Exactly here is where Paul, the noble apostle to the Gentiles, broke with the Judaizing apostles, and taught a doctrine more fully developed in its historic sequence, but substantially in perfect unison with the free teachings and spirit of Jesus himself. With Paul the test of Christian salvation was the possession of the mind of Christ. "If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his;" "but as many as are led by the spirit of God are sons of God." "Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but a new creature," begotten in the image of Christ, availeth everything before God. "God rewardeth every man, the Jew and the Gentile, according to his works." With Paul, descent from Abraham was nothing, observance of the legal code was nothing: a just and pure character, full of self sacrificing love, evoked by faith in Christ, was the all in all. Jesus Christ was the head of a new race, the second Adam; and all disciples, who, through moral faith in him, were regenerated into his likeness and unto newness of living, were thereby adopted as sons of God and joint heirs with him. The Pauline formula of salvation, freely open to all the world, was, spiritual assimilation and reproduction of Christ in the disciple.
But the Judaizing party bore a heavy preponderance in the early Church, and has succeeded unto this day in imposing on ecclesiastical Christendom its own test: namely, a sound dogmatic, belief in the supreme personal rank and office of Christ, as the only means of admission to the kingdom of heaven. The one peculiarity which most sharply and broadly contrasted the early Christians with the rest of the world was unquestionably their belief in the miraculous mission of Jesus, a belief growing deeper, higher, intenser, until it actually identified him with the omnipotent God. There was an inevitable tendency, it was a perfectly natural and necessary process, for them to make this point of contrast the central condition on which depended the possession of all the special privileges supposed to be promised to its disciples by the new religion. The result is well expressed by Polycarp in these words: "Whosoever confesses not that Christ is come in the flesh, is an Antichrist; and whosoever acknowledges not the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and whosoever says that there is no resurrection nor judgment, is the first born of Satan." This extract strikes the key note of the Orthodox Church all through Christendom from the second century to the present hour. In place of the true condition of salvation announced by Jesus, personal and practical goodness, it inaugurates the false ecclesiastic standard, soundness of dogmatic belief in relation to Jesus himself! Those who hold this are the elect, and shall stand in heaven with white robes and palms and a new song, while all the rest of the world apostate and detested enemies of God and his saints shall be trampled down in merciless slaughter, and flung into the pit whence the smoking signal of their torment shall ascend for ever and ever. It is a transformation of the bigoted scorn and hate of the covenanted Jew for his Gentile foes into the intensified horror of the Orthodox believer for the reprobate infidel. And it finally culminated in the following frightful picture which still lowers and blazes in the imagination of ecclesiastical Christendom as a veritable revelation of what is to take place at the end of the world:
While the stars are falling, the firmament dissolving, the dead swarming from their graves, and the nations assembling, Christ will come in the clouds of heaven with a host of angels and sit in judgment on collected mankind. All who submissively believed in his Divinity, and have the seal of his blood on their foreheads, he will approve and accept; all others he will condemn and reject. No matter for the natural goodness and integrity of the unbeliever: his unbelief dooms him. No matter for the natural depravity and iniquity of the believer: his faith in the atoning sacrifice saves him. The Judge will say to the orthodox, on his right, "You may have been impure and cruel, lied, cheated, hated your neighbor, rolled in vice and crime, but you have believed in me, in my divinity: therefore, come, ye blessed, inherit my kingdom." To the heretical, on his left, he will say, "You may have been pure and kind, sought the truth, self sacrificingly served your fellow men, fulfilled every moral duty in your power, but you have not believed in me, in my deity, and my blood: therefore, depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." Such is a fit verdict to be pronounced by the avenging Warrior depicted in the Apocalypse, from whose mouth issues a two edged sword, to cut his enemies asunder; who sits on a white charger, in a vesture dipped in blood, with a bow and a crown, and goes forth conquering and to conquer; whose eyes are flames of fire; who treads his rejecters in the wine press of his wrath until their blood reaches to the horse bridles. It was the natural reflection of an age filled with the most murderous hatreds and persecutions, based on political and dogmatic distinctions. But how contradictory it is to the teachings of Jesus himself! How utterly irreconcilable it is with the image and spirit of that meek and lowly Son of Man who said that he "came not to destroy men's lives but to save them;" who declared, "of mine own self I can do nothing;" who modestly deprecated all personal homage, asking, "Why callest thou me good?" who sat with the publican, and forgave the harlot, and denounced bigotry in many an immortal breathing of charity; and who, even in his final agony, pardoned and prayed for his murderers! What reason is there for supposing that he who was so infinitely gentle, unselfish, forgiving, when on earth, will undergo such a fiendish metamorphosis in his exaltation and return? It is the most monstrous, the most atrocious travesty of the truth that ever was perpetrated by the superstitious ignorance and audacity of the human mind. It is a direct transference into the Godhead of the most egotistical and hateful feelings of a bad man. No good man who had been ever so grossly misconceived, vilified, and wronged, if he saw his enemies prostrate in submissive terror at his feet, perfectly powerless before his authority, could bear to trample on them and wreak vengeance on them. He would say, "Unhappy ones, fear not; you have misunderstood me; I will not injure you; if there be any favor which I can bestow on you, freely take it." And is it not an incredible blasphemy to deny to the deified Christ a magnanimity equal to that which any good man would exhibit?
