IMMORTALITY
In God, is underived and absolute: “who only hath immorality.” In creatures, it is dependent upon the will of God. The immortality of the soul is argued from its boundless desires and capacities, is unlimited improvement, its desert of future punishment or reward, etc. All arguments, however, are unsatisfying without the testimony of Scripture. Christ “hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,” 2Ti 1:10 : the immortal blessedness of Christians, including the resurrection of the body, is by virtue of their union with Christ, Jos 14:15 . The everlasting woe of the wicked, the punishment of their sins, runs parallel with the eternal life of the redeemed, Mat 25:46 .
Fuente: American Tract Society Bible Dictionary
Immortality
The subject of immortality may be treated from many points of view-doctrinal, metaphysical, biological. But the scope of this article is necessarily limited to the historical method of treatment, and is further confined to a definite portion of the historical field-the 1st cent. of Christianity. Hence many aspects of the subject are excluded. For the previous development of the belief in immortality the reader is referred to the articles dealing with this and the related subjects in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) , Dict. of Christ and the Gospels , and Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics . The following is the outline of the treatment of the subject in this article:
I.General discussion of the place occupied in religious thought at the beginning of the Apostolic Age by the belief in immortality.
II.Particular history of the development of the belief during the Apostolic Age:
1.Pauline doctrine of immortality.
2.Petrine doctrine of immortality.
3.Johannine doctrine of immortality.
4.Apostolic Fathers doctrine of immortality.
III.Conclusion. Literature.
I. General Discussion
At the beginning of the Apostolic Age the Graeco-Roman world might almost be compared to the Pool of Bethesda at the critical moment of the angelic visitation. There was a troubling of the waters, and a steadily increasing number of seekers after spiritual health. The subject of immortality was, so to speak, in the air. The various Mystery-cults, with varying forms of ritual, all agreed in offering to the initiate the hope of a future life of bliss after death. Abundant evidence for this may be found in books and monographs dealing with the subject of the Mystery-cults in the Roman Empire. At the same time, along a totally different line of development, the Jew had arrived at a conception of immortality which was bound up with a spiritual conception of God and mans relation to God. In communion with God lay both the essence of immortality and its guarantee for faith. In Alexandrian Judaism, as represented by Philo, we have the blending of the Platonic doctrine of immortality, based on the distinction between the higher and the lower elements in man, with the Pharisaic assertion of the value of the individual to God and its grasp of the eternal character of the souls communion with God. Hence we can discern at least three distinct elements at work in the formation of current ideas about immortality.
(1) The view of a future life which rested upon the Eastern dualistic attitude towards matter and spirit. This Eastern, and especially Persian, element which entered so largely into the Mystery-cults of the century before and the century following the birth of Christ, laid stress upon the deliverance of the soul, by purificatory rites and by asceticism, from the bondage of the body, and thus pointed a way to ultimate salvation and immortality by union with the god. The resemblance of the rites of the Mystery-cults to various elements in the Christian sacraments has led many scholars to trace the influence of these cults of the Graeco-Roman world upon the form which Christianity assumed as it developed a system of ritual and doctrine. This point will be discussed briefly in dealing with St. Pauls doctrine of immortality.
(2) The Platonic element in Alexandrian Judaism, modified by Stoic influence, laying stress on the eternity of Reason, and hence offering an abstract form of immortality in which the continuance of personal identity was not involved.
(3) The Pharisaic doctrine of immortality with its insistence on the permanence of personal identity preserved in communion with God. The place of the body was not clearly defined, as Pharisaic Judaism held the immortality of the soul in combination with various forms of eschatological expectation, in which a body, spiritual or quasi-spiritual, was involved.
The Jewish view was, of course, not confined to Palestine, but, as we know, was spread throughout Egypt, Asia Minor, and all the Mediterranean coasts by means of the synagogue. All these elements intermingled and formed the basis of the popular attitude towards the future life, in the 1st cent. of Christianity.
But the form which the doctrine of immortality took in primitive Christianity is by no means explained when we have examined the conditions of thought under which it grew up. It certainly cannot be explained without them, but neither can it be explained wholly by them. Christianity gave its own definite form to all that it took up from the current thought of its time, and the outstanding factor in the form which the primitive Christian hope assumed is the Resurrection of Christ. It has been argued that the form which the belief in the Resurrection took, especially in St. Paul, was determined by these external influences, especially by the existence in various Mystery-cults of the idea of the death of the god and his resurrection. But these offer no true parallel to the belief in a historic Resurrection and do not explain either its existence or the peculiar moral value attached to the Resurrection of Christ by the primitive Church.
When we come to the historical account of the doctrine of immortality in the 1st cent. of Christianity, we find, in the first place, that it is inseparably connected with the Resurrection of Christ, and, secondly, that it is also inseparable from primitive Christian eschatology. The resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come is the phrase which crystallizes the growth of the idea of immortality for the popular mind during the early stages of Christianity. We shall find, however, in both Pauline and Johannine teaching, much that transcends the form of belief as crystallized in the credal phrase.
II. Particular Historical Development
1. Pauline.-It is impossible to work through the Pauline treatment of the subject without discovering that St. Paul had no doctrine of immortality. He deals with the subject only so far as it arises out of the question of salvation through Christ and the implications of salvation. Hence the most illuminating method of understanding St. Pauls attitude towards immortality will be to trace the bearings of his theory of salvation as it is worked out in Romans, the most definitely soteriological of his Epistles. The following are the principal points that arise from the examination of the Epistle.
(1) Eschatological background.-There is an eschatological background to the whole of St. Pauls thinking on the subject of salvation. This is not to say that the ethical nature of the salvation is excluded; on the contrary, the ethical is inseparable from the eschatological, the connexion between life and righteousness being of the very essence of St. Pauls thought. But from the outset and right through, the eschatological outlook is apparent. In Rom 2:7, one of the most general statements on the subject, St. Paul says that in the revelation of Gods righteous judgment He will render eternal life to all those who are seeking glory and honour and immortality (); in Rom 5:2, there is the justified boast in the hope of the glory of God; in Rom 5:17, those who receive the gift of righteousness shall reign in life; in Rom 8:11, the mortal bodies of those indwelt by the Spirit are to be quickened.
This eschatological colouring is more apparent in the earlier Epistles, e.g. 1 and 2 Thessalonians, than in the later. But even in the later Epistles, e.g. in Philippians, it appears: Php 3:20-21, for our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself.
Thus the eschatological element in the belief is not secondary or non-essential; it shows in the first place that St. Pauls sense of the necessity of a future glorified life is part of a larger scheme of things-the future Kingdom of God and its manifestation on earth.
(2) Christ as an earnest of the future life.-The present condition of Christs existence is both the pattern and the guarantee of the believers future state of existence. This is perhaps the most characteristic and original part of St. Pauls thinking on this subject, and requires the most careful study. It is true that various elements existed in Apocalyptic and Rabbinical systems of thought in St. Pauls time which may have suggested in details the form of his thought. For example, the idea of a spiritual body was not new; it occurs in Midr. Rab. and in the Gnostic Hymn of the Soul (see Rendel Harriss edition of the Odes and Psalms of Solomon, 1909, Introduction, p. 67f.) and the conception of the transformation of the righteous into the likeness of Messiah occurs first in Enoch xc. 38.
But the Death and Resurrection of Christ as historical facts are the decisive elements which St. Paul lays hold of and works out in their relation to the Kingdom of God, making new combinations of old ideas, throwing fresh light on the purpose of God, and filling the old categories of thought with a new vital force. No apocalyptic scheme offered any such conception as the Death and Resurrection of Messiah, and the acceptance by St. Paul of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus as historical facts, together with his identification of Jesus with the Messiah, set a train of thought working in his mind which yielded entirely new forms, not to be explained by any patch-work of older elements to be found in them. There are certain essential points of St. Pauls scheme of things which were never grasped by the Apologists and the early interpreters of Apostolic Christianity. This was partly because the eschatological element was not understood, and perhaps still more because St. Pauls attitude towards the human side of the Incarnation was not understood. The side upon which Irenaeus lays stress, the answer to the question Cur Deus Homo? was fully grasped and developed, viz. the deification of man through the Incarnation of the Son of God. But owing to the rise of christological controversies the emphasis laid by St. Paul and the primitive Church on the ethical value of the Resurrection of Christ and its implications dropped out of sight.
(a) First of all, then, for St. Paul the Resurrection of Christ has an ethical value which is of great importance in his view of the future life of believers. The Resurrection of Christ was not a foregone conclusion resulting from His Divinity, but it was intimately connected with Christs faith and holiness as man. His Resurrection was according to the Spirit of holiness; He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. In His Resurrection the full working of the law of the Spirit of life was displayed. He lives to God. The word glory which St. Paul uses to describe the present state of the risen Christ as well as His future manifestation has both an ethical and a quasi-material significance. The full moral likeness to God which Christ displayed has its counter-part in His present state of existence, the glory of God in the face ( , possibly better rendered in the person [cf. 2Co 2:10]) of Jesus Christ.
(b) This resurrection state of Christ is spiritual. The historic Christ retaining His moral characteristics has passed into a spiritual condition, by the operation of a law made manifest for the first time in His case. Christ is identified with the Spirit. He is no longer limited in manifestation by time and space, but can dwell in those who receive Him by faith. It is the real Christ that St. Paul conceives of as dwelling in believers and thereby bringing into operation in them the same law that resulted in His own Resurrection and victory over the law of sin and death.
(c) The ultimate result of this indwelling of the Spirit of Christ is to assert the complete triumph of life over death even in the bodies of believers (Rom 8:11). The full manifestation of this life will bring deliverance for creation (Rom 8:21) from the bondage of corruption (). For St. Paul, then, immortality is not , but . It is an integral part of the triumph of the Kingdom of God, beginning with the Resurrection of Christ (1Co 15:20-23 : ).
(3) The corporate nature of the future life.-The last point that comes out from the study of St. Pauls teaching on this subject is the corporate nature of the future existence, in strong contrast to the immortality presented by Plotinus and the later Neo-Platonists-an immortality of the Alone with the Alone. The indwelling Spirit of Christ is the ground of unity, as well as the assurance of immortality; the future life of bliss is the life of a blessed community of glorified persons, united to Christ and like Him morally and spiritually, finding their joy in the activities of eternal life, doing the will of God.
The Pauline view of the subject is also bound up with the Parousia and with the closely allied subject of the resurrection of believers. Hence the reader is referred to the articles on these subjects in this Dictionary for supplementary discussion of the Pauline teaching.
2. Petrine and other primitive teaching.-For the sake of convenience, the general teaching of the Catholic Epistles and the Pastorals is taken together with the Petrine doctrine of immortality. The doctrine of 1 Peter may be said to represent the general standpoint of the primitive Apostolic Church on this matter, while the Pauline and the Johannine teaching contain developments which profoundly affected the thought of the Church but which were never wholly understood and accepted.
(1) The First Epistle of Peter shows the same eschatological background that we find in St. Paul and everywhere in the primitive Church, and the same view of the ethical value of the Resurrection of Christ: who through him are believers in God, which raised him from the dead, and gave him glory; so that your faith and hope might be in God (1Pe 1:21).
But there is nothing of the extraordinary development of the consequences of the Resurrection-life of Christ in the Spirit, and the resultant view of the Kingdom as already manifested in its working. The most important passage for our purpose is 1Pe 3:18-20, the Descent into Hell of the Creeds.
Rendel Harris (Side-lights on NT Research, 1908, p. 208) has proposed the emendation on the supposition that has dropped out by haplography, and would refer the passage to a reminiscence of the visit of Enoch to the condemned watchers and his intercession for them (see Enoch xii., xiii.). But the interruption to the general sense of the passage is too serious, except on a very low estimate of the logical sequence of thought in the Epistle, to admit of the probability of this ingenious suggestion.
If the passage be interpreted to refer to the visit of Christ to the souls in Sheol during the interval between His Death and His Resurrection, then this is the only NT passage which supports such a conception, and it is a possible view that the Christian interpretation of the passage has been influenced by the strong belief which grew up in the primitive Church in the descent of Christ to Hades. But the passage requires fuller treatment than space allows of here (see, further, article Descent into Hades). If the credal interpretation be accepted, the passage is evidence rather for an intermediate state than for any clearly defined doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It does not necessarily imply more than is implied in the later Jewish view of Sheol. Still more perplexing Isa 4:6, if the same interpretation be attached to it. But it is possible to interpret both passages of the preaching of Noah to those who though dead now, were alive at the time when the Spirit of Christ in Noah preached to them. Then the last clause of Isa 4:6 may be evidence for the future state of the condemned. After judgment they continue to live in spirit in relation to God. Apart from this the writers attention is fixed on the coming glory, the crown of glory, to be revealed at the Parousia.
(2) Hebrews.-The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews retains the eschatological background common to the early Church, but adds to our inquiry one important new conception-that which is implied in the term . Christ in His present risen state is spoken of as (Heb 7:28); the spirits in the heavenly Jerusalem are called the spirits of the perfected righteous, (Heb 12:23; cf. also Heb 5:9; Heb 11:40, Luk 13:32). It is difficult to find the Pauline conception of a glorified body here. It would rather seem to present the Alexandrian Judaistic point of view that the righteous immediately after death reach their perfected state of bliss in full communion with God. The writer undoubtedly believes in the Resurrection of Christ and also in the ethical aspect of it already mentioned, but he does not seem to carry on, as St. Paul does, the consequences of this to the bodily resurrection of believers. But he clearly looks forward to a for the people of God, a heavenly city, and a corporate immortality, all based upon the present risen life of Christ.
(3) The Pastoral Epistles add one or two points. The dogmatic conception of abstract immortality-what Friedrich von Hgel (Eternal Life) calls quantitative immortality-perhaps appears in 1Ti 6:16 : . In 1Ti 4:8 a sharp distinction is drawn between the life that now is and that which is to come, a sign of the passing of the eschatological form of the distinction between the present age and the coming age. The rich are charged to lay hold on what is truly life ( , 1Ti 6:19).
In 2Ti 1:1 we have the Pauline conception, the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus; 2Ti 2:11, if we suffer with him we shall reign with him; 2Ti 4:1, living and dead are to be judged by Christ at His appearing; 2Ti 4:18, shall save me unto his heavenly kingdom. But the two most characteristic passages in this Epistle are 2Ti 1:10, where our Saviour Jesus Christ has annulled death and brought life and immortality () to light, through the gospel; and 2Ti 2:10, where speaking of the elect the writer says that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. Tit 1:1-2 echoes the phrase of 2Ti 1:1, the hope of eternal life, still reflecting the eschatological colouring. In Tit 2:12-13 the present age is contrasted with the appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Christ Jesus, also spoken of as the blessed hope; in Tit 3:5 ff. the bath of regeneration () and the renewing of the Holy Ghost are connected with righteousness and the hope of eternal life after the Pauline manner.
3. Johannine.-The three groups of Johannine literature are here treated separately.
(1) The Apocalypse.-The phrase which is so characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, eternal life, does not occur in the Apocalypse. For our subject we have the following passages: Rev 2:11, the overcomer shall not be hurt of the second death; Rev 3:5, the overcomers name will not be blotted out of the book of life. In Rev 4:4 the elders (who may possibly represent those who have attained-the elders of Hebrews 11) are seen in the symbolic garb of victors. In Heb 6:9 the souls of the martyrs are seen under the altar, crying for vengeance. In Heb 7:13-17 there is a description of those who have come out of great tribulation and who enjoy perpetual bliss before the throne of God. In Rev 20:4 those who are slain during the great tribulation are raised for the millennial kingdom, and reign with Christ for a thousand years. Rev 20:5 adds the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were ended. Then in Rev 20:11-15 the dead small and great, i.e. apparently the rest of the dead, are raised and judged according to their works, and all not found written in the Book of Life are cast into the Lake of Fire.
Here again the eschatological interest is paramount. The future existence of individuals is not a question of psychological or philosophical interest, but is determined by the view of the future Kingdom of God. Hence quantitative immortality does not appear. The righteous receive the reward of their works and patience, and enter on a blessing which appears to extend beyond the millennial kingdom, and at any rate reaches its climax there. The writer is not so interested in anything after that. But the future fate of the wicked is indeterminate. The view taken as to this depends upon our interpretation of the writers symbolism. The fire may be destructive, purgative, or penal. The torment of the beast and the false prophet is spoken of, but the final end of the wicked is not explicitly stated. They are cast into the Lake of Fire.
(2) The Epistles.-In the Johannine Epistles the Parousia still forms the background of Christian hope, but the precise form of the hope is vague, and shows signs of transformation into a purely spiritual expectation. The contribution of the Epistles belongs rather to the subject of the Parousia (q.v. [Note: quod vide, which see.] ). The term eternal life occurs frequently, but never with the eschatological sense in which it is used in St. Pauls Epistles and the Pastorals. But the profound ethical implication of likeness to God and to Christ fills the term with a new meaning. The life of the coming age, the original sense of the term , has become the life of God, expressed in Christ, imparted to the believer, working itself out in moral likeness to God, and perfected when Christ appears. He who dwells in God and God in him can never die, and he who loves dwells in God, and partakes of Gods eternal life. Immortality is qualitative wholly here, with no thought of duration.
(3) The Fourth Gospel.-Here the transformation of the eschatological background is practically complete. Subsequent developments really consisted, not in a deeper and richer spiritualization of the eschatological view-point, with all its stimulus and insistent pressure of the real world surrounding and penetrating the phenomenal world, but in the total abandonment of eschatology and consequent impoverishment of the Churchs life. But in the Fourth Gospel the intensity and reality of the hope are retained, while the particular Jewish colouring and schemes of thought are quietly dropped, with a few exceptions.
In this Gospel eternal life is the principal category under which the subject of immortality falls to be considered. The most important group of passages is in the 6th chapter. Here our Lord, after the miracle of the loaves, and evidently, in the mind of the author of the Gospel, explaining the significance of the miracle, claims that He is the living bread come down from heaven. Those who eat of this bread live for ever. Continuing to explain the saying, our Lord adds that the bread is His flesh and His blood, and that he who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of the Son of Man has eternal life, and will be raised by Christ at the last day. Again, he that eateth this bread shall live for ever. It is possible that we must accept the predestinarianism of Joh 6:36-37 as part of the older eschatological colouring. But evidently a difficult point is involved here. Schweitzer would explain the passage as the expression of a speculative religious materialism which concerns itself with the problem of matter and spirit, and the permeation of matter by Spirit, and endeavours to interpret the manifestation and the personality of Jesus, the action of the sacraments and the possibility of the resurrection of the elect, all on the basis of one and the same fundamental conception (Paul and his Interpreters, p. 202f.). That is, broadly speaking, the immortality described in the Fourth Gospel is sacramental, conditioned entirely by participation in the sacraments which, through the communication to them of the Spirit of the Risen Christ, have received this potency.
