An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant Part 6

Meantime new questions have arisen, questions of the relation of Jesus to Messianism, like those touched upon by Wrede in his _Das Messias Geheimniss in den Evangelien_, 1901, and questions as to the eschatological trait in Jesus' own teaching. Schweitzer's book, _Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu-Forschung_, 1906, not merely sets forth this deeply interesting chapter in the history of the thought of modern men, but has also serious interpretative value in itself. For English readers Sanday's _Life of Christ in Recent Research_, 1907, follows the descriptive aspect, at least, of the same purpose with Schweitzer's book, covering, however, only the last twenty years.

It is characteristic that Ritschl, notwithstanding his emphasis upon the historical Jesus, a.s.serted the impossibility of a biography of Jesus.

The understanding of Jesus is through faith. For Wrede, on the other hand, such a biography is impossible because of the nature of our sources. Not alone are they scant, but they are not biographical. They are apologetic, propagandist, interested in everything except those problems which a biographer must raise. The last few years have even conjured up the question whether Jesus ever lived. One may say with all simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other personage equally remote in point of time, and equally woven about--if any such have been--by the love and devotion of men. Bousset's little book, _Was Wissen wir von Jesus?_ 1904, convinces a quiet mind that we know a good deal. Qualities in the personality of Jesus obviously worked in transcendent measure to call out devotion. No understanding of history is adequate which has no place for the unfathomed in personality. Exactly because we ourselves share this devotion, we could earnestly wish that the situation as to the biography of Jesus were other than it is.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that, almost in a literal sense, G.o.d was the author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had pa.s.sed. The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the cla.s.sic Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.

The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic authors.h.i.+p of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authors.h.i.+p, which would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the true relation of Judaism to Christianity.

In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' _Leben Jesu_ saw the light, Wilhelm Vatke published his _Religion des Alten Testaments_.

Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full professors.h.i.+p. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had caused. Reuss in Stra.s.sburg was working on the same lines, but published the main body of his results much later.

The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due to this fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with those which were in masterful fas.h.i.+on substantiated in Holland by Kuenen about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.

Budde has shown in his _Kanon des Alten Testaments_, 1900, that the Old Testament which lies before us finished and complete, a.s.sumed its present form only as the result of the growth of several centuries. At the beginning of this process of the canonisation stands that strange event, the sudden appearance of a holy book of the law under King Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the process, through the decisions of the scribes, falls after the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the second century. Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the second century succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which differed from the standard then set up. This state of things has enormously increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that of the detection and separation of the various elements of which many of the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements of different ages, which have been wrought together into the doc.u.ments as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage.

The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking.

There was no such thing as right of authors.h.i.+p in ancient Israel, little of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether different from that which the same transaction would bear to us. The difficulty of the separation of these materials, great in any case, is enhanced by the fact alluded to, that we have none but internal evidence. The success of the achievement, and the unanimity attained with reference to the most significant questions, is one of the marvels of the life of learning of our age.

In the Jewish tradition it had been a.s.sumed that the Mosaic law was written down in the wilderness. Then, in the times of the Judges and of the Kings, the historical books took shape, with David's Psalms and the wise words of Solomon. At the end of the period of the Kings we have the prophetic literature and finally Ezra and Nehemiah. De Wette had disputed this order, but Wellhausen in his _Prolegomena zur Ges.h.i.+chte Israels_, 1883, may be said to have proved that this view was no longer tenable. Men ask, could the law, or even any greater part of it, have been given to nomads in the wilderness? Do not all parts of it a.s.sume a settled state of society and an agricultural life? Do the historical books from Judges to the II. Kings know anything about the law? Are the practices of wors.h.i.+p which they imply consonant with the supposition that the law was in force? How is it that that law appears both under Josiah and again under Ezra, as something new, thus far unknown, and yet as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth? It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah's reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the religion of the law exist. The centralisation of wors.h.i.+p at one point, such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing achieved by the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the so-called _Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving_, itself implies the multiplicity of the places of wors.h.i.+p. Deuteronomy demands the centralisation of the wors.h.i.+p as something which is yet to take place.

