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Marriage is the only sacrament which is also a natural condition. It is called a sacrament because St. Paul speaks of it as a great mystery (Eph. 5:32), and sacrament is the Latin translation of "mystery". We must distinguish between Christian Marriage which is a sacrament, Natural Marriage which becomes sacramental when those who have entered into it become Christians, and marriage in the sense of a sexual union of any kind which is recognized by the civil law. Although the last of these three is commonly called "marriage" (as in Westermarck,s History of Human Marriage), it is not necessarily either natural or honorable and will in this chapter be called not "marriage" but "union". There are forms of "union" which are sinful not only for Christians but also for non-Christians.
Marriage properly so called is the exclusive and permanent union of one man with one woman. A union which is not exclusive, whether polygamy (two or more wives to one man) or polyandry (two or more husbands to one wife), or which is not permanent, is not marriage but concubinage.
Marriage, defined as a monogamous1 union which is exclusive and permanent, is the natural form of union for human beings. It
1 Monogamous, of one man and one woman.
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is based on two natural facts: that men and women are roughly equal in numbers, therefore marriage must be monogamous; and that children require years of parental care before they can look after themselves, therefore marriage must be permanent. It is found in some of the most primitive races such as the Veddas of Ceylon. The saying of our Lord, that divorce (He might have added polygamy) was permitted for the hardness of men,s hearts, but in the beginning it was not so (St. Mark 10:5), appears to be confirmed by the researches of the anthropologists into the customs of primitive man. Other forms of union are corruptions due to sin: to lust, or idleness, or war, or superstition, or covetousness.
The family is the basis of human society, and the natural family is founded on marriage as defined above. Whatever weakens marriage weakens the family. Whatever weakens the family loosens the bonds of human society. Breaches of the law of marriage are contrary to natural morality, like murder, theft, and lying.
Our Lord gave the sanction of revelation to the natural law of marriage. His teaching on the subject is found in St. Mark 10:2-12; St. Matt. 5:32, 19:3-12; St. Luke 16:18.
Polygamy is nowhere directly forbidden in the Bible. Polyandry was unknown to the Hebrews, as it was also to the Greeks and Romans.1 But our Lord,s teaching assumes that there is only one husband and only one wife. So does St. Paul,s teaching, for he compares marriage to the union between Christ and His Church (Eph. 5:23-32). Consequently polygamy and polyandry have always been forbidden by the Christian Church, although polygamy was permitted by the Jews, and in the East sometimes practiced for many centuries after Christ.
In modern times the prohibition of polygamy has always been a great obstacle to the progress of the Gospel in Africa. But the experience of missionaries has shown that it is fatal to allow any departure from the Christian standard. The rule accepted by most Christian missions is that a polygamous wife may be baptized and continue to live in polygamy, but a polygamous husband may only be baptized on his death bed unless he puts away his wives; which is not always possible, for in African conditions that may be to abandon them to starve or become harlots.
1
It is chiefly found in certain Himalayan tribes.
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Our Lord also declared that marriage could not be dissolved. The apparent exception in St. Matthew will be discussed in the next chapter. In St. Mark and St. Luke no exception is given. St. Paul,s teaching assumes that marriage is indissoluble.
Marriage is a contract to enter into a natural state of life, and the contract is fulfilled when the marriage is consummated. The two persons are then "one flesh" in a natural state which continues as long as they are both alive. But it is the consent, not the consummation, which makes the union a marriage. A union in which there is not free consent, or in which either party does not intend the union to be exclusive and permanent, is not marriage; and such a union is concubinage which is forbidden to Christians.
The marriage of persons who have not been baptized is not sacramental, but it is a true marriage. If they are baptized or one of them is baptized after marriage, their marriage becomes sacramental. But married persons who are not Christians (that is, not baptized), though their marriage is not sacramental, are bound by the natural law to be faithful to one another until death.
The sacrament of marriage or Holy Matrimony has no outward visible sign commanded by God, and is not therefore a sacrament of like nature with Baptism and the Eucharist. But it is commonly numbered among the sacraments and is even called a sacrament in the Elizabethan "Homilies".
The subjects of Christian marriage are baptized persons not hindered by "diriment impediments". An impediment is called "diriment" when it makes the marriage invalid. There are also impediments which only make it irregular.
The diriment impediments are these: previous marriage to someone who is still alive; prohibited degrees of kindred and affinity (to be dealt with in pp. 4258); physical incapacity (that is, inability to perform the functions of marriage); mental incapacity (such as insanity or imbecility); and compulsion. If one of the parties is already married, or too nearly related to the other, or does not know what he or she is doing (is drunk, for instance, or too young
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to understand), or is acting under fear of violence, the marriage is no marriage.
In the Roman Communion, Holy Orders and a vow of celibacy are diriment impediments, but not in the Anglican Communion. A professed member of a religious order (such as a monk or nun) who breaks the vow of celibacy (without dispensation) by marrying commits a grave sin. But whereas the Roman Communion regards such a marriage as no marriage, the English Church regards it as a valid marriage, though sinful. (The plot of a novel by Donn Byrne turned on this point. The heroine was a runaway nun; but as he made her a runaway Anglican nun, his assumption that her marriage would be treated by the bishop as invalid was a mistake.)
The "matter" of marriage differs in different countries. With us it is the ring and the handclasp.
The "form" of marriage is consent in the presence of witnesses. In the Middle Ages this was considered sufficient, but both civil law and ecclesiastical law have imposed further conditions in order to prevent secret marriages. In any case the marriage is invalid if there are no witnesses, both by ecclesiastical and civil law.
The bridegroom and the bride are the ministers of marriage.1 The priest gives them the blessing of the Church, but a civil marriage without any priest is a valid sacramental marriage if the parties are baptized, and if they intend their marriage to be permanent and exclusive. But as the civil law now permits dissolution of marriage for several reasons, and as the false notion that marriage can be dissolved is now so widely spread as to make the Christian rule appear strange even to many practicing Christians, there must be many civil marriages which are not intended to be permanent and are consequently invalid spiritually though valid legally. It is in any case most undesirable that members of the Church should be married without the blessing of the Church, and those who have been married at a registry office should be urged to have their marriage blessed in church.
The Council of Trent made a rule that marriages should in future be invalid unless they were blessed by a priest. This rule, of course, applies only to members of the Roman Communion, but the consequence of it is that Rome does not recognize civil marriage or marriage in a non-Roman Church if either of the married pair is a Romanist. Persons who have contracted such a marriage, if
1
Not in the Eastern churches which regard the priest as the minister of marriage.
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Romanists, are regarded as living in sin and treated accordingly. It was on this ground that the Pope consented to Napoleon,s repudiation of Josephine: their marriage had been a civil one.
The inward spiritual grace of marriage is the power needed to enable those who marry to fulfill the purposes of marriage, which are duties so difficult and so responsible that it is amazing that any Christian should undertake them without expecting Divine help.
The first purpose of marriage is the procreation and care of children who are immortal spirits created by God for union with Himself. It is the duty of the parents to bring children into the world (to avoid the responsibility of parenthood is to sin against themselves, against the community, and against God); to provide for the needs of their bodies, minds, and souls; to see that they are baptized, confirmed, and taught the Christian religion; and to set them an example of holy living.
The second purpose of marriage is to hallow and to satisfy the instinct of sex, which God has given us and which, like every other natural instinct, is to be kept under strict control and used only for the glory of God and in accordance with His commands.
The third purpose of marriage is the love, support, and help which the husband and wife are to give to one another in every department of their lives.
Christian marriage is valid that is, recognized by the Church if it fulfils the following conditions. The parties must be free from any diriment impediment (see above); they must declare their intention that the marriage shall be exclusive and permanent, which they will have to do if they are married with the Anglican service; and the marriage must be in accordance with the requirements of the civil law. The reason for this is not only the general rule that the
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civil law must be obeyed when it is not contrary to Divine commands, but also that in this case, if it is not obeyed, there is a strong presumption that the couple do not intend their marriage to be permanent, for a marriage which is invalid by civil law can easily be repudiated.
The civil law of England requires the officiating minister to be in Anglican Orders, or, if not, specially empowered to officiate. If he is not ordained or licensed to perform marriages, the marriage is invalid. The marriage of persons under sixteen is not recognized by the civil law.
Both the canon1 and the civil law also require the following conditions for a regular marriage. To omit them is a punishable offense, but it does not make the marriage invalid.
The banns must be published that is, notice of the marriage must be given in church on three successive Sundays. This can be avoided by means of a license which is an episcopal dispensation from the requirement of banns. Licenses are of two kinds: the ordinary license which is issued by the bishop through the diocesan registry and through certain priests called "surrogates", and which is simply a dispensation from the publication of banns; and the special license which can only be obtained from the Archbishop of Canterbury (it is a relic of the medieval position of the Archbishop as legatus natus, or permanent representative, of the Pope), and which is a dispensation from all rules about the time and place of marriages. It costs £30 and is given only for urgent reasons.
The parties to the marriage, if under twenty-one, must have their parents, consent or at least that of a magistrate. The marriage must take place in a church recognized for the purpose (as all Anglican parish churches are, but not school chapels, etc.), or in a registry office, and between eight in the morning and six in the evening.
"Mixed religion" is by canon law an impediment to marriage, but it is not recognized by civil law. If one or both parties are unbaptized and are unwilling to receive baptism (with of course the necessary instruction) before their marriage, they should be advised to be married in a registry office. The marriage of an unbaptized person in church requires, by canon law, special permission from the bishop. The priest should never consent to publish banns without evidence that both persons have been baptized.
1
Canon 62.
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Marriage between persons of different Christian communions should be discouraged, as experience shows that the result is often unhappiness or indifference to religion. But if both parties are baptized Christians, the priest must not refuse to marry them.
