What is christianity

WHAT IS CHRISTIA
ITY?
Edited by Glenn Pease
1. WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? BY W. H. Griffith Thomas, D.D.
What Is Christianity?
*'Thou art permitted to speak for thyself I
beseech thee to hear me patiently." — -Acts xxvi. 1, 3.
THE question^ "What is Christianity?'' has
been very prominent of late years in the
minds of men. Scholars in several lands have
been writing on "The Essence of Christianity/*
The question is a natural and necessary one, and
certainly most important. What is Christianity?
Not what is its irreducible minimum, not how lit-tle
a man may accept, and yet be a Christian, but
what are the characteristic and distinctive ele-ments
of Christianity, what must he accept if he
would really profess and call himself a Christian?
One of the best ways to answer this question
is to take the life, or some point in the life, of
one of the finest men and truest Christians that
ever lived, the Apostle Paul, and try to discover
what Christianity meant to him. We may do this
in a variety of ways^ but for the present we con-fine
ourselves almost entirely to one episode in
the Apostle's life^ his appearance before Agrippa
and Festus^ as recorded in Acts xxvi. In this re-markable
story we have a striking picture of St.
Paul. As a man he is seen at his best. There
is no constraint in his utterances ; he is in his ele-ment;
the subject suits him^ and he yields himself
to it, and the result is this magnificent apologia.
As we listen to him, we can see something of the
reality of his splendid manhood, and are reminded
of the well-known words:
*'The elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man.' "
This is all the more noteworthy when we re-member
that the man before whom he stood was
one of earth's meanest creatures. And it would
almost seem as if St. Paul realised this, for, as
we listen to him, we forget the first picture of
Paul the man, and become wholly absorbed in the
second and larger view of Paul the Apostle. He
goes far beyond a mere defence of himself, and
pleads for the Master Whom he loved and served.

As though realising the characters and lives of
Agrippa and Bernice, he proclaims the everlast-ing
Gospel, and thus we have not simply a pic-ture
of Paul the prisoner, defending and justify-ing
himself; but chiefiy a picture of Paul the ad-vocate,
proclaiming and defending his Master.
Paul at the bar of Agrippa becomes merged into
the far nobler scene of Christianity at the bar
of the world. Christianity speaks here in the per-son
of Paul, and in the opening words of the chap-ter
we have the salient features of its message.
CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY
"Thou art permitted to speak/' said Agrippa:
and if only the world allows this to Christianity,
it may speak, for it has something to say. It has
a threefold Gospel.
The Gospel of the Resurrection. This was the
basis and burden of the Apostolic message, "Jesus
and the Resurrection.'' "Why," said Paul to
Agrippa, "should it be thought a thing incredible
with you that God should raise the dead.'*" On
the fact of the Resurrection the Apostles took their
stand, and preached it everywhere. This mes-sage
of the Resurrection was the cause of all the
opposition they encountered, especially from the
Jewish rulers, who were angered by the procla-mation
of the Risen One of Nazareth. Now wc
naturally enquire why the Resurrection should
have caused such enmity and persecution. Be-cause
of that which it implied, the Godhead of
Jesus Christ. The opposers knew very well that
10 The Christian Life
to accept the Resurrection was to accept Christ
as God^ for by the Resurrection all His claims
were irrefragably established. And this^ too, was
the reason of the prominence of the Resurrection
in the Apostolic preaching, the witness it bore to
the Godhead of Christ. It proclaimed Him to be
God, and as God Whom the world needs ; not some
distant Being, Who, having created the world, is
no longer intimately concerned with it; but God
Who is near, approachable, available for our every-day
life. Three times in one epistle St. Paul calls
the Gospel "the Gospel of God," and this not only
because it comes from God, but because it declares
Him. God, as the Source of life and power, was
proclaimed in the Resurrection of Christ, and this
is the first part of that "something" which Chris-tianity
has to say.
The Gospel of the Kingdom, The words of St.

Paul (in verse 15,) clearly show that acceptance
of Christ as God carried with it the acceptance
of Him as Lord and Master, and implied the ac-knowledgment
of our position as subjects and serv-ants.
Since Christ is God, He is supreme, He is
King and Ruler, and we are His subjects, and
consequently, through the Acts of the Apostles,
we find clear and significant reference to the King-dom
of God. This Kingdom is at once present
and future. Our Lord's conversations before His
Ascension were concerned with it. Philip preached
it in Samaria^ St. Paul at Ephesus did likewise,
and the last words of the book show St. Paul at
Rome '^preaching the kingdom of God." These
men were not afraid of the logic of their belief,
the outcome of their fundamental doctrines. "Is
Christ God.f* Then I am His subject." They real-ised
and preached Christ, Who because He is God
claims men as His own, claims to rule over their
lives, not only bestowing upon them the privileges,
but calling for the performance of the duties of
their heavenly citizenship. The Gospel of the
Kingdom is the second part of that "something"
which Christianity has to say.
The Gospel of Pardon. This, as verse 18 shows,
was also an integral part of the Apostolic preach-ing.
Men are rebels against God by reason of
sin; and rebels cannot possibly become subjects
of His Kingdom until they are pardoned — until
they have submitted and surrendered their lives
to Him. Unless the rebellion of sin is quelled in
man, there can be no entrance into God's King-dom,
no acceptance of Christ as God. And so the
Apostle Paul preached everywhere the forgiveness
of sins. The burden of his message was, "Through
this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of
sins." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and
thou shalt be saved." He preached a full, free,
present, assured, everlasting pardon: and this is
the third part of that "something" which Chris-tianity
has to say.
CHRISTIANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY FOR ITSELF
"Thou art permitted to speak for thyself/' This
is what the Gospel desires, and for three reasons:
Hearsay Evidence is often erroneous. In this
very book of the Acts we find glaring instances
of the danger of hearsay. The Church was re-garded
as an obscure Jewish sect, with some pe-culiar
ideas of "one Jesus." There was a smat-tering,
a second-hand smattering of knowledge;
and, unfortunately, we find the same only too
prevalent to-day. There is sadly too much second-hand
religion, religion gathered only from com-mon
report, ordinary conversation, and literary

tradition. Very frequently the Bible is condemned
without having been read, very often St. Paul's
Epistles are criticised without having been studied.
It is simply astounding to find error about the
Gospel, and even about simple Bible facts, in many
whose position and education warrant something
vastly different. There is error, because there is
no real knowledge; error, because hearsay evi-dence
is so often erroneous. But we may go fur-ther
and say that
Christian Testimony is only partial. Paul here
gives his own testimony, and there can be no pos-sible
doubt that the well-known change in his life
had a great effect on his hearers^ and was a fact
they could not get over. His conversion and
subsequent life counted for something, and it was
as though he said, "I experienced this; deny it,
and you say that I lie." St. Paul's character was
questioned by any who dared to deny the change.
Yet when we have said all that we can for the
power of this, it remains true that Christian testi-mony
is only partial and incomplete. While Chris-tians
are what they are, with the old Adam still
within them, there will always be slips and fail-ures
and sins, and I pity the man who takes his
Christianity from Christians only. There is no
doubt that we Christians ought to show much more
of the Christ-life than we do, and may God par-don
us for so often being stumbling-blocks instead
of stepping-stones. Yet such testimony, however
real, can only be partial, and this leads us to say
that
Personal Experience is always sure. This was
the goal of the Apostle; to this he was trying to
lead his hearers; for this purpose he gave his
own testimony. He desired Agrippa to test Chris-tianity
for himself; not only to hear of Paul's
Christ, but to have his own Christ, confident that
Agrippa would find Christ what he himself had
found Him. The primal necessity is to get our
religion direct from Christ, not to ask this man or
that man, not to follow this book or that book, but
to go direct to the Book of books and find Christ
for ourselves. When Nathanael questioned
whether any good thing could come out of Naz-areth,
Philip did not preach, or argue, or de-nounce;
he simply said, "Come and see." This
is the only safe test — the test of personal experi-ence.
Read His Word for yourselves: see who
He is, and what He asks, comply with His de-mands,
surrender the life, and the result will soon
be similar to that of the Samaritans: **Now we
believe, not because of thy saying, for we have
heard Him ourselves, and know that this is in-deed
the Christ, the Saviour of the world."

