Ten Great Religions Part 45

-- 7. The Fulness of Christianity is derived from the Life of Jesus.

Christianity has thus shown itself to be a universal solvent, capable of receiving into itself the existing truths of the ethnic religions, and fulfilling them with something higher. Whenever it has come in contact with natural religion, it has a.s.similated it and elevated it. This is one evidence that it is intended to become the universal religion of mankind.

This pleroma, or fulness, integrity, all-sidedness, or by whatever name we call it, is something deeper than thought. A system of thought might be devised large enough to include all the truths in all the religions of the world, putting each in its own place in relation to the rest. Such a system might show how they all are related to each other, and all are in harmony. But this would be a philosophy, not a religion. No such philosophy appears in the original records of Christianity. The New Testament does not present Jesus as a philosopher, nor Paul as a metaphysician. There is no systematic teaching in the Gospels, nor in the Epistles. Yet we find there, in incidental utterances, the elements of this many-sided truth, in regard to G.o.d, man, duty, and immortality. But we find it as life, not as thought. It is a fulness of life in the soul of Jesus, pa.s.sing into the souls of his disciples and apostles, and from them in a continuous stream of Christian experience, down to the present time.

The word pleroma (p????a), in the New Testament, means that which fills up; fulness, fulfilling, filling full. The verb "to fulfil" (p?????) carries the same significance. To "fulfil that which was spoken by the prophets," means to fill it full of meaning and truth. Jesus came, not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it; that is, to carry it out further. He fulfilled Moses and the prophets, not by doing exactly what they foretold, in their sense, but by doing it in a higher, deeper, and larger sense. He fulfilled their thought as the flower fulfils the bud, and as the fruit fulfils the flower. The sense of the fulness of life in Jesus and in the Gospel seems to have struck the minds of the early disciples, and powerfully impressed them. Hence the frequency with which they use this verb and noun, signifying fulness. Jesus fulfilled the law, the prophets, all righteousness, the Scriptures. He came in the fulness of time. His joy was fulfilled. Paul prays that the disciples may be filled full of joy, peace, and hope, with the fruits of righteousness, with all knowledge, with the spirit of G.o.d, and with all the fulness of G.o.d. He teaches that love fulfils the law, that the Church is the fulness of Christ, that Christ fills all things full of himself, and that in him dwells all the fulness of the G.o.dhead bodily.

One great distinction between Christianity and all other religions is in this pleroma, or fulness of life which it possesses, and which, to all appearance, came from the life of Jesus. Christianity is often said to be differenced from ethnic religions in other ways. They are natural religions: it is revealed. They are natural: it is supernatural. They are human: it is divine. But _all_ truth is revealed truth; it all comes from G.o.d, and, therefore, so far as ethnic religions contain truth, they also are revelations. Moreover, the supernatural element is to be found in all religions; for inspiration, in some form, is universal. All great births of time are supernatural, making no part of the nexus of cause and effect.

How can you explain the work of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of the Buddha, of Mohammed, out of the existing state of society, and the educational influences of their time? All such great souls are much more the makers of their age than its result; they are imponderable elements in civilization, not to be accounted for by anything outside of themselves. Nor can we urge the distinction of human and divine; for there is a divine element in all ethnic religions, and a broadly human element in Christianity. Jesus is as much the representative of human nature as he is the manifestation of G.o.d. He is the Son of man, no less than the Son of G.o.d.

One great fact which makes a broad distinction between other religions and Christianity is that _they_ are ethnic and _it_ is catholic. They are the religions of races and nations, limited by these lines of demarcation, by the bounds which G.o.d has beforehand appointed. Christianity is a catholic religion: it is the religion of the human race. It overflows all boundaries, recognizes no limits, belongs to man as man. And this it does, because of the fulness of its life, which it derives from its head and fountain, Jesus Christ, in whom dwells the fulness both of G.o.dhead and of manhood.

It is true that the great missionary work of Christianity has long been checked. It does not now convert whole nations. Heathenism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, stand beside it unmoved. What is the cause of this check?

The catholicity of the Gospel was born out of its fluent and full life. It was able to convert the Greeks and Romans, and afterward Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Scandinavians, because it came to them, not as a creed, but as a life. But neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have had these large successes since the Middle Ages. Instead of a life, Christianity became a church and a creed. When this took place, it gradually lost its grand missionary power. It no longer preached truth, but doctrine; no longer communicated life, but organized a body of proselytes into a rigid church. Party spirit took the place of the original missionary spirit.

Even the majority of the German tribes was converted by Arian missionaries, and orthodoxy has not the credit of that last grand success of Christianity. The conversion of seventy millions of Chinese in our own day to the religion of the Bible was not the work of Catholic or Protestant missionaries, but of the New Testament. The Church and the creed are probably the cause of this failure. Christianity has been partially arrested in its natural development, first by the Papal Church, and secondly by the too rigid creeds of orthodoxy.

If the swarming myriads of India and Mongolia are to be converted to Christianity, it must be done by returning to the original methods. We must begin by recognizing and accepting the truth they already possess. We must be willing to learn of them, in order to teach them. Comparative Theology will become the science of missions if it help to show to Christians the truth and good in the creeds outside of Christendom. For to the Church and to its sects, quite as much as to the world, applies the saying, "He that exalteth himself shall be abased, but he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

-- 8. Christianity as a Religion of Progress and of Universal Unity.

As long as a tree or an animal lives it continues to grow. An arrest of growth is the first symptom of the decline of life. Fulness of life, therefore, as the essential character of Christianity, should produce a constant development and progress; and this we find to be the case. Other religions have their rise, progress, decline, and fall, or else are arrested and become stationary. The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, have come to an end. As ethnic religions, they shared the fortunes of the race or nation with which they were a.s.sociated. The systems of Confucius, of the Buddha, of Brahmanism, of Judaea, of Mohammed, are arrested. They remain stationary. But, thus far, Christianity and Christendom advance together. Christianity has developed; out of its primitive faith, several great theologies, the mediaeval Papacy, Protestantism, and is now evidently advancing into new and larger forms of religious, moral, and social activity.

