HD-07-Christianity

Christianity in it’s Opening Phase: The Religion of Jesus

The story of Christianity is the story of a religion that has sprung from the faith that in its founder God was made manifest in the flesh and dwelt among men. Other religions have developed a conception of incarnation, but none has given it such centrality. In the belief that Jesus is the clearest portrayal of the character of God all the rest of Christian doctrine is implied.

It is not easy to tell the story briefly and clearly. The first Christian century has had more books written about it than any other comparable period of history . The chief sources bearing on its history are the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, and these-again we must make a comparative statement-have been more thoroughly searched by inquiring minds than any other books ever written. Historical criticism has been particularly busy with them during the last one hundred years and has reached the verdict that in the New Testament the early Christian religion about Jesus has overlaid and modified the record of the religion of Jesus himself, i.e., his own faith, but there is no unanimity about the degree of modification. It is known that Jesus himself did not write down his teachings. but relied upon his disciples to go about preaching what he taught. It is generally assumed by historians that after his death some of them did write down his sayings, with occasional notes of the historical setting, before they should be forgotten, and that thus a document, or group of documents, came into being that scholars call "Q" (from the German word Quelle or "source"). It is generally considered that "Q" was colored by the prepossessions of the early Christians and had sayings added to it that were mistakenly ascribed to Jesus, but on the whole it was authentic and quite naturally became primary source material for the compilers of Matthew and Luke. These compilers used a great deal of other material also, both oral and written; for example they drew much of their material from Mark, already existent (65-70 A.D.). The Gospel of John was not written until the end of the- century and then largely from private historical sources that were primarily concerned with the theological implications of Jesus' life and death.

Through all of these records runs the often unseen division between what is from Jesus himself and what is from the Apostolic Age. But when scholars are asked to separate the material that authentically reveals the historical Jesus from the material that reflects the growing Christology of the early Christians, they vary widely in their interpretations. At certain points each student is thrown back, after careful study, upon his own judgment, even his intuitive feeling of what is from the historical Jesus and what is from the early Church. In many cases these decisions on the quality of the evidence are crucial. There is some warrant therefore for saying that every life of Jesus is in some sense a confessio .fidei, or, at the very least, a personal impression of what actually happened.

Granting this, however, does not release the conscientious scholar from the obligation to hold his views tentatively, as being open to change if a scholarly consensus concerning a particular saying or event forces him to alter his previous opinion. One such consensus has emerged in this century following the appearance in 1910 of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus. There has been increasingly wide agreement that Jesus' eschatological conviction of the imminent "end of the age" had central importance in impelling him toward a prophetic mission. It is further held that when these expectations were not fulfilled and his followers attempted to recall his life and teachings, they did this confusedly; the chronological structure of the Gospels and their assignment of events to particular geographical locations were to a large degree editorial and therefore not certain. But scholars continue to seek for a broader consensus regarding the most authentic interpretation of Jesus' faith, intentions, and teachings. (If the present chapter, a very modest essay in this direction, errs, it may be on the side of accepting the authenticity of New Testament passages whose historical accuracy is still being debated. But the writer has already taken a position in regard to Confucius (p. 271) that spells out for him here the course of accepting as much of the tradition as is needed to account for the beliefs and conduct of Jesus' followers. Admittedly this is a vulnerable position to take, but quite unavoidable for all who work in this field.

Furthermore, there arises at this point a dilemma that is perhaps forever irresolvable. The Jesus of history, crucified on Calvary, and the Christ of faith, risen from the dead, are clearly distinguishable, indeed to the degree that one is forced to raise the question: which is the more important in the total history of the religion founded upon the one and so largely influenced by the other? In the writer's judgment this moot question need not be answered in this book, so long as the Jesus of history, as the enunciator of a distinctive ethic preparatory to the new age when God's will shall be done (in the Kingdom of God), and the Christ of faith, as a living witness to the redemptive action o(God, are seen sequentially, the one as founder, the other as focal figure in the religious development of the Christian faith.)

I The World into Which Jesus Came

That Jesus was born into a part of the world that had only recently been brought under Roman dominion is of some significance, to begin with. One of the last acquisitions of Roman arms was Palestine. The Jews, as we have seen in the chapter dealing with them, had been subjected over and over to a foreign yoke, yet the Roman rule came to seem more intolerable than any. This was due in large part to the fact that the Romans were an aloof, administrative group. They had in particular a purely regulatory feeling concerning local populations; there was no fellow-feeling at all. It had been different with the Greeks, who were an imaginative and responsive people, able to enter into the spirit of a locality and weigh its ideas as though they deserved respect. But the Jews and the Romans were poles apart. There was so little of seeing eye to eye that they were enigmas to each other and gave up trying to arrive at an understanding.

This hardening of the heart toward each other's natures and cultures precluded any possibility of adjustment and therefore made it inevitable that their living together in the same land would produce social tumult. This was so much the case throughout Palestine that in his childhood Jesus must have gained little better than a confusing impression of swift political and social changes taking place all around him. He grew up in an atmosphere of argument, conflict, and bitterness. There was endless talk. Older minds were bewildered by events and torn by mounting tensions. Even now the historians' picture of the period remains confusing. What then must contemporaries have felt!

The Political Divisions of Palestine in Jesus' Time

About the time of Jesus' birth Herod the Great died. Three of Herod's sons had escaped the fatal consequences of exciting his suspicion, and so survived. In his will he divided Palestine among them. While that unhappy country trembled on the brink of insurrection, the three sons hurried to Rome to have their bequests confirmed. Augustus Caesar assigned Judea, Samaria, and Idumea to Archelaus, Galilee and Perea to Herod Antipas, and the region northeast of the Lake of Galilee to Philip. Archelaus was, however, not given outright control of his district, as the other two sons were. The caution of Augustus proved well founded, for after nine years of incompetence and brutality Archelaus was accused before the emperor on a number of serious charges and banished to Gaul. His place was taken by a Roman official called a procurator, who was made responsible to the governor of Syria.

Procurator followed procurator in regular succession. They ruled Judea from Caesarea, on the coast northwest of Jerusalem. Few of them had any sense of the historic forces at work beneath the surface of the Jewish scene. Some of them were rapacious and unscrupulous men, anxious only to make enough money to retire in comfort to Rome. Though they allowed the Jews as much civil and religious liberty as political considerations (that is, Roman imperialism) permitted, they insisted on a kind of remote control over the Jewish religion. For example, they kept the robes of the high priest stored in the Tower of Antonia and released them only for the ceremonies in which they were worn. This meant that they could control the appointment of the high priest by signifying to whom they would be pleased to release the robes. They also from time to time tried to introduce into Jerusalem battle-standards and shields displaying the image of Caesar as emperor-god, but the Jews angrily protested each time, and the procurators for the sake of preserving the peace did not insist.

Under these conditions Judea was scarcely happy. Indeed, perplexed almost to despair by the difficulties besetting them, the Jews "strove among themselves"-Pharisees with Sadducees, and Zealots and Herodians with the rest. (See again pp. 395 f. and 398 f.)

The Situation in Galilee

In Galilee, on the other hand, the irritation was less pervasive. There Herod Antipas ruled over a very mixed population. The Jews were barely in the majority. There were many Greek-speaking citizens, as well as Phoenicians from the coast and Syrians from interior regions to the north. In some districts the Jews were outnumbered by these Gentiles. Furthermore, across the Jordan and not under Herod's authority directly, though within the borders of Perea, there were ten self-governing towns, (Hence called, from the Greek, the Decapolis, the "tenfold city.") leagued together on the pattern of Hellenic city-states. These were the Palestinian expression of Alexander the Great's dream of a new international order. Their presence helps to explain why Herod Antipas pursued a policy of internationalism. He hoped that a patient infusion of world-culture into his area would unify his people under his rule. But the Galilean Jews, though predisposed to "suffer fools gladly" so long as their religion was not threatened, were more than a little disturbed when he began to make their key towns over into Greco-Roman cities. One of these cultural ventures was the rebuilding of the largest city in Galilee, Sepphoris. This city was, however, outshone in magnificence, if not in size, by the new town of Tiberias on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee," a city provided with a colonnaded forum and named by Herod after the reigning Roman emperor. Here the Hellenistic influence reached its apogee in Herod's domain.

Many of the Jews in Galilee might have reconciled themselves to all this, and even welcomed it, if they had not been obliged to foot the bill. It had formerly seemed onerous enough to have to pay the direct, personal tax for administrative expenses, for only part of it went to Herod Antipas, the rest to far-away Rome. Now they were obliged to pay additional taxes in the form of burdensome customs duties, not only on goods imported into or exported from the region, but on those shipped from city to city and from farm to market, Tolls were collected, too, at bridges and harbors. And there was a salt tax-always irritating anywhere. The Jews thus found themselves contributing to the expenses of their own subjection. So, when in 6 A.D. Quirinius, the governor of Syria, ordered a census taken of the inhabitants of Palestine, in order that an even more thorough form of tax-assessment might be worked out, there were immediate hostile repercussions among the people. Jesus may have been twelve or more years old at that time and must have been keenly aware of the general excitement of the Galilean Jews, which boiled up swiftly into insurrection.

A certain Judas the Galilean, assisted by a Pharisee called Zaddok, organized the Zealot party by calling around him the Galilean hotheads and forming a rebel army that stood ready to fight on the principle: "No God but Yahweh, no tax but to the Temple, no friend but the Zealot." (According to their contemporary, ]osephus, "These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Lord and Master. They also do not mind dying any death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor could the fear of death make them call any man their master. And. ..I fear that what I have said does not adequately express the determination that they show when they undergo pain." Antiquities, XVIII, I, 6. The fanaticism of the Zealots was due in some measure to the fact that many of them had a family history of death by violence for rebellion. ]udas the Galilean's father was killed fifty-two years earlier while engaged in insurrection.) Judas and his followers surprised the city of Sepphoris, seized the armory , provided themselves with its store of weapons, and made the city their headquarters. So serious did the revolt become that the Roman General Varus had to bring up two Roman legions to suppress it. He burned and destroyed Sepphoris and crucified several thousand Zealots in a bloody attempt to stamp the movement out, but its secret spread continued. Jesus was faced with the realities created by it all his life, for one at least, if not two, of the Twelve (Simon the Zealot and possibly ]udas Iscariot.) had been affiliated with the Zealot party, and he himself was crucified finally, when the crowd in Pilate's courtyard shouted to have Barabbas, known to them as a Zealot, released to them instead of himself.

Not all the Jews of Galilee supported the Zealot cause. The Essenes were opposed to violence on principle. They were even opposed to animal sacrifices-a radical departure for that day. Fairly numerous in Galilee, they paid little attention to. the strife of the times but waited patiently for the Lord's Anointed One, the Messiah. Meanwhile, they lived by strict rules in celibate communities, holding their possessions in common, keeping the Sabbath day, laboring in their fields during the other days of the week, and devoting themselves to fasting, prayer, and frequent ceremonial ablutions, much as the Dead Sea community did.

The Pharisees, on their part, held themselves from violence largely out of considerations of prudence. They were by far the largest party in Galilee and were led by scribes and rabbis whose consciousness of mission was heightened by systematic training. The Jewish parties had all caught the concept of organization from the Greeks and Romans and knew their hopes of survival depended upon unified leadership. Many attended schools that the Pharisees maintained-academies, we might call them, for in attitude and method they resembled the academies of Greece. The largest of these schools was in Jerusalem and boasted great teachers like Shammai and Hillel. Caught, all of them, in a world of rapid and unpredictable change, the Pharisees made it their principle to live as nearly as conditions permitted according to their traditions. They felt that the only way to hasten the coming of the Messiah, and in the meantime save Judaism in their perverse and wicked generation from extinction, was to be scrupulous in religious practices that linked tradition with every detail of daily living. This meant that they endeavored to keep everyone of the Sabbath laws, to fulfill to the letter the regulations for keeping the Jewish festivals, to tithe, to repeat the Shema constantly, to have a mezuzah inside the door and a phylactery on the brow, (A mezuzah is a tube or case attached inside the door-post and containing a piece of cowhide parchment inscribed with Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21- A phylactery is a black calf-skin case with thongs for binding it on the forehead or left arm, containing a strip (or strips) of parchment inscribed with Exodus 13:1-10 and 11-16 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21. Today the orthodox do not wear the phylactery constantly but only during weekday morning prayers.) to be very particular about ceremonial purity, correct treatment of "holy things," and dietary rules, to have no legal dealings with anyone in the civil courts (because Jews should have recourse only to the judicial proceedings set up by their own tribunal, the Sanhedrin), and so on. Though the time was not long distant when they would be obliged to alter many of their old rites and introduce others that would be new, they were at this time critical of all those who did not keep the Law as they interpreted it.

The Sadducees, by comparison, were less influential in Galilee, but even more conservative. They were certain that the old cultus and Torah were unalterable, whereas the Pharisees, after much heart-searching, were willing with changed circumstances to alter old customs, if that meant preserving Jewish communities against religious dissolution. But Sadducees and pharisees alike opposed looseness, opportunism, and radicalism.

Some of the common people, perhaps most of them, were tolerant and easy-going in these things, readily influenced by "the world," and only loosely and vaguely religious. Many, on the other hand, considered themselves strict Jews, attended the services of the synagogues, revered the Law and the Prophets, kept the Jewish festivals and fasts, and went up annually to the temple in Jerusalem at the Passover. This was not enough, the sterner Pharisees held If they did not keep themselves free from ceremonial defilement, observe the strict dietary rules, tithe, wash their hands before meals, ceremonially cleanse their persons, their clothes, cups, jugs, basins, and all the food bought in the markets, and do no work on the Sabbath day, they were impure and could not be considered pious. Many of the devout among the common people, however, were sure that one could be deeply devotional, truly religious, without being narrowly legalistic in obeying "the tradition of the elders." It was to this group that the parents of Jesus seem to have belonged.

II The Life and Teachings of Jesus

Youth

The date of the birth of Jesus cannot be determined precisely. Matthew says (2:1) that he was born "in the days of Herod." Since Herod died in 4 B.C., this would suggest that Jesus ' birth occurred earlier than this. Luke says (3:1-2 and 23) that John the Baptist began preaching in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius (26 or 27 A.D.), and that Jesus was baptized by him shortly afterward and was "about thirty years old" when he began his own ministry. When we work back in time, we are obliged to date Jesus' birth four to six years before that hallowed by long use. (It was not until the middle of the sixth century A.D. that the Church began to reckon time as before and after the birth of Christ. The monks whose calculations were followed made a mistake in computing the year. It should be added that we possess no scriptural data for fixing the month and day of the birth. Both the Roman date of December 25th and the Armenian date of January 6th are of later origin and reflect the needs and decisions of post-New Testament times.) In another place Luke says (2:1-4) that Jesus was born during a census ordered by Augustus Caesar when Quirinius was governor of Syria ( 6-9 A.D. ). This shows some confusion on Luke's part. However, if we acc;;ept the evidence that Quirinius was in the service of the legate to Syria some time before his governorship, we can suppose, as some scholars do (but without clear evidence), that Luke was recalling a time when Quirinius was dispatched to Judea to conduct a census some ten or twelve years prior to his governorship.

As to the place of Jesus' birth, we again face uncertainty. Matthew and Luke are authorities for saying that he was born in Bethlehem, "the city of David"; but since these gospel writers were moved by the early Church's desire to make certain that Jesus was David's descendant and came from Bethlehem, as Messianic prophecies prescribed; scholars are inclined to raise questions. (The early Church's belief that all the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah were fulfilled by Jesus led, as New Testament scholars are agreed, to questionable assertions concerning his actions, his genealogical connections, and his presence at certain geographical locations. New Testament scholars are also agreed that the birth stories of Matthew and Luke were inspired by the post-resurrection faith that Jesus was the Son of God come down from Heaven to save the world-a sincere conviction and one which is in accord with a principle already noted in this book: "the logic of the faith) Greater certainty attaches to an assertion in which all the evangelists agree, that the home of the family was in Nazareth of Galilee. It was there that Joseph pursued the trade of carpenter, and so far as we know, up to his thirtieth year all but a few weeks of Jesus' life were spent there.

Of Jesus' childhood and youth we know little directly. The internal evidence of the Gospels leads us to assume-but it is an undocumented assumption-that his parents belonged to the common people, the ‘Am ha' aretz, but were quietly religious, for Luke says that they took the time, "every year", to go to Jerusalem to observe the Passover. Jesus came to know the Torah and the Prophets with enough familiarity to be able to quote them freely. It may be that he attended the local synagogue school. Somehow he came to know enough of the prophetic tradition to develop a distrust of whatever literalism and inelasticity the scribes and Pharisees were given to. As to his trade, he was apparently trained to be a carpenter. We know from the Gospels that he grew up in a large family. There were at least six other children: four boys-James, Joses, Simon, and Jude-and "sisters," how many is not said. (Mk. 6:3. Roman Catholic tradition, however, says the other children were not Mary's but children of Joseph by an earlier marriage or of Mary's presumed sister, Mary Cleophas. This view of the matter supports another tradition, that of "the perpetual virginity of Mary.") Luke gives us one revealing glimpse into his religious experience as a child. The story of the boy Jesus in the temple (Lk. 2:41-52) is a witness above all to the fact that he was capable of sustained interest in religious matters, an absorption so deep that he did not think of the effect his absence must be having upon his relatives and friends.

The next eighteen years of Jesus' life are often called the silent years, for we have no direct evidence on what took place during them. It has been traditionally assumed, from the fact that Joseph drops out of the story completely, that he died in this interval, and that Jesus, as the oldest son, took over the management of the carpenter business, his brothers helping him. This is pure assumption, but if he did so, Jesus hewed and installed the woodwork that went into Galilean homes and constructed ploughshares, yokes, and carts for the farmers near Nazareth.

Baptism and Temptation

When he was about thirty years old Jesus passed through one of the most profound experiences of his life. His baptism by John brought to him the same double experience of mystic vision and call that came to Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. It terminated the quiet years at Nazareth and changed the direction of his life completely.

John the Baptist had appeared suddenly on the banks of the Jordan with an urgent message, "Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is coming!" He had emerged from the desert region beyond the Jordan, where he had been meditating on what appeared to him the crisis of the hour. We are told by the Gospels that he "wore clothing made of hair cloth, and had a leather belt around his waist, and he lived. on dried locusts and wild honey"Al-that is, he had assumed the life of a solitary ascetic. His periods of lonely brooding increased his feeling that the end of the present age was at hand; the Messiah who should judge the world was about to appear and bring in the day of wrath that the repentant alone would be able to face. So near did this day seem to him that he is reported to have used the vivid figure, "The axe is already lying at the roots of the trees." Another startling image of his was drawn from the threshing floor; he said the Messiah had already taken up the winnowing fork in his hand and would "clean up his threshing-floor, and store his wheat in his barn," but would "burn up the chaff with inextinguishable .fire."A2 He was not alone in so believing" The Essenes had a similar sense of the imminence of the end, but John did not join them. He had too much of the feeling of social responsibility to retire into watchful waiting. He therefore left the desert and began a career of fiery preaching, in order to warn the unwary .He succeeded in drawing people from allover Palestine to hear him. When these listeners became distressed about their spiritual condition, he took them down into the Jordan and immersed them in the water, to signify their repentance and the washing away of their sins. He became known as the Baptist. He was more, however, than a ceremonialist. His instructions to his converts were on an ethical plane of highest urgency .In the interim before the coming of the Messiah, they were to practice the strictest individual and social righteousness. The crowds would ask him, "What ought we to do?" He answered, "The man who has two shirts must share with the man who has none, and the man who has food must do the same."A3 He told tax-collectors not to collect more than they were authorized to, and soldiers not to extort money or make false charges against people, but to be satisfied with their pay. Though he roused the anger of Herod Antipas by condemning his illegal marriage with Herodias, his brother's wife, and was arrested and finally executed while in prison, he had raised up a loyal following that became self-propagating. St. Paul found a circle of his followers in Ephesus thirty years later.

It was natural that Jesus should be attracted. In the first chapter of Mark we have the story given barely

and briefly:

It was in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water he saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit coming down like a dove to enter into him, and out of the heavens came a voice:

"You are my Son, my Beloved! You are my Chosen!"

This experience was profoundly moving and convincing. Ever since his twelfth year Jesus had felt, and been known by his acquaintances to feel, a more than ordinary interest in religious matters. His sensitive intelligence and quick social conscience predisposed him toward a prophetic role in life. Now he was clearly called to assume such a role.

It is significant that he at once retired into the wilderness beyond Jordan to think through the course that he must now undertake. In the Christian tradition, this time of meditation and decision is described as a period of forty days during which Satan tried to tempt him. As told by Matthew and Luke, the temptation had three phases. Back of the imagery used we may see the elements of very real issues. Should he continue to work for a livelihood-for bread? Not any longer. Should he use spectacular methods that might attract attention but put him in jeopardy? No, he must not force God's hand, must not put God's choice of him to trial. Should he seek political power as a precondition of redeeming Israel? No, that would be indeed compromising with Satan.

The Beginning of the Galilean Ministry

About the time of John's arrest, Jesus crossed the Jordan and made his way to Galilee, "proclaiming," says Mark, "the good news from God, saying, 'The time has come and the reign of God is near; repent, and believe this good news!' "A5 His tone was urgent and he produced such conviction about himself and his message that he was immediately followed by four disciples-Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, James and his brother John, both sons of Zebedee-all fisher-men who dropped their nets and followed him. The Lake of Galilee was then surrounded by thriving towns- Tiberias, Taricheae, Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida. Jesus began his ministry among them, choosing Capernaum as his headquarters because Simon Peter's home was there. At first he spoke in the synagogues, and when the crowds grew too large for that, he preached in the market-places and open fields.

The first chapter of Mark contains a full description of what befell Jesus on the first Sabbath day in Capernaum. It will serve out purpose well to analyze it at some length as a typical day in the early ministry of Jesus. First of all, "he went to the synagogue and taught." Probably there was more than one synagogue in Capernaum, and he went to the one to which he was invited. (The synagogues were controlled, in matters of doctrine and polity, by the scribes and Pharisees, but the local administration was in the hands of a council of elders, one of whom was elected the "ruler of the synagogue" and had charge of the religious services. He would be in a position to invite Jesus to speak in the synagogue. Another officer, the chazzan or attendant, was the synagogue's librarian, having in his care the rolls of the scriptures which were in the "ark"; he was also the caretaker of the building, and if a person with scribal training, the teacher of the synagogue school. Every synagogue had in addition a group of men who collected and disbursed the alms. It was in imitation of them that the Christians appointed deacons.) The interior of the synagogue was bare and simple. The congregation faced Jerusalem. Before them was a raised platform with a reading desk on it, and against the wall or within a recess was a cabinet containing the rolls of scripture. This was the ark. A curtain hung before it, and in front of the curtain stood a lamp, which was always alight. During services the "chief seats" were occupied by the elders and the leading Pharisees, who sat facing the other worshipers. Their voices led in the unison repetition of the Shema, an essential part of every service. At times the worshipers stood, as when the ruler of the synagogue recited prayers and the congregation repeated the appropriate responses. After the chazzan took from the ark the rolls of the Law and the Prophets, the scripture readings of the day were recited, first in Hebrew, then in Aramaic. Mter that the ruler himself, or a person chosen by him, addressed the congregation by way of "teaching."

Such was the setting of Jesus' first important utterance in Capernaum. When he began speaking, we are told, his audience was amazed at his teaching, for he spoke "like one who had authority," that is, with the force and confidence of one called by God to an urgent mission and so with great freedom of interpretation and from the fullness of his heart, not drily "like the scribes. " Whereupon a startling thing occurred. A man in the audience who believed he had a devil in him that had caused his abnormal physical and mental condition-the universally accepted explanation of certain ailments in that day-suddenly and hopefully interrupted the preacher.

"What do you want of us, Jesus, you Nazarene? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, you are God's Holy One!"

Jesus reproved him, and said,

"Silence! Get out of him!"