WORTH HEARING
"I beseech thee to hear me." This, too, is what
the Gospel asks.
The Gospel of the Resurrection explains the
enigmas of life. What the world needs is God;
without Him all is confusion. Without God there
is no real life, no true happiness, no permanent
satisfaction. Without God the past has no assur-ance,
the present no confidence, and the future
no hope. Without God man is a creature in the
darkness and filth of sin, with nothing but gloom
and despair at the end of his days. But bring in
the Resurrection of Christ, and all is changed.
It reveals God as Saviour, Guide, Strength, All —
it enables us to live the present, and to hope stead-fastly
as to the future. There is light through
the Resurrection for the whole life, the light of
God's presence, the joy, the peace, the power and
preciousness of His presence, and the enigmas of
life are solved by the Gospel of the Resurrection.
The Gospel of the Kingdom meets all the dif-ficulties
of life. What is the root of all man s
troubles.'* Turn to the Garden of Eden for the
answer. It was man's desire to be independent.
The setting-up of self against God and instead of
God — this is the essence of all sin. It means
that man will not have God to rule over him, will
not acknowledge and obey the law of God; but
will have a law of his own as the guide of his
life. And so man attempts self-government, 'local
self-government" in a very literal sense, and the
result is abject, absolute failure. Man has had
his opportunity of guiding his own life, and we
know full well what has happened in the history
of the world.
Take political life as an illustration. There
have been several forms of government seen
through the ages, but all incomplete and, in them-selves
alone, really useless. Once autocracy was
tried, but found pernicious through tyranny. Then
came aristocracy, but this alone was also found
unsatisfactory. Now some who ridicule aristoc-racy
are trying plutocracy, government by money,
but this is proving itself infinitely more danger-ous.
And others are trying democracy, and we
shall see how this fares. It matters not what may
be the form, man was never intended to be inde-pendent.
Democracy alone has in itself the ele-ments
of a terrible tyranny, and it is not preach-ing
the politics of earth, but the politics of Heaven,
to say that, though there are elements of good in
autocracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and democracy,
each and all of these must be guided, held, and

controlled by Theocracy, government by God. De
Tocqueville well says that **men never so much
need to be theocratic as when they are most demo-cratic."
What the world needs, what each man
needs, is the Absolute Monarchy of the Lord Jesus
Christ. Man needs the laws, rules and sanctions
of Christ's Kingdom, for these would permanently
settle all the difficult problems of individual and
social life. Just as the demonstrations in Trafal-gar
Square, London, England, years ago were set-tled
by an appeal to Crown rights, to the claim
of the Crown over that area, so in like manner any
difficulties through sin, the "demonstrations'* of
sin, individual or corporate, can be quickly settled
by claiming and acknowledging the Crovni rights
of the Lord Jesus. Only let Christ reign supreme
in heart and life, and the difficulties of life are
met by the Gospel of the Kingdom.
The Gospel of Pardon satisfies the needs of life.
The chief need of man is pardon, freedom from
a troubled conscience. The old question, "Canst
thou not minister to the mind diseased.'^*' again
and again recurs. We have a sense of guilt and
unrest, a sense of bondage and weakness, a sense
of defilement and separation from God, which
nothing can touch. And it is only in the Gospel
of pardon that these needs can be satisfied. It
is only when Christ says : "Peace, be still," "Come
out," that the spirit of evil loses its power; it is
only when He reveals Himself that the schism
in our nature is healed, and the needs of life sat-isfied
by the Gospel of pardon. These are the rea-sons
why Christianity is worth hearing.
WORTH HEARING PATIENTLY
"I beseech thee to hear me patiently," said
Paul. So says the Gospel. Why.^
It concerns our Highest Interests, It has to
do with life here and life hereafter. It claims to
touch life at every part, to solve all its problems,
to minister to its most important needs. It there-fore
deserves and demands our most careful at-tention^
for if it is all true^ it is terribly true,
and no one can reject it without peril.
It speaks to our Whole Nature, Not to the mind
only to interest it with mere speculation; not to
the heart only to indulge it with mere sentiment;
not to the conscience only to frighten and terrify
it; not to the imagination only to entrance it with
ephemeral visions ; not to the will only to make
it headstrong and self-centred; but to the whole
nature in every part^ to guarantee a real, com-plete,
and balanced nature and character. And

may God help that man who is closing any part
of his nature to the Gospel of Christ, who, like
Felix, is allowing sin to keep him back, or who,
like Festus or Agrippa, is cynically indifferent to
it. No one can close mind and heart against
Christ with impunity. It is a sad confession of
Darwin that, through long usage of his faculties
in the direction of physical science, he had lost all
taste for music and the fine arts, and had become
so far mentally atrophied. And it is terribly true
that a man may suffer moral atrophy and spiritual
deadness by misuse or disuse of any faculty in
relation to the Gospel.
It calls for the use of All our Powers. It asks
openness of mind, truthfulness of heart, and loyalty
of life. It appeals to us to put away prejudice
and preconception, and to listen carefully to what
it has to say. It has an A B C first, and then,
arising out of that^ higher and fuller knowledge.
It asks that the truth may be received with that
openness of mind and that willingness to learn
which form the basis of all wisdom. Then it asks
that the truths accepted by the mind should be
yielded to in loving confidence by the hearty and
lived out day by day in the conduct.
This Gospel message comes to us now as it came
to Agrippa^ asking only a personal test. With
courtesy it asks for candor^ patience^ and thor-oughness^
and given these^ all the demands of our
complex life will be satisfied.
"O, make but trial of His love.
Experience will decide,
How blest are they, and only they.
Who in His truth confide."
Our defilement will be cleansed by the salva-tion
of the Gospel; our weakness made strong by
its grace; our roughness made smooth by its
power; our anxiety assured by its reality; our
doubt removed by its truth; our tempest calmed
by its peace ; our darkness illuminated by its light ;
our sorrow alleviated by its comfort; our misery
relieved by its joy; our defencelessness sur-rounded
by its protection; our coldness warmed
by its love; and our emptiness filled by its ful-ness.
The whole circumference of our need will
be forever met and perfectly satisfied in the treas-ures
of the Gospel of the living, present. Divine.
glorious Christ. And, therefore, comes now to
each one of us the simple message, the old familiar
invitation, *'0 taste and see that the Lord is good:
blessed is the man that trusteth in Him."

2,
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? By Adolf Harnack
THE great English philosopher, John Stuart
Mill, has somewhere observed that mankind
cannot be too often reminded that there was once
a man of the name of Socrates. That is true ; but
still more important is it to remind mankind again
and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ
once stood in their midst. The fact, of course, has
been brought home to us from our youth up ; but
unhappily it cannot be said that public instruction
in our time is calculated to keep the image of Jesus
Christ before us in any impressive way, and make it
an inalienable possession after our school-days are
over and for our whole life. And although no one
who has once absorbed a ray of Christ's light can
ever again become as though he had never heard of
him ; although at the bottom of every soul that has
been once touched an impression remains, a con-fused
recollection of this kind, which is often only a
**superstitio,** is not enough to give strength and
2 What is Christianity ?
life. But where the demand for further and more
trustworthy knpwledge about him arises, and a man
wants positive information as to who Jesus Christ
was, and as to the real purport of his message, he
no sooner asks for it than he finds himself, if he
consults the literature of the day, surrounded by
a clatter of contradictory voices. He hears some
people maintaining that primitive Christianity was
closely akin to Buddhism, and he is accordingly told
that it is in fleeing the world and in pessimism that
the sublime character of this religion and its pro-found
meaning are revealed. Others, on the con-trary,
assure him that Christianity is an optimistic
religion, and that it must be thought of simply and
solely as a higher phase of Judaism ; and these peo-ple
also suppose that in saying this they have said
something very profound. Others, again, maintain
the opposite ; they assert that the Gospel did away
with Judaism, but itself originated under Greek in-fluences
of mysterious operation ; and that it is to
be understood as a blossom on the tree of Hellen-ism.
Religious philosophers come forward and de-clare
that the metaphysical system which, as they
say, was developed out of the Gospel is its real ker-nel
and the revelation of its secret ; but others reply
that the Gospel has nothing to do with philosophy,
that it was meant for feeling and suffering human-

ity, and that philosophy has only been forced upon
Preliminary 3
it. Finally, the latest critics that have come into the
field assure us that the whole history of religion,
morality, and philosophy, is nothing but wrapping
and ornament; that what at all times underlies
them, as the only real motive power, is the history
of economics; that, accordingly, Christianity, too,
was in its origin nothing more than a social move-ment
and Christ a social deliverer, the deliverer of
the oppressed lower classes.
There is something touching in the anxiety which
everyone shows to rediscover himself, together with
his own point of view and his own circle of interest,
in this Jesus Christ, or at least to get a share in him.
It is the perennial repetition of the spectacle which
was seen in the *' Gnostic " movement even as early
as the second century, and which takes the form of
a struggle, on the part of every conceivable tend-ency
of thought, for the possession of Jesus Christ.
Why, quite recently, not only, I think, Tolstoi's
ideas, but even Nietzsche's, have been exhibited in
their special affinty with the Gospel ; and there is
perhaps more to be said even upon this subject that
is worth attention than upon the connexion between
a good deal of ** theological " and ** philosophical "
speculation and Christ's teaching.
But nevertheless, when taken together, the im-pression
which these contradictory opinions convey
is disheartening: the confusion seems hopeless.
w
How can we take it amiss of anyone, if, after trying
to find out how the question stands, he gives it up ?
Perhaps he goes further, and declares that after all
the question does not matter. How are we con-cerned
with events that happened, or with a person
who lived, nineteen hundred years ago ? We must
^ook for our ideals and our strength to the present;
to evolve them laboriously out of old manuscripts is
a fantastic proceeding that can lead nowhere. The
man who so speaks is not wrong; but neither is he
right. What we are and what we possess, in any
high sense, we possess from the past and by the
past — only so much of it, of course, as has had re-

sults and makes its influence felt up to the present
day. To acquire a sound knowledge of the past is
the business and the duty not only of the historian
but also of everyone who wishes to make the wealth
and the strength so gained his own. But that the
Gospel is a part of this past which nothing else can
replace has been affirmed again and again by the
greatest minds. " Let intellectual and spiritual cult-ure
progress, and the human mind expand, as
much as it will ; beyond the grandeur and the moral
elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines
in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance."^
In these words Goethe, after making many ex-periments
and labouring indefatigably at himself,
summed up the result to which his moral and histori-
Preliminary 5
cal insight had led him. Even though we were to
feel no desire on our own part, it would still be worth
while, because of this man's testimony, to devote
our serious attention to what he came to regard as
so precious; and if, contrary to his declaration,
louder and more confident voices are heard to-day,
proclaiming that the Christian religion has outlived
itself, let us accept that as an invitation to make a
closer acquaintance with this religion whose certifi-cate
of death people suppose that they can already
exhibit.
But in truth this religion and the efforts which it
evokes are more active to-day than they used to be.
We may say to the credit of our age that it takes
an eager interest in the problem of the nature and
value of Christianity, and that there is more search
and inquiry in regard to this subject now than was
the case thirty years ago. Even in the experiments
that are made in and about it, the strange and ab-struse
replies that are given to questions, the way in
which it is caricatured, the chaotic confusion which
it exhibits, nay, even in the hatred that it excites,
a real life and an earnest endeavour may be traced.
Only do not let us suppose that there is anything
exemplary in this endeavour, and that we are the
first who, after shaking off an authoritative religion,
are struggling after one that shall really make us free
and be of independent growth — a struggle which
must of necessity give rise to much confusion and
half-truth. Sixty-two years ago Carlyle wrote : —
In these distracted times, when the Religious Princi-

