THE THEOLOGICAL DRIFT by W. H. Littlejohn

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 7, 1879

THE THEOLOGICAL DRIFT.

By W. H. Littlejohn

BY ELD. W. H. LITTLEJOHN.

The phenomenon of tides, though remarkable in its character, is not without its analogies in the religious world. In the one case the tendency up to a certain period of time is all in one direction, and then for a like period in the other; so that the flood is continually bearing upon its surface all sorts of floating material, first heaping them in masses upon the eastern, and then bearing them back to pile them in other masses upon the western shores of the great oceans.

Thus, also, in the history of the church, the trend of ideas is first in one direction, and then in the other. Action and reaction has been the order of the ages, so that one generation is in danger of counteracting the labors of another, and returning back again either to the same opinions which were once held and afterward rejected, or of going to extremes in the advocacy of views which formerly had been condemned as dangerous errors. Like the pendulum of the clock, theorists are continually passing and repassing the central point of truth.

Perhaps we cannot find, just at present, a better illustration of this idea than is presented in the history of thought on the question of man's nature and destiny. The middle ages were occupied in elaborating and enforcing the most extravagant views of hell, its duration, and its terrible infliction of suffering. For ages the terrors of its punishment furnished many with the staple from which was manufactured the argument to induce men to obey God. Later on in history we find that while the extravagance of the medieval views was somewhat abated, the doctrine of an eternal hell was still presented to the sinner as a motive to obedience. Such an idea has figured very largely in all the Calvinistic teachings, even down to the first quarter of our own century. From that time, however, there has been a rapid change in public sentiment. The pulpit has been speaking with less and less certainty of sound each year upon this great question, until within the last decade it has become manifest to all that a change of tactics has been adopted. The instances in which, at present, a resort is made to the old terrors for the purpose of impressing the impenitent, have become extremely rare. This fact had become so manifest that Phinney, who was a radical of the old-school theory upon this subject, was constrained to publish in the papers of the country an article calling attention to the modern departure, and deploring this marked change in the teaching of the pulpit.

This remonstrance, however, fell powerless. The revolution was too nearly complete to be stayed. Nay, more; the allusion to the change seemed to precipitate it by acknowledging the fact of its existence. Steadily and rapidly the old landmarks are being removed, and the new order of things is being entered upon. In the transit, former issues have been lost sight of. It is not now a contest for the old hell with its billows of fire and its myriads of the damned, doomed to be consigned bodily for eternal ages to its fiery flames; but it is simply a struggle for the defense of a modified conception of the idea of punishment. In that idea is found neither a local hell nor everlasting torment, except as it will be realized in remorse of conscience eternal in its duration. But even this extremely diluted form of opinion cannot pass unchallenged. The intellectual pendulum in its reaction is passing on to the other extreme. Radicalism in the one direction is, as ever, the parent of radicalism in the other. The minds of men tortured by, and utterly disgusted with, the unreasonable and terrific teachings of the doctors of divinity on the subject of future punishment, have been unable to eliminate from those teachings that which was erroneous, retaining that which was true. They boldly question now the correctness of these teachers even in the matter of the eternal duration of punishment, as modified to suit the modern theories of greater lenity.

Such men as Henry Ward Beecher and Prof. Swing of this country, and Canon Farrar of England, men who are schooled in the matter of feeling the popular pulse—perceiving that the revolution was fairly inaugurated and could not be stayed—have taken the forefront and become the champions in the great movement of modern reaction, which now has become inevitable. With them are hundreds of others of considerable prominence, who have perceived the certainty of the revolution and have hastened to become leaders in the popular revolt. By a single leap, apparently, they have passed over the old ground of faith in the remediless condition and eternal suffering of the damned, over the intermediate position of unending remorse, to the opinion that probably—if not certainly—eternity will furnish opportunity for the repentance and redemption of those who have rejected salvation here. So strong is the hold which this argument has taken upon the popular sentiment of the country, that already numerous religious bodies have deliberately decided that it is not illegitimate for orthodox Christian ministers to hold privately this modern heterodox view, provided, only, that they shall not proclaim it from the desk. In the interest of such an opinion, and its fearless advocacy, are arrayed several papers of the type of the Independent.

