tempted to charge the seeming extravagance of St Paul’s thought
upon his Jewish inheritance, while modern Jews are tempted to
stigmatize them as grotesque exaggerations of reasonable rabbinical
doctrines. Probably both are right, and both wrong. The germs
were Jewish; but, transported to a new soil, and watered with a
new enthusiasm, they assumed new forms. These cannot claim
the merit of correctness, but they are works of religious genius.
At the same time, they employ all the resources of dialectic, and
have, therefore, taken quite half the journey from primary religion
to theology. But the dislocation of religious thinking, when
Christianity ceased to be a Jewish faith and found a home with
Gentiles, destroyed the continuity of Paulinism and of Jewish
thought working through St Paul. In later times, when Paulinism
revived, the epistles spoke for themselves, though they were not
always correctly understood. It should be added that, according
to A. Harnack, Hellenistic Judaism had worked out the principles
of a theology which simply passed on into the Greek-speaking
Christian Church.
Besides the teaching of Jesus (best preserved in the first
three gospels) and the teaching of Paul (in six, ten, or thirteen
epistles), the recent “science” of New Testament
theology finds other types of doctrine. The Epistle to
the Hebrews is a parallel to Paulinism, working out Contents
of New Testament.
upon independent lines the finality of Christianity
and its superiority to the Old Testament. The Johannine
Gospel and Epistles are later than Paulinism, and presuppose
its leading or less startling positions. Whatever historical
elements may be preserved in Christ’s discourses as given in the
Fourth Gospel, these discourses fit into the author’s type of
thought better than into the synoptical framework. They have
been transformed. 1 Peter is good independent Paulinism.
The Epistle of James may breathe a Christianized Jewish
legalism, or, as others hold, it may breathe the legalism (not
untouched by Jewish influences) of popular Gentile-Christian
thought. The Johannine Apocalypse is chiefly interesting as
an apocalypse. F. C. Baur and his school interpreted it as a
manifesto of anti—Pauline Jewish Christianity; on the contrary,
it closely approaches Paul’s doctrine of the Atonement and his
Christology. Other writings are of less importance. Acts is
indeed of interest in showing us Paulinism in a later stage; the
writer wishes to reproduce his great master’s thought, but his
Paulinism is simplified and cut down. Possibly the Pastoral
Epistles show the same process. When we go outside the New
Testament, this involuntary lack of grasp becomes even more
marked.
Neither the theory of infallible inspiration, with its assertion of absolute uniformity in the New Testament, nor Baur’s criticism, with its assertion of irreconcilable antagonisms, is borne out by facts. The New Testament is many-sided, but it has a predominant spiritual unity. Only in minor details do contradictions emerge. It is to be remembered that criticism has broken up the historical unity of the New Testament collection and placed many of its components side by side with writings which have never been canonized, and which conservative writers had supposed to be distinctly later. But in regard to date there has been a remarkable retreat from the earlier critical assertions. And at any rate, since the New Testament canon was set up, New Testament writings have had a theological influence which no others can claim.
On both sides of the great transition from being a Jewish to being a Gentile faith, Christianity, according to recent study, manifested itself as “enthusiastic.” We may distinguish several points in this conception. (1) Most important, perhaps—the end of the world was held to be close at“Enthusiasm.” hand. “Kingdom of God” as generally used was an eschatological concept; and, whatever difficulties there may be as to certain gospel passa es, Christ, to say the least, cannot have disclaimed this view. he watchword rings through all the New Testament“- “the Lord is at hand.” A broader popular form was given to this expectation in “Chiliasm”—the doctrine of the “Thousand” years' reign[1] of Christ on earth (Rev. xx. 1-7). But even Chiliasm—which itself has its subtler and its grosser modifications—is found in early Gentile as well as in early Jewish Christianity. (2) 1 Corinthians shows us a Christian community filled with disturbances, and apparently without recognized officials. The democratic, or rather theocratic, rights of the spiritual man were for a time relied on to extemporize so much Church government as might be needed till the Master returned. Yet the beginnings of Church order come earlier than those of doctrine proper, and much earlier than the cooling of eschatological hopes. (3) There are traces inside and
outside the New Testament of aversion to receiving back into Church fellowship those who, after confessing Christ, had been guilty of grave sins. The New Testament evidence is by no means uniform (contrast Heb. vi. 4—6, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16; with 2 Cor. ii. 7); but this high conception of Church holiness is attested by a series of rigorist” heresies" during the early centuries; and nothing could be more characteristic of eschatological enthusiasm. Those who had fallen were not banished from hope, even by the rigorists. Still, their case was held OVer for a higher Judge; while the Church, especially in these more Puritian and separatist groups, kept her garments white. (4) The enthusiastic view of the possibilities of the Christian life—associated, as modern and especially Western Christians must suspect, with shallow external views of sin—lent itself to belief in sinless perfection. Even St Paul has been supposed, not without a certain plausibility, to teach the sinless perfection of real Christians. The West, with its theology protesting in the background, but in vain, still sings the prayer of the Te Deum: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.”
