Over Spiritalizing

Over Spiritalizing
by Sylvester Hassell

THE GOSPEL MESSENGER
Devoted to the Primitive Baptist Cause
Sylvester Hassell, Editor ---- W. M. Mitchell, Associate Editor



Williamston, N.C., Aug 1899

False and Dangerous Professed Spiritualizations of the Prophesies of Scripture
For seven years I have painfully noticed and tried plainly, earnestly, and kindly to warn our people of the extreme danger of a growing tendency among some of our ablest ministers to spiritualize or explain away, as mere incidents of the present experience of Christians in this momentary life, the solemn and eternal realities announced in the awful sublime prophesies of the Old and New Testament Scripture -- prophesies of the second personal coming of Christ to this world, His resurrection of the bodies of all the dead, His judgment both of the righteous and the wicked, His consignment of the wicked to everlasting punishment, and His welcoming of the righteous into everlasting happiness. To every simple, unsophisticated child of God these momentous events of the future are just as plainly and certainly set forth in the scriptures as are any events of the past; and the Bible that is robbed of these stupendous and eternal truths is an entirely new and different Bible from the Bible written by the prophets and apostles--so new and different a Bible that the church of God never has received it and never will, it does not matter, in the slightest degree, what human beings or what beings from the other worlds advocate its reception. The divinely inspired and unchanging faith of God's elect has for more than eighteen hundred years embraced every one of these great revealed truths and therefore will embrace every one of them forever. And I would rather that a millstone were hanged around my neck and that I were cast into the depths of the sea than that I should ever be guilty of the terrible sin of endeavoring to unsettle the faith of the weakest one of God's saints in any of these declarations of His Written Word.
In the early centuries of the Christian Era, in the Middle ages, and in modern times, Satan transformed into an angel of light, has, in the attractive but deceptive garb, of professed spirituality, been laboring to explain away, into mere present experience, all of these great prophesies of the Scripture. So did the paganizing Gnostics (Know-Alls) and Manichaeous of the early centuries, the Roman Catholic Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and the Swedenborgians, Universalists, Unitarians, and German Rationalists of modern times.
The very same method of explaining away the prophecies has been and may be applied to explaining away all the facts, all the doctrine, and all the precepts of the Scripture, and thus turns the whole Bible into one gigantic fable. Every informed man knows that hundreds of the Scripture prophecies have already been and are now being literally and minutely fulfilled, and therefore expects that the remainder of them will be literally and minutely fulfilled. The Bible is not an improved edition of Aesop's Fables -- a string of falsehoods intended to illustrate truths; but it is both literally and spiritually true. That method of interpreting the Scriptures which denies their literal truth and allegorizes away that truth into present experience, thus emptying them of their eternal meaning, has, for eighteen centuries been dragging down those who accept such interpretation into the maelstrom of utter unbelief, and will no doubt continue to do so unless sovereign and almighty grace interposes to save them.
The extreme predestinarian but able writer, Martin Luther, says: 'Mystical and allegorical interpretations are trifling and foolish fables, with which the Scriptures are rent into so many and diverse senses that poor silly consciences can receive no certain doctrine of any thing. When I was a monk, I allegorized everything; but now I have given up allegorizing, and my first and best act is to explain the Scriptures according to the simple sense; for it is in the literal sense that power , doctrine, and art reside.' The rigid predestinarian but clear and powerful thinker, John Calvin, says; 'the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and obvious meaning, by which we ought resolutely to abide; the licentious system of the allegorists is undoubtedly a contrivance of Satan to undermine the authority of Scripture, and to take away from the reading of it the true advantage.' The Particular Baptist preacher, C. H. Spurgeon, of London, perhaps the most gifted man of the Nineteenth Century, says: 'Illegitimate spiritualizations is a sin against common sense, a childish trifling and outrageous twisting of texts which make such an interpreter a wise man among fools, but a fool among wise men, and is the most ready method of revealing egregious folly. The Bible is not a compilation of clever allegories or instructive poetical traditions; it teaches literal facts and reveals tremendous realities. It will be an ill day for the church if the pulpit should ever appear