What the outcome of this affair will be, the patient student of the history of religious doctrines is only too well aware. It has been well said that revolutions never go backward. As in the political so in the theological world. The tide having swept everything for ages in the direction of the rugged rocks of interminable agony, is now sweeping back again toward the shores of final restorationism. He alone will be able to stay this terrible drift, who, from His throne in Heaven, can control not only the tides of the natural but also those of the spiritual world. If God shall not come to the rescue, the consequence will be incalculable damage to the cause of truth. No system of religion ever devised can bear, without injury, the strain of such terrible extravagances of teaching on the part of its ministers. The thinking men of the world are certain to come to the conclusion that individuals whose religious sentiments can from time to time experience such radical changes, cannot be safe leaders of the public mind. If they would stop here, their conclusions would not be so erroneous. Unfortunately, however, this would not be characteristic of human nature. The danger is that the contempt that they hold for the individuals whose weakness has been thus clearly manifested, will attach itself to the book of God from which they have claimed to draw their doctrinal opinions. If this should be the case, then we have before us an era of the most terrible infidelity which the world has ever witnessed.

Relief from past mistakes can never be found in the restoration teaching of the present. If that doctrine is true, then the Bible is false. It speaks with no doubtful tone upon that subject. If in the world to come there is to be forgiveness and final redemption, then the book which we call the Bible gives a sound upon doctrinal subjects altogether too uncertain to be of any value to the world as a shaper of opinion respecting the future state. Candid men will readily perceive this fact, and they will inevitably reject either the men who teach it and the Bible along with them, or else they will repudiate the doctrine, and cling to the Bible, finding therein authority for some view which shall avoid on the one hand the unreasonable doctrine of an unending hell, and on the other, the possibility of future restoration on the part of the sinner to the favor of God. This being true, the question now arises, Is there any intermediate position at the present time, which is defensible and sufficiently developed to meet the exigencies of the case? We believe there is.

While the great masses of mankind are rushing past the central point of the true faith to the extreme position of the false one, there are a few who are pausing right where they can plant their feet upon doctrine which is both scriptural and reasonable. While Mr. Beecher and his friends are throwing themselves into the arms of Universalism or restorationism, as an escape from the horrors of eternal conscious misery, there are springing up in all parts of the world devoted Christian souls who believe that they can find in the Bible evidence that man is not naturally immortal, and that immortality is alone the gift of God. In this view they discover both a scriptural and a reasonable solution of this whole question.

To him who is careful in observing the changes of the hour, the rapid development of this class of theorists is a matter of profoundest interest. Among them will be found certain whole denominations of Christians; such, for example, as Seventh-day Adventists, and, generally speaking, first-day Adventists. In the orthodox churches, also, there are thousands of members who are adopting these sentiments, and their numbers are rapidly increasing. So obvious is the fact, that it can hardly have escaped the attention of the casual observer. Scarcely a newspaper reaches us at the present time—which is in the habit of giving the publications of the week—wherein we cannot find a notice of some new work on the subject; or an article either advocating or attacking this conception of the soul.

In England, such men as R. W. Dale, Dobney, and others,—men of both piety and great learning,—are courageously advocating these sentiments. In Europe, too, this opinion is being received with considerable favor. In fine, it presents at present an array of talent and a mass of publications so vast in quantity, and so pointed in argument and forcible in illustration, that it must become an important factor in the solution of the most weighty problem which has been presented to the Christian church for ages. Whether looked upon from the natural or the theological standpoint, the advocates of this theory seem fully to be masters of the situation. When discussing the question of Scripture teaching on this subject, they all insist upon a literal interpretation of its sayings, when such an interpretation is not rendered impossible by the nature of the text or context. Instead of resorting to metaphor and figure as an easy method of removing obstacles in the way of a given opinion, they employ this method of explanation in cases where it is manifestly the only true one. In the study of the Bible they attach to the terms life and death the same signification which belongs to them in common parlance, as well as in the sacred writings generally, instead of following the practice of many modern theologians who are compelled, in order to support their doctrine of the soul's unending life, to employ the former as signifying happiness, and the latter as signifying misery.

