The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

V. Gordon-Natural Immortality Substituted for Resurrection

ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON (1836-1895), pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church, Boston, was a descendant of the renowned Pilgrim pastor, John Robinson. Adoniram’s father, John Calvin Gordon, named after John Calvin, was a hyperCalvinist. And his son, born in the modern foreign mission epoch, was accordingly named Adoniram Judson, after the missionary apostle to Burma. Such was his background. CFF2 558.3

Gordon was graduated from Brown University and Newton Theological Seminary, and later became a trustee of both institutions. Though living in a controversial era, he was not a polemicist but a proclaimer of the gospel. Revivals were frequent in his church. He emphasized the phrases “errant man” and “Inerrant Book,” and regarded the concordance as his best commentary. He was pre-eminently a spiritual preacher, as his writings attest: The Ministry of the Spirit; In Christ; Grace and Glory; Ecce Venit: Behold He Cometh; and The TwoFold Life. To him the Bible held the place of incomparable pre-eminence. CFF2 559.1

From a six-year pastorate in Jamaica Plains Baptist church, in 1869 he was called to the important Clarendon Street church, where he ministered until his death about twenty-five years later. He lived during a predominantly negative period of unbelief and gnosticism. Unitarian transcendentalism and the “lavender-water theology” were then flourishing in Boston, in the midst of which Gordon proclaimed a saving gospel. He was even arrested in 1885 for preaching on the Boston Commons to the unchurched. “Ruin and redemption” were the two poles of his theology, and “Back to Christ” his battle cry as he opposed the new theology of liberalism, which subtly employed the familiar phrases of orthodoxy. CFF2 559.2

To Gordon, Christianity was not a system of philosophy, but a revelation of faith, for philosophers had often made theology “dark with excess of light.” And all heresies, he observed pointedly, have been invented by learned scholars, and speculations “brooded in theological schools.” “Primitive faith” and the “primitive hope” were favorite expressions and objectives. He was one of the Northfield Conference speakers. CFF2 559.3

Gordon believed that the end of the age was near, and was deeply concerned over eschatology. “We are living,” he said, “at the terminal point of the old and the germinal point of the new,” when the “return of Christ” and the “renovation of the world” impends. Adhering to the Historical School of prophetic interpretation, held from Reformation times onward, ⁶⁶ he believed the Papacy to be the Antichrist of prophecy, destined to be destroyed at Christ’s second advent (2 Thessalonians 2:8). He was convinced that it was the only power that “answered to the prophecy of antichrist,” which had in many areas turned the truth of God into a lie, and had effected fatal substitutions for the gospel. CFF2 559.4

1. DEATH INJECTED AS THE OBJECT OF HOPE

Tremendous events, Gordon held, were to mark Christ’s coming. Among others, the day of the Advent is also “the day of the resurrection-‘that blessed last of deaths, when death is dead.’” His biographer-son makes this significant statement:
“His beliefs were those of the early church untainted by Hellenisms. Those two errors of an earthly theology, ‘that the world is the Christian’s home and that the grave is the Christian’s hope,’ were unqualifiedly rejected.” ⁶⁷ CFF2 560.1

Adoniram Gordon also significantly stated: “‘As the earlier martyrs must wait for the later martyrs before they can receive their full consummation of blessedness, so must the renewed soul wait for the renewed body in order that it may be perfected.’” And his revealing words concerning erroneous eschatological concepts are highly significant:
“‘Because our eschatology has so generally overlooked this great fact and substituted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul for the scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the man, the eye has been fixed on death as the object of hope.’” ⁶⁸ CFF2 560.2

2. SEXTON’S BELL HAS SUPPLANTED ANGEL’S TRUMP

Denying that death is the great “sanctifier,” Gordon insisted that CFF2 560.3

“it is only when the glorified soul is united to the glorified body that we shall awake satisfied in his likeness... the predestined purpose of redemption, that we should be conformed to the image of his Son, consummated at last in a flash of Advent glory.” ⁶⁹ CFF2 560.4

Modern concepts, he declared, have supplanted the primitive doctrine of resurrection. Gordon contended that CFF2 561.1

“instead of holding that at the sound of the last trump God ‘will quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you,’ it is becoming very common to maintain that at death a spiritual, incorporeal substance is released from the body. Thus one’s death is his resurrection, since in that event an imprisoned spiritual body breaks its shell and comes forth like the butterfly from the chrysalis. It is not, therefore, the angel’s trumpet calling the dead from the grave that ushers in the resurrection, but the sexton’s bell tolling the dead to the grave.” ⁷⁰ CFF2 561.2

Such a concept Gordon totally rejected. CFF2 561.3

3. PREMILLENNIALISM DISCREDITED UNDER ROMAN APOSTASY

He held that premillennialism was the “orthodox faith of the church in the primitive and purest ages,” but that it began seriously to be discredited when the church passed under the shadow of Roman apostasy, which in turn threw the most vital truths of the gospel “into eclipse.” Premillennialism was “only partially revived at the Reformation, but for the last half-century has been reasserting itself with such power that it may be safely affirmed that nine-tenths of the best European biblical scholarship now stands solidly for its defense. ⁷¹ CFF2 561.4

Gordon held that premillennialism had been the faith of the Anabaptists, more than of any other reformed group, and then of the Baptists from their very beginning. And although there had been a “gradual disappearance of chiliasm before the advancing corruptness of the Roman Catholic Church,” there was, nevertheless, ever a “hidden stream of doctrine in which this faith still flowed on.” ⁷² However, Luther and his associates “failed fully to revive this doctrine” at the Reformation. CFF2 561.5

