AMONG Continental theologians of the younger generation there are few, if any, that occupy a more distinguished place than Professor Wernle of the University
of Basel, and his work on the Beginnings of the Christian Religion, which is now presented to the English-speaking public, is the most matured and exhaustive
product of his scholarship. It may not be possible for
all of us to see eye to eye with him in the vast and
sometimes obscure field covered by his brilliant study;
but it is impossible for any one to withhold admiration
from the freshness, the vivacity, the vitality, the
penetrating insight which Professor Wernle exhibits
in his handling of the origin and primitive development of the Christian faith. The book is addressed
to all who are prepared to accept the bolder results of
New Testament criticism, and the central idea running through the whole of it is a very simple one.
It is first of all to ascertain what the Gospel is as
seen in the teaching and character of the Redeemer;
and secondly, to measure all the later expositions of
According to Professor Wernle, Jesus prepared the
ground for a new religious community but did not
organise it Himself, and the disciples of the Master
who had denationalised the Jewish conception of the
kingdom of God were unable to liberate themselves
from Judaism or to produce much impression upon
the Gentile world. Both of these tasks were the
work of St Paul; and as this work was of transcendent
importance to the future of the Christian faith,
Professor Wernle devotes a considerable part of this
St Paul was a trained theologian, the writer of the
Apocalypse was a layman, and this volume closes with
an analysis and estimate of that remarkable work.
It is the oldest and only document springing out
of lay Christian enthusiasm, and Professor Wernle
thinks that it represents the general lay opinion of
the Church in primitive Christian times. At the
bottom of this enthusiasm lay the belief that the
world was rapidly coming to an end, and that the
supreme duty of man was to seek salvation from the
coming judgment by watchfulness and repentance.
Men in such a condition of mind had no thought of
setting up stable ecclesiastical forms and institutions.
But these men had a new life in them—a life of
IN the summer of 1900 I delivered lectures on New Testament Theology in the University of Basel. These I have now expanded into a book, which, however, is by no means intended to rival any handbook to New Testament Theology. My only aim in preparing my lectures was to present my pupils with a clear idea of that which I conceived to be the real meaning of the Gospel, and to trace the great changes it underwent up to the rise of Catholicism. I purposely excluded from the scope of my work all that appeared to be unimportant for the aim that I had in view. Theological ideas came under consideration only in their relation to the Gospel of Jesus. I have striven to be true to my original purpose in compiling this book from my lectures.
In publishing my lectures my aim is a practical
one, and there is no reason to conceal it. An age of
transition such as ours needs above all else a constant
recurrence to the Gospel of Jesus for guidance. But
it is well known that the Gospel does not lie everywhere
Now, though it is perfectly true that “Cowper’s pious peasant woman” can understand Jesus in all that He was and all that He wanted, yet theological enquiry should surely never abrogate its great calling, which is to give all possible help to the simple comprehension of Jesus.
This, of course, theology can only do by self-suppression—i.e. by helping to liberate the Gospel from theology. If Jesus was, above all else, our Saviour from the theologians, then we theologians are truly His disciples only by the constant renewal of this saving work of His.
To do this, two conditions are pre-eminently
necessary, the existence of which, alas, cannot be
assumed as a matter of course amongst Christian
theologians. They are, firstly, true reverence for
that which alone deserves reverence; and secondly,
fidelity to the Christian conscience. I reckon as an
essential part of true reverence, the frankest and
fullest renunciation of that false reverence for
formulae, symbols, rites and institutions in which the
free word of God is imprisoned and fossilized. He
who does not completely reject the false can never
find room in his heart for the true. And in like
manner fidelity to the Christian conscience implies
the clearest and most unflinching criticism of all that
THE AUTHOR.
BASEL, December 1900.
THE publication of my work in an English translation is especially gratifying to me, for it is indebted in more than one place to English thought. I consider myself fortunate in having made the acquaintance of Thomas Carlyle while I was still a student at the University. He has become my leader and the leader of many of my friends. Here and there in this book the English reader will perhaps catch an echo of certain passages in Carlyle’s writings.
The translation strictly follows the German edition of 1900. It is only the first two chapters about Jesus which have been altered, and that merely so far as to make them correspond with statements contained in the author’s later publications.
THE AUTHOR.
BASEL, February 1903.
IT is no doubt true that Christianity is a daughter of the Jewish faith: yet it strikes its roots deep down into a soil which we may call beliefs common to all the religions of antiquity. In that soil the characteristic features of the various religions of the ancient world are not as yet distinguishable. Among these common beliefs may be included the whole body of ideas concerning the earth, nature, man, the soul, and the world of spirits. Before the dawn of science these popular ideas bore undisputed sway, and they live on even to the present time engaged in a ceaseless struggle with scientific conceptions of the universe.
According to the popular beliefs of antiquity, this
earth is, of course, the centre of creation, the only
scene of any history concerning God and mankind.
Over it is the vault of heaven, and there the sun and all the stars, “the powers of the heavens,” run their
This limited view of earth and world had naturally not been without influence upon religion. The unwavering faith in Providence, as well as the hope in the coming of the kingdom of God upon earth, have their chief support in this undoubted geocentric system. In like manner missionary zeal was kindled by the belief that it would be possible to preach the gospel to all the world in one single generation. Men had no idea then of the size of this earth, such as we know it now, nor of the infinite and persistent variety among the different races of men, which cause such great difficulties to missionary enterprise. And in like manner they had no conception of the universe as a whole or of this earth’s nothingness in comparison with it. However little reason we may have to boast of knowledge for which we are not indebted to ourselves, as little right have we to hide from our selves the chasm which separates us in this point from early Christianity as a child of antiquity.
The next point of difference goes a good deal
In the first place, the world of nature is a world of
wonders. St.
The religious value attached by the early Christians
to miracles surprises us to-day, even more than the
entire absence of the critical faculty. It is not
merely those Christians to whom we owe our Gospels,
who find the proof of the truths of their doctrine in
the stories of the miracles. Jesus Himself appeals
Nowhere is the difference between modern and early Christian modes of thought seen in so clear a light as in the fact that the stories of the miracles of the New Testament, which were once one of the chief proofs of the truths of our religion, are themselves to-day the object of long apologetic writings.
Like nature without, so the human mind within
is a mystery to the early Christians. Here, too,
they have no idea of a fixed sequence of events, but
everything happens independently and arbitrarily.
It is true that Jesus, and after Him the theologians
Paul and John, just touched upon the thought of
an inner necessity, but it was only by the way,
and led to no further consequences. The belief
in the freedom of man under all circumstances and
But the true domain of mystery lies in the real inner life of
the soul, in the unconscious with its enigmatic utterances. The miraculous
itself is contained in every human being, and can manifest itself suddenly in
ecstatic conditions. Unchecked by any Philistine spirit of rationalism, the
early Christians bestowed upon all manifestations of the mysterious inner life
of the soul a far more serious and more impartial attention than we moderns, who
are often inclined to be somewhat too precipitate in determining the limits of
that which is possible. In those days men were at once more childlike and more
dogmatic in their explanation of mental processes. Even though they built up no
system, the conception prevailed amongst them that these phenomena were the
manifestations of some external agent. It was not we ourselves, but a demon, an
angel, or a spirit that was the efficient cause; sometimes this agent is
conceived of as intimately connected with our soul, but at others he is an
entirely extraneous being that has forced his way into our body from without
through one of its many pores, and now dwells within it and rules over it. Here
we have the origin of the conception, not only of demoniacal possession, but of
that of the Holy Spirit, whose operations, save that they work the will of a
beneficent Deity, are pictured as analogous to those of the demons. Speaking
We may here mention in passing that in like
manner the anthropology of the early Christian laity—possibly not that of the theologian St Paul—maintains its close connection with the popular beliefs of
the ancient world, when it still conceives of matter
and spirit as in some manner merged in each other.
The soul, the spirit itself, is something corporeal,
though far more sublimated than our flesh and blood.
The rich man in Hades sees, hears, suffers thirst and torments in the flames, although his body already
How strange at bottom do the words of Jesus sound to our modern modes of thought! “Be not over-anxious for the soul what ye shall eat and drink, nor for the body wherewith ye shall be clothed.” The appearances, too, of the risen Master, with their hybrid character of visionary and grossly material features, can be more readily understood from the point of view of this anthropology, which is as yet not strictly dualistic. It is true that St Paul, as a clear thinker, endeavoured to arrive at a distinct separation of body and soul, but after all his efforts he only reaches the conception of the spiritual body, which still betrays his original starting-point.
After external nature and the mystery of the soul,
we come finally to the third great wonderland, the
domain of the Spirit. That which has become for
us moderns a dead formula, or else the play of the
freest fancy, was the deepest of all realities that
regulated life for the age of early Christianity. Jews
and Persians did, it is true, divide spirits according
to an ethical standard into angels and demons, but
as Satan can transform himself into an angel of light,
the operations of the two groups are often surprisingly similar; and finally, the original contrast of
harmful and helpful spirits can be plainly traced
even in the New Testament itself. The spirits fill
the whole of the upper world, the realm of the air,
and yet they live at the same time upon earth and
among men. All kinds of diseases—even fevers or
Nothing is easier than the proof that all these
conceptions of the enchanted world with its three
wonderlands are neither specifically Christian nor
Jewish, but simply belong to the ancient popular
belief, and not to it alone. The early Christians were
perfectly conscious that they shared this belief with
the heathen. That is why they made such frequent
use of all these elements in their apologetic writings.
The myths and miracles of Jesus are there compared
with perfect ingenuousness with their Greek parallels
(the earliest passage is in Justin Martyr, First Apology, chaps. xxi. and xxii.):
“If the Christians relate cures
of lame and palsied men, and of men sick from their
birth, and the raising of the dead, then all this is
similar to that which is said to have been done by
Asclepius.” The belief in the Resurrection of Jesus
has its parallel among the Jews in the report of the
risen Baptist, and among the heathen in the belief in
Asclepius, who was struck by lightning and ascended
into heaven. For the miraculous birth of the Son of
God, both friends and foes of Christianity adduced,
though with opposite intentions, the corresponding
cases of the origin of sons of God amongst the
heathen. Though Jesus compared His casting out
of devils with that of the Jewish exorcists, this art
was not specifically Jewish, but belonged to the
ancient world in general. The Jew whom Celsus
introduces as the opponent of the Christian, mentions
Egyptian, i.e. heathen ‘Goetes,’ who for a few obols
cast out devils, blow away diseases, bring up the souls
of the dead, etc. The same applies to the prediction
So deeply spread and so deeply rooted was the belief in ecstasy as a divinely-caused state, that the apologists declared that euhemerism—i.e. the attempt to explain the heathen religions by the deification of men—failed because of the fact of oracles. But the agreement of Christians with heathen in the belief in demons is most palpable in the controversy of Origen with Celsus. Both entirely concur in the assumption of an intermediary race or species of beings who are the givers of all gifts such as bread, wine, water, air, only Celsus calls them demons and Origen angels,—so narrow is the dividing line which here separates the friends and the foes of Christianity. A pure monotheist was hardly to be found either then or in the time of Jesus.
Such are some of the reasons that may be advanced in confirmation of the statement that the popular belief of the ancient world is the soil from which Christianity took its rise. In all these conceptions it is a child of its age and no revelation of God. Owing to the rise of science the props which still supported this belief in the midst of Christianity have gradually been withdrawn. Thus originated the great conflict between faith and knowledge. If it were really true, as many of its defenders maintain, that faith in the enchanted world constitutes the substance of Christianity, then, of course, the doom of our religion would be sealed.
CHRISTIANITY stands to Judaism indubitably in a relationship at once of the closest affinity and yet of the most striking contrast. What did it take over from Judaism? What did it reject? It rejected the Jewish idea, the pivot on which Judaism turns. To all its other elements it stands in a positive relationship; although the part which it rejected, involved as a necessary consequence an inner transformation of the whole Jewish system.
What is the Jewish idea? It is the conception
of religion as a legal, a national system. Nowhere
else was it developed with such uncompromising
severity. Speaking generally, religion is for the Jews
a system of law (νόμος) which is definitely drawn
up between a particular God and a particular people.
In contrast to all the false religions of the Gentiles,
the true religion is the Jewish law (or constitution).
The God of the whole world, so it is said, granted
to Israel alone its law in order to give them the
whole earth for their inheritance, provided they were
faithful citizens under this law, so that all other
people might accept the law of Israel and become
its subjects. Technically speaking, that is the formal
For the Church is simply the converse of this
constitution. It is exactly the same thing if you
call Judaism a Church or if you call it a constitution.
The Church is the realization of the law which exists
at first as an idea. There never was a time when
the Church excluded true piety on the part of
the individual, but the emphasis was laid on that
which affected the community—nay, more, on that
which affected it as a codified system of law. The
Church is religion conceived as a spiritual State.
Such was the position of Judaism from the exile
onwards that it could only exist as a spiritual State
It is well known that Jesus did not come forward as the opponent of the law or of the Church, but as the enemy of the Scribes and Pharisees. The simple reason of this is that they are the visible representatives of the Jewish law. For this law demanded a very minute acquaintance. It needed men to act as commentators and to develop it still further. It was not something that had been laid down once for all. It was constantly growing. Only one portion was committed to writing in the Thora. The greater part, the customary law, was handed down by oral tradition. And the written law itself was composed in a dead language. Besides this, the whole was very complicated and very learned. Hence the necessity of a learned caste—the theologians who are, of course, rather to be considered as lawyers. They formed a close corporation into which a man only entered, and that for life, after long years spent as disciple at the feet of honoured masters, and after due ordination. Nothing could possibly exceed the esteem in which this caste was held. The Scribes were God’s mediators and revealers—the only living authority in God’s stead. All others were laymen and in the position of minors. Such was Jesus. Hence His attitude of opposition.
Now the aim and object of the Pharisaic propaganda
was to drive this learned system into the heads of
the people. The Pharisees wanted to see the law,
which the Scribes first of all distilled as pure theory,
in a position of practical and universal supremacy.
They were zealous in good works; they loved a typical
All external things are either clean or unclean, sacred or common. The duty of the religious man is to keep himself undefiled by all unclean things, kinds of food, vessels, etc.
The actions of men are of different value in God’s sight. All ‘extraordinary works’ are especially pleasing to God; such, for instance, are, first and foremost, acts of worship, sacrifices, the paying of tithes, fasting, pilgrimages.
The end of man is holiness. He is nearest God who holds himself aloof from publicans, sinners, and Samaritans, and renounces the wicked world.
We need no further evidence to see that in opposing the Scribes and Pharisees, Jesus indirectly set Himself against the whole Jewish idea, law, and Church, and that St Paul rightly understood Jesus when he said “Christ is the end of the law.”
And herein it is especially instructive to observe
how the layman Jesus and the Scribe Paul attack
different sides of the Jewish idea and thus complete
each other in their criticism. It is the content of
the Jewish ideal of life that arouses the indignation
And then, after all, the same Jewish idea in its modified Christian form enters upon a new lease of power—a magnificent dominion destined to last for centuries. Would that it had been otherwise.
But even in the time of its degeneracy the Jewish religion was pre-eminent, surpassing every other upon earth. Christianity could only arise in Jewish soil. Nowhere else did such faith in God, so high a moral standard, and so lofty a hope for the future, lie full of promise side by side, waiting to be unified and exalted into a world-religion.
It is important to realize clearly the distinctive
feature in the Jewish faith in God. It cannot be
monotheism. For a long time past that had become
the common property of the enlightened Greek
world, as far as it had any understanding for religion,
and even in Israel itself it had been modified by a
belief in angels which bears clear marks of its
polytheistic origin. One need but read, for instance,
the Epistle to the Colossians if one would form some
idea of the weakness of Jewish monotheism, not to
mention the Greek prologue to the Fourth Gospel,
which places ‘a’ God, the Logos, by the side of the
God. Neither, however, is it the simple belief in
One frequently meets with the expression nowadays, “the transcendency of the Jewish idea of God,”
but in employing these words sufficient caution is not
always observed. It is quite true that to later
Judaism God has become a far-off, mysterious being.
Everyone who reads in succession the theophanies of
an Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and John realizes that.
A further proof may be found in the awe with which
the utterance of the name of Jahwe is avoided. “Hallowed be Thy name”—that is, may it be thought
of with the reverence due to the unspeakable.
Angels stand between God and man, whole hierarchies
The second great advantage of the Jewish religion
is its moral character. Jahwe was not only the God
of great deeds but the God of a lofty morality, who
by His person was a pledge for the indissoluble connection between faith and life. Both Jews as well
as early Christians realized how immensely important
were the consequences implied by this connection,
when they compared the Homeric gods with
their Jahwe. They were indeed themselves aware
that the work of the Greek thinkers and poets had
arrived at a great purification and moralization of the
polytheistic religion. This, however, they might
safely ignore, as the influence of Homer never ceased,
and could for them only be compared to the influence of their Bible. There were, it is true, not
It is a consequence of the strictly moral character
of the Jewish God that the outer forms of worship
in this religion are entirely subordinate to its moral
elements. This statement would not appear to be
consistent with the contents of the Law, the longest
portions of which are devoted to the regulation of
public worship, nor with the practice of the Pharisees,
who placed the ceremonial law above all purely
human duties. But it can be inferred, were it but
from the following two facts, first, that the cessation
of the Temple worship at Jerusalem had as good
as no influence whatever upon Judaism; and next,
that we find no disputes amongst the Christians as to
questions of ceremonial or of abstention from public
worship. Neither God nor His worshippers needed
the sacrifices. At the most the priests were pleased
when rich contributions thus fell to their share. If
amongst religiously-minded people any importance
was attached to public worship, then this was
simply for the sake of obedience. They just
It is true that Jewish ethics present us with an
entirely contradictory picture in which the ugliest
features are not wanting by the side of the most
pleasing and sympathetic. Amongst the former one
would reckon the preference given to the negative
avoidance of sin over the positive doing of good, the
equally important position assigned to morally
indifferent and important commandments, the merely
external summary of duties without any classification,
the interest in sexual questions, casuistry, and the seeking for reward. It was not without reason that the
But, on the other hand, this transformation of morality into its opposite, is not the only characteristic that one notices in later Judaism. We are not justified in affirming that Jesus came to His simplification of the demands of religion through His opposition to the Pharisees. He would have delivered His message exactly as He did regardless of the Pharisees, and again not as something entirely new, but as containing the elements of sound vitality which He found already existing. Here, too, there is no lack of documentary evidence in Jewish writings. The ethical teaching of the Psalms and Proverbs, and of Jesus the Son of Sirach, points in this direction, and analogous elements may be found in the oldest form of the “Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.” Even a Christian document such as the Epistle General of James, derives its life rather from the simple Jewish popular morality than directly from the Gospel of Jesus.
In the first place, we notice here that what is
demanded is extremely simple. There is scarcely
anything ceremonial or subject to national limitations.
Jesus meets the tempter in the wilderness with the
very simplest words from the Book of Deuteronomy.
In the decisive moments of His ministry He appeals
to the decalogue, the commandments of love, things
that everyone knows to be axiomatic truths. Surely
And is not, after all, the Jewish eagerness to believe that good deeds will be rewarded, the distortion of a true and great thought—that the good seed will under all circumstances ultimately bring forth good fruit? If we admit that Jesus was a sounder and saner teacher than our modern schoolmen, we may well ponder over the fact that He did not reject the scheme of rewards and punishments, but made use of it. Was not the true conviction thereby strengthened that idle piety is something entirely bad, and that God is not mocked? But in so doing Jesus did of course lay such stress upon the thought of the coming judgment that all easy-going optimism was purified by the most terrible earnestness.
This brings us to the third great legacy which Judaism bequeathed to Christianity—eschatology. Just as the origin of the new religion cannot be conceived without the Jewish hope in the coming kingdom of God, so in the lifelong struggle with the Roman state the victory is won through the Jewish hope in the Resurrection. The fact that the early Christians did not adversely criticise the Jewish hope in any book of the New Testament, and that they were able to treat Jewish apocalypses without further addition as Christian, proves how deeply indebted they felt themselves to the Jews in this point above all others.
How confused a maze of eschatological conceptions
could coexist often in one and the same person we can
see most simply by a few instances from the New Testament. We have an eschatology of the synoptists,
and that a twofold one (
The most important chapter in eschatology,
especially for the populace, excited as it had been
ever since the wars of the Maccabees by patriotic
It is, however, characteristic of the age of Jesus
that this political expectation seldom stands by itself,
but has to suffer admixture with elements of an
entirely different nature, with the eschatology of the
whole world and of the individual. Two important
questions, the fate of the world and the fate of the
individual soul, are added to the previous subject: “Israel and the Gentile World.” They are of especial
importance for the new religion, because though it
arose from the midst of the national eschatology,
it quickly freed itself from it and turned its attention
to the other problems. In the first place, we find
that in later Judaism the whole realm of action—heaven as well as earth and the world of spirits—are
all drawn into the historical drama, until at length—though the transition is not yet quite clear to us—the conception of the essential similarity between the
future and the present gives way to the conception of
the new aeon which in many important points is to
be the exact opposite of the present world. Here is
death, there everlasting life; here flesh, there spirit;
here sin, there innocence; here God is far away, there
He shall be seen face to face. This vision embraces
In the next place, men are now free to reflect upon the fate of the individual. The hope of salvation, first of the rescue of the individual in the great struggle that shall be in the last days, and then of his future blessedness—this hope takes its place beside that of the kingdom of God. The goal is one and the same, but many roads lead to it. Either the conception of the resurrection of the dead and of the day of judgment are accepted, and the emphasis is laid upon the judgment of the individual soul by God. The soul appears before the great judgment seat with the result of its whole life, there to receive everlasting joy or endless torment. In this case the old idea of the shadowy life of the soul in Sheol suffices to describe its condition until the day of the final resurrection. Or else the powerful light of the faith in retribution is flashed even into Hades itself, and that at once, so that for the individual death is followed immediately by judgment and the dead are portioned out between Gehenna and Paradise without waiting for the final judgment. But in this case the soul itself must be conceived of as something phenomenal, as sensible to bodily pain and pleasure.
In all this there is nothing clear and distinct—there
is no unity of conception. The sources of all these
ideas are so various that complete harmony is out of
The early Christians clearly felt and expressed their dependence upon the Jewish religion. They called their God the God of the Fathers; they declared the Old Testament to be their sacred book; they took the prophecies and the apocalypses as the basis of their hope. It was only the Jewish idea, the law, that they decisively rejected after a short period of hesitation; and even this only with the help of allegorical explanations which served to hide the defection from their eyes. But from the second century onwards, Christianity separates into two great movements. The one endeavours to realize the theory that the Christians are the true Israel, and finally gives the Jewish Church a fresh lease of life in Roman Catholicism. The other movement proceeds in part with rapid strides, and in part gradually, to the Hellenization of Christianity, to its transformation into Greek philosophy and mysticism; but in so doing it clearly shows us that in disassociating itself from Judaism, it has disassociated itself from the Gospel, which has this in common with Judaism, that it is a religion of practical morality.
WHEN the early Christians maintained that Jesus
had come into the world in the fulness of the time,
they were not at all thinking of an especially favour
able conjunction of affairs in the world, but simply
of the termination of that apocalyptic age—the
duration of which was unknown to themselves—which God had determined should precede the end
of all things. The historian, too, has to exercise the
greatest caution in the use that he makes of such
statements as to the necessity of any occurrence in
history. Even if he can prove in a general way that
the conditions favourable to this or that event were
present, he has done no more thereby than to point
out that the thing was possible in the abstract. For
who can say that these conditions were not already
present a few decades earlier, or were present in a
still more favourable degree a few decades later? By
the side of the proof that the age was especially
favourable to the spread of the Gospel, it would be
possible to advance the counter proof with almost
equally cogent arguments that the rapid transformation and decay of Christianity was due to the
unfavourable circumstances of the age. It is sufficient
First, then, we have the facts that throughout the Mediterranean countries we find a type of civilization which was on the whole uniform, and that the Jews were affected by it. This is shown above all by the universal supremacy of the Greek language into which the Old Testament was translated, in which the Jews philosophized, which St. Paul spoke and understood, in which the greatest portion of early Christian literature was written. Community of language implies to a very great extent community of thought. Traces of this community we find in the latest books of the Old Testament, but above all in Alexandrian Judaism. The Jews take possession first of the forms of Greek literature—we even find hexameters in the Sibylline books, then of the conceptions and of the aims and objects of Greek philosophy.
Cosmology and ethics are developed into sciences
in the Greek sense of the word; allegory becomes
the connecting link between the Jewish word and
the Greek spirit. We can already trace the first
steps of that Jewish apologetic and criticism which
paved the way for their Christian successors. The
earliest form of Christianity is little influenced by
all this, as long as it does not go beyond the
boundaries of Palestine. The Greek spirit had no
influence upon Jesus either directly or indirectly.
But even the great missionary, who in many ways
The mingling of religions was a prominent factor in the civilization of that age. It was effected consciously by the propaganda of the Oriental religions, unconsciously by the strange intermixture of all nations. This, too, was a preparation for Christianity. The only question is whether Christianity had not from the very first partaken of all these foreign elements, since Judaism, from which it had sprung, had been drawn into the process of decomposition. If in reality the Babylonian, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek religions had been influencing later Judaism from all the different quarters of this chaos of people, then Christianity would have acquired its character of world-religion even from its very origin.
We are scarcely in a position yet to put these
questions, let alone answering them. One thing is
certain, that Jesus and His Gospel are intelligible
from Judaism alone; and for this, for Jesus and for
His relation to Palestinian Judaism, other and more accurate data are available. He appeared in the last
In the next place we have to endeavour to present
to ourselves the state of feeling among the Jews before
Jesus appeared. It was a mysterious and a restless
age. True, there was no lack of mercenary souls and
of worldlings, who, leaving the future to take care of
itself, devoted themselves to deriving what profit and
pleasure they could from the passing moment. Jesus
All the hopes and longings, the serious earnestness, and the anger that lived in this people, were concentrated in one man—John the Baptist. He was the “fulness of the time” of Jesus. He stirred the masses as no man had done before. His preaching is only handed down to us in the Christian tradition, and therefore we do not know it accurately. The results of his activity were twofold. He suddenly applied the thought of the coming judgment, which lay forgotten and ineffective amidst the great confused mass of eschatological fancies, not to the Gentiles, but to the Jews themselves, and thereby shook their ecclesiastical system to the very foundation. The wrath of God descends upon the children of Abraham; it is of no avail to belong to the sacred people. Thereby in the next place the Baptist set each individual man the anxious question, What shall I do to be saved? This question, with which so many came to Jesus, is very far indeed from being a matter of course for a Jew, and not for a Jew alone. It was the result of the Baptist’s preaching.
Directly, John the Baptist was merely the founder
of a sect which succumbed to the influence of the
Pharisaic tendency. The entrance to this sect was
Jesus Himself was stirred by John to enter upon His own work. That was the greatest thing that John did.
CHRISTIANITY arose because a layman, Jesus of
Nazareth, endowed with a self-consciousness more
than prophetic, came forward and attached men so
firmly to His person that, in spite of His shameful
death, they were ready both to live for Him and to
die for Him. Jesus imparted new values to things:
He scattered new thoughts broadcast in the world.
But it was only His person that gave these new
values and these new thoughts that victorious power
which transformed the world. It is men that make
history and that imprint their personal character on
great spiritual movements. If our century has had
reason enough to learn that, then surely it is high
time that the senseless chatter should cease about
the religion of Christ which each Christian ought
to acquire for himself. As if His power as Redeemer,
His self-consciousness, His royal humility, could ever
find a habitation in our little souls, quite apart from
the fact that no one takes His external mode of life for
a pattern. The difference between the prophet and
the believer belongs to the elementary characteristics
What is the starting-point of our enquiry? Not the titles of Jesus; their meaning has itself partly to be explained by the self-consciousness. Not the stories of the Birth, Baptism, and Transfiguration; these are possibly but attempts at explanation on the part of the early Church. No; we must begin with Jesus testimony to Himself and with His mode of life.
Jesus comes to a man and says to him, “Thy sins
be forgiven thee.” He does on the Sabbath
whatever seems good to Him, and calls Himself Lord of
the same. As a new Moses He sets His “But I
say unto you” against the words of the law. Himself a layman, He sets Himself in the place of the
Scribes and declares to His audience of lay people
that all knowledge of God has been given Him,
and that He will impart it to them. He says: “Here is one greater than Jonah, greater than
Solomon, the least of whose disciples is greater than
John Baptist.” He exclaims: “Heaven and earth
shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away.”
He bids all those that labour and are heavy laden
come unto Him that He may refresh them. They
are to take up His yoke and learn of Him. And,
on the other hand, He declares it to be the most
grievous sin and one for which there is no forgiveness, if a man should blaspheme against the Holy
These passages have all been taken from the Synoptists; they are the more significant, because Jesus does not here, as in the Fourth Gospel, press His personality upon men’s notice, but rather conceals it. Now it is clear that a self-consciousness that is more than merely human speaks from these words. And this is the mystery of the origin of Christianity. What we need to do above all is to accept it as a fact—a fact which demands a patient and reverent hearing.
For scarcely more wonderful than the lofty self-consciousness of Jesus is the clear feeling of His
limitations. Jesus prays to God as to His master,
and teaches the disciples to pray to God. The
deepest humility and subjection to the Lord of
heaven and earth is His characteristic. Jesus will
not suffer Himself to be called good—God alone
is good. He knows nothing as to the last hour.
God alone knows that. It is not His to assign the
thrones of honour in the kingdom of God. That is
God’s sole prerogative. He speaks of God as the
only judge whom man need fear. In Gethsemane
He prays to God that the cup may pass, yet so
that not His but God’s will may be done. On the
Cross there even escapes Him—according to the
tradition—words that express a feeling of abandonment
The Church did not extend the reverence that it felt for Jesus to these expressions of His humility. In sharpest contrast to what Jesus Himself had said it set up the attributes of sinlessness and Godhead, and made the right to bear the name of Christian dependent on agreement therewith. This tendency can be traced back to the New Testament writings of the Apostle John. In the end this has brought about a reaction. Men have believed only in the humble words of Jesus, while they have increasingly distrusted the declarations of His majesty. But both belong together. The most wonderful feature in Jesus is the co-existence of a self-consciousness that is more than human with the deepest humility before God. The same man that exclaims, “All things are given Me by the Father, and no man knoweth the Father but the Son,” answers the rich ruler, “Why callest thou Me good? No one is good but one, God.” Without the first He is a man just such as we are; without the second He is an idle visionary. Jesus conceived of Himself as a Mediator. The Mediator is altogether man, without subtraction of anything that is human. But He has received from God an especial call and commission to His fellow-men, and thereby He towers high above them. Jesus shares this feeling of being a mediator with other men like Him. Even if it has in His case attained the highest degree of constancy, depth, and reality, yet no formula can define its exact limits.
Let us leave the form of His consciousness, of His
call—the Messianic idea—entirely on one side for
the present and look only at the fact itself. And
how stupendous a fact it is. Jesus is a simple country
child without any higher education or knowledge.
Above all, He is no theologian. Up to His thirtieth
year He was an artizan. In His native town no one
pays any particular attention to Him. His parents
have no forebodings of His greatness. This layman,
an artizan by trade, comes forward in God’s name.
He deposes all the Scribes. They do not know God.
Jesus alone has recognized Him. He sets on one
side the propaganda of the Pharisees. “Come unto
Me and I will refresh you!” He sets aside the
Baptist John. He belongs to the old order. His
simple word shall be God’s word--His help God’s help. And all this without ever falling into the
merely fanatical or visionary. He is always modest,
humble, sane and sober, and yet with this superhuman self-consciousness. It is
quite impossible to realize such an inner life as this. Revelation, Redemption, Forgiveness, Help—He has all those and
offers them to such as shall surrender themselves to
the impression of His personality. Jesus’ mode of
life is as far removed from the ordinary as His self-revelation. He stands entirely outside of human
society. He does not mean to be a pattern for
ordinary life. He has forsaken His calling, His
family and His home, and has given Himself up to
the life of an itinerant missionary. He has freed
Himself from all the duties of social intercourse.
He enters in again amongst men from without, but
as a guest and as a stranger. In this manner He
Besides this separation from the world we must notice the mysterious power of working miracles which Jesus possesses in a very high degree and which He can transmit to others. Even though Jesus uses all these powers in the service of ministering love they only thereby become the more extra ordinary. If He passes nights in solitary prayer, if in His zeal for preaching and healing He forgets both food and rest, if He interrupts the ordinary sequence of natural laws, or, Himself subject to some mysterious power, appears to His companions as a being of another world and to His ignorant relations as one possessed—everywhere there is the same impression of the superhuman. All this is quite peculiar to Himself, and is not intended to be typical. His companions, too, whom He attached to His own mode of life in order that they might help Him in His missionary labours, He distinctly separated by this very fact from the disciples in the world whom He and His companions wished to serve.
It is important to notice that the self-revelation of Jesus coincides with His mode of life. It was the same great calling which filled Him with the consciousness that He was the Redeemer, and which compelled Him to work as a homeless wanderer. Both in His words and in His life He represents the exceptional.
The fact that Jesus possessed a peculiar consciousness of His call stands firmly established as a portion of the New Testament which is proof against all the attacks of controversy. Now we must discover its form, the especial idea under which the call presented itself.
The whole of early Christianity gives one unanimous answer. Jesus is the Messiah, and has considered Himself such. The question now arises whether the belief of the early Church really was the belief of Jesus Himself. For the statement of the Church is attended by difficulties which have caused doubts to arise in connection with it.
The idea of a Messiah originated in narrow Jewish
patriotism. It embodies the national aspirations
of the Jews for a position of magnificence in the
world such as they conceived had already existed in
the time of David. The
The question, then, rightly arises, Can Jesus have clothed His lofty self-consciousness in so narrow a national Jewish idea? The answer depends, in the first place, on the reliability of the oldest tradition, and next on considerations of a general character. We have the trial of the King of the Jews, the entry into Jerusalem, the confession of Peter, the dispute for the places of honour on the right hand and on the left of the Messiah, which can scarcely all be inventions of disciples who inserted a later belief in the Messiah into the life of Christ. This result of our enquiry into the oldest Gospel (Mark’s) is confirmed by the oldest collection of Logia, in which Jesus answers the Baptist’s question, “Art thou He that shall come, or do we look for another?” by the simple reference to the beginning of the Messianic age of miracles; and in like manner ascribes to His victories over the demons the signification that in them the kingdom of God has come. Surely facts lie at the basis of these traditions, which, whether they be pleasant or not, demand a hearing and can only be suppressed by forcible means.
In addition to this there are considerations of a general character. The belief of the disciples in their Messiah must be older than Jesus’ death, for it could not entirely arise after that death, which was such a grievous disappointment to so many expectations. If it is older than Jesus’ death it is incredible that Jesus did not share it, and yet suffered it to be held.
If Jesus did not consider Himself to be the Messiah,
then He must have thought of Himself as a prophet.
This by itself would possibly be sufficient to explain
all that was extraordinary in His mode of life. But
This last consideration has brought us face to face
with the question as to the origin of the Messianic
consciousness. It is, however, only honest to confess
that this origin is a mystery for us: we know nothing
about it. All that we can say is how this consciousness did not arise in Jesus. It was not through
slowly matured reflections of an intellectual nature:
such are never the basis of certainty. The self-consciousness of a clever theologian might possibly thus
be accounted for, but not that of the Son of God.
