The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

CHAPTER VII

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY

Christianity did not arise in the form we associate with it. The followers of Jesus, after they had become convinced that their crucified leader had arisen from the dead and had become a spiritual agent, grouped themselves together in Jerusalem and formed a religious congregation whose distinguishing tenet was a belief in the near approach of the earthly kingdom of God, whose ruler would be Jesus. In his powerful name, the members of the congregation could perform miracles of healing where the faith was sufficient. This form of Christianity did not differ very widely from Judaism in anything but this belief in Jesus as the expected Messiah. It is obvious that this difference has no essential meaning to us to-day who know the origin and import of the Messianic hope of the Jews. Let us be frank with ourselves and clear our minds of these dreams of the past. These early Christians deceived themselves; their hopes were not fulfilled; the earthly kingdom of God did not come. Jesus was not the Messiah for the simple reason that there is no such person. He was not the Messiah any more than Mohammed Ahmed was the Mahdi—and for the very same reason. Mahdis and Messiahs and Buddhas are creations of religious and race imagination just as King Lear is the product of the poetic imagination of William Shakespeare. The educated man of the present must classify these figures as tremendous fictions whose power is waning. When he faces them squarely and asks himself what significance they have for his life, his answer must be, "Only historical and artistic." We may say, then, that Christianity in its first form has been outgrown.

But the Messianic form of Christianity gave it a vividness and concrete impressiveness that made it a force among the men of that age. Jesus was the heavenly Messiah who would return in power and rule according to righteousness. With him was bound up the hope of immortality and in his hand was dominion over the evils which beset one's path. A great world-event was impending; at any moment the last trumpet might sound and the dead and the living be delivered to judgment. Moreover, Jesus as the Christ and Lord was even now at work among men, his Spirit was active to guide and encourage those who had faith in him. In the congregation at Jerusalem, this belief in Jesus as the Messiah was closely associated with the past history of the race and did not involve a break with the Law. The Old Testament was searched to find prophecies which would throw light upon this apparently new departure and soon passage after passage was found which would easily lend itself to the desired interpretation. Under the guidance of these passages and of the new outlook, the life of the prophet of Nazareth was re-molded until it lost the greater part of its more human features.

Such an important amendment of the Jewish religion could not keep itself hidden. The Jews of the dispersion, broadened by their contact with the political, philosophical and religious movements of the Roman empire, yet cherishing a sincere faith in the traditions of their fathers, heard of the new sect which had arisen in Palestine. Their interest was aroused. Sometimes they felt sympathetic, sometimes they were antagonistic. Slowly at first and then more rapidly through the work of Paul, they came in more direct contact with this new movement. By this time, it had already become Hellenistic in its spirit and attitude. Around the nucleus of the life of Jesus and his resurrection, the seething, myriad-shaped ideas of the age attached themselves. The Palestinian congregation was left behind in its peaceful conservatism while the movement which it had inaugurated grew by leaps and bounds and swept outward into the tossing ocean of faiths and philosophies which extended from India to Gaul. To suppose that it could remain unchanged in such fellowship is to undervalue the assimilative tendencies in the social mind. The Greeks and Romans and Egyptians and Syrians could not think as Jews. They inevitably interpreted it in terms of their own ideas and problems in order to comprehend it.

We have already considered the interpretation which Paul gave to Christianity. It was, as we saw, dominated by the apocalyptic notion of a heavenly, or spiritual, man while it gave ample recognition to the desire for salvation from sin and participation in the divine life. Thus Christianity was brought into touch with the mystery-cults and responded to the yearning for some guarantee of immortality so wide-spread at this time. "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit which dwelleth in you." We should compare this passage from Romans with the corresponding discussion in Corinthians (1, 15), "And if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, our faith also is vain." The message which he brought to the Hellenistic world was in its essentials a definite one. Jesus, a man who recently lived in Palestine and did wonders, was raised by God and has become a heavenly man, the guarantee of immortality to those who have faith in him. The last trumpet of the day of judgment will sound and the dead will be raised with spiritual or incorruptible bodies, and those who are still alive will be changed and given these spiritual bodies since flesh and blood cannot enter the coming kingdom of God. This message is the natural interpretation of Christianity by a learned Hellenistic Jew.

But this was merely the beginning of the evolution of Christianity. The next phase involves its interpretation by the Gnostic movement. Let us see first what this Gnostic movement was before we try to determine its direct and indirect influence upon Christianity.

So far as can be made out, Gnosticism was a religious philosophy which grew up in the eastern part of the Roman empire. Toward the making of this theosophy went many strands of refined mythology coming from India, Persia, Alexandria and Palestine. It was an esoteric doctrine representing that free mingling of traditions from all sources so characteristic of the age. Those traditions were worked up by reflection into a fairly systematic outlook upon the world, entirely continuous with mythology yet far more highly developed. Gnosticism cannot be called a philosophy in the technical sense of that term since its constructions did not have a critical foundation. So far as it used Greek philosophy, it drew from the more pictorial myths of Plato and the conception of subordinate powers or demons advanced by stoicism. Its interest was not, however, philosophical but rather theosophical in character. The relation of the individual soul to the world-powers and the way in which a future state of happiness could be reached occupied its attention in the first instance; and the theology which it developed represented the stage-setting for this personal drama. I do not think it is saying too much when I state that there is nothing in Gnosticism which modern science and philosophy can recognize as having a valid foundation. We can understand why it developed, just as we can understand why mythology arose, but it was a mistaken movement because it followed the old mythological path of explanation. If the direction taken by reflection is wrong, the most strenuous endeavors cannot lead to truth.

Gnosticism possessed certain tenets which were very wide-spread in ancient civilization. The flesh was looked upon as a thing of evil which corrupted the soul. The physical world was in fact given over to the powers of darkness while the spiritual world was ruled by the god of light and purity. This dualism with its accompanying asceticism is to be found in the Persian religion, in India, in later Jewish thought, in the Orphic cults of Greece and even in Plato. It entered into Christianity as naturally as science does into our outlook to-day. All through the early years of the Christian era, and during the Middle Ages, this contrast existed and controlled ethics. All of which goes to show that Christianity was not the creation of a single man but the flowering out of religious mythology.