The foul spirit convulsed the man and gave a loud cry and went out of him.*

Jesus was probably as much surprised as anyone at this evidence of his healing power. (That seems to be indicated in what he did early the next morning. ) It should be kept in mind in judging the situation that he had no reason to question the diagnosis of puzzling ailments that was universal in his time, that is, that they were caused by an indwelling demonic power entering the person from elsewhere. His audience certainly had no doubt. We read further:

And they were all so amazed that they discussed it with one another, and said,

"What does this mean? It is a new teaching! He gives orders with authority even to the foul spirits, and they obey him!"

And his fame immediately spread in all directions. ...

After the synagogue service, the story continues, Jesus went with his disciples to the home of Simon Peter, where Simon's mother-in-law was in bed, sick with a fever. Jesus went up to her, and grasping her hand, made her rise. 00 And the fever left her, and she waited on them." Then followed one of the crucial episodes of Jesus' early ministry.

In the evening, after sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons, and the whole town was gathered at the door. And he cured many. ...

CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY, BETHLEHEM. From the bell tower of this church in Bethlehem we get a far-ranging view of the .fields where "the shepherds watched their flocks by night”. The silhouetted bells ring out each Christmas Eve to celebrate the birth of Jesus in the little town now the subject of bitterly disputed claims by Jordan and Israel.

TIBERIAS AND THE LAKE OF GALILEE. In the distance we see the town lying between the lake and the hills that was named after Tiberius Caesar. The picture was taken not far from the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount.

CAPERNAUM. This third-century synagogue on the shore of the Lake of Galilee at Capernaum marks the site of an older synagogue in which Jesus preached.

The wording here deserves close study. It is interesting to note that the other evangelists in copying from Mark at this point change the word many to all, but Mark undoubtedly preserves the original tradition. Jesus could not heal people except by their "faith," and in perfect honesty he always refused the credit, but said *This and the next four quotations are from Mark 1:21-45. Translation is from The Bible: An American Translation, University of Chicago Press, 1935. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.to every healed person such words as: "Go in peace, and sin no more. Your faith has healed you," (The healing miracles of Jesus, as preserved for us in the Gospels, present many difficulties, but the contemporary situation must be kept in mind The belief in demonic possession in cases of physical or mental illness, apparently universal in Palestine, led many who would otherwise have been "normal" to consider themselves "possessed." To those afflicted, this was a depressing if not terrifying condition at best; when we add the distresses ofjesus' times, with its compounding of political, psychological, and spiritual tensions, often of great intensity, it is easy to imagine that there were many instances, among all classes of the people, of what our century calls functional disorders, greatly aggravated by fears and repressions and exhibiting many of the symptoms of organic disease. If we can speak of a "minimum view" of Jesus' healing miracles, it would be something like this: Jesus was a challenging person, who "spoke with authority," as we have just seen, not only to men but also to "foul spirits," Moreover, there is a great deal of testimony that he was moved by love and compassion. With firm words, he brought back the faith and self- confidence of many sick and lost souls, convincing them that he had exorcised their "foul spirits," and causing their alarming symptoms to vanish in an instant.) That Jesus was disturbed by his new-found power and the kind of renown it brought him is implied in the next words:

Early in the morning, long before daylight, he got up and left the house and went off to a lonely spot, and prayed there. And Simon and his companions sought him out and found him, and said to him,

"They are all looking for you!"

He said to them,

"Let us go somewhere else, to the neighboring country towns, so that I may preach in them, too, for that is why I came out here."

But his experience in the other towns was like that in Capernaum. For some days he could no longer go into a town openly but stayed in unfrequented places, and people came to him from every direction. His popularity was tremendous. People "ran" to him. There seemed to be great promise in him. They were hopeful of great things. When he came again into Capernaum, "such a crowd gathered that there was no room even around the door. " On another occasion there were so many people in the house it was impossible to prepare a meal; on still another, so many people gathered along the lake shore that for fear of being crushed, Jesus had his disciples keep a boat ready to remove him. Subsequently, he found the crowd so great "he got into a boat and sat in it, a little way from the shore, while all the people were on the land close to the water,"A6 and from this vantage point, he taught them.

The Content of Jesus' Teaching

What was it in Jesus' preaching that so attracted the crowds during the early part of his ministry? Several answers to this question must be given. In the first place, he brought an urgent message that was itself exciting; it had to do with the imminence of God's total rule. Further, he had a great deal to say about getting ready for the new age by doing God's will now, while there was yet time. Finally, he spoke in simple and untechnical language about the central issues in religion, always with the use of homely illustrations drawn from nature and human life. He was a plain man speaking to plain people. Many of his most profound lessons were given through parables-brief stories that set the human situation in its true perspective. But it would not have been enough if the manner of his teaching had been its only attraction. What he really had achieved was a new synthesis of the religious insights of his people.

A. "The Kingdom of God is Near." It is apparent that Jesus shared with his people the expectation that the Messianic Kingdom long foretold was about to be ushered in. The religious feeling of the Jewish people then centered in this expectation. From his youth on Jesus was under the influence of the hopes raised by it. So that he was responding normally to his environment when he entertained along with his people their general and passionate hope of a new order of things.

It was an electrifying expectation. The time was at hand when "the Son of Man" would come as the judge and agent of judgment and redemption. It would not be a human event, a predictable political occurrence; it would be an unmistakably supernatural happening, caused, at a time unknown to man, by God alone.

In the Gospel of Mark there are passages (modified by the language of the Apostolic age) that have a similar meaning:

And he said to them, "I tell you, some of you who stand here will certainly live to see the reign of God come in its might."

"I tell you, these things will all happen before the present age passes away. ...But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son; only the Father. You must look out and be on the alert, for you do not know when it will be time."

Consider the following passages from Luke:

And he said to his disciples, "The time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man. ...Men will say to you, 'Look! There he is!' or, 'Look! Here he is!' Do not go off in pursuit of him, for just as when lightning flashes, it shines from one end of the sky to the other, that will be the way with the Son of Man. ...In the time of the Son of Man it will be just as in the time of Noah. People went on eating, drinking, marrying, and being married up to the very day that Noah got into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. ...It will be like that on the day when the Son of Man appears."

If we accept these sayings as going back to Jesus and they would seem in essence to be his-what is to be said of their significance? The conviction clearly is that an apocalyptic "end of the age" was imminent, possibly very near. The thrill of expectancy produced by this conviction is hard for us to recreate even in imagination. That it is a strange belief to the twentieth century is, .of course, no argument at all that only a strange or unhealthy mind could believe it then. (Is it really an entirely strange belief to the twentieth century? It could be said that the latter half of this century is increasingly dominated by thoughts of a possible end of human existence on this planet. We live in a time when scientists warn of ecological catastrophe; political leaders worriedly seek to prevent an atomic holocaust; and religious minds, seeing how eruptions of violence and destruction threaten to engulf mankind, talk of the judgment of God upon human folly and sin. Already in 1951 Rudolph Bultman, the German theologian, was saying in Jesus Christ and Mythology (Scribner's Sons, New York, p. 25 f.): "It is possible that the Biblical eschatology may rise again. It will not rise in its old mythological form but from a terrifying vision that modern technology, especially atomic science, may bring about a destruction of our earth. ...") For it was almost an obsession among the greater number of unhappy Jews of Palestine and was a large factor in the lives of the Jews who lived abroad. Not to believe it was unreasonable. In a world where the concept of social evolution and progress did not exist, and where faith in God's direct intervention in human affairs was unquestioned, no pious mind among the Jews doubted that God was soon to work his deliverance, just as he had in the past when his people were suffering beyond endurance.

But in his assessment of the situation Jesus showed originality at more than one point.

A careful examination of his use of the more or less fugitive thought-forms of the eschatology of his time shows that though Jesus shared the general apocalyptic hope, he transformed it. He took the narrowly conceived Messianism of the less universalist Judaism of his day, which hoped principally for the restoration of the kingdom of David, and replaced it with a new form of the old prophetic vision of a world where God's reign would be extended to all lands (see p. 386 f. ). As Jesus reconceived the old vision, the members of the Kingdom would come from everywhere. A passage from "Q" puts it with the utmost directness:

"You must strain every nerve to get in through the narrow door, for I tell you many will try to get in, and will not succeed, when the master of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock on the door, and say, 'Open it for us, sir!' Then he will answer you and say, 'I do not know where you come from. ... Get away from me, all you wrong-doers!' There you will weep and gnash your teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, while you are put outside. People will come from the east and west and the north and south, and take their places in the Kingdom of God. There are those now last who will then be first, and there are those now first who will be last."

Matthew renders part of this passage still more clearly, thus: "I tell you, many will come from the east and from the west and take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven, while the heirs to the kingdom will be driven into the darkness outside, there to weep and grind their teeth!"

As if this were not a drastic enough revision of the current Jewish hopes, Jesus predicted that the earthly center of the Davidic kingdom-Jerusalem and its temple-would be destroyed because the inhabitants of the city had not repented. Only repentance would save them, or anyone. Since outcasts, publicans, harlots, and other sinners showed more signs of repentance than the scribes and Pharisees, they would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the so-called servants of God who proudly justified themselves. (God took more pleasure in one sinner who repented than in ninety-nine just persons who saw no need of repentance. Matthew's paraphrase of the Lukan beatitudes is therefore not false to Jesus conviction: it is the pure in heart who shall see God; it is the meek who shall inherit the earth.)

Jesus also deviated from the general thinking by teaching that while the Kingdom in its fullness was still in the future, it was in a real sense already present. He told doubters that if "by the finger of God" he now cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God had already come upon them. He answered some Pharisees who asked when the Kingdom of God was coming, "The Kingdom of God is in your midst!"A13 He felt that he and his disciples had within them the mysterious power that one sees in a little bit of yeast that can leaven a large measure of flour, or in a mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, that can grow into a tree in which birds can roost.

And this brings us to the very knotty problem of Jesus' conception of his own relationship with God. Did he consider himself the Son of Man and Son of God in a special sense? Did he think of himself as the Messiah from the time of his baptism, or did he grow gradually into the conviction that he was the Lord's Anointed? Or did his followers endow him with Messiahship toward the end of his career and after his death, without any intimation from him that this was due him?

These questions are crucial and can perhaps never be answered finally. Nevertheless, some very definite things can be said about Jesus' sense of unique relationship with God.

God was much more to Jesus than a transcendent being to whom one owes a morning and an evening prayer. The intimacy and rapport of his communion with God seemed to surpass anything he experienced among men. In teaching his disciples to pray, he communicated something of this experience to them, but there was as well something incommunicable about it, so that they were reduced to wonder. Whatever his use of the terms Son of Man and the Christ was, it is quite beyond doubt that he knew he was "sent." God had commissioned him to establish his Kingdom. As with Amos, so with Jesus: God "took" him and sent him to men.

Hence he could preach and teach and heal with authority. He could propound a law superseding that of Moses. And he could recite to the congregation in Nazareth the great passage from Isaiah:

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me,

For he has consecrated me to preach the good news to the poor,

He has sent me to announce to the prisoners their release and to the blind the recovery of their sight,

To set the down-trodden at liberty,

To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor!"

and say, "This passage of Scripture has been fulfilled here in your hearing today!"

The sum of the matter is that Jesus had found a master principle for his life and that he was completely possessed by it. The central reality in his environment, the ultimate fact giving religious value and character to his world, was God, and in an act of surrender he gave himself up to the consciousness of the presence and will of God. Thenceforth, completely unified in person and attitude, he went among men, possessed of absolute certitude, never hesitant, never doubting, clothed with power and authority, his whole unified life crying aloud: Nothing is so important to you as that you should hear me, everyone of you: by me God speaks!

B. General Religious Teaching. One thing is obvious in all the teaching Jesus' disciples remembered: the centrality of the religious point of view. From the time of his baptism by John the Baptist, and throughout the rest of his life, the reality of God and of his own intimate relationship with God occupied the central place in Jesus' thinking and determined the consistency of his point of view. He was never moved to set in order his reasons for believing in the reality of God. In that age of universal faith in the divine existence, no one ever asked him to. What men desired to know then was what kind of a god God was, and what, in view of his character, he might be expected to do. On this point Jesus spoke with profound assurance. God was the sovereign moral personality ruling the universe, the moving spirit behind the course and at the end of history, a transcendent being, sternly righteous, who never departed from perfect justice in determining the course of events or the destiny of an individual. Yet God drew near to one bowed down in prayer. God was also forgiving and merciful, primarily occupied with human redemption, in character and action paternal. Jesus' favorite name for God was Father (or Father in Heaven). It is implied in his teaching that though God allows men to make their own decisions and, like the prodigal in the famous parable, take the means at their disposal and waste them in riotous living, he continues to love them throughout the redemptive process of punishment and suffering that inevitably follows and will forgive them when they return to him. God therefore is utterly good as well as holy. Men should trust him beyond all shadow of doubting, be unanxious, and regularly seek spiritual enlightenment through prayer, especially private prayer in one's room or in the solitude of the fields and hill tops.

Jesus' attitude toward nature was conditioned by his conception of God. He 'was truly Jewish in thinking of nature as the stage-setting of the sublime drama of human redemption. Nature was not the ultimate reality. God worked behind and through nature. (One might generalize and say that Jesus was like the Jews in looking through nature at God, and did not follow the Greek tendency to look through the gods at nature.) At the same time it is apparent in Jesus' teaching that he looked at nature directly with delight and trust. The lilies of the field, more beautifully arrayed than Solomon in all his glory, were of God's making and were, like the birds of the heavens-the ravens and sparrows-fully sustained by God's care. Surely, if men would know how to live with each other in the righteousness of God's kingdom, they too would find in nature all they needed. (It is a simplification, but the sense of Jesus' teaching at this point is: the trouble lies in the fact that men seek food and clothing first, but if they would seek first the Kingdom, food and clothing would come in course; that was God's plan. If we shed the thought-forms of Jesus' time, this is at the heart of his faith.)

Jesus' attitude toward his body and the impulses of the natural man within him (to follow the traditional phrasing for a reference to the native impulses of human beings) was similarly confident and trustful, and again typically Jewish. He apparently accepted the body as functionally integrated with the mind and spirit in a working unity .He was no ascetic. He enjoyed wedding feasts and banquets. He never suggested that the body is inherently corrupting and defiling, or that the soul is foully imprisoned in the flesh. The body may indeed become the dangerous instrument of an evil will, or it may be divided between good and evil because the will is so divided. In the latter case, Jesus said, one might use drastic means to regain unity of the personality: "If your foot makes you fall, cut it off.". But on the positive side, his follower, St. Paul, who had received a Jewish training, put the whole matter clearly enough in the suggestion that the body may become the temple of the Holy Spirit. (St. Paul, however, was sufficiently influenced by Greek modes of thought to say elsewhere that the flesh and spirit are "in opposition, so that you cannot do anything you please." ) Jesus, in short, did not distract his followers from the pursuit of personal and social goodness by suggesting that the body is the chief enemy of good and ought first to be subdued.

His attention was directed elsewhere. His primary interest was in man's doing the will of God. (Scholars are correct in saying that Jesus did not seek to do the will of God because he was an eschatologist; he was an eschatologist because he sought to do the will of God. ) The will of God was: that men should become fit for the coming Kingdom of Heaven by living together as persons religiously oriented toward him as sons toward a father and ethically oriented toward each other as brothers. No person was to be excluded from attempting to reach such fitness. No person was natively unworthy either of God's grace or man's fellowship. All through Jesus' teaching appears the concept of the infinite worth of human personality-the principle that is often called today respect for personality. He invoked this principle particularly in the case of little children, but also in. the case of the disinherited, the sinful, and alien folk, with whom he was constantly in association. There were to be no exceptions to the law of love; it was to be interracial and international.

These might be called the universal and fundamental elements in Jesus' religious teaching. They were, of course, clothed in and colored by the thought-forms of his day. That was inevitable.

C. Ethical Teaching. The religious consciousness of Jesus-analogous to that of the prophets-carried over into his ethical teaching. He spoke with the authority of moral assurance. And because he could himself move swiftly and easily from one moral decision to another, without prolonged hesitancy , his teaching contained a constant challenge to will whatever might prepare the way for the coming of the Kingdom of God and to be firm in that will.

Taking for granted their knowledge of the scope and requirements of the Kingdom of God, Jesus expected his followers, as truly religious men to be sincere, immediately and thoroughly sincere in acting on their insight. According to Luke this seemed so urgent a matter to him that once, when he challenged a man to follow him, and the man said, "Let me first go and bury my father," Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead; you must go and spread the news of the Kingdom of God!" Yet another man said to him, "Master, I am going to follow you, but let me first say goodbye to my people at home," to which Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plough, and then looks back, is fitted for the Kingdom of God."

Besides calling for sincerity and their complete self commitment, Jesus asked his followers to put their moral obligations above all social, legal, or ceremonial demands. It was at this point that he felt most critical of the Pharisees. They (One should perhaps note here that Jesus was referring to the Pharisees who had not yielded to the liberals of their own party.) were guilty of certain obvious faults: complacency , the desire for honor and applause, spiritual pride, hypocrisy. But, more profoundly, their gravest shortcoming lay in their neglect of the primary imperatives of the moral law. They had substituted legal and ceremonial practices for a creative and truly regenerating morality .They strained out the gnat, yet swallowed the camel; they cleaned the outside of the cup and the dish, but were themselves full inside of greed and self-indulgence; they were like white-washed tombs, looking well on the outside but full inside of the bones of the dead and all that is unclean. Though they paid tithes on mint, dill, and cummin, they let the weightier matters of the Law go-justice, mercy, and integrity. They took the relatively unimportant for the central and significant, and so their religious position had lost all vital significance.

It was indeed characteristic of Jesus, in all his ethical precepts, to transfer attention from the external features of moral behavior to its inward motivation, the spirit or attitude behind it. To concentrate upon outwardly correct behavior according to Jewish law was perversely short-sighted. Only if one's heart is right and one is in addition sincere in doing as the heart directs can one be called a truly moral person. Spirit and motive are all-important. Good and evil have their origins in the heart.

Before we look at the application of this principle to morality, we should see clearly that Jesus linked it up with a twofold concern: concern for one's own inner integrity and concern for the inner health of others. Woe, said Jesus, to anyone who hurts another at the center of his moral being! All three Synoptic Gospels repeat the solemn warning that anyone who causes a humble believer to fall might better have a millstone hung around his neck and then be thrown into the sea. Harming the moral nature of another is the gravest of crimes.

With the same stress or the inward condition of the personality Jesus restated and then rephrased the old Hebrew laws. Matthew assembles a series of teachings in which Jesus looks behind a prohibited act to the motive that might cause it. Two examples may be cited. There was the law against murder that had been given to the men of old. "But I tell you that anyone who gets angry with his brother. ..and anyone who speaks contemptuously to his brother. ..and anyone who says to his brother 'You cursed fool!' will have to answer for it." There was the law against adultery. "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman with desire has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

But the stress on the spiritual and the inward in morality reached its most significant form in Jesus' teaching about love. This is a teaching that still requires the utmost effort of understanding, for although the command to use the method of love toward friend and foe alike is an absolute principle, its application to the details of conduct is always marked by such relativity that sincere Christians often differ in their judgments as to what that conduct should be.

The absolute principle is contained in the familiar words:

You have heard that [the men of old] were told, "You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, so that you may show yourselves true sons of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on bad and good alike, and makes his rain fall on the upright and the wrongdoers. ...You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is.

You must always treat other people as you would like to have them treat you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

"You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole mind." That is the great, first command. There is a second like it: "You must love your neighbor as you do yourself." These two commands sum up the whole of the Law and the Prophets.

Recent studies of his disciples' understanding of Jesus' teaching about the love of God and the love of man clearly show that to them God's love for man is so boundless and unlimited that it is poured out on good and bad alike without regard to merit or need and does not diminish when it gets a bad reception. It hates evil, but it loves persons with the same unqualified good will with which a mother loves her child or the father in the parable loved the prodigal son. It was understood that every follower of Christ must love his fellow-men, regardless of merit or desert, in the same unqualified fashion. Evil must be opposed with vigor, but persons must be loved unendingly and with an unlimited capacity to forgive.

The application of this principle to the details of conduct must be left to the judgment of the moment, for the moment often contains unpredictable surprises, and one finds himself faced with the quandary , "Which side shall I take in this conflict between groups of my fellow-men? What is evil here, and what is good? (Or, "Which is the lesser evil?") And what form of opposition to evil must I adopt that will be consistent with inclusive love for all?" It cannot be said that Jesus' teaching, as it has been preserved, deals specifically with such a dilemma. Just the central principle is stated, and the application of it at any juncture is left to the conscience of the individual who espouses it.

In one direction, however, clear guidance is given. The hard rule is laid down that one should not resist with violence evil done to one's own self.

You have heard that [the men of old] were told, " An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But 1 tell you not to resist injury, but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other to him too; and if anyone wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat too.

The correct interpretation of these words would seem to be, do not engage in embittering and futile personal retaliation; it will only add to the moral confusion if one answers a personal injury with some similar one. Rather, then, one should endure a wrong without any display of vengefulness or hatred, and without doing the things that would prolong the bad situation indefinitely, with no improvement. Yet, on the other and more positive side, the wrong should be endured without moral surrender or compromise. The wrong-doer should be made to understand that his wrong-doing is being resisted, man to man, yet only with answering goodness, immediately expressed by a gesture-the turning of a cheek, the giving of a coat,. the second mile-symbolizing with shattering clearness the complete willingness of the wronged individual to live in fellowship with the wrong-doer, if possible.

A complementary teaching warns against rash or ill-considered criticism of another's conduct. For one thing, it is all too often true that the rash critic is himself in need of moral correction. For another, it is always best to be generous and thus call forth love from others.

Pass no more judgments upon other people, so that you may not have judgment passed upon you. ...Why do you keep looking at the speck in your brother's eye, and pay no attention to the beam that is in your own? How can you say to your brother, "Just let me get that speck out of your eye," when all the time there is a beam in your own? You hypocrite! First get the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see to get the speck out of your brother's eye.

You must be merciful just as your Father is. Do not judge others. ...Excuse others. ...Give, and they will give to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, they will pour into your lap. For the measure you use with others they in turn will use with you. In other words, goodness in any form has an all conquering power to call forth a response of the same kind.

The Growth of Opposition

The furor of excitement and interest that attended the journeys of Jesus through the towns and villages of Galilee attracted the attention of the Pharisees and Sadducees in Jerusalem. The former as guardians of the Law and the latter as guardians of the temple sent investigators to observe Jesus and render a full report of him. The report when it came in was adverse. Thereupon selected Pharisees and Sadducees were sent to Galilee to heckle and oppose him. Verbal encounters between them and Jesus became frequent and always threw the radical tendency of Jesus' proposals into sharp focus. A typical encounter occurred when, in passing through the wheat fields on the Sabbath, Jesus' disciples began to pick the heads of the wheat as they made their way through. The Pharisees protested against this as a breaking of the Sabbath law forbidding the gathering of produce from the fields. Jesus retorted: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." The Pharisees would not have denied the truth of this assertion, but they disliked its radical tone. They were critical also of other elements in Jesus' teaching. Because physicians were prohibited from working on the Sabbath day, they attacked Jesus' healings on the Sabbath. On more than one occasion they obliged Jesus to defend himself on this score. They noticed, too, that some of his disciples ate their food without first giving their hands a ceremonial washing to purify them, and accused Jesus of allowing the laxity. Jesus replied: "Listen to me all of you, and understand this. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can pollute him. It is what comes out of a man that pollutes him." Asked by his disciples to explain, he said: "It is from inside, from men's hearts, that designs of evil come; immorality, stealing, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, indecency , envy, abusiveness, arrogance, folly-all these evils come from inside, and they pollute a man."

What offended the Pharisees most, however, was the freedom with which Jesus interpreted the Law and the Prophets without respecting tradition. Too often the formula that Matthew uses in recording the Sermon on the Mount appeared in Jesus' discourse: "You have heard that the men of old were told. ..but I tell you. ..." In short, Jesus had his authority from within. Some Pharisees pitched on this with eagerness. They began to go among the people, zealously spreading the rumor that Jesus' eloquence and ability to draw the people away from the Pharisaic line of reasoning to a broad and (to their mind) dangerously free point of view were proof that he was possessed by an evil spirit that had entered into him. His apparent sincerity was the result of delusion; in truth he was going against the revelation of God, contradicting Moses, and leading the people astray.

