Part 41 (1/2)

164. Dante makes Adam say he had been 4302 years in Limbo when Christ, at his descent, rescued him. Paradise, canto xxvi.

through all the events and forces a.s.sociated with the death of Christ, including his descent to Hades and his resurrection, men are delivered from the doom of the under world. The common theology explains it as teaching that there was an expiatory efficacy in the unmerited sufferings of Christ. The system known as Unitarianism says it denotes merely the exertion of a saving spiritual power on the hearts of men. The first interpretation charges the figure of speech with a dramatic revelation of the love of G.o.d freely rescuing men from their inherited fate. The second seems to make it a tank of gore, where Divine vengeance legally laps to appease its otherwise insatiable appet.i.te. The third fills it with a regenerative moral influence to be distributed upon the characters of believers. The two former also include the last; but it excludes them. Now, as it seems to us, the first is the form of mistake in which the early Church, including the apostles, embodied the true significance of the mission of Christ. Owing to the circle of ideas in which they lived, this was the only possible form in which the disciples of Jesus could receive the new doctrine of a blessed immortality brought to light by Christianity.21 The second is the form of false theory in which a few scholastic brains elaborated the cruel results of their diseased metaphysical speculations. The third is the dry, meager, inadequate statement of the most essential truth in the case.

There is one more point of view in which the New Testament holds up the resurrection of Christ. It is regarded as a summons to a moral and spiritual resurrection within the breast of the believer. As the great Forerunner had ascended to a spiritual and immortal life in the heavens, so his followers should be inspired with such a realizing sense of heavenly things, with such Divine faith and fellows.h.i.+p, as would lift them above the world, with all its evanescent cares, and fix their hearts with G.o.d. This high communion with Christ, and intense a.s.surance of a destined speedy inheritance with him, should render the disciple insensible to the clamorous distractions of earth, invulnerable to the open and secret a.s.saults of sin, as if in the body he were already dead, and only alive in the spirit to the obligations of holiness, the attractions of piety, and the promises of heaven. ”When we were dead in trespa.s.ses and sins, G.o.d loved us, and hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places.” ”If ye, then, be risen with Christ, set your affection on things above, not on earthly things; for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in G.o.d.” This moral symbolic application of the resurrection is most beautiful and effective. Christ has risen, immaculate and immortal, into the pure and holy heaven: then live virtuously and piously, that you may be found worthy to be received unto him. ”He that hath this hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” Paul enforces this thought through the striking figure that, since ”we are freed from the law through the death of Christ, we should be married to his risen spirit and bring forth fruit unto G.o.d.” And again, when he speaks in these words, ”Christ in you the hope of glory,” we suppose he refers to the spiritual image of the risen Redeemer formed in the disciples' imagination and heart, the prefiguring and witnessing pledge of their ascension also to heaven. The same practical use is made of the doctrine through the rite and sign of baptism. ”Ye are buried with Christ in

21 Bretschneider forcibly ill.u.s.trates this in his Handbuch der Dogmatik der Evang. Luther. Kirche, sects. 156-158, band ii.

baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through faith in the working of G.o.d, who hath raised him from the dead.” ”Wherefore, if ye be dead with Christ, why are ye subject to worldly ordinances?

and if ye be risen with him, seek those things which are above.”

When the disciple sunk beneath the baptizing waters, he was typically dead and buried, as Jesus was in the tomb; when he rose from the waters into the air again, he figuratively represented Christ rising from the dead into heaven. Henceforth, therefore, he was to consider himself as dead to all worldly sins and l.u.s.ts, alive to all heavenly virtues and aspirations. ”Therefore,” the apostle says, ”we are buried with Christ by baptism unto death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, even so we should walk in newness of life.” ”In that Christ died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto G.o.d. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto G.o.d.” ”Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are pa.s.sed away; behold, all things are become new.”

This was strictly true to the immediate disciples of Jesus. When he died, their hearts died within them; they shrank away in hopeless confusion and gloom. When he returned to life and ascended to heaven, in feeling and imagination they went with him.

Every moral power and motive started into new life and energy.

”The day when from the dead Our Lord arose, then everywhere, Out of their darkness and despair, Triumphant over fears and foes, The souls of his disciples rose.”

