Christianity, which way? A historical study of changes and achievements in the Christian church

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTORY: THe CHURCH MILITANT .

I. Tue CHurRcH COURAGEOUS .

Chapter I The Church Courageous

ISTORIC Christianity goes back to two principal records. ‘The first is a group of four memorabilia called ‘‘Gospels’’ or good news, covering a brief period of the life and ministry of Jesus, a village carpenter of Nazareth, in Galilee. He made no name for himself among conspicuous or _ influential people. All that we know of his teaching, somewhat after the manner of the older Hebrew prophets, rests upon the testimony of a few men, obscure like himself, who had become his devoted followers. His violent death at the age of about thirty-three years, though under the form of a legal execution, was the result of an outbreak of religious fanaticism. No literature of any kind of which we have record was written by him, or under his super- 53 o4 CHRISTIANITY—WHICH WAY?

vision, or in obedience to any command or suggestion that he ever gave.

The other record deals with the organized work of these disciples after the death of their Master. The part of it that covers the very earliest days was not written until forty years or more after the events that it describes. It is not the report of an eye-witness but comes to us in the form of traditions, collected and written out by a man named Luke, for his friend Theophilus. It begins with the experiences of about a hundred and twenty people, already believers in the prophetic power of Jesus, eleven of whom had been chosen by him as intimate friends and companions. The latter part of the same book, mainly filled with the experiences of the great Apostle St. Paul, is written in a style quite different from the earlier report of traditions, and contains many experiences of Luke himself. Following this Book of the Acts there are a number of Epistles, one running into an elaborate apocalypse, that carry the history of the church down to the end of the first Christian century.

Between the ministry of Jesus and the first gathering of the church there was a brief period, falling within the fifty days between Passover and Pentecost, covered by what seems to have been an independent record, though it comes to us as the closing part of the Gospels, and runs over into the Acts. It is the testimony of certain disciples who claimed to have seen and to have talked with their Master after he was risen from the dead. These experiences were not reported originally by one person but by two at least, for there is a marked difference in the reports of appearances in Jerusalem and in Galilee. Those who claimed to be present on these occasions clung to their story all their lives, and indeed most of them lost their lives mainly because of their unswerving testimony. The whole record clearly indicates that if it had not been for these reappearances of their Master, the disciples never would have undertaken the task of preaching a new religion to the world. Throughout the Acts and the Epistles this single item, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, is uniformly regarded as the very crux and center of the whole Christian system, the chief of all the historic facts upon which their faith was built.

When we consider the time, the peculiar history of the Jewish people and the fact that this question of the resurrection was constantly discussed among them, it could not be called surprising that a resurrection tradition should arise, of the usual childish and superstitious form. They were not troubled by any of our modern ideas concerning the nature and the origin of life. They did not look upon death as the result of natural law but as the cutting off of days by an independent, personal power, who might repent, or change his purpose, and undo what he had done. They believed that their Master had brought back the dead, just as any great prophet could, by producing this change of purpose in him who caused the death. They had no clear idea of immortality apart from bodily resurrection. King Herod believed in resurrection. Martha believed it. The Romans had sealed the tomb and had set a watch because of so many rumors on this subject. The disciples were not looking for the return of their Master so soon, but there was nothing in their habit of thought or previous convictions that would dispose them to doubt the word of any among their fellowdisciples who might claim to have seen the risen Jesus.

Yet this is just what they did. The strangest feature of the early resurrection narratives is the surprise and incredulity of the disciples. And their perplexity seems not to have diminished, even after he had appeared to them again and again. We judge that it was not the fact but the manner of the resurrection that confused them, being so different from anything that they could have imagined beforehand. That a great prophet should come back with power and glory, in visible preparation for restoring the kingdom of Israel, would have seemed to them entirely natural. The words of the two disciples going to Emmaus show this attitude of mind very clearly. But to come secretly, at no time except when he could find them quite alone; to tell them nothing except what he had already told; to supplement his minute revelations concerning the heavenly estate on the night of the betrayal, with not a single word as to his own recent experiences there; not even to bring the promised Comforter, but only to repeat his promise without essential change; and then to close these indeterminate interviews with a mysterious departure that left them no plan or task for the immediate future, except to look for something that was not adequately described—surely no imagination in the world was ever vivid enough to make up such stories as these. It is an absurdity utterly without parallel, to think of a few simple-minded fishermen laying plans to preach a world religion upon a manufactured foundation such as these reported interviews with their Master, the rejected and crucified Nazarene. We must dismiss the whole hypothesis of conscious deception on the part of the disciples, as not worthy of a moment’s thought.

