Part 22

What relation now did the teachings of Jesus bear to the religious beliefs and hopes of the Jewish people? Certainly his words on most matters did not appear to his hearers opposed to Jewish doctrines, but rather they seemed to enlarge and to give a nobler content to their own ideas. With the current doctrine that the salvation of the individual depended on his own righteousness he was thoroughly in accord. He gave, however, a deeper meaning to the idea of righteousness: in opposition to the extreme legalistic notions which were emphasized especially by some of the Pharisees, he taught that there must first exist the inner motive of love for God and man from which alone right actions could flow; that one who had recognized his true relations to God and his fellows and whose transformed character showed itself in filial dependence on God and in loving and generous service towards men, and in the practice of humility, was already delivered from the bondage of sin and had entered into a new spiritual life. Although his contemporaries had abandoned their hopes of a prompt realization of the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus showed that that kingdom was already present in its beginning wherever men displayed the character and did the deeds which belonged to the kingdom—in other words, that the kingdom could be realized here by changing present conditions so that God’s will should be done on earth as in heaven. God, to Jesus’ mind, was not to be conceived as a king ruling over his people, but rather as a universal loving father, whose affection extended to the wicked as well as to the good, and embraced every class of mankind. He taught further that from this divine love flowed an infinite grace which left no man outside the possibility of salvation. But beyond all these elements in the teachings of Jesus, which, because of their supreme moral demands, made the way of salvation at once most simple and most severe, more than the fact that his teachings dealt primarily with the health of the soul, the personality of Jesus, his belief that he had received a divine commission, and his consciousness of his unique relation to God must be taken into account if we are to understand adequately the effect of his teaching. His immediate disciples never dreamed of separating themselves from the Jews until events forced them to take that step, but they were filled with the conviction that their Master was the Messiah and that a new revelation had come to them.

After Jesus’ death his followers made the central theme of their preaching the proclamation of him as the Christ, who by his sufferings and death had brought salvation to men; they taught that through him men might be delivered from their sin and enter into the blessings promised by his gospel. In general they laid more stress on eschatology than Jesus had done, for they confidently expected an early end of the world and the reappearance of Christ in glory. Quietly no doubt at first they began to make converts in Jerusalem. Then a persecution broke out and conversions were made outside Judea among other peoples than the Jews. About the year 45 a church, largely Gentile, was formed at Antioch,[310] the third city of importance in the Empire. The founding of this church definitely began the expansion of Christianity beyond the bounds of Judaism.

Paul was the chief leader in extending the gospel to the Gentiles, and so much did he overshadow the other missionaries that his work and teaching mark the second period in the history of Christianity. Although no account can here be given of his life and experiences, it is necessary to have these in mind to understand his influence. Especially important is it to remember that he was a trained Jew, familiar with the Old Testament and with the theological doctrines of his people; nor was he unacquainted with the ideas and the language of the Greek world, or untouched by the mysticism of his day. A Roman citizen by birth, a Hebrew of the Hebrews by descent and education, he was well fitted to play his great rôle as the apostle who was to carry Christianity out of Judaism to the Gentiles. He was, however, no systematic theologian to lay down a logical body of doctrine as a Greek might have done, and his writings were all occasional. Furthermore he had not been a companion of Jesus, but was one who believed that by an extraordinary experience he had come directly into knowledge of the risen Christ.

Yet if Paul was not a systematic theologian, he combined with his intense religious devotion a keen habit of mind which made the fundamental elements of his thought stand out clearly. To him Christ’s death and resurrection were the great facts of salvation, the means whereby man was redeemed from sin. If we read the Epistle to the Galatians, perhaps the earliest of the Pauline epistles (c. 46-50 A.D.), which contains much autobiographical material, we find certain ideas set forth there which are repeated again and again in his other writings. We can hardly do better than to begin with this letter.

First, Christ is stated to be the redeemer of men from their sins; this is shown by the words of the greeting: “Grace to you and peace from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us out of this present evil world, according to the will of our God and Father.” The suffering of the good for the sins of others, as we have already seen, was an idea familiar to the Jews, and it was easy for a Jewish convert to relate the death of Jesus to the prophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Paul saw in the death and the resurrection of Jesus the proof that he was the Christ. The vicarious character of Christ’s death was probably an element in all apostolic teaching. On it and the mystic indwelling of Christ, Paul wholly based his preaching.