The priestly Code declares that the limitation of wors.h.i.+p to one place was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the wilderness. It is a.s.sumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared the almost universal wors.h.i.+p of the stars. Moses may indeed have concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their G.o.d, hallowing the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation to the divine will. Jahve was a holy G.o.d whose will was to guide the people coming up out of the degradation of nature-wors.h.i.+p. That part of the people held to the old nature-wors.h.i.+p is evident in the time of Elijah. The history of Israel is not that of defection from a pure revelation. It is the history of a gradual attainment of purer revelation, of enlargement in the application of it, of discovery of new principles contained in it. It is the history also of the decline of spiritual religion. The zeal of the prophets against the ceremonial wors.h.i.+p shows that. Their protest reveals at that early date the beginning of that ant.i.thesis which had become so sharp in Jesus' time.

This determination of the relative positions of law and prophets was the first step in the reconstruction of the history, both of the nation of Israel and of its literature. At the beginning, as in every literature, are songs of war and victory, of praise and grief, hymns, even riddles and phrases of magic. Everywhere poetry precedes prose. Then come myths relating to the wors.h.i.+p and tales of the fathers and heroes. Elements of both these sorts are embedded in the simple chronicles which began now to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David and of Saul. Perhaps at this point belong the earliest attempts at fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regulation of all details of life upon which would depend the favour of the G.o.d who had brought punishment upon the people in the exile. The prophecy runs on into apocalyptic like that of the book of Daniel. The contact with the outside world makes possible a phase of literature such as that to which the books of Job and Ecclesiastes belong. The deepening of the inner life gave the world the lyric of the Psalms, some of which are credibly a.s.signed to a period so late as that of the Maccabees.

In this which has been said of the literature we have the clue also for the reconstruction of the nation's history. The nave a.s.sumption in the writing of all history had once been that one must begin with the beginning. But to Wellhausen, Stade, Eduard Meyer and Kittel and Cornill, it has been clear that the history of the earliest times is the most uncertain. It is the least adapted to furnish a secure point of departure for historical inquiry. There exist for it usually no contemporary authorities, or only such as are of problematical worth.

This earliest period const.i.tutes a problem, the solution of which, so far as any solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach from the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the time of the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from whom we have written prophecies. We get from these, as also from the earliest direct attempts at history writing, only that conception of Israel's pre-historic life which was entertained in prophetic circles in the eighth century. We learn the heroic legends in the interpretation which the prophets put upon them. We have still to seek to interpret them for ourselves. We must begin in the middle and work both backward and forward. Such a view of the history of Israel affords every opportunity for the connecting of the history and religion of Israel with those of the other Semite stocks. Some of these have in recent years been discovered to offer extraordinary parallels to that which the Old Testament relates.

THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE

When speaking of Baur's contribution to New Testament criticism, we alluded to his historical works. He was in a distinct sense a reformer of the method of the writing of church history. To us the notions of the historical and of that which is genetic are identical. Of course, nave religious chronicles do not meet that test. A glance at the histories produced by the age of rationalism will show that these also fall short of it. The perception of the relativity of inst.i.tutions like the papacy is here wholly wanting. Men and things are brought summarily to the bar of the wisdom of the author's year of grace. They are approved or condemned by this criterion. For Baur, all things had come to pa.s.s in the process of the great life of the world. There must have been a rationale of their becoming. It is for the historian with sympathy and imagination to find out what their inherent reason was. One other thing distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors. He realised that before one can delineate one must investigate. One must go to the sources. One must estimate the value of those sources. One must have ground in the sources for every judgment. Baur was himself a great investigator. Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he arrived as unwarranted. New doc.u.ments have come to light since his day.

Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed. There is still another other thing to say concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian.

He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly says that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was that in his search for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of personality, threatened altogether to disappear. The force in the history was the absolute, the immanent divine will. The method everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms. One gets an impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any other issue.

The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in the work of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He had no talent for the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of history, if one may so describe the type. He had imagination, sympathy, a devout spirit. His great trait was his insight into personality. He wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this investigation. Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the writing of church history on a great scale. They have contented themselves with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in which, at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some specific question.

