III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
III. Penalty.1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
1. Idea of penalty.By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”In this definition it is implied that:A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.
By penalty, we mean that pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by the Lawgiver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the violation of law.
Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”
Turretin, 1:213—“Justice necessarily demands that all sin be punished, but it does not equally demand that it be punished in the very person that sinned, or in just such time and degree.”So far as this statement of the great Federal theologian is intended to explain our guilt in Adam and our justification in Christ, we can assent to his words; but we must add that the reason, in each case, why we suffer the penalty of Adam's sin, and Christ suffers the penalty of our sins, is not to be found in any covenant-relation, but rather in the fact that the sinner is one with Adam, and Christ is one with the believer,—in other words, not covenant-unity, but life-unity. The word“penalty,”like“pain,”is derived from pœna, ποινή, and it implies the correlative notion of desert. As under the divine government there can be no constructiveguilt, so there can be nopenaltyinflicted by legal fiction. Christ's sufferings were penalty, not arbitrarily inflicted, nor yet borne to expiate personal guilt, but as the just due of the human nature with which he had united himself, and a part of which he was. Prof. Wm. Adams Brown:“Loss, not suffering, is the supreme penalty for Christians. The real penalty is separation from God. If such separation involves suffering, that is a sign of God's mercy, for where there is life, there is hope. Suffering is always to be interpreted as an appeal from God to man.”
In this definition it is implied that:
A. The natural consequences of transgression, although they constitute a part of the penalty of sin, do not exhaust that penalty. In all penalty there is a personal element—the holy wrath of the Lawgiver,—which natural consequences but partially express.
We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”
We do not deny, but rather assert, that the natural consequences of transgression are a part of the penalty of sin. Sensual sins are punished, in the deterioration and corruption of the body; mental and spiritual sins, in the deterioration and corruption of the soul.Prov. 5:22—“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, And he shall be holden with the cords of his sin”—as the hunter is caught in the toils which he has devised for the wild beast. Sin is self-detecting and self-tormenting. But this is only half the truth. Those who would confine all penalty to the reaction of natural laws are in danger of forgetting that God is not simply immanent in the universe, but is also transcendent, and that“to fall into the hands of the living God”(Heb. 10:31) is to fall into the hands, not simply of the law, but also of the Lawgiver. Natural law is only the regular expression of God's mind and will. We abhor a person who is foul in body and in speech. There is no penalty of sin more dreadful than its being an object of abhorrence to God.Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!”Add to this the law of continuity which makes sin reproduce itself, and the law of conscience which makes sin its own detecter, judge, and tormentor, and we have sufficient evidence of God's wrath against it, apart from any external inflictions.[pg 653]The divine feeling toward sin is seen in Jesus' scourging the traffickers in the temple, his denunciation of the Pharisees, his weeping over Jerusalem, his agony in Gethsemane. Imagine the feeling of a father toward his daughter's betrayer, and God's feeling toward sin may be faintly understood.
The deed returns to the doer, and character determines destiny—this law is a revelation of the righteousness of God. Penalty will vindicate the divine character in the long run, though not always in time. This is recognized in all religions. Buddhist priest in Japan:“The evil doer weaves a web around himself, as the silkworm weaves its cocoon.”Socrates made Circe's turning of men into swine a mere parable of the self-brutalizing influence of sin. In Dante's Inferno, the punishments are all of them the sins themselves; hence men are in hell before they die. Hegel:“Penalty is the other half of crime.”R. W. Emerson:“Punishment not follows, but accompanies, crime.”Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 59—“Corruption is destruction, and the sinner is a suicide; penalty corresponds with transgression and is the outcome of it; sin is death in the making; death is sin in the final infliction.”J. B. Thomas, Baptist Congress, 1901:110—“What matters it whether I wait by night for the poacher and deliberately shoot him, or whether I set the pistol so that he shall be shot by it when he commits the depredation?”Tennyson, Sea Dreams:“His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast, Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn'd: And that drags down his life: then comes what comes Hereafter.”