4. SIGNIFICANT ADDRESS ON “RECURRENCE OF DOCTRINE.”

In an impressive address to the alumni of Newton Theological Seminary, given June 10, 1885, on “The Recurrence of Doctrine,” Gordon spoke impressively of the “procession,” or “recurrence,” of doctrinal emphases-one truth receiving powerful emphasis for a time, followed by another coming into prominence, so that “cycles of doctrine” are characteristic of the Christian Era. Thus it is that the “warmer zone of Christology” has succeeded the “frigid latitude of Theology.” It is by this “fresh uncovering of a doctrine,” he added, that “great revivals and reformations have been effected” and heresies that have developed have been met. CFF2 562.1

Now comes the heart of his address. A century passed between Huss and Luther, each name standing for a great religious movement. Another hundred years elapsed between Luther and John Owen, a century from Owen to Wesley, and a hundred years between Wesley and Spurgeon. Developing this line, Gordon pointed out that the Bohemian revival had as its watchword, “The Eucharist for the people.” It was a mighty uprising against the papal mutilation of the sacrament. “The Hussites were called Calixtines, or defendents of the chalice,” as vast congregations met “in open fields, on the mountain tops, and in groves,” to celebrate the “communion in both kinds”—a sacramental revival and a protest against priestly assumptions and perversions. CFF2 562.2

The Lutheran watchword was “justification by faith,” the emphasis shifting from the “vindication of a sacrament to the vindication of faith!” A century later, under Oxford’s vicechancellor, John Owen, central figure in the Puritan Movement, the watchword was “Personal Righteousness,” stressing the paralleling works emphasized by James as a mighty counterpoise-not nullifying the doctrines of grace but buttressing them by law and works. CFF2 562.3

Then a century later came Wesley, leader of a new spiritual revolution, with the watchwords “Free Grace” and “The witness of the Spirit.” In an age of “barren externalism” came his plea for “interior piety,” resulting in a “world-wide renovation of formal Christianity.” But in time the prescribed spiritual exercises became a burden, and it was deemed presumptuous to “cherish the slightest hope that we had passed from death unto life.” So there came a swing back to preaching the “objective Christ” under the revival movement of Spurgeon and Moody-“salvation by the objective work and the objective word of Christ”—not the “wounds of penitence in the sinner’s heart; but the wounds of penalty in the Saviour’s body”; not simply “Christ within us as the ground of our salvation, but Christ for us on the cross and on the throne.” CFF2 562.4

“Truth,” said Gordon, is commonly stressed “in two extremes.” Predestination and free-will are both true, and justification by faith and by works, and salvation by Christ’s work both in us and for us. One aspect must not be stressed out of proportion to the other, for that is how heresies have arisen and extravagances have come to pass. CFF2 563.1

5. ESCHATOLOGY TO BE FINAL BATTLEGROUND

Then Gordon quotes Prof. R. D. Hitchcock’s predictive statement, that “the one field of Christian truth which yet remains to be explored is eschatology, or the doctrine of the Last Things.” These were prophetic words. On this point Gordon stated his agreement with Professor Hitchcock. He quotes Hitchcock as saying further that “eschatology is destined to be the battleground of theologians” in the period just before us. But eschatology centers and stands together with the second coming of Christ, and is soon to assume “an unwonted prominence”—a revival of the “primitive doctrine of our Lord’s second coming.” CFF2 563.2

6. DEATH SUBSTITUTED FOR SECOND ADVENT

Next comes this correlated statement bearing upon the destiny of man:
“By a ghastly anacronism, death has been largely substituted for the coming of Christ, in the common teaching; and thus a false centre has been set up in our eschatology, by which the doctrines pertaining to the last things have been thrown into eccentric relation.” ⁷³ CFF2 563.3

This involves the disposition of the wicked, in relation to the Second Advent. CFF2 564.1

7. RESURRECTION “BROKEN FROM ITS BIBLICAL MOORINGS.”

Speaking of the common “notion that a Christian’s resurrection takes place immediately upon his death,” Gordon declared, “I must characterize such a view as a practical denial of the resurrection”—a “doctrine which has broken from its biblical moorings.” He then refers to such “faulty eschatology” as appears in works like Munger’s Freedom of Faith, “where death is made practically identical with the coming of Christ, and the immortality of the soul has taken the place of bodily resurrection.” This, Gordon asserted, is “an utter rejection of the scriptural doctrine of resurrection.” It is the “denial or the neglect of the doctrine of Christ’s personal advent that has tended powerfully to bring in this perversion.” CFF2 564.2

He then calls for putting the “central truth” of eschatology back into its proper place, and comments: “‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures! On this single thread of revelation all the doctrines of Soteriology are strung together,—atonement, justification, sanctification.... CFF2 564.3

“‘This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.’ On this single thread, all the doctrines of eschatology are strung together-resurrection, reward, eternal glory.” ⁷⁴ CFF2 564.4

8. FORSAKEN DOCTRINES To BE REVIVED

Gordon is emphatic against such heresies as death-resurrection:
“An atonement which does not centre in Christ crucified is no atonement; a resurrection which does not centre in Christ glorified and coming in the clouds of heaven, and calling all that are in their graves to come forth, is no resurrection.... CFF2 564.5

“Resurrection means a standing up again of those who have fallen down under the stroke of death, in bodies fashioned like unto Christ’s resurrection body; and no butterfly elimination affected by the dissolving chemistry of death can at all answer to the meaning of this great word.” ⁷⁵ CFF2 564.6

He closed his address with this assurance: “Doctrines which have fallen into neglect and disuse are sure to revive and take their place once more in the belief and affection of the church.” Such was the expectation, in 1885, of Baptist A. J. Gordon, of Boston. CFF2 565.1