Eastern Christianity

“ When the hard iron crust of Islam is broken up, and the elements begin to melt with fervent heat, the Eastern world may be moulded into new forms. Then will the Oriental mind be brought into an impressible state, in which argument and persuasion can act upon it; and it may yield to the combined influence of civilization and Christianity. ”

“ The task of the missionary will be to relate Christianity to this great preparation that has been made for it and to think out with Eastern scholars the thought bases of a truly Eastern Christianity which shall seem to these Asiatic nations to come with all the authority of their own past behind it, and with all the glamour of a knowledge that the God who has been working with and for them in the past is now bringing them out into a larger and freer life. ”

“ The East and the West were bound to meet and religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. Western Christianity has for more than a hundred years now been sending its missionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to send their missionaries to the West. More justly the return of the East upon the West is not so much in a missionary propaganda, though there is a measure of that, as in a more subtle indoctrination of Western speculation by the fascination and mystery of the Eastern cults. ”

“ Externally regarded, in its origin and primitive development, Christianity must be reckoned an Eastern religion. In fulfilling its amazing destiny it quickly turned to the West for its richest missionary harvests, for there it found its most fertile soil, and its efforts at extension in the Farther East were long comparatively infructuous. ”

“ Christianity could certainly be so proclaimed as to suit the oriental, when taught by easterns to their brethren; and when a religion, intrinsically eastern, was presented without the western externals which a western is apt to identify with its essence. ”

“ A specific reason for the study of the non-Christian religions is found in the changes which our intercourse with Eastern nations has already wrought. With our present means of intercommunication we are brought face to face with them, and the contact of our higher vitality has aroused them from the comparative slumber of ages. Even our missionary efforts have given new vigor to the resistance which must be encountered. We have trained up a generation of men to a higher intellectual activity, and to a more earnest spirit of inquiry, and they are by no means all won over to the Christian faith. ”

“ The Eastern Church is both the source and background of the Western. Christianity arose in the East, and Greek was the language of the Scriptures and early services of the church, but when Latin Christianity established itself in Europe and Africa, and when the old Roman empire fell in two, and the eastern half became separate in government, interests and ideas from the western, the term Greek or Eastern Church acquired gradually a fixed meaning. It denoted the church which included the patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constantinople, and their dependencies. ”

“ SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS The new Oriental religions all appealed to the emotions. They helped to satisfy the spiritual wants of men and women, by dwelling on the need of purification from sin and by holding forth the prospect of a happier life beyond the tomb. It is not strange, therefore, that they penetrated every province of the Roman Empire and flourished as late as the fourth century of our era. Christianity had no more dangerous antagonists than the followers of Mithra and other eastern divinities. ”

“ We are beginning to recognize the right of religion and philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencies have combined to produce a considerable group of people who, having found, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in their inherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of the problems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hope of discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them. ”

“ It is a truism to say that we each take from a book only what we wish to take from it. To one who knows Russia and has the feeling for Eastern Christianity, there is no more enthralling occupation than to read the Gospels with an eye to discovering which parts Eastern Christianity has emphasised, which parts Western Christianity has taken; which parts, for instance, Russia has emphasised, which parts America has emphasised.
One evening in Vladikavkaz I had a long talk with Russian friends about this difference in emphasis, and we went through the whole of St. ”

“ Researches on the doctrines and practices common to Christianity and the Oriental Mysteries almost invariably go back, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, to the Hellenized East. It is there we must seek the key of enigmas still unsolved--The essential fact to remember is that the Eastern religions had diffused, first anterior to, then parallel with, Christianity, doctrines which acquired with this latter a universal authority in the decline of the ancient world. ”

“ The Orientals, including the Jews, made beneficence in its various forms, an individual duty. Kindness to the sick, the unfortunate, the poor, compassion with the sorrowful, almsgiving to the destitute, hospitality to [Pg 169] the stranger, are virtues characteristic of all eastern people. The New Testament chiefly echoes the sentiment of the Old on this matter, and the Old Testament chimes in with the voices of eastern teachers. In the West, government undertook responsibilities which in oriental lands, were assumed by individuals ”

“ In uniting the East and the West, in uniting Asiatic and European faith and character, the Church of the New Dispensation works faithfully upon the lines laid down by Christ, and only seeks to amalgamate the Western Christ and the Eastern Christ. ”

“ The Arian Controversy and the Council of Nicæa.
See ARIANISM:
and NICÆA, THE FIRST COUNCIL OF.
CHRISTIANITY: A. D. 330-1054.
The Eastern (Greek, or Orthodox) Church.
"'The Eastern Church,' says a well-known writer, 'was like the East, stationary and immutable; the Western, like the West, progressive and flexible. This distinction is the more remarkable, because at certain periods of their course, there can be no doubt that the civilization of the Eastern Church was far higher than that of the Western.'"
G. F. Maclear, The Slavs, page 25. ”

