Spiritual Infidelity by R. F. Cottrell

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 4, 1866

Spiritual Infidelity.

By R. F. Cottrell

The prevailing infidelity of the present day may be properly denominated spiritual infidelity. The enemy of man, the author of evil, and instigator and promoter of infidelity, changes his mode of warfare to suit the prevailing opinions of the times, and lays his plans as he deems best calculated to seduce men from faith by imperceptible degrees.

In his outward hostility to the church of God, he has chosen to get up a spurious religion, resembling in many of its features the genuine, but essentially false and erroneous; and, placing it by the side of the true, demands the homage of all on pain of death. Before the first advent, Satan's church had sacrificial rites and ceremonies, resembling those institutions by God as typical of the promised Messiah; but after that shadowy system had ended, being superseded by the rites and worship of the present dispensation, Satan's spurious religion must be changed from a counterfeit of the Jewish forms to that of the Christian. In other words paganism must be superseded by a corrupt Christianity, in order more successfully to oppose the onward march of truth. Again, where the light of the Reformation renders the Roman persecutor ineffectual, a corrupted Protestantism is the grand engine by which to oppose the truth.

So in regard to infidelity. Before the popular mind, in Christian countries, had become so deeply imbued with the fabled and fanciful view of an immaterial immortality, the immortality of the gospel, founded upon Christ, and a literal, bodily resurrection, was opposed by a materialistic infidelity, which claimed that when a man dies, that is the last of him. But as materialism becomes unpopular, and the professors of Christianity slide into the view of an immaterial immortality that virtually supersedes and makes useless a bodily resurrection, infidelity throws aside its material garb and puts on the popular immaterial clothing. Oh, yes, says modern infidelity, man is immortal independent of the resurrection and independent of Christ, of whom it is said, He died and rose again as a pledge of the resurrection of the dead. And infidelity has an advantage over false though popular faith, from the plain and self-evident truth, that, admitting man is immortal without the resurrection, the resurrection is not only useless, but the doctrine is inconsistent. If death frees the immortal spirit from a useless and burdensome materiality, there is no good reason why that materiality should be resumed. This is the ground upon which modern infidelity denies the clearly revealed doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. The popular mind is ripened for the change. Hence Satan prefers spiritualistic, in preference to materialistic infidelity.

Modern infidelity reasons against Christ and the resurrection as follows. In the first place it is claimed that the Old Testament is totally obscure on the subject of the resurrection. In this work of darkening and smutting the Old Testament, infidels are aided by those professed Christians who either wish to evade the Sabbath law, or to prove the immortality of the soul—a doctrine expressly and emphatically denied in that portion of the word of God. As a consequence it is next assumed that the Jews knew nothing of the doctrine of the resurrection, till after their captivity in Babylon and their mingling with other nations, especially the Persians, who, it is claimed, held the doctrine long before, and from whom the Jews first learned it. Thus it was, it is claimed, that the Pharisees in the days of Christ had derived this doctrine from the Persians: and Paul being a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, the ancient Persian doctrine has come to enjoy so much favor in the writings of the New Testament.

Modern infidelity speaks thus: “Dr. Martin Haug thinks it certain that Zoroaster lived in a remote antiquity, from fifteen hundred to two thousand years before Christ. He says that Judaism after the exile—and, through Judaism, Christianity afterward—received an important influence which in regard to the doctrine of angels, Satan, and the resurrection of the dead, cannot be mistaken. The Hebrew theology had no demonology, no Satan, until after the resurrection at Babylon. This is admitted. Well, is not the resurrection a pendant to the doctrine of Satan? Without the idea of a Satan there would be no idea of a retributive banishment of souls in hell, and of course no occasion for a vindicating restoration of them thence to their former or a superior state.”