Like so much of Schweitzers exegesis, this is brilliant and stimulating, but not wholly sound. Throughout the Gospel the possession of eternal life is independent of sacraments and connected simply with faith in Christ: he that believeth on me hath everlasting life, he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth on me shall never die. The charge of unintelligent spiritualizing is hasty and unfounded. As in the Synoptic Gospels, so also in the Fourth Gospel, Schweitzer has not recognized the peculiar ethical element which is the real basis of the primitive Churchs view of the Resurrection of Christ, and of the resurrection and future state of believers.
So in the Fourth Gospel the immortality implied is at bottom ethical; it is the life of God which Christ is in Himself and has come to earth to reveal, and in order to impart it in its fullness He must enter upon the spiritual state. It is expedient for them that He should go away. After His departure they will know that He is in the Father, they in Him, and He in them.
Hence, while in St. Paul we have the eager movement of the new life towards its glorious consummation, in the Fourth Gospel we have rather the steady contemplation of the fully revealed nature of the life of God in this world now. In both cases all the interest is centred on the purpose of God in its realization, rather than on the individual man and his ultimate fate. So that we have the appearance of the conditional immortality which is found in Athanasius, really only apparent, because the nature of immortality as a dogma was not in question, but the wider issue of the coming in of the Kingdom of God. In the Fourth Gospel we have also the corporate nature of the life insisted on. In St. Paul, spirit, soul, and body are to be preserved to the day of Christ; there is no immortality of the soul conceived of as a mere abstraction, but the eternal gain for the Kingdom of God of a person, whole and entire. In the Fourth Gospel there is not the same prominence given to the resurrection of the body, but ultimately the body of him who possesses the life of God must pass under the law of eternal life, although the author of the Fourth Gospel never states the expectation in the same way; it is not your mortal bodies, but I will raise him up. The incident of the grave clothes also shows that the writers conception of the Resurrection was purely spiritual: the Lard had become a Spirit, although capable of revealing His continued personal existence to His disciples. So for the Fourth Gospel the ultimate thing also is the gain of the individual: no man is able to pluck them out of my Fathers hand.
4. The Apostolic Fathers.-Here we have much less of vital importance. The creative impulse has died away, and we can trace the process, already mentioned, of the gradual abandonment of much that was most characteristic of the teaching of St. Paul. Ignatius offers the closest affinities with the point of view of the Fourth Gospel, as is well enough known. The following are the principal relevant passages:
(1) 1 Clement.-The principal passage in this Epistle is in chs. xxiv-xxvi. The future resurrection is based on the Resurrection of Christ, and the simile of the seed is used. Ch. xxvi. seems to limit the resurrection to the faithful, those who served Him in holiness, in the confidence of a good faith. Those who have died as martyrs or in the faith are spoken of as having obtained the inheritance of glory and honour (cf. v. 3, 7, 45:7). In i. 3 those who were perfected in love by the grace of God have a place among the pious who shall be made manifest at the visitation of the Kingdom of Christ.
(2) 2 Clement has several interesting passages: v. 5, our sojourning in this world in the flesh is a little thing and lasts a short time, but the promise of Christ is great and wonderful, and brings us rest, in the kingdom which is to come, and in everlasting life. In vi. 7 rest is contrasted with eternal punishment ( ). The future existence depends on the keeping of the baptism undefiled; the first occurrence of this conception is in vi. 9, vii. 6, viii. 6. In ch. ix. there is the assertion of the resurrection of the flesh to judgment, based on the Incarnation and not on the Resurrection of Christ. Ch. xii contains the curious Agraphon possibly from the Gospel of the Egyptians, When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female, neither male nor female. It is interpreted by the author as referring to the moral perfection and asceticism suited to the kingdom.
In xiv. 5 we have an important passage. After a somewhat strained analogy of the flesh as the Church, referring to the Church as pre-existent and possessing the Spirit, the author says: So great a gift of life and immortality () has this flesh the power to receive if the Holy Spirit be joined to it. In xix. 3, 4 we have a statement of immortality in fairly quantitative terms, and the expression the immortal fruit of the resurrection ( ). In xx. 5 Christ is the Saviour and Leader of immortality ( ).
(3) Ignatius.-We owe to Ignatius the famous phrase the medicine of immortality, (Eph. xx. 2), which is so often repeated by later patristic writers. Ignatius frequently uses the word immortality, but as frequently shows that his conception is ethical-qualitative, not quantitative. What he seeks is not mere duration of bliss, but true life ( , xi. 1). Faith and love constitute this true life, the life of God (xiv. 1). Christ has breathed immortality on the Church (, xvii. 1). At the Incarnation God was manifest as Man, for the newness of eternal life ( ), a reminiscence of Rom 6:4, but is never used of life in the NT. In xx. 2 it is the Sacrament, the bread, which is the medicine of immortality.
Other passages are Magn. i. 2, ix. 2: a reference to the Descensus; Trall. ii. 1, ix. 2; Rom. vi. 2; Phil. 9:2: the gospel is the perfecting of immortality ( ); Smyrn. 12:2, resurrection both fleshly and spiritual; ad Polyc. ii. 3, the prize is immortality and eternal life.
The remaining literature of our period adds nothing of importance.
III. Conclusion.-The principal trend of the teaching of the NT lies mainly along the lines laid down by our Lord, and expanded by the original thinking of St. Paul and St. John, if we may assume a name for the author of the Fourth Gospel for convenience sake. The expansion followed lines which were principally determined by the acceptance of the Resurrection of Christ as a historical fact. The emphasis thus lies on the value of complete personality brought into the sphere of the operation of the Kingdom of God. Those operations take on the form of eschatological expectations, but express fundamental and eternal realities of religion. The pale and thin conception of mere duration of existence is of no interest to the apostolic writers. It was of fundamental importance to possess true life, the life of God; and as the meaning of the Incarnation was explored, the conception of eternal life grew in depth and breadth and height.
Literature.-Sanday-Headlam, Romans 5 (International Critical Commentary , 1902); Robertson-Plummer, Corinthians (International Critical Commentary , 1911); J. Armitage Robinson, Ephesians, 1903; F. J. A. Hort, 1 Peter, 1898; B. F. Westcott, St. John , 2 vols., 1908, and The Epistles of St. John, 1883; H. B. Swete, The Apocalypse2, 1907. See also A. Sabatier, The Apostle Paul, Eng. translation , 1891; P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul, 1911; A. Schweitzer, Paul and his Interpreters, Eng. translation , 1912; E. Underhill, The Mystic Way, 1913; F. von Hgel, Eternal Life, 1912; S. D. F. Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality4, 1901; E. F. Scott, The Kingdom and the Messiah, 1911, also The Fourth Gospel, 1906; W. Sanday, Christologies, Ancient and Modern, 1910; C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, rep. 1913; J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 1891; J. Drummond, Philo Judaeus, 2 vols., 1888; H. J. Holtzmann, NT Theologie, 2 vols., 1911; A. Harnack, History of Dogma, Eng. translation 3, 7 vols., 1894-99, also The Mission and Expansion of Christianity, Eng. translation 2, 2 vols., 1908; R. H. Charles, Eschatology-Hebrew, Jewish and Christian, 1899; G. Dalman, The Words of Jesus, Eng. translation , 1902; F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, 1911; S. Reinach, Orpheus, Eng. translation , 1909.
S. H. Hooke.
Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church
IMMORTALITY
A state which has no end; the impossibility of dying. It is applied to God, who is absolutely immortal, 1Ti 1:17. and to the human soul, which is only hypothetically immortal; as God, who at first gave it, can, if he pleases, deprive us of our existence.
See SOUL.
Fuente: Theological Dictionary
immortality
(Latin: in, not; mortalis, mortal)
Ordinarily understood as the doctrine that the human soul will survive after separation from the body, continuing in the perpetual possession of an endless conscious existence. Together with the question of the existence of God, it forms from a practical point of view the most momentous question with which philosophy has to deal; for the practical attitude of a man towards the present life is necessarily affected by the position he takes respecting immortality. Belief in a future life of some sort seems to have been almost universal at all times. Immortality in the strict sense forms the foundation of the whole scheme of Christian faith. The doctrine received its complete philosophical elaboration from Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Following his lead, Catholic philosophers, with few exceptions, have rightly maintained the demonstrability of immortality without appeal to revelation. They argue on the one hand from the substantiality and especially spirituality of the human soul, on the other from man’s innate natural desire of perfect happiness, and from an adequate sanction for the moral law. The first line of argument alone can be summed up here. The objects of the activity of the human intellect are intrinsically independent of matter and material conditions, being concerned with immaterial things, and with material things in universal (general) and intelligible ways, in ways independent of time and space; moreover the human intellect is capable of strict reflection, i.e., of turning about and as it were grasping itself, while material or corporeal agents always grasp something else than the agent. Now activities such as these demand a subject or agent (the soul) that is intrinsically independent of matter and material conditions, an agent that is immaterial or spiritual. Now an agent that is spiritual must be incorruptible, i.e., imperishable, and hence capable of surviving separation from the material conditions in which it exists in man, and be immortal. And since the soul’s faculties (intellect and will) remain rooted in the soul with the latter as an ever-present object, the immortal duration of the soul will be a vital or conscious existence.
Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary
Immortality
(Lat., in, mortalis; Germ., Unsterblichkeit)
By immortality is ordinarily understood the doctrine that the human soul will survive death, continuing in the possession of an endless conscious existence. Together with the question of the existence of God, it forms the most momentous issue with which philosophy has to deal. It belongs primarily to rational or metaphysical psychology and the philosophy of religion, though it comes also into contact with other branches of philosophy and some of the natural sciences.
Belief in a future life of some sort seems to have been practically universal at all times. Here and there individuals have rejected this belief, and particular forms of religion or systems of philosophy logically incompatible with it have had adherents; still, however vague and inconsistent may have been the views among different peoples as to the character of the life beyond the grave, it remains true that the persuasion of the reality of a future existence seems to have been hitherto ineradicable throughout the human race as a whole. The doctrine of immortality, strictly or properly understood, means personal immortality, the endless conscious existence of the individual soul. It implies that the being which survives shall preserve its personal identity and be connected by conscious memory with the previous life. Unless the individual’s identity be preserved, a future existence has relatively little interest. From the doctrine of immortality thus explained there have been sundry variations. Some have held that after a future life of greater or less duration the soul will ultimately perish. Throughout the East there has been a widespread tendency to believe in metempsychosis or transmigration—that individual souls successively animate different human beings, and even the bodies of lower animals. A special form of this view is the theory of metamorphosis, that in such a series of reincarnations the soul undergoes or can undergo evolution and improvement of its condition. Pantheism, if logical, can offer only an impersonal immortality, a future condition in which the individual is absorbed into the absolute—the one infinite being, whether conscious or unconscious. Practically, this differs little from annihilation. For the materialist, the soul, or the conscious life, is but a function of the organism, and necessarily perishes at death. Positivists, however, while adopting this conclusion, would still cheer mankind with the hope of a place in the “choir invisible”, that is, a future existence in the minds and on the lips of future generations—a not very substantial form of immortality, and one of a very aristocratic character, the franchise being narrowly limited.
HISTORY
Egypt
Egypt affords at a very early date the most abundant evidence of an extremely vivid and intense belief in a future life. Offerings of provisions of all sorts to the spirits of the departed, elaborate funeral ceremonies, and the wonderfully skilful mummification of the bodies of the deceased, all bear witness to the strength of the Egyptians’ convictions of the reality of the next life. (See EGYPT, especially sections on The Future Life and The Book of the Dead.)
India
The doctrine of personal survival with a future retribution for good and ill conduct is found in the earliest forms of Brahminism. At a later period a school of Brahmin philosophers evolved a system of vague Pantheism in which absorption into the Infinite Being is the final goal. Still, the popular belief has in practice always tended towards Polytheism, whilst the doctrine of successive reincarnations of the soul in different human beings or animals remained a constant expression of belief in survival. A special form of this belief is the doctrine of Karma—the persisting existence and transmission through re-incarnations of the sum of the past deeds and merits of the individual. Akin to the pantheistic absorption of philosophic Pantheism is the theory of Nirvana, which forms a central feature in strict Buddhism. Whatever Nirvana may mean for the philosophers and saints of Buddhism, for the multitude the ideal liberation from labour and pain is restful quiet, not death or extinction.
China
In China worship of ancestors is evidence of belief in some form of personal survival which carries us back to the earliest ages of that most ancient and conservative nation. The departed spirits are both helped and propitiated to aid their descendants by sacrifices and sundry services of filial piety (see CONFUCIANISM).
Japan
Similarly in Japan, whatever may be the genuine logical theory of the soul in the religion of Shintoism, the popular mind finds in the great institution of ancestor worship instinctive satisfaction and expression for the belief in a future life, which seems so deeply and universally rooted in human nature.
Judaism
That early Jewish history shows that the Hebrew nation did not believe in a future life, is sometimes stated. It is true that temporal rewards and punishments from God are much insisted upon throughout the Old Testament, and that the doctrine of a future life occupies a less prominent position there than we should perhaps have anticipated. Still, careful study of the Old Testament reveals incidental and indirect evidence quite sufficient to establish the existence of this belief among the Israelites at an early date (see Genesis 2:7; Wisdom 2:22-23; Ecclesiastes 12:7; Proverbs 15:24; Isaiah 35:10; 51:6; Daniel 12:2, etc.). It would, however, on a priori grounds, have been incredible that the Hebrew people should not have held this belief, considering their intimate contact with the Egyptians on one side and the Chaldæans on the other (see Atzberger, “Die christliche Eschatologie”, Freiburg, 1890).
Greece
The Greeks seem to have been among the first to attempt systematic philosophical treatment of the question of immortality. Belief in a future life is clear in Homer, though the character of that existence is vague. Pindar’s conception of immortality and of its retributive character is more distinct and also more spiritual. The Pythagoreans are vague and tinctured by Oriental Pantheism, though they certainly taught the doctrine of a future life and of metempsychosis. We have not definite texts defining Socrates’ view, but it seems clear that he must have been a believer in immortality. It is, however, in the hands of his great pupil Plato that the doctrine attained its most elaborate philosophical exposition and defence. Plato’s teaching on the subject is given in several of his writings, the “Meno”, “Phædrus”, “Gorgias”, “Timæus”, and “Republic”, but especially in the “Phædo”. There are many variations and seeming inconsistencies, with liberal use of myth and allegory, in the unfolding of his ideas in these different works. For Plato, the soul is a being quite distinct from the body, related to it as the pilot to the ship, the charioteer to the chariot. The rational soul is the proper soul of man. It is a Divine element, and it is this which is immortal. Among his arguments in favour of immortality are the following: Throughout the universe opposites alternately generate and succeed each other. Death follows life and out of death life is again generated. Man must be no exception to this general law. The soul is a simple substance, akin in nature to the simple and immutable idea, and therefore, like the latter, incorruptible. The essence of the soul is life and self-movement. Being a soul only in so far as it participates in the idea of life, it is incapable of death. The process of learning is really only reminiscence, the recall of knowledge of a past life. Man is, therefore, to survive the present life. Truth dwells in us; the soul is made for truth, but truth is eternal. The soul is made for virtue, but advance in virtue consists in progressive liberation of oneself from bodily passions. The soul is not a harmony, but the lyre itself. Destruction can be effected only by a principle antagonistic to the very nature of a being. Vice is for the soul the only principle of this kind, but vice cannot destroy the being of the soul, therefore the soul is indestructible. Otherwise the wicked would have no future punishment to expect.
Finally, he urges, in many forms, the argument from retributive justice and the necessity of future existence for adequate reward of the good and punishment of the wicked. In Aristotle’s philosophical system, on the other hand, the question of immortality holds so small a place that it is doubtful whether he believed in a future personal life at all. He teaches clearly that the nous poietikos, the active intellect, is indestructible and eternal; but then it is not certain that he did not understand this nous, in a pantheistic sense. It is, however, in his Ethics that Aristotle is most disappointing on this subject. For obviously, the question of the reality of a future life is of the first importance in any complete philosophical treatment of morality, whilst Aristotle in this treatise practically ignores the problem. His attitude here proves how much all modern ethical philosophy owes to the Christian Revelation.
The Epicurean School offers us the most complete and reasoned negation of immortality among ancient philosophers. Indeed the most recent Materialism has little of force to add to Lucretius’ elaborate exposition of the Epicurean arguments (De Natura Rerum, III). He is quite candid in stating that his object is to relieve men from fear of that life. The position of the Stoics is more uncertain. Their Pantheism presents difficulties to the doctrine of survival, yet at times they seem to favour the belief. But in Greece and Rome, as elsewhere, whatever may have been the teaching of the philosophical schools the mass of even pagan mankind clung to a faith and hope in a future existence, however degraded and incoherent their conception of its character.
Christianity
With the birth of the Christian religion the doctrine of immortality took up quite a new position in the world. It formed the foundation of the whole scheme of the Christian Faith. No longer a dubious philosophical tenet, or a hazy popular opinion, it is now revealed in clear and distinct terms. The dogma of the Fall, the Christian conception of sin, the Incarnation of the Son of God, all the means of grace and redemption, and the priceless value of each human soul are connected in significance with this article of the Creed. As part of the Christian Faith this doctrine was one of the chief factors in establishing the equality of man and the liberation of the slave. The doctrine received its complete philosophical elaboration from St. Thomas. Accepting the Aristotelean theory that the soul is the form of the body, Aquinas still insists that, possessing spiritual faculties of intellect and will, it belongs to an altogether higher plane of existence than other animal forms. Though form of the body, it is not to be conceived as immersed according to its whole being in the body. That is, it is not completely and intrinsically dependent on the body which it animates, like form educt ex materiâ. For the human soul is created and infused into the body, and there is thus no intrinsic impossibility in its existing separate from the body. Still, as the human soul possesses vegetative and animal faculties, its natural condition is that of union with a body, and during this life the activities of the spiritual powers of intellect and will presuppose the co-operation of the organic faculties of imagination and sensation. Even the most spiritual operations of the soul are therefore extrinsically dependent on the bodily organism. The sensory and vegetative activities of the soul should necessarily be suspended when the soul is separated from the body, whilst its conscious spiritual life must then be carried on in some manner other than the present. What that manner is, our present experience does not enable us adequately to conceive. Yet St. Thomas holds that we can prove the fact of the soul’s conscious life when separate from the body.