An unheard of a.s.surance of the Father's love and of their eternal inheritance flooded their being with its regenerating, uplifting power. To their absorbing antic.i.p.ations the mighty consummation of all was at hand. In reflective imagination it was already past, and they, dead to the world, only lived to G.o.d. The material world and the l.u.s.t thereof had sunk beneath them and vanished. They were moving in the universe of imperishable realities unseen by the fleshly eye. To their faith already was unrolled over them that new firmament in whose spanless welkin no cloudy tempests ever gather and break, and the serene lights never fade nor go down.

This experience of a spiritual exaltation above the sins and degrading turmoils of pa.s.sion, above the peris.h.i.+ng baubles of the earth, into the religious principles which are independent and a.s.sured, peace, and bliss, and eternity, is attainable by all who with the earnestness of their souls a.s.similate the moral truths of Christianity, pressing in pious trust after the steps of the risen Master. And this, after all, is the vital essence of the doctrine of the resurrection as it makes practical appeal to us. This will stand, though gnawing time and hostile criticism should a.s.sail and shake all the rest. It is something not to be mechanically wrought upon us from without, but to be done within by our own voluntary effort and prayer, by G.o.d's help. To rise from sloth, unbelief, sin, from moral death, to earnestness, faith, beneficence, to eternal life in the breast, is a real and most sublime resurrection, the indispensable preparation for that other and final one which shall raise us from the sepulchre to the sky.

When, on Easter morning, Christian disciples throughout the world hear the joyous cry, ”Christ is risen,” and their own hearts instinctively respond, with an unquenchable persuasion that he is now alive somewhere in the heights of the universe, ”Christ is risen indeed,” they should endeavor in spirit to rise too, rise from the deadly bondage and corruption of vice and indifference.

While the earth remains, and men survive, and the evils which alienate them from G.o.d and his blessedness retain any sway over them, so oft as that hallowed day comes round, this is the kindling message of Divine authority ever fresh, and of transcendent import never old, that it bears through all the borders of Christendom to every responsible soul: ”Awake from your sleep, arise from your death, lift up your eyes to heaven, and the risen Redeemer will give you the light of immortal life!” Have this awakening and deathless experience in the soul, and you will be troubled by no doubts about an everlasting life succeeding the close of the world. But so long as this spiritual resurrection in the breast is unknown, you can have no knowledge of eternal life, no experimental faith in a future entrance from the grave into heaven, no, not though millions of resurrections had crowded the interstellar s.p.a.ce with ascending shapes. Rise, then, from your moral graves, and already, by faith and imagination, sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

Before leaving this subject, it belongs to us to look at it as a theory; that is, to consider with critical scrutiny the conclusions which are supposed to flow from its central fact. We must regard it from three distinct points of view, seeking its meaning in sound logic, its force in past history, its value in present experience. First, then, we are to inquire what really is the logical significance of the resurrection of Christ. The looseness and confusion of thought prevailing in relation to this point are amazing. It seems as if mankind were contented with investigations careless, reasonings incoherent, and inferences arbitrary, in proportion to the momentousness of the matter in hand. In regard to little details of sensible fact and daily business their observation is sharp, their a.n.a.lysis careful, their reflection patient; but when they approach the great problems of morality, G.o.d, immortality, they shrink from commensurate efforts to master those mighty questions with stern honesty, and remain satisfied with fanciful methods and vague results. The resurrection of Christ is generally regarded as a direct demonstration of the immortality of man, an argument of irrefragable validity. But this is an astonis.h.i.+ng mistake. The argument was not so constructed by Paul. He did not seek directly to prove the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the dead. He took for granted the Pharisaic doctrine that all souls on leaving their bodies descended to Sheol, where they darkly survived, waiting to be summoned forth at the arrival of the Messianic epoch. a.s.suming the further premise that Christ after death went down among these imprisoned souls, and then rose thence again, Paul infers, by a logical process strictly valid and irresistible to one holding those premises, that the general doctrine of a resurrection from the dead is true, and that by this visible pledge we may expect it soon, since the Messiah, who is to usher in its execution, has already come and finished the preliminary stages of his work. The apostle's own words plainly show this to be his meaning. ”If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. But now is Christ risen from the dead, become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Every man shall be made alive in his own order: Christ the first fruits; then they that are Christ's, at his coming; then the last remnant, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to G.o.d.” The notions of a universal imprisonment of souls in the intermediate state, and of a universal raising of them thence at an appointed time, having faded from a deep and vivid belief into a cold traditional dogma, ridiculed by many, cared for at all by few, realizingly held by almost none, Paul's argument has been perverted and misinterpreted, until it is now commonly supposed to mean this: Christ has risen from the dead: therefore the soul of man is immortal. Whereas the argument really existed in his mind in the reverse form, thus: The souls of men are immortal and are hereafter to be raised up: therefore Christ has risen as an example and ill.u.s.tration thereof. It is singular to notice that he has himself clearly stated the argument in this form three times within the s.p.a.ce of four consecutive verses, as follows: ”If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:” ”G.o.d raised Christ not up, if so be that the dead rise not.” ”For if the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised.” The fact of the resurrection of Christ, taken in connection with the related notions previously held in the mind of Paul, formed the complement of an irresistible argument to prove the impending resurrection of the dead, But if it be now perceived that those other notions were Pharisaic errors, the argument, as he employed it, falls to the ground.

