§ 158. As the belief in the immutability of the union of the Divine Essence with human nature in the Person of Christ contains in itself also the belief in the persistence of human personality, this produces in the Christian the impulse to form a conception of the state that succeeds death.

1. The meaning of this paragraph cannot be that belief in the continued existence of personality after death or (as we usually express it) the immortality of the soul arose in the way here indicated; for traces of that belief exist everywhere, and especially in the times of Christ and the Apostles it was prevalent among the Jewish people. The only thing the paragraph can mean is that apart from this connexion the belief could not have been given a place in our Christian Dogmatic. Indeed, the whole of the preceding argument has been set forth and proved without reference to this belief, and only one paragraph, that on the ascension of Christ (which is not directly a doctrine of faith) points in its direction. So that the reader who so far has found his Christian consciousness reflected in our exposition must own—assuming the facts of Christianity and our acquaintance with them—that faith in the Redeemer as it is here described may develop out of a sense of sin calling for redemption, and that from it we might infer the communication of Christ’s blessedness at every moment of life, including the last moment of all, even though we had no conception whatever of a life after death. Thus the question naturally arises whether, and how, this belief would have come to be bound up with our religious consciousness, had not the Redeemer accepted and sanctioned it. Only two possibilities are open. Either the survival of personality would have been ascertained as a truth through the activities of knowledge, that is by way of objective consciousness; or it might have been given us originally in our immediate self-consciousness, whether vitally bound up with the God-consciousness which everywhere is fundamental, or independently thereof and by itself. As regards the first, it would mean that the doctrine of immortality belonged to the higher natural science, and in that case the certainty of it could only exist for those who had mastered scientific method, while others got it from them at second hand. But this evidently is not how matters stand; it is undeniable that on the scientific plane the belief has always been attacked by some people as vehemently as it has been defended by others. Indeed, anyone who considers the so-called rational proofs of immortality more closely will scarcely find it possible to believe that the idea itself originated with science. It came from some other source, and what science did was to seek to combine it with other scientific results; and from the nature of the case any such procedure must always be liable to attack. Hence in the event of Dogmatic wishing to make a further use of the idea of immortality, it is not entitled to adopt these proofs; still less is it obliged to scrutinize them and supply their defects. On the contrary, its duty would be to await scientific demonstration of the idea, leaving the matter on one side till this was forthcoming. Otherwise, Dogmatic would be made dependent on a philosophical theory still under dispute.

As regards the second possibility, if belief in immortality were bound up with the God-consciousness in general, it would be a serious error on our part not to have developed it at the outset when dealing with that subject. This error, however, would have revealed and revenged itself before now, which in point of fact it has not done—a circumstance not calculated to predispose us to believe that the two things are really bound up together. True, there is an impious denial of immortality which is bound up with the denial of God; both things go along with a materialistic or atomistic type of thought; but there is also a surrender of the survival of personality which is of a quite different sort, and which, far from regarding spiritual activity as a mere phenomenon of matter, or making matter superior to spirit, strictly regards spirit as the power which produces living matter and conforms it to itself. From this point of view it may similarly be affirmed both that the God-consciousness constitutes the essence of every life which in the higher sense is self-conscious or rational, and that while spirit is essentially immortal in such productivity, yet of such productivity the individual soul is only a transient act, and thus essentially perishable; in which case every ‘act’ over and above the definite point reached by evolution and transcending the definite realm of human existence (to which personality belongs) would forfeit all significance. Between such a surrender of the survival of personality and the predominance of the God-consciousness (even a predominance which insisted on the purest morality and the loftiest spirituality of life) there would be no incongruity whatever. Added to this is the fact that there certainly is a belief in personal survival which is in harmony with the general spirit of piety, a belief which regards the presence of the God-consciousness in the human soul as explaining why the soul cannot share the general lot of transience; but there is also a belief which is impious. For how could this belief have any affinity with the God-consciousness, if it merely issued from an interest in the sense-aspect of life, even were that interest in some degree ennobled and refined? And yet this invariably is the case when immortality is postulated for the sake of retribution, on the assumption that no such thing exists as a pure and direct impulse to piety and morality, but both are sought only as means to the attainment of perfect felicity in a world to come. If then it must be admitted that there is a way of denying the survival of personality in following which we may be more deeply pervaded by the God-consciousness than if we accepted it, we must not continue to assert that this belief and the God-consciousness are bound up together.

