Table of Contents

The Duration And Nature Of Future Punishment

75 Free Online Commentaries

By HENRY CONSTABLE, A.M.
Prebendary of Cork

Fifth Edition - 1875

CHAPTER VI

The Primary Sense of Terms Vindicated

IF the various words descriptive of future punishment, which we have discussed in the last two chapters, had in human usage one sense only, there could be no room for doubt but that the view we advocate was that of Scripture: for it is not questioned that all these words have the sense which we have put upon them. Nor is it even attempted to be denied that this sense is their original and primary sense. Every dictionary in every language of the earth is our witness for this. Our opponents, both of the schools of Origen and Augustine, would deny this if they could; for these words, when taken in their primary sense, overturn both of their systems alike. If the wicked cease to exist in hell, there is no room either for Origen's restoration or Augustine's endless life of anguish.

2. But most words in common use, and especially in an advanced stage of knowledge and civilization, have several senses. Most of the terms in question have such. They are words too important, and too much in constant use, not to have gathered to them in course of time several senses derived from, and more or less different from their primary sense. These are called their secondary senses, and in certain circumstances are frequently used, and in some circumstances even more frequently used than the primary sense from which they are derived. It is in this fact that our opponents take refuge. They assert that the words of Scripture applied to future punishment are not to be taken in that primary sense which in the beginning of language was their only sense; but in one of those secondary senses, which, in the course of time, men came to attach to them. The schools of Origen and Augustine here agree. They differ indeed when they come to settle what secondary sense is to be taken, but they unite in saying that some secondary sense it certainly is. To this important question we will now attend. We will endeavour to arrive at the true principle of interpretation of these words. Our enquiry is—Are they to be understood in their primary sense? or, are they to be understood in one or other of their secondary senses?

3. This is a most important question. Here are words which bear with awful power upon myriads of myriads of beings throughout eternity. Understood in their primary sense, they consign the wicked to eternal oblivion: understood in one secondary sense, they consign him to eternal evil and misery: while understood in another, they promise him restoration to holiness and to happiness. Are the advocates of these several schools to be for ever arraying the various senses of these words against each other without any principles of interpretation, which are, with fair and candid minds, to set the matter at rest by showing that one, and only one of them, is that which God means us to accept. They are not. We have full means of knowing that in the great question before us the primary sense can alone be taken and that the secondary senses are here one and all alike to be laid aside.

4. We will not here enter into the question of the origin of human language. For our part we believe it to have been directly from God, i.e., that Adam did not invent language by any process more or less rapid; but that he found himself immediately on his creation endowed with a power of language fully suited to and sufficient for all the requirements of the condition in which he was created by God. Be this, however, as it may, there is no doubt that before the fall of man, the penalty attached to sin, viz., death, had but one sense, and that sense the primary. It was the introduction of sin which led gradually to those various secondary senses derived from the primary one of loss of physical existence. As this was the only sense which death had when it was first spoken of to Adam, we are compelled to take it in its primary sense when the word was first used in the sense of a penalty. Surely this one fact ought to be sufficient to guide us through all the later Scriptures which speak of death as the penalty of sin. God Himself stamped this as its original sense, and we may not dare to alter it without authority from Him. The penalty was first promulgated in the primary sense it must be understood ever since so, unless God tells us He has altered its sense. The primary sense attached to one of the terms descriptive of future punishment determines that it is to be attached to all the terms. Destruction is to be understood in the same sense so death.

5. But there is besides this a well-known and universally-accepted principle of interpretation among mankind which decides this question. The principle of interpretation is this, that all language relative to law and jurisprudence, all language descriptive of the sanctions of government, all language setting forth the penalties of crime and disobedience, is to be accepted in its primary sense and in no other. Examine the terms of any human law, ask the men whose life-study relates to law whether as legislators or administrators, all will reply that in all documents relating directly or indirectly to law and jurisprudence, no sense but the primary is for a moment allowable. Thus, when death is announced as a penalty for crime, no controversy would for an instant be admitted as to its meaning. No lawyer, for or against the criminal, would search for dramatic or poetic secondary senses. If the criminal himself were gravely to plead that his physical existence was not to be taken from him because he had understood the legal penalty of death in a secondary sense, it is quite possible that he might be saved from the scaffold and the hangman; but it would only be by his being sent to a lunatic asylum as an incurable madman.

