Primitive Christianity

“ The greatness of the difference is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, and usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through Hellenism. ”

“ Indeed, it is not too much to say that the research and criticism of recent days have brought us face to face with the primitive age of Christianity in a manner never attainable during any of the intermediate ages. It is as though we of the twentieth century had gained a height from which we could look across the intervening centuries, many of which lie wrapped in mist, and see clear and sharp against the horizon the blue hills of the wonderful first century. ”

“ In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked? ”

“ The primitive religion of the ancients was a natural growth, accepted insensibly during a state of savagery and maintained politically long after it had been repudiated by philosophy, but Christianity was offered to a world already advanced in civilization, and had to pass through a process of intellectual digestion before it could take its place as an unassailable national belief. The Church, before it stands clearly revealed in the light of history, had been inspired with the conception of a Trinity by a contemplation of the Platonic philosophy ”

“ And thus, in the expression of the [48] biographer of Charles V., the barbarous nations when converted to Christianity changed the object, not the spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas of the old religion were consciously tolerated by the first propagators of Christianity, who justly deemed that the new dogmas would be more readily insinuated into the rude and simple minds of their neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. ”

“ The Trinity is unscriptural We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. "To us," as to the Apostle and the primitive Christians, "there is one God, even the Father." With Jesus, we worship the Father, as the only living and true God. We are astonished, that any man can read the New Testament, and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God. ”

“ Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief. ”

“ Most of the ancient nations were controlled more or less by priests, who, as their power increased, instituted a caste to perpetuate their influence. Whether or not we hold the primitive religion of mankind to have been a pure theism, directly revealed by God,--which is my own conviction,--it is equally clear that the form of religion recorded in the earliest written records of poetry or legend was a worship of the sun and moon and planets. I believe this to have been a corruption of original theism; many think it to have been a stage of upward growth in the religious sense of primitive man. ”

“ If the faith once for all delivered to the saints was defective, and needed to be supplemented by subsequent additions, why may not Christianity itself be, as some have maintained, only a phase in the development of religion, which in process of time is to be superseded by something wholly unchristian? ”

“ What we have said is but an introduction to a sketch of the great evolution of dogmatic truth through eighteen centuries: but in recording its rise, the secret of its growth, and the source of its strength, it was impossible not to bring out the great fact that Christianity was nothing less than a divine life produced in the world over against the existing heathenism, and laying hold of the whole soul of man, in which, as we have just said, intellect and will are inseparable. ”

“ But can the doctrine of man's antiquity be made to harmonize with the essentials of Christianity and the inspiration of the Scriptures? If Christianity be a religion for man, as the present writer believes, we answer emphatically in the affirmative. Not the smallest feature that is essential to make Christianity a religion for man, if it be such, will be imperilled by this or any other well-established doctrine [Pg 385] of science. ”

“ Let us, then, labor to banish the wide-spread delusion believed and taught by a thousand systems of worship—Jew, Pagan and Christian—that "religion is of supernatural or divine origin," and the many ruinous errors; senseless dogmas and deplorable soul-crushing superstitions so thoroughly inwrought into the Christian system will vanish like fog before the morning sun, and be replaced by a religion which sensible, intelligent and scientific men and women can accept, and will delight to honor and practice. ”

“ Such ideas are exaggerations and perversions of Christian doctrine. They necessarily provoked a reaction and revolt in the minds and hearts of men whenever they were taught; and there has been, consequently, a perpetual effort, among Protestants who were not willing to abandon Christianity altogether, to find some kind of rational religion which can plausibly assume to be the pure, original Christianity of Christ. ”

“ But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master's life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. ”

“ If this corrupting tendency was in force in the fourth century when the Christian religion was on the point of becoming the religion of the empire, and when the sacred books of Christianity had attained to a position of authority in the Church not a whit below the books of the Old Testament, you may easily imagine what a multitude of interpolations and amplifications must have crept into the original tradition at a time when it was still young, unauthoritative, and plastic, during the first two or three generations that followed the death of Christ. ”

“ In the diversity of the Church will be found a more powerful argument for the divine origin of Christianity itself, than in the most perfect unity. It is not, humanly speaking, surprising that a religion should sustain itself from age to age in the same race and country. ”