Modern thought has not added much to the philosophy of immortality. Decartes’ conception of the soul would lend itself to some of the Platonic arguments. In Leibnitz’s theory the soul is the chief monad in the human nature. It is a simple, spiritual substance of a self-active nature. From this he infers its indestructibility and immortality, but he also believes that its pre-existence is similarly deducible. Spinoza’s Pantheism is incompatible with the theory of personal immortality. In Kant’s critical philosophy, substantiality is a mere subjective category or form moulding our way of thinking. The conception of the soul as a substance is illusory, and every attempt to establish immortality by rational argument is a mere sophism. Yet, like the existence of God, he reinstates it as a postulate of the practical reason. For Hume and Sensationists generally, to whom the mind is merely a series of mental states attached to certain cerebral changes, there can obviously be no metaphysical basis for the doctrine of immortality, though J. Stuart Mill argues that his school need have no special difficulty in adhering to the belief in an endless series of such conscious states.
JUSTIFICATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY
As we have already observed, the immortality of the human soul is one of the most fundamental tenets of the Christian Religion. Consequently, every evidence for the Divine character of Christianity goes to prove and confirm the foundation upon which the whole edifice rests. Catholic philosophers, however, with the exception of Scotus and his followers, have generally claimed to establish the validity of the belief apart from revelation. Still its adequate treatment presupposes, as already demonstrated, some of the main theses of natural theology, ethics, and psychology. It is itself the crowning conclusion of this last branch of philosophy. Only the briefest outline of the argument can be attempted here. For fuller discussion the reader may consult any Catholic text-book of psychology. The following are the chief propositions involved in the building up of the doctrine: The human soul is a substance or substantial principle. It is a simple, or indivisible, and also a spiritual being, that is, intrinsically independent of matter. It is naturally incorruptible. It cannot be annihilated by any creature. God is bound to preserve the soul in possession of its conscious life, at least for some time, after death. Finally, the evidence all leads to the conclusion that the future life is to continue for ever. By the human mind, or soul, is meant the ultimate principle within me by which I feel, think, and will, and by which my body is animated. A substance, in contrast with an accident, is a being which subsists in itself, and does not merely inhere in another being as in a subject of inhesion. Now the ultimate subject to which my mental states belong must be a substance—even if that substance be the bodily organism. Further, reflexion, memory, and my whole conscious experience of my own personal identity assure me of the present abiding character of this substantial principle which is the centre of my mental life. Again, the simplicity and spiritual character of many of my mental acts or states prove the principle to which they belong to be of a simple and spiritual nature. The character of an activity exhibits the nature of the agent. The effect cannot transcend its cause. But careful psychological observation and analysis of many of my mental operations prove them to be both spiritual and simple in nature. Our universal ideas, intellectual judgments and reasonings, and especially the reflective activity of self-consciousness manifest their simple or indivisible and spiritual character. They cannot be the activities of a corporeal agent or the actions of a faculty exerted by or essentially dependent on a material being.
Again, psychology shows that our volitions are free, and that the activity of free volition cannot be exerted by a material agent, or be intrinsically dependent on matter. If volition were thus intrinsically dependent on matter, all our acts of choice would be inexorably bound up with and predetermined by the physical changes in the organism. The soul is thus a simple or indivisible, substantial principle, intrinsically independent of matter. Not being composite, it is not liable to perish by corruption or internal dissolution nor by the destruction of the material principle with which it is united, since it is not intrinsically dependent on this latter being. If it perish at all, this must be by simple annihilation. But annihilation, like creation, pertains to God alone, for, as shown in natural theology, it can be effected only by the withdrawal of the Divine activity, through which all creatures are immediately conserved in existence. God could of course, by an exercise of His absolute power, reduce the soul to nothingness; but the nature of the soul is such that it cannot be destroyed by a finite being. For positive evidence, however, that the soul will continue after death in the possession of a conscious life, we must appeal to teleology and the consideration of the character of the universe as a whole. All science proceeds on the assumption that the universe is rational, that it is governed by reason, law, and uniformity throughout. Theistic philosophy explains, justifies, and confirms this postulate in establishing the government of the universe by the providence of an infinitely wise and just Creator. But the consideration of certain characteristics of the human mind reveals a purpose which can be realized only by the soul’s continuing in the possession of a conscious life after death. Firstly, there is in the mind of man, as distinguished from all the lower animals, the capacity to look back to the indefinite past and forward to the distant future, the impulse to project itself in imagination beyond the limits of space and time, to rise to the conception of endless duration. There is an ever-increasing yearning for knowledge, a craving for an ever fuller possession of truth, which expands and grows with every advance of science. There is the character of unfinishedness in our mental life and development—the contrast between the capabilities of the human intellect and its present destiny, “between the immensity of man’s outlook and the limitations of his actual horizon, between the splendour of his ideals and the insignificance of his attainments” (Marshall), which all demand a future existence unless the human mind is to be a wasteful failure.
Again, there is the craving of the human will, the insatiate desire of happiness, universal throughout the race. This cannot be appeased by any temporal joy. Finally, there is the ethical argument. Human reason affirms that the performance of duty is both right and reasonable in the fullest sense, that it cannot be better in the end for the man who violates the moral law than for him who observes it. But were this the only life this would often be the case. It would assuredly not be a rational universe, and it would be in irreconcilable conflict with the notion of the moral government of the world by a Just and Infinite God, if vice were to be rewarded and virtue punished—that the swindler, the murderer, the adulterer, and the persecutor should enjoy the pleasures of this world to the end, whilst the honest man, the innocent victim, the chaste, and the martyr may undergo lifelong injustice, privation, and suffering.
Argument from Universal Belief
We have already traced at such length the history of belief in a future life that it is only necessary here to point out that a universal conviction of this kind, in opposition to all sensible appearances, must have its roots in man’s rational nature, and therefore claims to be accepted as valid, unless we are prepared to hold that man’s rational nature inevitably leads him into profound error in a matter of fundamental importance to his moral life.
Evidence from Spiritualism
During the last quarter of a century considerable labour has been devoted to investigating what is called “experimental evidence” of another life. This, it is supposed, is specially suited to the Zeitgeist of our day. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, has published a score of volumes of “Proceedings”, and a dozen volumes of a “Journal”, in which is accumulated a mass of evidence in regard to extraordinary phenomena connected with thought-reading, clairvoyance, telepathy, mesmeric trance, automatic writing, apparitions, ghosts, spiritualism, and the like. In the last few years, also, several works by individual investigators, who have selected material from the Society’s “Proceedings” or elsewhere, have appeared, urging these phenomena as scientific proof, or rather as evidence guaranteed by scientific method, in favour of the hypothesis of another life.
The main evidence insisted on in most of the recent works is the alleged communications of certain mediums with the souls of particular deceased persons. These mediums are, it is supposed, gifted with some supernormal faculty by which they get into relations with departed spirits. They receive at times, it is alleged, information from these discarnate souls which they reveal to the investigator. This knowledge, it is asserted, is frequently of a kind which the medium cannot have attained by any recognized means, and therefore establishes the personal identity of the communicating spirit. In some cases the spirit furnishes much information about its present condition—which is, however, invariably of a very homely character. Amongst the grounds of objection against this line of argument it may be urged: The total number of mediums who give evidence of remarkable experiences is relatively small. Many are shown to be impostors. Those whose testimonies have been tested and authenticated are extremely few. The prominence of one or two well-known mediums in all the recent literature evinces this. The communications from the “departed” obtained even by the most successful mediums in their most fortunate experiments are very imperfect and disconnected in character, while the quality of the information received is ludicrously trivial, suggestive of the grade of intelligence we are wont to shut up in asylums for idiots (Royce). Further, the alleged mediumistic communications from the discarnate spirit, of however singular or private a nature, can never prove the personal identity of the spirit with any particular deceased human being. It can only prove that the “control” of the medium is exercised by an intelligence other than human; and there is no sort of evidence to prove the veracity of such an intelligence. The reality of occasional obsession by evil spirits has, since the time of Christ, been always believed in the Church. Finally, the mediumistic faculty, if it be the exercise of genuine power of communication with souls passed out of this life, must, according to Catholic theology, be effected not by use of a merely supernormal personal aptitude, but by a preternatural agency. It is the teaching of the Church that no good, but serious moral evil will be the ultimate result of invoking the intervention of such an agency in human affairs. The view that faith in life everlasting, revealed by Christ and guaranteed by the miraculous history of the Christian Religion, when once lost may be restored by the instrumentality of experiences like those of Moses Stainton or Mrs. Piper, does not seem very solidly founded (see OBSESSION and SPIRITUALISM).
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ST. THOMAS, Con. Gent., II, lxxix, lxxxi; Summa Theol., I, QQ. lxxvi. xc; PLATO, Ph do; FELL, Immortality of the Human Soul, tr. (St. Louis and London, 1906); MAHER, Psychology (6th ed., New York and London, 1905); MARTINEAU, A Study of Religion (2 vols., 2nd ed., Oxford, 1889); ALGER, The Destiny of the Soul. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life (14th ed., New York, 1889) contains a valuable bibliography of the subject, but the writer’s presentation of Catholic doctrines is often grotesque; ELBÉ, Future Life in the Light of Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science, tr. (New York and London. 1907); The Ingersoll Lectures by William James, Royce, Fiske, Osler (New York and Boston, 1896-1904) are useful on some particular points; ROHDE, Psyche. Seelenkult u. Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (2 vols., 3rd ed., Freiburg, 1903); KNEIB, Der Beweis für die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Freiburg, 1903); KNABENBAUER, Das Zeugnis für die Unsterblichkeit (Freiburg, 1878); PIAT, Destinée de l’homme (Paris, 1898); JANET AND SÉAILLES, History of the Problems of Philosophy, tr. (London, 1902).
The literature of what claims to be the evidence of spiritualism has rapidly increased in recent years. See HYSLOP, Science and a Future Life (New York and London, 1906); DELANNE, Evidence for a Future Life, tr. (London, 1909); LODGE, Survival of Man (London, 1909); MYERS, Human Personality and its Survival of the Bodily State (London, 1902-3); IDEM, Science and a Future Life (New York and London, 1898); TWEEDALE, Man’s Survival after Death (London, 1909).
MICHAEL MAHER Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIICopyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, June 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Immortality
is the perpetuity of existence after it has once begun (Lat. immortalitas, not dying). If a man die, shall he live again?’ is a question which has naturally agitated the heart and stimulated the intellectual curiosity of man, wherever he has risen above a state of barbarism, and commenced to exercise his intellect at all. Without such a belief, Max Muller (Chips from a German Workshop, 1, 45) well says, religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss. It is very gratifying, therefore, to the believer, and a fact worthy of notice, that the affirmative on this question is assumed more or less by all the nations of earth, so far as our information reaches at the present day, although, it is true, their views often assume very vague and even materialistic forms.
I. Ideas of rude Nations. We concede that the views of most rude heathen nations, both ancient and modern, respecting the state of man after death are indeed dark and obscure, as well as their notions respecting the nature of the soul itself, which some of them regard as a kind of aerial substance, resembling the body, though of a finer material. Still it is found that the greater part of mankind, even of those who are entirely uncultivated, though they may be incapable of the higher philosophical idea of the personal immortality of the soul, are yet inclined to believe at least that the soul survives the body, and continues either forever, or at east for a very long time. This faith seems to rest in uncultivated nations, or, better perhaps, races,
1, upon the love of life, which is deeply planted in the human breast, and leads to the wish and hope that life will be continued even beyond the grave;
2, upon traditions transmitted from their ancestors;
3, upon dreams, in which the dead appear speaking or acting, and thus confirming both wishes and traditions. SEE NECROMANCY.
1. Hindus. In the sacred books of the Hindus called the Veda, immortality of the soul, as well as personal immortality and personal responsibility after death, is clearly proclaimed (Miller, Chips, 1, 45). (We have here a refutation of the opinion that has hitherto been entertained, that the goal of Hinduism is absorption [q.v.] into the Universal Spirit, and therefore loss of individual existence, and that the Hindus as well as Brahmans believe in the transmigration [q.v.] of the soul, and a refutation by a writer who is most competent to speak. Professor Roth, another great Sanskrit scholar, in an article in the Journal of the German Oriental Society [iv, 427], corroborates Prof. Muller in these words: We here [in the Veda] find, not without astonishment, beautiful conceptions on immortality expressed in unadorned language with childlike conviction. If it were necessary, we might find here the most powerful weapons against the view which has lately been revived and proclaimed as new, that Persia was the only birthplace of the idea of immortality, and that even the nations of Europe had derived it from that quarter. As if the religious spirit of every gifted race was not able [which Mller (2, 267) holds] to arrive at it by its own strength.)
Thus we find these passages: He who gives alms goes to the highest place in heaven; he goes to the gods (Rev. 1, 125, 56). Even the idea, so frequent in the later literature of the Brahmans, that immortality is secured by a son, seems implied, unless our translation deceives us, in one passage of the Veda (7, 56, 24): O Maruts, may there be to us a strong son, who is a living ruler of men; through whom we may cross the waters on our way to the happy abode; then may we come to your own house!’ One poet prays that he may see again his father and mother after death (Rev 1:2; Rev 4:1); and the fathers are invoked almost like gods, oblations are offered to them, and they are believed to enjoy, in company with the gods, a life of never-ending felicity. We find this prayer addressed to Soma (Rev 9:1; Rev 13:7): Where there is eternal light, in the world where the sun is placed, in that immortal, imperishable world place me, O Soma! Where king Vaivasvata reigns, where the secret plague of heaven is, where these mighty waters are, there make me immortal! Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds are radiant, there make me immortal! Where wishes and desires are, where the bowl of the bright Soma is, where there is food and rejoicing, there make me immortal! Where there is happiness and delight, where joy. and pleasure reside, where the desires of our desire are attained, there make me immortal!’
2. Chinese. While it is true that Confucius himself did not expressly teach the immortality of the soul, nay, that he rather purposely seems to have avoided entering upon this subject at all, taking it most probably like Moses, as we shall see below, simply for granted (comp. Muller, Chips, 1, 308), it is nevertheless implied in the worship which the Chinese pay to their ancestors. Another evidence, it seems to us, is given by the absence of the word death from the writings of Confucius (q.v.). When a person dies, the Chinese say he has returned to his family. The spirits of the good were, according to him (Confucius), permitted to visit their ancient habitations on earth, or such ancestral halls or places as were appointed by their descendants, to receive homage and confer benefactions. Hence the duty of performing rites in such places, under the penalty, in the case of those who, while living, neglect such duty, of their spiritual part being deprived after death of the supreme bliss flowing from the homage of descendants (Legge, Life and Teachings of Confucius, Philadelphia, 1867, 12mo).
3. Egyptians. Perhaps we may say that the idea of immortality assumed a more definite shape among the Egyptians, for they clearly recognized not only a dwelling-place of the dead; but also a future judgment. Osiris, the beneficent god, judges the dead, and, having weighed their heart in the scales of justice, he sends the wicked to regions of darkness, while the just are sent to dwell with the god of light.’ The latter, we read on an inscription, found favor before the great God; they dwell in glory, where they live a heavenly life; the bodies they have quitted will forever repose in their tombs, while they rejoice in the life of the supreme God.’ Immortality was thus plainly taught, although bound up with it was the idea of the preservation of the body, to which they attached great importance, as a condition of the soul’s continued life; and hence they built vast tombs, and embalmed their bodies, as if to last forever.
4. Persians. In the religion of the Persians, also, at least since, if not previous to the time of Zoroaster, a prominent part is assigned to the existence of a future world, with its governing spirits. Under Ormuz and Ahriman there are ranged regular hierarchies of spirits engaged in a perpetual conflict; and the soul passes into the kingdom of light or of darkness, over which these spirits respectively preside, according as it has lived on the earth well or ill. Whoever has lived in purity, and has not suffered the divs (evil spirits) to have any power over him, passes after death into the realms of light.
5. American Indians. The native tribes of the lower part of South America believe in two great powers of good and evil, but likewise in a number of inferior deities. These are supposed to have been the creators and ancestors of different families, and hence, when an Indian dies, his soul goes to live with the deity who presides over his particular family. These deities have each their separate habitations in vast caverns under the earth, and thither the departed repair to enjoy the happiness of being eternally drunk (compare Tyler, Researches into the early History of Mankind, and the Development of Civilization, Lond. 1868). Another American tribe of Indians, the Mandans, have with their belief in a future state connected this tradition of their origin: The whole nation resided in one large village under ground near a subterraneous lake.
A grapevine extended its roots down to their habitation, and gave them a view of the light. Some of the most adventurous climbed up the vine, and were delighted with the sight of the earth, which they found covered with buffalo, and rich with every kind of fruit. Returning with the grapes they had gathered, their countrymen were so pleased with the taste of them that the whole nation resolved to leave their dull residence for the charms of the upper region. Men, women, and children ascended by means of the vine; but when about half the nation had reached the surface of the earth, a corpulent woman who was clambering up the vine broke it with her weight and closed upon herself and the rest of the nation the light of the sun. Those who were left on earth expect, when they die. to return to the original seats of their forefathers, the good reaching the ancient village by means of the lake, which the burden of the sins of the wicked will not enable them to cross (Tyler). The Choctaw tribe’s belief in a future state is equally curious. They hold that the spirit lives after death, and that it has a great distance to travel towards the west; that it has to cross a dreadful, deep, and rapid stream, over which, from hill to hill, there lies a long, slippery pine log, with the bark peeled off. Over this the dead have to pass before they reach the delightful hunting grounds. The good walk on safely, though six people from the other side throw stones at them: but the wicked, trying to dodge the stones, slip off the log, and fall thousands of feet into the water which is dashing over the rocks (see Brinton, p. 233 sq.).
