in every part of the known world, and especially in the centres of its life, such as Rome and Corinth, because we cannot but feel it now; and a principle so instinct with life cannot but be superior to and independent of the power of death. Here is the present power of the resurrection acting concurrently with the mass of cumulative evidence converging in the point when it was an event of actual history, and combining therewith to show the truth of it. Nothing can prove more conspicuously the strength of this influence in the personal life of St. Paul than his great Epistle to the Romans. Everywhere Christ is present with him as an energising power, which is vastly more than a mere memory of the past, and is a vital and potent agency still in operation. He did indeed die unto sin once, but evermore He liveth unto God.[126] The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead.[127] But what is not the least remarkable feature about the Epistle to the Romans is the fact that it was written to a Church of which St. Paul was personally ignorant. He had never been at Rome. It is evident, however, that there were many Christians there. These Christians were not his converts. He says he had had a great desire for many years to come unto them.[128] Then there had been Christians at Rome for many years. The many can be scarcely less than ten or a dozen; but if so, this brings us again to little more than fifteen years after the death of Christ. We find, however, these Christians professing identically the same belief in the same person and the same facts as St. Paul himself. They also believed in a Jesus Christ who had been crucified, and who had been raised from the dead. How they came to believe in Him we cannot tell. It is plain they did believe in Him. It is also probable in the highest degree, nay, it is impossible but that many of them from whom they received their faith, had either been eye-witnesses, or companions of eye-witnesses of the life of Jesus Christ. At any rate, it is obvious that the substantial framework of belief was identical with that which was current among the Churches of Galatia, and in the Church at Corinth. A man who had been crucified and risen again, was the centre of their hope, their affection, their joy, their confidence. In Him they all felt they were supernaturally united in a supernatural life; and as their knowledge of Christ was altogether independent of St. Paul's preaching, it possesses the value of independent testimony, and presents an additional amount of difficulty in the face of any attempt to account for the belief in Christ's resurrection on the hypothesis of some error or deception. However unreasonable it was to attempt to account for it in that way at Corinth, the difficulty becomes greater when the case of Rome is added to that of Corinth. Here the personal influence of the enthusiastic Paul is removed, and yet the results produced are manifestly undistinguishable. Their faith had been spoken of throughout the whole world,[129] and it was faith in a crucified and risen Jesus; a faith which they as Gentiles were not ashamed to profess in the Jew Christ Jesus, and to be confirmed in by the Jew Saul of Tarsus. There is something very remarkable in these results. How many national and personal prejudices must have been overcome; how many rooted and inherent animosities must have been eradicated; how much stubborn pride must have been bent and mortified; and how many acute sensibilities deadened, before results such as these could have been obtained. And what was it all for? No earthly advantage had been or was likely to be secured. No hope of visible reward was offered. Simply the loss of self-respect, in having believed what was only a gross absurdity if it was not the truth, was incurred. The knowledge that under any circumstances their temporal condition would have been far better if they had never heard of Christ Jesus; that the belief in His name could give them neither lands nor houses, but only lay upon them additional hindrances in the way of gratifying their natural inclinations, only expose them more and more to the hatred and contempt of men. If in this life only they had hope in Christ, they were of all men most miserable; there was no one redeeming point, no one compensating advantage. They had believed a lie, and they were all the worse for it. These two points at least are clear: that they thought it no lie, and that under the circumstances they must have been strangely constituted, if, being a lie, it had the power to sustain them as it did.

For observe, connected with the faith of Christ there was not even the gratification of flattered vanity in the case of these first believers. There is an intelligible pleasure that a man can find nowadays in constituting himself the apostle of unbelief. There is the promise of a certain intellectual glory in the effort to overthrow an ancient faith like that of Christianity. The hope of possible triumph is dazzling. There is a pleasure in seeming to be so much wiser than so many others, in having outstripped the accumulated wisdom of ages, in being the pioneer of intellectual emancipation, the harbinger of light that has emerged from every trace of religious darkness, the forerunner of the downfall of superstitious prejudices, the demolition of the last and oldest of the creeds. There is something to attract the imagination in all this, something to foster a self-complacent estimate of self, together with a kind of malevolent joy in indulging the passion of destructiveness. But what was there to flatter the vanity in the belief of a proclamation which was foolishness to the Greeks? What was there to exalt the intellect, or to magnify the self, in the doctrine of Christ crucified? We do not deny that it was possible for the self to enter in and mix even with the doctrine of the cross; but it could only do so as a principle that was fatally antagonistic to it. The two could not co-exist; one must destroy the other. The belief that a crucified malefactor had risen in triumph from the grave, was subversive of everything calculated to honour the intellect, or to please the natural desire of man to worship and admire himself. There was no harvest to be reaped from belief in the Crucified on this score. We are at a loss to discover in any one point what secondary motive can, with any show of probability, be attributed to the first believers, as predisposing them to their belief, if the motive was not a simple and sincere conviction of its truth. And yet if so, the difficulty becomes still greater in assuming that what they believed was not the truth, but a flagrant lie. For it must ever be remembered that it is an assumption after all. It is certainly not less difficult to prove in the face of all the evidence that Christ did not rise, than it is to prove upon that evidence that He did. If the result of the whole argument in the one case is a presumption, it most assuredly is not less so in the other.

Once more, it cannot for one moment be asserted that the Epistle to the Romans originated in any way the faith which it assumes. It is absurd to suppose that an unknown man merely on the credit of his reputation could have substantially modified the belief of a particular Church by simply inditing a letter to it. The state of things assumed at Rome, and the faith depicted in the Epistle to the Romans, are only intelligible on the supposition that they are true. It is obvious that the body of the writer's faith was substantially identical with that of those to whom he was writing. Both were attached to a particular person whom they believed to be the Son of God, who had been crucified, dead, and buried, had risen again, and was then sitting at the right hand of God as an intercessor.[130] And more than that, both believed that this person was the giver of a new Spirit which influenced both, and animated all believers, and made them all one, and was not only the evidence to them of the actual truth and resurrection of Christ, but was also the pledge that they themselves were accepted in a new relation to God by Christ.[131] This gift of the new Spirit was the invisible bond between them and Christ, between them and one another, between them and the Macedonian Christians, between them and the brethren of Corinth, between them and St. Paul himself.

Nothing the least like this Spirit had been known before in their own experience or in that of the ages past. It was a new phenomenon which they felt, and saw, and acknowledged, and could not deny. Now the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans contains incontrovertible proof of the operation of this Spirit. No letters from Paul could have made the Christians at Rome imagine they were influenced by it. We can see for ourselves that it was not less familiar to them than it was to him. No message of his had made it familiar to them. Years before they had known it, although from whom they had received it none can tell, but it is perfectly certain that a condition of belief like that at Rome could not have been the work of a day. It must have taken time to grow. And yet at the same time it is no less clear that it was a product of the existing generation. There was not one of those to whom the Apostle wrote who had not in his own being the consciousness of a prior condition of unbelief. Many of them had probably been defiled with some of the dark catalogue of crimes enumerated in the first chapter, but they had been justified by faith, and had found peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.[132] They knew this; they were conscious of the double experience; they could compare the one with the other. The Apostle's letter had not originated these experiences of their consciousness: it had reflected and expressed them. The notion of the Epistle to the Romans being an imaginary letter written under imaginary circumstances to imaginary persons, describing imaginary incidents and imaginary feelings, is too monstrously preposterous to be for one moment entertained. It has preserved the real and irresistible evidence of a vast spiritual influence at work among a large body of men which was precisely contemporaneous with one event—their belief, namely, in the resurrection of a man who had been crucified in Palestine.