Nor, again, was it owing to the influence of His
surroundings; the voices of demons and of the world
might make a man of genius vacillate: they could
never impart a divine certainty to him. The fact,
too, that Jesus appears from the very first with
unswerving constancy and immovable certainty as
one sent by God causes us to abandon both explanations. There is nowhere any hesitation, or doubt, or
development from presentiments to certainty. Jesus
learns new things as to the manner of His calling, but
never anything fresh as to the fact itself. He acts
The Gospels date the Messianic consciousness of
Jesus from the Baptism. He saw the Spirit of God
descending in the fashion of a dove, and heard a voice, “Thou art My Son.” The great Old Testament
prophets were, it is true, called in visions, and St. Paul
became a Christian and an apostle by means of a
vision. So far the evidence is in favour of the
evangelists' story. But there is one consideration
which should weigh very strongly in the contrary
direction. The strange occurrence at the Baptism
could have been told the disciples by none other than
by Jesus Himself. If Jesus told them, then it could
only be for the purpose of obtaining authority for
His mission. But Jesus never appealed to visions.
That is just His great distinction, His immense
advantage over Mahomet. The whole edifice of
Mahomet’s self-consciousness falls to pieces as soon as
the truth of his visions is questioned. But in Jesus’ case you may cut out the story of the Baptism and
of the Transfiguration and everything remains the
same. All the outer processes which served the Old
Testament prophets as means of communication with
God, fall into disuse when we come to Jesus. That
is just what constitutes His greatness. The consciousness of His call does not depend upon voices and
visions, which everyone who has not himself experienced them is at liberty to doubt, but simply upon
inner compulsion. How this compulsion came upon
Him, whether it was in the end connected with some
visionary experience, that is not for us to know. And
But then, on the other hand, the inadequacy of the Messianic idea for Jesus Himself is likewise clear. Besides the one thought, the Messiah is God’s last messenger, nothing but Jewish narrowness was connoted by this title. Happily Jesus is something else, something greater than the Messiah of the Jews. The traces are still preserved in the gospel tradition of the wrestling of Jesus with the inadequacy of the idea, of His labouring with the conception till finally its contents were completely transformed.
It is the story of the Temptation that shows us first of all that there is a complete want of inner harmony between Jesus and the Messianic idea. This story signifies the breach of Jesus with all that is fanciful and politically dangerous in the conception of the Messiah. The Messiah is a miraculous being who can do everything. Is Jesus to depend upon this, and thereby win over the people? The Messiah is a king of this world who attains to his dominion by force, deceit, treachery and cunning, just like other kings here on earth. Shall Jesus gain the sovereignty of the world by these means? No. He cries; it is the voice of Satan which is thus appealing to My feelings as Messiah. Away with it. In so doing He had already won the victory over that which presented the greatest danger in the conception of the Messiah, and had subjected Himself in obedient faith to God.
But what next? The Messiah of the Zealots had been cast aside. There remained the Messiah of the Rabbis. According to the true dogma, the Messiah was to remain concealed somewhere or other, perhaps in the desert, until God. exalted Him on His throne. That is to say, He was to do nothing and wait for the miracle to be wrought. But Jesus returned from the desert back into the world, in order to help men and prepare them for the Messianic time. He did not wait, but went about doing good. All the great redemptive activity of Jesus has no place in the Jewish conception of the Messiah; or, in other words, that which is great in Jesus from the point of view of the history of the world, is not a consequence of the idea of the Messiah, but is an original addition of His own.
‘Messiah’ and ‘Israel’ are two ideas that are inseparably connected together in the Jewish mind. The Messiah is Israel’s future king—that and nothing else. Jesus, too, remained faithful to this dogma, and confined His activity during the whole of His life to His own people. But through bitter and grievous deception He had to learn that Israel as a whole was not receptive: that it would not accept the message, and that it was blindly hurrying along the road that led to judgment. At the same time, glimpses that open out into the heathen world fill Him with hope. And so He resigns Himself to be, if God so wills it, the Messiah whom Israel rejects and the Gentiles accept. Thereby all that is merely national is almost entirely banished from the idea of the Messiah. It is turned into the formal conception of king; judged by its contents, it becomes a paradox.
In the Jewish fancy Messiah is surrounded by all manner of heavenly and earthly glory. David’s fame is reflected upon him. But the bitter experience that Jesus has gained in His dealings with His people causes the thought of the necessity of suffering, and even of death, to ripen in His soul. From the day at Caesarea Philippi onwards He begins to familiarize the minds of the disciples with it, and utilizes the very occasion when their enthusiasm bursts into flame, to give them their first solemn lesson.
The thought of death was the stumbling-block to
the Jews; it was the simple negation of the Messiah.
No Jew before Jesus ever applied
Thus did Jesus after much labour purify the title of Messiah which He had at first assumed through an inner compulsion. Even for us after all these centuries there is something surprisingly grand as we observe how the idea is emptied of all the merely sensual and selfish elements, so that finally the king in all his pomp and glory is turned into the tragic figure on the Cross. Herein, in one word, consists Jesus’ greatness. He introduces the tragic element where others joyously revelled in material Utopias.
But the end of this work is no renunciation of
The belief in the return causes every thoughtful person the greatest difficulty at the present day. Compared with this, even the Messianic problem has but little importance. In the first place, it is a fact that Jesus was mistaken in the point of time: He thought of the return as to His own generation amongst whom He had worked, by whom He had been rejected. If our account of the trial of Jesus has any historical value, then Jesus did in fact say to His judges, “We shall meet again.” But this meeting did not take place either for foe or friend. Yet that is not our real difficulty and stumbling-block. Apart from everything else, it is an altogether fantastic idea for us—that a dead person should return upon the clouds of heaven. This picture is the product of the idea of the world and of the psychology current in antiquity, and it is only in connection with them that it is endowed with any vitality. And so the doubt will arise whether it was really Jesus Himself, whether it was not, after all, His disciples who were the authors of this fantastic and erroneous conception.
But we must silence our modern modes of
thought when facts speak so clearly and so decisively.
However much may be a later addition in the
The question was for Jesus to find a sanction for His mission. The superhuman in Him accepted the form of the idea of the Messiah. The Messiah is, and remains, king in the kingdom of God. Taking His stand upon this presupposition, death appears to Him to be one of two things. It is either a proof that He is in the wrong, or it is a transition to a higher right that shall manifest itself to a world which now fancies that it is triumphing. By announcing His return Jesus declares that God is on His side, and that He is in the right. And for this very same reason the early Christians laid all the emphasis on the parousia as their strongest piece of evidence. Even though this evidence consisted merely in a hope—a hope unfulfilled—it was yet powerful enough to help Jesus and His disciples over their greatest difficulty.
At the same time, it is obvious that that which is
inadequate in the idea of the Messiah, here wins its
first and last victory over Jesus. In His prophecy
of the second coming Jesus yields its due to the
faith of the age. Here for a moment the wild
What were the titles which Jesus chose to express His self-consciousness? The question belongs
to the close of our enquiry. In the first place,
because the meaning of the titles can only be derived
from the self-consciousness and not this latter from
the titles; and next, because there is an especial difficulty in distinguishing
in this connection between what is to be assigned to Jesus and what is to be
referred to the oldest theology of the early Christian Church. The evangelists
ascribe to Jesus the titles Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man. The first He
never used of Himself, according to their account. They merely narrate that in
His answers to the Baptist, to Peter, and to the high priest during His trial He
accepted it—affirming the fact. On the other hand, the two other expressions are
handed down to us as self-designations. The word Son of God fell into discredit
amongst the Jews in later times, because the Christians showed a preference for
this title. But in the time of Jesus it may very well have been current amongst
the people as a popular Messianic expression. Does not God address the Messianic
King in the
And yet it is striking how very seldom Jesus uses the word. In reality only once. It was one of the culminating points of His life. In tones of exultation He spoke out of the fulness of His heart to those that were nearest to Him. Just as Father and Son know and trust each other, so do God and He. Thus He uses the Messianic title as the expression of the closest intimacy with God, of the most absolute trust in Him. But the title did not turn out to be a blessing for the early Church, destined as it was to migrate to heathen surroundings. It gave rise to physical and metaphysical speculations, and so caused a long series of misfortunes.
The commonest self-designation of Jesus in the
Gospels is the phrase ‘Son of Man.’ Would that
we knew for certain whether Jesus used it Himself!
The phrase is to be traced back to the vision of
Daniel (
Thus from the very first the titles turned out to
be the misfortune of the new religion. With the
titles either the old or the perverted new ideas creep
There was in Him something entirely new, a surpassing greatness, a superhuman self-consciousness which sets itself above all authorities, declaring God’s will and promises, imparting consolation, inspiring courage, delivering judgment with divine power, a new mediatorship between God and man, that left all the former far behind it. But this that was new in Jesus appeared clothed in a contemporary and at bottom unsuitable form, His consciousness as Messiah. And in spite of all His labour to change the antiquated, the petty, and the transitory, He did not entirely destroy it. Hence immediately after Jesus’ death a twofold movement can be traced amongst the disciples. Jewish patriots attach to the one word Messiah all the fancies and all the political Utopias of Judaism. But those who understand Him continue His work and set Him entirely free from these Messianic surroundings. The one road leads to the Messiah of the Apocalypse, the other to the ‘Second Adam’ of Paul and the Logos of the Fourth Gospel. The future belongs to the latter alone.
JESUS began His ministry with a clear and simple
promise: “The kingdom of God is at hand.” By
so doing He proves His acceptance of the Jewish
eschatology in its simplest form. The Jews waited
for the kingdom of God as the state of things when
Israel should be free and exalted to a position of
power and splendour, when the Gentiles should be
in subjection, and the patriarchs and holy men of
old should have risen from the dead, and God be
enthroned visibly amidst the people. Jesus original'
hope, too, must have been very similar to this, though
not exactly the same. This we necessarily infer from
the following considerations. Jesus never explained
the conception of the kingdom of God, for He presupposes it as well-known, nor does He anywhere
criticise any false conception of the kingdom of God,
He merely lays all the emphasis on its near approach,
and on the conditions of entrance. Furthermore,
He addresses His promise exclusively to the Jews,
His own people, and not to the Gentiles. Lastly,
He speaks of being together with the patriarchs,
The Jewish starting-point of the promise of Jesus will therefore form the first portion of our enquiry. But Jesus’ greatness begins in every case where He sets Himself free from these Jewish presuppositions. Three points deserve notice: The place and the manner; the time; the recipients of the Promise.
1. The national pride of the Jews, the fantastic
and material turn of the Oriental mind, combine to
embellish the Jewish hope in the kingdom of God
with a number of individual touches. This process
can be traced from the apocalypses, both Jewish
and Christian, down to the Koran. Read in the
Apocalypse of St John the song of triumph over
the fall of Babylon, the exultation over her misfortunes, the description of the final battle with all
its cruel details, the delineation, at once fantastic
and material, of the Jerusalem which is far indeed
from being heavenly, with its arrogant contempt of
the Gentiles. Mahomet’s descriptions of Paradise
with their repulsive sensuality may be passed over
in silence. Even so harmless a vision of the future
as is contained in the Magnificat
and the Benedictus,
the songs of Mary and of Zacharias, that St Luke
has preserved for us, is limited to the political liberation of the people. We may not indeed conclude
that because the political and the fantastical elements
are almost entirely absent from the sayings of Jesus,
that therefore He never thought or spoke of these
things. Jesus never expected that the kingdom of
God and the Roman empire could co-exist. The
latter would have to pass away with the advent of
No very great importance, therefore, attaches to the place and
the outer circumstances of the kingdom of God. It is clear that Jesus did not
think of heaven or the other world. This earth, or, more strictly speaking, the
land of Palestine, is the scene of the kingdom. There is no breach of continuity
between the life that men live here and now, and their existence yonder. They
eat and drink and take their pleasure; they live as men and not as spirits. To
speak of the metaphorical language of Jesus is of itself enough to
impair the naïveté of the whole picture. The entire
harmlessness and innocence of Jesus are reflected in
the simplicity of His expectations. For Jesus the
But what an entire misunderstanding it is of Jesus when emphasis is laid, as it often is to-day, upon the earthly elements in His hope. That which
He pictured to Himself, being a Jew of His age,
in earthly guise, He would have imagined in a later century just as easily after a heavenly fashion. All the emphasis is laid, not upon the place, but upon simple
happiness and upon community with God. When His kingdom comes, all suffering, all sorrow and lamentation, all sense of abandonment by God, shall be changed into joy,
exultation, and the blessed feeling of nearness to God. To behold God,
to be called the Children of God, to experience God’s comfort and mercy—that is the centre of the promise. Therefore, too, the picture of the kingdom is enriched by a
multitude of features which go
beyond the earthly framework: the resurrection of the dead, the angelic body, the everlasting life. Even if this earthly stage is never left, yet the barriers between this world and the next have been removed,
and the visible communion with God and with all His saints conjures forth a new world. But there is one fact which, plainer than all else, shows us of what little
Expressed in simple terms, what Jesus’ promises in the kingdom of God is everlasting life, man’s entrance into unbroken community with God. In common with His Jewish contemporaries, He pictures this everlasting life to Himself upon an earthly stage and with earthly features, but it is in the centre of the picture that He places that which is everlasting—nearness to God, such as is not known here upon earth.
And the door that leads to life eternal is the judgment of God that appoints unto every man everlasting bliss or everlasting torment. The later theology, which postponed blessedness to the next world, to heaven, understood Jesus after all better than our modern archaeologists, who in their interest for earth forget heaven. When He said the kingdom of God is at hand, He wished to place all those that heard Him in the presence of God and of eternity, in comparison with which this earth and world are of very little worth.
2. The Jews of Jesus’ time entirely postponed the
coming of the kingdom of God to the future. No
trace of that kingdom could be perceived as long as the
Roman ruled in the land. It had not, of course, been
so at all times. When the Asmonean high priests and
kings set up their empire and conquered many of the
The Gospels themselves, if asked for an answer, appear to be in doubt. By the side of passages which speak of it as still future, there are others which declare that it is just being established upon earth.
The former passages are the most numerous, and
are to be found from the beginning to the end of
Jesus' ministry. His disciples are to hand on this
same message with which He began: “The kingdom of God is at hand”; they are not to change it and say
the kingdom has come with Jesus. In the Lord’s Prayer they are to pray “Thy kingdom come,” not,
“may it be fully established,” for it is not here at all as
yet. So Jesus ever speaks of entrance into the
kingdom as of a future event. The Beatitudes are
all promises, one just as much as the other, “for theirs
is the kingdom of God,” as much as “for they shall
see God.” On the last journey to Jerusalem the sons
of Zebedee beg for the seats of honour in the future
kingdom, and Jesus acquiesces in the form of their
request. And even at the Last Supper He looks
The chief passage, too, which would seem to prove
the present nature of the kingdom, points likewise
to the future, if rightly understood (
Finally, the force of the argument derived from a
consideration of all these passages is confirmed by certain indirect
conclusions. To enter into the kingdom
Now if we add to these considerations the fact that the early Christians all expected the kingdom of God in the future, we may look upon it as one of the facts which we know with the greatest certainty that in the message of Jesus the term kingdom of God has an eschatological connotation, that it stands for the new world that is to come.
There are, however, it is true, passages which point in another direction, and these need to be examined as well. The question is whether they can be explained, starting as we have done from eschatological premises.
In His casting out of the devils Jesus saw the
beginning of the kingdom of God. “If I cast out
devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of
God is come unto you.” His victories over the
devils seem to Him to be so many blows struck
against the empire of Satan, leading on to its
downfall. God’s Spirit works through Jesus and lays the
This point we may look upon as established beyond all doubt. Jesus regarded—we must admit it—His momentary miracles as the first signs of the coming kingdom of God. We may perhaps call that the enthusiasm of Jesus.
Another saying seems to point in the same direction. We have to piece it together from Matthew and Luke. Its meaning is somewhat mysterious:
The law and the prophets until John.
Henceforth the kingdom of God suffereth violence,
And the violent take it by force.
But no sooner do we realize that Jesus uttered this in
triumphant exultation than the words come to be full of life for us. The kingdom
is no longer a far-off divine event as in the ages when the law and the prophets
prepared the way for it. It is even now being established upon earth, and that
with violence, while men take possession of it. So speaks one who beholds with
joy how the promise passes into accomplishment. Therefore, too, Jesus can say
that His disciples stand in the midst of the kingdom
These words are the expression of a mighty enthusiasm. With more of calm, but with no less certainty and joy, Jesus praises the beginning of the kingdom here and now in certain parables.
In the double parable of the mustard seed and of the leaven, Jesus contrasts the small beginning with the mighty end. So it is with the kingdom of God. It begins small and unnoticeable—so small that the great and the wise of this earth pay it no attention whatever. But its end brings about the transformation of the world. And so it is that all the great future is already contained in the small beginning. As we read these parables we must picture to ourselves Jesus going about teaching and ministering in that little corner of Galilee, and then try and imagine how this obscure activity is to lead up to the great world-catastrophe.
In the next parable, that of the seed growing of itself, two thoughts struggle for the mastery. In the first place it is that expressed by the words ‘of itself,’ the unshaken confidence in the necessary progress of God’s cause, independent of all human activity; on the other hand, the steps in the development, the sure insight embracing the whole process of evolution by slow and gradual laws. Of the two the first thought is to be ascribed to Jesus with greater probability. There is no mention in this connection of miracles. The parables breathe an atmosphere of joy, courage, and confident resignation.
The modern mind is only too apt to read its own thoughts of evolution, immanence, and the universal
But the question is whether He retained this
And so Jesus Himself made of Christianity the religion of hope. All His work breathes a spirit of expectation, of longing for the great invisible, for perfection. The goal of religion has not yet been reached. It cannot, it may not, be in our possession. During the whole period of His work on earth, Jesus never wearied of directing the gaze of His people forwards and upwards, and of balancing the blessedness of the future against all the suffering of the present. He did that in the Beatitudes no less than in the parable of poor Lazarus. It was only to the self-satisfied and contented, to the worldlings, that He had nothing to offer. We should picture Him entering into rich man’s house and poor man’s cottage with the greeting of peace, and then inviting His listeners in the simplest, most childlike strain to the joys of the life eternal. If Paul in a later age preaches the religion of longing in words of enthralling eloquence, he is merely continuing in his own language the Beatitudes of Jesus. This longing was the best element even in the Jewish religion, but here the Jewish nationalism—the Church—was in its way. Jesus had to remove the impediment.
3. The Jews believed that the kingdom was for
Israel, and that Israel should be the ruling people
in the kingdom. It is evident that Jesus shared
this belief at first. Not only do isolated sayings of
His show this clearly, but above all the fact that He
purposely confined His message to His own people.
From the very first the kingdom and the judgment
were for Jesus inseparable. By the side of the kingdom was Gehenna, by the side of the invitation the
threat. So the Sermon on the Mount rightly reproduces the thoughts of Jesus. The thought that
every Jew as such had a right to the kingdom never
entered into Jesus' mind. Yet at first the promise
was throughout of a glad and enthusiastic character.
But soon one disappointment follows another, and
thus the Galilean ministry comes to an end. It is
to disciples full of enthusiasm indeed, but not of
changed life, that the word is uttered as to the mere
saying of ‘Lord, Lord.’ To them also refer the
parables of the tares and of the drag-net in their
original form. Jesus cries woe upon the towns of
Bethsaida and Chorazin and Capernaum, because
all the miracles have been of no avail. The whole
people He compares now to children at play in the
market place, whom no one can satisfy, neither John
nor Jesus; and now to the unclean and relapsed spirit,
whose last state is worse than the first. The Jews
cannot and will not understand the signs of the time:
they live carelessly for the day; they eat and they
drink; they marry and are given in marriage; they
buy and they sell—that is their life, and nothing but
So the glad message of the kingdom finally turns into the announcement of the doom upon Israel. Jesus ranges Himself on the side of John. In the last days, just before His death, Jesus announced the fall of the Jewish Church, and even of the sanctuary, in clear and unmistakable terms. Not one stone shall remain standing on the other. At the same time the world of the Gentiles bursts into view and takes Israel’s place. In the parables we are told how, instead of the invited guests who refuse the invitation, others are called to take their places at the table which is ready; how the vineyard is let out to other husbandmen, in the place of those who refuse to pay the fruits thereof to the lord of the vineyard; and then without a parable: instead of the children of the kingdom, many shall come from the east and from the west and shall sit at meat with the patriarchs in the kingdom of God. How this admission of the Gentiles shall be brought about Jesus leaves to His God. He just gives the promise without giving His disciples any command to go forth as missionaries. The history of the apostolic age is sufficient proof of this statement.
But was the rejection of Israel on
the part of
Thus, then, the message of Jesus retains its
eschatological character from first to last. It is
the announcement of the end, of the near approach
of the judgment and of the kingdom, and such it
remains. It is only the national element that is
removed; the soberness and the glad joyfulness
remain: they are the marks of eternity. Thereby
Jesus so purified and so deepened the Jewish
eschatology that it was able to conquer the world,
and that the later change of the earthly expectation
into the heavenly did not affect it at all. That which
is great and new in Jesus is not to be found in the
Here, again, we can trace two divergent tendencies in the early Church, both of which start from Jesus eschatology. There is first the national Jewish tendency, fragments of which can be found in the Apocalypse—even St. Paul did not show himself quite free from it—Israel must be saved, cost what it may. And there is the freer, broader view which throws a bridge over to Greek thought and finally transforms the whole Jewish eschatology into a religious hope of the next world. This latter alone understood the meaning of the work of Jesus’ life.
IN the eyes of Jesus and of the Jews, the kingdom is a gift of God. It is established upon earth without any human intervention, in a supernatural manner by means of a series of miracles and catastrophes. Even in the period of His most confident hopefulness Jesus did not expect it to come about through His work or that of His disciples; it grows of itself. The thought of hastening the coming of the kingdom by any efforts on our part is in its origin neither Christian nor Jewish. It only originated when the idea of the supernatural was abandoned and the conception of the kingdom of God was entirely transformed. And how should Jesus and His disciples be able to bring about the judgment, the resurrection, the suspension of death, the vision of God? Such phantastic thoughts are entirely foreign to Jesus. What they have to do is not to try and hasten the coming of the kingdom, but to prepare themselves so that they may receive it worthily.
Jesus wished to urge men into this
preparation by
Two observations are here necessary by way of preliminary to remove any possible misunderstanding.
Jesus makes a clear distinction between the
apostles and the disciples in the wider sense of the
word. There is one little company of men whom
Jesus removes entirely from their life in the world,
separating them from their calling, their family, their
possessions, their homes, and associating them with
Himself as His followers in His life of constant
wandering. But these are the future missionaries,
whom Jesus makes partners in His own calling.
The most important sayings of Jesus are grouped
together in the Gospels after a very external fashion.
A great variety of Logia are collected together under
one or two principal headings. Above all, in the
Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is the new lawgiver
who proclaims a great number of exalted precepts
without any inner connection. But it is only fair to
assume that Jesus possessed a definite ideal, and that
all His single utterances must be understood with
reference to that ideal. He looked at man in the
definite relation in which he stands to the three great
realities—himself, his neighbour, and God—and that
in the presence of eternity, of the kingdom, and the
The end which each man should place before himself is self-mastery and freedom from the world. It is only when he has attained to this goal that he can appear at any moment before God and will not be surprised by the sudden approach of the day of judgment. Self-mastery is to extend to the inner life of man—Jesus laid great stress upon this—to the words, the thoughts, the heart from which they come forth. Hence the importance of keeping words and thoughts under strict control, of mastering every evil look and every idle word. The feelings of personal honour and vengeance must in like manner be suppressed, for they deprive the soul of its freedom. The disciple is to sit in judgment upon himself, and strive after sincerity and loyal singleness of heart. Nor is he to shrink from any hardship or privation when the need arises. Jesus insists upon the strictest temperance which never rocks itself to sleep in a fancied security; upon watchfulness and prayer, and the constant struggle against temptation. Cut off hand and foot, tear out the eye if they cause thee to offend. It is only by means of this stern self-discipline that it becomes possible for man to be able to appear at any moment before God.
Freedom from the world and indifference to its
attractions, its riches and its pleasures, as well as its
cares and its sorrows, are a part of this self-discipline.
Another great enemy is the family. True, it is a divine institution, but it binds the heart to the world with a hundred chains, and tames the conscience and the earnest zeal of the individual. Amongst the Jews, family affection was the be-all and end-all of life. Jesus utters words which attack this affection with terrible severity and call for the severance even of the dearest ties. Let the dead bury their dead. His own mission is the destruction of that affection which makes a slave of conscience.
Again, another foe is that anxious care for food and
clothing which imprisons men in a narrow cell whence
they have no longer any free outlook on the eternal
tasks and objects of life. Such conduct, says Jesus,
is heathen. Take care, He says, of the great things,
and God will take care of the little things. Neither,
however, does He spare the exact opposite of this
anxious life, the superficial life of routine and custom,
the life that most people lead without virtue and
without vice, and that enthralls them. He would
In all these demands, therefore, Jesus’ object is one and the same: the rousing of the conscience in presence of eternity. He gives us no rules of life, no laws whatever in detail.
With other times come other dangers and other duties. While Jesus rends family ties asunder, St Paul binds them up and strengthens them, and rightly so, for the heathen world presented a new situation. The key to the understanding of Jesus is to keep His aim in view and to recognize that the way that leads thereto is the awakening of the conscience.
The aim of Jesus stands out in the sharpest contrast to the modern ideal of culture, the free and full
development of the individual personality such as we
associate—whether rightly or wrongly—with the
name of Goethe. We of to-day count sin as a part of
our development, and delight therein if it has made
us richer. Jesus demands poverty and a severe
discipline. Better enter into the kingdom of heaven
with only one eye than keep both eyes and be thrown
into the fiery pit. This one saying is surely sufficient.
By this contrast to the modern ideal Jesus approaches
very closely to pietism, which at all events has
understood the seriousness of the Gospel in the face
of eternity. There is in the ethics of Jesus a kernel
of severity and renunciation, nor is this unnatural
when hell and perdition are realities. But, on the
other hand, Jesus separates Himself from much that
As regards duties to one’s neighbour Jesus simply formulated His demands in the words of God already contained in the Old Testament, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But the old commandment receives a new and exceedingly rich application at the hands of Jesus: it is flooded by a mighty stream of enthusiastic love which bursts the national boundaries and spreads over, to the benefit of mankind.
Love is to govern all the relations of the individual
to his surroundings. To the poor and needy it is to
appear as liberality, a royal bounteous munificence
free from all solicitude. As we ourselves receive all
our good gifts from God, so the giving of them in
our turn is to be a matter of course to us. Give to
those that ask of thee. Blessed are the merciful. I
must be ready to pardon the brother that wrongs me
and that breaks the peace, without setting any limits
or imposing any conditions, even till seventy times
seven. We ourselves only live through God’s pardoning love. Were it not for this love we must
all of us needs perish, even the holiest of men. God’s pardon is only limited by man’s inability to forgive.
To our friend and companion we must show humility
and readiness to help and to serve, and to take the
lower place even if we are the greater. He that will
be great, let him make himself small and of no reputation.
In each one of these relations Jesus demands love as something rich, boundless, and extraordinary. All that is petty, timorous, and calculating is to be banished far away. Love is to be revealed as a sovereign power that no external law can resist. Yet He is not even aiming herein at any extraordinary actions or exceptional works, but just at that love which can be realized in the ordinary intercourse of every day. The sovereign power of love is a thing to be experienced in the simple everyday relations of men.
This demand for an all-prevailing love appears also
to form the basis of the need that we feel in modern
times for the reform of society, but it is something
entirely different. Jesus did nothing for society as a
whole. He did not want to reform it. If we look
into them closely, His demands are unpractical for
any form of society. No social organization can ever
dispense with law, without falling into a state of
anarchy. Boundless generosity would imply the
abolition of property; boundless forgiveness, the
abolition of all punishment; boundless humility, the
abolition of every idea of honour and of order. Even
in the oldest Christian communities that set up some
such ideal, the claims of reality soon made themselves
felt again and the limits of the possible were restored
This, too, is the reason why Jesus entirely neglects
social ethics in His demand upon men. There is
at first sight something paradoxical in the fact that
the genius of love showed no interest in the
outward forms of human society. The state is, of
course, out of the question, being the rule of a foreign
power. Jesus saw therein chiefly the love of rule
and dominion on the part of the great of the earth.
His disciples should look upon politics as a deterrent
example. But even into the ethics of family life
Jesus does not enter further than to proclaim the
indissolubility of the marriage tie in opposition to
the practice of divorce for frivolous reasons. In so
doing He sets up an ideal for the individual
without further troubling Himself how it can be maintained in this present evil world. He said nothing
as to the relation of master and servant. He even
showed no desire to remove poverty out of the
world: “The poor ye have always with you.” The
Lastly, we come to the question, What is
Jesus' demand upon man as regards his duty
towards God? There are exceedingly few sayings
in the Gospels which refer to the direct relation
of man to God. This observation leads us straight
to the centre of the question. Jesus is naturally far
removed from every kind of speculation as to God,
simply because He is of a Semitic race. In spite
of the apparent exception in the case of Spinoza,
the men of that race have had to forego indulgence
in the speculative flights of the imagination. Neither,
however, is Jesus a mystic, nor does He claim of
But the ordinary everyday life is to be lived
under the influence of the principles of self-mastery
and love with the constant upward look to God, in
fear and in confidence, in faith and in longing.
Jesus laid the very greatest emphasis on the fear
of God, for our Father is the Lord of heaven
and earth and the judge of every evil word, who
can condemn body and soul to hell. In forbidding
men to judge; in bidding them have no fear of
men; in His parable of the talents, Jesus reveals
a fear of God such as no Old Testament saint
expressed more strongly. The fear of God is
always the foundation on which those features of
the Divine character, which inspire confidence and
However certain it is that the difficulty of the
great demand which Jesus made was substantially
lessened by the limitation of His outlook on the
world, of which this earth and Israel were the centre,
and by the boundless belief in the miraculous, it
would still be a mistake to exaggerate the distance
which separates Him from us. Even to His disciples
it seemed very strange that Jesus was able to sleep
in the midst of the storm. In fact, they and others
with whom Jesus had to do, constantly reflect our
own weak faith. When Jesus prayed in Gethsemane
He knew full well that His enemies were plotting
Such, then, was the will of God which Jesus preached—a life of righteousness in the three great realities. As often as He sent forth His glad invitation to enter the kingdom of heaven—whether He were speaking in the open air or in a crowded room—He brought these simple conditions home to His hearers. The right conduct of the individual in the present was of greater importance to Him than the joys of the future. He aroused the frivolous, softened the hard-hearted, and gave courage and comfort to the sorrowful. Just as He Himself insisted, with the greatest possible emphasis, on the simplest of duties, so He would allow no other standard to be set up either before God or man. On the judgment day God Himself will measure men by their self-control, their love and their trust in Him, and men too are to take these for their criteria. True, the heart is concealed from them—only God’s eye can pierce as far as that—but they have the fullest right to demand deeds as the fruits of the heart. Goodness must come to the light. If it shuns the light it is non-existent.
Thus far we have come across no suggestion of Church, sacrament or dogma. The will of God, as it is fully and completely contained in the Sermon on the Mount, is no less entirely distinguished from the claims of the later Church than from the Jewish law, and it ought really to produce an impression of entire novelty amongst us at the present day. But towards the end of Jesus’ activity on earth, there is a fresh addition—the claim of the confession of adherence to Jesus. This was the starting-point of the later development, and so it appears at first as if Jesus Himself was the cause of that fateful dogmatic after growth, and burdened the simple and eternal will of God with a minimum of dogma and ecclesiastical organization.
It is therefore very important to gain a clear idea
of the particular kind of faith that was demanded,
and of the circumstances under which Jesus called
for it. Jesus wants no confession in the later ecclesiastical sense.
He did not even insist upon the words “Thou art the Messiah or the Son of God,” but
simply on the recognition that God had sent Him,
and that His words were God’s words. “He that
heareth you heareth Me, and he that heareth Me
heareth Him that sent me.” Hence the frequent
connection, “I and My words,” “I and the Gospel,”
and that just in the passages relating to the confession.
This simple recognition that Jesus was sent by God
was really a matter of course for all that accepted
His message, for the cause and the person were one.
Jesus was His message. More than this He did not
ask. He would have no faith in Himself that in
anywise competed with the reverence to be felt for
Now it is one of the grandest features in Jesus’ character that He only came forward with this claim for confession after Caesarea Philippi, i.e. only from the time when danger approached His disciples and Himself.
He would have set no value upon a confession
unattended by danger and suffering. Such would
have come under the category of the mere lip worship ‘Lord, Lord.’ But now that danger approaches,
confession becomes necessary, so that the cause
should not perish together with the person. Jesus
does not shrink from laying this readiness to suffer
martyrdom upon each disciple as a positive duty.
That is the original sense of the words ‘self-denial’ and ‘carrying one’s cross’: no ascetic practices, but
suffering in the following of Jesus. In fact ‘to
follow’ Jesus means in the Gospels to suffer with
and for Him. Jesus’ prayer for those that confess
His name shows us how important this new condition was felt to be. Martyrdom thereby acquires
the power indirectly to atone for sin. But the first
demands that Jesus makes still hold good. No
different conception is attached to the doing of the
will of God. It becomes more serious, that is all;
it implies greater sacrifices, since he who sets out to
do it, thereby enrols himself a member of the fellowship of those that suffer with Jesus. Surely this
readiness to face death on the part of men who had
cut themselves off from their families and had refused
to obey their ecclesiastical superiors for Jesus’ sake
was something entirely different from the zeal for
The demand that Jesus makes is something so completely simple and positive that it can be described in its entirety without any reference to the law, the Pharisees, or Jewish ethics. Jesus was not one of those who can criticize the work of others but produce nothing of their own. Nevertheless we shall realize His work better if we compare it with the above-mentioned tendencies and forces.
When we examine the relation of Jesus to the Jewish law, we shall do well to leave on one side the statement in the Sermon on the Mount: “I am not come to destroy but to fulfil,” and simply to look at the facts. For that statement belongs in its present form to the age after St. Paul, and is intended to formulate the result of the struggles of the apostolic age possibly already from an early catholic standpoint. One reason is sufficient to show that it cannot be ascribed to Jesus, for its form betrays a theologian for whom the question “destruction or fulfilment of the law” implied a problem to be solved.
For Jesus there was no such question, no question
at all regarding the law in the strict sense of the
word, for He was a layman and was in any case but
moderately acquainted with the law,—had perchance
never studied it at all. Hence He always believed
Himself to be in agreement with the law. In the
law stood the commandments to love God and one’s neighbour; there stood the decalogue; there, too,
stood the words that one should serve God alone. In
At times, it is true, He came to a certain extent into collision here and there with this or that passage in the law. He could not approve of the granting of the bill of divorcement, in spite of Moses, who authorised it. But here there was a simple way out of the difficulty. It was one law against the other—God in Paradise against Moses on Sinai. The reason of the contradiction was the consideration which Moses showed for the hard-heartedness of the people. If the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, “Ye have heard that it hath been said to them of old time, but I say unto you,” are to be ascribed to Jesus Himself and do not (which is just possible) owe their present form to the early Church, then He set himself still more frequently against the letter of the law, namely, whenever He showed that the inner disposition was what really mattered and so removed narrowness and imperfection. But all these were exceptions. For Jesus God’s will never contradicted the law.
