The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

Let us now consider Jesus’ views as to the nature of God and as to man’s relation to him. First of all he taught his disciples that they must regard God as their Father. This idea was by no means new or foreign to the thoughts of his hearers. In the Old Testament we not infrequently find Israel spoken of as the son of God; it was said that God took a special and gracious interest in the people of Israel, that he cared for them wholly, or especially, and that they were his beloved people whom he had chosen to be the agents of his revelation. Jesus taught that God’s fatherhood expresses itself in infinite love for men, that this love extends not only to the righteous but to the wicked as well, so that both receive his care and blessings: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”[302] Furthermore he showed that the divine care is given to the humblest and smallest parts of the universe, so that the heavenly Father marks even the fall of a sparrow to the ground. The perfect nature of God’s love Jesus made the measure of God’s perfection; and, although he recognized man’s limitations and the moral value of an honest advance in righteousness, he set as man’s ultimate goal nothing less than the perfection of God himself as shown in perfect love.[303] Again he gave a new hope to outcasts and sinners by declaring that those who repented of their sins and desired to enter into right relations with God would not be despised. That was the meaning of the parable of the Prodigal Son: it illustrated the generosity of God’s affection and showed that it reached to the poorest and worst of men. To realize fully the significance of this teaching we must remind ourselves of the attitude of self-righteous Pharisees not only toward publicans and sinners but toward the common people, association with whom they scrupulously shunned and among whom they hardly admitted that true piety could exist. It was a scandal in their eyes that Jesus mingled freely with the classes whose contact was defilement and whose intimacy was shame, while he declared that he came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

Man’s proper relation to God Jesus held to be the exact converse of God’s to man: he taught that man’s sonship consists in a likeness to God, which will express itself in love toward God and toward all men. This teaching is nowhere more clearly set forth than in the words which I have just quoted: “Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven;”[304] the same lesson he inculcated in the prayer which he taught his disciples: “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” On another occasion he charged his followers: “Whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against anyone; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”[305] So Jesus held that love and forgiveness, the characteristics of God himself, are required of men as sons of their heavenly Father; that those who wish to claim such a relationship to God must exercise the same generous affection toward their fellows that God shows to them; and that with this must go such love of God as was taught in the law: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”[306]

Salvation Jesus would no doubt have defined in part as peace and confidence of mind in this world and eternal happiness in the next. Our data clearly show that he held that man secures salvation when he enters on the life which belongs to the sons of God, and that the basis of this life, as we have just seen, is love, while its outward signs are acts prompted by whole hearted affection for one’s fellow-men and for God. This life Jesus evidently regarded as the natural one from which man departs through sin, and therefore he taught that repentance from sin is the antecedent condition of entrance into right relations with God, that is to say, into salvation. At the beginning of his ministry he preached in Galilee that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand and called on men to repent and to believe in the good news; and at the end of his work he charged his disciples to preach repentance and the remission of sins to all peoples.[307] But it is important that we should keep clearly before us the fact that Jesus did not lay so much emphasis on the negative element of repentance as on the positive motive of love. He taught that the man who had that motive would naturally exhibit it in a trustful dependence on God and in a righteousness of life which would be of a very different character from that of a life directed by mere obedience to legal and ritual requirements. A man whose thoughts and acts were prompted by love of God and of his fellow-men had attained salvation—that is to say, Jesus held salvation to be a present experience, one which could be realized at any time by any man who recognized God as his father with all which that implied, and who consequently devoted himself to a life of unselfish service. He declared that such a man had already entered into a joy and blessedness which no earthly misfortunes could disturb. Jesus therefore not only gave his followers a sure hope of salvation in the future, when they should realize in heaven the supreme ideal of life and complete happiness, but he also taught them that they could have a real experience of salvation in their present every-day lives.

It should be observed that Jesus laid the greatest stress on the motives for righteousness, and that he paid little attention to the negative and restrictive elements which are inevitably large in any legalistic system of ethics or religion. For him mere external acts and observances were not enough, but righteousness and service must be prompted from within. Furthermore, although the record of his life and teachings show that he attached much importance to the social elements in religion, he dwelt on the responsibility of the individual, who must for himself, by his motives, character, and actions fulfill the requirements for entrance into salvation.

With regard to Jesus’ conception of his own person it is difficult to speak with certainty on many points. It is beyond question, however, that he regarded himself as one divinely commissioned to present the fatherhood of God and to set forth man’s proper relations to God and to his fellow-men. Faith in the validity of his commission and in his teachings as showing the way of salvation was required of his followers, for only by such faith could they be moved to transmute his teachings into action. Yet it is intimated that up to the time of his last arrival at Jerusalem Jesus made no effort to be popularly regarded as the Messiah for whom the Jews had looked. When at Caesarea Philippi Peter declared that he was the Christ, Jesus “charged the disciples that they should tell no man.”[308] His reasons for such caution seem evident when we consider the varied character of the Jews’ Messianic hopes, and the great probability that if he had allowed himself to be recognized as the one whom they expected, his proper work would have been greatly hampered, if not utterly checked. The danger is well illustrated by the incident recorded in John, when the people wished to take him by force and make him king, so that he was obliged to withdraw from them.[309]

But in spite of Jesus’ unwillingness to put forward Messianic claims for himself, it is clear that he considered his relation to God as unique in its knowledge and perfection. When he asked his followers to believe on him, he seems obviously to have called on them to trust him as the one who had been divinely commissioned to interpret God to men, and to accept the validity of his teaching as to man’s proper relations to God and his fellow-men, that is, as to the life which they should follow as the sons of their Father. The dogmatic associations which today are attached to the idea of a “belief in Christ,” obscure Jesus’ plain teaching for many. But when his ministry had been brought to its tragic close, his disciples saw him in a new light, and thereafter made his person a matter of supreme moment, as the Church on the whole has done ever since.

Again there has been much debate as to the significance of the sufferings and death of Jesus. From our data we must conclude that Jesus did not give to his passion the interpretation which his disciples naturally gave after the event, and which succeeding generations have given it. Yet toward the end of his ministry Jesus recalled and applied to himself the doctrine that the good may suffer death, not for his own faults, but for the sins of others, as found in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah; and it seems clear that he regarded his rejection and crucifixion as essential factors in bringing men into the kingdom of God.

What relation now did the teachings of Jesus bear to the religious beliefs and hopes of the Jewish people? Certainly his words on most matters did not appear to his hearers opposed to Jewish doctrines, but rather they seemed to enlarge and to give a nobler content to their own ideas. With the current doctrine that the salvation of the individual depended on his own righteousness he was thoroughly in accord. He gave, however, a deeper meaning to the idea of righteousness: in opposition to the extreme legalistic notions which were emphasized especially by some of the Pharisees, he taught that there must first exist the inner motive of love for God and man from which alone right actions could flow; that one who had recognized his true relations to God and his fellows and whose transformed character showed itself in filial dependence on God and in loving and generous service towards men, and in the practice of humility, was already delivered from the bondage of sin and had entered into a new spiritual life. Although his contemporaries had abandoned their hopes of a prompt realization of the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus showed that that kingdom was already present in its beginning wherever men displayed the character and did the deeds which belonged to the kingdom—in other words, that the kingdom could be realized here by changing present conditions so that God’s will should be done on earth as in heaven. God, to Jesus’ mind, was not to be conceived as a king ruling over his people, but rather as a universal loving father, whose affection extended to the wicked as well as to the good, and embraced every class of mankind. He taught further that from this divine love flowed an infinite grace which left no man outside the possibility of salvation. But beyond all these elements in the teachings of Jesus, which, because of their supreme moral demands, made the way of salvation at once most simple and most severe, more than the fact that his teachings dealt primarily with the health of the soul, the personality of Jesus, his belief that he had received a divine commission, and his consciousness of his unique relation to God must be taken into account if we are to understand adequately the effect of his teaching. His immediate disciples never dreamed of separating themselves from the Jews until events forced them to take that step, but they were filled with the conviction that their Master was the Messiah and that a new revelation had come to them.

After Jesus’ death his followers made the central theme of their preaching the proclamation of him as the Christ, who by his sufferings and death had brought salvation to men; they taught that through him men might be delivered from their sin and enter into the blessings promised by his gospel. In general they laid more stress on eschatology than Jesus had done, for they confidently expected an early end of the world and the reappearance of Christ in glory. Quietly no doubt at first they began to make converts in Jerusalem. Then a persecution broke out and conversions were made outside Judea among other peoples than the Jews. About the year 45 a church, largely Gentile, was formed at Antioch,[310] the third city of importance in the Empire. The founding of this church definitely began the expansion of Christianity beyond the bounds of Judaism.

Paul was the chief leader in extending the gospel to the Gentiles, and so much did he overshadow the other missionaries that his work and teaching mark the second period in the history of Christianity. Although no account can here be given of his life and experiences, it is necessary to have these in mind to understand his influence. Especially important is it to remember that he was a trained Jew, familiar with the Old Testament and with the theological doctrines of his people; nor was he unacquainted with the ideas and the language of the Greek world, or untouched by the mysticism of his day. A Roman citizen by birth, a Hebrew of the Hebrews by descent and education, he was well fitted to play his great rôle as the apostle who was to carry Christianity out of Judaism to the Gentiles. He was, however, no systematic theologian to lay down a logical body of doctrine as a Greek might have done, and his writings were all occasional. Furthermore he had not been a companion of Jesus, but was one who believed that by an extraordinary experience he had come directly into knowledge of the risen Christ.