Chapter VI: Section I: Creation (4)

Since Christ is the Revealer of God in creation as well as in redemption, the remedy for pessimism is (1) the recognition of God’s transcendence—the universe at present not fully expressing his power, his holiness or his love, and nature being a scheme of progressive evolution which we imperfectly comprehend and in which there is much to follow; (2) the recognition of sin as the free act of the creature, by which all sorrow and pain have been caused, so that God is in no proper sense its author; (3) the recognition of Christ _for_ us on the Cross and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit, as revealing the age-long sorrow and suffering of God’s heart on account of human transgression, and as manifested, in self-sacrificing love, to deliver men from the manifold evils in which their sins have involved them; and (4) the recognition of present probation and future judgment, so that provision is made for removing the scandal now resting upon the divine government and for justifying the ways of God to men.

Christ’s Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from
human sin, and Christ’s judgment will show that the wicked cannot
always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark
problems of history and the guarantee of human progress. _Rom.
3:25_—“_whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in
his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over
of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God_”;
_8:32_—“_He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for
us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all
things?_” _Heb. 2:8, 9_—“_we see not yet all things subjected to
him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor_”;
_Acts 17:31_—“_he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the
earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained._” See
Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems,
240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am.
Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318.

G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called
by Huxley the classic of pessimism.” Dean Swift, on the successive
anniversaries of his own birth, was accustomed to read the third
chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible “_Let the day
perish wherein I was born_” (_3:3_). But predestination and
election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible
plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been
saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit.
_Rev. 4:11_—“_Thou didst create all things, and because of thy
will they were, and were created._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel,
79—“All things were present to God’s mind because of his will, and
then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.” Pfleiderer,
Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he
says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the
actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world’s
history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not
unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of
the world.

Jones, Robert Browning, 109, 311—“Pantheistic optimism asserts
that all things _are_ good; Christian optimism asserts that all
things are _working together_ for good. Reverie in Asolando: ‘From
the first Power was—I knew. Life has made clear to me That, strive
but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.’ Balaustion’s
Adventure: ‘Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world! I think
this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes
glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage
to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow.’ Browning
endeavored to find God in man, and still to leave man free. His
optimistic faith sought reconciliation with morality. He abhorred
the doctrine that the evils of the world are due to merely
arbitrary sovereignty, and this doctrine he has satirized in the
monologue of Caliban on Setebos: ‘Loving not, hating not, just
choosing so.’ Pippa Passes: ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with
the world.’ But how is this consistent with the guilt of the
sinner? Browning does not say. He leaves the antinomy unsolved,
only striving to hold both truths in their fulness. Love demands
distinction between God and man, yet love unites God and man.
Saul: ‘All’s love, but all’s law.’ Carlyle forms a striking
contrast to Browning. Carlyle was a pessimist. He would renounce
happiness for duty, and as a means to this end would suppress, not
idle speech alone, but thought itself. The battle is fought
moreover in a foreign cause. God’s cause is not ours. Duty is a
menace, like the duty of a slave. The moral law is not a
beneficent revelation, reconciling God and man. All is fear, and
there is no love.” Carlyle took Emerson through the London slums
at midnight and asked him: “Do you believe in a devil now?” But
Emerson replied: “I am more and more convinced of the greatness
and goodness of the English people.” On Browning and Carlyle, see
A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 373-447.

Henry Ward Beecher, when asked whether life was worth living,
replied that that depended very much upon the liver. Optimism and
pessimism are largely matters of digestion. President Mark Hopkins
asked a bright student if he did not believe this the best
possible system. When the student replied in the negative, the
President asked him how he could improve upon it. He answered: “I
would kill off all the bed-bugs, mosquitoes and fleas, and make
oranges and bananas grow further north.” The lady who was bitten
by a mosquito asked whether it would be proper to speak of the
creature as “a depraved little insect.” She was told that this
would be improper, because depravity always implies a previous
state of innocence, whereas the mosquito has always been as bad as
he now is. Dr. Lyman Beecher, however, seems to have held the
contrary view. When he had captured the mosquito who had bitten
him, he crushed the insect, saying: “There! I’ll show you that
there is a God in Israel!” He identified the mosquito with all the
corporate evil of the world. Allen, Religious Progress,
22—“Wordsworth hoped still, although the French Revolution
depressed him; Macaulay, after reading Ranke’s History of the
Popes, denied all religious progress.” On Huxley’s account of
evil, see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 265 _sq._