In other words, when the school of interpreters under consideration find God declaring that “the soul that sinneth it shall die” (Eze. 18:4), they understand him to mean relatively the same as he did when addressing individuals in the use of similar language. Again, when they read that “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23), they are constrained to believe that he who yields himself a servant to sin will be rewarded—not with an interminable existence in misery—but by the cessation of that existence in death; and on the other hand they decide that he who becomes a servant of Christ will receive for his services an extension of his life throughout the eternal ages. Once more, when they ascertain that eternal life is to be given to those who by patient continuance in well doing seek for it (Rom. 2:5–7), they feel that it is safe to conclude that the eternal life promised means a life which shall never end, and that as those only who seek for it are to obtain the same, it is certain that they never possessed it naturally; else there would have been no need of their seeking for it. Furthermore, when they learn that it is declared in so many words that God “only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:15, 16), they feel assured that it cannot be true that immortality is inherent in all men.

In fine, when they discover that in no one of the more than seventeen hundred instances in which the soul is mentioned in the Bible, either in the use of that term or its equivalent terms, God has ever said in so many words that it was immortal or that it could never die, they infer that such a remarkable omission could never have occurred were it true that unending life could be predicated of the soul.

Again, passing from the domain of Scripture to that of reason, they are not only unable to find satisfactory proof that man has a deathless spirit, but they are, on the contrary, able to overwhelm their adversaries with most conclusive arguments from that source in confirmation of the Scripture teachings that unending life, if possessed at all, must come through a beneficent grant of the great Creator. All the analogies of nature, in their hands, conspire in teaching that death without the resurrection would necessarily close forever the existence of mortals. Every proof to the contrary which their adversaries are able to draw from the physical world is demolished by them as readily as is the cob-house of the school-boy by the advancing foot of the one in whose pathway it stands. For thousands of years the arcana of nature has been searched without avail as with a lighted candle in an effort to discover testimony in favor of the article of faith which is

passing in review. The nearest approximation to it is confessedly found in the transmutation of the caterpillar into the butterfly, the periodic return of spring with its annual presentation of revived vegetable life, etc., etc. But instead of substantiating the theory which they are cited to sustain, it is perceived by these men that the very paucity in numbers in these analogies, as well as their extremely inconclusive teachings, furnish presumptive evidence of the falsity of a doctrine which is able to offer so little in its own support by way of rewarding those who have searched so long and so faithfully. Challenging the whole array, they meet it with a logic as irreversible in its effects as was the “tekel” traced by an angelic hand on the walls of the royal palace, upon him who, when weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, was found wanting. Why, say they, there is no parallelism whatever in the cases. Man, when he enters the grave, does not present a case of suspended animation; but he is hopelessly dead, as evidenced by decay and decomposition; whereas the caterpillar is simply transformed into the butterfly by a natural process in one of the stages of his development, after which,—in common with all insect life,—he ceases to be altogether.

The following, from the pen of Mr. J. H. Pettengill, throws so much light upon the process by which the butterfly is brought into existence that I have thought best to give it a place here:—

“And as for the larvae that pass through the chrysalis state into a higher life as winged insects, they must preserve the germ of their future life unimpaired while in their first stage, or the butterfly within them is not developed. They die after fulfilling their career as grubs or larvae, and come short forever of that aerial lepidopterous state for which nature has designed them, and into which those of their species that are fit are admitted. Naturalists tell us that every larva of this class, as the caterpillar, for instance, carries within itself while in its grub state, an embryo butterfly or psyche (psuche, as it is called in Greek)—the very word the Scriptures use for the human soul—possessing all the organs of the butterfly in an undeveloped state, in addition to its own proper organism, and that this embryo butterfly or psuche hidden within the grub, is peculiarly liable to the attacks of little winged insects called ichneumon flies, which prey upon its substance and destroy its life, and that, too, without any apparent injury to the grub. It fulfills its larva life and goes into the chrysalis state, and, like all other grubs of its kind, wraps itself in its cocoon or winding-sheet, in the anticipation of a higher life to come. But it rises not with its fellow to another life in the air as a winged butterfly, for the embryo psuche (soul) within was destroyed while a crawling grub. It only goes into corruption and perishes forever. This butterfly life is reserved for those only of its species that were prepared for it, and died in a well-founded hope of the life to come.”

