292 THE K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S istic of all heathen religions as it is foreign to the testimony of both the Old Testament and the New. . . . With such a vision before our eyes (the translation of Enoch, Elijah and Christ), we should cease talking of the immortality of the soul, as though we knew not that 'God had provided some better things for us. It is a lamentable apostasy from Paulism to Platonism to substitute the hope of being unclothed for that of being clothed upon. Let philosophers dream of a naked immortality as man’s highest state in the life to come, but we will be content with nothing less than God’s full provision of this mortal putting on immortality. Therefore the conception of the body as the spirit’s clay and prison-house should find no place in a Christian eschatology. . . . That unseemly snatching for a crown of life, which characterizes the latest improved eschatology—Ahe theory that every man rises from the dead as soon as the breath is out of the body— has no foundation in Scripture.” Says Adam Clarke on 1 Cor. 15: “ One remark I cannot help making. The doctrine of the resurrection appears to have been thought of much more consequence among the primitive Christians than it is now. How is this? The apostles were continually insisting on it, and exciting the followers of Christ to diligence and obedience and cheerfulness through i t ! There is not a doctrine in the gospel on which more stress is laid, and there is not a doctrine in the present system of preaching, which is treated with more neglect.”—T. C. H. T*HE R E SU R R E C T IO N , tke Solid Cornerstone of Christianity There are many ministers, who if they preach a resurrection sermon at all at Easter time, will agree with the position taken by Dr. Carl S. Patton, the popular Congregational preacher of Los Angeles. Dr. Patton was quoted some time ago by the American Journal of Theology, as saying: “No matter who told me that a man of my own town had been raised from the dead; no matter how many apparently competent witnesses agreed in the statement; no matter if I saw it or thought Xsaw it myself, I should not believe it. . . . The reason we do not believe in the biblical miracles is, the testimony for them is not good enough.” “I do not believe that anybody in the time of Jesus thought he raised the dead or did these other miraculous things. It was forty years at the least between the death of Jesus and the writing of our earliest Gospel. Forty years is long enough for these stories to have grown up. During that period they did grow up —not consciously invented by any one man, but growing unconsciously as they passed from mouth to mouth and got farther from the time and the immediate associates of Jesus. . . . Xbelieve that in a miracle-loving and myth-making age the story that four hundred people would be just as easy as the story that one man had seen him. So it has often been asked, ‘Without the physical resur rection, what do you do with the empty tomb?’ I do not do anything with it, nor with the body of Jesus. It is merely an item in the whole story, and the whole story is the growth of a later time.” It seems strange that a man of Dr. Patton’s reasoning powers should fail to see the absolute necessity of the literal resurrection of our Lord in its vital bearing on all Christian doctrine. Look, for instance, at Paul’s reasoning in 1 Cor. 15: ‘‘If Christ is not risen our preaching is vain.” (Empty). According to the Apostle Paul, Dr. Patton’s preaching is but a blown bladder, a bag of wind, because he has nothing but a ghost Christ, a disembodied spirit.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker