The Saint Steve Highlights of Christ Triumphant

[Saint Steven]

*We are not entitled to evade this, because it is sometimes said in Scripture that men harden their own hearts - which is, of course, most true.

Here let me sum up briefly and with due reverence: The facts that the law was given "in order that the offense might abound," and that the law was our "tutor" (Gal. iii. 24), suggest the educational aspect of evil: we seem to understand better the statements of Gen. iii. 5, 22. Fresh light falls on the significant words, "GOD HAS SHUT UP all men unto disobedience," and on these, the Creation "was made subject unto vanity," not willingly, but by reason of Him who has subjected the same in hope.

God's sovereignty is everywhere to be traced: the error lies in failing to see that this sovereignty is that of Love.

Again it has been well said that there is no such thing as "pure evil ;" "so unrestrained is the inundation of the principle of good into selfishness and sin itself." - EMERSON on Circles. "There is a soul of goodness in things evil," says the greatest of Englishmen.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

We have hints in Scripture that by evil permitted and overcome, something is gained which, perhaps, could not have been otherwise had, e.g., there is "more joy over one repenting sinner, than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance." And if there is more joy in heaven, there is more love on earth from the same source, "for to whom little is forgiven the same loves little." Sin is very often the result of ignorance; how far this consideration goes I do not decide, but may there not be an element of ignorance in all sin?

Nor should we forget that in sinning, if I may say so, the raw material is very often the same as in the practice of virtue, but turned the wrong way - "there is," says EMERSON, "no moral deformity but is a good passion out of place. I have steadily enforced in these pages the guilt of sin, but it remains true that to sin greatly often demands the same qualities, that rightly used would have been great virtues.

Whatever the value of the above considerations, the larger hope has nothing to fear from any theory of sin that can be maintained. Take a lenient view of human guilt, and you thereby shut out endless penalty. Take the very sternest view, and the perpetuation of this awful hostility to God becomes inconceivable.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

A further consideration remains. As creation is for the Deity to enter into finite relations, and to subject His plans to definite limits, so, perhaps, evil, physical and moral, is in a sense inevitable. And it may be that, by the training and collision, thus involved, a higher type of character is formed than would be otherwise possible, e.g., self sacrifice, self restraint, sympathy, mercy, etc., seem to require a background of evil for their existence; although I believe that certain results of this have not always been thought out by its advocates. A creation thus advancing to perfection by a certain, if slow, victory over evil, may possibly be a nobler thing than a creation so safeguarded as to have never fallen. In S. BERNARD'S words, "ordinatissimum est minus interdum ordinate fieri aliquid." - Ep. xxvi., ad. Eug. iii. I shall neither affirm, nor deny, these propositions. But morality and reason require one thing, viz., that creation shall be in fact so advancing; that the victory over evil shall be a victory indeed, and not a compromise - i.e., they require not partialism in any form, but Universalism.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

Sin is the fertilizer that made grace grow. Sin and punishment not being the goal or end, but rather grace and forgiveness.

Like the natural order of things. A tree grows and produces a leaf. When mature, the leaf dies and falls to the ground. Dead leaves are the mulch from which fresh new life springs. Therefore, death produces life. This is the divine order of things.

Can there ever be great victory without a great struggle? And the worse the foe, the more glorious the celebration. And doesn't God himself love an amazing story? Why would his divine plan end in defeat?

Romans 5:20-21
The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

[Saint Steven]

Evil in process of extinction, nay, in the divine plan already extinguished - is tolerable. Evil permitted for a time, in order that it may be more completely vanquished, and men thereby trained - that we can understand. But when evil, moral or physical, becomes perpetual; when it ceases to be a means and becomes an end; when it is no merely passing stain, but is wrought into the very tissue of the universe - enduring as God Himself: when God is taught as freely and deliberately permitting the entrance of evil, destined, as He knows, to be an eternal horror in His creation; then we are compelled to refuse assent, compelled by our very reverence for God, by the supreme voice within, which if God anywhere speaks with man, is indeed His voice.

Nor would it be true, in my judgment, to call this ignorance willful in all cases, so vast is the network of illusions surrounding us. - See 1 Cor. ii. 8 (quoted with a little inaccuracy, p. 22). "MOST SINS," says S. GREGORY of Nyssa "are committed from a confusion of judgment as to what is truly good." - De mort. Or. ii. p. 1049.

