Chapter VII: The Evolution of Christianity

Christianity did not arise in the form we associate with it. The followers of Jesus, after they had become convinced that their crucified leader had arisen from the dead and had become a spiritual agent, grouped themselves together in Jerusalem and formed a religious congregation whose distinguishing tenet was a belief in the near approach of the earthly kingdom of God, whose ruler would be Jesus. In his powerful name, the members of the congregation could perform miracles of healing where the faith was sufficient. This form of Christianity did not differ very widely from Judaism in anything but this belief in Jesus as the expected Messiah. It is obvious that this difference has no essential meaning to us to-day who know the origin and import of the Messianic hope of the Jews. Let us be frank with ourselves and clear our minds of these dreams of the past. These early Christians deceived themselves; their hopes were not fulfilled; the earthly kingdom of God did not come. Jesus was not the Messiah for the simple reason that there is no such person. He was not the Messiah any more than Mohammed Ahmed was the Mahdi--and for the very same reason. Mahdis and Messiahs and Buddhas are creations of religious and race imagination just as King Lear is the product of the poetic imagination of William Shakespeare. The {85} educated man of the present must classify these figures as tremendous fictions whose power is waning. When he faces them squarely and asks himself what significance they have for his life, his answer must be, "Only historical and artistic." We may say, then, that Christianity in its first form has been outgrown.

But the Messianic form of Christianity gave it a vividness and concrete impressiveness that made it a force among the men of that age. Jesus was the heavenly Messiah who would return in power and rule according to righteousness. With him was bound up the hope of immortality and in his hand was dominion over the evils which beset one's path. A great world-event was impending; at any moment the last trumpet might sound and the dead and the living be delivered to judgment. Moreover, Jesus as the Christ and Lord was even now at work among men, his Spirit was active to guide and encourage those who had faith in him. In the congregation at Jerusalem, this belief in Jesus as the Messiah was closely associated with the past history of the race and did not involve a break with the Law. The Old Testament was searched to find prophecies which would throw light upon this apparently new departure and soon passage after passage was found which would easily lend itself to the desired interpretation. Under the guidance of these passages and of the new outlook, the life of the prophet of Nazareth was re-molded until it lost the greater part of its more human features.

Such an important amendment of the Jewish religion could not keep itself hidden. The Jews of the dispersion, broadened by their contact with the political, {86} philosophical and religious movements of the Roman empire, yet cherishing a sincere faith in the traditions of their fathers, heard of the new sect which had arisen in Palestine. Their interest was aroused. Sometimes they felt sympathetic, sometimes they were antagonistic. Slowly at first and then more rapidly through the work of Paul, they came in more direct contact with this new movement. By this time, it had already become Hellenistic in its spirit and attitude. Around the nucleus of the life of Jesus and his resurrection, the seething, myriad-shaped ideas of the age attached themselves. The Palestinian congregation was left behind in its peaceful conservatism while the movement which it had inaugurated grew by leaps and bounds and swept outward into the tossing ocean of faiths and philosophies which extended from India to Gaul. To suppose that it could remain unchanged in such fellowship is to undervalue the assimilative tendencies in the social mind. The Greeks and Romans and Egyptians and Syrians could not think as Jews. They inevitably interpreted it in terms of their own ideas and problems in order to comprehend it.

We have already considered the interpretation which Paul gave to Christianity. It was, as we saw, dominated by the apocalyptic notion of a heavenly, or spiritual, man while it gave ample recognition to the desire for salvation from sin and participation in the divine life. Thus Christianity was brought into touch with the mystery-cults and responded to the yearning for some guarantee of immortality so wide-spread at this time. "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal {87} bodies through his Spirit which dwelleth in you." We should compare this passage from Romans with the corresponding discussion in Corinthians (1, 15), "And if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, our faith also is vain." The message which he brought to the Hellenistic world was in its essentials a definite one. Jesus, a man who recently lived in Palestine and did wonders, was raised by God and has become a heavenly man, the guarantee of immortality to those who have faith in him. The last trumpet of the day of judgment will sound and the dead will be raised with spiritual or incorruptible bodies, and those who are still alive will be changed and given these spiritual bodies since flesh and blood cannot enter the coming kingdom of God. This message is the natural interpretation of Christianity by a learned Hellenistic Jew.

But this was merely the beginning of the evolution of Christianity. The next phase involves its interpretation by the Gnostic movement. Let us see first what this Gnostic movement was before we try to determine its direct and indirect influence upon Christianity.