6. Here, then, is a great principle of interpretation in use among all mankind: it is that all documents and terms relating to human conduct, as affected by law, are only to be interpreted in their primary sense. A secondary sense may be more usual and more proper elsewhere, but not here. Poetry and the drama, the literature of passion, imagination. and feeling, may use these terms differently; but their use is not to affect in the smallest degree the interpretation of a law. Here we take our stand. Here we are on sure and steady ground. The terms we have been discussing are the terms of the Divine Law: the jurisprudence we have been discussing is God's jurisprudence. The Great Governor is laying before his subjects the penalties which attach to sin. He speaks to them in the only language they can understand—their own language. He puts no new rules of interpretation upon it, when He addresses them. He accepts, adopts, and uses the language of those to whom He speaks. We can then only interpret the divine penalty for sin in the sense which man has put upon all such penalties, viz. in the primary sense. It is only claiming that God's penalty for clime against His law should be interpreted in analogy with all law. It is only saying that God speaks to men in their own tongue. It would be an outrage upon human law to interpret its sanction in some figurative and secondary sense; but that God's jurisprudence should be interpreted in this way, his awful penalty for sin explained by the tropes of poetry and the hyperbole of grief, is all outrage of a graver kind, because mixed up with a higher destiny and the Great Judge of the universe. On this principle, then, we set aside every secondary sense from the terms relative to future punishment: on this principle we accept their primary as their only possible sense: and on this principle the theories of Augustine and Origen fall together—the theory that inflicts eternal misery on man, and the theory that brings him back, through a death to sin, to holiness and happiness.

7. If any justification of this principle were required it is readily found. The primary sense is one unchanging sense, universally understood by every reasonable being of every stage of civilization, and every variety of religious belief. The secondary sense is various, changing, differently regarded by different minds. Thus death in its primary sense is always one and the same. Down from its first example and enunciation to the present day, it has preserved this sense unbroken and unchanged, and is understood alike by the savage and the civilized, by the ignorant and the learned, by the degraded and the sensitive mind.1 But when we come to the secondary sense all this is changed. There are several secondary senses! These secondary senses are ever varying with the opinions and circumstances of men! Some of these secondary senses are absolutely unintelligible to multitudes of minds, as those of children, persons of blunted moral feeling, and savages, who were yet all intended to be affected by the terms used.

8. In order to show the uncertainty which arises the moment we leave the primary sense of these terms and try to fix upon them a proper secondary sense, we will just show how one of the most important of these terms, death, is regarded by two opposing schools who both insist on the propriety of taking it in a secondary sense. The Augustinian fixes upon a sense, and interprets the word as signifying "death to all holy feeling," "death to all happiness"—i.e. misery, and moral corruption. But this is not its only secondary sense. The Universalist claims it in another! With him it is "death to sin," a process resulting in happiness! Who is to decide which of these is right? Scripture simply calls it death. If the Augustinian tells us that it is a punishment, and is therefore to be taken in an evil sense; the Universalist will reply that punishment is at least as often inflicted for the correction of the criminal as in vengeance; and that it is therefore at least as probable that it is here to be taken in a good sense. If the Augustinian will remind us that pain accompanies the death mentioned in Scripture, and that it is therefore evil, the Universalist will reply that pain and tears and anguish accompany the process of repentance and recovery, and that his view is therefore probable. If the Augustinian will urge that sin is of an infinite demerit, and should consequently receive infinite punishment, and that too for ever felt by the sufferer, the Universalist will set in opposition that love of God which is much more certainly infinite, that compassion of His which is boundless, that yearning which the Creator feels for the work of His own hands; and will argue hence, with an infinitely greater force, that He who brought back bloodstained David, and Saul the persecutor, and the woman who was a sinner, will, in the vast aionial period, bring back Balaam, and Judas, and Demas, and even the Archangel, now dark, but once a son of the morning. In a contest such as this, it were indeed difficult to decide. The adoption of the primary sense puts an end to all such contests. It removes dispute by removing ambiguity. It is essential to all law, most of all to the law of God. The graver the penalty for disobedience, the greater the necessity for certainty.

