The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Famous Premier Pastor, and Scientist Testify

I. Gladstone-Immortal-Soulism Entered Church Through “Back Door”

Britain’s illustrious Prime Minister Gladstone also thrust his thoughtful pen into the widespread discussion, still on in earnest toward the end of the nineteenth century. His was a conspicuously objective study. He wrote as an investigator seeking historical and Biblical facts, methodically analyzing both arguments and evidence with his trained mind. Then he impressively recorded his conclusions. This was a unique development, worthy of study. First note the man. CFF2 627.1

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE (1809-1898, eminent British statesman, financier, orator, and author, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1831 with highest honors both in the classics and in mathematics-achieving the rarity of a “double first in classics.” He was elected to Parliament in December of 1832, where his exceptional abilities were quickly recognized. Here he became distinguished for his financial skill, and was soon made undertreasurer for the colonies under Sir Robert Peel. Next he was appointed master of the mint, and then president of the Board of Trade, in 1843, with a seat in the cabinet. In 1845 Gladstone was named Secretary of State for the colonies, developing into a political Liberal, and in 1847 represented Oxford University in Parliament. CFF2 627.2

In 1852 Gladstone first became chancellor of the exchequer, and again from 1859 to 1866. He was considered to be the greatest of British financiers. Then he was made leader of the House of Commons. Finally, on December 4, 1868, he was accorded the highest honor attainable by a British subject-that of Prime Minister. This distinguished post Gladstone held four times-1868-1875, 1880-1885, 1886, and 1892-1894. Then England’s Grand Old Man, as he was commonly called, retired from public office, giving himself to writing. Besides being Prime Minister and first lord of the treasury, he was sometimes concurrently chancellor of the exchequer. His budgets were recognized as marvels of financial statesmanship. In fact, the history of his various ministries is really the history of the British Empire in his generation. CFF2 628.1

With the exception of a year and a half, Gladstone sat continuously in the House for sixty-two years-from 1833 to 1895. He cared little for power, several times being offered a peerage but each time declining the honor. He was by far the most prominent personage in the political arena of his time, but he preferred to remain the Great Commoner. CFF2 628.2

WRITINGS INCLUDE QUESTION OF FUTURE LIFE

Gladstone was considered without a superior as an orator, having great persuasive gifts and a magnetic voice. He was a scholar of the Old School. It is amazing how he found time for his periodic literary productions, including, among others, The State in Its Relations with the Church (1838); Studies on Homer (1858); and The Vatican Decrees (1874). His issuance of books ranged in time spread from 1838 to 1896. His later studies took him deeply into the realm of the Christian faith. CFF2 629.1

For years Gladstone pondered the question of the future life, and in 1896 he published his significant 370-page treatise, Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler-his last major work. Part II contains ten chapters. The first five are entitled, “A Future Life,” “Our Condition Therein: History of Opinion,” “The Schemes in Vogue,” “Concluding Statement,” and a “Summary of Theses.” This was painstakingly produced toward the close of his full life, although some forty years prior, in his Studies on Homer (1858), he devoted a number of pages to the doctrine of the future state. ¹ These later Studies were the result of many years of wide research, careful analysis, and mature thought. Because of its significance we trace it with some fullness. CFF2 629.2

The scope, grasp, and penetration of the “Future Life” section of this treatise is remarkable for one whose life had been devoted chiefly and brilliantly to affairs of state and finance. In addressing himself to the postulate of Bishop Joseph Butler’s famous Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), ² Gladstone declares that Butler contends as “a man who has to fight with one of his hands tied up,” because of restricting his arguments to the analogies from nature. The validity of Butler’s “argument on a future life” is “entirely wanting,” Gladstone avers, for by his chosen limitations he was “precluded from referring to Divine authority,” and is dependent chiefly upon reason, logic, and philosophy. ³ That is fundamentally unsound and unsafe in a religious issue. CFF2 629.3

