IX. Harvard’s Dean Sperry-Sinners Vanish Into Eternal “Nothingness”

The late Congregationalist WILLARD L. SPERRY, ^{7373) WILLARD L. SPERRY (1882-1954), Congregationalist, was trained at Olivet, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Yale. After certain pastorates he became professor of theology at Andover and at Harvard Divinity School, becoming dean at Harvard in 1922, and chaplain to the university. Fourteen books are listed among his more important writings. He was one of the Old Testament revisers for the R.S.V.} dean of Harvard Divinity School, where he was also professor of Christian morals, believed that the “undeviating sinner,” bent on committing “spiritual suicide,” will finally come to “nothingness”—to a “moral vanishing point.” That, Sperry says, was the risk of granting “moral freedom” to man.CFF2 840.7

1. DESTINY OF THE “UNDEVIATING SINNER.”

Here are Sperry’s wordsCFF2 841.1

“We have had to witness a great deal of coldly rationalized, relentlessly pursued, positive evil in the last few years. What about the destiny of the men who conceived and executed it? Well, the mercy of God is infinite, the patience of God untiring, and the most evil of men may experience some ‘irresistible grace.’ But I have never been able to see why a man who is deliberately set upon committing spiritual suicide should not be allowed to do so. All that you and I mean by life, by the good life, shrinks, dwindles and falls away when evil is made the good and goal of living. I cannot see why the destiny of the undeviating sinner may not be, ought not to be, naked nothingness. Hell, so construed, would be merely zero.CFF2 841.2

“It is said that the objection to this idea of the possible self-annihilation of the evil man is to be found in the refection that under such circumstances the only one who suffers is God. The man himself knows nothing, feels nothing; he is blacked out at some moral vanishing point. But through all eternity God will have to realize that at one of his ventures with mankind he has failed. The idea that God should fail at anything and have to admit that he has failed is to many minds intolerable. I have never been able to feel the force of this objection. God took that chance when he gave us our genuine moral freedom, and he has prepared for his own reflective pain as well as for his joy.” ^{7474) Willard L. Sperry, Man’s Destiny in Eternity, p. 216.}CFF2 841.3