The continuity of Christian thought: a study of modern theology in the light ...

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Table Of Contents

THS GRSBK THBOLOOT.

Tm Beorecy which attends the transitioii from the age of the apostles to the age of the early Christian fathers. — Suggestiveness of the fragments of the poet-apostolic age when viewed in the light of later history. •— Clement of Borne, the Pastor of Hennas, Papias, the ** Epistle to Diogn*- tiis,'' the recently discovered ** Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." —Iffnatios — The £pistle to Diognetus serves as an introduction to Greek theology. — The Qiristian principle according to the mind of its unknown author. — The evidence <^ the incarnation. — Bevelation as commending itself to the spiritual consciousness of man. — Importance assigned to knowledge. — The nature of Christian worship. — Ridicule of Jewish superstitions and usages. — Idea of the catholicity of the church. — The church emerge into the clear light of history by the time of Justin (a. d. 166). — In the account of his conversion we have a picture of the world in his age. — Phases of his intellectual career. — His residence in Rome and its inr floence upon his thought. — How he differed from other teachers of Christianity in the Latin Church by the importance he attached to philosophy. -« In this respect he repiesents the first great intellectual issue that divided the ancient church. — He maintains the continuity between the higher fonns of paganism and Christianity. — Christ the divme reason which is universally diffused. — Influence of the Stoic philosophy traced m his conception of Christ. — But he was also influenced by Platonism. — Espknation of the return to Plato in the second century. — Traces in Justm of the conflict of thought which finally ripened into the trinitarian controversy. — His opinions on other points betray a legal tendency of Latin or Jewish origin. — Christian theology the fruit of the Greek genius. — Its birth in Alexandria. —- Intellectual freedom of the age. — Resemblance of the second century to the nmeteenth. — Confusion of thought and the search after a principle of unity. — The complexity of the problem which Greek theology was called upon to solve. — Value to it of its close contact with heathen thought. — The heresies arose in Alexandria, but it was there also that they were met. -— Greek theology resisted successfully the orienlal tendency. — Clement of Alexandria. — What is known of his life.— He vindicated the alliance between Greek phOosophy and Christianity. — Tendency in tha age to divorce God from the world. — The eania which xu TABLE OF CONTENTS.

underlay this tendency. — Affinities between Plato^s thought and Buddhism. — The course of Greek philosophy after Plato. — Influence of Stoicism. — Why it failed to satisfy. — Clement is mainly concerned in enforcing the immanence of God. — He does not indulge in speculations about the mode of the divine existence. — Christ is Grod indwelling in the world. — Evidence of the connection between the man Jesus and the Deity incarnate in Him. — Organic relation of the incarnation to the course of human history. — Revelation takes place through the reason. — The inuige of God in man, the fundamental point iu Clement's anthropolog}'. — He knows nothing of the doctrine of the fall of man in Adam. — Ignorance the source of sin. — Revelation as light, the remedy of sin. — The education of the human race under the tuition of indwelling Deity. — What the idea of such an education implies as to the nature of man. — The function of fear in religion. — The methods of the Divine Instructor. — The nature of the judgment. — The object of punishment. — How Clement met the heresies of the age. — Marcion, the Ebionites, other forms of Gnosticism, the oriental principle. — The doctrine of sacrificial expiation for sin finds no place in his system. — The nature of redemption. — The incarnation in itself the true atonement with God. — The nature of faith. — Its relation to reason. — Clement's use of Scripture. — Idea of inspiration. — Relation toward the principle of heresy in general. — Definition ai the church. — The sacraments and rites of worship. — The nature of sacrifice. — Opposition to asceticism. — The principle on which it was resisted. — The future life and the " last things." — The ideas of a second personal coming of Christ in the flesh and the millennium irrational. — Rejection of the material notions about the resurrection. — Life in the future world a progressive development. — The love of God must eventually vindicate its power in a universal triumph over sin. — Why the theology of Clement has been presented at length. — His relation to those that came after him. — His influence upon his age. — His name stricken from the calendar of Saints in the Roman Catholic church ebout the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Introduction

