• Table of Contents
• Preface To The Third Edition
• Preface To The First Edition
• Chapter 6 - The Orthodox Doctrine On The Nature And Destiny Of Mankind
• Chapter 7 - On The Possibility That Christendom Has Erred On The Doctrine Of Human Destiny
• Chapter 8 - On the Immortality of the Soul
• Chapter 9 - On The Account Given In Scripture Of The Original Constitution Of Man
• Chapter 10 - On The Nature Of The Death Threatened To The Ancestors Of Mankind In Paradise As The Penalty Of Sin.
• Chapter 15 - The Doctrine Of Future Rewards and Punishments in the Old Testament
• Chapter 25 - Examination Of The Principal Scripture Texts Supposed To Teach The Everlasting Duration Of Sin And Misery

Life In Christ

Grk/Heb Fonts

PDF

by Edward White

Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, London 1875

Chapter IX

On The Account Given In Scripture Of The Original Constitution Of Man

'The notion of the separate existence of the soul has so incorporated itself with Christian theology, that we are apt at this day to regard a belief in it as essential to orthodox doctrine. I cannot, however, help viewing this popular belief as a remnant of scholasticism. I feel assured that the truth of the resurrection does not rest on such an assumption. What our Lord says, in answer to Martha's declaration, "I know that He shall rise again," when He proclaims Himself the Resurrection and the Life, is to this point. The Jews then entertained a philosophical belief of a future state. Our Lord tacitly reproves an assurance on such grounds, by His strong reference to Himself : "I am the Resurrection and the Life: whosoever believeth in me, shall live, though he die." '—Br. HAMPDEN, Bampton Lectures, p. 310.

WE have now reached that stage in this argument where it is necessary to commence an examination of the teaching of the Bible. This must be undertaken by us apart from any traditional theory on its verbal inspiration, for Holy Scripture loses rather than gains in authority over men's minds by the enforcement of a uniform church-doctrine respecting the mode of the origination of its various books.

The earlier chapters in Genesis are thought to bear marks of being a compilation from earlier documents, and carry with them admirable evidence of special adaptation to the limited intelligence of an infant nation. The less men know, the less they can be taught. A scientific statement of the genesis of the Earth and Man would have produced more confusion in Hebrew thought than it cleared away. There is a physical revelation made by God to the eye, which is neither infallible nor complete, which requires to be corrected by science, and the vision of the inner eye—yet which is useful, and adapted to the ends of common life. Thus nature presents the sun and moon of the same size and distance, and alike moving in the sky. Yet we do not herein impute to the Deity inveracity, knowing well that the false impression depends on the limitations of sense and the laws of perspective, while it answers the practical purposes of human existence sufficiently well. An analogous revelation in religion was of old consigned to the patriarchs, including a cosmogony and other monuments, which received their form rather from the limitations of man than from the fulness of God. Moses wrote truth on divinity in a fashion suitable to his times, but his was the unscientific eye, the unscientific voice. To see 'God's back-parts' was the vision vouchsafed to him. He was sent to teach the world that which would not do rather than to propose a binding theory either in physics or morals. The law made nothing perfect.

The books of Moses were designed for the Church in its childhood. Partly 'because of the hardness (blindness) of their hearts,' Moses was permitted to write many things imperfectly besides the old law of divorce. Astronomy, geology, ethnology, natural history, were written for the times, and no other mode of writing them could have profited the readers. It was sufficient that there should be in every case a certain substratum of fact, and such fact we doubt not underlies even that first chapter which describes the latest act of God in the production of new organisms on earth. At the point where the world's human history joins on to the past, it was inevitable that 'clouds and darkness' should rest on the beginning of the story; and the intellectual condition of the learner dictated in that early age the law which excludes an excess of light from the eye feebly opening on the universe.

The modern objections to the book of Genesis appear to be for the most part as futile as are many of its more slavish defences. The withholding of truth is not deception; knowledge is determined by faculty and experience. Eyesight first—then science. The father speaks to his little sons in such terms as they can understand, and are likely to profit by. When they become men it will be time to 'put away childish things.' Moses was the instructor of the world's infancy; such teaching as his was the only possible training for the time then present, with a view to the future. To ask for science at his hands, or even for strict conformity to all the facts, is to forget that darkness is necessarily the swaddling-band of mind awakening from nothingness.

