CHRISTIANITY

(CHRISTIANITY is derived from the adjective Christian, J which is formed from the name Χριστός, the Anointed, and means the religion introduced by Jesus Christ and communicated by Him to His circle of followers.

The Christian religion is the result of two factors, neither of which can be omitted if a true description is to be given. On the one hand there is the objective element, which consists in the manifestation and revelation of God to His people for the purpose of salvation; and on the other side there is the subjective element, which consists in the appropriation of this manifestation and what it implies by man through faith. Both elements enter into and form the constituent elements of a new life, which all Christians share in-common, and which is the essence of Christianity. This common life of Jesus and His people has many ways by which it can make itself seen and known. Christians have from the beginning exercised no small influence upon the ordinary political and moral life of the world. They have been able to effect changes in generally received moral ideas and maxims. They have altered the course and character of legislation. They have introduced new opinions and beliefs. They have formed fellowships for worship, built places of meeting, held councils and assemblies, and in many ways given evidence of their presence and power in the world. But it must always be remembered that Christianity is neither the church simply, nor theology, nor Christian ethics. It is more than all these put together. The common life of Jesus and His people, which is the core of Christianity, manifests itself in an outward visible organization for the purpose of worship, which is commonly called the church (see Church). But this worship is not Christianity; still less are the various institutions and ceremonies according to which worship is carried on.

Christianity cannot help powerfully affecting the whole of the intellectual side of man’s life. The spiritual events on which it rests must have their rationale, and the spiritual forces which course through it must have their rule, and man must more or less comprehend them, and assimilate them. The Christian cannot help having a very different idea of God from that held by Aristotle or Plato. The Christian regards sin as something which affects the whole human race, while the pagan believes it to be the mistake or misfortune of individuals. Christianity cannot help remoulding the beliefs and opinions of mankind, but theology and Christianity are two very different things.

The Christian is moved by moral impulses and guided by moral principles which are peculiar to himself. He cannot look on marriage, for example, from either the purely economic or the purely sensuous point of view. He cannot help reorganizing the scheme of virtues, and giving to the principle of love a pre-eminence which it has not in pagan ethics. Christianity cannot help putting a new face on morality, but Christian ethics and Christianity are still not one and the same thing.

Christianity includes all these and much more besides. It is nothing less than the whole round of human life in all its various departments in so far as it is related to and illumined and dominated by the divine love revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the presence of Jesus among His people and all that is implied in such a presence.

The close and inseparable connection between Jesus Christ and Christianity, which is implied in the name, and which study only makes more and more evident, produces the inevitable consequence that our view of the nature and characteristics of Christianity must depend on the answer which we give to the question which Jesus himself put to His disciples—“Whom do ye say that I, the Son of man, am ĭ ” There are different theories of Christianity, because there are different theories of Christ, and in order to know how various conceptions of the nature of Christianity arise it is necessary to be familiar with the various views which men have held and hold about the nature and work of Christ. For example, different theories of Christianity arise when we ask what was the relation existing between Jesus and what went before Him, what was the relation in which Jesus stood to His contemporaries and His immediate followers, what is the connection which subsisted between Jesus and the future. All these inquiries reveal different theories about the nature and work of Christ, which are reproduced in different theories of the essential nature of Christianity, and enable men whose opinions and principles are widely different to call themselves, to their own satisfaction at least, Christians.

