Nature in Scripture : A study of Bible verification in the range of common experience

Front matter

CNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

NATURE IN SCRIPTURE.

a Stutrg of Bible Ferificatton

Part Third. The Principle Of Justification"

Chapter * Page

I. Of Faith as related to Man's Dependence and

Progress 101

II. Against Transcendental Notions of Primitive

Kesponsibility 114

IH. Original Man and Historic Man 127

IV. The Perfect Faith and the Approved Man . 135

Part Fourth. The Manifestation Of Evil

I. Or Speculations on Original Sin 145

11. Of Spiritual Law Overruling Physical Tendency ... 151

III. Of Pains and Penalties as related to Conduct 160

IV. Op Physical Death as related to Spiritual

Development 175

V. Deterrent Consequences of Deliberate Unbelief 188

VI. Evil as set forth in the Christ's Teaching . 193-

Part Fifth. The Law Of Atonement

I. Recapitulation and Transition 213

II. The Law of Atonement in its Physical Type . 220

III. The Law of Atonement in General History . 228

IV. The Law of Atonement in Scripture History.

CONTENTS. xiii

Chapter Page

V. Sacrifice under the Law 252

VI. Sacrifice according to the Prophets . . . 263 VII. The Law of Atonement Fulfilled in the

Christ 271

VIII. Immediate Sequel of the Christ's Incarnate

Ministry 290

PART SIXTH. CRISES m THE PROCESS OF REDEMPTION

I. Of Justice and Judgment 299

II. Crises under Laws of Physical Change . . 303

m. Crises under Laws of Spiritual Development 30&- IV. Crises According to the Old Testament

Teaching 316

V. Crises Interpreted by the Christ .... 319

Introduction

CONCERNING SPEECH AND "WORDS.

" And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air ; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."

Genesis, ii. 19.

" A NATURAji action is it that man speaks ; But whether thus or thus, doth Nature leave To your own art, as seemeth good to you."

NATURE IN SCRIPTURE.

INTEODUCTIOK

CONCERNING SPEECH AND WORDS.

TT is proposed to study some parts of the Scripture -*- teaching in the light of material objects and human experiences to which that teaching bears testimony.

To adjust one's instrument is to begin work. I know of no better introduction to the work proposed than paying some attention to speech, — that curious instrument by which all things, and all relations of things, are brought into the working of men's minds.

The fundamental teachings of Scripture are not local or temporary, — but universal. The field is the world. Accordingly, the earliest Scripture brings to our notice the universal law of human speech; and a brief consideration of this law can hardly fail to quicken and temper our judgments as to the use of some very important words in the latest Scriptures, — words by which the whole sphere of reality wherein our thought moves has been summed up.

The picture of primitive speech in the second chapter of Genesis is fresh and appreciable now, for the reason that in whatever ways the forms of speech may have changed, the inner reality is ever the same. To-day, as in the beginning, living creatures are formed out of the dust of the ground, and are brought to man. New species, or peculiar individuals, may at any time come to man's notice in the course of propagation and discovery, and still the rule holds good that whatsoever man calls every living creature, that is the name thereof. The method of naming belongs to the method of creation.

Any object brought to man's attention suggests its own name, we may imagine, by means of some striking quality or aspect. Then other objects possessed of the same quality, or presenting the same aspect, range themselves under the same name. In this way the name becomes a general or family designation ; while individuals demand a further naming, according to their several attributes, to distinguish them from each other. In any case, a name once given not only stands in the mind for the object to which it belongs, but grows to be representatively the equal of the object, — puts itself into the same conditions and relations, demands connectives and auxiliaries, seeks, in fine, to become as vital and important as the existence or action it contemplates.

The name need not consist of one word only. It may be supplemented, — in fact, drawn out indefinitely. Thus there is secured to the latest comer in the world his individual right of naming. He is permitted to call the objects presented to him by names other than those already given, — names that shall correspond with his peculiar susceptibility, interest, and knowledge with regard to the objects. For example, " mountain " is a verygeneral name. Among many mountains there is one, it may be, that attracts somebody's attention by its color or shape, and he calls it *' green " or " round " mountain.

