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In the following article an account is given of Christianity as
a religion, describing its origin, its relation to other
religions, its essential nature and chief characteristics, but
not dealing with its doctrines in detail nor its history as a
visible organization. These and other aspects of this great
subject will receive treatment under separate titles. Moreover,
the Christianity of which we speak is that which we find
realized in the Catholic Church alone; hence, we are not
concerned here with those forms which are embodied in the
various non-Catholic Christian sects, whether schismatical or
heretical.
Our documentary sources of knowledge about the origin of
Christianity and its earliest developments are chiefly the New
Testament Scriptures and various sub-Apostolic writings, the
authenticity of which we must to a large extent take for granted
here, as the much less grounds we take for granted the
authenticity of "Cćsar" when dealing with early Gaul, and of "Tacitus"
when studying growth of the Roman Empire. (Cf. Kenyon, "Handbook
of the Textual Criticism of the N.T."). We have this further
warrant for doing so, that the most mature critical opinions
amongst non-Catholics, deserting the wild theories of Baur,
Strauss, and Renan, tend, in regard to dates and authorship, to
coincide more closely with the Catholic position. The Gospels,
Acts, and most of the Epistles are recognized as belonging to
the Apostolic Age. "The oldest literature of the Church", says
Professor Harnack, "is, in the main points and in most of its
details, from the point of view of literary history, veracious
and trustworthy . . . . He who attentively studies these letters
(those i.e. of Clement and Ignatius) cannot fail to see what a
fullness of traditions, topics of preaching, doctrines, and
forms of organization already existed in the time of Trajan
(A.D. 98-117), and in particular churches had reached
permanence" (Chronologie der altchristlichen Literature, Bk. I,
pp. 8, 11). Other points will, of course, be touched on and
other results assumed, which are more fully and formally treated
under JESUS CHRIST; CHURCH; REVELATION; MIRACLES.
For clearness' sake we shall arrange the subject under the
following chief heads:
I. ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY AND ITS RELATION WITH OTHER RELIGIONS;
II. THE ESSENTIALS OF CHRISTIANITY;
III. THE DIVINE PURPOSE IN CHRISTIANITY.
Origin of Christianity and its relation with other religions
Christianity is the name given to that definite system of
religious belief and practice which was taught by Jesus Christ
in the country of Palestine, during the reign of the Roman
Emperor, Tiberius, and was promulgated, after its Founder's
death, for the acceptance of the whole world, by certain chosen
men among His followers.
According to the accepted chronology, these began their mission
on the day of Pentecost, A.D. 29, which day is regarded,
accordingly, as the birthday of the Christian Church. In order
the better to appreciate the meaning of this event, we must
first consider the religious influences and tendencies
previously at work in the minds of men, both Jews and Gentiles,
which prepared the way for the spread of Christianity amongst
them.
The whole history of the Jews as detailed in the Old Testament
is seen, when read in the light of other events, to be a clear
though gradual preparation for the preaching of Christianity. In
that nation alone, the great truths of the existence and unity
of God, His providential ruling of His creatures and their
responsibility towards Him, were preserved unimpaired amidst
general corruption. The ancient world was given to Pantheism and
creature-worship; Israel only, not because of its "monotheistic
instinct" (Renan), but because of the periodic interposition of
God through His prophets, resisted in the main the general
tendency to idolatry. Besides maintaining those pure conceptions
of Deity, the prophets from time to time, and with ever
increasing distinctness until we come to the direct and personal
testimony of the Baptist, foreshadowed a fuller and more
universal revelation — a time when, and a Man through Whom, God
should bless all the nations of the earth.
We need not here trace the Messianic predictions in detail;
their clearness and cogency are such that St. Augustine does not
hesitate to say (Retract., I, xiii, 3): "What we now call the
Christian religion existed amongst the ancients, and was from
the beginning of the human race, until Christ Himself came in
the flesh; from which time the already existing true religion
began to be styled Christian". And thus it has been remarked
that Israel alone amongst the nations of antiquity looked
forward to glories to come. All peoples alike retained some more
or less vague recollection of a Paradise lost, a remote Golden
Age, but only the spirit of Israel kept alive the definite hope
of a world-wide empire of justice, wherein the Fall of Man
should be repaired. The fact that, eventually, the Jews
misinterpreted their oracles, and identified the Messianic
Kingdom with a mere temporal sovereignty of Israel, cannot
invalidate the testimony of the Scriptures, as interpreted both
by Christ's own life and the teaching of His Apostles, to the
gradual evolution of that conception of which Christianity is
the full and perfect expression. Mistaken national pride,
accentuated by their galling subject to Rome led them to read a
material significance into the predictions of the triumph of the
Messias, and hence to love their privilege of being God's chosen
people. The wild olive in St. Paul's metaphor (Romans 11:17) was
then grafted upon the stock of the patriarchs in place of those
rejected branches, and entered upon their spiritual inheritance.
We may trace, too, in the world at large, apart from the Jewish
people, a similar though less direct preparation. Whether due
ultimately to the Old Testament predictions or to the fragments
of the original revelation handed down amongst the Gentile, a
certain vague expectation of the coming of a great conqueror
seems to have existed in the East and to a certain extent in the
Roman worlds, in the midst of which the new religion had its
birth. But a much more marked predisposition to Christianity may
be noticed in certain prominent features of the Roman religion
after the downfall of the republic. The old gods of Latium had
long ceased to reign. In their stead Greek philosophy occupied
the minds of the cultured, whilst the populace were attracted by
a variety of strange cults imported from Egypt and the East.
Whatever their corruption, these new religions, concentrating
worship on a single prominent deity, were monotheistic in
effect. Moreover, many of them were characterized by rites of
expiation and sacrifice, which familiarized men's minds with the
idea of a mediatorial religion. They combined to destroy the
notion of a nation cultus, and to separate the service of the
Deity from the service of the State. Finally, as a contributory
cause to the diffusion of Christianity, we must not fail to
mention the widespread Pax Romana, resulting from the union of
the civilized races under one strong central government.