Taken by itself and a.n.a.lyzed by a severe logic, the resurrection of Christ proves nothing conclusively in regard to our immortality. If it did of itself prove any thing, the direct logical inference from it would be that henceforth all men, three days after death, would rise bodily from the dead, appear for a season on earth as before, and then ascend visibly into the sky.

If at the present time a man who had been put to death and entombed three days should openly come forth alive, considered as an isolated fact, what would it prove? It would merely prove that a wonderful event had occurred. It would show that either by some mysterious means he had escaped death, or else that by some apparently preternatural agency he had been restored to life from the dead. Taken by itself, it could not prove whether the occurrence was caused by a demoniacal or by a Divine power, or by some occult force of nature developed by a peculiar combination of conditions. The strange event would stand clear to our senses; but all beyond that would be but an hypothesis of our own, and liable to mistake. Consequently, we say, the resurrection, taken by itself, proves no doctrine. But we may so suppose the case that such an event would, from its relation to something else, acquire logical meaning. For instance, if Christ had taught that he had supernatural knowledge of truth, a Divine commission to reveal a future life, and said that, after he should have been dead and buried three days, G.o.d would restore him to life to authenticate his words, and if, then, so stupendous a miracle occurred in accordance with his prediction, it would prove that his claims and doctrine were true, because G.o.d is no accomplice in deception.

Such was the case with Jesus as narrated; and thus his resurrection appears, not as having doctrinal significance and demonstrative validity in itself, but as a miraculous authentication of his mission. That is to say, the Christian's faith in immortality rests not directly on the resurrection of Christ, but on his teachings, which were confirmed and sealed by his resurrection. It is true that, even in this modified form, some persons of dialectical minds will deny all validity to the argument. What necessary connection is there, they will ask, between the exhibition of mechanico chemical wonders, physical feats, however abnormal and inexplicable, and the possession of infallibility of intellectual insight and moral utterance? If a man should say, G.o.d is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence of his declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its dead alive, or cause the sun suddenly to sink from its station at noon and return again, would his wonderful performance prove his horrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat prove the opposite doctrine? Plainly, there is not, on rigid logical principles, any connecting tie or evidencing coherence between a physical miracle and a moral doctrine.22 We admit the correctness of this, on philosophical grounds. But the validity of a miracle as proof of a doctrine rests on the spontaneous a.s.sumption that no man can work a miracle unless G.o.d specially delegate him the power: thereby G.o.d becomes the voucher of his envoy. And when a person claiming to be a messenger from G.o.d appears, saying, ”The Father hath commanded me to declare that in the many mansions of his house there is a blessed life for men after the close of this life,” and when he promises that, in confirmation of his claim, G.o.d will restore him to life after he shall have been three days dead, and when he returns accordingly triumphant from the sepulchre, the argument will be unquestioningly received as valid by the instinctive common sense of all who are convinced of the facts.