ple, driven out of most Churches, either lies unseen in
the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently
working there towards some new Revelation ; or else
wanders homeless over the world, like a disembodied
soul seeking its terrestrial organisation, — into how many
strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it
not tentatively and errantly cast itself ! The higher
Enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without
Exponent ; yet does it continue indestructible, un-weariedly
active, and work blindly in the great chaotic
deep : thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church,
bodies itself forth, and melts again into new meta-morphosis.
No one who understands the times in which we
live can deny that these words sound as if they had
been written to-day. But it is not with ** the
religious principle" and the ways in which it has
developed that we are going to concern ourselves in
these lectures. We shall try to answer the more
modest but not less pressing question, What is .
Christianity ? What was it ? What has it become ?' *^
The answer to this question may, we hope, also
throw light by the way on the more coniprehensive
one, What is Religion, and what ought it to be to
us ? In dealing with religion, is it not after all with
the Christian religion alone that we have to do ?
Other religions no longer stir the depths of our
hearts.
What is Christianity ? It is solely in its historical >
sense that we shall try to answer this question here ;
that is to say, we shall employ the methods of his-torical
science, and the experience of life gained by
studying the actual course of history. This ex-cludes
the view of the question taken by the apolo-gist
and the religious philosopher. On this point
permit me to say a few words.
Apologetics hold a necessary place in religious
knowledge, and to demonstrate the validity of the
Christian religion and exhibit its importance for the
moral and intellectual life is a great and a worthy
undertaking. But this undertaking must be kept
quite separate from the purely historical question
as to the nature of that religion, or else historical
research will be brought into complete discredit.
Moreover, in the kind of apologetics that is now re-quired
no really high standard has yet been attained.
Apart from a few steps that have been taken in the
direction of improvement, apologetics as a subject
of study is in a deplorable state : it is not clear as to
the positions to be defended, and it is uncertain as
to the means to be employed. It is also not infre-quently
pursued in an undignified and obtrusive
fashion. Apologists imagine that they are doing a

^ What is Christianity ?
great work by crying up religion as though it were
a job-lot at a sale, or a universal remedy for all
social ills. They are perpetually snatching, too, at
all sorts of baubles, so as to deck out religion in fine
clothes. In their endeavour toX^esent it as a glori-ous
necessity, they deprive it of it3 earnest character,
and at the best only prove that ^it is something
which may be safely accepted because it can do no
harm. Finally, they cannot refrain from slipping
in some church programme of yesterday and ** de-monstrating"
its claims as well. The structure of
their ideas is so loose that an idea or two more
makes no difference. The mischief that has been
thereby done already and is still being done is
indescribable. No ! the Christian religion is some-thing
simple and ^süKIJmjel it means one thing and
one thing only :4lternal life in the midst of time,i^:
by the strength and under the eyes of Gocf^ It is
no ethical or social arcanum for the preservation or
improvement of things generally. To make what it
has done for civilisation and human progress the
main question, and to determine its value by the
answer, is to do it violence at the start. Goethe
once said, *' Mankind is always advancing, and
man always remains the same." It is to man that
religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst
of all change and progress himself never changes.
Christian apologetics must recognise, then, that it is
Preliminary 9
with religion in its simple nature and its simple
strength that it has to do. Religion, truly, does not
exist for itself alone, but lives in an inner fellowship
with all the activities of the mind and with moral
and economical conditions as well. But it is em-phatically
not a mere function or an exponent of
them ; it is a mighty power that sets to work of it-self,
hindering or furthering, destroying or making
fruitful. The main thing is to learn what religion •
is and in what its essential character consists ; no
matter what position the individual who examines
it may take up in regard to it, or whether in his
own life he values it or not.
But the point of view of the philosophical theo-rist,
in the strict sense of the word, will also find no
place in these lectures. Had they been delivered
sixty years ago, it would have been our endeavour
to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some
general conception of religion, and then to define the
Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly

become sceptical about the value of this procedure.
Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that
life cannot be spanned by general conceptions, and
that there is no general conception of religion to "
which actual religions are related simply and solely-^'
as species to genus. Nay, the question may even
be asked whether there is any such generic concep- y
tion as '* religion " at all. Is the common element
lo What is Christianity ?
in it anything more than a vague disposition ? Is
it only an empty place in our innermost being that
the word denotes, which everyone fills up in a dif-ferent
fashion and many do not perceive at all? I
am not of this opinion; I am convinced, rather,
that<^t bottom we have to do here with something
which is common to us all, and which in the course -4^ '
of history has struggled up out of torpor and discord
into unity and light^ I am convinced that August-ine
is right when he says, " Thou, Lord, hast
made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until
it finds rest in Thee." But to prove that this is so;
to exhibit the nature and the claims of religion by
psychological analysis, including the psychology of
peoples, is not the task that we shall undertake in
what follows. We shall keep to the purely histor-ical
theme: What is the Christian religion ?
Where are we to look for our materials ? The
answer seems to be sirpple and at the same time
exhaustive : ^esus Christ and his Gospel^ But how-ever
little doubt there may be that this must form
not only our point of departure but also the matter
with which our investigations will mainly deal, it is
equally certain that we must not be content to ex-hibit
the mere image of Jesus Christ and the main
features of his Gospel. We must not be content to
stop there, because every great and powerful per-sonality
reveals a part of what it is only when seen
The Gospel n
in those whom it influences. Nay, it may be said
that the more powerful the personality which a
man possesses, and the more he takes hold of the in-ner
life of others, the less can the sum -total of what
he is be known only by what he himself says and
does. We must look at the reflection and the
effects which he produced in those whose leader and
master he became. That is why a complete answer
to the question, What is Christianity, is impossible
so long as we are restricted to Jesus Christ's teach-ing
alone. We must include the first generation of

his disciples as well — those who ate and drank with
him — and we must listen to what they tell us of the
effect which he had upon their lives.
But even this does not exhaust our materials. If
Christianity is an example of a great power valid not
for one particular epoch alone; if in and through it,
not once only, but again and again, great forces
have been disengaged, we must include all the later
products of its spirit. It is not a question of a
"doctrine" being handed down by uniform repe-tition
or arbitrarily distorted ; it is a question of a
lifCy again and again kindled afresh, and now burn-ing
with a flame of its own. We may also add that
Christ himself and the apostles were convinced
that the religion which they were planting would
in the ages to come have a greater destiny and a
deeper meaning than it possessed at the time of its
1 2 What is Christianity ?
institution ; they trusted to its spirit leading from
one point of light to another and developing higher
forces. Just as we cannot obtain a complete know-ledge
of a tree without regarding not only its root
and its stem but also its bark, its branches, and the
way in which it blooms, so<we cannot form any
right estimate of the Christian religion unless we*^^
take our stand upon a comprehensive induction that
shall cover all the facts of its historyx It is true
that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay
more, it had a founder who himself was what he
taught — to steep ourselves in him is still the chief
matter; but to restrict ourselves to him means to
take a point of view too low for his significance.
Individual religious life was what he wanted to
kindle and what he did kindle ; it is, as we shall see,
his peculiar greatness to have led men to God, so
that they may thenceforth live their own life with
Him. How, then, can we be silent about the his-tory
of the Gospel if we wish to know what he was ?
It may be objected that put in this way the prob-lem
is too difficult, and that its solution threatens
to be accompanied by many errors and defects.
That is not to be denied; but to state a problem in
easier terms, that is to say in this case inaccurately,
because of the difficulties surrounding it, would be
a very perverse expedient. Moreover, even though
the difficulties increase, the work is, on the other
The Gospel 13
hand^ facilitated by the problem being stated in a
larger manner ; for it helps us to grasp what is es-

sential in the phenomena, and to distinguish kernel /-f^
and husk.
Jesus Christ and his disciples were situated in ,
their day just as we are situated in ours; that is to
say, their feelings, their thoughts, their judgments .
and their efforts were bounded by the horizon and
the framework in which their own nation was set
and by its condition at the time. Had it been other-wise,
they would not have been men of flesh and
blood, but spectral beings. For seventeen hundred
years, indeed, people thought, and many among us
still think, that the *' humanity" of Jesus Christ,
which is a part of their creed, is sufficiently provided
for by the assumption that he had a human body
and a human soul. As if it were possible to have
that without having any definite character as an in- *
dividual ! Cjo be a man means, in the first place, to
possess a certain mental and spiritual disposition,
determined in such and such a way, and thereby
limited and circumscribed; and, in the second
place, it means to be situated, with this disposition,
in an historical environment which in its turn is also ■.
limited and circumscribed. Outside this there are
no such things as ** men. '* It at once follows, how-ever,
that a man can think, speak, and do absolutely
nothing at all in which his peculiar disposition and
14 What is Christianity?
his own age are not coefficientij A single word
may seem to be really classical and valid for all time,
and yet the very language in which it is spoken
gives it very palpable limitations. Much less is
a spiritual personality, as a whole, susceptible of
being represented in a way that will banish the feel-ing
of its limitations, and with those limitations,
the sense of something strange or conventional ; and
this feeling must necessarily be enhanced the farther
in point of time the spectator is removed.
From these circumstances it follows that the his-torian,
whose business and highest duty it is to de-termine
what is of permanent value, is of necessity
required not to cleave to words but to find out what
is essential. The "whole" Christ, the "whole"
Gospel, if we mean by this motto the external im-age
taken in all its details and set up for imitation,
is just as bad and deceptive a shibboleth as the
" whole ** Luther, and the like. It is bad because
it enslaves us, and it is deceptive because the peo-ple
who proclaim it do not think of taking it seri-ously,
and could not do so if they tried. They
cannot do so because they cannot cease to feel, un-derstand
and judge as children of their age.