The rumor that Jesus was "possessed" was implanted at Nazareth. When he returned to his home town and taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath day, he wondered at the lack of faith. " A prophet is treated with honor everywhere except in his native place and among his relatives and at his home," he is reported to have said. Mark records that on an earlier occasion his relatives had cpme to Capernaum to stop him because, being not yet won over, they were alarmed at his behavior. The story has a grim note:

His mother and his brothers came. And they stood outside the house and sent word in to him to come outside to them. There was a crowd sitting around him when they told him,

"Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you."

He answered,

"Who are my mother and my brothers?"

And looking around at the people sitting about him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

The only answer that Jesus could make to the open accusations against him was, "How can Satan drive Satan out? ...If Satan has rebelled against himself and become disunited, he cannot last." But the Pharisees brushed this aside.

Many of the common people began therefore to fall away from Jesus, in doubt and disappointment. They had been so often deceived and misled; were they being imposed on once more? The enemies of Jesus redoubled their attacks, and threats against his life began to be breathed.

It was under these circumstances that Jesus made his way northwestward into the regions about Tyre and Sidon that were outside of Palestine, and then into southern Syria. This retirement to the north was apparently for the purpose of gaining time to consider further fateful decisions and to prepare his disciples for them. The Twelve were with him when he reached the inland town of Caesarea Philippi. (The capital of the Tetrarchy of Philip.) Here the Gospels tell us there occurred the famous confession of Peter. Jesus said to them, "Who do people say that I am?" They said to him, "John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and others that you are one of the prophets." (It was thus clear that the people had not thought he was the Messiah.) "But," he said, "who do you say I am?" Peter answered: "You are the Christ." The clear implication here is that this is the first time that any of the disciples had called Jesus specifically the Messiah. (It is important to observe that this story-and indeed the whole account of the so-called retirement to the north-has been questioned by many scholars as a reading back of post-resurrection realizations (that, for instance, the message ofJesus was to the whole of mankind, or that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and had fulfilled all the Old Testament prophecies) into Jesus' lifetime.

This reading back seems especially the case of Matt. 16:15 £, most scholars affirm. There we read: "He said to them, 'But who do you say I am?' Simon Peter answered, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!' Jesus answered, 'Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for human nature has not disclosed this to you, but my Father in heaven! But I tell you, your name is Peter, a rock [petros], and on this rock I will build my church [ ecclesia ], and the powers of death shall not subdue it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you forbid on earth will be held in heaven to be forbidden, and whatever you permit on earth will be held in heaven to be permitted." In the next chapter we shall see how important this passage has been historically, but New Testament scholars accept it only with the greatest reserve, if at all, as a post resurrection interpolation, because there exists no solid evidence elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus foresaw the rise of the church after his death or used the Greek term ecclesia..) The account then goes on to say that Jesus warned the Twelve not to say this about him to anyone, and he went on to tell them that he must go to Jerusalem and face suffering and death for the consummation of his mission. The frightened protest of the Twelve, voiced by Peter, met with his stern rebuke. This final step had now become necessary. He began to make his way steadily and quietly toward Jerusalem, timing himself to arrive during the Passover Festival.

Passion Week and Crucifixion

Jews from allover the world had come to Jerusalem to attend the great annual festival of the Passover. The Roman procurator, Pilate, had moved up to the city from the coastal town of Caesarea to be on hand to see order kept and to quell any attempted uprising. Herod Antipas had come down from Galilee to enjoy the festivities and to go through the motions of being a faithful Jew. There was no room in the inns. The Galileans came prepared to live in tents in the valley between the city and the Mount of Olives. Many of them knew Jesus and would welcome him if he put in an appearance. On a borrowed colt, he rode down the Mount of Olives, accompanied by his disciples, and into the city. The Galileans greeted him with shouts of joy and spread palm branches in the way, but the people of the city said, "Who is this?" and the people in the procession responded, "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee!"

With his disciples, Jesus did a startling thing. He went to the temple and overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove out the pigeon-dealers and all who were buying or selling things in the precincts of the temple. He cried out: "Does not the Scripture say, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a robbers' cave." This act must have had wide popular support, for the authorities did nothing in direct reprisal. However (at the behest of a law-and-order-conscious Pilate?), the Jewish leaders began verbal hostilities, in the hope of discrediting him before the people. For several days, while he taught in the temple, they attempted to trap him into some damaging utterance, but he eluded them. He urged the plain people to join his movement as the inauguration of the true Kingdom of God.

His opponents damaged him in the people's eyes, however, when he refused to make a declaration against paying the poll-tax to the Roman emperor. Presented with the dilemma, "Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" he made the disappointing reply, "Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give God what belongs to God!" The sheer weight of the opposition to him must have impressed the people unfavorably; even the Herodians joined in the opposition. Seeing that this was so, Jesus began to tell the people, in pungent parables, that though the Jews had received the first invitation to sit at God's banquet table, now because they had refused the invitation, God was going to bring in to the feast of the Kingdom outcasts and aliens. Matthew represents Jesus as saying pointedly to the Sadducees and Pharisees, "I tell you, the tax-collectors and prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God ahead of you. ...The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and given to a people that will produce its proper fruit."

THE VIA DOLOROSA. The steep street in Jerusalem, said to have been the one along which Jesus attempted to carry his cross before he fell under its weight, is visited on Good Friday by a group of Franciscan monks, who are shown kneeling at one of the traditional Stations of the Cross. (Courtesy of the Arab Information Center.)

All the evangelists agree that Jesus knew the opposition would contrive his death and that he prepared himself for it. In their treatment of events they clearly reflect the consuming interest of the early Christians in these final hours and especially in the Last Supper in an upper room in Jerusalem. As the early Christians told and retold the story, Jesus not only foresaw his death but knew who should betray him, and he performed a simple ceremony, during that last meal, to bring home to the Twelve the significance of his death.

As they were eating, he took a loaf and blessed it, and he broke it in pieces and gave it to them saying,

"Take this. It is my body."

And he took the wine cup and gave thanks and gave it to them and they all drank from it. And he said to them,

"This is my blood."

Later, in the Garden of Gethesemane, he was betrayed by Judas to a crowd of men with swords and clubs. If this is a correct description of the arresting force, then Pilate and the Jewish leaders collaborated in the arrest, for the swords would have been borne by Roman soldiers and the clubs by Jewish temple police. Had Pilate asked the Jewish authorities to arrest and question Jesus, because he seemed to be clearly a disturber of the peace, at a time when insurrectionary riots were to be feared? Did he urge them to bring an indictment before him on which he could legally act? Whatever the reasons, Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin and after examination turned over to Pilate as a politically dangerous person who made claims for himself that stirred up the people and involved him in anti-Roman activity. But Pilate passed Jesus over to Herod Antipas, as the governor of Galilee, and Herod sent Jesus back to Pilate. The latter endeavored to procure Jesus' release, the early Christians asserted, by offering him to the crowd in his courtyard as the prisoner to be released to them for that year. But the crowd cried for the release of Barabbas, known to them as a violent insurrectionist. (The Gospels say that Pilate was convinced of Jesus' innocence and tried to have him freed However, many recent scholars, aware that the Gospels lean over backward to exonerate Pilate at the expense of the Jews, argue strongly for the inherent improbability of this story. The trial and condemnation of Jesus by the Sanhedrin present many difficulties. Presumably the trial was held at night and, more-over, during a sacred time, against all custom; and its undue haste was in violation of regular procedure. Had the Sanhedrin wished to charge Jesus with violation of religious law, such a charge would not have been actionable under Roman law, which did not condemn people for religious differences. These circumstances make the story seem a distortion, if not an outright invention, of resentful early Christians. The execution of Jesus by crucifixion-a Roman practice--can be sufficiently accounted for by saying it was the result of a decision by the Romans, and of Pilate particularly, to rid themselves of a trouble-maker in a critical and explosive time. But the facts are unclear.)

Pilate then turned Jesus over to a guard of Roman soldiers to be crucified. At three o'clock, in the afternoon, forsaken by all but the women who would not leave him, amidst a howling mob for whom he breathed out the prayer, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," he cried out with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and, resigning himself into God's care, expired.

No single death in the world's history has so affected the human imagination. To the Christians who have used the cross as a symbol of their faith, it has seemed that in his willingness to suffer death for the redemption of his fellow-men Jesus has given to them their clearest insight into the quality of the redemptive love of God himself.

To avoid having the body hanging on the cross over the Sabbath day, Joseph of Arimathaea, a member of the Sanhedrin, offered the use of his empty tomb, and the body of Jesus was taken there.

The Religious Development of Christianity

To the Christians of the first century, the events that followed upon the death of Jesus were of greater importance than those that preceded it. it was true for them that the life and teachings of Jesus were of priceless value for their daily life and thought; but yet his resurrection from the dead was of higher value still, for it was their proof of his living reality as a person, that is, as the undying Lord of Life who was the assurance of their own immortality and the pledge of their unbreakable spiritual oneness with God the Father.

I The Apostolic Age

According to the testimony of the Gospels, at the time of Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples scattered and fled. None of them, except John, dared draw near to the place of crucifixion. Peter had waited nearby while Jesus was being tried, but on being identified by a maid‑servant in the courtyard of the high priest as a follower of Jesus, he denied it. Sick with despair and fear, the disciples remained in hiding during the Sabbath day. On the morning of the third day some of the women, before starting back to Galilee, sought out the tomb to which the body of Jesus had been taken. They found it empty.

The Resurrection

They reported extraordinary appearances of Jesus to them, as a result of which the despair of Jesus' followers gave way to a jubilant confidence and faith that were to spread a great new religion throughout the Mediterranean world.

The earliest extant account of the appearances of Jesus after the resurrection is that of St. Paul. About the year 52 A.D. he wrote to the church he had founded in Corinth:

Now I want to remind you, brothers ... [that] I passed on to you, as of first importance, the account I had received, that Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures foretold, that he was buried, that on the third day he was raised from the dead, as the Scriptures foretold, and that he was seen by Cephas [Peter], and then by the Twelve. After that he was seen by more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, although some of them have fallen asleep. (The early Christians spoke of death as "going to sleep" until the judgment Day.) Then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles, and finally he was seen by me also, as though I were born at the wrong time.

If we analyze this statement, and raise the question, what did Paul "see" when Jesus appeared to him, we find it striking indeed that, in the discussion of the resurrection body to which he proceeds, he strongly implies that Jesus rose in a spiritual body, not in a physical one. "It is so with the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in decay, it is raised free from decay. . . . It is a physical body that is sown, it is a spiritual body that is raised. . . . I can tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot share in the Kingdom of God, and decay will not share in what is imperishable. "

This is not the view of Luke and John, who say that Jesus' resurrection body was a physical one, nor is it what the Church later declared; but it is worth noting that one who was converted perhaps as early as two years after Jesus' death should hold it.

Pentecost

The resurrection appearances convinced the disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead so that he might soon return on the clouds of heaven as the promised Son of Man who should judge the nations at the great assize of the last day. His mission on earth, they now believed, had been to prepare the way for his second coming. So all the disciples who could do so, about 120 in number, left Galilee and went to live in Jerusalem, where they met in a large upper room for prayer and counsel. The Book of Acts says that among them were Mary, Jesus' mother, and his brothers. The Apostles were the official leaders of the group, but James, Jesus' brother, soon became a prominent figure.

The next great moment in their common experience is thus recorded:

On the day of the Harvest Festival [the Jewish festival the Greek‑speaking Christians called Pentecost], they were all meeting together, when suddenly there came from the sky a sound like a violent blast of wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And they saw tongues like flame separating and settling one on the head of each of them, and they were all filled with the holy Spirit and began to say in foreign languages whatever the Spirit prompted them to utter.

To the early Christians the resurrection was their proof of the truth of the Gospel, and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was their guarantee that the power that was in Jesus Christ their Lord was in them too. The Apostles now took courage and began preaching boldly in the streets where but a few weeks before Jesus had encountered an opposition that had ended in his crucifixion.

They met with startling success. Hundreds of converts joined them. The Pharisees and Sadducces in alarm arrested Peter and John, brought them before the Sanhedrin, and ordered them to cease speaking as they did "in the name of Jesus." But on their release they continued their preaching undeterred. Once more they were arrested, with others of their number, and haled before the Sanhedrin. Reminded that they had been ordered to refrain from speaking in the name of Jesus, Peter and the Apostles, we read, answered: "We must obey God rather than men." A' During the disturbance that followed, one of the leading Pharisees checked the rising anger of the other members of the Sanhedrin by suavely suggesting that fanatical Messianic movements always destroy themselves in time; one may therefore safely let them alone. This man was Gamaliel, a grandson of Hillel, and like his grandfather one of the great teachers of the rabbinical schools. He proceeded to draw upon history for his argument: "Men of Israel, take care what you propose to do with these men. For some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be a person of importance, and a group of men numbering some four hundred joined him. But he was killed and all his followers were dispersed and disappeared. After him, at the time of the census, Judas of Galilee appeared, and raised a great following, but he too perished, and all his followers were scattered. So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this idea or movement is of human origin, it will come to naught, but if it is from God, you will not be able to stop it”. This counsel prevailed; the authorities contented themselves with flogging the Apostles, in order to disgrace them in the eyes of the people, and let them go.

The Jerusalem Church

Two factors seem to have saved the Jerusalem church from annihilating persecution: first, the Apostles were followers of a dead leader and might be expected to lose their fervor with the passage of time, and second, the Apostles obviously kept all the provisions of the Jewish Law. In fact, the Palestinian followers of Jesus went daily to the Temple and honored the Law of Moses as much as any Jew, requiring circumcision of every convert not already circumcised, as if they were just a Jewish sect. But they had made some unorthodox additions to the accepted faith and practice. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in the Jewish scriptures and that he would shortly reappear on the clouds of heaven as the Son of Man. They met in private homes, such as the home of John Mark's mother in Jerusalem, for group gatherings, which were devoted to "the breaking of bread and prayers." The believers shared everything they had with one another, sold their property and belongings, and divided the proceeds according to their special needs, and they all had a vigorous proselyting spirit and baptized their converts.

But if it appeared true of the Palestinian followers of Jesus that they acted as if they were just a Jewish sect, this was not true of all the converts. Some began to take the liberties Jesus had taken with the Law of Moses. There were synagogues in Jerusalem for the Jews who had returned from foreign lands and spoke Greek, and these Greek‑speaking Jews were notably less impressed by the temple sacrifices than the Palestinian Jews and more given than the latter to stressing the passages in the prophetic writings condemning externalism in the practice of the Law. So, when any of the Greek‑speaking Jews became Christians, they eagerly applied the more radical passages from the Prophets to the life and sayings of Jesus and stressed Jesus' criticism of the practices of the Sadducees and Pharisees.

Tension appeared not only between these Christians and the Jewish authorities, but within the Christian group itself. On the one hand, the Apostles began to lose touch with the Greek‑speaking radicals. On the other hand, the latter made complaints against the Palestinian Christians "that their [i.e., the Greek speaking] widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food”. To allay this tension, the whole Christian group met and solved the problem by appointing from their number seven men who were not Apostles to take charge of the distribution of food and the keeping of accounts. One of these seven was a Greek‑speaking man by the name of Stephen, who was a leader of the more libertarian wing of the Christian movement. All went well until the Jewish authorities brought him before the Sanhedrin, condemned him, and stoned him to death.

This violent action signalized the outbreak of a great persecution of the church in Jerusalem. The Jewish authorities apparently directed it against those who did not keep the Jewish Law, for the Book of Acts says, "They were all scattered over Judea and Samaria, except the apostles."

Thenceforth the Christian movement in Palestine was to have two parties within it, which never lost their sense of being bound together under the name of Christ, but which struggled with each other for the right to be the final interpreters of what Christianity meant. On the one side stood James, the brother of Jesus, now the chief "pillar" of the Jerusalem church, and with him most of the Apostles. They held that Christians must not only follow Christ, but please God by also obeying the Law of Moses. One of the requirements for which they stood was circumcision, and they sent out their emissaries to the outlying churches to insist that this requirement be met before baptism. It was also considered necessary to observe the distinctions between clean and unclean and to refuse to sit down to a meal with the uncircumcised. Although some of the members of the Jerusalem church showed a willingness to compromise, the extremists carried their insistence to great lengths. They are often called the Judaizers. In time they formed an exclusive group of Jewish Christians called Ebionites or Nazarenes.

Among the Jerusalem Christians who were disposed to make compromises was Peter. He saw that the Holy Spirit had descended freely upon the more liberal Christians. What was more, on visits to the coast towns he found the new faith spreading among uncircumcised foreigners, and the Holy Spirit had come upon them too. He approved of their being baptized and sat down to eat with them without being overly careful concerning the Jewish dietary restrictions. But when he visited Antioch, he was severely criticized by the Judaizers who were sent to keep an eye on him, and thereafter vacillated before his narrower brethren, without being able to take a bold stand.*

Yet the more liberal elements in the Christian movement were to win the day and remake the heretical Jewish sect into a powerful independent religion that was to spread rapidly through the Gentile world. The leader of the liberals was their one‑time fiercest persecutor, a man from Tarsus called Saul (or Paul).

Paul and the Spread of Christianity to Europe

Paul has been frequently called "the second founder of Christianity. (Subsequently, he went to Rome, where presumably he was able to follow a freer course.) Certain it is that he fought and defeated the Judaizers, who thereafter steadily lost importance in the Christian movement, but more important, he developed certain basic theological concepts for stating the spiritual effects of Jesus upon the lives of his followers, concepts that enabled Christianity to win the Gentile world. To that world he brought intact the religion of Jesus himself in the vehicle of a faith about Jesus as Lord.

All this Paul accomplished only after an early career of fierce opposition to Christianity. He was a non-Palestinian Jew, born, about the same time as Jesus, in the town of Tarsus in Cilicia, then an important city and the seat of a university where the Stoic and Cynic philosophies were taught. Probably Paul here learned something of the Greek mystery‑cults and the desire of their adherents to achieve immortality by identification with dying and rising savior‑gods. His family was apparently well‑off, and presumably had purchased Roman citizenship; he therefore had the legal status of a free‑born Roman. But he reacted adversely to the religious ideas of his Hellenistic environment and remained a strict Pharisee. Filled with an earnest desire for "the righteousness which is from the Law," he went to Jerusalem and "sat at the feet" of Gamaliel, the leading Pharisaic teacher. OC this period of his life he later wrote: "I surpassed many of my own age among my people in my devotion to Judaism, I was so fanatically devoted to what my forefathers had handed down”. He joined furiously in the persecution of the early Church. He was present as an approving spectator at the stoning of Stephen.

When the Christian believers fled northward to Damascus and beyond, he went to the high priest and asked for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, where he probably lived, "so that if he found any men or women there who belonged to the Way, he might bring them in chains to Jerusalem." "But," says the Book of Acts, "as he was approaching Damascus, a sudden light flashed around him from heaven, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute Me?’” Blinded by the bright vision, Paul was led by the hand into Damascus, where for three days he could not see and neither ate nor drank. He believed that the resurrected Jesus, in whom the Christians now centered their faith, had appeared also to him.

So vast a change in Paul's life was now made necessary that he went off into upper Arabia to think things through. Then he returned to Damascus. He became a Christian leader not only there but also far to the north at Antioch, the third largest city in the Roman empire, where the new religion was making many converts among the Gentiles. Except for a two‑week visit to Jerusalem after three years to become personally acquainted with Peter and James, he confined himself to the districts of Syria and Cilicia. Then he set out on his famous missionary journeys, accompanied by men like Barnabas and John Mark. On his first journey he sailed to the island of Cyprus, traveled through it from end to end, embarked for Asia Minor, and established self‑propagating Christian groups at Perga, Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. On his second journey he revisited the churches he had already established and then proceeded to Troas (ancient Troy), whence he sailed to Macedonia on the continent of Europe. After establishing congregations in the principal cities along the coast, he went south to Athens and then to Corinth, where he founded an important church. On his return he sailed to Ephesus in Ionia before going home. His third journey took him around the same circuit.

Although he suffered from some physical malady, which he refers to as "a thorn in the flesh," in these journeys he displayed tremendous energy, zeal, and courage. His strength abounded, he said, because when he felt physically weak, he threw himself upon the strength of Christ, who dwelt within him.

Five times (he wrote) I have been given one less than forty lashes, by the Jews. I have been beaten three times by the Romans, I have been stoned once, I have been ship‑wrecked three times, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; with my frequent journeys, [I have been] in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from the heathen, danger in the city, danger in the desert, danger at sea, danger from false brothers, through toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, through hunger and thirst, often without food, and exposed to cold."

Two great spiritual facts animated Paul and gave him his dynamic faith: the "Lordship of Christ Jesus," and "the freedom of the Spirit."

He came to know the freedom of the spirit during the early days of his conversion. The Christians of Syria and Cilicia were for the most part uncircumcised and without the knowledge of the Jewish Law. In his great hunger to know the secret of true righteousness, Paul had long held the Law (the Torah) to be the one and only condition of a good life enjoying the Lord's favor. But now he was surprised and delighted to discover that those who followed Christ were, quite apart from the Law, more profoundly good than those who obeyed the Law. The righteousness that was in Christ was greater than the righteousness that was from the Law. The reason was that Christ changed a man's inward disposition and gave him the right relationship to his fellow men and to God, so that he did what is right from the heart, without having to refer constantly to outward legal requirements. Love was the fulfillment of the Law. Therefore the weary bondage of the Law could be cast aside for the freedom of the spirit. There was no further need, Paul declared, for circumcision, dietary restrictions, and distinctions between clean and unclean.

It was at this point that the Judaizers came into conflict with Paul. He had it out with Peter, James, and John at Jerusalem. In Galatians 2 he implies that obedience to Jewish law had become so critical an issue that, after fourteen years, he felt impelled to explain to the Jerusalern leaders the message he preached to the Gentiles. By God's power, he claimed, he had been made an apostle to the Gentiles, just as Peter was an apostle to the Jews. Peter, James, and John accepted his message and mission and shook hands, asking only that Christians in the Gentile world remember the needy in Jerusalem. Paul eagerly agreed.

The Lordship of Christ was another article of faith at the heart of Paul's conviction. To him it meant more even than the Messiahship of Jesus. He had joyously accepted Jesus as the Messianic savior who had inaugurated the Kingdom of God and would soon return on the clouds of heaven to judge the quick and the dead on the last day. But as a missionary to the Gentiles (to whom the Messiahship of Jesus, a purely Jewish concept, meant little), he was quick to see and to herald the power of Christ to redeem individuals from sin and death by uniting them to himself by faith. And here Paul made an original contribution to the interpretation of Christ's death and resurrection. Christ, he ardently declared, was a divine being who possessed the nature of God but who had humbled himself and come down from heaven and assumed human form, and, humbling himself still further, died on the cross, in order that he might rise again, after his victory over death, to the right hand of God as the Lord of life and death. In setting forth this new and glorious mystery, Paul ascribed unqualified divinity to the preexistent Christ: "He is a likeness of the unseen God, born before any creature, for it was through him that everything was created in heaven and earth, the seen and the unseen, angelic thrones, dominions, principalities, authorities,‑all things were created through and for him."

By this great conception ‑ through which Paul expressed his intuition that Jesus was the expression in human history of God's redemptive spirit and love at work since the dawn of creation ‑ Paul quite captivated the Gentiles. They had been brought up under the influence of the Greek mystery religions, which, as we have seen, satisfied the yearning for immortality by providing an experience of union with a resurrected savior‑god, thereby deifying and immortalizing the corrupt and perishable self. (To help them to understand properly the significance of the redemption which Christ wrought in their lives, Paul put it thus: by the mystical experience of baptism, those who believe may identify themselves with Christ in his death and resurrection, for "through baptism we have been buried with him in death, so that just as he was raised from the dead through the Father's glory, we too may live a new life." "You must think of yourselves as dead to sin but alive to God, through union with Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:4, 1 1). ) But Paul's conception was far more profound and regenerative than any they had known. He not only offered assurance of immortality through union with Christ but provided a means of salvation from guilt and sin in this life. For Christ the deified Lord of life and death had been the blameless Jesus of Nazareth of Galilee, who had proclaimed a high and noble ethics that led to individual and social remaking on the moral plane. Thus mysticism and ethics were in Paul's teaching one and inseparable. To follow Christ meant not only identifying oneself with him through baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the ecstasy of speaking with tongues, but even more, doing as Jesus did, living as he did. (If I can speak the languages of men and even of angels, but have no love, I am only a noisy gong or a clashing cymbal.... I want you all to speak ecstatically.... But in public worship I would rather say five words with my understanding so as to instruct others also than ten thousand words in an ecstasy" (I Cor. 13:1; 14:5, 19).)

This was important in the development of Christianity, for here Paul saved it from an extreme‑that of non‑ethical mysticism‑as dangerous to its balance and truth as the extreme of legalism from which he had earlier rescued it.

The letters that Paul sent to the churches he established furnish abundant proof of the importance he attached to ethics. With eagle eye he watched over his congregations and scolded them like a father for every infraction of the high Christian code of morality. He was far from believing that a capacity for religious ecstasy covers a multitude of sins.

His generosity toward his Christian brethren in Jerusalem brought to a sudden end his missionary career. He had taken upon himself the obligation to raise a collection for the poor in the Jerusalem church, and having done so, carried the funds to Jerusalem himself Here he ran afoul of the Jews, who mobbed him and caused his arrest. As a Roman citizen, he appealed to Caesar, anxious as he was at any rate to get to Rome. He was taken under arrest to the Imperial City, but if he expected to be released after his trial, he was disappointed. The authorities continued to hold him in custody. He had time to write letters to churches and individuals, but presumably after a period of confinement whose length is not known, he was executed as a troublesome character, a disturber of the Roman peace.

But he had by this time fully demonstrated the power of the Christian religion to bring together Jew, Greek, and Roman, legalist, mystic, and rationalist, all under a common sense of their vital spiritual community in Christ. To such of the culturally divided and spiritually drifting people of the Roman Empire as heard them, words like these from the powerful letter to the Ephesians‑a letter that some scholars now attribute to a follower of Paul rather than to him, but that in any case is warmed and vitalized by his spirit contained "good news":

You also were dead because of the offenses and sins in the midst of which you once lived under the control of the present age of the world.... We all lived among them once, indulging our physical cravings and obeying the impulses of our lower nature and its thoughts, and by nature we were doomed to God's wrath like other men. But God is so rich in mercy that because of the great love he had for us, he made us, dead as we were through our offenses, live again with the Christ. It is by his mercy that you have been saved.... It is not by your own action, it is the gift of God. It has not been earned, so that no one can boast of it. ~ . .

So remember that you were once physically heathen ..... At that time you had no connection with Christ, you were aliens to the commonwealth of Israel ... ; with no hope and no God in all the world. But now through your union with Christ Jesus you who were once far away have through the blood of Christ been brought near. For he is our peace. He has united the two divisions, and broken down the barrier that kept us apart; ... for it is through him that we both with one Spirit are now able to approach the Father. So you are no longer foreigners or strangers, but you are fellow citizens of God's people and members of his family. All

II The Early Church (50‑150 A.D.)

The World‑Spread of the Early Christian Communities

But in calling Paul "the second founder of Christianity," we should not exaggerate his immediate influence. Before his time other leaders than he had successfully carried Christianity to Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. Besides the Apostles we hear of Barnabas, Symeon Niger, Lucius the Cyrenian, Manaen, "who had been brought up with Herod the governor," Apollos, and others, all actively engaged in organizing new Christian churches. So rapidly, in fact, were Christian converts springing up along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean that it was Paul's ambition to proceed from Rome to Spain in order to carry Christianity to the farthest bounds of the known world.

The chief successes of early Christianity were in the commercial centers of the Roman empire, largely because there were synagogues, or at least Jewish quarters, in them, and the Christian message could make its best appeal in places where the Jewish religion was already known. But when the orthodox Jewish communities rejected the new faith and refused to harbor it, independent Christian communities sprang up among the tradesmen and working people of the great cities and towns, first among the Greek‑speaking citizens and then among those who spoke other languages. And not only did the new religion spread westward; it was also carried to the Tigris ‑Euphrates valley and into Ethiopia.

Opposition and Persecution

By the middle of the second century the Christian religion had become a major problem to the governors of the Roman provinces, especially in Syria and Asia Minor. For one thing, the Romans disliked mystery and secrecy. For another, the Christians considered themselves in the world but not of it. Though a few of them here and there joined the armed services of the Roman empire and took office in the administrative branches of the government, the greater number dissociated themselves from all worldly power. In purely secular matters they were obedient, but on the whole indifferent, to the civil authority. But they absolutely refused to take part in the official patriotic cult that required citizens to take an oath "by the genius" (the divine spirit) of the emperor and to offer incense and wine in honor of the emperor's godhead on the altar before his image. This refusal was a particularly sore point with the Roman administrative officials, less for religious reasons than because it signified disloyalty and rebellion. Moreover, the Christians met secretly, almost always at daybreak or at night, because so many of them were employed during the day. Distorted conceptions of their worship "orgies" were current. The Christians were accused of sexual perversions ("love-feasts") and cannibalism, the eating of human flesh. ("Take, eat; this is my body . . . this is my blood.") In addition, their staying away from theaters, gladiatorial combats, and popular festivals was interpreted as narrow and intolerant and aroused rage. "The Christians to the lions!" became a common cry.

A classic expression of official perplexity is contained in the letters of Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (in Asia Minor), to the Roman Emperor Trajan. Wrote he (112 A.D.):

It is my custom, my lord, to refer to you all questions about which I have doubts.... I have no little uncertainty whether pardon is granted on repentance, or whether when one has been a Christian there is no gain to him in that he has ceased to be such; whether the mere name, without crimes, or crimes connected with the name are punished.... Those who were accused before me as Christians ... asserted that the amount of their fault or error was this: that they had been accustomed to assemble on a fixed day before daylight and sing by turns a hymn to Christ as a god; and that they bound themselves with an oath, not for any crime, but to commit neither theft, nor robbery, nor adultery, not to break their word and not to deny a deposit when demanded; after these things were done, it was their custom to depart and meet together again to take food, but ordinary and harmless food; and they said that even this had ceased after my edict was issued, by which, according to your commands, I had forbidden the existence of clubs. On this account I believed it the more necessary to find out from two maid‑servants, who were called deaconesses, and that by torture, what was the truth. I found nothing else than a perverse and excessive superstition. I therefore adjourned the examination and hastened to consult you. The matter seemed to me to be worth deliberation.

Pliny reported, however, that when he found Christians who persisted three times over in saying they were Christians, he ordered them to be executed, "for," said he blandly, "I did not doubt that, whatever it was they admitted, obstinacy and unbending perversity certainly deserve to be punished!" The Romans, on principle, expected obedience.

Christians were publicly done to death in Rome as early as 64 A.D., in the time of Nero. During the century that followed, Roman officials frequently made examples of Christians who refused to worship Caesar's image by throwing them to the lions or burning them at the stake. The number of martyrs was not large, perhaps, but the public commotion was sometimes great and had far‑reaching effects both on the Christians themselves and on the public at large, especially in sharpening the feeling that the Christian religion was to its adherents worth not only living by but dying for as well.

Developments in Worship and Ecclesiastical Organization

Meanwhile, the Christian communities were developing into self‑contained units with an organized life of their own.

At the time of the Apostle Paul, when the Christians were beginning to look upon themselves as a Church called out of the world into a separate fellowship, their services were of two kinds: (i) meetings on the model of synagogue services, open to inquirers as well as believers, and consisting of readings from the Jewish scriptures, (Not until the second century were the Jewish scriptures supplemented with readings from the Gospels and Epistles.) prayer, preaching, and the singing of psalms; and (2) the agape or "love‑feast," for the believers only, an evening meal in which all present shared and during which a brief ceremony, recalling the Last Supper, commemorated the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood. Because this ceremony was couched in terms of thanksgiving, the Greek name for it was eucharist ("the giving of thanks").

As the Christian communities grew larger, the common meal was gradually discontinued as impracticable, and the Lord's Supper was observed thereafter at the conclusion of the public portion of the Sunday services, when the unbaptized withdrew in order that the baptized might celebrate together this inner mystery of the Christian faith.

About the year 150, Justin Martyr (of whom later) described the typical Sunday observances thus:

On the day called Sunday there is a meeting in one place of those who live in cities or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles [the Gospels] or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. When the reader has finished, the president urges and invites [us] to the imitation of these noble things. Then we all stand up together and offer prayers, [After this] bread is brought, and wine and water, and the president . . . sends up prayers and thanksgivings to the best of his ability, and the congregation assents, saying the Amen; the distribution and reception of the consecrated elements by each one takes place and they are sent to the absent by the deacons. Those who prosper, and who so wish, contribute [money], each one as much as he chooses to. What is collected is deposited with the president, and he takes care of orphans and widows, and those who are in want on account of sickness or any other cause, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers who are sojourners among [us].

Entrance into the Christian community was formalized into definite steps. Candidates for church membership, of all ages, were first given a systematic course of instruction and testing (catechization), lasting for several months and ending in the rite of baptism, by immersion or sprinkling. (Commonly, the catechizing was during Lent and the baptizing at Easter.) The believers appeared in white robes for their baptism, and that rite was followed by confirmation, or the laying on of hands, that the Holy Spirit might descend upon each new member. After the laying on of hands came unction (anointing with oil), concluded with making the sign of the cross, while each new member vowed to give up the old gods and the old morality and to follow the law of Christ, in perfect assurance of faith.

At first the churches were loosely organized, but by the end of the first century the congregations were directed by a board of elders, including one or more superintendents or "bishops." These officers were assisted by deacons. Preaching and instruction were still, however, in the hands of prophets and teachers, who either belonged to the congregation or came from elsewhere, perhaps as traveling evangelists. Out of this type of government there very naturally developed a more rigid and centralized form of organization. By the first quarter of the second century we read of congregations being headed by a single bishop, assisted by elders and deacons, and, when this became general, this permanent head of the congregation included among his functions those of teaching and preaching, with the result that the prophets and traveling evangelists of the early Church gradually disappeared from church life.

Doctrinal Developments to the Year 150 A.D.

Growth in doctrine more than matched the growth in institutional forms. By the year 100 A.D. a Christian literature distinct from that of the Old Testament and in some respects consciously designed to serve as a new scripture (it eventually became the New Testament) had come into being. Its appearance had become necessary with the gradual fading of the first generation's expectation of the imminent return of Jesus on the clouds of heaven‑a faith that had once made the writing of a scripture seem superfluous. The eye‑witnesses of Jesus' ministry were rapidly dying off by the time fifty years had passed, and the second‑generation Christians, most of whom now lived far from Jerusalem, demanded a record of the master's life and teachings. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. increased the urgency of this demand among those living outside of Palestine.

In the introduction to the preceding chapter we reviewed the beginning of this literature. Something further needs to be said here about the nature and content of the completed literature that sprang from these beginnings, for each portion of it is significant of the greater and greater estimates placed upon Jesus' teaching and person as time went on, and all combine to give us a sense of the factors, both Jewish and Greek, that operated in the first century of Christian history to make Christianity a great and rich religion.

Of the earliest portions of the New Testament ‑ the Epistles of Paul ‑ we need say nothing more, for their doctrinal significance has already been discussed. So it is to the Gospels that we first turn, for each had a distinct Christological purpose in view.

The Gospel of Mark, the earliest and briefest of the Gospels, was probably written in Antioch (or Rome?) during the years 65‑7o. According to Papias, a Christian writer of the early second century, it was based upon the recollections of St. Peter as set down by John Mark, who had lived in Jerusalem before he came to Antioch. This Gospel shows no interest in Jesus' birth and youth, but begins with his baptism and gives a vivid account of his ministry, with pointed descriptions of his human feelings. But Jesus is much more than an average human being in Mark; he is the Son of God through the experience of divine election at his baptism, and the true Messiah, the "Holy One of God." No doctrine of divine incarnation nor any conception of pre‑existence such as Paul exhibits is found, however.

Matthew and Luke, going further, provide a basis for the doctrine of the incarnation. Both relate the stories of the virgin birth and of supernatural incidents occurring during Jesus' infancy. They concentrate throughout on the divine character of the Messiahship of Jesus and the manner in which, as one who came from heaven, he fulfilled Hebrew prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man to redeem mankind.

But it is in the Fourth Gospel that we find the divine character of Jesus most clearly presented. The writer sought to write a Gospel that would find the living, subjectively experienced Lord of Paul in the historic, objectively known Jesus of the first three Gospels. The fundamental thesis of this Gospel is, "The Word (the Logos) became flesh and blood and lived for a while among us, . . . and we saw the honor God had given him, such honor as an only son receives from his father." Though we are not allowed to forget the man Jesus, who was an objective personage in a world of real persons and things, the divinity of Jesus is the characteristic note of this Gospel. Jesus Christ is above all else "the Son of God." He is more than the Son of God in the Hebrew sense of being the Messiah, for though this simpler Messianic significance is implicit, it is merged, even submerged, in the more comprehensive meanings found in the prologue of the Gospel. There Christ is represented as the visible bodying forth of the creative impulsion (the Logos) of the unseen and eternal Father and the mode or manifestation in a human person of the love of the Father for men. The Fourth Gospel therefore follows Paul in thinking of Christ as personally come from God‑that is, from a state of pre‑existence‑and connects him not only with the work of redemption on earth but with the creation of the world. In the body of the Gospel he is represented as remembering his preincarnate life, or at least that he had a preincarnate life. This pre‑existence, and not his human experience, accounts for his knowledge of God, to whom, therefore, he bears "true" witness. For, having come from heaven, "it is to what he has seen and heard that he gives testimony." What is more, not only are his words "the words of God," but he is himself the Word (the Logos); he is himself that to which he bears witness. To know him is to know the Father.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, written in the decade before the Fourth Gospel, does not use the term logos (Word), but it is apparent that the writer had something like it in mind. In the first sentence he says that God, who spoke fragmentarily through the prophets, has now spoken to us fully "in a Son, whom he had destined to possess everything, and through whom he had made the world." The Son while on earth resembled his human brethren in every respect; he shared their flesh and blood and participated in their nature, even to suffering temptation and agonizing "with tears." But, because in his essential nature he was divine, his spiritual and psychological endowment was unique. The human Jesus and the divine Father were mutually accessible to each other at all times. In this Jesus differed from his brethren, who can have no such free access to the Father without his redemptive mediation as high priest.

A simpler and less doctrinal conception of the person and work of Christ appeared in the epistles of James and Peter and in the non‑canonical writings of the so‑called Apostolic Fathers: Clement of Rome (writing ca. 93‑97), Hermas of Rome (ca. 115‑140), and the authors of such works as The Epistle of Barnabas (ca. 130), Second Clement (ca. 160), and The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles (ca. 130‑160 or earlier). For the most part, these various writings gave expression to a straight‑forward adoration of Christ as the heaven descended revealer of the true nature of God and the giver of a new law of life on the loftiest ethical plane.

Addressed directly not to the religious needs of the growing Christian communities but rather to the world at large were the writings of the Apologists. These were men educated in the best Greek and Roman schools and well versed in ancient philosophy, who sent their defenses of Christianity to the Roman emperors or to other non‑Christians of high rank and reputation. Among their number were Aristides of Athens, Melito, bishop of Sardis, Minucius Felix, a cultivated gentleman of Rome, and most famous of all Justin, called the Martyr because of the nature of his death, who, like his disciple, Tatian, had been successively a Stoic, Aristotelian, Pythagorean, and Platonist. When he turned Christian, he found in his new faith the perfect philosophy. He was far from believing that all other thought‑systems were untrue. The divine Logos was at work in the world before the time of Christ, enlightening Socrates and Heraclitus and imparting truth to such "barbarians" (a truly Greek expression) as the patriarchs of the Old Testament, so that the Greek philosophers and the Hebrew prophets, insofar as the Logos enlightened them, were to this degree Christians before Christ. But Christianity was superior to all other thought‑systems, because the Logos not only spoke through Christ, the Logos was Christ. Christ perfectly revealed the truth of divine reason and was the peerless teacher whom all humanity should accept.

The significance of Justin Martyr and his fellow apologists is that they successfully demonstrated how Christianity, when it chose to appear in Greek dress, could, at whatever sacrifice of its original Hebraic form, not only continue to make a powerful religious appeal but hold its own with any of the classic philosophies of the ancient world‑Platonism and Stoicism especially. It became easier now for Christian writers to invade the field of general philosophy and to speak of the Christian religion as truly universal in its scope and application. Catholic was the word they used.

III The Ancient Catholic Church (150‑1054 A.D.)

The word catholic was first applied to the Christian Church in its meaning of "universal." Descriptively, this was an apt designation for a religious faith that now reached into all the provinces of the empire and into every class of society. But it was too good an adjective to escape a more technical use. It became, in fact, part of the name of the single organized institution that expressed the Christian religion after the middle of the second century. With this name the Catholic Church could stand united in the resolve to maintain itself against its external foes and also to combat heresy and schism within.

In striving to keep both its outer and inner integrity, the ancient Catholic Church developed two things: (i) a system of doctrine, clarified, purged of error, and declared to be orthodox, and (2) an ecclesiastical organization characterized in its own eyes by apostolicity, catholicity, unity, and holiness. We shall now describe the several steps by which these developments were effected.

The Gnostic and Marcionite Heresies

It was Jesus' fortune to appear not only at a time when the Jews were looking for a Messiah but when the rest of the Mediterranean world was seeking an incarnation of godhead and had, at the same time, evolved the concept of the Logos, without realizing with what richness of meaning it might be endowed were it to be applied to a savior‑god appearing in the flesh of a human personality. When Christian thinkers brought the Logos‑concept to bear upon Jesus, a whole theology sprang, almost without effort, into being, a theology that combined in the most satisfactory measure both religion and philosophy. Yet there were dangers in the process. A just balance of elements had to be preserved, or the religious value of the new synthesis would be destroyed. It became the task of the Christian bishops and teachers of the second and third centuries to find that balance and to outlaw all deviations from the orthodox view.

Among the interpretations of the work and person of Christ during the second century that were later declared heretical were the Gnostic and Marcionite doctrines.

The view called Gnosticism (from gnosis, or esoteric knowledge) had a characteristic doctrine running through all its varieties: the Gnostics started with a dualism that radically divided spirit from matter and regarded the material world as so vile and degrading that the impersonal and unknowable God‑the ground of all being, dwelling ineffably in pure light‑could have had nothing to do with making it. In its partially Christianized form, Gnosticism, instead of assimilating philosophy to the Christian religion, adopted the figure of Christ as the final ingredient in a Greco‑Oriental synthesis. Surrounded by a society of male and female spiritual beings, called aeons, the pre‑existent Jesus among them, God dwelt far above the evil world. At a lower level lived and labored the creator of the earth, the son of a fallen aeon, Sophia, who in her fall nonetheless brought light down into the darkness; he is the Yahweh of the Old Testament, a spiritual vulgarian, who produced the evil mass that is the world of matter. The Old Testament and its way of life is hopelessly infected with Yahweh's inferior conception of things. To these Gnostics the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in bringing Adam and Eve to the Tree of Knowledge (that is, of Gnosis!), was a benefactor, not a vile tempter, and did his best to save the parents of the human race from Yahweh's misleading guidance! When Jesus, the compassionate divine aeon, saw how badly things were going on earth, he came down in the masquerade of a body (but his flesh could not have been real, it was appearance merely (This view, called Docetism, was an early heresy, not confined to the Gnostics.) ) and showed the human souls struggling in their defiling envelopes of flesh how, by an ascetic discipline of the body and the acquisition of saving wisdom for the mind, they could free themselves from their bondage in the material world and gain immortality by an escape from the flesh into pure spirituality of being.

Here were doctrines that the Church as a whole felt indeed it could not countenance without violence to its own historic foundations: that God does not control the entire universe, that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is an inferior being, that the Old Testament must be rejected as valueless, that Jesus was not really born and did not truly suffer and die, and that there can be no resurrection of the flesh.

The suggestion that the Old Testament is valueless found, however, a tempestuous advocate in a citizen of Rome called Marcion. Without joining any of the Gnostic schools (which flourished chiefly in Egypt and Asia Minor), he nevertheless followed their lead in excoriating the God of the Old Testament as a just but cruelly legalistic and merciless deity, who, though he created the material world, was of an inferior moral quality. The really good God, a god of love and mercy, who created the invisible, spiritual world, was not known to the prophets of the Old Testament; Christ was the first to reveal him. Men are in bondage to the bodies they have received from the God of the Old Testament, but their souls may find redemption through faith in the God of Jesus. Let them then follow Christ and St. Paul in ascetism, celibacy, and scorn of the physical world and strive to enter the Kingdom of the good God, here and hereafter. Marcion increased the alarm his views created by attempting to provide a scripture for his followers, in doing which he edited and brought together the writings of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, but first expurgated all passages linking Jesus with the God of the Old Testament. Furthermore, he broke away from the church at Rome and organized a new congregation.

This kind of thing aroused the Christian world to inquire into its basic positions.

The Answer of the Church: The Apostles' Creed and the Canon of the New Testament

The first clear voice within the Church to propose a program for dealing with heretical opinions was Irenaeus, a native of Asia Minor and the bishop of Lyons (in the province of Gaul). About 185 A.D. he issued a famous book, Against the Heresies. It was of determinative importance. In it he argued that the sign of a sound Christian doctrine is its apostolicity. The Apostles had perfect knowledge of the Gospel, and what is not in agreement with their teachings as transmitted in the Gospels and Epistles cannot be accepted. By this touchstone Gnosticism and Marcionism stood condemned. To the retort that Jesus must have imparted a private and esoteric teaching to an elect few‑a claim made by the Gnostics‑Irenaeus replied that such private wisdom, if it ever existed, would have had to be handed down through the churches founded by Apostles. Yet, he pointed out, the churches of apostolic foundation had no such traditions. On the whole, then, Irenaeus urged, one must go for sound doctrine to the apostolic writings, the apostolic churches, and their bishops.

This was the answer that appealed to the churches of the West. It was especially pleasing to the church at Rome, where between 150 and 175 A.D. a creed for use at baptism had been framed both to express the faith and to avoid the Gnostic and Marcionite doctrines. It came to be called, in accordance with Irenaeus' criterion of orthodoxy, the Apostles' Creed, and in its early form it ran (the crucial words being here italicized) as follows:

I believe in God the Father Almighty (In order to make the point against the Gnostics clear there was added later the phrase Maker of heaven and earth.)

And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried; the third day he rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, being seated at the right hand of the Father, whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead;

And in the Holy Spirit, holy Church, forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh.'

The later emendations and refinements of this creed sharpened its significance as a summary of orthodox and apostolic doctrine.

Another result of the Church's attempt to define apostolic tradition was an endeavor to fix a canon of authentic scripture. By the end of the second century the present New Testament canon was virtually agreed upon. (This is roughly true, though the canon was not finally fixed until 400 in the West and still later in the East. Several books were removed from the original list, others added.) The books now in the new Testament apocrypha were excluded from the canon when a careful weighing of their value had thrown doubt on their apostolicity.

The Church was by these measures placed in a position to preserve itself from dissolution into countless sects, "borne about by every wind of doctrine" and doomed to quick disappearance.

The Triumph of Christianity as the Imperial State Church

Meanwhile, the central Roman government remained officially opposed to Christianity. It had come to realize during the second century that the growing Christian Church was the institutional expression of a powerful new religion in the empire, and that it presented an increasingly serious challenge to the old pagan faiths. Because the latter had given to the Roman and Greek civilizations their distinctive moral and spiritual tone, it began to trouble the government, and the schools, that the old religious values were now threatened with total overthrow. Would the empire survive? The barbarian hordes that were poised along the Danube and the Rhine, ready to come plunging into the empire whenever the restraints were relaxed, would not be resisted by the pacifist Christians‑nor by the Romans themselves, should they be even partially infected by Christian pietism and otherworldliness. Something had to be done. Therefore Marcus Aurelius (1(11‑180 A.D.), himself an admirable person imbued with the highest ideals of Stoicism, initiated during the last years of his reign severe persecutions of Christians in the provinces. Septimus Severus, Caracalla, and Maximimus followed with like attempts to curb the Christian movement.