They saw, or certainly thought they saw, the risen Jesus. And the remarkable thing, putting all other mysteries of these peculiar experiences quite in a secondary place, is the effect of them upon the disciples themselves. When he first came he found a disheartened and partly scattered group of men. Fifty days later they had grown into heroes. The power that can be explained only by the possession of unbounded faith was theirs. And yet he had given them, in all the times he had met them, not a single proof or argument that they could use in convincing any possible gainsayer. Unlettered men though they were, they must have known that they had no actual evidence of the resurrection that was worth the breath it would take to tell it. Their own testimony in such a case could have no other effect than to provoke derision. They said they had seen their Master. But who'were they? Who else had seen him? Why did he hide himself here and there with them, when the whole Jewish nation, and the world, were eagerly waiting for proof of the very things that they told?

The modern mind confesses to an unholy curiosity as to what might have happened if the risen Christ had suddenly appeared to Caiphas or to Pontius Pilate. Why not? Neither of them could injure him now. He had said his kingdom was not of this world. Now he could bring proof of it that nobody could question. And the fact that we ourselves have such views as these on the subject is one of the weaknesses of modern religion. The insistent and unconquerable desire to find knock-down arguments, the hope of some day coming into possession of evidence enough to club the most blatant opponent of Christianity into submission, is one of our inheritances from centuries of religious controversy that never came in sight of what Jesus was teaching. It is not at all different from the Mohammedan effort to convert the world by the sword. It is the very temptation that the Master met and overcame in the wilderness. The disciples themselves, before he rose from the dead, seemed to have had exactly these ideas of advancing his cause. They were hoping to sit at his right hand and his left, and had utterly mistaken his promise that they should judge the twelve tribes of Israel. In such a ease, the twelve tribes were judged already, and something very unpleasant was coming to them. The most striking feature of these peculiar interviews with the risen Master is the evident fact that there gradually came into the minds of the disciples an entirely different idea of his kingdom and of their relation to it. Just what produced the change is the supreme mystery of the resurrection. The nearest experience akin to it that we can think of is the birth of love. Two people meet time after time, speaking of indifferent subjects, having no experiences at all dissimilar from ten thousand other human incidents, and then find that their whole outlook upon life, their purposes in it, and their possible enjoyment of it have utterly changed. So the disciples wakened to new conceptions of rehigion. They could no longer think of their Master wanting to triumph over Pilate or anyone else. He had already made his appeal to all that was highest in the man, and when that failed there was nothing else to do. The kind of religion that Jesus came to establish cannot be propagated by mere marshaling of proofs and arguments. To have dragged the most conspicuous example of unbelief in Jerusalem at the chariot-wheels of a triumphant demonstration, untouched by a spiritual appeal but convinced against his will by undeniable facts, might do for some modern types of evangelism, but it would never bring a Pentecost. The Christian church was to be founded upon ideas of the Kingdom of God very different from these. Nothing but changed hearts passes current there. The triumph of one opinion over another is a good way to drive out faith, but if they wished to produce faith they must first cultivate love for God and for their fellow-men, upon which alone can true and saving faith be built.

It is greatly to be feared that if some of us modern believers had enjoyed the opportunities of those first disciples we might have wrecked the Christian church at the start, instead of well nigh wrecking it nineteen centuries afterward, by our inordinate curiosity. We want to know where he got the clothes he appeared in, how he secured the food and built the fire by the lake. We are full of conjectures. Their minds were so open that we call them blank. They seem to have been in the condition described in the scene upon the Mount of Transfiguration, and when they spoke they scarcely knew what they said. Only once did Peter break over this reserve, after the early breakfast on the shore, and he was gently and properly rebuked. Their Master told them little in these interviews, for they already knew far too much. They had made up their minds as to the kind of religion the world needs. Israel was to be restored. The religion of the Jews, with a few added features, was to be planted upon the ruins of the Roman Empire. The day of vengeance was at hand. They were going to show to the world what the chosen people were chosen for.

