37. Robinson. The Christian Doctrine of Man
By H. Wheeler Robinson, M.A. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
1911. 1 he task which Mr. Robinson has set before himself, put briefly, is the T restatement in modern terms of the essential features of Christian anthropology. He occupies, however, the very modern standpoint which conceives everything as in a flux. What the Christian doctrine of man is, is therefore not a fixed thing but an ever changing—perhaps Mr. Robinson would prefer to say, an ever developing—quantity. It must be conceived as process, and studied as history. Even "its statement in terms of to-day can be no more than a cross-section of this continuous development" (p. 2).
There is no way of stopping the flow and obtaining once for all a precipitate. We can tell what Christian men used to think about man— what the writers of the New Testament thought, and how, standing on the shoulders of the writers of the Old Testament, they came to think it; what the Christian men of any subsequent age thought and how, standing on the
shoulders of the preceding ages, they came to think it. We can tell what the Christian men of to-day think, and how, in the midst of the influences which play upon them they have come to think it. But who can tell what the Christian man of to-morrow will think? And above all who can isolate from the steadily flowing stream, we will not merely say the constant elements, the elements which, up to to-day, have remained characteristic of Christian thought, but the permanent elements, the elements which will always remain characteristic of Christian thought? The weakness of the genetic method to which Mr. Robinson commits himself is revealed in such questions. We may speak of the Christian doctrine of man "beginning historically with the life and teaching of Jesus Christ"; we may represent the whole subsequent historical development as but "the record of the germination and growth of the seed sown by Jesus Christ"; we may declare that it has never "lost its vital continuity with Him who is its source"; we may praise it for its power to slough off what is outworn and to assimilate new elements which in the enlarging knowledge of the increasing years present themselves to it. But what we cannot gloze is that we have on this ground lost all right to speak of any such thing as the Christian doctrine of man. There have already been many doctrines of man held temporarily by Christians, and for aught we know there will be many more. Unless we can lay our hands upon a continuous teaching characteristic of all who are
Christians, bearing the mark not only of constancy so far, but of permanency forever, it is idle to talk about "the Christian doctrine of man."
There is no such thing.
What is needed to give us a really Christian doctrine of man is obviously an authoritative standard of Christian doctrine. And Mr.
Robinson has no such authoritative standard of Christian doctrine. The only authority which he ultimately recognizes is just his own personal decisions as to what were right and fitting (pp. 273–274). If we say, with
our fathers, that the Scriptures are authoritative, clearly their authority rests on the inspiration of their writers, and the inspiration of their writers is reducible to "the Christian experience created in them by the Spirit of God." But we have Christian experience as well as they and from the same source. "The potential authority of the Scriptures becomes actual over us only through the continuity of this experience within us, as mediated by the historic society." That is to say, we company with Christians; by our association with them a Christian experience is begotten in us which we refer to the Spirit of God; we see this same Christian experience reflected in the Scriptures; and so far, but only so far, we recognize them as authoritative. This, Mr. Robinson speaks of as a "unity of the historical and individual consciousness" which "goes back," he declares, "at last to the Spirit of God, on whom both depend." Thus he transmutes the "Schriftprinzip" of the fathers into a "Geistprinzip," but a "Geistprinzip" which reduces at last to a mere "Selbstprinzip." For he proceeds: "This is the religious expression of what is more than a pragmatic appeal to consciousness; we may put it philosophically by saying that the only rational appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to intrinsic truth."
Whatever manifests itself to us as intrinsically true we accept as true. It is its self-evidencing quality which authenticates it to us. This is the language of Lessing and the old Rationalism. Only, by it, they reduced what could be accepted as true to rational axioms. Mr. Robinson does not wish to do that.
"We appeal," he says, "to the intrinsic truth, the self-evidencing credibility of the experience which runs through Bible, and Church, and the life of the Christian man to-day." There is something else, in his view, in man, the source of sound convictions of truth, besides the bare rational faculty: but there is no other source of sound convictions of truth than what is in man.
