II. Edinburgh’s Taylor-Second Death Is “Suicide” Death

In Scotland, DR. ALFRED E. TAYLOR, ^{66) ALFRED E. TAYLOR (1869-1945), Anglican philosopher was educated at Oxford then taught in Manchester McGill University, and St. Andrews, and was professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh. Though a rationalist, he maintained a theistic belief in personal religious experience. He authored a dozen volumes.} long professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, discussing the somber fate of the wicked, insists that the “persistently rebellious sinner,” who by “his very impenitence” thereby insists on “walking over a precipice,” as it were, into the “second death,” consequently dies a “suicide’s death.” Man has the power of “refusal to respond” to the love of God, and thus to exclude himself from eternal life. This is how Taylor puts it:CFF2 827.4

“Shelley may have meant to be flippant-though flippancy was not congenial to him-when he wrote that ‘It is a lie to say God damns,’ but there was truth at the bottom of the words. God does not cast into Hell as an Eastern sultan might cast a wretch, who has provoked his anger, to the lions; it as the persistently rebellious sinner who casts himself into the darkness by has very impenitence, just as it is I myself who dash myself in pieces if I insist in walking over a precipice. The ‘second death’ is a suicide’s death.” ^{77) A. E Taylor, The Christian Hope of Immortality, p. 105. (Italics supplied.)}CFF2 827.5

1. REBELLIOUS CAN REFUSE TO RESPOND

The sinner can cut himself off from God’s provision of life:
“St. Paul’s tells us, in one of his most famous outbursts, of his confidence that ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come... nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God.’ But there is one thing which he does not say; he does not say that we ourselves cannot, by our own refusal to respond to that love, effect the separation which is beyond the united powers of all things else in heaven and in earth.CFF2 827.6

“Even we ourselves, I have ventured to say, cannot put ourselves beyond that lovingkindness of our Creator which is over all His works; but we can cut ourselves off from that more intimate and special ‘love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ towards those who are being re-made in His likeness; that self-separation is the ‘outer darkness’ of those who are excluded from eternal life. If we dare not affirm of any of our fellows that he has brought that exclusion on himself, neither dare any of us affirm of himself that he may not yet do so.” ^{88) Ibid., p. 110.}CFF2 828.1