9. As it is in all legal documents absolutely, so it is to nearly the same extent in historical composition. A secondary sense is all but banished from its terms. When we read of Lord William Russell losing his life through a prosecution instigated by the Court, we never dream of his becoming very "unhappy," or losing his "well-being," from the cessation of Court favour. Or, when we read of the loss of such a number of lives in such a battle, we never dream that twenty thousand men on one side became very unhappy at some national calamity, and that ten thousand men on the other side, "in generous sympathy," also became unhappy at sight of their foemen's tears. Such interpretations of men's writings are simply ridiculous. Yet such are the interpretations which learned theologians, and right reverend bishops, and long-robed preachers, put upon writings which, while we rejoice to know them to be divine, are also as purely human as the writings of Coke or Lyttleton, of Macaulay or Hume.

10. For Scripture, while it gives us in its wonderful variety specimens of every variety of composition, from the sublimest poetry to the baldest prose, is preeminently the code of the Divine law, the history of God's dealings with man. To insist that in writings of this kind the primary sense of words is to be abandoned and the secondary figurative sense substituted, is just as absurd, as unreasonable, as inadmissible, as to interpret the language of Coke or Hume by the tropes of the highest poetry. When God gravely and solemnly tells us how He will deal with us in the future world for our conduct in this, we are not only justified, but we are imperatively compelled, to take his solemn words explanatory of our future condition in their primary sense. So interpreted, "life" is "animal existence," and "death" is the "loss of animal existence;" and, so interpreted. away fly into the clouds all those secondary senses which writers, from Tertullian and Origen and Augustine, to their modern representatives, Messrs. Grant, and Jukes, and Angus, have been putting on them with such pertinacity and assurance that the christian world has all but universally believed that the sense universally attached to these terms in the common language of mankind is never attached to them in the most awfully solemn documents that ever addressed their teaching to the human ear. But this we need not suppose, we cannot suppose, we dare not suppose. Addressed to human ears, to man's highest hopes and his profoundest fears, these terms have the sense commonly attached to them by those to whom they are addressed. God does not describe the awful penalties of violated law under the figures of poetry.

11. If the primary sense of the terms be established as the true sense, there is an end of this controversy. But we will submit the matter to another test. We will give a table of the various terms applied to future punishment: we will append to them every meaning attached to them in the ordinary Greek language: and we will then show that the force of these aggregate terms admits of our view, while it absolutely rejects the views of Augustine and Origen. We take our meanings of the terms from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, allowed to be an authority of the highest order. What their views were upon the question itself we do not know, and do not care to enquire. What we ask from them is all the senses put upon a certain set of terms in that Greek language in which the New Testament was written. We will first give the table of words and then draw the inference from it.

TABLE OF GREEK WORDS

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12. We will thank our readers to look carefully at the foregoing table. It contains the words by which the New Testament describes future punishment, either in the way of infliction or deprivation, as that the wicked will suffer death (Thanatos ), and will be deprived of life (Zoe). It contains all the meanings which the speakers of the Grecian language applied to the above terms. We here take these terms simply and by themselves as they are used in the New Testament on this question, as in the text "the wages of sin is death," or, "if ye live after the flesh ye shall die." Let each theory of future punishment give a plain definition of what it means. Let this definition be applied to the above table.

AND THEIR MEANINGS.

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It is quite plain that in order to be the theory revealed in the New Testament it must suit one or other of the meanings of every one of the above words. It will not be enough that it occurs among the meanings of some, or of many, of these terms: it must be found in every one of them. Now tried by this plain test we must reject the theories of Augustine and Origen, and can only accept that here maintained.

