Part 11 (1/2)

215: ”The Epistles of John,” p. 75.

In his emphasis upon the incarnation and atonement, Royce has shown a profound appreciation of what is vital in Christianity, but his discussion shows also that these doctrines themselves, in being removed from their historic setting and adapted to the requirements of a philosophical theory, may easily lose what is for religion their most vital elements.

Each of our four philosophers has performed an important service for religious thought. Bergson has made an effective protest against materialism. Eucken has a.s.serted the reality of the spiritual world.

Ward has strengthened the philosophical foundations of belief in G.o.d and immortality. Royce has found in the distinctive ideas of Christianity the crown of religious philosophy.

The deeper thought of our age, judged by its leading exponents, has been working towards Christianity and not in the opposite direction. It has broken away from materialism with its denial of a spiritual world. It has broken away from an idealism which denies personality in G.o.d and man. It has been strongly attracted to Christianity, and influenced in its intellectual constructions by the teaching of Christ and of the Apostles. It is at one with Christianity in its ethical standpoint and emphasis. The Cross is no longer foolishness to the Greek, when leaders of philosophic thought find in Christianity their brightest glimpse into the homeland of the spirit, the source of their deepest insights into truth, the inspiration of their most fruitful activity and the key to the solution of their profoundest problems.

V

The Christian Faith and Other Religions

Four universals were contained in the last commands of the Risen Christ: ”All authority has been given unto me. Go, disciple all the nations, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you all the days.” If the marching orders of the Church were to be obeyed, the Christian Faith must be brought into contact and into conflict not only with Judaism but with all the ethnic faiths. If its program is to be carried out successfully, Christianity must supersede all other religions. In this lecture we must consider the relation of Christianity to ancient religions, or those prevalent in the Roman Empire at the time of its founding, and then its relation to modern religions.

I. CHRISTIANITY AND ANCIENT RELIGIONS

That the religion of the cross, which started in a despised and persecuted sect among a people without intellectual or military prestige, should in three centuries become the state religion of the Roman Empire, is often spoken of as the miracle of history. The early missionary could not appeal to military force or to an obviously superior type of civilization, and the wonder is not that Christianity conquered the Roman world but that it ever secured a foothold at all.

The familiar argument has been: ”We can account for the progress of Christianity, against obstacles and without outward aids, only upon the a.s.sumption that a divine power was working within.”

Since the rise of the ”religious-historical school” in Germany some dozen years ago, the question of Christianity's relation to contemporary religions has come up in a new form, and has been brought into the foreground of theological discussion. The victory of early Christianity, it is a.s.serted, is due to the fact that Paul not merely presented it to the Romans in a juridical form, but that he preached the myth or mystery of a dying and rising Saviour to the myth loving Greeks; and it is even said that the New Testament portrait of Christ, whatever historical reality lies behind it, is in fact a sort of glorified composite photograph made out of the elements of a Jewish Messiah, a Greek Apollo or Adonis and an Egyptian Osiris. The claim is made by the more extreme members of the ”religious-historical school” that every feature of Christianity that was supposed to be original, and indeed practically the whole Gospel narrative, can be parallelled closely or remotely in Persian, Hindu, Syrian, Egyptian or Greek religious literature, or in the Old Testament and the teaching of the philosophers.

The reasons for Christianity's triumph over other religions may be still to seek, but its claim to supernatural authority is called in question by the recent movement in scholars.h.i.+p which has taken as its motto, The study of the Christian Faith in the light of the history of religions.

”It would be strange indeed,” a writer has remarked, ”if such parallels did not raise new questionings in the place of old certainties. If the accounts of miraculous births and resurrections are plainly fabulous when we meet with them in other faiths, are they necessarily historical when they occur in the Christian Scriptures? At any rate we feel that stringent evidence will be required to prove them so.”[216]

216: J. Warschauer: _American Journal of Theology_, July, 1912, p. 336.

When we study the relation between early Christianity and the religions of the time it is clear that some established principles are needed to control the comparison. When it is discovered, for instance, that Confucius had seventy-two disciples and an inner circle of ten ”select ones,” and that he spoke the Golden Rule in a negative form, does it follow that the Gospel accounts of the choice of the twelve and of the seventy were borrowed from Confucius? Clemen's formulation of the principles that must govern the comparison will be generally accepted:

(1) ”A religious-historical explanation is impossible if it leads to untenable consequences or proceeds from untenable presuppositions. (2) The sense of the New Testament pa.s.sage, as well as the contents of the non-Jewish idea, must first be fully ascertained. (3) We ought never to a.s.sume that ideas of an advanced religion have been altogether borrowed, until we have done our best to discover any germs of them in the native religious literature. (4) The non-Jewish idea that is brought in as an explanation must really in some degree correspond to the Christian one.

(5) This element must have been already in existence: an idea that is subsequent in its emergence cannot, of course, have given rise to one previously existent. (6) It must be shown in regard to any foreign idea that it was really in a position to influence Christianity, or Judaism before it, and how.”[217] To these might be added that the possibility of coincidence must not be overlooked.

217: ”Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources,” 1913, pp. 17, 18. Principle (3) is quoted from Cheyne.

With these principles, most of them self-evident, in our minds, let us glance at the topics of immediate interest in our present field: (1) The Virgin Birth and its parallels; (2) the wors.h.i.+p of Christ and the Emperor-cult; and (3) Christianity and the Mystery Religions.

1. In its relation to the stories of current mythology, the Virgin Birth was a subject of active discussion in the time of the fathers. The patristic apologists make two points in referring to the mythological parallels. On the one hand, the similarity of the Gospel story in its supernatural element to the stories prevalent at the time is appealed to in order to commend it to the acceptance of the Greeks. Thus Justin says: ”We propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.”[218] Similarly Origen says: ”There is no absurdity in employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks with a view to showing that we are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind.”[219] On the other hand, the difference between the Christian and the heathen stories is appealed to as proof of the moral and historical superiority of the Gospel narratives. Justin says that the Virgin conceived ”not by intercourse but by power;”[220] and Origen, referring to a tradition about the birth of Plato, says that such stories are ”veritable fables.”[221]

218: ”Apol.,” I, 21.

219: ”Contra Cels.,” I, 37.

220: ”Apol.,” I, 33.

221: ”Contra Cels.,” I, 37.

The notion is popular to-day that stories of the birth of a G.o.d or a hero from a virgin are common in non-Christian religions, and the remark is heard that the Virgin Birth of Jesus would be credible were it not for these parallels. A closer examination shows, however, that while supernatural births were the common property of most ancient religions, the Virgin Birth was a distinctive and spontaneous feature of Christianity. Thus Clemen remarks that ”what we find in Indian thought (at any rate in earlier times) is not a Virgin Birth in the proper sense of that term, but only a miraculous birth, and one of quite a different type from the birth of Jesus.”[222] Alluding to the fact that Buddhism was so entirely outside the western range of vision as to be noticed very meagrely in the Greek and Roman literature, Clemen says that ”if there are similarities that cannot be accidental between this later Buddhistic literature and the New Testament, the question would arise whether the former could not be dependent upon the latter,”[223] since Christianity penetrated early to India.