“ The very framework of Eastern society is so opposed to the opinions of Europeans, that I will venture to prophecy it must be the work of several generations to root up prejudice before the mind of the Eastern can be prepared for the reception of our ideas of civilization. That Christianity is the only medium through 168which happiness may be attained by any people is most certain ”

“ The age of the great Fathers, with its essentially Oriental controversies on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ, is by far the most important epoch in the whole history of Eastern Christendom. ”

“ It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight. ”

“ Already the world has been opened up, the nations of the earth are awakening to the greatness of life's possibilities. The danger is that the Oriental peoples should become satisfied with the mere externals of civilisation, and miss that which will assure their complete emancipation. Christianity was born in the East, though it has become the inheritance of the West. It is adapted by its genius to all men. And undoubtedly the West has no better boon to confer on the East than that on which its own life and hope are founded—the religion of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Yes, and the yearning desire of Our heart bids us conceive and hope that the day is not far distant when the Eastern Churches, so illustrious in their ancient faith and glorious past, will return to the fold they have abandoned. We hope it all the more, that the distance separating them from Us is not so great: nay, with some few exceptions, we agree so entirely on other heads that, in defence of the Catholic faith, we often have recourse to reasons and testimony borrowed from the teaching, the rites, and customs of the East. ”

“ If the East is to return upon the West in substituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to the West. ”

“ The monasticism as well as the religion of the East has always differed from the monasticism and the religion of the West. The Eastern mind is mystical, dreamy, contemplative; the Western mind loves activity, is intensely practical. Representatives of the Eastern faiths in the recent Parliament of Religions accused the West of materialism, of loving the body more than the soul. ”

“ No eastern religion, Buddhism not excepted, appears to contain conceptions that satisfy the western mind. The religion of the Christ, however can be shown to hold whatever ideas and ideals make vital the great race-religions of the East. ”

“ The Christianity of the East was probably as degraded a form of belief, as lowering for human character, and as mischievous to social wellbeing, as has ever been held by civilised peoples. Yet the East, strangely enough, was the great home and nursery of all that is most distinctive in the constituent ideas of the Christian faith. Why, in meditating on Christianity, are we to shut our eyes to the depravation that overtook it when placed amid unfavourable social conditions, and to confine our gaze to the brighter qualities which it developed in the healthier atmosphere of the West? ”

“ In business the Turk and Jew have some common ground with the oriental Christian: in social life but little and in religion none at all. Europe has sometimes shown an interest in Asiatic religions, but on the whole an antipathy to them. Christianity originated in Palestine, which is a Mediterranean rather than an Asiatic country, and its most important forms, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, took shape on European soil. ”

“ When we begin to make gods of what after all must be sternly subordinated to higher things, and the East has done this in spite of its mystics and its dreamers, then we are not only in danger of sculpturing symbolic horrors on the fronts of our temples but of setting up therein strange altars to strange gods who are best worshipped by strange rites. All this, inevitably enough, has given to Eastern worship a more than earthly character, and has invested with the sanction of religion forces which it must always be the business of religion to subordinate and control. ”

“ There is danger, today, and it is inevitable, that [pg 142] missionaries from the West be too ambitious to occidentalize the native Christian community, ignorant of, or indifferent to, the grand possibilities of thought and of life which lie in Eastern character and teaching. It is much easier to thrust upon them everything Western than it is to appreciate and to conserve many things Eastern. ”

“ In the history of the world’s culture three historical stages of universal development succeed each other: the Oriental, the Franco-German, and the Teutono-Romanic. The kingdom of God had to enter each of these and have in each a distinctive character, so that as comprehensive a development as possible might be secured. The history of the preparation for Christianity in the history of the Israelitish theocracy moves along the lines of Oriental culture. The history of the beginnings of Christianity embraces the history of the founding of the church by Christ and His Apostles. ”

“ We are all eager to admit the immeasurable possibilities of the Oriental type of thinking for the development of Christianity, but Oriental systems thus far have been chiefly significant as indicating what stupendous religious powers can do when they are off the track. ”

“ The fundamental truth on which our civilisation rests is that God is good, and that therefore truth and progress are right and possible, and that the highest expression of the goodness of God is in His incarnation as it is universally taught by Christians of various views and of many denominations. The West owes to the East, if there is any common duty of man to man, to set before it the real truth as to the greatness of Western civilisation, namely, that it is the result of Christianity. ”

“ And why should they not, if our faith is to fit well the Oriental mind, and is to become a gracious power in its life? The growing opposition among the educated men of India, at the present time, is not really antagonism to Christianity itself, but to its western garb and spirit. And there is much reason for this attitude of mind. Conciliation and adaptation has not been the characteristic of the mind of the West in presenting its faith to the East. ”

“ True it is that Christianity was a product of the East, but it was an accidental and inferior offshoot from the original religion of the race, not adapted to their needs, and fitted only for exportation. ”

“ By their efforts was presented to the English-speaking world a series of translations of the sacred books of the East, which showed the relations of the more Eastern sacred literature,to our own, and proved that in the religions of the world the ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind are not of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out of a remote past. ”