It was His incomplete knowledge of the law which was in this point the cause of an entire deception on the part of Jesus. He took from the law only that which harmonized with His views, and so overlooked the fact that His opponents, too, had the law on their side, and that with far greater right. Pharisaism is a product of the religion of the law. There is an unbroken line of descent from Ezekiel through the code of the priests to the Talmud. The separation of sacred and profane, the preference for the ceremonial, the importance attached to that which was morally indifferent, the spirit of exclusiveness, the national fanaticism were all rooted in the law. The law implied the supremacy of the Jewish idea, the petrification of true religion, deadly enmity to the prophetic spirit. The law necessitated the existence of the Scribes, the murderers of Jesus. But all this Jesus concealed from Himself throughout His life on earth. He separated the human, the non-Jewish element, from the rest of the law, gave Jewish maxims an entirely contrary meaning, deepened and combined all that was limited and transitory. Jesus’ attitude to the root principle of the law was entirely negative. St. Paul was right when, in opposition to the disciples themselves, he called Jesus the end of the law.
Jesus, therefore, stands to the law as He did to
the conception of the Messiah and of the kingdom
of God. He employs the old words throughout,
and that bona fide. He thinks that He is their
true interpreter, and discards just that which is
characteristic and Jewish from their contents. And
yet in this very self-deception the great essential
The aim of the Pharisees was to establish a definite ideal of piety among the people. Jesus sets up His own—which is related to it in all points as yea to nay—in opposition.
It is not the things without in the world that are clean or unclean, it is the human heart within. This inner habitation must be set in order by the sweeping out of evil thoughts.
All that is without belongs to God, and we have power over it. God takes no special pleasure in works of supererogation such as the offering of sacrifices, tithes, going on pilgrimages and fasting, but He looks for the weightier matters in the law, righteousness and truth and love. Man is to serve Him in his daily life. That alone is the true divine service.
Man’s end is not a sanctity which withdraws itself
timidly from this wicked world, but love. This love
goes out in search of them that have gone astray
and have become estranged, for they are our brothers,
That was an opposition which went right down to the root of things: it was a reversal of all values. The demand that Jesus made was certainly not one whit less exacting than that of the Pharisees. Nay, it was more severe, for it embraced the whole of life and made every evasion impossible. Jesus banished sophistry and hypocrisy, and restored conscience and reality to their rights. He exiled religious self-esteem and self-conceit, and brought back love and humanity. He set up a religion of morality as against one of ceremony.
Above all, this struggle reveals the great reforming element in the demand of Jesus. He will have the sanctification of life in the world, the sanctification of one’s calling, one’s everyday life, one’s work within the limits of human society. All the demands that Jesus makes are set up, not for monks and ascetics, but for men in the world. Here is the battlefield, here the preparation for eternity. Hereby every form of pietism is condemned. Conscientiousness, love, trust in God—these constitute religion.
The relation of Jesus to Jewish ethics as a whole
can now be considered. The result is a surprising
one. Jesus eliminated the Jewish and retained the
human. The sum of His commandments is addressed to the man in the Jew and to man in general.
This discovery of the eternal in man was possible
for Jesus, because His aim was not to set up certain
detailed laws, but inner principles, capable of endless
application and adaptation. It was only for marriage
that Jesus laid down a definite law, and this indicates
the ideal. So St. Paul already understood Jesus’ words, for he approves of divorce in certain definite
cases. With this exception Jesus did not legislate
on any particular point. Conscience is by its nature
an individual matter. Jesus awakened it, but left it untrammelled. There is nothing less cabined and
confined than love, nothing more delicate; and trust
There remains, however, an apparent contradiction. What is the
relation between the eternal contents of the demand of Jesus and its
eschatological foundation? Jesus commandments were to prepare the
way for the approaching judgment and kingdom of
God, their aim was future blessedness. In the back
ground of all lies the alternative of the two roads,
the prospect of heaven or hell. And is this demand
to be forever valid in spite of this? Not in spite of,
but because of this, Jesus appeared with His eschatological messages—that is to say, with the announcement that eternity was near at hand. His demand is
that man should prepare to meet eternity, and fit
himself to live in it. But he can only do that if the
eternal within him is endowed with power and with
victory. The approach of eternity awakened in Jesus
the recognition of all that is essential, of all that
endures in the sight of God. Jesus was able to lay
the foundation of the religion that was to last for
ever, just because He was the prophet of the judgment that was to come. And even though later on
the eschatological drama receded ever further into
the background, and this earth and the present raised
One man alone, Paul, maintains the demand of Jesus in its sublimity, and even he not quite uniformly. In the early Church the ‘new law’ at once secures a footing.
Paul’s Gentile Church fell in like manner under the sway of the religion of law. A new Church—the Christian—took the place of the Jewish, and its claims are mostly the same: external, ceremonial, legal, and theological. Jesus’ words condemn His own Church down to the present day.
WHOEVER, refusing to be led astray by words, surveys the short history of early Christianity, cannot fail to be struck before long by a curious observation. All high-sounding words such as redemption, atonement, justification, the new birth, and the receiving of the spirit, are wanting in the early Gospels, and yet every reader feels that those that were about Jesus were raised to a state of peculiar happiness. On the other hand, the greater the frequency of these theological expressions in the later writings, the further does the actual fact of redemption, as of something experienced and imparted to us even to-day, recede into the background. Even St. Paul, who himself was certainly to be counted amongst the redeemed, set up general theories about redemption, which were more than once contradicted by experience in his own congregations. Talk, especially theological talk, about redemption, stands frequently, if not always, in the inverse ratio to the actual experience thereof.
We must speak of Jesus as Redeemer, because His
In the Gospels, Jesus appears before us first of
all as the physician of men’s bodies, as the redeemer
of the sick and suffering. However great the number
of miraculous narratives that we set on one side
as exaggerations or inventions of a later age, a nucleus
of solid fact remains with which we have to deal.
Jesus possessed a healing power, strictly limited, it is
true, by unbelief, but capable of producing the very
greatest physical and psychical changes wherever He
encountered faith. This power operated especially
in the case of mental diseases, but was by no means
confined to them. Now even though here, too, we
see Jesus completely dominated by the conceptions
of His time, and in part even not scorning to make
use of its remedies, we can yet feel the moral
grandeur of His character, and the boundless
sympathy with every form of distress through all the
outer folds of magic. He is a wonder-worker, but how
infinitely exalted He appears when compared with
any other worker of wonders. In the time of His
enthusiasm Jesus explained this ‘Redemption’ as the
beginning of the kingdom of God. On another occasion He places Himself on a line with the Jewish
exorcists, and once again He expresses doubts as to
the persistence of this driving out of demons. Jesus
Closely connected with the healing of the sick is
the restitution of the alienated, the publicans and
sinners. The Pharisees outlawed these people:
Jesus loved them. His great compassion for the
common people was especially directed towards this
class. And that gained for Him the names, given in
derision and mockery, of “glutton and winebibber,
friend of tax-gatherers and godless people.” He ate
and He drank with them; He sought shelter with
them. He called one of them out of the tax-office
to be His partner in His work as missionary. One
can scarcely conceive the strange character of this ‘Home Mission work’ of Jesus. For Jesus brought
these alienated classes back, not to any church party, but
to God. It is probable, too, that when He preached
to them He spoke little of sin and of repentance,
but He entered sympathetically into their daily
His ‘Home Mission’ won for the new religion
its most valuable adherents, because they were theologically the least corrupted. But it was attended
by consequences which were Hostile to the Church.
For this love finally embraced even Samaritans and
heathen, and leapt the bounds of any and every
ecclesiastical system. As soon as the new Church
was formed, therefore, it again applied the Pharisaic
measure to the publicans and heathen, so in St
Furthermore, Jesus ‘redeemed’ His listeners from
the theologians, and that had consequences that
reached still further. The Jewish religion was decaying, above all, because of the fact that instead of the
prophets as mediators between God and man, stood
the Scribes, their exact opposite. As the whole of
the religion was founded upon the sacred book, and
this was written in a dead language and stood in
need of explanation, the interpreters of the book
came to be looked upon as the sole revealers
Next to this, and as an immediate consequence
of this redemption from the theologians, comes the
redemption from the Jewish Church. It is in reality
.already contained in the fact that the individual
who was aroused by Jesus’ call was made dependent
simply upon himself and his own conscience.
Wherever men realize their individuality and individual responsibility, there the authority of the
Church ceases. When Jesus claimed the personal
allegiance of His followers, He was taking a step
that was entirely hostile to every ecclesiastical
organization and was aiming directly at separation.
Jesus' aim, however, was never merely negative.
Side by side with the separation from the Jewish
Church went the foundation of the new Christian
fellowship—a fellowship, not a Church. Why
should Jesus have founded a Church, filled as He
was with the expectation of the near approach of
the kingdom, which was to put an end to all human
forms? The great interest felt in the Church is a
product of later times, when the expectation of the
kingdom no longer occupied men’s minds in the first
instance. In Jesus’ teaching there is as yet no
mention of any external organization, nor does He
therefore say anything of the founding of sacraments,
the outward signs of membership in the fellowship.
He does not even, in any of His recorded sayings,
exhort the brethren to foster the growth of the fellowship. But nevertheless He did found a fellowship
The full scope of the redemptive activity of Jesus
was only attained in this fellowship of the disciples,
when the new life that was in Him was transmitted
to receptive hearts and minds. All that was
peculiarly His own in His piety and devotion was
transplanted and became the germ of the piety of
The next characteristic of the piety of Jesus is a combination
of opposites which is quite peculiar to it the union of the blithesomeness and
innocence of childhood with the courage and the serious earnestness of manhood.
This cannot, of course, be imitated in its perfection by any one, but its effect
nevertheless is that the predominance of the one quality always tends to be
mitigated by the joint action of the other. It is probably impossible for anyone
to form a conception
First of all, there was the certainty of the goal. Men’s hopes were established and assured. For the Jews the end of the world was something uncertain and mysterious. They spend their time in minute studies and subtle reckonings as to its coming, and at the same time snatch at the pleasures of the fleeting moment. Better enjoy something tangible here than trust to an imaginary happiness yonder. Through Jesus hope has become an assured certainty, and thereby a power in men’s lives with which the world has to reckon henceforth. Eternity is no longer a mere thought but actual reality; whether it comes sooner or later, the goal stands firmly fixed before men’s eyes. And that is how the early Christians were enabled with quiet confidence to support their disappointment when the parousia did not come as they had expected. “The kingdom shall still be ours,” was their consolation.
In the next place, man’s freedom, his power to do
the good, was incomparably strengthened. In all that
He says Jesus appeals to the will, to the power of free
choice. He conceives of God’s commandments as
It was possible for Jesus to strengthen man’s will power to this extent, because He freed him at the same time from the terror of sin. The Jewish feeling of sin, which was rather the consequence of misfortune than of moral depth of character, had already become something morbid, resting upon men’s minds like a nightmare. Paul is its great interpreter. It is true that the most important Jewish prayer contained the splendid sixth petition—
Forgive us, our Father,
For we have sinned.
Forgive us, O King,
For we have done unrighteously.
Dost thou not forgive and pardon gladly?
Praised be thou, Lord, most merciful,
Thou that dost pardon so greatly.
It was therefore an article in the Jewish creed that
was firmly believed, that God pardoned the Israelites
when they prayed to Him. But what was the use of
fine words if the individual had no sense of personal
certainty and was unable to derive thence the power
to live a glad and joyous life? He was weighed down for all that by the feeling
of sin. Jesus routed these wretched and morbid feelings all along the line. They
vanish before His presence like the mist before the sun. Jesus turned the theory
contained in the Jewish prayer into a fact, and gave to all that were about Him
the certainty of pardon and courage and joy. If He uttered the divine
declaration, “Thy sins be forgiven thee,” to any anxious soul, then all trouble
was at an end. As against the Pharisees He appears as the advocate of the true
Father of Sinners, and in the parable of the prodigal son He proclaims the
principle, that when God pardons, His justice is by no means diminished. But He
taught His disciples just simply to pray to God for forgiveness and to look upon
this as a fundamental law in the family both human and divine. Jesus has made it
perfectly plain that the child of God is separated by no sin from God’s love, as
little as the child of an earthly father from that father’s love. He looked into
the human heart deeper than most rabbis, and He read there “no one is good,” “ye
that are evil.”
The depth and the reality of the sense of the
peace of God which Jesus bestows upon His disciples
by this glad gospel is proved by their new relation
to the world. Here, too, Jesus brings redemption
from all cares and terrors. Since Jesus treads them
under foot, the demons are no longer powers to be
feared. Imagining that they were surrounded at
every step that they took by a whole host of evil
spirits, the Jews had come to find it hard to go
forward otherwise than timidly and anxiously. The
world—so it was said repeatedly—had been handed
over by God to the devil, for was he not the prince
and god of this world? Jesus, who had a mistaken belief in the reality of demons, conceived
By its precipitate judgments the Jewish doctrine
of retribution turned every misfortune into a divine
punishment, thereby doubling the distress. Jesus
entirely rejected this doctrine. He shows, on the
contrary, in the parable of Dives and Lazarus that
an entirely poor and abandoned man can be so much
happier than a rich man who satisfies his every desire,
because death so often brings with it a reversal of
men’s positions, and therefore Jesus says: “Blessed
More important, however, than all this both for Himself and for His disciples was His own death and the whole series of events leading up to it. At first it was a bitter necessity for Him, a divine purpose coming into collision with the human, which just had to be obeyed. Then later He began already to see some positive object therein. Some good end must surely be intended by His death. It must be fraught with blessing for many among the people who as yet believed not in Him. And then once more, in the hour of bitterest anguish, when all consolatory thoughts were like to be driven away again by the rude reality, Jesus still clung firmly to this. “It is the Father’s cup.” And thus He began His great work of recoining the value of things. Through Jesus’ death the disciples were gradually enlightened. The dogma of retribution was not true. Suffering and death are not methods of punishment, since God has inflicted them upon His own Son. Thus the Christians were set free from all the bitterness that the fear of death contains. It is true that even the first generation of Christians did not rest content with the teaching of Jesus herein. The thoughts of punishment, retribution, and expiation, were lodged too firmly in their heads. They must needs be applied to Jesus in a new form. But nevertheless in the judgment that they passed upon their own misfortunes we can see that they began to grasp the new idea—that the ‘cross’ comes from God’s love—this idea is the fruit of Jesus’ death.
Thus, then, Jesus does, as an actual matter of fact,
The disciple of Jesus prays this prayer without making any claim upon his Master’s advocacy or mention of His name. Thereby we are clearly given to understand in what sense Jesus would be the Redeemer, and in what sense He would not. His calling was to bring God so near to the men of His time and not to them alone—by His whole manner of life and personality, to bind them so firmly to God in the presence of eternity, that they should never more be able to part from Him. Herein He succeeded so entirely that the thought never occurred to His first disciples that He was setting Himself by the side of God, or was taking God’s place as the central object of man’s devotion.
They prayed to God alone, and they handed down the saying of Jesus that He, too, was not to be accounted good. And that was the final proof of their redemption. But through His humility and His truthfulness, and by His entire subordination to God, Jesus showed more than by all else that He deserved the name of Redeemer in the fullest sense of the word.
Looked at from a purely historical point of view, the death of Jesus was the necessary consequence of His revolt against the divine authority of the Scribes and the propaganda of the Pharisees. After His capture, however, Jesus was compelled in the presence of the Sanhedrim to confess Himself Messiah, and thus furnish an ostensible reason for His conviction. It would seem that the Roman governor accepted this political pretext. But that was not the real reason of the hostility and the violent conclusion of the struggle. The spiritual leaders of the people, and the party that stood in the greatest odour of sanctity, recognized that a spirit had appeared in Jesus, which was bound to sweep them away. Finally, the danger came to be so great that only the immediate removal of Jesus appeared to offer any possibility of safety. The death of the leader seemed to them to imply as a necessary consequence the defeat of the cause, the confusion of His adherents, and the impossibility of belief in an executed criminal. These calculations appeared to be confirmed by the flight and the dispersal of the disciples after the capture of Jesus.
Contrary to all expectations, the dispersed disciples began to gather together again, at first in Galilee and then in Jerusalem. “He is not dead,” they cried in triumphant enthusiasm to the murderers of Jesus; “He liveth.” The reckoning of the Sanhedrists turned out to be at fault. Their clever calculations proved to be the greatest folly and impolicy, for faith in the crucified and risen Lord brought about that which faith in the living Christ had not accomplished: the foundation of the new Church, the separation from Judaism, the conquest of the world.
Whence this sudden change? For that the disciples fled in confusion and consternation is a certain fact. Their answer was: the Lord has appeared to us, first to Peter, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred brethren together, then to James, then to all of the apostles, last of all to Paul. From these appearances—the first must have taken place, according to the oldest accounts, in Galilee—they inferred the facts of the resurrection and of the present life of Jesus in glory. In the very earliest time, when St. Paul obtained this information from St Peter, they were content with drawing these conclusions and required no further proofs. The new faith rests upon the appearances alone.
Our judgment as to these appearances depends upon the credibility which we attach to St. Paul and his informant, and still more upon our philosophical and religious standpoint, upon our ‘faith.’ Purely scientific considerations cannot decide where the question at stake is the existence or non-existence of the invisible world, and the possibility of communicating with spirits. Hence, too, all attempts at explanation, which rest upon the axiom that our world of phenomena is the only reality, are merely subjectively persuasive and convincing. The Christian faith always reckons with the reality of the other world which is our goal. A Christian, therefore, has no difficulty in accepting as the ground of his belief in the resurrection, the real projection of Jesus into this world of sense by means of a vision.
But there is another reason which prevents the
historian from resting content with this supposition
Of John the Baptist, too, it was said that he had arisen, and worked though Jesus. But his sect disappeared in the confused jumble of Jewish sects. But Jesus was really the Redeemer even after His death, and instead of His influence decreasing, He now really began to draw all men unto Himself. Even, therefore, though He may have helped by means of His appearances to enable His disciples to recover from their perplexity, the fact that these appearances produced this effect was the consequence of the earlier impression which death had not been able to efface. Faith in the resurrection is the fruit of salvation through Jesus.
JESUS did not leave His disciples without leaders. During His lifetime He had organized and trained a compact body, a little company, the twelve. By participating in His missionary labours they were to multiply His activity, and when He was not Himself present, they were to take His place. Upon the twelve He had laid the duty of leading the same wandering life as His own. He had given them the authority to preach and to heal which He Himself possessed. He made them sharers in all His rights. “He that receiveth you receiveth Me; he that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me.” It was the twelve who accompanied Jesus when He entered Jerusalem, who received His last commands and were witnesses of His capture.
The first appearance of the risen Master, soon after
the first flight of the disciples, fell to Peter, the captain
of this company. The second was to all the eleven.
We know nothing beyond the bare fact of these appearances; we do not know what words were then heard.
The consequences alone are evident: the assembling
Round the nucleus of this little company there gathered the former disciples as well as the new adherents. The old name, ‘the twelve,’ gave way to the new official designation, ‘the apostles,’ though it is possible that this did not take place before Greek soil was reached. The chief recommendation of the new name lay in the fact that it could be transferred to the later missionaries as well, but its original meaning was strictly limited: “One who had companied with Jesus in His missionary work, and had been witness of the resurrection.”
Nothing can exceed the significance of the apostles
in the history of the development of Christianity.
Jesus did not Himself found the Church. He who
shattered the institution of the Jewish Church had no
understanding for such an organization. But the
company of the apostles is His own peculiar creation.
He had faith in the power of the word and in the
influence of personality. The call of the companions
of His mission was the result of this faith. In this
call He was not uniformly successful; that is proved
by much else besides the one name Judas Ischariot.
But, on the whole, the work that He had begun
lasted. The foundation of the Church, all the work
of consolidating the early community of believers,
rests upon the apostles, upon their enthusiasm, their
courage and their endurance. Here, again, the
saying is proved true, that it is men that make
history. The belief in the resurrection, the future
The apostles were animated by a lofty self-consciousness. They felt themselves to be the representatives of Jesus. They were continuing His work. As ambassadors for Christ, they were ambassadors for God. The new office of mediation between God and man was continued by the apostles. Their manner of life was an extraordinary one, like that of Jesus. Besides their work as missionaries, the twelve had no calling: for their sustenance they depended entirely on the hospitality of the faithful.
But Jesus’ miraculous powers likewise continued effective in the apostles. It came to be universally accepted that an apostle could prove himself such by signs and wonders. Jesus Himself, so it was said, had given them power to tread on serpents and scorpions without danger. As a reward for their faithful services they should sit upon twelve thrones in the future kingdom and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.
In sayings such as these can be traced the glorification of the legend which dates from the earliest times. The self-consciousness of the apostles and the veneration of the disciples helped to complete each other almost from the first. At all events it was counted as an especial privilege of this early time that the twelve were there to lead; the twelve in whom Jesus Himself continued to live.
In spite, however, of all their high authority, there
was not the remotest attempt to place the apostles on
the same level as Jesus. Subordination to the
Master, resting in the feeling that he owes his position
In the Acts they lead a collective life, partly all together, partly two and two. They are merely types; there is no single person. It is true that there were differences enough of temperament, education and culture among them, but, on the whole, they were the representatives of the cause of Jesus; that, and nothing more.
The clearest proof of this is to be found in the way
in which they conceived of their calling. It was
just to hold firmly to the calling of Jesus. The
judgment and the kingdom were near at hand. In
spite of the rejection of Jesus on the part of the Jews,
which His death involved, the duty of the apostles,
after their Master’s death, was to preach repentance
to these very Jews, to see whether they might not
By the side of the twelve there early arose an
authority of quite a different kind: the brethren, and
the whole family of Jesus. While Jesus lived they
believed not, or at least they doubted. It was only
after His death that they were convinced of their
brother’s high calling. He appeared to James. This
occurrence immediately secured him and the whole
family a place at the head of the new community.
Paul speaks of James, the brother of the Lord, once
side by side with Peter, another time as a pillar,
together with Peter and John, thus making his
authority equal to that of an apostle. But that
which secured the ‘brethren’ their prerogative was
just this tie of relationship, and not the call to the
work. The veneration felt for Jesus was transferred
quite naturally to His brethren after the flesh, and
these again were nothing loth to share in the honour
paid to their great brother. The apostles and
brethren of the Lord almost became rival powers.
We can find traces of a dynasty of Jesus at Jerusalem.
After the death of James a cousin of Jesus is chosen
to be his successor, and so it goes on, to the
great detriment of the new community. The free
spirit of Jesus had not descended upon James, nor
had he learnt anything from his experience in life.
In him the unnatural reversion to Judaism found its
leader. Those fanatics who so cowed Peter at
Antioch that he refused to eat any longer with the
Both together, apostles and brethren, were the authorities on the side of tradition. By their side the prophets, the representatives of the new ideas, find a place. This place depended upon special psychical gifts and upon religious enthusiasm.
The prophets did not present an entirely new
feature in contemporary Jewish life. They had never
entirely died out since the age of the Maccabees. A
prophet, John, is Jesus’ forerunner. In the story of
the birth of Jesus, prophets and prophetesses find a
place. Jesus foretells the coming of false prophets,
and they appear in great numbers in the period
immediately preceding the final insurrection of the
Jews. They were the stormy petrels before the
coming of the terrible tempest. True, it is possible
that the arrival of the Christian prophets on the scene
stood in some connection with the first rumblings of
that mysterious political movement. But for all that
something new does here begin, something unknown
to the Judaism of that time. Shortly after the death
of Jesus, the pent-up fires of enthusiasm break forth
in the community of believers at Jerusalem. That
mysterious movement began which, on the one hand,
spread, all-powerful, like wildfire amongst the masses,
causing the risen Lord to appear to five hundred
Both from the Acts of the Apostles and from St
Paul’s letters, we see that ‘prophets’ are amongst
the distinctive marks of this first age of Christianity.
But we learn at the same time that their authority
was secondary. That is to say, that the ultimate
authority, the foundation, was in all cases the
tradition of Jesus. This might be supplemented by
the prophetic word, by the spirit, but never transformed. That was a principle which does all honour
to the perception of the guiding minds of the new
religion. For the spirit which spoke out of the
mouths of the prophets was impersonal, vague, and
beyond control; all manner of influences and
tendencies there competed with the influence of the
Jesus of history. It was, after all, the religious
impulse in its exclusiveness, for it forced back all
other spiritual powers, but at the same time in its
arbitrariness, and often in its moral indifference. To
make the spirit of the prophets the ultimate authority
But the list of the leaders of the oldest time is
far from being complete yet. We come next to
the teachers, men likewise filled with the ‘Spirit,’ who, through their spiritual gifts, fathomed the
hidden meaning of Holy Scriptures. They are the
representatives of the ‘Gnosis,’ i.e. of the right
spiritual understanding of the Revelation of God.
Thus, Christian theology begins with them. Apollos
is the first typical ‘teacher.’ A great future awaits
them. Furthermore, there are the mysterious seven
deacons. Stephen and Philip belonged to them.
Then there were apostles of the second rank, missionaries like Barnabas, Judas, and Silas, chosen by the Churches and sent forth by them or by the twelve as their delegates. As time went on and the twelve died one after the other, these apostles in the wider sense of the word stepped into their place. Lastly, there were the heads of the different Churches, called presbyters or bishops. They, too, were chosen on the ground of spiritual qualifications and by the voice of the Spirit. But their position, on the whole, was entirely subordinate to that of the itinerant leaders into whose hands the Spirit placed the supreme authority over the whole infant Church that was now just coming into being. These presbyter bishops did not then dream of the position of dignity to which they were destined later to attain.
Look where you will, there is nowhere a want of leaders; it is rather the superabundance, the too great variety in the body of officers, that strikes one. There would appear to be no one man in supreme command, no one to dominate all these different spiritual forces and carry on the work of Jesus without hesitation or confusion. There is indeed something marvellous in the sight—so soon after the death of Jesus—of this great organized host of able, enthusiastic, and courageous men all engaged heart and soul in the work of preserving for the world their Master’s in heritance. The cause of Jesus cannot fail.
EVEN in Jesus’ lifetime there was a Christian fellowship in the ideal sense of the word, the number of all those who recognized Him as the Lord, as their Head, and kept His commandments in their daily life. But there was no coherence, no organization. These followed only after Jesus’ death, under the impression produced by the appearances and under the guidance of the apostles. We cannot fix any exact date, but we may look upon the return of the disciples to Jerusalem in expectation of the second advent of Jesus in the place where He died as the decisive occurrence.
The Christian Church is the child of enthusiasm.
The less likely we are to imagine this as we look
at the Church to-day, the greater the importance of
reminding ourselves of this fact. The Church
originated in a hero worship—theologians call it
Faith the truest and the purest that has ever been.
It united all the worshippers indissolubly together
and created the new forms quite of itself. They were
the tokens of the same love. Jesus Himself and
The common faith immediately finds utterance
in confession. Faith in Jesus as the Messiah is
still in the background during His lifetime. Jesus
forbade His disciples to speak of it. He had
asked men to receive Him simply as sent by God.
Now the formal confession “Jesus is the Messiah” becomes the distinctive mark between friend and foe.
This confession rested at first on the unique impression made by Jesus the Saviour. It then acquired
consistency and certainty by means of the appearances, and culminated in the hope that He should
come again in glory on the clouds of heaven to
inaugurate the Messianic kingdom. For faith in the
Messiah was hope for the future. Jesus had not yet
been Messiah. He had merely been a candidate for
the office. Hence they spoke of the approaching advent of the Messiah—not of His
return. Thus there crept into the confession, through this element of hope,
something that was uncertain and yet certain, an anxiety, a yearning, a longing.
In reality it could only find expression in enthusiasm. A terrible fact—
Faith is enthusiastic. Those who are enthusiastic
for Jesus are ipso facto friends and brothers. Wherever enthusiasm is genuine, it is satisfied with a
minimum of outward forms. Wherever an extensive
apparatus of forms and ceremonies is counted
necessary and holy, there as a rule enthusiasm has
already beaten a retreat. At first enthusiasm
embraces every one in a similar state with open
arms. Herein we may discover the explanation
of the fact that the early Church exhibits rather an
enthusiastic than a legal character. All manifestations of anything extraordinary were reckoned
the surest sign of a disciple: above all else the
speaking with tongues. The impression made by
the story of what Jesus did and of His appearances was so great that it often happened that
not only believing disciples but strangers and new
comers who were present fell into an ecstatic
condition as they listened—an indubitable sign that
they were brethren, as God had vouchsafed the Spirit
unto them. So great was their joy, their gladness,
that articulate speech formed no adequate expression
All this enthusiasm was crowned by the heroism of the martyrs. There is an early Christian hymn:
These simple fishermen and artizans of Galilee surrendered their all, even their lives, and with a glad courage, that shrank not from death itself, set the seal upon their discipleship of Jesus. They translated Jesus’ words into deeds and accounted death for nought. The first community of believers was welded together by the blood of the martyrs far more than by the speaking with tongues. But this was all the organization that existed thus far. He that spoke with tongues of Jesus, he that for His sake gave all his belongings to the poor and died for Him, was His disciple; of that there could be no doubt. No outer sign was necessary.
And yet an outer form did come to be needed for
the whole community. In the first period of its
development Christianity existed as a sect (heresy).
The metamorphosis from sect into Church was a very
gradual process. Step by step the Christian sect
separated itself from the Jewish Church. By slow
degrees it emerged from its obscurity into publicity.
But it was only in the reign of Constantine that the
transformation was completed. At first it was a sect,
and nothing but a sect. No one thought of leaving
the Jewish Church. All shared in the public worship
of the Church and were subject to the public discipline.
But the community lived its own life hidden from the
public gaze. The earliest services of the Christian
Church were secret conventicles, meetings in the house
Their life as sectaries imparted a sectarian character to the outer forms current among the brother
hood. Every one free from suspicion was, it is true,
allowed ready access to the meeting-place of the
brethren. But admission to the brotherhood itself
was only granted after the observance of due formalities. This was the place occupied by baptism.
Baptism was no original Christian institution, but
was borrowed from the disciples of John with one
addition. By the utterance of the name of Jesus, a
As yet no instruction preceded baptism. It was
not necessary. The confession of faith in the Messiah
was so simple. But as a rule adults only were
baptized. Had not Jesus promised children the
kingdom of God without laying down any further
condition? The baptized now shared in the meals of
the brethren. The chief meal was always, or at least
frequently, connected with the repetition of a portion
of the account of the Last Supper. At the same
time they would speak of the blessing of the death of
Jesus, and rejoice at the thought of His coming
again. But the baptized were also subject to the
strict discipline of the brethren. Unworthy members
were excluded either permanently or for a time. He
especially who was a cause of offence to the little
society was compelled to leave the community. As
far as possible the judgment was to be given without
partiality or respect of persons, even the most
important members, the ‘hands and the feet’ of the society,
were to be put forth. Either the apostles or the
prophets or the community as a whole were to pass
the sentence. It was then counted to be passed by
Jesus Himself, for His real presence in every assembly,
were it but of two or three, was firmly believed in by
The foundation of the sect, however, brings about the first great change in the new religion. It can be traced in a certain increasing rigidity both without, where it assumes the shape of exclusiveness, and within, where it becomes legality. Between the brethren and those that are without, an impassable barrier has been set up by the institution of baptism and the profession of faith in the Messiah.
The words ‘orthodox’ and ‘unorthodox’ come to
be used as shibboleths, and take the place of the
distinctive mark given by Jesus Himself:—“By their
fruits ye shall judge them.” True, it cannot be for
gotten that to do God’s will alone leads into God’s kingdom. But the opinion very soon gains ground
that the doing of God’s will presupposes faith in
Jesus, and is, therefore, only possible in the company
of the faithful. That is the first fatal step away from
Jesus towards orthodoxy. Jesus had by preference
taken as His types people like the publican, the
Samaritan, the prodigal son, who were outside the
Church. In people such as these He could trace
so much more clearly just the really important
things, humility, love, repentance. But in His sect
Enthusiasm and legality would appear to be contradictories, and yet the whole history of sects
presents them as existing side by side. Often
enthusiasm is but the sign that something new,
something exuberant, would fain free itself from the
confinement of narrow forms. Amongst the brethren
the Gospel very soon became a new law. As soon
as the living person Jesus was no longer in their midst,
and yet at the very same time His authority was
immensely increased through the resurrection, necessarily His every word, even His mode of life, came to
be an authoritative standard. So the rules for the
missionaries were gradually laid down after the
pattern of Jesus’ life, and often they proved to be
fetters for the new circumstances. So, again, the new
law was now formed for the early Christian community out of the most important of Jesus' sayings,
and thereby words of temporary application often
received a typical meaning for all generations. The
Lord’s Supper was celebrated with a scrupulous frequency, and finally exalted
into a Sacrament founded by Jesus Himself. Perhaps, too, the example of Jesus
legalized the idea of the reception into the Church by baptism. In the same way
faith in the Messiah comes to be claimed as a dogma which must be believed. It
is no longer self-understood. In the long run, faith in an absent person can
only be maintained by legal forms. Thus, then, this development
And yet this sect, sharply defined against the world, and with the Gospel for law, was the necessary vessel for the eternal treasure of redemption in Jesus. This was the first body which the soul of Jesus took unto itself in order thence to begin the long journey out from these narrow borders into the wide world. All reverence to the Divine in this brotherhood. Here within this small compass lies hidden the life that is destined to give the world comfort and to inspire it with strength. These rude but strong characters, at enmity with the world, their expectant gaze turned towards the eternal mansions, are called to be the conquerors of the world.
THE ‘Spirit’ did not merely move men to talk
with tongues in the early Church. He did not only
kindle the glad ardour of sacrifice, and inflame the
courage of the martyrs—he was likewise the creator of the oldest theology. New
thoughts and pictures, and peculiar frames of mind, come into being amongst the
brethren in contrast with the unbelieving world. They are felt to be new, and
yet they make their way with an irresistible compulsion; they obtain authority
as inspirations of the Spirit. They originate partly from enthusiastic laymen
who by sudden illumination solve some dark mystery, partly from learned students
of the Old Testament to whom deep insight into passages hitherto obscure is
vouchsafed by the spirit that prevails in the community.
If the formation of the new thoughts is thus guided
by the Spirit, we can still more clearly recognize the
Spirit as their ultimate source by the opposition of
the world which lacks the gift of the same Spirit.
Or, to express the same thing in the language of
to-day, only he who shares to some extent in the
Now, as the Christian brotherhood was from the
very first a lay brotherhood, their theology was
bound to partake very largely of the lay character.
A theology arises in which unbridled fancy and
enthusiastic feelings have a greater share than the
clear conceptions of the understanding, which is
founded, not upon learning, at least not in the first
place, which is ready to accept at once moods of the
heart and mysterious echoes from the unconscious as
divine revelations, and above all, takes the miraculous
into account at every turn. These laymen often
accept the contrast to the Scribes as their guiding
line. Whenever any very artificial theory is
advanced in the Gospels, which does not appeal
to the heart, it is prefaced by the words “The
Scribes . . . . say unto Him.” They themselves
would by preference be reckoned among the babes
and the foolish to whom God has revealed that
which has remained hidden from the prudent
and the wise. This contrast, however, soon ceases
to be as complete as it was at first. In its teachers
the brotherhood acquired a learned element which
differed from the rabbis only by its readiness
to enter into the spirit of the sect. The special
service which these teachers rendered to the community was the unsealing of the treasures of the
whole of the Old Testament, which had otherwise
remained a closed book for the laity, even were it
only by reason of the difficulties presented by the
language in which it was written. But they were
also the first to borrow from the Jewish professional
There were really two different motives at work leading to the formation of this earliest theology. On the one hand, the personality of Jesus Himself challenged reflection in the highest degree, almost more on account of that which lay hidden in the future, than on account of that which men already knew concerning it. They could not but feel impelled to examine in every direction and to attempt to understand His Messiahship, His death and His resurrection, and above all the mystery of His miraculous personality.
To this inner motive, the impression made by the personality of Jesus, there was at once added another—the apologetic interest, the determination of the relation to Judaism. The object was to win Jews for Jesus, to defend Him against them. In both cases, whether it were attack or defence, the employment of Jewish words and conceptions, common to friend and foe alike, was obviously necessary. All the oldest Christian theology is therefore Jewish in the means which it employs.