13. A single glance will show that what we understand as the terrible punishment of the wicked, viz., their "loss of existence," is found under every one of the above terms. But when we come to the definitions given by the Augustinian and Universalist we find that neither meets the requirements of the case. Thus the Augustinian means by future punishment "an existence in misery and moral pollution." He thinks, and perhaps justly, that this view of punishment agrees with some of the senses of some of the above terms; as, for example, that it may very well agree with a sense of Apollumai "to be undone;" or of phthora and olethros as significant of "loss." We need not dispute this with him; but this concession leaves him still at a far distance from his object. He must show that his view of punishment consorts with a meaning of every one of the terms. One of the meanings of phthora is "mixing of colours;" but we never suppose that this sense describes the punishment of the wicked. Why? Because though it is a meaning of one of the terms it is not any meaning of the rest. And so we say of the Augustinian view. It is not enough for him to say that his view suits several, or most of the above terms. This is what he is always doing. He selects some of them and keeps his hearers occupied solely with these. But Scripture has used a great many terms—a great many more in the Greek than we find in the corresponding terms in English, in order that on this vital point there may be no ambiguity. Now if the Augustinian could show that his view agreed with every one of the above terms with but a single exception, that single exception would exclude his view as effectually as if his view were not found under one of them. But our readers will see that the Augustinian view is not among the senses of several of the above words, as, for example, of Thanatos, Apothnesko, Aphanizo, Exolothreuo.

14. It is yet more hopeless when we come to the Universalist. When we come to ask him what he means by that "death" and that "destruction" which God says that He will inflict upon sinners hereafter, he tells us that in his opinion these terms mean "the extinction of sin," the "destruction or obliteration of pride and self-will" in sinners, through which their restoration is to be effected. But when we come to compare his definition with the terms in question, we do not find it the sense of a single one of them. He will not find in the Greek language that Thanatos, taken by itself, ever means "the extinction of sin," or that Apoleia, taken by itself, ever means "the obliteration of any evil quality." These words occur simply and by themselves in the New Testament, and we will allow no man to subjoin other words to them.

15. Tried then by this simple test the theories of our opponents fall to the ground. It is not simply that the meaning which they put upon the terms of Scripture is not their primary meaning, but that, in very many instances it is not their meaning at all . If they want to show that their sense of the words is their true sense in the New Testament, they mast first undertake the task of showing that the Greek of the New Testament is a language in itself, different from the Greek spoken and written by ordinary men in the apostolic days; a sacred language, peculiar to the writings of the evangelists and apostles; quite distinct from the Greek of Josephus and Philo, of Demosthenes and Plato. When they shall have succeeded in establishing the evidence of this sacred language they will have also succeeded in establishing an unintelligible hieroglyphic, i.e., that the words about which we are speaking cannot be shown to have any sense at all. We however take our stand upon the intelligible principle that the Greek of the New Testament is part and parcel of the grand tongue of Greece, from which it cannot be dissevered, from which it would be its death to sever it; and, standing on this ground, we call upon our opponents to abandon theories, which, opposed to the established usage of the Grecian language, are contrary to God's holy Word.

16. Before we bring this chapter to a close we will show our readers how truly and really the terms of Scripture are opposed to the theories of Augustine and Origen, by showing them that their advocates, in explaining fully and completely the theories which they maintain, are compelled in doing so to contradict in plainest contradiction every one of the strongest declarations of Scripture relative to future punishment. Neither of these theories can be explained without contradicting Scripture. If the simple language of the New Testament is exclusively adhered to, it will not set forth, but will contradict their views. If they only speak of "death," and "destruction," and "loss of life," as the lot of the wicked, they know perfectly well that the ordinary sense of these terms is ruinous to their systems: if they say that the wicked will be "consumed," "burnt up," reduced to "ashes," they are but too keenly aware that these terms express the opposite to what they teach. When they want, then, to be plain, when they want, beyond any ambiguity of phrase, to set forth their horrible or delusive theories, they are compelled by dire necessity to introduce a language not merely not used by Scripture but flatly contradictory to what it does use. In order to show this we will draw out tables of some of the chief of those terms in which the Scripture speaks of future punishment. We will give these terms in the Greek, Latin, and English languages. Those who are unacquainted with the form can pass them over.