6. Polynesians. The natives of Polynesia imagine that the sky descends at the horizon and incloses the earth. Hence they call foreigners palangi’ or heaven-bursters,’ as having broken in from another world outside. According to their views, we live upon the ground floor of a great house, with upper stories rising one over another above us, and cellars down below. There are holes in the ceiling to let the rain through, and as men are supposed to visit the dwellers above, the dwellers from below are believed to come sometimes up to the surface, and likewise to receive visits from men in return.
7. New Hollanders. The native tribes of Australia believe that all who are good men, and have been properly buried, enter heaven after death. Heaven, which is the abode of the two good divinities, is represented as a delightful place, where there is abundance of game and food, never any excess of heat or cold, rain or drought, no malign spirits, no sickness or death, but plenty of rioting, singing, and dancing for evermore. They also believe in an evil spirit who dwells in the nethermost regions, and, strange to say, they represent him with horns and a tail, though one would think that, prior to the introduction of cattle into New Holland, the natives could not have been aware of the existence of horned beasts (Oldfield).
8. Greenlanders. The Greenlander believes that when a man dies his soul travels to Torlgarsuk, the land where reigns perpetual summer, all sunshine, and no night; where there is good water, and birds, fish, seals, and reindeer without end, that are to be caught without trouble, or are found cooking alive in a huge kettle. But the journey to this land is difficult; the souls have to slide five days or more down a precipice, all stained with the blood of those who have gone down before. And it is especially grievous for the poor souls when the journey must be made in winter or in tempest, for then a soul may come to harm, or suffer the other death, as they call it, when it perishes utterly, and nothing is left. The bridge Es-Sirat, which stretches over the midst of the Moslem hill, finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword, conveys a similar conception. Tyler, on whose works we mainly rely for the information here conveyed on rude nations, traces the idea of a bridge in Java, in North America, in South America, and he also shows how in Polynesia the bridge is replaced by canoes, in which the dead were to pass the great gulf. It is noteworthy that the Jews, also, when they first established a firm belief in immortality, imagined a bridge of hell, which all unbelievers were to pass.
II. Ideas of more cultivated Nations. Wherever pagan thought and pagan morality reach the highest perfection. we find their ideas of the immortality of the soul gradually approaching the Christian views. The first trace of a belief in a future existence we find in Homer’s Iliad (23, 103 sq.), where he represents that Achilles first became convinced that souls and shadowy forms have a real existence in the kingdom of the shades (Hades) by the appearance to him of the dead Patroclus in a dream. These visions were often regarded as divine by the Greeks (comp. II. 1, 63, and the case of the rich man and Lazarus in Luk 16:27). Compare also the article HADES SEE HADES .
But, while in the early Greek paganism the idea of the future is everywhere melancholic, Hades, or the realms of the dead, being to their imagination the emblem of gloom. as may be seen from the following: Achilles, the ideal hero, declares that he would rather till the ground than live in pale Elysium, we find that, with the progress of Hellenic thought, a higher idea of the future is found to characterize both the poetry and philosophy of Greece, till, in the Platonic Socrates, the conception of immortality shines forth with a clearness and precision truly impressive. For we must remember, O men, said Socrates, in his last speech, before he drained the poison cup, that it depends upon the immortality of the soul whether we have to live to it and to care for it or not. For the danger seems fearfully great of not caring for it. [Compare Locke’s statement: If the best that can happen to the unbeliever be that he be right, and the worst that can happen to the believer be that he be wrong, who in his madness would dare to run the venture?] Yea, were death to be the end of all, it would be truly a fortunate thing for the wicked to get rid of their body, and, at the same time, of their wickedness.
But now, since the soul shows itself to us immortal, there can be for it no refuge from evil, and no other salvation than to become as good and intelligible as possible. More clearly are his views set forth in the Apology and the Phaedo, in language at once rich in faith and in beauty. The soul, the immaterial part, being of a nature so superior to the body, can it, he asks in the Phaedo, as soon as it is separated from the body, be dispersed into nothing, and perish? Oh, far otherwise. Rather will this be the result. If it take its departure in a state of purity, not carrying with it any clinging impurities of the body, impurities which during life it never willingly shared in, but always avoided, gathering itself into itself, and making the separation from the body its aim and study-that is, devoting itself to true philosophy, and studying how to lie calmly; for this is true philosophy, is it not? well, then, so prepared, the soul departs into that invisible region which is of its own nature, the region of the divine, the immortal, the wise, and then its lot is to be happy in a state in which it is freed from fears and wild desires, and the other evils of humanity, and spends the rest of its existence with the gods. This view, or better doctrine of the immortality of the soul, held by Socrates and his disciple Plato, implied a double immortality, the past eternity as well as that to come. They certainly offer a very striking contrast to the popular superstitions and philosophy of their day, which in many respects recall the views held by the Hindus. The people, especially those who held the most enlarged views up to this time, had entertained what might be termed a doctrine of semi-immortality. They looked for a continuance of the soul in an endless futurity, but gave themselves no concern about the eternity which is past. But Plato considered the soul as having already eternally existed, the present life being only a moment in our career; he looked forward with an undoubting faith to the changes through which we must hereafter go (Draper, Istell. Development of Europe, p. 118; compare below, Philosophical Argument).
III. Ideas of the Jewish Nation.
1. It has frequently been asserted that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not taught in the O.T. The Socinians in the 16th and 17th centuries took this ground. Some have gone so far as to construe the supposed silence of the O.T. Scriptures on this subject into a formal denial of the possibility of a future life, and have furthermore fortified their positions by selecting some passages of the Old Testament that are rather obscure, e.g. Ecc 3:19 sq.; Isa 38:18; Psa 6:6; Psa 30:10; Psa 88:11; Psa 115:17; Job 7:7-10; Job 10:20-22; Job 14:7-12; Job 15:22. In the most odious manner were these objections raised by the Wolfenb Uittel Fragments (see the fourth fragment by Lessing, Beitrdge z. Gesch. u. Lit. a. d. Wolfenbttelschen Bibliothek, 4:484 sq.). Bishop Warburton, on the other hand, derived one of his main proofs of the divine mission of Moses from this supposed silence an the subject of immortality. Moses, he argues, being sustained in his legislation and government by immediate divine authority, had lot the same necessity that other teachers have for a recourse to threatenings and punishments drawn from the future world, in order to enforce obedience. In a similar strain argues professor Ernst Stahelin in an article on the immortality of the soul (in the Foundations of our Faith, Lond. and N. York, 1866, 12mo, p. 221 sq.): Moses and Confucius did not expressly teach the immortality of the soul, nay, they seemed purposely to avoid entering-upon the subject; they simply took it for granted. Thus Moses spoke of the tree of life in Paradise of which if the man took he should live forever, and called God the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thus implying their continued existence, since God could not be a God of the dead, but only of the living; and Confucius, while in some respects avoiding all mention of future things, nevertheless enjoined honors to be paid to departed spirits (thus assuming their life after death) as one of the chief duties of a religious man. Another evidence of the belief of the Jews at the time of Moses and in subsequent periods in the immortality of the soul, as a doctrine self-evident, and by them universally acknowledged and received, is the fact that the Israelites and their ancestors resided among the Egyptians, a people who, as we have seen above, had cherished this faith from the remotest ages (comp. Herodotus, 2, 123, who asserts that they were the first who entertained such an idea). It is further proved that the Jews believed in immortality,
(a) from the laws of Moses against Necromancy (q.v.), or the invocation of the dead, which was very generally practiced by the Canaanites (Deu 18:9-12), and which, notwithstanding these laws, is found to have been prevalent among the Jews even at the time of king Saul (1 Samuel 28), and later (Psa 106:28, and the prophets);
(b) from the name which the Jews gave to the kingdom of the dead, (), which so frequently occurs in Moses as well as subsequent writings of the O.T. That Moses did not in his laws hold up the punishments of the future world to the terror of transgressors is a circumstance which redounds to his praise, and cannot be alleged against him as a matter of reproach, since to other legislators the charge has been laid that they were either deluded or impostors for pursuing the Very opposite course. Another reason why Moses did not touch the question of the immortality of the soul is that he did not intend to give a system of theology in his laws. But so much is clear from certain passages in his writings, that he was by no means ignorant of this doctrine. Compare Michaelis, Argumenta pro Immortalitate Animi e Mose Collecta, in the Syntagm. Comment. 1 (Gttingen, 1759); Lderwald, Unters. von d. Kenntniss eines knffigen Lebens i. A. Test. (Helmstudt, 1781); Semler, Beantwortung d. Fragen d. Wolfenbttelschen Ungenonnten; Seiler, Observ. ad psychologiam sacran (Erlang. 1779).
The following texts from the writings of Moses may be regarded as indications of the doctrine of immortality, viz. Gen 5:22; Gen 5:24, where it is said respecting Enoch, that because he lived a pious life God took him, so that he was no more among men. This was designed to be the reward and consequence of his pious life, and it points to an invisible life with God, to which he attained without previously suffering death. Gen 37:35, Jacob says, I will go down to the grave () unto my son.’ We have here distinctly exhibited the idea of a place where the dead dwell connected together in a society. In conformity with this idea we must explain the phrase to go to his fathers (Gen 15:15), or to be gathered to his people [more literally, to enter into their habitation or abode] (Gen 25:8; Gen 35:29; Num 20:24, etc.). In the same way many of the Indian savages (as we have already seen) express their expectation of an immortality beyond the grave. Paul argues from the text Gen 47:9, and similar passages where Jacob calls his life a journey, that the patriarchs expected a life after death (Heb 11:13-16; yet he says, very truly, ). In Mat 22:23, Christ refers, in arguing against the Sadducees, to Exo 3:6, where Jehovah calls himself the God of Isaac and Jacob (i.e. their protector and the object of their worship), long after their death. It could not be that their ashes and their dust should worship God; hence he concludes that they themselves could not have ceased to exist, but that, as to their souls, they still lived (comp. Heb 11:13-17). This passage was interpreted in the same way by the Jews after Christ (Wetstein, ad loc.). In the subsequent books of the O.T. the texts of this nature are far more numerous. Still more definite descriptions are given of , and the condition of the departed there; e.g. Isa 14:9 sq.; also in the Psalms and in Job. Even in these texts, however, the doctrine of the reward of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked in the kingdom of the dead is not so clearly developed as it is in the N.T.; this is true even of the book of Job. All that we find here with respect to this point is only obscure intimation, so that the Pauline is applicable, in relation to this doctrine, to the other books of the O.T. as well as to those of Moses. In the Psalms there are some plain allusions to the expectation of reward and punishment after death, particularly Psa 17:15; Psa 49:15-16; Psa 73:24. There are some passages in the prophets where a revivification of-the dead is spoken of, as Isa 26:19; Dan 12:2; Ezekiel 27; but, although these do not teach a literal resurrection of the dead, but rather refer to the restoration of the nation and land, still these and all such figurative representations presuppose the proper idea that an invisible part of man survives the body, and will be hereafter united to it. Very clear is also the passage Ecc 12:7, The body must return to the earth from whence it was taken, but the spirit to God who gave it,’ evidently alluding to Gen 3:19. SEE SHEOL.
From all this we draw the conclusion that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was not unknown to the Jews before the Babylonian exile. It appears also from the fact that a general expectation existed of rewards and punishments in the future world, although in comparison with what was afterwards taught on this point there was at that time very little definitely known respecting it, and the doctrine, therefore, stood by no means in that near relation to religion and morality into which it was afterwards brought, as we find it often in other wholly uncultivated nations. Hence this doctrine is not so often used by the prophets as a motive to righteousness, or to deter men from evil, or to console them in the midst of suffering. But on this very account the piety of these ancient saints deserves the more regard and admiration. It was in a high degree unpretending and disinterested. Although the prospect of what lies beyond the grave was, as Paul said, the promised blessing which they saw only from afar, they yet had pious dispositions, and trusted God. They held merely to the general promise that God their Father would cause it to be well with them even after death (Psa 73:26; Psa 73:28, When my strength and my heart faileth, God will be the strength of my heart, and my portion forever’). But it was not until after the Babylonian captivity that the ideas of the Jews on this subject appear to have become enlarged, and that this doctrine was brought by the prophets, under the divine guidance, into a more immediate connection with religion. This result becomes very apparent after the reign of the Greciai kings over Syria and Egypt, and their persecutions of the Jews.
The prophets and teachers living at that time (of whose writings, however, nothing has come down to us) must therefore have given to their nation, time after time, more instruction upon this subject, and must have explained and unfolded the allusions to it in the earlier prophets. Thus we find that after this time, more frequently than before, the Jews sought and found in this doctrine of immortality and of future retribution, consolation, and encouragement under their trials, and a motive to piety. Such discourses were therefore frequently put in the mouths of the martyrs in the second book of Maccabees, e.g. 6:26; 7:9 sq.; comp. 12:4345; see also the Book of Wisdom , 2, 1 sq.; and especially 3:1 sq., and the other apocryphal books of the O.T. At the time of Christ, and afterwards, this doctrine was universally received and taught by the Pharisees, and was, indeed, the prevailing belief among the Jews, as is well known from the testimony of the N.T., of Josephus, and also of Philo. Tacitus also refers to it in his history, Animas praelio aut suppliciis peremptorum aeternas putant.’ Consult an essay comparing the ideas of the apocryphal books of the O.T. on the subjects of immortality, resurrection, judgment, and retribution, with those of the N.T., written by Frisch, in Eichhorn’s Bibliothek der Biblischen Literatur, b. 4; Ziegler, Theol. Abhandl. pt. 2, No. 4; Flugge, Geschichte des Glaubens an Unsterblichkeit, etc., pt. 1. The Sadducees, boasting of a great attachment to the O.T., and especially to the books of Moses, were the only Jews who denied this doctrine, as well as the existence of the soul as distinct from the body (Knapp, Theology, 149). (See Johannsen, Vet. Heb. notiones de rebus post mortem, Hafni 1826.) SEE RESURRECTION.
2. Among the modern Jews, the late celebrated Jewish savant and successor to Ronan at the Sorbonne, professor Munk, regarded as one of the strongest evidences which the O.T. affords for a doctrine of the immortality of the soul the expression He was gathered to his people, so frequent in the writings of the O.T. The Rev. D. W. Marks, in a series of Sermons (Lond. 5611 1851), p. 103 sq., says of it: It has generally been supposed that to be gathered to one’s people’ is an ordinary term which the sacred historian employs in order to convey the idea that the person to whom it is applied lies buried in the place where the remains of the same family are deposited. But whoever attentively considers all the passages of the Bible where this expression occurs will find, says Dr. Munk, that being gathered to one’s ancestors’ is expressly distinguished from the rite of sepulture. Abraham is gathered unto his people,’ but he is buried in the cave which he bought near Hebron, and where Sarah alone is interred. This is the first instance where the passage to be gathered to one’s people’ is to be met with; and that it cannot mean that Abraham’s bones reposed in the same cave with those of his fathers is very clear, since the ancestors of the patriarch were buried in Chaldaea, and not in Canaan. The death of Jacob is related in the following words: And when Jacob had finished charging his eons, he gathered up his feet upon the bed, and he expired, and was gathered unto his people’ (Gen 49:33).
It is equally certain that the phrase he was gathered unto his people’ cannot refer to the burial of the patriarch, because we learn from the next chapter that he was embalmed, and that the Egyptians mourned for him seventy days; and it is only after these three score and ten days of mourning are ended that Joseph transports the remains of his father to Canaan, and inters them in the cave of Machpelah, where the ashes of Abraham and Isaac repose. When the inspired penman alludes to the actual burial of Jacob he uses very different terms. He makes no mention then of the patriarch being gathered to his people,’ but he simply employs the verb , to bury:’ And Joseph went, up to bury his father.’ The very words addressed by Jacob on his deathbed to his sons, I am about to be gathered unto my people; bury me with my fathers,’ afford us sufficient evidence that the speaker, as well as the persons addressed, understood the expression being gathered to one’s people’ in a sense totally different from that of being lodged within a tomb. But a stronger instance still may be advanced. The Israelites arrive at Mount Hor, near the borders of Edom, and immediately is issued the divine command, Aaron shall be gathered unto his people, for he shall not come into the land which I have given to the children of Israel. Strip Aaron of his garments, and clothe in them Eleazar his son. And Aaron shall be gathered, and there he shall die.’ No member of his family lay buried on Mount Hor; and still Aaron is said to have been there gathered to his people.’ Again, Moses is charged to chastise severely the Midianites for having seduced the Israelites to follow the abominable practices of (Baal Peor’); and, this act accomplished, the legislator is told that he will be gathered unto his people.’ This passage certainly cannot mean that Moses was to be gathered in the grave with any of his people. The Hebrew lawgiver died on Mount Abarim; and the Scripture testifies that no one ever knew of the place of his sepulcher;’ and still the term to be gathered to his people is there likewise employed. Sufficient instances have now been cited to prove that is to be understood in a different sense from the rite of sepulture, and that the Hebrews in the times of Moses did entertain the belief in another state of existence, where spirit joined spirit after the death of the body.
But, although the position here assumed seems very tenable, it is nevertheless true that the Israelites certainly did not have a very clear conception of the future existence of the soul, and that life and immortality’ were not brought to light very distinctly before Christ came, for whom the office was reserved of making clearly known many high matters before but obscurely indicated (Journal of Sacred Literature, 8, 179).
IV. New-Testament Views. When Jesus Christ appeared in this world, the Epicurean philosophy (q.v.), the fables of poets of a lower world, and the corruption which was prevalent among the nations had fully destroyed the hope, to say nothing of a belief, in future existence. It was left for him to declare the existence of the soul after death, even though the earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved (2 Corinthians 5, 1), with great certainty and very explicitly, not only by an allusion to the joys that await us in the future world, and to the dangers of retribution and divine justice (Mat 10:28), but also in refutation of the doctrines of the unbelieving Sadducees (Mat 22:23 sq.; Mar 12:18 sq.; Luk 20:28 sq.). Jesus Christ, said Paul, hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light (2Ti 1:10), and will render to every man according to his deeds. To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory, and honor, and immortality, eternal life’ () (Rom 2:6 sq.). The original for eternal life here used () denotes nothing else than the immortality of the soul, or a continuation of the substantial being, of man’s person, of the ego, after death, by the destruction of the body (comp. Mat 10:28; Luk 12:4). SEE ETERNAL LIFE; and on the origin of the soul, and its pre-existence to the body, the article SEE SOUL.