Thus, if so, what of heaven? Must evil be present there to elicit virtue? Again, if the highest type of character be the result of conflict with evil, must the Seraphim and Cherubim, &c., have known evil? and so on up to the very throne of God.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

This prepares us for a very interesting question, viz., whether the evil effects of long continued willful sin ever wholly pass away. It may be replied, perhaps never in some cases. Some men, if I may for the moment so apply our Lord's striking words, may, in some sense, enter into life halt and maimed. Obstinate persistency in sin may leave on the spirit a wound whose evil effects are permanent. There may be, for I will not attempt to decide, a permanent weakness, though the disease of sin he cured. Two results of this deserve notice. (I.) It furnishes us with a fresh answer to the plausible taunt cast at the larger hope as leading the careless to say, "if this be true I will have my fling, for all will come 'right at last.'" On any view, your fling I reply, will bring on you "the wrath to come" - a retribution terrible in proportion to the willfulness of your sin. But, further, your fling may involve you in a penalty strictly everlasting. You may, though pardoned, for ever suffer from the numbness and spiritual weakness which your sin leaves behind. (II.) May not this furnish a meeting place for reasonable men on both sides? For final and universal restoration is not opposed to perpetual penalty in a certain sense; because the willful sinner, though saved, may yet suffer a perpetual loss, a paena damni loss of the highest spiritual blessedness hereafter.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

For annihilation is no victory: it is death triumphant over life.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

An evil result of the traditional creed has been that it, by exaggerated threats, deadens men to any true sense of future penalty. Men grown familiar with endless punishment practically think very lightly of any less penalty, however awful. Thus a critic of this book maintains that the "tragic" element in religion is lost except we retain endless penalty! Is, then 10,000 years (or 100,000) of pain and banishment from God a comic thing, and not tragic?

Further, every form of partial salvation is rooted in selfishness. This selfishness is largely unconscious, but not the less real. Most people will have noticed a shocking unwillingness, on the part of the so-called religious world, even to entertain the idea of Universalism. The unspoken feeling is often this - "If hell is gone, perhaps my heaven is gone too." And then comes the deduction - What, if so, is to become of ME? We have thus a heaven actually, in some true sense, built on hell; buttressed on endless misery and sin. And this is received as the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Der Alte]

..

An evil result of the traditional creed has been that it, by exaggerated threats, deadens men to any true sense of future penalty. Men grown familiar with endless punishment practically think very lightly of any less penalty, however awful. Thus a critic of this book maintains that the "tragic" element in religion is lost except we retain endless penalty! Is, then 10,000 years (or 100,000) of pain and banishment from God a comic thing, and not tragic.
Further, every form of partial salvation is rooted in selfishness. This selfishness is largely unconscious, but not the less real. Most people will have noticed a shocking unwillingness, on the part of the so-called religious world, even to entertain the idea of Universalism. The unspoken feeling is often this - "If hell is gone, perhaps my heaven is gone too." And then comes the deduction - What, if so, is to become of ME? We have thus a heaven actually, in some true sense, built on hell; buttressed on endless misery and sin. And this is received as the true Gospel of Jesus Christ....

...

I doubt very seriously that you have the knowledge and understanding necessary to legitimately make any of the arguments you have presented. This is just more of the same old anti-non-UR rhetoric, kind of in the vein of we're right and you're wrong are to nuh-huh. About as meaningful and compelling as you consider any similar arguments presented by this side. What would really be nice is credible, verifiable, historical etc,. evidence. Do you know what that is? Hint, it is not quoting guys like Emerson as some kind of expert.

 

[Saint Steven]

A degrading selfishness is popularized, nay, is sanctified; religion is tainted. Salvation becomes a sort of stampede for life, an universal sauve qui peut, a chase, in which the Powers of evil are always catching the hindmost. And most strange of all, this grotesque and tragic scene is gravely asserted to be the victory of Jesus Christ. I do not know whether all this is more strange, or more shocking. For what can be more shocking than that any of the Blessed should be for a moment happy in a heaven literally built over the anguish and blasphemies of the lost - nay, so long as a solitary mourner sits for ever in hopeless despair? Heaven is likeness to Jesus Christ; and likeness to Jesus Christ is undying sympathy with the lost; is love unquenchable towards His worst enemies. But the heaven which the traditional creed (and every modification of it) offers to us is a thing so hardened, so awful that merely to think of it fills the mind with horror. Deadened sympathies; palsied love; selfishness incarnate; pity for ever withered; such is the heaven too many of the masters of our Israel teach. "It is a mystery," they reply. It is hell, I answer, disguised as heaven. Do they then imagine that we have not wit enough to see that so to answer, where the gravest moral questions are concerned, is a confession that no answer is possible?