THE TABLE

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17. We are not at present able to present to our readers a table of Universalist terms such as that just given of the opposite school. We have just put down as below a few of such terms which occur to us at present. They will show, so far as they go, the same tendency to contradict the language of Scripture. Should our work extend to another edition, we propose to enlarge this table; and would feel obliged if any of our readers would furnish us with examples which they may meet with in their studies.

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18. In order to show the extreme danger of such a principle of interpretation as that the have controverted in this chapter, we will show how readily it may be applied to overturn the cardinal doctrine of Christianity, viz., the resurrection of Christ, and our resurrection as a result of His. It is simply effected by attributing to the terms descriptive of it their secondary or figurative sense instead of their primary and literal one. And for such an interpretation there is fully as much, in our opinion much more, ground, than for adopting it in the case of future punishment.

19. The noun "resurrection," and the verbs, "to rise again," have in common use a primary and a secondary sense. According to those with whom we reason, the secondary figurative sense is in Scripture the most important, the highest, and the most common sense.2 As being such, in their judgment, they have interpreted all the terms relative to future punishment in conformity with it. "Death" is, with them, "moral disorganization:" "life" is, with them, "well-being:" "destruction" is, with them, "the overthrow of happiness:" and so on through all the terms. Now upon what principle can they refuse to the terms "resurrection" and "rise again from the dead," a similar figurative sense. They are certainly so used in Scripture.3 Why should not this be their use whenever there used? We ask our opponents for a single reason why these should not be thus used. In the application of such terms to bodily resurrection the New Testament introduced a use all but unknown to the Gentile mind, which was not at all the case with regard to the terms of punishment. Why then should they deny to the terms relating to resurrection some such figurative sense as they know so well how to apply to the terms of punishment? Why should not resurrection be "an awakening out of the sleep of ignorance and sin," a "resumption of vigour," or some such "high" sense, and not the "low" "material" sense of awaking dull matter from the dust? On some such principle the early heretics would appear to have gone, who denied the bodily resurrection of Christ, and denied that there would be any bodily resurrection for man.4 They too could descant upon the superiority of the figurative sense. What could our Augustinian theorists reply to such men? Nothing that could not be overturned from their own practice in other cases. What could they reply to a modern sect who have in England assumed the name of "Shilohites," and who reject the ordinary doctrine of our Lord's resurrection and that of his people on the very identical ground on which they reject the final destruction or annihilation of the wicked, viz., their rejection of the literal sense of the terms of Scripture? When such airy reasoners say, "We believe that all mankind will be redeemed by the Spirit and power of God from all evil, and put into the possession and enjoyment of all good, so that pain and sorrow shall be no more: and we believe that this is the resurrection spoken of in the Scriptures,"5 what can our Augustinians reply? Nothing. How can they rebuke them? They cannot rebuke them. They have been teaching for centuries the principle of interpretation on which the Shilohites act in a particular case. They cannot deny that it is just as applicable to the doctrine of the resurrection as it is to that of future punishment. And, indeed, by their common view of the believer's death as, according to them, introducing him at once into the glory and bliss of heaven, they remove the grand reason and object of the believer's resurrection.

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Footnotes

1. * BICKERSTETH, On the Prophecies, 5th ed., p. 69.

2. * S. C. BARTLETT, Life and Death Eternal, c. ii.

3. ** Luke 2:34; Col. 3:1; Eph. 5:14; Col. 2:12.

4. † Luke 2:34; Col. 3:1; Eph. 5:14; Col. 2:12.

5. 1 Cor. 15:13; 2 Tim. 2:18

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