The whole of the great impression made by Jesus
culminates in the confession “Jesus is the Messiah.”
This was likewise the chief point of contention with
the Jews. If the Jews said, “He is not the Messiah
Through that one word Messiah it came about
that the whole figure of Jesus was placed within the
framework of the Jewish picture of the things to
come that lay there ready and to hand. In the
latter no change was made whatever; the only addition
was the name of Jesus. This oldest Christian dogma
is nothing but the filling up of a Jewish outline
with a concrete name. First of all, the prophecies of
Daniel are taken for guidance. So Jesus Himself
had done. Hence the “Son of man” becomes in the
Gospels the usual self-designation of Jesus. This,
however, is but the starting-point. Soon all the
Jewish apocalyptic theories with their richness of
fantasy, claim the person of Jesus for their own.
Contrary to all expectation, He becomes a mighty
conqueror, hastening on a white steed at the head
of the heavenly host to annihilate all God’s enemies
upon earth. How strangely inappropriate to Jesus
that the “eagles” should be “gathered together” to
devour the dead bodies of the slain! First come
the storm-signals of wars and rumours of wars,
famines, pestilences and earthquakes, signs in the
The Jewish faith swallowed up the Christian, and in reality it was the Jews who came forth the conquerors from these disputes. ‘Jesus the Messiah’ is a Jewish idea. It remains such in spite of all the new meaning which Jesus put into the conception. All that there is inadequate in it, which He Himself had repressed as far as possible, recovered the lost ground immediately after His death.
But how can Jesus return as Messiah if He rests in the grave? This objection is met by the proof of the resurrection. Unfortunately, the reality of the appearance was convincing to believers only, for it was only disciples that had seen the risen Lord. The enemies of the faith might without further ado declare them to be either deceivers or deceived. The belief in mere visions would never have made any impression upon Jews. An objective proof must be furnished.
The story of the empty grave was circulated at a
very early period with the object of providing this
desideratum. But who had found the grave empty?
Again, it was only disciples, and women too so
writes the oldest evangelist. Was that a sufficient
foundation? It was strengthened by the additional
facts that apostles themselves found the grave
empty, and that the women had besides seen
But the death of Jesus? How was this greatest
stumbling-block, this direct negation of the Messiahship, to be united with the faith? The oldest
theology of the Cross originated in this question.
Jesus own forebodings and His prophecies were
appealed to as proving that His death had been no
surprise to Him. Hence the emphasis laid upon the
prophecies of the Passion in our Gospels. But that
was but a poor comfort! Some few scanty indications given by Jesus as to the salvation to be brought
about by His death were taken as a starting-point.
It would seem that Jesus had Himself imagined that
His death would exercise a salutary influence on
This thought is now brought into connection with the sufferings of Jesus. Then come the theologians who skilfully apply all their juridical and ceremonial conceptions to the death of Jesus. When St Paul became a Christian he already met with the formula, “died for our sins,” on the lips of the leaders of the early Church. Now, all this is again Jewish theology. The real conclusion which the disciples should have drawn from the death of Jesus, is that even death itself is no punishment sent by God but a gift of His love. Christian apologetics working with Jewish conceptions overlaid and concealed this thought, so full of comfort. Forensic metaphors and ideas of propitiation began the process which is to transform the mystery of love into an arithmetical problem.
It was the teachers, too, not the laymen, who tried
to explain the death of Jesus by the Old Testament.
They transferred the scheme of prophecy and of fulfilment to the death of Jesus, and indeed to all the
events of the Gospel history, and so removed by this
argument from prophecy any rock of offence that
still perchance remained. Such of them as spoke
Greek preferred to make use of the Septuagint
Died according to the Scriptures.
Rose on the third day according to the Scriptures.
Born at Bethlehem according to the Scriptures.
But, after all, a great undertaking is connected with what had else been merely an insupportable extravagance, viz., the conquest of the Old Testament by Christian ideas. Apparently the interpreters proved their thesis from the Old Testament. What they really did was to put their meaning into it. And so it became possible to preserve the endless treasures of this sacred book.
To laymen, who had not the same intimate
acquaintance with the Old Testament, the whole
earthly life of Jesus, forming as it did but the ante
chamber to His reign in heaven, appeared less in the
light of prophecy than in that of the miraculous and
supernatural. Did not the greatest miracle of all,
the Resurrection, reflect a halo upon the Master’s earthly life, removing Him from the rest of mankind
Thus, then, one was at the same time brought to
the ultimate question, What is the foundation for
this element of mystery and miracle in the personality of Jesus? The answers to this question are
exceedingly instructive, although their date is entirely
a matter of conjecture. One thing is evident. Jesus
was man and as man Messiah. This firm conviction
could never be abandoned amid Jewish surroundings.
With this presupposition the answer that appealed
most convincingly to the early Church and its
enthusiasm was the story of the reception of the Spirit. Thereby Jesus completely came into line
But was not the Messiah David’s son? Curiously enough the very passage of Scripture accepted by the Scribes but rejected by Jesus, is quoted in confirmation of the Messiahship. St. Paul is already familiar with it as something that needs no proof. The genealogies of our first and third Gospels must be ascribed to the earliest community. One is almost inclined to believe that it flattered the family of Jesus to be raised thus suddenly to the rank of a Davidic and Messianic dynasty. They certainly did not refuse the honour, as we can see from their confession to the Emperor Domitian. For us there is something that almost provokes a smile in this attempt to found the majesty of Jesus upon a royal genealogy.
The next attempt to explain the mystery of Jesus—the story of the conception by the Holy Ghost which
later won its way to general acceptation—no longer
belongs to the earliest brotherhood. Many of the
Jewish Christians themselves rejected it. But, on the
other hand, Jewish teachers began from very early
times to bring the idea of pre-existence into connection with Jesus. Strictly speaking, the Jewish theory
Speaking generally, all this theological activity betrays a certain dilettantism. There is a want of creative power in these early Christians. They have experienced something altogether abnormal in Jesus, but in order to express it their own words fail them. So they turn to the Jewish categories nearest at hand and attempt to confine the indefinable within these definitions. After all, how very petty are these first Christian thoughts about Jesus compared with the deeds of Jesus Himself and His own inner life. The real superiority of the new religion over the old is rather concealed than expressed by the earliest Christology.
No one will blame these early Christians because
The theology of the early Christian Church has, however, yet
one other fruit to show—and therein consists its true greatness. It was the
collection and the arrangement of the most important sayings of Jesus, the
handing down of the Gospel itself. It is a mistaken view to look upon this work
as one that was merely receptive. The power to recognize the essential and to
adapt it to the needs of the brethren was also requisite. The first in the field
was the author of the Collection of Logia, perhaps the Apostle Matthew, who
grouped the most important words of the Master under different headings from a
practical point of view for catechetical purposes. Above all, he brought
together the principal sayings in which God’s will is clearly taught to all men
by Jesus—these formed the nucleus of the later Sermon on the Mount. It began
with the gracious promises of the Beatitudes, and ended with the judgment upon
all those who know God’s will but do it not. Still to this day the passage
relating to the true standard of judgment expresses the clear consciousness that
the kernel of the Gospel is contained in this sermon. All depends upon the
fruits: and what they are is just what the whole sermon tells us. Then a second
address brings together the duties of the missionaries. Controversial
collections of Logia are attached to this;
St Mark, the exponent possibly of a Petrine tradition, gives us another collection of Logia, arranged some what differently, not in the shape of long addresses, but by way of a narrative. He shows us how this tradition first attached importance to the occasion and the situation of each saying, how it inquired into the persons concerned, and then how groups of related anecdotes came to be formed. St Mark’s groups, too, contain a portion of the theology of the early Christians.
The first of his groups collects words of Jesus in
which His power to forgive sins, His intercourse with
publicans, His opposition to fasting, His lordship
over the Sabbath, are all illustrated in contrast to the
Scribes and Pharisees and the disciples of John.
The same heading, “Jesus and the parties,” may be
placed over the controversies in Jerusalem with the
priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Scribes,
which illustrate Jesus’ attitude to the people, to the
Roman government, to the resurrection, to the law
and the prophets. A third controversy sets forth
Jesus’ attitude to the tradition of the elders. The
enemies, it will seen, are the same as those against
whom St Matthew’s Collection of Logia fights. And
the same subjects meet us here as well as there, the
kingdom of God, the second advent, the confession
of sins, love of the brethren, and prayer. An especial
group brings together the principal sayings about
marriage, children, riches, self-denial and the duty
of serving. It is true that the chief commandments
in which God’s will consists are nowhere set forth in
order. The reason for this will be that the Logia
Collection had already obtained so firm a footing.
But the treasury of the early Christian brotherhood was not yet exhausted. The first and the third evangelists drew still further riches from this marvellous store; above all, the numerous parables which partly in all probability lay before them in written collections. St Luke especially must have been acquainted with a wonderful tradition of parables. It is a pity that those who took up arms in defence of the position that Jesus was the Messiah were but seldom clear as to the real sources of their strength. They did not perceive that the simple setting forth of the words of Jesus without any addition or explanation constitutes the best defence of Christianity, because better than all titles and legends it sets forth Jesus the man.
IN one respect the development of the whole of
the early Christian community was from the first
reactionary—that is to say, in its far more positive
relation to the Jewish nation. The belief in its
incapacity and rejection by God with which Jesus left
the world gave way to renewed patriotic hopes and
renewed loving efforts. For Jesus there was finally
no further doubt as to the certain separation between
the kingdom of God and Israel, but His disciples
clung to the old connection with a desperate tenacity,
nor could all the persecution they had to suffer at the
hands of the Jews cool the ardour of this religious
patriotism. Here on this ground, Paul, with his
ardent love for his native land, with his readiness to
be banished from God’s sight for His people’s sake,
stands shoulder to shoulder with the twelve apostles
and with James the brother of the Lord, of whom
Hegesippus relates that he was once found on his
knees in the temple praying for the forgiveness of
the sins of his people. Even at the beginning of the
Jewish war, when the apocalyptic leaflet (contained
Parties had, however, arisen through the relation to the law—though not at first. Both for Himself and His disciples Jesus had to the very last clung to the faith that they had the law on their side against the Pharisees. Nor was this faith in anywise diminished at first in spite of the self-deception on which it rested. They disputed with the Jews about questions of Christology, not about the law.
Amongst the brethren the word of Jesus was the
ultimate authority—hence a free and natural life
such as Jesus had brought into the world. There was
no return to the ideal of the Pharisees, or to the
asceticism of John the Baptist. All the emphasis
was laid upon conscientiousness, love, the longing
for God and trust in Him; but it was in these very
points that they believed they were but faithful to
the law. God’s will as it was written in the law
was declared in the words of Jesus. As soon as
God’s will was grasped in its inner meaning, becoming the deepest motive of the heart instead of an
external ordinance, every contradiction seemed to be
removed. This oldest Jewish Christianity is therefore to be conceived as entirely anti-Pharisaic, nay,
more, as at bottom not Jewish at all—for how could
it otherwise have bequeathed to us the picture of
Here was an inherent contradiction, for the same law was also the authority for the Pharisaic Scribes. Now, as soon as it was recognized, the contradiction was bound to lead to the formation of parties according to the answer which men gave to the question: Should Jesus’ word and the law remain connected or not?
The first missionary journey to the Gentiles afforded the occasion. Nowhere could any other feeling than that of joy prevail at the thought that Gentiles were to be admitted into the Church. But what was to be the condition of this admission? Was it to be Jesus’ word or the ceremonial law? For the Jewish Christians, circumcision, the Sabbath, the regulations as to food, etc., were such old customs that they were scarcely any longer felt as burdens, but all the more unendurable were they for the Gentiles.
Barnabas and Paul simply set aside the law altogether for the Gentiles who sought admission—the sole condition then demanded having faith in Jesus. News of the great invitation only reached Jerusalem when it had already become an accomplished fact. It came through a hostile channel, being reported by narrow-hearted brethren who were Pharisees in all but the name. What was now to be done?
Thus early in the history of the young community
do we come to the parting of the ways. True, at
first the leaders, James, Peter, and John, united with
The extremes quickly fell asunder. Paul placed Christianity in opposition to the law, and proclaimed the freedom of the Jewish Christians in Gentile countries. James and his party completely identified Christ and the law, and claimed the right to force the Gentiles to observe the law. In between these two extremes, the apostles remained in the old position of doubt and uncertainty which they had taken up at Jerusalem, without any definite principles, buffeted about by every storm and tempest, ill-fitted for leadership.
Such was the origin of Judaistic Christianity, a reversion to the Judaistic type in the very heart of the early Christians, occasioned by the progressive measures taken by St. Paul. It was an altogether reactionary movement. The law was set above Christ, the Jewish idea maintained in its fanatical narrowness and intolerance. The majority of these people were sincere enough, to be sure. One does not make a burden of one’s life in mere superficial lightheartedness. But for them Jesus had come into the world in vain.
This tendency falsified the picture of Jesus by
the insertion of many foreign Judaistic features. To
It was only in Palestine and the neighbouring districts, where
there had always been a strong Jewish element at the foundation, that this
Jewish Christianity tenaciously maintained itself, but it was without any
importance whatsoever for the fate of the Church at large. It retained its
sectarian character all the more readily as it had itself split up into numerous
subordinate sects. To these two main currents of thought in the apostolic age—
Such was the end of Jewish Christianity. The enthusiasm of the early days was succeeded by stagnation, decay, and finally dissolution.
Its enthusiasm, as well as all its living fruitful germs, St. Paul took over into his Gentile Church. By his progressive tendencies he drove the Church at Jerusalem into reactionary courses, and so sealed its decay and ultimate ruin. He was the disturbing, the exciting element in the earliest form of Christianity. He pulled down as much as he built up. He destroyed the peace, the vagueness, the compromises of this first age, and in so doing he understood the mind of his Master and the new mode of government of his Master’s God.
JOHN the Baptist came as “more than a prophet,”
as greatest “among them that are born of a woman.”
He set himself against the existing order of things
and roused the whole people. But all that he left
behind him was the ascetic sect of the Baptists which
vanished in the chaotic confusion of different religions.
Jesus followed. He grasped and combined all that
was sound, deep, and genuine in the Jewish religion
and rejected all that was morbid and artificial. He
brought to His disciples the redemption and freedom
of the children of God. But the immediate result of
His activity—the early Christian fellowship—remained
a mere sect composed of communities of pious Jews
who longed for the Messiah and the kingdom, lived
strictly according to the commandments of Jesus, and
loved their own people. Almost exactly as they
lived a few decades after the death of Jesus, Mahomet
found them living centuries later. This Jewish
Christianity lived apart from the main current of the
world’s history, in watchful expectation of the last
day, and occupied in devotional exercises. The introduction
But in so doing we are realizing one of history’s secrets. History makes great leaps, reveals deep
chasms and yawning abysses, never advances in a
straight line, and thus mocks all a priori theorizing.
Paul never knew Jesus during His lifetime, and
nevertheless it was he who best understood Him.
He was one of those Scribes and Pharisees on whom
Jesus called woe, the cause of whose moral and
spiritual malady was just the theory “True religion
All this he did, not through calculation nor yet capriciously, but in the full consciousness that he was called thereto by God. The consciousness of this call is very evident in all his letters, most of all in those to the Galatians and in the second to the Corinthians, where he has to meet the attacks of his adversaries. What a proud and defiant note is struck in the beginning of the letter to the Galatians: “Paul, apostle, not by men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead,” upon which follows the explanation: “When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen, immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me, but I went into Arabia.” The second epistle to the Corinthians, the greatest apology of the apostle, would almost have to be transcribed from beginning to end, so full is it of a divine self-consciousness which reaches its height in such expressions as these:
Declarations which attain a similar high level are
to be found in
The lofty expressions “Workers together with God,” “Fellow-workers unto the kingdom of God,” come
down to us from St. Paul. He did not reserve them
for himself alone, but applied them to the other
apostles as well; to none other, however, than these.
The same enthusiasm which we noticed above in the
sayings of Jesus concerning the beginning of the kingdom, can be read in these words. Like Jesus, too, it
is God’s word that he is going to declare: no one is
to look upon it as man’s. Just as the power of God
is contained in the Gospel unto the salvation of all them that believe, so St. Paul feels himself to be the
The apostle’s self-consciousness has in fact limits
which it never exceeds. Christ stands high above
him. Indeed the distance between the Master and
His fellow-missionary has already been considerably
St. Paul’s likeness to Jesus strikes one at once, and
at the same time the dissimilarity between the two is
no less obvious. In the case of both there is a
self-consciousness which goes far beyond all that one
usually meets with; there is the claim to have been
chosen by God from out of the mass of mankind for
an especial purpose; in both, again, there is nothing
like fanaticism, but clear recognition of their limitations, and there is a deep humility before God.
And yet the word ‘mediator’ cannot be applied in
the same sense to both. Whereas Jesus maintains that He knows God in an entirely new way—as the Son—Paul boasts of this knowledge of the glory of
God which is reflected in the face of Jesus. He feels
that he is not a creator; he merely transmits historical
It was as apostle of this Jesus, sitting on the right
hand of God, that St. Paul founded the Gentile
congregations, safeguarded their liberties at Jerusalem,
withstood St Peter to the face at Antioch, drove the
Judaizing party from the field, even if they appealed
to the authority of one of the twelve, and dying as
Whence came the certainty of the apostolic calling?
By far the most beautiful answer is to be found in
the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “Necessity is laid
upon me; yea, woe is me if I preach not the gospel.”
The calling to go forth as missionary is an inner
compulsion which St. Paul cannot at all withstand.
As the lion roars, so he must preach. Thus spake the
old prophets. So Jesus might very well have said.
The question, however, as to the origin of this compulsion must not be avoided. St. Paul gives us a
clear account. He became at once Christian and
apostle—such is his answer—to the question through
the vision on the road to Damascus. Unlike Jesus, he
ever turns back to this vision as to the call which he
received. “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen
the Lord?” The Lord “appeared to me,” just as He
appeared after His death to the twelve. He can tell
us the very day and the hour. From that moment
he dates the new life and the new calling. All at
once, without any break, the persecutor became the
missionary—he himself looked upon it with amazement, how his conversion and his call came about
A contradiction, however, is contained herein which was immediately noticed by St. Paul’s contemporaries. The apostleship is the incarnation of the tradition. The apostle is one who hands down the tradition: he is one of a company who secures for the Christian community the connection with the Jesus of history.
Revelation, on the other hand, is the prophet’s privilege. He has not to impart the old message of Jesus, but new words of God, just as they flow from the fountain source. Either, therefore, St. Paul is an apostle and hands down the tradition, or he is a prophet and declares the revelation. A combination between the two would only be conceivable if St. Paul had merely received the title of prophet by revelation, but had been obliged to go to the apostolic tradition for the contents of his message. Such a combination St. Paul refused by not going up to Jerusalem after his call, but by going forth to preach the Gospel on his own account. By so doing he afforded his opponents the opportunity of rightly contesting his title to the apostleship in the hitherto legitimate sense of the word.
The apostleship that rests upon revelation—such is
the great leap that history takes. Interpret and explain the vision itself as you will, you must admit the
leap. It was not the apostles whom Jesus called while
He lived on earth, to whom He confided the whole
of His message—it was not they who really continued
Hence the necessity and likewise the difficulty of his apology. A very great many Christians could not grasp the fact that one whose past record was the worst imaginable, who did not know Jesus and possessed no authority but that of a vision the invention of which was the easiest matter conceivable dared place himself by the side of the twelve whom all men revered, who already were almost accounted as saints.
Fortunately Paul did not attempt the proof of the truth of his vision. He needed none himself, and he would in no case have convinced his adversaries. True, he appealed to it, yet never to it alone. On the contrary, he marshals a whole row of other reasons of a somewhat varied character.
First of all he adapts himself to his opponent’s mode of thought, to the high esteem in which they
hold the original apostles. It is true he is the least
of the apostles not worthy to be called an apostle,
because he had persecuted the brethren. It was only
God’s grace that enabled him to take his place by
their side and even to work more than they. But
the twelve and he declare the same Gospel. Have
they not handed down to him the fundamental facts
It is, however, to the success of his work that St. Paul is able to appeal still more frankly and proudly. The Churches that have been founded by him are the seal of his apostleship, his letter of recommendation known and read of all men. “From Jerusalem and round about unto Illyricum”—so he writes to the Romans—“I have fully preached the Gospel of Christ,” and that, even where the ground had not yet been broken, “not where Christ was named.”
Such is his glorying as a Christian. There are no
vain boasts, no boundless conceits. On the contrary,
he has remained constant, just within the bounds
which God has set him. Have not the twelve
apostles, too, been obliged to confess that God’s grace has granted him so great a measure of success—more than to themselves? As a part of this outward
success he twice reckoned his apostolic signs and
wonders as a proof that he was in nowise inferior to
the other apostles. The Acts of the Apostles give us
examples of this activity, which, however strangely it
may strike us, in St. Paul especially, just formed a portion of a missionary’s regular inventory. Many of these
signs consisted of cures of sick persons; a still greater
number, probably, were instances of mighty psychical convulsions finding vent in ecstatic experiences.
The Galatians “suffered many things” when God
ministered the Spirit to them and a power worked in
their midst. At Corinth the proof of the possession
of the Spirit and of this power inflamed a fanatic and
undisciplined enthusiasm accompanied by the speaking
with tongues, prophesying and healing of the sick.
But St. Paul was not the man to rejoice at the sight
of such external signs alone. Where no moral change
followed upon them he might very well have been
inclined to see even something Satanic in them. New
men—new moral creatures—such the apostle ever
puts forward as the surest proof of his apostleship.
To the Thessalonians he writes: “Ye received my
message not as the word of men, but as it is in truth
the word of God, which effectually worketh also in
you that believe.” When his opponents in Corinth
asked for a sign as a proof that Christ really spoke
But now the Jews arrived with their whole host of accusations and slanders. They were past masters as critics and as spies. “Paul,” said they, “was careless and changeable in his decisions; he hypocritically hushed up the unpleasant consequences of his latitudinarian gospel; he did not draw his support from the congregations, because he was afraid to do so; his sufferings and attacks were proof enough that God had smitten him,” and many other statements of a like nature. In short, his whole mode of life and all his methods were a clear refutation of his claim to the apostleship. His self-defence is proud and of a grand simplicity: “For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world.”
And again, in
When on some other occasion his right to call
himself a minister of Christ was called in question—probably on account of his not having known Jesus—he cries out at once in entreaty and as a challenge:
“If any man trust to himself that he is Christ’s, let
him of himself think this again, that as he is Christ’s so are we Christ’s.” The halting sentence expresses
the one thing to which he attaches the greatest importance—respect and toleration for the faithful fellow-worker. He himself acted in accordance with these
opinions when the factions arose at Corinth and also
at Rome. He never wishes to drive others from the
And so he gains the victory over all the attacks of his adversaries, the good and the bad alike, be cause his words and his life, the visible success and the inner self-mastery, have ever been in the completest harmony. Called to be an apostle by a revelation in an apparently illegitimate manner, he brilliantly legitimized himself by the services which he rendered. And in a fortunate moment the original apostles, including St James, confirmed this by holding out the right hand of fellowship, nor could any thing that was set in motion from Jerusalem in later times affect this position.
We have in reality only reason to be thankful to the Jews. Had it not been for their denunciations, we should have lost the apostle’s proud and frank apology. The man of God had no reason to fear the light, since with “unveiled face he reflected, as in a mirror, the glory of God,” for a world that hailed the light with joy.
ST PAUL knew that he was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles. External circumstances favoured this conviction. He himself was a Jew of the dispersion, a seasoned traveller accustomed from his earliest years to the life of the Greek towns. The pride that he took in his peculiar and independent position must have caused his work amongst the distant Gentiles to appear especially desirable to him, unhindered as it would be by the tradition of the early apostles. Next may be mentioned the opposition of the Jews, which he knew only too well from his own past. And besides it was advisable for the renegade—such he appeared to his friends—to depart to a safe distance. Such circumstances and such considerations no doubt contributed largely to aid St. Paul in forming his decision; but the really decisive cause was the clearly-felt impulse that urged him to go forth from the very moment of his call. He was under a necessity—he had to go to the Gentiles.
A tremendous task was laid upon him, to announce
In spite, however, of this Jewish preparation the attempt to bring Jesus to the Greeks was something entirely new. How was it to be done?
Several ways might be tried. One had already
been attempted: the preaching of the twelve. It
consisted of two simple parts: the promise and the
threat, together with the demand. First the message: The judgment and the
kingdom are close at hand:
St. Paul rejected this method with the exception of
the first part, the announcement of the judgment.
It is not that the presuppositions were too Jewish for
him. He never experienced any difficulty in explaining the conception of the Messiah. But for
himself this description of Christianity as a scheme
of a promise and a claim upon conduct was altogether inadequate. Christianity was entirely a religion
of redemption for him. He knew what that meant—to wish to do God’s will and not to be able to do it.
All the weakness, the powerlessness and perversity of
men when left to themselves, had become intelligible
to him through his own failures, and at the same time
he had experienced the rescue from this state, the
uplifting power—God’s grace. Now, with such an
experience the scheme of salvation put forward by the
earlier missionaries—it was that of Jesus Himself—could never satisfy him. Jesus the Redeemer, not the
lawgiver, that was his watchword. It was a great
piece of good fortune for Christianity. As a mere
teacher of true religion Jesus would only have
taken His place in the ranks of the Greek moral
philosophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras.
As such He would doubtless have commanded
respect and admiration, but never the faith which
gives birth to a religion. Paul saved Christianity
An entirely different method of bringing Jesus to the Greeks was indicated by the great example of the Jewish-Alexandrine religious philosophy. Jesus needed but to occupy the position of Moses, as indeed He did later on. The Jews of Alexandria looked upon religion as a philosophy, with all its branches—cosmology, psychology, ethics, etc. But as distinguished from the Greek philosophy, they looked upon their own as a revealed philosophy resting upon the oracles of the Old Testament, to which all the wisdom of the Greeks was related either as borrowed or as a preparatory stage. For they either ascribed to the Spirit of God only the sacred writings of the Jews, in which case the Greeks must have stolen from them, or they allowed a certain activity of the divine reason in the Greek thinkers and poets, but proclaimed at the same time the superiority of the absolute revelation which had been granted to Moses.
It is quite possible that the Alexandrine Apollos
gave utterance to similar thoughts about Jesus in
his teaching regarding the ‘divine wisdom,’ as his
countrymen did about Moses. But such a mixture
of religion and philosophy appeared to St. Paul pure
perversity. Once more his own personal experience
was the decisive factor in the judgment which he
formed. There had been a time when, as teacher of
the law, he had boasted of the wisdom of his religion,
and looked proudly down upon the blind heathen that
were ignorant as children. But the collapse of his
zeal for the law implied at the same time the fall of
his pride in his wisdom. The foolishness of the Cross
How does Paul preach Jesus the Redeemer to the Greek world?
As for Jesus and the twelve so also for St. Paul, the
eschatological message stands in the forefront. The
day of judgment is at hand, when each single individual, whether living or dead, shall have to appear
before God’s throne and give an account of all that
he has done. Reward and punishment are meted out
The influence of Jesus is felt in the emphasis that is laid upon the individual, and in the entire abolition of all the privileges of Israel. It is individual men and women that appear before God, not peoples; and moral character is the only issue at stake. As before, an especially earnest appeal is founded upon the nearness of the approaching end: it is still time; soon it may be “too late.” “The night is far spent, the day is at hand.”
The question may be raised whether St. Paul provided sanctions for his eschatological message to the heathen. Prophecy has at no time been greatly disturbed to seek for sanctions. Does it not rest upon God’s word, upon the foretelling of His messengers?
The approach of the final catastrophe was a certain
fact both for the apostle and for the Jews, proved
out of the Old Testament; and Paul might reasonably
presuppose among all proselytes of the synagogues
some knowledge of the prophecies contained in the
Scriptures. Nevertheless he spared no trouble in
trying to give reasons for the positions that he
advanced, and met the Greeks as well as he could on
their own ground. The conceptions of requital after
Even though the announcement of the judgment
thus appeared to the Greeks as a message that could
be grasped at once—in fact, as one with which they
were almost familiar—the preaching of the resurrection
was, it must be admitted, a stone of stumbling to them
from the very first. Many Corinthians looked upon
his conception of the restoration of the earthly body
as an utter absurdity. Rather than believe such
nonsense they would abandon the thought of any
resurrection whatever. St. Paul finds himself compelled to draw up an elaborate defence of the doctrine
of the resurrection of the dead, which does in fact
so far meet the objections of the Greeks that it
removes the chief ground of offence, the quickening
of the old body. In this apology he makes use of the
It is especially over the worship of idols that St
Paul waxes wroth. He shows no understanding for
any religion but his own. He is just a Jew counting
all Gentiles as fallen away from the true religion. The
two theories which underlie his criticism are both
Jewish—the image theory and the demon theory.
Either the heathen are fools because they worship
The explanation of the monotheistic faith which is
to take the place of this idolatrous worship is likewise
based upon Jewish presuppositions, nor could one have
expected St. Paul to do otherwise. He could have
found no suitable proof in the person of Jesus. At
first the whole of nature is interpreted as a revelation
of God. In His works God has manifested His
power and His divinity to all men. But then St
Paul proceeds to utter that hard saying about the
falling away of the heathen from the original revelation and the uselessness of all that philosophy attempts
to do. The Jews alone have kept God’s primary
revelation. It has been preserved and set forth in the
sacred Scriptures. And indeed the Old Testament
was the indispensable handbook to any monotheistic
form of belief at a time when all higher knowledge of
the Greek thinkers and poets was precluded. “The
wisdom of the world” meant “foolishness unto God.” And yet even a Paul who
wishes to set himself in uncompromising opposition against the whole of the
heathen world, even he cannot escape the influence of Hellenism entirely. The
doctrine of the ‘nous’ that
can behold the invisible essence of God in His works,
the conception of truth, the definition of God as the
Moral degradation, impurity, was closely connected with this intellectual corruption—the worship of idols, heathen rites, magic ceremonies, and sexual excesses were all mutually interdependent. Many of those who listened to St. Paul, especially at Corinth, were the scum and offscouring of the depraved masses of the great cities where the apostle taught. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, usurers, drunkards, revilers—all these the apostle enumerates in order to continue “and such were some of you.” Even the blackest pessimism did not paint the situation in too dark colours. We have more than sufficient documentary evidence for the prevalence of unnatural vices in this period. St. Paul therefore could say to those to whom he preached that they were a “massa perditionis” without meeting with much contradiction. But in order to gain a hearing he appeals at the same time to reason and conscience, which he does not believe to be quite extinct even in the most bestial of men. Even without any knowledge of the Old Testament they have the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile excusing or else accusing one another. This recognition of the divine in man, which goes so far as to acknowledge that there are uncircumcized heathen that keep the law, is all the more surprising by the side of the apostle’s pessimistic estimate of the Gentile world as a whole.
But after all, in thus appealing to the conscience St Paul is aiming merely at the awakening of the feeling of sin, and his optimistic utterances are made to serve his preaching of the judgment that is to come. They are of importance for us, because St. Paul is here again clearly borrowing from Greek rationalism through intermediate Jewish sources. The Jews had taken over from the Stoic popular philosophy the use of the words “Reason, Conscience, Nature,” and at the same time that conception of men as beings normally endowed with moral faculties and standards of conduct, of which these words are the expression. All differences of time and place sink into comparative insignificance by the side of this the common property of all normally developed moral human beings in the civilized world. This rationalism is one of the most important causes of the rapid spread of Christianity, and St. Paul is the first to make use of it.
The introductory stage of St. Paul’s missionary work
was thus formed of two parts—the eschatological
message and the description of the degradation of the
heathen world. We are not yet in the temple of
Christianity itself, but only in the porch. The Jewish
element still almost entirely dominates the preaching
of St. Paul. His estimates are still influenced by
Jewish prophecy, by the Jewish Scriptures, and by
Jewish views of the Gentiles. But as a matter of
fact lines of communication already lead over to the
Greek world, even though they are mostly derived by
St. Paul directly from the Jews. His eschatology
reminds the Greeks of nearly related doctrines, and
they have more that is akin to the monotheistic faith
than the apostle is ready to believe. But he himself
St. Paul’s object in thus bringing the Gentile hearers
face to face with the near approaching judgment,
utterly degraded and fallen away from God as they
were, was not to lead them to repentance in the
earlier sense of the word, but to faith. To repent
meant, with Jesus, to turn round and do God’s will. Paul does not at all believe that his hearers can
do that. In spite of all the power that a man
possesses of forming moral judgments, it is perfectly
useless to appeal to his reason as long as it is held
captive by his senses—by the law of sin in the flesh. His own experience had
shattered his faith in the victorious power of the will; this, however, was not
the only or even the decisive reason for the new demand for faith. As the whole
object of his missionary labours is to win over the Gentiles for the Christian
Churches, Paul can never grant that any awakening of new moral power would be
possible through man’s unaided efforts apart from the Church. He must, on the
contrary, be so entirely broken and powerless that no other path of safety
remains open to him in the whole world but faith—i.e. entrance into the Christian
fellowship. This is the point where Jesus and His
apostle are furthest apart from each other. With
Jesus, courage, joy, and feeling of strength and entire
health; as He Himself does God’s will so He bids
others do it, without attaching any ecclesiastical
limitation. In Paul’s case we have the description of
a weak and heartbroken man who can only gain the
Oppressed by the burden of his sin, and trembling at the thought of the judgment, the convert is brought to Jesus his Redeemer—not the Jesus of the Gospels who promised the kingdom of God, revealed God’s will, drove out demons and made God and man at one: this Jesus Paul himself never knew. He would, accordingly, have been obliged to have preached Him on the authority of the early apostles. But in their message He appeared as a prophet and a lawgiver, and that did not suit Paul’s purpose. Jesus the crucified alone, or the crucified and risen Son of God, such is the Redeemer in St. Paul’s preaching. He gives a short title to the whole of his message—the “word of the Cross.” Now the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not really deeds of Jesus, but experiences in which He played a very passive part. From an external point of view they are purely historical facts—paradoxes for the understanding, miracles and mysteries. Paul grants all this. The statement, Jesus the crucified is our Redeemer, is merely folly for the understanding; it is only through faith, that makes its way through all that is repulsive and paradoxical, that it becomes a power unto salvation.
Christianity, says St. Paul to the Corinthians, so
clearly that there can be no possibility of a mistake,
Christianity is not a philosophy: it is no rational
system, but it is something historical, irrational and
Furthermore, this preaching, paradoxical as it was,
contained elements that were extremely congenial
to the Greek mind. The crucified Lord is the Son
of God, who according to St. Paul descended from
When once this first step had been taken, when faith had been aroused and the enthusiastic confession had fallen from the convert’s lips—“Jesus is the Lord” (the apostle uses this title and not ‘Messiah’ amongst the Greeks)—St. Paul immediately proceeded to gather the disciples together into an organzied community. No Christian could have fought his way through the great dark night of idolatry and immorality as an isolated unit: the community—St. Paul calls it Church, using a Jewish word—was here the necessary condition for all permanent life. Here, again, many points of contact were presented by the Greek system of guilds and confraternities, of which the Jews had already made some use.
At the present day we are scarcely in a position to decide
whether Paul exclusively followed Jewish patterns, or whether in some points he
modelled his organizations directly upon the Greek type. As in addition he was
bound to take over the characteristic rites of the Jewish Christian Church, and
many of its forms and customs, he in any case created something that was
entirely new to the world in which he lived. Through this amalgamation of
Jewish, Greek, and Christian elements arose the Christian Church of the
Gentiles, which throughout its future history remained ever open to receive new impressions, as a
direct consequence of its origin from different sources.