Marriages in which one party is a Romanist create special difficulties. The Roman Communion forbids its members to marry non-Romanists unless they have a dispensation; and dispensations are given only on conditions which are most humiliating to the non-Romanist bridegroom or bride.1 If they ignore the prohibition and marry in a non-Romanist church or in a registry office, Rome regards the marriage as no marriage and the couple as living in sin. An Anglican priest who is asked to perform such a marriage should point this out and should, if he thinks it expedient, try to persuade the Romanist party to the marriage to join the English Church formally (receiving, of course, the necessary instruction) before the wedding. It cannot be right to encourage a Romanist who wishes to remain a Romanist to break the laws of the Roman Communion. No Anglican priest should undertake such a responsibility without going thoroughly into all the circumstances and consulting his bishop.
Where one party to the marriage is a foreigner, the consulate of the country concerned must be consulted. Many foreign countries will not recognize the marriage of their citizens unless their own laws are carefully complied with, and these laws are sometimes very peculiar. Many an English girl has married a foreigner and found, on reaching her husband,s country, that she was not regarded as his legal wife.
Marriages between persons of different races, though often very inexpedient, is not forbidden by the Church. Civil laws forbidding it are held by some theologians to infringe the natural rights of man. The law of some countries (but not Great Britain) compelling royalty to marry royalty has often had disastrous results, physical and moral.
1
A promise must be given that all the children shall be brought up to be Romanists and that there shall be no attempt to convert the Romanist spouse (but no promise the other way). The marriage must be in a Romanist church, and there must be no additional ceremony in any other church.
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Marriage is of great importance to both Church and State; and since their interests are not the same, there is nearly always tension between them.
The State has to make laws for all its members, Christian and non-Christian. There are always some, and there may be a large majority, who are unwilling to live according to the Christian law of marriage or who do not even recognize it as binding.
The Church makes laws only for her own members and must obey the revealed law of God, which the secular State cannot be expected to recognize unless the great majority of citizens recognize it.
The law of Great Britain and of all European countries recognizes the exclusiveness of marriage and does not allow polygamy or polyandry; but it does not recognize the permanence of marriage, for it claims the power to dissolve it in some circumstances. (In Southern Ireland, however, the civil law makes no such claim, and marriage cannot be dissolved.)
The word "divorce" is used in three senses which must be carefully distinguished.
It is sometimes used in the sense of nullity of marriage. In this sense Henry VIII "divorced" Catherine of Aragon on the ground that they were within the prohibited degrees, and that therefore the marriage had never been valid. (Catherine,s claim was that her marriage with Henry,s brother Arthur had never been consummated, and therefore they were not within the prohibited degrees.) Napoleon,s "divorce" from Josephine was also a suit for nullity of marriage.
Divorce may also mean separation a mensa et thoro (from bed and board). This has always been allowed by the Church in certain cases, and the canons of the Church of England provide for it. The married couple are freed from the obligation to live together; but
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they may not marry anyone else, and they are required to live chastely. Their marriage vows are not dissolved but only suspended.
But in modern times divorce usually means dissolution of marriage. This is not recognized by the Church. Since marriage is a permanent state, it is indissoluble. A union which can be dissolved is not marriage but concubinage. A State which permits divorce in this sense legalizes concubinage.
Both Jewish and pagan laws allowed dissolution of marriage (though the prophet Malachi strongly discouraged it: Mal 2:16). Our Lord, however, forbade it absolutely. His teaching is clearly recorded by St. Mark (10:2-12), and St. Luke (16:18); and so radical a critic as Dr. Cadoux admits that He undoubtedly taught the indissolubility of marriage. St. Paul and the other writers of the New Testament everywhere assume that marriage is indissoluble.
But St. Matthew (5:31, 19:2) adds to the prohibition of divorce the words "except for fornication"; and many have supposed that our Lord meant that a man may divorce his wife for adultery, but for no other reason, and be free to marry another. (The case of the wife who divorces her husband is not mentioned, but all Hebrew laws are addressed to the man. Since men and women are equal under the New Covenant, whatever applies to the husband applies also to the wife.)
But this interpretation of our Lord,s words appears to be mistaken for two reasons. The word used is not "adultery" (:@4P,\") but "fornication" (B@D<,\"); and if He had meant that divorce was allowed for adultery, He would merely have been following the teaching of the stricter of the two Jewish schools of thought, the school of Shammah. But if He had done this, His disciples would have shown no surprise. As it was, they were astonished and exclaimed, "If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry" (St. Matt. 19:10). This interpretation must therefore be rejected, and the Church has in fact rejected it.
The Roman Communion, which does not allow the dissolution of marriage, teaches that when our Lord permitted a man to put away his wife for "fornication", He did not give him the right to marry
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again as the following words show. The reference was to separation from bed and board, not to dissolution of marriage. The objection to this interpretation is that it does not explain the use of the term "fornication" rather than "adultery".
A better interpretation which was published independently by Dr. Lowther Clarke and Dr. Gavin is that the words "except for fornication" are not our Lord,s own but are a note inserted by the editor of St. Matthew,s Gospel and refer to conditions in the Christian Church when she first began to receive Gentile converts. Some of these converts had probably contracted marriages permitted by Greek law and custom but regarded with horror by the Jews, such as marriage between an uncle and a niece.1 It is these marriages which are meant by B@D<,\", fornication. The words "except for fornication" mean that the prohibition of divorce did not apply to a convert to Christianity who had in his pagan days married his niece. This interpretation makes clear the difficult passage in Acts 15:20, 29. The Council at Jerusalem decided that pagans who became Christians need not keep the Jewish law, but that they must abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and fornication, and things strangled, and blood; and it has always appeared strange that fornication should appear in company with three ceremonial prohibitions, or tabus, of the Jewish Law. But if fornication means marriages held by pagans to be lawful but by Jews to be incestuous, the meaning becomes clear. If the converts from paganism were to live in one community with the Jewish converts, they must abandon habits which Jews could not be expected to tolerate. They must abstain from food which Jews had been taught to regard with special horror and give up marriages which the Jews regarded as incestuous.
But this interpretation of the words "except for fornication" would not be acceptable to the Roman Communion which is committed to the belief that whatever words the Gospels attribute to our Lord must have been actually spoken by Him, and therefore would probably not admit that these words are an editorial note. In any case however we interpret them, the Scriptures are not to be interpreted in such a way as to contradict one another in doctrine.2
1
But unfortunately not regarded with horror by the royal families of Southern Europe since the Counter-Reformation. Many such marriages have been contracted by papal dispensation, especially in the royal families of Spain and Portugal, with disastrous results.2
The Church may not so expound one place of Scripture that it be repugnant to another: Article 20.
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The evidence of St. Mark and St. Luke is clear, and the two doubtful passages in St. Matthew, the meaning of which is disputed, must not be preferred to it, especially as on critical grounds the matter peculiar to St. Matthew is the least trustworthy part of the Synoptic Gospels.
Some have argued that our Lord was not a law giver and that He laid down ideals to be aimed at, not rules to be obeyed. Some of His commands, such as "Give to him that seeketh of thee", cannot be observed literally in all cases. It is one thing to say, "No one ought to divorce his wife and marry again in her lifetime". It is another to say, "No one may divorce his wife and marry again in her lifetime, and if he does, the marriage is not a marriage" but adultery.
It appears, however, that the latter is what our Lord said. He was setting up a society, and that society would be founded on marriage, as is every form of human society. His commands about private conduct were addressed to individuals and were ideals rather than laws; but His commands about marriage were addressed to the society and must be taken as laws. We see in this argument the influence of the modern English idea, which is unknown to the greater part of mankind, that marriage concerns only the bridegroom and the bride. This is a mistake. Every marriage is of the greatest importance to the two families which it links together, and to the whole community, both ecclesiastical and civil, in which they live. What is required for a strong foundation for society is that the natural law of exclusive and permanent marriage confirmed by Divine revelation should be taught, accepted, and reverenced by all, and with it a true and pure attitude towards the instinct of sex in human nature. It is impossible to enforce the marriage laws of Christ upon a society with low and coarse ideas about marriage and about sex. The attempt to do so, as in medieval Christendom, has often been disastrous.
The Western churches have on the whole been faithful to the command of our Lord in this respect.1 The marriage service of the Church of England teaches quite firmly that the marriage bond remains "till death us do part" and is supported by English canon
1
But not the followers of Luther and Calvin.
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law (till 1857 there was no statute law on the subject, but the control of marriage in England was left to Church laws and Church courts).
The witness of the Eastern churches has not been so consistent. From the fifth century onwards the close connection between the Church and the Byzantine Empire led to the contamination of the Greek canon law by the civil law which was pagan in origin and spirit. The Orthodox churches permit dissolution of marriage for several causes (though in Russia it was not allowed at all before Peter the Great whose legislation was influenced by German Lutheranism).1 But the laxity of the Eastern churches has nothing to do with the supposed exception in St. Matthew and must not be connected with it (as has often been done by people who ought to have known better). The Eastern churches do not accept as divorced those who have been divorced under civil law, but have their own divorce courts presided over by a bishop and conducted according to the canon law.
Experience shows that any departure from the rule that marriage is absolutely indissoluble is soon extended. Dishonest methods of taking advantage of it are widely employed, and the way is prepared for fresh departures. The English civil law first permitted dissolution of marriage in 1857 as a remedy for a few hard cases. Now the number of divorces has grown so enormously that the civil courts can hardly deal with them because the public opinion has become accustomed to divorce.
The Church must have a stricter rule for her members than the civil law which is imposed on non-Christians as well as Christians. The rule that marriage is indissoluble is revealed by God, and the Church has no power to change it. But even if it had not been revealed by God, the members of the Church would be bound by it until it had been altered. There is no room here for the exercise of private judgment. A member of the Church may think (mistakenly) that this rule is not Divine, that it may therefore be altered, and that the Church ought to alter it. But as long as it remains the rule of the Church, he must obey it. Archbishop Parker,s example is here to be followed. He did not believe in clerical celibacy, and he wished to marry. But he waited for seven years until the obligation of celibacy had been formally removed.