It is with pain and regret that the writer has penned the foregoing sentences, which, he supposes, some persons will read with the feeling that they are inexcusable misrepresentations, others, with a shocked and resentful horror, relieving itself in the cry, Infidelity! Blasphemy! The reply of the writer is simply that, while reluctant to wound the sensibility of any, he feels bound in conscience to make this exposition, because he believes it to be a true statement; and loyalty to truth is the first duty of every man. Truth is the will of God, obedience to which alone is sound morality, reverential love of which alone is pure piety. Frightful as is the picture drawn above of Christ in the judgment, it is impossible to deny, without utter stultification, that every lineament of it is logically implied in the formula. "There is no salvation for the man who unbelievingly rejects, no damnation for the man who believingly accepts, the official Christ and his blood." And what teacher will have the presumption to deny that just this has been, and still is, the central dogma in the faith of ecclesiastical Christendom? The legitimate result of this view, unflinchingly carried out, and applied to the precise point we now have in hand, is seen in that horrible portrayal of the Last Judgment wherewith Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Rome. The great anatomical artist consistently depicts Christ as an almighty athlete, towering with vindictive wrath, flinging thunderbolts on the writhing and helpless wilderness of his victims. The popular conception of Christ in the judgment has been borrowed from the type of a king, who, hurling off the incognito in which he has been outraged, breaks out in his proper insignia, to sentence and trample his scorners. The true conception is to be fashioned after the type given in his own example during his life. So far as Christ is the representative of God, there must be no vanity or egotism in him. Every such quality ascribed to the Godhead is anthropomorphizing sophistry. However much more God may be, he is the General Mind of the Universe. He includes, while he transcends, all other beings. Now, the General Mind must represent the interests of all, the disinterested good of the whole, and not any particular and selfish exactions, or resentful caprices, fashioned on the pattern shown among human egotists by a kingly despot.
The Church, in developing Christianity out of Judaism through the person and life of Jesus, has given prominence and emphasis to the wrong elements, seeking to universalize and perpetuate, in a transformed guise, the local spirit and historic errors of that Pharisaic sect against which he had himself launched all his invective. That temper of bigotry and ceremonial technicality which hates all outside of its own pale as reprobate, and which ultimated itself in the virtual Pharisaic formula, "Keep the hands and platter washed, and it is no matter how full of uncleanness you are within," at a later period embodied itself through the leaders of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy in the central dogma, "Nothing but faith in Christ can avail man anything before God." Instead of this the true doctrine is, Nothing but obedience, surrender, and trust, personal penitence and aspiration, can avail man anything before God.
The Christians, as the Jews did before them, have made a wrong selection of the doctrine to be, on the one hand, particularized and left behind; on the other hand, carried forward and universalized. This immense error demands correction. Let us notice a few specimens in exemplication of it. Jehovah is not the only true God in distinction from odious idols; but Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, and the rest, are names given by different nations to the Infinite Spirit whom each nation worships according to its own light. The Jews and the Christians are not the only chosen people of God; but all nations are his people, chosen in the degree of their harmony with his will. The providence of God is not an exceptional interference from without, exclusively for the Jews and Christians; but it is for all, a steady order of laws within, as much to be seen in the shining of the sun, or the regular harvest, as in any shocks of political calamity and glory. Not the Messiah alone reveals God; but, in his degree, every ruler, prophet, priest, every man who stands for wisdom, justice, purity, and devotion, represents him. It is not doctrinal belief in the Messiah, but vital adoption of his spirit and character, of the principles of real goodness, that constitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not for the resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for the resurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, and misery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue, knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physical reign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium on earth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively in Palestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on the millennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whether above the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pure affection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excluded from all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought not to cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigid outlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when the three story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits of what men knew, before exact science was born, or criticism conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the demands of the growing body of human knowledge.
Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on the whole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world and the day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents no valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical and critical information for entering into the book from the point of view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that its imagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of Hebrew Christianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out of the universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Daniel depicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but the relations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires of Persia, Media, Babylon, and Macedonia, from which they had suffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to put beneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne of God, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, with Hell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to the earth the third part of the stars of heaven; the worm wood star, that falls as a blazing lamp, and turns a third of the waters of the earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, seven vials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches, seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce, be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why, then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of fact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of the avenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and the golden streets of the city.
The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind of the Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because it rests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transference which is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association and universalizing of political and military images, which are then hardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutual relations of God and mankind. We ought to break open the metaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside. But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist on worshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents.
There is one all important fact which should convince of their error those who hold the current view of a general judgment at the end of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ. We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a final resurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existed in the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birth of Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwards adopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, this doctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to the Persians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it is Zoroaster and not Christ to whom we are indebted for the central dogmas of our religion! No, these things are imagery, not essence, the human element of imaginative error with which the divine element of truth has been overlaid, and from whose darkening and corrupt company this is to be extricated.
There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevant metaphors which we have already examined, several others of great impressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separate the truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leave the subject with an exposition of the real method of the divine government and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrast with the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them.