B. The object of penalty is not the reformation of the offender or the ensuring of social or governmental safety. These ends may be incidentally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the vindication of the character of the Lawgiver. Penalty is essentially a necessary reaction of the divine holiness against sin. Inasmuch, however, as wrong views of the object of penalty have so important a bearing upon our future studies of doctrine, we make fuller mention of the two erroneous theories which have greatest currency.
(a) Penalty is not essentially reformatory.—By this we mean that the reformation of the offender is not its primary design,—as penalty, it is not intended to reform. Penalty, in itself, proceeds not from the love and mercy of the Lawgiver, but from his justice. Whatever reforming influences may in any given instance be connected with it are not parts of the penalty, but are mitigations of it, and they are added not in justice but in grace. If reformation follows the infliction of penalty, it is not the effect of the penalty, but the effect of certain benevolent agencies which have been provided to turn into a means of good what naturally would be to the offender only a source of harm.
That the object of penalty is not reformation appears from Scripture, where punishment is often referred to God's justice, but never to God's love; from the intrinsic ill-desert of sin, to which penalty is correlative; from the fact that punishment must be vindicative, in order to be disciplinary, and just, in order to be reformatory; from the fact that upon this theory punishment would not be just when the sinner was already reformed or could not be reformed, so that the greater the sin the less the punishment must be.
Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.
Punishment is essentially different from chastisement. The latter proceeds from love (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Heb. 12:6—“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”). Punishment proceeds not from love but from justice—seeEz. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in judgment,“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”;Rev. 15:1, 4—“wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“Righteous art thou, ... thou Holy One, because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot.”[pg 654]So untrue is the saying of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:“The end of all punishment is the destruction of vice, and the saving of men.”Luther:“God has two rods: one of mercy and goodness; another of anger and fury.”Chastisement is the former; penalty the latter.
If the reform-theory of penalty is correct, then to punish crime, without asking about reformation, makes the state the transgressor; its punishments should be proportioned, not to the greatness of the crime, but to the sinner's state; the death-penalty should be abolished, upon the ground that it will preclude all hope of reformation. But the same theory would abolish any final judgment, or eternal punishment; for, when the soul becomes so wicked that there is no more hope of reform, there is no longer any justice in punishing it. The greater the sin, the less the punishment; and Satan, the greatest sinner, should have no punishment at all.
Modern denunciations of capital punishment are often based upon wrong conceptions of the object of penalty. Opposition to the doctrine of future punishment would give way, if the opposers realized what penalty is ordained to secure. Harris, God the Creator, 2:447, 451—“Punishment is not primarily reformatory; it educates conscience and vindicates the authority of law.”R. W. Dale:“It is not necessary to prove that hanging is beneficial to the person hanged. The theory that society has no right to send a man to jail, to feed him on bread and water, to make him pick hemp or work a treadmill, except to reform him, is utterly rotten. He must deserve to be punished, or else the law has no right to punish him.”A House of Refuge or a State Industrial School is primarily a penal institution, for it deprives persons of their liberty and compels them against their will to labor. This loss and deprivation on their part cannot be justified except upon the ground that it is the desert of their wrong doing. Whatever gracious and philanthropic influences may accompany this confinement and compulsion, they cannot of themselves explain the penal element in the institution. If they could, ahabeas corpusdecree could be sought, and obtained, from any competent court.