Paul, however, did not teach that the death of Christ in itself saved men without effort on their part; on the contrary he held that man could attain redemption only through faith in Jesus Christ. Now “faith” meant to him something more than mere belief or trust; it was trust marked by an attitude of sympathy with the divine nature and a readiness to receive that nature into one’s self so that Christ could dwell in man, and the human and the divine natures could be united. In this way to Paul’s mind the Jew was set free from the requirements of the law and obtained justification, that is, gained forgiveness of his sins and reconciliation with God. Faith supplanted law, and made men sons of God. So he wrote: “We being Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, yet knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, save through faith in Jesus Christ, even we believed on Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the law: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.”[311] And again: “But before faith came, we were kept in ward under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. So that the law hath been our tutor to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith is come, we are no longer under a tutor. For ye are all the sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus.”[312] This attitude of the apostle was due in part to his own experience, which had shown him the insufficiency of the Jewish law, and also in part to the polemic against Judaism which was a necessary part of his ministry. But his doctrine of justification by faith was not developed for forensic purposes; it was one of his firmest convictions.

When Paul spoke of Christ dwelling in a man, as he frequently did in the Epistle to the Galatians,[313] he meant his words to be taken literally: he held that Christ enters into the man, frees him from the domination of the sinful flesh, and, being a life-giving spirit, brings the Christian from death to life; and that in this way the believer by faith shares in Christ’s death, resurrection, and triumph. Therefore he exhorted the Colossians: “If then ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are upon the earth. For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”[314] Faith to Paul’s mind was a present union with the risen and glorified Christ; it was for him the means of salvation, or rather it was salvation. As he wrote in the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, he held that through union with Christ man dies to sin and rises to freedom from the bondage of wickedness; he is reborn a new creature and enters into a new spiritual life.[315]

Closely associated with faith is Paul’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The word itself (πνεῦμα) was intelligible to both the Greek and Jewish world, but since Paul was not a systematic theologian, it is a matter of much dispute as to what his exact concept of the Holy Spirit was. He evidently thought of the Spirit as a divine objective reality. In some passages he identifies Christ and the spirit of Christ or the spirit of God;[316] from this we may conclude that he probably thought the Holy Spirit to be a mode of the indwelling Christ. But if his concept is not clear to us, we have no difficulty in understanding his ideas as to the operation of the Spirit. He taught that it is the Spirit which assures men of their sonship so that they may address God as their Father; that it transforms the inner man; and that it demands the sanctification of the body, for the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.[317] From the Spirit come the fundamental virtues—“love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance.”[318] Thus the Spirit is the means of continuing the believer in his course and of perfecting him in the Christian life. In common with his contemporaries Paul of course believed that many ecstatic phenomena—speaking with tongues and prophesying, for example—were the gifts of the Spirit; but his instructions to the excitable Corinthians show his good sense and wisdom.[319]

In all his teaching Paul was highly practical. It is not certain that he held a dualistic view of man’s nature in the Greek or Persian sense, but he was well acquainted with the struggle between man’s lower and higher natures and he knew the warring elements within the individual. He frequently contrasted the flesh and the spirit, meaning by the first man’s sinful nature which keeps him in the bondage of wickedness. From this bondage and consequent death he held that man cannot escape by his own powers; but that Christ delivers man from sin and its consequences. This deliverance is an act of grace, a gift from God. We have only to read the Epistles which bear his name to see how wisely he dealt with actual errors and sins, or stirred to concrete acts of righteousness the members of the churches which he had founded.

In most of his writing Paul dwelt on the present salvation which the mystic union with Christ secured, but at times he treated the eschatological nature of salvation, teaching that the full effects of it would be realized when Christ should come to be glorified in his saints. That this day would come quickly the apostle fully believed; then the faithful, dead and living alike, would receive their full reward and the wicked their punishment.

These, briefly, are the fundamental elements in Paul’s doctrine: first, the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus; second, faith which secures the mystic union with Christ; third, the indwelling Holy Spirit, which completes man’s redemption and moral regeneration. For all Paul doubtless found warrant in the life and words of Jesus, although he seems to have neglected the ethical teachings of the Master. Paul’s views have formed the basis of much of the doctrine of the Church since his time, although his idea of union with Christ through faith soon fell into the background; when it was revived it took on a form very unlike the apostle’s teaching.