We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the canonical literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical. We alluded to the new sense of the continuity of the history of the apostolic churches with that of the Church of the succeeding age. The influence of these ideas has been to set all problems here involved in a new light. Until 1886 it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of the apostolic age. In that year Weizsacker's book, _Das Apostolische Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche_, admirably filled the place. A part of the problem of the historian of the apostolic age is difficult for the same reason which was given when we were speaking of the biography of Jesus. Our materials are inadequate. First with the beginning of the activities of Paul have we sources of the first rank. The relation of statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was one of the earliest problems which the Tubingen school set itself. An attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's _Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums_, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of Paul's successors in that cardinal activity. It offers, strange as it may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity which has dealt adequately with the sources. It gives also a picture of the world into which the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the truth which has for a generation past grown in men's apprehension that there is no possibility of understanding Christianity, except against the background of the religious life and thought of the world into which it came. Christianity had vital relation, at every step of its progress, to the religious movements and impulses of the ancient world, especially in those centres of civilisation which Paul singled out for his endeavour and which remained the centres of the Christian growth. It was an age which has often been summarily described as corrupt. Despite its corruption, or possibly because it was corrupt, it gives evidence, however, of religious stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual endeavour rarely paralleled. In the Roman Empire everything travelled.

Religions travelled. In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a faith of mankind which had not its votaries.

It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas. These things facilitated the progress of Christianity. They made certain that if the Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it would one day conquer the world. Equally, they made certain that, as the very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself transformed. This it is which has happened in the evolution of Christianity from its very earliest stages and in all phases of its life. Of any given rite, opinion or inst.i.tution, of the many which have pa.s.sed for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name, men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and representing the accommodation and a.s.similation of Christianity to its environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great change which pa.s.sed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because their minds rested upon that which was outward and spectacular. Not unnaturally the metamorphosis in the inward nature of Christianity which had taken place a century and a quarter earlier was hidden from their eyes. In truth, by that earlier and subtler transformation Christianity had pa.s.sed permanently beyond the stage in which it had been preponderantly a moral and spiritual enthusiasm, with its centre and authority in the person of Jesus. It became a system and an inst.i.tution, with a canon of New Testament Scripture, a monarchical organisation and a rule of faith which was formulated in the Apostles' Creed.

To Baur the truth as to the conflict of Paul with the Judaisers had meant much. He thought, therefore, with reference to the rise of priesthood and ritual among the Christians, to the emphasis on Scripture in the fas.h.i.+on of the scribes, to the insistence upon rules and dogmas after the manner of the Pharisees, that they were but the evidence of the decline and defeat of Paul's free spirit and of the resurgence of Judaism in Christianity. He sought to explain the rise of the episcopal organisation by the example of the synagogue. Ritschl in his _Entstehung der alt-catholischen Kirche_, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could not be true. Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went forward to embrace the h.e.l.lenic and Roman world. The inst.i.tutions, dogmas, practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There was here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity. But it was not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and scribes and Pharisees with other names elsewhere. The phenomenon of the waning of the original enthusiasm of a period of religious revelation has been a frequent one. Christianity on a grand scale ill.u.s.trated this phenomenon anew. Harnack has elaborated this thesis with unexampled brilliancy and power. He has supported it with a learning in which he has no rival and with a religious interest which not even hostile critics would deny. The phrase, 'the h.e.l.lenisation of Christianity,' might almost be taken as the motto of the work to which he owes his fame.

HARNACK

Adolf Harnack was born in 1851 in Dorpat, in one of the Baltic provinces of Russia. His father, Theodosius Harnack, was professor of pastoral theology in the University of Dorpat. Harnack studied in Leipzig and began to teach there in 1874. He was called to the chair of church history in Giessen in 1879. In 1886 he removed to Marburg and in 1889 to Berlin. Harnack's earlier published work was almost entirely in the field of the study of the sources and materials of early church history.