Thus much may be said with regard to the remote preparation of
the world for the reception of Christianity. What immediately
preceded its institution, as it was born in Judaism, concerns
the Jewish race alone, and is comprised in the teaching and
miracles of Christ, His death and resurrection, and the mission
of the Holy Spirit.
During his whole mortal life on earth, including the two or
three years of His active ministry, Christ lived as a devout
Jew, Himself observing, and insisting on His followers
observing, the injunctions of the Law (Matthew 23:3). The sum of
His teaching, as of that of His precursor, was the approach of
the "Kingdom of God", meaning not only the rule of righteousness
in the individual heart ("the kingdom of God is within you" —
Luke 17:21), but also the Church (as is plain from many of the
parables) which He was about to institute.
Yet, though He often foreshadowed a time when the Law as such
would cease to bind, and though He Himself in proof of His
Messiahship occasionally set aside its provisions ("For the Son
of man is Lord even of the sabbath", Matthew 12:8), yet, as, in
spite of His miracles, He did not win recognition of that
Messiahship, still less of His Divinity, from the Jews at large.
He confined His explicit teaching about the Church to His
immediate followers, and left it to them, when the time came,
openly to pronounce the abrogation of the Law. (Acts 15:5-11,
18; Galatians 3:19; 24-28; Ephesians 2:2, 14-15; Colossians
2:16-17; Hebrews 7:12)
It was not so much, then, by propounding the dogmas of
Christianity as by informing the Old Law with the spirit of
Christian ethics that Christ found Himself able to prepare
Jewish hearts for the religion to come. Again, the faith which
He failed to arouse by the numerous miracles He wrought, He
sought to provide with a further and stronger incentive by dying
under every circumstance of pain, disgrace, and defeat, and then
raising Himself from the dead in triumph and glory. It was to
this fact rather than to the wonders He worked in His lifetime
that His accredited witnesses always appealed in their teaching.
On the marvel of the Resurrection is based in the counsels of
God the faith of Christianity. "If Christ is not risen again,
your faith is vain", declares the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians
15:17), who says no word of the other wonders Christ performed.
By His death, therefore, and His return from the dead, Christ,
as the event proved, furnished the strongest means for the
effective preaching of the religion He came to found.
The third antecedent condition to the birth of Christianity, as
we learn from the sacred records, was a special participation of
the Holy Spirit given to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost.
According to Christ's promise, the function of this Divine gift
was to teach them all truth and bring back to their remembrance
all that [Christ] had said to them (John 14:26; 16:13). "I send
the Promised of my Father upon you, but remain ye in the city
till ye shall be clothed with power from on high" (Luke 24:49).
"John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with
the Holy Ghost, not many days hence" (Acts 1:5). As a result of
that Divine visitation we find the Apostles preaching the Gospel
with wonderful courage, persuasiveness, and assurance in the
face of hostile Jews and indifferent Gentiles, "the Lord working
with them and confirming their words by the signs that followed"
(Mark 16:20).
We have now to consider the circumstances of Christianity at the
outset, and to estimate to what extent it was affected by the
already existing religious beliefs of the time.
It took its rise, as we have seen, in Judaism: its founder and
His disciples were orthodox Jews, and the latter maintained
their Jewish practices, at least for a time, even after the day
of Pentecost. The Jews themselves looked upon the followers of
Christ as a mere Israelitish sect (airesis) like the Sadducees
or the Essenes, styling St. Paul "the instigator of the revolt
of the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts 24:5). The new religion was
at first wholly confined to the synagogue, and it votaries had
still a large share of Jewish exclusiveness; they read the Law,
they practised circumcision, and they worshipped in the Temple,
as well as in the upper room at Jerusalem. We need not wonder,
then, that some modern rationalists, who reject its supernatural
origin and ignore the operation of the Holy Spirit in its first
missionaries, see in early Christianity Judaism pure and simple,
and find the explanation of its character and growth in the
pre-existing religious environment. But this theory of natural
development does not fit the facts as narrated in the New
Testament, which is full of indications that Christ's doctrines
were new, and His spirit strange. Consequently, the records have
to be mutilated to suit the theory. We cannot pretend to follow,
there or in other places, the rationalists in their New
Testament criticism. There is the less need of doing so that
their theories are often mutually destructive. A dozen years ago
an observer computed that since 1850 there had been published
747 theories regarding the Old and New Testaments, of which 608
were by that time defunct (see Hastings, "Higher Criticism").
The effect of these random hypotheses has been greatly to
strengthen the orthodox view, which we now proceed to state.
Christianity is developed from Judaism in the sense that it
embodies the Divine revelation contained in the latter creed,
somewhat as a finished painting embodies the original rough
sketch. The same hand was employed in the production of both
religions, and by type and promise and prophecy the Old
Dispensation points clearly to the New.
But type, and promise, and prophecy as clearly indicate that the
New will be something very different from the Old. No mere
organic evolution connects the two. A fuller revelation, a more
perfect morality, a wider distribution was to mark the Kingdom
of the Messias. "The end [or object] of the Law is Christ", says
St. Paul (Romans 10:4), meaning that the Law was given to the
Jews to excite their faith in the Christ to come. "Wherefore",
he says again (Galatians 3:24), "the law was our pedagogue unto
Christ", leading the Jews to Christianity as the slave brought
his charges to the school door.
Christ reproached the Jews for not reading their Scriptures
aright. "For if you believed Moses, you would perhaps believe me
also; for he wrote of me" (John 5:46). And St. Augustine sums
the whole matter up in the striking words: "In the Old
Testament, the New lies hidden; in the New, the Old is made
manifest" (On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, 4.8). But
Christ claimed to fulfil the Law by substituting the substance
for the shadow and the gift for the promise, and, the end having
been reached, all that was temporary and provisional in Judaism
came to a conclusion. Still, a direct divine intervention was
necessary to bring this about, just as, in any rational account
of the theory of evolution, recourse must be had to supernatural
power to bridge the gulf between being and non-being, life and
non-life, reason and non-reason. "God, who, at sundry times and
in divers manner, spoke in times past to the fathers by the
prophets, least of all in these days hat spoken to us by his
Son" (Hebrews 1:1, 2), the message growing in clearness and in
content with each successive utterance till it reached
completion in the Incarnation of the Word.