We have thus far seen two tendencies in Christian thought. The first appears in the synoptic gospels where Jesus is represented as the mediator and teacher, who interpreted to men the universal loving fatherhood of God and showed them their proper relations to God and to their fellow-men; the other is seen in Paul who taught that through the indwelling Christ salvation was secured. It was inevitable that reflective thought should act upon these teachings, and that in the philosophic environment of the Christian churches, at least outside Judea, attempts should be made to apprehend and to formulate in intellectual terms the nature, life, and mission of Jesus—in other words to create a Christian philosophy or theology. When in the period between 50 and 100 A.D., Christianity came into conflict with Hellenistic philosophy and theosophy this work of building up a Christian philosophy began. This stage is the third represented in the New Testament.

The so-called Epistle to the Hebrews (c. 90 A.D.) is the first document of the New Testament in which the Greek intellectual habit clearly appears. Although the unknown author was writing to Gentile Christians for practical and not doctrinal ends, there is good evidence that he had been influenced by Alexandrian thought. He presents Christianity as the final and absolute religion, emphasizes Christ’s priestly office and his sacrifice, and gives a more philosophical and abstract definition of faith than any other writer of the New Testament. The great example, however, of the effect of the contact of Christianity with Greek thought is furnished by the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles.

This fourth Gospel was apparently written at Ephesus, probably between 100 and 110 A.D., by one who was well acquainted with the philosophy and mysticism of his time; he was also strongly influenced by Paul. If the Johannine Epistles are not by the same author, they represent the same range of ideas as the Gospel, and we are therefore justified in using them together with it.

The fourth Gospel is much more an interpretation than a history of Jesus’ person and life; it takes for granted that its readers are acquainted with the facts; and it assumes that the church is one universal body.

Let us now consider the opening words of this Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not. There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came that he might bear witness of the light. There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.”[320]

Here then are two fundamental ideas: first, the eternal existence and divine nature of Christ who is the Word, the Logos of philosophic speech, and second, the revelation of God to man through the incarnate Word—“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The concept of the Logos as the world-reason we saw first appear in the philosophy of Heraclitus; then the idea developed through the centuries until the Logos was equivalent to the reason of God, at once existing in God and being his expression. As such it was a part of Alexandrian thought, being found, for example, in Philo. The Logos of the philosopher, however, was the agent connecting a transcendental god with the divine creation, making and sustaining the world. In so far the Johannine statement is in accord with current thought and expression, although we should probably be wrong if we affirmed that the author was drawing on Philo directly; it is far more probable that he was simply using ideas and language common in the intellectual circles of the day. But if we compare the idea of the Logos in the Johannine prologue with that in Philo we observe a profound and striking difference between the two. For Philo, as we have just said, the Logos was an abstract entity which existed for cosmological purposes; in the Johannine thought, although the Logos is the creator of the world, he is much more: he is incarnate in mortal flesh that he may reveal God to man and bring man salvation. The author wished to show that the creator and revealer were one, that the Logos had appeared as a man on earth. Now this emphasis on the human side of Jesus, the son of God, was in all probability due to the arguments of some incipient Gnostics who denied that the Christ had come in the flesh, and this polemic purpose goes far to explain the abruptness of the prologue. When once the statement has been made the philosophical language dealing with the Logos is dropped; yet the position and emphasis of the ideas in the prologue were calculated to assure the enlightened readers of the fourth Gospel that the witness of the generation which had seen Jesus was true and must be accepted.[321] The first purpose of the author was to set forth the prime significance of the personal human Jesus, with whom men had lived on familiar terms and from whom they had learned the deepest truths.[322]

How then, according to this writer, does the incarnation of the Word of God in the human Jesus bring salvation to men? The first answer is given by the use of a symbol which is employed in six passages in the Gospel:[323] Christ is the light which lighteth every man; that is, the function of the incarnate Word is to bring the light of true insight, which is knowledge of God,—and Jesus in himself brings that knowledge. So Jesus declared that he was the light of the world, come to illumine the darkness of sin and ignorance in which men dwelt by manifesting the Father to them. He said in answer to Philip: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”[324] These words show also that knowledge could come only from belief; hence followed the necessity of believing in Jesus as the incarnation of the Word of God, and in the truth of his teachings. It is the knowledge of the truth thus acquired which sets men free.[325]

