An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant Part 5

It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme, no meaning save that man's being reconciled to G.o.d. Jesus reveals a G.o.d who has no need to be reconciled to us. The alienation is not on the side of G.o.d. That, being alienated from G.o.d, man may imagine that G.o.d is hostile to him, is only the working of a familiar law of the human mind. The fiction of an angry G.o.d is the most awful survival among us of primitive paganism. That which Jesus by his revelation of G.o.d brought to pa.s.s was a true 'at-one-ment,' a causing of G.o.d and man to be at one again. To the word atonement, as currently p.r.o.nounced, and as, until a half century ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is sacrificial attached. To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation of G.o.d and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial meaning whatsoever. There is indeed the perfectly general sense in which so beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a grand exemplification of self-sacrifice. Yet this is a sense so different from the other and in itself so obvious, that one hesitates to use the same word in the immediate context with that other, lest it should appear that the intention was to obscure rather than to make clear the meaning.

For atonement in a sense different from that of reconciliation, we have no significance whatever. Reconciliation and atonement describe one and the same fact. In the dogma the words were as far as possible from being synonyms. They referred to two facts, the one of which was the means and essential prerequisite of the other. The vicarious sacrifice was the antecedent condition of the reconciling of G.o.d. In our thought it is not a reconciliation of G.o.d which is aimed at. No sacrifice is necessary. No sacrifice such as that postulated is possible. Of the reconciliation of man to G.o.d the only condition is the revelation of the love of G.o.d in the life and death of Jesus and the obedient acceptance of that revelation on the part of men.

CHAPTER IV

THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT

It has been said that in Christian times the relation of philosophy and religion may be determined by the att.i.tude of reason toward a single matter, namely, the churchly doctrine of revelation.[4] There are three possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man in extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then the two spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation, theology is at first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It is occupied in applying the principles which it receives at the hands of theology.

These are the so-called Ages of Faith. Notably was this the att.i.tude of the Middle Age. But in the long run either authoritative revelation, thus conceived, must extinguish reason altogether, or else reason must claim the whole man. After all, it is in virtue of his having some reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in them meaning and edification. This external relation of reason to revelation cannot continue. Nor can the encroachments of reason be met by temporary distinctions such as that between the natural and the supernatural. The ant.i.thesis to the natural is not the supernatural, but the unnatural. The ant.i.thesis to reason is not faith, but irrationality.

The ant.i.thesis to human truth is not the divine truth. It is falsehood.

[Footnote 4: Seth Pringle-Pattison, _The Philosophical Radicals_, p.

216.]

When men have made this discovery, a revulsion carries their minds to the second position of which we spoke. This is, namely, the position of extreme denial. It is an att.i.tude of negation toward revelation, such as prevailed in the barren and trivial rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century. The reason having been long repressed revenges itself, usurping everything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely the current morality plus certain unprovable a.s.sumptions. Indeed, they may think it to be but the obstinate adherence to these a.s.sumptions minus the current morality. It is impossible that this shallow view should prevail. To overcome it, however, there is need of a philosophy which shall give not less, but greater scope to reason and at the same time an inward meaning to revelation.

This brings us to the third possible position, to which the best thinkers of the nineteenth century have advanced. So long as deistic views of the relation of G.o.d to man and the world held the field, revelation meant something interjected _ab extra_ into the established order of things. The popular theology which so abhorred deism was yet essentially deistic in its notion of G.o.d and of his separation from the world. Men did not perceive that by thus separating G.o.d from the world they set up alongside of him a sphere and an activity to which his relations were transient and accidental. No wonder that other men, finding their satisfying activity within the sphere which was thus separated from G.o.d, came to think of this absentee G.o.d as an appendage to the scheme of things. But if man himself be inexplicable, save as sharing in the wider life of universal reason, if the process of history be realised as but the working out of an inherent divine purpose, the manifestation of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of G.o.d to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method of all their n.o.bler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral.

Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the G.o.d who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt.

There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of communion with G.o.d has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however, signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only in degree and not in kind. Such an experience was that of prophets and law-givers under the ancient covenant. Such an experience, in immeasurably greater degree, was that of Jesus himself. Such a turning-point in the life of the race was the advent of Christianity.

The world has not been wrong in calling the doc.u.ments of these revelations sacred books and in attributing to them divine authority. It has been largely wrong _in the manner in which it construed their authority_. It has been wholly wrong in imagining that the doc.u.ments themselves were the revelation. They are merely the record _of a personal communion with the transcendent_. It was Lessing who first cast these fertile ideas into the soil of modern thought. They were never heartily taken up by Kant. One can think, however, with what enthusiasm men recurred to them after their postulates had been verified and the idea of G.o.d, of man and of the world which they implied, had been confirmed by Fichte and Sch.e.l.ling.

In the philosophical movement, the outline of which we have suggested, what one may call the _nidus_ of a new faith in Scripture had been prepared. The quality had been forecast which the Scripture must be found to possess, if it were to retain its character as doc.u.ment of revelation. In those very same years the great movement of biblical criticism was gathering force which, in the course of the nineteenth century, was to prove by stringent literary and historical methods, what qualities the doc.u.ments which we know as Scripture do possess. It was to prove in the most objective fashion that the Scripture does not possess those qualities which men had long a.s.signed to it. It was to prove that, as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature and show the progress of the history which the Scripture enshrines.

After a contest in which the very foundations of faith seemed to be removed, it was to afford a basis for a belief in Scripture and revelation as positive and secure as any which men ever enjoyed, with the advantage that it is a foundation upon which the modern man can and does securely build. The synchronism of the two endeavours is remarkable. The convergence upon one point, of studies starting, so to say, from opposite poles and having no apparent interest in common, is instructive. It is an ill.u.s.tration of that which Comte said, that all the great intellectual movements of a given time are but the manifestation of a common impulse, which pervades and possesses the minds of the men of that time.

The attempt to rationalise the narrative of Scripture was no new one. It grew in intensity in the early years of the nineteenth century. The conflict which was presently precipitated concerned primarily the Gospels. It was natural that it should do so. These contain the most important Scripture narrative, that of the life of Jesus. Strauss had in good faith turned his attention to the Gospels, precisely because he felt their central importance. His generation was to learn that they presented also the greatest difficulties. The old rationalistic interpretation had started from the a.s.sumption that what we have in the gospel narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must have been brought by Jesus as a present and opened thus in jest. Jesus was, of course, begotten in the natural manner. A simple maiden must have been deceived. The execution of this task of the rationalising of the narratives by one Dr. Paulus, was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the claim. The most spiritual of the narratives, the finest flower of religious poetry, was thus turned into the meanest and most trivial incident without any religious significance whatsoever. The obtuseness of the procedure was exceeded only by its vulgarity.

STRAUSS

On the other hand, as Pfleiderer has said, we must remember the difficulty which beset the men of that age. Their general culture made it difficult for them to accept the miraculous element in the gospel narrative as it stood. Yet their theory of Scripture gave them no notion as to any other way in which the narratives might be understood. The men had never asked themselves how the narratives arose. In the preface to his _Leben Jesu_, Strauss said: 'Orthodox and rationalists alike proceed from the false a.s.sumption that we have always in the Gospels testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are, therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary way. We have to realise,' Strauss proceeds, 'that the narrators testify sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, nave, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, ill.u.s.trative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection, might have some such explanation as this. No one had ever undertaken to apply this method consistently, from one end to the other of the gospel narrative. What was of more significance, no one had clearly defined the conception of legend. Strauss was sure that in the application of this notion to certain portions of the Scripture no irreverence was shown. No moral taint was involved. Nothing which could detract from the reverence in which we hold the Scripture was implied. Rather, in his view, the history of Jesus is more wonderful than ever, when some, at least, of its elements are viewed in this way, when they are seen as the product of the poetic spirit, working all unconsciously at a certain level of culture and under the impulse of a great enthusiasm.