2. None the less, it may well be held that belief in the survival of personality is bound up with faith in the Redeemer. The Redeemer ascribes such survival to Himself in everything that He says about His return or reunion with His people; and (since He can only say these things of Himself as a human person, because only as such could He have fellowship even with His disciples) it follows that in virtue of the identity of human nature in Him and in us, the same must hold good of ourselves. Self-evident as this may seem, we must nevertheless inquire whether objections can be made, and what these objections are, whether to the correctness of the underlying assumption or the legitimacy of the inference. Objections of the former kind could only relate to a divergent interpretation of Christ’s sayings, and so far they would not be matters for discussion here, but would belong to exegesis. Here it need only be said that even if in good faith one were to maintain that, in one way or another, the relevant sayings of Christ are all figurative, and not to be interpreted strictly, and that He nowhere claims personal survival, yet faith in Christ as we have here presented it would certainly still be possible. (For although the surrender of personal survival as just described would then be common to Christ and to ourselves, yet this would not necessarily abolish the specific difference between Him and us.) None the less, a complete transformation of Christianity would be the result were such a mode of interpretation to prevail within the Church and be made fundamental to the Christian faith. And this of itself implies that we cannot assume that such an interpretation could be put forward in good faith. The case would not be greatly altered were anyone to impugn the legitimacy of the inference referred to above on the ground that even if Christ did ascribe personal survival to Himself, it was an opinion which He merely took over from current belief without definite personal conviction, making no other use of it than He did of similar opinions in similar cases; so that His utterances on the point do not belong to the type which is so closely bound up with His assurance regarding His own dignity and destiny that neither of these could really be believed in if those utterances were rejected. In fact, it would scarcely be possible for anyone to hold sincerely that it was without personal conviction that Christ rejected the view of the Sadducees, or that His faith in the irresistible progress of His Word did not depend on His faith in the persistence of His personality. But if we cannot deny His firm conviction on the subject, the only further objection that could be suggested is that the survival of His personality (His belief in which we, in that case, should have to share) implies nothing for our own; on the ground that His survival depends exclusively on what is peculiar to Him, namely, the union of the Divine Essence with human nature which alone constitutes His human person, and that therefore we must say that just because the Redeemer is immortal, all other men are not. Such an explanation would be docetic, and none the less docetic that it is so only in one particular respect. For the difference between an immortal and a mortal soul cannot consist, or reveal itself, solely in the fact that at some time or other one of them really dies; the activities and states of each must always and in every respect be different from those of the other. Hence, if the soul of the Redeemer were imperishable, but our souls perishable, it could not justly be said that as man He was like us in all points, except sin. For if it were to be maintained that originally it was the nature of the human soul to be immortal, but that each soul becomes mortal by the transmission of sin, this would imply that the whole original work of God had been destroyed by sin, and its place taken by something else. Hence we must put aside a distinction favoured by some, to the effect that all souls become mortal through sin, and at death perish with the body, but that through fellowship with Christ believers obtain a share in immortality and pass through death to life along with Him. Either this goes back to an assumption which is Manichean in spirit, namely, that those who do not attain to living fellowship with Christ could not in any case have become immortal; or, if the others are like them in nature, that very nature must have been made totally different by regeneration. Nothing remains therefore but to say that if we take the utterances of the Redeemer about His eternal personal survival as being imbued with His perfect truth, as His disciples undeniably did, then all who are of human race can look forward to survival too. Even so the Redeemer continues to be the mediator of immortality, only not exclusively for those who believe on Him here, but for all, without exception; in this sense, that if personal immortality did not belong to human nature, no union of the Divine Essence with human nature to form such a personality as that of the Redeemer would have been possible; and conversely, that since God had determined to perfect and redeem human nature through such union, human individuals must all along have possessed the same immortality as the Redeemer was conscious of. Such is the true Christian assurance concerning this belief; every other guarantee for it, even were it clearer than efforts at proof would so far lead us to expect, must remain alien to the Christian mind, at least until this belief comes to be one of the ideas constituting the complete and universal body of human conviction.

3. This belief naturally is accompanied by a desire to form and keep clear ideas as to the condition of personality after death. But it is wholly impossible for us to claim that in this we shall definitely succeed. The question as to the conditions of existence after death (and a knowledge of them must form the basis of any clear conception) is a purely cosmological question; and space and spatialities are so closely connected with times and seasons that equally with these they lie outside the range of those communications which the Redeemer had to make to us. Hence all the indications He gives are either purely figurative,⁴ or otherwise so indefinite in tenor that nothing can be gathered from them more than what for every Christian is so much the essential thing in every conception he may form of existence after death, that without it such existence would be mere perdition—namely, the persistent union of believers with the Redeemer. Similarly, what the Apostles say on the subject is said merely by way of dim presentiment, and with the confession that definite knowledge is lacking. True, then, as it may be that each moment of our present life is intrinsically more perfect and wise the more completely and clearly it embraces both past and future, we should not seek to determine our purposes by picturing to ourselves the form of our future life. Such efforts, which spring from the interest of our sensuous self-consciousness in the survival of personality, are always sensuous in character, even when nobler than those of Judaism and Islam; and we must carefully guard ourselves against allowing them an influence (as though they derived from our Christian faith) which may only too easily injure Christian faith and life, and thereby spoil for us the present. Hence, as regards the idea of the future life, what we shall chiefly have to do is to scrutinize carefully the propositions put forward by others, as well as the opinions which have become dominant.

§ 159. The solution of these two problems, to represent the Church in its consummation and the state of souls in the future life, is attempted in the ecclesiastical doctrines of the Last Things; but to these doctrines we cannot ascribe the same value as to the doctrines already handled. 1. The phrase, ‘the Last Things,’ which has been somewhat generally accepted, has a look of strangeness which is more concealed by the word ‘Eschatology’; for the term ‘things’ threatens to carry us quite away from the domain of the inner life, with which alone we are concerned. This of itself indicates that something is being attempted here which cannot be secured by doctrines proper in our sense of the word. The terms have this in common, that if the beginning of a wholly new and ever-enduring spiritual form of life be represented as from our point of view ‘the last thing,’ that endless duration appears merely as the end of a time-life which, as contrasted therewith, is almost a vanishing quantity. This can only be justified by bringing in the idea of retribution, and that idea accordingly becomes dominant. On the other hand, if the same endless duration be regarded as the further development of the new life begun here, the brief time-life appears rather as its preparatory and introductory first stage. The former view, insisting on the idea of retribution, appeals for support chiefly to those passages in which Christ represents Himself as one to whom judgment has been committed; the latter, based on the idea of development, to passages in which He says that He is come to save. Indisputably this latter view is more closely akin to the premonition of personal survival as that is demonstrably present in the Christian consciousness; on the other hand, the former is more in harmony with the idea of the consummation of the Church, an idea which, in order to find a point of attachment in our present life as a whole, insists on the exclusion of all that can be called ‘world’ even from the Church’s environment. Thus doctrines of the Last Things have connexions equally with both these problems; each doctrine relates to both. If we tried to form a Christian idea of a state subsequent to this life, and it failed to agree with our idea of the consummation of the Church, we could not believe that it really expressed the absolutely final stage; we should have to suppose that there still remained a further development, in which the Church would be perfected. Conversely, if we viewed the consummation of the Church as arriving within the present course of human affairs, we should have to add something in thought for the state after death, in order to give it a content of its own; the material for this, however, could not be drawn from our Christian consciousness, for its contents are all of the other kind. Hence it was in the nature of the case that both elements should be thus conjoined—the consummation of the Church (which we cannot regard as possible in this life) being placed in that future life of which we cannot but form a conception, and the idea of that life (based as it must be on fellowship with Christ) being filled out with content from the perfected state of the Church. It must be so, if the new form of life is decisively to transcend the present.