The Christianity, then, which the Apostles preached on the day
of Pentecost was entirely distinct from Judaism, especially as
understood by the Jews of the time; it was a new religion, new
in its Founder, new in much of its creed, new in its attitude
towards both God and man, new in the spirit of its moral code.
"The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ" (John 1:17).
St. Paul, as was to be expected, is our clearest witness on this
point. "If any man be in Christ", he says, "he is a new
creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are new"
(2 Corinthians 5:17). How new Christianity was, the Jews
themselves showed by putting its Author to death and persecuting
His adherents. Renan himself, who is not always consistent,
admits that "far from Jesus being the continuer of Judaism, what
characterizes His work is its breach with the Jewish spirit"
(Vie de Jésus, c. xxviii).
It may be granted that there is a certain resemblance between
the Essene communities and the earliest Christian assemblies.
But the resemblance is only on the outside. The spirit of the
Essenes was intensely national; except in the matter of worship
in the Temple, they were ultra-Jewish in their observance of
external forms, ablutions, the Sabbath, etc., and their mode of
life and discouragement of marriage were essentially
anti-social. Harnack himself owns that Christ had no relations
with this rigoristic sect, as was shown by His mixing freely
with sinners, etc. (Das Wesen des Christenthums, Lect. Ii, p.
33, tr.). But Christianity did not reject anything in Judaism
that was of permanent value, and so the Jewish converts on the
day of Pentecost could not have felt that they were abjuring
their ancient faith, but rather that they were then for the
first time entering upon the full understanding of it. More will
be said on this point when we come to consider what is the
essence of Christianity, but we may notice that the Church very
early found it necessary to emphasize her distinctness from
Judaism by abandoning the essentially Jewish rites of
circumcision, Temple-worship, and observance of the Sabbath.
Judaism is not the only religious system that has been
requisitioned by rationalistic writers to account for the
appearance of Christianity. Points of similarity between the
teaching of Christ and His Apostles and the great religions of
the East have been taken to indicated a derivation of the latter
system from the earlier, and the elaborate eschatology of the
Egyptian religion has been quoted to account for certain
Christian dogmas about the future life.
It were a long and not very profitable task to state and refute
these various theories in detail. Underlying all of them is the
rationalistic postulate which denies the fact and even the
possibility of Divine intervention in the evolution of religion.
In virtue of that attitude rationalism is confronted with the
impossible task of explaining how a universal religion like
Christianity, with an extensive yet logical system of dogma,
could have been evolved by a process of promiscuous borrowings
from existing cults and yet preserve everywhere its unity and
coherence. If the selection were made by Christ and His
adherents, rationalists must tell us how these "ignorant and
unlettered men" (Acts 4:13; cf. Matthew 13:54; Mark 6:2) knew
the religions of the East, when it was a matter of astonishment
to their contemporaries that they knew their own.
Or, if the dogmas and practices under consideration were the
additions of a later age, the questions arise, first, how to
reconcile this statement with the fact that the essence of
Christianity is discoverable in the earliest Christian witnesses
and, secondly, how scattered communities composed of various
nationalities and living under different conditions could have
united in selecting and maintaining the same dogmas and rules of
conduct.
We may ask, furthermore, why Christianity which, on this
hypothesis, only selected pre-existing doctrines, excited
everywhere such bitter hostility and persecution. "About this
sect", said the Roman Jews to St. Paul in prison, "we are
informed that it meets with opposition everywhere" (Acts
28:22)k.
Immense erudition has been wasted in the attempt to show that
Buddhism in particular is the prototype of Christianity, but,
apart from the difficulty of distinguishing the original creed
of Gautama from later and possibly post-Christian accretions, it
may be briefly objected that Buddhism is at best only an ethical
system, not a religion, for it recognizes no God and no
responsibility, that in so far as it emphasizes the comparative
worthlessness of earthly things and the insufficiency of earthly
delights it is in accord with the Christian spirit, but that in
aim it is essentially diverse. The supreme aim of Christianity
is eternal happiness in a state involving the employment of all
the soul's activities, that of Buddhism the ultimate loss of
conscious existence.
Let us grant, once and for all, that God's intercourse with His
creatures is not confined to the old and New Covenants, and that
Christianity includes many doctrines accessible to the unaided
human reason, and advocates many practices which are the natural
outcome of ordinary human activities. We thus expect to find
that, human nature being the same everywhere, the various
expressions of the religious sense will take similar shapes
amongst all peoples. Accordingly, false religions may very well
inculcate ascetic practices and possess the idea of sacrifice
and sacrificial banquets, of a priesthood, of sin and
confession, of sacramental rites like baptism, of the
accessories of worship such as images, hymns, lights, incense,
etc. Not everything in false religion is false, nor is
everything in the true religion (or Christianity) supernatural.
"We must not look", says M. Müller, "in the original belief of
mankind for [distinctively] Christian ideas but for the
fundamental religious ideas on which Christianity is built,
without which as its natural and historical support,
Christianity could not have become what it is" (Wissenschaft der
Sprache, II, 395).
These remarks apply not only to the religious systems which are
alleged to have influenced the conception of Christianity, but
to those which it met as soon as it issued from Judaism, its
cradle. Here, we are face to face with history, and not with
mere hypothesis and assumption. For Christianity, on its first
essaying to realize its destiny as the universal religion, did
actually come in contact with two mighty religious systems, the
religion of Rome, and the widespread body of thought, more of a
philosophy than a creed, prevalent in the Greek-speaking world.