It is evident from the passages cited that Christ and his apostles did more to illustrate and confirm the belief in the immortality of the soul, as cherished at the present day, than had been done by any nation, even the Jews included. He first gave to it that high practical interest which it now possesses; and it is owing to Christianity that the doctrine of the soul’s immortality has become a common and well-recognized truth no mere result of speculation, as are those of the heathen and Jewish philosophers, nor a product of priestly invention-but a light to the reason, and a guide to the conscience and conduct. The aspirations of philosophy, and the materialistic conceptions of popular mythology, are found in the Gospel transmuted into a living, spiritual, and divine fact, and an authoritative influence, not only touching the present life, but governing and directing it.
V. Christian Views. In the early Christian Church the views on the immortality of the soul were very varied. There were none that actually denied, far from it, nor even any that doubted its possibility. But some of them, e.g. Justin, Tatian, and Theophilus, on various grounds, supposed that the soul, though mortal in itself, or at least indifferent in relation to mortality or immortality, either acquires immortality as a promised reward, by its union with the spirit and the right use of its liberty, or, in the opposite case, perishes with the body. They were led to this view partly because they laid so much stress on freedom, and because they thought that likeness to God was to be obtained only by this freedom; and partly, too, because they supposed (according to the trichotomistic division of human nature) that the soul () receives the seeds of immortal life only by the union with the spirit (),) as the higher and free life of reason. This view was also afterwards introduced into the Greek Church by Nicholas of Methone (compare Hagenbach, Doctrines, 2, 16). And, lastly, other philosophical hypotheses concerning the nature of the soul doubtless had an influence. On the contrary, Tertullian and Origen, whose views differed on other subjects, agreed on this one point, that they, in accordance with their peculiar notions concerning the nature of the soul, looked upon its immortality as essential to it (Hagenbach, 1, 158). The schoolmen of the Middle Ages in the Western Church considered the immortality of the soul a theological truth; but their chief leaders, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, were at issue on the question whether reason furnishes satisfactory proof of that doctrine. As Anselm of Canterbury had inferred the existence of God himself from the idea of God, so Thomas Aquinas proved the immortality of the soul, in a similar manner, by an ontological argument: Intellectus apprehendit esse absolute et secundum omne tempus. Unde omne habens intellectum naturaliter desiderat esse semper, naturale autem desiderium non potest est inane. Omnis igitur intellectualis substantia est incorruptibilis’ (compare Engelhardt, Dogmzengesch. 2, 123 sq.). On the other hand, Scotus, whose views were more nearly allied to those of the Nominalists, maintained: Non posse demonstrari, quod anima sit immortalis’ (Comm. in M. Sentent. bk. 2, dist. 17, qu. 1; comp. bk. 4, dist. 43, qu. 2). Bonaventura, on the contrary, asserted: Animam esse immortalem, auctoritate ostenditur et ratione’ (De Nat. Deor. 2, 55). Concerning the further attempts of Moneta of Cremona (13th century), William of Auvergne (bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249), and Raimund Martini (Pugio Fidei adv. Maur. p. 1, ch. 4), to prove the immortality of the soul, compare Minscher, Dogmengeschichte, ed. by Von Colln, p. 92 sq. (Hagenbach). On the views since the Reformation, SEE SOUL, IMMORTALITY OF.
VI. Philosophical Argument. There are many writers, both in philosophy and theology, who deny that the immortality of the soul can be proved apart from revelation. E. Stahelin (Foundations of our Faith, p. 232) says: We might take up a line of argument used by philosophy both in ancient and modern times-from Socrates down to Fichte-to prove the immortality of the inner being; an argument derived from the assertion that the soul, being a unity, is, as such, incapable of decay, it being only in the case of the complex that a falling to pieces, or a dissolution, is conceivable. But; he continues, the abstruse nature of this method leads us to renounce a line of argument from which, we freely confess, we expect little profitable result. For, after all, what absolute proof have we of this unity of the soul? Can we subject it to the microscope or the scalpel, as we can the visible and tangible? It must content us for the present simply to indicate that the instinct and consciousness of immortality have nothing to fear from the most searching examination of the reason, but find far more of confirmation and additional proof than of contradiction in the profoundest thinking. Further, that this instinct and consciousness do actually exist, and are traceable through all the stages and ramifications of the human race, is confirmed to us by our opponents themselves that there is in man something which is deeper and stronger than the maxims of a self-invented philosophy, namely, the divinely created nobility of his nature, the inherent breath of life, breathed into him by God, the relation to the Eternal, which secures to him eternity. Watson (Institutes, 2, 2) goes even further, and declares that nowhere else but in the Bible is there any indubitable declaration of man’s immortality, or any facts or principles so obvious as to enable us confidently to infer it. All observation lies directly against the doctrine of man’s immortality. He dies, and the probabilities of a future life which have been established upon the unequal distribution of rewards and punishments in this life, and the capacities of the human soul, are a presumptive evidence which has been adduced, as we shall afterwards show, only by those to whom the doctrine had been transmitted by tradition, and who were therefore in possession of the idea; and even then, to have any effectual force of persuasion, they must be built upon antecedent principles furnished only by the revelations contained in holy Scripture. Hence some of the wisest heathens, who were not wholly unaided in their speculations on these subjects by the reflected light of these revelations, confessed themselves unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion. The doubts of Socrates, who expressed himself the most hopefully of any on the subject of a future life, are well known; and Cicero, who occasionally expatiates with so much eloquence on this topic, shows, by the skeptical expressions which he throws in, that his belief was by no means confirmed.
The first attempt of a philosophical tenet on the doctrine of immortality is offered in Plato’s Phaedo. On it the New Platonics reared their structure, adorned with many fanciful additions. All scientific attempts throughout the Middle Ages, and up to our own day, have been modified views, allied more or less to Platonism. In opposition to these, the French materialism of the 18th century attempted to destroy, or at least undermine, the belief in immortality.’ Not less materialistic is the position of the Pantheists, headed by Spinoza. These hold that the World-Soul, which, in their opinion, produces and fills the universe, also fills and rules man; nay, that it is only in him that it reaches its-special end, which is self-consciousness, and attains to thought and will. It is true, they go on to say, that at the death of the individual this World-Soul retreats from him, just as the setting sun seems to draw back its rays into itself; and that self-consciousness now sinks once more into the great, unconscious, undistinguished spirit-ocean of the whole. The answer to this ridiculous position has been best given by M’Cosh (Intuitions of the Mind, p. 392 sq.): We can conceive of air thus rushing into air, and of a bucketful of-water losing itself in a river; and why? because neither air nor water ever had a separate and conscious personality. The soul, as long as it exists, must retain its personality as an essential property, and must carry it along with it wherever it goes. The moral conviction clusters round this personal self. The being who is judged, who is saved or condemned, is the. same who sinned and continued in his sin, or who believed and was justified when on earth.
Kant, Locke, and other metaphysicians, on the other hand, like some theologians, as we have seen above, also exclude the immortality of the soul from the province of natural theology. They deem it impossible to prove our future existence from the creation, or even from the admitted attributes of the Creator, and are thus in singular opposition to the ancient Platonists, who regarded the eternal continuance of our being as the more obvious doctrine of natural theology, and inferred from it the divine existence as the less direct intimation of nature. It is said that much of the reasoning employed by pagan writers to prove the immortality of the soul is unsound. This is a fact, and yet by no means invalidates their right to believe in the conclusion which they deduced illogically. There are many truths, the proof of which lies so near to us that we overlook it. Believing a proposition firmly, we are satisfied with the mere pretence of an argument for its support; and searching in the distance for proofs which can only be found in immediate contact with us, we discover reasons for the belief which, long before we had discovered them, was yet fully established in our own minds; and yet we deem these reasons sufficient to uphold the doctrine, although, in point of fact, the doctrine does not make trial of their strength by resting upon them. If they were the props on which our belief was in reality founded, their weakness would be: obvious at once; but, as they have nothing to sustain, their insufficiency is the less apparent; our belief continues, notwithstanding the frailness of the arguments which make a show of upholding it, and thus the very defects of the proof illustrate the strength of the conclusion, which remains firm in despite of them.
That the immortality of the soul has been firmly believed in by men destitute of a written revelation will not be denied by fair-minded scholars. It probably would never have been doubted had not some learned, though injudicious controversialists, as Leland and others, deemed it necessary to magnify the importance of the Bible by undervaluing the attainments of heathen sages. The singular attempt of Warburton to prove that the authority of the Mosaic writings is evinced by their not teaching the doctrine of a future state led him to an equally paradoxical attempt to show that the phraseology of pagan sages furnishes no valid evidence of their belief in the soul’s immortality. But each of these efforts was abortive; and if each had been successful, such a kind of success would have resulted in even greater evils than have come from the want of it.
The fact, then, that our existence in a future world has been an article of faith among pagan philosophers indicates that this doctrine is an appropriate part of natural theology. But, even if it had not been thus believed by heathens, it ought to have been; and the arguments which convince the unaided judgment of its truth are also reasons for classifying the doctrine among the teachings of nature. These arguments may be conveniently arranged under six different classes: first, the metaphysical, which prove that the mind is entirely distinct from the body, and is capable of existing while separate from it; that the mind is not compounded, and will not therefore be dissolved into elementary particles; that, being imperceptible, it cannot perish except by an annihilating act of God (comp. Dr. M’Cosh’s argument above cited); secondly, the analogical, which induces us to believe that the soul will not be annihilated, even as matter does not cease to exist when it changes its form; thirdly, the teleological, which incline us to think that the mental powers and the tendencies so imperfectly developed in this life will not be shut out from that sphere of future exertion for which they are so wisely adapted; fourthly, the theological, which foster an expectation that the wisdom of God will not fail to complete what otherwise appears to have been commenced in vain, that his goodness will not cease to bestow the happiness for which our spiritual nature is ever longing, and that his justice will not allow the present disorders of the moral world to continue, but will rightly adjust the balances, which have now for a season lost their equipoise; fifthly, the moral, which compel us to hope that our virtues will not lose their reward, and to fear that our vices will not go unpunished in the future world, which seems to be better fitted than the present for moral retribution; and, sixthly, the historical, the general belief in a future state of rewards and punishments, the expectations of dying men, the premonitions of the guilty, and the tenacious hopes of the beneficent. All these arguments are in favor of our unending existence, and there are none in opposition to it; and it is an axiom that whatever has existed and now exists, will, unless there be special proof to the contrary, continue to exist (Bibliotheca Sacra, May, 1846, art. 2).
The natural proofs of the immortality of the soul are treated very skillfully by professor Chace, in the Bibliotheca Sacra for February, 1849. First he analyzes the Phaedo of Plato, and finds it to contain the following arguments for immortality:
1. From the capacity and desire of the soul for knowledge, beyond what in this life is attainable;
2. From the law of contraries, according to which, as rest prepares for labor, and labor for rest; as light ends in darkness, and darkness in light; so life, leading to death, death must, in turn, terminate in life;
3. From the reminiscences of a previous existence, which the soul brings. with it into the present life;
4. From the simple and indivisible nature of the soul; only compound substances undergo dissolution;
5. From the essential vitality of the soul itself. He adds that although these arguments did not amount, in the estimation of Socrates, to an absolute proof of the doctrine, he thought them sufficient not only to deprive death of all its terrors, but to awaken in the mind of a good man, when approaching death, the calm and cheerful hope of a better life. These arguments, however, are far behind the present state of science. The second and third rest on purely imaginary foundations; the fourth and fifth are inconclusive; and the first only, we grant, has a real, though subordinate value. Cicero adds to these arguments one from the consensus gentium, a universal prevalence of a belief in immortality. Of Butler’s argument for immortality in the Analogy, the professor remarks that it is perhaps less fortunate than any other part of that great work. Both of the main arguments employed by him are no less applicable to the lower animals than to man, and just as much prove the immortality of the living principle connected with the minutest insect or humblest infusoria as of the human soul.
It is not a little remarkable that this fact, which in reality converts the attempted proof into a reductio ad absurdum of the principles from which it is drawn, should not have awakened in the cautious mind of Butler a suspicion of their soundness, and led him to seek other means of establishing the truth in question. These he would have found, and, as we think, far better suited to his purpose, in the facts and principles so ably and so fully set forth in his chapters on the moral government of God, and on probation considered as a means of discipline and improvement. Indeed, we have always been of the opinion that these two chapters contain the only real and solid grounds for belief in a future life which the work presents; the considerations adduced in the one particularly appropriated to that object serving at furthest only to answer objections to the doctrine. Professor Chace founds his own argument chiefly upon the gradual and progressive development of life in our planet, from the epoch of its earliest inhabitant down to the present hour, which development, taken in connection with the capacities and endowments of the soul, indicates, on the part of the Creator, a purpose to continue it in being.
See, besides the authorities already referred to, Marsilius Ficinus, De Imortalitate Animae (Par. 1641, fol.); an extract of it is given in Buhle, Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie, 2, 171 sq.; Spalding, Bestimmung des Menschen (Leips. 1794); Struvius, Hist. Doct. Graecorum et Romanorum1n, de Statu Aniaruru post nortem (Alten, 1803 8vo); Meier, Philosophische Lehre v. Zustand der Seele Mendelssohn, Phaedon (Berlin, 1821); Hamann, Unsterblichkeit (Leips. 1773, 8vo); Jacobi, Philos. Beweis. d. Unsterblichkeit (Dessau, 1783); Fichte (J. G.), Destination of Man (tr. by Mrs. R. Sinnett, London, 1846, 12mo); Jean Paul Richter, Das Campaner-Thal. (Frankf. 1797, 8vo); Olshausen, Antiq. Patrum de Immortalitate Sententice (Regiom. 1827, 4to); Herrick, Sylloqe Scriptorum de Immortalitate, etc. (Regensb. 1790, 8vo); Knapp, Theology, 149; Htiffell, Ueber d. Unsterblichkeit d. menschlichen Seele (Carlsruhe, 1832); Hase, Evangel. Protest. Dogmatik, 82, 8; Duncan, Evidence of Reason for Immortality (1779, 8vo); Tillotson, Sermons, 9, 309; Hale, Sir Matthew, Works, 1, 331; Stanhope, Boyle Lectures (1702, 4to, senn. 3); Foster, Sermons, 1, 373; Sherlock, Works, 1, 124; Dwight, Sermons, 1, 145; Channing, Works, 4, 169; Chalmers, Works, 10, 415; Drew, on Immortality (Philadel. 1830, 12mo); Newman, The Soul (Lond. 1849, 12mo); Quarterly Review, Aug. 1834, p. 35; New York Review, 1, 331; Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 209-212; Robert Hall, Works, 1, 189; 2, 373; Howe, Works, 8vo ed., p. 193; Amer. Bible Repository, 10, 411; Christian Spectator, 8, 556; New Englander, 9, 544 sq.; 11:362 sq.; 14:115 sq., 161 sq.; Alfeth. Quart. Rev. July 1864, p. 515; Oct. 1863, p. 685; July, 1860, p. 510; Jan. 1865, p. 133; Bib. Sacra, 1860, p. 810 sq.; Baptist Quart. Rev. 1870, April, art. 5; Journal of Speculative Philosophy, April, 1870, art. 1; Schalberg (Dr. J.), Unsterblichkeit o. d. pers. Fortdauer d. Seele a. d. Tode (3rd edit. Naumberg, 1869); Egomet, Life and Immortality (Lond. 1860); Schott, Sterben u. Unsterblichkeit (Stuttg. 1861); Dumesnil, lmmiortalite (Paris, 1861); Naville, La Vie Eternelle (Par. 1863); Huber, Idee d. Unsterblichkeit (MAunich, 1864); Baguenault de Pullihesse, L’Immortalite (Par. 1864); Pfaff, Ideen e. Artzes . d. Unsterblichkeit d. Seele (Dresden, 1864); Wilmarshof, Das Jenseits (Lpz. 1863); Nitzsch, Systema of Christian Doctrine (see Index); Pye Smith, First Lines of Christ. Theol. p. 144, 352, 357; Saisset, Modern Pantheism (Edinburgh, 1863, 2 vols. 12mo), 1, 140 sq., 263; 2, 36 sq.; Alger, History of Future Life (3rd ed. Phila. 1864); Schneider, Die Unsterblichkeitsidee, etc. (Regensb. 1870, 8vo); Brinton. Myths of the New World (N. Y. 1868, 12mo). (J. H. W.)
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Immortality
perpetuity of existence. The doctrine of immortality is taught in the Old Testament. It is plainly implied in the writings of Moses (Gen. 5:22, 24; 25:8; 37:35; 47:9; 49:29, comp. Heb. 11:13-16; Ex. 3:6, comp. Matt. 22:23). It is more clearly and fully taught in the later books (Isa. 14:9; Ps. 17:15; 49:15; 73:24). It was thus a doctrine obviously well known to the Jews.
With the full revelation of the gospel this doctrine was “brought to light” (2 Tim. 1:10; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 5:1-6; 1 Thess. 4:13-18).
Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary
Immortality
IMMORTALITY.In the ordinary acceptation of the term immortality connotes endlessness. It has ceased to express merely or solely a denial of physical death, in its incidence or its consequences, and has been extended to include the possibility or actuality of death, considered as putting an end to conscious existence either now or in the limitless future. Whether these two alternatives really mean the same thing, whether to be capable of dying is always and ultimately to die, and so that only is immortal which by its very nature and constitution is not liable to death, while all else perishes,as is probably the case,is a question that hardly comes within the scope of the present article. It will, however, be just, and will conduce to clearness, to separate these two considerations; to seek to determine, in the first instance, the teaching of Christ with regard to immortality in the limited sense of a denial of cessation of existence at death; and, secondly, to review the much wider and more perplexed question of the permanence of this immortal state. Does death end all?, according to the mind and teaching of the Founder of Christianity, is an inquiry that needs to be twice raised,once as it concerns the terminus of the present life upon earth, and again as it refers or may refer to a future to which human thought can set no limit. It is obvious that the first question is comparatively simple and uninvolved; and that upon its answer in the affirmative depends the possibility of opening the second, which is highly complicated, and involves the most far-reaching and important problems that can present themselves for human consideration.