But the mountain presents itself to multitudes of observers in successive generations. Firm as it is, the mountain does not hold out unchanged. Adverse elements are at work upon it, — now fire, now frost. At one time it is denuded of trees or even of soil. Again it is overrun with various orders of vegetation, haunted by tribes of animals, explored and perused by lovers of wild scenery, or analyzed and penetrated by the curious in science, to make it disclose the secrets of its formation and contents. Why would not the accurate account of all this make just so much descriptive name or repute of the mountain, exactly like one's calling it green or round ? Thus there is brought before us the persistent correlation of three sorts of things, namely, outward objects, observing minds, representative names. We find the most extended descriptions depending upon a mental exertion identical with that which originated the first word-element. It is the law of existence. The world's history is the co-ordinate development of material nature, mind, and language. Mind is the luminous centre, and whatever objects are presented, the word-shadow is sure to be cast. Be the shadow one syllable or thousands of sentences, it may be called a name. There is an assumed equality of a book's title and its contents. The detail of a descriptive catalogue is only what is meant by the name that sums up the collection. The whole creation, throughout the ages of life of which man is speaking, " according to his own art, as seemeth best to him," is conceived in Scripture as the Word of God, by which he awakens thought, teaching us to give him names, — and at length a name of majesty and goodness.

Our extended sense of name implies, of course, not simply the multiplication of words, but the organic structure of language. AVords are vitally related to one another. Otherwise they could not be made to represent the intimate relations and lucid order of thought, — till they have actually grown by inflection and composition, by logical and rhetorical arrangement, to the very form and pressure of intellectual experience. The naming faculty rises to a new effort when the objects and elements of nature are studied under conditions of thought connected with accumulated results and resources of investigation, — the effort indicated in scientific nomenclature.

As speech tends to keep even pace with the intelligent appreciation of things, so a word having the beginning of its use from a cfertain original suggestion or starting-point of thought tends to hold on its way in the same direction. Those who use words are concerned to keep them lively and active, — equal to the vigor and variety of the objects they represent. Words in one respect are like the giant who was strong only when he touched the ground. They need to be kept in close contact with the realities which are the ground of their significance. But, if words are carried away from the real ground of their meaning, so as to acquire a fanciful or merely conventional force, then it happens, according to the saying of Bacon, " that words, as a Tartar's bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment." ^ This applies especially to words of comprehensive significance, that have their rights in part by inheritance from other words in other languages, — whose duties they are set to discharge.

1 "Works, vol. i. p. 211, — '* Advancement of Learning."

The word world, for example, has a really inexhaustible import in the English New Testament ; such, indeed, that it would be impossible to appreciate the general cast of thought to which those writings seek to introduce us, without particular attention to this word. Its fulness of meaning is due to the fact that, in our authorized version, the single word world has taken up into itself the force of two Greek terms, each of immeasurable import ; and now it will be hard for any revision to disengage and distribute anew the values that have been treasured so long in one syllable.

It is plain that our word ivorld, as a name for the sum of things, has not reached its fulness till there is a general consent as to what grand total is referred to. But when creation has disclosed the rounded system, and thought has embraced the same and confided it to this word's keeping, then, in whatever subordinate sense the word may be used, it is never wholly alienated from its supreme significance. We may have any number of worlds by reason of the world that includes them all, and by whose law they exist. Call the earth the world. It is not the world without its sun, moon, and stars. Take them away, and earth falls into chaos. Speak of the world of mind in distinction from the world of matter. But it is mind in relation with matter that we mean. The two worlds are one. Refer to the world of art or science, — the religious, the political, the social world. But these are not worlds apart from the grand total which is the world. Say there is a world of law in a drop of water. Yes : because the same law " preserves the stars from wrong." Any kind or order of world implies the world-total. Each variety of the idea requires the unity to constitute it. The ultimate reach of thought which a word registers is inseparable from the minor phases of its meaning ; because throughout its gradations the word is animated by a common soul.

Let us take now the Greek word cosmos, to whose properties and functions our word world has fallen heir in the New Testament, and see how the same law is illustrated.

Cosmos seems to set out from a fundamental idea of orderly relation and harmony of parts, and to rise through humbler uses to its high significance. An ornament making an impression of harmony and beauty on the observer, the fine arrangement and keeping of dress, a well-ordered army animated by a single mind and will, — these are examples to indicate the kind of objects to which, by reason of a certain common quality, the word cosmos was applicable at first. But when all visible order is apprehended as the reign of invisible law, when the heavens and the earth with all their hosts are seen to exhibit a harmony so pervading as to awaken the belief that the order of nature is unbroken, — then there is not only this or that thing which may be called a cosmos; there is the cosmos, the totality of order and beauty, the revelation of transcendent Intelligence and Power. Let this ultimate idea be once in the mind, and it takes possession of the word also. Throughout the range of its minor uses the word carries henceforth the grand cosmical conception, and refers the least example of real order to universal law. Indeed, the word has a tendency to give up its primitive applications, as too little in keeping with its great calling as a name for the material universe.

