Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

by James Martineau

These positions we certainly conceive to be unassailable. But they lie so completely out of the field of modern doubt and controversy, that we are at a loss to imagine what possible use the author can make of them. The general features of the Christian faith, and the character of the Church, had assumed in the third century a determinate form, about which there is no important question between believer and unbeliever. Who would deny that the disciples for whom Clement of Alexandria and Origen wrote, whom Tertullian and Minucius Felix defended, and to whose institutes Cyprian was a convert, believed in Jesus Christ as a person at once historical and divine, and were strengthened by that belief to the endurance of martyrdom? The real and only difficulties lie higher up, in the attempt to trace the sources and earlier varieties of this belief; and if our author can show that, in winding its way through two centuries, and traversing several distinct regions of thought, it dropped or rounded off no primitive facts, and became mingled with no foreign ideas,—if he can establish the essential constancy and uniformity, from the first, of the tradition and doctrine which obtained ascendency at last,—he will indeed reduce legitimate scepticism within very narrow limits, and deserve a niche in the Valhalla of critical renown. But if he contemplates clearing these centuries by an argumentative leap; if, from the martyr faith of an age later than the Antonines, he means to conclude the certainty of the Incarnation two hundred years before,—then we must say, he attempts a logical feat which puts to shame the cautious steps of such reasoners as Paley, Marsh, and Whately. The catena of well-linked testimonies, with its bridge of safe footing, which they have endeavored to sling across the chasm of the post-apostolic age, is but a paltry cowardice of ecclesiastic engineering to one who can pass the gulf upon the wing of inference. An advocate is intelligible, and proceeds upon admitted rules of evidence, who says with these earlier divines: "Here are the writings of Paul, of John, of Matthew, and of other men who were present at the events they relate or assume; whose lives were turned into a new channel by their influence; and who went to prison and to death rather than deny them. They positively declare that they witnessed the most stupendous miracles, and, after their Master had been visibly taken up through the clouds, themselves habitually exercised the same supernatural power. You must admit that the guaranties of testimony can go no further: surrender yourself therefore to the Gospel." This is an argument which accomplishes all that is possible with historical evidence in such a case; and were its allegations of fact sustainable, it would still be the best form into which the reasoning could be thrown. Unfortunately, we can no longer feel assured that any first-hand testimony exists, as a distinguishable element, in the narrative books of the New Testament; so that we can regard them only as monuments of the state of Christian tradition during a secondary period. Still, this flaw is not repaired by striking into the course of belief three or four generations lower down, and substituting the "Martyr literature" of the third century for the Evangelist memorials of the second or the first. And when our author transfers to Clement and Origen the praise of unaffected simplicity usually awarded to the Apostolic writers, and actually presents it as sufficient proof of divine attributes in Christ, we can only suppose that, in his opinion, some truths are too good to have any bad way to them. What else can be said of the following mode of inference?

"Much do we meet with in these writers that indicates infirmity of judgment or a false taste; yet does there pervade them a marked simplicity, a grave sincerity, a quietness of tone, when He is spoken of whom they acknowledge as Lord. If there be one characteristic of these ancient writings that is uniform, it is the calm, affectionate, and reverential tone in which the Martyr Church speaks of The Saviour Christ!

"I am perfectly sure that, if you could absolutely banish from your mind all thought of the inferences and the consequences resulting from your admissions, you would not, after perusing this body of Martyr literature, fall into the enormity of attributing the notions entertained of Christ, as invested with Divine attributes, to any such source as 'exaggeration,' or 'extravagance,' or to 'Orientalism,' or 'enlarged Platonism.' Exaggeration and inflation have their own style: it is not difficult to recognize it. No characteristic of thought or language is more obvious. You will fail in your endeavor to show that this characteristic does attach to the writings in question; and why should you make such an attempt? There can be no inducement to do so, unless it appears to be the only means of escaping from some consequence which we dislike."—p. 107.