Jesus Christ claimed to have a definite relation to the past history of that people among whom He was born. In His teaching He put himself at the end of the Old Testament, and declared that He came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets. Christianity, therefore, however it be explained, has a close connection with Judaism, and the religion of Jesus cannot be considered without regard to the religion of Moses. This is now universally acknowledged, however variously the relation between the two may be explained. Criticism finds an ample confirmation of the claims of Christ in the intimate connection in which His teaching, life, and work stand to the Old Testament and the past life of the inspired Hebrew people. The whole of the Mosaic dispensation, the whole of the Jewish economy, with its prophecy, priesthood, and kingship, is recognized as summed up in the person and work of Christ. The Old Testament, which without Christ is but a collection of sacred books written at different times and in various manners, is regarded when looked at through Christ as an harmonious whole of anticipatory revelation. Indeed, one of the chief differences which critical apologetic finds between the Old Testament and other so-called sacred books is, that Christ is at the end of the Old Testament, and that no other scriptures have such a conclusion. But all this implies that Christianity is a development from Judaism, and that our idea of the one will be modified by our conception of the other. Those who refuse to admit that Judaism is more than one of the many natural religions of mankind can. hardly admit the supernatural character of Christianity, or regard it in any other light than as the outcome, perhaps the highest outcome possible, of that side in man’s nature which has been called by some the religious faculty. Those who attempt to derive Mosaic institutions from Egypt, who seek the basis of Hebrew prophecy in epileptic tendencies, and see nothing in the theocratic idea which was not suggested by ordinary kingship, cannot have much difficulty in analyzing Christianity into the natural development of the religious sentiment aided by a somewhat extravagant enthusiasm. Those, on the other hand, who find it impossible to accept the assumptions, and to get over the innumerable difficulties attending the naturalist theory of the Old Testament and of the history of the Hebrew people, find in Christianity something different in kind as well as in degree from all natural religions. Modern criticism even of the negative kind often indirectly supports the supernaturalist theory of the Old Testament and of Christianity, for its fundamental maxim, that waters cannot rise higher than their source, has proved the impossibility of explaining away Old Testament institutions and New Testament truths into merely the natural outcome of the religious faculties of a peculiar people. It has proved that the Old Testament religion contains materials which were not got from the intercourse of the Jews with other nations, and which did not arise naturally from the geographical position or the ethnographical characteristics of the Hebrew people. It has shown that the Old Testament religion was not a natural stream gathered from many a smaller rill, but came forth gushing, like the water of Hebrew history, from the Rock which contained it; and in doing so it has given its testimony to the altogether unique and supernatural character of Christianity.

The relation of Jesus to His contemporaries, and of His disciples and their writings to the founders of the various ethnic religions, is another point whence proceed various views of the nature of Christianity. The old deist view, adopted and intensified by the Encyclopedists, that Jesus was a charlatan, that His disciples were partly cheats and partly dupes, and that Christianity was founded in fraud and perpetuated by deceit, has to all intents and purposes disappeared. But many believe that Christianity is only one of the many religions which are all of them true though none of them contain the whole truth. The modern notion of evolution has been called in to enforce this view, and Christianity is explained to be the most perfect development yet reached by the religious spirit of mankind; while the character of Jesus and the New Testament writings are explained on the same principle. On theories of this kind Christianity is the prcduction of the natural forces of the period which gave birth to it, and· contains nothing which cannot be traced back to the circumstances of the time, and the conditions of humanity. All such theories commonly rest on the general principle that the supernatural is impossible, and that whatever involves a miracle is tpso facto incredible, and then proceed by means of some special principle to explain the presence of facts which seem to imply the supernatural. (See article Apologetics.) These principles are used to explain not so much the origin of Christianity itself as the origin of the Christian writings of the New Testament, and the production of the scheme of doctrine and morals therein contained. Perhaps the most ingenious of these theories is that cluster which has been produced by the writers of the Tübingen school, who have suggested the general method which has been almost universally followed by anti-supernaturalist writers. The method is by an ingenious negative criticism to separate between the original elements of Christianity as these were present in the mind of Jesus and communicated by Him to His disciples, and those elements which were afterwards added by more philosophical adherents, and to explain how, out of the conflict between the two opposite tendencies of Judaism and antiJudaism, the various and conflicting elements at last settled into a somewhat harmonious whole. By this ingenious method Jesus is reduced to the position of a Jewish rabbi, not much more noticeable than some of his contemporaries, and Christianity is not the religion of Jesus, but what grew out of that religion when it was subjected to the influences of Roman civilization, Greek philosophy, and Eastern theosophy. Such theories are unsupported by external, and rest confessedly on internal evidence. The weakness of internal evidence when unsupported by external is well known, atíd in this case the internal evidence is anything but strong. There are many serious objections to be taken to the Tübingen hypotheses (see article Bible) merely as hypotheses, and these difficulties are so great that it is almost evident the hypotheses would never have been put forward unless the anti-supernaturalist idea of Christianity had been taken for granted at the outset. There can be little doubt that if the supernatural be admitted these various hypotheses, while they suggest some difficulties which have not yet been solved, will be found to be at variance with the plain results both of external and internal evidence.

On the other hand those who believe in the supernatural take a different view of the relation of Jesus to His contemporaries. He was no mere Jewish rabbi, but spake as never man spake, and did what never man did. He was the manifestation of God, and came to give by His presence, person, and work, as well as by what He said, the full revelation of God. He was while on earth the centre of the world’s history, to whom all had looked forward, to whom all look back. And Christianity is not the simple product of the contemporary philosophical and religious systems, but is the embodiment of the unique appearance and work of Christ.