to indorse the skeptical hypothesis that Holy Scripture is but the record of a refined mythology in which globules of truth are dissolved in seas of poetical and imaginary detail. Legitimate spiritualizing, affirming the literal truth of the Scriptures, and making a present spiritual application of such truths (as the apostle Paul does in Gal. iv. 22-31) is not only allowable, but is impressive and refreshing; but illegitimate or improper spiritualizing, denying the literal truth of the Scriptures, turning them into fables, and pretending to give their only real meaning as present and experimental, is utterly false and ruinous, and is but a disguised form of infidelity. The Scriptures thus interpreted are no more like the Scriptures of the prophets and apostles than a picture of a landscape is like the landscape itself; there is only an apparent but no real resemblance between the two.'
Eschatology is the doctrine of the last things that are to occur in the history of the human race. The five great points of eschatology are the second personal bodily coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to this world, His resurrection of the bodies of all the dead, His judgment both of the righteous and the wicked, His consignment of the wicked to everlasting punishment, and of His welcoming of the righteous into everlasting happiness. These five points, as revealed in the Scriptures, are perfectly inseparable, so that a denial of one point is a virtual denial of the others. All these five points are not only plainly and repeatedly declared in the Scriptures, but they have been set forth in the Articles of Faith of the Predestinarian Baptists for hundreds of years. But I am very sorry to have to say that these Bible and Baptist Articles of Faith have been abandoned or discarded by some of the churches to which some of our excessively spiritualizing ministering brethren belong; and the Scriptures that, to every simple mind, so plainly teach the five great points of eschatology, are, by these ministering brethren, applied and either tacitly or explicitly restricted to present Christian experience. The plainest and strongest texts predicting the future second personal bodily coming of Christ to this world are applied and apparently restricted to His present spiritual coming to His people; the plainest and strongest texts predicting the future resurrection of the bodies of all the dead are applied and apparently restricted to the present spiritual resurrection of the souls of the people of God from their death in trespass and sins, or to the imagined passage, at death, of a spiritual body with the spirit into the eternal world; the plainest and strongest texts predicting the future eternal judgment of both the righteous and the wicked are applied and apparently restricted to Christ's present spiritual judgment of His people; the plainest and strongest texts predicting the future consignment of the wicked to everlasting punishment are applied and apparently restricted to God's present fatherly chastisement of His people for their sins; and the plainest and strongest texts predicting the future welcoming of the righteous into everlasting happiness are applied and apparently restricted to the present spiritual happiness of His believing and obedient people -- so that, by this method of explaining the Scriptures, the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of all the dead, the judgment, hell, and heaven are all right now and here in this present momentary earthly life, and, so far as we are to understand by the interpretation of the Scriptures by some of these ministering brethren, these five great events are confined to this life and to the people of God, and the human race (especially the wicked) will be as non-existent after time as they were before time, which is exactly what all infidels and atheists believe, but which I can not think is the faith of any of our Primitive Baptist ministers. Other brethren as well as myself may misunderstand what these ministering brethren believe in regard to the five great points of eschatology; and, as we are bound up into nominal fellowship with them by the modern invention of formal Associational correspondence, and as they have discarded their Articles of Faith and seem to restrict all the prophecies of Scripture to the present earthly life, we think that we ought to know what they really believe on these great fundamental subjects, and what is the reason for their belief -- that is, if they believe in these great future and eternal events, what are the passages of Scripture upon which they base such a belief. With us, and we hope with them, the dreams of human imagination are but as worthless chaff in comparison with the precious and enduring Word of the living God (Jer xxiii. 28-40; Isa xl. 6-8; 2 Tim iii. 14-17; 1 Pe i. 24-25). False interpretations of that Word -- turning it into fables -- are as dishonoring to God as they are distressing to His believing people.
Elder Sylvester Hassell


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