Yet the knowledge of God revealed to the believer through faith in Christ was not to the author’s mind the sole factor in securing salvation. We have seen how prominent love is in the teachings of Christ, as reported by the synoptic writers; to this element the Johannine writer returned and made it almost preëminent. Love is the definition of God himself in the First Epistle;[326] love was the motive which prompted God to reveal himself to the world through his only begotten son who by that revelation and in his person brought salvation to men.[327] To love one another was the new commandment which Christ gave his followers, and the measure of their love was his love for them; it was also to be the proof to the world that they were his disciples.[328] Love, then, was at once the warrant of their hope and the evidence of the new life into which they were reborn through belief in Christ and acceptance of him as the revealer of God to men.

This new life is expressed in the fourth Gospel as a mystical union with Christ which cannot be distinguished in its essence from that of the Pauline epistles; only the way of entrance into it is differently described. Paul makes faith the gate; although the Johannine author does not lay less emphasis on faith than Paul,[329] he does not look at it in quite the same way as the earlier writer, and he speaks of the entrance into the true relation with Christ as a new birth—using the same idea as the pagan mystics. The new birth was described as of the spirit, whereas the first was of the flesh,[330] and the believer’s vital relation to Christ was symbolized by the figures of the vine, of the bread, and of the water of life.[331]

Pauline influence may possibly be seen also in the Johannine doctrine of the Holy Spirit—at any rate the fourth Gospel shows that at the time it was written a belief in the Holy Spirit was well established, so that the germ of the doctrine of the Trinity was already planted.[332] The Holy Spirit is variously referred to as the Advocate or Helper, and the Spirit of Truth, which was to be the active agent in edifying believers and rebuking the world when Christ was no longer in the flesh.[333]

The purpose of the fourth Gospel then was first to prove that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, and secondly to bring men to a belief in this fact which would give them life in Christ.[334] The idea that salvation is present spiritual experience culminates in the Johannine writings; the doctrine that those who hear and believe have already entered into eternal life is clearly stated.[335]

Let us now summarize the fundamental ideas of primitive Christianity which we have been examining in this lecture. In the first place, because of his nature and his teachings Jesus was regarded as the revealer of God to men, and at the same time, being the Christ, he was held to be their saviour and redeemer. Paul emphasized Christ’s death and resurrection, John the incarnation as the great central facts. Secondly, love and faith and their effects on man’s relation to God and to his fellow-men were made the essential elements in the Christian life. Thirdly, the doctrine of the mystic union of the believer with the divine Christ and that of the indwelling Holy Spirit were fundamental in both the Pauline and Johannine writings. Revelation, faith, mystic union with the Divine, salvation—our previous studies have shown us that these ideas were both familiar and welcome in the Greco-Roman world of the first century of our era.

We have now reviewed the essential elements in each of the three stages represented in the writings of the New Testament. In the first, the teachings of Jesus show no trace of any influence exerted by Greek philosophic or religious thought. With Paul we begin to detect the signs of such influence—the germs of the doctrine of Logos, for example, are found in the later epistles (Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians), which set forth a belief in the eternal existence of Christ, the Son of God. But it remained for the Johannine writer to give a fuller philosophic statement to this doctrine, and in general to bring Christianity well within the province of Greek thought and expression. Thenceforth Christianity belonged to the Greek intellectual world.

FOOTNOTES:

[301] _Adv. haer._ IV, 30, 3.

[302] _Matt._ V, 44-45.

[303] _Matt._ V, 43-48; cf. _Luke_ VI, 27-36.

[304] _Matt._ V, 44-45; _Luke_ VI, 35.

[305] _Mark_ XI, 25.

[306] _Deut._ VI, 5; _Matt._ XXII, 37; _Mark_ XII, 30; _Luke_ X, 27.

[307] _Matt._ IV, 17; _Luke_ XXIV, 47.

[308] _Matt._ XVI, 13-20; _Mark_ VIII, 27-30; _Luke_ IX, 18-21. Cf. _Mark_ XIV, 61; _Matt._ XXVI, 63.

[309] _John_ VI, 15.

[310] _Acts_ XI, 19-26.

[311] _Gal._ II, 15-16.

[312] _Gal._ III, 23-26.