It is natural that the words " world " and " cosmos," though starting from different original suggestions, in different portions of the human family, at diiEferent times, should come to be the equivalents of each other, since both reach a unity of significance in the sum of things. Of course this unity overrules all distinctions ; and, moreover, in the intellectual process of comparison and translation, either word would easily appropriate to itself any power of suggestion that might once have been peculiar to the other.

Having before shown that the word world is not degraded from its high service by lending itself to limited conceptions, it is hardly necessary to remark how naturally it comes down to well-known and well-inhabited regions, — for example, in the New Testament, the realms ruled by Caesar Augustus, — or to remind ourselves that we have an " old world " according to the measure of former knowledge, and a " new world," the glory of modem discovery. It is perhaps more needful to mention that several places in the Greek Testament give oikoumene, — very properly rendered "world," and pointing particularly to the earth's inhabitants, — the household world of a period contemplated as vitally interested in events described.

But our word world is more than a name for the material universe ; it is a name for universal history also. The world is not a consummation of harmony and beauty, that admits of no change. It is an enduring world, and still a world of life, growth, and vicissitude. The world exists for a purpose, and that purpose implies the reason for its continuance. While we have been here and there, going through with various forms of personal experience, all things have moved with us in so steady a round as to afford us exact measures for different parts of common duration, — signs, seasons, days, and years.

Now, in Greek, there is not only a word to represent the world as existing in space (cosmos), — the nursery and theatre of life, — there is also a word (alcov, — "aeon") to sum up the invisible progress of life itself, and stand for the inner world of conscious being and collective history. Times measured mechanically and registered punctually, by means of regular movements of bodies in space, give an outward and abstract notion of continuance ; but life has a chronology of its own, that cannot be tabulated, and the ceons are measured only in themselves. Therefore, those who, in giving us the English New Testament, merged cosmos and ceon in one word world, failed to mark adequately those ages on ages, somewhat distinguishable yet really dateless, that ensue by historic development upon the original creation.

The Greek word aion represents, commonly, a thing of life, having the law of its duration in itself, not independently, but subject to universal elements and laws of being. It denotes not time in the abstract, but a life-time — as of a man, a family, a nation, a race. Let the term be applied to particular things, and there may be as many aeons as there are objects, having each a vital constitution, upon which, under general conditions of life, the measure of its existence depends. Every aeon may be signalized by outward phenomena of life whose times and changes may be noted. But the interior process of life, the very essence of the aeon, is too subtile for chronometers ; and it suggests rather than defines its own limits. It is in virtue of this vital quality that the word rises above the applications of detail, and reaches a comprehensive and even supernatural significance. Thus, using instead of ceon the familiar word age, we may speak of the age of plants or animals, individuals or species; we may contemplate the age of governments, systems of thought, modes of worship ; but we reach the unity of finite duration in the sum of things. Every living creature has its own period, and all creatures combine to constitute the living age in general, — that reality of unmeasured existence which is the world of far-reaching history. The scientist has to do chiefly with the world as cosmos; the historian has to do chiefly with the world as ceon. The cosmos is attributed to God as Creator; the ceon is oftener referred to God as Providence, Euler, or Eedeemer. When the world is spoken of as one whole, without reference to the varying phases of its physical and moral order, it is cosmos. When the world is distinguished from itself, so to speak, — when it is contemplated as many worlds in as many successive periods, as the world that now is or the world that is to come, as the world beginning or the world ending, — then it is ceon.

" Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed;"^ but it is important to understand also that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is referring to ceonian worlds, — not to the cosmos merely. There is the conception of a sin incompatible with forgiveness, whether in this world or in that which is to come.^ And both worlds are aeons, periods of moral government. " The harvest is the end of the world ; " ^ " so shall it be in the end of this world ; " * " what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world ? " ^ In these instances, not to mention others,^ it is the consummation

1 Heb. xi. 3. 2 Matt, xii! 32. ^ Matt. xiii. 39.

* Matt. xiii. 40. ^ Matt. xxiv. 3.

of the aeon, or world-age, which is referred to, — a consummation by no means of necessity final in such a sense that another world-age may not be expected to emerge from the one that is ready to pass away.