The effect of the national religion of pagan Rome on early
Christianity concerned rites and ceremonies rather than points
of doctrine, and was due to the general causes just mentioned.
With Greek philosophy, on the other hand, representing the
highest efforts of the human intellect to explain life and
experience, and to reach the Absolute, Christianity, which
professes to solve all these problems, had, naturally and
necessarily, many points of contact.
It is on this connection that modern rationalists have brought
all their learning and research to bear in the effort to show
that the whole later intellectual system of Christianity is
something more or less alien to its original conception. It was
the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil
that explains, according to Dr. Hatch (Hibbert Lectures, 1888),
"why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of
Jesus, and a metaphysical creed in the forefront of the
Christianity of the fourth century". Professor Harnack states
the problem and solves it in similar fashion. He ascribes the
change, as he conceives it, from a simple code of conduct to the
Nicene Creed, to the three following causes:
* The universal law in all development of religion, that when
the first generation of converts who have been in contact, more
or less immediate, with the founder, and endowed with his
spirit, have passed away, their successors, having no personal
grasp of their creed, must depend on formulć and dogmas
* the union of the Gospel with the Greek spirit (a) due to the
conquests of Alexander and the consequent mingling of Jew and
Gentile, (b) further strengthened about A.D. 130, when Greek
converts brought into Christianity the philosophy in which they
were educated, (c) again, about a century later, when Greek
mysteries and Greek civilization in its widest range were
admitted, and finally, (d) about the middle of the fourth
century, when the Greek spirit finally prevailed and polytheism
and mythology (i.e. the worship of the saints) were admitted
* the internal struggles with Gnosticism, which aimed at a
synthesis of all existing creeds. "The struggle with Gnosticism
compelled the Church to put its teaching, its worship, and its
discipline into fixed forms and ordinances, and to exclude
everyone who would not yield them obedience" (Das Wesen des
Christenthums, Lect. Xi, p. 210).
It is the second of these reasons for the birth and growth of
dogma that concerns us immediately; but we may remark in regard
to the first that it ignores the direct working of God on the
soul of the individual, the perpetual renewal of fervour through
prayer and the use of the sacraments, that have always marked
the course of Christianity. Herein, the spirit of its first days
is seen still to be energetic, notwithstanding the comparative
elaborateness of creed and ritual of modern Christianity. The
saints are admitted to be the most perfect exponents of
practical Christianity; they are not exceptions or accidents or
by-products of the system; yet they did not find dogma any
hindrance to their perfect service of God and man.
As regards the third cause above mentioned, we may grant that it
has always been the providential function of heresy to bring
about a clearer definition of the Christian creed, and that
Gnosticism in its many varieties undoubtedly had this effect.
But long before Gnosticism had sufficiently developed to
necessitate the safeguarding of doctrine by conciliar
definition, we find traces of an organized Church with a very
definite creed. Not to mention the traditional "for of doctrine"
spoken of by St. Paul (Romans 6:17) and the act of faith
required by Philip from the eunuch (Acts 8:37), many critics,
including the Protestants Zahn and Kattenbusch (Das Apostolische
Symbol., Leipzig, 1894-1900), agree that the present Apostles'
Creed represents a formula which took shape in the Apostolic Age
and was uninfluenced by Gnosticism, which Protean heresy first
became formidable about A.D. 130. And as regards organization,
we know that the episcopate was a fully recognized institution
in the time of Ignatius (c. 110), whilst the Canon of New
Testament Scripture, the final establishment of which was
undoubtedly helped by Gnosticism, was in process of recognition
even in Apostolic times. St. Peter (assuming the Second epistle
to be his) classifies St. Paul's Epistles with the "other
Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16), and St. Polycarp, early in the
second century, quotes as Scripture nine of those thirteen
Pauline documents.
Concerning the "union of the Gospel with the Greek spirit"
which, according to Hatch and Harnack, resulted in such profound
modification so the former, we may admit many of the statements
made, without drawing from them the rationalistic inferences. We
readily grant that Greek thought and Greek culture had
thoroughly permeated the society into which Christianity was
born. Alexander's conquests had brought about a diffusion of
Greek ideals throughout the East. The Jews were dispersed
westwards, both from Palestine and from the towns of the
Captivity, and established in colonies in the chief cities of
the empire, especially in Alexandria. The extent of this
dispersion may be gathered from Acts 2:9-11), Greek became the
language of commerce and social intercourse, and Palestine
itself, more particularly Galilee, was to a great extent
hellenized. The Jewish Scriptures were best known in a Greek
version, and the last additions to the Old Testament — the Book
of Wisdom and the Second Book of Machabees — were entirely
composed in that tongue. In addition to this peaceful permeation
of the Hebraic by the Greek genius, formal efforts were made
from time to time, both in the political and the philosophical
sphere to hellenize the Jews altogether.
It is with the latter attempt that we are concerned; for the
writings of Philo, its chief and earliest advocate, coincided
with the birth of Christianity. Philo was a Jew of Alexandria,
well versed in Greek philosophy and literature, and at the same
time a devout believer in the Old Testament revelation. The
general purpose of his principal writings was to show that the
admirable wisdom of the Greeks was contained in substance in the
Jewish Scriptures, and his method was to read allegory into the
simple narratives of the Pentateuch. To the pure and certain
monotheism of Judaism he wedded various ideas taken from Plato
and the Stoics, trying thus to solve the problem, with which all
philosophy is ultimately confronted, how to bridge the gulf
between mind and matter, the infinite and the finite, the
absolute and the conditioned. Philo's writings were, no doubt,
widely known amongst the Jews, both at home and abroad, at the
time when the Apostles began to preach, but it is extremely
unlikely that the latter, who were not educated men, were
acquainted with them.
Not until the conversion of St. Paul and the beginning of his
apostolate can Christianity be said to have come, in the mind of
one of its chief exponents, into immediate contact with Greek
religious and philosophical theories. St. Paul was learned, not
only in Hebrew, but also in Hellenistic lore, and a singularly
apt instrument in the design of Providence, on account of his
Jewish origin and education, his Greek learning, and his Roman
citizenship, to aid Christianity to throw off the
swaddling-bands of its infancy and go forth to the conquest of
the nations.
