JESUS AND PAUL

LECTURE I

INTRODUCTORY

THE PHASES OF NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE, AS REFLECTING THE MOVEMENT OF RELIGIOUS LIFE

1. The Phases of the Literature

The aim that we are pursuing in common in this brief course of study is an analysis of the early literature of Christianity in order to get at the springs of its life. We are to apply without reserve or restriction every process of historical and literary criticism which modern science places within our reach. We do this because as rational students of the history of civilization no less than as Christian believers we are persuaded of the preeminent value of Christianity as a force operative in the social organism. For as such it made itself felt in the reconstruction of the world which followed upon the downfall of Graeco-Roman heathenism, and the ele ments of its power are still available. At the beginning of our era national religion in the form of emperorworship gave way to the Old Testament ideal of the Kingdom of God in Christianized form. Personal religion, which had taken the form of various oriental mystery religions and cults of individual immortality, also gave way. It yielded to the doctrine of an eternal life in the keeping of Christ with God. National religion and personal religion were combined in new forms, and the combination led to the conversion of

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Europe. We look to it still to effect the Christianization of the world.

Enquiry of the sort here proposed implies, of course, the application of quite a new form of the doctrine of Sacred Scripture. Revelation and Inspiration will take on for us an altered meaning. Conservative brethren may even deny our right to apply the ancient terms to the new doctrine. But unless I quite mistake the meaning of Jesus, of Paul, and of that great disciple of Paul at Ephesus to whom tradition assigns the name of John, this is exactly what the New Testament calls upon us to do. A Christian, as against a mere rabbinic doctrine of Sacred Scripture, implies making of the letter a means of access to the eternal Spirit, and as such subordinate. The effort of Jesus and Paul was to secure this subordination. They stood opposed to a religion of the letter, of the scribe, of the written authority of a sacred book. Jesus waged his conflict against the "lawyers" who had changed the vital relation of sons to a Father in Heaven into legalism and book-religion. Paul attacked "the law." He took the conflict over into the abstract as an opposition between Law and Grace.

After Paul came reaction. The compiler of our first Gospel takes the view-point of the neo-legalist. "Matthew," as we call him, is a scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, bent at all costs on keeping in his treasure both the new and the old. Such is also the view-point of the Epistles of James and Jude, and of most of the ecclesiastical literature of the post-apostolic period.

But again the pendulum swings forward. The Ephesian evangelist, to whom tradition gives the name of "John," lifts the whole debate to a higher level. For him the value of the records of religion in the past is their ability to bring men into vital contact with the life of God in man, 66 (6 the life," as he calls it, even the

eternal life, which was from the beginning, which was with the Father, and was manifested to us in the form of a living Word, so that our eyes could see it and our hands handle it, a Word of life with which we still have an eternal, imperishable fellowship." In his interpretative Gospel this deutero-Pauline evangelist introduces a scene of Jesus as the incarnate Logos in dispute with the scribes concerning the authority of Moses and the Law. It is Paulinism in other language. The heart of it lies in Jesus' rebuke of the scribes' conception of Scripture and its value to religion. To them Scripture was simply a collection of authoritative precepts, obedience to which would win them the reward of a share in the world to come. To him it was a voice of the indwelling God. "Ye search the Scriptures," he says to his detractors, "because ye think that in them ye have eternal life; and they are they that testify of me; but ye would not come unto me that ye might have life."

This Johannine principle is the Church's charter of intellectual freedom. We shall search the Scriptures as never before; but not because we think that in them, but only through them, we have eternal life. They bear witness to One that has it, an eternal Wisdom of God who spake by the prophets, and was incarnate in Christ.

Historico-critical analysis does not disregard the authority of the New Testament. It seeks it on a higher level. We search the Scriptures in order that we may bring ourselves and others into contact through them with the life of the eternal Logos, "the life that was from the beginning with the Father," that lies latent in the outward universe of order and law, that slumbers in the brute and dreams in man, but awakes to full consciousness in sons who know the Father; 1 the Logos that

1 Compare Philo (conf. ling. 28): "Those who have real knowledge of the one Creator and Father of all things are rightly called Sons of God.' And even if we are not yet worthy to be called 'Sons of God,' we may deserve to be called children of His eternal

is not only "latent" (èvdiáberos as the Stoics said), but also "manifest" (πроpoрikós); "for the life was mani(προφορικός); fested, and we have seen, and bear witness, that ye may have fellowship with us; yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son, Jesus Christ."

Christianity comes down to us as the triumphant survivor in the conflict of religions in the Roman Empire; a survivor not by accident, nor by superhuman intervention from without, but by an inherent fitness to be the religion of a civilized and united humanity. Its ideal was that of a kingdom of God, a universal sovereignty of law and order in a commonweal of righteousness, peace, and good will. This ideal was primarily social, though individualism was already strongly felt. Taken over from Judaism and glorified, the doctrine of the Kingdom of God proved more acceptable in the long run to the mass of populations mingled in the Empire than the ideal of Rome's world-religion: Emperor-worship as the symbolic expression of a supreme loyalty to the genius of the Roman world order. "Christian" civilization on its social side means the adoption of Jesus' ideal. It centers in the prayer: "Thy kingdom come."

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What Cæsar-worship had to commend it may be realized by comparing in our own time the patriotic devotion of which Japanese emperor-worship is capable. will not speak of the extravagances of a nominally Christian empire, whose dominant caste aspired but recently to unify the world under its own Kultur. Civilization in the period of the Cæsars, centered around the Mediterranean, took over the Hellenistic conception of a supreme governor in whom as the embodiment of law and order in the commonwealth the divine impulse that controls the progress of humanity is manifest. Rejecting pagan imperialism the civilization which centers around 'image,' the most holy Logos." Cf. Mt. 11: 27; Jn. 1: 12, 18; 17:3; I Jn. 3: 1-3; 4: 7; 5: 1-5, 18.

the Atlantic has preferred to take over its social ideal in the Christian form. And, as we have seen, the basis of this ideal was the divine sovereignty sung by Hebrew prophets and Psalmists. We have scarcely emerged as yet from the convulsive struggle, but we are done at last with the Roman ideal, which made slavery the lowest social stratum and military autocracy the highest. The mediæval ideal, it has been said, was the City of God. It may seem to-day to be not only distant but receding. Still it came within view, and the vision still lives as the goal of religion on its social side.

Graeco-Roman civilization took over also the essential ideals of individual religion as embodied in the Oriental cults of personal redemption. For far and wide ancient forms of nature-worship had been recast into "mysteries" through whose rites the devotee sought to share in the immortality attained by the dying and rising Savior-god. The modern world has adopted this religious ideal also. But it has preferred to take it over in the Christianized form of assimilation to the death and life of Jesus, self-devoted for the kingdom's sake and for the brotherhood; rather than in the Oriental form of assimilation to the death and life of some mythical hero or demi-god who was very far from representing in his reputed career the noblest aspirations of humanity.

Christianity comes down to us, then, as the survivor in the great imperial melting-pot of national and personal religions, triumphant because worthy, surviving because fitted to survive. The select literature of its age of conquest is the New Testament, a group of writings enshrined by the Church through the centuries as the very well-spring of its life. To reverent and sympathetic scrutiny this literature should yield up something of the secret of the triumph. We may not thereby bring ourselves in immediate view of the absolute religion, but we may at least expect to advance a stage in sorely