1
I was told this by Father George Florovsky.
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No one who believes that the Church is a society with rules binding on its members and that its authority is not derived from the State can reasonably think that changes in the civil law can alter the duty of members of the Church. We are members of both Church and State. The State permits certain actions which the Church forbids. There is no conflict of duties. We are not disobeying the State when we obey the Church.
As citizens who are also members of the Church and believe that dissolution of marriage is contrary not only to Divine revelation, but also to natural law, we ought to oppose its extension and to do what we can to restore the observance of the natural law that marriage cannot be dissolved because the observance of the natural law benefits mankind.
As members of the Church we are bound not to make use of the right of divorce in any circumstances. A husband or wife who is prevented by the adultery, desertion, or lunacy of the person to whom he or she has sworn to be faithful "for better for worse, till death us do part" is bound to live in chastity until the other repents, recovers, or dies. However, the breach of the marriage vow is not being divorced but marrying again in the other,s lifetime.
The duty of the priest is to refuse to go through the form of marrying persons who are validly married already to someone who is still alive.1 If the civil law requires him to act as a registrar, he must disobey it and suffer the consequences whatever they may be; for his first duty is to the Church. He must report every case to the bishop, but the bishop has no power to permit by dispensation what is contrary to Divine law. The priest is also bound to teach by every possible means that Christian marriage is indissoluble by Divine command, and that a union which is not indissoluble (anyone who has been divorced and remarried once may be so again) is not marriage at all, but concubinage. The address after the wedding is a good opportunity of teaching the nature of marriage to all who are present.
How persons who have broken the marriage laws of the Church should be treated is a matter of discipline, not of doctrine. Heart-
1
To read the English marriage service with its solemn vows "till death us do part" over such persons is a blasphemous mockery. English law does not now compel priests to solemnize the marriage of persons who have a divorced partner living.
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rending cases often arise, and the temptation to laxity is strong. But four observations may be made here. First, it must at all costs be taught that the rules of the Church, whether Divine or human, are binding on all her members and cannot be broken with impunity; that the marriage service of the Church is intended for her members only; and that those who have taken those solemn vows and broken them have at least committed perjury for which they must repent.
Second, the Church must require repentance which includes amendment of life. Those who will not admit that they have done wrong, or cannot be made to understand that the permission of the State is no excuse for adultery and perjury, deserve no sympathy and no concessions.
Third, the distinction between the "guilty" and the "innocent" party, besides being often quite unreal, is entirely unreasonable and ought to be dropped as was recommended by the recent Church Commission on the subject. If marriage is indissoluble, neither can marry again. If it is not indissoluble, the "guilty" party has as much right to marry again as the "innocent" party, and refusal of the right to marry is not a reasonable form of punishment for adultery.
Fourth, marriage is the concern of the whole community, and it is better that particular persons should suffer than that the whole community should suffer. To admit that even one valid marriage may be dissolved is to make every marriage, even the most happy, capable of being dissolved; that is, to make it concubinage instead of marriage.
The logical way to deal fairly both with those who believe and those who deny that marriage is indissoluble would be to make two forms of union legal, as in the ancient Roman and the modern Ethiopian Empires. Marriage in church would be absolutely indissoluble, and this would be recognized by the civil law. Marriage in a registry office would be capable of being dissolved, as now, for certain reasons. Those who wished to leave open the possibility of divorce would have to avoid being married in church and taking vows of lifelong constancy. The Church of England would then have to do as the Roman Communion does and refuse to recognize civil union as a Christian marriage, or to admit those who had contracted it to the sacraments, unless they consented to add the Church marriage to it.
But English public opinion is too confused, too sentimental, and too ignorant for any such solution as this. Unfortunately there are still vast numbers who think that the Church is a public service like
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the post office, and is as much bound to baptize, marry, and bury everyone who comes as the post office is to sell him stamps. It is at least the duty of the Church to avoid sentimentalism and laxity, and to enforce her laws on all her members, clerical and lay. No one is obliged to belong to the Church, but those who belong to her must keep the rules.
Mankind is agreed, certainly Christendom is agreed, that marriage between persons nearly related to one another must be forbidden. But two questions are disputed: where the line should be drawn (since it must be drawn somewhere), and whether affinity or relationship by marriage is to be regarded as a bar to marriage or only kinship or relationship by blood.
The Christian Church teaches that marriage is so close a bond that it unites not only the married couple but their families. A man becomes the brother of his wife,s sister, the son of his wife,s parents. A woman likewise becomes related to her husband,s kin as if they were her own. The sister of a man,s wife, then, is not someone whom he might one day marry. Such an idea should be as revolting as marriage with his own sister. This principle cannot be defended on biological grounds. It is a spiritual principle and is fully supported by Scripture. St. Paul speaks of marriage with the stepmother as "one which is not so much as named among the heathen" (I Cor. 5:1), and directs that those who are guilty of it shall be immediately excommunicated. It was directly forbidden by the Jewish Law (Lev. 18:8). So were marriage with a brother,s widow and other marriages with persons related only by affinity.
The Church of England forbids marriage with persons within the third degree of kindred and affinity. The degree is reckoned in this way. A man is related in the first degree to his parents and to his children; in the second degree to his brothers and sisters, grand-
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parents, and grandchildren; in the third degree to his uncles, aunts nephews, and nieces. We need carry the list no further. Persons who are married are counted as one for this purpose. Thus a man,s wife,s sister is related to him in the second degree of affinity. His nephew,s wife and his wife,s niece are related to him in the third degree of affinity.
The list of prohibited degrees at the end of the Prayer Book, drawn up by Archbishop Parker, forbids all the degrees which come within these limits and no others. The line thus drawn is based upon the line drawn in the Hebrew list of prohibited degrees in Lev. 18 and is regarded as being, for that reason, of Divine authority.
But Lev. 18 is not a complete list. It includes some cases of affinity in the third degree which is the furthest limit to which it extends, but it omits some relationships which fall within that limit; and like all Hebrew laws it is addressed to the man and does not treat men and women as equal. For instance, it forbids marriage with a brother,s widow but does not mention a deceased wife,s sister.
(The law of prohibited degrees in Lev. 18 is not to be confused with the "levirate law" which belongs to a much older stratum of the Hebrew law (Deut. 25:5-10: cf. Gen. 38:8), and is a relic of primitive notions about inheritance. The levirate law is well known because it is mentioned in the Gospels (St. Mark 12:19; etc.). If a man died without heirs, his brother was directed by the levirate law to marry the widow even if he had a wife already, and the children of this marriage were regarded as the children of the dead man and inherited his property. The levirate law was probably obsolete in practice at the time when the Sadducees tried to puzzle our Lord with it. It has never been accepted by any part of the Christian Church.)
The Prayer Book Table of Prohibited Degrees applies to the Hebrew law the principle of "parity of reasoning"; that is, it assumes that whatever is forbidden to a man is equally forbidden to a woman (since under the New Covenant "there is neither male or female", men and women are equal); and it assumes that if one case of any degree of kindred or affinity is forbidden, all cases of the same degree are forbidden.
The English canon on the subject (99 of the 1604 code) did not, however, declare that marriages contrary to these prohibitions were no marriages, but that they were to be judged incestuous and
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unlawful, and that the parties so married were to be separated by legal process. In this it followed the example of the medieval canons.
Until 1835 the English civil law left this matter to the Church. The Marriage Act of that year declared all such marriages to be null and void. Various Acts between 1907 and 1931, however, removed the prohibition of marriages within the second and third degrees of affinity (except with the widow of a grandfather or grandson, and the corresponding ones for the woman). These marriages were expressly permitted as civil contracts only. The Acts did not claim to alter the law of the Church in any way, and it remains as it has been since the Reformation.
It is clear that members of the Church are bound to obey the law of the Church; but since there are in England no proper church courts capable of taking action against those who break them, the provisions of the canon can no longer be carried out. The position is extremely unsatisfactory.
If the Table of Prohibited Degrees is of Divine authority, the Church has no power to alter it. But we cannot be certain about this. No other part of Christendom treats this matter precisely in the same way as we do, nor do the modern Jews. We cannot be absolutely certain that the code in Lev. 18 is part of the moral law and not merely part of the civil law. In the latter case it would not necessarily be binding upon Christians. Nor can we be certain that the principle of "parity of reasoning" is of Divine authority since neither the Roman nor the Eastern Communions use it in the same way as we do. (We may ignore the various Reformed denominations, for they hold that the individual must judge for himself in such matters and, therefore, impose no marriage laws on their members, but are content with those imposed by the civil law.)
It is therefore a possible theory that the Church has the right to alter the rules if she wishes. If she has such a right which is doubtful she has not in England used it.
But the Church must have a definite rule firmly enforced and, as far a possible, universal. If we cannot have a rule for the whole Church, let us at least have one for the Anglican Communion. (The Australian Church has already given permission for marriage with a deceased wife,s sister and thereby broken the unity of the Anglican churches, while the American Episcopal Church appears to have no rules at all on the subject.) The Table of Prohibited Degrees in the Prayer Book is at least consistent and reasonable, whether it rests on Divine authority or not.
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It is certain that marriage with a brother,s widow and with a deceased wife,s sister was never allowed in any part of Christendom until the fifteenth century and was then only permitted to kings for political reasons by the corrupt Popes of the Renaissance.
Therefore, whether the church has the right to alter the Table of Prohibited Degrees or not, it is highly inexpedient that the right, if it exists, should be used. The argument that a man ought to be allowed to marry his deceased wife,s sister because she makes the best stepmother for his children is said to be disproved by experience (for instance, that of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). On the other hand, this permission is a serious breach in the Christian doctrine of the family.
The Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury,s Commission on Kindred and Affinity as Impediments to Marriage is a valuable mine of information on the subject, but its conclusions are not very convincing. It has not given sufficient grounds for rejecting "parity of reasoning" or altering the present table of prohibited degrees. In any case those conclusions have not, so far, affected the law of the Church of England which remains as it was before and which all members of the Church of England are bound to obey.
In one respect this report is satisfactory. It opposes any attempt to restore the medieval system of dispensations which the Church of England abolished at the Reformation. The faculty of granting these dispensations is one of the chief means by which the Pope controls the bishops. The story of how Bishop Hefele was forced to accept the decrees of the Vatican Council illustrates this very clearly. He was deprived of his "faculties" and made to feel that his refusal to accept the Vatican decrees was causing many of his flock to live in sin.
Penance or Absolution is commonly regarded as one of the sacraments. Even Luther reckoned it with Baptism and the Eucharist. Our Lord gave to His Apostles the power to forgive sins in the words, "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosesoever sins
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ye retain, they are retained" (St. John 20:23). They were to do this, not in their own name, but in His. They were to be His ambassadors. What He gave to them was not merely the power to say to any sinner, "If you repent, God will forgive you", for any Christian might do that. It was the power to bestow forgiveness in the name of God and the right to decide whether it was to be given or refused. This power belongs only to the apostolic ministry and is bestowed on every priest at his ordination. It does not, however, mean that the misuse of such a power will be sanctioned by God; or that if a priest, who is necessarily liable to make mistakes, forgives someone who ought not to be forgiven or refuses forgiveness to someone who ought to have it, God will not revise his decision. The power of an ambassador is limited by the approval of his Sovereign, and the power of the priest by the love and justice of God.
The subject of this sacrament is any baptized person. The sins of the unbaptized are forgiven when they are baptized. It is not necessary to have been confirmed in order to receive absolution.
The outward sign consists of the confession of sins, the absolution given by the priest, and the penance which the sinner must perform as a condition of his forgiveness. Strictly speaking there is no "matter", nothing corresponding to the water in baptism. The repentance of the sinner is commonly spoken of as the matter; and this consists of contrition (sorrow for sin), confession, and amendment. The form in use in the Church of England is to be found in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick. Until about the twelfth century it was in the form of a prayer, not a declaration, as it still is in the Eastern churches. The minister of absolution must be a bishop or priest.
In the Roman Communion absolution given by a priest who has not been licensed to give it, or in a place where he has no jurisdiction (except to someone in danger of death), is held to be invalid. The Anglican Communion has no such rule. A priest ought not to give absolution or perform any other ministerial act outside his jurisdiction without leave. Absolution so given is irregular but not invalid.
The inward grace of absolution is the application of the infinite merits of Christ to sin committed after baptism. It is true that God
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will always forgive those who truly repent, and therefore sacramental absolution is not necessary for forgiveness. But though not necessary, it is of great value. The sinner is thereby assured, as he could be assured in no other way, that God has really forgiven him. Our Lord would not have given this power to His apostles unless He had meant it to be used, and the experience of multitudes of those who have used it has confirmed its value to those who use it with real repentance and faith.
Besides this, the act of confession to a fellow man deepens sorrow and shame for the sins committed, and the absolution gives special power to overcome them in the future. It also helps the sinner to understand that all sin of whatever kind committed by a member of the Church is a sin against the whole Christian community, so that every grave sin ought to be forgiven by the Church through her official representative, the priest. If the priest is an expert spiritual adviser, the penitent has the opportunity of receiving counsel which will enable him to treat his moral failings with the proper remedies. Moral sickness requires to be cured, and the remedy which will cure one kind of person will do great harm to another. It is the business of the priest to discover the cause of evil habits and to suggest the best way of curing them.
In the early Church grave sin was followed by confession in public and a long period of exclusion from the sacraments. This method is still used in some parts of the mission field. But in the fourth century it ceased to be universally practiced. The present practice of private confession to a priest began with the "soul friend" or private spiritual director in the Irish Church. It spread all over Christendom and was made universally compulsory in the Latin churches in the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It is also in theory, though in some countries not in practice, compulsory in the Orthodox Eastern Communion.
In the Anglican churches private confession and absolution are recommended in the Long Exhortation in the Communion Service and in the Visitation of the Sick. They have been continuously in use and were very common in the seventeenth century, but nearly
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died out in the eighteenth. They were revived, against strong opposition, by the leaders of the Oxford Movement and are now very widely used. The words in the Exhortation, "let him come to me, or some other discreet and learned minister", permit the penitent to choose his own confessor. Private confession in the Anglican Communion is voluntary; that is, no priest has the right to refuse communion to any one or to refuse to present him for confirmation solely on the ground that he will not make his confession to a priest.
The penitent is bound as a condition of absolution to undo as far as is possible the wrong he has done to anyone. If, for instance, he has stolen anything or cheated anyone, he must make restoration. Apart from this the penance is intended to help him to deepen his sorrow and to amend his life in future. It is not a satisfaction for sin because nothing that we can do can be set against our sins as an equivalent.
No priest should hear the confessions of others unless he has made his own confession; but every priest with cure of souls may at any time be called upon to hear a confession and therefore ought to prepare himself to exercise that part of his ministry. He must be "discreet and learned" that is, he should be well trained in moral and ascetic theology. Otherwise he should not attempt to give counsel for it may do more harm than good. He is bound to absolute secrecy by the seal of confession which covers the name of the penitent, everything that he has said, and everything which may possibly lead to the discovery of anything that has been told in confession. The priest is not to attempt to take control of the penitent,s life. Like a medical doctor, he can only give advice, not commands; but the penitent is responsible if he disobeys that advice. The confessor has just so much power over the penitent as the penitent chooses to give him, and he should train the penitent to depend not on his or her confessor but on God.
He will be wise always to hear confessions in the open church, especially those of women (except, of course, in the case of sick persons), and always to have some trustworthy person present in the church, but out of earshot, in case the penitent becomes hysterical or tries to blackmail him.
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The Unction or Anointing of the Sick is founded on the authority of St. James 5:14-16 supported by St. Mark 6:13. Its purpose is the restoration of the sick to health of body, mind, and spirit.
The subject of this sacrament is a baptized person who is seriously ill. It does not convey "character" or permanent status, and there is no reason why it should not be bestowed more than once even in the same illness; but it should not be repeated unless a fresh crisis occurs for it has not the nature of food but of medicine.
The "matter" is pure olive oil which is placed on the sick person,s forehead by means of cotton wool. The oil should be blessed by the bishop of the diocese or his suffragan (not any bishop, but only one who has jurisdiction). Besides ecclesiastical propriety, the blessing by the bishop gives a certain prestige to the anointing and helps the recovery of the sick person. But if for any reason it cannot be blessed by the bishop, a priest may bless it. In the Orthodox Communion the oil is blessed by seven priests.
The "form" is a prayer for recovery. The 1549 Prayer Book included a form for unction of the sick, but it was dropped in 1552 under the influence of Bucer. Since that time there has been no form for unction in the Prayer Book. It was not restored in the 1928 revision because the subject was still under consideration by the Lambeth Conference. But the Lambeth Conference of 1930 gave its sanction to a form for unction previously issued by the Convocations which is now the proper service to be used in the Anglican communion.
The minister of unction is a bishop or priest. St. James speaks of the BD,F$bJ,D@4, the priests, as the ministers of unction.
The inward grace of unction is the strengthening of the spirit which has been weakened by the sickness of the body. The body and spirit are so closely connected that whatever affects one affects
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the other. Thus the weakness of the body weakens the spirit, and the strengthening of the spirit helps the body to recover. Another effect of unction is the forgiveness of sins, but it should ordinarily be preceded by confession and absolution.
Some theologians have maintained that unction is not properly a sacrament because its effect is only on the body. The answer to this is that we cannot draw so sharp a distinction between effects on the body and effects on the spirit; and that even when the sick person does not recover, the spiritual effect of unction is valuable, as is shown by experience.
The tradition in Latin Christendom that the purpose of unction is to prepare us for death is not supported by Scripture or by the ancient rites. It is a medieval abuse and is declared in Article 25 "to have grown of the corrupt following of the Apostles". Nevertheless, though the chief purpose of unction is restoration to health (spiritual and mental as well as bodily), it also has the effect, when the person who receives it is going to die, of strengthening him to prepare for death. But it should not be called "extreme unction". Precisely what this adjective means is uncertain; but even if it only means "the last of the unctions", it has no meaning in the Anglican communion in which there are no other unctions (except the unction of a King at his coronation).1
The unction of the sick is not to be confused either with "faith healing" or with "psychological treatment", and there is nothing magical or miraculous about it. It is a sacrament of the Church and can only be administered to the members, and by the priests, of the Church. Its effect is to strengthen the sick man in spirit and in body. It does not necessarily cure him, and it is of course in no way a substitute for the work of the physician.
The gift of healing (I Cor. 12:28), though similar in its effects to the sacrament of Unction, is not to be confused with it. Every
1
Unction was first called "extreme" in the ninth century. Orthodox Eastern theologians object strongly to this adjective. Chardon, the Benedictine author of History of the Sacraments (1695-1771), calls it "an abuse produced by an abuse". See Harris in Liturgy and Worship, p. 537.
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priest has the right and the duty of administering unction. But the gift of healing is a special gift bestowed on some laymen as well as on some priests, and even on persons who are not Christians. There are "faith healing" sects which devote themselves chiefly to healing. Faith healers who forbid the sick to use ordinary scientific means of recovery are to be avoided. The Church always requires the fullest use of medical and surgical knowledge. The priest and the healer are to cooperate with the physician and the surgeon (Ecclus. 38:1-14).