His first book, published in 1873, was an inquiry as to the sources for the history of Gnosticism. His _Patrum Apostolicorum Opera_, 1876, prepared by him jointly with von Gehhardt and Zahn, was in a way only a forecast of the great collection, _Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur_, begun in 1882, upon which numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The collection has already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own two works, _Die Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Die Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1897, are deposited the results of his reflexion on the ma.s.s of this material. His _Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament_, 1906, etc., should not be overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have discovered ma.n.u.scripts of importance. He has had to do with the Prussian Academy's edition of the Greek Fathers. A list of his published works, which was prepared in connexion with the celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 1911, bears witness to his amazing diligence and fertility.

He was for thirty-five years a.s.sociated with Schurer in the publication of the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_. He has filled important posts in the Church and under the government. To this must be added an activity as a teacher which has placed a whole generation of students from every portion of the world under undying obligation. One speaks with reserve of the living, but surely no man of our generation has done more to make the history of which we write.

Harnack's epoch-making work was his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_, 1886-88, fourth edition, 1910. The book met, almost from the moment of its appearance, with the realisation of the magnitude of that which had been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and practice, and of external circ.u.mstances on the history of thought. His history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never before attained. Philosophy, wors.h.i.+p, morals, the development of Church government and of the canon, the common interests and pa.s.sions of the age and those of the individual partic.i.p.ants, are all made tributary to his delineation.

Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the Logos-Christology at Nicaea and Chalcedon was inevitable. A certain historic naturalness of the movement he would concede, the world on which Christianity entered being what it was. He is aware, however, that many elements other than Christian have entered into the development. He has phrased his apprehension thus. That h.e.l.lenisation of Christianity which Gnosticism represented, and against which, in this, its acute form, the Church contended was, after all, the same thing which, by slower process and more unconsciously, befell the Church itself. That pure moral enthusiasm and inspiration which had been the gist of the Christian movement, in its endeavour to appropriate the world, had been appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents knew. It had taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had no perception of the fact that it ill.u.s.trated the old law that the conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient culture with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate the degree in which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-s.h.i.+ning flame. It had been a maker of history. Meantime it had been unmade and remade by its own history. It confidently carried back its canon, dogma, organisation, to Christ and the apostles. It did not realise that the very fact that it could find these things natural and declare them ancient, proved with conclusiveness that it had itself departed from the standard of Christ and the apostles. It esteemed that these were its defences against the world. It little dreamed that they were, by their very existence, the evidence of the fact that the Church had not defended itself against the world. Its dogma was the h.e.l.lenisation of its thought. Its organisation was the Romanising of its life. Its canon and ritual were the externalising, and conventionalising of its spirit and enthusiasm. These are positive and constructive statements of Harnack's main position.

When, however, they are turned about and stated negatively, these statements all convey, more or less, the impression that the advance of Christianity had been its destruction, and the evolution of dogma had been a defection from Christ. This is the aspect of the contention which gave hostile critics opportunity to say that we have before us the history of the loss of Christianity. Harnack himself has many sentences which superficially will bear that construction. Hatch had said in his brilliant book, _The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church_, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Christianity was ever to wield an influence in the world at all. Again, one must consider that the process of the recovery of pure Christianity must begin at exactly this point, namely, with the recognition of how much in current Christianity is extraneous. It must begin with the sloughing off of these extraneous elements, with the recovery of the sense for that which original Christianity was. Such a recovery would be the setting free again of the power of the religion itself.

The constant touchstone and point of reference for every stage of the history of the Church must be the gospel of Jesus. But what was the gospel of Jesus? In what way did the very earliest Christians apprehend that gospel? This question is far more difficult for us to answer than it was for those to whom the New Testament was a closed body of literature, externally differentiated from all other, and with a miraculous inspiration extending uniformly to every phrase in any book.

These men would have said that they had but to find the proper combination of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped themselves by the ant.i.theses in which Jesus stood. There is much about them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and unquestionably only relative. In a large sense, much of the meaning of the gospel has to be gathered out of the evidence of the operation of its spirit in subsequent ages of the Christian Church, and from remoter aspects of the influence of Jesus on the world. Thus the very conception of the gospel of Jesus becomes inevitably more or less subjective. It becomes an ideal construction. The identification of this ideal with the original gospel proclamation becomes precarious. We seem to move in a circle. We derive the ideal from the history, and then judge the history by the ideal.

