Maclaren on Genesis 2:17
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In “Maclaren on Genesis 2:17” Jefferson Vann responds to some 19th-century arguments against conditional immortality based on that text.
By the 19th century, the debate over the nature and purpose of hell had heated up in Europe and America. Canadian Presbyterian, Dr. William Cochrane published a wonderful tome called Future Punishment,[1] in which he compiled examples of all the various views on the subject, including works by conditionalists and restorationists. One of the articles within that book was Dr. William Maclaren’s article entitled “Conditional Immortality” in which he explains that view and argues against it. Maclaren also published his article as a separate tract,[2] and that is the resource I would like to highlight today.
Maclaren was attempting to defend the “immemorial doctrine of the Church” which he claims, “has been assailed from opposite sides, by Restorationists and annihilationists, with a vehemence of assertion which their mutually contradictory interpretations of scripture do not seem to abate.”[3] On the one hand, the restorationists are claiming that human beings have immortal souls which cannot die, thus eventually even the hardest of criminal minds must eventually give in to the gospel truth and be reconciled. On the other hand, annihilationists (conditionalists) are claiming that the so-called immortal soul is a myth and that God’s wonderful plan for the impenitent is not to keep them imprisoned in hell for eternity but to destroy them in hell. Maclaren probably imagined that his orthodox view of perpetual torment in hell was the middle ground between these two extremes.
His purpose for this tract was to speak to the views expressed by conditionalists in England and America. He specifically referred to “such writers as the Rev. Edward White, Samuel Minton, and Henry Constable, in England, and C. F. Hudson and others, in America.” He summarized their views as follows:
“That the death threatened to man in Eden, on account of sin, is the extinction of his being.
That the righteous are through the incarnation and the work of Christ, rendered immortal.
That there shall be a general resurrection and judgment of the whole human race, and the wicked, having been raised up, shall have inflicted on them such punishment as will issue in their annihilation, or in the final extinction of their being.”[4]
That is a very good summary. Conditionalists today can scarcely find fault in it. It covers four issues that are still very much part of the conditionalism debate: the meaning of death, Christ as the only means of eternal life, and the timing and purpose of hell.
For this article, I will comment only on Maclaren’s case against the conditionalist approach to the death threat in Eden.
Genesis 2:17 “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die” (NET).
Maclaren condemns conditionalists for assuming that when God threatened Adam with death in this verse, he was referring to “cessation of existence, or the extinction of being.” He accuses them of the materialist presupposition that when the body dies, the soul ceases to exist. Instead, he argues that “is nothing inconsistent with the continued existence of the soul after death.”[5] Therefore, the death that God could have been warning Adam about was mere physical death – the destruction of the body. He argues that the concept of extinction of being has never been the primary meaning of the word death.
I think Maclaren had a point in response to the 19th-century conditionalists who argued that the meaning of death is always the extinction of a being. But I also think that neither the 19th-century conditionalists nor the 19th-century traditionalists like Maclaren have acted responsibly toward the text of Genesis 2:17. Advocates of both views are guilty of imposing their presuppositions about the meaning of death on that text.
What do we know about the death threat of Genesis 2:17? Plenty. We know that it involved actual mortality. This is spelled out in the text by the infinitive mōt (מוֹת). This word indicates that the threat was more than a simple experience of death. It was a change in condition. Before sin, Adam and Eve were functionally immortal, in that both their beings and their environment were conducive to continued existence and life. But sin changed that. It did not result in immediate death, but it did result in immediate mortality. Adam and Eve continued to live for a few hundred years according to the record of Genesis, but both eventually died, as did their descendants.
The problem of this 21st century conditionalists is that Maclaren and other traditionalists deny this. They argue that conditionalists presuppose materialism and thus cannot believe that a soul can exist after the body’s death. But my argument is that Genesis 2:17 says more than the fact that the body will die. It says that after sin, all people will become mortal. To assert that there is a part of the human being that cannot die is to reject what Genesis 2:17 teaches.
From Genesis 2:17, we also know that the death threat involved eventual death for all. This is spelled out in the text by the second person imperfect indicative tamut (תָּמֽוּת). Maclaren and other traditionalists choose to interpret this threat as having to do only with the body, but there is no textual reason to do this. The threat was that the “you” that existed would die. When God made good on that threat, he explained that it meant “you are dust, and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).