"Psychological treatment" differs from both the sacrament of unction and from spiritual healing. It is a scientific method of which every priest who attempts to help the sick ought to know something, though he ought not to practice it himself unless he has been fully trained. For a full discussion of the whole subject, and the kindred subjects of exorcism and the treatment of neurosis and insanity, see Dr. Charles Harris in Liturgy and Worship, pp. 472-540. It is one of the functions of the Church to heal the sick, but no one should attempt to do so unless he has been thoroughly trained both in the spiritual and the physical aspects of disease.
The doctrine of the Last Things (J §FP"J") is called Eschatology. These belong to the future and to a world which is outside our present experience. We have no means of knowing anything about them except Divine revelation. Reason fails us here, and God has not revealed to us much about the Last Things. The few passages of Scripture which refer to them are obscure. We do not know, for instance, whether the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is intended to give us information about what happens after death, or whether it assumes the contemporary Jewish beliefs in order to teach a moral lesson. But though revelation tells us little, speculation has always been ready to fill the gaps in our knowledge. We cannot accept the teaching of the Fathers where it goes beyond Scripture. We have no reason to suppose that they knew more about
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the Last Things than we do. Still less can we accept the speculations of later divines, especially as differences about the Last Things have been one of the causes of schism. On this subject more than any other we ought not to assert what has not been revealed to us.
The "Four Last Things" are Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. But first something must be said about the immortality of the spirit.
That man consists of spirit (B<,Ø:") as well as body and animal life or soul (RLPZ) and that the spirit survives death is believed by all except materialists. But the necessary immortality of the soul, or more accurately of the spirit, as taught by some of the Greek philosophers, is not a Christian doctrine. It does not appear to be taught anywhere in the Bible. The following are the principal arguments put forward in favor of it.
Most men have believed that the spirit survives death; and if it survives death, there seems to be no reason why it should ever perish. General belief gives a certain presumption in favor of it. Those who believe in a righteous God (which is a doctrine almost confined to those who accept the revelation to the Hebrew prophets) must believe that the injustices of this life are set right in another; but it does not follow that the other life is to last for ever. Again, the aspiration of man to union with God is not fulfilled in this life; but man does not possess any other powers which he cannot satisfy. His aspiration to union with God must be capable of satisfaction, or else it would not exist; and as it cannot be satisfied in time because God is eternal, it must be satisfied out of time. Therefore the human spirit must be immortal or eternal.
It was a favorite argument of the philosophers that the spirit was "simple substance", not made up of parts; and that since decay and death arise from decomposition, the spirit of man which could not suffer from decomposition was eternal.
An argument of a different and much more doubtful kind is the testimony from psychic phenomena. It is impossible to find any certain test of the genuineness of messages which those who receive them believe to come from the spirits of the dead. Christian tradition suggests that if they are really messages from another world, they do not come from the spirits of the dead but from devils who are trying to deceive us. But even if such messages were really
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what they are said to be, they would not and could not prove that the spirit is immortal but only that it survives death.
It appears, then, that the arguments for the necessary immortality of the human spirit are not convincing. It is quite consistent with the Christian Faith to hold that the spirit of man is not immortal or indestructible, but that God has given it immortality as a privilege subject to certain conditions.
What we believe in as Christians is not the "immortality of the soul" but the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. St. Paul taught that the resurrection of the body was a necessary part of the Gospel (I Cor. 15:13-17). St. John taught that our Lord had promised eternal life to those who believed in Him (St. John 10:28; etc.).
The Last things begin with Death, the one event in the future which we know will happen. We believe that we shall be judged, but we know we shall die (unless the Last Judgment takes place in our lifetime).
Death is the separation of body and spirit (II Cor. 5:1-4). The scientist regards death only as it affects the body. The Christian regards it as it affects the whole man. Death rends the human person in two. The body is not, as Plato taught, a garment which the spirit puts off at death, but a necessary part of the person. To be deprived of the body is to suffer loss. It is the "wages of sin" (Rom. 6:23). For this reason Christians reject sentimental ideas about death. It is not the end of "life,s fitful fever".1 It is not "the gate of life".2 It is the punishment of sin, and must be regarded seriously and solemnly for that reason.
Moreover, death is the end of our probation and is followed immediately by the Particular Judgment (II Cor. 6:2; Heb. 9:27; St. Luke 16:23). The brothers of the rich man in the parable were still alive, but he had been judged. If we are guided by this parable, the particular judgment follows death and is not postponed till the end of the world. The Bible tells us nothing of any "second "chance". As far as we know, we are to be judged by our conduct in this life, account being taken of the knowledge and the opportunities given to us. We should be very foolish to assume that we shall have any second chance given us after death.
1
Shakespeare, Macbeth, iii. 2.2
C. F. Gellert: Hymns Ancient and Modern, 140; English Hymnal, 134.
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Death is to last only for a time (I Cor. 15:23). The body and the spirit will not be permanently separated by death. The punishment will come to an end. The body is to be restored. We believe in the Resurrection of the Body.
We know nothing of the condition of those who are condemned by the particular judgment. St. Luke 16:23-24 tells us that the rich man was in torment. But the word translated "hell" is Hades, not Gehenna; the abode of the dead, not of the lost. We do not know whether that torment was to be permanent or how long it was to last. We are not even certain that our Lord meant, in this parable, to reveal anything about the state of the dead. It is possible that He merely took the current belief of the Jews as a scene for the parable.
We are told a little more about those who will have been acquitted. Since this life is our probation, they are safe from eternal banishment from God,s presence; and they are free from temptation and from sin (Rm. 6:7) since it is these that constitute our probation. St. Matt. 22:32; Heb. 12:1, 23; and Rev. 6:9-11 imply that they are conscious, not asleep as some have supposed. They live in comfort and peace (Rev. 14:13: cf. Wisdom 3:1 which, being in the Apocrypha, has not the authority of revelation). They are, at any rate to some extent, united with our Lord (I Thess. 4:14; I Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23).
This condition is commonly called the "Intermediate State". We must not speak of disembodied spirits as being in any "place" or refer to them as anywhere. We do not know what their relation to space is.
It seems probable that their condition is one of continual progress. Whether any of them see the "Beatific Vision" of God is a disputed question. The early Fathers seem to have taught that no one would see the Beatific Vision until after the resurrection of the body, and that all the saints, even the Blessed Virgin, were still in an imperfect condition. Prayers were offered for them as they still are in the Orthodox Communion. It was held that this condition will remain
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until the general resurrection when, having recovered their bodies, they will be admitted into Heaven, the state of glory, which will include the Beatific Vision. Meanwhile, they are at rest in Paradise (the garden). They are in Christ. They are making progress towards perfection, and they are helped by the prayers of their friends on earth who ask God to give them refreshment, light, and peace. Paradise is distinguished from Heaven. The former is the temporary abode of the blessed dead, the latter their permanent home. The former is the state of rest, the latter the state of glory. This was the theory taught, with minor variations, by the earlier Fathers, followed until recently by most Anglican divines. It seems to be supported by our Lord,s words to the dying robber, "Today thou shalt be with Me in Paradise" (St. Luke 23:43). One would suppose that if anyone needed purgation after death, it would be the one man in the Bible who repented on his death bed; but our Lord promised him immediate admission to Paradise which, if we are to build any theory on this text, is neither a condition of pain (Purgatory) nor a condition of glory (Heaven), but a condition of rest (Paradise).
But in Latin Christendom quite a different theory has been developed. According to this theory, since we shall not be fit for Heaven when we die, we shall require purification after death. This purification will be very painful. According to medieval teaching, it will only differ from Hell in being for a time, not eternal. The condition of purification is called Purgatory. Belief in it was made a dogma by the Council of Trent.
It is held that the spirits of the great majority of the faithful will enter Purgatory immediately after death and the Particular Judgment. A few will escape Purgatory altogether and go straight to Heaven, with which this theory identifies Paradise. The rest will remain in Purgatory for a shorter or longer time until the temporal punishment due to the sins which they have committed in this world has been accomplished. Their time in Purgatory may be shortened by the prayers and especially by the Masses offered by the faithful. These prayers and Masses may be paid for. From this arises the enormous organization of Masses for the dead supported by appeals for pity for the poor souls in Purgatory, and of indulgences granted by the Pope which may be applied for the benefit of those in Purgatory. The immense influence of this system on popular religion is well known to those who have lived in any Romanist country. "Purga-
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tory pick purse", as our reformers called it, is still so deeply rooted that Rome cannot be expected to alter the doctrine or reform the system which is founded upon it.
There is no Scriptural evidence whatever for any belief in Purgatory. The words "We went through fire and water, and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place" (Psalm 66:12) refer to the Exodus from Egypt and not to the future of man after death. Therefore the dogma of Trent, "There is a purgatory, and the souls therein detained are assisted by the prayers of the faithful, and especially by the holy sacrifice of the Mass", must be rejected as a dogma. It is not held by any part of the Church outside the Roman Communion.
The developed doctrine of Purgatory appears to be derived from three sources, one rational and two speculative. It is a reasonable opinion that we shall require purification after death; and that, as purification and getting rid of bad habits is usually painful in this life, it will also be painful hereafter. St. Augustine held that this opinion was "not incredible", and we may well agree.
Belief in purgatorial fire appears to have been first taught explicitly by St. Gregory the Great. He seems to have thought that nightmares which took the form of visions of the future life were Divine revelations, and by means of his Dialogues they became part of the traditional teaching of the Church.
The fires of Purgatory had by the time of the Schoolmen become a tradition which they dared not criticize. They combined it with the doctrine that every sin must be paid for. They held that our Lord had freed men from suffering eternal punishment for sin. The temporal punishment remained to be undergone either in this life or in Purgatory. It is this third element in the system which is rejected by Article 22 as "the Romish doctrine of Purgatory". The belief that God demands an equivalent for every sin has no basis in Scripture and is contrary to the Christian doctrine of God. Such passages as "Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing" (St. Matt. 5:26) refer, as the context shows, to human creditors, not to God,s dealings with His children (cf. St. Matt. 18:27).