The relation in which Christianity stands to the future is also a basis on which various views of its nature have been rested, according to the theory of the peculiar powers of diffusion and propagation which it is supposed to possess. Anti-supematuralists consider Christianity to be merely a moral force, acting through mere moral enlightenment; but this has already been sufficiently dwelt upon. There are, however, what may be called two Christian views of the modus propagandi of Christianity, which produce two of the real nature of Christianity itself. This difference of view is best seen in the variety of answers given to the question how Christianity subsisted after the departure of Christ, and how it subsists now from age to age, a more or less compact organic life in the world. The various answers given may be roughly placed in two classes as they lay stress on the spiritual or the mechanical side of the process, and enlarge on the spiritual or the mechanical influences at work. Those who take what may be called the spiritual view of Christianity hold that it was sustained after the ascension of Christ by the mission and work of the Holy Spirit, whose presence and influence enable it to go on from age to age, spreading in the world and developing according to the laws of its growth. And they believe that as the chief result of Christ’s work consisted in a change of moral relation between God and those for whom Christ died, the spread and permauence of Christianity is purely moral, and manifests itself mainly in a change of wilL Of course all this takes place in special ways and by appropriate means. These means are called the means of grace, and are usually held to be the Word, Sacraments, and Prayer; but it is always to be understood that all such means are secondary or subordinate, and that the primary means of grace is the Holy Spirit, who works through these subordinate means, but may and does work in other ways. It is always understood that the operations of the Spirit cannot be limited to special actions nor confined by mechanical laws. On the other hand those who look at Christianity from what may be called the mechanical point of view are inclined to lay stress upon the means by which the Spirit works. They do not ignore the mission of the Holy Ghost nor His work, but are apt to say that He works only in certain prescribed ways, and through one set of means, and the tendency is to lay almost exclusive stress on one set of subordinate means—the Sacraments, and to represent that the persistence and spread of Christianity depend upon the constancy and correctness of sacramental ceremonies.

These opposite views of the nature of Christianity depend upon differences of dogmatic conception which may be briefly indicated. All through the one view, a change in the relationship between God’s will and man’s will is held to be the fundamental result which flows from the work of Christ. All through the other view man’s nature rather than man’s will is considered, and the result of Christ’s work is looked on rather as a process within human nature than as a change in moral relations between man and God. In this way the progress of Christianity is looked on as the gradual semi-physical impregnation of human nature by the nature of Christ, a prolongation of the Incarnation rather than a development of the consequences of the finished work of Christ, to be produced by keeping Christ incarnate in the sacrifice of the Mass and impregnating mankind by means of Transubstantiation in the Sacrament of the altar. The one view is the view of churches which have accepted the Reformation, the other is that of churches which have not.

These various conceptions of Christianity may be further illustrated by the views which are held by the partisans of each concerning the relations between Christianity and the Bible. The Bible and Christianity cannot be separated, but different opinions may be and have been held about the relation in which the two stand to each other. On the one hand naturalists, and those who take the mechanical view of Christianity, are inclined to regard the Bible chiefly as a compendium of abstract truths, which may be condensed into dogmas and summarized in creeds; while those who take the spiritual view of Christianity regard the Bible as the medium which reveals God and His gracious deab'ngs personally to the believing reader or hearer. To the one the Bible is a quarry of doctrines to be rationally criticized or implicitly accepted when once stamped as genuine by the church, to the other it is above all things a means of grace which the most ignorant can use and profit by. To the naturalist the Bible has been formed by the church, it is simply the natural production of the minds of those who formed the old Jewish and the early Christian communities, and grew to be what it is without the aid of superhuman intervention. To those who have adopted a mechanical view of Christianity the Bible is also the product of the church, but of the supernatural power in the church, and has grown to be what it is because it has been sanctioned by the church. To those who take the spiritual view of the nature of Christianity, the Bible, on the other hand, is and always has been the formative power in the church and that round which the church gathers itself, for it is the presence of God speaking to His people.