Our author professedly opposes "Ancient Christianity" to modern scepticism, because "History," as he observes, "is solid ground," and no region of atmospheric phantasms, births from the refracted rays of metaphysic light. History, however, is solid ground only so far as it is really explored; and the trending of the land and curving of the shore in one latitude of time no more enables us to lay down the map of another, than an anchorage at the Ganges' mouth would enable us to paint the gorges of the Himalayas, and distinguish the real from the fabulous sources of the sacred stream. To take us into the basilicas and show us how Christians worshipped in the days of Alexander Severus, to introduce us to the Proconsul's court and bid us witness their refusal of divine homage to Cæsar's image, and then ask us whether a faith like this could have had any origin but one,—this is not history, but the mere evasion of history. We want to know, not what must have been the source, but what was the source, of the great moral power that rose upon the world as Rome declined. Whoever wishes to shut out human ideas and natural agencies from participation in the matter, must go patiently through the entire remains of the early Christian literature; must trace the conflict between the Hebrew and the Pauline Gospel; find a place for the peculiar version of the religion given by the Evangelist John; fix the limits of Ebionitism, of Chiliasm, of Docetism; and show that these modes and varieties of doctrine stop short of the substance of the early faith, and do not enter the canonical Scriptures with any disturbance of their historic certainty. Nothing of this kind do we expect from our author. For he entertains a conception, respecting the logic of Christian evidence, which, however prevalent among English divines, betrays in our judgment a mind not at all at home with the present conditions of the problem. He seems to think that we can first prove the historic truth of the Scriptures in general; and then get rid of the difficulties in particular; and requires us, in obedience to this pedantic law of logical etiquette, to carry into our investigation of every successive perplexity the rigid assumption that the writings with which we deal are "inspired," and their contents of "Divine authority."

"When a collection of historic materials, bearing upon a particular series of events, is brought forward, it will follow, upon the supposition that those events have, on the whole, been truly reported, that any hypothesis, the object of which is to make it seem probable that no such events did take place, must involve absurdities which will be more or less glaring. But then, after the truth of the history has been established, and when the trustworthiness of the materials has been admitted, as we proceed to apply a rigid criticism to ambiguous passages, we shall undoubtedly encounter a crowd of perplexing disagreements; and we shall find employment enough for all our acumen, and trial enough of our patience, in clearing our path. And yet no amount of discouragements, such as these, will warrant our falling back upon a supposition which we have already discarded as incoherent and absurd."—p. 110.

We cannot call this a vicious canon of historical criticism; for it simply excludes historical criticism altogether. The critic's work is not a process which can go on generically, without addressing itself to any particular matters at all, and vindicate comprehensive conclusions in blindness towards the cases they comprise. The judgment that, on the whole, a certain book contains a true report of events, can only be a provisional assumption, founded on natural and childlike trust, and can claim no scientific character, till it comes out as a collective inference from an investigation in detail of the narrative's contents. No doubt, the bare fact of the existence of Christianity as a great social phenomenon in the age of the Antonines, may afford evidence enough that Jesus of Nazareth was no imaginary being; the genius of the religion, and the traditional picture of its author, may indicate the cast of his mind and the intensity of his influence; the institutions of the Church may betray its origin in Palestine, and the approximate date of its birth. But these conclusions, founded entirely on reasonings from human causation, can never carry us into the superhuman; or enable us to say more respecting the memorials of the life of Jesus, than that they may be true, and do not forfeit, ab initio, their title to examination by fundamental anachronism, misplacement, and moral incongruity. How far the existence of this primâ facie case falls short of "establishing the truth of the history," and "the trustworthiness of the materials," we need not point out to any one accustomed to deal with questions of evidence. And as for the great proposition, that "the Gospel of Christ is a supernaturally authenticated gift," we cannot imagine how it is to be proved in general, without research into a single miracle. Is it indifferent to the fact of the Incarnation, that the only two accounts of the birth and infancy of Jesus are hopelessly at variance with each other? Is the evidence of the Resurrection unaffected by the discrepancies on which harmonists have spent a fruitless ingenuity? Are we as sure that, in reading the Apostles' works, we have to do with "inspired writers," as if they had not made any false announcements about the end of the world? What does our author mean by admitting these things as "difficulties," yet denying them any just influence in abatement of our confidence? He may form one estimate of their weight, and his opponent another; but in neither case can they be postponed for treatment in a mere appendix to the discussion of Christian evidence: they are of the very pith of the whole question, and, so long as they lie in reserve as quantities of unknown magnitude and direction of influence, render historical belief and unbelief alike irrational.