We accept as true only what evinces itself to us, being what we are, as true on intrinsic grounds: only what is self-evident to us. The Scriptures have no
authority to us; their contents are accepted by us only so far as they accredit themselves to us on intrinsic grounds. Even the testimony of Jesus is without authority to us. This does not mean that we have no reverence for Jesus or fail to recognize His uniqueness among men. "We may emphasize as we may, and ought, the closeness of His relation to the ideals of Israel, the intimate interweaving of His thought as well as His life with all the tendencies of His time; we may recognize the limitations to His power in the defeat of His hopes for Israel, and the limitations to His knowledge, as in the eschatological outlook of some at least of the discourses ascribed to Him in the Synoptic Gospels; the fact remains that there is a uniqueness in His own consciousness of Himself, in the historic presentation of His personality in the New Testament, and in His influence on the subsequent centuries of human life, that forbids us to regard Him as simply one of ourselves" (p. 279). It only means that whatever we think of Him, we cannot always think well of what He teaches us, and therefore cannot accept His deliverances as authoritative enunciations of truth. "Not only did the Light of the World shine first on Semitic faces, and flash its glory to us from the jewels of Oriental parable and paradox, but, in the humility of the Incarnation, the divine Thought was moulded to the pattern of Jewish conceptions. In particular, the eschatology of the Gospels is distinctively
Jewish, and its influence on Christian thought has been out of all proportion to the worth of its forms. Scientific conceptions of the world and of the limits of its material destiny have replaced the panorama of Jewish apocalypse in the modern man's imaginative forecasts; the ultimate questions lie beyond both modern and ancient forms" (pp. 80–81). We may manage perhaps to believe in Jesus; we cannot always believe Him. We have no authoritative guide to truth except our own personal judgment, depending, as Mr. Robinson would add, on the Spirit of God.
When Mr. Robinson begins his book on "The Christian Doctrine of Man" with two chapters on "The Old Testament Doctrine of Man" and "The New Testament Doctrine of Man" respectively, we must understand, therefore, that he is not seeking and finding in the Old and New
Testaments a doctrine of man which shall be normative for Christian thought, but only writing the first two chapters of the history of Christian thought concerning man—tracing its roots in Hebrew soil, observing its first blades as they shoot up from that soil in the teaching of Jesus and His first disciples. He is even at pains to warn us in the opening words of the former of these chapters not to fancy we can get authoritative guidance for our thinking from the data with which it deals. "The object of this chapter," he says (p. 4), "is to collect and interpret the evidence afforded by the Old Testament as to the ideas of human personality current amongst the Hebrew (or Jewish) people. It is customary to refer to the result as 'The Old Testament Doctrine of Man,' and the custom is here retained for the sake of convenience; but it must not be supposed that any formal statement of belief on these matters is contained in the literature itself, much less that the title is intended to suggest that the results of our inquiry are necessarily binding for Christian faith." A much greater wrong is done to the Old
Testament, however, by this method of approaching it than merely voiding it of its authority. It does not profess to be a record of the ideas current among the Hebrew (or Jewish) people. It professes to contain a revelation from God to the Hebrew (or Jewish) people. And though of course much can be learned from it of the ideas current among the Hebrew (or Jewish) people, this is from its own point of view merely incidental, while its main communications are from quite another source. To lump both elements of its contents together as ideas current among the Hebrew (or Jewish) people is already to discredit the Old Testament in its most fundamental assertions. Mr. Robinson does it, however, an even greater wrong than this.
He insists, not only on interpreting it "on the plane of 'natural' development," but actually on assimilating its teaching (against its own loudest protest, since Israel proclaims itself a unique nation in contrast with heathen nations) to that of ethnic thought. The euphemistic way in which he expresses this fell purpose to stifle all that is unique in the Old
Testament is this: "The Bible is here studied simply as ancient literature, and simply in the light of ancient thought." The meaning of this is that the start is taken from "primitive thought" as that thought is ascertained by the anthropologists in their study of so-called "primitive peoples," and the Old
Testament is forced into its grooves. Thus, if the Old Testament tells us that God, having formed man of the dust of the ground, "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul," we are at once told that we have here "the common idea of the breath-soul, which is so frequent in animistic thought, and indeed provides a name for animism
(Latin, anima)" (p. 15). If the solidarity of the human race is assumed in the Old Testament, we are told that we meet here only that idea of "corporate personality" which is so widespread an item of "primitive psychology" (pp. 8, 27, etc.). If the Old Testament proclaims the great fact that the Spirit of God acts immediately upon the spirit of man, we are reminded of "the ancient conception of the accessibility of personality to all manner of external influences, not exercised through the natural senseorgans," and are asked to think of "telepathic powers" ascribed to all, of "the phenomena of fetishism and totemism, demonology and witchcraft, of a vast world of possible outside influences extending (for the Hebrew) right up to the Spirit of God" (p. 7; cf. p. 10). The interpretation of the Old
Testament, in this sense, "simply in the light of ancient thought," means nothing less than the degradation of the Old Testament; and we cannot wonder that when after such evisceration of its teaching the contributions of the Old Testament to dogmatic thought come to be summed up (pp.
