CHAPTER IV

THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT

It has been said that in Christian times the relation of philosophy and

religion may be determined by the attitude of reason toward a single

matter, namely, the churchly doctrine of revelation.[4] There are three

possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed

that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man

in extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is

beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then the two

spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation, theology is at

first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It is occupied in

applying the principles which it receives at the hands of theology.

These are the so-called Ages of Faith. Notably was this the attitude of

the Middle Age. But in the long run either authoritative revelation,

thus conceived, must extinguish reason altogether, or else reason must

claim the whole man. After all, it is in virtue of his having some

reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to

exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those

who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because

there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed

religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in

them meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to

revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be met

by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and the

supernatural. The antithesis to the natural is not the supernatural, but

the unnatural. The antithesis to reason is not faith, but irrationality.

The antithesis to human truth is not the divine truth. It is falsehood.

[Footnote 4: Seth Pringle-Pattison, _The Philosophical Radicals_, p.

216.]

When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to

the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of

extreme denial. It is an attitude of negation toward revelation, such as

prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the

eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges

itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive

religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of

deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion

of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely

the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is

that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable

assumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence

to these assumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that

this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is need

of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason

and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.

This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best

thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as deistic

views of the relation of God to man and the world held the field,

revelation meant something interjected _ab extra_ into the established

order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet

essentially deistic in its notion of God and of his separation from the

world. Men did not perceive that by thus separating God from the world

they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his

relations were transient and accidental. No wonder that other men,

finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus

separated from God, came to think of this absentee God as an appendage

to the scheme of things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as

sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history

be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the

manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no

longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that

evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God

to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is

an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method

of all their nobler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral.

Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the

God who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never

broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.

There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of

communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the

religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict

the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however,

signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only

in degree and not in kind. Such an experience was that of prophets and

law-givers under the ancient covenant. Such an experience, in

immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself. Such a

turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.

The world has not been wrong in calling the documents of these

revelations sacred books and in attributing to them divine authority. It

has been largely wrong _in the manner in which it construed their

authority_. It has been wholly wrong in imagining that the documents

themselves were the revelation. They are merely the record _of a

personal communion with the transcendent_. It was Lessing who first cast

these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were never

heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what enthusiasm

men recurred to them after their postulates had been verified and the

idea of God, of man and of the world which they implied, had been

confirmed by Fichte and Schelling.

In the philosophical movement, the outline of which we have suggested,

what one may call the _nidus_ of a new faith in Scripture had been

prepared. The quality had been forecast which the Scripture must be

found to possess, if it were to retain its character as document of

revelation. In those very same years the great movement of biblical

criticism was gathering force which, in the course of the nineteenth

century, was to prove by stringent literary and historical methods, what

qualities the documents which we know as Scripture do possess. It was to

prove in the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess

those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove that,

as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the

philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to

restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their

faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature

and show the progress of the history which the Scripture enshrines.

After a contest in which the very foundations of faith seemed to be

removed, it was to afford a basis for a belief in Scripture and

revelation as positive and secure as any which men ever enjoyed, with

the advantage that it is a foundation upon which the modern man can and

does securely build. The synchronism of the two endeavours is

remarkable. The convergence upon one point, of studies starting, so to

say, from opposite poles and having no apparent interest in common, is

instructive. It is an illustration of that which Comte said, that all

the great intellectual movements of a given time are but the

manifestation of a common impulse, which pervades and possesses the

minds of the men of that time.

The attempt to rationalise the narrative of Scripture was no new one. It

grew in intensity in the early years of the nineteenth century. The

conflict which was presently precipitated concerned primarily the

Gospels. It was natural that it should do so. These contain the most

important Scripture narrative, that of the life of Jesus. Strauss had in

good faith turned his attention to the Gospels, precisely because he

felt their central importance. His generation was to learn that they

presented also the greatest difficulties. The old rationalistic

interpretation had started from the assumption that what we have in the

gospel narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the

facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural

only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the

interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural

cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must

have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened thus in jest. Jesus

was, of course, begotten in the natural manner. A simple maiden must

have been deceived. The execution of this task of the rationalising of

the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the

claim. The most spiritual of the narratives, the finest flower of

religious poetry, was thus turned into the meanest and most trivial

incident without any religious significance whatsoever. The obtuseness

of the procedure was exceeded only by its vulgarity.

