Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" / Volume 6, Slice 3

by Various

The death of Jesus as a criminal, and his resurrection, profoundly aroused the belief and hopes of the little group of Jews who were his followers. His person and mission assumed the first place in their affections and their thinking. He had been to them a prophet, mighty in word and deed, but he now becomes to them the Messiah, Christ. It is not his word but his person which assumes first place, and faith is acceptance of him—crucified and risen—as Messiah. Hence his followers early acquire the name Christians from the Greek form of the word. With this emphasis upon the Messiah the Jewish element would seem to be predominant, but as a matter of fact it was not so. The earlier group of disciples, it is true, did not appreciate the universality of the teaching of Jesus, and they continued zealous for the older forms, but St Paul through his prophetic consciousness grasped the fundamental fact and became Jesus’ true interpreter. As a result Christianity was rejected by the Jews and became the conquering religion of the Roman empire. In this it underwent another modification of far-reaching consequence.

In our earliest sources—the epistles of St Paul—Christ is the pre-existent man from heaven, who had there existed in the form of God, and had come to earth by a voluntary act of self-humiliation. He is before and above all things. Christianity and Greek thought. By him all things exist. In the Johannine writings he is the Son of God—the Logos who in the beginning was with God—of whom are all things—who lightens every man—and who was incarnate in Jesus. Here the cosmological element is again made prominent though not yet supreme, and the metaphysical problems are so close at hand that their discussion is imperative. Even in Paul the term Messiah thus had lost its definite meaning and became almost a proper name. Among the Greek Christians this process was complete. Jesus is the “Son of God”; and the great problem of theology becomes explicit. Religion is in our emotions of reverence and dependence, and theology is the intellectual attempt to describe the object of worship. Doubtless the two do not exactly coincide, not only because accuracy is difficult or even impossible, but also because elements are admitted into the definition of God which are derived from various sources quite distinct from the religious experience. Like all concepts the meaning of religious terms is changed with a changing experience and a changing world-view. Transplanted into the Greek world-view, inevitably the Christian teaching was modified—indeed transformed. Questions which had never been asked came into the foreground, and the Jewish presuppositions tended to disappear. Especially were the Messianic hopes forgotten or transferred to a transcendent sphere beyond death. When the empire became Christian in the 4th century, the notion of a kingdom of Christ on earth to be introduced by a great struggle all but disappeared, remaining only as the faith of obscure groups. Immortality—the philosophical conception—took the place of the resurrection of the body. Nevertheless the latter continues because of its presence in the primary sources, but it is no longer a determining factor, since its presupposition—the Messianic kingdom on earth—has been obscured. As thus the background is changed from Jewish to Greek, so are the fundamental religious conceptions.

The Semitic peoples were essentially theocratic in their religion; they used the forms of the sensuous imagination in setting forth the realities of the unseen world. They were not given to metaphysical speculation, nor long insistent in their inquiries as to the meaning and origin of things. With the Greeks it was far otherwise. For them ideas and not images set forth fundamental reality, and their restless intellectual activity would be content with nothing else than the ultimate truth. Their speculation as to the nature of God had led them gradually to separate him by an infinite distance from all creation, and to feel keenly the opposition of the finite and the infinite, the perfect and the imperfect, the eternal and the temporal. To them, therefore, Christianity presented itself not primarily as the religion of a redemption through the indwelling power of a risen saviour, as with Paul, nor even as the solution of the problem how the sins of men could be forgiven, but as the reconciliation of the antinomy of the intellect, indicated above. The incarnation became the great truth: God is no longer separated by a measureless distance from the human race, but by his entering into humanity he redeems it and makes possible its ultimate unity with himself. Such lines of thought provoke discussion as to the relationship of Jesus to God the Father, and, at a later period, of the nature of the Holy Spirit who enters into and transforms believers.