55–60) little is left but to deny that it supplies any basis for the doctrines of the universality of sin, inborn sinfulness, or a racial fall.
The New Testament is as little authoritative for Mr. Robinson as the Old Testament. But he shows himself, nevertheless, deeply interested in its correct exegesis, and expounds its teaching under the three rubrics of the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and the Johannean writings, far beyond the direct needs of his special topic. With many of his exegetical findings we find ourselves in full accord: many of them seem to us, on the other hand, perverse and the outgrowth of zeal, say, to be rid of such doctrines as those of the fall of the race in Adam, original sin, and what Mr.
Robinson calls "total depravity," under the impression apparently that by that term man is declared to be as bad as he can be. "Jesus," he tells us, "has no concern in tracing sin back beyond the will of the individual, but short of this He will in no case stop" (p. 94). He does not mean that Jesus finds sin only in the actual volition, as distinguished from the disposition of the heart: he recognizes that Jesus always carries sin "back past the external act to the inward disposition." He only means that Jesus says nothing of a fall in Adam. He does not even admit that Paul does. Speaking of Rom. 5:12–
21, he remarks: "The present passage certainly supplies no clear proof that he did, or exegetes would not be so divided as they are on this crucial point of exegesis" (p. 119). Paul, he strongly contends, teaches in Rom. 7:7–25 the "doctrine of the fall of each man through the weakness of his physical nature," and takes "no account of the pseudo-historic Adam other than is implied in the fact that he was the first to fall in this way" (p. 118). Making thus every man the Adam of his own soul, we can hardly suppose him to ascribe in Rom. 5:12–21 any further direct influence of "Adam's act upon racial sin than belongs externally to the example and unique place in history of that act" (p. 120). The exegesis of this latter passage is very sinuous; and as a result Paul is made out a pure Pelagian. At least, however, he is allowed
to teach the universality of sin as did Jesus before him; and that should have protected Mr. Robinson from certain remarks on Luke 13:1–5: "Jesus expressly refuses to allow any inference to be drawn from a calamity to the guilt of the sufferer" (p. 95, note); and John 9:2–3: "It should be noted that Christ explicitly rejects the view that present suffering is necessarily the punishment of sin" (p. 139, note 3); generalized on another and equally mistaken basis: "Suffering, as the Book of Job has taught us, does not necessarily imply sin; but sin must necessarily imply suffering" (p. 310).
The truth is that what we are taught by these passages is only that it is not possible for us to point out the particular ground of any particular instance of suffering: that sin does not underlie all suffering they do not in the least suggest. Side by side with his difficulties with "total depravity" (some very remarkable remarks upon Jesus' teaching with regard to it are to be found on p. 93), Mr. Robinson's difficulties with the Biblical doctrine of predestination should be mentioned—seeing that these difficulties appear also to root in his extreme zeal for human "freedom." It should not fail to be observed that he is already compelled to recognize the complete sovereignty of God as the Old Testament view (p. 63)—a recognition not really broken by the attempt to set up "two conditioning facts," in the goodness of God and the freedom of man (p. 64). When he reaches Paul he is still harping on the "double truth" of the grace of God and the freedom of man, with a view to leaving an impression that though Paul never even saw that they needed reconciling, and much less suggests any reconciliation of them, they are yet wholly irreconcilable. In Mr. Robinson's own mind
(surely not in Paul's) there is nothing for it but that the divine factor should give way to the human.