At the same time we are not in a position to exhibit the confluence of the two factors, or to guarantee it. The consummated Church cannot be thought of as analogous to the Church militant; nor do we know whether into the future life we ought to project the idea of an interdependent common life and work, to which no proper goal can be assigned. On the other hand, if we seek to conceive the future life by analogy with the present, as an ascending development, we cannot but have doubts whether any such development is possible in the consummated Church. Thus the solution of one problem seems never exactly to fit the other. We encounter the same difficulty if we keep to the indications of Scripture. There much is said by way of representing the consummated Church; but it is not so said that we can affirm with certainty that it ought to be dated subsequently to the end of all earthly things;⁵ and for that reason from of yore many Christians have actually expected the consummation of the Church here on earth. Other passages are meant rather to describe the life after death,⁶ but whether they are also a representation of the consummated Church may be doubted.

2. Hence the following paragraphs, which treat of the Last Things, cannot have ascribed to them at all the same value as the previous doctrines. It is certainly not to be denied that we are conscious of our spiritual life as being the communicated perfection and blessedness of Christ, or that of itself this implies that in every case only the perfect is the originally real, whereas the imperfect owes its being to it; or that this conviction is likewise faith in the reality of the consummated Church, yet only as an actively motive force within us, which is the really operative element in every aspect or moment of life which promotes the Church. If, however, the distinction (ineradicably bound up with our self-consciousness) between inner principle and outward manifestation be abolished (this active principle being also conceived as somehow attaining to expression in space and time), the position stands on a less firm foundation. Similarly, the equating of all human individuals with Christ implies that the general premonition of the imperishability of spirit, even in individual form, becomes certain for the Christian mind; but this in no way involves any particular way of conceiving survival. Indeed, we cannot really make a picture of it either in the form of an infinitely progressive development or in that of an unchanging completeness; to such a task our sensuous imagination is unequal. If, on the other hand, we treat these paragraphs, irrespectively of their source in our self-consciousness, as matters simply to be received on the authority of Scripture, even so they are not comparable to the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection; for what is in question there is statements made by the disciples regarding a fact connected in the closest possible way with their vocation. True, if we had evidence to show how, in ways we could reproduce, Christ formed these two conceptions in His own mind, we should endeavour with perfect confidence to appropriate His thought for ourselves; for here too we should ascribe to Him nothing less than a perfectly developed human power of premonition, free from all uncertainty due to sin. But the content of these paragraphs cannot be so derived. We nowhere find in His teaching a connected and unambiguous treatment of these subjects, obviously meant to convey definite instruction about them. In each particular saying either the subject is doubtful, or the outline drawn is indistinct and the interpretation in a variety of ways uncertain. Hence there is nothing for it but that we should bring up those thought-forms which early became prevalent in the Church and passed over into our Confessions without being submitted to a fresh scrutiny, and should adduce them, under the title of prophetic doctrines, merely as the efforts of an insufficiently equipped faculty of premonition, adding reasons for and against. But we give fair warning that in any new forms which these doctrines may assume, the fancy (for to it belongs everything alien to the scope of our present experience which is set forth as object of a possible future experience), if it is to remain Christian, must place itself under the protection of exegesis, and only elaborate the material which exegesis supplies. What it must not do is to let itself become the plaything of caprice or of alleged new revelations.

3. Under the circumstances, an exact construction of these paragraphs in a closely knit context is not to be thought of. We must be content to assume their sense as generally acknowledged, and let the facts prove that in their regard matters really are as I have indicated. This means exhibiting the two points—personal survival and the consummation of the Church—in their relation to each other, in a picture appealing to the sensuous imagination. Hence, in the first place, the survival of personality, above all, as the abolition of death, is represented under the figure of the resurrection of the flesh. The consummation of the Church, on the other hand, is represented in a twofold manner—first, as conditioned by the fact that no further influence upon the Church can now be exerted by those who form no part of the Church, it is introduced in its character as the separation of believers from unbelievers, by the Last Judgment. But as excluding (in contrast to the Church militant) all the activities of sin and all imperfection in believers, it is represented as eternal blessedness. Since the survival of personality, and therefore also the resurrection of the flesh, had to be taken as applying to the whole human race, and some mode of existence had to be found for those separated from believers, over against eternal blessedness stands (also introduced by the Last Judgment) the eternal damnation of the unbelieving. It is clear that, as this last pictorial representation is not an anticipation of any object of our future experience, it cannot be given the form of a special doctrine; all we can do is to treat it as the shadow of eternal blessedness or the darker side of judgment. These separate pictures fit together into a single imaginative picture, for this reason that the new form of existence is conditional on the Return of Christ, to which everything which belongs to the completion of His work must be related. Hence it seems entirely natural to begin with the Return of Christ, which introduces all the rest; in this way the other items develop out of it, and in relation to it, in their natural sequence.