Greek philosophy in the second century A.D. had sunk for the most part into scepticism and impotence; its original impulse had been lost, and no new intellectual power took its place; only in Alexandria was there a genuine effort made to solve the fundamental problems of God and the world. Plato had made God accessible to the highest knowledge as the transcendent idea, remote from the world. For Aristotle, too, God in his essence is far above the world and at most its first mover. The stoics, on the other hand, taught his immanence, while the eclectics sought truth by the mingling of the two ideas. They accomplished their purpose in various ways, by distinguishing between God and his power—or by the notion of a hierarchy of super-sensible beings, or in a doctrine which taught that the operations of nature are the movement of pure spirit; or by the use of the “Word” of “Wisdom,” half personified as intermediate between God and the world. While these monotheistic, pantheistic doctrines were taught in the schools, the people were left to a debased polytheism and to new superstitions imported from the Orient; the philosophers themselves were by no means unaffected by the popular beliefs. Mingled with all these were the ancient legends of gods and heroes, accepted as inspired scripture by the people, and by philosophers in part explained away by an allegorical exegesis and in part felt increasingly as a burden to the intelligence. In this period of degeneracy there were none the less an awakening to religious needs and a profound longing for a new revelation of truth, which should satisfy at once the intellect and the religious emotions.

Christianity came as supplying a new power; it freed philosophy from scepticism by giving a definite object to its efforts and a renewed confidence in its mission. Monotheism henceforth was to be the belief not of philosophers only but even of the ignorant, and in Jesus Christ the union of the divine and the human was effected. The Old Testament, allegorically explained, became the substitute for the outgrown mythology; intellectual activity revived; the new facts gained predominant influence in philosophy, and in turn were shaped according to its canons. In theology the fundamental problems of ontological philosophy were faced; the relationship of unity to multiplicity, of noumenon to phenomena, of God to man. The new element is the historical Jesus, at once the representative of humanity and of God. As in philosophy, so now in theology, the easiest solution of the problem was the denial of one of its factors: and successively these efforts were made, until a solution was found in the doctrine of the Trinity, which satisfied both terms of the equation and became the fundamental creed of the church. Its moulds of thought are those of Greek philosophy, and into these were run the Jewish teachings. We have thus a peculiar combination—the religious doctrines of the Bible, as culminating in the person of Jesus, run through the forms of an alien philosophy.

The Jewish sources furnished the terms Father, Messiah, Son and Spirit. Jesus seldom employed the last term and St Paul’s use of it is not altogether clear. Already in Jewish literature it had been all but personified (cf. The doctrine of the Trinity. the Wisdom of Solomon). Thus the material is Jewish, though already modified doubtless by Greek influence. But the problem is Greek. It is not primarily ethical nor even religious, but it is metaphysical. What is the ontological relationship between these three factors? The answer is given in the Nicene formula, which is characteristically Greek. By it we perceive how God, the infinite, the absolute, the eternal, is yet not separated from the finite, the temporal, the relative, but, through the incarnation, enters into humanity. We further see how this entering into humanity is not an isolated act but continues in all the children of God by the indwelling spirit. Thus, according to the canons of the ancient philosophy, justice is done to all the factors of our problem—God remains as Father, the infinitely remote and absolute source of all; as Son, the Word who is revealed to man and incarnate in him; as Spirit, who dwells even in our own souls and by his substance unites us to God.