The doctrine of Purgatory does not offer any one a "second chance". Orthodox, Romanists, and Calvinists, whether they believe in Purgatory or not, believe that all who are there are already saved and will reach Heaven at last.
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If Purgatory exists at all, its purpose must be to reform the sinner, to free him from evil habits, and to make him fit for Heaven. It is not an extension of our probation.
The practice of prayer for the dead does not depend upon belief in Purgatory. There is no certain case of it in Scripture except II Maccabees 12:44 in the Apocrypha. II Tim. 1:18 is probably, but not certainly, a prayer for the dead. It cannot therefore be regarded as dogma necessary to salvation, but it has been practiced in every part of the Church and in every age. It has never been rejected by the Church of England, and even the civil courts have recognized that it is lawful. It is implied by the Prayer Book, especially in the words "that we and all Thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins", and is quite explicit in the Revised Prayer Book of 1928 in the Liturgy and in the Funeral Service and other places.1
The objections raised to it in some quarters are the result of the eschatological theory of Calvin. He was so violently opposed to the abuses of the doctrine of purgatory that he denied the existence of any "intermediate state", and taught that all men went immediately after death to Heaven if elect, and to Hell if reprobate; and that in either case prayer was useless and was therefore forbidden. There seems, however, to be no basis for this doctrine in Scripture. It is contrary to the tradition of the Church and does not appear to be reasonable. Most human beings are a mixture of good and evil and do not seem to be fit either for Heaven of for Hell when they die. Calvin and his followers thought (as indeed their medieval predecessors did) that only a small part of mankind would reach Heaven, and that the great majority were doomed to eternal punishment in Hell. This severe belief is probably due to St. Augustine,s interpretation of such passages as St. Matt. 7:13.
1
It is found in epitaphs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in literature in such unexpected places as Tennyson,s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1851), which ends with the words "God accept him, Christ receive him".
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The clause in the Apostles, Creed, "I believe in the Communion of Saints", is only found in Latin creeds, and its meaning is uncertain. It may mean "the partaking of holy persons" (subjective genitive), or "the partaking of holy things" (objective genitive). One medieval primer makes it refer to the Holy Communion or "housel". But it is usually understood in the first sense.
Communion is a sharing in love and prayer and is a necessary result of the spiritual unity of the Church. The family of which our Lord is the Head includes all baptized Christians, both living and departed. It is He that binds together the living and the dead. The point at which we meet is the altar where we join "with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" in the worship of God.
If the dead are conscious, as seems to be implied by St. Matt. 22:32, we must believe that they pray for us (Rev. 6:9-11); and as we have seen, it has always been the practice of the Church to pray for them, as it was the practice of the Jews in our Lord,s time. Our fellowship is based on mutual love and prayer. We are compassed about continually by a great cloud of those who have borne witness to the faith (Heb. 12:1) and who form with us "the general assembly and the church of the first born" (Heb. 12:23). Even the Puritan Richard Baxter could write:
"In the communion of saints
Is wisdom, safety, and delight,
And when my heart declines and faints,
It,s raised by their heat and light.
Still we are centered all in Thee,
Members, though distant, of one Head;
In the same family we be,
By the same faith and spirit led.
Before Thy throne we daily meet
As joint petitioners to Thee;
In spirit we each other greet,
And shall again each other see."
English Hymnal, 401.
Whether we may go further than this and address the blessed dead directly is a disputed point. The Roman Communion, as we have
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seen, distinguishes sharply between the saints in Heaven commemorated on All Saints, Day and the souls in Purgatory commemorated on All Souls, Day; and teaches its members to pray to the former who no longer need prayers, but for the latter who cannot pray for themselves. The Eastern churches make no such distinction but pray both to and for all the blessed dead alike. The Anglican Communion has always recognized, though very cautiously, prayer for the dead, but has never since the Reformation given any kind of recognition to prayer to the dead, or Invocation of Saints. Till recently it was almost impossible to find any single Anglican writer in favor of it. All Saints, Day has always kept its place in our calendar. All Souls, Day was informally recognized in the seventeenth century in the Oxford calendar printed with the Archbishop of Canterbury,s licence,1 and it was replaced in the English calendar at the revision of 1928. But the Anglican Communion does not sanction belief in Purgatory, and we cannot draw a sharp distinction between the saints in Heaven and the souls in Purgatory. We think that all alike are in Paradise, and that all alike both pray for us and are benefitted by our prayers.
There are three forms of Invocation of Saints: Comprecation or Indirect Invocation; Direct Invocation; and Invocation for Benefits.
Comprecation is prayer to God that we may have our share in the intercessions of the blessed dead. It is common in the ancient liturgies, and there can be no possible theological objection to it. But some people think it not direct enough for them.
Direct invocation is a request to the saints to pray for us. The best known example is the sentence added in the sixteenth century to the devotion known as the "Angelus" (which had till then been entirely in the words of Scripture): "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death".
Such invocation is not properly speaking a prayer. It is not a request which could be addressed to God, but a request which from its very nature can only be addressed to a fellow creature. There is, however, nothing even approaching Scriptural authority for it; so
1
Probably because it was the "feast of title" of All Souls, College.
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that though the Council of Trent made a dogma, the Anglican churches can never accept it as more than a tenable opinion. Apart from popular inscriptions found in the catacombs, there seems to be no evidence for it earlier than the fourth century. Then it spread very rapidly just at the time when great numbers of pagans were coming into the Church, and both religious and moral standards were being lowered by pagan influence. It is only too certain that multitudes regarded the saints as Christian substitutes for the gods, and that in more than one country the old popular paganism continues even till today under a Christian façade. Clearly it is better to pray to the Blessed Virgin than to Isis, and to St. George rather than to Perseus, but it is not surprising that all kinds of pagan superstitions became mixed with the Christian faith. In particular the alleged appearance of saints to particular persons and the establishment of pilgrimages to the place where the saint appeared (Walsingham is a medieval instance, and Lourdes a modern one) are a survival of Mediterranean paganism.1 Some of the arguments put forward in defense of invocation of saints only increase the objections to it. Thus it is said that in order to approach a King, one asks for the favor of one of his courtiers; to which we can only reply that God is not that kind of King, and that He is nearer and more accessible to us than any saint can be. Another argument is that as we ask our friends here to pray for us, we may ask our friends who are dead to pray for us. But we do not ask our friends here several times a day to pray for us, and we do not ask people to pray for us unless we are sure they can hear our request.
On the other hand, the direct invocation of saints has greatly strengthened in those who use it the belief in the communion of saints and of the unseen world. Many of them tell us that by asking the saints to pray for them they come to know them as friends. We cannot be sure that this is only fancy. It may be as real as any other religious experience. Direct invocation of saints has been practiced by most of Christendom for sixteen centuries. It is not one of the Romanist additions to the faith, for it is older than any of them. We must not reject it because it is liable to abuse, for every devotional practice is liable to abuse.2
1
The story of the appearance of Castor and Pollux at the Battle of Lake Regillus has many Christian parallels even in modern times.2
The common argument that invocation of saints is contrary to the belief that Christ is our only Mediator appears to be due to a misunderstanding. To ask the departed to pray for us is no more a denial that our Lord is our only Mediator than to ask our friends in this world to pray for us. But the argument may be fairly used against such extravagant beliefs as that the Blessed Virgin is the Neck of the Church (sanctioned by more than one Pope; see p. 77).
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Invocation of saints is the greatest practical difference between the Anglican and the Orthodox Communions. Orthodox worship is full of it. Anglican worship has been carefully stripped of every trace of it.1 If the Anglican churches were to restore the invocation of saints, it would certainly do as much as anything to bring about intercommunion.
But could they?
The chief objection to the invocation of saints is that we do not know whether the saints can hear us. I have often discussed this with Orthodox friends and have never been given any satisfactory answer, nor does Darwell Stone nor any other Anglican defender of the practice give any satisfactory answer either. Scripture tells us nothing. The Fathers knew no more than we do. The religious experience of individuals cannot be tested and does not convince those who have not shared it. Most members of the Anglican Communion are not willing to address the saints directly on the ground that they prefer to devote the little time and power that they have to speaking to God who certainly does hear us, rather than to the saints for whose power to hear us we have no evidence.
They do not condemn those who wish to invoke the saints or assert positively that the saints do not hear us, but they cannot be sure that they do. They claim freedom to regard the question as open, and they think that the Anglican churches are right to exclude direct invocation of saints from the public services so that no one is compelled to practice it. Even for the sake of union with the Eastern churches the Anglican Communion cannot surrender this freedom or assert anything to be true for the truth of which there is no convincing evidence.
This position is precisely that of George Herbert (1593-1633) in his poem, "To all Angels and Saints":
"O glorious spirits, who after all your bands,
See the smooth face of God, without a frown
Or strict commands;
Where everyone is king, and hath his crown,
If not upon his head, yet in his hands;
1
The address to Ananias, Azarias and Misael in the Benedicite is not invocation but poetical apostrophe. A similar address is paid to "all beasts and cattle"!
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Not out of envy of maliciousness
Do I forbear to crave your special aid:
I would address
My vows to thee most gladly, blessed Maid,
And Mother of my God, in my distress.
Thou are the holy mine whence came the gold,
The great restorative for all decay
In young and old;
Thou are the cabinet where the jewel lay:
Chiefly to thee would I my soul unfold.
But now, alas! I dare not; for our King
Whom we do all jointly adore and praise,
Bids no such thing;
And where His pleasure no injunction lays"
Tis your own case"ye never move a wing.
Although then others court you, if ye know
What,s done on Earth, we shall not fare the worse,
Who do not so;
Since we are ever ready to disburse
If anyone our Master,s hand can show."