FIRST PROPHETIC DOCTRINE: THE RETURN OF CHRIST

§ 160. Since the disciples of Christ could not consider the comforting promises of His Return⁷ as having been fulfilled by the days of His resurrection, they expected this fulfilment at the end of all earthly things.⁸ Now since with this is bound up the separation of the good and the bad, we teach ‘a Return of Christ for Judgment.’ Symb. Roman.: ὅθεν ἔρχεται κρίνειν ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς.—Symb. Nic.: καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος.—It is solely to this point that the Augsburg Confession refers, Art. 3. A much fuller statement in Expos. simpl. xi. Ex coelis autem idem ille redibit in judicium, etc.—Conf. Belg. xxxvii.: Credimus … dominum nostrum Jesum Christum a coelo corporaliter et visibiliter sicut ascendit magna cum gloria et majestate venturum, ut se vivorum atque mortuorum declaret judicem.

1. From the days immediately subsequent to Christ’s resurrection we have no record of His having repeated promises of this kind;⁹ rather He speaks exclusively of His entering into His glory, and refers His disciples to His spiritual presence.¹⁰ But this could not cause doubt in the disciples’ minds, leading them to explain the former promises as having been fulfilled already; for His words in their context had pointed too clearly to a Return of Christ, in which He would manifest Himself to the whole world. Hence the disciples were so deeply impressed by a definite assurance¹¹ (although not given them in Christ’s name) which interpreted these sayings of His literally, that later, when the destruction of Jerusalem occurred (in distinctly prophesying which Christ had spoken also of His own future), the question was not even raised among Christians whether all those sayings might not be referred to Christ’s future understood in a non-literal way. Accordingly, after everything Chiliastic had been purged out, the opinion very early became fixed and almost universally accepted that the Return of Christ would coincide with the close of the present state of the earth.

2. If, however, we consider more carefully such passages as are most generally taken to refer to this subject, and also are most explicit, it turns out either that they excite the suspicion (some owing to the dates they fix, the others on account of their predominantly ethical tone) that they are not to be taken literally, or that, even if we interpret the personal Return literally, still there is much else in the context which cannot be taken literally on any terms, because any interpretation of the kind would destroy the whole unity of the discourse. Yet, apart from this literal exegesis we have no Biblical warrant for the position that the reunion of believers with Christ (which is the essential content of our belief in personal survival) is conditional on such a personal Return; indeed, elsewhere He Himself speaks of the first without any mention of the second.¹² Still less have we Biblical warrant for believing that there is bound up with both a prior universal separation of the good and the bad (of which even Paul says not a word¹³), or for thinking that this event, due to a definite reappearance of Christ, will be accompanied by the termination of our present form of existence. Thus all that might go to form a definite picture falls asunder; and, as the essential content of our paragraph, there remains simply this—that (if we substitute the efficacious activity of Christ for His bodily presence) the consummation of the Church, regarded as the cessation of its wavering growth and development, is possible only through a sudden leap to perfection, and on condition that procreation ceases, as also the coexistence of the good and the bad; and that, therefore, this leap to perfection must simply be regarded as an act of Christ’s kingly power. This is certainly rooted deeply in Christian faith; even if it does not of itself emerge as a distinct idea in every mind, yet all feel attracted by it when presented to them. For in Christ the Divine Essence is permanently united with human nature; hence human nature cannot be so inseparably restricted to a particular planet as to be involved in that planet’s destruction as resulting from cosmic laws. On the contrary, everything pertaining to it must be capable of being conceived in the light of this union and as an effect of it.

So that in this doctrine everything that is figurative and necessarily uncertain in quality flows from our interest in personal survival, whereas everything that can be stated with assurance relates to the consummation of the Church.

SECOND PROPHETIC DOCTRINE: THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH

§ 161. Not only did Christ sanction, by figurative utterances¹⁴ and also by His teaching,¹⁵ the idea, prevalent among His race, of the resurrection of the dead, but He further in His utterances ascribed this awakening from death to His own agency; and it is an extension of this His teaching—a perfectly natural extension based on kindred utterances—to say that the general awakening of the dead will in a sudden manner interrupt the usual course of human life on earth.¹⁶

