I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at
this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to. Sin is put
into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural;
and there is no connection between them. This is very convincing if we
find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds. But
if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is
patent--its plausibility is gone. It is a shining example of this false
abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to
all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and
death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural
life, but of the moral life.' What right has any one, in speaking of the
ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man
becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and
their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and
'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between? The distinction is
legitimate, as has already been remarked, within limits, but it is not
final; and what the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, about the
relation of sin and death, is one of the ways in which we are made
sensible that it is not final. Sin and death do not belong to unrelated
worlds. As far as man is concerned, the two worlds, to use an inadequate
figure, intersect; and at one point in the line of their intersection sin
and death meet and interpenetrate. In the indivisible experience of man
he is conscious that they are parts or aspects of the same thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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