By some writers the terms used in the NT, and especially by Christ Himself, with reference to a life after death have been further understood to imply blessedness. Life immortal would thus be not only life in the ordinary acceptation of conscious existence, but it would be life plus felicity. It is perhaps hardly right or wise to saddle the doctrine with this additional connotation. It will, however, be necessary to examine how far the words of Christ suggest or imply that He regarded happiness as an essential and inseparable part of the life to come, or a future existence of misery more or less prolonged as inconceivable unless it were terminated by restoration to bliss or annihilation of consciousness.
There is, however, a further preliminary consideration which must be taken into account. An examination of the whole teaching of Christ upon so momentous a theme, as it is transmitted by the Evangelists, may be expected to yield results not only positive but negative. Positive, inasmuch as upon a subject that concerns the deepest interests of men no great religious teacher can do other than afford some guidance to those who seek knowledge and truth at his lips; and negative, since the revelation which he may venture or see Ht to make of his own thoughts will obviously be determined and limited by the character and capacity of his contemporaries. In a sense neither derogatory nor contemptuous towards his hearers, he will refuse to cast his pearls before swine. Environment naturally and inevitably plays a large part in moulding the form into which doctrine shall be cast, and in assigning the bounds beyond which it shall not move. Teaching appropriate and welcome to the keen-witted and philosophic circles of Athens will fall on dull and inappreciative ears by the waterside or in the fields of Galilee. And of the confessedly greatest Teacher that the world has ever known this may be expected to be preeminently true; He will make His sayings accord both as to form and substance with the receptive ability of those to whom they are delivered. There will be many things within the compass of His own knowledge which they cannot now bear (Joh 16:12). And though He will at times give utterance to sayings hard to be understood (Joh 6:50 ff., Joh 6:60), of a depth and significance beyond their comprehension, foreshadowing truths into the full understanding of which only after-generations will be able to grow, the major part of His instruction will not be concerned with these; else would that instruction be barren and profitless to the hearers, no fruitful seed germinating to new spiritual and intellectual life. Moreover, it is precisely these sayings, dealing with the higher, more abstract and supra-sensible side of things, that would be most likely to be lost upon ordinary disciples, to fail to find a place in their memory, and in their subsequent reproductions, whether written or oral, of the Masters teaching. Only by the choicer natures, the more refined and contemplative spirits among His followers, such as we conceive the Apostle John to have been, would this aspect of His discourse and doctrine be caught up and treasured, to be afterwards faithfully delivered as words , although for the moment they may have soared far above the care or comprehension of those who first heard them with their outward ears.
Upon a priori grounds, therefore, bearing in mind the character of the people among whom Christ lived and with whom He had to deal, we should expect to find the speculative and philosophic side of doctrine but slightly represented, while stress is laid more upon ethics and the practical conduct of life. The supernatural will be stated, as it were, in terms of the natural, the heavenly of the earthly, and with a constant recognition of the actual needs and circumstances and possibilities of His hearers. Whether and how far this is so in fact only an examination of the texts can show. Such an examination of the more or less direct references in the Gospels to a future life will be most conveniently conducted under the three divisions suggested, viz.(1) a renewed life after death, (2) the permanence of this life, (3) its comprehensiveness, whether it is to be conceived as embracing the entire race of mankind or limited to a part thereof. It will be necessary to take separately the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels and of St. John.
A. The Synoptists
(1) With regard to the first point little need be said, for indeed there is nothing in dispute. That the teaching of Christ assumes from first to last a conscious life beyond the grave for Himself and His hearers lies upon the surface of His words and permeates His entire rule of life. The whole tone of His speech, the implications of His parables, the sanctions with which He surrounds His encouragements and warnings, the comparative value which He teaches men to set upon heavenly and earthly things, the gravity and seriousness of His outlook into the future, all show that here at least to Him and to His hearers there was common ground; that He did not need to begin by proving to them that death was not the end of all, but that the universal postulate of religious thought of His day anticipated a renewal of personal and conscious existence after death. In this respect He was but adopting, assuming, and making the basis of impressive exhortation and warning what the majority at least of His contemporaries believed.
The repeated references to the coming of the Kingdom of God or of the heavens (Mat 3:2; Mat 4:17; Mat 10:7; Mat 12:28, Mar 1:15, Luk 9:27; Luk 10:9 al.), into which not everyone who professes loyalty will enter (Mat 7:21); to the Day of Judgment or that day (Mat 10:15; Mat 11:22; Mat 11:24, Luk 10:14, Mat 7:22 al.); to His own Resurrection (Mat 17:9; Matthew 28; Mat 26:32, Mar 9:31; Mar 10:34, Luk 18:33 al.) and the Coming of the Son of Man (Mat 10:23; Mat 16:27 f., Mar 13:26; Mar 14:62 al.), when those who have confessed or denied Him upon earth will reap as they have sown, in a public confession or denial of them before His Father and the holy angels (Mat 10:32 f., Luk 9:26; Luk 12:8 f.),all presuppose and rest upon the foundation of a belief in another life after this. The disciples are to lay up treasure in heaven (Mat 6:20, Luk 12:33), the enjoyment of which is clearly not designed for the present. In the regeneration these disciples shall sit upon thrones in the capacity of judges (Mat 19:28, Luk 22:30). Even His enemies, who bound Him to death, shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power (Mat 26:64, Mar 14:62; cf. Mat 24:30, Mar 13:26, Luk 21:27). The robber, after death, shall be with Christ in Paradise (Luk 23:43). More than one parable bears emphatic witness to the same belief, for example that of the King and the Wedding Feast (Mat 22:1 ff.), of the Talents (Mat 25:14 ff.), of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luk 16:19 ff.). These and other expressions which might be cited, figurative as some of them undoubtedly are, sufficiently emphasize the form and substance of a teaching which is not limited to the present, but always and consistently presupposes a life of active consciousness beyond the grave.
It is doubtful whether even the reputed scepticism of the Sadducees (Mat 22:23-33, Mar 12:18-27, Luk 20:27-40) is any real exception to this. The scope and articles of the creed that they professed remain very uncertain. And their famous apologue is perhaps rather directed against the conception of a joint and common resurrection at one time and place, at which the relationships of this life would be resumed, than implies disbelief in any sequel after death to the life lived upon earth. The incident gives occasion at least to a most emphatic assertion on the part of Christ of the reality of the life that succeeds the present, and an equally emphatic repudiation of the idea that those who have died have ceased to beGod is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.
(2) The question of the duration of this new life, the permanence or impermanence of the state after death, presents greater difficulties. Once again it may be said in anticipation that the probabilities of the case are strongly in favour of the former hypothesis. A teacher of the elevation and spirituality of Christ would hardly be likely to suggest to His hearers as a reward for following Him a prolonged existence indeed, but one which closed in the thick darkness of oblivion; and if He wished to convey the thought that in this respect a sharp distinction prevailed between those who loved and obeyed Him and those who did not,the former are to be immortal, the latter entirely cease to be,He would do so very clearly and emphatically, as presenting a further powerful and almost overwhelming incentive to hearken to His words. Moreover, it is to be noted also that the conception of endlessness in the abstract is not one easily formulated or grasped, and that a doctrine of this character, assuming it to be present in His teaching, may very well prove to have been set forth in the simplest terms, rather by way of suggestion and illustration that would appeal to His hearers, than in the rigorous language of a scheme of metaphysics. The more important terms that bear upon this point are collected and will be conveniently examined together at a later stage. A few expressions only from the Synoptic Gospels call here for notice.
One of the most important passages, rather, perhaps, on the ground of what it implies than of what it directly states, is the declaration recorded in St. Matthews Gospel (Mat 16:18) of the permanence and inviolability of Christs Church, founded and built up as it is upon Himself.* [Note: It is strange that is still sometimes referred to Peter. The Speaker, or the Evangelist who reports Him, is playing upon the name in a characteristically Oriental manner. The similarity of the sound forms to Oriental thought a real bond of connexion between the persons. The whole point of the play is lost, and the expression reduced to meaninglessness and absurdity, if and are identified (cf. 1Co 10:4, and in the OT, Gen 2:23, Exo 2:10 etc.).] The Speaker can hardly be conceived as thinking of a mere temporary duration of that Church, united as it is with Him in the closest of all bonds; the destruction or annihilation of the one would involve a like fate for the other: the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it now or henceforth. And if the Church is to remain, then necessarily its members collectively: for the Church is the members.
It may be said also that the abiding nature of Christs words (Mat 24:35, Mar 13:31, Luk 21:33), under the circumstances of their utterance, presupposes the continued existence of intelligent receptive hearers and doers. The permanence of His words is contrasted with that which in the universe appears most permanent and unchanged, Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away (Mar 13:31, cf. Mat 5:18, Luk 16:17); in no part or degree shall their accomplishment fail to be achieved. But this complete fulfilment does not imply the cessation of their effect upon and in those for whom they are spoken. Rather is it the beginning of a new life, which is only then perfected.
The literal demands of these passages would be satisfied by what has sometimes been termed racial or collective immortality; in which the race might be supposed to persist, while the individuals, each and all in turn, perished. Such an interpretation could not be ruled out of court on the ground that it is not suggested elsewhere in Christs teaching. But a conception so remote and unusual would seem to require much more clear and definite exposition, and is hardly consistent with the numerous references to a personal and individual survival.
In a negative sense also phrases like (Mat 24:6, Mar 13:7, Luk 21:9), (Mat 10:22; Mat 24:13, Mar 13:13), . (Mat 13:40; Mat 13:49; Mat 24:3) clearly do not imply an absolute end, involving annihilation or the like. They do not, of course, assert survival in any universalistic sense; but they are not altogether neutral in the matter (cf. Matthew 13 ll.cc., and the interpretation that is given by Christ Himself of the parable of the Sower). The end of one era is the beginning of another, and for some at least ushers in a period of supreme blessedness (Mat 10:22; Mat 24:13, Mar 13:13).
The indications which the Synoptic Gospels afford on the subject of the comparative duration of the existence of the righteous and the wicked after death are almost wholly concerned with the significance of words like ( . Mat 25:46, Mat 18:8, Mat 25:41, Mar 3:29, ib.), and will be more conveniently examined together (see below). Here it need only be said that parables such as those of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, or the Wedding Feast, do not in themselves suggest or demand any inequality of treatment as regards the mere duration of the allotted punishment or reward; and that references to the Judgment, the Day of Judgment, or the Last Day are equally neutral, as far as direct statement is concerned. While the burning of the tares in the parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Mat 13:30), if the detail is to be pressed as anything more than the natural and appropriate setting of the story,the legitimate and necessary end of weeds,rather points in the direction of permanence and indestructibility. Burning is not annihilation of matter, but transformation of form. And this particular feature of the parable might admit of interpretation as implying renovation through suffering, but is hardly satisfied by any theory of absolute cessation of being. Similarly, it might be urged that the of Mar 9:43 (cf. v. 48) implies the permanence of the fuel on which it feeds. It is clear, however, that no secure or decisive argument can be based on what are obviously allusive and metaphorical expressions.
B. St. John.Within the Fourth Gospel, where, if anywhere in the record of our Lords teaching, we might expect to find a reasoned and philosophical doctrine of a future life, that teaching is so entirely, or almost entirely, conveyed in connexion with a special phraseology, the leading terms of which are , , and . , that little need be said by way of anticipation of the special investigation of these terms. It is worth noting, however, at once, in view of the interpretation of these expressions which will be urged below, that every reference in St. John to a definite termination or close of a world-period is, as we saw was the case in the Synoptists, such as to presuppose and assume a continuation beyond. The conception of an absolute end, beyond which there is nothing, is as foreign to the thought of this Gospel as to that of the others. There is a last day ( , john Joh 6:39 f.; Joh 6:44; Joh 6:54; Joh 11:24; Joh 12:48, a phrase not found in the Synoptists); but it terminates one age only to usher in another more glorious. Judgment () again in St. John does not ordinarily await the setting up of a future tribunal; it is immediate conviction, wrought by the presence of the light. And in the one passage where it is definitely relegated to the future (Joh 5:29) the parallelism of the phraseology ( ) shows that whatever threatening of suffering or retribution may lie behind the word, there is no thought of extinction, or of a final end, in the mind of the Speaker,they that have practised ill ((Revised Version margin) ) come to the resurrection equally with those that have done good. He cannot be conceived to mean that they are raised merely that forthwith, or after a longer or shorter period, they may be destroyed.
It is in St. John also that the most emphatic assertions are foundapart from the special phraseology to which reference has been madeof the abiding blessedness and freedom from ill of those who believe in Christ. He that believeth in me (Joh 11:26); he that drinks of the Christ-given water (Joh 4:14); he that cometh unto me , and he that believeth on me (Joh 6:35). The many mansions and the prepared place of Joh 14:2 are clearly intended to convey the assurance of more than merely temporary resting-places. Finally, the prayer that all His followers may be one, as He is one with the Father (Joh 17:11; Joh 17:21), and may be with Him where He is (Joh 17:24), implies for those who are thus united a coequal duration of existence with Himself.
For the believer, therefore, the future, thus conditioned and defined, is a life of blessedness. But there is nothing to suggest, much less to show, that the continuance of the life is dependent upon its felicity; or that these two features are other than completely independent, no necessary connexion subsisting between them which would make an eternal but unblessed life a contradiction in terms.
, , or .The primary significance of the term is not seriously in question. Age or period suggests a limited stretch of time marked by a definite close. In this sense the word is found in the Gospels, with reference to the present era under which the speaker is living, either simply or as ethically characterized by degeneracy and corruption. The cares choke the word (Mat 13:22 || Mar 4:19); the sons of this are wiser than the sons of light (Luk 16:8); is contrasted with the that is to follow it as (Mat 12:32), or (Luk 20:34 f.); and the latter appears again as in Mar 10:30 || Luk 18:30, where the present is . It is worthy of notice that in one of the above passages (Luk 20:35) the future is something to be gained (); its nature or characteristic, therefore, was more prominent to the writers mind than any mere question of duration. In one context, the parable of the Tares in St. Matthew, the end of the present age is definitely indicated () () (Mat 13:39 f., Mat 13:49), and the same phrase is twice employed later in the Gospel, once by the disciples with reference to the Parousia, which they assume to be synchronous with the end of the (Mat 24:3), and again by Christ Himself, when He asserts His presence with His disciples (Mat 28:20).
In the last two passages especially it is clear that in no shape or form is there attached by the Speaker or His hearers to the phrase end of the age the thought of a termination of personality or conscious life. The close of the one epoch marks the opening of another, into which pass without interruption the actors and participators in the present. The pledge given to the disciples of personal association with Himself, or rather of His personal association with theman association which is already subsisting ( , Mat 28:20), could hardly have been couched in more emphatic or significant terms, or in words less suggestive of a possible severance, however clearly they may admit or even require the thought of a change of the conditions under which it is maintained.
is also twice used in the Gospels with reference to the past, Luk 1:70, Joh 9:32. In neither case are the words those of Christ Himself. And all, perhaps, that need be said is that the speakers, Zacharias and the man born blind respectively, employ the phrase to denote in an indefinite kind of way the whole antecedent period of human history during which the conditions of life upon the earth have been such as they now know them to be, or believe them to have been in former times.
Elsewhere in the Gospels, the word under consideration is found only in the phrase , or . The latter occurs in Luk 1:33 and in the inserted doxology of Mat 6:13 (retained in the margin of the Revised Version). It may fairly be regarded as merely a strengthened form of the other, intermediate between that and the yet more emphatic expression employed especially in the Apocalypse, and by St. Paul in doxologies. occurs once in St. Matthew and St. Luke (Mat 21:19, Luk 1:55), twice in St. Mark (Mar 3:29; Mar 11:14), and twelve times in St. John (Joh 4:14; Joh 6:51; Joh 6:58; Joh 8:35 bis. Joh 8:51 f., Joh 10:28; Joh 11:26; Joh 12:34; Joh 13:8; Joh 14:15), constituting indeed this Evangelists sole use of the word , with the exception of the phrase above noted (Joh 9:32). Setting aside Mat 21:19 || Mar 11:14, which condemns the fig-tree to perpetual barrenness, and where is a strong negation of any possible or prospective fruitfulness at any time; and the passages from St. Luke, of which the first is Messianic and expressly asserts the endlessness of the Messiahs kingdom, and the second has reference to the Divine attitude or action towards men, which also can hardly be thought of as subject to termination or change; the remainder may be classified as positive or negative. In the former, the phrase qualifies some verb expressive of continuance or life ( Joh 6:51; Joh 6:58, Joh 8:35, Joh 12:34, Joh 14:15); in the latter it is joined with a more or less emphatic negative, and denies the possibility of the contingency to which the passage refers ( Mar 3:29, Joh 8:35; Joh 4:14; Joh 8:51 f., Joh 10:28, Joh 11:26, Joh 13:8).
Of all these passages it may be said at once that the Speaker clearly has in mind a state of things of which no reversal is by Him conceived as possible, either now or at any future time. In presence of natural death, the solemn declaration that he who believes (Joh 11:26) does not merely defer the date, but repudiates the possibility of anything that deserves to be called death for the believer. The bond-servant, again, whose sojourn in the house of his master comes to an end, is expressly contrasted with the son who (Joh 8:35); and the same expression is used of the Christ (Joh 12:34), with the same associated ideas of permanence and perpetuity. Peter rejects his Masters offer of service in washing his feet (Joh 13:8)a rejection which lie immediately after gladly retractsnot certainly with the idea that he may accept the offer on some or any future occasion, but sincerely, and as far as his present thought is concerned, finally. And life (Joh 6:51; Joh 6:58) is not limited, terminable life, merely lengthened out as compared with the present, but is a life that needs no artificial and bodily sustenance to enable it uninterruptedly to endure. The connotation of the phrase, whether on the lips of Christ Himself or employed by another, evidently implies an outlook into a future to which the thought of the writer or speaker neither assigns nor conceives it possible to assign a limit.