There is no doubt that Strauss, who was at that time an earnest Christian, felt the relief from certain difficulties in the biography of Jesus which this theory affords. He put it forth in all sincerity as affording to others like relief. He said that while rationalists and supernaturalists alike, by their methods, sacrificed the divine content of the story and clung only to its form, his hypothesis sacrificed the historicity of the narrative form, but kept the eternal and spiritual truth. In his opinion, the lapse of a single generation was enough to give room for this process of the growth of the legendary elements which have found place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained by primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements never the work of a single individual. They are never intentionally produced. The imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind was possible, however, only on the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time, the means of transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss'

explanation of his theory has been given above, to some extent in his own words. We may see how he understood himself. We may appreciate also the genuineness of the religious spirit of his work. At the same time the thorough-going way in which he applied his principle, the relentless march of his argument, the character of his results, must sometimes have been startling even to himself. They certainly startled others. The effect of his work was instantaneous and immense. It was not at all the effect which he antic.i.p.ated. The issue of the furious controversy which broke out was disastrous both to Strauss' professional career and to his whole temperament and character.

David Friedrich Strauss was born in 1808 in Ludwigsburg in Wurttemberg.

He studied in Tubingen and in Berlin. He became an instructor in the theological faculty in Tubingen in 1832. He published his _Leben Jesu_ in 1835. He was almost at once removed from his portion. In 1836 he withdrew altogether from the professorial career. His answer to his critics, written in 1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his book, _uber Vergangliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum_, published in 1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third edition of his _Leben Jesu_ in 1838, but these were all repudiated in 1840. His _Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Volk_, published in 1866 was the effort to popularise that which he had done. It is, however, in point of method, superior to his earlier work, Comments were met with even greater bitterness. Finally, not long before his death in 1874, he published _Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_, in which he definitely broke with Christianity altogether and went over to materialism and pessimism.

Pfleiderer, who had personal acquaintance with Strauss and held him in regard, once wrote: 'Strauss' error did not lie in his regarding some of the gospel stories as legends, and some of the narratives of the miraculous as symbols of ideal truths. So far Strauss was right. The contribution which he made is one which we have all appropriated and built upon. His error lay in his looking for those religious truths which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous metaphysical speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the devout heart and moral will, as these are ill.u.s.trated in the actual life of Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a positive picture of Jesus as the ideal of religious character and ethical force, his work would indeed have been attacked. But it would have outlived the attack and conferred a very great benefit. It conferred a great benefit as it was, although not the benefit which Strauss supposed. The benefit which it really conferred was in its critical method, and not at all in its results.

Of the ma.s.s of polemic and apologetic literature which Strauss' _Leben Jesu_ called forth, little is at this distance worth the mentioning.

Ullmann, who was far more appreciative than most of his adversaries, points out the real weakness of Strauss' work. That weakness lay in the failure to draw any distinction between the historical and the mythical.

He threatened to dissolve the whole history into myth. He had no sense for the ethical element in the personality and teaching of Jesus nor of the creative force which this must have exerted. Ullmann says with cogency that, according to Strauss, the Church created its Christ virtually out of pure imagination. But we are then left with the query: What created the Church? To this query Strauss has absolutely no answer to give. The answer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a supreme historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend. The old rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain everything in some natural way. Strauss and his followers often appeared frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be explained. If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was declared mythical. What was needed was such a discrimination between the legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and standing of the doc.u.ments. No adequate study of this kind had ever been undertaken. Strauss did not undertake it, nor even perceive that it was to be undertaken. There had been many men of vast learning in textual and philological criticism. Here, however, a new sort of critique was applied to a problem which had but just now been revealed in all its length and breadth. The establishing of the principles of this historical criticism--the so-called Higher Criticism--was the herculean task of the generation following Strauss. To the development of that science another Tubingen professor, Baur, made permanent contribution.