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:301, 302—“The Greeks of Homer’s
time had a naïve and youthful optimism. But they changed from an
optimistic to a pessimistic view. This change resulted from their
increasing contemplation of the moral disorder of the world.” On
the melancholy of the Greeks, see Butcher, Aspects of Greek
Genius, 130-165. Butcher holds that the great difference between
Greeks and Hebrews was that the former had no hope or ideal of
progress. A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 74-102—“The voluptuous
poets are pessimistic, because sensual pleasure quickly passes,
and leaves lassitude and enervation behind. Pessimism is the basis
of Stoicism also. It is inevitable where there is no faith in God
and in a future life. The life of a seed underground is not
inspiring, except in prospect of sun and flowers and fruit.”
Bradley, Appearance and Reality, xiv, sums up the optimistic view
as follows: “The world is the best of all possible worlds, and
everything in it is a necessary evil.” He should have added that
pain is the exception in the world, and finite free will is the
cause of the trouble. Pain is made the means of developing
character, and, when it has accomplished its purpose, pain will
pass away.

Jackson, James Martineau, 390—“All is well, says an American
preacher, for if there is anything that is not well, it is well
that it is not well. It is well that falsity and hate are not
well, that malice and envy and cruelty are not well. What hope for
the world or what trust in God, if they were well?” _Live_ spells
_Evil_, only when we read it the wrong way. James Russell Lowell,
Letters, 2:51—“The more I learn ... the more my confidence in the
general good sense and honest intentions of mankind increases....
The signs of the times cease to alarm me, and seem as natural as
to a mother the teething of her seventh baby. I take great comfort
in God. I think that he is considerably amused with us sometimes,
and that he likes us on the whole, and would not let us get at the
matchbox so carelessly as he does, unless he knew that the frame
of his universe was fireproof.”

Compare with all this the hopeless pessimism of Omar Kháyyám,
Rubáiyát, stanza 99—“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To
grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it
to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” Royce,
Studies of Good and Evil, 14, in discussing the Problem of Job,
suggests the following solution: “When you suffer, your sufferings
are God’s sufferings, not his external work, not his external
penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own
personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and
has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” F. H. Johnson,
What is Reality, 349, 505—“The Christian ideal is not
maintainable, if we assume that God could as easily develop his
creation without conflict.... Happiness is only one of his ends;
the evolution of moral character is another.” A. E. Waffle, Uses
of Moral Evil: “(1) It aids development of holy character by
opposition; (2) affords opportunity for ministering; (3) makes
known to us some of the chief attributes of God; (4) enhances the
blessedness of heaven.”

4. To Providence and Redemption.

Christianity is essentially a scheme of supernatural love and power. It conceives of God as above the world, as well as in it,—able to manifest himself, and actually manifesting himself, in ways unknown to mere nature.

But this absolute sovereignty and transcendence, which are manifested in providence and redemption, are inseparable from creatorship. If the world be eternal, like God, it must be an efflux from the substance of God and must be absolutely equal with God. Only a proper doctrine of creation can secure God’s absolute distinctness from the world and his sovereignty over it.

The logical alternative of creation is therefore a system of pantheism, in which God is an impersonal and necessary force. Hence the pantheistic _dicta_ of Fichte: “The assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and false theology”; of Hegel: “God evolves the world out of himself, in order to take it back into himself again in the Spirit”; and of Strauss: “Trinity and creation, speculatively viewed, are one and the same,—only the one is viewed absolutely, the other empirically.”