While thus the Greek philosophy furnished the dialectic and the mould for the characteristic Christian teaching, the doctrine of the Trinity preserved religious values. By Jesus the disciples had been led to God, and he was the central fact of faith. After the resurrection he was the object of praise, and soon prayers were offered in his name and to him. Already to the apostle Paul he dominates the world and is above all created things, visible and invisible, so that he has the religious value of God. It is not God as abstract, infinite and eternal, as the far-away creator of the universe, or even as the ruler of the world, which Paul worships, but it is God revealed in Jesus Christ, the Father of Jesus Christ, the grace and mercy in Jesus Christ which deliver from evil. Metaphysics and speculative theories were valueless for Paul; he was conscious of a mighty power transforming his own life and filling him with joy, and that this power was identical with Jesus of Nazareth he knew. In all this Paul is the representative of that which is highest and best in early Christianity. Speculation and hyperspiritualization were ever tending to obscure this fundamental religious fact: in the interest of a higher doctrine of God his true presence in Jesus was denied, and by exaggeration of Paul’s doctrine of “Christ in us” the significance of the historic Jesus was given up. The Johannine writings, which presupposed the Pauline movement, are a protest against the hyperspiritualizing tendency. They insist that the Son of God has been incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and that our hands have handled and our eyes have seen the word of life. This same purpose, namely, to hold fast to the historic Jesus, triumphed in the doctrine of the Trinity; Jesus was not to be resolved into an aeon or into some mysterious tertium quid, neither God nor man, but to be recognized as very God who redeemed the soul. Through him men were to understand the Father and to understand themselves as God’s children. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity satisfied at once the philosophic intelligence of scholars and the religious needs of Christians. Only thus can its adoption and ultimate acceptance be explained. Its doctrinal form is the philosophic statement of beliefs held by the common people, who had little interest in theology, but whose faith centred in Jesus. It marks the naturalization of Christianity in the Greek world for the common people who believed in Christ, and for the philosophers who justified the faith to reason.

The historic and religious values of the doctrine of the Trinity may be illustrated by way of contrast. The Mahāyāna systems are the union of Buddha’s teaching with the forms of the Brahman philosophy. The historic Buddha—the man Gautama—is taught as only one of a limitless series of incarnations or (better) appearances. For his life on earth with his material body was only an appearance, a seeming, a phenomenon, and simultaneously with its activities the true Buddha existed unmoved and eternal. Thus the way was opened for other apparitional Buddhas, and different sects take different ones as the objects of faith and worship. Moreover, our true nature is also Buddha. The conscious life of all men is apparitional and illusive. Salvation is the comprehension of this fact, and in the apprehension of our essential oneness with the absolute. Hence the way of salvation is by knowledge. In the Mahāyāna gnosticism was triumphant, and the historic values of Gautama’s teaching and personality are lost. The Mahãyãna illustrates in part what would have followed the triumph of gnosticism in Christianity, for not only would the historic value of the life and teaching of Jesus have been lost, but with it the significance of humanity.

It is apparent that such a doctrine as the Trinity is itself susceptible of many explanations, and minds differently constituted lay emphasis upon its different elements. Especially is this true as its Greek terminology was translated into Latin, and from Latin came into modern languages—the original meaning being obscured or disguised, and the original issues forgotten. For some the first thought of God, the infinite and ultimate reality lying beyond and behind all phenomena, predominates. With these the historic manifestation of Jesus becomes only a guide to lead us to that immediate apprehension of God which is the end of theology, and to that immediate union with God which is the end of religion. Such an end is accomplished either by means of pure thought or by a oneness of pure feeling, giving as results the theological or philosophical construction of the concept God, or a mystical ecstasy which is itself at once immediate, inexplicable and indescribable. On the other hand, minds of a different and more concrete character so emphasize the distinctions God, Son and Holy Spirit, that a tritheistic construction appears—three individuals in the one Godhead: these individuals appearing, as for example in the Father and the Son, even in opposition to each other. In general we may say then that the Trinity takes on four differing aspects in the Christian church: in its more common and easily apprehended form as three Gods, in its ecclesiastical form as a mystery which is above reason to be accepted by faith, in its philosophic form as the highest reason which solves the ultimate problems of the universe, and finally, as a mode by which the spirit through an emotional content enters into communion with God himself.

To some Christians the doctrine of the Trinity appeared inconsistent with the unity of God which is emphasized in the Scriptures. They therefore denied it, and accepted Jesus Christ, not as incarnate God, but as God’s highest creature by whom all else was created, or as the perfect man who taught the true doctrine of God. The first view in the early Church long contended with the orthodox doctrine, but finally disappeared, and the second doctrine in the modern Church was set forth as easily intelligible, but has remained only as the faith of sects relatively small in number.