SPIRITUALISM AND THE RESURRECTION

By D. M. PANTON, B.A.

On one tenet Sir Oliver Lodge, who, as the oldest living Spiritualist and a man of deserved scientific fame, is exercising a profound influence on the Church of God – “Sir Oliver Lodge,” in the amazing words of Dr. R. F. Horton, “has become a more intensely orthodox exponent of Christian verity than many of our Free Church preachers” - challenges the Christian Faith with a challenge of life or death. “The body,” Sir Oliver says, “is a nuisance to be got rid of. If people would get over that trouble about interment and about lying there for centuries waiting for a general resurrection - all that kind of mediaeval superstition - they could begin to regard death as more like what it is, an adventure, an episode that is bound to come, something that we may be ready for, welcome when it comes, and not be afraid of.” Resurrection is thus always denied in toto by Spiritualism, as never having occurred, as undesirable, and as impossible. How far this Spiritualistic and Gnostic acid has eaten into the vitals of the Christian Creed, and how far the modern Church has advanced on the road of abandonment of the Faith, can be seen from words of the Dean of St. Paul’s. “Few, if any Bishops,” says Dr. Inge (Church of England Newspaper, May 4^th, 1923), “would hold a candidate [for the ministry] to the quite literal acceptance of the Descent into Hell, the Ascension into Heaven, or the Resurrection of the Flesh.”

A COLLAPSED FOUNDATION

The Apostle at once grapples with the consequences of a denial of resurrection. “If there is no resurrection of the dead” - if a resurrection of the dead has no existence; if the springing of a corpse to life is an impossibility; if no dead body ever rose, or ever could rise, or, as a matter of fact, ever will rise - “neither hath Christ” - for the denial cuts backward as well as forward – “been raised” (1 Cor. 15: 13). You cannot (he says) isolate Christ from humanity, so that He rose, but we do not: He is the typical Man, and all His human experiences are the experiences of all the human: to deny our resurrection is to leave, somewhere in the abysses of Joseph’s grave, the Sacred Dust.

Now the first ineludable fact built on a full tomb is that the Christian Faith is (in that case) an unsubstantial dream. “If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain” - void, groundless, a shell without a substance, a nut without a kernel: it would contain no substantive, no objective, truth, nothing to which the preacher could appeal as a vera res (Ellicott), an acknowledged event, an actual fact: “and your faith also is vain” - all that on which your faith fastens - atonement, pardon, heaven, bliss - collapses; for from a closely knit history and revelation, the central fact, the king-nut, is thus withdrawn. Christ Himself rested His claims upon the resurrection, both before and after the event. If Christ rose, He lifts our corpse out of the grave, as well as delivers our soul out of Hades: if He failed to rise, He leaves our soul in Hades, and our body in corruption. The corrupt cannot save the uncorrupt, or themselves: or else Abraham or Moses or David or Isaiah, one or more, would long ago have left their graves. God’s crowning surgery is an operation on the coffin; and an un-emptied tomb can only mean [for the regenerate believer] an unsaved soul. No resurrection proves no redemption.

FALSE APOSTLESS

The second consequence fastens at once on those primarily responsible. “Yea, and we” - the fountains of the Faith – “are found” - by a cross-examining world and an incensed God – “false witnesses” - not mistaken witnesses, but false - “of God; because we witnessed of God” - empowered by the Spirit of God, and attributing the event to God (Acts 2: 32) – “that He raised up Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead are not raised.” Innocent fanatics, deluded enthusiasts, the Apostles could not be, for they were witnesses before they were preachers, and they asserted as a fact perceived by their senses what their senses had never perceived*; and since the Apostles were unanimous (Acts 4: 33), false, testimony to a fact which they said they had seen, and which they had never seen, could only be a collective and deliberate Conspiracy. Who can believe that the writer of 1 Cor. 13., the man who has more influenced the world for good than any other man since Christ, and who laid down his head at last on the block for his faith - was a fraud throughout, living a life of continued and systematic falsehood? But false witnesses, false apostles, if thus disclosed, are a death-blow of the Christian Faith.**

[* If a man says that he handled a scarred body, and watched the man risen from the dead eating solid food, and says it repeatedly, and it never happened at all, he must be conscious that it never happened, and so it is the deliberate invention of a false witness; and by asserting that God authorizes his testimony, he either makes God suborn false witness, or else commits sacrilege by using God’s name for falsehood - a capital offence under the Law.]

** The obverse truth is singularly effective:- namely, that deniers of the Resurrection can betray an evil morale equally convincing as an integral part of error. Mr. G. W. Foote, famous in the nineteenth century as ‘Saladin,’ a foremost infidel, says:- “Christianity has elected to stand or fall by a myth so monstrously improbable that it is impossible to discuss it without insulting common sense and outraging the most rudimentary principles of experience and reason. He who discusses the probability of the Resurrection of Christ as if it were a grave and legitimate subject for debate is as demented and absurd as he who would gravely state it. If you set a reasonable thesis before me, O Christian, I will reason with you; but if you set before me a proposition so monstrously absurd that to seriously attack it would only be a logical burlesque, a pedantic mockery, you must not deem me disrespectful if, without noticing it, I pass by on the other side. But if, as in the case with the Resurrection monstrosity, you insist on thrusting your devout imbecilities upon my attention, do not deem me discourteous if I reserve reason and criticism for higher purposes, and treat your puerile superstitions with ridicule and contempt. Jack and his beanstalk was just as suitable for the nucleus of a religious system as Christ and his cross; but the one has been taken, and the other left. Christ and his cross is the more blood-stained and crude legend of the two, and would, therefore, receive the readier acceptance by the barbarous mental and moral instincts of priest-manipulated ignorance.” Amazing nonsense of this kind is a good deal more than nonsense: it is an evil heart vitiating and falsifying the intellect, whose motions it dooms to sterile and eternal miscarriage.]