So far as can be made out, Gnosticism was a religious philosophy which grew up in the eastern part of the Roman empire. Toward the making of this theosophy went many strands of refined mythology coming from India, Persia, Alexandria and Palestine. It was an esoteric doctrine representing that free mingling of traditions from all sources so characteristic of the age. Those traditions were worked up by reflection into a fairly systematic outlook upon the world, entirely continuous with mythology yet far more highly developed. Gnosticism cannot be called a philosophy in the technical sense of that term since its constructions did not {88} have a critical foundation. So far as it used Greek philosophy, it drew from the more pictorial myths of Plato and the conception of subordinate powers or demons advanced by stoicism. Its interest was not, however, philosophical but rather theosophical in character. The relation of the individual soul to the world-powers and the way in which a future state of happiness could be reached occupied its attention in the first instance; and the theology which it developed represented the stage-setting for this personal drama. I do not think it is saying too much when I state that there is nothing in Gnosticism which modern science and philosophy can recognize as having a valid foundation. We can understand why it developed, just as we can understand why mythology arose, but it was a mistaken movement because it followed the old mythological path of explanation. If the direction taken by reflection is wrong, the most strenuous endeavors cannot lead to truth.

Gnosticism possessed certain tenets which were very wide-spread in ancient civilization. The flesh was looked upon as a thing of evil which corrupted the soul. The physical world was in fact given over to the powers of darkness while the spiritual world was ruled by the god of light and purity. This dualism with its accompanying asceticism is to be found in the Persian religion, in India, in later Jewish thought, in the Orphic cults of Greece and even in Plato. It entered into Christianity as naturally as science does into our outlook to-day. All through the early years of the Christian era, and during the Middle Ages, this contrast existed and controlled ethics. All of which goes to show that Christianity was not the creation of a single man but the flowering out of religious mythology.

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According to the teaching of Gnosticism, the soul was in danger of destruction or of dire calamities unless it possessed the proper preparation for its journey after death. The best means of safety was the participation in the life of some savior-god who had vanquished the powers of darkness and evil. It is evident that the world-setting of Gnosticism was not far different from that of Christianity. They were products of the same age, outgrowths of a similar soil. The advantage which Christianity had was its connection with a noble personality and the ethical background which this gave it. Gnosticism was oriental far more than it was Greek. Had it been connected with the ethical teaching of the classic Greek tradition, had a myth of the resurrection of some noble teacher like Plato arisen to control the phantasy of the oriental mind, the result would not have been far different from Christianity.

It was only natural that Gnosticism with its belief in a savior-god should feel itself drawn to Christianity with its similar teaching. Jesus was regarded by the Christian gnostics as divine, as an eternal being who had manifested himself historically in fulfillment of his function of mediator. The Christian congregations were thus forced to take another step in the deification of Jesus. For Paul, he was still a man, the second or spiritual Adam who began a new dispensation. For the earlier Christians, he was the God-selected Messiah. He now became a god who was also the son of God. The evolution was inevitable in the intellectual environment of the time. But the Christian congregations, as represented by their clearest thinkers, wished to avoid gnostic extremes and to keep near the historical basis and the ethical monotheism of the best Hebrew {90} tradition. Jesus was God, but he was also man. In this way, arose the doctrine of the incarnation. Instead of being a monument of mystical insight as theologians tell us, it was the consequence of a problem forced upon the Church. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the attempt to combine gnostic polytheism and monotheism. The only way three can be made one is by a mystery, so a mystery it became. It is a bit of verbal gymnastic or a formal solution of an impossible problem which the pressure of events had forced upon the Church.

Christianity was now on the high-road to a theology. To enter the Hellenistic world and not be forced to develop a theology was simply impossible. The first fruit of this entrance into the intellectual world of the time was the Fourth Gospel or the so-called Gospel according to John. Scholars have begun to interpret this gospel as an attempt to combine the older Christian tradition with the theological speculations of the age. The beginning of the gospel strikes a new note which separates it immediately from the synoptics. "In the beginning was the Word (Logos) and the Word was with God and the Word was God." What is this Word or Logos with which the historical Jesus was identified? For Philo, the Alexandrian Jew who played such an important part in the theological speculation of the time, the Logos was a second God, the reflection of his glory, the only begotten Son, the actual creator of the world, his active agent at work in events. It is not going too far to assert that, without the speculations of Philo, the Fourth Gospel could not have been written. And yet Philo was merely developing and applying to the Old Testament the writings of the stoic philosophy and the {91} teaching of Plato. Does it not follow that, in the Fourth Gospel, we have the more theosophic portions of ancient philosophy attached externally to the life of the Prophet of Nazareth? Under such conditions of origin, how can we begin to separate reason and revelation? Gnosticism, stoicism, platonism, the Old Testament, the stories of the life of Jesus, the broadening of Christianity, all went together to make possible the mystic theology of this gospel.