With Strauss himself, sadder than the ruin of his career, was the tragedy of the uprooting of his faith. This tragedy followed in many places in the wake of the recognition of Strauss' fatal half-truth.

BAUR

Baur, Strauss' own teacher in Tubingen, afterward famous as biblical critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that through it was revealed in startling fashion to that generation of scholars, how little real knowledge they had of the problem which the Gospels present. To Baur it was clear that if advance was to be made beyond Strauss'

negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must wait upon an adequate criticism of the doc.u.ments which are our sources for that history. Strauss' failure had brought home to the minds of men the fact that there were certain preliminary studies which must needs be taken up. Meantime the other work must wait. As one surveys the literature of the next thirty years this fact stands out. Many apologetic lives of Jesus had to be written in reply to Strauss. But they are almost completely negligible. No constructive work was done in this field until nearly a generation had pa.s.sed.

Since all history, said Baur, before it reaches us must pa.s.s through the medium of a narrator, our first question as to the gospel history is not, what objective reality can be accorded to the narrative itself.

There is a previous question. This concerns the relation of the narrative to the narrator. It might be very difficult for us to make up our minds as to what it was that, in a given case, the witness saw. We have not material for such a judgment. We have probably much evidence, up and down his writings, as to what sort of man the witness was, in what manner he would be likely to see anything and with what personal equation he would relate that which he saw. Baur would seem to have been the first vigorously and consistently to apply this principle to the gospel narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every author belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the importance of his subject for the parties and struggles of his day, the safer is the a.s.sumption that both he and his work will bear the impress of these struggles. He will represent the interests of one or another of the parties. His work will have a tendency of some kind. This was one of Baur's oft-used words--the tendency of a writer and of his work. We must ascertain that tendency. The explanation of many things both in the form and substance of a writing would be given could we but know that. The letters of Paul, for example, are written in palpable advocacy of opinions which were bitterly opposed by other apostles. The biographies of Jesus suggest that they also represent, the one this tendency, the other that. We have no cause to a.s.sert that this trait of which we speak implies conscious distortion of the facts which the author would relate.

The simple-minded are generally those least aware of the bias in the working of their own minds. It is obvious that until we have reckoned with such elements as these, we cannot truly judge of that which the Gospels say. To the elaboration of the principles of this historical criticism Baur gave the labour of his life. His biblical work alone would have been epoch-making.

Ferdinand Christian Baur was born in 1793 in Schmieden, near Stuttgart.

He became a professor in Tubingen in 1826 and died there in 1860. He was an ardent disciple of Hegel. His greatest work was surely in the field of the history of dogma. His works, _Die Christliche Lehre von der Vereohnung_, 1838, _Die Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung Gottes_, 1841-1843, his _Lehrbuch der Christlichen Dogmengeschichte_, 1847, together const.i.tute a contribution to which Harnack's work in our own time alone furnishes a parallel. Baur had begun his thorough biblical studies before the publication of Strauss'

book. The direction of those studies was more than ever confirmed by his insight of the shortcomings of Strauss' work. Very characteristically also he had begun his investigations, not at the most difficult point, that of the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but at the easiest point, the Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had published a tractate, _Die Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen Gemeinde_. In that book he had delineated the bitter contest between Paul and the Judaising element in the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835 his disquisition, _Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe_, appeared. In the teachings of these letters he discovered the ant.i.thesis to the gnostic heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's _Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi_, in 1845. Here the results of his study of the book of the Acts are combined with those of his inquiries as to the Pauline Epistles. In the history of the apostolic age men had been accustomed to see the evidence only of peace and harmony. Baur sought to show that the period had been one of fierce struggle, between the narrow Judaic and legalistic form of faith in the Messiah and that conception, introduced by Paul, of a world-religion free from the law. Out of this conflict, which lasted a hundred and fifty years, went forth the Catholic Church. The monuments of this struggle and witnesses of this process of growth are the New Testament writings, most of which were produced in the second century. The only doc.u.ments which we have which were written before A.D. 70, were the four great Epistles of Paul, those to the Galatians, to the Romans, and to the Corinthians, together with the Apocalypse.