But whilst recognizing this providential dispensation in the
election of St. Paul, we cannot, in face of his own express and
emphatic testimony, go on to assert that he universalized
Christianity, as Philo attempted to universalize Judaism, by
adding to its ethical content the merely natural religion of the
Greek thinkers of his own more sublime and pure conceptions. In
one of his earliest letters, the First Epistle to the
Corinthians, St. Paul rebukes their factious spirit, whereby
some of them had styled themselves partisans of Apollos, a
learned Alexandrian, and repudiates again and again that very
attempt to make Christianity plausible by tricking it out in the
garb of current speculations. "But we preach Christ crucified,
unto the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles
foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:23; see chaps. 1 and 2, and
Colossians 2:8). St. Paul, at any rate, was not indebted for his
Christology to Philo or his school, and any similarity of
terminology which may occur in the works of the two authors may
quite reasonably be ascribed to the metaphors already embodied
in the language they both used.
More insistence has been laid, perhaps, on the resemblance
between the Christology set forth by St. John in the opening
chapters of his Gospel and in the Apocalypse, and the Logos
theories which Philo elaborated, and which he is said to have
taken from Greek sources. If he did so, we may remark, he
neglected others older and nearer to hand, for the conception of
a Divine Word of God, by which the Deity enters into relation
with the created universe, is by no means exclusively or
originally Greek. The idea, expressed in the opening verses of
Genesis, is frequently repeated in the rest of the Old Testament
(see Psalms 32:6; 147:15; Proverbs 8:22; Wisdom 7:24-30, etc.).
Philo, therefore, was not compelled to seek in the Platonic Nous,
which is merely the directive cause of creation, or the Stoic
Logos, as the rational soul of the universe, the foundation of
his doctrine. His Logos theory is not at all clear or
consistent, but, apparently, he conceives the Word to be a
quasi-personal, subordinate, intermediate being between God and
the world, enabling the Creator to come into contact with
matter. He calls this Logos "the eldest" and the "first-born"
son of God, and uses phrases that suggest the Fourth Gospel; but
there is no resemblance in substance between the bold, clear,
categoric statements of the inspired Apostle, and the misty, if
poetical, conceptions of the Alexandrian philosopher. We may
conjecture that St. John chose his language so as to impress the
cultivated Greek mind with the true doctrine of the Divine
Logos, thus connecting his teaching with the older revelation,
and, at the same time, putting a check upon the Gnostic errors
to which Philoism was already giving birth.
Abandoning the Apostolic Age, Harnack, in his "History of
Dogma", ascribes the hellenization of Christianity to the
apologists of the second century (1st German edit., p. 253).
This contention can best be refuted by showing that the
essential doctrines of Christianity are contained already in the
New Testament Scriptures, while giving, at the same time, their
due force to the traditions of corporate Christianity. If the
Nicene Creed cannot be proved article by article from the sacred
records, interpreted by the tradition that preceded them and
determined their canon, then the rationalist assertion will have
some support.
But the point of comparison with the Creed must be not only the
Sermon on the Mount, as Hatch desires, nor the merely verbal
teaching of Christ, but the whole New Testament record. Christ
taught by His life no less than by His words, and it was His
actions and sufferings as well as His oral lessons that His
Apostles preached. For the fuller exposition of this, see
REVELATION. Here it suffices to note that Christian theology
became, in the hands of the apologists, the synthesis of all
speculative truth. It met and conquered the various imperfect
systems that possessed men's minds at its birth and arose after
that event.
The early heresies — Sabellianism, Arianism, and the rest — were
but attempts to make Christianity one of a number of
philosophies; the attempts failed, but the scattered truths that
those philosophies contained were shown, as time went on, to
exist and find their fulfilment in Christianity as well. "The
Church", says Newman,
has been ever 'sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing
and asking them questions'; claiming to herself what they said
rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects,
completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus
gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the
sense of her teaching. (Development of Doctrine, viii)
In the same section Newman thus summarizes the battle and the
triumph:
such was the conflict of Christianity with the old established
Paganism, which was almost dead before Christianity appeared;
with the Oriental Mysteries, flitting widely to and fro like
spectres; with the Gnostics, who made Knowledge all in all,
despised the many, and called Catholics mere children in the
Truth: with the Neo-Platonists, men of literature, pedants,
visionaries, or courtiers; with the Manichees, who professed to
seek truth by Reason, not by Faith; with the fluctuating
teachers of the school of Antioch, the time-serving Eusebians,
and the reckless versatile Arians; with the fanatic Montanists
and harsh Novatians, who shrank from the Catholic doctrine,
without power to propagate their own. These sects had no stay or
consistence, yet they contained elements of truth amid their
error, and had Christianity been as they, it might have resolved
into them; but it had that hold of the truth which gave its
teaching a gravity, a directness, a consistency, a sternness,
and a force to which its rivals, for the most part, were
strangers. (ibid., viii)
The essentials of Christianity
We have so far seen, in its origin and growth, the essential
independence of Christianity of all other religious systems,
except that of Judaism, with which, however, its relation was
merely that of substance to shadow. It is now time to point out
its distinctive doctrines.
In early Christianity there was much that was transitory and
exceptional. It was not presented full-grown to the world, but
left to develop in accordance with the forces and tendencies
that were implanted in it from the first by its Founder. And we,
having His assurance that His Spirit would abide with it for all
time, to inspire and regulate its human elements, can see in its
subsequent history the working out of His design. Hence, it does
not trouble us to find in primitive Christianity qualities which
did not survive after they had served their purpose. Natural
causes and the course of events, always under the Divine
guidance, resulted in Christianity taking on the form which
would best secure its permanence and efficiency. In Apostolic
times, supreme authority as to faith and morals was vested in
twelve representatives of Christ, each of whom was commissioned
to proclaim and infallibly interpret His Gospel. The hierarchy
was in an inchoate condition. Special charismata, like the gifts
of prophecy and tongues, were bestowed on individuals outside
the official teaching body. The Church was in process of
organization, and the various Christian communities, united,
doubtless, in a strong bond of charity, and in the sense that
they had one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, were to a large
extent independent of one another in the matter of government.