Nor can we for a moment allow that the failure of ever so many "German theories" to give a satisfactory account of the origin of Christianity, is any good reason for contented acquiescence in the received doctrine. Our author insists, that we must make our definitive choice between some modern hypothesis and the Evangelical tradition; and either take the facts as they are handed down to us, or else replace them by some better representation. By what right does he impose on us such an alternative necessity? Is the critic disqualified for detecting false history, because he cannot, at his distance, write the true? Is it a thing unknown, as a product of scholarship, that fabulous elements disclose themselves amid the memorials of fact? and is it not an acknowledged gain to part with an error, though only in favor of an ignorance? If a modern hypothesis as to the mode in which the religion arose may "break down" by mere internal incoherence and improbability, why may not the ancient account, if it should be chargeable with similar imperfections, be liable to the same fate? It is surely conceivable that all the finished representations we possess,—Hebrew and Alexandrine, as well as German,—furnish, more or less, an ideal and conjectural history of the infancy of Christendom; and that the reproduction of that time may not only be now impossible, but have already become so ere a hundred years were gone. The baffling of one solution implies therefore no triumph of another; and if the tradition on which we stand be insecure, our position is not improved by clipping the wings of every adventurous hypothesis on which we had thought to escape the common ground.

Our author cannot then change the venue of the great Christian cause from the first century to the third, and, on the evidence present there, give even preliminary judgment. The conflict between the new religion and the old which characterized that period, he paints with striking and truthful effect; and, contrasting the severe and holy veracity of martyred disciples with the careless indifference of Paganism to religious truth, he rightly refers the superiority of the Christians to their faith in a Person, instead of mere assent to an Opinion. Is it, however, correct to regard this as original and exclusive to the Gospel, and to set it on the forehead of the Church as the very mark of her distinctive divinity? We think not. The same feature is manifest in Judaism, to which again it belongs, not as a peculiarity, but in common with every faith whose Only God is the apotheosis of humanity. It is the one grand moral characteristic of genuine Theism, as opposed to Pantheism; rendering it more than the enthusiasm of poetry, the earnestness of philosophy, the inspiration of genius, and constituting it, in the deepest sense, Religion. Nor is the ground of the distinction far to seek. Religion, in its ultimate essence, is a sentiment of Reverence for a Higher than ourselves. Higher than ourselves, however, can none be, that have not what is most august among our endowments; none, therefore, by reason of size, of strength, of duration; none simply by beauty or by skill; none even by largeness of discerning thought, but only by free and realizing preference of the most Just and Good. A Being of living Will can alone be nobler than myself, lift me above the level of my actual mind by looking at my latent nature, and emancipate me into the captivity of worship. In other words, reverence can attach itself exclusively to a Person; it cannot direct itself on what is impersonal,—on physical facts, on unconscious laws, on necessary forces, on inanimate objects and their relations, on space, though it be infinite, on duration, though it be eternal. These all, even when they rule us, are lower than ourselves; they may evade our knowledge, defy our power, overwhelm our imagination, but never rise to be our equals, or conspire to furnish even the symbol of our God. The mere deification of Nature, the recognition of oneness pervading her variety, the sense of an absolute ground abiding behind her transient phenomena, may supply a faith adequate to the awakening of wonder and the apprehension of ideal beauty, but not to the practical consecration of life; glorifying the universe as a temple of Art, but railing off within it no oratory of Conscience. In order to extract anything like a religion of conduct from this type of belief, its hierophants are obliged to approach as near as they can to the language of proper Theism, and not even despise typographical aid for pushing personification to the verge of personality; uttering various warnings not to neglect the "intentions of Nature," or insult the "Relentless Veracities," and inviting sundry offenders to blush before "the Eternal Powers." The whole force of such expressions is evidently due to the false semblance of living thought and will with which they clothe the conceptions of mere abstract relations or physical tendencies. These rich tints are no self-color, but a borrowed light reflected from a grander Presence studiously withdrawn from view; and when their gloss is gone, no positive residuum is found, but a doctrine of hope and fear, without any element of Duty. It were a mockery, an inanity, to bid a man spend his affections on hypostatized laws that neither know nor answer him. In his crimes, it is not the heavy irons of his prison, but the deep eye of his judge, from which he shrinks; and in his repentance he weeps, not upon the lap of Nature, but at the feet of God. In his allegiance, his vow is made, not to the certainty of facts, but to the majesty of Right, and the authority of an Infinitely Just; and his acts of trust are directed by no means to the steadiness of creation's ways, but to the faithfulness of a perfect Mind. In short, all the sentiments characteristic of religion presuppose a Personal Object, and assert their power only where Manhood is the type of Godhead. This condition was imported, or rather continued, from the Hebrew to the Christian system; and brought with it the devout loyalty of heart, the singleness