19 APRIL 1930, Page 6

Personal Immortality and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

[Dr. Charles Gore was formerly Bishop of Birmingham and later of Oxford. He is the author of numerous publications on the interpretation of Christianity to-day.]

IN the very brief compass of a short article I cannot, -11- I think, do better than attempt a personal witness. I have never felt myself much impressed with the arguments used in ancient and modern times to prove immortality from an examination of the nature of the soul—its essential distinction from the body, its indis- cerptible unity, and so on. Nor have I by natural instinct shrunk from- the idea of annihilation. What I have never, been• able to doubt is the peremptory authority of duty, as something different in kind from pleasure or profit—as something primary and unanalys. able into anything more ultimate. Thus I have always found my conscience, reluctantly or willingly, responding to the claim of all the prophets—Zarathustra, the Chinae sages, the Greek moralists, the Hebrew prophets, and Jesus Christ—that I am bound to live the good life and therein recognize the voice of God. It is, I believe, chiefly on this basis that I have always found in ethical monotheism the faith which is also right reason. I do not doubt the strength of "the argument from design" in physical nature to the existence and unity and personality of God —that is, in its modern form, which depends not so much on individual organisms as on 'the Vision of the universe as one -vast organization, with- a definite ten- dency upward in the region best known to us. But it is first in the world of moral personalities (and in , that of artistic creation) that we get a glimpse of what the purpose of God must be in that portion of the universe known to us. I am lifted to the idea of mankind as created to co-operate with the Kingdom of God—the Kingdom at once of righteousness, beauty and truth.

To the earliest of the prophets whom I have named— that marvellous man Zarathustra—it was quite evident from the start that the Kingdom was not to be ,realized on this earth or in this life. He postulated at once personal immortality and the life beyond. This was by no means the case with the Hebrew prophets. Having found nothing of moral value in the popular beliefs, in Sheol or ghosts, they were content, even in face of obvious facts, to maintain the idea that within the limits of this life man was to expect and would see the Kingdom of God. But finally, the facts were too strong for this short-range belief. The faith of Israel that God was to come into His own did not fail, but the range was extended. And this extension of range concerned not only the action of God but the life of the individual who was co-operating with God. The motive to a belief in personal immortality which proved irresistible was threefold. First, that as , God is just and good, the final destiny of the individual must be, what it plainly is not in this life, in accordance with justice. Secondly, that, in view of the close fellowship with God with which the soul of the devout man is taken up, it is impossible to imagine that God, Who grants such intimacy with Himself to the spirit of man, can bring it to an abrupt end with death. Thirdly, that it is not conceivable that if the Kingdom of God is to be finally realized, in a new city of God and a renovated nature, the faithful Israelites who have struggled and died for the cause should not participate. Along these lines, all of them surely very cogent to any believer in God and His King- dom, Israel came to be convinced of personal immortality : and, inasmuch as they have never thought of " the soul" as distinct from the body, or of the body as the prison house of the soul, the belief in personal immortality among the Jews, So far as they escaped Greek influences, was always belief in the Resurrection of dead persons as wholes, not in the immortality Of bare souls. So St. Paul .(in. Acts XXIV. 15) expresses the faith in which he had been bred—" having hope towards- • God, which these also (my Jewish adversaries) themselves look for that there shall be a Resurrection both of the just and unjust."

The belief, then, in personal survival had become part of the normal creed of Israel before the mission of Jesus Christ. The Sadducees, however, denied it, and sought to pose Him with a difficulty concerning it;. and He, Who was so sparing in dogmatic affirmations, and so apt to meet a plain question not with a plain answer but with another question, on this subject spoke decisively and at once. "Ye do err," He told the Sadducean sceptics, "not knowing the scriptures neither the power of God." It was the second of the train's of thought mentioned . above which He appears specially to sanction—that the friendship of God with the saints of old is such as cannot have come to an end with death ; and at the same time He spiritualizes the idea of Resurrection as something quite different from resuscitation to the old conditions of bodily life. Men in the life beyond are to be "as angels." If the beliefs in survival beyond death had been left at this point, it seems to me that it would have rested on secure ground—that is to say, that I think the argument from "the values," especially the absolute value of the good life, to the existence of God and the argument from God's justice and goodness to man's personal immortality is an almost irresistible argument.

But there is no question that the appeal of this argu- ment became an absolute assurance in the Christian Church through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on the third day—through the empty 'tomb and the repeated appearances of the risen Christ: I do not think that historical evidence can ever be strictly demonstrated. Then I am not surprised that a person who has convinced himself that miracles are impossible or incredible can somehow manage to explain the evidence away. But seience appears to be withdrawing its ban apon the belief in miracles as such. Professor E. W. Hobson, in his' Survey of the Domain of Natural Science, describes the denial of their possibility in nature, like the denial of free will in man, as "a piece of a priori dogmatism, quite incapable of substantiation on scientific grounds." And Dr. Tennant, in his Miracle and Its Philosophical Presupposition, argues convincingly to the same effect. Granted this, I think the evidence of the fact is convincing. Its strength is threefold. It lies, first, in the complete change wrought in the mental character of the Twelve within- a very short period, of which no 'other plausible account can be given than was given, viz., the empty tomb and the convincing appearances; secondly, it lies in the witness of St. 'Paul, who, converted within a few years of the crucifixion, received the Creed of the Resurrection on the third day in a formulated shape, which, in agreement with the Twelve, he passed on to his converts ; thirdly, it lies in the accounts of the appearances which seem to transcend in their character anything which can reasonably be ascribed to the imagination of the disciples or the " mythopoeic faculty," and which so subtly but unmis- takably suggest the idea of the " spiri',ual body," that is a body which was no longer subject to the laws which govern material life as we know it in experience--a body in which Jesus passed out of the grave clothes, leaving them to collapse, and out of the closed tomb, and into the room "where the doors were shut "—a body in which He no longer lived here or there or passed by walking from one place to another, but had been raised by some higher plane of existence in which it was simply the organ and clothing of the spiritual will.

And we cannot fail to see how this conception of the risen body reappears in St. Paul's argument about the body of the Resurrection, which he contrasts with the body of" flesh and blood," and which wholly disposes of any conception of resurrection which would necessitate the recollection of the material particles of the "body of corruption." I know nothing less convincing than the attempts to explain away the evidence of the corporal resurrection of the crucified Christ. Nor can I feel the least movement of assent to the arguments that whether the actual event occurred or not is a matter of little moment, or that what used to be an aid to faith has now becom2 merely an obstacle of which we should do well to rid ourselves. No !—a thousand times no! Always the permanent obstacle to the Christian faith in God is the appearance of sheer moral indifference in material nature. If the Christ, believed in as Christians believe in Him, had simply been rejected and crucified and buried and passed like other men, good, bad and indifferent, into the unseen world, not only could the faith in Christ never have arisen in the world, but I do not believe it could ever be maintained. If I am to hold the faith in Christ as the incarnate Son of God, my reason seems to demand at that crisis in the whole long process of divine redemption some such positive evidence that the God and Father of the Crucified Jesus is verily also the Creator and Lord of the world of Nature. That is why it seems to me that, in connexion with the Christ, the "miraculous" events, and especially the Resurrection, are as essential as St. Paul represents them as being.

Finally, I cannot but rejoice that the Christian belief in the Resurrection gives so little satisfaction to the natural curiosity of mankind about the future. It gives us visions of the last day and the general resurrection and -the last judgment which are obviously imaginative. We have all the assurance that God is at last to come into His own in His whole creation which is needed to make faith firm and hope sure and love active—all that is needed to make us feel that it is worth while to venture all for the cause of the Kingdom. But as to the "inter- mediate state" between death and resurrection, as to the states and occupations of the life beyond, there is no information given. All our attention seems to be, as one would say, deliberately diverted from such speculation, to be Concentrated on the task of kingdom- building and soul-making here in the world to-day.

CHARLES GORE.

[This article concludes our series on Immortality. Beginning with the issue of May 17th, we shall publish a series of eight articles on "Anglican Church Life Overseas." The series will be intro- duced by Canon Spanton (U.M.C.A.) and will include articles on the Church in India, Africa, China, Japan, and the West Indies.]