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view; the purpose of tracing the movement of the greatest spiritual impulse ever imparted to the human race. Larger light is available now than in Baur's time on the conditions and movements of religious thought, both Jewish and Hellenistic, in the Empire. It should enable us to make better application than he made of a principle which, if stated in somewhat different terms from Baur's, remains profoundly true. It offers, as I believe, a valid coördinating scheme to the critic. The statement of that principle I must leave to a subsequent occasion. You have already divined that it concerns the impulse of religious life which assumes so different a shape in its transition from Jesus to Paul. Meantime let me sum up. The successive phases of the literature as it reaches us are three: the literature of the Apostle; the literature of the teacher, and of the prophet; the literature of the theologian. But as the Ephesian evangelist teaches us, the manifested life is one: even that which was from the beginning with the Father. He that sees it bears witness, that all men may share his fellowship with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. A true answer to this Johannine utterance is made by the great Jewish philosopher of post-reformation times. "It is not absolutely necessary," says Spinoza, "to know Christ after the flesh, but we must think very differently of that eternal Son of God, I mean the eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things, and chiefly in the human mind, and most of all in Jesus Christ." 10`

10 Spinoza, Op. i, 510, Ep. to Oldenburg.

LECTURE II

BEGINNINGS AND GROWTH OF THE GOSPEL OF
RECONCILIATION

1. Movement of Israel's Religious Development from Nationalism to Universalism

From the view-point of the historian of religion the Christian era should begin with the 25th of December, 165 B. C. On that date the worship of Jehovah was restored in the temple at Jerusalem purified from heathen defilement, and God began to make all things new. The heroic sons of Mattathias who had won back both religious freedom and national independence founded a native dynasty of priest kings, and with the beginning of the new epoch religion too advanced with mighty strides. Prophecy took on the new form of apocalypse. Its goal was no longer a kingdom of this world but a cosmic deliverance. Its conflict was no longer against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, world-rulers of darkness in heavenly places. Israel's enemy was no longer the alien oppressor, but the invisible foes of humanity, the powers of Sin and Death.

It

Next to apocalyptic prophecy among the factors of the new religious age stands legalism. It had been an uprising of the people which saved the religion of Jehovah when the priesthood proved largely faithless. was now the people's place of worship, the Synagogue, an institution unknown to the Law, which began rapidly to eclipse the prescribed and official worship of

the temple in the real religious life of the nation. And with the Synagogue came the scribe, the interpre ter of Scripture, and the Pharisee, its faithful devotee, who seeks to attain the national hope by faith and obedience. The later Maccabees became selfish and degenerate time-servers. The Pharisees proved by hundreds of martyrdoms the sincerity of their devotion to the ideals advanced during the war of liberation: Not conquest, but freedom to worship God.

The book-religion of scribe and Pharisee strains every nerve to attain for the nation reconciliation of Jehovah's favor. For the individual it seeks "a share in the world to come," that "resurrection of the just " which now for the first time began to play a part, soon to become the controlling part in Jewish piety. was the contribution of apocalypse.

This

But side by side with apocalypse and legalism there comes into view a third development of other import. This same new age of Judaism sees the rise and culmination of the Wisdom literature, re-interpreting the religion of Jehovah in terms of ethics and philosophy. This type of thought flourished chiefly in Alexandria, and culminated in the Logos-doctrine of Philo, the earlier contemporary of Jesus. A Wisdom fragment preserved in the Gospels presents these three great agents of Jehovah's new-creative Spirit as prophets, wise men, and scribes."

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Thus while Gentile religions crumbled, or turned back toward nature-worship, Judaism advanced; though showing itself anything but impervious to the currents of thought and life around it. Outward expansion went hand in hand with inward renewal. It was growth promoted not only under pressure of adverse circumstance, but also under stimulus of contemporary Gentile thought.

However contrary to our inherited ideas, evidence is

not lacking of rapid evolution even in that supreme expression of Israel's religious genius of which Jesus became the leader and representative. Not only was there a great advance from the baptism of John to the preaching of Jesus, the Gospels themselves, little as they are disposed to admit a process of development, do not conceal the fact that Jesus himself increased in wisdom as in stature, and that his faith was both broadened and deepened by the things which he experienced and suffered. The humble, expectant faith of a heathen woman could open to him new vistas of the comprehensiveness of his calling, as he sought refuge from the hostility of his own people in the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. And this was not the only incident of Gentile faith to lead him to broader views. Contrasts such as that of the believing centurion with Jewish unbelief could make him warn the Galilean cities that Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh and Sodom, would meet a better fate than they in the judgment. So he said to Jerusalem also: "The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof."

If rejection in Galilee led Jesus to a broader view of his mission, the more disastrous rejection in Jerusalem led to a deeper and higher. When he set his face steadfastly to go up to Jerusalem, accompanied by a mere handful out of the great multitudes that had eaten of the loaves and then withdrawn, it was with a clear premonition of his fate. He could not but foresee that if he had failed to carry with him the adherents of the Synagogue in Galilee, his attempt to take the temple out of the hands of the hierocracy, and make it a house of prayer for all the people, might have no better result. And the penalty of failure would be death. He spoke plainly to those whom he invited to join with him in this forlorn hope, of what was involved in the

issue. If he carried the people with him it meant that judgment would begin at the house of God. The step would have been taken which according to Malachi was the supreme act of national purification in preparation for Jehovah's coming. The King's palace would be purged and ready for His dwelling among a repentant and loyal people. If he did not, his cause would not survive another Passover.1

There is nothing improbable in the representation of the Gospels that it was at the time when Jesus laid before the Twelve his purpose to carry the campaign for the reign of God to the central sanctuary that the question was first raised as to the real nature of his mission. He certainly had neither the desire nor the intention to be a political Messiah. Of that the story of Peter's Rebuke leaves no doubt. On the other hand direct action such as he now proposed meant the assumption of national leadership in a sense beyond that of mere prophet and teacher. And failure, such as was only too probable, meant that the kingdom, if realized at all, must come by the intervention of God. The alternative is expressed in the titles Son of David Son of Man. Critics who reject the views of the fashionable eschatological school" consider that

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1 The driving out of the traders from the temple was a coup d'état, the carefully planned climax of Jesus' career, by which he at once symbolized the significance of his mission and staked his all upon the event. The significance then attaching to the act will be apparent from a Jewish interpretation in parable of the Isaian figure of Israel as the forsaken wife. (Ex. Rabba, c. 51.) It is a comment on the name tent of witness" applied in Exodus to the Tabernacle: "A king was angry with his wife and forsook her. The neighbors declared, ' He will not return.' Then the king sent word to her (Mal. 1: 6-14; 3:1-12): 'Cleanse my palace, and on such and such a day I will return to thee.' came and was reconciled to her. Therefore is the sanctuary called the tent of witness.' It is a witness to the Gentiles that God is no longer wroth." To Jesus the restoration of his Father's house as a house of prayer was a token of national repentance and divine "reconciliation."

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