From the noble poem of Genesis, embodying the general idea of Creation by an Eternal Mind, and probably the fact of a recent local action in six days, he passes on to the still mysterious ground of primeval history. After carefully studying the mythical theories, there is no valid reason known to the writer why we should not accept the history of Adam and Eve as a true narrative. It is not necessary to deny that there may have been previous human races upon the earth, as there had been previous animal races. Assuredly science determines nothing which forbids the belief that existing mankind is of recent origin, or that its introduction was accompanied by a fresh creation of animal life in some departments of nature. There is nothing in the narrative of man's creation which throws discredit on its truth. If man sprang directly from the hand of the Infinite Being (at least a more intelligible hypothesis than that he blindly forced his way upward from the brutes, as the brutes originally forced theirs upward from an abyss of dead atoms), his first stage in life must have been passed in a supernatural scene. Some persons seem to consider that the first chapter of human history ought, in order to be credible, to resemble the last. Such a narrative, however, as that of Genesis is far more credible, on the hypothesis of God's action in creation, than would be an elementary history based on any likeness in man's earliest experience to a chapter in subsequent savage or highly civilised life. The supernatural lustre that shines over Eden, so far from offering an obstacle to rational belief, is a spiritual attestation to its truth.

'Trailing clouds of glory do we come,

From God who is our Home;'

and the credit, which the subjective significance of the narrative—describing the earliest experience of man as a trial of moral subjection to the Eternal Wisdom—wins for it from considerate readers, is supported by all subsequent divine revelations. The belief or disbelief in a God working in nature is a potent element in the determination of scientific opinion.

It is beyond question that the fabric of Christian theology assumes the truth of this narrative as the foundation of the divine dealings with men. Christ very distinctly affirms in His teaching the murder of mankind by the Fiend. It is equally evident that the apostles of Christ make this narrative, as in S. Paul's great epistle to the Romans (ch. 5:12—20), the foundation of their system, whether true or false. Redemption has for its object in part to save men from the results of the sin of Adam; and his fall, or 'death,' is referred to as established by the book of Genesis. Thus the complex evidence of Christianity, miraculous, prophetic, internal, is brought to bear retrospectively upon the credit of this early narrative, and verifies it.¹

We purpose to treat it, then, notwithstanding the modern assumption of its mythical character, as a narrative of truth, which has received the sanction of Christ and His Apostles, and is of equal value with the gospel history, itself so abnormal. It is needless to add that under this old-fashioned view it assumes a momentous aspect, as the starting-point in the method of the divine government of the earth, for it is only as we understand rightly the primary condition of man that we can understand the ruin wrought by the powers of evil, or the redemption wrought by Incarnate Love.²

We proceed, then, to examine the Mosaic history.

It introduces Man upon the earth in the character of the king of the world, made immediately by God's hand in God's image.

'And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them' (Gen. 1:26, 27).

The second narrative in Genesis thus resumes 'the wondrous tale,'—

'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food: the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil' (Gen. 2:7—9).

'And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die' (Gen. 2:15—17).

In attempting to fix the ideas designed by this narrative it is obviously just to insist that the main drift of Moses is such as would be apprehended by an Israelitish reader of the book of Genesis when it was first published in the wilderness.

1. The first observation suggested by the terms of the history is that, according to Moses, man was not formed within the precincts of Paradise, where grew the Tree of Life; but was created from the dust of the ground in the territory outside it, where animal life abounded, and where, as we now learn from fossil geology, death had reigned over all organised existence from the beginning of the creation. 'The Lord God took the man whom he had formed, and put him in the garden of Eden' (2. 15).³ This circumstance seems to point to the conclusion that if the creature so made enjoyed loftier prospects than those of the animals, to whose organisation his own bore so strong a resemblance, this was not from the original constitution of his nature, but from super-additions of grace bestowed on a perishable being.

2. The language in which the creation of man is described is such as to fix with certainty the intention of the writer. 'God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul' (2. 7). The notion has prevailed that the design of the sacred writer here is to teach that when the body was formed of the dust, a soul was 'breathed into it' by the direct inspiration of God, which was of the immortal nature of the Creator Himself, and could never die. There is nothing more certain in criticism than that this is precisely the reverse of the doctrine intended to be conveyed by Moses.