But not until the middle of the third century did the central government become thoroughly alarmed. The Emperor Decius, returning from the endangered frontier and sensing in the apathy of the people to their peril weaknesses due to Christianity, issued an order in 2 5 0 that every citizen of the empire must be required to get a certificate from a government official affirming that he had sacrificed to the emperor's image. Failure to possess such a certificate was to be visited with death. In the persecutions that followed there were conspicuous martyrs, the bishops of Rome and Antioch among them. Multitudes were painfully tortured, and yet refused to yield. A great many others surrendered to the government's pressure, whether through fear or weakness, and joined the number of "the lapsed," as the more faithful Christians called them. Still others bribed officials to issue them certificates without their actually having sacrificed in the prescribed manner. In the eyes of the loyal "confessors" they, too, were apostate. The persecution soon ended, and most of the apostates tried to get back into the Church, with the result that some of the stricter Christians created schisms in the churches in protest against the readmission of the returning penitents. (One such schism at Rome was widely discussed. During the persecutions under Diocletian a similar and more widespread schism developed in North Africa and persisted until the Muslim invasion.) Under the Emperor Valerian the persecutions were fiercely renewed; much church property was confiscated, and many among the higher clergy met martyrdom. But when the emperor fell a prisoner to the Persians, his orders were rescinded. A final terrible persecution began under Diocletian in 303. Successive decrees ordered all churches destroyed, Christian scriptures burned, bishops and lesser clergy put to the torture until they sacrificed to Caesar's image, and ordinary Christians forced to sacrifice likewise. But before the persecutions had gone very far, Diocletian retired from the burdens of office and left four coordinate

"Caesars" in control. Thereafter the persecutions became more sporadic. Clashes among the Caesars soon upset the balance among them, and the son of one of them, a man favorable to Christianity, named Constantine, finally overcame all opposition and became in 323 the sole ruler of the empire.

Constantine changed the entire situation. Already in 313 he had issued jointly with another contender for power an edict granting freedom of conscience to Christians and equality with other religions to Christianity. Constantine was said to have affirmed meanwhile‑whether truthfully or not‑that early in his upward struggle he had seen in the heavens the cross of Christ with the inscription In hoc signo vinces ("In this sign you shall conquer"), and although he was not baptized, he had vowed to rest his hopes of conquest in the Christian God. (This may be a legend with only general truth to sustain it.) When, therefore, Constantine became undisputed emperor, he set himself to the task of strengthening the Catholic Church. Not only did he restore to the Church its lost properties; he allowed it to increase its holdings. He frowned upon heretical sects and sought to heal all schisms, for he wanted unity in the empire and hoped to obtain it through a united Christendom. He made the Christian Sunday a legal holiday. He built new churches and ordered others built at pagan expense. Indeed, his interest was almost too great; it amounted to a form of active control. His successors followed in his steps. Christianity was declared in 383 the imperial state religion.

The Arian Controversy and the Nicene Creed

While all these events were in progress, the theological formulation of the Catholic faith had gone steadily forward. Tertullian and Cyprian in North Africa, and Clement and Origen in Alexandria began to clarify and define the still‑inchoate doctrines concerning the relation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to set forth the claims of the Church to power and authority. But lack of complete agreement among them gave scope to acrimonious disputes.

Constantine felt that the issues had to be settled by a world council of the churches. The circumstances were these. A learned presbyter of Alexandria, called Arius, differed with his bishop on the question of whether Christ was a finite or an eternal being. Arius held that Christ, even as the Logos, was a created being. He was made like other creatures out of nothing, and so he could not be eternal; neither could he be of the same substance as God. The Son, he argued, had a beginning, whereas God, who is eternally One, was without beginning. Arius' bishop took issue with him hotly, asserting that the Son was eternal, uncreated, and of like essence with God. Summoning a synod, the bishop had Arius deposed, but this only caused the controversy to spread all over the East. This was in 321, and Constantine, after failing in conciliatory efforts, called a council of the whole Church to settle the issue once and for all. In the summer Of 325 some three hundred delegate bishops, mostly from the East, met at Nicaea, across the Bosphorus from Constantnople, and produced the famous formula of the Creed of Nicaea. With its crucial phrases italicized, its text was:

We believe in one God, Father Almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of [literally, "out of " ] the Father, as His only Son, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same substance [homo-ousios] with the Father, through whom all things in heaven and earth were made; who for us men and our salvation came down and was made flesh, became man, suffered, and rose on the third day, ascended to heaven, and is coming to judge the living and the dead. And (we believe) in the Holy Spirit.

Attached to this creed was a rider declaring anathema those who say, "There was a time when he was not" or assert, "The Son of God is of a different subsistence or substance, or is created."

This creed, adopted under pressure from the emperor, who wanted peace, did not immediately solve the doctrinal difficulties or save the peace. The phrases we have italicized were bitterly denounced by many and were actually revoked by later councils. (One such council substituted for the homo‑ousios of the Creed of Nicaea homoi‑ousios, that is, "of like substance." "We call the Son like the Father, as the holy scriptures call him and teach." But the decision of this council did not stand. The Church later went back to the Nicene formula.) Indeed it was perhaps only the ardent, indefatigable, and patient defense of it by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in tract after tract that finally overbore opposition and led to its ultimate acceptance. And even then it was several generations before it became infallible in the eyes of the Church. (The familiar Nicene Creed which is recited in certain Christian churches today, it should be said, is not the original creed adopted at Nicaea in 325, but an expanded form of it (often called the "Constantinopolitan Creed") which came into use after the time of the General Council Of 381. For completeness, we may add that the later formulation says firmly that the Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one in essence (or substance), though in three hypostases (subsistences or individualized manifestations). When this formulation was translated into Latin, the rather abstract Greek for individualized manifestation became the rather concrete word persona' and connotations of distinct and self‑contained personality were suggested in a way not intended by the original Greek wording.)

TURIN CATHEDRAL. The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin is a Renaissance version of an early Christian basilica, the Renaissance architects having made it cruciform and added a dome mounted on a hexagonal base and a campanile or bell tower standing apart. Behind it looms the Chapel of Sudario, which preserves a shroud said to be that in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus. (Religious News Service Photo.)

What Athanasius successfully urged upon his at first unbelieving contemporaries in the East was that the issue at stake was no mere verbal matter, no question of words; it was the issue of whether Christ is truly a savior. For the East in general held to the Greek conception of salvation, that it consists in making divine and immortal the sinful mortality of the human being. Athanasius was eventually able to convince the East that only God can bring immortal life down into the realm of mortality, and so Jesus must have been true God, truly so in substance or essence, not just a created being of lower quality, as Arius had urged.

The Christological Controversies and the Creed of Chalcedon

The story of theological difficulties is not ended. Other issues now arose to divide the mind of Christendom. When the Creed of Nicaea laid down the dogma that the Logos or Christ was not of a lower grade of deity but equal in divinity with God the Father, it said nothing about the mode of union of the divine Logos with the human Jesus. So the incarnation itself now became the center of heated theological argument.

Once the distinction was drawn between the divine and the human natures of Christ, it was possible to regard them as being so distinct as to make it difficult to account for Jesus' unified personality. On the other hand it was equally easy to see such a dominance of the one nature over the other as to suggest the absorption of the one nature in the other.

The West had no great difficulty here, for among the definitive statements of Tertullian, made over a century earlier, was the generally accepted formula: "We see (in Christ) a twofold state, not confounded but conjoined in one person, Jesus, God and man." The practical‑minded West puzzled over the matter no further.

Not so the East. It was soon fiercely, and deeply, divided. The great sees of Alexandria and Antioch became especially irreconcilable‑until the Muslim conquests hammered them down in common disaster.

The controversy first became heated when Apollinaris, a bishop in Syria, perhaps reacting adversely to the views of his nearest colleagues, asserted that Christ could not have been perfect man united with complete God, for then there would not have been one Son of God, but two sons, one by nature and one by adoption, the first with a divine, the second with a human will. Such a thing seemed inconceivable, religiously abhorrent. Therefore, in Christ a human body with its animating principle ("animal soul" was the actual phrase) was indwelt by the Logos, as the reasoning principle, the union, on the analogy of the unity of a human personality, being so complete that the body of Christ was the body of God, and in crucifying this body the Jews crucified God. Immediately, his opponents of the school of Antioch pointed out that under this conception Christ was not truly human, for his manhood was incomplete, without a reasoning intelligence or the power of choice. The Antiochians declared that in Christ a whole human being must have been divine; the Jesus of history had a complete human nature, endowed with reason and free will like all other men, and the Logos dwelt in him as in a temple, in perfect moral unity, such that the Logos and Jesus willed the same things. Nestorius, their chief spokesman, excited riots among the monks of Constantinople, where he became bishop, when he preached a sermon against calling the Virgin Mary "the mother of God," declaring she did not bear a deity, she bore "a man, the organ of deity." Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, now entered the fray on the other side. He admitted that Christ's humanity possessed body, rational soul, and spirit, but it was without personality; the Logos was its personality. What he meant was that the human nature of Jesus was assimilated by the personality of the Logos, so that "from two natures [there arose] one," a wholly divine personality. The Nestorians, however, felt this denatured the humanity; the truth was that the humanity and divinity were "in conjunction" only; they were united in will without one absorbing the other.

Charges and counter‑charges flew thick and fast. A general council was called in 431 and found itself unwholesomely involved in political machinations and imperial pressures. Nestorius was deposed and banished. But the issues remained unsettled. Finally, a general council met in 451 at Chalcedon in Asia Minor and formulated a definition of the relation of Christ's natures that became standard Catholic doctrine. It reads:

Following, therefore, the holy Fathers, we confess and all teach with one accord one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, and, further, of a rational soul and body; of one essence with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one essence with us as regards his manhood, in all respects like us, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead begotten of the Father before the ages, yet as regards his manhood‑on account of us and our salvation‑begotten in these last days of Mary the Virgin, bearer of God; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, proclaimed in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures being in no way destroyed on account of the union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person and one hypostasis‑not as though parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only bcgotten God the Logos, Lord, Jesus Christ, even as the prophets from of old and the Lord Jesus Christ taught us concerning him, and the Creed of the Fathers has handed down to us.

This creed, like the Nicene, was a triumph for the West, and of course the West accepted it without demur. But the East did not find it so satisfactory. Those who followed the Alexandrian lead dissented as "partisans of the one nature" and were called accordingly Monophysites. From them sprang the Coptic Church of Egypt and Abyssinia and the "Jacobite" churches of Syria and Armenia, which dissent to this day.

The Nestorians were already declared unsound when the general council convened at Chalcedon. They persisted as a sect in Syria, however, and they found the peoples to the east of them receptive. So they took their doctrines into Persia, and from thence to India and China, which they reached in the seventh century. In Syria Nestorianism survived the Muslim conquest. Nestorian churches also still exist in southern India and northwestern Iran.

The Growth of the Papacy

It was the good fortune of the church of Rome to be on the victorious side in the great doctrinal controversies of the second and fourth centuries. During the Gnostic crisis it was the church of Rome that framed the Apostles' Creed, and it was the same church that led in the formation of the New Testament canon. The superior dignity of the church of Rome was acknowledged by eminent authorities of the West. Irenaeus, from his place in Gaul, urged the Western churches to agree with Rome in all matters involving the apostolic tradition. Cyprian, from his place in North Africa, thought of Rome as "the chief church whence priestly unity takes its source."

Aware of all these things, and sure that if civil authority rested at Constantinople in the person of the emperor, spiritual authority rested at Rome in his own person, Pope Leo I (440‑461) declared that because St. Peter was the first among the Apostles, St. Peter's church should be accorded primacy among the churches. He based his claim on the doctrine that Peter's powers, as defined in Matt. 16: 18, 19, ("I tell you, your name is Peter, a rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death will not subdue it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you forbid on earth will be held in heaven to be forbidden, and whatever you permit on earth will be held in heaven to be permitted.") had been passed on to each of his successors. This was a special application, we note, of the doctrine of "apostolic succession," a doctrine that had early been formulated, e.g., by Clement of Rome at the close of the first century, and that was generally understood to apply to all bishops as the successors, through the laying on of hands at ordination, of all the Apostles. But Leo held that St. Peter was the first in rank among the Apostles, and hence the successors of Peter were the first among bishops.

He and his successors took steps to make good this claim, but their success was in suspense while the Roman empire fell. Well was it for the pope, indeed, that most of the empire's invaders‑Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards ‑ had already been converted to Christianity by missionaries of the heretical Arian sects. (By the great missionary Ulfilas and others.) They were heretics, but they were Christians, so that when Alaric the Visigoth captured Rome, he treated the pope with favor and spared the churches, while ravin and ruin overwhelmed all else around.

As the inroads of the barbarians swelled to a disastrous flood‑tide and civilization faltered, the popes drew some consolation from the fact that the Arian invaders were after awhile persuaded to become Catholics. (As a result of the conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, and the efforts of the British missionary Boniface.)

The Rise of Monasticism

Monasticism grew rapidly in the Catholic Church after Christianity was made the imperial state religion. Early tendencies in its direction appeared in the individuals who followed St. Paul's suggestion that men and women believers might well practice sexual abstinence and live as "virgins." But as a movement involving a definite break with society, it did not begin until toward the end of the third century. Its first great representative was St. Anthony of Korma in Egypt. After trying to practice asceticism in his own village, an attempt that failed, he went away into the solitude of the desert. There he was beset by his famous temptations, at peace only when asleep, when awake fasting and praying ceaselessly, but haunted by demons, in male and female form, enticing him to every sin. Egypt was full of lonely exiles and friendless men; its climate was favorable for, and its people respectful toward, austerity. The belief was prevalent (in accord with the Gnostic and Alexandrian theologies) that the world and the body were defiling, so Anthony attracted many followers. It was soon apparent, however, that those who strove to live entirely alone often went mad and just as often failed through lack of guidance, so a communal type of hermit life (cenobitism) was developed by Pachormus, a convert to Coptic Christianity in southern Egypt, who organized monasteries (and one nunnery) under a rule of balanced work and meditation, directed by an abbot.

Both the solitary and communal types of monasticism quickly spread to Syria and Asia Minor. The solitary hermits drew great attention to themselves. Some retired to caves and desert places; some, like Simeon the Stylite, lived on the tops of pillars in ruined cities and had their food lifted up to them on poles; others (the Dendrites) resided in trees; still others, in the same manner as Buddhist monks in China and Tibet, walled themselves up in narrow enclosures and had food tossed in to them or pushed through slits in the wall. But this form of asceticism was never more than the rage of the moment. By far the greater number of hermits gathered together in monasteries (that is, became monks) and maintained themselves by their own husbandry. They early won the favor of Basil, bishop of Caesarea, one of the three great Cappadocians still honored by the Eastern Orthodox churches, and he laid down for them a rule that is universal in the East to this day. By it the monasteries submit themselves to the bishops of their localities and, in addition to the monastic practices shared with the West, prohibit strong drink and outside or non‑canonical reading. Social service among the poor and orphaned is prescribed.

In the West the monastic movement was slow in getting started, but when the Germanic invasions turned society upside‑down, it became popular and developed many independent orders. For some time each monastery had its own rule, and some were shockingly lax. In the sixth century, therefore, appeared the order of St. Benedict, whose founder prescribed for those who joined his order a full life of manual labor in the monastery's fields or shops, serious directed reading, and above all, worship throughout the day and part of the night. The severity of the Benedictine Rule is suggested by this passage from it:

Idleness is the great enemy of the soul, therefore the monks should always be occupied, either in manual labor or in holy reading. The hours for these occupations should be arranged according to the seasons, as follows: From Easter to the first of October, the monks shall go to work at the first hour [6 A.M.], and the time from the fourth to the sixth hour shall be spent in reading. After dinner, which comes at the sixth hour [noon], they shall lie down and rest in silence; but anyone who wishes may read, if he does it so as not to disturb anyone else. Nones [a service designed for 3 P.M.] shall be observed a little earlier, about the middle of the eighth hour, and the monks shall go back to work, laboring until vespers. . . . From the first of October to the beginning of Lent, the monks shall have until the full second hour for reading, at which hour the service of terce [a service for 9 A.M.] shall be held. After terce, they shall work at their respective tasks until the ninth hour [3 P.m.]. When the ninth hour sounds, they shall cease from labor and be ready for the service at the second bell. After dinner they shall spend the time in reading the lessons and the psalms. During Lent, the time from daybreak to the third hour shall be devoted to reading, and then they shall work at their appointed tasks until the tenth hour. At the beginning of Lent each of the monks shall be given a book from the library of the monastery which he shall read entirely through. One or two of the older monks shall be appointed to go about through the monastery during the hours set apart for reading, to see that none of the monks are idling away the time, instead of reading, and so not only wasting their own time but perhaps disturbing others as well. . . . And if any brother is negligent or lazy, refusing or being unable to read or meditate at the time, let him be made to work, so that he shall at any rate not be idle.

That the Benedictine monasteries, which eventually spread through western Europe, had libraries was in itself a fact of great consequence for the future. Books were thereby saved that might otherwise have been lost.

Just how consistent monasticism was, at least in the case of some individuals, with an active purpose of serving society at large was apparent in the life, first, of St. Jerome, who while in monastic seclusion in Palestine completed the Vulgate, the translation of the Old and New Testaments into Latin; and in the career also of St. Chrysostom, the "golden‑mouthed," who emerged from hermit life to attract great congregations in Antioch by his sermons and was therefore called to the bishopric of Constantinople (and the jealousies that plunged him into the obscurity of ill‑deserved exile).

Another influential representative of the hermit life was Gregory the Great, the first monk to be chosen to the papal office (590‑604). An administrator with great personal gifts, he so managed the financial resources of the papacy (The church at Rome now had great land‑holdings in Italy.) that he virtually ruled Italy like a monarch. He laid the foundations of later papal authority in England, in whose conversion to Christianity he took great interest, (England was converted by a kind of Christian pincers movement‑from the north by way of Ireland and Scotland, from the south by missionaries sent out from Rome directly. Ireland had been converted earlier by St. Patrick. His converts crossed to Scotland; after they won it, missionaries entered England from Scotland.) and increased his ecclesiastical power in France and Spain. His emphasis on penance and his stress on belief in purgatory brought these aspects of belief and practice for the first time to the forefront in Catholicism. He anticipated later practice by advising penitents to seek the aid of the saints. He took it to be a fact that as the apostolic successor to St. Peter, who was "the prince of all the Apostles" to whom "by the Lord's voice the care of the whole church was committed," he should be acknowledged to be the head of the whole Church. He thus was the forerunner and model of the powerful medieval popes.

St. Augustine

But the greatest personality of the ancient Catholic Church was Augustine (354‑430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He was a person in whose temperament almost every human quality was present in great intensity, yet such was the clarity and strength of his mind that he was able to master his unruly passions and harness them to a Christian purpose. Born of a pagan father and Christian mother, he attended the schools of his native North Africa, and at seventeen, while pursuing the study of rhetoric, he followed the promptings of his ardently sensuous nature and took a concubine. He rejected the New Testament at first as "unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero," G1 whose works he was studying. But Cicero was not enough, so he became an adherent of Manichaeism. (This was a philosophical system evolved by a Persian called Mani (215‑276). Combined of elements drawn from Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christianity, its characteristic tenet was the dualism of light and darkness, spirit and matter, good and evil. The soul of man is in bondage to vile matter and must follow the way of asceticism to freedom from the lusts of the flesh. Organized like a religion, it became for a time one of the chief rivals of Christianity. Though its influence waned after Augustine's time, it is interesting that some of the Crusaders returned to western Europe with a revived form of its doctrines and founded the sect of Cathari in southern France. ) He derived only small comfort from this doctrine, however, for he never became one of the "perfect"; he could only be a "hearer," because he was unable to give up the lusts of the flesh, as Manichaeism demanded. His prayer at that time, he says in his famous Confessions, was, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."

At twenty‑nine he went to Italy. There, in Milan, he heard the powerful sermons of Ambrose, another of the great personalities of the ancient Catholic Church. His conscience was touched. When his mother, on joining him, urged him to enter upon betrothal to someone of his own class, he sorrowfully sent away his faithful concubine, who had borne him a son, and agreed to do as his mother asked, though on account of the tender years of the girl to whom he contracted himself, he put his marriage off. Then, finding himself still a prey to desire, he took another concubine. He almost despaired of himself now, for it seemed indeed true to him, as the Manichaeans taught, that the flesh is incurably evil.

Radical changes in his point of view followed from an awakened interest in Neo‑Platonism. (An Aleyandrian school of philosophy, of which Plotinus (205270) was the chief representative. All reality consists, according to this school, of a series of emanations, at various removes, issuing from the One, the perfect Form, which is the source of all being everywhere. Like water from an overflowing spring, the realities closest to the source of being are the purest and best. Mind or intelligence is the emanation nearest to the One, soul or psyche is further removed, and matter is at the outer edge of being, at such a remove from its source as to suffer from an absence of indwelling divine reason or worth. Man is a union of matter, soul, and mind. His salvation depends on his moving away from immersion in the realm of matter and achieving knowledge of true reality by an intuitive and mystical union with the One. As his soul becomes more intelligent and rational, it becomes more spiritual and divine.) He began to consider it true that the temptations of the flesh follow from a falling away from God rather than from the presence of any positive and inherent element of badness in the flesh. In fact, he came to believe that God is the source of all things, and that matter and evil are to be defined in terms of an absence of the creative energy of God, due to spiritual remoteness from the one eternal good Being.

His conversion to Christianity occurred with apparent suddenness. Learning of a Neo‑Platonist who had turned Christian, and then of some Egyptian monks who overcame their temptations by simple faithfulness to their monastic discipline, he ran distractedly from his friend Alypius into the farther reaches of a garden and heard a child's voice from across the wall saying, "Take up and read." Returning to his friend, he seized a copy of the Epistles of the New Testament lying on the bench, and opening it, read: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness ... ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof." These words brought him to a decision." Thenceforth he lived in strict continence. Baptized by Ambrose, he left for North Africa, resolved to found a monastery. There he became the bishop of Hippo, wrote voluminously for the next thirty years, and died while the Vandals were besieging his city.

Augustine was so many‑sided that his theology is a synthesis of various trends. One sees in it a Neo-Platonist strain that modifies his basic reliance on Hebraic insights. But he yielded to no one tendency exclusively. So germinal was his thinking that we should not take leave of him without briefly summarizing his doctrines of God, man, and the Church and his philosophy of history.

Augustine's mystical personal experience of God kept him from thinking of God as a pure abstraction. God is near and very real, and both in the person of Jesus and through the activity of the Holy Spirit has broken into history and is continuously at work in human hearts. And yet, Augustine's conception had a Neo‑Platonist tinge. God is the one eternal Being, alone absolutely real and absolutely good. He is the source of all other things, and they depend upon him at every moment for their continued existence. The physical universe especially has only a derived reality and is scarcely worthy of study in itself.

How he could invoke God as being at every moment literally at hand and yet experience him as not identifiable with physical reality is evident in the famous vision he shared with his beloved mother at Ostia a few days before her death:

The day now approaching whereon she was to depart this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass ... that she and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden of the house where we now lay, at Ostia. . . . We were discoursing then together, alone, very sweetly. . enquiring between ourselves in the presence of the Truth, which Thou art, of what sort the eternal life of the saints was to be. . . . And when our discourse was brought to that point, that the very delight of the earthly senses was . . . in respect of the sweetness of [Eternity], not only not worthy of comparison, but not even of mention; we, raising up ourselves with a more glowing affection towards the "Self‑same," did by degrees pass through all things bodily, even the very heaven whence sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth; yea, we were soaring higher yet, by inward musing, and discourse, and admiring of Thy works; and we came to our own minds, and went beyond them, that we might arrive at that region of never‑failing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel forever with the food of truths. . . .

We were saying then: if to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the poles of heaven, yea, the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign. . . . and He alone speak. . . . that we might hear His Word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor angel's voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but . . . might hear His Very Self . . . were not this [to] Enter into thy Master's Joy? . . .

Lord, Thou knowest that in that day when we were speaking these things, and this world with all its delights became, as we spake, contemptible to us, my mother said, "Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life. . . . One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?"