Such was the fashion in which Christ allowed His Church to be
established. It has greatly changed in outward appearances
during the ages. Has there been any corresponding change in
substance? Are the essentials of Christianity the same now as
they were then? We affirm that they are, and we prove our
assertion by examining the main points of the teaching, both of
Christ and His Apostles. We must look upon the matter as a
whole. We cannot judge of Christianity properly before the
coming of the Holy Spirit. The Gospels describe a process which
was not consummated till after Pentecost. The Apostles
themselves were not fully Christians till they knew through
faith all that Christ was — their God and their Redeemer as well
as their Master. And as Christianity furnishes a regulative
principle for both mind and will, teaching us what to believe
and what to do, faith no less than works must characterize the
perfect Christian.
The teaching of Christ
Taking, then, first of all, Christ's own dogmatic and moral
teaching, we may divide it into (a) what He did not reveal but
only reaffirmed, (b) what He drew from obscurity, and (c) what
He added to the sum total of belief and practice.
(a) The Jews, at the time of Christ, however worldly-minded,
were at any rate free from their ancestral tendency to idolatry.
They were strict monotheists, believing in the unity, power, and
holiness of the Supreme Deity. Christ reaffirmed, purified, and
confirmed the Jewish theology, both moral and dogmatic. He
asserted the spiritual nature of the Godhead (John 1:18; 4:24),
and insisted on the importance of worshipping Him in spirit,
i.e. with more than merely external rites. And he exacted the
same right dispositions of heart in the whole of God's service,
showing how both guilt and merit depend on the will and
intention (Matthew 5:28; 15:18). He recalled the original unity
and indissolubility of the marriage-tie. He brought into
prominence the immortality, and hence the transcendent
importance, of the human soul (Matthew 16:26), as against the
heresy of the Sadducees and the worldliness of the Jews in
general. In all these points He fulfilled the Law by showing its
real and full significance.
(b) But He did not stop here. Taking the great central precept
of the Old Dispensation — the love of God — He pointed out all
its implications and made clear that the doctrine of the
Fatherhood of God, so imperfectly grasped under the law of fear,
was the immediate source of the doctrine of the brotherhood of
men, which the Jews had never realized at all. He never tired of
dwelling on the loving kindness and the tender providence of His
Father, and He insisted equally on the duty of loving all men,
summing up the whole of His ethical teaching in the observance
of the law of love (Matthew 5:43; 22:40). This universal charity
He designed to be the mark of His true followers (John 13:45),
and in it, therefore, we must see the genuine Christian spirit,
so distinct from everything that had hitherto been seen on earth
that the precept which inspired it He called "new" (John 13:34).
Christ's clear and definite teaching, moreover, about the life
to come, the final judgment resulting in an eternity of
happiness or misery, the strict responsibility which attaches to
the smallest human actions, is in great contrast to the current
Jewish eschatology. By substituting eternal sanctions for
earthly rewards and punishments, He raised and ennobled the
motives for the practice of virtue, and set before human
ambition an object wholly worthy of the adopted sons of God, the
extension of their Father's Kingdom in their own souls and in
the souls of others.
(c) Among the doctrines added by Christ to the Jewish faith, the
chief, of course, are those concerning Himself, including the
central dogma of the whole Christian system, the Incarnation of
God the Son. In regard to Himself, Christ made two claims,
though not with equal insistence. He asserted that He was the
Messias of Jews, the expected of the nations, Whose mission it
was to undo the effects of the Fall and to reconcile man with
God; and He claimed to be Himself God, equal to, and one with,
the Father. In support of this double claim, He pointed to the
fulfilment of the prophecies, and He worked many miracles. His
claim to be the Messias was not admitted by the leaders of His
nation; had it been admitted, He would doubtless have manifested
His Divinity more clearly. Most modern rationalists (Harnack,
Wellhausen, and others) acknowledge that Christ from the
beginning of His preaching knew Himself as the Messias, and
accepted the various titles which belong in the Scripture to
that personage — Son of David, Son of Man (Daniel 7:13), the
Christ (see John 14:24; Matthew 16:16; Mark 14:61-62). In one
passage — and very significant one — He applies the name to
Himself — "But this is eternal life: That they may know thee,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John
17:3).
In regard to His Divinity, His claim is clear, but not
emphasized. We cannot say that the title "Son of God", which is
repeatedly given to Him in the Gospels (John 1:34; Matthew
27:40; Mark 3:12; 15:39, etc.), and which He is described as
taking to Himself (Matthew 27:43; John 10:36), necessarily of
itself connotes a Divine personality; and in the mouths of
several of the speakers, e.g. in the exclamation of Nathaniel,
"Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God", it presumably does not. But in
the confession of St. Peter (Matthew 16:16) the circumstances
point to more than a mere amplification of the Messianic title.
That title was at that time in habitual use in regard to Jesus,
and there would have been nothing significant in Peter's
expression and in Christ's glad acceptance of it, if it had not
gone further than the common belief. Christ hailed St. Peter's
confession as a special revelation, not as a mere deduction from
external facts. When we compare this with that other declaration
narrated in the same Gospel (Matthew 26:62-66), where, in answer
to the high-priest's adjuration, 'I adjure thee by the living
God, that thou tell us if thou be the Christ the Son of God",
Jesus replied, "Thou has said it" (i.e., "I am"; see Mark
14:62), we cannot reasonably doubt that Christ claimed to be
Divine. The Jews so understood this and put Him to death as a
blasphemer.