The third degree of invocation of saints is the request not merely for prayers but for particular benefits. Romanist theologians teach that the saints can only help us by praying for us, and that every direct request is assumed to be a request for prayer. But a very little acquaintance with popular Romanist devotions shows that this assumption cannot be seriously maintained. Those who pray to the saints expect much more than their prayers. For instance, those who ask St. Antony of Padua to find what they have lost do not expect St. Antony merely to pray that it may be found. Why should not any other saint do that? The whole system of applying to particular saints with particular requests is really a survival of polytheism from which in its lower forms it cannot be distinguished, and all that the theologians say cannot alter what the people do.
This kind of invocation of saints is certainly forbidden by the English Church. It is disputed whether the "Romish doctrine concerning invocation of saints", forbidden in Article 22, means the medieval abuses (Newman in Tract 90; Darwell Stone, Invocation of Saints) or the dogma of Trent (John Wordsworth, Invocation of Saints and the 22nd Article; E. J. Bicknell, Thirty-Nine Articles). In either case it is certain that the English Church forbids all invocation which goes beyond the simple "Pray for us"; that it does not encourage even "Pray for us"; and that those who
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practice direct invocation of saints practice it on their own responsibility and have no right to force it on their fellow Churchmen or to teach it as more than, at most, a private opinion which a member of the Church is free to accept or reject.
Though the Blessed Virgin is undoubtedly the first of saints and occupies a unique position as God-bearer (Theotókos), we cannot draw the distinction between her and the other saints so sharply as to forbid invocation of other saints but allow it when addressed to her. Invocation of saints, whether of the Blessed Virgin or any other, is a matter of private opinion and ought to remain so. No one ought to be either compelled or forbidden to practice it, and for this reason it has no place in Anglican liturgical worship.
Approach to the spirits of the dead by other means is prohibited absolutely both by Scripture and by every part of the Church in every age. Necromancy, the attempt to communicate with the dead by physical means, has been practiced ever since the dawn of history but is forbidden both in the Old and the New Testaments (Deut. 18:10-11; Acts 19:19; Gal. 1:8-9, 5:20; I Tim. 4:1; Rev. 21:8; etc.) One reason for this is that there is no means of being sure that the messages which are supposed to come from the dead really do come from them, while there is good reason to believe that these messages, if they come from outside this world (which is doubtful), come from devils who use them to deceive mankind. This opinion is supported by the disastrous results to faith, morals, and intellect which only too often follow attempts to communicate with the dead, and by the fact that no message of spiritual or moral value has ever been received by such means. Modern necromancy, or "spiritualism", with its apparatus of mediums, "controls", table turning, ouija boards, seances, etc., however tempting it may be to the bereaved, is a dangerous error which no Christian should approach even in jest. Our fellowship with the departed is spiritual, not psychic. Our point of contact with them is not in the seance room but at the altar.
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That our Lord would return to earth was believed universally in the early Church and made an article of the Creed: "He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead". He appears, according to the usual interpretation, to have foretold His second coming (St. Mark 14:62; St. Matt. 24:30; St. John 5:28). In Acts 1:11 His coming again is foretold by the two angels to the apostles. St. Paul expected our Lord,s coming again in his own lifetime (I Thess. 3:17, 4:16-17, 5:2; II Thess. 1:7, 2:1; I Cor. 4:5, 11:26, 15:23-26; Phil. 3:20, 4:5; I Tim. 6:14: cf. Acts 17:31). This coming again is expressed in the language of "apocalyptic". The Jewish "apocalypses" were books about the Last Things, of which books there were many in the first century, and of which Daniel and Revelation are the best known examples. Apocalyptic language may appear strange to us, but it conveys a truth which is a necessary part of the Christian faith. The Second Coming of our Lord is certain, but it lies outside the order of the world as we know it. Our Lord said that He did not know when it would be, and it is useless to speculate on what form it will take.
The Second Coming of Christ is to be at the end of this world. We are not to expect it to be followed by a golden age on earth. This is the "millenarian" heresy which the Church has always condemned. Whatever may be the meaning of Rev. 20:2-3, it either does not mean this or, if it does, we are not to regard it as revealed truth; for it was because of this passage that the Church long hesitated to place the Revelation in the Canon of Scripture. The idea, common in the nineteenth century, that we are to expect "the kingdom of heaven" as a golden age at some future time on this earth is contrary alike to Scripture, tradition, and reason. Christian tradition bids us expect not a golden age but the supreme persecution in the days of the Antichrist. This tradition is based on II Thess. 2:3, I St. John 2:18, 4:7, which probably refer to the compulsory worship of the Roman Emperor with which the Church was then threatened. But we certainly have no evidence
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for the optimistic view that the rule of Christ is destined to prevail over the whole earth. All our experience shows that progress can only be made by constant effort, that relaxation of effort leads at once to the loss of all that has been gained, and that the majority of men is not willing, and is never likely to be willing, to make the sacrifice of self which the service of our Lord requires. We expect the complete coming of His kingdom, not in this world, but in another (see also pp. 2523).
The Second Coming of Christ, then, is to be outside of space and time. We do not know whether this earth is to become colder until life on it is impossible as the scientists tell us, or whether it will be destroyed by fire as is prophesied in II Peter 3:10 (which is quite possible astronomically, for heavenly bodies are known to have been destroyed in this way). The Second Coming of Christ is to be accompanied by the resurrection of the dead and the General Judgment. We are warned by our Lord Himself to be always ready for it. It may take place at any time. God may decide to bring His material creation to an end or refashion it in some other way. We do not know. All that we do know is that we are to be constantly ready for judgment.
The bodies of the dead will rise again as our Lord Himself taught (St. Mark 12:25; St. Luke 20:37). St. Paul placed this doctrine in the center of his teaching (I Thess. 4:16; I Cor. 15:13 ff.; Rom 1:4; Acts 23:6, 26:23). He argued that "if the dead are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised, and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain" I Cor. 15:13). One of the chief topics of the Fourth Gospel is the eternal life which our Lord promised to His disciples. But eternal life implies the possession of a body. To be without one,s body is to be dead.
The body which is to be given back to us at the general resurrection will not be the same as our present body; for St. Paul tells us it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, it is sown a "psychic"1 body, it is raised a spiritual body (I Cor. 15:42-44). But it will have some connection with our present body of what kind we do not know. We shall be able to recognize one another. It is for this reason that Christians treat even the dead
1
The word translated "natural" is the adjective of RLPZ, and means "belonging to the animal life".
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body with reverence. Christian sentiment is opposed to cremation, but not Christian principle. We do not believe, as the ancient Egyptians did, that the fate of the spirit depends on what happens to the body or that a body which is burned or eaten by wild beasts will not rise again. But such pagan practices as "scattering the ashes" are entirely contrary to the Christian spirit of reverence for that which has been, and in some way unknown to us will be again, the temple of the Holy Ghost (I Cor. 6:19). (See English Hymnal, 352).
The resurrection body will be incorruptible, immortal, glorious, full of power (I Cor. 15:43). When we are clothed with it (II Cor. 5:4), we shall be fit to stand before God. The general resurrection will be followed by the General Judgment.
The Judgment is presented to us in the form of a picture. Such an event can only be described in symbolic terms and those of the most general kind.
Our Lord Himself is to be the Judge (St. Matt. 16:27, 25:32; Acts 17:31). He is especially suited for this office because He is both God and Man (St. John 5:27). As God He knows everything and is absolutely just (which no one who did not know everything could be). As Man He knows from His own experience what those who come before Him have had to face and can therefore be merciful.
The New Testament tells us that all men are to be judged and also angels (St. Matt. 25:41; I Cor. 6:3; Rev. 20:10; Jude 6; II Peter 2:4). Even if it had not been revealed that all men would be judged, we should still believe it on rational grounds. It is a necessary consequence of belief in the justice of God. It was believed by many heathen nations and was expressly taught by Plato.
The General Judgment differs from the Particular Judgment because it will be public and will be passed on all men, those outside the covenant as well as those inside. All will be judged according to what they have done, what they have omitted to do, and what opportunity they have had of doing otherwise. Those who knew the revelation of God will be judged by that revelation. Those who did not will be judged by what they did know (St. Matt. 25:34-46).
The judgment will be absolutely just, and it will be final. Our Lord is God as well as Man and will give judgment as God. "These shall go away into eternal punishment; but the righteous into eternal life: (St. Matt. 25:46).
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The word Hell originally meant "the hidden place". Hela was the Norse goddess of the dead. It is used in the English versions of the New Testament to translate two words: Hades and Gehenna. It is always important to observe in which sense the word is used.1 In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the rich man was in Hades, not Gehenna (St. Luke 16:23). Capernaum is to be cast down to Hades, not Gehenna (St. Matt. 11:23). But when our Lord said, "It is better for thee to enter into Heaven with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into Hell", the word is Gehenna (St. Mark 9:47; also St. Matt. 5:22).
Hades was the name of the Greek god of the dead. His abode was called "the house of Hades" and later simply "Hades". Thus Hades in the New Testament came to be the Greek word for the Hebrew "Sheol", the dusty region beneath the earth to which the earlier Hebrews believed their spirit ("nephesh", identified with the breath) would go when it left the body.
Hades therefore became the name for the intermediate state of the dead between death and the General Judgment. It included Paradise, Purgatory, and Limbo. (Medieval theologians believed that besides Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell (Gehenna) there was the Limbo of the Fathers where the righteous men were who lived before our Lord,s death. The "spirits in prison" to whom He preached (I Peter 3:19) were there, and they were delivered by Him and transferred to Paradise so that the Limbo of the Fathers was empty. There was also the Limbo of children occupied by the spirits of unbaptized infants. As belief in Limbo is mere speculation, we need not consider it further.)
Hades was often translated by "Hell" in Tudor English. "He descended into Hell" in the Apostles, Creed represents "ad inferos", Hades. It was only Calvin who held that our Lord went to the abode of the lost, for he did not believe in Hades but only in Gehenna and Heaven.