of service, the incorruptible heroism of endurance, which had encountered Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem, as it now met Pliny in Bithynia, and Quadratus at Smyrna. The Paganism of the Empire, on the other hand, failed entirely of this condition. It was a mere nature-worship, expressive of the political dynamics by which, through the award of a mysterious necessity, Rome had become the centre of the world. If, among the deities whose congress was now assembled on the Tiber, there were any which once, in their indigenous seats, had commanded the full moral faith, and touched the true theistic devotion, of a people, that time had passed; and the conquered tribes suffered a more fatal loss when the victorious city adopted their religion, than when she crushed their liberty. Removed to Rome, the rites of a provincial worship expressed nothing except that its gods were gods no more, but had descended from divine monarchic rights to a place among a pensioned hierarchy. Vanquished divinities inevitably become delegated powers of nature, and resign their sceptre to the sovereign they are compelled to own. As the administration of the Empire embraced a congeries of checked nationalities, so did its pantheon include a collection of extinguished religions. While as Imperator the head of the state was the embodiment of its unity by natural force, as Divus he represented its unity by preternatural sanction; and the divine honors paid to him were the acknowledgment of a necessity more than human in the culminating majesty of Rome. These honors would be freely rendered to him by those who looked on all realized existence, on everything charged with force enough to come up and be, as equally decreed by "the Eternal Powers,"—equally divine. Such homage would appear to them the mere expression of a fact, and a graceful owning of mysterious fates in its production; and no scruple could withhold them from an act which contradicted nothing in their mind, and did but fling a breath of pious incense around the thing that veritably was. It were absurd to expect the protest of a martyr from a man whose religion you cannot contradict; who will see a God wherever you ask him; and whose worship asserts nothing but that, a phenomenon being there, an occult power is behind it. A faith of this sort is deficient, as an Hegelian would say, "in the moment of negation"; it is all unobstructed affirmation, and can strike no light because it thus finds nothing to dash itself against. But let the divine element in the universe cease to be impersonal and impartially coalescent with the whole, let it live an Individual Mind, and the requisite antagonism immediately appears. To the Jew, the worship of Cæsar would be no other than high treason to Jehovah, whose tool, whose whip of lightning, and whose cup of consolation the Pagan Emperor might become; but whose emblem and incarnation he could so little be, that he rather stood defiantly at the head of the opposing realm, and, even when forced to be the organ, did not cease to be the competitor of God. For opposing realm there must be, wherever proper Theism exists. Man feels that his personal attributes, his will, his character, his conscience, demand conflict for their condition, and without the possibility of ill could never be; and when he carries them out into the infinite region, to serve as his image of the Highest, they bear with them the inseparable shadow of evil, and give it place in the universe, as the darkness in whose absence light would want its distinction, the privative without which the beauty of holiness were nothing positive. Hence, expressed or unexpressed, a dualism mingles with all genuine theistic faith. All is not divine for it. It has a devil's province somewhere. Face to face, as Ebal to Gerizim, the frown of blighted rock to the smile of verdant heights,—hostile as the priest of falsehood to the true prophet,—there stand contrasted in this creed two domains of the world,—one surrendered to insurgent powers, the other reserved as the nursing ground from which right and truth shall be spread. To the Hebrew, the Pagan world was given over to a false allegiance, and inspired with diabolical delusions. For him to sacrifice to the genius of Cæsar, would have been, therefore, a desertion to the enemies of God, forbidden by every claim of faithfulness and veracity. Thus we conceive that the moral conditions of the martyrs' protest against idol-worships were complete within the limits of Judaism before the mission of Christ; and that the essence of it lies, not in the exclusive characteristics of the Gospel, but in the difference between Theistic reverence for a Personal Being, and the Pantheistic acknowledgment of an impersonal divineness. The peculiar function of Christianity in this respect was to become missionary to the world of this heroic fidelity transmitted from the parent faith, and hitherto bounded by its limits; and to find a place in the universal conscience of civilized nations for the duty of bearing testimony, though with tortures and death, to the pricelessness of truth and the sanctity of conviction. True it is that the Gospel was qualified for this office by directing human faith upon a Person; and would have exercised no such power, had it been a mere philosophy presenting propositions for assent, instead of a Living Mind for trust and reverence. But this condition would have been attained by the simple extension of the Jewish Theism. The Personality, which is needed as a centre of intense fealty and affection, is found in the God of Hebrew tradition, and, for its effects in kindling a martyr courage and constancy, did not require to be sought in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. He, no doubt, as the mediate expression of the Supreme Will, as the Being with whom the Church stood in direct contact, as the presence of the Divine in the Human, was the object of the disciples' actual allegiance. We do not in the least question this as a fact, but only as a necessity, ere we can account for the moral features of a martyr age.

