The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life

by William Rounseville Alger

13 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 237.

14 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 5.

15 Pearson on the Creed, 12th ed., pp. 272-275.

heaven; he came to earth and lived in a human body; on returning to heaven, instead of resuming his proper form, he bears with him, and will eternally retain, the body of flesh he had worn on earth! Paul says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." The Church, hastily following the senses, led by a carnal, illogical philosophy, has deeply misinterpreted and violently abused the significance of Christ's ascension. The drama of his resurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meant throughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was a seal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification of what should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not a type, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not a significant exhibition of the regular course of things. The same logic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body: therefore we shall," must also say, "Christ rose visibly on the third day: therefore we shall." Christ's resurrection was a miracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. The common conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, not the manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logical right to say that the physical appearance in Christ's resurrection was merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, and that on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soul entered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied in the common belief is true. The record is according to mere sensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. The record gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to follow the light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition. The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from the world of the dead, assumed again his former body, he assumed it by a miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself to his disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does not follow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that any others will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms.

The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach the popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from numerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, in common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the "flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead," or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies," why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events, nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of the fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an innumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly and church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed could enter heaven until after that great consummation.

The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is furnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion are as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died, except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle's reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked grain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all be changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne the image of the earthy." The analogy which has been so strangely perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful," "spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown, that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts on its body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul's conception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not the resurrection body that shall be; but the living soul which occupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body of immortality when the spring tide of Christ's coming draws the buried treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven.

A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates of the dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from analogy. The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with the changing phenomena of Nature's seasons would naturally suggest to a pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annual resurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what first arose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed in glowing metaphors, might by an easy process pass abroad and harden into a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula.

"O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre roll'd, And Nature rise up from her death's damp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And in blooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types of our destiny see."

Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmost souls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed forms repose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored to each other as we were before. Listening to the returned birds whose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on the verdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe the landscape over again, we eagerly snatch at every apparent emblem or prophetic analogy that answers to our fond imagination and desiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated by love and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from the cold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic, are poor analysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct and wander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before building a dogmatic doctrine on analogies, we must study those analogies with careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and to what they really lead. There is often an immense difference between the first appearance to a hasty observer and the final reality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a little more closely those seeming analogies which, to borrow a happy expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister of Immortality."

Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage of the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, not resuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Does the butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not return, ascent through future developments, not descent through the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed of? Of a soul."