First of all, the animation of man by the breath of God proves the immortality of his 'soul' no more than a similar asserted animation of brutes proves the immortality of their 'souls.' 'Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, and thou renewest the face of the earth. Thou takest away thy Spirit, they die, and return to their dust' (Psalm 104.). Neither does the phrase 'man became a living soul' convey the notion of his receiving an 'ever-living spirit'—but this and nothing more—that he became a 'living being or animal,' placed, so far as immortality was concerned, but not in respect of the image of God, on a level with other living creatures around him. The same phrase, as descriptive of the lives of beasts, is employed by Moses in describing the animals with whom 'God made a covenant ' after the flood, 'fowl, cattle, and beast' ( Gen. 9:10).⁴ The same phrase is found in the Apocalypse ( 16:3), to denote the fishes that died in the sea.⁵

But we have the advantage of a special comment, fixing the meaning of this phrase, from the pen of St. Paul himself. In the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, he speaks of the burial and resurrection of a Christian in these terms: ' It is sown a natural body, ... ; it is raised a spiritual body, ... And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul, ... ; the last Adam was made a quickening, or life-giving, Spirit, ... The first man is of the earth earthy, ... , a man of dust; the second man is the Lord from heaven' (1 Cor. 15:44-47). The apostle's argument is lost in the misleading English version. The English reader must understand that the word translated 'natural' in ver. 46 (psuchicon), is an adjective formed from the noun psuche, translated soul in the phrase 'living-soul,' of the Greek version of Genesis. It is as if our word soul stood for animal, and we had such an adjective as soulical formed from it. The comment of the apostle then becomes clear. 'There is a soulical or animal body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul or animal (a phrase distinctly applied in the Scripture to the brutes); the last Adam was made a life-giving Spirit. The first man was of the earth, a man of dust; the second man is the Lord from heaven.'

Here, then, we have the authority of St. Paul for deciding that when Moses described the result of the animation of Adam by the Divine Breath, so far from designing to teach that thereby an immortal spirit was communicated to him, the object was to teach exactly the contrary, that he became a 'living creature or animal,' neither possessed of eternal life in himself, nor capable of transmitting it. And the phrase living soul is chosen, not to distinguish him from the rest of the creation, but to mark his place as a member of that animal world whose intellectual powers partake of the perishableness of their organisations.

In the same manner, the statement that God 'breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,' so far from being intended to indicate the immortal perpetuity of his nature, is specially chosen to mark his dependence on the atmosphere for his continued life. The prophet Isaiah refers to this passage with manifest design of marking man's present evanescence. 'Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted of?' (Gen. 2:22.)

3. When, then, it is said that 'God made man in his own Image,' we far exceed the intention of the book of Genesis, if we affirm that this signifies that God made man absolutely immortal. There is, however, a need to distinguish an absolute from a conditional immortality. Just as the term mortal may be taken to signify either capable of death, or certain to die, so immortal may stand for designed to live for ever, or certain to live for ever. The answer to the question, Was man at first made mortal or immortal? depends on the meaning attached to the word. If mortal means certain to die, then Adam was not created mortal; if it means capable of death in body and soul, he was mortal. If immortal signifies designed to live for ever, then Adam was created immortal. If it means certain to live for ever, then he was created mortal. For the meaning of this venerable record plainly is that man at first was placed on trial for continuous life to be secured by obedience. If he obeyed, he should live on for ever. If he transgressed, he should die, according to the law which reigns over all other earthly organisms.

The 'image of God' then is to be taken to signify his capacity for understanding God and His works, his capacity for sovereignty, his moral uprightness, and his designed destiny to an immortal life conditional on obedience. 'God made him to be—i.e., that he might be—the image of his own eternity'—as an Apocryphal writer justly declares.

But this continuous life depended at present on an external aliment. So long as Adam obeyed, and abstained from the tree of Knowledge, he was permitted to take of the tree of Life,—the effect of which is declared in this narrative to be life eternal. 'Now lest he put forth his hand and take of the tree of Life, and eat and live for ever,—so He drove out the man.'

The account which is given by Moses of the constitution of man at his creation differs exceedingly from that account of our nature which is given by modern psychology, and hence the inveterate custom has arisen of compelling these primitive documents to speak a language foreign to their proper meaning. For many ages the European world, in striking contrariety to the habit of the Buddhist world, has maintained the inextinguishable and eternal duration of the animating principle in our nature; knowing of no other basis of hope for a future existence;—because rejecting the testimony of God that our 'eternal life is in His Son.' Coming to the reading of the Mosaic account of the creation of man under such views, men have compelled the narrative to speak a meaning contrary to its intention.

