THE

HISTORY OF

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

CHAPTER I. THE WAY PREPARED

THE birth of the Christian Church was a new thing in history. The student, whatever his standpoint, can scarcely fail to find in it an incalculable element which defies analysis. Nevertheless, like all historical events, the Church had its roots in a soil prepared long before. It is comparatively easy to trace in the previous course of religion, politics, society, and thought certain predisposing causes, without which, humanly speaking, the Church could not have been. These antecedents do not really explain the origin of so new and amazing a development, though they made it possible. The non-Christian inquirer will have to be content to make the most he can out of them. To the Christian they fall into their place as part of a Divine plan. He believes that all history, like the whole of nature, is one continuous and purposeful progress, and that the wisdom of God so directed the world's course that the Church, at the appointed time, found all things ready for her appearance.

First among such preparations, and most direct, stands the history of the Jewish people and their religion. Religion was the one great contribution of that mysterious and The preparagifted race to the development of humanity. Jewish tion of Israel. sacred literature laid the foundations of Christianity. books of the Old Testament, written at various times during a period of at least eight centuries, and from curiously varying points of view, had combined to teach the highest conceptions of God and His requirements which the world had known. And Christianity, springing as it did directly out of Judaism, adopted and developed this teaching, but did not change it.

A

of Israel.

The first dogma of Judaism was the unity of God. In contrast with the competing divinities of the heathen world, national The theology and tribal gods, gods of the sky and the sea, the river and the woodland, gods of the great natural processes of birth and death, gods of the works and ways of men, the Jew had learned that there was one only God, universal, almighty, supreme, eternal, a personal living God who had direct relations with mankind. It may be that this 'ineffable Name" had as a matter of history been a development from the original tribal God of the Hebrews-whom they knew as 'Jahweh.' But the result is far greater and more important than the processes.

Again, this one God was recognised as a moral being. God is holy.' This was as profound a distinction between the God of the Jews and the divinities of the nations as His unity. For the Gentile gods, though philosophers and poets might attribute to some of them moral qualities like truth and justice and benevolence, were, as generally understood and worshipped, either immoral or non-moral. They were propitiated or made enemies, not by the righteousness of the worshipper but by his sacrifices and ritual observances. In contrast with all that, God was to the Jew essentially holy and righteous. And He had imposed on His creatures a like law of holiness and righteousness, for He had made man in His own image.' Although, as the Jew believed, He had revealed to Moses a system of worship and sacrifice which bore considerable resemblance to the systems current in the heathen world, yet sacrifices, as the prophets had taught, were valueless unless accompanied by purity and justice on the part of those who offered them. Jehovah might have a chosen people, but He had no favourites and no respect of persons He could not be pacified for wrong-doing by offerings of bulls and goats.

Again, the God of the Jews was a God of loving purpose. He was preparing 'redemption,' 'salvation' for Israel, and through Israel for mankind at large. And in many different ways, with varying distinctness, the hope of Divine redemption from the evils of the world was gradually connected in the Old

Testament with the figure of a personal Redeemer, a Messiah, an anointed King and Prophet and Priest, whose triumph would be achieved through suffering.

Most important of all, from the point of view of Christian history, the Jewish religion was embodied in a religious society. At first this was conceived as a nation, united by The idea of common ties of blood and history, ruled by a king of an ecclesia, her own. When the Jews lost their monarchy and their national independence, though the national idea persisted, and indeed tended in some ways to become narrower and more exclusive, yet a wider and a more spiritual conception is to be noted, that of a sacred congregation, an ecclesia, marked off from the world by outward observances like circumcision and other ritual, and by the strict observance of the Mosaic Law, but a theocracy rather than a monarchy. Without question it was this conception which dominated the minds of those who first preached Christianity. To the first Jewish recipients of the Gospel of Him who was Himself a Jew of the royal tribe and line, the organisation of believers as an ecclesia, a Church, was, apart from all question of revelation, an obvious and natural thing. The new ecclesia with its distinctive sacraments and social life was the continuation and development of the old. So S. Paul, writing to the Gentile Christians in Rome (Rom. xi.), describes their position as that of branches from a wild olive-tree, grafted upon a cultivated olive, as a compensation for the loss of some of the original branches. The Gentile Church is not regarded as a new creation, but an addition to the already existing ecclesia. The same thought occurs in a Roman writer of the second century. In the 'Shepherd' of Hermas (p. 57, n.) the vision is seen of a very aged woman, in glittering raiment, holding a book, and sitting on a great white chair. The seer thinks her at first to be 'the Sibyl,' but is told that she is the Church. 'Why then,' he asks, 'is she so aged?' 'Because,' is the reply,' she was created before all things: and for her sake the world was framed.'

Before the birth of Christ, these splendid and characteristic conceptions of Jewish religion had spread far beyond Palestine.