Baptism in the name of Jesus the Crucified was the
form of entrance. Then followed very numerous
meetings, for meals partaken in common, for divine
worship, and also for the support of the poor brethren
in the different localities as well as at Jerusalem.
They were true communities of brethren, closely knit
Scarcely have the Gentiles become members of the Christian community than Paul tries to discover something for them to do. His aim is now to train these masses of men, who had hitherto been for the most part without any kind of discipline, to work for the realization of the Christian ideal. He who had up till now only given and promised, now summons them to do the will of God in the strength of that which they have received. Words of Jesus, texts of the Old Testament, claims of the conscience, rules of Christian custom and discipline, reflections prompted by consideration for the outside heathen world, are all to become one combined motive for moral regeneration.
A very important question here arises: Did St. Paul keep faithfully to the ideal of Jesus, subordinating everything else to it?
Two preliminary observations are necessary to obviate any unfairness in the comparison.
1. St. Paul had to do with Gentiles, not with Jews. He cannot presuppose the high average of morality which Jesus merely purified, simplified, and set free from all impediments. A great part of his task consists in bringing his converts to the point where Jesus found His disciples from the very first. He cannot effect anything without lowering the standard to a certain extent. He is obliged, e.g., to attach greater value to outer deeds and respectability than to thoughts, even though he himself has exactly the same opinion as Jesus about the inner motive. In the next place, he is confronted with a whole mass of new ethical problems with which Jesus was not acquainted. The whole domain of social ethics, the state, the family, slavery, woman’s position—all directly concern him, for it must now be decided whether these forms and institutions have any meaning for Christians. Whether St. Paul’s solution is the right one may be doubted. At any rate he creates new values.
2. Jesus’ claim concerned the individual simply and solely. St. Paul has the Christian Churches in view. There is a Christian form of worship, Christian discipline, the beginnings of ecclesiastical law, all of them things which did not exist in Jesus’ time. Thus, whilst Jesus detached the individual as far as possible from his surroundings and left him to his own resources, St. Paul looks upon the duties which a man owes to the fellowship as the highest. This necessarily implies certain ecclesiastical claims even though they be reduced to a minimum.
Hence the simple division which was obviously
The position to the world is the first and most urgent problem. The Christians come forth from this world where the demons bear sway and idolatry and immorality prevail. What is to be avoided as heathenish and sinful? What is necessary for the support of life? What is left to the free decision of the individual conscience? Can laws for all be set up? And what do they embrace?
St. Paul’s solution of these difficult problems cannot but excite our highest admiration.
He starts from that which is obviously wicked, from
downright vices, which are not to be tolerated in the
Church. Idolatry, immorality of every kind, theft,
drunkenness, are not to occur amongst Christians, were
it but for the reason that they would thereby compromise themselves in the eyes of the world. Under
the same category come, furthermore, party divisions,
strife and bickering. Thence he goes down to the
roots of these vices in the sins of thought and word.
No, it is only when we have reached the individual
conscience that we come to the decisive point. All
that does not proceed from faith is sin. Whatever
the conscience does not forbid is good. The conscience is individual, free, and only liable to give
reckoning to God. But the matter is not settled
with this proclamation of the freedom of conscience.
Who can deny that the conscience of the masses of
the Gentile converts is anything but degraded and
darkened? How indistinct, in such cases, are the
boundaries between conscience, bad habits, and
caprice! The aim is the transformation and education of this conscience till it attains to Christian
standards. The ‘nous,’ the practical reason itself,
must be changed step by step, that it may be entirely
weaned from its former worldly standards and may
become capable of understanding God’s will, that
which is good, pleasing and perfect. This comes to
pass through the influence of the Christian community,
and yet only on condition that the individual himself
works at the purifying and deepening of his moral
sense. The Christian has therefore never attained
completeness in his relation to the world, but is
always in the midst of a process of growth and
development. He knows that he has always a
number of problems set before him which only he,
The man who reached the height of these principles—higher than these there are none—did not only personally renounce the part of lawgiver in favour of free development of the Churches, but he saved Christianity itself from the fate of ever lasting immobility by setting up a code of laws. A religion like that of Islam is stereotyped for all time through its sacred book of laws, both from an ecclesiastical, social, and political point of view. Thanks to the Apostle Paul, Christianity is bound to no other law than that of the Christian conscience. To attain to this point of view, and still more, to maintain it, called for a courageous faith which perhaps no other man possessed in that age.
But did St. Paul himself remain quite true to his own principles in the advice that he gave and in his exhortations? The step between the setting up of a principle and its application in concrete instances is difficult enough, especially in the early days of any movement. In every case we have our highest authority in the principles which the apostle himself has laid down, even if his exhortations in the concrete case are opposed to them.
Great emphasis is laid in the epistles upon the
duty of the renunciation of this world, and that with
good reason: “Be not conformed to this world”; and “set your minds on the
things that are above, for your citizenship is in heaven”; “seek the things that
are above, not the things that are below”; “I am
crucified unto the world and the world to me.” In
expressions such as these the world is entirely identified
The question concerning meats offered to idols presented the greatest difficulty of all, since it
entered more deeply than any other into the every
day life of the converts. Every invitation to a
meal, every purchase in the market, might bring
the Christian into contact with this meat. The
argument that by eating such meat one entered
into communion with the demons to whom it was
offered, made an impression albeit a transitory one—even upon St. Paul himself. But the real reason
for abstinence is love alone, regard for the conscience
of the weak brother. The individual is free even in
this case to regulate his own conduct. If he can
thank God for his meat, no man can condemn him. On
one occasion a saying of the apostle’s was misunderstood: he was supposed to have meant that a
Christian was not allowed to consort any more with
whoremongers, usurers, and idolaters. St. Paul
emphatically protested against this misinterpretation
of his words by the characteristic statement, “other
wise you would have to leave this world.” The
Christian must take up his position in the world and
remain therein, for God has made it, and it belongs
to God. So, then, in spite of his call to renunciation,
St. Paul represents with reference to the world the
To describe the duties which a man owes towards
himself, St. Paul is fond of using the word ‘sanctification,’ and, in fact, generally speaking, words derived
from the language of ritual. Here one can trace the
influence of St. Paul’s early training in the school of
the Scribes. Jesus makes no use whatever of the
Pharisaic terminology of sacred and profane. The
opposite of ‘holy’ is not wicked, but unclean, unconsecrated; and the application to the world without,
instead of to one’s own heart, is only too easily made.
It is not difficult to find reminiscences in St. Paul’s writings of the earlier Jewish phraseology—this, e.g.,
that it is especially the members, the body, i.e.,
the external, that is to be sanctified rather than the
heart above all else. Sanctification is therefore, as
in later Christian literature, something that is strictly
limited. It consists in avoiding the sins of the flesh,
and in repressing sensuality. If we recall the few
facts that we know as to the past history of the
Christian converts, e.g., at Corinth, and remember the
difficult position in which they were placed in the
world in which they lived then, we can easily realize
that sanctification, in the narrow sense of the word,
was bound to constitute the first task of the Christian
life. A higher morality can only grow up where the
individual has attained the mastery over his lower,
his animal impulses. Hence the following sentence
stands at the head of all the rest of the apostle’s exhortations to the Thessalonians:
“This is the will
of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain
As we pass on to consider St. Paul’s relation to social
institutions, it is surprising to find in what favourable terms he speaks of the
State, and that, too, when Nero sat on the throne. The difference between Jesus and His apostle is very striking in this
point. For Jesus living in Palestine, the State is
naturally regarded as a foreign power resting upon
brute force and oppression. For Paul, the Roman
citizen, it is the great empire of peace, which enables
him to exercise his calling as missionary without let or
hindrance, and more than once protects him and his
congregations from the Jews and the rabble. Thus
he calls the State the great minister of God for good.
It receives all its power from God Himself. It is
none other than the State that will for a season
St. Paul regards the organization of human society,
the relation of master and slave, as something divinely
ordained and admitting of no reform. There is no
thought of the abolition of slavery, or of equality at
least between Christian slaves and their masters.
God calls the one to be a slave and the other to be a
How different, again, are the problems which Jesus.
There was no more decided opponent of asceticism
on this point than the author of the first letter to the
Corinthians, who enjoins their marital duties upon
husband and wife, and warns them against a dangerous
continence. He speaks of these matters in the down
right way of old times without any appearance of
prudery, which is very different from our fastidious
treatment of these subjects. In a world full of crime,
uncleanness, and sordidness of every kind he recognized
his vocation in the education of the masses to the
ideals of honourable marriage and constant fidelity.
Perhaps he demanded too little: obedience of the
women, love of the men—more the passages in the
letters do not contain: but then this little contained,
after all, all that was important, and on this foundation a new and healthy life could be built up. He
likewise commended in a few brief and wise words
the education of their children to Christian fathers
and mothers, and to the former the duty of obedience.
But, then, is there not the celebrated chapter in the First Epistle to the Corinthians? Here, surely, we have the words of a monk and an enthusiast.
First of all, “the present distress” and the “shortness of the time” have to a certain extent shifted his
point of view. He here strikes a note which reminds
one of the apocalypse in
This will occasion no surprise to anyone who knows
how difficult it is for a man to escape entirely from
the influence of his past. On the contrary, it is
surprising how one with such ideals, and starting from
such premises, could write so exceedingly wisely,
soberly, and with such entire self-suppression as St
Paul in
The apostle’s prescription regarding the head-dress to be worn by women during divine service belongs to the reform of manners properly so called. The difference between St. Paul and Jesus is here again especially noticeable. In Jesus case we have only the three great realities by the side of which all details disappear. His gaze is directed upon eternity. St. Paul regulates a special case—woman’s dress—insisting upon it with the greatest urgency, and marshals a whole array of reasons in support of the position. But the rule which the apostle lays down is intended to counteract woman’s mistaken aim to be man’s equal in everything; and then, in the midst of the strangest statements, we are surprised by the assertion of the essential equality of the two sexes: “Nevertheless, neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man (in Paradise) even so is the man also by the woman (since then), but all things of God.” It was just the exaggerated emphasis which the apostle had laid upon the inferiority and subordination of woman that compelled him to reflect and make this correction.
In regulating the intercourse with the unbelievers,
St. Paul sets up the simple principles of friendliness,
peacefulness, and love, even towards slanderers and
persecutors, and so remains true to the example of
Jesus: “Provide things honest in the sight of all men.
If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
We have thus examined the Christian’s position towards the world from every point of view. On its progress from the little villages round about the Sea of Galilee, out into the great world and into the great cities, Christianity encountered a number of new tasks and problems, the solution of which tested the power of Jesus' spirit. St. Paul was the first great leader in this forward march. The new religion is indebted to him for its boldness, for its undaunted faith, for its energy in saving the good seed and in pulling out the weeds in every new ground that was sown.
The second principal task which St. Paul had to
take in hand was the regulation of the care of
the community. Jesus had not founded any
organized community, and had given His commandment of love of one’s neighbour the widest possible
extension by especially including one’s enemies. The
brotherhood of believers became the real sphere for
the exercise of this love of one’s neighbour, both
Every single congregation was always to consider
itself a member of the whole body—the Church of the
Christian brotherhood, and never as a self-existent
unit. Did not the apostles, the prophets, and the
teachers, belong to the whole Church? Jerusalem was
the Mother Church of all these congregations. The most palpable external sign of this connection was the
But its chief domain was after all that which lay
nearest home—the individual congregation. Just like
Jesus, St. Paul esteemed that love highest which did
not go forth in search of distant and extraordinary
deeds, but proved its strength in the ordinary and
everyday life. A man might give all that he had to
the poor and yet be without the right kind of love.
It is this prosaic, everyday love—no sentimental
enthusiasm—that St. Paul commends to the Corinthians,
St. Paul’s third and last task, the regulation of public worship, is almost entirely a part of the second. For Jesus there was naturally no such thing as a Christian public worship, for the simple reason that He founded no Church. He taught His disciples to pray both by themselves and together; and it is at least the beginning of such worship that one liturgical prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, is ascribed to Him. The necessity of a special separate Christian form of worship made itself felt in the first congregation, otherwise there had been no continuance of the corporate life of the Church. Its two principal component parts—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are signs of this very corporate life, intended to mark, the one the reception of the member into the community, the other the public meetings of the brethren. We must be careful to remember this when we come to examine St Paul’s regulations.
In regard to both sacraments St. Paul is no longer
a creator. He simply accepts the tradition. The
So far all is simple. The Church must have its
outward symbols and its means of edification, and these
things must be so regulated that they really conduce
to the Church’s benefit. And though we have here
much that is new and that goes beyond what Jesus
taught, yet the purely moral character of His Gospel
is left inviolate. But through St. Paul a new value
The apostle, however, knew full well that besides
participation in acts of ritual there is an altogether
different manner in which Christians can have
communion with God. Like Jesus, he exhorts his
hearers and readers to offer up prayer and
thanksgiving, to place their trust in God, to commit all their
cares to Him, to accept everything, even affliction
and suffering, as from His hand, to fear Him and to
long for Him. The prayer of thanksgiving is above
Let us now review once more the whole of the
Christian claim, as it is presented by St Paul, and
compare it with that made in the first instance by
Jesus, and we shall perceive that a great forward
movement has taken place, and on the whole, it has
preserved the direction imparted to it by Jesus.
The Christian ideal has become richer, more varied
and comprehensive, but it has not essentially changed,
and it has not deteriorated. This we can best realize
when we read all the passages in which St. Paul briefly
summarizes the essentials of the new religion. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing,
but the keeping of God’s commandments is every
thing. In Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails aught, but faith working through love.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, faith, gentleness, purity. But
The man who formulates his claim under these
main headings understood Jesus better, grasped His
meaning more fully, than any other that came after
him. And this sympathetic comprehension of that
which was essential in Christianity, enabled him to
carry the teaching of Jesus from the Jews to the
Gentiles, retaining the human and the eternal, while
rejecting the merely national. This brilliant definition of the ideal is at the same time the best criticism
of all that is imperfect in St. Paul’s work. A great
man deserves to be measured by his aims rather than
by his achievements. He who would understand St
Paul aright should seek to find him at the height of
his ideal, and then he will discover that he is not very
far distant from Jesus. But to present the claim of
Jesus to the Gentiles and to maintain it in its entirety
was indeed a very great achievement on the part of
St. Paul. His work was assailed by two great
enemies, which sought to compel him to descend
from the height of his ideal and adapt himself to the
imperfections of the uncultured masses: they were,
on the one hand, the gross vices, on the other the
enthusiasm of his heathen converts. The sinful life
that was so often continued after conversion, the
instances of incest and fornication, the lawsuits, the
factions all seemed to cry with one accord: lower
your standard, at least temporarily. On the other
hand, the ascetic aberrations of some, the spiritualistic
follies of others, the pride of the ‘strong,’ the striving
to shake off all control and to cease from all work,
appeared to be so many indications of the necessity
St. Paul had begun his missionary labours with the preaching of the judgment. He ends as he began. The preaching of the ideal and the lofty Christian claim both call for this conclusion. Whether a man is pressing forward towards the ideal, or lagging behind, is by no means a matter of indifference. It is a question of life and death. The return of Jesus, which all Christians await, will bring with it the judgment, when all, apostles and congregations alike, will have to render an account of the result of their lives, and receive praise or blame in equity and truth.
With a mighty loud voice, just as one of the old Christian prophets, St. Paul cries out to his converts, “Maranatha, the Lord is at hand. Redeem the time. Your salvation is nearer than at first. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Be ye not, brethren, in the darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief in the night. Let us not sleep, but let us be sober. Let us put away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light.” That is the language of Jesus Himself. Just as in the claim that he makes, so in this message of the judgment, St. Paul has suffered himself to be inspired by his Master. And this is yet one other proof, that in spite of the ecclesiastical transformation which he effected, he wished to bring to the Gentiles Jesus and His Gospel alone.
For us, of course, he has left great and important
questions without an answer. What is the meaning
of faith and grace and church, if in the last resort it
is the word of judgment that decides the faith even
of Christians? When St. Paul invited the Gentiles
to enter the Christian community he promised them
that the road to salvation should be simple and easy. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord
At times this idea of the value of the Church seems to
dominate St. Paul to the exclusion of every other. Even in the extreme case of
incest at Corinth lie hopes that the man’s soul will be saved in the day of the
Lord Jesus. If God punishes the thoughtless participation in the Lord’s Supper
with sickness and with death, then this punishment is merely a means of
chastening lest we be condemned together with the world. He that has built badly
upon the foundation of Jesus Christ shall nevertheless be saved “yet so as by
fire.” God’s faithfulness is so great that He must complete what He has begun.
The meaning of statements such as these appears to be none other than that all
Christians should be saved even though, it is true, under different degrees of
blessedness. And this is just where St. Paul’s extremely high estimate of the
external ecclesiastical organization finds its expression. But passages which
point in a contrary
The contradiction in which St. Paul stands with himself is a necessary one, and arises from his historical position. On the one hand he has to gain converts for the Church, and must exalt it as the only road to salvation, and therefore separates mankind into those within and those without the Church, as the saved and the lost. On the other hand, as a true disciple of Jesus, he is bound to destroy all confidence in the Church—even the Christian Church—and place the individual in the presence of eternity and God’s judgment before everyone that does not do the right. Hence this hesitation and contradiction. St. Paul is an ecclesiastic and a Christian with a living personal faith. All the later teachers of the Church who were at once apologists of the ecclesiastical institutions and disciples of the Gospel, have followed in the apostle’s contradictory footsteps.
Yet this ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ cannot be St. Paul’s last
word. Salvation as he understands it is only attained
where the individual has reached the certainty that
he is God’s child personally and that nothing can
separate him from God’s love. This certainty is as
It is experienced as he gazes upon the Cross, the revelation of God’s love; as he places his trust in God’s faithfulness, of which he has made trial in the course of his own life, and as he listens for the voice of God’s Spirit which testifies to our spirit that we are the children of God. It was the final aim of all St Paul’s missionary labours that each convert won over by him should reach the goal to which Jesus had brought the disciples in the Lord’s Prayer, wherein they receive all things as from God’s hand and are safe for time and for eternity in His fatherly love.
St. Paul brought Jesus to the Gentiles as their Redeemer who uplifts them to the new life with God. He attained that which Jesus Himself desired, but in his own, even somewhat abnormal, manner.
In the first place, his aim is so to bring home to his hearers their sinfulness and powerlessness and their liability to the judgment, that every road to safety by their own efforts is cut off and only the way of faith remains open to them. This may be called St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of faith.
In the next place, he does not present Jesus the Redeemer in all His life and suffering as the object of faith, but only the Cross and Resurrection of the Son of God. This is St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of the Cross.
The form which St. Paul’s missionary preaching
But St. Paul is likewise the first to have entered into the forms, ideas, and conceptions of the Greeks at innumerable points of his missionary labours. He did not merely bodily transplant the Gospel from one place to another. He saw that the new plant took root and acclimatized itself. There are far more points of contact between the Greeks and St. Paul’s practice than between them and his theology, which is embedded rather in Jewish ideas. But the great achievement is this, that the same man took up that which was Greek and that which was Jewish fused the two elements and then entirely subordinated them to a third, the Christian, in Jesus as he understood Him. For it is not the amalgamation of Hellenism and Judaism, but the conquest of both for Jesus, that assigns St. Paul his high place in the world’s history.
THE Pauline theology is an entirely new phenomenon on the soil of Christianity. In the early
Church at Jerusalem, isolated theological propositions had been set up which had arisen in the
course of reflection about Jesus and in controversy
with the Jews. They spoke of the Son of God and
of the Messiah, of the wonderful call of Jesus and of
His vicarious death. But nowhere do we find even
the feeling of the necessity for any clear co-ordination
of all these thoughts. The Jews—even the learned
Jews—never felt any desire to build up systems
of doctrine. There never existed any systematic
theology of the synagogue. The Rabbis taught the
explanation of single passages, the comparison with
other passages, the formation of syllogisms, and also
the allegorical method of exegesis. The expositions
of St Paul in
St Paul’s education at the feet of the Rabbis certainly proved to be of great importance for him. Here he learned to know and understand the Sacred Book, learned rabbinical methods of interpretation, and many thoughts and conceptions of contemporary Jewish theology. Henceforward he could command the resources of a trained jurist. His later doctrines as to the annulling of the law and justification by faith are proof of this. Here it is that he heard men speak of Adam, of the Fall, of the death of all men. In fact, generally speaking, his interest in sin and the avoidance of sin first awakens in the school of the Rabbis. It is probably to the same source that he owes his initiation into apocalyptic mysteries. One single circumstance, however, should warn us against forming an exaggerated estimate of this rabbinical influence; it is the use St Paul makes of the Septuagint. He takes no interest in the Hebrew text. In his arguments he uses words of the Septuagint to which nothing corresponds in the Hebrew. The influence of his masters cannot therefore have extended very far.
The decisive factor in the genesis of St Paul’s theology was his personal experience, his conversion on the road to Damascus.
Henceforward his estimate of things was an entirely
different one. All that had before seemed to him
great and important, was now of little worth. He
saw everything in a new light. His whole being
was radically changed. Rarely, indeed, has such an
entire alteration taken place in any man. Previous
to his conversion, the law had been his chief delight;
he had been contented with himself and vainglorious;
he had found himself without fault, and trusted
optimistically in his own strength. Afterwards arose
the consciousness that he had been Messiah’s enemy
and persecutor of the cause of God. Hence mistrust
and even condemnation of the whole of his previous
life. Then the crucified Jesus had been a fanatic
and a blasphemer, overtaken by a just punishment;
now this same sufferer on the cross was the Messiah,
the Redeemer, the Son of God. So decisive an
experience, producing such an entire reversal of all
values, was bound to become an unparalleled incentive
to thought and inquiry. To think now meant to
re-think. The convert’s first duty, the first point that
he was bound to clear up for himself, was that during
the whole of his previous life he had been pursuing
a wrong course, and that now he was in the right
one. Paul changed his previous thoughts so entirely
that it is lost labour nowadays to attempt to trace
his course back to the ideas which he entertained
before his conversion. In fact, we are completely
ignorant as to what ideas he exactly had at that time.
One thing alone is certain, that he abandoned those
which he had and buried them out of sight. The
apostle had one theology and one alone, and that is
a Christian one. Each single word of his epistles
For he that was converted in so violent a fashion
is now missionary to the Gentiles. The judgment is
near at hand: his task is to save out of heathenism as
many as are predestined to salvation. The theology
which is presented to us in his letters is neither that
of the Jewish Rabbi nor yet that of the convert of
Damascus reflecting on his previous and his present
state, but it is that of the missionary. What he did
was not merely to turn his thoughts to account
for the practical aims of his mission, but, as far as
we know them, he formed them during and for
his mission. St Paul’s line of thought may best be
termed Christian missionary theology from an
eschatological point of view. Why else should he
have employed the Greek language and Greek forms
and conceptions, and thrust the really rabbinical train
of thought so completely into the background? Or
why else, again, should he have attached so great an
importance to conversion, which divides, or ought to
divide, the life of every Christian into two halves?
But if the Pauline theology is a missionary theology,
then it is the theology of an apologist, the first great
system of Christian apologetics—compared with
In the next place, the great twofold divisions of this system of apologetics is the result of St Paul’s peculiar position between Gentiles, Jews, and Judaizing Christians. It is first a theology of redemption the basis of his missionary preaching to the Greeks; and secondly, anti-Jewish apologetics—the defence of that same preaching against Judaizers and Jews. His theological work, however, is not exhausted in his tireless efforts to seek and to save the lost and to beat back the foes from without. He aims likewise at a theology for mature Christians. He seeks to penetrate to the depths of the thoughts about God contained in the Holy Scriptures and in the revelation of Christ. It is a Christian gnosis which has penetrated even into the world of spirits and into the divine mysteries. We must now attempt to present these three great facts of his system of thought separately, though they frequently, of course, intersect and blend with each other.
ST PAUL understood the word ‘salvation’ in a very wide and comprehensive sense—not merely as liberation from evil or from sin, but as salvation out of this present evil world into the good world which in a sense is future but has now already begun. Hence the simplest division of our subject will be:—This present evil world and its powers; the crisis; Jesus the Saviour; the salvation of believers.
This Present Evil World and its Powers.
In his missionary preaching St Paul began with the message of the judgment that is to come. Under the lurid light of the day of judgment he revealed the entire destruction of his hearers. The theoretical basis of this preaching is a radically pessimistic view of the whole world, which takes no account of the difference between Jew and Gentile, a pessimism which extends to the whole human race, and even beyond it to nature and the supersensuous world itself.
In the first place, the whole human race, the whole
Whence comes this doom of death, mysterious and yet certain?
The Jew Paul answers, from sin. The wages of sin
is death. Since Adam’s sin death goes in and out
amongst men like a hereditary disease; but at the
same time it is the consequence of the sin of each
individual. For all men have sinned and therefore
all die. The universality of sin follows as a simple
inference from the universality of death. St Paul is
here thinking, in the first place, of individuals. They
are free agents—freely have they sinned and so
incurred the penalty of death. Thus far St Paul has
not diverged from the teaching of the Rabbis. But
he soon leaves that teaching behind him when he
declares that it is not in the power of the individual’s free will to accept or to reject sin. Sin has
acquired a sovereign power over the human race since
Adam. There is a kingdom of sin, and that is
humanity itself. We all, Jews and Gentiles, are
under sin. There is a law of sin in our members to
which we are subject. Hereby St Paul declares the
necessity of sin for all men, and not merely its actual
universality. He gives expression to this thought of
the necessity of sin in opposition to the rabbinical
doctrine, led thereto perhaps by a deeper insight into
the innermost life of the soul and the play of motives,
But what is the origin of sin, with its all-compelling power?
St Paul gives two answers to this question, the difference between which is not explained in his letters.
1. The whole of mankind is involved in the fall of
the first man. Through the first man, Adam, came
sin, and as its consequence death, unto all men. That
is the Jewish theory built up by the Rabbis on
the foundation of
2. Sin clings to man’s bodily nature. All men are
flesh, and sin dwells in the flesh. Man is sold under
sin because he is flesh. Nothing good dwells in
him, that is, in his flesh. So closely are the body
and sin connected that St Paul creates the expression “body of sin.” This theory is neither Jewish
nor Greek, but an original creation of the apostle’s.
The Jewish starting-point is, it is true, clear enough:
the opinion that the human body is weak, impotent
and corruptible, keeping men in entire separation
from God. Jewish, too, is the opposition between
flesh and spirit, instead of between body and soul, as
the Greeks say. But the pessimism which we read in
St Paul’s sentences is by no means Jewish. The
conviction of the weakness of the flesh and of the
existence of evil motives or of the evil heart in man
never suffered the Jews to abandon their confidence
in their own strength and righteousness. Side by side
with the feeling of sinfulness, the most characteristic
features of Jewish piety are self-satisfaction and
boasting on account of good works. Words such as “I know that in me, i.e., in
my flesh, dwelleth no good
thing” must have had an altogether repulsive sound
for Jewish ears; and Paul is very well aware how he
tramples the optimism and self-satisfaction of his
fellow-countrymen under foot when he uses them.
And when he goes so far as to say “The flesh lusteth
against the spirit,” he appears to take the flesh as the
principle of sin and sensuality, just as matter is the seat
of evil for the Greeks. Here he is ranging himself on
the side of the dualism of the later philosophy which is
ultimately derived from Plato. He draws nearer to the
Greeks, just as Philo did before. But for all that St
Did St Paul himself reconcile his two theories of the origin
of sin? Not in his letters—e.g. in
Here we stand face to face with the ultimate questions of theological speculation. The gnostics soon afterwards occupied themselves with these matters. In fact, we here enter upon the domain of the Pauline gnosis and leave the field of thought covered by his missionary preaching. St Paul did not shirk these ultimate questions, but he came to no satisfactory conclusion, and contented himself with answers which are contradictory.
One can distinguish the germs of three theories.
1. The theory of evolution.—This present earthly
world is related to the future spiritual world as the
lower stage to the higher. First the natural
(psychical), then the spiritual (pneumatic), first Adam,
that is, of the earth, then He that is of heaven—Christ.
St Paul develops this theory in
2. The theory of degeneration.—Not only man
but all nature is fallen from a state of glory into a
state of corruption. The foundation is the story of
the fall in
3. The theory of evil spirits. St Paul once mentions incidentally (
St Paul’s pessimism culminates in this last sentence
concerning the God of this world. The view at
which he finally arrives is that this present evil world
was not originally so created by God, but has only
become such through the fall, and that it is now
governed by fallen angels, powers hostile to God.
Various reasons led the apostle to form this awful
opinion: contemporary Jewish thought and feeling,
his own bitter experience, his realization of the darkness of the heathen world in which he worked, and
of the lurid light cast by the approaching day of
judgment. The apocalypse of Ezra shows us how
strong a tendency the Jews had in times of national
disaster to entertain such pessimistic views of the
world’s future. And yet, what a difference there is!
For Ezra, there are still some righteous, few though
they be in number, whereas St Paul writes, “None is
righteous; no, not one,” and “in me dwelleth no good
thing.” The reason for this difference is evident.
St Paul’s pessimism is intended to serve his apologetic. It is because Jesus alone is the Redeemer,
that the world has to be presented as irredeemably
wicked, and every other road to salvation closed to
It is evident that the apostle’s apologetic is very far removed from the preaching of Jesus. Jesus was no pessimist, and yet He surely knew what was in man, and knew that no one was good. Children and birds and flowers were His delight. He rejoiced in God’s love and in the good men whom He met. St Paul first violently extinguished every other light in the world so that Jesus might then shine in it alone. This exaggeration of the truth in the service of apologetics was the more fatal that the Church soon began to turn this pessimism to good account.
The Crisis. Jesus the Saviour.
In the scheme of St Paul’s missionary preaching
the message of the judgment and of death is followed
by that of the crucified and risen Son of God. Here
we have the heart and centre of the Pauline theology.
Here we can see more clearly than in many other
cases into the genesis of his creed. It goes right back
to the deep personal experience connected with the
vision of the risen Christ. And this experience
imparts its personal character to the theory, producing
What did Paul learn of Jesus? For what was he indebted to Him?
He did not know Jesus upon earth, and only learnt some facts of His life by hearsay. His personal acquaintance with Jesus was only brought about by means of the vision on the road to Damascus. Here he saw the heavenly Jesus, the risen Lord, the Spirit, and was called by Him to be an apostle. Hence the Resurrection of Jesus comes to be a fact of very far-reaching influence for him. Death’s reign is at an end. Eternity—the spirit world—enters in triumph into the world of sense. The morrow of the new day has dawned. Now, as the call at Damascus is the starting-point for the whole of St Paul’s new life, the resurrection has really become the foundation of his religion for him.
A new light is forthwith shed upon the crucifixion
likewise. Before this the Cross was the greatest
stumbling-block, as it apparently refuted the claim of
Jesus to be the Messiah. But no sooner was He
accepted as the risen Lord than it came to appear as
something divine. It was the means of salvation.
By the sacrifice on the Cross God’s message of love
and grace was conveyed to man. These seem to us
to be theological reflections. But the sense of pardon
and blessedness which Paul derived from the Cross
was a real personal experience. Henceforth it is for
him the fixed centre round which all history turns,
There can be no doubt, therefore, that this experience is the root of St Paul’s Christology. The articles of his creed, however, are a great deal more than the expression of this experience. In them as they have now come down to us we can hear the Christian apologist speaking. One instance above all others will serve to make this point clear. As the result of his experience St Paul might have said: “As for me, it was at the foot of the cross that I first learnt what God’s love meant.” But instead of this we read in the letters: “No man can attain to the certainty of this atonement save in the cross alone.” That is the language of the apologist. Hence the extension to all men, the proof of necessity, the exclusion of all other possibilities. This applies to al] St Paul’s statements about the crucifixion and resurrection: how much more to the development of the doctrine concerning the Son of God, where there is no personal experience to build upon.
The Cross, the Resurrection, the Son of God—these are three new great starting-points in the Pauline Christology. In the Cross he proclaims God’s love, in the Resurrection the dawn of the world that is to come, in the Son of God the pattern for all Christians. Since St Paul wrote, these are the three subjects of all Christology.
The Proof of the Love of God.
The first portion of St Paul’s apologetic had presented the Gentiles before the judgment-seat of God
When once Paul became a Christian, he accepted this explanation. All that he did was to add additional conceptions of sacrifice, propitiation and redemption, employing the terms of the professional theologians. The theory of sacrifice is repeated in countless variations in his letters, now in a legal, now in a ceremonial form, and again in both together. It was really through St Paul that the thought of Jesus’ death, of sin, and of the atonement for sin, first came to be inseparably connected. St Paul’s greatness is not, however, constituted by this rationalism—for such we must term the arithmetical manipulation of the death of Jesus—but by an entirely new appreciation of the Crucifixion.
In the first place, he removed the death of Jesus
from its narrow Jewish setting and placed it in the
centre of the world’s history. He attached so
immense a significance to this propitiatory sacrifice that
all petty legal categories were felt to be comparatively
unimportant. Jesus did not die for the sins of a few
Jews alone, but for all mankind; nay, more, even for
the world of spirits. The explanation of this fact
is that no ordinary righteous man died on the Cross,
but the Son of God, the highest object of the divine
love. What need after this for any other sacrifices,
means of propitiation, acts of penitence—in fact, of
any human works? The propitiatory death of Jesus
occupies the place of all that was ever done to gain
God’s grace. There was nothing left to be done by
men, or even by angels, than just to accept this propitiatory sacrifice. But in the next place St Paul’s interpretation of this sacrifice started from above and
not from below. It is not that a sacrifice is to be
brought to God which is to change His wrath into
mercy. Such had been men’s thoughts before, but
God is the agent, the sacrificer, the propitiator: and
the motive of His action is love, and nothing but love.
That was an entire reversal of the usual point of view,
and we find it clearly and consciously employed by
St Paul in all the chief passages of his letters: God
was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.
God gave His own Son for us, to show us that He
would give us all. God shows His love for us in that
while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. By
thus proclaiming aloud the love of God the apostle
really does away with the necessity for all legal and
propitiatory thoughts. If the conception of sacrifice
It is true, however, that the influence of Jewish
modes of thought again makes itself felt here in the
exaggerated estimate of the single historical fact.
As before the whole process of man’s moral degradation was derived from Adam’s fall, accompanied
by sin and death, so now all God’s grace is gathered
together from the whole course of history, and
concentrated in the death of Jesus. Paul actually
denies that God ever pardoned before the death of
Jesus; at any rate, he maintains that it was only now
that His grace was made manifest. Had he not in
his apologetic zeal already extinguished every other
light in the world? This new light must now therefore illuminate the whole world and the whole course
of history both forwards and backwards. This exaltation of the one historical fact was not so dangerous
for Paul, who expected the end of the world in the
near future, as for later ages, which were thereby
nothing less than robbed of their faith in the living
God. It must, moreover, be remembered that the
historical fact can never be intelligible without the
theological interpretation. One of two results is
bound to follow. Either rationalism gains the upper
hand, and defines the necessity of the death of Jesus,
attaching a legal or ceremonial value thereto; or
the paradoxical and the miraculous elements prevail,
and then there remains nothing but faith in the
Here the old and the new lie side by side. To the former belong the theory of sacrifice and the rationalism, which attains to its position of influence in the Church through none other than Paul himself, to the latter the paradox that God’s love is manifested in the Cross. Now this statement, when properly understood, annuls the theory of sacrifice, and approximates to the thought of Jesus that even death and suffering come out of God’s hand. But when St Paul narrows the statement, maintaining that God’s grace is visible only in the Cross, then he departs from Jesus’ teaching, who saw God’s love poured out upon mankind in all that He gave them both in trouble and in joy.
