The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

V. Edinburgh’s Baillie-Admits “Conditionalism May Be Right”

The book And the Life Everlasting (1934), by Scottish Dr. JOHN BAILLIE, ⁴⁰ professor of divinity at the University of Edinburgh, was originally a course of lectures at the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in America, in 1932. Baillie’s was yet another voice in the growing “current discussion” on the immortality question. ⁴¹ He begins with the source of the traditional viewthe “primitive,” or animistic, concept of “some kind of survival,” with its “second self, or ghost, which, being released from the corpse at death, goes on to live a life of its own,” with its “belief in immortality.” ⁴² CFF2 791.3

1. PLATONISM TRACED BACK TO ANIMISTIC SOURCES

Turning next to Platonism’s postulate that the “soul is immortal and indestructible,” ⁴³ Baillie terms Plato’s philosophy a “defence of animism”—that “all natural processes are ultimately due to the agency of souls.” ⁴⁴ To such, “to think of a soul as dying” is a “contradiction.” But Platonic immortality was “an entirely disembodied kind”—a “shadowy second self,” or “double.” ⁴⁵ Out of all this there developed “Western monasticism” and “the doctrine of the immortality of the discarnate soul.” ⁴⁶ CFF2 791.4

Further, what the concomitant “doctrine of eternal punishment” does is “to make evil an eternal element in the universe,” which Baillie labels as “Manichean dualism.” This position he refers to as “repellant,” with its “chamber of horrors eternally present.” ⁴⁷ CFF2 792.1

2. CONDITIONALIST POSITION MAY BE “RIGHT.”

Professor Baillie thus comes to the question of choice between two “alternatives”—namely, innate or “conditional” immortality—and makes this important statement: CFF2 792.2

“If we reject the [pagan] doctrine of eternal evil, then we have to choose between the alternatives of conditional survival and universal restoration. And this choice is likely to be determined by our judgment on a single issue. The conditionalist holds that complete annihilation is the natural fate of souls from which every trace of the divine image has been effaced, and it may be that in this the conditionalist is right.” ⁴⁸ CFF2 792.3

In passing, Baillie speaks doubtingly of “universalism.” ⁴⁹ CFF2 792.4

3. THE HOPE OF CHRISTIAN EXPECTATION

Recapitulating, Baillie refers to primitive “tribalism with its purely corporate ethic and immortality,” and “Brahminism with its... reabsorption of all finite spirits into one general fund of spiritual life.” Eliminating these, we are faced with “two remaining alternatives”—“pessimism,” or the “hope of everlasting life with God.” There is little solace in inherent “life,” before described. “If we ourselves have indeed passed... into the marvellous brightness of the Christian expectation, the praise is not to us but to the grace of God in our Lord Jesus Christ.” ⁵⁰ The implication is clear. CFF2 792.5