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

"Will you SPEAK WICKEDLY FOR GOD ?" asks the indignant Patriarch. "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil." Here is the peculiar horror of the traditional creed. In the very Holy of Holies, it places that which revolts and degrades. The God it worships bids us love our enemies, while He consigns to endless perdition His own enemies. Hating sin with an eternal hatred, He provides for it an endless duration, an abiding home. Because it is so very evil, therefore it must go on for ever, for this is the meaning of saying that for the very worst sinners there is after death no hope. Their guilt is so vast, therefore it must endure for ever; it is so very foul, therefore it must defile for ever God's redeemed universe. The Blessed are content to gaze placidly over the abyss of hell, their satisfaction unbroken; their joys undimmed, if not actually heightened, by the torments of the lost (pp. 43-4). And when, finally, the curtain falls on an universe darkened by endless sin, they actually call this the triumph of the Cross; and are content to retire into a heaven of ineffable selfishness, where love is paralyzed, and the Spirit of Christ dead; not caring though the wail of the lost for ever rise; the husband grown for ever deaf to the appeal of the wife; the mother unheeding the eternal agony of her child.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

DANTE inscribed over the gate of the medieval hell, "Abandon hope, you who enter here." Our teachers bid us inscribe over the gate of heaven, words, if possible, more awful, "Abandon love and sympathy: abandon the spirit of Jesus Christ, you who enter here." They bid us sing:

"O saints of God, for ever blest,

In that dear home how sweet your rest."

How SWEET YOUR REST, O wives whose husbands for ever burn; O mothers, how sweet your rest, while your children for ever agonize. IN THAT DEAR HOME HOW SWEET YOUR REST!

"You are shocked at reading that the Blessed rejoice over the agonies of hell," pp. 43-4. But have you any reason, nay, any shadow of reason, to be shocked, on your principles? Are you afraid to face the inevitable result of your teaching? MUST not the Blessed acquiesce in, nay be PLEASED with the divine judgments whatever they be? Pray consider this. These judgments, whether healing and finite as we think, or vindictive and endless as you think, are certainly the outcome of the divine Will. They claim your approval as of right The Bible tells you "The righteous shall REJOICE when he sees the vengeance." - Ps. lviii. 9. Can you escape the conclusion that the shocking passages, pp. 43-4, are justified substantially if your dogma be true?

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[FineLinen]

Dear Steve: Much thanks for so faithfully presenting the highlights of a remarkable book. I have just been considering another saint (J.W. Williams) who writes.....

“Who could have peace in the Christian hope while overwhelmed with the consciousness that many of those dearest to us are even right now shrieking hopelessly for watery relief from fiery torments? If any can be happy under such a burden of woe, are they hardened to insensibility; or do they really take their creed seriously?

Do believers in eternal hell torment really believe it, in their careless unconcern for the unsaved, or do they just give formal and thoughtless assent to their creeds. A sincere contemplation of such an infinite spectacle of woe as they present about hell is enough to unseat the reason of every believer of it if it weighs on his mind as it should if true. It would be appalling to know the number of all those who thought they had committed ‘the unpardonable sin,’ another erroneous tradition, and that they were hopelessly hell-bound because of it, and as a result became maniacs and suicides.

Yet in utter disregard of the frightful results of their hideous pagan ideas, the eternal hell torment evangelists would like to unchristianize those of us who dare to question their views by turning the searchlight of truth on their errors.

After hell is ended in the lake of fire, where can the previous inhabitants of hell go? Not back to hell, for it then will be no more. Not back into death, for ‘there shall be no more death.’

Only one destiny will be possible for them, and that is the one declared in Is. 26:9, and that is correction through judgment.”

 

[Saint Steven]

Yet in utter disregard of the frightful results of their hideous pagan ideas, the eternal hell torment evangelists would like to unchristianize those of us who dare to question their views by turning the searchlight of truth on their errors.

It seems that they have erected towering libraries as temples to this false angry volcano god that they try to foist on us who know better.

 

[FineLinen]

It seems that they have erected towering libraries as temples to this false angry volcano god that they try to foist on us who know better.