The history of the Christian doctrine of man subsequently to the New Testament is traced in the chapters bearing respectively the titles of "Dogmatic Anthropology" and "The Contributions of Post-Reformation
Science and Thought." The former of these traces the history through the Reformation period, the latter thence to our own day. The discussions of the former period are presented as dominated by the contrast between grace and free will; those of the latter by the problem of personality. Both chapters are ably written and are full of interesting detail. The discussion of the Augustinian-Pelagian debate is particularly well done; and the exposition of the revived Augustinianism of the Reformers is clear and decisive. It Is wrong, however, to say that the doctrine of "immediate imputation" comes into Protestant theology late. It is Zwingli's doctrine, the formal characterization of which (p. 223) is misleading: it is only the guilt of "inherited" corruption, not "the guilt of Adam's first sin" which Zwingli doubts. It is wrong again to speak of Calvin's doctrine of predestination as "supra-lapsarian" (p. 225); Calvin was explicitly infralapsarian. But the trouble here lies doubtless in the widespread misapprehension of the meaning of these terms. It is absurd, of course, to repeat from Fairbairn that "Calvin was as pure, though not as conscious and consistent, a Pantheist as Spinoza": Calvin's theism was exceptionally pure and conscious. And it is equally absurd to repeat the inconsiderate charge against Calvin of Scotist elements of thought; Calvin stood, in his thought of God, at the opposite extremity from Scotism. We do not know what to make of a clause like this: "Pre-scientific supernaturalism, so far as it subordinated the events of Nature to the control of God, glorified divine wilfulness and human self-importance" (p. 238). Surely no one will deny that "the events of Nature" "are subordinated to the control of God": and surely that God controls "the events of Nature" does not carry with it the necessity of "willfulness" on His part. If what is meant is merely that before the age of "the reign of law" men ventured to believe that God would intervene in the affairs of the world for the benefit of His people, why, it is to be said, that there is every warrant in Scripture and Reason—and surely
in "Christian Experience"—for believing that yet, and that in any event the denial of it is expressed in unnecessarily violent terms. We have gained immensely, of course, from the growth of scientific knowledge and in nothing more than in the deeper conception of the orderliness of the world which it has brought us: but this gain would be dearly bought if it separated us further from God, and left us in the hands rather of a machine.
To be sure that all the events of Nature, and of History as well, are under the direct control of God cannot give us a "piecemeal" and "erratic" world.
Law and God are not contradictories and if they were, it were better to choose God than Law for our portion. The chief interest in this chapter culminates, however, in the discussion of "evolution," which enters in during this period as a factor of importance in man's thought of man. The current ineptitudes in dealing with this subject reappear here. We cannot speak of evolution as relating "simply to the method of man's creation" (p.
242): evolution cannot create—it presents a substitute for creation, and undertakes to show us how man may come into being without being created, by just, as Topsy says, "growing." Nor can we follow when we are bidden to look forward to further evolution with hope for ourselves, especially when this is connected with some thought of personal immortality (pp. 243–244). The doctrine of evolution has no hopeful message for us concerning our individual future; it teaches us to look not beyond death but beyond ourselves for what is more nearly to approach the longed-for goal. But of this we shall have something to say later.
The volume not only closes but culminates in its last chapter, for which we may believe the whole was written. It is entitled, "The Christian
Doctrine of Man in Relation to Current Thought"; but what it is is the systematic statement "in modern terms" of what the writer believes to be
"the essential features of Christian anthropology" (p. 344). In the light of the whole history outlined in the preceding pages, he now essays to gather
up what a Christian man finds himself permitted by modern thought to think of man. He sums it all up in five propositions: man has worth to God as spiritual personality; he is an individual self, possessing moral freedom and responsibility; sin is that which ought not to be; man is dependent on divine aid for the realization of spiritual possibilities; personal development must be defined in terms of social relationship. Personality, Freedom, Sin,
Society—these are the topics which engage attention; and the interacting factors which determine conclusions are fundamentally the doctrines of evolution on the one hand, and of human autonomy on the other. Mr.
Robinson's acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is quite decided and goes the whole way; but it can scarcely be said to be without misgivings. He apparently rejoices to be able to say that "modern views of the Bible and of the origin of the race remove Adam's transgression from the data of the problem," say, of the universality of sin (p. 269), but he is still compelled to add that evolution "still leaves us with an unsolved mystery of iniquity," which, he holds, "throws us back on personal freedom" (p. 302). He will not admit indeed that any other explanation of the universal sinfulness which our observation informs us of is tolerable than just that of personal freedom. "The search for explanation, other than freedom, springs from an inadequate view of personality" (p. 304). But Mr. Robinson knows as well as we do that freedom will not account for universality of action: he finds his exit from the difficulty as others do—by denying sin to be sin and affirming that only that is sin which is "freely" done by man. "The general conclusion is that whilst we may speak of the whole mass of evil tendencies in the race, transmitted from one generation to another by heredity, organic and social, as alien to the divine purpose for man, we must not call it sin in the full sense, since, apart from personal freedom appropriating it, it lacks the essential element of guilt.… Admittedly, this view of the facts leaves unexplained the universality of sin; yet if there be such a thing as real
personal freedom, how can we ever go behind it, without denying its reality?" (pp. 306–307).
This is not all, however, which Mr. Robinson is willing to sacrifice to his unreasonable theory of freedom. To make room for it he is ready to curtail the omnipotence of God and His universal providence. God must have "limited Himself" when He created "finite personality, possessing moral freedom" (pp. 334 ff.); and the divine providence, while no doubt its
"general purpose" shall be realized, must "leave room for the contingency which is a mark of human action" (p. 336). The predestination which lies behind particular providence is of course also denied, but strangely enough a particular foreknowledge is still allowed to God, on the remarkable ground that what God foreknows is unknown to us and thus cannot fetter our choice. "Thus there is full scope for human contingency; for divine foreknowledge does not enter as an operative force into our volitional activity" (p. 337). How foreknowledge differs in this from foreordination is not explained to us. What God has foreordained is certainly as hidden from us as what He foreknows: and His foreordinations therefore enter as little as His foreknowledge as operative factors into our volitional activity. Of course we shall infallibly choose what God has foreordained that we shall choose. But no less shall we infallibly choose what He has foreknown that we shall choose: otherwise it could not be foreknown. The choice is as certain in the one case as the other; and the choice is as free in the one case as the other. Of course Mr. Robinson is not to be expected to be affected by such considerations. He is not even affected by the fully recognized fact that the quality of freedom which he demands for moral responsibility cannot be justified on psychological analysis (p. 292),—so that he is compelled to say, "On the level of psychological analysis, freedom"—that is such a "freedom" as he demands—"seems impossible": though he adds, "On the level of moral personality, freedom"—that is this kind of "freedom" which
he has in mind—"is essential." We have no reason to believe this last assertion, however, except on the authority of its assertion. The plain fact is that it demands a kind of freedom for the grounding of moral responsibility which not only does not exist, but is not moral at all. God surely is a moral personality and immensely responsible; but He certainly does not possess a kind of "freedom" by virtue of which He may choose independently of the "set" of His nature. It is absurd to say we have no moral responsibility, unless we have equal power to choose as we choose and to choose as we do not choose.
The difficulties of the evolutionary scheme, taken as a complete account of the universe, seem to culminate in such facts as these: the presence among existences of living beings, among living beings of persons, among persons of the divine-man, Jesus Christ. If evolution itself is called on to give an account of these things, we must posit life as latent in the nonliving, personality as latent in the impersonal, deity as latent in the undivine. The alternative is to suppose that life, personality, the divine are introduced from without—and that is to break away from the evolutionary principle as the sole organon of explanation. We are not quite sure that Mr.
Robinson preserves throughout his discussions complete consistency in this matter. But ordinarily at least he takes his courage in his hands and goes the whole way with the evolutionary demands. We may feel considerable satisfaction as we begin to read this sentence (p. 278): "Whilst all personality is dependent on evolution for the clay of its physical manifestation, all personality must transcend the course of such physical evolution by the inbreathed breath of spiritual life." So far, it looks as if Mr.
Robinson intended to allow for an intrusion from without at the point of the production of personality. But our satisfaction is at once dashed by the addition of this closing clause: "though that breath of God go back to the very beginnings of life." The "breath of God" producing spiritual life was
then, according to him, already present, though no doubt only latently present, through the whole series of non-personal living-beings. And there is no reason for stopping at the beginnings of life: it must have been equally present, though only latently present, also in the non-living existences that lie behind life. Similarly, with reference to Jesus Christ, we read (pp. 279–
280): "From such conceptions it is not far to the recognition of all human personality as the partial manifestation of the pre-existent Son of God; i.e. the supra-naturalistic element we have recognized in all personality is spiritually akin to its one transcendent manifestation in Jesus Christ." And again (p. 280): "If it be asked how such an Incarnation be conceivable in connection with the acceptance of evolution, the answer is not an appeal to supernatural birth (necessary to Augustinianism only), but to the presence of personality in and amid the working of natural law in the case of every man." The Incarnation is, then, not a new beginning except in the sense that every new species is a new beginning; it is a new form taken on by what is old—actually present in the evolving stuff beforehand. Accordingly Mr.