But before tracing Gladstone’s discussion we may well note this contemporary statement of G. W. E. Russell, who records an interview with the great statesman:
“Never shall I forget the hour when I sat with him [Mr. Gladstone] in the park at Hawarden, while a thunderstorm was gathering over our heads, and he, all unheeding, poured forth, in those organ-tones of profound conviction, his belief that the human soul is not necessarily indestructible, but that Immortality is the gift of God in Christ to the believer. The impression of that discourse will not be effaced until the tablets of memory are finally blotted out.” ⁴ CFF2 630.1

1. VARIANT VIEWS HELD IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

The second half of Gladstone’s examination of Butler’s Analogy centers on his claim of the natural and indefeasible immortality of the soul “apart from the body,” ⁵ which the bishop asserts is ours as an “absolute possession.” After discussing the varying views of Greek philosophy, and the notions of preexistence and transmigration of souls often involved, Gladstone turns to Jewish teaching in the time of Christ-from the Sadducees, who denied a continuation of pesonal existence beyond the grave, to the Essenes (or Ultra-Pharisees), who believed in the natural immortality of the soul. ⁶ CFF2 630.2

Then follows chapter two, on the “History of Opinion.” Here Gladstone declares according to F. Nitzsch the “immortality of the soul was the subject of free and open discussion among the early Fathers,” with men like Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, Irenaeus, and Lactantius denying the Innate Immortality of the soul, but with Tertullian and others, on the contrary, teaching that the soul is “indivisible and imperishable.” Gladstone then cites Fldgge as likewise pointing out that “there was as yet no dogma of the church upon the subject.” ⁷ It was the same concerning the punishment of the wicked. Some affirmed the process of punishment to be eternal, “others regarded the souls of the wicked as destined to annihilation.” ⁸ CFF2 630.3

2. “INHERENT” IMMORTALITY NOT ASCENDANT TILL ORIGEN

Gladstone describes the open-discussion attitude of the Early Church in this way:
“The secret of this mental freedom, the condition which made it possible, was the absence from the scene of any doctrine of a natural immortality inherent in the soul. Absent, it may be termed, for all practical purposes, until the third century; for, though it was taught by Tertullian in connexion with the Platonic ideas, it was not given forth as belonging to the doctrine of Christ or His Apostles.” ⁹ CFF2 631.1

That is a vital point. CFF2 631.2

Then the thought is repeated for emphasis:
“It seems to me as if it were from the time of Origen that we are to regard the idea of natural, as opposed to that of Christian, immortality as beginning to gain a firm foothold in the Christian Church.” ¹⁰ CFF2 631.3

The time of Origen, steeped as it was in the lore of Platonic philosophy, and seeking Platonic “buttresses for the Christian faith,” is thus set forth by Gladstone as the actual time of introduction of the “natural immortality” concept, in contrast with the true and original “Christian” view. Then he adds: CFF2 631.4

“The opinion, for which he [Origen] is now most generally known to have been finally condemned, is that which is called Restorationism or Universalism; an opinion which harmonizes with, and perhaps presupposes, the natural immortality of the soul. But the idea of restoration was only one amidst a crowd of his notions, all of which had the natural immortality of the soul for their common ground.” ¹¹ CFF2 631.5

Gladstone presses the point that, prior to Pope Vigilius, “the immortality of the soul had heretofore been a question open and little agitated.” While Origen’s “complex group of opinions” had been “organically founded” on the premises of Innate Immortality and had been condemned, Gladstone notes, “Of the immortality of the soul there was [at the time neither condemnation or approval.” But he adds, accurately, that the “extension of opinion” became “more obvious, perhaps more powerful, from the time of St. Augustine.” ¹² CFF2 631.6

3. “WHOLESALE” ACCEPTANCE BY TIME OF MIDDLE AGES

The revolutionary change of view that came as the result of slow but steady accretion resulted finally in the wholesale acceptance of the natural immortality postulate-a “revolution of opinion” that, Gladstone declares, was established by the Middle Ages. Thus: CFF2 632.1