Maclaren had to take such language as merely referring to the human body. He insisted that the Bible teaches that human beings have a dual nature and backed up that assumption with texts like Genesis 2:7. But Genesis 2:7 does not say that God gave Adam a living soul. It says that God gave Adam the breath of life and he became a living soul. Also, Maclaren admits that the phrase “living soul” (נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּֽה) is also applied to the animals,[6] thus it is not irrefutable proof of this dual nature he assumes.
Maclaren defines the immediate death that Adam and Eve experienced not as mortality, but as the “sense of shame, the dread of God’s displeasure, and a consciousness of a baleful change in their relations to God, … not the extinction of being, but of conscious wellbeing.”[7] He asks interpreters to suspend their first thoughts about what death meant in the context of Eden. The reality that God banished the first couple from Eden so that they would no longer have access to the tree of life hardly agrees with his interpretation of death as shame and separation.
life and death in the New Testament
Maclaren also objects to the conditionalist understanding of the death threat in Eden because of how the words “life” and “death” are used in the New Testament. He argues that the promise of life in the New Testament is not the resurrection life, but “a blessed life in fellowship with God, where all the fruits of His favor are enjoyed.” By contrast, death is “AN ABNORMAL EXISTENCE OF ALIENATION FROM GOD, subject to all the penal evils which follow such an existence in this world and in the world to come.” [8] Maclaren quotes passages in the New Testament where the terms “life” and “death” are used metaphorically.[9] These texts are supposed to reveal that when the Bible talks about life and death it really means two perpetual states of conscious existence. What the texts really prove is that human beings can think about life and death metaphorically. They do not prove that the death threat in Eden was a metaphorical threat.
the charge of self-contradiction
Maclaren claims that conditionalists contradict themselves because on the one hand, they say that the Edenic threat was extinction of being, but then they insist that those who die will be raised again at Christ’s return. Maclaren responds that “what has ceased to be cannot be raised up again. The rain drops of this year are not a resurrection of the rain drops of last year. The sounds which issue from the tolling bell today are no resurrection of the tones which came from it yesterday. A resurrection implies continuity of being. If Adam ceased to be, when he died, he cannot be raised up again. Another man may be created in his likeness, but the original Adam is gone forever.”[10]
I think 21st Century conditionalists would agree with Maclaren that a resurrection implies continuity of being in some sense. What many of us would deny is that the continued existence is the conscious life of the soul. In fact, the only continued existence anyone needs in order to be raised from the dead is continued existence in the mind of our original creator. To suggest that God cannot raise a person from the dead unless he continues that life in a disembodied soul is to err not only anthropologically, but to err theologically as well. With God all things are possible.
What we conditionalists object to is the wholesale acceptance of the pagan doctrine of innate immortality based on the Bible’s promise of resurrection. The resurrection that the Bible proclaims is not a reuniting of the living soul with the resuscitated body. It is the restoration of the entire being – the being that was made of the dust of the earth and given life, lost its life, returned to dust, and then will be returned to life through the supernatural act of resurrection by its creator. If the threat in Eden means anything, it means that the life created will be interrupted after sin enters the picture. By suggesting that is not the case, it is traditionalists like Maclaren who are guilty of self-contradiction when they affirm the resurrection.
Sadducean view of death?
A few days ago, I addressed Israel P. Warren’s claim that conditionalists were modern-day Sadducees.[11] Not surprisingly, Maclaren suggests the same thing. He argues that the “doctrine of Conditional Immortality is an attempt to unite incompatible elements, and the result is that the theory will harmonize neither with the Scriptures nor with itself. If the annihilationist retains his definition of death, he must abandon, like the ancient Sadducees, the hope of a resurrection. And, if he retains the Christian hope of a resurrection, he must forsake his Sadducean view of death, as the cessation of being. The doctrine is self-destructive. For, if the dead have ceased to be, they cannot be raised up, and if they have not ceased to be, then, according to Annihilationists, they are not dead.”