God's treatment of men in this world also combines the elements of penalty and of chastisement. Suffering is first of all deserved, and this justifies its infliction. But it is at the beginning accompanied with all manner of alleviating influences which tend to draw men back to God. As these gracious influences are resisted, the punitive element becomes preponderating, and penalty reflects God's holiness rather than his love. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 1-25—“Pain is not the immediate object of punishment. It must be a means to an end, a moral end, namely, penitence. But where the depraved man becomes a human tiger, there punishment must reach its culmination. There is a punishment which is not restorative. According to the spirit in which punishment is received, it may be internal or external. All punishment begins as discipline. It tends to repentance. Its triumph would be the triumph within. It becomes retributive only as the sinner refuses to repent. Punishment is only the development of sin. The ideal penitent condemns himself, identifies himself with righteousness by accepting penalty. In proportion as penalty fails in its purpose to produce penitence, it acquires more and more a retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell.”
Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, 327-333 (quoted in Ritchie, Darwin, and Hegel, 67)—“Punishment has three characters: It is retributive, in so far as it falls under the general law that resistance to the dominant type recoils on the guilty or resistant creature; it is preventive, in so far as, being a statutory enactment, it aims at securing the maintenance of the law irrespective of the individual's character. But this latter characteristic is secondary, and the former is comprehended in the third idea, that of reformation, which is the superior form in which retribution appears when the type is a mental ideal and is affected by conscious persons.”Hyslop on Freedom, Responsibility, and Punishment, in Mind, April, 1894:167-189—“In the Elmira Reformatory, out of 2295 persons paroled between 1876 and 1889, 1907 or 83 per cent. represent a probably complete reformation. Determinists say that this class of persons cannot do otherwise. Something is wrong with their theory. We conclude that 1. Causal responsibility justifies preventive punishment; 2. Potential moral responsibility justifies corrective punishment; 3. Actual moral responsibility justifies retributive punishment.”Here we need only to point out the incorrect use of the word“punishment,”which belongs only to the last class. In the two former cases the word“chastisement”should have been used. See Julius Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, 1:334; Thornton, Old Fashioned Ethics, 70-73; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:238, 239 (Syst. Doct., 3:134,135); Robertson's[pg 655]Sermons, 4th Series, no. 18 (Harper's ed., 752); see also this Compendium, references on Holiness, A. (d), page 273.
(b) Penalty is not essentially deterrent and preventive.—By this we mean that its primary design is not to protect society, by deterring men from the commission of like offences. We grant that this end is often secured in connection with punishment, both in family and civil government and under the government of God. But we claim that this is a merely incidental result, which God's wisdom and goodness have connected with the infliction of penalty,—it cannot be the reason and ground for penalty itself. Some of the objections to the preceding theory apply also to this. But in addition to what has been said, we urge:
Penalty cannot be primarily designed to secure social and governmental safety, for the reason that it is never right to punish the individual simply for the good of society. No punishment, moreover, will or can do good to others that is not just and right in itself. Punishment does good, only when the person punished deserves punishment; and thatdesertof punishment, and not the good effects that will follow it, must be the ground and reason why it is inflicted. The contrary theory would imply that the criminal might go free but for the effect of his punishment on others, and that man might rightly commit crime if only he were willing to bear the penalty.
Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.
Kant, Praktische Vernunft, 151 (ed. Rosenkranz)—“The notion of ill-desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified first of all as pure and simple requital and retribution.... In every punishment as such, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon on it.”These utterances of Kant apply to the deterrent theory as well as to the reformatory theory of penalty. The element of desert or retribution is the basis of the other elements in punishment. See James Seth, Ethical Principles, 333-338; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:717; Hodge, Essays, 133.
A certain English judge, in sentencing a criminal, said that he punished him, not for stealing sheep, but that sheep might not be stolen. But it is the greatest injustice to punish a man for the mere sake of example. Society cannot be benefited by such injustice. The theory can give no reason why one should be punished rather than another, nor why a second offence should be punished more heavily than the first. On this theory, moreover, if there were but one creature in the universe, and none existed beside himself to be affected by his suffering, he could not justly be punished, however great might be his sin. The only principle that can explain punishment is the principle ofdesert. See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:348.
“Crime is most prevented by the conviction that crime deserves punishment; the greatest deterrent agency is conscience.”So in the government of God“there is no hint that future punishment works good to the lost or to the universe. The integrity of the redeemed is not to be maintained by subjecting the lost to a punishment they do not deserve. The wrong merits punishment, and God is bound to punish it, whether good comes of it or not. Sin is intrinsically ill-deserving. Impurity must be banished from God. God must vindicate himself, or cease to be holy”(see art. on the Philosophy of Punishment, by F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139).
Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 186, 274—Those who maintain punishment to be essentially deterrent and preventive“ignore the metaphysics of responsibility and treat the problem‘positively and objectively’on the basis of physiology, sociology, etc., and in the interests of public safety. The question of guilt or innocence is as irrelevant as the question concerning the guilt or innocence of wasps and hornets. An ancient holder of this view set forth the opinion that‘it was expedient that one man should die for the people’[pg 656](John 18:14), and so Jesus was put to death.... A mob in eastern Europe might be persuaded that a Jew had slaughtered a Christian child as a sacrifice. The authorities might be perfectly sure of the man's innocence, and yet proceed to punish him because of the mob's clamor, and the danger of an outbreak.”Men high up in the French government thought it was better that Dreyfus should suffer for the sake of France, than that a scandal affecting the honor of the French army should be made public. In perfect consistency with this principle, McKim, Heredity and Human Progress, 192, advocates infliction of painless death upon idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards, insane criminals, murderers, nocturnal house breakers, and all dangerous and incorrigible persons. He would change the place of slaughter from our streets and homes to our penal institutions; in other words, he would abandon punishment, but protect society.
Failure to recognize holiness as the fundamental attribute of God, and the affirmation of that holiness as conditioning the exercise of love, vitiates the discussion of penalty by A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 243-250—“What is penal suffering designed to accomplish? Is it to manifest the holiness of God? Is it to express the sanctity of the moral law? Is it simply a natural consequence? Does it manifest the divine Fatherhood? God does not inflict penalty simply to satisfy himself or to manifest his holiness, any more than an earthly father inflicts suffering on his child to show his wrath against the wrongdoer or to manifest his own goodness. The idea of punishment is essentially barbaric and foreign to all that is known of the Deity. Penalty that is not reformatory or protective is barbarism. In the home, punishment is always discipline. Its object is the welfare of the child and the family. Punishment as an expression of wrath or enmity, with no remedial purpose beyond, is a relic of barbarism. It carries with it the content of vengeance. It is the expression of anger, of passion, or at best of cold justice. Penal suffering is undoubtedly the divine holiness expressing its hatred of sin. But, if it stops with such expression, it is not holiness, but selfishness. If on the other hand that expression of holiness is used or permitted in order that the sinner may be made to hate his sin, then it is no more punishment, but chastisement. On any other hypothesis, penal suffering has no justification except the arbitrary will of the Almighty, and such a hypothesis is an impeachment both of his justice and his love.”This view seems to us to ignore the necessary reaction of divine holiness against sin; to make holiness a mere form of love; a means to an end and that end utilitarian; and so to deny to holiness any independent, or even real, existence in the divine nature.
The wrath of God is calm and judicial, devoid of all passion or caprice, but it is the expression of eternal and unchangeable righteousness. It is vindicative but not vindictive. Without it there could be no government, and God would not be God. F. W. Robertson:“Does not the element of vengeance exist in all punishment, and does not the feeling exist, not as a sinful, but as an essential, part of human nature? If so, there must be wrath in God.”Lord Bacon:“Revenge is a wild sort of justice.”Stephen:“Criminal law provides legitimate satisfaction of the passions of revenge.”Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:287.Per contra, see Bib. Sac., Apr. 1881:286-302; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 46, 47; Chitty's ed. of Blackstone's Commentaries, 4:7; Wharton, Criminal Law, vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1.
