The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church

by Edwin Hatch

B. The Christian Idea.

In primitive Christianity we find ourselves in another sphere of ideas: we seem to be breathing the air of Syria, with Syrian forms moving round us, and speaking a language which is not familiar to us. For the Greek city, with its orderly government, we have to substitute the picture of an Eastern sheyk, at once the paymaster of his dependents and their judge. Two conceptions are dominant, that of wages for work done, and that of positive law.

1. The idea of moral conduct as work done for a master who will in due time pay wages for it, was a natural growth on Semitic soil. It grew up among the fellahin, to whom the day’s work brought the day’s wages, and whose work was scrutinized before the wages were paid. It is found in many passages of the New Testament, and not least of all in the discourses of our Lord. The ethical problems which had vexed the souls of the writers of Job and the Psalms, are solved by the teaching that the wages are not all paid now, but that some of them are in the keeping of the Father in heaven. The persecuted are consoled by the thought, “Great are your wages in heaven.”[414] Those who do their alms before men receive their wages in present reputation, and have no wages stored up for them in heaven.[415] The smallest act of casual charity, the giving of a cup of cold water, will not go without its wages.[416] The payment will be made at the return of the Son of Man, whose “wages are with him to give to every man according as his work is.”[417] So fundamental is the conception that “he that cometh to God must believe,” not only “that He is,” but also that He “pays their due to them that seek after Him.”[418] So also in the early Christian literature which moved still within the sphere of Syrian ideas. In the “Two Ways,” what is given in charity should be given without murmuring, for God will repay it:[419] in the Epistle of Barnabas, the conception of the paymaster is blended with that of the judge.[420] “The Lord judges without respect of persons: every one shall receive according as he has done: if he be good, his righteousness shall go before him: if he be wicked, the wages of his wickedness are before his face.”

2. God is at once the Lawgiver and the Judge. The underlying conception is that of an Oriental sovereign who issues definite commands, who is gratified by obedience and made angry by disobedience, who gives presents to those who please him and punishes those with whom he is angry. The punishments which he inflicts are vindictive and not remedial. They are the manifestation of his vengeance against unrighteousness. They are external to the offender. They follow on the offence by the sentence of the judge, and not by a self-acting law. He sends men into punishment.

The introduction into this primitive Christianity of the ethical conceptions of Greek philosophy, raised difficulties which were long in being solved, if indeed they can be said to have been solved even now. The chief of these difficulties were, (i.) the relation of the idea of forgiveness to that of law; (ii.) the relation of the conception of a Moral Governor to that of free-will.

(i.) The Christian conception of God on its ethical side was dominated by the idea of the forgiveness of sins. God was a Sovereign who had issued commands: He was a Householder who had entrusted His servants with powers to be used in His service. As Sovereign, He could, at His pleasure, forgive a breach of His orders: as Householder, He could remit a debt which was due to Him from His servants. The special message of the Gospel was, that God was willing to forgive men their transgressions, and to remit their debts, for the sake of Jesus Christ. The corresponding Greek conception had come to be dominated by the idea of order. The order was rational and beneficent, but it was universal. It could not be violated with impunity. The punishment of its violation came by a self-acting law. There was a possibility of amendment, but there was none of remission. Each of these conceptions is consistent with itself: each by itself furnishes the basis of a rational theology. But the two conceptions are apparently irreconcilable with each other; and the history of a large part of early Christian theology is the history of endeavours to reconcile them. The one conception belonged to a moral world, controlled by a Personality who set forces in motion; the other to a physical world, controlled by a force which was also conceived as a Personality. Stated in Christian terms, the one resolved itself into the proposition, God is good; the other into the proposition, God is just. The two propositions seemed at first to be inconsistent with each other: on the one hand, the infinite love of God excluding the idea of punishment; on the other hand, His immutable righteousness excluding the idea of forgiveness.[421] The difficulty seemed insoluble, except upon the hypothesis of the existence of two Gods. The ditheism was sometimes veiled by the conception that the second God had been created by the first, and was ultimately subordinate to Him. In the theology of Marcion, which filled a large place in the Christianity of both the second and the third centuries, ditheism was presented as the only solution of this and all the other contrasts of which the world is full, and of which that of Law and Grace is the most typical example.[422] The New Testament was the revelation of the good God, the God of love; the Old Testament was that of the just God, the God of wrath. Redemption was the victory of forgiveness over punishment, of the God who was revealed by Jesus Christ over the God who was manifested in the Law.

The ditheistic hypothesis was itself more difficult than the difficulties which it explained. The writers who opposed it were helped, not only by the whole current of evangelical tradition, but also by the dominant tendencies of both philosophy and popular religion. They insisted that justice and goodness were not only compatible but necessarily co-existent in the Divine nature. Goodness meant not indiscriminating beneficence; justice meant not inexorable wrath: goodness and justice were combined in the power of God to deal with every man according to his deserts, including in the idea of deserts that of repentance.