“It seems indisputable, that the materials for the opinion that the soul is by nature immortal, whether we call it dogma or hypothesis, were for a long period in course of steady accumulation; though this was not so from the first. After some generations, however, the mental temper and disposition of Christians inclined more and more to its reception. Without these assumptions it would be impossible to account for the wholesale change which has taken place in the mind of Christendom with regard to the subject of natural immortality.” ¹³ CFF2 632.2

The sweeping “revolution of opinion” that was effected over the course of centuries is then described:
“It would be difficult, I think, to name any other subject connected with religious belief (though not properly belonging to it) on which we can point to so sweeping and absolute a revolution of opinion: from the period before Origen, when the idea of an immortality properly natural was unknown or nearly hidden, to the centuries of the later Middle Ages and of the modern times when, at least in the West, it had become practically undisputed and universal.” ¹⁴ CFF2 632.3

4. IMMORTAL-SOULISM SPRINGS FROM PLATO

Gladstone then traces Immortal-Soulism back through Augustine and Origen to Alexandria and Plato, for Aristotelianism was “negative” while Platonism was “congenial.” Hence Plato’s preeminence: CFF2 632.4

“But Plato had been supreme in Alexandria; and Alexandria was the parent of Christian philosophism in the persons of Clement and of Origen. He had also a high place in the mind of St. Augustine, and he probably did much more among Christians than he had ever achieved among pagans, in establishing as a natural endowment that immortality of the soul which was already ineradicably fixed as fact for Christian souls (although upon a ground altogether different in the mind of the Church), so far as it touched the destination of the righteous.” ¹⁵ CFF2 632.5

5. LED INEVITABLY TO “ETERNAL TORMENT” OF DAMNED

This “new doctrine” of natural immortality for the righteous led inevitably to a corollary position of vast proportions —that of the Eternal Torment of the damned, held increasingly as a threat over the sinner: CFF2 633.1

“The question of their [the “godless’”] destiny in the world to come, which had been but infinitesimal in the first apostolic days, now came to assume grave, and even vast, proportions. And here it was that the new doctrine, as I shall call it, of natural immortality played so material a part. The sinner had to be persuaded. He had also to be threatened; and threatened with what? If the preacher only menaced him with the retribution which was to follow the Day of judgment, the force of the instrument he employed materially depended on what he could say as to the duration of that penal term, a subject which, in the earliest teachings of the Church, it had been found unnecessary minutely to explore.” ¹⁶ CFF2 633.2

The Eternal Torment postulate therefore indisputably enhanced the power of the “priesthood as a caste,” as it was more and more stressed as a deterrent. CFF2 633.3

6. ETERNAL TORMENT DOGMA ESTABLISHED THROUGH AUGUSTINE

It was ultimately Augustine’s “acceptance of the Platonic philosophy” that brought it, with modifications, into the teachings of the Latin Church. And from Augustine onward the dogma of the “never-ceasing” and “eternal punishment of the wicked” came to prevail for the sins of a brief, finite lifea dogma that Gladstone calls “an horribile decretum.” ¹⁷ And in all this, Flugge says, the “Latin Church led the way.” Gladstone then adds that the “formation of the ecclesiastical dogma... closes with the Schoolmen.” ¹⁸ They supplied “the Western Church with its formal eschatology,” with distinction to be noted between the Western and Eastern churches, but the motive force “was drawn from the works of St. Augustine.” ¹⁹ Thus Peter Lombard found “the natural immortality of the soul, in possession of the field of thought, and, perhaps, accepted it simply as part of the common heritage.” ²⁰ Finally, the Bull of Leo X, in 1513, “issued with the assent of a Lateran Council,” now condemned all those who denied the postulate of natural immortality. ²¹ CFF2 633.4

7. CREPT INTO CHURCH BY ‘BACK DOOR.”

Thus “the reserve of the early Church has been abandoned. Even the recollection of it has faded from the popular mind.” So it was that the “Western tone had prevailed over the Eastern.” ²² And now follows one of Gladstone’s most significant conclusions, in contrasting natural and Christian immortality: CFF2 634.1