STRAUSS

On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the

difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture made

it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the gospel

narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave them no notion

as to any other way in which the narratives might be understood. The men

had never asked themselves how the narratives arose. In the preface to

his _Leben Jesu_, Strauss said: 'Orthodox and rationalists alike

proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the Gospels

testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are,

therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and

natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We

have to realise,' Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify

sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and

beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had

unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions

upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time

and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not

falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naïve,

and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within

the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in

narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of

spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic

statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that

particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection,

might have some such explanation as this. No one had ever undertaken to

apply this method consistently, from one end to the other of the gospel

narrative. What was of more significance, no one had clearly defined the

conception of legend. Strauss was sure that in the application of this

notion to certain portions of the Scripture no irreverence was shown. No

moral taint was involved. Nothing which could detract from the reverence

in which we hold the Scripture was implied. Rather, in his view, the

history of Jesus is more wonderful than ever, when some, at least, of

its elements are viewed in this way, when they are seen as the product

of the poetic spirit, working all unconsciously at a certain level of

culture and under the impulse of a great enthusiasm.

There is no doubt that Strauss, who was at that time an earnest

Christian, felt the relief from certain difficulties in the biography of

Jesus which this theory affords. He put it forth in all sincerity as

affording to others like relief. He said that while rationalists and

supernaturalists alike, by their methods, sacrificed the divine content

of the story and clung only to its form, his hypothesis sacrificed the

historicity of the narrative form, but kept the eternal and spiritual

truth. In his opinion, the lapse of a single generation was enough to

give room for this process of the growth of the legendary elements which

have found place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained

by primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all

unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his

career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements never the

work of a single individual. They are never intentionally produced. The

imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind was possible,

however, only on the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time,

the means of transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss'

explanation of his theory has been given above, to some extent in his

own words. We may see how he understood himself. We may appreciate also

the genuineness of the religious spirit of his work. At the same time

the thorough-going way in which he applied his principle, the relentless

march of his argument, the character of his results, must sometimes have

been startling even to himself. They certainly startled others. The

effect of his work was instantaneous and immense. It was not at all the

effect which he anticipated. The issue of the furious controversy which

broke out was disastrous both to Strauss' professional career and to his

whole temperament and character.

David Friedrich Strauss was born in 1808 in Ludwigsburg in Württemberg.

He studied in Tübingen and in Berlin. He became an instructor in the

theological faculty in Tübingen in 1832. He published his _Leben Jesu_

in 1835. He was almost at once removed from his portion. In 1836 he

withdrew altogether from the professorial career. His answer to his

critics, written in 1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his

book, _Über Vergängliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum_, published in

1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third edition of his

_Leben Jesu_ in 1838, but these were all repudiated in 1840. His _Leben

Jesu für das deutsche Volk_, published in 1866 was the effort to

popularise that which he had done. It is, however, in point of method,

superior to his earlier work, Comments were met with even greater

bitterness. Finally, not long before his death in 1874, he published

_Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_, in which he definitely broke with

Christianity altogether and went over to materialism and pessimism.

Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in

regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his regarding some of

the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the

miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So far Strauss was right. The

contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and

built upon. His error lay in his looking for those religious truths

which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous

metaphysical speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the

devout heart and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life

of Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain

elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive picture of

Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical force, his work

would indeed have been attacked. But it would have outlived the attack

and conferred a very great benefit. It conferred a great benefit as it

was, although not the benefit which Strauss supposed. The benefit which

it really conferred was in its critical method, and not at all in its

results.

Of the mass of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss' _Leben

Jesu_ called forth, little is at this distance worth the mentioning.

Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of his adversaries,

points out the real weakness of Strauss' work. That weakness lay in the

failure to draw any distinction between the historical and the mythical.

He threatened to dissolve the whole history into myth. He had no sense

for the ethical element in the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of

the creative force which this must have exerted. Ullmann says with

cogency that, according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ

virtually out of pure imagination. But we are then left with the query:

What created the Church? To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer

to give. The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of

Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a supreme

historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour

to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend. The old

rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain

everything in some natural way. Strauss and his followers often appeared

frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be

explained. If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was

declared mythical. What was needed was such a discrimination between the

legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached

only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and

standing of the documents. No adequate study of this kind had ever been

undertaken. Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it was

to be undertaken. There had been many men of vast learning in textual

and philological criticism. Here, however, a new sort of critique was

applied to a problem which had but just now been revealed in all its

length and breadth. The establishing of the principles of this

historical criticism--the so-called Higher Criticism--was the herculean

task of the generation following Strauss. To the development of that

science another Tübingen professor, Baur, made permanent contribution.

