XII. Colgate-Rochester’s Hamilton-Platonic Assurance a “Lie”

Inherent immortality is likewise denied by Dr. WILLIAM HAMILTON, ^{6060) WILLIAM HAMILTON (1924-), Baptist, was trained at Oberlin and at Union Seminary and St. Andrews University. After teaching at Hamilton College, since 1953 he has been professor of religion and ethics at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. He is author of three books.} Of the Department of Christian Theology and Ethics at the Baptist Colgate-Rochester Divinity School of Rochester, New York. He forthrightly denominates the Platonic assurance of Innate Immortality “a lie”—the “first lie recorded in the Bible.” There is no “independent” “eternal life.” Our hope is solely in Christ.CFF2 929.1

“This is still a world that has, for each of us, death as the end of one part of the story. We all will die. The promise that we shall not die is the Platonic hope; it is a lie, the first lie recorded in the Bible.CFF2 929.2

“For Paul the Christian hope is not a hope that we will be spared death. It is the hope, the conviction, the faith, that God will not break the relationship he has given us in Christ through faith. We are not the immortal ones; the relationship we have laid hold of by faith, that is what is ‘immortal’ in Paul’s version of hope. What we might say is this: the basis for hope in Paul is faith and love. There is no independent proof for eternal life here; the Christian hope is intelligible only as part of the whole story, the partly unknown, partly known extension of the past and present parts which we do in fact know.” ^{6161) William Hamilton, “A Theology for Modern Man,” Interpretation, October, 1957, p. 402. (Italics supplied.)}CFF2 929.3