“With the departure of the ancient reserve there had come a great practical limitation of the liberty of thought possessed by the individual Christian. The doctrine of natural, as distinguished from Christian, immortality had not been subjected to the severer tests of wide publicity and resolute controversy, but had crept into the Church, by a back door as it were; by a silent though effective process; and was in course of obtaining a title by tacit prescription.” ²³ CFF2 634.2

How true that was! Then he adds this pointed observation on the non-Biblical basis of the teaching:
“The evidence of the change may perhaps be most properly supplemented by the observation of the noteworthy fact that, when arguments are offered for the purely natural immortality of the soul, they are rarely, if ever, derived from Scripture. For it will be borne in mind that, logically viewed, resurrection is one thing, and immortality another.” ²⁴ CFF2 634.3

Two pages farther on he repeats the thought of its surreptitious entrance: “The natural immortality of the soul did not become the subject of free and general discussion in the Church. It crept onwards in the dark.” ²⁵ Then he draws the sweeping conclusion: CFF2 634.4

“It appears indisputable that the tenet never was affirmed by the Councils, never by the undivided Church, never by either East or West when separated, until, towards the death of the Middle Age, the denial was anathematized under Leo X on behalf of the Latin Church.” ²⁶ CFF2 634.5

8. IMMORTAL-SOULISM “WHOLLY UNKNOWN” TO SCRIPTURE

But that is not all. Gladstone now emphasizes the fundamental point of Immortal-Soulism’s total lack of foundation in Scripture. It is, he asserts, only “philosophical opinion.” Thus: CFF2 635.1

“Another consideration of the highest importance is that the natural immortality of the soul is a doctrine wholly unknown to the Holy Scriptures, and standing on no higher plane than that of an ingeniously sustained, but gravely and formidably contested, philosophical opinion.” ²⁷ CFF2 635.2

9. “PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATIONS” DISGUISED AS DIVINE REVELATION

Gladstone then warns against “philosophical speculations,” as in this case, insinuating themselves in disguise into the sacred “precinct of Christian doctrine,” but in reality gaining entrance as a false pretension under an “abuse of authority.” CFF2 635.3

“And surely there is nothing, as to which we ought to be more on our guard, than the entrance into the precinct of Christian doctrine, either without authority or by an abuse of authority, of philosophical speculations disguised as truths of Divine Revelation. They bring with them a grave restraint on mental liberty; but what is worse is, that their basis is a pretension essentially false, and productive by rational retribution of other falsehoods.” ²⁸ CFF2 635.4

In the light of all this evidence, Gladstone soberly concludes, “We have ample warrant for declining to accept the tenet of natural immortality as a truth of Divine Revelation.” ²⁹ CFF2 635.5

10. GLADSTONE’S DEFINITIVE DESCRIPTION OF “CONDITIONALISM.”

In chapter three, on “The Schemes in Vogue,” Gladstone gives the following definitive statement of the Conditional Immortality position as he understood it, which view he says is “entitled to claim some kindred” with what is “usually called orthodox.” This inevitably involves the question of the ultimate extinction rather than the endless torment of the wicked, for the two are inseparable: CFF2 635.6

“It [Conditionalism] begins by renouncing the opinion of natural immortality, and takes firm ground when denying to it authority or countenance from the Holy Scriptures. On the other hand, it renounces also the conception of an existence prolonged without limit in the endurance of torment. But it neither teaches nor approximates to the notion of an extinction immediately consequent either upon death or upon the Day of Judgement. It does not attempt to find a particular limit for the ordained period of suffering; but holds that it is bounded by the nature of the subject to which it is applied, and that sin is a poison to which the vital forces of the soul must in the end give away, by passing into sheer extinction.” ³⁰ CFF2 635.7