Is there any escape from this situation, short of the return to the authority of Church or Scripture in the ancient sense? Furthermore, even the men to whom the gospel was in the strictest sense a letter, identified the gospel with their own private interpretation of this letter. Certainly the followers of Ritschl who will acknowledge no traits of the gospel save those of which they find direct witness in the Gospels, thus ignore that the Gospels are themselves interpretations.

This undue stress upon the doc.u.ments which we are fortunate enough to possess, makes us forget the limitations of these doc.u.ments. We tend thus to exaggerate that which must be only incidental, as, for example, the Jewish element, in the teaching of Jesus. We thus underrate phases of Jesus' teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have apprehended better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in Harnack's own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's anxiety to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their nature. We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials at hand. What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was it the longing for the coming of the Kingdom of G.o.d, the striving after the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the faith of the Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to the person of Jesus?

What word dominated the preaching? Was it that the Kingdom of G.o.d was near, that the Son of Man would come? Or was it that in Jesus Messiah has come? What was the demand upon the hearer? Was it, Repent, or was it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or was it both, and which had the greater emphasis? Was the name of Jesus used in the formulas of wors.h.i.+p before the time of Paul? What do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or baptism in that name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord's Supper and the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in the rite? Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a wors.h.i.+p of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of the dogma of his person and of the trinity?

In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily of the Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the seventh centuries. The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds anything which has been written on this theme. A debate which to most modern men is remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must have had for those who took part in it. Tertullian shaped the problem and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which the Orient two hundred years later made its own. It was he who, from the point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the words 'person' and 'substance,' which continually occur in this discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear. Most brilliant is Harnack's characterisation of Arius and Athanasius. In Arius the notion of the Son of G.o.d is altogether done away. Only the name remains. The victory of Arianism would have resolved Christianity into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be better ill.u.s.trated than by one undisputed fact. Athanasius, who a.s.sured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living communion of G.o.d with man, is yet the theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the redemption is to bring men into community of life with G.o.d. But Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea.

The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous endowment. The Christ, who was G.o.d, lifts men up to G.o.dhood. They become G.o.d. These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible meaning. The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work. It gloried in the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one person forever, was unintelligible. In the end it came to pa.s.s that the enthusiastic a.s.sent to that which defied explanation became the very mark of a humble and submissive faith. One reads the so-called Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact a.s.sent. It had long since been clear to these Catholics and churchmen that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not possible to defend Christianity against the heretics. The heresies read their heresies out of the Bible. The orthodox read orthodoxy from the same page. Marcion had proved that, in the very days when the canon took its shape. There must be an authority to define the interpretation of the Scripture. Those who would share the benefits which the Church dispensed must a.s.sent unconditionally to the terms of members.h.i.+p.

All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind the question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed. With all that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning acute or gradual h.e.l.lenisation, secularisation and defection from the Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the men of both parties. Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he must have. It is this religious issue, everywhere present, which gives dignity to a struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There are two religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from the beginning, the one over against the other.[5] The one saw in Jesus of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling as the Messianic King, endued with special powers, lifted above all men ever known, yet a man, completely subject to G.o.d in faith, obedience and prayer. This view is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words and deeds. It s.h.i.+nes through the testimony of the men who followed him. Even the belief in his resurrection and his second coming did not altogether do away with it. The other view saw in him a new G.o.d who, descending from G.o.d, brought mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world, and after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of G.o.d, where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and prayers to Jesus as to G.o.d, all miracles and exorcisms in his name.

[Footnote 5: Wernle, _Einfzhrung in das Theologische Studium_, 1908, v.

204.]

In the long run, the simpler view did not maintain itself. If false G.o.ds and demons were expelled, it was the G.o.d Jesus who expelled them. The more modest faith believed that in the man Jesus, being such an one as he was, men had received the greatest gift which the love of G.o.d had to bestow. In turn the believer felt the a.s.surance that he also was a child of G.o.d, and in the spirit of Jesus was to realise that sons.h.i.+p.