Gehenna was originally the valley of Hinnom on the western side
1
"Gehenna" occurs seven times in the New Testament, "Hades" eight times.
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of Jerusalem. Because this valley, which had been used for the worship of idols, became the rubbish heap of the city where large fires were always burning, the name Gehenna came to be applied to the abode of the Devil and his angels and of condemned spirits of men, which was believed to be a place of everlasting fire. In the New Testament there are many references to this belief, and most Christians have always believed that those who were condemned at the General Judgment would be cast into fiery torments and suffer them eternally. We must now consider how far this belief is necessary to the faith.
It is God,s will and purpose that all men should be saved and have eternal life (I Tim. 2:4, 4:10; St. John 3:16-19; II Peter 3:9). But He will not save them against their will. He has given them free will, and it is His unchangeable purpose to preserve that free will. If man has free will at all, he must be capable of continuing to misuse it to the end. In that case God has failed with him. Our Lord has died in vain for him, which was the most bitter part of His sufferings. But it was inevitable if man was to have free will at all. God Himself could not have given man free will which should not be free, for as we have seen, God cannot do what is contrary to His own nature (pp. 29, 140).
Every person, therefore, whether man or angel, who has free will has with it the possibility for final disobedience and impenitence; and the impenitent cannot be in Heaven. For Heaven is not a place but a state. The impenitent, by his very impenitence, is in Hell wherever he is. Even Marlow saw this when he made Mephistopheles say to Dr. Faustus, "Myself am Hell".
So the possibility of final impenitence and permanent banishment from the presence of God, from all that is good, and true, and beautiful, is the necessary consequence of belief in free will, of the belief that morality and holiness exist, of the belief that we are rational persons.
And the conclusion of reason is fully supported by revelation. Our Lord said, "It is better for thee to enter into life with one hand, than having two hands to depart into unquenchable fire" (St. Mark 9:43); "Then shall He say to those on the left hand, Depart from Me ye cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (St. Matt. 25:41). Cf. St. Matt. 3:12. Our Lord also
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said of Judas Iscariot, "Good were it for that man if he had never been born" (St. Mark 14:21). "He that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost hath no forgiveness for ever, but is guilty of an eternal sin" (St. Mark 3:29).
Jude 7, "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire", and Rev. 20:10, 21:8, which explicitly speak of eternal punishment, may be regarded, perhaps, as representing Jewish rather than Christian teaching. But apart from these passages the New Testament certainly teaches that it is possible for a man to be finally lost. St. Peter says, "If the righteous is scarcely saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" (I Peter 4:13), and Hebrews 6:4, "It is impossible to renew again unto repentance those who have once been enlightened ... and have fallen away". Cf. also the explanation of the parable of the wheat and the tares (St. Matt. 13:41).
Universalism the belief that all men will necessarily be saved is contrary both to Scripture and reason, and has been condemned as a heresy by the Church at the 5th Ecumenical Council. It was because the alternative was so terrible that our Lord died to save us from it.
But though we must believe that the possibility of final and permanent condemnation lies before us and must treat our earthly life and conduct with the seriousness which this possibility requires, we must not include in this belief ideas which do not necessarily belong to it.
God condemns no one to Hell. He does not intend anyone to be lost (I Tim. 2:4; II Peter 3:9). He was willing to die Himself rather than that anyone should be lost. In many minds the remains of ancestral Calvinism still unconsciously suggest that belief in Hell means belief that God is a tyrant who condemns some of His creatures to eternal torture; but the orthodox teaching of the Church and the Bible does not support any such belief.
The Church does not require us to believe that any particular person is lost or even that any one will necessarily be lost at all, except the devil and his angels (St. Matt. 25:41), and perhaps Judas Iscariot (St. Mark 14:21; St. John 17:12).
Sentimental pity for those who have never had a chance is quite out of place here. Hell is not for those who have never had a chance (St. Matt. 25:44; St. Luke 12:48) but, as the passages from the New Testament quoted above show, for those who have had every chance and have deliberately thrown it away.
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No one will be condemned because he knew nothing of Christ. St. Matt. 25:32 ff. shows that the heathen ("all the nations") will be judged by the extent to which they followed the light that was given them.
Some have imagined that even in Hell there may be mitigation of punishment (punishment, indeed is not the right word, for the purpose of punishment is reform), but we have no evidence for speculations about this.
We do not know how St. Paul,s saying "God shall be all in all" (I Cor. 15:28) can be reconciled with belief in the possibility of final condemnation. It cannot mean that there is no such possibility which would be contrary both to Scripture and reason.
So far as we know, our fate for eternity depends upon this life. If a "second chance" is given to any one, we have no evidence for it; and it would be the height of rashness to presume upon it. The kind of person who hopes for a second chance would, if he were given one, hope for a third chance and so on. The theory of a "second chance" for those who have really had a first chance (we know nothing about the fate of the others) is not in accordance with either justice or mercy.
We need not believe that Hell is eternal physical torture. The references to "eternal fire" call the fire eternal, not the punishment, except Rev. 20:10 which cannot be regarded as a sufficient basis for such a doctrine. All language dealing with eternity and the spiritual world must be symbolic, and the use of the word "fire" is certainly symbolic. We must ask ourselves what sort of future a man is to expect whose life here has been devoted wholly to cruelty, or lust, or avarice, or ambition, and who finds that he cannot satisfy the desires which occupy all his attention and cannot put others in their place. An eternity of utter boredom, of ceaseless regret for evil pleasures which can no longer be indulged, without hope or mitigation, would be as terrible as the tortures of Dante,s Inferno.
But we need not believe even this. Some have thought that the spirits of those who have refused eternal life will altogether cease to exist (St. Matt. 10:28, "Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna", where the word translated soul is RLPZ, not B<,Ø:"), and that immortality is only given to us on conditions, as was taught by Arnobius, a Christian writer of the fourth century. This is contrary to the belief in the necessary immortality of the spirit; but, as we have seen, the necessary immortality of the spirit
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is not a Christian doctrine, and the arguments in favor of it are not entirely convincing.
But the theory that "Æf4@H, aeonian, the word translated "everlasting" or "eternal", does not mean eternal but only "till the end of the age", proves too much. For if this is true of Hell, it is also true of Heaven. The same word is used for eternal life (St. Mark 10:30; St. John 3:15; etc.).
We are not to think of Hell as the doom of other people but as the possible doom for ourselves. It is this alone which the New Testament places before us. It gives no support to the ghastly notion of St. Thomas Aquinas and others that the sight of the tortures of the lost is part of the blessedness of the saved. The difficulty of believing in Hell is partly due to an insufficient hatred of sin. Hell is the necessary consequence of sin which has reached its end by excluding from the person all that is good.
Those who will be acquitted in the general Judgment (which will confirm and make public the decision already given in the Particular Judgment) will be those who have been forgiven. The "righteous" are not those who have not sinned, for there are no such persons, but those who have been freed from sin and reconciled to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Matt. 25:22 shows that these will include many who in this life were outside the covenant of God (B"<J J §2<0, all the nations), but who, having lived according to the knowledge that they had, will have been saved through Jesus Christ, though they did not know Him (Acts 4:12: cf. Isa. 45:4).
The eternal life which our Lord promised is not something which is to begin after the end of this world. It begins already in this life. It is union with God which grows more and more here and in the intermediate state, to be made complete when the Resurrection of the Body and the General Judgment are followed by admission into Heaven. It is not absorption. We are to continue for ever as persons. Heaven is not the Nirvana of the Buddhists because the Buddha offered men escape from life,1 whereas our Lord came that they might have life and might have it more abundantly (St. John 10:10). Union with God will include union with our fellow men. We expect that every society of men of every kind which has in this life helped
1
As his teaching is commonly represented, but some Buddhists deny this.
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to fulfill God,s purpose will be found in Heaven in a completely satisfying and eternal form; as Browning says in "Abt Volger".1
Above all, eternal life will bring us to the Beatific Vision, to the full enjoyment and worship of God and the employment therein of all our powers. This is the purpose for which we were made, and is therefore the environment to which every part of us will be completely adapted. In our present existence we cannot imagine this, and it is useless to speculate about it. The symbolic language of the Revelation and other parts of the Bible about Heaven is not to be taken literally. The reality is such as no human language could possibly express.
The love, by our capacity for which we see most clearly that we are made in the image of God, will be completely satisfied; and therefore we shall be wholly occupied in the worship and the service of God. We shall no longer be capable of the slightest opposition to His Will; and for that reason the condition of changelessness, which seems to us now so difficult to reconcile with happiness, will be the condition of perfect joy; for St. Augustine,s words will have been fulfilled, and our heart will be no longer restless because it will have found rest in the Beatific Vision of the Trinity in Unity.
1
"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound,
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round."
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As we have seen, there are three elements necessary to true religion which ought to be combined in equal proportions: the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical elements.
A full expression of the Christian religion must include all three. It must satisfy the need of man to live as a member of a society, his need that what he believes shall commend itself to his reason, and his need to worship and to love God.
The Christian religion is embodied in the Church which is entrusted with the mission to bring all men to know and accept the Gospel. To do this, the Church must have marching orders, principles to guide her preachers. The Bible contains much which has only an indirect bearing on the message of God to men. The Church has therefore drawn up a short summary of what the universal experience of Christians has shown to be necessary. Originally that summary was very simple indeed (Acts 13:37). "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" is perhaps not part of the original text of the Acts, but it at least represents a very early view of what the convert had to profess before baptism. As the Church came to be opposed by various false interpretations of Scripture (false because one-sided), the Creed was enlarged to exclude them; but it never included any statement which had not been found to be necessary.
The Creed is necessary for two reasons. The revelation of God must be preserved against the corruption of time, and it must be preserved against the distortions caused by the different outlooks of races, classes, and persons. The Creed must be abo