1. We are so much aware of the connexion of all our mental activities, even the most inward and profound, with those of the body, that we really cannot form the idea of a finite spiritual life apart from that of a bodily organism. Indeed, the spirit we only conceive as soul when in the body, so that it is impossible to speak of the soul’s immortality in the strict sense apart from bodily life. Since the activity of the spirit as a definite soul ceases at death simultaneously with the bodily life, it is only with bodily life that it can recommence. Indisputably, however, the idea of the resurrection of the flesh implies something more than this; it implies such an identity of life that life after resurrection and life before death constitute one and the same personality; and this formed part especially of the Jewish conception of the matter.¹⁷ Clearly, too, the soul as an individual entity only persists by itself in the continuity of consciousness, which again appears to us as conditioned by memory; and memory in its turn is as much bound up with bodily states as any other mental activity. We cannot then conceive how under absolutely different bodily conditions such a unifying memory could get to work; yet in its absence the soul itself would not be the same. But insistence on this appears to bring us back to the position which we rejected above—namely, that the human mind is rigidly restricted to the surface of this globe. On the one hand, every organism is a product of the planet on which it appears, and dependent on the specific nature of that planet; hence the similarity of the future body to the present would imply a similarity of the two worlds; but even memory, again, in virtue of its organic aspect is dependent on the near affinity of impressions; thus, for example, in the present life our memory of a definite period of time grows extremely faint once the whole scene has changed. If we further add that, the greater the excellence of the future life, the less could a definite volition come to the aid of such memory, it must be owned that the more the soul in itself remains the same, the more must the future life be a simple, easily attachable prolongation of the present. But, in that case, the other point of departure for all these eschatological ideas—namely, the consummation of the Church—gets less than justice; for in such a life as that just described no consummation is possible. Hence the latter interest compels us, if we wish to escape the other extreme, once again to limit more strictly the similarity between the future organism and the present; and it is on this that the description of the resurrection body as immortal¹⁸ and without sex¹⁹ is based. The first of these qualities, which of itself implies a world of a quite different constitution, completely gets rid of that interest in bodily self-preservation which by experience we know to be so fruitful a seed of strife between flesh and spirit. The second quality, in addition, guards against the entrance into the consummated Church of new souls called into being through procreation; for we cannot conceive of such souls not being handicapped by natural forces in the development of spirit, i.e. we cannot conceive them without sin. But obviously both qualities are inimical to the identity of the soul and the continuity of consciousness. The immortal body will then at every moment and in every function reveal its difference from the mortal; and the soul in that case will be all the less capable of appropriating the share which the mortal body had in the formation of our present consciousness, and of retaining it in memory. And as regards the second quality, it is impossible to see how, if the relations of sex cease, the organic system on which they rest can be retained; or, again, how a male and a female soul can as such fail to be different. And thus, if owing to changed organization each soul ceased to be either male or female, no soul would be the same as before. Thus it is clear that in our doctrine both points of departure must be provided for, but that the two really represent different interests; for the resurrection of the flesh must be conceived in one way if individuals are to remain absolutely the same, and in another if one and all they are to be merged in the consummated Church. Hence the different items cannot be combined in an idea capable of clear representation; any idea we can form suffers from the indeterminateness peculiar to these doctrines, a characteristic harmonizing with the special name we have given them.

2. The general and simultaneous resurrection of all men implies that those who rise have existed since death in a state different from that which they enter by resurrection; and upon this implication rests the reality of the idea of a Last Judgment. It is naturally to this intermediate state, as immediately impending, that our sense-bound interest in the survival of the individual is primarily directed; and the question arises whether at our point of view we possess any rule by which to guide efforts at explanation, or are at all bound to supervise them. The first would be the case only if we found something laid down about this state in the New Testament; but all the passages²⁰ which might be reckoned in here are either of uncertain doctrinal character or of doubtful meaning. The second would be necessary if such explanations contained anything inconsistent with our Christian consciousness. Now, the intermediate state can be conceived of in a purely negative way, as meaning simply that the old life activities have ceased and the new have not yet begun—and this is the idea of the sleep of the soul. To this our Christian consciousness can make no distinct objection; but while thereby, on the one hand, all Christians are made equal (since, alike for those who first fell asleep and for the last, the interval is nil), yet on the other hand, if the waking of the soul is to be conceived as synchronous with the origin of the new body, it is difficult to imagine how recollection of the former state can simultaneously be implanted and retained. If the intermediate state be conceived as a conscious state, Christian faith certainly will insist that it cannot be a state devoid of fellowship with Christ; for in that case it would be a lapse from grace which could not be regarded otherwise than as punishment, and would mean the reintroduction of an idea which the Evangelical Church discarded soon after its formation.²¹ But if the intermediate period is to be conceived as one of fellowship with Christ, it must be freed from all resemblance to ancient or even Jewish notions of an impoverished sort of life in the underworld. For all the obstacles to blessed fellowship with Christ, which in this life arise from the sense-world, have fallen away; the intermediate state, therefore, must be a state of enhanced perfection. But in that case it is difficult not to regard the general resurrection of the dead as superfluous, and reunion with the body as a retrograde step. Indeed, it looks as if in consistency only one way of escape were left open, namely, to suppose that in the intermediate state each individual soul by itself is in fellowship with the Redeemer, but that the fellowship of the blessed with each other, and hence too the activity of individuals, is conditional on the resurrection of the flesh, which therefore is necessary to perfection. Still, even on this supposition, the existence of the Church remains interrupted till the resurrection, as the existence of the individual does on the former supposition; and so one of the two elements comes to be more endangered as the other is better secured. Hence some have taken the simultaneous general resurrection in a merely figurative sense, and have wished to infer from other scriptural passages²² that for each individual the future life begins immediately after death.²³ But for one thing this means that the soul is already in possession of the new body when it parts from the old, an idea we find widely accepted; on the other hand, the simultaneous Last Judgment and also (since its alleged purpose has wholly lapsed) the personal Return of Christ must in that case be taken just as figuratively as the simultaneous general resurrection. Thus we cannot help wavering between this more Biblical idea, which represents the action of Christ, in conjunction with great cosmic changes, as suddenly giving existence to the future life and the Church triumphant as a great whole (though at the cost of unbroken continuity), and the less Biblical view which (though in a fashion which compels us to ask for scientific proof, since so much emphasis is laid on exact affinity with the conditions of earthly life) maintains the continuity of personality as strictly as possible, the consummated Church only growing little by little out of the earthly life which goes on alongside of it.