Sterrett, Studies, 155, 156—“Hegel held that it belongs to God’s
nature to create. Creation is God’s positing an _other_ which is
not an _other_. The creation is _his_, belongs to his being or
essence. This involves the finite as his own self-posited object
and self-revelation. It is necessary for God to create. Love,
Hegel says, is only another expression of the eternally Triune
God. Love must create and love _another_. But in loving this
_other_, God is only loving himself.” We have already, in our
discussion of the theory of creation from eternity, shown the
insufficiency of creation to satisfy either the love or the power
of God. A proper doctrine of the Trinity renders the hypothesis of
an eternal creation unnecessary and irrational. That hypothesis is
pantheistic in tendency.

Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 97—“Dualism might be called a
logical alternative of creation, but for the fact that its notion
of two gods in self-contradictory, and leads to the lowering of
the idea of the Godhead, so that the impersonal god of pantheism
takes its place.” Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:11—“The world
cannot be necessitated in order to satisfy either want or
over-fulness in God.... The doctrine of absolute creation prevents
the _confounding_ of God with the world. The declaration that the
Spirit brooded over the formless elements, and that life was
developed under the continuous operation of God’s laws and
presence, prevents the _separation_ of God from the world. Thus
pantheism and deism are both avoided.” See Kant and Spinoza
contrasted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:468, 469. The unusually full
treatment of the doctrine of creation in this chapter is due to a
conviction that the doctrine constitutes an antidote to most of
the false philosophy of our time.

5. To the Observance of the Sabbath.

We perceive from this point of view, moreover, the importance and value of the Sabbath, as commemorating God’s act of creation, and thus God’s personality, sovereignty, and transcendence.

(_a_) The Sabbath is of perpetual obligation as God’s appointed memorial of his creating activity. The Sabbath requisition antedates the decalogue and forms a part of the moral law. Made at the creation, it applies to man as man, everywhere and always, in his present state of being.

_Gen. 2:3_—“_And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it;
because that in it he rested from all his work which God had
created and made._” Our rest is to be a miniature representation
of God’s rest. As God worked six divine days and rested one divine
day, so are we in imitation of him to work six human days and to
rest one human day. In the Old Testament there are indications of
an observance of the Sabbath day before the Mosaic legislation:
_Gen. 4:3_—“_And in process of time_ [lit. “_at the end of days_”]
_it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an
offering unto Jehovah_”; _Gen. 8:10, 12_—Noah twice waited seven
days before sending forth the dove from the ark; _Gen. 29:27,
28_—“_fulfil the week_”; _cf._ _Judges 14:12_—“_the seven days of
the feast_”; _Ex. 16:5_—double portion of manna promised on the
sixth day, that none be gathered on the Sabbath (_cf._ _verses 20,
30_). This division of days into weeks is best explained by the
original institution of the Sabbath at man’s creation. Moses in
the fourth commandment therefore speaks of it as already known and
observed: _Ex. 20:8_—“_Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy._”

The Sabbath is recognized in Assyrian accounts of the Creation;
see Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., 5:427, 428; Schrader, Keilinschriften,
ed. 1883:18-22. Professor Sayce: “Seven was a sacred number
descended to the Semites from their Accadian predecessors. Seven
by seven had the magic knots to be tied by the witch; seven times
had the body of the sick man to be anointed by the purifying oil.
As the Sabbath of rest fell on each seventh day of the week, so
the planets, like the demon-messengers of Anu, were seven in
number, and the gods of the number seven received a particular
honor.” But now the discovery of a calendar tablet in Mesopotamia
shows us the week of seven days and the Sabbath in full sway in
ancient Babylon long before the days of Moses. In this tablet the
seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth
days are called Sabbaths, the very word used by Moses, and
following it are the words: “A day of rest.” The restrictions are
quite as rigid in this tablet as those in the law of Moses. This
institution must have gone back to the Accadian period, before the
days of Abraham. In one of the recent discoveries this day is
called “the day of rest for the heart,” but of the gods, on
account of the propitiation offered on that day, their heart being
put at rest. See Jastrow, in Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1898.