Robinson quotes here with evident emphasis on the comparison made, Illingworth's words ("Lux Mundi," ed. 1904, p. 152), to the effect that the coming of Christ "introduced a new species into the world—a Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations of men." If we read Mr. Robinson aright here, then, he would posit the divinity which was "brought out" in Jesus as already latent in all personality, in all living beings, in the non-living existences which lie back of all. Jesus Christ is not an intrusion of the Divine into the human race; he is merely a modified man, as man is a modified beast, and a beast is a modified thing. All that is patent in Him was latent beforehand not only in us, but in the amœba and in the seawater. Such a theory has express affinities with Manichæanism and
Gnosticism, with their extraction of the spiritual and the divine from entanglement with matter; it brings into clear view the Pantheistic background of the evolutionary philosophy (as lucidly expressed by, say, Le
Conte); but it is not recognizable as Christian.
Another difficulty which is thrust upon Mr. Robinson by his evolutionism—we have already adverted to it briefly—concerns the outlook for the future. Mr. Robinson strenuously argues for personal immortality
—that is for the immortality of the soul, for, being rather of Plato than of Paul, he has doubts of resurrection; is not "death the natural fate of the bodily organism"? He cannot be content "with an ultimate philosophy which does not carry up all these values and personality itself into God as their home and source and hope" (pp. 287–288). But on evolutionary ground, is this reasonable? Is it even to be desired? From the evolutionary point of view Christ is a new species, as different from present humanity as humanity is different from the beast. From Him as starting-point a new kind may come into being, a new kind which after a while (it did not happen so with Christ) may win to itself deathlessness. But what of those who lived before this new species had its birth? What of those who have lived since it made its appearance in the world, but have manifestly fallen behind it in the qualities of the new life? What of all mankind up to to-day, no one individual of whom has been quite a Christ? We might as well confess it frankly—evolution has no hope to hold out for personal immortality. It bids us look forward to an ever bettering race, not to an ever bettering individual. It tells us to see in the individual a stepping stone to a higher individual to come, built up upon its ruins in the survival of the fittest. How can it promise eternal survival to the unfit? And to what of the unfit will it promise it? If we are to project into eternity the unripe to abide forever, instead of seeing an ever increasing succession of the riper and yet riper—how far down the scale of unripeness does immortality extend? If
the merely personal—not yet the divine—has in it the power of an endless life, why not also the merely living—not yet personal? Is not the logic of the matter shut up to this alternative: since from the bottom up all that is to come is latent in the evolving stuff, and hidden in the amœba itself (or the clod, for the matter of that) there already exists, although not yet manifested, all the divinity that is in the Christ—all is immortal and "the spirit" that is in every form that ever existed shall live on forever; or else the immortality which crowns all is not attained until the end of the process is reached—which is not yet. We must not permit the fundamental fact of the evolutionary principle to pass out of sight, that the goal to which all tends is not to be found in the future of the individual, but in the successors of the individual. On an evolutionary basis, immortality must mean the persistence of the evolving stuff in every higher manifestation, and cannot mean the persistence of the unripe individual itself. When Mr. Robinson proclaims then the immortality of the soul, and of all souls, and indeed the ultimate perfection of every soul—for Mr. Robinson would fain "trust the larger hope" and believe in the ultimate blessedness of all (p. 338)—he is drawing his faith and his high hopes from some other than an evolutionary fountain. And to be perfectly frank we do not see that Mr. Robinson has left himself any fountain from which he can draw them. Evolution, plus the autonomy of man, with some sense of wrong-doing and ill-desert and a more or less vague feeling of the goodness of God, constitute but a poor basis for any eschatology. In point of fact we cannot form any sure expectation of what is in store for us, unless God has told us of it. Where no authoritative revelation of God is allowed, no express eschatology is attainable.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, xii. 1914, pp. 151–161.