There are only two possibilities here : either the.
Gospe l is in all respects identical with its earliest
form, in which case it came with its time and has
departed with it; or else it rontains something
The Gospel 15
which, under differing his *'^rir^^^*'"^'î IS ^ ên fla-nf*
nt vnli flitv. The latter is the true view. The
history of the Church shows us in its very com-mencement
that "primitive Christianity" had to
disappear in order that '* Christianity" might re-main;
and in the same way in later ages one
metamorphosis followed upon another. From the
beginning it was a question of getting rid of formu-las,
correcting expectations, altering ways of feel-ing,
and this is a process to which there is no end.
But by the very fact that our survey embraces the
whole course as well as the inception we enhance our
standard of what is essential and of real value.
We enhance our standard, but we need not wait
to take it from the history of those later ages. The
thing itself reveals it. We shall see that the Gospel
in the Gospel is something so simple, something
that speaks to us with so much power, that it can-not
easily be mistaken. No far-reaching directions
as to method, no general introductions, are neces-sary
to enable us to find the way to it. No one
who possesses a fresh eye for what is alive, and a
true feeling for what is really great, can fail to see
it and distinguish it from its contemporary integu-ment.
And even though there may be many indi-vidual
aspects of it where the task of distinguishing
what is permanent from what is fleeting, what is
rudimentary from what is merely historical, is not
quite easy, we must not be like the child who, want-ing
to get at the kernel of a bulb, went on picking
off the leaves until there was nothing left, and then
could not help seeing that it was just the leaves that
made the bulb. Endeavours of this kind are not
unknown in the history of the Christian religion,
but they fade before those other endeavours which
fseek to convince us that there is no such thing as
either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that
everything is of equal value and alike permanent.
In these lectures, then, we shall deal first of all
Vith the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this theme will
occupy the greater part of our attention. We shall
then show what impression he himself and his Gos-
^ pel made upon the first generation of his disciples.
Finally, we shall follow the leading changes which
the Christian idea has undergone in the course of
history, and try to recognise its chief types. What
ijjT^mmon to all thf; foniTijivhHJT^^t-î^'^ takep^ cQr.

rected byjieference j^o the GospeL^nd, copversely^
the chief features of the Gospel, corrected bvjiÄffix-
^5Il£S--tS_!l^?^2I&J5^i^^^ nfiay be allowed to hope,
bnngjL|s_tQ_t.he kernel of the matter. Within the
limits of a short series of lectures it is, of course,
only to what is important that attention can be
called ; but perhaps there will be no disadvantage in
fixing our attention, for once, only on the strong
lines and prominent points of the relief, and, by
The Gospel 17
putting what is secondary into the background, in
looking at the vast material in a concentrated form.
We shall even refrain, and permissibly refrain, from
enlarging, by way of introduction, on Judaism and
its external and internal relations, and on the
Graeco-Roman world. We must never, of course,
wholly shut our eyes to them — nay, we must always
keep them in mind ; but diffuse explanations in re-gard
to these matters are unnecessary. Jesus
Christ's teaching will at once bring us by steps
which, if few, will be great, to a height where its
connexion with Judaism is seen to be only a loose
one, and most of the threads leading from it into
** contemporary history " become of no importance
at all. This may seem a paradoxical thing to say ;
for just now we are being earnestly assured, with
an air as though it were some new discovery that
was being imparted to us, that Jesus Christ's teach-ing
cannot be understood, nay, cannot be accurately
represented, except by having regard to its con-nexion
with the Jewish doctrines prevalent at the
time, and by first of all setting them out in full.
There is much that is true in this statement, and
yet, as we shall see, it is incorrect. It becomes ab-solutely
false, however, when worked up into the
dazzling thesis that the Gospel is intelligible only as
the religion of a despairing section of the Jewish na-tion
; that it was the last effort of a decadent age,
1 8 What is Christianity ?
driven by distress into a renunciation of this earth,
and then trying to storm heaven and demanding
civic rights there — a religion of miserabilism ! It is
rather remarkable that the really desperate were
just those who did not welcome it, but fought
against it ; remarkable that its leaders, so far as we
know them, do not, in fact, bear any of the marks

of sickly despair ; most remarkable of all, that while
indeed renouncing the world and its goods, they
establish, in love and holiness, a brotherly union
which declares war on the world's misery. The
oftener I re-read and consider the Gospels, the more
do I find that the contemporary discords, in the
midst of which the Gospel stood, and out of which
it arose, sink into the background. I entertain no
doubt that the founder had his eye upon man in
whatever external situation he might be found —
upon man who, fundamentally, always remains the
same, whether he be moving upwards or down-wards,
whether he be in riches or poverty, whether
he be of strong mind or of weak. It is the con-sciousness
of all these oppositions being ultimately
beneath it, and of its own place above them, that
gives the Gospel its sovereignty; for in every man
it looks to the point that is unaffected by all these
differences. This is very clear in Paul's case; he
dominates all earthly things and circumstances like
a king, and desires to see them so dominated. The
The Gospel 19
thesis of the decadent age and the religion of the
wretched may serve to lead us into the outer court ;
it may even correctly point to that which originally
gave the Gospel its form ; but if it is offered us as a
key for the understanding of this religion in itself,
we must reject it. Moreover, this thesis and the
pretensions which it makes are only illustrations of
a fashion which has become general in the writing
of history, and which in that province will naturally
have a longer reign than other fashions, because by
its means much that was obscure has, as a matter
of fact, been cleared up. But to the heart of the
matter its devotees do not penetrate, as they
silently assume that no such heart exists.
Let me conclude this lecture by touching briefly
on one other important point. In history absolute
judgments are impossible. This is a truth which in
these days — I say advisedly, in these days — is clear
and incontestable. History can only show how
things have been; and even where we can throw
light upon the past, and understand and criticise it,
we must not presume to think that by any process
of abstraction absolute judgments as to the value to
be assigned to past events can be obtained from the
results of a purely historical survey. Such judg-ments
are the creation only of feeling and of will ;
they are a subjective act. The false notion that the
understanding can produce them is a heritage of

I that protracted epoch in which knowing and know-ledge
were expected to accomph'sh everything ; in
which it was believed that they could be stretched
so as to be capable of covering and satisfying all
the needs of the mind and the heart. That they
cannot do. This is a truth which, in many an hour
of ardent work, falls heavily upon our soul, and yet
— what a hopeless thing it would be for mankind if
the higher peace to which it aspires, and the clear-ness,
the certainty and the strength for which it
strives, were dependent on the measure of its learn-ing
and its knowledge.
3. WHAT CHRISTIANITY MEANS TO ME BY LYMAN ABBOTT
PROLOGUE
TkE Christianity of the Twentieth Century is
not the same as the Christianity of Jesus Christ;
and it ought not to be. For Christianity is a life,
and after nineteen centuries of growth it can no
more be the same that it was in the First Century
than an oak is the same as an acorn, or America
in 1920 is the same as America in 1787. Jesus
told his disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven
was like a seed planted, which from the least of
seeds would grow to be a great tree. This is what
has happened. The Roman Catholic Mass is quite
different from the Last Supper as taken by Jesus
and his friends in that upper chamber; the West-minster
Confession of Faith is quite different from
the Sermon on the Mount; the highly organized
churches of the present day are quite different from
the Church in the house as described in the Book of
Acts. During these nineteen centuries philosophers
have been trying to interpret Christian life and
experience and so have developed a Christian
vii
viii PROLOGUE
theology; reformers have been trying to apply the
principles inculcated by Jesus Christ to the varying
and often complex conditions of society and so have
developed a Christian social ethics ; men and women
have been trying to express their experiences in
methods adapted to their various temperaments and

so have developed Christian rituals; pagans coming
into the Christian life have brought their paganism
with them, so that while their paganism has been
Christianized at the same time and by the same
process Christianity has been paganized.
To-day throughout Christendom we are submit-ting
this modern Christianity to a sifting process.
We are trying to find out what in it is Christian and
what pagan, what natural growth and what artificial
addition, what we shall accept and what reject. The
Protestants are rejoiced to see this sifting process
going on in the Roman Catholic communion, the
Liberals welcome it in the conservative churches;
personally I welcome it wdierever it appears and
whatever questions it asks. Unbelief is less dan-gerous
than insincere beliefs. But in this book I
do not take part in this sifting process. Without
attempting to determine what of modern Chris-
PROLOGUE ix
tianlty is true and what false, I invite my reader
to join me in an attempt to get back of all the
product of centuries of life and thought, to inquire
what was Christianity as it was taught by Jesus
Christ in the First Century, to ascertain what is
essential in his spirit and his teaching which makes
Augustine and Luther, Calvin and Wesley, Lyman
Beecher and W. E. Channing, in spite of their dif-ferences.
Christian teachers, and the Roman
Catholic Sisters of Charity and the Social Settle-ment
workers Christian despite their differences in
temperament and method.
My critical studies have convinced me that we
have in the New Testament a fair reflection of the
teaching of Jesus Christ as it was understood by
his immediate disciples in the First Century; that
there is no inconsistency between his teaching and
that of the Apostle Paul; that the Fourth Gospel
was written by the Apostle John, or by one or more
of his disciples recording reports received from
him; that it truly reflects the mystical aspects, as
Matthew reflects the ethical aspects of the Master s
teaching; and that, if we would understand the
Master, we must realize that he was both practical
X PROLOGUE
and mystical, Oriental and Occidental. But I do
not accept the conclusions of those scholars who
have attempted to distinguish in the Gospels be-tween
the teachings of Jesus and those of his inter-