Then the Master came. He used no arguments. Such mistaken ideas of religion as these cannot be corrected by logic. He brought them no definite plans. They had too many plans now. He brought nothing but himself. And as they met him, time after time, as their hearts burned within them when he reopened the old, familiar Scriptures again and again, with the new light breaking upon them, the conviction took shape that their Master, even in heavenly glory, had as much desire to be with them again as they had to be with him. He had come not to teach them anything but that his joy might be in them and that their joy might be full. They learned that resurrection is not a dogma to be proved but the natural state of a new life, given from above; the perfect restoration of the only relationships in life that are worth having. Their experience was something like that of St. Paul, and of all others who have met the risen Lord, not to be known by its evidences but by its effect upon themselves. They had known Jesus in the flesh. Henceforth they were to know that Jesus no more. They would have been hopelessly hampered in trying to preach the gospel if their knowledge had been confined to what the theologians call his ‘‘estate of humiliation.’’ They now had a glorified Christ to preach, the same one indeed that we have to preach. Jesus as a teacher is a wonderful basis for religion. That story never grows old. But there is no gospel to preach except Christ crucified and risen again.

In the report of his appearing to the eleven upon the mountain in Galilee, it is said that they worshiped him, but some doubted. The narrative shifts abruptly at this point, as though the writer had now told us all we could ever wish to know. He left out the one thing that we do wish to know, whether they continued to doubt, or were convinced; and if they were convinced we should like very much to know how it was done. It is incredible that the writer, presumably Matthew, did not know this part of the incident quite as well as the part that he tells us. And he must have been a strange tax-gatherer indeed if he did not know human nature well enough to realize that if it was proof he was trying to set forth he should have told us the rest of the story, or else he should have left out this part of it altogether.

If Matthew’s thought, however, had nothing to do with evidence—and the narrative broken off in the middle reveals the unconscious working of a mind unspeakably exalted whenever he thought of that blessed companionship, believed to be lost for the rest of this life, but now restored in wonderful winsomeness forever—it is difficult to see how the Spirit of God could give him better words than this fragmentary sentence in which to anticipate some of the richest spiritual experiences of millions and millions of believers, all down the centuries. We all have had our doubts, right in the face of evidence. Others about us have been joyfully believing, while we, with the same opportunities, have been unable to believe. Can we explain what became of our doubts? Very seldom indeed do we know the manner of their going. All that we know is they went. They simply dropped away and left us free. They did not come from the lack of argument in the first place, and they did not go for the abundance of it. Faith is not belief but adventure, and doubt is only the under side of faith. The experience of these eleven men upon the mountain carried in it a promise of their future usefulness that is almost enough in itself to account for Pentecost. They had been believers. They still were, the whole eleven of them, though some doubted. For they did not doubt Christ. They only questioned whether this appearance that they saw actually was Christ. The believers did not draw aside their skirts from the inquirers, in the modern fashion that we all know so well, and call them rationalists. They did not set themselves above their questioning brethren as a_ superior kind of Christians. They did not fall into dispute. We judge that the difference between the two parties was the question whether this was a disembodied appearance, or was actual flesh and bones. So far as the record tells us, these two opinions among the Apostles persisted down to the Day of Pentecost and later. And there was no difference in spiritual power on that day because there had been, and probably still were, among the Apostles themselves two theological views as radically divergent as anything that ever came up between Catholic and Protestant, Unitarian and Trinitarian, upon a question that is as fundamental in Christianity as any question can be, namely the nature of Christ’s resurrection body. The fact that men of such diverse views on such a subject could yet work together in perfect harmony undoubtedly had much to do with bringing the first Christian Pentecost. <A similar act among modern Christians would bring Pentecost again,

These early preachers were Hebrews, and their audiences were Hebrew. They quoted

Scripture by the page, as is evidenced in the reported sermons of Peter and Stephen, and their quotations hit the mark even less frequently than most of ours do. But when they came to speak of Jesus, power went forth with what they said. They had been with him, in every sense in which the words can be used. They appealed to facts, of course, for Christianity is historically built upon things that occurred. But they did not depend upon mere proof and argument. Their unanswerable plea was not what could be said about their faith but what that faith made of those who sincerely and intelligently accepted it.

