THE following letter (now slightly retouched) appeared in the Highland Times of September 3. It is, so far, a reply to a certain Judge Rutherford of New York, who has been lecturing in Inverness and elsewhere in favour of Russell’s views:—
Sir,—Millennial Dawnism, which has no mean exponent in the Hon. J. F. Rutherford of New York City, ought after all to die a natural death ere this year is out. It ought to do so, at least in the estimation of sensible persons, if Christendom shall not have been annihilated and the Millennium fully come by October of this year. Pastor Russell, the protagonist of the movement with which the Hon. J. F. Rutherford is identified, declared some time ago that October, 1914, would see the end of this world! Well, we shall see. Meantime, lest the simple-minded should be carried off their feet by the attractions of Pastor Russell’s counterfeit Christianity, you will, I hope, allow me through the medium of your popular paper to criticise as briefly as may be, the salient points of this novel system of divinity. I say, “counterfeit Christianity,” advisedly, for how can one otherwise characterise a system which maintains that itself is Christian, and yet teaches that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is allowed to have had some form of spiritual existence before He was changed into a man, was never more than a mere creature of God; that, when He was in this world He was simply and purely a man; that He did not rise out of the grave with that body in which He was crucified on the cross of Calvary; and that although He now lives a divine being, His is but a divinity in which “the little flock” also are to be the sharers? Pastor Russell’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit is, if possible, still more dishonouring to God than is his doctrine concerning Jesus Christ; for the Holy Spirit, Pastor Russell says, is only a creature, still lower in the scale of being than is Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that the Millennial Dawnists scarcely ever say that there is a Holy Spirit!
But it is by their exposition of Scripture, which goes to support the view that there is no everlasting punishment for the impenitent wicked, that Millennial Dawnists have won most of their popularity. But what if the exposition amounts to mere imposition! The subject is indescribably solemn, and I offer only these two observations—(1) Pastor Russell, following the method of other successful jugglers, makes use of a false dialectic. He, to begin with, gives a definition of “death” which makes it synonymous with “ceasing to exist.” Of course, if death is equivalent to ceasing to exist, then even the second death can have no terrors, and, the second death once disposed of, it will be a comparatively easy thing to water down to innocuousness the other Biblical expressions which all sections of the Christian Church from the beginning have taken to mean everlasting punishment. But to say that death merely means cessation of existence, is not to speak in consonance with right reason or with the obvious meaning of Scripture. The essential nature of death is separation and corruption; temporal death is the separation of soul and body, and the corruption of the body; spiritual death is the separation of God and the soul, with the corruption of that soul. And that the Bible gives no countenance to the idea that death means cessation of existence or absolute loss of consciousness ought to be patent to everyone. Did Christ mean to suggest that the selfish rich man had at death lost consciousness in every sense when He declared that “in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments,” or that the penitent thief would in the article of death, so far as consciousness was concerned, absolutely cease to exist when He promised him, “To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise?” An affirmative answer ought to be impossible. (2) Everyone knows that the Christian Church did not receive the doctrine of everlasting punishment so much from the mouth of either prophet or apostle, as from the mouth of the Lord Jesus Himself. One of the words He made use of in speaking of the place of woe is Gehenna. But this, says Pastor Russell, is but an allusion to the valley of Hinnom, where the offal of the city, Jerusalem, was burnt. Now, on the part of the Christian Church it is not denied that, to begin with, the word Gehenna did mean the valley of Hinnom. What is averred is that the doctrine of everlasting punishment is of more ancient date than the term Gehenna, that in Christ’s time the Jews had come to speak of the place of future punishment as Gehenna, and that Christ took up a current term and made it for His hearers synonymous with the place of torment. In every language it is one of the commonest things to find words that, to begin with, connoted only what was very commonplace, afterwards charged with the most special and profound connotation. Pneuma, itself, to begin with, means the wind or the air, it then is used to mean the breath of our nostrils, from that it is taken up to mean man’s immortal part, and in the end (in New Testament Greek), it is used to declare the nature of God Himself. Does the history of the term diminish aught from the pregnancy of Christ’s oracle, “God is Spirit?” Surely not. But no more does the etymology of the word Gehenna relieve it in the least from the awfulness of the content wherewith the term was charged in Christ’s teaching.
Thanking you in anticipation.—I am, yours, etc.,
JOHN R. MACKAY.