S. S. Times, Jan. 1892, art. by Dr. Jensen of the University of
Strassburg on the Biblical and Babylonian Week: “_Subattu_ in
Babylonia means day of propitiation, implying a religious purpose.
A week of seven days is implied in the Babylonian Flood-Story, the
rain continuing six days and ceasing on the seventh, and another
period of seven days intervening between the cessation of the
storm and the disembarking of Noah, the dove, swallow and raven
being sent out again on the seventh day. Sabbaths are called days
of rest for the heart, days of the completion of labor.” Hutton,
Essays, 2:229—“Because there is in God’s mind a spring of eternal
rest as well as of creative energy, we are enjoined to respect the
law of rest as well as the law of labor.” We may question, indeed,
whether this doctrine of God’s rest does not of itself refute the
theory of eternal, continuous, and necessary creation.

(_b_) Neither our Lord nor his apostles abrogated the Sabbath of the decalogue. The new dispensation does away with the Mosaic prescriptions as to the method of keeping the Sabbath, but at the same time declares its observance to be of divine origin and to be a necessity of human nature.

Not everything in the Mosaic law is abrogated in Christ. Worship
and reverence, regard for life and purity and property, are
binding still. Christ did not nail to his cross every commandment
of the decalogue. Jesus does not defend himself from the charge of
Sabbath-breaking by saying that the Sabbath is abrogated, but by
asserting the true idea of the Sabbath as fulfilling a fundamental
human need. _Mark 2:27_—“_The Sabbath was made_ [by God] _for man,
and not man for the Sabbath._” The Puritan restrictions are not
essential to the Sabbath, nor do they correspond even with the
methods of later Old Testament observance. The Jewish Sabbath was
more like the New England Thanksgiving than like the New England
Fast-day. _Nehemiah 8:12, 18_—“_And all the people went their way
to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great
mirth.... And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth
day was a solemn assembly, according unto the ordinance_”—seems to
include the Sabbath day as a day of gladness.

Origen, in Homily 23 on _Numbers_ (Migne, II:358): “Leaving
therefore the Jewish observances of the Sabbath, let us see what
ought to be for a Christian the observance of the Sabbath. On the
Sabbath day nothing of all the actions of the world ought to be
done.” Christ walks through the cornfield, heals a paralytic, and
dines with a Pharisee, all on the Sabbath day. John Milton, in his
Christian Doctrine, is an extreme anti-sabbatarian, maintaining
that the decalogue was abolished with the Mosaic law. He thinks it
uncertain whether “the Lord’s day” was weekly or annual. The
observance of the Sabbath, to his mind, is a matter not of
authority, but of convenience. Archbishop Paley: “In my opinion
St. Paul considered the Sabbath a sort of Jewish ritual, and not
obligatory on Christians. A cessation on that day from labor
beyond the time of attending public worship is not intimated in
any part of the New Testament. The notion that Jesus and his
apostles meant to retain the Jewish Sabbath, only shifting the day
from the seventh to the first, prevails without sufficient
reason.”

According to Guizot, Calvin was so pleased with a play to be acted
in Geneva on Sunday, that he not only attended but deferred his
sermon so that his congregation might attend. When John Knox
visited Calvin, he found him playing a game of bowls on Sunday.
Martin Luther said: “Keep the day holy for its use’s sake, both to
body and soul. But if anywhere the day is made holy for the mere
day’s sake, if any one set up its observance on a Jewish
foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to
dance on it, to do anything that shall reprove this encroachment
on the Christian spirit and liberty.” But the most liberal and
even radical writers of our time recognize the economic and
patriotic uses of the Sabbath. R. W. Emerson said that its
observance is “the core of our civilization.” Charles Sumner: “If
we would perpetuate our Republic, we must sanctify it as well as
fortify it, and make it at once a temple and a citadel.” Oliver
Wendell Holmes: “He who ordained the Sabbath loved the poor.” In
Pennsylvania they bring up from the mines every Sunday the mules
that have been working the whole week in darkness,—otherwise they
would become blind. So men’s spiritual sight will fail them if
they do not weekly come up into God’s light.

(_c_) The Sabbath law binds us to set apart a seventh portion of our time for rest and worship. It does not enjoin the simultaneous observance by all the world of a fixed portion of absolute time, nor is such observance possible. Christ’s example and apostolic sanction have transferred the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first, for the reason that this last is the day of Christ’s resurrection, and so the day when God’s spiritual creation became in Christ complete.

