Here was the main point of dispute. All parties within the Church agreed as to the need of a tribunal, but each party had its own. Each made its appeal to a different apostle. But since, though many in number, they were teachers, not of their own opinions, but of the doctrine which they had received from Jesus Christ, the more orthodox or Catholic tendency found it necessary to lay stress upon their unity. They were spoken of in the plural, οἱ ἀπόστολοι.[681] While the Gnostics built upon one apostle or another,[682] the Catholics built upon an apostolic consensus. Their tradition was not that of Peter or of James, but of the twelve apostles. The πίστις was ἀποστολική, an attribute which implies a uniform tradition.[683]
It was at this point that organization and confederation became important: the bishops of the several churches were regarded as the conservators of the tradition:[684] while the bishops of the apostolic churches settled down to a general agreement as to the terms of the apostolic tradition.[685] In distinction from the Gnostic standards, there came to be a standard which the majority of the churches—the middle party in the Church—accepted. It is quite uncertain when the rule came to be generally accepted, or in what form it was accepted. But it is in the main preserved for us—with undoubtedly later accretions—in the Apostles’ Creed. Tertullian’s contention is that this rule is not only apostolic and binding, but also adequate—a complete representation of apostolic teaching—that there were no necessary truths outside it.[686] The additions were made by the gradual working of the common sense, the common consciousness, of the Christian world. They were approved by the majority; they were accepted by the sees which claimed to have been founded by the apostles. The earliest form is that which may be gathered from several writers as having been generally accepted in Rome and the West: it is a bare statement. “I believe in God Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who was born of a virgin, crucified under Pontius Pilate, the third day rose again from the dead, sitteth on the right hand of the Father, from whence he is coming to judge the living and dead; and in the Holy Spirit.” The term Son came to be qualified in very early times by “only begotten;” and after “the Holy Spirit,” “the Holy Church, the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh,” were added.
2. Side by side with this question of the standard or authentic minimum of traditional teaching, and growing necessarily with it and out of it, was the question of the sources from which that teaching could be drawn, and of the materials by which the standard might be interpreted. The greater part of apostolic teaching had been oral. The tradition was mostly oral. But as the generations of men receded farther from the apostolic age, and as the oral tradition which was delivered came necessarily to vary, it became more and more uncertain what was the true form and content of the tradition. Written records came to be of more importance than oral tradition. They had at first only the authority which attached to tradition. Their elevation to an independent rank was due to the influence of the Old Testament. There had been already a series of revelations of God to men, which having once been oral had become written. The revelation consisted of what was then known as the Scriptures, and what we now know as the Old Testament. The proofs of Christianity consisted to a large extent in its consonance with those Scriptures. But the term Holy Scriptures was less strictly used than is sometimes supposed. The hedge round them had gaps, and there were patches lying outside what has since come to be its line. It was partly the indefiniteness of the Old Testament canon which caused the term Scripture to be applied to some writings of the apostolic age. But the question, Which writings? was only answered gradually. The spirit of prophecy had only gradually passed away. It was the common ground for the reception of the Old Testament and the New Testament; as the spirit of prophecy was common to both, it was but natural that both should have the same attributes. But prophecy was not in the first instance conceived as having suddenly ceased in the Church. The term Scripture (ἡ γραφή) is applied to the Shepherd of Hermas by Irenæus.[687] The delimitation of the body of writings that could be so denoted was connected with the necessity of being sure about the apostolical teaching—the παράδοσις.[688] The term Scripture was applied to the recorded sayings of Jesus Christ (the λόγια) without demur.[689] It came to be applied also to the records which the apostles had left of the facts of the life of Christ. Then, finally, it tended more gradually to be applied to the writings of the apostles and of apostolic men.
But questions arose in regard to all these classes, which were not immediately answered. There were several recensions current both of the sayings of Jesus Christ and of the memoirs of the apostles. There were many writings attributed to apostles and apostolic men which were of doubtful authority. But the determination was slow, and the date when a general settlement was made is uncertain.[690] There is no distinction between canonical and uncanonical books either in Justin Martyr or in Irenæus. The first Biblical critic was Marcion: the controversy with his followers, which reaches its height in Tertullian, forced on the Church the first serious consideration of the question,—Which recensions of the words and memoirs of Christ, and which of the letters and other writings of the apostles and apostolic men, should be accepted? There came to be a recognized list of the writings of the new revelations, as there came to be—though it is doubtful whether there had yet come to be—a list of the writings of the earlier revelations to the Jews. Writings on the recognized list came in as the voices of the Holy Ghost.[691] They were, as the writings of the prophets had been, the revelation of the Father to His children. Hence faith or belief came to take in the Christian world the sense that it had in Philo—of assent not only to the great conceptions which were contained in the notion of God, but also to the divine revelation which was recorded in the two Testaments.
3. It might have been well if the Christian Church had been content to rest with this first stage in the transformation of the idea of belief, and to take as its intellectual basis only the simple statements of the primitive creed interpreted by the New Testament. But the conflict of speculations which had compelled the middle party in the Christian churches to adopt a standard of belief and a limitation of the sources from which the belief might be interpreted, had also had the effect of bringing into the Church the philosophical temper.[692] In the creed of the end of the second century, the age of Tertullian, there are already philosophical ideas—the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the relation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father, and of both to men. The Creed, as given in the treatise against Praxeas, is equally elaborate.[693] With that Creed—traditional as he believed it to be—Tertullian himself was satisfied. He deprecates the “curiositas” of the brethren no less than the “scrupulositas” of the heretics. He denies the applicability of the text, “Seek and ye shall find,” to research into the content of Christian doctrine: it relates only to the traditional teaching: when a man has found that, he has all that he needs: further “seeking” is incompatible with having found. In other words, as among modern Ultramontanes, faith must rest not on search but on tradition (authority).[694] The absolute freedom of speculation was checked, but the tendency to speculate remained, and it had in the “rule of faith” a vantage-ground within the Church. There grew up within the lines that had been marked out a tendency which, accepting the rule of faith, and accepting also, with possibly slight variations, the canonical Scriptures, tried to build theories out of them: γνῶσις took its place side by side with πίστις.[695] It grew up in several parts of Christendom. In Cappadocia, in Asia, in Edessa, in Palestine, in Alexandria, were different small groups of men who within the recognized lines were working out philosophical theories of Christianity.[696] We know most about Alexandria. There was a recognized school—on the type of the existing philosophical schools—for the study of philosophical Christianity. Its first great teacher was Clement. He was the first to construct a large philosophy of Christian doctrine, with a recognition of the conventional limits, but by the help and in the domain of Greek thought. But he is of less importance than his great disciple Origen. In the De Principiis of the latter we have the first complete system of dogma; and I recommend the study of it, of its omissions as well as of its assertions, of the strange fact that the features of it which are in strongest contrast to later dogmatics are in fact its most archaic and conservative elements.
It is not to my present purpose to state the results of these speculations. The two points to which I wish to draw your attention in reference to this tendency to philosophize, are these:
(1) The distinction between what was either an original and ground belief or a historical fact of which a trustworthy tradition had come down, and speculations in regard to such primary beliefs and historical facts, tended to disappear in the strong philosophical current of the time. It did not disappear without a struggle. Tertullian, among others, gives indications of it. The doctrine of the Divine Word had begun in his time to make its way into the Creed: it was known as the “dispensation” (œconomia). “The simpler-minded men,” he remarks, “not to say ignorant and uneducated, who always constitute the majority of believers—since the rule of faith itself transfers us from the belief in polytheism to the belief in one only true God—not understanding that though God be one, yet His oneness is to be understood as involving a dispensation, are frightened at this idea of dispensation.”[697] But the ancient conservatism was crushed. It came to be considered as important to have the right belief in the speculation as it confessedly was to have it in the fact.