“ And even after he had felt the spiritual change, which forms the great line of distinction in the human character, he retained, for a long time, too many of his old prejudices against them. But, becoming an active agent of the Bible Society, he was unexpectedly brought into contact with some whom he found to be men of sense, of piety, of zeal, and of candour; more disposed to disseminate the pure faith of Christianity, than propagate their own peculiar tenets. ”

“ And how did the various religions compare with what we believe to be the true religion--Christianity--in its pure and ennobling truths, its inspiring promises, and its quiet influence in changing and developing character?
I assume that there is no such thing as a progressive Christianity, except in so far as mankind grow in the realization of its lofty principles; that there has not been and will not be any improvement on the ethics and spiritual truths revealed by Jesus the Christ, but that they will remain forever the standard of faith and practice. ”

“ Hence I declared to thee that nothing could save the Christian faith from the imputation of polytheism except the assumption that the God of the Christians, like the original myth of all primitive faith, hath in himself a double spiritual sex-hood, of which Christ is the Son, 'begotten,' not created; 'conceived,' not made; divine, because as the son of man is human, the Son of God must be divine. ”

“ It is startling, no doubt, and humiliating to find out how very little hold traditional Christianity has upon men.... So far as I am able to estimate, we are faced now with this situation, a Christian life combined with a pagan creed. For while men's conduct and their outlook are to a large extent unconsciously Christian, their creed (or what they think to be their creed) most emphatically is not.... ”

“ If, then, the tradition of God being born into the world was so universally established in heathen countries before the Christian era, as here shown, why should not, and why will not, our good Christian brethren dismiss their prejudices, and tear the scales from their eyes, so as to see that this universal belief would as naturally lead to the deification and worship of "the man Christ Jesus" as water flows down a descending plane? ”

“ But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. ”

“ In the Middle Ages such a channel would have been ready to hand; spiritual ferment used to express itself through the Christian Church, generally in the teeth of official opposition. A modern movement of any depth cannot so express itself. Whatever the reasons may be, the fact is certain. The principal reason, I believe, is that the minds of modern men and women can find no satisfaction in dogmatic religion; and Christianity, by a deplorable mischance, has been unwilling to relinquish dogmas that are utterly irrelevant to its essence. ”

“ I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character; and I sometimes find myself wondering whether there can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity without the presence of that element which in the past has presided over the origin of all religions, namely, a belief in new physical facts and possibilities. ”

“ But so little is this the fact that the oldest traditions of Christian art depict the founder of Christianity Himself not as a blooming man, not as a figure of the inward and outward health that proceeds inevitably from complete and absolute conformity to the Divine will, but as a wan and wasted personality plainly worsted by the world. ”

“ And to prove it, we will here institute a critical comparison between Christianity and some of the older systems with respect to the essential spirit of their teachings, and observe how utterly untenable and groundless is the dogmatic assumption which claims for the Christian religion either any originality or any superiority. Of course if their is nothing new or original, there is nothing superior. ”

“ And if from all these researches he is able to show that the religious sentiment appeared in humanity at first under superstitious and imperfect forms—as all manifestations of physical, intellectual, and moral life were imperfect and primitive—and then, with the slow and gradual evolution of civilization, instead of being eclipsed and disappearing, rose to higher forms and attained to a reflex knowledge of itself, until it took concrete form in the Christian religion ”

“ Some nations trace back their descent to a time of utter barbarism, whence the Gods recalled them; others start from a golden age, as the primitive condition of men. [2] The latter opinion prevailed with the Hebrews, from whom the Christians have derived it. According to them, the primitive state was one of the highest felicity, from which men fell; the primitive worship, therefore, must have been the normal Religion of mankind. ”

“ The foundation to a new ethic in these questions cannot be laid, until men begin with Old Testament shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to handle the life questions which the idealism of Christianity has indeed spiritualised but at the same time debased. ”

“ That ministry which sets aside modern inspiration, revelation, prophecy, angels, visions, healings, &c., is not ordained of God; but is Anti-Christian in spirit. In short, it is that spirit of priestcraft and kingcraft, by which the world, for many ages, has been ruled as with a rod of iron.
The sooner the present generation lose all reverence and respect for modern "Christianity," with all its powerless forms and solemn mockeries, the sooner they will be prepared to receive the kingdom of God. ”

“ The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed, civilisation is not opposed to faith. ”

“ Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be conceived and practised as a way of living—nothing more nor less. ”