No exact portion of absolute time can be simultaneously observed
by men in different longitudes. The day in Berlin begins six hours
before the day in New York, so that a whole quarter of what is
Sunday in Berlin is still Saturday in New York. Crossing the 180th
degree of longitude from West to East we gain a day, and a
seventh-day Sabbatarian who circumnavigated the globe might thus
return to his starting point observing the same Sabbath with his
fellow Christians. A. S. Carman, in the Examiner, Jan. 4, 1894,
asserts that Heb. 4:5-9 alludes to the change of day from the
seventh to the first, in the references to “_a Sabbath rest_” that
“_remaineth_,” and to “_another day_” taking the place of the
original promised day of rest. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles:
“On the Lord’s Day assemble ye together, and give thanks, and
break bread.”

The change from the seventh day to the first seems to have been
due to the resurrection of Christ upon “_the first day of the
week_” (_Mat. 28:1_), to his meeting with the disciples upon that
day and upon the succeeding Sunday (_John 20:26_), and to the
pouring out of the Spirit upon the Pentecostal Sunday seven weeks
after (_Acts 2:1_—see Bap. Quar. Rev., 185:229-232). Thus by
Christ’s own example and by apostolic sanction the first day
became “_the Lord’s day_” (_Rev. 1:10_), on which believers met
regularly each week with their Lord (_Acts 20:7_—“_the first day
of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread_”) and
brought together their benevolent contributions (_1 Cor. 16:1,
2_—“_Now concerning the collection for the saints ... Upon the
first day of the week let each one of you lay by him in store, as
he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come_”).
Eusebius, Com. on _Ps. 92_ (Migne, V:1191, C): “Wherefore those
things [the Levitical regulations] having been already rejected,
the Logos through the new Covenant transferred and changed the
festival of the Sabbath to the rising of the sun ... the Lord’s
day ... holy and spiritual Sabbaths.”

Justin Martyr, First Apology: “On the day called Sunday all who
live in city or country gather together in one place, and the
memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are
read.... Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common
assembly, because it is the first day on which God made the world
and Jesus our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For he
was crucified on the day before, that of Saturn (Saturday); and on
the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun
(Sunday), having appeared to his apostles and disciples he taught
them these things which we have submitted to you for your
consideration.” This seems to intimate that Jesus between his
resurrection and ascension gave command respecting the observance
of the first day of the week. He was “_received up_” only after
“_he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the
apostles whom he had chosen_” (_Acts 1:2_).

The Christian Sabbath, then, is the day of Christ’s resurrection.
The Jewish Sabbath commemorated only the beginning of the world;
the Christian Sabbath commemorates also the new creation of the
world in Christ, in which God’s work in humanity first becomes
complete. C. H. M. on _Gen. 2_: “If I celebrate the seventh day it
marks me as an earthly man, inasmuch as that day is clearly the
rest of earth—creation-rest; if I intelligently celebrate the
first day of the week, I am marked as a heavenly man, believing in
the new creation in Christ.” (_Gal. 4:10, 11_—“_Ye observe days,
and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, least by
any means I have bestowed labor upon you in vain_”; _Col.
2:16,17_—“_Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or
in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which
are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ’s._”)
See George S. Gray, Eight Studies on the Lord’s Day; Hessey,
Bampton Lectures on the Sunday; Gilfillan, The Sabbath; Wood,
Sabbath Essays; Bacon, Sabbath Observance; Hadley, Essays
Philological and Critical, 325-345; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 3:
321-348; Lotz, Quæstiones de Historia Sabbati; Maurice, Sermons on
the Sabbath; Prize Essays on the Sabbath; Crafts, The Sabbath for
Man; A. E. Waffle, The Lord’s Day; Alvah Hovey, Studies in Ethics
and Religion, 271-320; Guirey, The Hallowed Day; Gamble, Sunday
and the Sabbath; Driver, art.: Sabbath, in Hastings’ Bible
Dictionary; Broadus, Am. Com. on _Mat. 12:3_. For the seventh-day
view, see T. B. Brown, The Sabbath; J. N. Andrews, History of the
Sabbath. _Per contra_, see Prof. A. Rauschenbusch, Saturday or
Sunday?