Ekklesia

“ Already for several years, I had received the doctrines of the Bible: I had become a theologian of the true primitive Church. I cannot, however, say that as yet I was a firm believer, since I had not abiding in me the spirit of the Gospel of Christ; which is neither the fruit of our reading, nor the work of our own intellect, but is given us immediately from God. I was a Christian in mind, but not in heart. If Christianity, as some suppose, were a mere opinion, a belief, it would suffice, in order to become a Christian, to admit the truth of the Scriptures. ”

“ But with the Christian philosophers it was not merely the negative influence of scepticism which drove them to Eclecticism. Their conviction of a sure knowledge of things divine—the final question for all philosophy—exerted a positive influence as well, which led them to formulate more or less explicitly a view of the function of philosophy as an organon of the truth, not merely with reference to the past history of Greek thought, as their contemporaries outside of the Christian Church were accustomed to do, but with a view to all possible speculation on the Deity. ”

“ Can it be that the book of Ecclesiastes is the mere record of the miserable experiences of an embittered and disappointed sensualist, or is it the profound and searching exposition of the vanities of this world as they appear to a lofty searcher after truth and God, measured by the realities of a future and endless life, which the soul emancipated from pollution pants and aspires after with all the intensity of a renovated nature? ”

“ It is, therefore, not unnatural that the one Greek philosopher who, despite the monistic and necessitarian postulates of his philosophy, conceived of his God in as vivid a fashion as the writers of the New Testament, and almost as intimately as the founder of Christianity himself, should have inherited the passion for a personal god from the folk and land of his nativity. ”

“ You cannot possibly regard the wild stories of these Nazarenes as true?”
“As the only truth, that is known to man.”
“What? Is it you, my own Quintus—proud, wise, high-spirited—who say this? Have you waited for me to tell you, that all belief in the gods, be their names what they may, is as hollow as a gilded nut which a child or a fool takes for gold...?”
“Belief in the gods—yes, Cornelia; but not belief in God. One word may have many and various meanings. The gods—is the name the people give to those idols of the imagination, to which they attribute human passions and weaknesses. ”

“ In this way Ecclesiastes would evidently direct our most earnest attention to what follows: "the conclusion of the whole matter." Here is absolutely the highest counsel of true human wisdom—the climax of her reasonings—the high-water-mark of her attainments—the limit to which she can lead us: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil." ”

“ Just as the particular period of Christ’s manifestation has ever been reverently regarded as a revelation of the manifold nature of the eternal wisdom, so may we not see the same in the choice of a language, at a particular period of its development, as the bearer of the message of salvation to mankind? Surely this is a manifestation of the Divine wisdom which must ever be seen and felt whenever the outward character of the Greek of the New Testament is dwelt upon by the truth-seeking spirit of the reverent believer. ”

“ And yet we are gravely told that God thus acts, and that the Bible thus teaches; we are constantly rebuked as wanting in faith and humility, because we can find no such principles in either providence or the Bible. The plain declaration of the prophet Ezekiel contains the spirit of both. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” ”

“ The moral doctrine of the Alexandrian school was as follows: --The mind of man, originally a portion of the divine Being, having fallen into a state of darkness and defilement by its union with the body, is to be gradually emancipated from the chains of matter, and rise by contemplation to the knowledge and vision of God. The end philosophy, therefore, is the liberation of the soul from its corporeal imprisonment. For this purpose the Eclectic philosophy recommends abstinence, with other voluntary mortifications, and religious exercises. ”

“ We include in "ecclesiastical history" the life of the most insignificant bishop or the most wicked of popes, not the life of the wisest of philosophers or the most Christian of kings. But such a limitation is as untenable in fact as it is untrue in theory. The very stones of the spiritual temple cry out against such a profanation of the rock from which they were hewn. If the Christian religion be a matter not of mint, anise, and cummin, but of justice, mercy, and truth ”

“ Of the latter, indeed, no terms were severe enough to express their contempt, and they were sometimes in the habit of saying that the Eucharist tasted to them like dung. Man being thus God by nature, has in him all that is divine, and each one may say that he himself created the universe. One of the accusations brought against Master Eckart was that he had declared that his little finger created the world. Nay, more, man can so unite himself with God that he can do whatever God does; he thus needs no God; he is impeccable, and whatever he does is without sin. ”

“ If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch, or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material [pg 253] weakness it would offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which its propagation bears witness. ”

“ Theology is not above Christianity: the Christian Church is in many respects the best practical exposition of the Christian Religion. Facts are still the most powerful, the most solid, the most stubborn guides in the mazes of speculation and casuistry; they cut through difficulties which arguments cannot overturn; they overturn theories which will surrender to nothing else. Ecclesiastical History is thus, as it were, the backbone of Theology. ”

“ We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:—the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together. ”

“ It was no wonder, then, that the more thoughtful of the laity, conscious of the evils of the dominant faith, and yet powerless, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, to apply a corrective short of indifferentism or practical atheism; striving helplessly for something better than they saw around them, and yet unable to release the primal principles of Christianity from the incrustations of scholastic theology, should find their only refuge in these philosophical speculations which virtually reduced Christianity to nothingness. ”

“ Moreover Gnosticism, of which Alexandria was the chief focus, had raised the question of the unity and nature of the Godhead, and professed a false gnosis as the perfection of religion. By this also thoughtful minds were led to consider the true relation of knowledge to faith, and hence to attempt the first rudiments of a Theology, the Science of Faith.
To refute heathenism both as a Philosophy and as a Religion, and to set forth Christianity as the absolute truth, was the very function of such men as Clement and Origen ”

“ Wherefore also the Scriptures were translated into the language of the Greeks, in order that they might never be able to allege the excuse of ignorance, inasmuch as they are able to hear also what we have in our hands, if they only wish. One speaks in one way of the truth, in another way the truth interprets itself. The guessing at truth is one thing, and truth itself is another. Resemblance is one thing, the thing itself is another. And the one results from learning and practice, the other from power and faith. For the teaching of piety is a gift, but faith is grace. ”

“ But the teaching, which is according to the Saviour, is complete in itself and without defect, being “the power and wisdom of God;” [988] and the Hellenic philosophy does not, by its approach, make the truth more powerful; but rendering powerless the assault of sophistry against it, and frustrating the treacherous plots laid against the truth, is said to be the proper “fence and wall of the vineyard.” And the truth which is according to faith is as necessary for life as bread; while the preparatory discipline is like sauce and sweetmeats. ”

“ Ecclesiasticism hails Christ as the Saviour of the world, inasmuch as His death was a sacrifice sufficient to atone for the sins of all men. But it is reserved for Science to confirm the truth of this spiritual recognition [68] of the Divine Redeemer, Love, by evidential testimony adduced from proven facts of so-called natural law, whereby Christ is seen as the expounder of doctrine that controverts the theory of evil and suffering as opposing forces to the Will of a God of Love, and reveals their purpose in the spiritual evolution of mankind. ”

“ Nothing is lost from that perfectly preserved atmosphere of something foreign to our own experience in time and place, which one felt instinctively to be foreign whether or not one were Egyptologist enough to recognize it as perfect; while at the same time the interest is kept up by a stress of human feeling which makes the thrilling events chronicled hold one as if they happened before one’s eyes. The early Christians are represented, not as martyrs and haloed heroes, but as human beings with a great deal of human nature in them ”

“ And, on the other hand, the champions of a new religion saw the necessity of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the ideas of their opponents, in order to meet them on their own ground and gain admittance into the very heart of pagan learning. “In the truest sense of the word,” says a writer in the Dublin Review, “Christianity is a philosophy, and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in those times. ”

“ For what one may call the typical Protestant consciousness the Bible is the final revelation of God, governing, if only we can come to understand it, both our faith and our conduct of life, but the want of a true understanding of it and, above all, the burdening of it with an inherited tradition has clouded its light for multitudes of devout souls. ”

“ Ezekiel 26—Downfall Of Philosophy 26:1. And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the first day of the month, that the word of the Lord came unto me, saying.—Chapter 26 depicts ecclesiasticism in the guise of an elaborate system of philosophy. The name Tyrus signifies “Rock;” and human philosophy, particularly Greek Platonic philosophy, is the real rock foundation of ecclesiastical teachings. Any true ecclesiastic, when driven by the Word of God from his untenable errors, claims sanction for them by reference to the philosophy of Plato and the inherent immortality of man, etc. ”

“ For this reason, then, we require greater attention and consideration in order to investigate how precisely we ought to live, and what is the true piety. For it is plain that, from the very reason that truth is difficult and arduous of attainment, questions arise from which spring the heresies, savouring of self-love and vanity, of those who have not learned or apprehended truly, but only caught up a mere conceit of knowledge. With the greater care, therefore, are we to examine the real truth, which alone has for its object the true God. ”

“ Akin to this is what the holy Apostle Paul says, preserving the prophetic and truly ancient secret from which the teachings that were good were derived by the Greeks: “Howbeit we speak wisdom among them who are perfect; but not the wisdom of this world, or of the princes of this world, that come to nought; but we speak the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery.” ”

“ The Greek religion of Wisdom perished in a false philosophy—"Oppositions of science, falsely so called." The Mediæval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort; in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution that ended the Mediæval faith; and I can tell you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins only by ending them; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by compounding for them. ”

“ Yet Gnosticism, Doketism, Cerinthianism, certainly sprang from the teeming soil of Ephesian thought; and without a recognition of this fact, we shall never understand the Epistle. Undoubtedly, if the Apostle had addressed himself only to contemporary error, his great Epistle would have become completely obsolete for us. To subsequent ages an antiquated polemical treatise is like a fossil scorpion with a sting of stone. But a divinely taught polemic under transitory forms of error finds principles as lasting as human nature. ”