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Rh tempted to charge the seeming extravagance of St Paul’s thought upon his Jewish inheritance, while modern Jews are tempted to stigmatize them as grotesque exaggerations of reasonable rabbinical doctrines. Probably both are right, and both wrong. The germs were Jewish; but, transported to a new soil, and watered with a new enthusiasm, they assumed new forms. These cannot claim the merit of correctness, but they are works of religious genius. At the same time, they employ all the resources of dialectic, and have, therefore, taken quite half the journey from primary religion to theology. But the dislocation of religious thinking, when Christianity ceased to be a Jewish faith and found a home with Gentiles, destroyed the continuity of Paulinism and of Jewish thought working through St Paul. In later times, when Paulinism revived, the epistles spoke for themselves, though they were not always correctly understood. It should be added that, according to A. Harnack, Hellenistic Judaism had worked out the principles of a theology which simply passed on into the Greek-speaking Christian Church.

Besides the teaching of Jesus (best preserved in the ﬁrst three gospels) and the teaching of Paul (in six, ten, or thirteen epistles), the recent “science” of New Testament theology ﬁnds other types of doctrine. The Epistle to the Hebrews is a parallel to Paulinism, working out upon independent lines the ﬁnality of Christianity and its superiority to the Old Testament. The Johannine Gospel and Epistles are later than Paulinism, and presuppose its leading or less startling positions. Whatever historical elements may be preserved in Christ’s discourses as given in the Fourth Gospel, these discourses ﬁt into the author’s type of thought better than into the synoptical framework. They have been transformed. 1 Peter is good independent Paulinism. The Epistle of James may breathe a Christianized Jewish legalism, or, as others hold, it may breathe the legalism (not untouched by Jewish inﬂuences) of popular Gentile-Christian thought. The Johannine Apocalypse is chieﬂy interesting as an apocalypse. F. C. Baur and his school interpreted it as a manifesto of anti—Pauline Jewish Christianity; on the contrary, it closely approaches Paul’s doctrine of the Atonement and his Christology. Other writings are of less importance. Acts is indeed of interest in showing us Paulinism in a later stage; the writer wishes to reproduce his great master’s thought, but his Paulinism is simpliﬁed and cut down. Possibly the Pastoral Epistles show the same process. When we go outside the New Testament, this involuntary lack of grasp becomes even more marked.

Neither the theory of infallible inspiration, with its assertion of absolute uniformity in the New Testament, nor Baur’s criticism, with its assertion of irreconcilable antagonisms, is borne out by facts. The New Testament is many-sided, but it has a predominant spiritual unity. Only in minor details do contradictions emerge. It is to be remembered that criticism has broken up the historical unity of the New Testament collection and placed many of its components side by side with writings which have never been canonized, and which conservative writers had supposed to be distinctly later. But in regard to date there has been a remarkable retreat from the earlier critical assertions. And at any rate, since the New Testament canon was set up, New Testament writings have had a theological influence which no others can claim.

On both sides of the great transition from being a Jewish to being a Gentile faith, Christianity, according to recent study, manifested itself as “enthusiastic.” We may distinguish several points in this conception. (1) Most important, perhaps—the end of the world was held to be close at hand. “Kingdom of God” as generally used was an eschatological concept; and, whatever difﬁculties there may be as to certain gospel passa es, Christ, to say the least, cannot have disclaimed this view. he watchword rings through all the New Testament“- “the Lord is at hand.” A broader popular form was given to this expectation in “Chiliasm”—the doctrine of the “Thousand” years' reign of Christ on earth (Rev. xx. 1-7). But even Chiliasm—which itself has its subtler and its grosser modiﬁcations—is found in early Gentile as well as in early Jewish Christianity. (2) 1 Corinthians shows us a Christian community ﬁlled with disturbances, and apparently without recognized ofﬁcials. The democratic, or rather theocratic, rights of the spiritual man were for a time relied on to extemporize so much Church government as might be needed till the Master returned. Yet the beginnings of Church order come earlier than those of doctrine proper, and much earlier than the cooling of eschatological hopes. (3) There are traces inside and outside the New Testament of aversion to receiving back into Church fellowship those who, after confessing Christ, had been guilty of grave sins. The New Testament evidence is by no means uniform (contrast Heb. vi. 4—6, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16; with 2 Cor. ii. 7); but this high conception of Church holiness is attested by a series of rigorist” heresies" during the early centuries; and nothing could be more characteristic of eschatological enthusiasm. Those who had fallen were not banished from hope, even by the rigorists. Still, their case was held OVer for a higher Judge; while the Church, especially in these more Puritian and separatist groups, kept her garments white. (4) The enthusiastic view of the possibilities of the Christian life—associated, as modern and especially Western Christians must suspect, with shallow external views of sin—lent itself to belief in sinless perfection. Even St Paul has been supposed, not without a certain plausibility, to teach the sinless perfection of real Christians. The West, with its theology protesting in the background, but in vain, still sings the prayer of the Te Deum: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.”