With Strauss himself, sadder than the ruin of his career, was the

tragedy of the uprooting of his faith. This tragedy followed in many

places in the wake of the recognition of Strauss' fatal half-truth.

BAUR

Baur, Strauss' own teacher in Tübingen, afterward famous as biblical

critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that through it was

revealed in startling fashion to that generation of scholars, how little

real knowledge they had of the problem which the Gospels present. To

Baur it was clear that if advance was to be made beyond Strauss'

negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must wait upon an

adequate criticism of the documents which are our sources for that

history. Strauss' failure had brought home to the minds of men the fact

that there were certain preliminary studies which must needs be taken

up. Meantime the other work must wait. As one surveys the literature of

the next thirty years this fact stands out. Many apologetic lives of

Jesus had to be written in reply to Strauss. But they are almost

completely negligible. No constructive work was done in this field until

nearly a generation had passed.

Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pass through the

medium of a narrator, our first question as to the gospel history is

not, what objective reality can be accorded to the narrative itself.

There is a previous question. This concerns the relation of the

narrative to the narrator. It might be very difficult for us to make up

our minds as to what it was that, in a given case, the witness saw. We

have not material for such a judgment. We have probably much evidence,

up and down his writings, as to what sort of man the witness was, in

what manner he would be likely to see anything and with what personal

equation he would relate that which he saw. Baur would seem to have been

the first vigorously and consistently to apply this principle to the

gospel narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an

author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every author

belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the importance of his

subject for the parties and struggles of his day, the safer is the

assumption that both he and his work will bear the impress of these

struggles. He will represent the interests of one or another of the

parties. His work will have a tendency of some kind. This was one of

Baur's oft-used words--the tendency of a writer and of his work. We must

ascertain that tendency. The explanation of many things both in the form

and substance of a writing would be given could we but know that. The

letters of Paul, for example, are written in palpable advocacy of

opinions which were bitterly opposed by other apostles. The biographies

of Jesus suggest that they also represent, the one this tendency, the

other that. We have no cause to assert that this trait of which we speak

implies conscious distortion of the facts which the author would relate.

The simple-minded are generally those least aware of the bias in the

working of their own minds. It is obvious that until we have reckoned

with such elements as these, we cannot truly judge of that which the

Gospels say. To the elaboration of the principles of this historical

criticism Baur gave the labour of his life. His biblical work alone

would have been epoch-making.

Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near Stuttgart.

He became a professor in Tübingen in 1826 and died there in 1860. He was

an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest work was surely in the field

of the history of dogma. His works, _Die Christliche Lehre von der

Vereöhnung_, 1838, _Die Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und

Menschwerdung Gottes_, 1841-1843, his _Lehrbuch der Christlichen

Dogmengeschichte_, 1847, together constitute a contribution to which

Harnack's work in our own time alone furnishes a parallel. Baur had

begun his thorough biblical studies before the publication of Strauss'

book. The direction of those studies was more than ever confirmed by his

insight of the shortcomings of Strauss' work. Very characteristically

also he had begun his investigations, not at the most difficult point,

that of the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but at the easiest point, the

Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had published a tractate, _Die

Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen Gemeinde_. In that book he had

delineated the bitter contest between Paul and the Judaising element in

the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835

his disquisition, _Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe_, appeared. In the

teachings of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic

heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of

organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this

supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same

general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's _Paulus, der

Apostel Jesu Christi_, in 1845. Here the results of his study of the

book of the Acts are combined with those of his inquiries as to the

Pauline Epistles. In the history of the apostolic age men had been

accustomed to see the evidence only of peace and harmony. Baur sought to

show that the period had been one of fierce struggle, between the narrow

Judaic and legalistic form of faith in the Messiah and that conception,

introduced by Paul, of a world-religion free from the law. Out of this

conflict, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth the

Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of this

process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of which were

produced in the second century. The only documents which we have which

were written before A.D. 70, were the four great Epistles of Paul, those

to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the Corinthians, together with

the Apocalypse.

Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated and

others false. Yet this was the first time that a true historical method

had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole. Baur's

contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity,

in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the

struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the

primitive Church. In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the

one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the

developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the

scattered Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth

Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the

gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The

Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the

phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with

the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly

clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely

dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of

historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown,

the age uncertain. The book, however, can hardly have appeared before

the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the

second century. Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the

element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth

Gospel and account for its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or

of paschal controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth

Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and

work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and

spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with

metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.

Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of

the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no

interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question

which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has

busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own. His zeal here

also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray. The _Tendenzkritik_

had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.

Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much

overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached by

prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last

analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the

principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in

everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration. It is often in

contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and

institutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the

purpose of God, into which their own life is grandly taken up. To make

each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme

or endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a professor.

* * * * *

The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men who have

inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in their course

which has proved of more than usual significance. The compass of the

book demands such a limitation. But by this method whole chapters in the

life of learning are passed over, in which the substance of achievement

has been the carrying out of a plan of which we have been able to note

only the inception. There is a sense in which the carrying out of a plan

is both more difficult and more worthy than the mere setting it in

motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been

expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past

seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of

the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet

had the value that they at least indicated the area within which

solutions do not lie,--when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil

by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is

made to realise that the conditions of the advance of science are, for

theologians, not different from those which obtain for scholars who, in

any other field, would establish truth and lead men. In a general way,

however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two

generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and

authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather

noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tübingen positions. Harnack's

_Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1893, and his _Chronologie

der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1897, present a marked contrast to

Baur's scheme.

THE CANON

The minds of New Testament scholars in the last generation have been

engaged with a question which, in its full significance, was hardly

present to the attention of Baur's school. It is the question of the New

Testament as a whole. It is the question as to the time and manner and

motives of the gathering together of the separate writings into a canon

of Scripture which, despite the diversity of its elements, exerted its

influence as a unit and to which an authority was ascribed, which the

particular writings cannot originally have had. When and how did the

Christians come to have a sacred book which they placed on an equality

with the Old Testament, which last they had taken over from the

synagogue? How did they choose the writings which were to belong to this

new collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for

edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of the

growth of the collection is that of the growth of the apprehension

concerning it. This apprehension of these twenty-seven different

writings as constituting the sole document of Christian revelation,

given by the Holy Spirit, the identical holy book of the Christian

Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that

which its constituent elements must have had for men to whom they had

appeared as but the natural literary deposit of the religious movement

of the apostolic age. This apprehension took possession of the mind of

the Christian community. It was made the subject of deliverances by

councils of the Church. How did this great transformation take place?

Was it an isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement?

Did not this development of life in the Christian communities which gave

them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also the

so-called Apostles' Creed and a monarchical organisation of the Church

and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?

It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment. With the

rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this body of

literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the

larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and

life of men. Compared with this question, investigations as to the

authorship and as to the time, place and circumstance of the production

of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank. As

they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a

different spirit. The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger

context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.

It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of

documents, which ultimately found themselves together in the New

Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by

consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do

represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual

unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the

outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their

writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which

was the unique relation which the more important of these documents

historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a

heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly

faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the

Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the

first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the

canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken

reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They

gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic

authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and

spiritual effectiveness. The apostles had come, in the mind of the early

Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction. Writings long enshrined

in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been

much considered, were now assigned to apostles, that they might have

authority and distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact.

The theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its

inward principle, soundly constituted. Modern critics reversed the

process. They began where the Church Fathers left off. They tore down

first that which had been last built up. Modern criticism, too, passed

through a period in which points like those of authorship and date of

Gospels and Epistles seemed the only ones to be considered. The results

being here often negative, complete disintegration of the canon seemed

threatened, through discovery of errors in the processes by which the

canon had been outwardly built up. Men realise now that that was a

mistake.

Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first the

recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the conception

of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was not primarily a

book-religion save in the sense that almost all Christians revered the

Old Testament. Other writings than those which we esteem canonical were

long used in churches. Some of those afterward canonical were not used

in all the churches. In similar fashion we have learned that identical

statements of faith were not current in the earliest churches. Nor was

there one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a

time concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There

were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the Church, as

outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So there were many

creeds or, at least, informally accredited and current beginnings of

doctrine. By and by there was a formally accepted creed. So there were

first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only

by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition

of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that,

despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a

sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian

literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian

literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a

juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to

whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths.

The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The

historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of

institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more

than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most

conspicuous teacher of our generation, in two at least of these

particular fields, has been Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the

sources of Christian history, he had come upon this question of the

canon again and again. In his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_,

1887-1890, 4te. Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given

above, is absolutely fundamental. In his _Geschichte der altchristlichen

Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Chronologic der allchristlichen

Literatur_, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered in rich detail. It was in

his tractate, _Das Neue Testament um das Jahr_ 200, 1889, that he

contended for the later date against Zahn, who had urged that the

outline of the New Testament was established and the conception of it as

Scripture present, by the end of the first century. Harnack argues that

the decision practically shaped itself between the time of Justin

Martyr, c. A.D. 150, and that of Irenæus, c. A.D. 180. The studies of

the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view.