Many details in Baur's view are now seen to have been overstated and others false. Yet this was the first time that a true historical method had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole. Baur's contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity, in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the primitive Church. In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the scattered Christian communities into an organised Church. The Fourth Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown, the age uncertain. The book, however, can hardly have appeared before the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the second century. Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth Gospel and account for its name. They do not find traces of Montanism or of paschal controversies. But the main contention stands. The Fourth Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and work of Jesus. It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.

Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of the problem which the synoptic Gospels present. His opinions are of no interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has busied scholars practically from Baur's day to our own. His zeal here also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray. The _Tendenzkritik_ had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.

Baur had the kind of ear which hears gra.s.s grow. There is much overstrained ac.u.men. Many radically false conclusions are reached by prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last a.n.a.lysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the principle of ant.i.thesis. Again, the a.s.sumption of conscious purpose in everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration. It is often in contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and inst.i.tutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the purpose of G.o.d, into which their own life is grandly taken up. To make each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man's scheme or endeavour is, as was once said, to make G.o.d act like a professor.

The method of this book is that it seeks to deal only with men who have inaugurated movements, or marked some turning-point in their course which has proved of more than usual significance. The compa.s.s of the book demands such a limitation. But by this method whole chapters in the life of learning are pa.s.sed over, in which the substance of achievement has been the carrying out of a plan of which we have been able to note only the inception. There is a sense in which the carrying out of a plan is both more difficult and more worthy than the mere setting it in motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet had the value that they at least indicated the area within which solutions do not lie,--when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is made to realise that the conditions of the advance of science are, for theologians, not different from those which obtain for scholars who, in any other field, would establish truth and lead men. In a general way, however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tubingen positions. Harnack's _Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1893, and his _Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur_, 1897, present a marked contrast to Baur's scheme.

THE CANON

The minds of New Testament scholars in the last generation have been engaged with a question which, in its full significance, was hardly present to the attention of Baur's school. It is the question of the New Testament as a whole. It is the question as to the time and manner and motives of the gathering together of the separate writings into a canon of Scripture which, despite the diversity of its elements, exerted its influence as a unit and to which an authority was ascribed, which the particular writings cannot originally have had. When and how did the Christians come to have a sacred book which they placed on an equality with the Old Testament, which last they had taken over from the synagogue? How did they choose the writings which were to belong to this new collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of the growth of the collection is that of the growth of the apprehension concerning it. This apprehension of these twenty-seven different writings as const.i.tuting the sole doc.u.ment of Christian revelation, given by the Holy Spirit, the identical holy book of the Christian Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that which its const.i.tuent elements must have had for men to whom they had appeared as but the natural literary deposit of the religious movement of the apostolic age. This apprehension took possession of the mind of the Christian community. It was made the subject of deliverances by councils of the Church. How did this great transformation take place?

Was it an isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement?

Did not this development of life in the Christian communities which gave them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also the so-called Apostles' Creed and a monarchical organisation of the Church and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?

It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment. With the rise of this idea of the canon, with the a.s.signing to this body of literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and life of men. Compared with this question, investigations as to the authorship and as to the time, place and circ.u.mstance of the production of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank. As they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a different spirit. The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.

It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of doc.u.ments, which ultimately found themselves together in the New Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which was the unique relation which the more important of these doc.u.ments historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and spiritual effectiveness. The apostles had come, in the mind of the early Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction. Writings long enshrined in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been much considered, were now a.s.signed to apostles, that they might have authority and distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact.

The theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its inward principle, soundly const.i.tuted. Modern critics reversed the process. They began where the Church Fathers left off. They tore down first that which had been last built up. Modern criticism, too, pa.s.sed through a period in which points like those of authorship and date of Gospels and Epistles seemed the only ones to be considered. The results being here often negative, complete disintegration of the canon seemed threatened, through discovery of errors in the processes by which the canon had been outwardly built up. Men realise now that that was a mistake.

Two things have been gained in this discussion. There is first the recognition that the canon is a growth. The holy book and the conception of its holiness, as well, were evolved. Christianity was not primarily a book-religion save in the sense that almost all Christians revered the Old Testament. Other writings than those which we esteem canonical were long used in churches. Some of those afterward canonical were not used in all the churches. In similar fashion we have learned that identical statements of faith were not current in the earliest churches. Nor was there one uniform system of organisation and government. There was a time concerning which we cannot accurately use the word Church. There were churches, very simple, worshipping communities. But the Church, as outward magnitude, as triumphant organisation, grew. So there were many creeds or, at least, informally accredited and current beginnings of doctrine. By and by there was a formally accepted creed. So there were first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that, despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths.

The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of inst.i.tutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most conspicuous teacher of our generation, in two at least of these particular fields, has been Harnack. In his lifelong labour upon the sources of Christian history, he had come upon this question of the canon again and again. In his _Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_, 1887-1890, 4te. Aufl., 1910, the view of the canon, which was given above, is absolutely fundamental. In his _Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius_, 1893, and _Chronologic der allchristlichen Literatur_, 1897-1904, the evidence is offered in rich detail. It was in his tractate, _Das Neue Testament um das Jahr_ 200, 1889, that he contended for the later date against Zahn, who had urged that the outline of the New Testament was established and the conception of it as Scripture present, by the end of the first century. Harnack argues that the decision practically shaped itself between the time of Justin Martyr, c. A.D. 150, and that of Irenaeus, c. A.D. 180. The studies of the last twenty years have more and more confirmed this view.

LIFE OF JESUS

We said that the work of Strauss revealed nothing so clearly as the ignorance of his time concerning the doc.u.ments of the early Christian movement. The labours of Baur and of his followers were directed toward overcoming this difficulty. Suddenly the public interest was stirred, and the earlier excitement recalled by the publication of a new life of Jesus. The author was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, at one time a candidate for the priesthood in the Roman Church. He was a man of learning and literary skill, who made his _Vie de Jesus_, which appeared in 1863, the starting-point for a series of historical works under the general t.i.tle, _Les Origines de Christianisme_. In the next year appeared Strauss'

popular work, _Leben Jesu fur das deutsche Volk_. In 1864 was published also Weizsacker's contribution to the life of Christ, his _Untersuchungen uber die evangelische Geschichte_. To the same year belonged Schenkel's _Charakterbild Jesu_. In the years from 1867-1872 appeared Keim's _Geschichte Jesu von Nazara_. There is something very striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant like a professor in Halle or Tubingen.' French was at that time a language much better known in the world at large, particularly the English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature. The number of editions in French and of translations into other languages is amazing. Beyond question, the critical position was made known through Renan to mult.i.tudes who would never have been reached by the German works which were really Renan's authorities. It is idle to say with Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning, Renan had not possessed more. That is not quite the point. The book has much breadth and solidity of learning. Yet Renan has scarcely the historian's quality. His work is a work of art. It has the halo of romance. Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it is.

Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany. He set out for the priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and history. He made long sojourn in the East. He spoke of Palestine as having been to him a fifth Gospel. He became Professor of Hebrew in the _College de France_. He was suspended from his office in 1863, and permitted to read again only in 1871. He had formally separated himself from the Roman Church in 1845. He was a member of the Academy. His diction is unsurpa.s.sed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive. He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes.

He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus' part. In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist's intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.

Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate. This was the fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men's minds. Keim's book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus' age, which has now been largely superseded by Schurer's _Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi_, 2 Bde., 1886-1890. There have been again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great problem. Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment of the critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's _Jesus de Nazareth_, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's _Leben Jesu_, 1901. So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme.