Shall We Believe In
A Resurrection Bod^)?
A Quotation From Rev. Gerrit Huj)ser, Meeting the Modern Disesteem of the Body and Disbelief In Literal Resurrection
* this idea of the inseparable connection between matter and sin, like many an other delusion, found its way into the theology of the Christian Church, as one of the results of attempts, which but too often proved successful, to mix in the vain and puerile philosophies of heathenism with the eternal verities of the Word of God. And when Christian theologians allowed themselves to in dulge in the dreary speculations of Oriental and Greek philosophy, about the eternal conflict between the princi ples of light and darkness, it is not strange that they divested the account of the trial and fall of our first parents of all its grand and terrible significance, and turned it into a meaningless if not contemptible fable! “ The earthly life of the Man Christ Jesus, however, ought forever to have kept His people from supposing that life in the body and sin are necessarily associated with each other. That life of thirty-three years of sinless devotion to the will of the Father, is in itself the best possible evidence that the primary cause of the fall of man, and of the consequent degradation and misery of our race, is not to be found in the fact that man is a physical and animal, as well as a spiritual being. r“ But not this only. The forty days that followed upon the Savior’s resur rection, during which time He gave His followers so many infallible proofs that He was indeed that very God-Man Who, in the days of His humiliation, had so abundantly demonstrated His thor oughly human sympathy, as well as His
HERE has grown up in the Christian Church a con temptuous disesteem of the body. In the minds of mul titudes of intelligent Chris tian people, the idea of the existence of a spirit in a
physical organism seems to be insep arably associated with the idea of sin and consequent misery. And hence they suppose, when once they have got rid of this cumbrous clay, that then they will at once enter upon the fullness and perfection of their bliss and glory. Rev. Gerrit Huyser in a new book “ The Humanity of Christ,” meets this modern view with the Biblical teaching. We quote from the book: “ Let us briefly consider how little ground there is, either in Scripture or in the nature of things, for such a con clusion,” says Mr. Huyser. “ How was it in the case of our first parents? Did not Jehovah God form the body of Adam first, and afterwards create the living soul to inhabit that tenement of clay? And were not Adam and Eve both spotless as they came forth from the plastic hand of Deity? Had not God made them in such a way, that they were fitted to exercise all the powers of their wonderfully composite being, physical as well as intellectual and spiritual, in perfect conformity to His will? Because God had enclosed their ethereal spirits in bodies of an earthly mold, had He thereby made it impossible for them to live lives of holy obedience? “ It is a matter of historic proof that
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