2. Upon scriptural grounds.(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
2. Upon scriptural grounds.(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
2. Upon scriptural grounds.(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
2. Upon scriptural grounds.(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
2. Upon scriptural grounds.(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.
Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”
Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”;2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body.Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life.Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”;Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”
Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”;Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”:2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”;1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first[pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.
But it may be asked: Is not all this, in1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.
Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated‘soul’, inGen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If aforce, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”
Dr. H. Heath Bawden:“It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”
(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life,viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”;cf.3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”;16-19—the curse of pain and toil:22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life.Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”;25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”;Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”;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”;6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”:8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”
Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”;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—“dead through your trespasses and sins”;5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”;James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”;1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”;Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to[pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for“God”,“spirit”,“holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.
(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.
Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).
Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”;Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated“was corrupt,”is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. InPs. 119:176,“I have gone astray like a lost sheep”cannot mean“I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.”Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers[annihilators?]and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”;57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth[is annihilated?]and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”;Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off[annihilated?].”
Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute“annihilate”for“lose”;Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”;cf.Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used.1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth[annihilates?]the temple of God, him shall God destroy”;2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used.2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”= the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation.“Destruction from”= separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com.in loco:“from”= the source from which the“destruction”proceeds).“A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com.in loco.2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word“destruction”(ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated“perished”(ἀπώλετο) inverse 6.“We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition”(Plumptre, Com.in loco).
(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.
Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.
Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”;Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”;20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”;21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”The“second death”is the first death intensified. Having one's“part in the lake of fire”is not annihilation.
In a similar manner the word“life”is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good.1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life.John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that“life”is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions,“for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”(Luke 12:15). But lifeis: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.
(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New[pg 994]Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.
On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.
On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and =“sinking,”“depth,”or“the sunken, deep, place.”Ἁιδης, Hades, = not“hell,”but the“unseen world,”conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, onJob 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”
Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham“was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.”“Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt”(W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac inGen. 35:29, and of Jacob in19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried.Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being“gathered unto his people”was something different from burial.Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.”Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”;7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”;14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”
Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”;Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”;23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”;cf.1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor:“to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.
(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.
Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”
Death is often designated as a“sleeping”or a“falling asleep”; seeJohn 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.”Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used inEccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and inPs. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”
See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.”Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for‘spirit’and‘breath,’shall we say that the spirit is only breath?‘Heart’in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be‘eaten up with avarice,’while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”
(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and[pg 995]of Elijah (Gen. 5:24;cf.Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14;cf.Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).
The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”[pg 997]The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”
The Egyptian coffin was called“the chest of the living.”The Egyptians called their houses“hostelries,”while their tombs they called their“eternal homes”(Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are“living again after death, and being born again as the sun,”which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138).“The deceased lived again after death”(134).“The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born”(164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul.“There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs”(197).
Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo:“O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”;“Teti is the living dead”;“Arise, O Teti, to die no more”;“O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death.“The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”;“They render thee happy throughout all eternity”;“He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal.“Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”;“Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body.“Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”;“the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul.“A god is born, it is Unas”;“O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”;“O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.
Howard Osgood:“Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.”Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.”Ebers, Études Archéologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.”Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.”See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.
It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality:Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality:Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”;[pg 996]cf.Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”;2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”;1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor;cf.Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”;Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”
Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”;Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”;Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”;Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection;Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”
Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.”Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end;cf.Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.”Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”;26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?”Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought“a better country, that is, a heavenly”;cf.Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.
The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More:“But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.”God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey:“They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”
Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child:“What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.”Whittier, Snowbound, 200sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.”Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope:“For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”
The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”
(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).
John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.
John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”;10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”;2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people:“We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”
Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preëxistence.“In reality,”he said,“it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.”It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.
There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour:“Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.”George Dana Boardman:“Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”
George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures:“Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.”Athanasius:“Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God”(quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial.[pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, Irenæus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment.Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.