In support of the idea that the resurrection of the Persians, as taught by Zoroaster, was a physical resurrection, the writer above quoted says, “It might be thought that the familiar Persian conception of angels, both good and evil, fervers and devs, and the reception of departed souls into their company, with Ormuzd in Garotman, or with Ahriman in Dutsakh, would exclude the belief in a future bodily resurrection. But Christians and Mohammedans at this day believe in immaterial angels and devils, and in the immediate entrance of disembodied souls upon reward or punishment in their society, and still believe in their final return to the earth, and in a restoration to them of their former tabernacles of flesh. Discordant, incoherent, as the two beliefs may be, if their co-existence is a fact with cultivated and reasonable people now, much more was it possible with an undisciplined and credulous populace three thousand years in the past.”

These two beliefs are truly characterized by our author as discordant and incoherent; and if those professing faith in the Bible as a revelation from God, had all adhered to the simple and consistent teachings of that book, modern spiritualistic infidelity would have had no help from them in the seduction of the world to this last form of infidelity. But the unscriptural doctrine, that all men are immortal—that they will exist eternally in conscious happiness or misery, independent of the resurrection—is the greatest auxiliary to the infidelity of the times. From the egg of natural immortality in every popular church, a brood of vipers is being hatched. And there is a terrible responsibility resting upon those who, having the Bible truth urged upon their minds, still cling to the popular fable, and labor with their might to sustain the false foundation upon which Spiritualism is built, and without which it could never have existed.

Our author says it is admitted that the Hebrew theology had no demonology, no Satan, until after the residence in Babylon. It is true that they had not the demonology of the heathens, before that time. Their theology did not teach that dead men were either gods or demons. It left the dead in Sheol, where there is no work, nor device, nor wisdom, nor knowledge. But were they ignorant of the existence of evil spirits, since God forbade through Moses their intercourse with familiar spirits on pain of death? Were they not forbidden to sacrifice to devils? Lev. xvii, 7; Deut. xxxii, 17; 2 Chron. xi, 15; Psa. cvi, 37. And did not Satan provoke David to number Israel? 1 Chron. xxi, 1. David, as well as Job, understood there was such a person. Psa. cix, 6; Job i, 7–22; ii, 1–7.

There was abundant opportunity for the Persians, and all the surrounding nations to get their ideas, which harmonize with the Mosaic account, from the Israelites, long before the captivity in Babylon; and mixing these with their mythology, to form a system like the Zoroastrian.

In regard to the resurrection, David had prophesied, “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol”—“thou wilt show me the path of life,”—“my flesh shall rest in hope.” “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness.” Psa. xvi, 9–11; xvii, 15. Isaiah had also said, “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.” Isa. xxvi, 19. The ancient man of Uz also trusted in a Redeemer, who in the latter day should stand upon the earth, by whose redeeming power he should in his flesh see God, though his skin and his body should have been destroyed by worms and lost in the dust. Is it true that the Jews first learned the doctrine of the resurrection from the Persians?

Had Abraham no hope of a future life, when God promised him personally an inheritance in the land of Canaan, and then told him he would die more than four hundred years before his descendants should go to that land? It is said he believed God; but he could not believe these two propositions, without believing he was to arise from the dead. Hence Paul was right in representing Abraham as looking for the city that is to descend from heaven.

Had the people who have the word of God, adhered to it as it reads, spiritual infidelity would not prevail in the world as it does. Its mouth would be stopped. But it is a sad fact, that, while no truth of the Christian system has been derived from the heathens, the popular view of the nature of man has; and this has prepared the way for infidelity to flourish as it does this day. And it is in vain for Christians to stop the mouths of these ranters against revelation, and maintain the Bible doctrine of the resurrection, till they repudiate the pagan fable that makes the resurrection unnecessary and absurd. “And ye by putting them [departed souls] in Heaven, hell, and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection. If the souls be in Heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the resurrection?”—Tyndale.

These queries of this reformer of the sixteenth century, deserve a candid consideration. If the ideas of natural immortality and the resurrection are harmonious, let it be made apparent.

R. F. COTTRELL.