Thus far we have reached no seon whose nature does not admit the possibility of limits, albeit to forecast or definitely to mark these limits is not given to finite minds. Ages arrive and pass in a movement of incomprehensible reality. The ages of ages, surpassing all reach of imagination, do not carry the mark of absolute duration. The metaphysical eternity is that which the ages of ages are not, and to which they can bear no rational proportion. It is the antithesis, not the synthesis, of limited periods. The wheeling of planets is as irrelevant to the abstract idea of eternity as the ticking of the clock.

Moreover, if it be true that mon signifies properly not abstract duration, but an enduring life, then the law of thought demands absolute Being, or else it admits of no absolute ceon. Plato, in the Timaeus, affords an example of what was the law of his thinking. There the Creator is the Eternal, let us say the Eternity. The created universe is after an eternal pattern. But "time," he says, "was generated with the universe, in order that, being produced together, they might together be dissolved, if their dissolution should ever happen." Time, accordmg to Plato, is an image of eternity, — aionos eikon. But both eternity and time are conceived as realized in beings. The image of self-existence is in the everpresent now of conscious life, of which we do not say that it begins or ends ; and so all ages of life, past or to come, afford a shadowy suggestion of measureless existence. In this way of thinking, all passing times and numbered eras have their life and law from the Eternal. True, the supreme Mon, transcending all finite thought, has been thought of differently by different minds. Some, given to speculation, taking their notions as the higher sphere of their knowledge, have ventured far, and even thought to find proceeding from the depth of unbegotten Being a whole hierarchy of spiritual aeons on the way down to worlds and ages here below. But the pretence of knowledge in what is beyond experience is sure to encounter the reaction of minds predominated by an opposite tendency, — minds slow in trusting themselves to a speculative drift, for fear of being borne away from solid reality. Each of the tendencies referred to, however, is essential to human nature. The two are developed together in every mature person, though not always in stable equilibrium. Only by the action of both, exciting and restraining each other, is the full-orbed revelation of history possible. Yet, while the too presuming and the too sceptical, the gnostics and the agnostics, may be alike losers for a time in something of sober truth which a rational comprehension may possess, neither the one class nor the other can avoid the logic of words. To both mon stands for existence, having a law of enduring life within, — implying a duration not to be mathematically demonstrated, no matter whether the existence be wholly of ideal stuff, or of the palpable material by which the senses are addressed. But the aeons of revelation are not aeons of philosophic fancy. They are genuine world-ages, whose secret is life, organic law, holding on its way beneath and beyond the shows of .things, binding different elements and existences in unity, and so opening a broad avenue of thought to one supreme Being, the Source of life, — in all, through all, over all.

The study of the New Testament ceon cannot come to a satisfactory end, however, without bringing in the adjective formed from the noun. As we find aeons within seons, aeons before aeons, and aeons succeeding aeons ; as every aeon may be looked upon as an age of ages, and all aeons are conceived in the New Testament as conditioned with respect to other aeons, according to the eternal purpose and operation of God ; it is hard to imagine that the adjective cconian could be alienated from the objective variety and fluxional nature of what it grows from What belongs to unseen life, universal causation, organic law, we should naturally think, might be called emphatically ceonian. So, at any rate, St. Paul seems to think, when, speaking of the hidden and surviving man in distinction from transitory forms of organization, he declares that "the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are ceonian!' ^

As ceonian does not recognize beginning or ending in terms of time, so it does not deny beginning or ending in so far as either may be implied in the proper conception of elements described as aeonian. In classic Greek the life of a man is referred to as an aeon. A man's life is also an age of ages. St. Paul speaks of what was the character of his life at different periods. All the elements of his beiug were childish during the child-age. And, although he does not note the moment when childhood ended, it is plain that it did end ; for, when he became a man, his life took on the characteristics of another age. Now this presents a perfect likeness to the manner of speaking in the New Testament about the aeon of mankind, — that is, the world-ages. 1 2 Cor. iv. 18.

In the second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians there is set forth an inner reality and progress of human existence that was expressly "according to the course (aeon) of this world (cosmos) " as governed by invisible principles and agencies working in the souls of men ; and this seonian experience was so alien and insensible to the highest revelation of divine life as to be described under the figure of death. The immortal life, the perfect law of being, the Ephesians had not received by tradition from their fathers, but were relatively "dead in trespasses and sins." This seonian death, however, was to be limited and annulled by new life communicated through the revelation of Jesus Christ ; and, the impartation of the divine life to that seon was to avail for the ages (seons) to come, that God might show them " the exceeding riches of his grace " through the same revelation of Jesus Christ. Thus the seonian . life, that is such by way of eminence as being imparted to men by the eternal Spirit, struggles with and overcomes the aeonian principles that are negative to itself, superseding the seons of ignorance and error due to man's immaturity and proneness to low appetites, with other aeons that declare man's resurrection and joint heirship with the Son of God.