The traditional conception of Groi which has come down to us from the Middle Ages through the Latin church is undergoing a profound transformation. The idea that God is transcendent, not only exalted above the world by His moral perfection, but separated from it by the infinite reaches of space, is yielding to the idea of Deity as immanent in His creation. A change so fundamental involves other changes of momentous importance in every department of human thought, and more especially in Christian theology. The epithets applied to God, such as absolute and infinite, have a different significance when applied to Deity indwelling within the universe. When we no longer localize Him as a physical essence in the infinite remoteness, it is easier to regard Him as ethical in His inmost being ; righteousness becomes more readily the primary element in our conception of His essential nature. There is no theological doctrine which does not undergo a change in consequence of the change in our thought about God. Creation and revelation, the relation between God and humanity, the incarnation and the things which concern our final destiny, are lifted into a higher sphere and receive a deeper, a more comprehensive and more spiritual meaning.

The object of the following treatise is to present the outlines of that early Christian theology which was formulated by thinkers in whose minds the divine immanence was the underlying thought in their consciousness of God. The Greek fathers, from the second to the fifth centuries, could not escape, even had they been inclined to do so, from the influence of a philosophy like the Stoic, so entirely in accordance with the well-known tendencies of Hellenic life and culture, and which existed for five hundred years, as the genuine expression of the Greek mind before it was overcome by other forms of theosophical speculation. Although from the second century a retrogressive movement toward Platonism was gaining strength, as seen in Justin and more especially in Origen, yet it was impossible for Christian thinkers, even so late as the age of Constantine, to emancipate their minds from the subtle spell of that philosophy whose distinguishing feature was the belief that God indwelt in the universe and in the life of man. Such an influence was as inevitable as that of scholasticism upon the reformers of the sixteenth century, or of Calvin upon some modem thinkers, who congratulate themselves on having abandoned his system while still adhering to what was fundamental in his method. But the Greek theologians did not stand in an attitude of revolt or alienation from Hellenic philosophy and culture. They knew its value in their own experience, and held it to be a divine gift to the Greek people, — a divinely ordered course of preparation for the " fullness of time." From the alliance of Greek philosophy with Christian thought arose the Greek theology, whose characteristics are a genuine catholicity, spiritual depth and freedom, a marked rationality, and a lofty ethical tone by which it is pervaded throughoat. For a time its influence was felt and acknowledged in the West, as is seen in the writings of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Minucius Felix, and to a limited extent even in Tertullian. But the East and West began to grow apart after the time of Constantino, and the first foundations of the later schism between the Greek and Latin churches were already laid, when there arose in the West, under the influence of Augustine, a peculiar theology with which the Gbreek mind could have no sympathy, whose fundamental tenets it regarded with aversion.

The Augustinian theology rests upon the transcendence of Deity as its controlling principle, and at every point appears as an inferior rendering of the earlier interpretation of the Christian faith. Augustine is the most illustrious representative in history of a process very familiar to our own age, by which men of considerable intellectual activity, wearied with the questionings and skepticisms which they cannot resolve, fall back upon external authority as the only mode of silencing the reason and satisfying the conscience. Like the modem Brownson, he had swung round the circle of theories and systems in which his age abounded, without finding relief ; like Mallock, he was painfully impressed with the moral skepticism concealed beneath the superficial appearance of ordinary life ; and, like Newman, he possessed an unrivaled skill in dialectic, which he employed in defense of the system which he had chosen to identify with the Christian faith. His conversion took place at Milan, where he was struck by the external power and splendor of the church under its majestic administration by Ambrose ; he received, on assent, the Christianity of the time, and included in it the pppular notions and tendencies which were current in the church, as part of the divine revelation. After he became Bishop of Hippo, and especially after his entanglement in the Donatist and Pelagian controversies, he stood forth as the type of the ecclesiastic in all later ages : like Newman after his perversion, there was nothing so obnoxious or irrational that he could not make it plausible to the reason ; that which seemed to be useful or desirable for maintaining the control and ascendency of the church was stamped to his mind with the signet of the truth. The needs of ecclesiastical policy became the standard by which to test the validity of Christian belief.

