صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

ter to burn, body as well as soul, in everlasting fire. How this change was brought about, and why the Jewish dogma was reproduced in all its grossness, is obvious enough. A controversy, and a very sharp one, arose on this very point between the Gnostics and the Apologists for the Christian faith, in the process of which theories must be formed, sides must be taken, and opinions distinctly defined. The Gnostics were the earliest corrupters of Christianity. They were the Hegelians of the early Church, accepting all its creeds and symbols, but emptying them of their native meaning, and filling them out again with their own wild and dreamy speculations. One of their notions was the essential evil of matter, and hence they poured contempt upon the natural body. The flesh is the prison of the soul, and keeps it in darkness and corruption. They denied, not merely the resurrection of Christ, but his incarnation. The real Christ was never clothed in flesh; it was only an appearance. These are the heretics to whom St. John is supposed to refer in his anathema against those who confess not "that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh." They travestied the whole doctrine of the resurrection as the Church held it, and resolved the language of Christ and Paul into a figure of speech. It only meant a moral resurrection, a rise out of sin into holiness and virtue. Taking up the Jewish dogma as they found it latent in the minds of Christians, they raked it with the keen and subtile logic which they were masters of, and whenever they fell in with a Christian believer, especially among the simple and unlearned, they were pretty sure to stagger him at this weak and vulnerable point.

*

Against these wily antagonists, Tertullian undertook the defence of the Christian faith. He was a native of Carthage, born not far from A. D. 150, and flourished, therefore, about the close of the second century. He was a convert from heathenism. His mind was coarse, rugged, full of

* 1 John iv. 3.

African fire, and dwelt doggedly in the literal sense. He wrote specially against the Gnostics. His treatise, De Resurrectione Carnis, takes the extreme Jewish position, and maintains, in its utmost literalism, the resurrection of the flesh. Sometimes his argument rises into strength and grandeur. "Look now," says he, "at the examples of the Divine power. Day dies into night, and on all sides is buried in darkness. The glory of the world is dishonored; everything that exists is covered with blackness; all things are rendered mean, silent, and torpid; there is a general mourning, a cessation of all business. Thus the lost light is mourned for. And yet again it revives with its own ornament and dowry with the sun, the same as before, whole and entire; slaying its own death, night; bursting its sepulchre, the darkness; coming forth the heir to itself, until night revives with its own accompaniments. The rays of the stars are rekindled which the morning glow had extinguished. The absent constellations are brought back, which the destruction of time had taken away. The mirrors of the moon are re-adorned, which the monthly number had worn away. The winters and summers revolve, and springs and autumns, with their own powers, habits, and fruits. Earth receives instructions from heaven to clothe the trees, after they have been stripped; to color the flowers afresh; again to bring forth the herbage; to exhibit the same seeds that had been taken away, and not to exhibit them before they are taken away. Wonderful procedure! from a defrauder to become a preserver; that she may restore, she takes away; that she may guard, she destroys; that she may retain entire, she injures; that she may increase, she consumes. Nothing perishes but for salvation. Therefore this whole revolving order of things is an attestation to the resurrection of the dead. God wrote it in his

works before he wrote it in his word."

Neander's Planting and Antignostikus, Vol. II. pp. 485, 486, Bohn's edition.

From the year 170 onward, this doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh appears with greater and greater distinctness. It appears at first faintly, in private summaries of belief; more distinctly after the controversy with the Gnostics. The first professed creed, however, in which it is found, is one drawn up by the arch-heretic Arius, about A. D. 327; and the first public creed which contains it is that of the Council of Constantinople, A. D. 381.* Dr. Sykes seems to lay too much stress upon this fact; for the reason why it was not sooner put into the public creeds doubtless was, that it was not deemed necessary, since it had not been extensively denied by Christian believers. Like Like many other doctrines, there was no philosophy about it until controversy made it a subject of investigation.