But of this belief there is no trace in this record. Had the Mosaic idea of human nature been that of modern psychology, that man consisted of a mortal body and an immortal soul, it is inconceivable that it should not have appeared in an authoritative account of the creation. Clearly Moses desired to say something as to man's dignity, in respect of the nature bestowed on him, for he speaks of the Divine Image; and if deathlessness be his inalienable attribute, that was the place in which to declare it. But neither there, nor elsewhere in the Bible, does Scripture confirm this lofty opinion of the nature of man. God 'made man in His own image,'—and gave him 'dominion' over all animals, but the utmost said of him is that he became a 'living creature,' a phrase frequently applied to the animal creation itself.

The reason of this silence as to deathlessness will become still clearer if we consider the definition of humanity that prevails through the Bible. According to modern conception, the body is an inconsiderable fraction of our nature, mortal and corruptible. It is the spirit which is the true man, the unseen and everlasting personality. The body indeed scarcely deserves the name of humanity; it endures but for a moment. The soul is the Inhabitant of Eternity, the 'great Coeval of God,' the coequal of holy Angels in the possession of immortality. But in the biblical account of man's creation this grandiose style of thought is reversed. There this despised body is spoken of as the Man; 'God formed man from the dust of the ground;' and the whole being takes his name from the ground whence it sprang. He was called Adam, from Adamah, the Earth or ground. His distinguishing name is taken from that corporeal organisation which is supposed by modern idealists to be little better than a transient appendage of the spiritual humanity. And when he sinned, thereby incurring the curse of death, the words attributed to the Creator are these, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return;' no mention even being made of that immortal intelligence which is supposed to constitute the veritable personality which had committed the offence.

Now in this simple psychology of the Old Testament it is noticeable that soul, or nephesh, which is attributed to man, is also frequently attributed to the animals. There is indeed no word descriptive of man's inner nature which is not also used to describe that of the animals. If man possesses ... a nephesh, soul or life (as in Gen 9:5; 'at the hand of every man's brother will I require eth-nephesh, the life of man'), so do they: 'Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh, for the nephesh, the soul or life of the flesh, is in the blood' (Lev. 17:14). 'Ye shall not eat the nephesh, the life or soul, with the flesh' (Deut. 13:23). If man possesses a ruach, ... or ... 'spirit of life' (Gen. 6:17), so in biblical phraseology do they.' Who knoweth the spirit of a beast that goeth downward?' 'They have all one ruach' (Eccl 3:19, 21; Psalm 104:29, 30, (Heb.). If man possesses a neshamah, or spirit, so do they. 'All in whose nostrils was the nishmatk-ruach cliujim, breath of the spirit of life (which includes the animals, see ver. 21) died'⁶ (Gen. 7:22). The spirit which is in man is of a superior order, as 'the candle of the Lord;' he has 'more wisdom than the beasts of the field; 'nevertheless he shares 'spirit' with all animated natures, although they do not bear the 'image of God.'

The leading feature in the language of the Bible respecting Man is that it agrees in an unexpected manner with the deductions of recent science in treating humanity as an integer. In the language of Mr. Heard,—

'We have not yet reached to the point where we can say what the connection between soul and body is; but all advance is in the direction of a fusion between physiology and pyschology, when we shall neither speak of the body without the mind, nor of the mind o without the body. When two gases uniting in definite proportions combine into a new substance with distinct properties of its own, unlike those of the gases when separate, we call this tertium quid by a name of its own. For all practical purposes Water is still an element. It is not a fusion or a mixture as of water with wine, much less of one floating on the other as of oil or water, hut it is a union in which the very substances themselves of oxygen and hydrogen, and not the phenomenon only, are absorbed into a new substance with new and distinct phenomena of its own which we call water. So in the union of mind and matter in the formation of man. Man is not a mixture of mind and matter, much less an immortal mind in a mortal body, but he is the identity of two distinct substances which lose their identity in giving him his. Man is thus the true monad.'—Heard, Tripartite Nature, p. 185.