The Augustinian theology made possible the rise of the papacy.^ Leo the Great, in the generation after Augustine, put forth the claim for the authority of the Koman see which was never afterward relaxed, and which saw its realization in the imperial authority over Christendom of Hildebrand and Innocent III. Augustinianism and the papacy owe their appearance to an age when free inquiry and intellectual activity were struck with decline, when the reign of barbarism was

* How the work of Augustine contributed to the development of the papacy is clearly shown by Geffcken, StCLat und Kirche, in ihrem VerhcUtniss geschichtlich entwickdty pp. 95-98. The ''City of Grod" is a prophetic anticipation of the church of the Middle Ages. In Geffcken's words : " Er stellt Natur, Individualitat, Familie, Nationalitat, Staat als etwas verluiltnissmassig Gleichgultiges hin und ordnet alles der sichtbaren, allgemeinen Kirche unter ausserhalb deren es kein Heil giebt, er stellt die Autoritat ' ihrer Tradition neben die der Schrift, behauptet den sacramentalen Character der Ordination und des Friesterstandes. Und wenn er die Yertretung der Kirche noch in die Aristokratie der Bischof e setzt, so war es, nachdem einmal ein gesonderter Stand der Leviten hingestellt war, nur ein Schritt, diesen auch einen HohepHester als einheitlichen Mittelpunkt der Kirche zu.geben."

about to begin. Under such circumstances we may see in both alike a providential adaptation of Christianity to a lower environment. They did not grow out of the Christian idea as its necessary development, but were rather retrograde forms under which the Christian principle might still be operative, though in greatly diminished degree. One need not speak of the papacy as a usurpation : it was a dispensation divinely appointed for the races of Europe ; a schoolmaster, like the Jewish theocracy which it so closely resembled, to bring them to Christ. But the same divine hand which. is revealed in its rise and its fortunes is revealed also in the process which led to its overthrow and rejection. The Augustinian theology had subserved a temporary purpose, and began to wane with the papacy when the hmnan mind once more regained its freedom. So far as both yet linger in the modem world, it is an evidence that there are those who still need, or think they need, a religion based upon external authority, or a morality whose sanction is fear of the consequences of sin in the future world. The motive which lends interest and value to a study of the history of Latin theology in the Middle Ages, or in its later Flx)testant modifications, is to seek in its varied fortunes for that tendency to revert again to the true interpretation of the Christian faith, from which it was originally a falling away. The transitions of modem thought in regard to the nature of God and His relation to the world are in nowise abrupt or sudden, or the result of a preparation to be found exclusively in our own time. It is of the highest importance to show, if it can be shown, that the preparation for the higher and fuller trath may be traced in the progress of thought during the Middle Ages as well as in the later Protestantism. For all our thought concerning God has its foundation in the consciousness of man, — or rather, it is inland through the consciousness that the divine revelation is made, — and therefore, among those in every age who have set themselves seriously to find out God, we should expect some testimony, however feeble or overborne by contradictions, to the later and fuller utterance of the consciousness as it speaks in ourselves. There is scarcely a thinker in the whole range of Latin or Protestant theology who has not at moments given expression to a higher thought of Deity than that which underlies the formal theology, the ecclesiastical institutions, or the current modes of belief which command his adherence and approval. It is Augustine who, at a certain stage in his career, could write : —

" For God is diffused through all things. He saith Himself by the Prophet, ^ I fill heaven and earth/ and it is said unto Him in a certain psahn, * Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend up to heaven, Thou art there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there ; ' because God is substantially diffused everywhere. God is not thus diffused through all things as though by diffusion of mass, so as to be half in one half of the world's body and half in the other, and thus entire in the whole ; but entire in heaven alone, and entire in earth alone, and entire in both heaven and earth, and comprehended in no place, but everywhere entire in Himself. He is nowhere and everywhere."