preters. Such a discrimination cannot be accom-plished
by grammatical and exegetical methods.
I began the systematic study of the New Testa-ment
when I entered the ministry in i860. Since
that time I have been a student of one book, a
follower of one Master. My aim in life as teacher,
pastor, administrator, editor and author, has been
to understand the principles which Jesus Christ
inculcated and to possess something of the spirit
which animated him, that I might apply both his
principles and his spirit to the solution of the various
problems, individual and social, of our time. Other
books I have studied, to other teachers I have lis-tened;
but in the main either that I might better
understand Christ's teaching or better understand
the problems to which that teaching was to be ap-plied.
Many problems which theologians have at-tempted
to solve I am content to leave unsolved.
Like the Hebrew Psalmist I do not exercise myself
in things too wonderful for me. After sixty years
PROLOGUE xi
of study I still say with Paul, " I know only In frag-ments
and I teach only in fragments." After more
than sixty years of Christian experience, — -for I
cannot remember the time when I did not wish to be
a Christian, — I still say with him, " I count not my-self
to have apprehended but I follow after that I
may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended
of Christ Jesus.'^
This volume is an endeavor to state simply and
clearly the results of these sixty years of Bible study,
this more than sixty years of Christian experience.
The grounds of my confidence in the truth of the
statements made in this volume are the teachings
of Jesus Christ and his apostles as reported in the
New Testament, interpreted and confirmed by a
study of life and by my own spiritual consciousness
of Christ's gracious presence and life-giving love.
4. THE ESSENTIAL CREED OF THE CHRISTIAN BY GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS
The essential creed of the Christian is brief
and simple, but it is personal and compelling.
Let us think of it soberly. Let us not only
believe it with our minds; let us accept it with
our wills. Here it is.

Article 1. I believe that God is my Father
whom I must serve.
Article 2. I believe that man is my brother
whom I must save.
Article 3. I believe that I must serve my
Father and save my brother by the sacrifice
of love.
5. WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? BY GEORGE CROSS
INTRODUCTION
Christianity is the name commonly given to the
religion that came into existence through the career of
Jesus of Nazareth and professedly preserves his char-acter
to this day. Christianity is a religion; that is, the
name stands for a way in which men seek unitedly to
come into communion with the eternal and invisible, a
way in which they attempt to enter into happy relations
with the Supreme Being. It is a historical religion; that
is, it had its beginnings at a definite period of human life
in this world and the course of its progress from age to
age is traceable. It is a religion whose votaries aim at
honoring the worth of him from whom it sprang by call-ing
themselves by a name that designates his supreme
place among men — Christ, Anointed of God, Sent of
Heaven, King of their Hearts — Christians, Christ-ones.
When the historian unfolds before our eyes the man-ner
in which this mighty spiritual movement has spread
throughout the world and continued through the cen-turies,
our attention is transfixed and our thought is
challenged. What is it? What does it mean? Its
phenomena are so vast and so varied and its followers
have differed so much among themselves that at times
one is tempted to say that there is often little or nothing
more than the name in common. Yet even the posses-sion
of a common name is significant. The name may
supply the clue to the true interpretation of its character.
At any rate, for the intelligent man the attempt to inter-pret
it is inevitable.
2 What Is Christianity ?

The interpretation of Christianity is not exclusively
the work of the scholar and philosopher. For the home
of this religion has not been mainly in the high places of
human life but more especially in the lives of the common
people. They have given the most abundant inter-pretation.
The conscious interpretation of it by the
professional thinker is dependent on the popular, half-involuntary,
half-conscious interpretation that is offered
in the ways of the masses of believers — their spontaneous
religious speech, acts of worship, songs, prayers, modes of
conduct, customs of assembly, and methods of organiza-tion.
The thinker must try to account for these things.
The interpretations of Christianity that have ap-peared
are numerous. In our survey it will be neces-sary
to pass by many that are of only minor interest
and limit our study to the great outstanding types. We
shall select six — Apocalypticism, Catholicism, Mysticism,
Protestantism, Rationalism, and Evangelicism. These
overlap and mingle, of course, but they are sufficiently
distinct to stand apart in our study.
CHAPTER I
APOCALYPTICISM
It is related in the Gospel of Mark that at a critical
point in his career "Jesus asked his disciples, saying unto
them, Who do men say that I am ? And they told him,
saying, John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but others,
One of the prophets. And he asked them, But who say
ye that I am? Peter answereth and saith unto him,
Thou art the Messiah" (Greek, Christ).
These are momentous words, for they record the first
historic confession of the Christian faith. It seems to
have risen spontaneously to the lips of the disciple when
the Master's great question was asked and he spoke with
the evident assurance that he was uttering the convic-tion
that bound him and his companions together in a
common allegiance and a common hope. Here, there-fore,
we date the beginning of the Christian religion.
Here, for the first time, the followers of the Nazarene
were consciously differentiated from the rest of men by
their unanimous trust in his mission. Here, too, for the
first time, Jesus was placed outside the category of com-mon
men, even of the highest and best of them, and
assigned a unique place in the world. What, more
precisely, that place should be was as yet vaguely
conceived in the minds of his followers. The colloquy
that follows Peter's confession reflects a clash of ideas
on the subject among his disciples from the outset.
The controversy about him that has continued for

4 What Is Christianity?
centuries was then at its beginning, and the end of it
is not even yet in sight.
Among the many Christian confessions that rise up
as way-marks along the road of Christian history, Peter's
confession enjoys a pre-eminence, and that for a better
reason than its priority in time. For it has always been
and still remains the most popular of them all. In this
stock confession of Christendom subject and predicate
have become so closely united that the two words, Jesus
and Christ, regularly stand together as a single personal
name. Moreover, this confession is the parent of all the
others. For they are all enlargements or modifications
of it, and they indicate the manner in which faith in the
messiahship of Jesus has infused a new meaning into
beliefs that arose at first independently of it. We can
say — for we see it now as it was impossible for those
early disciples to see it — that the Petrine confession
marked the rise of a new religion among men. It did
not seem so, I say, at the time. For to say that Jesus
was the Christ seemed at first simply to say that through
him was to come the realization of the Jewish hope.
But the actual outcome was vastly different from what
anyone could have anticipated. For it was only a little
while before the new faith found itself in violent conflict
with the Judaism out of whose bosom it sprang. A
dramatic account of that conflict appears in the early
chapters of the Acts and is reflected by anticipation, as
it were, upon the accounts of Jesus' career. The root
of the controversy lay in the question whether the
faith in Jesus did not represent the true Judaism. And
now, after the lapse of all the intervening centuries, it is
still an open question whether, after all, it was not mis-
Apocalypticism 5
leading to call Jesus the Christ. Did not Peter's con-fession
introduce into the minds of Jesus' followers a
misconception of the character and purpose of Jesus?
In assigning to him the character and the purpose of the
Jewish Messiah did it not pervert his true aim and theirs ?
And has not the Christian faith been burdened with
beliefs in consequence from which it still seeks relief?
This is in part the subject of our present discussion.
The significance of the primitive confession that
Jesus was the Messiah is to be perceived only by refer-ence
to the whole circle of ideas to which the term
belongs. For the story of the origin and development
of Jewish Messianism the reader must be referred to
the works of specialists, to whom of late we owe a great
increment of knowledge on the subject. It is not
possible in the present connection to do more than indi-cate
in a general manner the conditions and conceptions

out of which it sprang. Jewish Messianism is a promi-nent
feature of a specifically Jewish philosophy which
men have called Apocalypticism. Jewish Apocalyp-ticism
is a modification, under the influence of the Jewish
religious spirit, of a widespread, if not universal, oriental
philosophy of the universe and of human life. The
character of this philosophy we shall expound more fully
presently. The thing we wish to point out just now is
that the effect of the adoption by Jesus' followers of
Peter's confession was to carry Jewish Messianism over
into the new Christian community and thereby bring
the minds of Christians so directly under the power of
Jewish Apocalypticism that it became naturalized in
their interpretation of their new faith. That is to say,
Christians found, first of all, in the formulas of Jewish
Apocalypticism a body of ideas by which they were
enabled to express to themselves and to others the sig-nificance
and worth of the personality and career of
Jesus. Christian Apocalypticism is a Jewish heritage.
The conceptions by which the religious Jew was wont
to set forth his hopes for the future were transferred
to the Christian mind and became the instruments of
its self-expression. This was quite natural at a time
when the great body of believers in Jesus came of Jewish
stock. But the union of Christian faith and Jewish
philosophy, which was so natural to men of the pharisaic
type of mind, has continued to the present day when the
naturalness of it is no longer clear. We shall see that,
like so many other marriages, it has been both for better
and for worse. Its fruit is mingled evil and good.
On the other hand, the fact that conceptions that
were formerly distinctively Jewish have obtained a
powerful hold on many other peoples and races and
have maintained their hold on them for long centuries
creates a presumption that these conceptions must have
belonged originally to mankind at large or, at least, have
borne such a likeness to prevailing conceptions among
other peoples that the transition from one to the other
must have been easy and natural. The comparative
study of religions has confirmed the presumption. We
were formerly trained so thoroughly in the belief that
the Jews were most especially a people separate from all
others that we forgot they were the natural heirs of
ecumenical traditions. The Jews were but a single
branch of the Israelitish people, the Israelites of the
Hebrews, the Hebrews of the Semites, and the Semites
of the stock of that ancient humanity whose story has
Apocalypticism 7