We take up next the story of the early church. It was not an elaborate organization. For a time it seems to have been little more than an advanced school of Hebrew thought. They counseled in their upper chamber and worshiped in the Temple. Previous to the Day of Pentecost they had taken a step toward organization that seems to have been ill advised. Surmising, by a fearful wrench of Scripture, that the number of the Apostles must be kept at twelve, and that the essential qualification of an Apostle was what he had seen and heard, and not the fact that he had been called by the Master, they chose by lot Matthias, one of the two candidates who could pass this test. He drops out of the record so promptly that we are unable to conjecture how well he filled his man-made apostleship. What we know is that he never displaced Judas, who still holds the twelfth position in every list, picture, and group of statuary in the world. We could not do without him.

A real problem, however, soon appeared. It grew out of the necessity of caring for the poor, and especially for those who had come to Jerusalem without making provision for an extended stay, and had joined the number of the believers. The local members of the church did what was natural and necessary. ‘Those who had salable property disposed of it to provide for this need. Afterward some who had possessions in distant places did the same. In the enthusiasm there arose the conviction that all property, sold and unsold, held by Christians was not theirs, but belonged to the whole number of believers. They were not instituting a new social order, or thinking of such a thing. They were merely pulling down their barns because of the sudden abundance of the’ harvest.

The money, thus wastefully provided, was brought to the Apostles, who were just then the busiest men in the world. They had one clear and unmistakable precedent. If they had held any opinion at all of being under a rigid and divinely ordered system of church government, their course was very plainly marked out for them. Judas had carried the bag. They had elected Matthias to be his successor and to take his office. The duty of administering this fund plainly belonged to Matthias. The early church, however, had not fallen into the modern church’s slavery to precedent. The Apostles called a mass meeting and boldly launched a scheme that is not in the Old Testament and is not hinted of in any of their previous relations with the Master. It was the clearest possible case of pure synagogue democracy. A new church office was created on the spot. Seven men, a Hebrew number, were chosen and set apart by the laying on of hands.

When they chose Matthias they had prayed first and then cast lots. Now they voted first and prayed afterward. The art of church government was coming on by leaps and bounds. These seven men, solemnly ordained by what seems to have been a synagogue ceremony, were selected not to preach but to distribute alms. Their commission was to serve tables, so that the preaching could be done by those who knew how. Some of the seven refused to abide by their instructions. We are not told what kind of care Stephen gave to his widows, but the first thing we learn of him he has abandoned them and is preaching to the Jews with such power and success as to lead to his own martyrdom.

Another shoemaker who did not stick to his last was Philip. He soon appears in the apostolic offices of preaching and baptizing, with such prominence as to crowd the real Apostle of the same name completely off the stage, and we never hear of him again. The early church was more interested in getting the work done than it was concerned over the manner of doing it. The records are too scanty to admit of dogmatizing, but the fact is palpably clear that they had no idea of a foreordained and divinely authoritative system of church government, definitely given and never to be changed. So much volunteer service led to confusion, and they found it necessary to put authority into the hands of those who showed the ability to keep some kind of order among the saints. Formal church government was of slow and natural growth. When their system proved to be inadequate, or did not suit them, they changed it.

They deferred to the opinion of the Apostles, very naturally, as having been intimately associated with the Master. Apostolic leadership was much in evidence but Apostolic authority had not yet appeared. Simon Peter, first of the Twelve and earliest preacher of all, got himself into trouble by admitting Gentiles to fellowship and was called upon to explain. Not all his self-appointed inquisitors put together could have had Peter’s opportunities to know just what was the mind of the Master in such a case. But so far from exercising his authority as Primate Apostle, or even citing the language of the Great Commission to preach the gospel to every creature, we find Peter speaking almost in a tone of apology. He admits that he had not thought of Christianity as anything but an exclusively Hebrew faith until the matter had been made clear to him in a vision. It is greatly to be regretted that visions have gone out of style in the modern church. A great sheet let down by the four corners, with a few near-human ancestors in it, would not shock the sensibilities of any twentieth-century brother more profoundly than Peter’s animals went contrary to every prejudice that he had. And it might help a little toward the settlement of some presentday controversies.

So many wonderful things had come suddenly into the lives of these devout and sincere followers of the Christ that they could not yet reason out each separate truth in all its logical bearings. The natural effect of faith, then as now, was not to force the religion of all men into one exact mold but to develop each man independently along the line of his own highest capabilities, at a speed in exact proportion to his own teachableness. They had not arrived at the problem of just how little faith one can have and still be a Christian, or how much of adulteration faith can stand before it passes over the line and becomes unbelief.