Both naturalists and those who hold a mechanical theory of Christianity agree in holding that there is an external sort of development in the Bible, and that the church can go beyond the Bible, whereas those who hold the spiritual view of Christianity deny both these positions. Naturalists hold that one part of the Bible is beyond the other, and since the Bible is simply the outcome of man’s religious thoughts and feelings in certain ages and places, they believe that men now may give utterance to thoughts and sentiments which in depth of feeling and insight may surpass those contained in the Bible. The Tübingen theologians, for example, believe that the New Testament is a series of deposits of religious truth, in which the truths taught by Jesus are supplemented by the teachings of His disciples, by the lessons of Paul, and by the theories of Christians educated in the philosophy of Greece; while Dr Newman considers that the church, in virtue of a supernatural gift bestowed upon her, can add to the doctrines contained in the Bible according to certain well-defined lines of development. On the other hand those who hold the spiritual view of Christianity believe that the church can never go beyond the Bible, and that progress in Christian theology means greater insight into the manifestation of God in the Bible and greater power to interpret the supernatural facts and forces made known therein.

The various theories differ also in the closeness of connection which they think subsists between Christianity and the Bible. The naturalist and those who put the church above the Bible as the formative power in Christianity both make the relation between Christianity and the Bible a purely intellectual one, whereas those who hold by the spiritual view make the Bible a means of grace and not merely the quarry whence to hew theological dogmas. But the naturalist agrees with spiritual Christians in maintaining the authoritative character of the Bible, while the mechanical Christian sets the Bible aside when it does not agree with church tradition. With the naturalist, however, the Bible is authoritative because it is the only set of documents which tell him about Christianity in its primitive state. It is authoritative because it is the only witness to the historical facts of Christianity, not because it is to be a law to him. To the spiritual Christian, on the other hand, the Bible is authoritative because it is a revelation of those spiritual forces and a record of those spiritual events on which Christianity still depends, and which teach him the way of salvation.

To sum up, then, Christianity claims to be no mere social revolution or natural step in the march of human progress. It is a religion whose sources are not to be found within man’s nature but outside of it in the saving revelation of God in Christ, and Jesus is thus the author and giver of an eternal life which spreads itself and is maintained, not by mechanical contrivance, but by the living Spirit of God entering into human history, and building on the basis of reconciliation a kingdom of God which is both human and divine, and which comes and comes again and again in wave after wave of developing completion until the will of God is done on earth as in heaven.

Christianity began its career in the world at a time singularly propitious both politically, socially, and religiously for the advent of a new universal and spiritual religion.

Even apart from the entrance of Christianity the reign of Augustus over the whole Roman empire was an epoch-making period. Never before had the various races of mankind been united under one universal empire which promised to be permanent. For the Roman power was different from the governments of Asiatic adventurers and Greek warriors. Where Rome planted her foot was fated to remain Roman. The ancient Asiatic empires had been for the most part the creation of victorious generals, and had been kept in life only by a tolerably rapid succession of dynasties; their power seemed to depend on the character of the individual ruler. And the empire of Alexander, while more enduring, was not coherent. But from the beginning of her conquests the spirit of Rome herself seemed always to be greater than the vigour and ability of her generals and rulers, and she alone of empires seemed to be indifferent to the precarious stability of government ensured by regular dynastic succession. “The Romans conquered like savages, but ruled like philosophic statesmen, till, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, from the shores of Britain and the borders of the German forests to the sands of the African desert, the whole Western world was consolidated into one great commonwealth, united by bonds of law and government, by facilities of communication and commerce, and by the general dissemination of the Greek and Latin languages.” The world had a centre as it never had before, and the golden threads of well-established government connected all the world with Rome. Roads were made connecting Rome with the remotest countries, and a system of posts established which provided for easy communication with the capital. Military colonies carried Roman usages and manners, civilization and privileges, to the remotest corners of the empire. Magnificent cities were built in such outlying dependencies as Britain, Gaul, and Germany. The arts and civilization were gradually extending their dominion and subjugating the most distant and most desolate places. To all this Augustus added a more perfectly devised centralization which made the empire a more compact whole, so that any new influence made its throbs felt from centre to extremities in a wonderfully short time. The world was made ready for the furtherance of the spread of opinions as it had never been before, and for becoming spell-bound by invisible spiritual laws like those which Christian morality weaves around its disciples. The time of Augustus, if it was the beginning of the decline and fall of the Roman empire as a visible earthly dominion, was also the beginning of its permanent establishment on earth in a purely invisible way, when its policy, statesmanship, and legislation were to pass into all the nations of the earth and become part of their lives so long as the world endured.