The reason of this is that St Paul, as an apologist, is obliged to narrow the road that leads to God’s love, so that it must perforce pass through the Christian faith alone, and therein he sets no good example to the Church.
The Dawn of the Coming World.
The Resurrection of Jesus was an unparalleled event; the sovereignty of death was at an end; he that had ears could hear the first peal sounding for the general resurrection to usher in the world that was to come. From the invisible world Jesus stepped forth once more into the world of phenomena, and so testified still more clearly to the fact that the new world was close at hand.
St Paul, who was himself vouchsafed an appearance of the risen Christ, grasped the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus: the old world is passing away, the new world is at hand. Thereby the Christian hope received a mighty accession of strength. Again and again we have these two statements coupled together. As surely as God awakened Jesus so surely will He awaken us. But such were the thoughts of the earliest Christians as well. What is new in St Paul’s conception of the resurrection is the meaning that he discovers in it for this present life.
The positive and negative elements seemed to him to be necessarily combined in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. The Son of God had come into this world only to die because of it, and to succumb to its evil powers. But no sooner was He awakened from the dead than His life began in the world beyond, the true world.
All this seemed to Paul to be typical and symbolical, and that in very many ways. Did it not imply that man had bidden farewell to all the former world, and that the new world had already dawned? Death, sin, the flesh, the descent from Adam—their power was broken, their reign was at an end, But the new sun was fast rising, and its rays were already illuminating the Christian life.
To express this in theological language was, however, rather more difficult. Again we have an
historical fact—to be sure, it was a miracle—to start
with. Now, was this miracle to imply the transition
from the old world to the new? It was evident that
death, sin, and the flesh still continued in the world.
The Resurrection of Jesus did not put an end to all
The end of death is, of course, one of the things to be awaited. But flesh and sin are to be laid aside. How can that be done, seeing that Paul himself still lives in the flesh, and very many Christians still in sin? St Paul gives two explanations, and the one contradicts the other.
On the one hand, as he looks at life as it really is, he takes refuge in ethical theory, in the categorical imperative. Christ’s death and resurrection ought to imply for all Christians the death of their own sin and selfishness, and the beginning of the new life. On all occasions St Paul insisted clearly and impressively on this imperative.
On the other hand, his metaphysical pessimism impels him to accept a theory which brings the powers of nature on the scene, and maintains that flesh and sin have been overcome in the tragedy of Jesus’ death. Seeing that men have been described by him as under the dominion of evil powers of nature, there is no room for a purely ethical solution. Somehow or other these natural powers must be vanquished and rendered innocuous by the death of Christ. This St Paul really did maintain, but never in a very convincing fashion.
As a matter of fact these theories are concerned
with the other-worldly character of Christianity.
That beautiful passage in Colossians: “Seek the
things that are above, where Christ is seated at the
right hand of God . . . . your life is hid with Christ
in God,” tells us what is St Paul’s object. The
Christian is to have his gaze turned towards the
The Son of God who came down from Heaven.
St Paul was not acquainted with the historic Christ
during His life here on earth. He merely heard men
speak of Him. He thus became familiar with all
manner of instances of His love, humility, and kindness, and apparently he told his Greek converts of
them. These, however, did not form the basis of his
theology. The most important element in that are
the titles. The knowledge of the titles and of their
value compensates for the lack of personal knowledge.
How could it be otherwise? If one knows Jesus
St Paul had three titles from which to choose—all three had been commonly used of Jesus in the earliest Christian community: Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God.
The title of Messiah—the Greeks said Christ—is
naturally retained by St Paul, were it but for the
Jews’ sake. He employs the word in the old eschatological sense, as the Lord of the kingdom of heaven
that is at hand, and also, with but little of its original
meaning, as a mere title of Jesus. He nowhere
attaches any new signification to it. He himself
awaits the advent of Messiah, earnestly looks forward
to the day of Messiah, and considers all Christians to
be living in expectation of Messiah’s revelation. His
idea of the Messiah is that of the apocalypses. He
conquers Antichrist and vanquishes Beliar; doubtless He is surrounded by all the
hosts of heaven just as He is represented in the apocalyptic pictures. And he
likewise expects the judgment of Messiah when God shall grant Him to sit upon
His judgment-seat. But this Jesus that is yet to come is of almost less
importance for St Paul than the Jesus who has come already. Besides thus looking
forward into the future we find him—more and more frequently—looking back upon
the Cross and the Resurrection. Besides, he feels that the word Christ has a
strange sound for Greek ears, and conveys no clear meaning. He therefore
introduces two Greek titles in its stead: Lord and Saviour. The word Lord is
introduced as an equivalent for Messiah into the official formulae
The second title—Son of Man—St Paul abandoned, as it could only have denoted Jesus’ human descent for the Greeks—quite contrary to the sense of the Hebrew word. But instead he calls Jesus the ‘Man.’ It is possible that he intended this as the right Greek translation of the oldest title. “The man from heaven” would then be the last reminiscence of the passage in Daniel where the “Son of man is expected from heaven.”
Unfortunately we cannot determine with sufficient
certainty whether St Paul, in making use of his idea
of the heavenly man or second man, started from the
title, Son of Man, that was used in the primitive
community. For in any case he created something
new and original, whatever the preliminary stages may
have been. The abrupt break of continuity with the
national Christology and the conception of Jesus’ world-wide mission are both revealed in this title.
Jesus appears to be so great to St Paul that He can
only be compared with the first man, the father of the
human race. Where Adam fell back He goes forward,
Besides, St Paul himself frequently varied these thoughts. In one place you will find the whole contrast is made to consist in the difference of natures: Adam earthly, Jesus heavenly. In another, in the difference of the act: Adam disobeyed, Jesus was obedient. The explanation is that on each occasion he is pursuing a different aim. In order to bring out clearly the sequence of the present and the future world, he contrasts the lower and the higher nature of the two prototypes. But when he wishes to guarantee the certainty of the life eternal to the Christians, he demonstrates that equally important consequences for their descendants have resulted from the deeds of these two progenitors.
But how are we the descendants of Christ? There is no answer. Neither does the comparison of the consequences hold good. Adam’s descendants died; Christ’s followers die also. At bottom, then, no very great service is rendered by this comparison. It dazzles one at first, but cannot be carried out. It is a brilliant idea entertained by St Paul for a time but afterwards abandoned. The meaning of Jesus cannot be clearly expressed by changing and playing with such antitheses.
There remains yet one title—the Son of God as
the centre of Pauline theology. The word ‘Son of
God’ had already been used by the earliest community, but in a very harmless sense. It denoted
Jesus as the favourite of God, His confidant, knowing
His ways better than anyone else. In the
But what is the relation of the Jesus of history to
St Paul used the words “man such as we are” in a very strict sense indeed. Jesus had been born of a woman. He had taken upon Himself our physical nature. He died on the Cross and was buried. He even died of weakness and to pay the debt of sin. Had the Docetae then existed they would have found no more determined opponent than the apostle himself. For the death on the Cross, which was their chief rock of offence, was the apostle’s glory. If he occasionally uses the equivocal expression, ‘homoioma,’ picture or likeness, then he would merely say that the Son of God, who is originally of a different nature, now became such as we are. Neither, however, does the later doctrine of the twofold nature—the opinion that in Christ Jesus a heavenly being was united to a human find any support in St Paul. Jesus, while upon earth, was for him a man, not a man and Son of God, first flesh then spirit, not both together. One thing only separates Jesus from all other men, His sinlessness, which has of necessity to be postulated for the theory of sacrifice. With this one exception nothing separates Him from ourselves. However often He may be set up as our pattern, nothing is ever said of a special spiritual organization, or of a second nature.
Doubtless this whole point of view is a myth from beginning to
end, and cannot be termed anything else. It was as a myth, as a story of a God
who had descended
The way in which St Paul, however, imparts an ethical meaning to his myth is very admirable. The coming down of the Son of man to a life of service and obedience forms the pattern of our humility and sacrifice. The whole of the great Christological passage in the letters to the Philippians has an ethical and practical purpose. But how much more simply did Jesus teach His disciples the lesson of humility by the example of His life upon earth without any mythological background! As everywhere, St Paul finally reaches the thought of Jesus, but here in so dangerous and roundabout a fashion that the Jesus of history is completely smothered up by the myth of the heavenly Son of God.
Paul and Jesus.
The Cross, the Resurrection, the Son of God who descended from heaven—these are the three great innovations of the Pauline Christology. In the Gospel of Jesus they are almost entirely wanting, yet St Paul’s object is to express evangelical thoughts by means of them. The comparison between the Master and the disciple is especially instructive:—
1. Jesus.—God is our Father, and has been always and everywhere. He showers down His love upon us by the gifts of food and raiment, by abundant pardon, by deliverance from the evil, by the promise of the kingdom that is to come. All that Jesus does and says is meant to confirm man’s faith in the love of God the Father.
Paul.—In the Cross of Jesus God gives the whole world a proof of His pardon and His love. Without that there is no certainty of the atonement. Only he that believes in the Cross has the true God.
So speaks the ecclesiastical apologist according to the principle that outside of the Church—that is, the community of those that believe in the Cross—there is no salvation.
2. Jesus.—The kingdom of God is at hand. It is to be the aim of the disciples’ longing, and is to give them strength for a new life in righteousness. Jesus leads His disciples onwards till they can walk in the light of eternity.
Paul.—The Resurrection of Jesus is the proof that the world to come is already beginning. Even now the Christian is risen with Jesus and has entered into life eternal.
So speaks the apologist, who is bound to give palpable proofs for the promised realities, and thereby confuses facts and postulates.
3. Jesus.—Through His teaching and His example He redeems men, so that they become the children of God, and lifts them up to a life of love and humility.
Paul.—The Son of man came down from heaven
upon earth so that we might have a pattern in His
So speaks the apologist, who himself knew not Jesus, for whom therefore the mythical picture had to effect that which the impression made by Jesus wrought in the earlier disciples.
The consequences of the great innovation were boundless. Jesus was presented to the Greeks in the shape of a mythical drama. Once again they had a new myth, and that, too, derived from the immediate present. And this conquered the world. The simple teaching of Jesus of Nazareth had never been able thus to win its way to victory, for the world was not yet ripe to receive the impression of a great personality by itself. That which was great and redemptive in Jesus had to suffer itself to be wrapped up in the heavy coverings of dogma; even in St Paul it lives and works mightily therein. In spite of all, it must be deemed fortunate that Jesus was preached to the world by St Paul. After all, side by side with the thoughts about Him came the Master Himself.
The Salvation of the Faithful.
After preaching the crucified and risen Son of God,
St Paul’s next step in the course of his missionary
labours was to gather the faithful into communities,
to purify their life in common, and so to regulate it
that it might become a haven for the individual and
the means of his salvation. Passing now to theory,
we find the doctrine of the salvation of the faithful
built up upon these facts. Here, too, the foundation is
formed by St Paul’s experience both of his own nature,
and especially of his missionary communities; but it
St Paul had himself been converted by the appearance of the risen Lord. He had felt an entire breach of continuity with the past, the death of his former life, a changed estimate of all values, of all frames of mind. But at the same time he felt the growth of a new life within himself since that meeting with Christ. Powers burst forth into being, of the existence of which he had had no previous knowledge. He himself began to speak with tongues, to behold visions, to catch glimpses of the world beyond. So powerfully did he feel the nearness of God that he was compelled to fall upon his knees and to cry out “Abba, Father.” Peace and joy, blessedness, freedom from all anxious care, took up their abode within him. The contest against all the powers of evil seemed no longer so terrible. Victory was at hand. He felt himself to be more than human—a giant, a hero: “I can do all things through Him that strengtheneth me.” All this called for an explanation, and Paul, in accordance with the whole of his psychology, could only find it in the ‘Spirit’ which had miraculously been imparted to him.
The experience he had gathered in the course of his
missionary work seemed to him to point in the same
direction. Here he saw the servants of sin, the scum
and offscouring of mankind, carried away by a passion
ate religious enthusiasm from the very moment that
he began to preach, and often even strengthened so as
to overcome their sins. Many were the miracles that
he witnessed among his converts—manifestations of
power, such as the healing of diseases, the speaking
Both these factors, the personal experience as well as the results of the missionary journeys, must be remembered if one would understand the doctrine of redemption. But the third factor—the apologetic motive is not long in making its influence felt. The results of experience are universalized and completed. The ecclesiastical interest acquires clear expression for the first time in a theory concerning the value of the Church as an organized body. The word ‘ekklesia’ is of course but little mentioned as yet, but all the more is said of Faith, of the Spirit, of Baptism, which together constitute the Church. But at the same time even the most determined apologist cannot shut his eyes to the imperfection of the communities and of the redemption by means of them. The patch work character of the whole of this earnest of the world to come is only too evident. Hence the theory concerning the postulates for the future world succeeds the theory concerning the experiences in the present; the doctrine of salvation by the Church is followed by eschatology.
The Theory of the Experiences.
St Paul recognizes as the root of the Christian’s new life a single definite force: the Spirit of God or of Christ. This force does not work directly, but only through the means of grace. The inner means is faith; the outer are the Word, the Church and the Sacraments. Now, though the Spirit works upon men through these media an entire change of the inner and outer man is seldom effected: there are. obstacles in the way. Such obstacles are the flesh, the sin that still remains, suffering and death. The Christian’s duty is to endeavour to overcome these obstacles. He actually does this partly through faith and moral effort, partly through hope in the coming perfection. Thus the theory of the experiences leads on quite naturally to the theory of the postulates for the future world. Such, then, is the arrangement of the following section.
i.
The power that effects the believer’s salvation is the Spirit. Although St Paul occasionally speaks of the Spirit as though it were matter—e.g., the outpouring of the Spirit—yet he regards it usually as distinctly a force. As such it is included under the strict law of natural causation, only that it is a cause of a higher order. Like all forces, it can only be described by its effects.
The effects of the Spirit are exceedingly manifold, and range from the extraordinary to the normal, from the miracle to ordinary virtue.
First of all come the physical effects—the ‘forces’ in the general sense of the word. According to the
To quench this exaggerated spiritual exaltation
St Paul places the exact opposite of speaking with
tongues at the head of the gifts of the Spirit, viz., the
word of wisdom and the word of knowledge. As he
is speaking of nothing but extraordinary things, he
must, in the first place, mean a speaking of God
and the Divine which appears suddenly and unexpectedly, like a revelation, and surprises all that listen.
The lightning thought of wisdom reveals the presence
of the Spirit. But that is not all. St Paul teaches
that the whole body of Christian knowledge, all those
thoughts the possession of which constitutes the preeminence of Christians over Jews and Gentiles, can be
traced to the Spirit. Every Christian teacher may
boldly step forth with the claim that he is bringing an
inspired message, and every layman who calls Jesus
Lord speaks under the impulse of the Spirit. This is
the point from which the representation of the
Pauline gnosis will have to start. Two things are
especially important in this derivation of knowledge
from the Spirit. In the first place, the chasm between
St Paul sounds the deepest depths when he brings
the life of prayer into connection with the Spirit.
Prayer as he describes it in
The most important sphere, however, of the Spirit’s operations has yet to be mentioned. St Paul
conquered the whole of life for the Spirit and thence
derived all moral action and every virtue in our
possession. The extraordinary is once more the
starting-point. A charism—a gift of grace—is in
reality the altogether exceptional privilege of quite
extraordinary persons. Just as there are only certain
people who can prophesy or teach, so there are others
who alone understand the difficult task of serving,
of presiding, of ministering to the poor, because they
have been specially endowed by the Spirit with these
gifts. This or that individual Christian can be joyful,
or patient, or chaste in especially difficult circumstances
where perhaps every other would have given up the
struggle. The reason of that must be that the Spirit
But who can fail to recognize that the entire theory of the effects of the Spirit, which, starting from miraculous forces, derives from one and the same source all knowledge, the life of prayer and moral action, is nothing but the description of the Christian ideal drawn by an enthusiastic apostle? The actual state of things, the condition of the congregations, corresponded here and there with this ideal, but contradicted it in the vast majority of cases. A theory of the Christian life as it should be universally is here built up upon isolated great experiences. So Paul spoke to the Gentiles that he might sing the praises of Christianity, and to the Christians in order that they might be urged on to the attainment of the ideal by the description thereof. This apologetic character of the doctrine of the Spirit is rendered still plainer by all that follows.
St Paul terms the Spirit, Spirit of God or Spirit of Christ, and both phrases mean the same thing. The identification is by no means a matter of course. It is the apostle’s doing, and his object is the subordination of mysticism, under the influence of the Jesus of history.
The phrase ‘Spirit of God’ is certainly a very
obscure expression; its meaning depends entirely
upon the conception of God held by the man that
uses it. He who represents God to himself as the
impersonal first cause of the world, or as the negation
St Paul’s universal experience in founding his congregations was that they became the scenes of a wild
enthusiasm which was certainly connected with faith
in Jesus, but had in reality nothing whatever to do
with Jesus Himself. The breach with their former
heathen life, the concentration of their thoughts on
the after world that was so near at hand, their renunciation of this world, the feeling that they were
safe in port, all combined to drive many Christians
into a whirlpool of religious sensations. The religious
life had been aroused, and dominated them exclusively. Plain civic duties and ordinary everyday
work were neglected. Idleness, ascetic tours de force, selfish fanaticism, an exaggerated zeal for
certain spiritual gifts, were on the increase. St
Paul cut off all that was unhealthy and dangerous.
Yet he still allowed enough and to spare of that
enthusiasm to continue, which originated, not from
the influence of Jesus, but from the untrammelled religious impulse. It is very
significant that in speaking about these gifts of the Spirit—e.g., talking
with tongues, healing, etc.,-—St Paul never uses the
words ‘Spirit of Christ;’ just as, conversely, when he
does use them, he never has such manifestations in
On the other hand, St Paul spares no effort in his
endeavour to bring the Spirit under the influence of
Jesus. This he does, firstly, by forming the expressions ‘Spirit of Christ,’ ‘Spirit of the Son of God,’
and next, and in a still higher degree, by placing Christ and the Spirit side by
side with each other, and even identifying them with regard to their influence
upon Christians. This last he effects by a threefold series of propositions:
Christ lives in the believer; the believer lives in Christ; the believer died
and rose again with Christ. In stating the second of these propositions, even
the grammatical expression which St Paul employed—‘in Christ’—is exactly parallel to
the words ‘in the Spirit,’ which were used in other
cases. Now by this means the whole doctrine of
redemption is apparently doubled. We have a theory
of the Spirit and a theory of Christ, the aim of which
is, after all, exactly the same—the renewal of life.
Therefore the Spirit and Christ must be identical, as
indeed we should infer from the very expression ‘Spirit of Christ,’ which connects the two conceptions.
What, then, is the meaning of this identity? It is by
no means a dilution of the idea of Christ into any
thing impersonal or abstract: this is the last thing
of which the man who had seen Christ would think.
On the contrary, it is the Christianization of the Spirit,
who is thereby transformed from an impersonal force
of nature into the historical influence of the person
But it was Paul the apologist who completed this
subordination of the Spirit to Christ. The Jews
spoke of the Spirit of God, and the Greeks might also
The means of grace.
The Spirit of Christ does not enter when and where it will. It is bound to certain outer and inner media. The most important of the latter is faith. St Paul became a Christian without the help of any ecclesiastical organization, but not without faith in Christ. He had to bring that to the vision of Christ which the others had to bring to the preaching of Jesus. The parallel with the miracles of Jesus here strikes one’s attention. Just as want of faith prevented Jesus from performing miracles, so the Spirit, in spite of all the forces at its command, cannot take up its abode with any unbeliever. In neither case is faith the final cause but solely the condition.
What is faith in this connection? Not primarily
that which it came to be later—the acceptation of a number of formula? as true;
just as little as this was the faith which Jesus demanded. Faith can best here
be defined as readiness and receptivity for the work of redemption. When Paul
begins his preaching of death and judgment, of the Cross and Resurrection, as
God’s great acts of redemption, these all depend upon whether or not his hearer
recognizes something divine therein, something that has to do with his own
redemption. He needs not to understand the connection of the propositions. As
soon as it dawns upon him, “this Jesus concerns me and my salvation,” then faith
has been awakened in him. Consciousness of a divine power unto salvation in the
mighty drama of Jesus that, and nothing but that, is faith. Forthwith,
If we ask in the next place whether this faith is a free act on the part of man, or whether it is God working in him, then it is very hard to say what answer St Paul would have given. The different parts of his doctrine of salvation are as a matter of fact so closely connected together that there is very little room for the exercise of man’s free will; in man there dwells no good thing—but yet there is the longing for salvation. The doctrines of grace and of predestination appear to exclude any co-operation on the part of man in the work of redemption. If God determines who is to belong to the saved and to the lost, then faith as a condition of salvation must be reckoned as a part of that which God decrees.
But for another reason determinism cannot be said
to be St Paul’s final answer. St Paul is a missionary
and an apologist. As such, he is bound to count
upon the freedom of his hearers. He would lose his
missionary zeal, the fire of his eloquence and the
ardour of his love, if he did not hope to attain his end
thereby amongst men free to choose. He must
often have exclaimed—like a Methodist preacher—“Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of
salvation; be ye reconciled with God. Let not
God’s grace be offered you in vain.” He who
thus appeals to the feelings of his hearers does not
believe that the season of grace for each individual
amongst them has passed long ago. And so we find
St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans counting it a
Of the external means through which the Spirit of
God works upon them that draw nigh, the word of
God is the most essential. Faith is awakened when
the word is preached. In St Paul’s own case, of
course, this does not apply. But not every one is called
by a vision from heaven. St Paul’s opinion of the
importance and power of the word or Gospel was
exceedingly high. In it God’s power unto salvation
is brought near to men. Therefore it is God’s word
and not man’s. Here indeed the apostle is in entire
agreement with his Master, whose employment of
parables is a testimony to the importance He attached
We pass next to that which is
really the most important of all the means of salvation, the Church, i.e.,
the whole Christian organism. The demand for faith—i.e.,
for entrance into the Church—proves that the Spirit
is bound to the Church, and this is further indirectly
proved by the fact that the Spirit nowhere has an
abiding place outside of Christianity. But St Paul
also adopted the most appropriate metaphor to
express this theory, the Church as the body of Christ.
Therefore Christ is the Spirit of the Church.
Thereby he unites Christ and the Church so firmly to each
other as only the Catholic system has done besides.
For as yet no need had arisen for the division of the
Church into visible and invisible. This need only
arose when it became evident that the sad experience
which even St Paul had had, was not transitory but
belonged to the essence of the Church here on earth.
St Paul did not as yet believe this. He looked at
the good and bright sides in his congregations, and
St Paul made a very free use of the metaphors in
tended to express the relationship between Christ and
the Church. Now it is body and spirit, now body
and head, and again man and wife. At times he
pursues the image into minute details without much
taste, after the manner of contemporary allegories.
But the very change of metaphor proves the indissolubility of the quantities compared. Christ and
the Church form a unity for St Paul which nothing
can put asunder. Now, however new this relation
The same remark applies to the remaining means of
salvation, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Hitherto
they had been valued as signs of membership,
baptism as a condition of redemption besides. But
it was Paul who first created the conception of a
sacrament. Any external acts—here bathing, eating,
and drinking—are turned into sacraments as soon as
they are esteemed to be means of salvation. They
are thereby stamped as something different from what
they really are: the element of mystery and the
miraculous takes possession of them, they come to
be the instruments of divine power. This result
St Paul achieved in the case of baptism and the
Lord’s Supper. Baptism was not of supreme
importance for himself personally. It conferred no
new gift upon the man who had been vouchsafed the
vision of Christ. As missionary, too, he had not
regarded baptizing as his office. God had not sent
him forth for that. Even the great idea of dying and
rising again with Christ appears in the Epistle to the
Galatians without any mention of baptism. It is only
Obstacles to Salvation, and the way to overcome them.
Salvation as St Paul conceives of it, is in its essence the imparting of a divine power. Men cannot save themselves—they are sick, powerless, and prisoners. Then there comes to their help the power that has its origin in the world beyond, the Spirit. He takes over the guidance into his hands as effective cause. We ourselves are passive instruments driven by the Spirit. The aim of salvation is that the power from beyond should permeate everywhere and dominate all, absorbing entirely everything that is fleshly and sinful. Then shall the next world, the new heaven and the new earth, have come unto us.
But do we even attain to a complete salvation here
in this world—when everything that is old hath passed
away and all things have become new? No; salvation
by the Spirit is thwarted by certain obstacles which stop
its progress. Death is still with us, and announces its
approach by sufferings which ever remind us of our
perishable nature and drag us down from the heights
of enthusiasm. The flesh is by no means dead or
absorbed. The Christian feels his lusts and passions
only too keenly. And sin? St Paul met with it at every step among his converts.
At Corinth alone incest, fornication, lawsuits about property, party strife. And
had it really departed even out of his own life?
Paul was no fanatic to shut his eyes to any unpleasant facts. Whenever he came across a sin he called it by its name. To hush things up or decently to throw a veil over them was never his way. He remained unaffected by the flowers of Greek rhetoric. It would be truer to say that he occasionally formed too gloomy a picture of the state of the whole community because of the sins or failings of a few. But he never lost courage. He clings firmly to his. apologetic theory of the ideal of redemption without admitting any limitations, and he sets to work to look the obstacles that lie in the way straight in the face and to overcome them.
First comes the summons to fight against the flesh, sin and
the devil, to fight with all the power of one’s will. For it has been proved
that the Spirit alone cannot do it. Man—i.e., his will—is to help the Spirit
to victory by taming the lusts and passions, by hard
work and strict self-discipline. Now here the
categorical imperative and the thought of the end to
be achieved reinforce the Spirit working according to
laws of natural causation. Whether this is theoretically conceivable or not is a matter of indifference.
Whenever St Paul expounds the theory of salvation
he ends by this call to duty. And thereby he
rendered experience her due. If we live in the Spirit
let us also walk in the Spirit. We are debtors not to the
If, however, in spite of all, the believer should have
stumbled, then faith raises itself up again by the
Cross of Jesus. For surely God’s love does not cease
at our baptism. Why, that is when it really begins
for us. As Christians we are under grace, and have
the certainty of salvation from the wrath that is to
come. It is not, of course, from ourselves that we
derive any absolute guarantee of the abiding love of
God. Even though the Spirit may impart to us in
our hearts the certainty of the Sonship, who shall tell
us exactly where the Spirit ceases and one’s own wish
begins? The moments of ecstatic communion with
God are succeeded, alas, often so swiftly, by hellish
Our self-discipline and faith in God’s love do not, however, fully remove the obstacles in the way of salvation. Again and again the Christian finds himself entangled in this present evil world. Only one thing helps him in every difficulty, and that is hope. Hope alone permits the Christian to look at the world as it is, and to escape depression without wrapping himself up in any fictitious optimism. We walk by faith, not by sight. We are, it is true, saved, yet by hope. Here we see in a mirror darkly, and all our knowledge is fragmentary. We ourselves, though we have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body. The Spirit is an earnest of our future state, and not that state itself. Never did any man realize the imperfection of our present state more sincerely or truly. That is why no one can call him an idle enthusiast. This recognition, however, of the defects of our present state is but the necessary negative condition attaching to the positive hope in which St Paul’s message centres. This present world passeth away, and the salvation which has here been begun will soon be completed.
This leads us on of itself to the theory of the postulates for the future. The decisive factor here, however,
is not the picture of his fancy, but the power of the
yearning which draws its comfort thence. For this
yearning Paul found words—think of the song of
creation’s earnest expectation—which still to-day fill
us, “ripae ulterioris amore”! For the details of
eschatology are always more or less the product of
By thus striving to overcome the obstacles on the
road to redemption through work, faith, and hope, the
Christian at length attains to the certainty of salvation,
so that he can stand on the everlasting foundations
even now, in the midst of tribulation and distress.
The assurance of salvation is explained by the
theory of election—Paul starts from the following
proposition: That which is eternal cannot have
arisen in time. If the Christian, therefore, is certain
of his eternal salvation, then this must have been
determined upon by God before all time. God chose
certain individual men and women before the creation
of the world, even those who possess this certainty,
and foreordained that they should become brothers
of Christ and children of God. In consequence
of this election by God, all that happens to them for
their salvation follows in an inevitable succession.
Every imaginable evil may befall such chosen children
of God—it matters not, their lives are marked out for
them, they must reach the goal. All works for their
good and brings them nearer to the goal. Even were
a devil to get possession of them, he would have to
work God’s will and bring them forward on the road
St Paul thought that all Christians should attain to this consciousness of election. He did not, however, transmit his belief to the Church. Experience showed only too plainly that being baptized and being saved are too different things. The individual is to attain to salvation in the Church but not through the Church. St Paul prescribed no particular method for the acquisition of the assurance of salvation. As tokens he mentions now the love felt for God, now the faith in the Cross, and now the voice of the Spirit. In the end it is found to be a personal experience. No man can tell his brother what it is; he must discover it himself. God is faithful, and He will complete the good work which He has begun; so St Paul would reassure those of a wavering and doubting temperament. Here, however, there is a gap in the apostle’s apologetic system. Strict consistency demanded that entrance into the Church should guarantee salvation. St Paul meets this demand half-way when he connects salvation with faith. But he does not pursue this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. In the end salvation is a matter which the individual has to settle with his God. Hereby we see that St Paul was more than an apologist for the Church: he was a disciple of Jesus.
The Theory of the Postulates for the Future.
Here, too, the needs of the apostle’s apologetic
system unite with his personal hopes. The vast
From these data we can derive a clear picture of
the Pauline eschatology in its principal features, distinguishing its negative from its positive elements.
All that is hostile to God throughout the whole
sphere of salvation must be conquered, destroyed,
or at least subdued. Flesh and blood cannot inherit
the kingdom of God. They are taken up into
something higher. All the hostile angelic powers are
cast down and subjected to the dominion of Christ.
Finally, the last enemy, death, is vanquished. And,
on the other hand, the dead rise up, they enter into
These are the principal features of the eschatology;. they are
perfectly clear and in this form peculiar to St Paul. There are several features
of the Jewish apologetic which point in the same direction—e.g., the
idea of a transformation of the body, but nowhere so
simple and consistent a system. St Paul, it is true,
completes this system by the addition of many traditional details derived from Jewish apologetics. To the
principal features he added: the Antichrist, the arrival
of Messiah, the restoration of Israel, the day of judgment, the millennium, Paradise and others. The
process of transformation is also conceived in a thoroughly
Jewish fashion with many wonders and catastrophes,
and as of old, this earth is to be the scene of the
kingdom of God. But all this is relatively of little
importance compared with that which alone really
matters—the immense progress in the spiritualization
of the eschatology. We enter into a new world,
a spiritual kingdom. The earthly joys of Jesus’ promise, the glad eating and drinking at His table,
have gone. Paul retains, however, what Jesus desired
above all else—communion with God in a higher, an
eternal state of existence. Taking this, therefore, as
With these brief indications he has left us a number
of unsolved problems. (1) Is the resurrection and
transformation of the body one event, or are they
two separate occurrences which succeed each other
rapidly? On one occasion, St Paul says plainly, the
dead shall rise incorruptible; on another he speaks of
the awakening of the mortal body, when he explains
to the Corinthians that the body belongs to the Lord
and not to fornication; and founds his explanation on
the message of the resurrection. He appears to presuppose that this mortal body will in the first instance
rise again. Is it not contained in the very conception
of resurrection and transformation that the old body
will first of all arise from the grave and only
afterwards be changed? (2) Does Paul expect a resurrection of all men, or only of Christians? In the most
important chapter he only mentions the resurrection of
Christians, but in the course of his missionary preaching he brings all the just and the unjust before the
judgment throne of God. But even if the unbelievers
participate in the resurrection, the spiritual body
cannot surely be granted them. We do not find any
definite mention of hell—the word itself does not even
occur. Is it possible that he conceived of ordinary
death as a final punishment? (3) When does the
judgment take place? Does it coincide with the
But is it true that all men are condemned either to
life or to death? Isolated texts in St Paul’s Epistles
appear to give expression to the bold thought that
all men shall be saved. “As in Adam all die, so also
in Christ shall all be made alive.” “As through one
trespass the judgment came unto all men to condemnation, even so through one act of righteousness the
free gift came unto all men to justification of life.” “God hath shut up all unto disobedience that He
might have mercy upon all.” On these passages
later theologians have based their hope of a universal
restoration. But on insufficient grounds. As soon
Other passages in the letters have given rise to the
opinion that in the course of his life St Paul gradually
receded more and more from the Jewish hope of the
resurrection and approximated to the Greek hope of
immortality in the after-world. We hear of the
apostle’s wish to enter into the eternal house of God
in heaven as soon as his earthly tabernacle is dissolved,
or of his longing to depart and be with Christ. That
appears to point to something different to the old
hope of the resurrection. But it is only appearance.
The man who composed the great chapter on the
resurrection in First Corinthians had not yet acquired
The Pauline eschatology was too exalted for the later Christians, too poor in the concrete pictures of the imagination. It was not the letters of St Paul but the Apocalypse that became the handbook for the doctrine of the last things. Since, however, they drew the longing for eternity from these letters and suffered his courage, his consolation and his joy to influence their lives, St Paul’s labours in their midst were not altogether fruitless.
St Paul was the first to build up a great theory of
salvation. Before him salvation had been a matter of
experience. No one had described it. Jesus made
children of God of His disciples without uttering one
word about salvation. Through Him they had
become established in hope, and victorious in the
pursuit of the good; the anguish of sin no longer
beset them, the cares of this world no longer troubled
them; death itself had lost its terrors. They were
God’s children, living together with God as with their
father. Upon the basis of this experience—his own
as well as that of others—St Paul built up his soteriology. He called the power which produced all these
single effects the Spirit of God, and united it with
the historic Christ and the Gospel. The Spirit is
But St Paul likewise built up this whole theory of redemption as an apologist in the service of the Church. The Spirit was attached to the Church and its institutions. He made out all men outside of the Church to be as bad as possible, he set up the Christ of the Church as the only Saviour, and praised the Christian ideal, as it is possessed by the Church, as the greatest thing in the world. Thereby his soteriology obtained that definite ecclesiastical character with which it shortly afterwards passed over into Catholicism.
By constructing this theory of redemption St Paul united the Gospel of Jesus with a cosmology and a theology which in spite of many Jewish conceptions was bound to be welcomed by the decaying ancient world on account of its pessimism, its new myths, its ideal, its doctrine of hope. Jesus, His influence and His Church, were here introduced into the drama of the great world. All that was merely Jewish and national was weeded out; there remained the story of the fall and of the redemption of creation. And conversely, all the hopes and longings, the thoughts and imaginations of the ancient world came to crystallize round the person of Jesus, and so acquired consistency and the sense of reality. Thus, then, the background had been found for Jesus, and the centre for the philosophy of the world and of salvation. That was the work of St Paul.
THE contrasts between this world and the next,
between Adam and Christ, the flesh and the Spirit,
death and life, are the subjects of the great theology
of salvation. No mention is made of Israel, of its
law, of its peculiar position. These matters do not
concern the Greeks. But the struggle against Jews
and Judaizers compelled St Paul to undertake a learned
exposition of his teaching as compared with Judaism.
This struggle had of course to be fought out in the
first instance in the sphere of actual fact. The
connection with the synagogue had to be cut off
in all places where St Paul preached, and the Old
Testament had to be brought to the Gentile Christians
without the official Jewish explanation. Then St
Paul had stubbornly to defy the whole congregation
at Jerusalem, and at Antioch to withstand St Peter
to the face—fighting, in the first instance, for the
freedom of the Gentile Christians, and in the second
for their equality of rights with the Jewish Christians.
More important here than all his learning was the
resolute attitude of his personality. Finally he had
The Law Annulled.
It was a memorable hour when St Paul met St Peter at Antioch, and fairly placed the alternative before him: Christ or the law. Either the one or the other. A little while before, at the council at Jerusalem, he had only proclaimed the freedom of his Gentile converts without criticising the observance of the law by the Jewish Christians. But now the law and Christ stood opposed to each other. Paul put the following question to Peter: Where have we ourselves found our salvation, and where not? No sooner was the question put in this antithetical form than the law was annulled. It now took its place amongst those hostile powers from which Christ has set us free. Henceforth St Paul’s motto was: to die unto the law, in order to be able to live unto God.
Thereby St Paul destroyed the idea that true religion was the legal system of the Jewish race. His object now was to establish this on a theoretical basis.
There were many ways in which he might achieve this result. The divine origin of the law might be questioned. Or secondly, the eternal and the temporal elements in the law might be separated by means of internal criticism. There was a third road, which led to freedom from the law—allegorical interpretation. Finally it could be pointed out that the law was not the way of salvation, and had been annulled by a new divine dispensation.
The first method—the denial of the divine origin—
The second method was pursued by Catholic and
gnostic teachers of the second century, who distinguished the eternal law of nature from the transitory
law of ritual. Even the conversation of Jesus with
the Scribe as to the supreme commandment seemed to
point in this direction. But for St Paul the ‘nomos’ admits of no such division—it is something whole and
entire. It is possible indeed to be uncertain of which
part of the law he is thinking on this or that particular
occasion: e.g., in
The allegorical interpretation had been a means even for the Alexandrian Jews (Philo and others) of liberating themselves, at least theoretically, from the literal meaning of the law. It was practised in Palestine also, and Paul knew of it. He made use occasionally of Old Testament stories in an allegorical fashion: e.g., of the story of Isaac and Ishmael. And in like manner he interpreted isolated commandments which seemed to him unsuitable to God if taken literally; as, e.g., the prohibition to muzzle the mouth of the oxen when the corn is trodden out. Could not the whole of the ritual law be thus interpreted? Would not this turn out to be the road to freedom?
There are indeed certain indications which appear to point in
this direction. The circumcision of the heart in the spirit is contrasted with
the circumcision of the flesh as that which alone has value in the sight of God.
Or we hear of the circumcision not made with hands—i.e., the putting off
of the body of the flesh at baptism. If the law is spiritual, does it not then
rightly need a spiritual—i.e., allegorical—interpretation
of those portions which are of less value? Does not
the celebrated antithesis of letter and spirit (
St Paul’s theology pursues an entirely independent course of its own. His criticism establishes two propositions hitherto unheard of: the law cannot be the way of salvation; Christ by His death has freed us from the law.
1. The law cannot be the way of salvation, because it only demands, it does not give. It presupposes God as lawgiver and judge: man has to perform a task, God rewards or punishes. St Paul never wearies of describing this relationship of wages without toning down any of the difficulties. “Now to him that worketh, the reward is not reckoned as of grace but as of debt.” Thereby, however, the result of the law is merely a negative one. The law brings the full knowledge of sin: by its continual injunctions and prohibitions it actually stimulates transgression and drives a man to sin. So it works wrath and has death as its doom. Despair is the result of the service of the law.
The picture which St Paul thereby presents to
us of later Judaism is a very strange one. He
characterizes it as a religion of wage service and of
fear, a slave’s religion suitable for bondsmen only. To
be a sincere adherent of Judaism is tantamount to
despairing of one’s salvation. For God is the stern
Judge before whom even the most pious Jew cannot
Now, is St Paul’s criticism of later Judaism just? What would a Jewish Rabbi think of this representation of his faith? He would say: this is a caricature of our religion. The Jewish Church is law and grace. The law presupposes grace. To be a Jew, a child of Abraham and a member of the chosen people, is already a mark of grace. Circumcision is a symbol of God’s covenant grace. The whole Jewish Church is an organization for the attainment of salvation. It has sacrifices, repentance, the great day of atonement, the good works of the fathers, personal merits, the forgiveness of God in answer to prayer. He who has fear in the presence of the law may take refuge in the grace of God. For Israel has a God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, a faithful God.
How was it that St Paul thus entirely ignored the grace that was in the Jewish Church and the justification that was already within reach? There is a double reason—one personal, one apologetic.
St Paul saw to the bottom of contemporary
Judaism. It was really in the main a service for
wages and a slavish form of piety. A man could not
breathe freely in God’s love, could not feel himself
free as a child of God. Jesus could retain complete
But now, of course, St Paul’s apologetic and
ecclesiastical interests came into play. Besides the
grace in Christ he could not possibly allow any Jewish
means of grace to have any efficacy. The despair
which the law produced in pious souls was welcome
to him, because it was the only way to get them to
accept Jesus as their Redeemer. The whole of St
Paul’s criticism of the law, instead of being based on
Jewish premises, always presupposes the Christian
salvation that has already been won. As a Christian
St Paul had become so entirely estranged from the
law and the Jewish Church that he could never again
judge it objectively. He was obliged, therefore, in
writing
2. The despair to which legalism leads has been
clearly set forth. The law is not the way of salvation,
but as it is nevertheless divine, how can we escape
our obligation to it? Christ was sent by God to set
Christ sets us free from the law in a twofold manner, in both instances by suffering vicariously for us. In the first place, Christ’s whole life upon earth was a free and vicarious service of the law. He was made under law to them that are under law. For the Son of God who descended from heaven was, as such, free from the law. If He subjected Himself to the law He did it for our sakes that we might become the free children of God.
But above all the death of Christ was a vicarious suffering endured to set us free. St Paul’s line of argument is a masterpiece after the true rabbinical fashion. One passage in the law pronounces every transgressor to be accursed; another says that every one that is hanged is accursed of God. Therefore he that is hanged is accounted a transgressor in the eyes of the law. Now, Christ hung upon the tree, but naturally without being a transgressor or accursed. Therefore, He became a curse for us, and our transgression has received its due punishment in His death. Thereby we have been set free from the law.
The passage in which he employs the argument from the marriage law describes exactly the same thing. From a legal point of view death puts an end to marriage and sets the surviving partner free. In a similar manner our obligation to the law would be ended by our death. Christ died in our stead; that is as much as to say that the connection between us and the law had been severed. We are dead to the law. That is to say, we are free men.
It is clear of course that all these arguments deal
with legal abstractions and have nothing whatever to
do with the Jesus of history. The question, does
Jesus set us free from the law or not, could surely
only be answered from the point of view of His
position in history. This St Paul, however, absolutely
refuses to take. The Jesus of history is for him a
servant of the law just like every other Jew, but
as Son of God voluntarily and vicariously. Now,
without going any further, St Paul is at fault in
his premises, and so the whole of this theory is an
ingenious conjuring with ideas and nothing more.
All this strikes us as so unnatural that many have
found it hard before now to take St Paul seriously
here. But for all that he was in serious earnest, and
the idea that he had in his mind was a great one. He
rightly understood Jesus when he conceived of Him
as our Redeemer from the law. He revealed the
contradiction between the respect which Jesus paid
to the law and His actual relation to legalism. He
drew that inference from the Gospel of Jesus, which
His disciples neither had the courage nor the perspicacity to draw for themselves. Jesus was in very
deed the end of the law; with Him began a new
mediatorship and a new religious relation. The
struggle against Scribes and Pharisees reached its
rightful conclusion only when their legalism—the
system which stood behind their persons—was
annulled. That St Paul based this true under
standing of Jesus on a very lame theory which
disregarded facts, we have to take into the
bargain. And, besides, St Paul’s mistake must be
put down to the account of those who had been
Of course, if we confine ourselves to the Jewish point of view we can easily understand the wrath and the indignation of St Paul’s adversaries when he came forward with proofs such as these. For there was no single word in his theory that carried conviction with it. The very method, the attempt to prove the annulling of the law from the law itself, implied reasoning in a circle. There was, to be sure, a good dose of the characteristic cleverness of the Jewish Rabbi in it: and that made it seem all the more obnoxious to them. This kind of apologetic was bound to repel every thinking Jew. Christ was the end of the law for the believer—i.e., for the man who had from the very first embraced the Christian point of view.
Justification by Faith and Freedom in the Spirit.
The positive converse to the negative criticism of the law is the proof of the superiority of the Christian religion over Judaism. St Paul’s object is to show that Christians who have abandoned the law but who believe in Christ as their liberator from the law, far from losing, have been greatly the gainers by the exchange. Once again these theories are based upon experiences quite peculiar to St Paul, out of which, however, he constructs the defence of his practice as missionary and of the gospel which he preaches.
By the vision of Christ on the road to Damascus
the religious relationship had been reversed for
St Paul. Before, it was he who performed and
By this same miracle of his conversion St Paul became a new man morally. When he found God and experienced His love, the good became the untrammelled motive power of his life, proceeding from his inmost being. He felt himself free, and the good conquered, without any kind of external compulsion, without either threats or prohibitions, without the taskmaster: nay, rather, from pure delight and love. That, in St Paul’s language, is the Spirit. When the storms in his inmost being had subsided, external attractions lost their hold upon him. Instead of being something foreign to him, the good became his true home. He felt light-hearted and glad in the midst of all his labours.
By means of these experiences St Paul was able to
look into the depths of religion as no previous thinker
When it was therefore necessary to defend the
reception of the Gentiles against the attacks of
Jews and Judaizers, without exacting the observance
of the law, and simply on the ground of their faith,
then naturally St Paul found his personal experience
very valuable. All that is genuine and profound in
the doctrines of justification and of Christian liberty
can be traced back to the experiences of St Paul.
But his apologetic interests have here injured the
expression of his thoughts to an even greater extent
than in other points of his theology. They compelled
him to accommodate himself to the difficulties and to
the conceptions of his opponents, and to the employment of like conceptions in setting up antitheses
against their theses. A great subject of a distinctly
non-Jewish nature was thereby pressed into a perverted Jewish form. This remark applies to the
doctrine of justification, which defends the entrance
of the Gentiles on the ground of faith, even more
than to the doctrine of Christian liberty. Jews and
Judaizers alike declared that without circumcision
and the fulfilment of the law no one could prepare
What, then, is the meaning of justification? What is the position of God, what is the position of man?
The word ‘justify,’ like its opposite, ‘to declare
guilty,’ is a forensic term and is thence applied to the
act of the Supreme Judge—God. In later Judaism
men pictured God to themselves as keeping account in
heaven of the deeds of men upon earth. Every man
had his own particular page in the heavenly book, in
which the good deeds were written on one side and
the bad on the other. Now the Judge passes sentence
in every moment when He decides to write the deed
on the good or the bad side. But He can only pass
the final sentence when He sums up the total of the
good and the bad deeds. There is accordingly a
twofold act both of justification and of condemnation—one
that is going on continuously as each deed is
done, and a final one on the day of judgment.
Under the first head would be included, e.g., the justification of the publican on the strength of his prayer
in the temple, or of Abraham because of his faith in
God’s promise. Under the second St Paul himself
includes the justification of the doers of the law on
the day of judgment, of which he holds out the
prospect in
The question now arises, which kind of sentence St Paul had in
view in his doctrine of justification:
What, then, is the position of God in justification?
Here we clearly realize the contradiction between the
new meaning and the old form. God must be conceived of as judge in accordance with the forensic
expressions. As such He gives His award on the
In the Jewish doctrine of justification God is the
judge who punishes or rewards. St Paul, revising
this doctrine, substitutes the God of mercy who
forgives sinners on the ground of their faith.
But St Paul’s ultimate object was to establish the
new order: first God, then man. This he does in
the Epistle to the Galatians by emphasizing the
promise, and by uniting promise and faith in one
conception. The God that promises is the God that ‘prevents’; man’s faith only comes second. In the
Epistle to the Romans the doctrine of the revelation
of the “righteousness of God” in the death of Jesus
is intended to express the same thought. In the
doctrine of justification as a connected whole, ‘righteousness’ must be the substantive to the verb
‘to set forth as righteous,’ i.e. to justify, and means ‘justification.’ The only reason why St Paul did not
employ the ordinary Greek word for justification is
that the Old Testament provided him with an
expression established by long usage, “The righteousness of God” (cp.
But the old forensic system exercises its most
baneful effect upon the position of man in the doctrine
of justification. Faith in Jesus Christ comes to be
the condition for justification. Now for Paul himself
this faith was nothing but the feeling of God’s love
in the death of Jesus, the passive reception of God’s gift, the exact opposite of any kind of performance
of works. But in the course of his controversy with
the Judaizers, he sets up, in opposition to their thesis,
justification by the works of the law, his antithesis,
justification by faith; thus putting faith instead of
the ceremonies of the law as the work of man that
is acceptable to God. That is, of course, not his
intention: he emphatically declares faith and works to be opposites, but the
power of his adversaries’ formula is stronger than his will. And what is the
faith after all which secures justification? It is the faith in Jesus as the
Messiah, in His death and resurrection—in a word, it is the creed of the Church.
And thus in fact a new work—the Church’s creed—has stepped into the place of
circumcision, ordinances as to food, the Sabbath, etc., and even now the
apologist is not afraid of uttering the fatal proposition:
One further argument, however, was indispensable.
If St Paul wished to refute Judaism, he must prove “justification by faith” from the Old Testament.
It was a critical undertaking. How could he expect
to find again in the Old Testament the great new
creation which he had experienced in Jesus? But
apologetic methods smooth away most difficulties by
taking merely words into account. By chance the
decisive words ‘faith’ and ‘righteousness’ were found
in the Old Testament (
But for us there is still another point in this matter which
is very instructive. Through the use that St Paul makes of Abraham in his
apologetic he renders the theory of salvation vulnerable. Before this we always
used to hear that the whole of mankind was a ‘massa perditionis,’ that the light of salvation only
began to shine in the world when Christ came on
earth. And now, all at once, long before Christ’s advent, there is the golden age of Abraham in the
Whoever examines St Paul’s doctrine of justification, laying aside all Protestant prejudices, is bound
to reckon it one of his most disastrous creations.
The word ‘justify,’ with the new meaning attached
to it, is ambiguous; the position of God who as judge
declares the sinner to be righteous, is confusing; the
value attached to the creed of the Church as the
decisive factor in the judgment is fraught with evil
consequences, and the proof from the Old Testament
is arbitrary and artificial. St Paul fought for the
universalism of Christianity and the substitution of
the religion of love for that of legalism: what he
really attained was the establishment of the Christian
Church with the new legalism of faith and the creed,
with the return of all the Jewish sins of narrowness,
fanaticism, and the restricted conception of God. A
great and profound thought, however, lies hidden, in
spite of all, beneath the defective outer form. God
is our Father, who freely gives to us whether we
deserve it or not, and we men, just as we are, His
children, living by His love. This thought is at
once strengthened and realized by the fact of the
historical manifestation of Christ. To the kernel
The second reproach, however, which his Jewish adversaries cast in his teeth still remained unanswered. The annulling of the law was equivalent, they said, to an invitation to unchecked sin. The reception of the Gentiles without the law merely paved the way for the entrance of immorality into the Christian Churches. St Paul’s answer to this was the doctrine of Christian freedom.
He attaches a sharply defined meaning to the word ‘freedom’: it is freedom from the Jewish law, which, like a giant, holds men in bondage. The children of the house are free, therefore freedom from the law means at the same time the sonship of God. And that, according to St Paul, was Christ’s great achievement, that out of the slaves of legalism He made us to be the free children of God.
But there is no danger in this freedom from the
law, because the Christian’s new life proceeds from
within. In the Spirit which God has given him, the
Christian has a complete substitute for the law.
Whilst the law, as a foreign and extraneous power,
demanded of us that which was incapable of fulfilment, and was unable to break the inner law of sin in
our members, the Spirit grants the Christian the
power for a new life from within, and all that proceeds
from the Spirit is not contrary to the law but fulfils
it. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
chastity; and along with the gift of love is given the
fulfilment of the whole law, for the command of love
to one’s neighbour is the sum of the whole law. So,
then, the freedom of the Christian from the law is no
It is as though one stepped out of the dark night
into the bright light of day, when one comes to these
marvellous and simple sentences after leaving the
laboured arguments of the doctrine of justification.
They are eloquent with the glad rejoicing of a man
who has become a child again after having been an
aged pedant, and at the same time with an enthusiasm for the victory of the good in all his friends
which is peculiar to the period of creative activity.
Nowhere else has the superiority of the new religion
over the old found so brilliant an expression. But
on a closer examination we observe that it is not a
picture of things as they really are, but a coloured
apologetic representation that we have here before us.
St Paul himself was the first to be aware that the
Spirit produced very various effects, e.g. at Corinth,
and amongst them some which threatened to implant in
the lives of the converts the tendency to an unbridled
and morally dangerous enthusiasm. One need but
compare the fruits of the Spirit which the apologist
enumerates in the Epistle to the Galatians with those
which are noted in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. And apart from this St Paul knew very well that the work of the Spirit
cannot be compared to natural causation, so that the moral life could be deduced
from it by purely logical methods. That which he describes as apologist was the
ideal and not the real in his congregation. Read, e.g., the statement: “They that are Christ’s have crucified the
flesh, with the passions and the lusts thereof.” Taken
St Paul felt that himself, and therefore added
in the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans the command in the imperative mood to the description in
the indicative. We may perhaps even go still
further and say that the description of the ideal was
written by him in the shape of a command to his
readers to attain to it. Both in the doctrine of the
Spirit and in the doctrine of the new birth the
Christian is to read his obligation to understand his
Christian freedom as obedience to God’s will. His
freedom is to consist in becoming the servant of
righteousness, in the rendering of services to the
brethren, and in a freedom from sin. To this St
Paul firmly adheres. There is no word about the
law. Christians are not under the law but under
grace. But the place of the external law is taken by
The net result of all these theories as to law,
justification, freedom, is the annulling of the mistaken Jewish idea. True religion is not the
Torah of the holy people, just as God is not a mere
tribal Jewish God. He that would become God’s child must first escape from the purely national
Jewish customs. Thus St Paul takes up that
standpoint which alone corresponds to the Gospel of Jesus.
There is a reverse side, however, to the apostle’s undertaking. The destruction of Jewish legalism furthered the development of the Christian Church. But the Church has also its legal system—first of all spiritually expressed in faith and the confession of Jesus, and soon afterwards in the new ceremonies which find a footing in the Sacraments. However strange it may sound, the man that destroyed the Jewish idea of the Church is in reality the theoretical creator of the new ecclesiastical system. It is indebted to no one more than to him who said, “He that believes will be saved.”
But St Paul’s standpoint, which was on the whole still purely spiritual, was far too high for the succeeding age. It could not remain content with the mere annulling of the Jewish law. Even the education of the Gentiles called for a new Christian law. This was formed, as the Torah had been before, by the gradual collection of ecclesiastical customs, legal forms, regulations for public worship, dogmas, etc., which were ultimately sanctioned officially. The origin of Catholicism is the gradual transformation of the Church built upon faith into an institution of dogmas, laws, and ceremonies. That is of course a very great decline from St Paul’s high ideal, but it is a decline in the direction of that idea of the Church which St Paul himself had created.
The fate of the Jewish people.
The results of St Paul’s missionary labours were immense. Christianity became the religion of the Greeks and Romans, of the Mediterranean peoples as a whole, instead of being as before the religion of the Jews. It was quite evident that God had abandoned His ancient people and had entered upon a new course.
The whole people of Israel seemed all at once to have no lot or part in the divine plan of salvation.
This was of course likewise a result of the message
of Jesus. Jesus had found greater faith in the
centurion of Capernaum and in the woman of Canaan
than in Israel. In unmistakable language He had
set aside the privileges of Israel. The men of Nineveh
and the Queen of Sheba should fare better on the day
of judgment than this people. St Paul merely completes the great process of levelling which Jesus had
begun. The second and third chapters of the Epistle
to the Romans are our chief evidence in support of this
statement. There the apostle proclaims the equality
of Jews and Gentiles before God—God is no respecter of persons. The mere possession of the
written law is of no value, for the Gentiles have the
law written in their hearts. It is the working of
good that decides on the day of judgment. Nor does
literal circumcision carry any privilege with it. The
uncircumcised that do God’s will shall judge the
circumcised that transgress the law. Indeed, both
Jews and Gentiles alike are under the dominion of
sin, only the Jews with the greater responsibility.
Let them lay aside, therefore, all national pride and all
The answer to such rebukes was naturally that of apostasy. The report must have been spread, especially at Rome—even among Christians—that Paul had denied his nationality and blasphemed his people, his God and the law. The reproach was comprehensible enough, but it was not just. St Paul could in all truth call God to witness that he would rather himself be anathema from Christ for the sake of his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh. Their salvation was the fervent wish of his heart and the object of his supplications to God. But it was just in the presence of accusations such as these that the problems almost drove him to distraction. How can the present unbelief of the Jews be reconciled with God’s promise to them, with the glorious part of God’s chosen people? Can the people of God be lost? The answer to this question is the last great chapter of the apologetic. And on this occasion it concerns his own heart as well as his kinsmen.
First of all, the privileges of Israel over all other
peoples are solemnly set forth, in striking opposition
to other passages in the same epistle. Theirs is the
adoption and the glory and the covenants and the
giving of the law and the service of God and the
promises, and the fathers and Christ as concerning the
flesh. So speaks the Jew in St Paul, who suddenly
bethinks himself of his origin. But then there begins
a mighty wrestling to attain to clearness as to
1. Has God’s word become of none effect? No; the Bible itself speaks of election amongst the children of Abraham, and of God’s free choice everywhere. If God blesses only one portion of Israel and rejects another, and saves the Gentiles in its place, then all this is in accordance with Scripture. The God of the Bible has revealed Himself as the God of arbitrary power. All that He does is right. Man, a weak thing of nought, should bow down in all humility before the sovereign decrees of God that have been revealed to him in the Old Testament, the God that blesses one and pours out His wrath upon another.
2. But how is the salvation of the Gentiles, that seek not after righteousness, consonant with the rejection of Israel, that is jealous for the law? It is just Israel’s religiousness and perverted zeal for works that are the cause of their having hardened their hearts against God’s new ways. The Gentiles are ready to receive the new message and to behold the works of God, whereas Israel’s pious zeal renders them unreceptive. God gives Himself to such as are willing to receive the gift.
8. But is the election of Israel set aside forever? No. A part of Israel hardened their hearts, but the purpose of this was simply to draw the Gentiles on to their salvation. But when the fulness of the Gentiles has entered in, then Israel’s heart shall no longer be hardened and all Israel shall be saved. This must come to pass, because of the promises to the fathers. For the mercies and the election of God are sure.
These three stages are not directly contradictory.
And yet what a fluctuating medley of thought about God! First,
the God of mere arbitrary power;
Jesus had passed a clear and definite sentence of condemnation upon Israel, because He had come to recognize in the course of His activity that God’s ways were about to turn aside from Israel, and because He submitted to this result of His experience. St Paul did not submit, though God had definitely entered upon new paths—the fact was accomplished, but the apostle set the authority of the old scripture still higher. The contrast is a characteristic one—both for Jesus and for St Paul—here reverence for facts, there for the Bible. At the same time, we observe once more how the Jesus of history is simply nonexistent for St Paul when he treats apologetic problems of this nature. No mention whatever is made of Him in the three chapters of the Romans which treat of Israel’s fate. The literal text of the Septuagint seems to be the only decisive authority, and that is so sacred and so almighty, that whenever it comes into collision with the human conscience, the latter is silenced when the voice of revelation speaks. This is, of course, only apparent—we have had sufficient reason to know that St Paul could on other occasions manipulate the Old Testament text as he liked. The really decisive factor was after all his patriotism, which he did not get rid of even as a Christian.
But notwithstanding its reverence for the
apostle, the Christian Church soon laid aside the
ST PAUL developed his soteriology as well as his
anti-Jewish apologetic in the midst of his missionary
labours and for purely practical purposes. In order
to win over the Gentiles, Jesus had to be presented to
them in a wider, more comprehensive, and intelligible
system; and furthermore, this system had to be defended against the attack of the Jews and Jewish
Christians. It may even be safely maintained that
St Paul scarcely ever speculated in the interests of
pure knowledge and abstract truth. All his propositions—even the most abstruse—served the practical purposes of missionary life, and were never put
forward without reference to them. But for all that
it is a fact that through St Paul speculative thought
and knowledge became a power in Christianity. The
relation of Jesus to the problem of knowledge was a
totally different one. The whole of His teaching is
marked by the entire absence of every kind of
speculation and an emphasis on the all-importance
of action. If He boasts of the knowledge of God
He means the understanding of the divine will in
What is the meaning of ‘gnosis’ in St Paul’s case? It has
three characteristic features. (1) It is something
In these sentences, pregnant with such important
consequences, the difference between ecclesiastical
and non-ecclesiastical science is for the first time
definitely established. They are related as reason to
revelation, as the human to the divine. But what is
the Spirit of which St Paul speaks? It is simply the
Spirit of the Church or the sect, the sum of the impressions, words, feelings, impulses and thoughts
which are produced in the Church, and which prevail
in it as being both holy and necessary. In a word, it
is the Christian consciousness as it grew up from the
seed sown by Jesus, and as it was further transmitted
in His sect. That which would be counted divine
must pass muster before it as the final court of appeal.
Whatever in anywise contradicted it would not be
counted as revealed truth. But the Christian consciousness itself is placed beyond the bounds of
discussion: it is perfectly sure of itself; it is ultimate
and supreme. A proud and even justifiable Christian
self-esteem developed this theory, but created therein
a kind of supernatural coat-of-mail for itself which
was at last bound to exercise a chilling and
be-numbing reflex action. This theory preserves the
peculiarity and sovereignty of the Christian religion—that is its everlasting merit—but it does this
Now what is the object of the Pauline gnosis?
It is itself again the Spirit—i.e., the revelation of God. Gnosis is the revealed understanding of the divine revelation, the re-discovery, by means of the Spirit, of the Spirit that is hidden from all other men.
All the oracles of the Christian prophets would be included under the conception of revelation, especially the revelation by means of Jesus. There is, in fact, an especial art of interpreting the words of the prophets, which is inspired by the Spirit, the judging or discerning of spirits. But this is not called gnosis by St Paul. Nor, again, is Christ the revealer of God’s word for him, as it is the Cross and Resurrection, and not His sayings, that are the divine acts of salvation in St Paul’s meaning of the word. So, then, there remains finally only one great object for the Pauline gnosis—the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews.
St Paul introduced the Old Testament in all his
Churches as the sacred canon, the only divinely
inspired book. This was an event of the very greatest
importance in the history of Christianity. The
Jewish national literature is declared to be divine,
and is to become the sacred book of the Greek and
Roman converts to Christianity, whilst at the same
time it is the sacred book of the Jews, the bitter
The divinely inspired character of the Old Testament in every one of its parts is a firmly established fact. There is no dispute between Jews and Christians as to this point. St Paul accepts the teaching of the Rabbis, that the whole of the Old Testament is a collection of divine oracles, and that every text, even apart from its context, is a word of God. He personifies Scripture, speaking of it as of a divine being: “the scripture foresaw,” “the scripture hath shut up all things.” He does not indeed speak of the Spirit that inspired the Old Testament, perhaps because he considered the Spirit to be a gift of the last days. On the other hand, he appears in certain passages to have arrived at the conclusion that Christ is the inspirer and revealer in the Old Testament. Here he abandons his Jewish standpoint altogether, and his action is attended with important consequences. If Christ spoke in the Old Testament, then it is certainly a Christian book.
But the inspired book demands an inspired exegesis.
For this purpose the Jews had the order of the
It is therefore proved that the canon of the Old
Testament is to be interpreted by the canon of the
Christian conscience. And so the task set to the interpreters of Scripture is endless. By reason of its divine
origin, every word in the Bible is written for all eternity.
In each a divine meaning is contained, often more
than one. Being intended for all time, each word
has likewise an application for the age of the interpreter. Here, in this present age, it has to accomplish its direct purpose. Thus, e.g., the chastisements of the patriarchs in the wilderness were written
for our warning, upon whom the ends of the ages are
come. In fact, everything that was written aforetime
The exegesis of the passage concerning the oxen
whose mouth is not to be muzzled is the best
example of the Pauline gnosis made to serve the
practical needs of the missionary. The canon of
exegesis, which the Rabbis likewise accepted, runs:
Nothing unworthy is to be ascribed to God. The
Christian spirit forthwith discovers that the passage
can be applied suitably to the missionaries. But for
the most part the apostle’s gnosis serves the purposes
of his anti-Jewish apologetic. It was only necessity
that caused the Christians to invent the proof from
prophecy properly so-called. As the patriotic
prophecies of a Messiah applied to Jesus in a very
small number of instances, the Christian gnosis had
now to discover in the Old Testament new proofs
for the Messiahship of Jesus. Few excelled St
Paul in the art of finding such passages. He did
not hesitate to undertake the proof that all the
promises of God were ‘yea’ in Jesus—i.e., had been
fulfilled in Him. How great a skill in exegesis that
Of greater importance, however, than either of
these results was the fact that, thanks to this Old
Testament gnosis, the Christian and the Jewish
Church were continually placed side by side. The
history of Israel is interpreted in a Christian spirit.
Even the Christian Sacraments, Baptism and the
Supper of the Lord, are discovered in the pillar of
The apologetic exposition of the Old Testament for the purpose of confuting the Jews by no means, however, exhausted the Pauline gnosis. It produced, besides, bold speculations of its own, which only clearly come to light in the letters of the captivity, but date from a much earlier time: the chief subjects were the angel world and Christ.
In the
The gnostic speculations as to Christ were of much
greater importance. Jesus is the ‘Lord’ (= Kyrios).
The subject of the whole of the Old Testament is
the Lord (= name of God). Consequently St
Paul can set down the equation Jesus = the Lord
in the Old Testament. Proofs for this abound. Expressions like “the understanding of the Lord,” “the
Table of the Lord,” “the Glory of the Lord,” “the name
of the Lord,” “to tempt the Lord,” “to return to the
Lord,” are all applied to Jesus. Jesus, e.g., was the
God of revelation in the wilderness; there He baptized
(the water from the rock), and celebrated the
Eucharist (the manna). True, the letter to the
Philippians says that it was only after the resurrection
that the name above all other names was given Him
(i.e., the sacred tetragrammaton equivalent to the Greek
Kyrios, Lord), but other passages contradict this statement,
Now when once this gnostic Christology reached such giddy heights as these, then the most extravagant speculations of the later letters can no longer strike us as strange. When once Jesus has become the God of Revelation of the Old Testament, and the mediator in the creation, then He is also the head and the centre of the world of angels. And if His propitiatory death has power for all men without distinction, why should not the rebellious angels like wise experience His power? In all this reasoning there is no missing link between the possible and the impossible. The ‘humanity’ of Christ has been laid aside a long time ago by the earlier speculations. Can we be astonished if the fulness of the Godhead now dwells in Him bodily? If there is anything that surprises us, the reason is that we do not know the Old Testament passages which St Paul uses as the basis for his gnosis in the letter to the Colossians. The occasion for his treating of this subject was the rise of false teachers at Colossae who appealed to the authority of angels. To meet this heresy St Paul considers it advisable to remind his readers that all angels derive their being from Christ alone, and through Him alone they continue to exist.
The Pauline gnosis claimed to be a revealed
exegesis of the Old Testament. But this Christology
This adaptation of previous isolated speculations
cannot, however, be considered to be an explanation
of the Pauline Christology. Its real origin is to be
sought elsewhere. St Paul’s object was to make
Christ the centre of his cosmology. However strange
its outer form may appear to us, the whole of this
gnosis is after all the first great Christian interpretation of the universe. It is not without reason that
it is just in the Epistle to the Colossians that the
But what a circuitous route he travels. How
simple and untheological is the gospel faith in
Providence by the side of this. Compare the reasons
But St Paul knows another gnosis of a completely
different nature besides this of which we have been
speaking. It is theocentric, and it belongs to the close
of his system. It is a bold undertaking to penetrate
with the Spirit into the deep things of God and
to explain the whole of the world and history from
the standpoint of God as the realization of divine
purposes. The starting-point of this gnosis is his own
experience, his own certainty of salvation. As the
Christian regards the whole of his former life in spite
of all its sin and all its evil fortune as the divinely
appointed path for his own redemption, so he may
with equal right look upon the whole course of the
world’s history, of which his own life forms an infinitesimal portion, as the necessary way of the Lord
unto salvation. Only then the goal is so infinitely
greater. The simplest formula of this philosophy of
history is: All things are from God, through God, and
to God. God is the first cause of the whole world
and of all history. He has created them. Now even
God Himself willed the Fall and sin. He has given over to sin and disobedience all alike, that to all alike He may at last show mercy. Yes, the law was only given to man in order to make the offence greater. But the greater the sin the wider God’s mercy. No statement is too bold for St Paul to make, for the thought never occurs to him that sin could thereby lose the character of guilt on the part of man. Sin is guilt in any case, but then God is God even over sin. And then the world is gradually led back to obedience to God by the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God. Now that is the manifestation of God’s grace which is so inexpressibly great, so much greater than sin. Step by step the process of redemption proceeds. Christ, the Church, the Gentiles, Israel, the angel world, are one after another embraced by the love of God and return to Him from whom they took their origin. In the end God will be all in all. All things have reverted—not to physical absorption in God, but to worship and subjection to the honour of God the Father. The fall and sin had one great and important consequence. The story of the parable was lived in real life—the story of the children who only learned to love their home when they were in a strange country.
The end of this gnosis in a man like St Paul could only be a prayer of glad thanksgiving. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God; how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past tracing out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counsellor? Or who hath first given to Him and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” The passage is especially beautiful because of the modesty of this gnostic, who in spite of his great presentiments ever reminds himself that God is too high for him. However far he may penetrate, there remains in God an element of mystery. But for all that, his prevailing mood is one of thanksgiving and of joy. From his own stand point, in the bright light of certain conviction, he can confidently scan the dark riddles and unsolved problems of existence. He knows that all is light for God and will one day be light for him. And he knows the love of God as the end and goal of all that happens in the world. That is Christian gnosis which interprets the world from the experience of faith or of Jesus. In fact, whether he formulates it with Christ or with God as the centre, the whole of his knowledge is one of the great effects which his experience on the road to Damascus produced in him.
We have arrived at the end of St Paul’s theology.
It has been shown that its roots are to be found
in the experience of the vision of Christ and in his
apologetic as missionary. In the building of the
Now it is of course true that the Jesus of St Paul
is no longer merely the Jesus of the Church of
Jerusalem. The Son of God, the Cross and the
In the next place, the Church, which dominates
the Pauline theology second to Christ alone, is for
him still identical with the communities which in spite
of all imperfections were real instruments of salvation
and channels for the influence of Jesus. Hence the
practical value of St Paul’s ecclesiastical apologetic.
Nevertheless it was he who likewise created the
Christian idea of the Church in its fanatical narrowness, by pronouncing as he did all who were outside
the fold, as a sinful mass of corruption doomed to
death, and in many passages at any rate, attaching
everlasting blessedness to belief in the ecclesiastical
creed. Thereby the same man who led Jesus out
But in spite of all this, Christianity only became a great spiritual power in the world through the theology of St Paul. For through him it obtained a cosmology as a foundation, which enabled it to compete with Greek philosophies and Oriental myths. Through him the Jewish idea was annulled and so Christianity was set free to enter the world. Yes, and at the same time its spiritual character is assured for all eternity. Ceremonies have no value as means of salvation. St Paul grasped the world-historic greatness of Jesus, and compared Him with the first man. The Messianic element is forced into the background; with Jesus a new humanity begins. Paul placed the two great ideas of the Fatherhood of God and the freedom of the Spirit in the centre, as the Christian ideal in religion, and has thereby laid down the safest canon of criticism for every form of religion.