Here is a God-dishonoring assumption. To assume that the creator of the universe must grant eternal life to all human beings so that he can someday raise them from the dead is absurd. God needs to do no such thing. When he threatened to make human beings mortal because of Adam’s sin, he could make good that threat. When he warned that that mortality would result in eventual death he was not speaking metaphorically. The death he threatened was real, and all the cemeteries on the planet are evidence of that reality. It is not Sadduceeism to argue for the necessity of a literal resurrection because of a literal death. When the traditionalists argue that the death threat of Genesis was not fulfilled literally, it is they who are denying a literal resurrection. As such, they are acting more like the Sadducees.
God’s exclusive immortality
Maclaren also objects to the conditionalist doctrine of God’s exclusive immortality. We conditionalists see the Eden threat as real because God who the Bible describes as the only one with immortality (1 Timothy 6:16) certainly has the right to remove that option from Adam and his descendants. But Maclaren objects that God can be exclusively immortal and grant immortality to his creation at the same time. God has immortality “IN AND OF HIMSELF” and man has immortality “derived from God, and dependent on his sustaining power.”[12]
Our argument with Maclaren and other traditionalists on this point is that they have assumed immortality is a universal gift and that the New Testament denies that fact. Immortality is most certainly a gift, but it is a gift only promised to those who come to Christ in faith. It is Christ who “has broken the power of death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel!”[13] The ones who have the Son have this life, all others do not have this life.[14] Surely it is the God who has immortality in and of himself who is qualified to promise it to others.
Also, in the same Gospel in which Christ promises believers eternal life, he tells us how that promise will be fulfilled. Jesus said, “a time is coming when all who are (dead) in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out … to the resurrection resulting in life.”[15] This resurrection resulting in life is the only way to become immortal. No one gets immortality any other way.
Mere immortality
Maclaren’s final objection to the doctrine of conditional immortality is that it degrades the gospel by suggesting that the only destiny God offers is endless conscious existence. He argues that if “the penalty threatened on account of sin is the extinction of being the life which Christ bestows is the opposite. It is the imparting to men endless conscious existence. Only this, and nothing more. Holiness of heart and life cannot enter into the end. It may be a means to the end, or a condition, without which the end cannot be secured, but the end is merely conscious existence.”[16]
No believer in conditional immortality ever taught such a lie. We use the term “eternal life” to describe the destiny of the saved because that is one of the Bible’s terms for that destiny. We believe that eternal life promised to believers is a reversal of the death threat of Genesis 2:17. But we certainly acknowledge that along the way, the Bible indicates a transformation and sanctification that is much more than mere immortality. Maclaren suggests that we teach that the grand end of redemption “was that men might be preserved in existence.” He calls that teaching “a revolution and a degradation.”[17] If we only taught that God’s goal for humanity was continued existence, we would be guilty as charged. But conditionalism is a theology of renewal. We believe that Jesus Christ is making all things new.
However, that renewal comes at a cost. The holy and happy eternity that humanity could have lived was interrupted in Eden. Sin entered the word, and with it, death – real death. If sinners refuse their Savior, the mortality and death of Genesis will result in the second death of Revelation. Conditionalists recognize that fact. Others, like Maclaren, look that fact squarely in the face and continue to deny it.
[1] Cochrane, William. Future Punishment, Or Does Death End Probation: Materialism, Immortality of the Soul, Conditional Immortality or Annihilationism. Brantford, Ont: Bradley, Garretson, 1886
[2] MacLaren William. Conditional Immortality. Publisher Not Identified, 1885.
[3] Maclaren, 142.
[4] Maclaren, 142-143.
[5] Maclaren, 150.
[6] Maclaren, 156.
[7] Maclaren, 157.
[8] Maclaren, 160.
[9] Matthew 8:22; Revelation 3:1; Romans 8:6; 1 Timothy 5:6; Ephesians 2:1.
[10] Maclaren, 163.
[11] https://www.afterlife.co.nz/2023/02/are-conditionalists-sadducees/
[12] Maclaren, 167.
[13] 2 Timothy 1:10.
[14] 1 John 5:12.
[15] John 5:28-29.
[16] Maclaren, 168.
[17] Maclaren, 169.