The solution is found in Irenæus, who argues that in the absence of either of the two attributes, God would cease to be God:

“If the God who judges be not also good, so as to bestow favours on those on whom He ought, and to reprove those whom He should, He will be as a Judge neither wise nor just. On the other hand, if the good God be only good, and not also able to test those on whom He shall bestow His goodness, He will be outside goodness as well as outside justice, and His goodness will seem imperfect, inasmuch as it does not save all, as it should do if it be not accompanied with judgment. Marcion, therefore, by dividing God into two, the one a God who judges, and the other a God who is good, on both sides puts an end to God.”[423]

It is found in Tertullian, who, after arguing on à priori grounds that the one attribute implies the other, passes by an almost unconscious transition from physical to moral law: just as the “justice” of God in its physical operation controlled His goodness in the making of an orderly world, so in its moral operation it has, since the Fall, regulated His dealings with mankind.

“Nothing is good which is unjust; all that is just is good.... The good is where the just is. From the beginning of the world the Creator has been at once good and just. The two qualities came forth together. His goodness formed the world, His justice harmonized it. It is the work of justice that there is a separation between light and darkness, between day and night, between heaven and earth, between the greater and the lesser lights.... As goodness brought all things into being, so did justice distinguish them. The whole universe has been disposed and ordered by the decision of His justice. Every position and mode of the elements, the movement and the rest, the rising and the setting of each one of them, are judicial decisions of the Creator.... When evil broke out, and the goodness of God came henceforward to have an opponent to contend with, the justice also of God acquired another function, that of regulating the operation of His goodness according to the opposition to it: the result is that His goodness, instead of being absolutely free, is dispensed according to men’s deserts; it is offered to the worthy, it is denied to the unworthy, it is taken away from the unthankful, it is avenged on all its adversaries. In this way this whole function of justice is an agency for goodness: in condemning, in punishing, in raging with wrath, as you Marcionites express it, it does good and not evil.”[424]

It is found in the Clementines,[425] the “Recognitions” going so far as to make the acceptance of it an element in “saving knowledge:” “it is not enough for salvation to know that God is good; we must know also that He is just.”[426] It is elaborated by both Clement of Alexandria[427] and Origen; but in the latter it is linked closely with other problems, and his view will be best considered in relation to them.[428] The Christian world in his time was settling down into a general acceptance of the belief that goodness and justice co-existed, each limiting the other in the mind of God: the general effect of the controversy was to emphasize in Christianity the conception of God as a Moral Governor, administering the world by laws which were at once beneficent and just.

(ii.) But this problem of the relation of goodness to justice passed, as the corresponding problem in Greek philosophy passed, into the problem of the relation of a good God to moral evil. The difficulties of the problem were increased in its Christian form by the conception of moral evil as guilt rather than as misery, and by the emphasis which was laid on the idea of the Divine foreknowledge.

The problem was stated in its plainest form by Marcion:

“If God is good, and prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did He allow man, that is to say His own image and likeness, nay more, His own substance, to be tricked by the devil and fall from obedience to the law into death? For if He had been good, and thereby unwilling that such an event should happen, and prescient, and thereby not ignorant that it would happen, and powerful, and thereby able to prevent its happening, it would certainly not have happened, being impossible under these three conditions of divine greatness. But since it did happen, the inference is certain that God must be believed to be neither good nor prescient nor powerful.”[429]

The hypothesis of the existence of two Gods, by which Marcion solved this and other problems of theology, was consistently opposed by the great mass of the Christian communities. The solution which they found was almost uniformly that of the Stoics: evil is necessary for the production of moral virtue: there is no virtue where there is no choice: and man was created free to choose. It was found, in short, in the doctrine of free-will.

This solution is found in Justin Martyr:

“The nature of every created being is to be capable of vice and virtue: for no one of them would be an object of praise if it had not also the power of turning in the one direction or the other.”[430]

It is found in Tatian:

“Each of the two classes of created things (men and angels) is born with a power of self-determination, not absolutely good by nature, for that is an attribute of God alone, but brought to perfection through freedom of voluntary choice, in order that the bad man may be justly punished, being himself the cause of his being wicked, and that the righteous man may be worthily praised for his good actions, not having in his exercise of moral freedom transgressed the will of God.”[431]

It is found in Irenæus:

“In man as in angels, for angels also are rational beings, God has placed the power of choosing, so that those who have obeyed might justly be in possession of what is good; and that those who have not obeyed may justly not be in possession of what is good, and may receive the punishment which they deserve.... But if it had been by nature that some were bad and others good, neither would the latter be deserving of praise for being good, inasmuch as they were so constituted; nor the others of blame for being bad, inasmuch as they were born so. But since in fact all men are of the same nature, able on the one hand to hold fast and to do what is good, and again on the other hand to reject it and not do it, it is right for them to be in the one case praised for their choice of the good and their adherence to it, and in the other case blamed and punished for their rejection of it, both among well-governed men and much more in the sight of God.”[432]

It is found in Theophilus[433] and Athenagoras,[434] and, as a more elaborate theory, in Tertullian and the philosophers of Alexandria. Just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had made freedom of will to be the specially divine part of human nature, so Tertullian[435] answers Marcion’s objection, that if God foreknew that Adam would fall He should not have made him free, by the argument that the goodness of God in making man necessarily gave him the highest form of existence, that such highest form was “the image and likeness of God,” and that such image and likeness was freedom of will. And just as Epictetus and the later Stoics had conceived of life as a moral discipline, and of its apparent evils as necessary means of testing character, so the Christian philosophers of Alexandria conceive of God as the Teacher and Trainer and Physician of men, of the pains of life as being disciplinary, and of the punishments of sin as being not vindictive but remedial.[436]

There was still a large margin of unsolved difficulties. The hypothesis of the freedom of the will, as it had hitherto been stated, assumed that all beings who possessed it were equal in both their circumstances and their natural aptitudes. It took no account of the enormous difference between one man and another in respect of either the external advantages or disadvantages of their lives, or the strength and weakness of their characters. The difficulty was strongly felt by more than one school of Christian philosophers, the more so because it applied, not only to the diversities among mankind, but also to the larger differences between mankind as a whole and the celestial beings who rose in their sublime gradations above it.

“Very many persons, especially those who come from the school of Marcion and Valentinus and Basilides, object to us that it is inconsistent with the justice of God in making the world to assign to some creatures an abode in the heavens, and not merely a better abode, but also a loftier and more honourable position; to grant to some principality, to others powers, to others dominations; to confer upon some the noblest seats of the heavenly tribunals, to cause others to shine out with brighter rays, and to flash forth the brilliance of a star; to give to some the glory of the sun, and to others the glory of the moon, and to others the glory of the stars; to make one star differ from another star in glory.... In the second place, they object to us about terrestrial beings that a happier lot of birth has come to some men than to others; one man, for example, is begotten by Abraham and born according to promise; another is the son of Isaac and Rebekah, and, supplanting his brother even in the womb, is said even before he is born to be beloved of God. One man is born among the Hebrews, among whom he finds the learning of the divine law; another among the Greeks, themselves also wise and men of no small learning; another among the Ethiopians, who are cannibals; another among the Scythians, with whom parricide is legal; another among the Taurians, who offer their guests in sacrifice.

“They consequently argue thus: If this great diversity of circumstances, this varied and different condition of birth—a matter in which free-will has no place—is not caused by a diversity in the nature of the souls themselves, a soul of an evil nature being destined for an evil nation, and a soul of a good nature for a good one, what other conclusion can be drawn than that all this is the result of chance and accident? And if that conclusion be admitted, it will no longer be credible either that the world was made by God or that it is governed by His providence: and consequently neither will the judgment of God upon every man’s doings seem a thing to be looked for.”[437]

It is to this phase of the controversy that the ethical theology of Origen is relative. In that theology, Stoicism and Neo-Platonism are blended into a complete theodicy: nor has a more logical superstructure ever been reared on the basis of philosophical theism.

It is necessary to show the coherence of his view as a whole, and it is advisable, in doing so, to use chiefly his own words:[438]

“There was but one beginning of all things, as there will be but a single end. The diversities of existence which have sprung from a single beginning will be absorbed in a single end.[439] The causes of those diversities lie in the diverse things themselves.[440] They were created absolutely equal; for, on the one hand, God had no reason in Himself for causing inequalities;[441] and, on the other hand, being absolutely impartial, He could not give to one being an advantage which He did not give to another.[442] They were also, by a similar necessity, created with the capacity of being diverse; for spotless purity is of the essence of none save God; in all created beings it must be accidental, and consequently liable to lapse.[443] The lapse, when it takes place, is voluntary; for every being endowed with reason has the power of exercising it, and this power is free;[444] it is excited by external causes, but not coerced by them.[445] For to lay the fault on external causes and put it away from ourselves by declaring that we are like logs or stones, dragged by forces that act upon them from without, is neither true nor reasonable. Every created rational being is thus capable of both good and evil; consequently of praise and blame; consequently also of happiness and misery; of the former if it chooses holiness and clings to it, of the latter if by sloth and negligence it swerves into wickedness and ruin.[446] The lapse, when it has taken place, is not only voluntary but also various in degree. Some beings, though possessed of free-will, never lapsed: they form the order of angels. Some lapsed but slightly, and form in their varying degrees the orders of ‘thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers.’ Some lapsed lower, but not irrecoverably, and form the race of men.[447] Some lapsed to such a depth of unworthiness and wickedness as to be opposing powers; they are the devil and his angels.[448] In the temporal world which is seen, as well as in the eternal worlds which are unseen, all beings are arranged according to their merits; their place has been determined by their own conduct.[449]