Socially, too, the world was wonderfully ripe for the entrance and spread of a universal religion. Slavery it is true flourished, and there were conquerors and conquered, privileged and unprivileged classes. But the beginning had already been made of that lavish distribution of Roman citizenship which laid the foundation of a common political life throughout the empire.

The religious character of the times was also marvellously adapted for furthering the advance of Christianity. The old national creeds were fast disappearing, and were being submerged in the vast cosmopolitan religion of Rome. It was the wise custom of conquering Rome to do nothing to disturb the religions of the peoples subdued by her armies, and commonly the principal deities of the conquered nations were added to the overcrowded pantheon of Rome. This religious tolerance or indifference gradually began to eat the heart out of paganism, and all over the civilized world the pagan creeds sat lightly on their worshippers. The various deities were looked on as interchangeable manifestations of a supreme fate-power who reigned alone in the invisible world, while in this visible earth the genius of Rome seemed to be the one object of worship. The old national religions with their well-defined outlines and limits were being gradually effaced, and men were longing for some religion which, while it had the universal character which the times required, should have more individuality and personal power in it than were supplied by the thoughts of a supreme spiritual fate, or by the mere materialist conception of the genius of Rome. And all this bred a thirst for information about sacred things which was unknown in earlier times. The claims of conflicting religions were philosophically discussed, and amid all the gross materialism of the period there were longings for some deeper, truer religion than any they had known. These longings were further stimulated by the gradual but almost universal advance of new religious ideas coming from the far East, which was then regarded as the cradle of science and philosophy. In the 5th century before our era the vast Buddhist movement had overspread all the East from Thibet to Ceylon, and the Greek and Roman conquests in Asia brought Europe within the intoxicating influence of its subtle religious ideas. This strange Eastern theosophy, which during the first four centuries of our era is known by the name of Gnosticism, had a most powerful influence on the old religions of the West, which seemed to dissolve under its touch. Everywhere in the art and literature of the period we find its prevalence in the West during the age of Augustus and his successors. It insensibly undermined the beauteous sensuous mythology of Greece and the harder sterner religion of Rome, and substituted for them a religion in which, if fear was the prevailing emotion, worshippers still felt that there was more spirituality and greater claims to universality than their old national religions could give. And thus the gradual defacement of old religious outlines, the stimulation of strange cravings to know the mysteries of nature and of worship, and the longing for rest in a universal religion of deliverance prepared the world for the coming and spread of the religion of Jesus Christ.

The great problem Christianity had to face and to solve was one of no ordinary difficulty, and one involving a number of side issues which greatly perplexed the early church. The practical side of the problem as it met the early Christians may be put thus :—How could Christianity, which was rooted in Judaism, be at the same time a religion equally open to Jew and Gentile; how could the exclusiveness of Judaism and the utter want of exclusiveness in Christianity be reconciled with each other? And the solution of this problem brought the early Christians into conflicts of a special kind with the government and philosophy of the times.

When Jesus proclaimed His mission, and when He sent forth His disciples on preaching tours to make known himself and His work, we find the phrase “kingdom of heaven” perpetually occurring; and it was this phrase and what it suggested that brought the early Christians face to face with the great problem they had to solve. When Jesus announced that the kingdom of God was at hand, His message was quite intelligible to His Jewish audiences. The phrase was sacred and familiar, and their thoughts went back at once to the old theocracy of Israel. And when after the death and ascension of our Lord, His Jewish believers got a truer and deeper insight into the meaning of the expression, still the idea it conveyed bound Christianity, with bands that could not be untied, to Judaism, the Old Testament Scriptures, the miraculous life of the J ewish nation, and the ideal Israel long expected and long announced. Throughout the Old Testament Scriptures we find three ideas connected with the thought of the kingdom of God. It implied first and primarily the share in the inheritance in the land which the Lord gave to His people and to their children; and then it implied security in this possession, deliverance from Egypt and a succession of enemies, and, lastly, the possession of an inward spring of covenant life, which guaranteed them both salvation and possession, These three things were the historical and material basis on which rested the whole spiritual and prophetic superstructure of the ideal kingdom of God, which lay enshrined in the heart of every devout Hebrew. When our Lord by His preaching, by His life, death, and rising again, and by His mission of the Holy Spirit, gave new meanings to these thoughts, He only widened, deepened, spiritualized, and gave personal point and application to what the prophets and holy men of old had already declared. And when He and His apostles guided by His Spirit taught His early followers that His kingdom of God meant possession of the spiritual blessings of God’s grace, and deliverance from sin, death, and Sat