3. If we now turn to the general resurrection, and the predominant modes of conceiving the subjects treated of in the following doctrines, there is one more difficulty to be solved. If saved and unsaved enter upon utterly different states, there is an unanswerable case for holding that the new bodies which they receive cannot be the same in both cases. The organism must be adapted to the conditions of life which are impending; and this gives rise to a new difficulty if we seek to conjoin the idea of the general resurrection with that of the Last Judgment. If both classes equally become different at the resurrection, sentence has already been pronounced upon them before the judgment comes on, and judgment becomes superfluous; the more so that such a difference in bodies which originate simultaneously could not be produced by the action of identical cosmic forces combined with differences of a purely ethical kind, but only by a directly creative divine fiat. On the other hand, if those destined to bliss and those destined to perdition are still alike at the resurrection, the resurrection is not an execution of the judgment, and since in one class or the other or in both inward changes must later take place which transform the organism, the reality of the idea of the Last Judgment depends solely on these changes occurring simultaneously, but there is no further need for the simultaneity of the resurrection of the dead and the transformation of the living.

Taking all these considerations together, we find that the various ideas of how the future life is attached to the present are incapable of being made perfectly definite. As the essential content of the doctrine there remains only this, that the ascension of the risen Redeemer was possible only if all other human individuals too can look forward to a renovation of organic life which has links of attachment to our present state; and further, that the development of the future state must be posited on the one hand as dependent on Christ’s divine power and on the other as a cosmic event for which arrangements have been made in the universal divine world-order. The first of these last two ideas is certified as implied in the faith underlying the endeavour to form ideas on this matter; the second hovers before the mind as indicating a problem we can never completely solve.

THIRD PROPHETIC DOCTRINE: THE LAST JUDGMENT

§ 162. The idea of the Last Judgment, the elements of which are likewise found in the utterances of Christ, is meant to set forth the complete separation of the Church from the world, inasmuch as the consummation of the former excludes all influences of the latter upon it.

1. The main element in the idea of the Last Judgment, namely, that Christ will utterly separate the believing and the unbelieving from each other, so that they are consigned to quite different places and can exert no further influence on each other, does not at all involve the consummation of the Church. As has been shown,²⁴ the imperfections of the Church are due much less to the influence of unbelievers mingling with believers in this world than to the carnal elements still present in the regenerate themselves. Hence if at the resurrection believers were the same in soul as at their departure from this life, they would enter the new life, in spite of the supposed separation, as persons in whom sin, though in process of disappearing, was still at work. Thus the value which in this respect is attributed to separation rests solely on an incorrect reading of the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church.²⁵ But if this distinction, as we have understood it, is to cease with the beginning of the new life, it follows that at that point the regenerate themselves must discard those elements of sinfulness and carnality which still cling to them. But this is not effected by the outward separation itself, and it was for this reason that in his own exegetical fashion Origen²⁶ sought to interpret one of the relevant passages as indicating an inner separation. Apart from the fact that to have all worldly and carnal motives and ideas so abruptly torn away would so far endanger the continuous identity of personal life, such an inner separation would simply be completed sanctification; and, as all sanctification must flow from vital fellowship with the Redeemer, the Christian consciousness is unable to recognize itself in any view from which this is absent. Indeed, in any such abrupt cessation of sanctification, not mediated by our own spontaneous action, we cannot help finding something magical, which, had it only been applied to each individual earlier, would have made superfluous the whole redemption which depends on living fellowship with Christ. Thus it always seems as if one of these two things excluded the other. John does appear to offer a mediating idea which might reconcile the discord;²⁷ for if the inner separation is effected by the perfect knowledge of Christ consequent on His Return, it is a work of redemption. But if considered more closely, this suggestion too breaks down. If the Return of Christ effects this change only in proportion to each person’s receptivity, it still remains that such receptivity is not equally great in all the regenerate when they leave this world. So that the complete purification of the soul due to the appearance of Christ would not be wrought in each case with equal instantaneousness, but more swiftly in some and more slowly in others. Hence even this separation would not be simultaneous; it would only come to be gradual after the new life began. If, on the other hand, whether the degree of receptivity for the knowledge of Christ be higher or lower is a matter of no importance, the inner separation certainly would be effected abruptly; but the same change would necessarily be produced in the unbelieving, for Christ appears to them also at His Return, and in them, too, the receptivity in question is present, even in the worst of cases, in some infinitely small degree. In that case, we should find this growing on our hands into a sudden recovery of all souls for the kingdom of grace, which, while making the separation of persons meaningless, would in itself not be wholly free from an admixture of magic.

2. If now we turn back to the idea of a separation between persons according as they have reached the close of life in a state of belief or unbelief (and it is this idea which has become dominant, because it seems to be approved by Christ’s own words), we can hardly deny that it is better fitted to bring about the blessedness of believers in the new life than their perfection. For if the influences emanating from the unbelievers mingled with believers are received by the regenerate solely in their character as organs of the Holy Spirit, and lead solely to action derived from, and determined by, the Spirit, many perfections will be evoked thereby, such as we find likewise in the Christ’s pattern life—perfections which apart from such influences could never have developed. But it seems to be otherwise as regards blessedness. The evils due to sin always spread over the entire common and corporate life; hence even in the next life believers, if involved in the same common life with unbelievers, would have to suffer from the evils these brought with them. But here too people have not recurred as they should have done to the idea of living fellowship with Christ. During His sojourn here Christ also partook in the common life shared by sinners, but we do not suppose that, apart from sympathy and bodily pain, He was a sufferer. Similarly, those united to Him in living fellowship will experience nothing which tends to hamper their spiritual life and could therefore be felt by them as evil—just as Christ Himself never felt bodily pain and sympathy as evils. Besides, even bodily pain (if a possibility at all in the life after resurrection) would necessarily be capable of being produced in other ways than through sin, so that separation would be no guarantee against it. Sympathy, too, would still be inseparably bound up with identity of nature; so that the blessed would still have sympathy with the others, though wholly separate from them. Thus the separation contemplated at the Last Judgment remains, even from this point of view, both inadequate and superfluous. All that might be said is that it takes place for the sake not of the blessed but of the others, whether to ensure that they reap no benefit from what the good might do to alleviate the evils pervading the fellowship of the new world, or lest in that very fellowship they might find means of themselves attaining to communion with Christ. But either this would mean attributing jealousy to the Supreme Being, an idea against which even the higher paganism protested; or it must rest solely on that familiar and widespread idea of the divine righteousness which in its one-sidedness looks so like caprice that before we could feel ourselves entitled, not to say obliged, to regard the idea as in harmony with the mind of Christ, it would have to be much less equivocal in its origins, the expression given to it much more decisive, and the Apostles’ use of it much more comprehensive.

3. The idea of the Last Judgment, then, we are unable to state in a final form which perfectly satisfies both demands. None the less, in view of its almost universal prevalence in Christendom, we must try to elicit its essential meaning. By way of preliminary it may be remarked that in so far as it can be traced to an all but vengeful desire to enhance the misery of unbelievers, and to exclude them from all the redemptive influences of the good, or again so far as there has contributed to its prevalence a fear lest, even after attaining perfected fellowship with Christ, we might be pained by the company of the bad, it springs from an unpurified Christian temper and obscures the essential meaning of the whole conception. It follows that this essential meaning can only be what remains over, when we have completely freed our thought from fear and vengefulness. This appears to consist in the following two points. First, once our fellowship with Christ has been perfected, we are so completely freed from evil that even though evil men and evil things be present, both as such are for us non-existent Wrong and evil being thus wholly shut out from the common consciousness of believers, that consciousness can embrace nothing but the untroubled and unimpeded fulness of divine grace; the Church is really then a wholly self-enclosed body, so that an outlook (and of this we can never rid ourselves here) that dwells upon opposition and contrast will there give place utterly to one for which evil has ceased to exist, because God cannot originate it. Secondly, if we conceive the Church as consummated, but at the same time suppose that there still exists a part of the human race which has not been captured and pervaded by its spirit, such a supposition is possible only on the assumption that the part in question is completely isolated from all influences issuing from the Church, which means shut off from all contact with it. There is indeed one discourse of Christ,²⁸ at least very closely related to this theme, which clearly implies that every influence (even the faintest) passing from the seats of the blessed to those who during their earthly life have failed to turn to God, touches them to better issues.

FOURTH PROPHETIC DOCTRINE: ETERNAL BLESSEDNESS

§ 163. From the resurrection of the dead onwards, those who have died in fellowship with Christ will find themselves, through the vision of God, in a state of unchangeable and unclouded blessedness.

1. The state of believers after their full reinstatement in life may be conceived under two forms, either as a sudden and unvarying possession of the highest, or as a gradual ascent to the highest—an ascent, however, which like the development of Christ Himself must be thought of as without retrogression and without conflict. Both views have their own special difficulties, when we try to fill in the general outline and to shape the mere formula into a clear imaginative picture. As regards the first, we can hardly explain to ourselves how the consummation can be reached by us, or implanted in us, just at the resurrection, without destroying all connexion with our present life; which would not be the case if this life were gradually forgotten, like our childhood, as we grew by degrees in perfection. Still more, if we are to conceive a perfection incapable of any further increase—and this in a finite being completely severed from all that admitted of cultivation, or required it—then we find it embarrassingly difficult to imagine how this being, now deprived of every object for its activity, could express its perfection. We cannot separate communal life from man’s nature as such, still less can the Christian conceive himself apart from such a life; for the fellowship of believers with each other and that of each with Christ are one and the same thing. Not only so; a common life, devoid of every object of common activity, a life which therefore must limit itself exclusively to the mutual presentation of the contents of the inner life, can scarcely be thought of as an absolutely perfect state. It is true, we have in our present life an element which is akin to such a state, namely, common worship, and all æsthetic representations of the God-consciousness. But we find it deplorable that for such things pious Christians should neglect their practical obligations; such a life impresses us as meagre; hence we cannot bring ourselves to think that the highest perfection of existence can be reduced to such an alternation of giving and receiving empty and aimless representations. Instead, our imagination strains to discover some work which in that life might be entrusted to us. On the given assumptions, however, nothing remains but either the cultivation of some external nature or the oversight of some less perfect spiritual world—both such that occupation with them could not disturb our bliss. But we do not find in Scripture any encouragement to such an idea,²⁹ nor have we the power to fill out such a formula with real meaning.

It is no easier, supposing we try to imagine that at the resurrection there will begin a perfection which rises up and up to infinity. We can hardly conceive such a thing without inequalities and variations, and, even were it not so, at all events not without such a dissatisfaction with what is present as naturally goes along with the expectation of something better yet to come; and this after all is a sense of imperfection, and therefore in free beings a sense somehow of guilt. Indeed, progress can scarcely be thought of apart from external relations and conditions of development. But if once we open this sluice, there sweep in at once diversities among those who are the same in kind, the antithesis of the pleasant and the unpleasant, and, as a consequence, everything that characterizes human life here below. In fact, nothing remains (and perhaps on these assumptions it is a position we cannot avoid without inconsistency) but that we should accept the change from life to death as itself an element in that future experience. This makes it clear that what we have conceived in this form is not the consummation of the Church, but merely a gradually self-amending and self-purifying repetition of the present life. Thus the problem remains unsolved.

2. If now, selecting either form, we inquire as to the real vital content of this future state, and concede at the start that this content, so far as our activity is concerned, is limited to representation; then, in order to gain a clear imaginative picture, we should have to know what there will be for us to represent there; i.e. what influences will affect us and be taken in by us. To this question the usual answer is to say that eternal life will consist in the vision of God.³⁰ This we can only take to mean the completest fulness of the most living God-consciousness: the next question is how this will be distinguished from our present God-consciousness. The simplest reply would be that while our God-consciousness now is always a mediated one, inasmuch as we have it only in and with some other element, there it will be unmediated. But this can scarcely be harmonized with the retention of personality. For as self-conscious individuals we can only have the God-consciousness, if it is really to be ours, along with our self-consciousness; and even if the latter has to be distinguished from the former, this will only be conceivable in one of two ways. Either we merely distinguish our self from our God-consciousness, as the subject in which the God-consciousness dwells, without our self-consciousness having any other content; and this is an idea which hardly anyone will tolerate. Or our self-consciousness, as being changeable and constantly affected, must differ from the other conceived as something which remains ever the same. Hence, if the individual life is to persist in human nature and even in finite nature as such, our God-consciousness must always remain a mediated one; and it is exclusively within this sphere that we shall have to seek the distinction between its present and its future form. In that case, nothing remains but that (even here we strive after it, though with a sense of inability to attain) we should have an unimpeded knowledge of God in all and along with all; and also, so far as finite nature allows it, that we should steadily have knowledge of all that wherein and whereby God makes Himself known; and this without conflict arising between this desire in us and in any other, or between the steady God-consciousness and consciousness in any other of its aspects. This certainly would be pure and assured vision; it would render us completely at home with God. Only, we can no more understand how we are to find ourselves at this point just at the resurrection without thereby imperilling the continuity and identity of our existence, than we can see how, if we start there at the point we have attained here, we can ever reach the consummation. Thus we can take our departure from either point—from the problem of imagining an unchangeably identical blessedness, or from that of conceiving an endlessly progressive advance. But we really can solve neither problem; and we therefore always remain uncertain how the state which is the Church’s highest consummation can be gained or possessed in this form by individual personalities emerging into immortality.

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Footnotes

1. Rom. II²⁵.²⁶. ↩

2. Eph. I²².²³ 2²¹.²². ↩

3. 103, 3. ↩

4. The sayings I refer to are familiar to everyone, and are too numerous to be cited in detail. ↩

5. John 6⁶³⁻⁵⁸, Acts 1⁶. ⁷, Eph. 4. ↩

6. 1 Cor. 15²³ᶠ., Phil. 3²¹. ↩

7. Omitting all the passages which are obviously parabolic, we have the following: Matt. 16²⁷. ²⁸ 24²⁰ff. 25³¹ff., Mark 13²⁶ff., Luke 21²⁷. ²⁸, John 14³. ¹⁸ 16¹⁶. ↩

8. 2 Cor. 5¹⁻²², 2 Thess. 1⁷⁻¹⁰ 2⁸, 2 Tim. 4¹, 1 Pet. 4⁵⁻⁷. ¹³, 2 Pet. 3¹⁰ff.. ↩

9. John 21²². ²³ is surely not sufficiently definite in its terms. ↩

10. Matt. 28²⁰, Luke 24²⁶, John 20¹⁷. ↩

11. Acts 1¹¹, ↩

12. John 17²⁴. ↩

13. 1 Cor. 15²⁰ff., 1 Thess. 4¹⁴ff.. ↩

14. Matt. 25³¹ff., John 5²⁸· ²⁹ 6⁴⁰· ⁵⁴. ↩

15. Matt. 22³⁰⁻³². ↩

16. 1 Cor. 15⁵¹· ⁵², 1 Thess. 4¹³⁻¹⁸. ↩

17. Luke 20²⁸⁻³³. ↩

18. 1 Cor. 15⁴². ↩

19. Matt. 22³⁰. ↩

20. Luke 16²²ff. 23⁴³, 1 Pet. 3¹⁹. ²⁰. ↩

21. Art. Smalc. ii.: Quapropter purgatorium … mera diaboli larva est. Pugnat enim cum primo articulo qui docet Christum solum et non hominum opera animas liberare. Et constat etiam de mortuis nihil nobis divinitus mandatum esse.—Expos. simpl. xxvi.: Quod autem quidam tradunt de igne purgatorio, fidei christianae, credo remissionem peccatorum et vitam aeternam purgationisque plenae per Christum, et Christi domini sententiis (John 5²⁴ 13¹⁰) adversatur. ↩

22. Directly, though not with certainty, from Luke 23⁴³; indirectly from Phil. 1²¹⁻²⁴. ↩

23. Expos. simpl. xxvi.: Credimus enim fideles recte a morte corporea migrare ad Christum … Credimus item infideles recte praecipitari in tartara. ↩

24. Cf. § 126, 1. ↩

25. Cf. § 148, 2. ↩

26. Comment. in Matt. x. 2 (on Matt. 13³⁶⁻⁴⁰), ed. R., vol. iii. p. 444. ↩

27. 1 John 3². ↩

28. Luke 16¹⁹⁻³¹. ↩

29. Matt. 19²⁸ and 2 Tim. 2¹² cannot really be taken in that sense. ↩

30. A thought first derived from Matt. 5⁸ and 2 Cor. 5⁷, but with what justice is disputed. ↩