And again, speaking of the incarnation, it is Augustine who says : —

" And though He is everywhere present to the inner eye when it is sound and clear. He condescended to make Himself manifest to the outward eye of those whose inward sight

18 weak and dim. Not then in the sense of traversing spacej but because he appeared to mortal men in the form of mor* taZ flesh. He is said to have corns to us. For He came to a place where He had always been, seeing that He was in the world and the world was made hy Him." ^

Even Thomas Aquinas, when the exigencies of reason required it, could write : —

'^ There have been some, as the Manichees, who said that spiritual and incorporeal things are subject to divine power, but visible and corporeal things are subject to the power of a contrary principle. Against these we must say that God is in all things by His power. There have been others again who, though they believed all things subject to divine power, still did not extend divine Providence down to the lower parts, concerning which it is said in Job, ^ He walketh upon the hinges of heaven and considereth not our concerns.' And against these it is necessary to say, that God is in all things by His presence. There have been again others, who, though they said all things belonged to the Providence of God, still laid it down that all things are not created immediately by Grod, but that He immediately created the first, and these created others. And against them it is necessary to say that He is in all things by His essence." ^

Passages like these are gleams of a higher thought, flashing forth at exceptional moments, when the religious heart speaks out or the reason forgets its trammels. But the f onnal theology, the ecclesiastical institutions, which Augustine sanctioned for the ages that followed him, which Calvin renewed for the Prot^ estant churches, are built upon the ruling principle that God is outside the world and not within ; that

1 De Doc. Christ, i. c. 13.

^ Sum. Theol, Prima Pars, qn. viii. art. 3, quoted in Hampden's BampUm Lectures, p. 184.

He is absolute Deity in the sense that His being would be complete without the creation or humanity or the Eternal Son.

What is sometimes called " modem infidelity " is mainly, I had almost said exclusively, a protest against the theology based upon such a conception of God, It is not Christianity in itself which is to-day obnoxious to serious men, but a Latinized Christianity which the thought of the world has outgrown while it is still perpetuated in the formal attitude of the churches. The traditional doctrines concerning the nature and method of the divine revelation, the atonement, and the final destiny of man, are called in question, not because they are irrational in themselves, but because they no longer spring by an inward necessity from that changed conception of God which is consciously or unconsciously postulated by the mind. We often hear of a Catholic faith which is an older reality than any of the theologies which command the popular assent, but those who profess to hold it are too apt to identify the ancient creeds with their Latin interpretation. It is not till we get back into an earlier age, before Christianity was translated into its Latin idioms, that we can discern another interpretation of the Christian faith, — the religion of Christ as it appeared to men who were living and thinking under intellectual conditions more similar to our own than any intervening age has since exhibited. The ancient Greek theology, as it was developed from the second to the fourth century under the hand of great masters like Clement and Athanasius, differs at every point from Latin theology as it received its final impress from Augustine in the fifth century.

I have attempted in the following pages to contrast the two theologies, and to trace the genesis of each to its ruling principle. In so doing, I am not presenting any novel view of the history of Christian thought. The distinction between the Greek and Latin theologies has been made by every recent writer of any importance in the field of church history, among whom may be mentioned, as best known, Gieseler, Neander, Domer, Ritschl, Baur, Pressens^, Kenan, Bunsen, Maurice, and Milman. Gieseler attached the highest importance to Greek theology, and saw in the theology of the Latin church, as it originated with Tertullian, a debased rendering of the spiritual truths of Christianity. The distinction also runs through the great work of Domer on the " Person of Christ ; " it is significant that he finds neither in Augustine nor in Thomas Aquinas, the two most celebrated theologians of the Latin church, an adequate conception of the incarnation. Neander appreciated clearly the differences between the two theologies, but was so averse to all that bore upon ecclesiastical organization that he has not traced the western theology to its genuine root; nor does he see as clearly as Domer, that the Augustinian doctrines of sin and grace implied a fundamental departure from what was highest and most real in the earlier theology.

Ritschl has devoted an elaborate treatise to the "Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation," and begins his treatment of the subject with Anselm's theory of the atonement, as if the early church had been utterly silent upon so momentous a theme. While he admits that Greek theology stands upon a different niveau from Latin, and that to this cause, and not to political complications alone, was owing the schism between the Greek and Latin

Digitized by VJjQOQlC churches, he gives no intimation that the Greek theologians looked at redemption and reconciliation from a point of view distinctly their own, and would have been as averse to Anselm's doctrine of atonement as they were to Augustine's doctrine of original sin.^ The value of Ritschl's discussion of the subject lies in his exhibition of the progress of thought among the thinkers who followed Anselm, till they approximate the leading principle of Greek theology, that the incamar tion does not differ from the atonement as the means from the end, but that in the incarnation itself is manifested the reconciliation^ of man with God, and the actual redemption of humanity from its lost estate. But this conclusion Ritschl fails to draw. The mind of Baur was so preoccupied with the antithesis between the Petrine and Pauline types of Christianity and their reconciliation in the Catholic church, that he has failed to read another and deeper antithesis in the history of ancient theology for whose reconciliation the world is still waiting. It is because he sees

^ The late Rev. J. M. Neale, in the preface to his translation of the Eastern Liturgies, remarks that he finds no trace in them of the modem theory of the atonement, as it has been held in the Latin or Protestant churches, according to which the sufferings of Christ were an equivalent for human pimishment. " For nearly twenty years," he says, " these and the other early liturgies have been my daily study ; there are very few passages in them which I could not repeat by heart ; and scarcely any important works on the subject which I have not read. I may therefore claim some little right to be heard with respect to them. And I say most unhesitatingly, that while I conceive that some passages in them might be tortured into a Calvinistic sense were sufficient ingenuity employed, no ingenuity can make any single clause even patient of the theory of equivalence. If that theory be true, the eucharistic teaching of evexy eastern liturgy is absolutely false."

in the Fourth Gospel only a product of Alexandrian thought in the second century, and not an original independent tradition of the teaching of Christ, of equal antiquity and authority with the tradition given in the synoptical gospels, that he is inclined to disparage also the work of the earlier Alexandrian writers like Clement and Origen, as if with the Fourth Gospel it was but a variation of the Gnostic heresy.^ Apart from this defect, no one has thrown a keener light upon the condition of religious thought in the ancient church, or seen more clearly how great a departure from primitive Christianity was involved in the Augustinian dogma of original sin.^

A formidable obstacle to the intelligent study of the Greek theology is the lingering hold of Augustine upon the modem mind. The tenets of the Bishop of Hippo have been for so many ages identified with divine revelation, that it requires an intellectual revolution in order to attain the freedom to interpret correctly, not only the early Fathers of the church, but Scripture itself. As there has been a traditional interpretation of Scripture, so there has been a traditional reading of the theologians before Augustine's

^ And yet Baur and others who deny the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, recognize a finer and more elevated spiritual touch in its portraiture of Christ than in what they hold to be the only genuine tradition. "Le doux et profond langag^ du Christ gnostique, a ddsarmc^, conquis les plus s^y^res critiques modemes. lis nient hautement I'historicitd des rdcits du quatri^me fivang^le, et plus encore celle des discours, mais ils en prennent si bien I'esprit, qu'ils I'opposent aux donn^es les plus certaines des £vangiles jud^o-chri^tiens, absolument comme s'ils avaient un Jean authentique." La Revdutum Religieuse au Dix* neumeme Siede, par F. Huet, p 194.

a Baur, Die CkristUche Kirche, iL 163-181.

time, by which they were all made to say about one and the same thing. The idea of a Catholic faith, supported by the unanimous consent of the Fathers, continues to perpetuate the error. A false conception of development has done much to confuse the study of ancient theology, by taking it for granted that because Augustine lived at a later time, he therefore built upon the same foundation with his predecessors and carried their work to a higher stage.