Syncretist religions suggested other thoughts. We see that already even in the synoptic tradition the calling upon the name of Jesus had found place. One wonders whether that first apprehension ever stood alone in its purity. The Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no such simple trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have been able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new G.o.d Jesus had nothing to do with the cruel G.o.d of the Old Testament. He supplanted the old G.o.d and became the only G.o.d. In the Church the new G.o.d, come down from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known G.o.d of Israel.

No less, must he stand in relation to the simple hero of the Gospels with his human traits. The problem of theological reflexion was to find the right middle course, to keep the divine Christ in harmony, on the one side, with monotheism, and on the other, with the picture which the Gospels gave. Belief knew nothing of these contradictions. The same simple soul thanked G.o.d for Jesus with his sorrows and his sympathy, as man's guide and helper, and again prayed to Jesus because he seemed too wonderful to be a man. The same kind of faith achieves the same wondering and touching combination to-day, after two thousand years.

With thought comes trouble. Reflexion wears itself out upon the insoluble difficulty, the impossible combination, the flat contradiction, which the two views present, so soon as they are clearly seen.

In the earliest Christian writings the fruit of this reflexion lies before us in this form:--The Creator of worlds, the mediator, the lord of angels and demons, the Logos which was G.o.d and is our Saviour, was yet a humble son of man, undergoing suffering and death, having laid aside his divine glory. This picture is made with materials which the canonical writings themselves afford. Theological study had henceforth nothing to do but to avoid extremes and seek to make this image, which reflexion upon two polar opposites had yielded, as nearly thinkable as possible. It has been said that the trinitarian doctrine is not in the New Testament, that it was later elaborated by a different kind of mind.

This is not true. But the inference is precisely the contrary of that which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind, are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is his glad and confident resting in the love of G.o.d the Father. It is his courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is his wonderful mingling of purity and love of righteousness with love of those who have sinned. You may find this in the ancient literature, as the Fathers describe that to which their souls cling. But this is not the point of view from which the dogma is organised. The Nicene Christology is not to be understood from this approach. The cry of a dying civilisation after power and light and life, the feeling that these might come to it, streaming down as it were, from above, as a physical, a mechanical, a magical deliverance, this is the frame within which is set what is here said of the help and redemption wrought by Christ. The resurrection and the incarnation are the points at which this streaming in of the divine light and power upon a darkened world is felt.

That religion seemed the highest, that interpretation of Christianity the truest, the absolute one, which could boast that it possessed the power of the Almighty through his physical union with men. He who contended that Jesus was G.o.d, contended therewith for a power which could come upon men and make them in some sense one with G.o.d. This is the view which has been almost exclusively held in the Greek Church. It is the view which has run under and through and around the other conception in the Roman and Protestant Churches. The sense that salvation is inward, moral, spiritual, has rarely indeed been absent from Christendom. It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment, something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in esteeming that they were then only saved of G.o.d or Christ when they were saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened when one no longer holds that G.o.d and men are mutually exclusive conceptions. It is G.o.d working within us who saves, the G.o.d who in Jesus worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has never seen.

CHAPTER V

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

By the middle of the nineteenth century the empirical sciences had undergone vast expansion in the study of detail and in the discovery of principles. Men felt the necessity of some adequate discussion of the relation of these sciences one to another and of their unity. There was need of the organisation of the ma.s.s of knowledge, largely new and ever increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages, had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate fas.h.i.+on with the material world, in the study of which the sciences were now achieving great results. Indeed, the methods current and authoritative with theologians and metaphysicians had actually prevented study of the physical universe. Both of these had invaded areas of fact to which their methods had no application and uttered dicta which had no relation to truth. The very life of the sciences depended upon deliverance from this bondage.

The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that, concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for example, G.o.d and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the intent of some of the scientists in their strong a.s.sertion of agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.

Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have been applied empirical methods which have the closest a.n.a.logy with those which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and cla.s.sify the phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten from this point of view.

In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences, meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience of individuals and the experience of ma.s.ses of men, of ages of observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the psychical is a vanis.h.i.+ng distinction. Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establis.h.i.+ng a city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must realise how the s.p.a.ce between is filled with the gradations of an absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of these polar fas.h.i.+ons. It does operate in infinite variations of degree, in unity with itself, after both fas.h.i.+ons, at all times and upon all materials.