It now remains to see what Paul thought was to be the final portion of the hardened and persevering sinner. One class of passages in his writings, if taken by themselves, would lead us to believe that on that point he had no fixed convictions in regard to particulars, but, thinking these beyond the present reach of reason, contented himself with the general assurance that all such persons would meet their just deserts, and there left the subject in obscurity. "God will render to every man to the Jew first, and also to the Greek according to his deeds." "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." "So then every one of us shall give an account of himself to God." "At the judgment seat of Christ every one shall receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or whether it be bad." From these and a few kindred texts we might infer that the author, aware that he "knew but in part," simply held the belief without attempting to pry into special methods, details, and results that at the time of the judgment all should have exact justice. He may, however, have unfolded in his preaching minutia of faith not explained in his letters.
A second class of passages in the epistles of Paul would naturally cause the common reader to conclude that he imagined that the unregenerate those unfit for the presence of God were to be annihilated when Christ, after his second coming, should return to heaven with his saints. "Those who know not God and obey not the gospel of Christ shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence and glory of the Lord when he shall come." "The end of the enemies of the cross of Christ is destruction." "The vessels of wrath fitted for destruction." "As many as have sinned without law shall perish without law." But it is to be observed that the word here rendered "destruction" need not signify annihilation. It often, even in Paul's epistles, plainly means severe punishment, dreadful misery, moral ruin, and retribution. For example, "foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition," "piercing them through with many sorrows." It may or may not have that sense in the instances above cited. Their meaning is intrinsically uncertain: we must bring other passages and distinct considerations to aid our interpretation.
From a third selection of texts in Paul's epistles it is not strange that some persons have deduced the doctrine of unconditional, universal salvation. "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." But the genuine explanation of this sentence, we are constrained to believe, is as follows: "As, following after the example of Adam, all souls descend below, so, following after Christ, all shall be raised up," that is, at the judgment, after which event some may be taken to heaven, others banished again into Hades. "We trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of them that believe." This means that all men have been saved now from the unconditional sentence to Hades brought on them by the first sin, but not all know the glad tidings: those who receive them into believing hearts are already exulting over their deliverance and their hopes of heaven. All are objectively saved from the unavoidable and universal necessity of Hadean imprisonment; the obedient believers are also subjectively saved from the contingent and personal risk of incurring that doom. "God hath shut them all up together in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all." "All" here means both Jews and Gentiles; and the reference is to the universal annulment of the universal fatality, and the impartial offer of heaven to every one who sanctifies the truth in his heart. In some cases the word "all" is used with rhetorical looseness, not with logical rigidness, and denotes merely all Christians. Ruckert shows this well in his commentary on the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians. In other instances the universality, which is indeed plainly there, applies to the removal from the race of the inherited doom; while a conditionality is unquestionably implied as to the actual salvation of each person. We say Paul does constantly represent personal salvation as depending on conditions, as beset by perils and to be earnestly striven for. "Lest that by any means I myself should be a castaway." "Deliver such an one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." "Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of the lord." "To them that are saved we are a savor of life unto life; to them that perish, a savor of death unto death." "Charge them that are rich that they be humble and do good, laying up in store a good foundation, that they may lay hold on eternal life." It is clear, from these and many similar passages of Paul, that he did not believe in the unconditional salvation, the positive mechanical salvation, of all individuals, but held personal salvation to be a contingent problem, to be worked out, through the permitting grace of God, by Christian faith, works, and character. How plainly this is contained, too, in his doctrine of "a resurrection of the just and the unjust," and of a day of judgment, from whose august tribunal Christ is to pronounce sentence according to each man's deeds! At the same time, the undeniable fact deserves particular remembrance that he says, and apparently knows, nothing whatever of a hell, in the present acceptation of that term, a prison house of fiery tortures. He assigns the realm of Satan and the evil spirits to the air, the vexed region between earth and heaven, according to the demonology of his age and country. 22
Finally, there is a fourth class of passages, from which we might infer that the apostle's faith merely excluded the reprobate from participating in the ascent with Christ, just as some of the Pharisees excluded the Gentiles from their resurrection, and there left the subject in darkness.
22 A detailed and most curious account of this region, which he calls Tartarus, is given by Angustine. De Gen. ad. lit. lib. iii. cap. 14, 15, ed. Benedictina.