But the more Jesus was transformed into a god, the more he lost his human characteristics. The figure of Jesus becomes elusive and shadowy; he lives among men but is not of them. To make God a man or man a second God was an impossible task. When all is said, the Fourth Gospel performs this task about as well as it could be done, yet Jesus is no longer a Galilean peasant but a mystic being who speaks in riddles.

This vital interplay of Christianity and Hellenistic thought led to the passing away of the older Messianic idea with its distinct limitations. A noble monotheism was the result, while the concrete, human element which the historical origins of Christianity had contributed to it prevented this monotheism from losing sight of human problems. The value of Christianity lies in its ethics but it is doubtful whether the ethics could have become effective unless it had been carried by the more chaotic beliefs which we usually call religious. There can be little doubt that some religious system would have conquered the Roman empire; the educational level was too low to enable the better type of philosophy to dominate the life of the mass of the people. Magic and other-worldism were rampant because the social and political organization was unsatisfactory and mental discipline {92} was not wide-spread. In brief, the world was still at the mythological level and was not yet prepared for a higher plane. _This being so, the success of Christianity was the best thing which could have happened_.

Later phases of the evolution of Christianity force us to qualify this position that its success was the best thing which could have happened. In order to escape the dangers which free theosophizing brought, the leaders of the Christian congregations felt the need of a firmer organization. The result was the gradual concentration of moral and doctrinal authority in the hands of bishops. The early Church had been democratic in polity but the times were not ripe for such democracy and slowly elders were chosen to be leaders. These elders were shepherds or bishops, that is, spiritual overseers. Soon they claimed and were granted life-tenure and greater authority. Every analogy from the Old Testament and from the larger political organization of the time worked in their favor. This assumption of authority on the part of the bishops is well represented by the letter of warning sent out by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch. "Obey the Bishop as Jesus Christ the Father, and the Presbyters as the Apostles, but honor the Deacons as the law of the Lord.... Whoever honors the Bishop is honored of God; whoever does aught behind the Bishop's back, serves the devil." The natural result of this changed organization was the doctrine of Apostolic succession. With this doctrine went another, the belief in the Apostolic Origin of the articles of faith. The flexible growth of Christianity was at an end. There arose a series of dogmas enunciated by Councils of bishops and these were forced upon Christianity as authoritative. Free enquiry and {93} speculation was at an end. A religion with a creed had appeared, a thing unknown before in the history of ancient thought.

When Protestantism arose, it made a half-hearted appeal to the spirit of free inquiry. Protestantism was, however, a complex movement with decided limitations in the motives at work and the knowledge on which to build. The old church organization, molded on the lines of the Roman empire, was discarded and the function of the priesthood was changed, but the intellectual attitude and the creed upheld remained practically the same. Some of the more radical branches of the movement like the baptists of Northern Italy were suppressed too soon to allow their influence to be felt. On the whole, Protestantism was hampered by the New Testament canon which it inherited from the later stages of the evolution of Christianity. It seldom went seriously back of the stage at which Jesus was deified. Its reforms were social and political rather than theological. The tendency was to establish the bible as ultimate authority without investigation as to its origin. The consequence of this establishment of the bible as the final court of appeal was decidedly harmful since it set reason and experience over against a supposed revelation. So far as Protestantism itself was concerned, it did not have in it, as a consequence of this bibliolatry, the intellectual vitality necessary to a true evolution. Had it not been for the larger social, scientific and philosophical developments which sprang up at the same time and founded themselves on reason and experience, the protestant revolt would have ended in a blind alley. There is every reason to believe, however, that it helped to break the tyranny of the theological {94} view of the world and to free the human spirit for new endeavors. Protestantism, just because it was a revolt, could not attain sufficient unity and power to stamp out intellectual freedom. The modern world was too complex to be dominated by religion. But we have already indicated the conditions which gave rise to the higher criticism whose results we have been summarizing.