The same considerations will apply to the adjective , and especially as it is used to qualify in a phrase which becomes a distinctive feature of St. Johns Gospel and First Epistle. For the word itself the somewhat question-begging rendering age-long has been offered. In such a rendering it is evident that all depends on the conception the writers had formed of the age, and the associations it bore to their minds. If they thought of it as definitely terminated or terminable, then age-long is equivalent to temporary. If they regarded it and wrote of it without any associated idea of a limit or end, or if the context clearly intimates that no such idea would have been admitted, then so far age-long is synonymous with immortal, everlasting, or eternal. And it appears undesirable to introduce a new and ambiguous term. Apart, however, from the phrase , the adjective is of rare occurrence in the Synoptic Gospels, and is not used by St. John. It is found three times in St. Matthew in association with terms expressive of suffering or retribution to be endured in the future ( , Mat 18:8; Mat 25:41; , Mat 26:46). St. Luke has a reference (Luk 16:9) to , the eternal tabernacles, open to those who have been far-sighted enough to secure to themselves friends while it was in their power, from whom in their own day of need they may claim favours and return in kind. And a significant and unique phrase in Mar 3:29 , suggests far-reaching conclusions, with regard to which all that perhaps need be said in this place is that it stands here as an explanatory addition to an emphatic affirmation that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness . The context, therefore, precludes an interpretation in a sense contrary to the implications of the preceding words, as though the writer might be thinking of an act of sin committed once for all, and then with all that it entailed definitely and finally set aside.
The reading is sufficiently decisively attested by the witness of BL [Note: L Bampton Lecture.] 28. 33, the Latin and other versions, and is adopted by all editors. It is supported also by the Sinaitic Syriac, mutilated, however, in this verse, if the transcript (1894) may be trusted. The TR [Note: R Textus Receptus.] is found in C2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] and the cursives, with one or two Latin manuscripts, and the Peshitta Syriac. The various reading , C-D 13. 69. 346, would seem to be a correction of designed to introduce into the text the meaning of sinfulness as distinguished from a sin. Cf. II. B. Swete, in loc., a not wholly satisfactory note. The true exposition seems to be given by E. P. Gould in his commentary:* [Note: Critical Commentary, St. Mark, T. & T. Clark, 1896.] An eternal sin may be one subjecting the person to an eternal punishment, eternal in its consequences, that is. But certainly it is equally allowable to suppose that it describes the sin itself as eternal, accounting for the impossibility of the forgiveness by the permanence of the sin,endless consequences attached to endless sin. This is the philosophy of endless punishment. Sin reacts on the nature, an act passes into a state, and the state continues. That is, eternal punishment is not a measure of Gods resentment against a single sin. It is the result of the effect of any sin, or course of sin, in fixing the sinful state beyond recovery.
With regard to the phrase , there is a striking difference in its associations in the few passages in which it is found in the Synoptists, and in the more frequent use of St. John; a difference which seems to reflect the varying attitude of the writers towards the teaching of Christ. In the Synoptists the sphere of is in the future. It is to be inherited (Mat 19:29), and to be received in the coming (Mar 10:30, Luk 18:30) in recompense for that which the disciples of Christ forego in this; which the ruler (, Luk 18:18, Mat 19:16, Mar 10:17), or lawyer (, Luk 10:25) conceives that he may inherit or attain (, Mt. l.c.) by virtue of good deeds in the present. In St. John, on the contrary, is a present possession. The believer has or may have it (Joh 3:36; Joh 5:24; Joh 6:47; Joh 3:15-16; Joh 6:40); and the bestowal of this gift is described as the express aim and purpose of the coming of the Son into the world and of His death, the fruit of the Fathers love (Joh 3:16) and will (Joh 6:40), but conferred by the Son Himself (Joh 10:28, Joh 17:2). In one passage also where the same phrase is used, the closeness of the fellowship with Himself implied in the possession of is mystically described as an eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood, and is associated with the resurrection at the last day (Joh 6:54). This last passage would by itself prove, what the others assume, that , though present, is not limited by the present. Elsewhere there is an approach to the Synoptic standpoint of a future life over against or following on that now lived, although sight seems never to be entirely lost of the conception of as subsisting already and now attainable. He that hateth his soul () in this world will keep it (Joh 12:25); the meat (), the gift of the Son of Man, abideth unto eternal life (Joh 6:27). The same thought recurs in Christs words to the woman of Samaria; there it is the water, His gift, which becomes a well of water springing up unto eternal life (Joh 4:14). And, finally, in connexion with the same incident, the harvest, the ripeness of which the disciples are bidden to recognize, is laid up unto a future which is undefined in time and place; the reaper gathereth together fruit , and shares with the sower in a common joy (Joh 4:36).
Once also Christ appeals to the knowledge or belief of His hearers in the present reality of this eternal life; they think that they have it in the OT Scriptures, missing the spirit there, and the testimony of these Scriptures to Himself, and ascribing life to the letter (Joh 5:39). A somewhat similar thought underlies the answer of Simon Peter to Christs question whether he and the Twelve intend to follow the example of others, and be repelled by hard sayings; Thou hast the words of eternal life (Joh 6:68),words, that is to say, which in their spirit and teaching bring to the hearers. Finally, lest, as it were, any lingering possibility or suggestion should remain of a time-limit to be understood in the phrase, or of its being confined under a merely temporal category, it is twice expressly defined in terms which are ethical and spiritual, and transcend all limitations of time or change; the Divine , committed by the Father to the Son and by Him transmitted to the world, is eternal life (Joh 12:50); and in similar pregnant words (Joh 17:3) is the learning to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
All the passages in which this phrase is found in the Gospels have now been passed in review. An extension of the examination to the remaining books of the New Testament would not modify the conclusions reached, or throw fresh light upon its meaning. It is used twice by St. Luke in the Acts (Act 13:46; Act 13:48); by St. Paul in the Romans (Rom 2:7; Rom 5:21; Rom 6:22 f.), Galatians (Gal 6:8), and Pastoral Epistles (1Ti 1:16; 1Ti 6:12, Tit 1:2; Tit 3:7); by St. John himself in his First Epistle (Joh 1:2; Joh 2:25; Joh 3:15; Joh 5:11; Joh 13:20; the adjective not elsewhere), and by St. Jude (Jud 1:21). These conclusions are entirely in harmony with the results obtained from a consideration of the term , or of the adjective standing by itself, is in its significance independent of time-limits, and may be described indifferently as either present or future. When, moreover, the occasion offers to indicate its characteristics and meaning by definition, that definition is framed not on the lines of time and space, as here, there, or elsewhere, now or then, but is wholly ethical, supranatural, belonging to the realm of the mind and spirit, and lifting up beyond the touch of change or end, into the region of the changeless, the immortal.
At the risk, therefore, of repetition, it must again be pointed out that words and phrases which are crucial for any doctrine of immortality as taught by Christ in the Gospels, so far from implying or suggesting an absolute termination, whether nearer or more distant, to that future which the speakers or writers have in mind, seem to indicate that no such idea was ever present to them; and in some passages, which are neither isolated nor unimportant, a fair interpretation of the writers thought in the light of the context appears to exclude the possibility of any such limit being found at any definite point or place in the age towards which his gaze is directed.
, , , .
There remains a group of words and phrases to be referred to, which with more or less distinctness characterize the future, or contrast it with the conditions of the present. All of them, when used in their fullest sense, imply non-mortality, but they do not bear directly upon the question of the duration of existence after death, which, as we have seen, has come to be the chief element in the connotation of the term immortality. The chief of these is with its derivatives, including the phrases of which it forms a part, in the Gospels is not mere physical life, but is an expression for the higher life, the life which is life indeed, life in its fullest, richest aspects. Such life was in the Word (Joh 1:4); it is Christs gift to His disciples (Joh 10:28, cf. Joh 6:33); nay, He is Himself the life (Joh 11:25, Joh 14:6). It is so good a possession that to enter into life is worth the sacrifice of an eye or a limb (Mat 18:8 f. || Mar 9:43; Mar 9:45). It begins after death (Joh 5:24)not in a temporal sense, but when as a state ceases to be; and it is a resurrection of life to which the well-doers will come forth from the tomb (Joh 5:29). To have life in himself is an attribute of the Father, and is His gift to the Son (Joh 5:26); and this life or eternal life is repeatedly stated to be the present possession of the believer (Joh 3:15 f, Joh 3:36, Joh 6:47; Joh 6:54), the gift of Christ which some of them wilfully refuse (Joh 5:40), and which the unbelieving will not see (Joh 3:36), but which is emphatically declared to be the final end of His coming into the world (Joh 10:10, cf. Joh 20:31). The words which He has spoken are (Joh 6:63), and His commandment is (Joh 12:50). None of these passages suggests that the thought of a termination of the life was present to the mind of the Speaker; some are hardly compatible with such a thought, and others absolutely forbid it (e.g. Joh 1:4; Joh 5:26). This , therefore, is fittingly represented as .
A similar absence of limitation will be found to characterize expressions such as , , etc., which describe the future from the point of view of deliverance from the present, its calamities and its evils. These terms, however, are not in themselves suggestive of duration, except so far as their results are involved; and, as doctrinal terms, belong in the New Testament rather to the Epistles than to the Gospels. In the eschatological discourses, however, of the Synoptic Gospels, salvation is described as a state to be attained by those who endure (Mat 10:22; Mat 24:13 || Mar 13:13); the saving of the life or soul (, cf. Luk 6:9) is strikingly said to be the result of willingness to lose it for Christs sake (Mar 8:35 || Luk 9:24, cf. , Mat 16:25); and in St. John the salvation of the is the purpose of the Divine mission of the Son (Joh 3:17), the salvation of His hearers, the end of the words and teaching which He imparts (Joh 5:34). Hence salvation is contemplated as beyond an end; is rather a crisis than a final close, the entrance into new conditions and a more gracious environment. Both thought and phraseology become meaningless if the subjects of the change are conceived as either annihilated or reduced to unconsciousness.
Agrapha. Of the unwritten Sayings, few have interest or importance for the present subject. The most noteworthy and authentic is that which is embodied in St. Pauls argument of 1Th 4:15-17. Whether all or any of this is intended to be a direct citation of Christs words must remain uncertain. The teaching of the passage is, however, founded upon a . And though it has in view only the dead in Christ, and their position of privilege and priority as compared with those alive at the time of the Lords descent from heaven, it distinctly asserts of these that they will be for ever () with the Lord. The writer therefore contemplates for them an eternal co-existence with the Lord; and he claims that for this doctrine he has the authority of Christ Himself.
Of the Logia from Oxyrhynehus the mystical Saying, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye keep the Sabbath, ye shall not see the Father (Log. 2; Grenfell and Hunt, p. 10), may be said to imply that those who do so fast and truly keep the Sabbath will see the Father, and therefore live with Him. Of the later Logia also, which were discovered in 1903 (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iv. p. 1 ff.), the Introduction, as it is named by the editors, apparently quotes Joh 8:52the hearer of these words shall not taste of death. And the first and second Sayings both make reference to the Kingdom which shall be a place of rest to him who seeks and finds. These indications are all of them slight, and do not add anything to the teaching of the Gospels. But as far as they go they are in harmony with what we have found to be the constant implications in Scripture of the words of Christ and His disciples.
The most striking and suggestive feature, therefore, of all these references in the Gospels to the future, and of the doctrine which they may be understood to imply, is the absence of any indication of a termination of the new conditions which they introduce. In some instances, indeed, the writers statement might be regarded as colourless in this respect, and the thought and context of his words would not be directly contradicted by an assumption that these conditions were themselves temporary, and at some indefinite period superseded by others. Elsewhere the tone and context strongly support, if they do not compel, the view that the state of things contemplated was contemplated, as far as the forecast of the speaker was concerned, as permanent. In a third and most important series of passages, the same expressions phrases are directly applied to the Divine Being and to His Kingdom in such a manner as to show that no thought of a eessation or close could by any possibility have entered into the mind of the Speaker, or have been regarded by Him as conceivable.
Moreover, the change of circumstances thus introduced involves no interference with the conscious life, not, at least, to the extent of reducing it to unconsciousness. The subjects of the change are represented as speaking, feeling, and willing, with all their faculties under control and in action. Nor is there any suggestion that this condition is occasional or temporary; it is, on the other hand, tacitly assumed to be usual and a matter of course.
Further, also, most prominent and characteristic examples of this manner of regarding the future were found to be associated with the terms and its derivatives. This word, originally apparently denoting a definite age, marked off by beginning and end, had come to be regularly employed to denote an age, the beginning of which was, indeed, sometimes more or less obscurely indicated, but to which the Speaker did not assign a further limit, and, in some instances, would clearly have rejected the idea of a limit as contradictory and impossible. The thought underlying these expressions is not that of a terminable period, but of a limitless progression.
The only adequate rendering of such a thought in English is by the words eternal, immortal, or the like. For there lies implicit in these words precisely what we have found to be the implication of , etc., in the Gospels; viz. that the speaker rejects the idea of a bound or limit beyond which there is nothing, or nothing for the subject of whom he is speaking; that however far off the boundary fence is in thought set up, he immediately insists that it shall be taken down, and removed farther away,only to repeat the process as often as an attempt is made to assign a limit or define an end. This is, indeed, the only real conception which we seem able to frame of the meaning and content of such terms as immortality, eternity, etc., as they are ordinarily employed. They connote not a positive and comprehensive idea, which the mind distinctly outlines to itself as a whole, but rather the negative and indefinite one of the absence of an end; looking forth into the future, we find ourselves unable to discern a point beyond which there is an absolute blank as far as the conditions under consideration are concerned. The association of the thought of a final end with the conditions or state supposed would involve a self-contradiction, or, if we prefer to use the phrase, would be impossible. Such a conception is entirely logical and consistent, and amounts practically to defining immortality as the summation of an infinite number of intervals or spaces of time, succeeding one another without break, and receding into dim, fathomless distance.
The precise words endless, immortal, or immortality do not occur in the Gospels; cf., however, Luk 1:33 Of his kingdom there shall be no end, . The omission, if omission it be, is partly supplied by St. Paul, who describes the after-state of the Christian as and , incorruption and deathlessness (1Co 15:53 f). The latter term is shown by its use in 1Ti 6:16 (the blessed and only Potentate ) to have moved far in the direction of a positive connotation.
Similar considerations apply generally to the references to this doctrine in the remaining books of the New Testament, a detailed examination of which lies outside the range of the present article. Such an examination would strengthen in detail, but would not change the character of the argument. In no instance is there a suggestion of absolute finality. The conclusion of every , for example, marks the commencement of another, accompanied by changed conditions, indeed, but not, as far as the statements and apparent train of thought carry us, by annihilation in any sense, or a destruction which involves loss of personal consciousness or life. And while the writers do not in so many words define that future into which their thought projects itself as immortal or endless, their attitude towards it and the phrases and descriptions which they employ are such as to negative the idea that they would or could have admitted of the drawing of a line here, there, or anywhere, beyond which absolute oblivion and death should reign. Compare Rom 1:25 ad fin., Rom 6:22 ad fin. Rom 9:5; Rom 16:26 , 2Co 4:18 b, 2Co 11:31, Phm 1:15, Heb 1:8; Heb 7:3; Heb 13:8; 1Pe 5:10, Rev 1:18.
(3) In passing to the third part of our inquiry, which relates to the comprehensiveness of the life beyond the grave, whether it is contemplated as equally endless for all, or whether a distinction is drawn as regards duration between the after-existence of the evil-doer and that of the righteous man, we are conscious of a certain reserve in description and expression on the part of the Evangelists, of a delicacy which certainly reflects the mind and teaching of the Master. The passages which refer to the future of the wicked are comparatively few in number: and the outline, as it were, of the picture presented is drawn, not, indeed, waveringly or hesitatingly, but with a light hand, as though the subject were one to which detail or elaboration were inappropriate. Reticence and brevity characterize all the utterances of Christ that bear upon the share which the evil-doers have in the life after death. Thus, while the righteous man and believer enters beyond the grave upon a renewed life, to the duration of which no limit is set, and which the hearers of Christs words understood in this sense to be eternal, the question is justly raised whether the same statement may be made, and the same inference drawn, with regard to the future existence of those who are not righteous and do not believe. Do those whoto adopt the language of the parablego away into the outer darkness, pass into oblivion, suffer extinction, or experience any other of the conjectural fates which have from time to time been assumed to be the lot of the wicked? or, as an alternative, may outer darkness be paraphrased into purgatory, on the further side of which there is light?
It may be said in limine that the presumption is against any such limitation of the duration of life beyond the grave in the case of one class or section only of humanity. It would require very strong evidence to enforce the acceptance of the view that terms or expressions which disown the idea of a boundary, an end, when used of the future state of the righteous, actually and of set purpose connote such an idea when they describe the lot of the wicked: or that the Speaker would confuse His audience with antitheses which were merely verbal, and possessed no underlying significance or reality. Upon this issue, again, only an examination and fair interpretation of the passages which bear upon the subject can decide. It will be found that such passages in the Gospels are few in number, though not wanting in suggestiveness.
The most significant and important passage is perhaps Mar 3:29, to which reference has already been made; and its significance does not altogether depend upon the closing words, in which the variation of text occurs. Assuming that the reading is correct, as we are justified in doing (see above, p. 788a), it is difficult to see what other meaning can be attached to the phrase than that of a sin the results of which are permanent. An act of sin cannot be permanent or endless in execution, though it may be ceaselessly repeated; it is only in its fruits that it endures. And if can be supposed to describe sinfulness in any sense, the meaning is practically the same; for endless sinfulness necessarily involves endless retribution. The earlier part of the verse has its parallels in the two other Synoptists
Mat 12:32 .
Mar 3:29 , .
Luk 12:10 .
The simplest form is that of St. Luke; but it is hardly less pregnant or decisive than those of the other Evangelists. The blasphemy is personal, the conscious and wilful act of a conscious and responsible being; and thereforeunless the words are to be emptied of their force, and reduced to meaninglessnessthe consequences are personal also, falling not on someone else, but on the blasphemer himself, for whom there is no place for forgiveness either in this age or in that which is to come. The reason is supplied by St. Mark, and by St. Mark only,he is guilty of an eternal sin, is liable to its penalty, and subject to its consequences. The permanence of sin implies and necessitates the permanent impossibility of forgiveness. On the central and essential point the three reports are at one.