Such an enthusiastic temper does not lend itself to cool theory. Why should theology labour at definitions? “The Lord is at hand;” a Christian’s one wisdom is to be ready to meet him. And yet materials for theology were richly provided even during this period. That is true above allMaterial for theology. of the man whom we know best in New Testament days—St Paul. Himself through and through animated with the joyful hope, even when prepared to surrender (2 Cor. v. 8; Phil. i. 23, ii. 17) the prospect of personal survival (1 Thess. iv. 17; 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52) until that bright day, yet as a teacher he lays such stress upon Christ’s first coming that the emphasis on the second Advent may be struck out—leaving still, we might almost claim, a complete Paulinism. He who planned his campaigns to the great civilized centres of Corinth, Ephesus and Rome, and thus prepared for a historic future of which he did not dream, drew his parallels of thought with no less firm hand, and showed himself indeed “a wise master-builder.”
In one aspect Montanism is the central reaction of the primitive Christian enthusiasm against the forces which were transforming its character. Of course it had other aspects and elements as well. Hippolytus and Novatian repeat the protest less vehemently; Donatism shows it blended with later hierarchical ideas.
But, when the enthusiasm cooled, it was Greek thought which interpreted the contents of Christianity. The process of change is called by Harnack sometimes “secularization” and sometimes Hellenization. “Acute Hellenizing,” we are told, took the form of Gnosticism. The Gnostics wereGreek influence. the “first theologians.” When the Church in turn began to produce a theology of her own she was imitating as Well as guarding against those wayward spirits. What was to be the central topic? The Church’s first creed had been “the Fatherhood of God and the Messiahship of Jesus” (A. Ritschl); but the “Rule of Faith” (Irenaeus; Tertullian, who uses the exact expression; Origen)—that summary of religiously important facts which was meant to ward off error without reliance on speculations such as the Logos doctrine—built itself up along the lines of the baptismal formula of Matt. xxviii. 19.[2] There are traces in the New Testament of a baptismal confession simply of the name of Christ (1 Cor. i. 13, 15; Rom. vi. 2; cf. even the late verse Acts viii. 37), not of the threefold name. Moreover, textual criticism points to an early type of reading in Matt. xxviii. 19 without the threefold formula. Still, it is strange how completely this seemingly isolated passage takes command of the development of early theology.
Out of the Rule of Faith there came in time what tradition mis-calls
the Apostles’ Creed—the Roman baptismal creed, a formulary
of great importance in all the West; then other creeds, which
also are in a sense expansions of the Rule of Faith. The Greek
mind threw itself upon the problem—who precisely is Jesus Christ
the Lord? His Messiahship is asserted; who then isDoctrine of trinity and
of Person
of Christ.
the Messiah? and this second figure in the baptismal
confession? A provisional answer, linking Christian
theology with the philosophical theology of antiquity,
asserted Jesus Christ to be the divine Logos. But this
assertion was expanded and refined upon till two great
doctrines had been built up—«that of the Trinity of divine Persons
in the unity of the Godhead, and that of the union of two distinct
natures, divine and human, in the person of Jesus Christ. It is
curious that the Syrian church of the 4th century (e.g. Aphraates)
was almost unaffected by the great dogmatic debates. But there
is no hint of a reasoned rejection of Greek developments in favour
of primitive simplicity, still less of any independent theological
development. Aphraates accepts the Logos Christology, and, soon
after his time, his church is found on the beaten track of orthodoxy.
- ↑ Four hundred years is another significant figure in the Jewish book, 4 Ezra.
- ↑ If Harnack is right in regarding a New Testament canon as one of the “Apostolical authorities” which the Church brought into the field against Gnosticism, we see the truth on historical grounds of the position taught on dogmatic grounds by R. Rainy (Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine)—scriptural faith not the starting-point but the goal of theological development. The starting-point is rather the “Rule of Faith.”