Once fairly inducted, it did not fail to gather about it the absurdities and fantasies for which it has a strong natural affinity. It became a question, whether the same flesh would rise again; whether it would have the same form and sex; at what age it would rise; whether it would be the body that died and was buried, or some other of the series which the soul had occupied; whether souls would know their own bodies by instinct; and what would prevent the body from burning up and decomposing when roasted in hell-fire. On these points, the unbelievers did not fail to tax all the ingenuity of the faithful. Tertullian maintained that the identical dead body would rise again, particle for particle; and Origen is said to have believed that bodies would rise in globular shape, as if rolling were an easier or better method of locomotion than walking. Augustine argues that burning material bodies will not necessarily destroy them; he knows of worms that can be boiled in water without hurting them in the least. Thomas Aquinas thinks the identical substance will come up out of the grave that was put into it. The unbelievers were gen

* Dr. Sykes's Enquiry.

erally silenced, or rather evaded, by remanding all difficulties and contradictions to the Divine Omnipotence.

It is quite possible, as some writers have imagined, that the dogma of a fleshly resurrection was borrowed by the Jews from the Magians, and by the Christians from the Jews; but we do not think that this accounts sufficiently for its genesis and descent to the Christian Church. How came the Magians by it? for they are said to be the first and the only heathen that ever held it. They held it in company with kindred and cognate ideas. They had first sunk God in nature, and worshipped nature in the sun, moon, and stars, and hence their only conception of a real and tangible immortality was on the plane of nature, and for this the dead bodies must stand up again upon the earth. The Jews believed it only after the glory of Israel had waned, and they were looking for a temporal Messiah. The Christian Church received it, or at least developed it, after her day of childlike faith had passed. There is a common genesis for all such heresies, and a common soil for them to germinate and grow in. It is the tendency of the carnal mind to carnalize the truths of the Divine Word. It is wisely permitted, in order that those truths may not sink out of sight and be entirely lost. It broke the descent of the Magians toward Atheism; it broke that of the Pharisees towards blank Sadduceeism; it gave the Christian Church a foothold, and saved it from sliding into Gnosticism. carnalized faith is better than none at all, and to believe in the resurrection of the flesh is better than to lose sight of the eternal realities, or turn them into dreams and shadows.

A

It is a singular fact, however, that the idea of a spiritual body, distinct from the natural, and always investing the soul, is most plainly set forth in the writings of these Christian fathers. They seem to have had no notion of a disembodied state after death. Man still lives, and lives in human form, and with a bodily organization, after the material coverings have been laid in the grave. "Spirits after death,"

says Irenæus, "have a body adapted to their condition the same as before." Tertullian himself affirms the doctrine in its full integrity: "If souls be sensible of pain after death, and tormented with fire, then must they needs have some corporeity, for incorporality suffers nothing." Origen affirms the same thing.* Augustine distinctly recognizes it: "Unde et spirituali erunt: non quia corpora esse desistent, sed quia spiritu vivificante subsistent."† They will be spiritual, not because they will cease to be bodies, but because they will subsist by the quickening spirit. The majority of the fathers believed, too, that angels live in substantial bodies. Why they did not perceive that these ideas rendered entirely nugatory their notion of a resurrection of the flesh, it is difficult to imagine, unless, as is probably the case, they regarded matter as more real than spirit-substance, and the natural world more truly and brightly existent than the spiritual, and supposed, therefore, like the heathen, that departed spirits pined to get back to its glorious domains.

After the Reformation this notion of the resurrection of the flesh could not fail to be scrutinized and re-examined. In 1678 Dr. Cudworth's "Intellectual System" was published, one of the grandest monuments of learning in the English language. In this he devotes over a hundred pages to the subject of the spiritual or celestial body, in which he shows that not only the ancient philosophers, but most of the Christian fathers, believed that man lives in human form after death; and their reasonings are set forth in such clear array, that the notion of a resurrection of the flesh sinks into unimportance. It became doubtful whether he really believed it, and his great work provoked replies from the orthodox, who charged him with bringing the doctrine into peril. They might well be alarmed, for the best English thinkers came to doubt it, as both unphilosophical and unscriptural, and to treat it as a lifeless tradition.

* Cudworth's Intellectual System, Ch. V. Sec. III.

† De Civ. Dei, LXIII., CXXII.

« السابقةمتابعة »