If we stand at the thirteenth chapter of the Book of the Acts we are between the two natural parts of the Christian church. On the farther side, it is the church of tradition. It had no records, at least none that have been preserved. The wonderful events upon which it was based and by which it grew for half a century were handed down by oral legends. Compared with ordinary legends they are exceptionally reliable. They report many things which we should unhesitatingly set down as fiction, if we were to find them in other narratives of equal antiquity. In the legends of the early church, however, we must take into consideration the very exceptional nature of the events themselves which they report. It is not reasonable, for example, to compare the New Testament miracles with similiar stories that concern purely normal periods of history. The cases are not parallel. The most that we can say of the part of the New Testament preceding the thirteenth chapter of the Acts is that the language of it is too poetic and imaginative to be bound down by mathematically strict rules of interpretation. Some leeway must be given as to the exact significance of this or that statement, or we shall go utterly wild in our efforts to comprehend this part of the sacred narrative.

In the church of tradition we find practically all the miracles of the New Testament, nearly all the mysticism, and a very pronounced type of unthinking faith. These are abnormal experiences. Just how much the abnormal character of them was heightened in the telling is a question that different readers of the New Testament will deal with in different ways. Our immediate spiritual ancestors of the Puritan times had no question where they drew the line. The mystery to them was entirely in the events that were reported, and the reports were absolutely literal. Some modern Bible readers go clear over to the opposite view. They insist that the incidents which the Gospel writers describe, and the originals of the early legends from which Luke compiled the first ten chapters of the Acts, were as bald and colorless as the daily life of a modern American village, and that the mystery is wholly in the way they were finally narrated. These are the two extreme opinions. How intelligent readers of the New Testament are to understand these records depends a good deal upon their type of mind, and whether their natural inclinations are toward or against a belief in miracles.

In the legend narratives we find a naive and refreshing type of faith. These early believers do not know what fear is, and when they meet danger it is with open defiance. They rather enjoy being arrested and imprisoned, for escape is certain and the experience is pretty sure to be interesting. Peter is delivered by prayer, and when he appears at the door of the very house where they are praying for him, they refuse to believe that it is Peter, though we can hardly call this an exclusive experience of the early church. Peter himself, on the housetop, hears what he recognizes as a divine command to slay and eat, and three times refuses to obey, though one would think Peter had had trouble enough already with the number three to make him more careful. Believers were of one heart, which is always possible. But they were of one mind also, and that can be the case only in the very childhood of a religion.

On the hither side of the thirteenth chapter of the Acts is the church of history. We find a faith that faces enormously greater tasks but lacks the impulsive quality. Systematic administration of relief has taken the place of community of goods. The thorn in the flesh, which is seriously hindering the greatest work in the world, is not removed, though devoutly prayed for. We can hardly avoid regretting that the Pentecostal church did not have a chance at that thorn. Mob violence is no longer met with open defiance, but the boldest soul in Christendom has already been let down over the Damascus wall in a basket. The church in Jerusalem, healing by shadow, delivered by angels, is living on the alms of strangers. The church in Antioch, calmly mapping out its world field and generously measuring its resources against the mighty task, becomes henceforth the pattern of the Glorious Bride of Christ.

The Antioch church reaches this high place, not in the fashion of a few centuries later by cultivating an exclusive apostolic authority, but in just the opposite manner, by giving its Apostles away. Barnabas and Saul are called for by the Holy Ghost, who does not speak again in the first person singular in the New Testament. And the church rose to the occasion. Being asked to give, it gave its best. We note that the simple democracy of twenty years before has already disappeared. No mass-meeting was called. Five men only, Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, and the two Apostles themselves, are mentioned as taking this momentous step. They are called prophets and teachers. Who was prophet and who was teacher we are not told; and we look in vain for the familiar names, necessary to any true church, of bishop and elder. Saul had already been sent far hence to the Gentiles and had been ordained by the laying on of the hands of Ananias. But he does not hesitate to accept reordination at the hands of mere prophets and teachers. Of the three hundred denominations in America there is not one so small and ignorant, or occupying quarters in a back alley so obscure, that it could not have told these Antioch brethren how they were making scores of inexcusable blunders in church government, and were not proceeding in the only true and proper New Testament way at all.