The significance for the doctrine of immortality of the parable or apocalypse of Mat 25:31-46, with the sentences pronounced on the sheep and goats and the penalties incurred, lies in the application of identical words and phrases to describe the duration of that future into which both pass from the judgment-seat. If the of the righteous is , so is the of the wicked (Mat 25:46); the fire into which the latter depart is also (Mat 25:41), although this word is not applied to the Kingdom prepared for the righteous (Mat 25:34). It is surely an abuse of language to maintain that the Speaker designed to convey a different meaning in the two instances. If, as we have seen reason to believe, the term carried with it the thought of the absence of an assigned or assignable end to that vista of the future contemplated by the Speaker, or, in other words, was practically identical in significance with our immortal, eternal, it cannot justly be shorn of this connotation when it is applied to the punishment which overtakes those on the left hand of the Judge.
An expression is found in Joh 5:29 which has some bearing upon this subject. Its importance for a doctrine of universal immortality must not be overestimated; for the stress lies again upon the parallelism; but by implication, though not directly, it appears to assert the same equality of lot for all as regards the duration of the revived existence. It would not be difficult, indeed, to draw out at length a similar proof for the words and to that which has been attempted above for and ; and to show that these expressions never, on the lips of Christ and in the Gospels, denote a resurrection which is the prelude to a new life leading only to a new death. On the contrary, ushers in another period and fresh conditions of existence, of which no termination is contemplated or conceivable. All that are in the tombs shall come forth. And as the resurrection of life, the portion of those who have done good, can hardly be understood to indicate a merely temporary restoration or perpetuation of existence, so no interpretation of the difficult phrase resurrection of judgment will be satisfactory which postulates a distinction in this respect between the righteous and those upon whom the judgment falls.
A similar argument might not unfairly be based upon the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luk 16:19 ff.), or the King and the Wedding Guests (Mat 22:2-14), viz. that the conditions, the data of the parable, do not in either case suggest, but rather by their tone deprecate the idea of absolute annihilation awaiting those who, on the one hand, find no place in Abrahams bosom, or, on the other, have failed to fitly provide themselves with raiment meet for the wedding feast. It would, however, be at the best no more than an argumentum e silentio, to which no great value could be attached. The declaration of Christ also to the Sadducees, as reported in St. Lukes Gospel, that all live to him (Luk 20:38), though from one point of view susceptible of a universalistic interpretation, does seem on any construction to exclude the idea that there are some who finally cease to live in any real or intelligible sense of the word.
, , etc. It remains to consider briefly the significance and implication of the terms employed in the Gospels to denote death, perishing, or destruction. The principal of these are the verbs and , with the cognate nouns and .
The uncompounded verb occurs hut rarely in the Gospels (Mat 2:20, Mar 15:44, Luk 7:12; Luk 8:49, Joh 11:44; Joh 19:33), and is always employed of mere physical death regarded as the termination of the activities, good or evil, of the present life. There is no thought of a future, either affirmed or denied, in the minds of the speakers; and in none of the passages is the word on the lips of Christ or reported as used by one of His disciples. Neither is the simple verb found in NT Greek. And the adjective is used only by St. Paul (twice as an epithet of , Rom 6:12; Rom 8:11, once of , 2Co 4:11, and in antithesis to , 1Co 15:53 f., or to , 2Co 5:4).
is found only four times in the Gospels. In Mat 26:8 || Mar 14:4 it is the waste of the ointment. For its real purpose, as conceived by the Speaker, the ointment perishes, is lost; but it is clearly not annihilated, only diverted from its proper use. In Mat 7:13 the way that leads , to destruction, is described as broad; no indication, however, is given as to the fate of those who traverse this way when they reach , and it is fair, therefore, to interpret the phrase in the light of the other passages where the word occurs (in the parallel passage Luk 13:24 no mention is made of the broad way). Joh 17:12 not one of them is lost but the son of perdition, employs a Hebraistic mode of expression. is one who shares the qualities, is like in character to , cf. , Mat 23:15; but though he , and nothing is directly stated as to his present condition or future destiny, the son of perdition is certainly not conceived as either unconscious or extinct, nor is there any suggestion that this is to be his ultimate fate.
In the Synoptic Gospels , like , uniformly expresses merely physical death as the cessation of physical activities. Two passages in St. Luke, however, call for special notice. In the parable referred to above, both Lazarus and the rich man die (, luke Luk 16:22); but their conscious activity does not terminate, it is merely transferred to other spheres. And of the sons of God, the sons of the resurrection, it is emphatically said (Luk 20:36) that recurrence of death is for them impossible. Death, therefore, passes upon them once, but leaves them , equal to angels, in an exalted and privileged state, no more subject to its power. The word is more common in St. John (28 times), and in accordance with the more contemplative and spiritual character of his Gospel is employed also metaphorically, though its predominant use is literal and physical. Thus the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies (, Joh 12:24), but by and through death rises to a newer and richer life, and bears much fruit. And for the believer death is but the beginning of life (Joh 11:25), a life that is permanent and exposed to no return of death ( , Joh 11:26).
Of the word , death, a similar account must be given. It is usually physical death, with no reference to or thought of that which is beyond. By the Synoptists it is employed more or less metaphorically in Mat 4:16, Luk 1:79 (quotations from Isaiah), Mat 26:38 || Mar 14:34. In Mat 20:18 || Mar 10:33 is for Christ Himself the prelude to life. So in Joh 5:24 he that believeth hath passed out of death into life; and later in the same Gospel Christ declares that he who keeps His word shall not see (Joh 8:51). or taste of (Joh 8:52) death (cf. Joh 11:26).
Finally, there is the term , perhaps the most significant of all the expressions that describe dissolution and the cessation of a worldly estate. It is apparently employed by the Sacred Writers with a weaker as well as a stronger association. The former meaning, to lose, to find to be missing, is illustrated by Mat 15:24, Luk 15:4; Luk 15:8 f., Joh 6:12; Joh 18:9 and other passages. The predominant sense of the word, however, is that of ruin, the precise nature or degree of which will be indicated by the context; but which consists essentially in the loss or withdrawal of capacity for the due discharge of function or duty. Thus the wine-skins perish in St. Matthew (Mat 9:17), both the wine and the skins in St. Mark (Mar 2:22); but the substance of both survives, though they have become wasted and useless. So also in Joh 6:27, where the that perishes loses its nutritive power, and ceases to be able to perform the part of food. Applied to persons the word is equivalent to ruined, undone, succumbing to present or prospective emergency or pressure, e.g. Mat 8:25 || Mar 4:38, Luk 8:24; Luk 15:17, Joh 11:50. In the passages most pertinent to the present inquiry a definitely spiritual ruin is contemplated, the object of which is usually the , Mat 10:28; Mat 10:39; Mat 16:25 || Mar 8:35, Luk 9:24; Luk 17:33; Luk 6:9, Joh 12:25; but the loss or ruin of the soul here is distinctly said to be preliminary to finding, saving, or (Luk 17:33) quickening it (). The idea conveyed is again, therefore, not annihilation or destruction of being, but change of state. Here, also, the highest form of teaching is found in St. John. Every believer in Christ, or the sheep who hear His voice, are expressly declared to be permanently exempt from ruin (Joh 3:16; Joh 10:28); and while the man who loveth his life ( ) is the active cause of its ruin ( ), he who hates it in this world will keep it unto life eternal (Joh 12:25). Passages in which the word is used of mere physical destruction, in which usually no thought of the future is involved, must be interpreted in accordance with this general conception (Mat 2:13; Mat 12:14; Mat 26:52, Mar 9:22, Luk 17:29 al.).
In the passages referred to above, Mat 10:39 and parallels, the antithesis , or ; is hardly to be weakened or explained away as mere willingness to lose. There is an actual loss incurred and completed. And the ruin consists in the stripping off from the of all those qualities and connexions which have bound it to the present, and have made it what it is, material and sensual. The essential , the soul transformed, is saved by the process, and enters upon a new life. Thus the phrase is practically equivalent to St. Johns loving and hating (Joh 12:25).
In attempting to estimate the value of these indications with regard to the future life of the wicked, few and slight as they seem to be compared with the fulness and frequency of the references to the blessed lot of the righteous, two preliminary conditions which are essential to their right interpretation need to be borne in mind. In the first place, it was clearly far from the intention of the Teacher to lay down or elaborate any metaphysical doctrine of a future existence, such as we might reasonably expect from formal systems of philosophy. Written across His words and actions is their immediate and practical aim; and to have mystified His plain and unlettered hearers with definitions and metaphysics would have been to repel them, and defeat His own purpose. That task He must leave to successors, who in other times, and with other surroundings, will enter into His labours. To expect to find, for example, in the Gospels a well-ordered and articulated defence of natural immortality, so called, is unreasonable. Any such expectation is by the conditions of the case doomed to disappointment. Hints, pre-intimations, there will naturally be, the elucidation and development of which will be the care of after ages; but completeness, finality, from a logical or philosophic point of view, will not be found; nor a series of statements which, however fitted they might be to meet the requirements of some one or other of the later centuries, were out of touch with the thought of His own day and generation.
Again, the reticence observed as to the fate of the wicked, and the comparative infrequency of mention thereof, are entirely in harmony with what is found to be the case in the early literatures of the other great religions of the world. To expatiate on a destiny of woe and pain, or upon the duration of the sufferings of the lost, is, judging from all analogy, evidence not of an early but of a late position in the history of religious thought; and were this a marked feature of the Gospels, it would justly have laid them open to the suspicion of having at least undergone modification in the interests of later and more developed forms of belief. The hymns of the Rig-Veda, for example, dwell much upon the blessed estate of the good who do that which is acceptable to the gods, and accordingly go hereafter to dwell with them; but they contain only slight and passing references to the lot of the evil-doers, who are hurled by Indra into darkness. The Egyptian Book of the Dead relates the varying trials and fortunes of the deceased in the nether world, through which he passes successfully by the aid of talismanic formulae and the favour of the gods; but complete silence is observed with regard to the man who at the bar of Osiris fails to pass the prescribed tests. And it is characteristic also not of primitive but of mature, if not decadent, Buddhism to set forth in vivid description and with luxuriant art the series of hells in which carefully graduated torments on an ascending scale of horror are apportioned with precision to the heinousness of the sinners crimes. It was not otherwise in early Christianity. There, too, it was left to later ages to elaborate descriptions and to revel in details of a future life, the real circumstances of which neither human language is capable of defining nor human thought, tied down as it is to categories belonging essentially to present conditions, able to conceive. The comparative silence of the earliest authoritative documents, and of the earliest teaching so far as it has come down to us, is more eloquent and convincing than the most exhaustive and graphic statement of doctrine could ever have been.
Mohammedanism, it may he said, is an exception to this rule, and from the very beginning lavishes its descriptive powers on the torments that await the unbeliever. Islm, however, sprang adult and full-armed from the mind of its founder, and was stereotyped in the Korn. Its doctrines have already a long history of development behind them, and, if we could trace them back to the starting-point, would probably he found in all instances to conform to the prevailing type of historic growth.
The results to which we have been led may be briefly summarized as follows:
(1) The reality of a conscious life beyond the grave is uniformly assumed and taught by Christ Himself and by the writers of the Gospels.
(2) To this future life there is assigned no terminus or end. Rather do the phrases used suggest that the thought of a final end never presented itself to Speaker or writer as either actual or possible. And where words like , , etc., are employed, the end or last day is obviously and patently not absolute, but marks and introduces a new beginning. No philosophical theory of immortality is formulated; such a theory is not to be expected, and was, indeed, under the circumstances hardly possible. The doctrine of the Gospels, however, of a renewed life after death to which no limit is set, and for which by virtue of the very terms employed no limit appears to be conceivable, is in the last analysis all that we mean, or can mean, by eternity, immortality.
(3) The writers give no countenance whatever to any theory which in respect of its duration separates the lot of the righteous from that of the wicked. Slight and indefinite, overlaid with metaphor and parable, as are the indications of the conditions under which the future life of the latter will be lived, the guarded statements made and the hints allowed to fall consistently imply that in this respect equality of treatment is meted out to all. If the of the one is , and he is not to die , the of the other is likewise, and he is or may be guilty of a , the fruits of which are gathered in no less a period of time than is described by the same phrase. Theories of universal restoration, of final extinction, or of any modification or combination of these find no support in the words of Christ or of His disciples as recorded in the Gospels.
The present writer shares the convictions which have been very widely felt and expressed, that the final demonstration of immortality, if and when it is given, will have to be based on broader than any merely literal or narrowly expository grounds. Christ spoke to His own age; and necessarily spoke such truths and in such a form as that age could receive and assimilate. That He exhausted, the whole range of truth in His statement, or formulated both in shape and substance all doctrine that the mind of man could ever appreciate, is as impossible to believe as it is contrary to His own express words (Joh 16:12). Nor can we doubt that if He had lived in our day, He would have delivered truths expanded and recast to meet the needs and tendencies and capacities with which He found Himself brought into touch.
That the Christian Church has been on the whole on right lines, and has been justified generally in her interpretation of the teaching of her Founder and His immediate disciples with respect to this particular doctrine, the foregoing exposition has attempted to show. The end, however, is not yet. And the ferment of thought, not less, perhaps more, characteristic of our age than of any that have preceded it, is not destined to be stilled into unconcern, or to have its efforts paralyzed, by any dogmatic creed or pronouncement of whatever authority. It claims the right to work out its own doctrinal freedom not only in the light of the Sacred Records, but under the guidance of that reason which it holds no less certainly than revelation to be an element and gift of the Divine.
Literature.The treatises on NT Theology, or Theology in general, and the History of Doctrine contain little that is relevant. See the article on Eschatology by S. D. F. Salmond in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , vol. i. p. 749 ff., and the literature there cited. Add W. N. Clarke, Outline of Christian Theology, Edinburgh, 1898, p. 192 ff.; William James, Human Immortality5 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , London, 1903; J. Royce, Conception of Immortality, London, 1904.
A. S. Geden.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Immortality
IMMORTALITY.See Escratology.
Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible
Immortality
IMMORTAL, IMMORTALITY
Strictly and properly speaking, this can only be applied to JEHOVAH in his threefold character of person; for of Him, it is justly said, “who only hath immortality.” (1Ti 6:16) But in Him, and by Him, and from Him, the church is said to have rendered to it “glory and honour and immortality, eternal life.” (Rom 2:7) But then, the striking and essential difference is here; JEHOVAH hath immortality in himself. It is His very Being-The church hath it by gift, and enjoys it only from her union with Christ. Of what nature or kind that immortality is, which distinguisheth the state or existence of the miserable in hell, Scripture hath not said. It is said, indeed, “their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” (Mar 9:44; Mar 9:46; Mar 9:48) How ought true believers in Jesus to rejoice in the consciousness of their interest in him, to join the hymn of the apostle; “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen.” (1Ti 1:17)
Fuente: The Poor Mans Concordance and Dictionary to the Sacred Scriptures
Immortality
. The deathless state which stands in contrast to the mortality of man, and which the ‘mortal’ will ‘put on’ when ‘changed.’ 1Co 15:53-54. God only has in Himself immortality, being the fountain and source of life for all things. 1Ti 6:16.In Rom 2:7 and 2Ti 1:10 the word is , not ‘immortality,’ but ‘incorruption.’
The immortality of the soul is plainly revealed in scripture. God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul (Gen 2:7), which is quite different from anything said of a mere animal. The Lord, when showing the Sadducees that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, added “for all live unto [or ‘for’] him (Luk 20:38), though as to the body they may have died.
Fuente: Concise Bible Dictionary
Immortality
General references
Gen 5:24; 2Sa 12:23; 2Ki 2:11; Neh 9:5; Job 4:17-21; Job 14:13; Psa 16:10-11; Psa 21:4; Psa 22:26; Psa 23:6; Psa 31:5; Psa 36:9; Psa 37:18; Psa 37:27; Psa 49:7-9; Psa 49:14-15; Psa 73:26; Psa 86:12; Psa 102:24-28; Psa 121:8; Psa 133:3; Psa 145:1-2; Pro 14:32; Ecc 3:21; Ecc 12:7; Isa 14:9; Isa 25:8; Isa 26:19; Isa 38:18-19; Eze 32:31; Dan 12:2-3; Mat 10:28; Mat 16:26; Mat 19:16-17; Luk 10:25-28; Mat 25:46; Mar 10:30; Mar 12:26-27; Luk 9:25; Luk 20:36-38; Joh 3:14-16; Joh 3:36; Joh 5:39-40; Joh 6:39-40; Joh 6:44; Joh 6:47; Joh 6:50-51; Joh 6:53-54; Joh 6:58; Joh 10:28; Joh 11:25-26; Joh 14:19; Joh 17:2-3; Act 20:32; Act 23:8-9; Act 26:7-8; Act 26:18; Rom 2:7; Rom 6:22-23; 1Co 15:12-55; Gal 6:8; Col 1:5-6; 1Th 4:13-18; 1Th 5:10; 2Th 1:7-9; 2Th 2:16; 1Ti 4:8; 1Ti 6:12; 1Ti 6:19; 2Ti 1:9-10; Tit 1:2; Tit 3:7; Heb 9:15; Heb 10:34; Heb 11:5; Heb 11:10; Heb 11:13-16; 1Pe 1:3-5; 1Jn 2:17; 1Jn 2:25; 1Jn 5:13; Jud 1:21; Rev 1:7; Rev 3:4; Rev 22:5 Resurrection; Righteous, Promises to, Expressed or Implied, to the Righteous; Wicked, Punishment of
Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible
Immortality
(Lat. in + mortalis, mortal) The doctrine that the soul or personality of man survives the death of the body. The two principal conceptions of immortality are
temporal immortality, the indefinite continuation of the individual mind after death and
eternity, ascension of the soul to a higher plane of timelessness.
Immortality is properly speaking restricted to post-existence (survival after death) but is extended by the theory of transmigration of souls. (See Metempsychosis) to include pre-exisence (life before birth).
The arguments for immortality fall into four groups
Metaphysical arguments which attempt to deduce immortality from properties of the soul such as simplicity, independence of the body, its knowledge of eternal truth, etc.
Valuational and moral arguments seek to derive the immortality of the soul from its supreme worth or as a presupposition of its moral nature.
Empirical arguments which adduce as evidence of immortality, automatic writing, mediumship and other spiritualistic phenomena.
— L.W.