LIFE OF JESUS

We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the

ignorance of his time concerning the documents of the early Christian

movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward

overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public interest was stirred,

and the earlier excitement recalled by the publication of a new life of

Jesus. The author was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate

for the priesthood in the Roman Church. He was a man of learning and

literary skill, who made his _Vie de Jésus_, which appeared in 1863, the

starting-point for a series of historical works under the general title,

_Les Origines de Christianisme_. In the next year appeared Strauss'

popular work, _Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk_. In 1864 was published

also Weizsäcker's contribution to the life of Christ, his

_Untersuchungen über die evangelische Geschichte_. To the same year

belonged Schenkel's _Charakterbild Jesu_. In the years from 1867-1872

appeared Keim's _Geschichte Jesu von Nazara_. There is something very

striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point

for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been

undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the

character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had

been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had

been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had

turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious

spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The

enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before

he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant

like a professor in Halle or Tübingen.' French was at that time a

language much better known in the world at large, particularly the

English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and

charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature. The

number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is

amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through

Renan to multitudes who would never have been reached by the German

works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with

Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning,

Renan had not possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has

much breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the

historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of

romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it

is.

Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the

priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and

history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as

having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the

_College de France_. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and

permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself

from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His

diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to

bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life

of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then

as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but

doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to

his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never

was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes.

He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of

mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or

an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet

enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or

period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than

the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.

Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the

fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's

minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more

than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which

has now been largely superseded by Schürer's _Geschichte des Judischen

Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi_, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been

again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great

problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives

of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment

of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of

the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without

exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in

England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's

_Jesus de Nazareth_, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's _Leben Jesu_, 1901. So

great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they

urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition

of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a

calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme.

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, asserted 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, God 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 passed. 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 classic

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

authorship 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 authorship, 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

professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public

attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had

caused. Reuss in Strassburg 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 fashion 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, assumed 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 documents

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 authorship 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 assumed 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 Geshichte

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 assume 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 worship 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 worship 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 worship. Deuteronomy demands the

centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place.

The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place

was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the

wilderness. It is assumed that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared

the almost universal worship of the stars. Moses may indeed have

concluded a covenant between his people and Jahve, their God, hallowing

the judicial and moral life of the people, bringing these into relation

to the divine will. Jahve was a holy God whose will was to guide the

people coming up out of the degradation of nature-worship. That part of

the people held to the old nature-worship 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

worship shows that. Their protest reveals at that early date the

beginning of that antithesis 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 worship 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 God 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 assigned 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 naïve assumption 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 constitutes 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, naïve

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 institutions 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 pass 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 documents 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 Weizsäcker'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 Tübingen 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 institution, of the many which have

passed 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 assimilation 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 passed 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 passed 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 institution,

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 fashion 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 Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions,

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 illustrated 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 Hellenisation 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 mass 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 manuscripts 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 associated 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 circumstances on the history of thought. His

history of doctrine has thus a breadth and human quality never before

attained. Philosophy, worship, morals, the development of Church

government and of the canon, the common interests and passions of the

age and those of the individual participants, are all made tributary to

his delineation.

Harnack cannot share Baur's view that the triumph of the

Logos-Christology at Nicæa 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 Hellenisation 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 illustrated 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-shining

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 Hellenisation 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 antitheses 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 documents which we are fortunate enough to

possess, makes us forget the limitations of these documents. 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 God, 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 God 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 worship 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

worship 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 God 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 illustrated than by one

undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character

as a religion of the living communion of God 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 God. 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 God, lifts men up to godhood. They become

God. 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 pass that the

enthusiastic assent 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

assent. 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 assent unconditionally to the terms of membership.

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 Hellenisation, 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 God in faith, obedience and prayer. This view

is surely sustained by many of Jesus' own words and deeds. It shines

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 God who, descending from God,

brought mysterious powers for the redemption of mankind into the world,

and after short obscuring of his glory, returned to the abode of God,

where he had been before. From this belief come all the hymns and

prayers to Jesus as to God, 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 gods

and demons were expelled, it was the God 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 God had to

bestow. In turn the believer felt the assurance that he also was a child

of God, and in the spirit of Jesus was to realise that sonship.

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 God Jesus had

nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He supplanted the

old God and became the only God. In the Church the new God, come down

from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known God 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 God, contended therewith for a power which

could come upon men and make them in some sense one with God. 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 God or Christ when they were

saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened

when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive

conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus

worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has

never seen.