"The current Evangelical Theology involves in its system belief in the deathlessness of sin, the indestructibility of error, and permanence of evil. That though there was a time in the history of the universe when sin in any shape or form did not exist, when no cry of pain or sense of guilt darkened the all-extensive bliss and holiness of creation, yet since sin has once effected an entrance into such a scene, it has come in never to go out again, indestructible, unconquerable, ineradicable, endless. Absolute happiness and sinlessness have forever vanished like the phantom of a dream. The ‘eternal state’ is a universe endlessly finding room for myriads of souls rolling and writhing in the burning agonies of ceaseless flame, eternally sinful, vile and morally hideous. It pictures the “final perfection” yet to be attained as having room for a vast cesspool of immoral and degraded beings, continually existing in opposition to God."

~Vladimir Gelesnoff ~

 

[Saint Steven]

To resume, - these horrors are taught when, as now, Agnosticism is so threatening; when Science looks on the Gospel with hardly disguised scorn. And too often, an ignorant, if well meaning, clergy are content to cry, "Have faith ;" as though God were not the author of reason; as though loyalty to conscience were not the supreme duty of every rational being; and a recognition of its supremacy the very condition by which alone any religion is possible. I am content at the bidding of faith to accept a mystery which transcends my reason; but to prostitute conscience, to dethrone the moral sense, is treason to God; it is "propter, vitam vivendi perdere causam."

I do not mean willful untruth, but I do mean that virtual falsehood stains almost the whole body of our religious literature.' Falsehood is to say one thing, while meaning another. Hence, to assert that the world is saved, while meaning that in fact half the world will be damned; that mankind is rescued, while meaning in fact that many (or few, it matters not which) go to the devil for ever: to do this in a thousand forms, in hymns, in sermons, tracts, treatises, is falsehood; and with such untruth our religious literature is, I repeat, honeycombed through and through.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Saint Steven]

"There appears to me in all the English divines a want of believing, or disbelieving, anything because it is true or false. It is a question which does not seem to occur to them." - Life of ARNOLD. - Letter 152.

"It is a terrible business to have a falsehood domiciled with truth, and for its possessor, when he is only half convinced or not all convinced of its truth, to take the greatest pains to dress it up like a truth. For the falsehood gets no good from the truth, but the truth gets all maimed by the falsehood. They talk of the love of God, and His mercy, and His pity, and His justice, and His righteousness - while all the time they are speaking, this hideous companion in their own soul is laughing at all these things. Love of God - what of eternal torture? Righteousness of God - what of eternal evil? Good news, salvation - oh, have done with it all." - STOPFORD BROOKE.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Der Alte]

It seems that they have erected towering libraries as temples to this false angry volcano god that they try to foist on us who know better.

Typical vehement UR rhetoric.

2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
2 Timothy 2:15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.​

 

[Saint Steven]

So long as the popular creed and the Bible are held together, so long must this system of untruth continue. We pray to "our Father," to Whom in the next breath we assign acts towards His own children more cruel than any to which the worst earthly parent would stoop. We thus degrade the Godhead below, FAR BELOW, THE LEVEL OF HUMANITY. What is left for us to worship if the truth be a lie - if love essential be cruelty itself - if God be that, which I dare not write? Nor is this all. Having thus assigned to God acts of infinite cruelty, the popular creed goes on to assure us of His tenderness that never wearies - His love that never fails. What falsehood, what cruel mockery is this, coming from those who really mean, that this unfailing, eternal Love watches to all eternity, callous and unsympathising, the undying evil, the endless agony of its own children.

Christ Triumphant by Thomas Allin chapter ten --- bold emphasis mine

 

[Der Alte]

So long as the popular creed and the Bible are held together, so long must this system of untruth continue. We pray to "our Father," to Whom in the next breath we assign acts towards His own children more cruel than any to which the worst earthly parent would stoop. We thus degrade the Godhead below, FAR BELOW, THE LEVEL OF HUMANITY. What is left for us to worship if the truth be a lie - if love essential be cruelty itself - if God be that, which I dare not write? Nor is this all. Having thus assigned to God acts of infinite cruelty, the popular creed goes on to assure us of His tenderness that never wearies - His love that never fails. What falsehood, what cruel mockery is this, coming from those who really mean, that this unfailing, eternal Love watches to all eternity, callous and unsympathising, the undying evil, the endless agony of its own children.

We don't get to tell God what is just/unjust, humane/inhumane etc.