been mostly lost to us. The Jews were, therefore, the
natural heirs of the traditions of many races, whatever
traditions they may have had that were peculiarly their
own. Their likeness to the common Semitic stock, at
least, was much more marked than their unlikeness.
Then, too, their geographical location in Palestine, that
ancient battle-ground of many mighty peoples, brought
them into close contact with the great complex of experi-ences
and ideas that constituted the culture of the
ancient world. Their acquisitiveness as a people, com-bined
with their individuality, enabled them to stamp the
traditions that had flowed down to them from many
sources with their own distinctive characteristics. This
inheritance of theirs became woven through and through
with their monotheism and their highly moral concep-tions
of the nature of the Deity and of man's relation to
him and then, through the dispersion of the Jews, was
given to the world. This position is thoroughly con-firmed
by the critical study of the Jewish Scriptures and
the recovery of the knowledge of ancient mythology.
It may not be possible to disentangle completely the
different strands that have been woven into the Jewish
Scriptures, yet it is perfectly plain to the discriminating
student that much of the folklore and mythology that
belonged to other nations recurs in the Old Testament,
but has been transformed there by the higher spirit that
was given to the Jews.
Now the striking thing about the traditions of primi-tive
culture is the similarity of the main strands of their
folklore and their myths even when the various peoples
concerned were far separated in time and distance and
without apparent contact with one another. The peoples
that were able to establish stable governments over
large territories and to secure the safety essential to the
growth of the higher forms of culture wrought up these
primitive stories into literary and philosophic forms, but
did not obliterate their original features, so that the
link of connection between the cruder and the finer cul-ture
of antiquity has been preserved. Their underlying
unity is discernible. The general themes of these ancient
constructive efforts of the human mind are the same
everywhere. They all reflect in highly dramatic and
realistic form the effect produced upon the spirits of men
by the constant struggle with the powers of material
existence. They tell the story of the destructive fury
of malignant forces that assail men and also the story
of deliverance from these foes. Their interest was not
so very different from the interest with which we today
pursue our study of the world and of man, namely, the
aim to realize the highest well-being. But the place
which is taken by abstract ideas in our present philoso-phies
was occupied by realistic, semi-personal creations

of the ancient mind. In what we are pleased to call —
in less marked anthropomorphic form — the impersonal
forces of nature, men of old saw the operations of living
beings. What we figuratively describe as the battle of
the elements they regarded as the actual encounters of
real animate existences possessed of passions like ours.
Whether we turn to the mythology of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans, Assyrians, Iranians, Indians, or Greeks, the
interest is the same, namely, the framing of an account
of the origin of the woes and the blessings of men through
the operations of what we call, somewhat blankly,
"nature," but what they, in part, personalized.
Apocalypticism g
These mythologies present three outstanding features
in common: First of all, prominence is given to the
material forces against which men seem to have struggled
so often in vain — stormy seas, raging floods, torrential
rains, earthquakes, and fires. These forces working
harm to hapless men are viewed as great monsters of
transcendent might, say, a great dragon or a serpent
in the deep or in the sky. Sometimes by a fusion of
traditions these monsters were multiplied. Secondly,
human experiences of deliverance from these baneful
forces are pictured as the beneficent deeds of some great
hero, generally more distinctly human in form than were
these dangerous beings, but still superhuman. These
saviors of men throttle and subdue the evil powers and
rescue men from sufferings and calamities by a higher
control of cosmic forces. Thirdly, there was a repre-sentation
of a Golden Age in the distant past when men
were without their present trials, and for the return of
that age they fondly hoped. Perhaps we should say
that this was not so much a memory of the past as an
anticipation of the future reflected upon the past and
held as a ground of encouragement for the future.
Here is a pictorial philosophy so widespread among
the ancients that it seems to be native to men. It consti-tutes
a view of things that is both a cosmic philosophy
and a philosophy of salvation. It sets forth the three
main forms of experience in which men become aware of
their universal kinship. First, their sufferings and mis-fortunes
are due to forces too mighty for them to master
or control unaided. Secondly, there is deliverance from
these trials through intervention from on high, and with
this goes the sense of dependence on a Savior-friend.
io What Is Christianity?
Finally, there is the hope of an ideal state to come, but
founded from the beginning of human life — a heaven, a
paradise. These three features are found, indeed, in all

religions, and they remind us that there never has been,
as there never can be, a religion that does not embrace
in the end a philosophy of all being.
What has all this to do with Peter's confession that
Jesus was the Messiah ? Much in every way, but prin-cipally
because in effect the confession connected the
career of Jesus hopefully with those universal human
feelings of need and longing for deliverance of which we
have spoken, and because it made him personally the
bearer of that deliverance. It placed Jesus, in effect,
at the very heart of all the distracting problems that
press for human solution and declared that he could
supply the answer to them. To be sure, Peter could
scarcely have been even dimly aware of this at that time.
The confession was purely Jewish in its conscious pur-port.
It pronounced Jesus a purely Jewish deliverer,
and the disciples were very slow to perceive afterward a
larger meaning in their faith, but none the less it pre-pared
the way for the universalization of the Christian
faith, because the Jewish messianic hope was the uni-versal
human hope intensified, purified, and exalted
through the peculiar experiences of the Jewish people.
A few words must now be said in further explanation and
justification of this statement.
I. THE ORIGIN OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM
It was suggested above that in earlier stages of
their life as a people the Israelites were so much like to
the surrounding peoples in character that it would be
A pocalypticism 1 1
difficult to distinguish the qualities that made them
excel. But in course of time, under the leadership of
those men of deep moral insight and moral vision we call
the prophets, they grew to be a nation enjoying as their
distinctive dignity the consciousness of a relation to their
God fundamentally different from that relation which
other peoples conceived they bore to their gods. For
while the popular view of the relation between the
peoples and their gods was that of consanguinity or phys-ical
kinship, and while this inevitably involved the god
in each case in the fate of his people, in the view of the
prophets the national existence of Israel was based upon
a mutual covenant between him and them to which, in
the end, every individual Israelite was a partner. Thus
the basis of their national life was moral rather than
physical, because the covenant-relation is established by
an act of choice rather than by physical necessity. This
also made the continuance of their God Jahwe's protec-tion
of them dependent on their obedience to the terms
of that covenant. Out of this relation arises the idea of
law. It is quite in keeping with this whole conception
that the prophets should constantly insist that the test

of all action, both national and personal, was found in
the law of their God, and that their well-being depended
on their obedience to it. To attempt to trace the effects
of this belief upon the spiritual life of the whole nation
would carry us too far afield for our present purposes,
but it is easy to understand how from this point of view
there grew up in the minds of the people the conviction
of the superiority of their God to all other gods and at
the same time the sense of their own superiority to other
peoples. The corollary of such a conviction is the
persuasion of their own indestructibility as a people.
Other peoples might perish, but they could not because
their God was above all gods. It was this belief that bore
them up in their times of fearful struggle with nations or
empires of far greater material power than they, and that
gave them confidence that they should survive all defeats
and be more than conquerors in the end. It was in sup-port
of this confidence that the prophets reinterpreted the
popular lore of the race from the earliest ages with a view
to showing that the course of all the peoples and of the
material world from the beginning was directed in con-formity
with the purpose of God to select Israel as a
people for himself and to give them ultimate supremacy
over all others. With this object in mind they continu-ally
offered forecasts of a day of deliverance and triumph
to come.
The eyes of the prophets were therefore upon the
future. For them the true Golden Age, even if at times
they did idealize the past, was yet to come. It seems
that the people were fond of speaking of the coming
" Day of Jahwe" when he should triumph for them over
their enemies and his. The prophets were able to
impart a profoundly moral character to this prospect.
Their predictions of blessing for Israel in that day
were interspersed with warnings; for while, as the
people thought, it was to be a day of judgment on all
nations, it was not less to be a day of judgment for
Israel as well. It would bring retribution for the
wicked as well as reward for the righteous. And that
meant that there was to be a distinction made within
Israel as truly as a distinction between Israel and
other peoples. Indeed, in some prophetic utterances
A pocalypticism 1 3
the principle of righteous judgment seems to be applied
indiscriminately as respects the different nations. Thus
there rose up in the prophetic mind the overpowering
conception of a great Judgment Day for the vindication
of righteousness among all men — one of the great spirit-

