Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/555

Rh ESCHATOLOGY 535 what, at any one time, the mind of the church has been. Reserve was wise, but reserve has its dangers. Licence was given to the unguided and uncontrolled popular imagination to create and people its own heaven and hell, while poetry and art were permitted to seize on the unseen future as their own domain, and, alas, to stamp their figured expressions indelibly as literal truths on the minds of men. 1 There are two distinct modes of treatment for these difficult subjects. In the philosophy of them we meet with the ever-recurrent antagonism between the Platonic and Aris totelian systems. 2 Thus the speculative argument on which the schoolmen and Calvinists chiefly rely in support of a theory of unending penalty for sin that the violated majesty of an Infinite Being demands infinite pain is founded on a sentence in Aristotle s Ethics, 3 while a gentler creed appears with every revival of the Platonic philosophy, which, as Neander observes, extended its spiritualizing influence to eschatology as to other doctrines of the faith. 4 But without entering on the region of pure speculation, the New Testament itself discloses two entirely different eschatological methods. The one is moral, spiritual, idealist, employing outward forms only as symbols, viewing the future rather in regard to development of character than as a mode of existence. This is the Christian as contrasted with the Jewish method. The other follows the natural ten dency of Hebrew thought. It is literal, material, sen suous. It delights in chronological arrangements of the unknown future, and topographical arrangements of the unseen world. Missing the repeated warnings of Christ, delivered both in parables and in express admonitions warnings to prepare for a slow and gradual development of His kingdom, and to leave &quot;the times &quot; in His Father s keeping this method aims in all its representations at abrupt catastrophe and at a consummation depending on startling and supernatural surprises. 5 These distinctive tendencies appear within the New Testament most prominently the one in the fourth gospel the other in the Apocalypse. The Pauline theology exhibits them side by side, showing their discordance in the absence of all attempt on the part of the apostle to reconcile them. Thus in his treatment of the resurrec tion, in the one view it is the sudden appearing of Christ which will begin the heavenly life for all, in the other this life in Christ begun already on earth will attain its perfection at the death of the individual. As the moment of the second advent receded, the church s expectation necessarily transferred the object of Christian hope the communion with Christ in the kingdom of glory to the earlier event, death ; but St Paul retains the old termino logy without endeavouring to adapt it to this change (ef. Phil. i. 22, 23, iii. 10, 11, with 1 Cor. xv. 52 /.; 1 Thess. iv. 15, ttc.). The same discordance is observable in his treatment of the judgment and of the end of the world. In his use of terms and reference to times the apostle follows his Jewish training. &quot;The day of the Lord,&quot; with all its prophetic associations as &quot; day of judg ment,&quot; is preserved ; the sudden and final award of wrath or favour appears in its forensic form; and all is ended by a separation between the heirs of eternal life and the lost. 1 The part played by poetry on these subjects from the Apocalypse down waul lias often distressed thoughtful people. But modern poetry and the highest literature of every department are on the side of liberal and tolerant views. 2 See Aug., Civ. Dei, xxi. 13. 3 Aquinas, Sum. Theol., qutest xcix., art. 1 ; Calvin, Instil., iii. 25. 4 The first clear note of immortality in Hebrew literature is struck in the Book of Wisdom, the work of an Alexandrian Jew. The Origen- ists, perhaps Scofus Erigena, and, in later times, some at least of the Cambridge Platonists, are examples of the statement above. 8 &quot;Abrupt Supernaturaiism.&quot; Keander, Hist. Christ. Doym., i. 249. But the spirit of the apostolic teaching is independent of this form. The idea that regards the development of the higher life as a constant process varying in each indi vidual, but having its roots in the common life of the church, that looks on to the ultimate perfection as a unity of all with the Redeemer in God, the whole universe having been gradually subdued by Christ to himself, this, which we may call the essentially Christian idea, is what we receive as the innermost feeling of the man who, from a Pharisee and a zealous upholder of the law, was called to be a chosen instrument of the gospel of the favour of God in Christ. In the patristic period the conflict between the two rival systems is apparent in every detail. Here, as everywhere else, the opposition is marked in regard to the duration of punishment. But it rages most fiercely, perhaps, round the doctrine of the millennium. The earthly reign of Messiah was transferred from Jewish to Christian expectation. But the Christian hope could not without inconsistency take a Jewish form. Christ s kingdom of heaven refused to realize itself as a period of sensual enjoyment, and the poetic chronology of the apocalypse was soon found to have raised difficulties of an insurmountable kind whi:h were not diminished when a locality was sought for the promised earthly reign. If it was found at Jerusalem before the final judgment, how could the expectations connected with the second advent be fulfilled 1 In the Apocalypse the completion of the kingdom of God takes place in the New Jerusalem the millennium appearing only as an interval of rest after the crisis of the conflict with Antichrist. Thus a new decisive epoch is introduced, the consummation of things having thus gradually receded from the incarnation, which was the focus of Jewish eschatology, to the second advent, and still further to the close of the millennial reign. The later interpretation, fixing the beginning of the thousand years kingdom at the incarnation, though decidedly opposed to the Apocalypse, is a recurrence to the primitive Jewish view. In accordance with this opinion, the end of the world was very generally expected about the year 1000. Another view dated the millennium from the formal adoption of Christianity by the empire under Con- stantine, and caused the expectation of the end of things which was so prevalent in the 14th century. 6 The most important of all the questions that arise in connection with eschatology relates, of course, to the teach ing of our Lord. A true view of the future must be a Theodicea. It must correspond to the highest human con ception of the nature and character of God. The revelation in and through Christ affords this highest conception. And yet it is in the discourses of Christ himself that men find the passages which seem to prove the doctrine most irrecon cilable with the insight He has elsewhere given into the Divine heart. Now, Christ was not the first to &quot;stamp ideas of immor tality on the minds of men under the forms of heaven and hell.&quot; 7 His gospel brought life and immortality to light, but it was by illuminating obscure and completing partial truths. It is therefore most important to ascertain what forms of belief on these subjects He found existing. 6 Millenarians or Chiliasts were opposed by Origen and Jerome. Augustine hesitated and changed his views about them. All were not equally gross in their conceptions. The prophetic pictures of festivity were the origin of the sensual notions. The apocalyptic literature, Sibylline oracles, &e., encouraged them. Papias (Tren., Adv. liter. v. 33) puts a fantastic prediction into the mouth of Christ, on which later writers enlarged. See Aug., Civ. Dei, xx. 7. The specific time 1000 years did not originate with the Apocalypse. See Bleek s Introduc tion, and Neander, Ch. Hist., ii. 496 (Bohn). Corrodi, Kritische Oe- schichte des Chiliasmus, is quoted as the classical German book on the subject. The English reader will get a full and most interesting view in Irving s Ben Ezra. 7 Reconciliation of Religion and Science by Rev T. W. Fow .e, p. 93.