Another prominent feature in the theology of Christ was His
doctrine about the Paraclete. When, in St. John's gospel
(14:16-17), He says; "And I will ask the Father, and he shall
give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever,
the spirit of truth", it is impossible to believe that what He
promises is a mere abstraction, not a person like Himself. In
verse 26, the personality is still more marked: "And the
Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father shall send in my
name, He will teach you all things". (Cf. 15:26, "But when the
Paraclete shall come whom I shall send you from the Father, the
Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father" etc.) It may be
that the full meaning of those words was not realized till the
Spirit did actually come; moreover, the revelation was made, of
course, only to His immediate followers; still, no unbiased mind
can deny that Christ here speaks of a personal influence as a
distinct Divine entity; a distinction and a Divinity which is
further implied in the baptismal formula He afterwards
instituted (Matthew 28:19).
Christ took up the burden of the preaching of His precursor and
proclaimed the advent of the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of
Heaven, a conception already familiar in the Old Testament
[Psalm 144:11-13], but furnished with a wider and more varied
content in the words of Christ. It may be taken to mean,
according to the context, the Messianic Kingdom in its true
spiritual sense, i.e. the Church of God which Christ came to
found, wherein to store up and perpetuate the benefits of the
Incarnation (cf. The parables of the wheat and the tares, the
dragnet, and the wedding feast), or the reign of God in the
heart that submits to His sovereignty (Luke 16:21), or the abode
of the blessed (Matthew 5:20 etc.). It was the main topic of His
preaching, which was occupied in showing what dispositions of
mind and heart and will, were necessary for entrance into "the
Kingdom", what, in other words, was the Christian ideal.
Regarded as the Church, He preached the Kingdom to the multitude
in parables only, reserving fuller explanations to private
intercourse with His Apostles (Acts 1:3).
The last great dogma which we learn from the life, preaching,
and death of Christ is the doctrine of Redemption. "For the Son
of Man also came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and
to give His life a redemption for many" (Mark 10:45). The
sacrificial character of His death is clearly stated at the Last
Supper: "This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be
shed for many unto remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28). And He
ordained the perpetuation of that Sacrifice by His Disciples in
the words: "Do this in commemoration of me" (Luke 22:19).
Christ, knowing the counsels of His Father, deliberately set
Himself to realize in His own person the portrait of the
suffering servant of Jahveh, so vividly painted by Isaias
(chapter 53), a Messias Who should triumph through death and
defeat. This was a strange revelation to Israel and the world.
What wonder that so novel an idea could not enter the Apostles'
minds till it had actually been realized and further explained
by the Divine Victim himself (Luke 24:27, 45). Thus, first of
all in action, Christ preached the great doctrine of the
Atonement, and, by raising Himself from the dead, He added
another proof to those establishing His Divine mission and His
Divine personality. But, naturally enough, He left the more
explicit teaching on these points to His chosen witnesses, whose
presentment of Christianity we shall presently examine.
To turn now to what is new in the moral teachings of Christ, we
may say, once for all, that it embodied ethical perfection.
There may be development of doctrine, but, after the Sermon on
the Mount, there can be no further evolution of morals. God's
own perfection is set as the standard (Matthew 5:48). Duty was
the principal motive in the Old Dispensation; in the New this
was sublimated into love. Men were taught to serve not on
account of the penal ties attached to non-service, but on
principles of generosity. Before, God's will was to be the aim
of the creature's performance; now, His good pleasure also was
to be sought. "What things are pleasing to Him, these do I
always" (John 8:29), and by action even more than by word Christ
taught the lesson of voluntary self-sacrifice. Never till His
time were the Evangelical counsels — voluntary poverty,
perpetual chastity, and entire obedience — preached or practised.
From no previous moral code, however, exalted, could the
Beatitudes have been evolved. Meekness and humility were unknown
as virtues to the heathen, and despised by the Jew. Christ made
them the ground-work of the whole moral edifice. To realize what
new thing Christ's ethical teaching brought into the world and
put within the grasp of everyone, we have only to think of the
great host of the Christian saints. For they are the true
disciples of the Cross, those who imbibed and expressed His
spirit best, who had the courage to test the truth of that
Divine paradox which forms the substance of Christ's moral
message; "He that shall wish to save his soul shall lose it, but
he that shall lose his soul on my account shall find it"
(Matthew 16:25; cf. Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; 17:33; John 12:25).
That was the course He Himself adopted — the way of the Cross —
and His disciples were not above their Master. Self-conquest as
a preliminary to conquering the world of God — that was the
lesson taught by Christ's life, and still more by His passion
and death.
The teaching of the Apostles
Does the Christianity presented to us in the rest of the
writings of the New Testament differ from that described in the
Gospels? And if so, is the difference one of kind or one of
degree? We have seen that Christianity must not be judged in the
making, but as a finished product. It was never meant to be
fully set forth in the Gospels, where it is presented mainly in
action. "I have yet many things to say to you: but you cannot
bear them now", said Christ in His last discourse. "But when he,
the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth . . .
and the things that are to come he shall show you" (John 16:12,
13). We may presume that Christ Himself told them these many
things when "He showed himself alive after his passion, by many
proofs, for forty days appearing to them, and speaking of the
kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3), and that they were rendered
permanent in the minds of the Apostles by the indwelling of the
Spirit of Truth after Pentecost. Accordingly, we must expect to
find in their teaching a more formal, more theoretic, and more
dogmatic exposition of Christianity than in the drama of
Christ's life. But what we have no right to expect, and what
rationalists always do expect, is to find the whole of
Christianity in its written records. Christ nowhere prescribed
writing as a means of promulgating His gospel. It was
comparatively late in the Apostolic Age, and apparently in
obedience to no preconceived plan, that the sacred books began
to appear. Many Christians must have lived and died before those
books existed, or without knowledge of them. And so we cannot
argue from the non-appearance of any particular tenet to its
non-existence, nor from its first mention to its first invention
— fallacies which often vitiate the erudite researches of the
rationalists.