In singling out, as one of the grandest practical results of Christianity, the recognition it has obtained for the obligations of religious truth, our author has rightly seized a characteristic distinction of modern from ancient society. The principle is a real agency of the first order in history; we do not accuse him of overrating its importance, but of mistaking its genealogy. And now we must add, that if we differ from him as to the source whence it comes, we differ still more as to the issues whither it conducts. So inconsiderately does he allow himself to be borne away by his evangelical zeal, that he claims for the Gospel, not only the glory of first revealing, but the exclusive right of ever practising, the duties of religious veracity. None but historical believers have the least title to attach any sacredness to their convictions, or to feel any hesitation about denying them. What business have the authors of the "Phases of Faith," and the "Creed of Christendom," to any better morality of belief than Gallio or Lucian? If they have not fallen back into the Pagan indifferentism, they ought to have done so, and our author will continue very indignant till they do. He is offended with Mr. Newman for asking judgment on his "argument and himself, as before the bar of God"; and with Mr. Greg for saying that, in the process of changing cherished beliefs, "the pursuit of truth is a daily martyrdom," and for giving "honor to those who encounter it, saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still!" And he is not ashamed to declare that the guileless veracity which in himself would be a martyr's constancy, would be in another an overweening conceit. So astonishing, logically and ethically, are his statements on this subject, and so curiously do they determine his intellectual position, that we must present them in his own words:—

"We Christian men of this age, along with our venerated martyr brethren of the ancient Church, in making this profession,—that we may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters of religion; we (as they did) affirm that which is consistent within itself, and which, in the whole extent of its meaning, is certain and is reasonable, grant us only our initial postulate, that Christianity is from heaven.