Augustine adapted his conception of God to his Christian conviction that God is "one in three," In the Trinity he saw no subordination of one member to another, as earlier theologians did. "There is so great an equality in that Trinity," he wrote, "that not only the Father is not greater than the Son, as regards divinity, but neither are the Father and the Son together greater than the Holy Spirit.” Going further, he suggested that the Holy Spirit, though equal with the Father and the Son as regards divinity, "proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son (filioque). " " Yet again, the Trinity is as united as lover, loved, and love, or as memory, understanding, and will, of which he said: "Since, then, these three, memory, understanding, will, are not three lives, but one life; nor three minds, but one mind; it follows certainly that neither are they three substances, but one substance."

In forming his doctrine of man ‑ which had enormous influence not only on Catholic theologians but also on the Protestant Reformers ‑ Augustine drew upon his bitter experiences of his own moral weakness in youth. Man in and of himself is depraved, "the entire mass of (his) nature ruined"' "bound by original sin." This is the inheritance we all have from Adam. Adam was created good and with a fine intelligence. But he was endowed with free will, and though he could have chosen not to sin, he, along with Eve, ate of the forbidden fruit in willfulness and pride. After that he and all his descendants have been in a state of original sin, from which no one can now escape by his own efforts. It is as though the whole human race were morally diseased.

But God is merciful. Those whom he chooses, he saves by divine grace. Not that they deserve such mercy; it is entirely a free gift. This is the love of God, on which no human claims can be made. And when the divine grace comes, no one can resist it. Uplifted to effort and perseverance ‑ " the perseverance of the saints" ‑ the sinner is changed, justified, sanctified. To others the grace never comes, for they are doomed to damnation.

This hard doctrine involved Augustine in fierce controversy with a British monk called Pelagius, and with others. These men contended that there is no such thing as original sin, all men having an aptitude for goodness. Adam may have left to his descendants a bad example, but no inherited and inescapable moral weakness. Anyone who has faith is justified. But Augustine fought stoutly for his view. He knew from experience how inescapable are pride and lust in a life spent apart from God and how irresistible is God's sudden grace.

The Church, according to Augustine, is the divinely appointed institution to perform the sacraments that are the means of grace. There is only one Church, and none who are outside of it, whether heathen or heretic, can be saved. In opposition to a purist group in North Africa called the Donatists, who maintained that the sacraments performed by unworthy priests were ineffectual, Augustine held that the sacraments are instituted of God, not of men, and therefore they communicate grace regardless of the unworthy character of any man who performs them.

Augustine expressed his philosophy of history in his treatise The City of God. When he wrote it, Rome, "the mistress or the world," had been sacked by barbaric conquerors, and the pagan writers of the time were loudly lamenting what they conceived to be a fact, that the city had declined and fallen because the grand old gods that had brought greatness to her had been abandoned for the enfeebling god of the Christians. In defending Christianity against this charge, Augustine boldly contrasted the Earthly City, which in history reached its clearest forms in Babylon and Rome, with the City of God, to which God's elect in every generation have belonged. In his own day, he said, not all those who were in the visible Church were members of the invisible City of God. They, the non‑elect, together with all those outside the Church, belonged to the Earthly City, which must decline and pass away. But the City of God will survive even the death of "civilization" and ultimately inherit the earth. So wrote Augustine even while the barbarians hammered at the gates of the cities of his Africa.

It cannot be said that the Roman Catholic Church adopted all of the Augustinian theology. Other influences, as we shall see, intervened. But the Protestant Reformation was a return to Augustine just as much as it was a return to Paul and Jesus.

The Division of the Church into East and West

Not only was the Roman empire brought low by invasions from the north; in the seventh century other invaders appeared in the southeast and rapidly overran Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Spain. The staunch defense of Constantinople checked them for a time in the East, and a Frankish chieftain by the name of Charles Martel turned them back in France in 732. Otherwise, perhaps, the Muslims would have taken Europe.

The effect of the Muslim conquests on what was left of the Roman empire was to divide it more seriously than ever. The Emperor Leo III at Constantinople incurred the displeasure of Pope Gregory II by his efforts to obtain reform in the face of the onrushing Muslim peril. Recoiling sharply from the criticisms coming from Arab (and Christian) quarters concerning the "idolatrous" veneration of images and pictures in the Christian churches, the emperor forbade, in 726, their further use ‑ thus fathering the first iconoclastic movement in Christian history. There was immediate remonstrance both in the East and in the West. In the East Leo used his army to enforce his decree. But Rome was far enough away to make good its disobedience. What was more, the pope called a Roman synod and obtained an action excommunicating those who opposed the use of pictures, namely, the emperor and those who sided with him. The emperor then retaliated by removing Sicily and southern Italy from the pope's spiritual jurisdiction. This left the pope in a precarious situation, for northern Italy was occupied by Lombards, and they had their hearts set on the conquest of Rome. So the pope called for help from Charles Martel, whose prowess against the Muslims made his aid worth seeking. Both Gregory and Charles were to die before that help was forthcoming, but Charles's son Pippin the Short, invaded Italy, brought the Lombard king to terms, and made a present of the province of Ravenna to the pope. He thus caused the pope to fix the orientation of the papacy toward the trans‑Alpine lands rather than toward the East and, without knowing it, laid the foundations of a huge, unstable, Western empire.

The pope gained much. He was now not only the largest land‑holder in Italy, with an annual income of over a million dollars, but a temporal sovereign, the ruler of "the states of the Church," as they came to be called, and very important these were to him. (From 740 to 1870 the popes held firmly to their States of the Church, and, when bereft of them by King Victor Emmanuel, were outraged. In 1929 Mussolini restored the pope's temporal sovereignty over the Vatican and the grounds immediately around it.) Pippin's son, Charlemagne, gained much too. He built up an empire that included almost all of western Europe‑in modern terms, France, northeastern Spain, Belgium, Holland, most of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and northern Italy. Cordial to the Church, Charlemagne came to Rome and on Christmas Day, 8oo, was formally crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Leo III. This act signalized the fact that West and East were at the parting of the ways, a fact accepted some years later by Emperor Leo V in Constantinople when he officially recognized the title of Charlemagne, and thus acknowledged that the empire had fallen in two.

Meanwhile, a serious doctrinal split between East and West had been preparing. We have already seen that Augustine thought the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In 589 a Western council, meeting in Spain, added to the Nicene Creed (the creed Of 381 A.D.) the word filioque ("and from the Son") immediately after the words saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The theologians of the East protested the change strongly, believing that to make it meant denying that God is the source of all things. The West held out generally for the filioque. The rift of opinion hung fire for several centuries. Finally, in 876 a synod at Constantinople condemned the pope both for his political activities and because he did not correct the heresy of the filioque clause. This action was part of the East's entire rejection of the pope's claim of universal jurisdiction over the Church. A bitter break came in 1054, when the long‑smoldering schism led a papal legate, without authorization, to excommunicate the patriarch of Constantinople and the patriarch to hurl back anathemas in return. Since then the two branches of the Catholic Church have gone their separate ways.

However, as individuals brought the final break, its decisiveness was in doubt for a time, but after Good Friday in 1204, when Crusaders from northwestern Europe, on their way to delivering Jerusalem from the Muslims, inexcusably sacked and pillaged Constantinople, the break became final and complete.

IV The Eastern Orthodox Churches

Although until recently the patriarch of Constantinople claimed spiritual supremacy over them, the various bodies of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been virtually independent of each other, divided as they are into units corresponding more or less to the national states in which they have existed. Yet none of them has departed to any great degree from the Orthodox tradition accepted in the East. Inasmuch as the ancient sees of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch early fell into Muslim hands, theological development in those areas virtually ceased after the eighth century. It ceased elsewhere as well. The only real changes have been in liturgy and religious practice. Here leadership was for a long time held by the patriarch of Constantinople, and when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, it passed to the Slavic Orthodox churches, and particularly to the largest of them all, the Russian Orthodox Church, whose patriarch once said that even as Constantinople had been the second Rome, so Moscow should be the third.

The unity of the Orthodox churches has never been really broken. Although, as a consequence of international changes and conflicts, the various nationalized churches have sometimes had such violent disputes concerning jurisdiction that more than once one branch of the Church has excommunicated another, they have all learned to fall back finally on a doctrine of expediency, called "economy," whereby acts of excommunicated Church leaders have been first tolerated, and then validated, on the grounds of keeping the churches operating without loss of power and authority. Basically, this reaction to occasional divergence rests on a sense of "wholeness" or essential indivisibility (the Orthodox interpretation of catholicity) of the Church, which preserves its unity even in the diversifications that arise from the exercise of freedom.

The General Doctrinal Position

In spite of differences of administration, the various branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church have remained more or less united in matters of doctrine. The ancient creeds are accepted as infallible definitions of orthodox apostolic teaching. There have been local divergences in faith and practice, but in general the churches have not departed from the doctrinal position reached by the last of their acknowledged ancient fathers, John of Damascus, who one century after the Muslims seized Syria made a last effort on the basis of the completed creeds and the writings of preceding fathers to systematize the Eastern faith.

The position taken by John of Damascus fairly well characterizes the general attitude of the Orthodox churches‑a mystical emphasis on the life‑giving incarnation of God in Christ conveyed down to the present time through the seven sacraments and the other rites and devotional practices of the churches. The Western interest in the practical, juridical (analytical and individualistic) aspects of the relation between God and man had no great place in the concern of John of Damascus, or, for that matter, of the Eastern Church before or after him.

There are some interesting aspects in this position. John of Damascus appeared at a time when the Byzantine type of church architecture had been highly developed. The chief external mark of the Eastern churches had become a dome resting on a rectangular or octagonal substructure, supported by half‑domes and buttresses. In the interior, the nave led to a chancel within which was the altar and to the rear of it a semi‑circle of seats for the bishops and presbyters. The pulpit stood outside of the chancel, nearer to the congregation. The floor, walls, ceilings, and screens were richly decorated with pictures and mosaics, representing in the formal manner of symbolical and devotional art the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, Christ, the Apostles, and many saints and martyrs. Icons, with images shown in low relief against a plaque (such as Christ on the cross and Mary as the Mother of God), were colored in red, gold, and blue, and these, together with multi‑colored mosaics of the same subjects, were venerated by the worshipers, prayers being addressed in their direction and even kisses and strokings bestowed on them. in due time some of these images and pictures were credited with miraculous powers and became objects of special pilgrimage. When the Emperor Leo III was moved to order the suppression of such veneration, and there ensued the uproar in the East and West that we have described, John of Damascus came to the defense of images. He declared that the question of icons "is a question for Synods and not for Emperors." He went on to argue that the synods would see in images an incarnation of God in Christ. Again, icons were analogous to the sacraments, in that they conveyed divine grace to the believer. Yet again, they were analogous to books, for "what a book is to the literate, that an image is to the illiterate." Indeed, the reverend father went so far as to put all the rites, creeds, and institutions of the Church in the same position: all alike chiefly convey divine life and grace to the believer.

It was in accordance with this reasoning that in 787 the Seventh General Council ‑ the last in which the Greek and Roman churches concurred ‑ declared that pictures and images, the cross, and the Gospels "should be given due salutation and honorable reverence, (though) not indeed that true worship which pertains to the divine nature. . . . For the honor which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who shows reverence to the image shows reverence to the subject represented in it." (So far the East and West could agree.)

Differences Between the Eastern and Roman Churches

But even in the attitude toward images the Eastern and Roman churches have differed. In the East icons are not humanized, and the figures remain symbols, simplified representations of "essential" meanings. As such they are rendered in formalized bas‑relief rather than in the round as in the Roman Church. In other words, the East regards icons as signifying divine nature and spirit, whereas the Roman Church on the whole uses images to bring the Virgin and the saints within human range. Hence the attitude to Jesus' mother differs fundamentally in the two churches: the Roman Catholics venerate the Blessed Virgin as one who loves her child and is compassionate and humane to her suppliants; the Eastern churches worship her as the holy Mother of God, the exalted being in whom the human and the divine met in the Incarnation.

These differences in attitude are considered by representatives of the Eastern churches as not contradictory but complementary. As one puts it: "The Western mind, being more analytical, approaches spirit and matter as distinct and even opposite entities, whereas Orthodoxy conceives matter and spirit as two interdependent manifestations of the same ultimate reality. These attitudes are not contradictory but complementary to each other; yet in their own way they color every aspect of Church life, and, as a result, the same terms are differently understood by the Christian East and West. . . . An example of this is the word 'Catholic,' which in the West has acquired the meaning of universal in the sense of the geographical extension of the Church throughout the world. . . . In the East 'Catholic' means 'integral' or 'whole'; the word signifies the inner quality of the true Church as opposed to heresies or sects. . . . The same difference in interpretation applies to the word 'Orthodoxy.' In the West this word stands for 'correct doctrine'; in the East it is also interpreted as 'right praise,' for the Eastern mind links teaching with worship, and considers that only those Christians who pray to God in the spirit of love and humility have proper access to Orthodox belief and profess it in the right way."

Other points of difference persisting down to the present may be briefly mentioned. The East has sacraments differing from those of the Roman Catholic Church in certain respects: baptism in infancy by triple immersion, chrismation (anointing after baptism with oil consecrated by a bishop), the eucharist or sacrament of communion in both kinds (bread and wine), confession only after reconciliation with those wronged or estranged, the taking of holy orders only after the congregation has given its unanimous approval, marriage with the bride and groom wearing crowns of glory, and extreme unction, which is given not, as in the West, only before death, but in serious illness to encourage recovery. It is held that in the eucharist the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, not as in Roman belief by transubstantiation, (The doctrine that during the celebration of the mass the substance of the bread and of the wine is converted into the actual or real body and blood of Christ.) but rather by a transformation due to the operation of the Holy Spirit. The liturgy of the eucharist has been developed into an elaborate work of devotional art, enriched by antiphonal choral chants, sung in different voices, without instrumental accompaniment, by priests in gorgeous vestments. Long recitatives at a high level of devotional poetry and beauty precede and follow the central act of elevating the sanctified bread and wine before the altar. The sign of the cross is made by the priest with candles, of which two in the left hand, with lighted tips meeting, symbolize the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and three in the right hand, similarly joined, symbolize the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The list of differences could be extended. It must suffice to mention but one or two more. In addition to refusing to add filioque to the Nicene Creed, the East repudiates the belief in purgatory taught in the Roman West. The Orthodox churches do not demand celibacy of all the clergy, allowing those to marry who are content to remain among the "lower" clergy. Of course, the Eastern churches firmly "renounce" as "erroneous" the belief "that a man, to wit, the Bishop of Rome, can be the head of Christ's Body, that is to say, of the whole church." With equal firmness they reject "the erroneous belief that the Holy Apostles did not receive from our Lord equal spiritual power, but that the holy Apostle Peter was their Prince: and that the Bishop of Rome alone is his successor: and that the Bishops of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and others are not, equally with the bishops of Rome, successors of the Apostles." They contend that the pope of Rome cannot be infallible in matters of faith and morals, because several of the popes have been condemned as heretics by the Church councils; and certainly, they say, the pope cannot claim to be superior to the Church councils.

The Present Situation

The Orthodox churches outside the Iron Curtain have to a large extent recovered from the setbacks received during World War II. Since their admission to the World Council of Churches, they have participated in its activities with considerable evidence of vitality. All the Orthodox churches, including the Russian, participated in the Fourth General Assembly of the World Council, held in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968.

The Orthodox churches in Russia and the satellite countries have gone through difficult and critical times. The old national Church of Russia was so clearly identified with the Czarist regime that the 1917 revolution was a major catastrophe to it. But the situation of its disestablished successor, the Orthodox Church of Russia, seems rather to improve with time. Its work in society continues to be restricted, for the Church may engage only in religious activity. It may maintain a certain number of buildings, train and employ priests, and conduct religious services, but formal religious education of the young is prohibited. However, although for some time the Russian government kept the Russian Church from joining the World Council of Churches, it reversed itself in 1961. In November of that year not only the Russian but also the Bulgarian, Rumanian, and Polish churches sent delegates to the meeting of the World Council at New Delhi, India, and entered its membership. In his letter requesting such membership, the patriarch of Moscow reported that the Russian Church had at that time thirty thousand priests, twenty thousand parishes, seventy three bishoprics, eight theological schools, and forty monasteries. Apparently, as long as there is no "subversion" or "counter‑revolutionary activity" within the Church, it is allowed to minister religiously to its estimated forty million adherents. However, there is constant surveillance and an obvious wish on the part of the government that the Church would die out.

As members of the World Council of Churches, the Eastern Orthodox churches, encouraged by the late Patriarch Athenogoras I of Constantinople, have sought closer ecumenical ties with both the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. The Third Pan‑Orthodox Church Conference held at Rhodes in 1964 considered proposed discussions with the Roman Catholic Church on reunion but postponed, until "adequate provisions" had been effected, conferences of committees empowered to arrange for such union. Meanwhile, Athenogoras met with Pope Paul in Jerusalem in 1964 and again in Istanbul and Rome in 1967, to effect the first steps in achieving closer relations. In 1965 the mutual excommunications that were pronounced in 105 4 were annulled simultaneously in Rome and Constantinople. Meetings have since followed not only between Orthodox and Roman Catholic leaders but also, at the highest level, between these and Protestant leaders.

In the Americas, Archbishop Iakovos, with headquarters in New York, is the primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America. But there are other (eighteen) Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions in the Americas, including (besides the Greek) the Russian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Serbian, Syrian, Ukranian, and Albanian jurisdictions. An unusual event was the requiem conducted in 1967 by Archbishop lakovos before the bier of Francis Cardinal Spellman in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. In 1969 he also preached there in behalf of worldwide Christian unity.

V The Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages

The Great Period of the Papacy

The Roman Catholic Church entered the Middle Ages with a head who was a temporal sovereign quite equal in political and financial position to some of the secular sovereigns of the West. Not only that. The Donation of Constantine, so‑called, suggested that he was destined to be the theocratic ruler of the entire West. (The pope's territorial ambitions were bolstered by an extraordinary forgery that was circulated at this time and won widespread acceptance as genuine. Known as the Donation of Constantine, this forgery represented Constantine as granting to the popes not only spiritual supremacy over the whole Church but also temporal dominion over Rome, Italy, and the "provinces, places, and cities of the western regions." Not until the middle of the fifteenth century was the forgery successfully discredited.) Whether the popes of the time actually desired such a position or not, there seemed to be no insurmountable obstacle to their attaining it if they wanted it.

The kings and chieftains of the West, on their part, were willing to concede the spiritual supremacy of the Roman pontiff, but they were equally sure that the pope ought not to intrude himself into their purely temporal affairs.

Hence arose vexing conflicts between the popes and secular powers. Such churchmen as were elevated to high office at the behest or by the appointment of kings and princes were often easy‑going and worldly-minded. Some of them had even bought and paid for their appointment a practice called simony. They were prone to take their churchly honors as a personal prerogative, to do with as they liked, and the farther they were from Rome the more this was the case. In northern areas, especially in Germany, bishops even married and passed their bishoprics on to their sons, in complete disregard of the rule laid down long before by Pope Leo I that all the clergy, even to the sub-deacons, should be celibate. Again, northern bishops were frequently complaisant toward, and sanctioned, easy divorce among kings and princes when political marriages proved unsatisfactory. In another direction, conflicts arose between canon law (the law of the Church drawn from the decrees of councils, synods, and popes) and the civil law of the various states, and where the state was strong, the canon law was often violated in the administration of parishes and monasteries.

A head‑on contest between pope and emperor could not long be avoided. Its outbreak simply awaited the appearance of personalities sufficiently strong to enter upon it. This occurred when Hildebrand became pope in 1073, under the name of Gregory VII. He wasted no time. A new emperor, Henry IV, had ascended the throne in Germany. The pope ordered Henry to conform to the decree that bishops receive their staff of office from the pope and not from the emperor, and he charged the married bishops of Germany to give up their wives. But Henry IV was to prove a formidable opponent. He defiantly appointed a cleric of his own choice to the bishopric of Milan, then under his control. Hildebrand called him to task. Henry held a council with his nobles and bishops and led them in rejecting Hildebrand's authority as pope. Hildebrand replied with a decree falling like a thunderbolt upon Henry, excommunicating him and releasing his subjects in Germany and Italy from their oaths of allegiance to him. Though Henry sent the pope a fierce letter calling him "now no pope, but a false monk," and telling him to "come down, to be damned through all eternity," he was merely blustering. In reality he was hard hit. His nobles told him that if he were not released from his excommunication within a year and a day, they would depose him.

In great trouble Henry crossed the Alps. It was mid‑winter. He followed the pope to a castle at Canossa, and for three days stood in the snow of the courtyard, a white‑clad, bare‑footed penitent, while Gregory considered what to do about him. Finally, the pope, utterly avenged, admitted Henry to an audience and released him from his excommunication.

The pope's great triumph ‑ one of the most dramatic in history ‑ was short‑lived. Three years later he made the mistake of excommunicating Henry again. Henry's answer was a march on Rome that enabled him to drive the pope out of it and set up a rival pontiff. But the contest had reached an inconclusive stage. Soon Gregory and Henry were both dead, and their successors, Henry V and Pope Calixtus II, came to a compromise.

Bishops everywhere and in all cases were to be chosen by the Church in accordance with canon law, yet before their consecration the German bishops were to appear before the emperor to be invested by the touch of the royal scepter with the temporal possession of their sees. In other words, all new German bishops were to be acceptable to the emperor. Furthermore, it was agreed that bishops should be celibate. Hildebrand's reforms had in great part been achieved.

More powerful even than Hildebrand was Pope Innocent III (1193‑1216) a hundred years later. Innocent entered on his office when papal prestige had reached a new height, largely due to his predecessor's effective discipline of Henry II of England. (From the security of his island kingdom Henry II had challenged the Roman pontiff by passing laws limiting the application of canon law in ecclesiastical cases and putting the election of bishops into the hands of the king, to whom these prelates were required to do homage. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas A Becket, an old friend of Henry's, had sternly opposed him at this juncture, and Henry's expression of anger caused four knights to ride to Canterbury and murder the archbishop before the cathedral's very altar. The pope, capitalizing on Becket's popularity, canonized him; streams of pilgrims (precisely like those pictured in The Canterbury Tales) poured through the cathedral's doors and wore down the stone floor by kneeling before the new saint's tomb. The king, full of dismay and remorse, withdrew the offending laws, and as a penitent submitted himself to being scourged before Becket's tomb!) Although Innocent III was conceded, on his accession, to be without qualification the spiritual superior of every terrestrial sovereign, he acted on the principle that he was the first among his peers in the temporal sphere also. When Germany was torn between rival claimants to the throne, he crowned one of them, Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor ‑ after wringing large promises from him. When the new emperor forgot his promises, the pope put a rival in the field and with the help of the king of France established him on the imperial throne. He thus proved that he could make and unmake kings. The king of France, too, felt the pope's whip‑hand. Resolved to rid himself of his unloved queen, the Swedish princess Ingeborg, the French monarch divorced her. The pope then put all France under an interdict (i.e., a ban on all religious services), and the king, yielding to popular clamor, took back his queen. In Spain the pope first assumed control of Aragon and then granted it back as a fief to its king, Peter. He imposed a similar status upon the rebellious English. Richard the Lion‑Hearted's unpopular brother, King John, tried to force his candidate for archbishop on the see of Canterbury, and the pope placed England under an interdict, to last until Stephen Langton, his choice, should be made archbishop. When King John resisted, the pope excommunicated him, declared his throne vacant, and proclaimed a crusade against him. John capitulated but was not restored to grace until he acknowledged his kingdom to be a fief of the papacy from which a thousand marks were due annually to the pope as a feudal tax!

CHARTRES CATHEDRAL. The facade of this most praised of Gothic cathedrals is interestingly asymmetrical, its two spires being in different styles. Its doorways are decorated with spirited sculpture of great refinement. In the interior the stained glass windows, seen from between columns and arches faultlessly executed, are the finest in the world. It is seven hundred years old. (Religious News Service Photo.)

Within the Church itself Innocent III became the undisputed head of the whole ecclesiastical domain. All disagreements of the higher clergy were ordered to be referred to him, and his decisions were final. He reserved the right to move bishops about among their sees. He forced through the Fourth Lateran Council (in 1215) the acceptance of the dogma of transubstantiation and the rule that the good standing of a Catholic was conditioned upon periodic confession, absolution, and communion.