As certainly as the Creator desires to correct the mistakes and perversities of his offspring, and thus to take away their sins, so certainly he desires that punishment may give place to those moral results which punishment contemplates. Accordingly the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew sets before us the coming of the Son of Man in the glory of his revelation as involving not only a life-giving energy but a judicial process. The seonian life evinced in love and service, to whomsoever done, meets approval and reward in the larger fellowship of £eonian life to come; while those who recognized no divine call in the sufferings of their fellow-men are sent away into an seonian punishment. We know at once that this is not a punishment to be summed up in a sentence, which is to be mechanically executed within punctual limits of time. What is aeonian is revealed under relations of cause and effect known as organic law ; and, herein is the common quality of aeonian punishment and seonian life. Neither is a thing of arbitrary prescription. Manifested in individual experience, ■ — not, it may be, without distinction of times, — both are conditioned and determined in the nature of things, which is another name for the reign of God. Having recognized, therefore, the common relation of both life and punishment to the divine energy and authority, we are bound also not to overlook the distinction between the two. The life of love is divine and eternal as having its source in God, — its perfection in harmony with the divine character. The endurance of punishment (kolasis), on the contrary, is the mark of an immature nature, or of a perverse will, needing to be changed and superseded. It belongs to an economy of teaching and correction. The suffering experienced enforces a just demand for reformation of conduct, and so declares the discipline of creative Goodness with reference to a moral end. The end achieved, the experience of punishment has passed into the development of character.

If seonian life may annul the death of sin, so may the law of love do away with the discipline of chastisement that has gained its moral end. The adjective quite overdoes its function when, instead of qualifying its substantive, it contradicts the very element of truth which the substantive represents. But suppose punishment should aggravate the moral distemper : what then ? May not punishment, which is negative to the perfection of existence, be negative also to the perpetuity of existence that cannot be reconciled with love ? Failing of its moral end, may not positive punishment reach a natural limit in the cancelling of an abnormal being, just as sickness ends in death? At least, there is nothing in the conception of punishment as seonian to force upon us the conclusion that the Creator is determined to communicate his immortality of being to those who will only outrage the law of well-being. The experience of punishment may be conceived as reaching either a moral or a physical limit according to divine law, without the least sacrifice of its seonian character. The only remaining hypothesis, that of incorrigible character and endless being, needs no discussion. But, as we are dealing now, not with doctrine, but with the use of a word, I will call attention to a text having no direct bearing upon any disputed tenet. It is the three last verses of the Epistle to the Eomans, — the concluding ascription to Him who is able to establish believers in the gospel, " according to the revelation of the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal (seonian), but now is manifested, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal (seonian) God." The seonian times expressly limited by revelation, and exactly noted in the phrase " since the world began," — what proportion have they to the eternity of the seonian God ?

Having in our language a name for the sum of things, and endeavoring to verify the use and range of the name in the New Testament, we have found our world to be cosmical and oeonian. From the masses that make up the world of space we have passed to the hving realities that make up the world of history, and have recognized the tendency of human minds to rise above dependent existences to the thought of one absolute Being. The conception of God transfigures our worlds. They pass into the universe. The ages are inspired with boundless meaning. The name that properly marks the periods of world-life connotes the ever-existent Originator and Governor of all things. The most ephemeral organism has life from the Eternal, and is an aeon by itself. But the word ceon receives a consecration which withdraws it from common associations. Taking lower forms of being into silent partnership with higher, and marking all life-periods with the seonian stamp as "times and seasons which the Father hath put in his own power," ceon becomes a comprehensive name, and is set apart to high service in connection with those cycles of being that are God's revelation in the human race.

In fine, that man should conceive of outward nature as the building and temple of God by reason of responses in his soul from the inner sanctuary, which responses he utters in hallowed names and sacred writings, is an auspicious token of man's place and calling in the universe. It indicates his birthright, — to " dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple." All truth is man's province ; his vocation is discipleship. His earHer conceptions may be crude and mistaken. But if he knows but little of the cosmical world, he himself is part and parcel of the seonian creation; and when the fulness of times has developed the motive and tendency of the divine working, then assurance begins to take the place of doubt. The movement of humanity according to a ruling Eeason becomes more prophetic than the prophets. The dispensation which culminates in the divine Man gives the Word of perfection for the future of mankind. It introduces us to the sphere of the Father's spiritual creation, — to the reign of God, which is within us.