Throughout the Scripture the sacred writers, as if acting under a superintending wisdom, have persistently spoken of this complex humanity, and not of either of its component elements, as the object of the Divine Government. Under this view the body cannot be dispensed with either for judgment, or for reward. It forms an essential element of man's nature; and apart from its destined union with that organism the animating spirit is not spoken of as the veritable humanity. ⁷

When God is represented as speaking of man, He always describes him as 'dust and ashes,' or 'flesh and blood.' The blood is said to be 'the life of man,' as of all flesh. When Redemption is accomplished by the Incarnation, the Divine LOGOS is said to have 'become flesh,' to have taken on Him the 'likeness of sinful flesh,' and to have 'given His flesh for the life of the world.' And when judgment is administered to both good and bad, there is a resurrection, or reconstruction of the body, at least in some of its elements, in order that men may be rewarded according to their works. Although S. Paul explains, by the image of a grain sown, and the ear that springs from it, that there is but a partial relation between the present and future body, he nevertheless insists that there it some physical relation between them, as between the rotting grain and the springing ear. One rises from the other. Thus too Christ says, 'All that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth.' And Christ's own resurrection, the pattern of all others, was the revivification of the body which had died—altered in form and attributes doubtless, but still in some degree atomically identical.

Now such a view of human nature seems to leave no room for the pseudo-philosophic doctrine of an Immortal Soul, which is the true human type. The dissolution of the complex nature is the death of the man, irrespectively of the destruction of its component elements. When Christ died, He was, as a man, ' destroyed ' (Matt, 27.). The 'shedding of His blood' was the pouring out of the 'life' of the 'flesh,' which was the shrine of the Godhead. These views of Man's nature are adhered to with marvellous tenacity throughout the Scripture, and they are such as to commend its teaching to thoughtful biologists.

The apostle Paul discusses the subject of the Resurrection of the dead, as if the hope of humanity were bound up with that supernatural consummation. The thought of the independent and eternal perpetuity of the ' soul ' of unredeemed man appears never to have glanced across his mind as affording any prospect of future bliss or future being. He does not even allow that apart from redemption, effected by Christ's resurrection, there was any hope of the temporary survival of souls;—since the hades-state is, for good and bad, one of the miraculous results of a new probation, ' If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which have fallen asleep in Christ have gone to nothing'—... ; for thus he explains the term in the following verse, 'If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.' What can be gathered from this style of reasoning, except that S. Paul regarded the body of the first Adam as being formally the man, that the animating principle within us is not alone or principally man, that without redemption man would certainly go to nothing at death, and that if redemption is to be accomplished there must be a new birth of spirit—a union of body and mind with Christ, and a resurrection from the dead?

If we have correctly interpreted the general sense of the biblical doctrine on man's constitution, the true idea of death is the breaking up of the human monad. When the complex man is dissolved he is dead, no matter what may become of the component elements of his being; just as water is put an end to, when the combining oxygen and hydrogen are separated. And as water might be destroyed in two ways, by simply separating its elements, leaving them still to exist, or by annihilating those elements, just so man's death might be brought about in two ways,—by dividing the body from the soul or animating spirit, leaving both of those elements to exist in a different manner; or, by putting them out of existence altogether. A man may be thus said to be dead both by a Pharisee and a Sadducee; although the one would believe that the animating principle survived, and the other would believe that it had perished. The former idea of death is set forth by Christ in the words, 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth single, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.' In this case the death of the grain is its disintegration—the breaking up of the organisation, a process in which one portion survives, to gather around itself fresh materials in a veritable resurrection. Such was His own death. The humanity was broken up, 'destroyed,' and 'poured out its life unto death,'—but a divine and spiritual energy remained, around which God built up again the dissolved Humanity, and made that so restored God-man the Life of the World.

What shall become of the residuary elements of disintegrated organisms clearly depends in each case upon their relation to the general plan. In some instances each liberated fraction immediately seeks fresh combinations. In others, the specialised energy, as in the electric fishes, is transmuted into heat in the ensuing decomposition. In others, one of the elements, as in the flesh of beasts, becomes the aliment of living organisms. In others, the disintegration leaves one of the remaining germs to form, as in transformed insects, a new life, the same yet not the same. In others, as in the seeds of plants, a portion of the dissolving organism remains to form the nucleus of a new plant or tree, which perhaps gathers its requisite materials from the relics of the former. In others, as in the case of animals, the animating principle either passes out of existence, or is absorbed, according to Oersted, by some over-soul of Nature, or 'returns to God who gave it;'—but in every case the destination of the component parts, when their union is dissolved, is determined by the will of God as to the future of the organism. This observation will be of value somewhat further on. In no case does the subsequent disposition of the elements affect the reality of the death of the integer. Its dissolution is its destruction. And no temptation to play upon the word 'annihilation,' in its metaphysical sense of abolition of substance, should turn the attention away from the fact that thus all living things on earth are, one by one, destroyed.