The papacy had reached its all‑time height of spiritual and earthly power.

Meanwhile, the medieval world, unified as never before under the Church, turned its creative energies toward these attainments: the medieval cathedrals, refinements of the mass, monastic orders oriented toward social mission (in a medieval version of the way of works), scholasticism (a medieval way of knowledge), and profound ventures into mysticism (a medieval way of devotion).

The Medieval Cathedrals

Cathedrals were the principal or mother churches of a diocese, and took their name from the fact that they were the locus or seat of a cathedra (throne) of a bishop. They were usually in large towns. Because the dignity of the cathedra called for equal dignity in the sanctuary, the architecture of a cathedral was usually impressive, especially from the twelfth century on, through the next three hundred years.

Cathedrals were of three chief types: Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic, and this ordering of adjectives corresponds roughly to their chronological development. The first was characterized by domes supported on pendentives and columns (or piers), the second by semi‑circular arches and vaults, as in Roman architecture, and the third by pointed arches and ribbed construction. In Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals the floor plan sought room for a large congregation and included, especially in central and western Europe, a nave, side aisles, transepts, and an apse. These allowed a symbolically appropriate cross to be achieved, the nave and apse forming the upright and the transepts the cross‑arms. The Byzantine and Romanesque cathedrals required thick walls to hold up the heavy roofs and domes, and hence their windows were relatively small; but since the basic structure of the Gothic cathedrals consisted of ribs of stone springing from the columns lining the nave and transepts and reaching up in high pointed arches far above the floor‑a skeletal structure that was capable of standing by itself if properly buttressed from the outside‑the roofs and sidewalls could be, and were, reduced to a mere skin of stone, and the sidewalls were pierced by large windows of colored glass, in beautiful designs. High towers were usually placed on either side of the facade, with a large window (the "rose window") between; and, if wanted, a tower could be placed over the crossing of the nave and transepts. These towers and the buttresses supporting the side‑walls could be, and often were, made the seat of numerous spires rising toward the sky. Almost everywhere, both inside and outside, there was room for statues and bas‑reliefs of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and the saints of the church, as well as for numerous figures and symbols of the faith, while at the roof‑edges the water‑spouts were often shaped into such grotesqueries as gargoyles. The stained glass windows gave scope for vividly colored symbols and portrayals of the life of Christ and of the history and significance of the Church.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. The seat of the archbishop of Canterbury and the scene, in the twelfth century, of the murder of Thomas ~ Becket, this cruciform cathedral is in the Perpendicular Gothic style. It has a prominent central tower rising 232ftet. It was begun as a basilica as early as 95o and completed, after much restyling, five hundred years later. This picture was chosen to show how the old town, which made it a community project, surrounds it. (Religious News Service Photo.)

In its totality, a great cathedral was a complex symbol, and summary, of the faith. In fact, before the invention of the printing press, a cathedral was, as were the icons and mosaics of the Byzantine churches, a "Bible for the poor," and indeed an essential element in every man's religious education, Because of its importance, in central and western Europe the building of a cathedral became in the favored towns a true community enterprise in which bishops, priests, artisans, guilds, and common people joined together in an act of faith; it often required, in fact, centuries of effort to bring to completion the huge structure that was to dominate both the landscape and the spiritual life of its town and countryside.

Mass in the Cathedral

The basic reason for the erection of cathedrals, as of other Catholic churches, was of course the celebration of the mass; but they were also the scene of coronations, investitures, ordinations, funerals, weddings, and other events in the life of the community that needed religious or ecclesiastical sanction. There was often high pageantry.

The mass had evolved through the centuries into a colorful event, marked by a liturgy so enriched by symbol and gesture that the common man could grasp its significance and multiple meanings without understanding all of the Latin that was its spoken medium. The vestments of those officiating ‑ priests, deacons, subdeacons, clerks, sometimes cardinals and archbishops, as well as others ‑ made all ceremonies and processions occasions of color and drama. The ritual of the mass varied from region to region, but the central act of the mass remained the same. To illustrate this, let us consider the following partial description of the mass as it was celebrated at York Minster, one of the great cathedrals of England, during the late medieval period:

The elements ‑ wine in a chalice and the host (a wheaten wafer) on a paten or plate ‑ are on the altar upon linen cloths. The priest and his attendants are kneeling at and below the altar. With his hands held together, the priest says in Latin:

Thee therefore most merciful Father, through Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord, we humbly pray and beseech: (Here the priest rises from his knees, kisses the altar, and makes the sign of the cross over the chalice) that thou wouldest hold accepted and bless these gifts, these offerings, these holy undefiled sacrifices.... which oblation do thou, we beseech thee, 0 God Almighty, vouchsafe to render altogether blessed, counted, reckoned reasonable and acceptable, that it may be made unto us the Body and Blood of thy most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. A photograph of the nave of the church takenfrom the main altar. The choir is in the foreground, the nave in the rear. (Religious News Service Photo.)

The priest now bows his head over the linen cloths preparatory to taking up the host, and continues: Who on the day before he suffered took bread into his holy and most honored hands, (Here the priest raises his eyes) and with his eyes raised toward heaven unto thee, 0 God, his Father Almighty, giving thanks to thee, blessed (Here the priest touches or elevates the host, enabling the host's transubstantiation to occur) and brake and gave to his disciples, saying, Take and eat ye all of this, for this is my Body. In like manner, after supper, taking this most excellent cup into his holy and most honored hands, (Here, if he follows the Continental practice, the priest elevates the chalice, and the miracle of transubstantiation again takes place) and likewise giving thanks unto thee, he blessed and gave to his disciples, saying, Take and drink ye all of this, for this is the cup of my Blood, of the new and everlasting covenant, a mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many for the remission of sins. (Here the priest covers the chalice with linen cloths because it has been transubstantiated into the real Blood of Christ and is most holy.) As often as ye do these things, ye shall do them in memory of me.

As the mass proceeds the priest spreads his arms to make of himself a semblance of the cross, and prays for himself and others. During the prayer he draws back his arms and makes the sign of the cross. Next he breaks the wafer into three pieces and puts one portion into the Blood and says: May this all‑holy mingling of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be unto us and to all who receive them health of mind and body, and a healthful preparationfor the laying hold on eternal life, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The priest now kisses the chalice and its linens, blesses those before him, prays for them, and then prays for himself that he may partake worthily of the sacrament. He communes first himself. At taking the Body, he says:

The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ be unto me an everlasting medicine unto eternal life. Amen.

At receiving the Blood, he says:

The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve me unto everlasting life. Amen.

At receiving the Body and Blood commingled, he says:

The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve my body and my soul unto everlasting life. Amen.'

In the events that followed, the laity partook of the wafer but not of the wine, for as the doctrine of the mass developed through the years into the full theory of transubstantiation, the laity, especially of England, shrank more and more from communing in the Blood of Christ; and now the Church has forbidden it.

Throughout Europe there was a place in most masses for prayers of intercession; generally, those for the living were offered just before the words of institution that converted the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; those for the dead followed after them, and became the basis for "masses for the dead," which were a prominent feature of the activities of the Church.

EDUCATION OF THE VIRGIN. Conceived according to the Hildesheim school (ca. 1510), the young Virgin, already crowned, is responding to the affectionate, slightly admonitory instruction of her teacher. The canopy over their heads is clearly Gothic, resembling a miniature Gothic cathedral. (Philadelphia Museum of Art. Given by Elizabeth Malcolm Bowman in memory of Wendell Phillips Bowman. '30‑1‑163a,b.)

Scholasticism

Since the time of Charlemagne the cathedrals and monasteries had devoted more and more attention to the schools they had founded for boys and young men. Some of the teachers, pursuing truth for its own sake, began to develop an interest in every kind of subject matter. They not only taught what was in the old books ‑ the Vulgate, the creeds, collections of canon law, fragments of Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, the writings of the Neo‑Platonists, the works of St. Augustine, and so on ‑ but they began to compose new treatises, which were circulated among the various monasteries and aroused debate, controversy, and dialectical discussion. As the fame of individual teachers increased, students came from far and near, and the conditions were created for the founding of universities, the first of which were established late in the twelfth century. Soon Bologna became famous for canon and civil law, Salerno for medicine, and Paris and Oxford for theology.

Scholasticism was the brain‑child of these medieval schools. It quite naturally concerned itself with the logic of the faith. After its first tentative emergence in the time of Charlemagne, it became with time more responsible, philosophically more weighty. (It is generally agreed that some of the early efforts of scholastic logic were scarcely profound. In the words of Guignebert, Christianty, Past and Present (Macmillan, 1927, p. 257): "To tell the truth, the dialecticians of the ninth century, and even those of the first half of the tenth, do not always deal in their arguments with really lofty subjects; little by little they perfect their methods through discussions which appear to us extremely puerile. They inquire, for instance, whether God can choose as a Redeemer a woman or a demon or an ass, or even a plant or a stone; they discuss the question whether a prostitute can become a virgin again through Divine grace, or whether a mouse that nibbles a consecrated wafer really eats the Lord's body!" But our possible amusement at this turn of discussion should be tempered with the thought that it was not characteristic of scholasticism generally or of any one place for long.) Its dialectical method was applied at last to the really great problem of theology: how to reconcile reason and revelation ‑ a problem that becomes in one direction the problem of the reconciliation of science and religion and, in another, that of the reconciliation of philosophy and theology.

Augustine had laid one of the bases of Scholasticism by saying, "Faith seeks the support of the intelligence" (fides quaerit intellectum), meaning that the intelligence explores and corroborates or finds added reasons for believing in the divinely revealed dogmas of the Church. The other basis of Scholasticism was suggested by Anselm 1033‑1109) in one of his works: credo ut intelligam, "I believe in order that I may understand." On the one hand, then, the scholastics proceeded on faith: the revelation was to be accepted as true, and then understanding of God, man, and world would follow. On the other hand, revelation was supported and defended by reason, as Augustine had suggested. It was in this spirit that Anselm developed his famous ontological argument for God's existence. (The argument runs: everyone understands by the name "God" that greater than which cannot be thought. Since anything not having existence cannot be greatest, the greatest has to have existence. Therefore God necessarily exists.)

When Scholasticism was in full swing one hundred years later, its exponents were committed roughly to the following procedure: they took their starting point from the incompletely systematized doctrines set forth in the scriptures and the creeds, erected these into a general structure of truth, and then proceeded to fill in this framework with the proper details ‑ that is to say, with the deductions, inferences, and related data necessary to a fully developed systematic theology ‑ all the while using as a test of validity each detail's coherence with the revealed dogma.

The early schoolmen started out with high hopes, drawing heavily upon the opinions of the church fathers and the great pagan philosophers. But they soon hit upon serious snags, which no amount of discussion seemed entirely to remove. Among them, as Anselm had pointed out, was the problem of the status to be assigned to unchanging ideas or universals. Were universals real (the position of medieval realism) or names merely (the position of nominalism)? t(To put the issue more technically, do universals (class terms) like man or house exist, as Plato claimed, prior to and as patterns determining the nature of the individual objects bearing their names (realism), or are such universals merely designations (names) for resemblances between objects, and do they have no existence except in thought (nominalism)?) Much depended‑much that did not at once meet the eye upon the answer. Take the Church, for example. "Church" is a universal. Did the Church exist as an ideal form prior to all individual churches, which must then have come into existence to exemplify its nature, or is "Church" a name given to individual institutions with certain marked resemblances and thus bestowed after they came into existence? If the answer was in terms of the first alternative, then the Church was indeed a divine institution; if the answer was in terms of the second alternative, then it was a much more human institution than it claimed to be.

The Church was actively behind the realists, yet nominalism had sown such doubts, left such problems, and won so many followers that the effort of the scholastic theologians to bring philosophy wholly into the service of theology (which they called "the queen of the sciences") proved at last a failure. By the fourteenth century Catholic theology had to let philosophy go upon its own way of free intellectual inquiry, untrammeled by tradition and authority.

The recovery late in the twelfth century of the Aristotelian writings helped to win for philosophy this freedom from theology. Up to the twelfth century only fragments of Aristotle's writings had survived the wreck of Roman civilization, but then from Spain there came translations of his works from the Arabic texts studied in the University of Cordoba. These translations were later checked against recovered Greek texts. For the first time in seven hundred years the West had before it a systematic treatment of natural science. The final result of its study was a "new theology," ably presented by Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastics. His synthesis of faith and philosophy, which reconciled without discrediting either, proved to be the most influential scholastic achievement.

Thomas Aquinas

Born in 1227, Thomas Aquinas was a native of Italy, a member of a noble family of part Roman and part German blood. He became a Dominican friar, of such promise that he was sent to Paris and Cologne to study under Albertus Magnus, another Dominican friar and one of the encyclopedic minds of his time. Afterwards he taught, first at Cologne, then at Paris, and finally in Italy, where he wrote his great books ‑ now the standard theological guides of the Roman Catholic Church ‑ the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica.

In the endeavor to reconcile reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, Aristotle and Christ, he tried to show that natural reason and faith are lower and higher forms of apprehension that are complementary to each other. By itself human or natural reason, that is, such reason as Aristotle used, can go very far, not only in exploring the natural world but also in proving the existence of God. It is possible for human reason by its own efforts to establish God's existence, using at least five cogent arguments: an argument from motion to an unmoved mover, an argument based on the necessity of a first efficient cause, an argument from possibility to necessity, an argument accounting for the gradation to be found in things, and a teleological argument drawn from consideration of design in the structure of the world. Nor is this all that reason can do. It can discover without divine help the nature of God; that is, it can by itself establish that God is pure actuality, one and unchanging, perfect and therefore good, infinite and therefore possessed of infinite intelligence, knowledge, goodness, freedom, and power. But reason is unable to establish more than general propositions. It cannot know what God hath wrought historically unless it receives divine supplementation of its knowledge. Therefore, it needs to have added to its conclusions what revelation alone can supply, namely, knowledge of the tragic nature of the fall of Adam, by which mankind has been infected with original sin, the facts of the Incarnation and the Atonement, the doctrine of the Trinity, the fact of saving grace through the sacraments, assurance of the resurrection of the body, and knowledge of hell, purgatory, and paradise. Thus a faith based on revelation knows things that are above reason, that is, that are beyond reason's unaided power to establish.

Yet faith needs reason none the less. Nothing should be accepted by faith that is contrary to reason. There is no risk in this. Candid examination of the Christian revelation shows it to be in no part contrary to reason, but in all its parts according to reason.

Similar reasoning enabled Thomas Aquinas to reconcile philosophy and theology. Philosophy begins with the world of sense‑experience and by the exercise of scientific reflection (reason) ascends to God. Theology begins with the revealed truths that are from God and descends to man and the world. Both supplement and need each other.

In his doctrine of man Aquinas combined Aristotle with the Christian revelation. With Aristotle, he considered that body and soul (matter and form) are functionally necessary to each other. The body without the soul cannot live, and the soul, though immortal, can neither develop nor maintain the characteristics of an individual self without the body. Hence, it is a great comfort to be assured by Christian revelation of the resurrection of the body.

Aquinas clarified the Catholic conception of the sacraments by a similar Aristotelian distinction of lower and higher elements. Every sacrament has two elements in it, a material element (water, bread, wine, oil) and a formal element (the liturgical formulas). Together they make an organic union and supply a means of grace. Present during the performance of each sacrament are the human or affected and the divine or causal elements. When the conditions are duly present, supernatural grace is conveyed through the sacraments to the human recipients as regenerating power. In each case a miracle takes place. Especially is this so in the celebration of the mass. There, at the words of consecration by the priest, the unleavened bread and the wine are transubstantiated, so that without changing in shape or taste they are the very body and blood of Christ. The miracle of the Incarnation is thus repeated at each celebration of the mass.

Penance, though a sacrament, is not highly sacramental. It is more prolonged and requires greater human participation. It involves contrition, confession (to a priest), satisfaction, and absolution (by a priest). Here, as in all human regeneration, there is a lower and a higher side. In his life on earth the individual finds himself able to attain a certain degree of natural virtue. Without God's aid he may exemplify wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. But these will not redeem him; these are but the virtues of the natural man. To attain to eternal life, he must attain the theological virtues, which have God for their source and their object and are nourished by God's grace alone. These virtues, which he cannot achieve by himself but must have from God, are faith, hope, and love.

To go no further with the summary of Aquinas' synthesis, we may see how orthodox and yet how flexible it is. The whole system is dogmatic from beginning to end, yet science is granted competence in the discovery of truth. Theology is in highest place, but humanism and naturalism are also given roles to play.

Medieval Monasticism

Monastic reform was in the air before the Crusades. (In fact, the Crusades were first projected by popes schooled in the reforms initiated by the Cluny movement of the tenth century.) Significantly, the whole monastic scene in Europe during the Crusades was dominated by the reforming Cistercian order ‑ French and Benedictine, like the Cluny group ‑ its greatest exponent, as organizer and preacher, being the saintly Bernard of Clairvaux. But the most notable expressions of medieval monastic piety were achieved a little later by the Dominican and Franciscan orders.

The Dominican order was in origin a missionary movement, whose first objective was the conversion of the heretical Cathari of southern France. But Dominic (1170‑1221), its Spanish founder, had the inspiration to send his "preachers," as imitators of the Apostle Paul, to many other parts of Europe, especially to the university towns, and their success caused his order to grow swiftly. The friars, as his monks were called, were devoted to learning because they were primarily preachers and teachers sent to the uninstructed and the unconvinced. They dressed plainly in black (whence their name of Black Friars) and were vowed to a mendicant poverty, begging their daily food in the spirit of Matt. 10:7‑14. The order was headed by a "master‑general" who supervised the work of the "provincial priors" in the Dominican "provinces." At the head of each monastery or nunnery was a "prior" or "prioress," chosen for a term of four years by the monks or nuns themselves, something of a democratic innovation. It was the misfortune of the Dominicans that the popes chose them as inquisitors; they had no original leaning in that direction. When they followed their own natural path, they had wide success among the higher classes and produced great writers and teachers, like the theologians Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; the reformer of Florence, Savonarola; and the mystics, Eckhart and Tauler.

The Franciscans had their great success among the common people. The founder of their order, St. Francis of Assisi (1182‑1226), is one of the world's great personalities‑as an individual the most winsome of saints, as a world‑figure Christ in a medieval incarnation. After a gay and frivolous youth, during which his father, a businessman, disinherited him for showing no interest in accumulating riches, he underwent after illness a religious experience that led him back to the "rule of Christ" as described in the New Testament. Thereafter he said he was "married to Lady Poverty," ate the plainest food, wore unadorned grey garments, possessed no other property than his immediate personal belongings, worked when he could, not for money, which he would not take, but just for the needs of the hour, or begged for his food when work failed. He preached to the poor or, when afield, to birds and beasts, in a love of nature that was a revelation to his hard‑headed and practical age. He ministered to the unfortunate, the lepers, the outcast with a compassion drawn both from his own nature and from his imitation of Christ. His way of life immediately attracted others, and he prescribed for them no more than the New Testament "rule of Christ." When twelve men had joined him, he went with them to Pope Innocent III for recognition of their order, and it was at once granted. Francis attempted no organization beyond sending his grey‑clad friars out two by two on preaching missions. Even so, his movement spread like wildfire. It became necessary for others to step in and organize it, putting at its head a "minister‑general" who directed the "provincial ministers" of the "provinces," which were composed in turn of local groups under a "custos." A second order, for nuns, was formed under Clara Sciffi of Assisi, and later a third order was created for lay people who wished, while pursuing a livelihood, to fast, pray, and practice benevolence in association with the order. St. Francis did not oppose the organizers who came to help him, but he regretted the necessity of putting a spiritual movement in leading strings. *(Today the order consists of three branches of varying degrees of strictness: the Friars Minor (dressed in dark brown tunics), the more rigorous Capuchins (grey‑clad), and the less rigorous, property accumulating Conventuals (in black tunics).)

Both the Dominican and Franciscan orders had enormous influence in suggesting that the Christian religion transcends all organization and reaches into every department of life with an elemental appeal addressed directly to every man's reason and conscience.

Medieval Mysticism

While, under the leadership of men like Thomas Aquinas, the schoolmen were pursuing what the Hindus would call "the way of knowledge," and while at the same time the common man was following "the way of works," there were others who cultivated a mystic "way of devotion" that was deeply rooted in the Church's past. Monasticism had always had its mystic aspect. When the monk retired to solitary meditation, he sought to purge himself of evil and lift his soul to ecstatic union with God and the saints. The mystics were those who refused to believe that the direct vision of God himself, or of Christ, or of the saints had to await the passage from this world to the next; the mystic vision was possible here on earth.

Medieval mysticism had both an individual and a cultic form. In the twelfth century the Cistercian leader, Bernard of Clairvaux, tried to bring new vigor into the religious life of his time by preaching and writing of the blessing that came from the mystic's love of the Virgin and of Christ. In his Homilies on the Song of Songs he provided later mystics with valuable concepts for the description of their feelings. He saw in Christ the bridegroom of the soul and so vividly defined this relationship of the Redeemer and his adorers that he made it possible for mystics to interpret their raptures as ideal and heavenly love. It seemed to Bernard that such a relationship would transcend earthly feeling. Love for Jesus can be so warm and personal that the entire being of the enraptured mystic becomes flooded with a sense of tenderness, fervor, and sweetness. (How profoundly stirring this idea was, may be seen in the hymn which comes down from his day, perhaps from his own hand:

Jesus, the very thought of thee

With sweetness fills my breast;

But sweeter far thy face to see,

And in thy presence rest. . . .

0 Hope of every contrite heart,

0 joy of all the meek,

To those who fall, how kind thou art!

How good to those who seek!

But what to those who find? Ah, this

Nor tongue nor pen can show;

The love of Jesus, what it is

None but his loved ones know.)

Hugo St. Victor and Bonaventura in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries carried mysticism into the schools. The Dominican preachers Meister Eckhart and John Tauler, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Germany, succeeded in developing an influential mystic cult in central Europe. Both were impatient with the externalism of the then current Catholicism. To Eckhart even "individuality" was something to be laid aside; it was "nothing." Only the divine spark in the soul is real; it alone matters. Following the same path, the Dominican ascetic Henry Suso illustrated in his own life the privations that extremer mystics determinedly underwent. As long as he felt within himself any element of self‑love and fleshly desire, he submitted his body to the extremes of self‑torture, carrying on his back a heavy cross studded with nails and needles and sometimes lying down upon it in stern self-chastisement, until at last God did "gladden the heart of the sufferer in return for all his suffering with inward peace of heart, so that he praised God with all his heart for his past suffering."

Around these German mystics a cult calling itself the Friends of God arose and spread through southwestern Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. In Holland the movement led to the founding of a group called the Brethren of the Common Life, whose members, renouncing sex, lived in separate houses of brethren and sisters, practicing the mystic discipline in semi‑monastic seclusion. The finest literary product of this group was a book of simple and earnest piety called the Imitation of Christ, by one Thomas a Kempis. No book produced during the Middle Ages has reached so many readers as this, for it commended itself long after as much to Protestants as to Catholics.

In other parts of the Catholic world the disorders of the Church beginning in the fourteenth century caused many individuals to turn to mysticism for truth and grace. Two great women found in their mystic raptures the power to work for reforms in the Church and in the world. Catherine of Siena (1347‑1380), energized by a mystic experience of "marriage" with Christ, the heavenly bridegroom, worked among the victims of the Black Plague and, being distressed by the "Babylonish Captivity" of the popes at Avignon, personally persuaded Gregory XI to move the seat of the papacy back to Rome. Almost two centuries later, Teresa of Avila in Spain (1515‑1582), after similar experiences, reformed the Carmelite order. She found guidance and help from a fellow mystic, the ascetic John of the Cross.

It is needless here to extend the list. One and all displayed the irrepressible longing of all high religions to transcend the formal and external limits of human experience and meet God face‑to‑face.