“The present inequalities of circumstance and character are thus not wholly explicable within the sphere of the present life. But this world is not the only world. Every soul has existed from the beginning; it has therefore passed through some worlds already, and will pass through others before it reaches the final consummation. It comes into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of its previous life. Its place in this world as a vessel appointed to honour or to dishonour is determined by its previous merits or demerits. Its work in this world determines its place in the world which is to follow this.[450]

“All this takes place with the knowledge and under the oversight of God. It is an indication of His ineffable wisdom that the diversities of natures for which created beings are themselves responsible are wrought together into the harmony of the world.[451] It is an indication not only of His wisdom but of His goodness that, while no creature is coerced into acting rightly, yet when it lapses it meets with evils and punishments. All punishments are remedial. God calls what are termed evils into existence to convert and purify those whom reason and admonition fail to change. He is thus the great Physician of souls.[452] The process of cure, acting as it does simply through free-will, takes in some cases an almost illimitable time. For God is long-suffering, and to some souls, as to some bodies, a rapid cure is not beneficial. But in the end all souls will be thoroughly purged.[453] All that any reasonable soul, cleansed of the dregs of all vices, and with every cloud of wickedness completely wiped away, can either feel or understand or think, will be wholly God: it will no longer either see or contain anything else but God: God will be the mode and measure of its every movement: and so God will be ‘all.’ Nor will there be any longer any distinction between good and evil, because evil will nowhere exist; for God is all things, and in Him no evil inheres. So, then, when the end has been brought back to the beginning, that state of things will be restored which the rational creation had when it had no need to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; all sense of wickedness will have been taken away; He who alone is the one good God becomes to the soul ‘all,’ and that not in some souls but ‘in all.’ There will be no longer death, nor the sting of death, nor any evil anywhere, but God will be ‘all in all.’”[454]

Of this great theodicy, only part has been generally accepted. The Greek conceptions which underlie it, and which preceded it, have survived, but in other forms. Free-will, final causes, probation, have had a later history in which Greece has had no share. The doctrine of free-will has remained in name, but it has been so mingled on the one hand with theories of human depravity, and on the other with theories of divine grace, that the original current of thought is lost in the marshes into which it has descended. The doctrine of final causes has been pressed to an almost excessive degree as proving the existence and the providence of God; but His government of the human race has been often viewed rather as the blundering towards an ultimate failure than as a complete vindication of His purpose of creation. The Christian world has acquiesced in the conception of life as a probation; but while some of its sections have conceived of this life as the only probation, and others have admitted a probation in a life to come, none have admitted into the recognized body of their teaching Origen’s sublime conception of an infinite stairway of worlds, with its perpetual ascent and descent of souls, ending at last in the union of all souls with God.

Lecture IX.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.
III. God as the Supreme Being.

It was in the Gentile rather than in the Jewish world that the theology of Christianity was shaped. It was built upon a Jewish basis. The Jewish communities of the great cities and along the commercial routes of the empire had paved the way for Christianity by their active propaganda of monotheism. Christianity won its way among the educated classes by virtue of its satisfying not only their moral ideals, but also their highest intellectual conceptions. On its ethical side it had, as we have seen, large elements in common with reformed Stoicism; on its theological side it moved in harmony with the new movements of Platonism.[455] And those movements reacted upon it. They gave a philosophical form to the simpler Jewish faith, and especially to those elements of it in which the teaching of St. Paul had already given a foothold for speculation. The earlier conceptions remained; but blending readily with the philosophical conceptions that were akin to them, they were expanded into large theories in which metaphysics and dialectics had an ample field. The conception, for example, of the one God whose kingdom was a universal kingdom and endured throughout all ages, blended with, and passed into, the philosophical conception of a Being who was beyond time and space. The conception that “clouds and darkness were round about Him,” blended with, and passed into, the philosophical conception of a Being who was beyond not only human sight but human thought. The conception of His transcendence obtained the stronger hold because it confirmed the prior conception of His unity; and that of His incommunicability, and of the consequent need of a mediator, gave a philosophical explanation of the truth that Jesus Christ was His Son.