The main heads of the Apostolic preaching, as far as we can
gather from the records, vary with the character of the
audiences they addressed. To the Jews they dwelt upon the
marvellous fulfilment of the prophesies in Christ, showing that,
in spite of the manner of His life and death, He was actually
the Messias, and that their redemption from sin had really been
accomplished by His sacrifice on the Cross. This was the burden
of St. Peter's discourses (Acts 2 and 3) and those of St.
Stephen and all who addressed the Jews in their synagogues (cf.
Acts 26:22-23). Once convinced of the reality of Christ's
mission and the seal God set upon it by His Resurrection, they
were received into the Christian body to discover more at
leisure all the implications of their belief. In regard to the
Gentiles, the same striking fact of the Resurrection was in the
forefront of the Apostolic teaching, but more stress was laid
upon the divinity of Christ. Still, St. Paul, whose peculiar
mission it was to approve the new revelation to those that sat
in darkness and had no common ground of belief with the Jews,
did not consider that his Gospel was anything different from
that of the others. "I have laboured more abundantly than all
they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me: for, whether I,
or they, so we preach, and you have believed" (1 Corinthians
15:10-11).
This definiteness and uniformity of content in the Apostolic
message, and this sense of responsibility in regard to its
character, is still more strikingly emphasized by the same
Apostle in the next Epistle, wherein, rebuking the Galatians for
giving heed to innovators "who would pervert the Gospel of
Christ", he exclaims: 'Yet, though we ourselves or an angel from
heaven preach a gospel other than that we have preached to you,
let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:7, 8). There is no trace here
of uncertainty or ignorance as to what Christianity meant, or of
any tentative groping in search of truth. Even then, when
theological science was in its infancy, we find the Apostle
exhorting Timothy to keep to the very phrases in which he has
received the Faith, "the form of sound words", avoiding "profane
novelties of expression" (1 Timothy 6:20; 2 Timothy 1:13). Once
again "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions
which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle" (2
Thessalonians 2:14). And those traditions were directly
communicated by Christ Himself to His Apostle, as he tells us in
many passages — "For I have received of the Lord that which also
I delivered unto you" (1 Corinthians 11:23), and again "For I
delivered unto you first of all what I received" (1 Corinthians
15:3).
Many rationalists have professed to discover in the apostolic
writings various kinds of Christianity mutually antagonistic and
all alike illegitimate developments of the original Gospel. We
have Pauline, Petrine, Joannine Christianity, as distinguished
from the Christianity of Christ. But those theories which ignore
Catholic tradition and supernatural guidance, and rest on the
written records alone, are gradually being abandoned, helped to
their disappearance by the critics themselves, who have little
respect for each others' hypotheses. We may take the Apostolic
messages as one self-consistent whole, any apparent
discrepancies or want of coherence being amply accounted for by
the different circumstances of their deliverance.
This preaching, therefore, reduced to its simplest form, was:
The Resurrection of Christ as a proof of His Divinity and
Incarnation, a guarantee of His teaching and a pledge of man's
salvation.
On the historic fact of the Resurrection the whole of
Christianity is based. If He was not truly slain, Christ cannot
have been man; if he did not rise again, He cannot have been
God. St. Paul does not hesitate to stake everything on the truth
of this fact: If Christ be not risen again, then is our
preaching vain, and your faith also is vain. Yea, and we are
found false witnesses of God" (1 Corinthians 15:14-15).
Consequently, God's providence has so arranged matters that the
proofs of Christ's Resurrection place the fact beyond all
reasonable doubt.
But if St. Paul is so emphatic about the foundation of the
Christian Faith, he is also careful to erect the edifice upon
it. It is to him that we owe the statement of the doctrine of
grace, that wonderful gift of God to regenerate man. Christ had
already taught, in the allegory of the vine and the branches
(John 15:1-17), that there can be no salutary action on the part
of the faithful without vital communication with Him. This great
truth is expanded in many passages by St. Paul (Philippians
2:13; Romans 8:9-11; 1 Corinthians 15:10; 2 Corinthians 3:5;
Galatians 4:5-6) wherein regenerate man learns that he is God's
adopted son and united with Him by the indwelling of His Holy
Spirit. This privilege is what man gains by Christ's redemption,
the benefits of which are applied to his soul by baptism and
other sacraments. And St. Paul is not only the chief exponent of
this doctrine, but he alone of the Apostles promulgates anew the
mystery of the Blessed Eucharist, the principal fountain of
grace (1 Corinthians 11:23, 24; cf. John 4:13-14).
We need not pursue farther the development of doctrine amongst
the Apostles. The Christianity they preached was received from
Christ Himself, and His Spirit prevented them from misconceiving
or misinterpreting it. On the strength of His commission they
insisted on the obedience of faith, they denounced heresy, and
with skill, incredible had it not been Divine, they preserved
the truth committed to them in the midst of a perverse, subtle
and corrupt civilization. That same Divine skill has remained
with Christianity ever since; heresy after heresy has attacked
the Faith and been defeated, leaving the fortress all the more
impregnable for its onset. The Christianity we profess today is
the Christianity of Christ and His Apostles. Just as they were
more explicit than He in its verbal formulation, so the
Apostolic Church has ever since laboured to express more and
more clearly the treasures of doctrine originally committed to
her charge. In a sense, we may believe more than our first
Christian ancestors, inasmuch as we have a more complete
knowledge of the contents of our Faith; in a sense, they
believed all that we do, for they accepted as we the principle
of a Divinely-commissioned teaching authority, to whose dogmatic
utterances they were ever prepared to give assent. The same
essential oneness of faith and the same variety in its content
for the individual exist side by side in the Church today. The
trained theologian, deeply versed in the wonders of revelation,
and the young or the uneducated who know explicitly little more
than the bare essentials of Christianity, knowing the One True
God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, believing in the
Incarnation, the Atonement, the Church, are equally Christians,
equally possessed of the integrity of faith. |