Finally he placed love and practical results higher than enthusiasm and theology, and thereby found the eternal in the transitory. As one surveys the whole of what he achieved, one stands in silent amazement at his greatness as a thinker.
WE can recognize the effect of Jesus upon His disciples directly from the Gospels. Here we see all that was great and new in Jesus that seemed worth recording. It was this at the same time that struck root and further developed. The effect of St Paul, on the other hand, we can only discern quite indirectly. We can gather what it was, partly from his letters, and partly from those documents of the succeeding age which were clearly influenced by him. Even though these conclusions are mostly hypothetical, we cannot entirely disregard them. Our present object, then, is to discover the characteristics of the earliest Christianity in heathen countries.
Wherever the Christians are gathered together in
fully organized communities, there they feel that they
are sharply divided not only from the popular religion
of their heathen neighbours, but also from the Jewish
synagogue. Both constitute for them that world to
which they have bidden farewell. Indeed it is contrast with the world that determines the signification
of the term Christian. In the first place comes the
The important point to notice here is the theoretical
character of the faith, which is guaranteed by the
contents. Neither mystical nor ethical elements are
contained therein. It consists in assent to the propositions of the preaching. In this assent a certain
amount of trust is contained as well. But the
Other characteristics of the Christian in opposition
to the world may be noticed in addition to this the
first; e.g., participation in the holy rites of the Church.
This would appeal especially to the Greeks, to whom
the Christians were, above all else, the saints, i.e., the
congregation participating in the true worship. The
later ‘Sacraments,’ Baptism and the Lord’s Supper,
were in very early times valued by the Greeks
as mysterious rites connected with the world beyond.
In baptism, the new birth is symbolized by a
dying and a rising again. An implanting in
Christ takes place whilst the convert passes through
The way is paved for a radical transformation from
this point onwards. The greatness of the earliest
form of Christianity was essentially constituted by
two historical realities—Jesus and the community
which attached itself to Him. All that deserves the
name of salvation is the effect of these two realities.
They were also the two main factors in St Paul’s missionary work—the incarnation of the grace of
God. But in the Pauline Churches the place of the
person of Jesus is occupied by statements concerning
the Son of God, the Cross and the Resurrection, which
are accepted in faith. Where Jesus stood before,
there now stands the dogma of Christ. The social
There was, however, yet one other characteristic
which distinguished the Christian from the world, and
this constitutes the splendour of the early days of the
faith: it was the earnest endeavour to develop the
new life of the individual. Conversion was no empty
word for great numbers of Christians, but an actual
breach with an earlier life which had frequently been
stained by vice. The watchful care of the brethren,
The dark side to this picture was, of course, not
wanting. Even in this first age the forerunners of
St Paul’s attitude to average Christianity was one of uncompromising hostility. He still hoped that it would be rooted out. But in vain. It had been present from the very first in the life of the Christian congregations, in the lives of those members who believed that they themselves were converted because of the conversion of others. It had not crept in, therefore, as a consequence of decay. Each congregation had no doubt a heavy task in combating the most formidable vice of the great cities, sexual excesses; and in the East, resistance was doubly difficult. Then came the specially Greek sins, dishonesty and trickery in the lower classes, litigiousness and wrangling in the upper. And then finally all that the Christian calls superstition, participation in secret, mostly immoral rites, magic books, amulets, incantations. All this existed from the very first in the Christian congregations themselves. The establishment of ecclesiastical discipline always involved a certain amount of loss alongside of the indubitable gain. By the suppression of the coarser elements, room was secured for the development of the finer. But the benefit thus secured was speedily counter balanced by the substitution of fixed rules and rigid customs for the free exercise of the apostle’s judgment.
This imperfect state of affairs was not without
influence upon the feelings of those individuals who
Was there any certainty of salvation, and upon what
did it depend? Paul urged his converts to place all
their trust in the doctrine of election. Whoever did
that placed his reliance upon Christ and upon faith.
This could be done either with or without moral
earnestness. And there were instances of both these
courses, just as there are to-day. Whoever, on the
contrary, was more impressed by the fact that
Christians fell into sin and were lost, practically
abandoned the certainty of salvation, and of such there
were very soon a great number. Contrary conclusions
were, however, in turn drawn from this fact again.
Some would work out their salvation with fear and
trembling, and ensure salvation through entire consecration of life. Others suffered things to take
their course, and thought it would be time enough
in the last hour. Even the Pauline Epistles themselves refer to all these different possibilities, and we
also meet with them later on in close connection.
A clear distinction between St Paul and Jesus now
manifests itself as regards the effects of their labours:
both bound up indissolubly—religion, the life as God’s child in God’s love—and the claims of morality; but
the emphasis was a very different one. Jesus gives
prominence to the moral claim, to the true will of
God instead of the false. Hence the danger which
threatened His community was legalism. Whereas
St Paul, building upon grace and the atonement, had
almost from the first to guard against the danger of
moral corruption. True he struggles against it with
all his might and main, especially in
We can, after all, best arrive at a correct standard
of judgment by contrasting the later with the earlier
condition of these Pauline communities. Regarded
from this point of view, they always appear again in
a favourable light. It was a great step to take, and
one attended by no little risk, to find a home for the
Gospel, the child of Judaism, in the new world,
which was in reality so ill-prepared for it. There
was scarcely anyone less able to understand Jesus
than these Greeks, whose sole surviving art was
that of long-winded disputation. And to attempt to
bring Jesus actually to such a city as Corinth, was
simply an immense undertaking. But it succeeded.
The result of the labours of St Paul and his companions, was that round about the Ægean sea the
Christian colonies grew up and developed a new,
sound, and healthy life. Demons of vice were turned
into respectable citizens, thieves and brawlers became
useful workmen, and anxious and distressed souls found
Yet we will never forget that our own Christianity was a consequence of St Paul’s missionary labours. Perfection is not to be found in this world. The question was put to the Greeks: Will you have Jesus, or will you not? They answered: We will have His teaching if we may have it as Greeks. And so they obtained it as Greeks, and corrupted it to the best of their ability. We, no doubt, would have done exactly the same. But the great result was, that Jesus held His ground, never suffered Himself to be utterly degraded, and ever again uplifted humanity.
No obscurity rests upon St Paul’s own personal religion, because he possessed that highest of all gifts, the art of speaking about himself and his own inner life. He understood how to describe the unutterable and indefinable moods of his own soul in such a way that they continued to work on in others. It was just the tenderness of his temperament, that often almost morbidly sensitive basis of his soul with its tendency to the ecstatic, that made of him one of the greatest revealers of the inmost recesses of personal religion. There it lies open for all to behold in his letters, and we can speak of a personal impression that St Paul makes upon us, and even of his redemptive work, as though of Jesus Himself.
The change at his conversion was all-decisive. It
Although Paul could boast before his conversion of a blameless
life as touching the righteousness concerning the law, he had some bitter experiences even
then. He must have sounded the misery of sin, and
the torture of a divided mind, down to the very
depths. The recollection of it still quivers almost
convulsively in the concluding verses of
But is this contrast absolute? Is the breach with the past at Damascus so complete that no consequences of his previous condition can be traced in the present? Even as a Christian St Paul had moments of depression. How could it be otherwise? New temptations perpetually arose from his own nature and from his surroundings. The reconciliation between these moments of depression and the feeling of grace is brought about by faith—i.e., the constant abiding in the love of God which has once for all been manifested in Christ. “That life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith in the Son of God who loved me.” “Because Christ hath loved us, no power on earth shall be able to separate us from God.” Thus St Paul was enabled to perpetuate his single experience through faith. It is all repetition, says Kierkegaard. It is no new experience, but constant trust in the old one. Here, too, St Paul is the forerunner of many who lived in later ages.
The other contrast is between strength and weakness. It is of no less importance for him than the
former. Through his conversion St Paul was
caught up and swept away by the enthusiasm of the
earliest Christian Church and learnt to taste of the
powers of the great Beyond—a wonderful experience.
He fell into ecstasies and saw visions. He was
vouchsafed revelations. He saw the Lord. He was
caught up into Paradise. He heard heavenly words.
Then he was so strong that he felt himself more than
man—he was already a spirit. We are not in the
flesh—“the life eternal hath begun.” But then, on
the other hand, came moments of terrible depression,
To attain the mastery over these fits of depression is above all the task of that longing and yearning which is nothing but the expression of a heightened feeling of contrast. Out of this longing expectancy St Paul extracts the most wonderful notes in all his letters. The Spirit itself is in bondage to the weakness of creation, so that he prays unconsciously in groanings that cannot be uttered, which God, however, hears. That is the prayer of longing, the groaning and the crying for the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Imprisoned in our earthly tabernacle, in a strange country, we long for our home which is with God. “I have the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that were far better.” Once again it is St Paul who was the first to proclaim this feeling of man’s deep, wild longing for his eternal home.
But longing is the constant reminder of one’s necessities, and perpetually awakens one’s consciousness
of them. Then St Paul finds the highest comfort of
all in a moment of prayer. “My grace is sufficient
for thee, for strength is made perfect in weakness.
When I am weak then I am strong.” He has found
peace in perfect trust in God; that, too, is faith.
Thereby he can do all things, and boasts even of his
The personal religion which has been sketched thus far is essentially one of moods and feelings. For the alternation as well as the harmonizing of contrasts falls under the sphere of the emotional life. This is one of the reasons why St Paul’s place in the history of religion is so important. He transferred the real life of religion to the feelings, discovered it in the feelings. Religion, according to St Paul, is fear and hope, possessing and seeking, rejoicing and longing, joy in communion with God, and yearning for God; and by surrendering ourselves to the divine influence which comes over us, we are saved—i.e., uplifted out of this world into God’s presence. Hence an unbroken apostolic succession through St Augustine and St Bernard to Schleiermacher. Paul was the first clearly to experience and express for all time the two sets of feelings: sin and grace, strength and weakness; and thereby the inner meaning and depth of religion were immensely increased. The holy of holies is no longer placed in outer effects and consequences, but transferred to communion with God in the innermost heart. For this emotional life the significance of historical events is exceedingly limited. They are simply considered as means to create moods and to excite feelings. This is just what the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus were for St Paul. By this means the historical tradition and the unbroken continuity with the past are indeed preserved, but the true life of religion is in the present; it is the soul’s communion with the living God. Knowledge of the historical fact is but the kindling spark.
The peculiar danger of this emotional form of
religion has always consisted in its tendency to allow
the field of the active life to lie fallow. Paul escaped
this danger, thanks to his calling. As the consciousness of his apostolic calling was fully developed in
him, and never for one moment forsook him, it
imparted a zeal and a restless energy to him, which
made every kind of luxuriating in dreams and visions
and every form of idleness a physical impossibility.
In this respect Paul became a hero of ethical self-discipline, and of entirely unselfish service to the
brethren. He conceived of his especial calling as
being at the same time typical. Hence the servile
labour to which he compelled his hands, hence the
bodily discipline carried to the verge of asceticism,
hence his strict temperance and entire sincerity.
Paul overcame all obstacles, especially those originating in his own temperament, in a wonderful manner,
or used them as stepping-stones. He withstood, too,
every temptation to pride, and every tendency to a
domineering bearing. But above all he perfected
love and self-sacrifice in his calling. He could endure
and forgive; he sympathised in every man’s afflictions,
he collected money for his enemies. In certain
cases he sacrificed the freedom of his conscience to
his love. For the Jews’ sake he was ready to be
severed from the Christ. In his old age he took an
unselfish delight in the progress of the Gospel in spite
of the envy and the wrangling of his associates.
Notwithstanding his longing for heaven, he preferred
to remain on earth, so as to work and to suffer for
the brethren. Each one of his letters to them is a
proof of his love. Thus he strove with all his might
The peculiarity of St Paul’s personal religion
becomes still more manifest when it is contrasted with
the essentially different form of Jesus religion. This
is the exact opposite of a religion of emotion. It may
be objected that the relative insignificance of the
subjective element in the case of Jesus, is due to the
impossibility of extracting the true Jesus from His
reporters. But to this we may reply: Had Jesus
been a mystic, or in any other way pre-eminently a
man of feeling, then this would have found expression
in His words in spite of all additions or omissions of
these reporters. But it is just a peculiarity of His
that the inner life of His soul is rarely, or never,
reflected in what He says, and that no value of its
own is attached to the emotional life. His personal
religion is altogether practical. He went about doing
good, helping others, struggling for the right—a life
concentrated in present tasks and aims, a religion that
looked forward to ideals that were to be realized.
All Jesus’ actions are indeed prompted by feelings—i.e., by the childlike certainty of the love of God and
by the deep seriousness with which the great future
inspires Him. But these feelings do not constitute
separate domains of their own, from which the road
to action has subsequently to be discovered. On the
contrary, whether consciously or unconsciously, they
are the ever present substratum of all that He does.
There is an entire absence here of the alternation
between the sense of sin and of grace, as well as of that
Both forms of personal religion are justifiable if they have but really been experienced. It is a consequence of the predominance of St Paul’s theology, that his personal religion has likewise come to be regarded as the normal type, though, it is true, only after the excision of the really mystical element. But the deterioration of morality has been the regular and inevitable consequence of an exclusive emphasis of the emotional life. Our task to-day is again to bring into the foreground Jesus’ own personal religion, and to hold this up as a word of warning to our age.
Paul has left a deeper impression upon history than
any other of Jesus’ disciples. He transplanted the
young religion into the great world of civilization,
created its first profound system of thought, and
developed a new form of personal religion. In so
doing he was the first to introduce Christianity into
the world’s history. The whole future development of
the Gospel is determined by the form imparted to it
THE Apocalypse of St John no longer belongs to the first period of early Christianity, that is, if we consider the exact date of its composition. The book cannot have been written earlier than the reign of Domitian; the destruction of Jerusalem has taken place long ago, and the outbreak of the great persecutions on the part of the State is anticipated. But as the solitary surviving memorial of early Christian prophecy, and as the product of enthusiasm, it still represents the hopes and thoughts of the earliest age before the development of the ecclesiastical constitution. No living prophet, it is true, here speaks to us: it is a book; but the book is one which claims with its very first words to be prophetic inspiration. Whatever its ultimate origin from Christian and Jewish sources, the book itself emphatically claims to be considered as a whole, and as the expression of Christian prophecy.
The author at once expresses the profoundest
consciousness of his call in his opening sentences.
God wanted to make known to His servants the
Thereupon the heavenly calling of the prophet is related to us in the vision. When he was upon the island of Patmos, to deliver the message of God and the testimony about Jesus, he found himself in a trance on the Lord’s day and was charged by Jesus Himself to write to the seven Churches of Asia Minor what he saw, that which is and that which shall be hereafter.
The seven Epistles which are now dictated to him may be regarded from a twofold point of view. They are messages of the heavenly Messiah to the heavenly leaders of the seven Churches made known to men upon earth by the prophet John. But at the same time they are the oracles of the Spirit; so the close of every letter reminds us, the Spirit is speaking to the Churches. The prophet wishes therefore to be regarded purely as a medium, both in what he promises and threatens as well as in his revelations and exhortations. The difference between St Paul and the author of this book is very striking. St Paul, too, censured various evil practices after a similar manner—e.g., in First Corinthians—employing both promises and threats. But he always speaks as a human being and never as the interpreter of the Spirit.
Next follows the long series of apocalyptic visions,
A comparison with some of the products of the
Jewish apocalyptic literature, which bear a very
striking similarity, e.g., the books of Baruch and Ezra,
which were written about the same time, reveals to
us the fact that the prophetic consciousness is a great
deal more prominent in the case of John. In the
former case the pseudonymous author speaks for the
most part in his own person, and clearly distinguishes
But is the whole book to be really ascribed to prophetic revelation? On the contrary, every page of the book confirms our belief that we are here dealing with fiction. The mythological contents of the visions, the form of revelation by means of angels, the conscious employment of literary art in the construction of the book, the similarity of the style with that of all Jewish apocalypses, are all proofs against the genuineness of the prophecy. Very probably, too, the name of John is intended to denote the celebrated disciple of Jesus, and then the book is pseudonymous, like all similar compositions. It is a literary production from beginning to end. Even the seven Epistles are not real letters which were ever despatched; one does not write to angels.
How are we then to explain the contradiction between the prophetic claims and the employment of fiction in the composition of the book?
The author possessed prophetic gifts and powers.
The seven letters and many short oracles of the
Spirit scattered here and there throughout the book,
can be traced back to a state of inspired enthusiasm
as their original source. He may even have had
visions, at least one vision which impelled him to
write. Above all, he feels himself called to be a
Thereby his work becomes a memorial of the decay
of prophecy. We can learn from him that there were
once Christian prophets who possessed God’s word
and claimed the highest authority. Their enthusiasm,
their courage, their holy zeal, speak from every good
word in this book. But its author is scarcely himself
to be accounted any longer one of them. He would
cover his Jewish scholasticism with the mantle of
As the prophet that he claims to be, the author of the Apocalypse has above all to foretell the future. Indeed, his whole book consists of such prediction. The vast agglomeration of his promises admit, after all, of a very simple division into three parts: (1) The Christian hope in the parousia; (2) political prophecy; (3) conceptions borrowed from the storehouse of Jewish apocalyptical tradition.
The coming of Jesus, the Son of man, down from
heaven, stands in the front of the prophecy, that is its
Christian element. The old expectation of the
earliest Church continues in undiminished strength.
The nearness of His coming is, as before, the chief
point in connection with it. As the book begins, “For the time is at hand; behold He cometh”—so it ends: “Yea, I come quickly. Amen. Come, Lord
Jesus!” He will come suddenly as a thief, as a judge,
as a Saviour of them that are His. The last great
tribulation precedes His coming. There will be a
sifting of the saints, then it will be decided who shall
stand and who shall fall. Such had ever been the
And yet this hope has experienced a great transformation through the changes wrought by the course
of contemporary history. It comes to be political,
because the Roman State has assumed an attitude of
hostility to the Christians. One persecution has
already taken place in which the blood of martyrs
has been shed, and now the last great persecution is
close at hand. The thirteenth and seventeenth to
nineteenth chapters deal with this especially. The
enemy is Rome, the great city Babylon, which has
the dominion over the kings of the earth. Already
it is drunken with the blood of the saints, and of
the witnesses of Jesus. It is the great harlot,
the mother of the harlots and of the abominations
of the earth. The demoniac power appears
in
In the midst of the political chaos which the
prophet predicts, the Emperor Nero appears upon the
scene. The belief in Nero’s return from the grave
No small danger arose for Christianity from this
political coloring of its hope. St Paul had declared
that every power in the State, even the Emperor
Nero, had been appointed by God and was to be
regarded as the servant of God. And now in consequence of the entirely new position of affairs the
emperor has come to be for the Christians the servant
of Satan, and it is from him that he draws all
his power. Is the Christian, then, bound to render
him obedience any longer? Is rebellion not his duty?
But nothing lies further from our author’s intentions
than any idea of rebellion. His one demand is
patience. He would never allow any other form of
resistance but that of passive endurance. God alone
brings us the victory, not men. On the other hand,
the prophet’s visions in
But the Christian hope in the parousia and the political prediction against Rome, after all, only occupy a small portion of the big book. The main body of the prophecies is nothing but old material taken from the storehouse of Jewish apocalytic traditions. If the ‘prophet’ wished to write an apocalypse, then he had above all else to be careful that the old tradition as to the mysteries at the end of the world should not be lost in his hands. Rather take too much of it than too little. Contradictions do not matter. Put into your book all that you can lay hold of: do not bother about probabilities. As a matter of fact this writer has tied together a whole bundle of eschatologies, often without any mutual connection.
The greatest space is occupied by the description
of the preliminary signs and the tribulation. The
seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven bowls, are
only variations of similar signs of the last days which
occur in all apocalypses. Of these the seven bowls
and the seven trumpets are so nearly related, that
they are best explained as a twofold copy of the
same original. First of all, in each case the earth is
But the prophet is very far from exhausting all his store of preliminary signs of the end in this threefold use of the number seven (seals, trumpets and bowls). He has to find room for the rest in the insertions which he introduces between the three sevens. To these belong: The sealing of the 144,000 out of the twelve tribes of Israel (without Dan, the tribe of the Antichrist), to whom afterwards the great multitude which no man could number out of all nations and peoples is added. Here the writer has almost certainly introduced an original Jewish fragment into his book.
The desolation of the holy city by the Gentiles. This section dates from some time previous to 70 A.D., and originally predicted the exemption of the temple from desecration.
The sending of the two witnesses—according to an old tradition, Elijah and Enoch—as preachers of repentance to the holy city. They are killed by the beast, but are immediately raised from the dead and ascend up into heaven. All these three insertions are based not merely upon Jewish traditions, but upon written fragments.
The supernatural commencement of salvation is really only described when we reach chap. xii.: the birth of the Messiah from the woman whose robe was the sun, the effort of the dragon to destroy him, his translation to God. Thereupon follows the assault of heaven by the dragon, which ends with his defeat by Michael and his being cast down from heaven. Then the dragon persecutes the other seed of the woman—i.e., here the Church of Jesus. For this purpose he hands over his power to has been snatched up to God descends as king from heaven and destroys him.
All this material is of mythological origin, and is no invention of the Christian author’s. It can even be traced back right through Hebrew literature to Babylonian myths, but it has been transmitted by Jewish writers. Our author was the first to impress upon it a Christian interpretation. The all-important element in it for him is this: the victory of the Christian has already been decided in heaven, the dragon has been cast out. Hence the certainty of the approaching deliverance.
The final act of the drama is described by him in
two stages, and offers a combination of different
eschatologies. First of all, after the battle of the
This is, indeed, the official Jewish eschatology, but
it is presented in such a form that every Christian
can easily adopt it. The case is different with the
great final picture. Here we are transported, not into
the new heaven and the new earth, but into that
which is entirely of this earth, into the coarsely
phenomenal and Jewish from a narrow national
point of view. Our author has again incorporated a
Jewish fragment. The new Jerusalem is brought
before us in the form of a cube with golden streets,
high walls, and twelve gates made of precious stones.
There is no temple in it, neither does it need sun or
moon. God Himself is there and illuminates the
city. The Gentiles are still in their position of subjection; they may bring their treasures as tribute
into the holy city, and be healed by the fruit of the
tree of life. The main thing is, of course, the presence
Throughout the whole of the Apocalypse, however,
the picture of the Christian hope is set before us with
many beautiful features of great poetic worth and
emotional effect. The Christian joy and blessedness
are expressed in many sayings, just as simply as in
the beatitudes of Jesus. And then again by the side
of these, the creations of the wildest fancy, even in
the best portions of the book, the letters to the seven
Churches: “To him that overcometh, to him will I give
of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone,
and upon his stone a new name written which no one
knoweth but he that receiveth it.” “And he that
overcometh, and he that keepeth my words unto the
end, to him will I give authority over the nations:
and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the
vessels of the potter are broken to shivers, as I also
have received of my Father: and I will give him the
morning star.” It is Jesus who utters such abstruse,
essentially unchristian words in these letters. In fact,
taking the prophecy of the book as a whole, the name
of Jesus has been applied in a manner altogether
unsuitable to the Jesus of history. The very role He
did not want to play—that of Jewish Messiah in a
What then, after all , is there that is Christian in this prophecy? Set it for a moment side by side with the apocalypse of Ezra, and the answer is not far to seek. There is resignation often akin to despair; here the exultant confidence of victory. With the glad exultant longing and splendid certainty of victory, the little handful of Christians faced their long and arduous struggle against almighty Rome. “The kingdom will still be ours.” That was the power which Jesus gave.
HE is a prophet who can say what God will do and what men are to do. The claim which our author makes is determined by the great outer and inner dangers of his Churches. Persecutions threaten from without, an increasing worldliness from within. The Jews stir up persecutions against the Christians, and bring false charges against them; the Romans, as judges, do the will of the Jews. In such a time, patience, endurance and fidelity are the most needed virtues. Above all else, the test of a man’s Christianity is to be found in his refusal to participate in the imperial cultus. Only he who refuses to worship the beast and to bear his mark is a Christian. There must be no revolutionary resistance. Whosoever shall kill with the sword shall with the sword inevitably be killed. Here the patience and faithfulness of the saints can alone be of any avail.
Be thou faithful unto death! Blessed are the dead
that die in the Lord from henceforth. Every Christian
is to be prepared for martyrdom; i.e., here the “keeping of the testimony of Jesus.” The prophet has
But if God is to be for us, things must first of all be changed in the Churches themselves. Worldliness has already begun to creep in. Ephesus has lost its first love. Sardis, decayed from its former estate, is spiritually dead. Laodicea is neither cold nor warm, boasts, indeed, of its riches, and is yet so miserable. Here we can see the condition of the Pauline Churches not so very long after the death of their founder. The worldliness is increased through heretical teachers, false apostles and prophetesses, who declare fornication and the eating of meat offered to idols to be allowed, deluding the Christians with the idea that only then the depths of Satan’s wiles can be sounded. It is ordinary heathen libertinism which is disseminated by these Nicolaitans, Christian messengers and prophets. Besides this, the catalogue of crimes at the end of the book shows us what kind of people called themselves Christian here and there.
The danger from within appears, according to the
letters to the Churches, to be almost greater than
that from without. It is especially to guard against
Taking it all in all, it is an entirely untheological practical kind of Christianity. Fidelity in persecution, resistance to worldliness, clinging to the first love, such is the claim that the seer makes. He is still animated by the genuine enthusiasm of the first great age. We can trace this, even externally, by the fact that there is as yet no set form for repentance, no ecclesiastical law; as long as the judgment is yet to come, so long there is time for repentance. However strict the separation which is demanded from the world, there is as yet no legalism within, because the voice of the Spirit is still heard. But now that the struggle with the Roman empire has begun we can scarcely any longer speak of the Christians as a sect. The former sect takes its place in the history of the world, resolved for the present just to remain true to itself and to look upon world and devil as one.
There is no trace of any opposition to St Paul, however much his formulae may be disregarded. We misconceive St Paul altogether as long as we do not recognize that he would have made exactly the same demands in this position.
BEYOND his promise and his claim the author of the Apocalypse pursues no ulterior aim. He feels no need for theological thought and has no time to spare for it. This does not preclude his possessing very definite—though in no wise original—conceptions about God and the things of God. Even though he is layman, he is, after all, a learned layman, who has both read and heard a great deal. Like all laymen, he accepts the most obvious contradictions and does not strive after any inner harmony. His thoughts are never abstractions: they are all fancies calculated for the eye and the ear. It will not be without value to examine the conceptions of a man such as this. For he represents the average Christian, both in his thoughts and in his hopes.
We saw above how pessimistic was his estimate
of the political position of the age. Satan is the
present ruler of this world. He has given the beast
power over all the kings of the earth. As in the
letter to the Ephesians, so here: we Christians fight
not against flesh and blood, but against the demoniac
This fundamental faith in a present living God is the basis upon which all the optimistic hope for the future rests.
But how, then, can the power of the dragon and of
the Gentiles be explained? The author gives no
answer to this, because he has no interest in untying
God Himself is, it is true, a very distant mysterious
Being. It is significant that He is described for the
most part in accordance with Ezekiel’s vision. In
His immediate neighbourhood stand the elders of
No wonder, then, that His behests are so exclusively
Christ appears as the chief of this great host of
intermediate beings, and Christ is everything to our
writer, therefore possessed of all titles also, only not
God. This distinct subordination beneath God is
maintained throughout the whole book. Twice in the
letters to the Churches Jesus Himself is made to
speak of His God. The visions in
But then, how very little our author feels himself
bound by these, his own words. All the divine
predicates are again heaped upon Jesus almost
immediately afterwards, and He is placed high above
the angels, and that from the beginning, not only
after His exaltation. He is the beginning of the
creation of God, the first and the last and the living
one, the Α and the Ω, the beginning and the end.
He is the Redeemer, and will also be the judge over
Christian and Gentile. It is especially in the letters
to the Churches that one can see that our author has
discovered in Christ, to his great comfort, a substitute
for the dread and inaccessible God. That, again, is a
sign of the layman’s theology. God is too far distant,
too high for him: one cannot hold intercourse with
Him after a friendly fashion. Christ, on the other
hand, is known, and can be brought quite near to one.
The name for Christ which occurs most frequently in
the book is “The Lamb” (taken from
What has Jesus done, then, upon earth? As answer to this we are merely told He died and His blood has redeemed us. Thereby we have been legally delivered from the bondage of the heathen and of the devil, and have become members of the people of God. This does not preclude the writer having many other thoughts besides as to Jews’ work. But this is practically the most important to him, because he always has to picture the Christians to himself as a people.
He did not know Jesus, and so he cannot start from any personal impression. But he is now in the midst of the struggle with the Roman people, and then Jesus must be the king, the leader in this struggle, who has redeemed us for His host. The victory is ours because our King possesses such divine power high above all angels. The future will bring us the terrible and bloody victory, and the reward for those that have died the hero’s death. Judaism—the Old Testament and Paul too—have furnished their attributes of Jesus. The author has taken these various heterogeneous elements, and has just placed them side by side. They are only harmonized by his temperament.
It is interesting to see how this layman’s book
agrees with St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians in the
highest attributes of the Christology. The Epistle
to the Colossians is directed against heretical teachers
who preached the worship of angels. The Apocalypse
likewise rejects angelolatry. In both cases Jesus is
exalted high above all angels. First of all, Jesus was
But what now is the origin of all this Christianity of the Apocalypse? Can it be traced back to Jesus Himself, or to the first apostles, or to Judaists, or to St Paul and his companions, or to what other source?
Every direct development from the primitive Palestinian form of the Gospel is excluded. Nothing reminds us of Jesus and His disciples. Scarcely ever do we meet with even a faint echo of any saying of Jesus, the gospel faith in the Fatherhood of God is entirely wanting. There is not even a single instance of the use of the phrase kingdom of God. Whoever knew Jesus Himself or even only His words, could never have suffered these wild fancies of vengeance to hold dominion over him.
On the other hand, Paulinism is certainly the presupposition of this form of Christianity. St Paul’s universalism, his entire annulling of the law, his
strict separation from the Jewish synagogue, are all
taken for granted in this book. The Christology, however, best shows the dependence upon Pauline
formulas: Jesus is the Son of God who has descended
from heaven. He is highly exalted above all angels,
the beginning of the creation of God. He only
The Christianity of the Apocalypse is a development of that form of Christianity which St Paul presented to the Gentiles.
An entirely different element was, however, added to it, viz., Judaism with its apocalyptic literature and all the belief in God, angels and demons and the cosmology which this implies. It is still an open question in what form the Christian prophet appropriated this Judaism, whether he edited an already completed Jewish writing, just inserting a few Christian additions, or whether he independently combined all manner of literary and oral Jewish traditions from the standpoint of his Christian faith. But this question is of secondary importance. In any case he has completed digested Judaism and made it his own before he has uttered his prophecies. It is not improbable that he was himself of Jewish extraction; his style, and especially his knowledge of the Hebrew Old Testament, almost seems to prove this. He then, according to our supposition, would have entered one of the Pauline Churches, and would have assimilated the new world of thought as far as it suited him. Be that as it may, his Christianity presents a complete fusion of the most heterogeneous materials (we cannot call them hostile: cf. 2 Thess.)—Pauline Christianity and Jewish apocalyptic theory.
But out of these materials he created something that was his own. He saw the struggle between State and Church on the point of breaking out; he saw it in the light of an illumination from above: it was the struggle of spirits, and as a Christian he foresaw the victory of his faith under all circumstances. This lifted him high up above his fellow churchmen into the ranks of the prophets. From this prophetic height he issued his instructions for the struggle that was about to begin, like a practised general, who, above all, pays attention to the weak points in his own troops. That which he thus places in the forefront is neither Pauline nor Jewish, but simple Christian commands for the period of persecution. This now succeeds to the missionary period properly so-called, but this change involves a corresponding one in the Christian line of defence and attack.
One evil legacy he did indeed bequeath to us: Christianity was drowned in a sea of Jewish fancies and feelings. That was a misfortune from which the new religion was destined to suffer grievously.
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS.
Christianity is the result of the labours of men.
John is the forerunner as prophet. Jesus comes
next, with a consciousness more than human as
Son of God. The apostles transmit His message.
Prophets and teachers join their fellowship. Paul—stamped as it were out of the ground—brings about
the great transition from the Jews to the Greeks
under the sense of a divine calling. Finally, on the
outbreak of the struggle with Rome, the Christian
All have one and the same message—it is eschatology transformed into a practical demand. It is the message of the judgment and the coming of the kingdom of God in the immediate future. That is the aim of their cry—“Repent ye”; “Watch ye.” Be ye saved from the coming judgment. Upon this earth there is nothing left that abideth forever. The Jewish Church is tottering to its fall. The Roman empire is doomed to decay. There is no thought of any new great world-organization. Hence the minimum of ecclesiastical forms.
And if, after all, there is even in this present world something new and that endureth—then it is the life of the disciples of Jesus. Their Church is but miserable to look at; their theology setting aside St Paul’s alone—is a wretched jumble of Jewish words and conceptions and Christian insertions and additions. But the new life in these communities is of surpassing greatness: to be a disciple of Jesus means to be a redeemed man—one who exercises self-control, who loves the brethren, and clings to God above all else. It was Jesus who gave them this new life, and therefore they were ready to stand up for Jesus, and if need be to die for Him. Paul alone speculated about the redemption. But even with him possession is the really important matter. “He that hath not the Spirit of Christ is none of His.”
These three points, the presence of men of God, the longing to leave this present world, the new life of the children of God, are the signs of this first creative period. When they are present no emphasis is laid upon the Church. Is not the spirit in the leaders, the spirit that creates and destroys forms; and does not the longing for heaven imply the longing to quit the Church on earth, and is not the new life of more importance than church membership?
And what did this enthusiasm produce? It separated Christianity from Judaism, and started it on its independent course. It began the evangelization of the whole world. It took up the struggle with Rome’s world-power. And so within. It produced the first great theology, formed a new kind of literature—the Gospels—created the Apocalpyse; at bottom, all of them unfixed undogmatic creations. How often Paul produces new formulas, and alters the outlines of the whole of his theology.
But at the same time the first beginnings of the Church are developed out of this same enthusiasm: there is the organization of the communities, fixed forms of worship, discipline, church officers, creed, moral regulations; more important than all, St Paul’s great theory: no salvation outside of the faith. But all is still provisory—means to the great end. Every Christian wished from the bottom of his heart that his Church might perish, and the kingdom of God begin.
Genesis
2:1-25 2:17 3:1-24 3:1-24 3:7-10 6 15 15:6 15:6
Deuteronomy
Psalms
Song of Solomon
Isaiah
24:1-23 45:23 51:5-6 51:8 53:1-12 53:7
Daniel
Habakkuk
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
1:15 2:1-29 2:1-29 3:23 4:1-25 4:1-25 6:1-23 7 7:1-25 7:1-25 7:11 8:1-39 8:31 11:1-36 12:1-21 13:1-14
1 Corinthians
2:1-16 4:9-15 7:1-40 12:1-11 13:1-13 13:1-13 14:1-33 15:1-58 15:1-58 15:1-58 15:1-58
2 Corinthians
3:4-6 3:6 4:6 5:1-21 5:4 5:18-20 6:1-18 11:1-33 11:5
Galatians
Philippians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
Revelation
iv v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389