'The doctrine of a future life and judgement': Bishop Bull on the Last Judgement, the life everlasting, and the Old Testament

In the final extract from Bishop Bull's sermon 'The Vanity of this Life, the Eternity of the next', he summarises how - in the words of Article VII - "both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ". This insistence on the unity of the covenants grounds the Christian hope in God's enduring purposes, "the old catholic faith" stretching back to patriarchs and prophets. 

We can detect here, I think, an affirmation of a Reformed approach to reading of the Scriptures of the Old Covenant, a refusal to stand the New Testament against the Old, declaring the same hope in both, "the doctrine of a future life and judgment". As the Advent season begins again for us the cycle of feasts and observances which lead from Incarnation, to Cross, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Bull's sermon is a call to read and hear the Scriptures of the Old Testament as a proclamation of our salvation in Christ, in expectation of his coming to judgement and the hope of the life everlasting in Him.

By these testimonies and instances, it sufficiently appears, that good men under the Law did not live and die like swine, feeding only on the husks of these earthly vanities, as some have foolishly imagined. They had undoubtedly a future state in their eye, and lived by the faith of it, as well as we. This faith was first derived, not from the law of Moses, (for that in the letter of it promised nothing beyond this life,) but from the gracious revelation of God to mankind from the beginning. For the clearing whereof we are to remember, what the author of the Book of Wisdom in the place before cited tells us*, and the Church of God always believed; viz. that "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of His own eternity;" and that "through the envy of the devil death entered into the world." That is, that our first parents in paradise were designed to a life immortal, if they had not sinned ...

In a word, the doctrine of a future life and judgment, continued inviolate and unquestioned among the Jews, till after their return from the captivity. After which time, (exactly how soon, or how long after, seems to me uncertain,) there arose the heresy of the Sadducees, who believed neither the immortality of the soul, nor the resurrection of the body, nor the judgment to come. But concerning these Josephus observes, that "though they were generally rich and great men," (their principles leading them to mind and seek after the riches and honours of this world,) "yet they were very few in number, compared to the rest of the Jews." And accordingly we read, that when our blessed Lord had refuted their wicked doctrine out of the Pentateuch, or books of Moses, which they themselves acknowledged, the multitude, as adhering to the old catholic faith, applauded His discourse ...

And thus, I hope, I have sufficiently cleared and confirmed my first observation from the text, that good men, under the Law or Old Testament, looked beyond this present vain and transitory life, and believed and hoped for an everlasting happiness in the life to come. Now this discourse serves to confirm the truth of the Christian religion, and our belief of it. The great promise of the Gospel, is of a happy life hereafter to them that live virtuously here. That this promise is not delusory, no new fiction, or vain suggestion of Christ and His Apostles, is sufficiently evident from the suffrage of the Church of God before our Saviour's time, and from the beginning. We may say of this promise of a future life, as St. John doth of the Evangelical precept of love, that it is a new commandment, and yet no new one, but an old one, delivered from the beginning.

*It is worth noting that Bull introduced his earlier reference to the Wisdom of Solomon with the words "though it be not canonical, is yet an ancient and venerable writing" - the understanding of "the other Books" set forth in Article VI.

(The photograph is of St. Davids Cathedral, Pembrokeshire. Bull was Bishop of St. Davids 1705-10.)