The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as
its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection
expressed in the first paragraph of his _Influence of Greek Ideas and
Usages on the Christian Church_. "It is impossible for anyone, whether
he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of
both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene
Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of
conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the
theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather
than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent.
The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly
of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would
probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have
no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the
other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of
the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him
crucified." At the end of the second century it included various
philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the
Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son
to the Father and of both to men. The Word--the _logos_ of Heraclitus
and Philo--threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the
endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity
and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently
pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their
faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that
conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided
Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue
the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to
determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness
which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life
and doctrines of the Church."
The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When
the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had
confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word
as people used it when they said that they had faith in Mr.
Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as
of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge,
not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct
or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the
Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed
the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least
as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its
cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the
evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the
Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded
a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage
from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts
the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and
universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was
one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason
first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word,
but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the
things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the
active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the
world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection
thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the
pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not to
_Genesis_ but to Plato's _Timaeus_.
The fact that the Greek philosophers were the real fathers of the
church, that the theological systems which have played so dominating a
social and political role in Europe are rooted in the speculations of
the great pagans, is a tribute to the power of Hellas. But the
circumstances under which that power was exerted were unfavorable. It
is interesting to consider what might have been the religious history
of our civilisation if Christianity had appeared while the Greek was
still not only mythopoeic but mythocrates, still the master of his
creation; if Socrates, for instance, perhaps the only religious
teacher in history who could have dominated Saint Paul, had been the
apostle to the gentiles, and if the great dynamic power of
Christianity had been attached to the mechanism of Greek thought at
its best. The Greek thought of early Christian times had become
stereotyped; it is often characterized as sterile, but no adjective
could be less apt in view of the mass and power of the doctrines that
sprang from it. And stereotyped as it was, it was still flexible in
comparison with its Christian offspring. The history of the word
"dogma" is an instructive one. Beginning with a modest connotation,
since it meant only "my impression," it stiffened gradually as
accumulated authority adhered to it, yet even to the last in
pre-Christian usage it meant simply a doctrine which one might take or
leave. The union of the Christian notion of divine authority with the
Greek notion of hard and fast definition made ruinous combination, and
gave birth to the Christian belief that it is sometimes necessary to
put a man to the torture or to the death to correct his ideas.