A DESTROYED FAITH

If one link is broken, a chain is worthless: the Apostle passes to a third rotten link. “And if” - Paul drives home, by, repeating it, the cardinal fact – “the dead” - dead persons dead men – “are not raised” - if no grave can be emptied, “neither hath Christ been raised”: if the thing is impossible, it has never happened: “and if Christ bath not been raised, YOUR FAITH IS VAIN” - not empty of substance, as before (verse 14), but fruitless in effect; that is, “ye are yet in your sins” your faith has never delivered you from the realm of sin, the guilt of sin, or the corruption of sin. A dead Redeemer is no redeemer: if the Lamb is dead, so is the atonement: if the Debtor, bearing a whole world’s debts, is unreleased, it can only be because the debt is unpaid. Denial of the Resurrection sweeps away the Atonement, because it strips it of any proof of validity: as the Resurrection is the proof of the Sacrifice’s acceptance, so no Resurrection is a rejected Sacrifice. If Christ lies in His grave, I lie in my sins: if He lies under death, I lie under guilt: if He is in dust, I am in Hell.

A LOST CHURCH

The fourth article in an unbeliever’s un-escapable creed is a lost Church. “Then they also which are fallen asleep” - a sleep necessarily means an awaking – “in Christ have perished”: all the saints of all the ages closed their eyes in fancied salvation, only to open them in real damnation. For what wrought death? Sin. And what keeps souls dead? Sin. And therefore if Christ never rose, what keeps Him dead? Sin. Universal death means universal sin, un-expiated, un-lifted, un-forgiven. If Christ is not raised, it is proof positive that on Calvary He was no propitiation, but the feeble victim of an enormous wrong; and if thus Christ is bodiless, Himself a wandering and homeless spirit, all the dead saints are un-shriven ghosts, guilty spirits, lost souls. In other words, if Christ never rose, all that is good and noble and best in the history of mankind has gone down into a common ruin, and we wake to a universe that is a nightmare, and a God of whom the best that can be said is that He is unknown and unknowable.

A VANISELD HOPE

The final consequence of our Lord’s un-emptied tomb is the utter miscarriage of all Christian experience. “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ” - if the Christian cannot cross the grave, or look for a world to come – “we are of all men most pitiable”: in this world, off scouring, in the world to come, lost; conspicuously mistaken, we have been conspicuously fooled. Hope which is only hope is a cruel mirage. We have abandoned evil for good; we have given up sin for righteousness; we have left impurity for purity; we have renounced all that the world holds dear for no visible recompense - even for possible martyrdom: yet the fruit of it all is - damnation. To be dying of thirst in a wilderness and, crawling to an oasis of palm and spring, to find it a mirage - this is worse far than dying of thirst without a mirage.

INCREDIBLE UNBELIEF

Now, finally, face the facts. A minister said some time back:- “More than twenty years ago, just after my ordination, this question forced itself upon me. What if after all this article of our creed were a beautiful romance, an ancient myth or idle dream? Solemnly and seriously I had to face the question, and find my way back to the home of truth.” We are confronted with an inexorable dilemma. An un-risen Christ makes of the apostles monsters of guilt; it charges Christians with unchanged sinfulness; it involves all the holiest in perdition; it changes renunciation of evil into a folly. This is a creed vastly more difficult of belief than the Christian Faith. The moral miracle of unbelief is greater than the physical miracle of faith; the more so as the limits of the physical are unknown, but the limits of the moral are within sharp and known boundaries. For if Christ is not risen, He is dead: if the Gospel is not true, it is false: if my sin is not forgiven, I am lost: if God’s word is not truth, it is falsehood. On the other hand, if but one Apostle is true; if but one man is delivered from his sins; if but one dead saint in the whole history of the world is saved:- CHRIST IS RISEN; and the Gospel is the one momentous truth of the universe. No physical miracle can be any difficulty to the Creator. Professor Virchow, the founder (as he has been called) of modern pathology, and the operator of probably more thousands of post-mortem dissections than any other man living or dead, was asked,- “Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead? Why shouldn’t I?” was the prompt response.

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RESURGAM

I shall arise. For centuries

Upon the grey old churchyard stone

These words have stood; no more is said,

The glorious promise stands alone,

Untouch’d while years and seasons roll

Around it; March winds come and go,

The summer twilights fall and fade

And autumn sunsets burn and glow.

I shall arise! O wavering heart,

From this take comfort and be strong!

“I shall arise,” nor always grope

In darkness, mingling right with wrong;

From tears and pain, from shades of doubt,

And wants within, that blindly call,

“I shall arise,” in God’s own light

Shall see the sum and truth of all.

Like children here we lisp and grope

And till the perfect manhood, wait

At home our time, and only dream

Of that which lies beyond the Gate:

God’s full free universe of life,

No shadowy paradise of bliss,

No realm of unsubstantial souls,

But life, deep life, more real than this.

O soul! Where’er your ward is kept,

In some still region calmly blest,

By quiet watch-fires till the dawn

And God’s reveille break your rest,

O soul! that left this record here,

I read, but scarce can read for tears,

I bless you, reach and clasp your hand,

For all these long two hundred years.

I shall arise - O clarion call!

Time rolling onward to the end

Brings us to life that cannot die,

The life where faith and knowledge blend.

Each after each, the cycles roll

In silence, and about us here

The shadow of the Great White Throne,

Falls broader, deeper, year by year.

‑ The Jewish Missionary Magazine.