ual gifts of Israel to the world.
It might be expected that the successive overthrow
of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of the Israelitish
people, their captivity in foreign lands, their pitiable
weakness on the economic side, and their political hope-lessness
would strain this fundamental conviction to the
breaking-point. That they survived their downfall,
that in the minds of many of the people of Judah their
sense of moral superiority remained unimpaired, and
their confidence in the ultimate salvation of the righteous
stood firm, is one of the miracles of history. The effect
of their bitter experiences was to intensify the confidence
of the pious Jew in the power of his God. The darker
their material and political outlook, the more fervent
became their religious faith and hope. The Day of
Jahwe would most surely come, but the deliverance it
would bring should not be accomplished by the sword
of Judah, but by the irresistible intervention of their
God from on high. The day of judgment upon man-kind
should be a day of salvation for the suffering
righteous.
It is evident that the misfortunes of these people
occasioned a vast revolution in their religion. The
destruction of the monarchy upon which the prophets
had devoted so much of their energy in an attempt to
keep the kings true to the higher faith, the obliteration
of the political state, the exile from the land that they
called the land of Jahwe, the ruination of their sanctu-aries
and of the worship there, led to a spiritualization of
their religious belief; the contact with Babylonian and
Persian civilization broadened their horizon. A new
world on high was opened to the eye of their imagination,
and a vaster world on the earth spread before them.
And consequently a new destiny lay beyond. Their
God no longer dwelt in the temple made with hands or
even in the land of Palestine but in the high heaven above
them. They learned from Babylon and Persia to people
that heaven with exalted beings whose nature was suited
to the invisible better world, and whose business it was
to act as the messengers of the unseen God and carry out
his decrees on earth. All the so-called gods were no
gods at all. The evident hopelessness of a struggle with
the mighty empires whose power was made manifest to
them every day, and the fading character of all material
prosperity, turned their minds to the heaven. There
the pious Jew fixed his gaze, and while the hope of a
restoration of the earthly kingdom of Israel still lingered,
the progress of events tended to give to this earthly
kingdom more and more a miraculous character while it
should last; but it came to be conceived by many a Jew
as having only a limited duration and as destined to

give place to a kingdom in the heaven that should last
forever.
A new interest was henceforth taken in the present
and future state of the dead. The old view that all men
went to one place and met the same fate and that the
present life was the scene of all punishment and reward
passed with the passing of confidence in the perpetuity
and worth of a political kingdom on earth and the rise
Apocalypticism 15
into prominence of the distinction of righteous and
unrighteous within the nation. The righteous must
have a place in the new kingdom. If that kingdom was
to be ushered in by a judgment, then there must be a
judgment for the 'dead as well as for the living. The
idea of a resurrection of the dead came as a consolation
to those who contended for the supremacy of righteous-ness;
and with this the old idea of Sheol, as the final
abode of all indiscriminately, gave way. Sheol could
no longer be a place of hopelessness for all, or if Sheol
was the place of the wicked there must be another abode
for the righteous, though it was difficult to say where
it should be before the resurrection. With this new
interest in the dead arose many speculations and guesses
about the unseen regions. There was no unanimity of
opinion. But new regions began to appear — Heaven,
Paradise, Sheol, Gehenna, were distinguished, but their
relations were obscure. Whether there was to be a
resurrection of all the dead for judgment or a resurrec-tion
of the righteous only was uncertain. With the
incoming of Greek influence came a doubt of the reality
or value of any resurrection or of any material kingdom.
There was a tendency to spiritualize everything and to
fix attention upon the hope of a life eternal in a purely
spiritual world; but this view was probably that of the
few. Yet amid all the differences of speculation there
stood out clearly the firm belief in a coming universal
judgment and end of the world. The latter was usually
conceived as ushered in by a fire which should destroy
the present order of things and the wicked with it.
There is one feature in this development of the Jewish
religious spirit that claims our special interest, namely,
1 6 What Is Christianity?
the expectation of the coming of a King-Messiah. In
the earlier prophetic delineation of the glory of the com-ing
kingdom there appeared from time to time pictures
of an ideal king through whom their God would establish
the power and prosperity of his people. The destruction
of the two kingdoms and the subsequent exile rendered

the fulfilment of the prophetic hope a physical impos-sibility.
The nationalism of which the prophets were
the spokesmen gradually faded away with the experi-ences
of the captivity. It became to a large extent
unnecessary. For the nationalism of the prophets was
too narrow for those who gained the universalistic out-look
upon the world and the spiritual interpretation of
things that came through contact with the larger gentile
views of existence. A great modification of the mes-sianic
expectation became necessary if it was to survive
and minister to the religious life of men. The Messiah
must take on a character in keeping with the new views
of the world and of salvation. A mere son of David
could never fulfil the functions of a Judge of all mankind
and of the Ruler of a kingdom that came from heaven.
He must be a heavenly being and, like the kingdom, must
also descend from heaven to earth. Would he not live
and reign forever ? But here again there was much con-fusion.
The old and the new mingled as the new seers
sought to connect their new views with the old prophetic
declarations. Sometimes the temporal kingdom receives
no recognition whatever, but all is heavenly. The
Messiah of such a kingdom would be a heavenly and
eternal being. At one time (in Second Enoch) it is
said that the kingdom will last a thousand years, or
again (in Fourth Esdras) that it will last four hundred
Apocalypticism 17
years — corresponding to the four hundred years in
Egypt — but the Messiah was to die at the close. Some-times
the expectation of a Messiah is entirely wanting,
and Jahwe himself is the immediate deliverer of his
people and Judge of the world. The Messiah is at one
time a mighty monarch ruling all nations in righteous-ness,
and again he is a co-sufferer with his people. Thus
nationalism and universalism, materialism and spiritual-ism,
were mingled in the post-exilian life of the Jews, and
the minds of the people were divided.
In this rude survey of the spiritual development of
the Jewish people we have covered many centuries and
reached the times of Jesus himself. The advent of Jesus
and his message to the world, directly or through his
disciples, were contemporary with the later phases of
this evolution. While, therefore, Peter's confession that
Jesus was Messiah connects Jesus with the ideas out-lined
above, it does not determine which of these various
and conflicting views of the character of the coming
kingdom, of the manner of its establishment, and of the
end of the world were uppermost or even present in the
minds of his followers. This much, however, is plain —
that the new faith obtained the formulas of its expression
through the conceptions whose development we have
sought to outline. We shall now attempt to state why
we have described this view of things by the term

Apocalypticism.
2. PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM
The contact with Babylonian and Persian culture in
the earlier period following upon the destruction of the
Jewish state and the contact with Greek culture in the
x 8 What Is Christianity ?
later period — to mention only the most important for-eign
influences — gave a powerful stimulus to the Jewish
intellect and vastly widened its horizon. Babylonian
astrology and Persian dualism gave to the Jews a new
knowledge of the world, and Grecian thought gave them
a new view of its meaning. This intellectual expansion
was accompanied by a deepening of their moral and
religious life. This came to them as a consolation for
their terrible losses. Two real worlds, the heaven and
the earth, besides the shadowy realm of Sheol, or the
underworld, now came into view. Man is of the earth,
and his days are few. But Jahwe God is in the high
heaven above all earthly things and free from all earthly
contingencies. There he lives and reigns eternally.
Superhuman beings serve him there. He rules also on
the earth, and the angels of his power go forth from his
presence bearing his decrees and effecting his purposes
on the earth. All events that occur on the earth are
determined in advance in heaven. So to say, that which
took place on earth was first enacted in heaven and must
inevitably come to pass. If men could but enter heaven,
or if the veil that separates heaven from earth could
be withdrawn for a time, men would be able to see
beforehand the things which are to come to pass.
What is true of the earth is also true of the under-world,
for Jahwe is lord there also and predetermines
the fate of its denizens. Thus there lies before men
the possibility of obtaining a knowledge of the distant
future.
The possibility becomes an actuality. The new
world becomes the basis of a new view of human knowl-edge.
Men have actually witnessed the lifting of the
Apocalypticism 19
veil between heaven and earth. There have been apoca-lypses,
revelations, of those things that happen in heaven.
Men have had visions of that realm and they have heard
voices speaking to them from it. The disclosures that
came to men in this way are not to be classed with things
that they learn in the ordinary manner. The sight and
the hearing they enjoyed were special gifts bestowed
upon the few. They were the seers, the prophets of

their God. This knowledge was not merely natural but,
as we are accustomed to say, supernatural, miraculous.
It was certain that they who obeyed the heavenly vision
should infallibly be blessed. The word that came from
heaven could not fail.
Moreover, the apocalypses disclosed the secret causes
of the events for whose coming believers were to look so
hopefully. They belonged to the same order as the
knowledge concerning them. They were not brought
about through the normal working of those things we see
about us, but by the special act, the determining will, of
God. Apart from this they could not happen. If God
thus intervened by his mighty power to bring to pass
things that would be otherwise impossible, then the
tremendous events which the seers were now foretelling
and which seemed so contrary to expectation — the
descent of the Messiah from heaven, the resurrection
from the dead, the assembling of all mankind for judg-ment,
the burning of the world and the wicked with it,
and the creation of a new world for the righteous or the
taking of them up into heaven — would surely occur.
Here, then, their religious faith found its firm support.
With such a basis of confidence an oppressed and impov-erished
people could bid defiance to all the powers of this
world or the world beneath. These are the themes of
the Jewish apocalyptic.
It is a very striking feature of those Jewish apoca-lypses
which have been committed to writing that they
are all pseudonymous. The writers conceal their per-sonal
authorship under the name of some accredited
prophet or worthy of the past. Such names as Enoch,
the Twelve Patriarchs, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Daniel, Ezra, are attached to the apocalypses. What is
the secret of this self-effacement? It could not have
been simply a means of avoiding the danger of identifica-tion
which is often so real to the writers among an
oppressed people. It must have been mainly for the
sake of securing for their messages the credence that
attached to the utterances of men who were commonly
regarded as special messengers of their God — men who
had seen the heavenly things and spoke by the spirit of
Jahwe. That is to say, the authors of the Jewish apoca-lyptic
firmly believed that their own utterances were
revelations from heaven, visions given by God, and they
sought to persuade their readers of the same by attribut-ing
their works to men in whom the people already
believed. This brings out another very interesting
fact related to the production of Jewish apocalyptic.
We shall indicate it.
The apocalyptic writings cover, roughly speaking,