We next pa.s.s from the meaning of the resurrection in logic to its force and working in history. When Jesus hung on the cross, and the scornful shouts of the mult.i.tude murmured in his ears, the disciples had fled away, disappointed, terror stricken, despairing. His star seemed set in a hopeless night of shame and defeat. The new religion appeared a failure. But in three days affairs had taken a new aspect. He that was crucified had risen, and the scattered disciples rallied from every quarter, and, animated by faith and zeal, went forth to convert the world. As an organic centre of thought and belief, as a fervid and enduring incitement to action, in the apostolic times and all through the early centuries, the received fact of the resurrection of Christ wielded an incomparable influence and produced incalculable results. Christianity indeed rose upon it, and, to a great extent, flourished through it. The princ.i.p.al effect which the gospel has had in bringing life and immortality to light throughout a large part of the world is to be referred to the proclaimed resurrection of Christ. For without the latter the former would not have been.

Its historical value has therefore been immense. More than nine tenths of the dormant common faith of Christendom in a future life now outwardly reposes on it from tradition and custom. The great majority of Christians grow up, by education and habit, without any sharp conscientious investigation of their own, to an undisturbed belief in immortality, a belief pa.s.sively resting on the demonstration of the doctrine supposed to have been furnished by the resurrection of Christ in Judea two thousand years ago. The historical power of that fact has therefore been inexpressibly important; and its vast and happy consequences as food and basis of faith still remain. But this historic force is no longer what it once was as a living and present cause. It now operates mostly through traditional reception as an established doctrine to be taken

22 J. Blanco White, Letter on Miracles, in appendix to Martineau's Rationale of Religious Inquiry.

for granted, without fresh individual inquiry. Education and custom use it as an unexamined but trusted foundation to build on by common a.s.sumptions. And so the historic impetus is not yet spent. But it certainly has diminished; and it will diminish more.

When faced with dauntless eyes and approached by skeptical methods, it of course cannot have the silencing, all sufficient authority, now that it is buried in the dim remoteness of nineteen centuries and surrounded by obscuring accompaniments, that it had when its light blazed close at hand. The historical force of the alleged resurrection of Christ must evidently, other things being equal, lessen to an unprejudiced inquirer in some proportion to the lengthening distance of the event from him in time, and the growing difficulties of ignorance, perplexity, doubt, manifold uncertainty, deficiency, infidel suggestions, and naturalistic possibilities, intervening between it and him. The shock of faith given by the miracle is dissipated in coming through such an abyss of time. The farther off and the longer ago it was, the more chances for error and the more circ.u.mstances of obscurity there are, and so much the worth and force of the historical belief in it will naturally become fainter, till they will finally fade away. An honest student may bow humbly before the august front of Christian history and join with the millions around in acknowledging the fact of the resurrection of Christ. But we maintain that the essential fact in this historic act is not the visible resuscitation of the dead body, but the celestial reception of the deathless spirit. So Paul evidently thought; for he had never seen Christ in the flesh, yet he places himself, as a witness to the resurrection of Christ, in the same rank with those who had seen him on his reappearance in the body: ”Last of all he was seen of me also.” Paul had only seen him in vision as a glorified spirit of heaven.

We know that our belief in the fleshly resurrection of Jesus rests on education and habit, on cherished a.s.sociations of reverence and attachment, rather than on sifted testimony and convincing proof.

It is plain, too, that if a person takes the att.i.tude, not of piety and receptive trust, but of skeptical antagonism, it is impossible, as the facts within our reach are to day, to convince him of the a.s.serted reality in question. An unprejudiced mind competently taught and trained for the inquiry, but whose att.i.tude towards the declared fact is that of distrust, a mind which will admit nothing but what is conclusively proved, cannot be driven from its position by all the extant material of evidence.

Education, a.s.sociations, hopes, affections, leaning that way, he may be convinced; but leaning the other way, or poised in indifference on a severe logical ground, he will honestly remain in his unbelief despite of all the arguments that can be presented. In the first place, he will say, ”The only history we have of the resurrection is in the New Testament; and the testimony of witnesses in their own cause is always suspicious; and it is wholly impossible now really to prove who wrote those doc.u.ments, or precisely when and how they originated: besides that, the obvious discrepancies in the accounts, and the utterly uncritical credulity and unscientific modes of investigation which satisfied the writers, destroy their value as witnesses in any severe court of reason.” And in reply, although we may claim that there is sufficient evidence to satisfy an humble Christian, previously inclined to such a faith, that the New Testament doc.u.ments were written by the persons whose names they bear, and that their accounts are true, yet we cannot pretend that there is sufficient evidence effectually to convince a critical inquirer that there is no possibility of ungenuineness and unauthenticity.

In the second place, such a person will say, ”Many fabulous miracles have been eagerly credited by contemporaries of their professed authors, and handed down to the credulity of after times; many actual events, honestly, interpreted as miracles, without fraud in any party concerned, have been so accepted and testified to.

Roman Catholic Christendom claims to this day the performance of miracles within the Church; while all Protestant Christendom scouts them as ridiculous tales: and this may be one of them. How can we demonstrate that it does not fall within the same cla.s.s on the laws of evidence?” And although our own moral beliefs and sympathies may force upon us the most profound conviction to the contrary, it is plainly out of our power to disprove the possibility of this hypothesis being true. In the third place, he will say, ”Of all who testify to the resurrection, there is nothing in the record admitting its entire reliableness as an ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or deceit anywhere, may have put a miraculous interpretation upon it all, such additional particulars as his visible ascension into the sky being a later mythical accretion.” This view may well seem offensive, even shocking, to the pious believer; but it is plainly possible. It is intrinsically more easily conceivable than the accredited miracle. It is impossible positively to refute it: the available data do not exist. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that the time is coming when the basis of faith in immortality, in order to stand the tests of independent scrutiny, must be historically as well as logically s.h.i.+fted from a blind dependence on the miraculous resurrection of Christ to a wise reliance on insight into the supernatural capacity and destiny of man, on the deductions of moral reason and the prophecies of religious trust.

Finally, we pause a moment, in closing this discussion, to weigh the practical value of the resurrection of Christ as acknowledged in the experience of the present time. How does that event, admitted as a fact, rest in the average personal experience of Christians now? We shall provoke no intelligent contradiction when we say that it certainly does not often rest on laborious research and rigorous testing of evidence. We surely risk nothing in saying that with the mult.i.tude of believers it rests on a docile reception of tradition, an unquestioning conformity to the established doctrine. And that reception and conformity in the present instance depend, we shall find by going a step further back, upon a deep a priori faith in G.o.d and immortality. When Paul reasons that, if the dead are not to rise, Christ is not risen, but that the dead are to rise, and therefore Christ is risen, his argument reposes on a spontaneous practical method of moral a.s.sumption, not on a judicial process of logical proof. So is it with Christians now. The intense moral conviction that G.o.d is good, and that there is another life, and that it would be supremely worthy of G.o.d to send a messenger to teach that doctrine and to rise from the dead in proof of it, it is this earnest previous faith that gives plausibility, vitality, and power to the preserved tradition of the actual event. If we trace the case home to the last resort, as it really lies in the experience developed in us by Christianity, we shall find that a deep faith in G.o.d is the basis of our belief, first in general immortality, and secondly in the special resurrection of Christ as related thereto.

But, by a confusion, or a want, of thought, the former is mistakenly supposed to rest directly and solely on the latter. The doctrinal inferences built up around the resurrection of Christ fall within the province of faith, resting on moral grounds, not within that of knowledge, resting on logical grounds. For example: what direct proof is there that Christ, when he vanished from the disciples, went to the presence of G.o.d in heaven, to die no more?

It was only seen that he disappeared: all beyond that except as it rests on belief in the previous words of Christ himself is an inference of faith, a faith kindled in the soul by G.o.d and not created by the miracle of the resurrection.

That imagination, tradition, feeling, and faith, have much more to do with the inferences commonly drawn from the resurrection of Christ than any strict investigation of its logical contents has, appears clearly enough from the universal neglect to draw any inferences from, or to attribute any didactic importance to, the other resurrections recorded in the New Testament. We refer especially to the resurrection narrated in the twenty seventh chapter of Matthew, ”the most stupendous miracle ever wrought upon earth,” it has been termed; and yet hardly any one ever deigns to notice it. Thus the evangelist writes: ”And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” Nothing is inferred from this alleged event but the power of G.o.d. Yet logically what separates it from the resurrection of Christ? In Greece there was the accredited account of the resurrection of Er, in Persia that of Viraf, in Judea that of Lazarus, in other nations those of other persons. None of these ever produced great results. Yet the resurrection of one individual from the dead logically contains all that that of any other individual can. Why, then, has that of Christ alone made such a change in the faith of the world?