We must frankly ask ourselves what features of historical Christianity are congruent with our modern life. The Hellenistic world to which dogma and ritual are mainly due is a thing of the past, existent for no one but the scholar. Ours is a new world with new ideas, new problems and new possibilities. Does the recognition of historical continuity preclude the acknowledgment of very radical changes?

I am certain that the deification of Jesus will be given up step by step. He was not born miraculously, nor was he preexistent as the Word or Logos. These terms do not fit into an outlook dominated by science. To call him the Son of God in an exclusive sense is not warranted by the facts, nor has it any clear meaning for the present age. To the old Greek, Egyptian, and Roman, the idea was familiar; many of the patrician families traced their descent to Apollo or Jupiter. But such a literal interpretation of the phrase has no sanction for us, and any other than a literal meaning is essentially meaningless. Jesus was a noble and tender-hearted man with the beliefs of his age. To speak of him as ideally perfect and sinless is absurd just because these terms are absolutes where relatives alone have meaning. Like most theological terms they cut themselves loose {95} from their necessary setting, which, in this case, is human nature and society.

When the necessary critical work has been done, what is left of the stately theology reared by Church Fathers, councils and scholastics? Apparently only a mellowed religion with a universalistic outlook and a strong ethical trend. This mellowness and this universalism were not qualities present in perfection from the start, although we cannot say that Christianity was antagonistic to them. Mellowness takes time. I cannot but feel that men like St. Francis, Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Melancthon, Wesley, on the ecclesiastical side, and men like Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Fichte, Darwin, and Mazzini, on the laic side, have contributed to this mellowness. From this point of view, we can best describe modern Christianity as an evolution of Hebrew ethical monotheism along tenderer and more human lines under the stimulus of many very noble personalities.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christianity passed through a fire of criticism which rocked it to its foundation. To those who lived at that time, the transition from the older, and more dogmatic, form was accompanied by spiritual and moral struggles which seem to us exaggerated. The very indifference of the present age shows that the atmosphere has cleared and that new values have come to the front. A short while since, I picked up Hutton's once famous book, _Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith_, and read his analysis of the life of Cardinal Newman and his interesting criticism of Matthew Arnold. I must confess that the time-spirit of which Arnold {96} made so much has done its work. The scene is shifting from a religion which stresses a peculiar form of salvation and a career in another world to social and economic conditions and ideals. Is there not something Byronic in much of Arnold's religious poetry? Is there not too much of the pageant of the bleeding heart in his sighs of regret and farewell? Yet he realized that the old faith was dying and that man had not yet found that which could fill its place. It takes time to make an adjustment in these matters, just as it is time alone that softens the griefs of unrequited love or the loss of dear ones. And it is usually only the next generation, which has been able to make a genuinely fresh start, that settles into a new way of life.

Change is a great physician because it is able to introduce new factors into the situation, and it has been at work since Arnold's day. There are, nevertheless, prophecies in his poems of another world which would before long take the place of the one that was dying; and some of us believe that, in the new democracy which is stirring into life throughout the earth, this new and more creative world is being born:

"The millions suffer still and grieve,
And what can helpers heal
With old-world cures men half believe
For woes they wholly feel?

"And yet men have such need of joy!
But joy whose grounds are true;
And joy that should all hearts employ
As when the past was new."

In the figure of Jesus, ethical and aesthetic idealization guided by religious emotion has created a {97} personality of a peculiarly appealing type well fitted to remain as an ideal to foster and strengthen the noblest tendencies. But this ideal has become practically self-supporting apart from its mythical scaffolding. Its real foundation to-day is in its appeal to sympathies, natural to social beings, which the spiritual evolution of humanity has developed and given content to. When man succeeds in applying these sympathies rationally, in a social fashion, he may bring upon this sad old earth some measure of that kingdom for which Jesus longed. But Christianity has stood and, on the whole, still stands for certain beliefs in regard to the universe as a whole and the relation of man to it, which only patient reflection and inductive investigation can settle. By their very nature, these beliefs cannot have an historical justification although they have had an historical origin. Taking these beliefs in their simplest form and separating them from all connection with the figure of Jesus and the developed ethics whose stimulus goes back to him, they become an acceptance of an ethical God, a special providence and immortality. Remove these postulates, and it is doubtful whether theology has not also disappeared. It behooves us to examine the validity of these postulates in the light of modern science and philosophy.

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