Whatever the source from which it springs, there is one charge so often alleged against the Greek theology that it deserves a moment's notice. It is said that it was deficient in the doctrines of sin and grace.

It is true that the Greek fathers did not accept the doctrine of original sin as propounded by Augustine,^ with its correlated tenets of total depravity, the loss of the freedom of the will, the guilt of infants, predestination or reprobation by a divine decree, or the endlessness of future punishment. But it does not follow that their conception of sin was on this account wanting in depth or adequacy. If the attitude of Augustine is to be taken as the standard of Christ tian teaching upon the nature of sin, its origin and its consequences, then other religions, such as Mohammedanism or Buddhism, would seem in these respects to have excelled Christianity. Compared with the few allusions to the future consequences of sin, and these of a somewhat general character, to be found in the New Testament, the Koran invokes on almost every page the horrors of an endless torment in definite language not to be misunderstood. If the nature of man is wholly corrupted by sin, as Augustine taught,

1 A summary of the Greek and Latin anthropologies is given in Shedd's History of Christian Doctrine, ii. pp. 42, 91.

Buddliism rises to a clearer declaration of the same principle, when, running counter to life itself, it makes sin exist in all desire. If views like these constitute what some are pleased to call tlie backbone of theology, then the ancient Greek theology was indeed deficient, for it assigned the chief importance to the belief that man was made in God's image, and relied upon indweUing Deity to lead mankind from sin to righteousness.

In the spirit of this earlier theology sin is regarded fis a transgression of the law, not the law which is conceived as an arbitrary appointment of a will external to man, but the law written in his constitution, — the life and the truth of God imprinted on the human nature in order that it may become partaker of the divine nature. To this end the incarnation takes place, that man may be delivered from the power of sin, and brought into harmony with that law which constitutes the life of God, in the obedience of which consists the real life of the creature. As obedience is life, so in disobedience is death. The design of God, as revealed in the ages that preceded the coming of Christ, was to teach mankind how sin brought forth death, in order that, in the light of the incarnation, might be discerned the meaning and the value of lif e.^ It is said of the late Mr. Maurice, that being asked for the best treatise on the nature of sin, he replied, St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians; or, in other words, that method which most clearly presents Christ

^ This qualitative or ethical use of the words <<life" and ** death " is common to Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, and is in harmony with their use in the Fourth Gospel. It was, however, objected to Mr. Maurice, by a distinguished controversialist, that this use was non-natural. Cf. Mozley's Essays, voL iL, on Maurice's theology.

in his spiritual exaltation is best fitted to reveal the nature, the extent, the enormity of sin. Such might have been the reply of Clement of Alexandria or of Athanasius, such surely was the method of Greek theology in the days of its vigor ; and even in its decline, it still remained true, in a formal way, to that which had been its ruling principle. The Greek church, it has been often remarked, had but one dogma, that of the incarnation, — a dogma, it should be remembered, resting primarily, not on the authority of a council, but on the reason or the Christian consciousness, — and with the evolution of this truth in its relation to God and to humanity, Greek thought and speculation were occupied for over four hundred years. In this truth lay involved all the issues of the Christian faith ; in its presence, other questions paled in importance; by its light were to be interpreted all tenets and opinions concerning man and his destiny. Hence the early fathers did not base their theology upon speculations regarding the origin of evil ; it was enough to know that the redemption of mankind was an accomplished fact, that humanity had been endowed through Christ in its own right with a recuperative power, which would enable it to struggle successfully against all that was contrary to its true nature. The sense of sin was not regarded as an experience generated in the soul apart from God, for there was a divine presence in the world and in human hearts whose mission it was to convince of sin and righteousness. There was no artificial division in human experience, according to which the sense of sin must first prevail and dominate in the consciousness before a man could receive the Saviour ; but the knowledge of Christ, and his reception in the heart, became the power by which sin was iiunreafldngly revealed, and by which also it was oyercome.