OUR ESCHATOLOGY | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 6, 1876

OUR ESCHATOLOGY.

Under the above heading is published, in Scribner’s Monthly, for July, an article by an “orthodox minister.” Some of the arguments, a portion of which we give below, we consider unanswerable; and yet, singularly enough, the writer totally misapplies them. The arguments, however, are none the less good in themselves, and we lay them before our readers:—

“The specific purpose of this article is to consider only so much of what is usually included under the above heading as relates to the final condition of the dead, and to show that the current theories upon this subject are unreasonable and untenable.

“The traditional and common belief respecting the final allotment and experiences of men is that there are two distinct states—one of unmixed, interminable woe; the other of unalloyed, eternal happiness. But the last cannot be true unless the first is false. That is, the endless punishment of the lost will render perfect happiness in Heaven impossible, because, for the redeemed to be perfectly happy while the unsaved are completely and irremediably miserable, implies the destruction of those faculties of the soul which are essential to its existence, viz., perception, memory, and moral sensibility.

“The primitive suffering of vast multitudes will be known by the redeemed, if they retain their ability to perceive facts. Now, unless they have lost their moral sensibility, unless they have lost that pitying love and tender sympathy for their kind when in suffering, which most fits them for Heaven, they will have sentiments of grief, of sorrow, amounting to positive pain, as soon as they are aware of the fact that many, and perhaps some of their own relatives and friends, are suffering in hell. If this be so, there will be an alloy in their happiness, and, therefore, it will not be perfect. . . .

“But the most repulsive feature of the current eschatology is that it makes God a particeps criminis in this heartless indifference to the woes of the lost, by affirming that the ever-present view of the irremediable suffering of millions of his own offspring will not produce a ripple of disturbance in his infinite happiness. It not only represents God to be cruelly indifferent himself, but solely responsible for a like indifference on the part of the blessed to the sufferings of their fellow-beings, by ascribing their inhumanity to their ‘acquiescence in the will of God.’

“Now, it is plain that this is a gross misrepresentation of the divine character. The foundation principle of a correct system of eschatology is that, notwithstanding the existence of sin and the punishment of sin, God is, nevertheless, always good, always loving and merciful, and always just. No system can be credible which denies that these attributes are always co-existent with God. That there is no hindrance to their co-existence will be evident, if we keep in mind the fatherhood of God, and the likeness of the divine administration to what we conceive should obtain in the methods of the wise and kind human parent. A little consideration will show that love requires both the divine and the human parent to do to and for their offspring precisely what justice requires them to do, and vice versa.

“In this point of view, it also becomes apparent that justice and love in any parent are necessarily co-existent and inseparable; that neither God nor man can truly love his offspring without at the same time being just to them; or be just to his offspring without at the same time loving them. It follows that punishment is as much a dictate of love and mercy as of justice; and further, that punishment is never justifiable unless it is dictated by love and administered in love.”

“No parent or administrator has a right to inflict punishment who cannot do it in love. The conception of an administrator, whether in the family, the civil or the divine government, taking pleasure in the infliction of suffering because it is a just punishment, is revolting to all Christian or refined instincts; such a being would be a monster. And still further, it must be conceded that no one is fit for the high trust of retributive administration in either of the relations just named, who does not come to the infliction of punishment with sentiments of profound regret, and of sincere sympathy and pain, in view of the suffering he is about to inflict. The father who punishes his child with indifference to its pain, or without positive grief, is considered inhumane, if not inhuman. The civil judge who pronounces the sentence without an emotion of sympathy for the suffering culprit, is declared to be unworthy the ermine. Good men look with detestation upon heartless indifference to the sufferings of even criminals. Even so, to conceive of the divine Father and Judge, as consigning his own offspring to interminable and hopeless misery without a sentiment of sympathetic grief, and then turning his back to them forever, never to have an after-thought of fatherly pity for them, is to conceive of a being at once inhuman, ungodlike and Satanical. Such a conception of God effectually demonizes and dethrones him.”—Herald of Life.