“Here is the doctrine of conditional immortality typified in nature as clearly as possible. The parallel is perfect, and if this does not foretoken and teach what we believe the Scriptures declare, concerning the destruction of the psuche, or soul, within man by sin while yet in this world, and his consequent forfeiture of that higher angelic life in the world to come, which is reserved for the righteous alone, then it is impossible for nature to teach us anything by analogy.”

Nature, likewise, simply suspends the operations of growth while the atmospheric conditions are unfavorable to the same. When spring with its warming sunshine and moistening showers invites the dormant though not dead roots into another effort, they readily respond by shooting forth a vigorous growth of vegetable life. If, say they, our friends would show us a solitary instance in which a creature or a plant once dead, absolutely and unqualifiedly, has by any natural process been metamorphosed either into the physical form or spiritual essence of some other living entity, which truly represents the continuation of its own life in another form—whether tangible or intangible—then we would concede that they had made out a probable case; but until then we attach no importance to their inductions except as a proof of the hopeless nature of their cause. To such a conclusion, also, we think candid men are together with them rapidly coming. Many of the greatest scientists of the present hour are, it must be conceded, drifting farther and farther from the conviction that man, either in his own organization or in his surroundings, is able to find any evidence for believing that one, who by looking back for a few decades of years is able to see the limit of his existence in the past, should presume that he—as an exception to all created things—has by virtue of his creation been made equal to God in the sense that he can never die. As this view of the subject shall be more and more generally received, mankind will be better prepared for the glorious announcement in the word of God that Christ has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel; for so long as they are instructed that they have by nature an indefeasible title to unending being, they will never exert themselves to obtain the same, and never more than half believe that the wicked are to spend the eternal ages in irremediable woe.

With the acceptance of this doctrine also, all difficulty in the matter of justifying God in the creation of man, is forever disposed of. No longer will the infidel imputation of cruelty upon a being of infinite capacity for having created a race, nine-tenths of whom are destined during the eternal ages to perpetual anguish in the fiery billows of hell, have power or significance. If man is not immortal per se, then it is easy to conceive how, on the one hand, God can be just and the justifier of him who believeth on Jesus; and, on the other hand, how he could first resurrect, and then with perfect propriety punish, by fire or otherwise, those who have rejected offered light, and then allow them to become as though they had not been. This is so, first, because when God has renewed this earth and filled it with the millions of the redeemed to live therein in perpetual bliss, then he will have proved the wisdom of the creative act which brought it into existence by evident results, whose beneficence eternity alone will be able to reveal; secondly, because He who created has both the right and the power to resurrect; thirdly, because it is manifestly His prerogative by the visitation of reasonable punishment after the resurrection to restrain retroactively the sins of men in this life, provided that punishment is not extreme or unreasonable in its character; fourthly, because God has the undoubted right first to make man subject to death, and subsequently to make it possible for him through obedience to live forever.

But these propositions being true, as suggested above, then the Christian, with the Bible in his hand and the book of nature open before him, without fear of successful refutation, can enter the schools of modern philosophy, and, as Paul did of old, mightily convince men that Jesus is the Christ, and that in him is offered a plan of salvation, which is logically sound and every way equal to the mighty task of saving sinful man.

Once satisfy mankind that Jesus entered the world in order to save its inhabitants from the doom of actual and eternal death, and that he offers to them everlasting life as a free gift in consideration of their acceptance of him through obedience to his will, and you have brought to bear upon them a power which will move them almost irresistibly in the direction of the greatest boon of which the human heart can cherish a hope. All their former repugnance to the reputed methods of the Deity for the redemption of man will be gone; and while they see combined in him both justice and love, they will yearn with an unutterable desire for that unending existence which was of such priceless value in the eyes of the Messiah that he was willing to die on the cross in order that man might not perish, but have everlasting life.