Such an enthusiastic temper does not lend itself to cool theory. Why should theology labour at deﬁnitions? “The Lord is at hand;” a Christian’s one wisdom is to be ready to meet him. And yet materials for theology were richly provided even during this period. That is true above all of the man whom we know best in New Testament days—St Paul. Himself through and through animated with the joyful hope, even when prepared to surrender (2 Cor. v. 8; Phil. i. 23, ii. 17) the prospect of personal survival (1 Thess. iv. 17; 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52) until that bright day, yet as a teacher he lays such stress upon Christ’s ﬁrst coming that the emphasis on the second Advent may be struck out—leaving still, we might almost claim, a complete Paulinism. He who planned his campaigns to the great civilized centres of Corinth, Ephesus and Rome, and thus prepared for a historic future of which he did not dream, drew his parallels of thought with no less ﬁrm hand, and showed himself indeed “a wise master-builder.”

In one aspect Montanism is the central reaction of the primitive Christian enthusiasm against the forces which were transforming its character. Of course it had other aspects and elements as well. Hippolytus and Novatian repeat the protest less vehemently; Donatism shows it blended with later hierarchical ideas.

But, when the enthusiasm cooled, it was Greek thought which interpreted the contents of Christianity. The process of change is called by Harnack sometimes “secularization” and sometimes Hellenization. “Acute Hellenizing,” we are told, took the form of Gnosticism. The Gnostics were the “ﬁrst theologians.” When the Church in turn began to produce a theology of her own she was imitating as Well as guarding against those wayward spirits. What was to be the central topic? The Church’s ﬁrst creed had been “the Fatherhood of God and the Messiahship of Jesus” (A. Ritschl); but the “Rule of Faith” (Irenaeus; Tertullian, who uses the exact expression; Origen)—that summary of religiously important facts which was meant to ward off error without reliance on speculations such as the Logos doctrine—built itself up along the lines of the baptismal formula of Matt. xxviii. 19. There are traces in the New Testament of a baptismal confession simply of the name of Christ (1 Cor. i. 13, 15; Rom. vi. 2; cf. even the late verse Acts viii. 37), not of the threefold name. Moreover, textual criticism points to an early type of reading in Matt. xxviii. 19 without the threefold formula. Still, it is strange how completely this seemingly isolated passage takes command of the development of early theology.

Out of the Rule of Faith there came in time what tradition mis-calls the Apostles’ Creed—the Roman baptismal creed, a formulary of great importance in all the West; then other creeds, which also are in a sense expansions of the Rule of Faith. The Greek mind threw itself upon the problem—who precisely is Jesus Christ the Lord? His Messiahship is asserted; who then is the Messiah? and this second ﬁgure in the baptismal confession? A provisional answer, linking Christian theology with the philosophical theology of antiquity, asserted Jesus Christ to be the divine Logos. But this assertion was expanded and reﬁned upon till two great doctrines had been built up—«that of the Trinity of divine Persons in the unity of the Godhead, and that of the union of two distinct natures, divine and human, in the person of Jesus Christ. It is curious that the Syrian church of the 4th century (e.g. Aphraates) was almost unaffected by the great dogmatic debates. But there is no hint of a reasoned rejection of Greek developments in favour of primitive simplicity, still less of any independent theological development. Aphraates accepts the Logos Christology, and, soon after his time, his church is found on the beaten track of orthodoxy.