"They that are Christ's," "the dead in Christ, shall rise." "No sensualist, extortioner, idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." "There is laid up a crown of righteousness, which the Lord shall give in that day to all them that love his appearing." In all these, and in many other cases, there is a marked omission of any reference to the ultimate positive disposal of the wicked. Still, against the supposition of his holding the doctrine that all except good Christians would be left below eternally, we have his repeated explicit avowals. "I have hope towards God that there shall be a resurrection both of the just and the unjust." "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ." These last statements, however, prove only that Paul thought the bad as well as the good would be raised up and judged: they are not inconsistent with the belief that the condemned would afterwards either be annihilated, or remanded everlastingly to the under world. This very belief, we think, is contained in that remarkable passage where Paul writes to the Philippians that he strives "if by any means he may attain unto the resurrection." Now, the common resurrection of the dead for judgment needed not to be striven for: it would occur to all unconditionally. But there is another resurrection, or another part remaining to complete the resurrection, namely, after the judgment, a rising of the accepted to heaven. All shall rise from Hades upon the earth to judgment. This Paul calls simply the resurrection, [Non ASCII Characters] After the judgment, the accepted shall rise to heaven. This Paul calls, with distinctive emphasis, [Non ASCII Characters] the pre eminent or complete resurrection, the prefix being used as an intensive. This is what the apostle considers uncertain and labors to secure, "stretching forward and pressing towards the goal for the prize of that call upwards," [Non ASCII Characters] (that invitation to heaven,) "which God has extended through Christ." Those who are condemned at the judgment can have no part in this completion of the resurrection, cannot enter the heavenly kingdom, but must be "punished with everlasting destruction from the presence and glory of the Lord," that is, as we suppose is signified, be thrust into the under world for evermore. As unessential to our object, we have omitted an exposition of the Pauline doctrine of the natural rank and proper or delegated offices of Christ in the universe; also an examination of the validity of the doubts and arguments brought against the genuineness of the lesser epistles ascribed to Paul. In close, we will sum up in brief array the leading conceptions in his view of the last things. First, there is a world of immortal light and bliss over the sky, the exclusive abode of God and the angels from of old; and there is a dreary world of darkness and repose under the earth, the abode of all departed human spirits. Secondly, death was originally meant to lead souls into heaven, clothed in new and divine bodies, immediately on the fall of the present tabernacle; but sin broke that plan and doomed souls to pass disembodied into Hades. Thirdly, the Mosaic dispensation of law could not deliver men from that sentence; but God had promised Abraham that through one of his posterity they should be delivered. To fulfil that promise Christ came. He illustrated God's unpurchased love and forgiveness and determination to restore the original plan, as if men had never sinned. Christ effected this aim, in conjunction with his teachings, by dying, descending into Hades, as if the doom of a sinful man were upon him also, subduing the powers of that prison house, rising again, and ascending into heaven, the first one ever admitted there from among the dead, thus exemplifying the fulfilled "expectation of the creature that was groaning and travailing in pain" to be born into the freedom of the heavenly glory of the sons of God. Fourthly, "justification by faith," therefore, means the redemption from Hades by acceptance of the dispensation of free grace which is proclaimed in the gospel. Fifthly, every sanctified believer receives a pledge or earnest of the spirit sealing him as God's and assuring him of acceptance with Christ and of advance to heaven. Sixthly, Christ is speedily to come a second time, come in glory and power irresistible, to consummate his mission, raise the dead, judge the world, establish a new order of things, and return into heaven with his chosen ones. Seventhly, the stubbornly wicked portion of mankind will be returned eternally into the under world. Eighthly, after the judgment the subterranean realm of death will be shut up, no more souls going into it, but all men at their dissolution being instantly invested with spiritual bodies and ascending to the glories of the Lord. Finally, Jesus having put down all enemies and restored the primeval paradise will yield up his mediatorial throne, and God the Father be all in all.
The preparatory rudiments of this system of the last things existed in the belief of the age, and it was itself composed by the union of a theoretic interpretation of the life of Christ and of the connected phenomena succeeding his death, with the elements of Pharasaic Judaism, all mingled in the crucible of the soul of Paul and fused by the fires of his experience. It illustrates a great number of puzzling passages in the New Testament, without the necessity of recourse to the unnatural, incredible, unwarranted dogmas associated with them by the unique, isolated peculiarities of Calvinism. The interpretation given above, moreover, has this strong confirmation of its accuracy, namely, that it is arrived at from the stand point of the thought and life of the Apostle Paul in the first century, not from the stand point of the theology and experience of the educated Christian of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER V.
JOHN'S DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
WE are now to see if we can determine and explain what were the views of the Apostle John upon the subject of death and life, condemnation and salvation, the resurrection and immortality. To understand his opinions on these points, it is obviously necessary to examine his general system of theological thought. John is regarded as the writer of the proem to the fourth Gospel, also of three brief epistles. There are such widely spread doubts of his being the author of the Apocalypse that it has seemed better to examine that production separately, leaving each one free to attribute its doctrine of the last things to whatever person known or unknown he believes wrote the book. It is true that the authorship of the fourth Gospel itself is powerfully disputed; but an investigation of that question would lead us too far and detain us too long from our real aim, which is not to discuss the genuineness or the authority of the New Testament documents, but to show their meaning in what they actually contain and imply concerning a future life. It is necessary to premise that we think it certain that John wrote with some reference to the sprouting philosophy of his time, the Platonic and Oriental speculations so early engrafted upon the stock of Christian doctrine. For the peculiar theories which were matured and systematized in the second and third centuries by the Gnostic sects were floating about, in crude and fragmentary forms, at the close of the first century, when the apostle wrote. They immediately awakened dissension and alarm, cries of heresy and orthodoxy, in the Church. Some modern writers deny the presence in the New Testament of any allusion to such views; but the weight of evidence on the other side internal, from similarity of phrase, and external, from the testimony of early Fathers is, when accumulated and appreciated, overwhelming. Among these Gnostic notions the most distinctive and prominent was the belief that the world was created and the Jewish dispensation given, not by the true and infinite God, but by a subordinate and imperfect deity, the absolute God remaining separate from all created things, unknown and afar, in the sufficiency of his aboriginal pleroma or fulness. The Gnostics also maintained that Creative Power, Reason, Life, Truth, Love, and other kindred realities, were individual beings, who had emanated from God, and who by their own efficiency constructed, illuminated, and carried on the various provinces of creation and races of existence. Many other opinions, fanciful, absurd, or recondite, which they held, it is not necessary here to state. The evangelist, without alluding perhaps to any particular teachers or systems of these doctrines, but only to their general scope, traverses by his declarations partially the same ground of thought which they cover, stating dogmatically the positive facts as he apprehended them. He agrees with some of the Gnostic doctrines and differs from others, not setting himself to follow or to oppose them indiscriminately, but to do either as the truth seemed to him to require.