The fact of a fulness of divine and human life in Jesus took form in the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. The fact of the reconciling and uniting power of this life took form in the doctrine of the atonement.

Both of these doctrines are illogical and false, in their form, as church doctrines. But both of them represent most essential facts. We have seen the truths in the doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity. The truth in the atonement is, as the word itself signifies, the at-one-making power of the Gospel. The reconciliation of antagonist truths and opposing tendencies, which philosophy has always unsuccessfully endeavored to state in theory, Christianity accomplishes in practice. Christianity continually reproduces from its depths of life a practical faith in G.o.d, both as law and as love, in man, both as a free and yet as a providentially guided being. It gives us G.o.d as unity and as variety, as the substance and as the form of the world. It states the reality of evil as forcibly as any system of dualism, and yet produces a practical faith in good as being stronger than evil and sure to conquer it. In social life it reconciles the authority of human law with the freedom of individual thought and action. In the best Christian governments, we find all the order which a despotism can guarantee, with all the freedom to which a democracy can aspire. No such social organization is to be found outside of Christendom.

How can this be, unless it is somehow connected with Christianity?

The civilization of Christendom consists in a practical reconciliation of antagonist tendencies. It is a "pleroma" in social life, a fulness of concord, a harmony of many parts. The harmony is indeed by no means complete, for the millennium has not arrived. As yet the striking feature of Christendom is quant.i.ty, power, variety, fulness; not as yet co-operation, harmony, peace, union. Powers are first developed, which are afterward to be harmonized. The sword is not yet beaten into a ploughshare, nor has universal peace arrived. Yet such is the inevitable tendency of things. As knowledge spreads, as wealth increases, as the moral force of the world is enlarged, law, more and more, takes the place of force. Men no longer wear swords by their sides to defend themselves from attack. If attacked, they call the policeman. Towns are no longer fortified with walls, nor are the residences of n.o.blemen kept in a state of defence. They are all folded in the peaceful arms of national law. So far the atonement has prevailed. Only nations still continue to fight; but the time is at hand when international law, the parliament of the world, the confederation of man, shall take the place of standing armies and iron-clad navies.

So, in society, internal warfare must, sooner or later, come to an end.

Pauperism and crime must be treated according to Christian methods.

Criminals must be reformed, and punishment must be administered in reference to that end. Co-operation in labor and trade must take the place of compet.i.tion. The principles by means of which these vast results will be brought about are already known; the remaining difficulties are in their application. Since slavery fell in the United States, one great obstacle to the progress of man is removed. The next social evils in order will be next a.s.sailed, and, one by one, will be destroyed. Christianity is becoming more and more practical, and its application to life is constantly growing more vigorous and wise.

The law of human life is, that the development of differences must precede their reconciliation. Variety must precede harmony, a.n.a.lysis must prepare the way for synthesis, opposition must go before union. Christianity, as a powerful stimulus applied to the human mind, first develops all the tendencies of the soul; and afterward, by its atoning influence on the heart, reconciles them. Christ is the Prince of Peace. He came to make peace between man and G.o.d, between man and man, between law and love, reason and faith, freedom and order, progress and conservatism. But he first sends the sword, afterward the olive-branch. Nevertheless, universal unity is the object and end of Christianity.

Index of the Princ.i.p.al Authors Consulted in the Preparation of this Work.

ACKERMANN (D. C.). Das Christliche im Plato. Hamburg. 1835. (Translated in Clark's Theological Library.) (Greece.)

aeSCHYLUS, and other Greek Poets. (Greece.)

ALGER (WM. R.). A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.

Philadelphia: Childs. 1864.

ALLEN (JOSEPH H.). Hebrew Men and Times. Boston. 1861. (Judaea.)

American Oriental Society, Journal of the. New Haven; published annually.

(Oriental Religions.)

AMPeRE (J. J. A.). L'Histoire Romaine. Paris. 1864. (Rome.)

------ ------ La Science en Orient.

Anthropological Society of London, Memoirs of (commenced in 1863-64).

Asiatic Journal, 1816-1843. London.

Asiatic Researches (commenced London. 1801).

BALDWIN (JOHN D.). Pre-Historic Nations. New York. 1869.

BANHERJEA (Rev. K. M.). Dialogues on Hindoo Philosophy, comprising the Nyaya, Sankhya, and Vyasa. London. 1861. (Brahmanism.)

BAUR (F. C.). Symbolik und Mythologie. Stuttgart. 1829.

BLEEK (ARTHUR HENRY). Avesta. The religious Books of the Pa.r.s.ees.

Translated into English from Spiegel's German translation. Hertford. 1864.

(Zoroaster.)

BoEKH. Manetho und der Hundstern period. Berlin. 1840. (Egypt.)

BURNOUF (EUGENE). Commentaire sur le Yacna. Paris. 1823.

------ ------ Introduction a l'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien. Paris. 1844.

------ ------ Le Bhagavata Purana, on Histoire Poetique de Krichna. Paris.

1840.

BURNOUF (EMILE). Essai sur le Veda. 1863.

BRUGSCH. Histoire de l'Egypte. Leipzig. 1859. ------- Aus dem Orient.

BUNSEN (C. C. J.). Bibelwerk. Leipzig: Brockhaus. 1858. (Judaea.)

------ ------ Gott in der Geschichte. Leipzig. 1857.

------ ------ aegypten's Stelle in der Weltgesehichte. Hamburg. 1845-1867.