Death, Gladstone continues, means ultimate “cessation of existence” CFF2 636.1

“It [Conditionalism] protests against the current method of interpretation, which assigns to death in the New Testament the meaning not of a cessation of existence, but of an existence prolonged without limit in a state of misery. And it insists upon recovering for the word ³¹ that idea of a termination, which dwells in it as a central essence. Ethically, the destructive nature of sin against God is taken as the basis of this scheme of ideas; and it claims to work according to natural laws, in propounding, as the eventual solution of the problem, not suffering without any end for the wicked, but the disappearance or extinction of their being ³² at such time as the providence of God shall prescribe.” ³³ CFF2 636.2

11. GLADSTONE’S CONSIDERED CONCLUSIONS IN SUMMATION

In chapter five, “Summary of Theses on the Future Life,” Gladstone tabulates an elaborate series of cumulative conclusions, of which the following are the most pertinent, as they appear on pages 260 to 267: CFF2 636.3

1. Is Unscriptural.—“That the natural immortality of the soul is not taught in Holy Scripture.” CFF2 636.4

2. Restricted Acknowledgment.—“Neither is it commended by the moral authority of quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [that is, always, everywhere, and by everyone acknowledged].” CFF2 636.5

3. Unaffirmed by Councils.—“Neither is it affirmed or enjoined by any of the great assemblies [General Councils] of the undivided Church, or by any unanimity, actual or moral, of Decrees and Confessions posterior to the division of the Church into East and West.” CFF2 636.6

4. Immortality a Gift.—“The immortality of the soul is properly to be regarded as... a gift or endowment due to the Incarnation of our Lord.” CFF2 636.7

5. Limited to Righteous.—“If we set out from the belief that Christ both reveals and gives immortality, which is exemption from death, and is life without an end, it is plain that the first application of this doctrine is to the righteous.” CFF2 637.1

6. Differing Opinions.—“In regard to future punishment, it is plain that great differences of opinion have prevailed at different periods of the history of the Church, the first centuries presenting a view of a different colour from that which may be said to have prevailed over others from about the time of St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine.” CFF2 637.2

7. Traditional Theology.—“It does not appear safe to apply the term traditional theology to the largely developed opinions of later ages on future punishment, as compared with the more reserved conceptions of an earlier period.” CFF2 637.3

8. Impugns Justice.—“There can be no such thing as suffering, of whatever kind, through eternity except by God’s departing from a principle of justice.” CFF2 637.4

9. Death Is Extinction.—“The ordinary and principal description of the future state of the unrighteous is that conveyed in the word death. This word in its ordinary signification bears the sense of an extinction or cessation of some kind. It might mean cessation for the wicked of life itself.” CFF2 637.5

10. Distorts Meaning-“The popular definition of death... takes away from death that idea of cessation and extinction:... It adds an idea of suffering, amounting largely to misery and torment, which the original sense of the word in no manner contains.” CFF2 637.6

11. Strikes at Probation.—“It [Restitution]... strikes at what all believers in a future state consider as the grand and central truth of the subject, this, namely, that we are living in a state of probation.... But under Restitutionism all idea of essential quality as a distinctive mark disappears, and therefore all idea of genuine probation.” CFF2 637.7

12. Restitutionism Unsupported.—“The notion of Universal Restitution is, then, not supported by Scripture, or by Christian tradition, or by any sound philosophy of human nature.” CFF2 637.8

13. Gradual Assumption.—“The metaphysical doctrine of a natural indefeasible immortality of the soul, as an immaterial existence, has come, unawares and gradually to reckon, or be assumed, as a doctrine of Faith, and no longer as only a philosophical opinion.” CFF2 637.9

14. Justice of God.—“The central and final stronghold of believers is faith in the indefeasible and universal justice of the Divine Being.” CFF2 637.10

Such were the considered conclusions of England’s Grand Old Man, the Great Commoner, and four-time Prime Minister of Britain, after his mature, intensive study of the history of the soul question. These were the ultimate convictions of this learned Anglican layman. CFF2 637.11

Picture 1: Joseph Parker
Joseph Parker (d. 1902), congregationalist pastor of London City Temple—evil ends in Utter, final extinction.
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