a period of time stretching from the second century
before Christ to the end of the first Christian century.
The events of the times before the captivity were now
far back in the past. The common tendency among men
to idealize the past was accentuated among the Jews of
these later days through the contrast with their former
A pocalypticism 2 1
condition. Those patriotic statesmen of the former
days who gave a moral interpretation of Israel's history
and attempted to direct the policy of the state by their
forecasts of coming changes were now among the national
heroes. They had foretold the things that had come to
pass. They were inspired of Jahwe. They had had
visions of the heavenly things. The things which eye
saw not and ear heard not and which entered not into
the heart of the common man had been revealed to them.
If the prophets had foretold the things which had already
come to pass, why should they not also have foretold the
things which were even yet to come ? And so the new
seers, believing that they too had visions given them by
God, disclaimed all honor for themselves and ascribed
their experiences to the acknowledged sages of the past
in order to establish the hearts of the people in the con-fidence
that the things which they had seen in vision
were really about to occur. This use of the works of the
ancient prophets was possible through the collection of
their writings by the learned and devout scribes of the
people. They had not hesitated to attach the names of
known prophets to writings whose authorship was un-known
in order to preserve those works and secure for the
whole body of the collected writings the veneration that
would insure the loyal obedience of the people. That
is to say, the scribes had already made a virtual canon of
scripture, a collection of the utterances of men whose word
was the word of God, the words of men who were given a
knowledge inaccessible to others. Jewish Apocalypticism
leans for support upon a canon of inspired scripture.
We may now briefly summarize the results of our
study to this point. First, Jewish Apocalypticism is an
outcome of the doctrine of a dual world, the earth and
the heaven above the earth. There was also a shadowy
underworld obscurely related to the heaven, but like it
in that it was ordinarily invisible. Secondly, it was a
doctrine of the predetermination of all events by the
irresistible decretive will of God, a doctrine of divine
predestination. Thirdly, it was a doctrine of human
knowledge of future events by means of supernatural
vision, a theory of the knowledge of the invisible.

Fourthly, it was a universalistic interpretation of human
history in contrast with the narrower nationalism of the
ancient prophets, and it thereby carried with it the
enfranchisement of the individual. Finally, Apoca-lypticism
offered a moral interpretation of all human
history. Everything was viewed from the standpoint
of a universal and final day of judgment (the idea of a
canon of inspired scripture is intimately associated with
Apocalypticism, but is not essential to it). If these
things are so, Apocalypticism, so far from being a degen-erate
offspring of prophetism, was the very flower of
prophetism and brings the era of Jewish prophecy to a
close.
3. APOCALYPTICISM IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
We turn once more to the Pe trine confession. The
pronouncement that Jesus was the Messiah, while it did
not determine which of the many different views that
were current in Jewish apocalyptic was to become the
Christian view, did finally interpret the mission of Jesus
through the general apocalyptical view of the world and
of human life. Apocalyptic became the native air in
which early Christianity lived and breathed. It pro-
Apocalypticism 23
vided for the new age the answer to the question of the
meaning of the career of Jesus, his relation to the all-determining
will of God, and his relation to the destiny
of mankind universally. Apocalyptic became for Jewish
believers, and to a large extent for generations of gentile
believers after them, the determinate mode of expressing
the Christian faith. So closely do the cast of thought
in the Jewish apocalyptic and the prevailing thought in
the New Testament coincide that to the reader who is
unacquainted with the Jewish Apocrypha, and whose
knowledge of these ancient people is drawn wholly from
the Old and the New Testament, it must have seemed,
as he read the foregoing account of the character of
Jewish Apocalypticism, that it was derived directly from
the New Testament.
The books of our New Testament came almost
entirely, if not altogether, from the hands of Jewish
believers in the messiahship of Jesus, and they are
addressed to readers most of whom are presupposed to
be familiar with Jewish thought. So far as the general
type of thought is concerned, nothing stands out more
prominently than the fact of our having before us there
a Christian recast of the Jewish apocalyptic. This is a
matter that claims our attention somewhat in detail.
First of all, the New Testament is thoroughly charged
with the consciousness of the contrast between two
worlds, heaven and earth (with also a vague recognition

of a real lower world different from both) . The contrast
turns in favor of the heaven. The interest and hope of
believers are concentrated there. The presence and
activity of God on earth and among men do not alter
the fact that he is pre-eminently in heaven. The words
of the invocation so dear to all Christendom make it
indisputable: "Our father which art in heaven, hal-lowed
be thy name." From thence came the Christ to
earth and thither he has returned, to come a second time.
Whether it be Matthew or Paul or John who speaks, it is
the same. The conception is more or less realistic in all,
and the very foundation of the Christian hope seems at
times to lie there. Believers' expectations of future
blessedness are made to depend on the reality of that
heaven, for they hope to be raised from their graves or
to ascend from the surface of the earth at the coming of
Christ to be with him— though this is not the invariable
way of putting it, and sometimes the language seems to
be symbolic rather than literally descriptive.
The denizens of these worlds are clearly distinguished,
and for the most part easily recognized. Angels of God
from heaven frequently appeared to the sight of believ-ing
men, speaking to them, assisting them in their tasks
or ministering to their comfort and well-being. Demons
from the lower world were also banefully active every-where,
afflicting men with ills or deceiving and beguiling
them into sin — though there are no references to their
visibility. Life is sometimes represented as a constant
battle with these hidden foes, for while their home was
in the underworld their operations were on the earth or
even in the heights above where the good angels are.
Hence the moral conflicts in which men were engaged
might appear as pitched battles with monstrous spiritual
forces in the higher regions. As Paul puts it— "Our
wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers
of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of
A pocalypticism 2 5
wickedness in the heavenly places." What a dignity
and grandeur was thereby attached to our human, moral
struggles ! Jesus had the angels of God at his command,
and to him and his followers they rendered service. It
will not do to call this mere religious rhetoric, for in those
times it all seemed very real.
So profoundly impressed were these first-century
believers with the reality of their heritage in that higher
world that the hope of the messianic kingdom, which

they had inherited from the Jews, was conceived no
longer, after the manner of the prophets, as growing up
out of better moral conditions on the earth, but as the
expectation of a city-state that should descend to earth
out of the skies after the evil world had been destroyed.
The imagery of the New Testament, when these themes
are discussed, is most impressive. For vividness and
magnificence these portrayals have never been excelled.
And no wonder, because the stake was the most momen-tous
possible. No effort was spared to excite and sustain
the expectation of a speedy apocalypse of the Redeemer
from on high. Striking references to this hope are found
almost everywhere. We quote a single passage from
one of the letters of Paul: "For our citizenship is in
heaven: from whence also we look for a Saviour, the
Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of
our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body
of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able
even to subject all things to himself."
When we turn to the accounts of the manner in which
the gospel was proclaimed from the first the apocalypti-cal
cast of thought is equally manifest. Visions, dreams,
voices, and visitants from the heavenly realm are
26 What Is Christianity ?
frequent accompaniments of the early preaching. These
were the seals of the divine authority of the message.
Thus it is no cause of surprise if the conceptions, convic-tions,
and reasonings of the speakers and writers were
often viewed by them as direct impartations from heaven
and incomparably higher in worth than the natural
thoughts of men. In what other way was it open to
them to affirm that they believed that the new life they
were living was itself the life divine? The question
which would trouble us today — how such things were
psychologically possible — seems never to have occurred
to them. The nearest they came to it was by referring
their higher thoughts to the inner working of the Spirit
of God on their minds. Many pages might be filled with
quotations illustrative of the Apocalypticism of the New
Testament writers. A few references must suffice.
If we turn to the accounts of the birth of Jesus, we
find the occurrences connected with it represented as the
outcome of action from a higher divine world and not
from the human will itself. For example, Matthew says :
"Now the birth of Jesus was on this wise: when his
mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they
came together, she was found with child of the Holy
Spirit." Then passing to Joseph's situation he adds:
"But when he thought on these things, behold an angel
of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, . . . ."
And so the account continues. Magi from the East are
guided to the young child by a moving star, and they

return to their country by a different route because of a
warning from God by a dream. By a dream Joseph is
directed to take the child to Egypt, by a dream he is told
by an angel to return, and by a dream he is warned to go
A pocalypticism 2 7
to Galilee. This is the manner in which the early Chris-tians
expressed their confidence that Jesus had come to
the world by the predetermining will of God, and that
the earthly events pertaining thereto had been similarly
ordered by God. In Luke's account the representations
of heavenly intervention are even more vivid. Angelic
messengers, divine inspirations, voices from the sky,
signalize the advent of the expected Messiah. Or if we
turn to the accounts of the death and resurrection of
Jesus, we are equally impressed with the vigor of the
apocalypses. Earthquakes, appearings of the dead to the
living, the deeds and words of heavenly angels, startling
appearings of Jesus himself, attest the truth of the faith
in him and prove the supernatural character of his mis-sion.
Or, again, if we take the accounts of his ministry,
they are studded with occurrences of intervention from
another world. A notable instance' is the transfigura-tion.
We quote from Mark:
And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter and James
and John and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart by
themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his gar-ments
became glistering, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth
can whiten them. And there appeared unto them Elijah and
Moses; and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answereth
and saith unto Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here
And there came a cloud overshadowing them; and there came a
voice out of the cloud: This is my beloved Son: hear ye him.
And suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more,
save Jesus only with themselves.
This manner of narration is quite generally characteristic
of the whole of the accounts of Jesus' career. They are
cast in the mold of a belief in heavenly apocalypses.
Everything is conceived miraculously. Now, to remove
the miraculous elements from the story is to rob it of its
peculiar power. It is not for us to seek to modernize
these narratives by excising the overt interventions.
That would be an act of violence destructive of the
peculiar merits of the gospel records. While these
accounts would sound very artificial if produced in our
times, they were entirely natural to the minds of religious

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