2. The actual penalty of sin.The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:(a) From Scripture.This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”(b) From reason.The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
The one word in Scripture which designates the total penalty of sin is“death.”Death, however, is twofold:
A. Physical death,—or the separation of the soul from the body, including all those temporal evils and sufferings which result from disturbance of the original harmony between body and soul, and which are the working of death in us. That physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, appears:
(a) From Scripture.
This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.”Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited[pg 657]after the visitation of all men,”where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf.1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified.“As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”
Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.[pg 658]Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”
Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”;Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”;John 8:44—“He[Satan]was a murderer from the beginning”;11:33—Jesus“groaned in the spirit”= was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought;Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one[trespass]unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”;cf.the legal phraseology in1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.”Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death”= death is sin's just due.1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh”= that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin.1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”;Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”;6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”;8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin”(= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ...“he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”;Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”
On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.”Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.”If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:
Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is thisacquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.
Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.
While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin:Psalm 90:7, 8makes this plain:“For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, inRom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”
(b) From reason.
The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.
The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf.Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).
OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.
OnRom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; alsoGen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.”See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an“anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an“anticipative consequence”of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.
The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a“natural,”“earthly”body, but might have attained a higher being, the“spiritual,”“heavenly”body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf.1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).
Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”
Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,”see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses'[pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw:“He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.
Nicoll, Life of Christ:“We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.”But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay:“The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.”So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.
John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”;1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction;2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”;Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.”In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished:Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”At the house of Jairus Jesus said:“Why make ye a tumult, and weep?”and having reproved the doleful clamorists,“he put them all forth”(Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.
Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.”The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is“the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.”Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,”are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. OnActs 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks:“When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said:“Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christdied, the shepherd for the sheep; We onlyfall asleep.”Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”
B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.
(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term“death”is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.
Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the[spiritually]dead to bury their own[physically]dead”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”;John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”;8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”;Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”;Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”;1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while[pg 660]she liveth”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”;1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”;Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where“eternal life”is more than endless physical existence, and“death”is more than death of the body).
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”;Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with“death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”
(c) Eternal death may be regarded as the culmination and completion of spiritual death, and as essentially consisting in the correspondence of the outward condition with the inward state of the evil soul (Acts 1:25). It would seem to be inaugurated by some peculiar repellent energy of the divine holiness (Mat. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:9), and to involve positive retribution visited by a personal God upon both the body and the soul of the evil-doer (Mat. 10:28; Heb. 10:31; Rev. 14:11).
Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.
Acts 1:25—“Judas fell away, that he might go to his own place”;Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”;2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”;Mat. 10:28—“fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Heb. 10:31—“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”;Rev. 14:11—“the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever.”
Kurtz, Religionslehre, 67—“So long as God is holy, he must maintain the order of the world, and where this is destroyed, restore it. This however can happen in no other way than this: the injury by which the sinner has destroyed the order of the world falls back upon himself,—and this is penalty. Sin is the negation of the law. Penalty is the negation of that negation, that is, the reëstablishment of the law. Sin is a thrust of the sinner against the law. Penalty is the adverse thrust of the elastic because living law, which encounters the sinner.”
Plato, Gorgias, 472e; 509b; 511a; 515b—“Impunity is a more dreadful curse than any punishment, and nothing so good can befall the criminal as his retribution, the failure of which would make a double disorder in the universe. The offender himself may spend his arts in devices of escape and think himself happy if he is not found out. But all this plotting is but part of the delusion of his sin; and when he comes to himself and sees his transgression as it really is, he will yield himself up the prisoner of eternal justice and know that it is good for him to be afflicted, and so for the first time to be set at one with truth.”
On the general subject of the penalty of sin, see Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 1:245sq.; 2:286-397; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 263-279; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 194-219; Krabbe, Lehre von der Sünde und vom Tode; Weisse, in Studien und Kritiken, 1836:371; S. R. Mason, Truth Unfolded, 369-384; Bartlett, in New Englander, Oct. 1871:677, 678.