The Decline of the Papacy

The papacy was unable to maintain itself on the height of authority and power reached during the thirteenth century. The factors that led to its decline were many. The unremitting papal pressure at the top only accentuated the divisive effect of a new sense of nationalism rising among the different European peoples from below. France and England, particularly, were able to move toward independence. Indeed, the Holy Roman Empire (now "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire") broke up into a collection of loosely united petty kingdoms. When this happened, France began to wield a more powerful influence than Italy. There was an immediate clash of interests. The French clergy, forced to take sides, began to distinguish between the spiritual and the temporal authority of the pope and often sided with the king of France in disputes involving temporal matters. When Pope Boniface VIII (1294‑1303 ) and Philip the Fair fell out, the latter did an epochal thing, a demonstration both of the force of rising nationalism and of the stirring of democracy in western Europe. He called together a parliament such as the English already had; it was the first French States‑General and had representation from clergy, nobility, and commoners. This body gave him full support. The pope thereupon issued the famous bull, Unam Sanctam, containing the unqualified words: "We declare, we say, we define and pronounce that to every creature it is absolutely necessary to salvation to be subject to the Roman pontiff." This attempt to bring him to heel only led Philip to call another session of the States‑General, during which the Holy Father was defiantly arraigned as a criminal, a heretic, and immoral, and an appeal was issued for a general council of the churches to put him on trial. Because neither side would yield, the pope, a spiritual authority without military power, at length suffered the indignity of imprisonment by some of Philip's armed supporters. He was soon released, but the harm was done: in the name of nationalism, rough men had seized the pope's person and put him under duress.

A succession of "French" popes followed (1305-1377). Fearing violence in Italy, they retired to "Babylonish Captivity" at Avignon, where the power of the king of France over them was so unlimited that rival popes were elsewhere put in the field (1378‑1417), thus to the great damage of papal prestige producing what is known as the Great Schism. Thenceforth France and England became increasingly independent. The papal power waned. In the great chorus of liberated voices that was rising, the popes were no longer able to command a hushed silence when they spoke.

The Movement Toward Individualism, Freedom, and Reform

Meanwhile, during the Crusades and especially after the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century ‑ an event that brought many scholars fleeing to Italy with the literary masterpieces of the ancient Greeks in the original tongue ‑ there began that revival of classical learning known as the Renaissance. Poets and tale tellers like Petrarch and Boccaccio were the literary masters who joined the great Renaissance painters and sculptors in popularizing the "humanist" outlook, with its ever‑fresh delight in man and nature. Even the popes became zealous patrons of art and learning and all but forgot the duties they owed to the Christian world as Holy Fathers.

This was not lost on the common man. With the world rapidly expanding and enlarging his view‑as stories first of the Crusades, then of the discoveries of Marco Polo, of Columbus, and later of Magellan and others were conveyed to him‑and with his own life vastly altered by the rise of commercial towns independent of lords and princes, the common man began, in guild‑hall and market‑place, to question the manners and morals of the clergy, from the pope down, and to criticize the practices of the Church that had recently been established the sale of indulgences, (It was held that the pope has access to a treasury of the superfluous merits accumulated by the saints and that he had unlimited dispensation of these credits. Indulgences were sold in the form of documents transferring credits to the purchaser's spiritual account.) obligatory confession, and papal taxation in the form of money fees for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and all appointments to office in the Church, and for hundreds of other transactions. Moreover, the common man began to want learning for himself. He knew he could not master the classics of antiquity known to the learned, but he became curious about the Bible. He reveled in the mystery plays that dramatized for him episodes from the biblical story and moral dilemmas from everyday life. These whetted his appetite for direct acquaintance with the literary sources of these productions.

The common man's criticism of the Church and his hunger for scripture reached more intense forms in northern Europe than elsewhere, and there aroused the English priest John Wyclif to condemn papal taxation as greed and the doctrine of transubstantiation as unscriptural and to send his Lollard priests among the people of England to teach them the leveling doctrines of the Bible directly from translations out of the Vulgate into the English tongue. Wyclif influenced John Huss in Bohemia to lead a popular religious revolt of such proportions that the Council of Constance in 1415 condemned Huss to be burned at the stake. A quite unrelated reform later in the fifteenth century was led by the Dominican monk Savonarola in the city of Florence, which, after a brief triumph over the lives and spirits of the entire citizenry, procured for Savonarola finally only his own death by hanging.

In vain the Church at large attempted, through the cooperation of bishops, kings, emperors, and by the councils called at Constance and at Basel in the first half of the fifteenth century, to introduce needed reforms in Church life and administration. The only reform they seemed able to effect was the healing of the scandalous papal schism, an accomplishment brought about by forcing the rival popes from office and then restoring a single pontiff to the see of Rome. Otherwise, the situation remained fundamentally unaltered and provocative of greater upheavals to come.

V1 The Reformations of the Sixteenth Century

The sixteenth century witnessed a seeking of thorough going religious reforms. At their onset in Germany the initial intent was to obtain reforms within the Church by pointing out faults and making a vigorous protest; but the "Protestants" soon found themselves outside the Church. Thereafter the pattern became more and more common of first breaking away and then obtaining reform, until Protestants began breaking away from Protestants. The only general reform of a church from within occurred by way of reappraisal, redefinition, and renewal; this was the Catholic Reformation.

Let us look at these developments.

Some Precipitating Factors

The Protestant Reformation split Western Christianity into two apparently irreconcilable groups. It was long in preparation, as any study of medieval thought, even one so brief as ours, shows. It remained only for certain new developments, chief among which was the rise of the middle class to economic and cultural self-sufficiency, to bring it to pass. When the people of Europe gathered into towns along the rivers and coasts, as a consequence of the increase of commerce and trade, wealth was no longer immobilized in land or in produce offered for near‑at‑hand barter. It became fluid in the form of money, and modern capitalism was born. Gradually, the lords and princes were forced to relax their hold upon the growing middle class, and thousands of townspeople began to be true individuals. With no immediate overlords save only burgomaster and town councilors, they increased rapidly in self-confidence and ability to meet life's problems on their own intitiative. Politically, they began to evolve a point of view that was later to issue in democracy. One John Ball, the so‑called mad priest of Kent, cried out in England as early as in the fourteenth century:

"My good friends, matters cannot go on well in England until all things shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.... Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? So what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves? They are clothed in velvet and rich stuffs, ornamented with ermine and other furs, while we are forced to wear coarse linen. They have wine, spices, and good bread, while we have only rye‑bread and the refuse of the straw; and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, while we have the trouble and the work, and must brave the rain and the wind in the fields. And it is by our labor they have wherewith to support their pomp."

In such words lay the seeds of the peasant revolts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England and central Europe.

It is not surprising that the common man of Europe began to want his religious competence recognized too, whether in the use of reason or in the exercise of conscience. Martin Luther very well expressed the feeling of laymen when he passionately asserted:

"I say, then, neither pope, nor bishop, nor any man what ever has the right of making one syllable binding on a Christian man, unless it be done with his own consent. Whatever is done otherwise is done in the spirit of tyranny.... I cry aloud on behalf of liberty and conscience, and I proclaim with confidence that no kind of law can with any justice be imposed on Christians, except so far as they themselves will; for we are free from all.

The spiritual fact was that at the very time when the layman began to feel his own competence most, the Church seemed to him most corrupt. The Church had become identified in his mind with a vast system of financial exactions, rapaciously draining gold from every corner of Europe to Rome, where luxury, materialism, irreverence, and even harlotry seemed to reign unchecked among the clergy. Not only was the Church in his eyes corrupt, it seemed also to be left behind in the onward sweep of progress. In a changing world it represented cramping institutionalism, conservatism, conformity from age to age to one inflexible law, one worship, one order of life for every individual. Worse still, a yawning gulf had opened between religion and life, and the disparity between the Church and man's need increased more and more, until the pious layman, just a little appalled anyway by the secularizing effects of capitalism and nationalism, began to wish for changes in the Church that would make it serve the needs of men better.

All that was lacking was a leader who should precipitate the needed reforms.

The Lutheran Reformation

In Germany such a man appeared. He was Martin Luther (1483‑1546), an honest, impetuous, heavy set German, who linked conviction immediately and as a matter of course with appropriate action. Born in Saxony of peasant stock, he absorbed from his environment no particular respect for priests, but a great fear of the wrath of God. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but midway through his study of the law he responded to his intense religious need and entered a monastery of the Augustinian order, bent on winning God's favor by a pure and arduous conformity to monastic discipline. He punctiliously obeyed all the rules of his order; he swept the floor, fasted, bent over his books, almost froze. But though he wept and prayed and became mere skin and bone, he failed to make God gracious. indeed, he was not sure of his salvation. In 1507 he was ordained to the priesthood and later was appointed a professor in the new university established at Wittenberg by Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony. There he came to despise Aristotle as an "accursed, proud, knavish heathen" who had led many of the best Christians astray by his emptiness and "false words." The reason for this animus seems to have been the lack in Aristotle of any profound religious conviction. Luther obtained what he most needed directly from the Bible, and on its books, especially the Book of Psalms and the epistles of Paul, he lectured with growing enthusiasm and comfort to himself.

A journey to Rome in the meantime, even while it deepened his love of the Holy City, confirmed him in the conviction that the papacy had fallen into unworthy hands. He saw in the lives of the priests at Rome not the poverty and humility of Christ but pomp, worldliness, and pride. He was later to say:

" It is of a piece with this revolting pride that the Pope is not satisfied with riding on horseback or in a carriage, but though he be hale and strong, is carried by men like an idol in unheard‑of pomp. My friend, how does this Lucifer‑like pride agree with the example of Christ, who went on foot, as did also all the Apostles?"

His own inner life was illuminated suddenly by a sentence from St. Paul; its words were determinative in clearing up his own uncertainty: "The just shall live by faith" (Romans 1: 17). Faith! It alone was sufficient! God cannot be made gracious by good works; God, like a father, is gracious toward his own. All who live in this love and trust know that they are justified by their faith alone and will gratefully live a life of good works, without any urging, like a child who knows his father loves him. Gratitude, not fear, is the spring of the Christian life.

While Luther was forming these convictions, he was disturbed by the arrival of Tetzel, a papal agent, to sell indulgences in a nearby town. When members of his Wittenberg congregation (he preached in the castle church besides teaching in the university) went to buy these indulgences, he spoke out against their doing so. Urged by friends, tradition says, on October 31, 1517, he posted on the door of the castle church the famous Ninety‑Five Theses, a detailed attack on the selling of indulgences, drawn up in the form of propositions for public discussion. in accordance with the prevailing academic etiquette, he politely invited debate on each point he made, but he hardly anticipated the effect of his action. So great was the demand both for copies of the Latin original of his Theses and for its German translation that the university press could not issue copies fast enough to meet the demand from every part of Germany.

The fat was in the fire now. All north Germany began to buzz with talk. There was no thought then on anyone's part of leaving the Church; there was only a demand for reform. Yet there was present a deeper desire‑scarcely conscious‑for greater freedom from Rome. It was natural that Luther should be immediately attacked by Tetzel and others. His own bishop sent a copy of the Theses to the pope, who promptly ordered Luther to appear at Rome for trial and discipline. The elector of Saxony, who was proud of Luther, intervened, however, and the pope modified his demand to the order that Luther appear before the papal legate at Augsburg, which he did.

All this pressure had the effect, in itself a basic reaction of the entire Protestant Reformation, of making Luther search the scriptures to verify his position and justify his actions. His examination of the Bible convinced him that the Catholic Church had so far departed from its scriptural basis that many of its practices were actually anti‑Christian. He was driven to question not only the sale through indulgences of the infinite merits of Christ and the superfluous merits of the saints, but the whole medieval attitude toward penance and good works conceived as transactions made with God for his favor through the necessary mediation of priest, bishop, and pope. True repentance is an inward matter and puts a man into direct touch with the forgiving Father. Therefore, in the words of the 36th Thesis: "Every Christian who feels true compunction has of right plenary remission of pain and guilt, even without letters of pardon." Forgiveness of sins comes through the change wrought in a man's soul by his direct personal relationship with Christ and through Christ with God. Gradually, Luther reached the position that the true Church is not any particular ecclesiastical organization but simply the community of the faithful whose head is Christ. The only final religious authority is the Bible made understandable to believers by the Holy Spirit through their faith. So competent is every man of faith that he is potentially a priest. The Church should therefore proclaim "the universal priesthood of all believers." Said he:

To put the matter plainly, if a little company of pious Christian laymen were taken prisoners and carried away to a desert, and had not among them a priest consecrated by a bishop, and were there to agree to elect one of them, born in wedlock or not, and were to order him to baptise, to celebrate the mass, to absolve, and to preach, this man would as truly be a priest, as if all the bishops and all the popes had consecrated him. That is why in cases of necessity every man can baptise and absolve, which would not be possible if we were not all priests.

Further, because believers should be enabled to participate in religious exercises to the full, services should be in German rather than Latin, and they should be simplified and given a clearer intent.

Luther's appearance before the papal legate proved inconclusive. Ordered to recant, he refused and made good his escape back to Wittenberg. A lull in the papal agitation against him followed, produced by political developments in the empire, but it ended abruptly when Luther was led into a debate with the Catholic theologian John of Eck and forced to admit that he thought the Council of Constance had erred in condemning John Huss. Was Luther now repudiating the authority of the Catholic Church wherever it ran counter to his own judgment of what the Bible meant? It appeared so, and the pope issued a bull of condemnation against him. The Emperor Charles V being called upon to act, Luther was summoned in 1521 to appear before the imperial Diet, meeting at Worms. The elector of Saxony consented to this only if Luther were promised safe‑conduct, which being assured, Luther appeared. He readily acknowledged that the writings issued under his name were his, but would not retract, he said, unless he should be convinced from scripture that he was in error. While some of his admirers among the German princes looked on, he boldly told the emperor and assembled delegates of the Church: "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by evident reason ‑ for I confide neither in the pope nor in a Council alone, since it is certain they have often erred and contradicted themselves ‑ I am held fast by the Scriptures adduced by me, and my conscience is taken captive by God's Word, and I neither can nor will revoke anything, seeing that it is not safe or right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen."' Because he was under safe‑conduct, Luther left Worms unharmed, but it was understood that as soon as he returned home, he could be apprehended for punishment. The Diet therefore put him under a ban, ordered him to surrender, and forbade anyone to shelter him or read his books. But Luther could not be found. His prince, the elector Frederick, had had him seized on the way home, and he was hidden away in Wartburg Castle.

Luther used his enforced leisure to good purpose. He set to work on a translation of the New Testament into German. (Some years later, in 1534, he issued a complete translation of the Bible, an epochal achievement in more than one sense. Not only did it carry out the Reformation principle that the Bible must be put into the hands of the common man, but it also gave the Germans for the first time a uniform language, through which they could achieve national cultural unity.)

The Edict of Worms was never enforced. When Luther emerged from hiding, the emperor was busy with wars and quarrels elsewhere, and moreover, it was apparent that the German people were largely on Luther's side. Whole provinces became Protestant at one stroke when their princes renounced allegiance to the pope and turned Lutheran. By the time of Luther's death in 1546 his reforms had spread from central Germany into much of southern Germany, all of northern Germany, and beyond into Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Baltic states.

Luther did not leave to his followers a fixed system of theology and polity. He himself showed many inconsistencies, due in no small degree to his caution and growing conservatism. He was not a radical. He had repudiated Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, yet, as though he were appealing from medieval Catholicism back to the ancient Catholic Church, he found in St. Augustine a man after his own heart‑ and back of Augustine he rested, of course, on St. Paul. So vehemently did he cling to what he conceived to be Augustine's doctrine of determinism and predestination that he alienated the humanist Erasmus. Others found him too conservative in matters of worship, inasmuch as he retained the use of candles, the crucifix, the organ, and certain elements of the Roman mass. (But he removed the priestly sacrificial aspects of the Roman mass and may be said to have moved back toward the Lord's Supper as described in the New Testament.) When an attempt was made to bring Luther. and the Swiss Reformer Zwingli together, the conference between them broke down because Luther insisted that although there is no transubstantiation in the Lord's Supper, the body of Christ is spiritually present in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine (consubstantiation). His conservatism appeared, too, in his social and political views. He showed traces of anti‑Semitism in later life, and in the peasant revolt of 1524 he disappointed many by siding with the princes. In fact, he laid the basis of German statism by commanding submissive obedience to state authorities on the part of all Lutherans. Wherever the Lutheran Reformation spread, the Catholic monks and nuns either left the district or abandoned their former way of life and dress and joined the Lutheran community as parish priests, teachers, and lay‑folk, free to marry and raise families. Luther himself married a former nun and enjoyed a happy family life with the five children he had by her. In organizing the new Lutheran communities, he concerned himself most with three functions: the pastorate, charity, and the training and educating of the children. The monasteries that were appropriated by the town councilors or by princes were often turned, on his advice, into schools and universities.

Luther did not live to see the religious war that brought Germany during the mid‑century years to the brink of chaos and resulted in the compromise Peace of Augsburg (September 1555), by which equal rights were guaranteed to Catholics and Lutherans, but which left the religion of each province to the determination of its prince, on the principle cujus regio, ejus religio ("whose the rule, his the religion"). The Lutheran Reformation had really put the ruling prince where the bishop had formerly been, that is, in a position to exercise general jurisdiction over the churches.

The Swiss Reformation

A more radical Reformation came in Switzerland, when Ulrich Zwingli (1494‑1531), a highly educated parish priest whose sympathies lay from youth with the humanists, especially in their war on superstition and irrationalism, advocated a return to the New Testament as the basic source of Christian truth. In Zurich, therefore, he began a systematic public exposition of the books of the Bible, beginning with the Gospels. By 1522 he reached the conviction that Christians are bound by and should practice only what is commanded in the Bible‑a far more radical position than that of Luther, who held that Christians need not give up the elements in Catholic practice that are helpful and not forbidden in the Bible. In accordance with his convictions, Zwingli persuaded the people of Zurich to remove all images and crosses from the churches and to sing without organ accompaniment. In putting a stop to the celebration of the Catholic mass, he took the view that when Jesus said "This is my body," he meant "This signifies my body." It was irrational to suppose, he contended, that Christ's body and blood could be at once in heaven and with equal reality on ten thousand altars on earth all at the same time, as Luther argued. The bread and wine must be regarded as symbolic in character; they were blessed memorials of Jesus' sacrifice of himself upon the cross. The proper way to celebrate the Lord's Supper was to reproduce as nearly as possible the atmosphere and situation of the early Christian eucharist. Ritual should be at a minimum. And as to the regular church services, the sermon should be the central element in worship. It was the chief means by which the will of God could be made known. Local church government was to be reposed in the hands of the elders of each congregation, called collectively the spiritual council, for this seemed a close approximation to early Christian church organization.

The Zwinglian Reformation spread in his lifetime to Basel, Berne, Glarus, Mulhausen, and Strassburg. Ultimately it produced civil war between Catholic and Reformed forces, and Zwingli fell in one of the battles (1531).

In the southwestern part of Switzerland an intense young preacher called Farel won Geneva over to the Reformation. The task of producing a thorough going religious reform proved so difficult that he prevailed upon a young French scholar by the name of John Calvin (1509‑1564) to stay and help him. Calvin was at the time (1536) in flight from France, where he had just published, at twenty six years of age, the first edition of the Reformation classic The Institutes of the Christian Religion, a crystal‑clear definition of the Protestant position, which was destined to lay the foundations of Presbyterianism.

Because the public policies of Calvin flowed logically from his religious convictions, it would be well to list at once the chief affirmations of the Institutes.

1. The central fact of religion is the sovereignty of God. God wills whatever happens in the physical world and in human history and thereby assures his own glory. His will is inscrutable, and from the human point of view he may seem to follow merely his good pleasure, but his character is holy and righteous, and all his decisions are just.

2. Man is possessed of a certain natural knowledge of God as the moving spirit in nature and history, but his understanding is dimmed by his innate depravity, inherited from Adam, and so his knowledge must be supplemented by the revelation of holy writ.

3. Man's depravity vitiates not only his understanding but his whole nature. With a conviction going straight back to St. Augustine, Calvin wrote:

Original sin may be defined as an hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all parts of the soul, which makes us obnoxious to the wrath of God, and then produces in us those works which the Scripture calls "Works of the flesh." . . . We are, on account of this corruption, justly condemned in the sight of God. And this liableness to punishment arises not from the delinquency of an other; for when it is said that the sin of Adam has made us obnoxious to the justice of God, the meaning is not that we, in ourselves innocent and blameless, are bearing his guilt. The Apostle himself expressly declares, that "death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12), that is, have been involved in original sin, and defiled.'

4. But not all men are lost. There is a justification by faith that saves some, and these go on to sanctification. justification comes through the work of Christ in the believer's behalf and is "the acceptance with which God receives us into His favor, as if we were righteous." But God justifies only those believers in Christ whom he elects to receive into favor.

5. This idea of election leads into the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. "By predestination we mean," wrote Calvin, "the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation."

6. Like Augustine, Calvin considered the Church under two aspects. The Church invisible is constituted of all the elect of God in heaven and on earth; the Church visible is the company of professing believers on earth, organized in accordance with God's word in the scripture. In the Church visible the believer is not saved by his works, for it is God's election alone that saves him. Yet he is saved unto a righteousness abounding in good works; in fact, his righteousness is the only assurance he has of his election. "We are justified not without, and yet not by works," said Calvin.

This reasoning led Calvin to regard life with more than usual gravity and seriousness. Duty and self‑discipline were to him uppermost. One must live as under God's eye. Frivolous people who spent their hours in worldly pleasures, light‑heartedly preferring card-playing, dancing, and masquerades to sober reflection, reading the Bible, and doing God's will, might fear the worst. They were to be regarded as already the Devil's own, doomed to the fires of hell. On the other hand, those who were moved by the Holy Spirit to go about the Lord's solemn business on earth were earnest, industrious, and thrifty and valued these attributes in themselves as signs of their election to salvation. By this chastening logic, from which there seemed no escape, Calvin changed the mood of the citizens of Geneva to a puritanical righteousness. There was no room in Geneva for Luther's playfulness and laughter, his roaring, lusty voice raised in song around the organ, nor for his glad sense of the passing of God's wrath and the outpouring of his gracious love. Calvin's joy was a more secret thing, an inward peace and satisfaction, not expressed in the joviality of convivial fellowship. It was intellectual rather than emotional in quality and expression.

In Geneva arose a new kind of community. Working with the Small and General Town Councils, over which he gained increasing if sometimes stormy ascendancy, Calvin instituted both a church life and an educational system that gave Geneva a trained ministry and a people sufficiently informed regarding their faith to be able to give a clear account of it. Refugee scholars and exiles from all over Europe flocked to Geneva as to an asylum, so that the city increased its original thirteen thousand population by six thousand. Among the brilliant men who came there were Beza, one of Europe's leading humanists, Cordier, perhaps the ablest of European educators, Caraccioli, an Italian noble, Michael Servetus, who scarcely reached Geneva before he was condemned to death in a public trial and burned at the stake for heretical unitarian views, and the Scottish refugee John Knox.

The Reformation in France and the Low Countries

Beza and Cordier came to Geneva when the fires of affliction were being kindled for the Protestants of France. The Reformation had begun rather quietly in that land, yet with every prospect of soon sweeping the country. Then all at once it was very nearly drowned in blood. The forces on either side were brought into such violent conflict that civil war engulfed the country. Much more completely than in Geneva, the French Protestants, or Huguenots, adopted John Calvin's conception of church organization. The local congregation "called" its own ministers through the elders and deacons who formed the "consistory. " (T. M. Lindsay, in A History of the Rejormation (Scribner's Sons, igig, 11, p. 165), gives the following clear summary: Calvin "proposed to revive the simple three‑fold ministry of the Church of the early centuries‑a congregation ruled by a bishop or pastor, a session of elders, and a body of deacons. This was adopted by the French Protestants. A group of believers, a minister, a 'consistory' of elders and deacons, regular preaching, and the sacraments duly administered, made a church properly constituted. The minister was the chief; he preached; he administered the sacraments; he presided at the 'consistory.' The 'consistory' was composed of elders charged with the spiritual oversight of the community, and of deacons who looked after the poor and the sick. The elders and deacons were chosen by the members of the congregation; and the minister by the elders and deacons." This was Christian democracy. Kings and bishops naturally opposed it.) The Catholic clergy and nobility, particularly the zealously Catholic House of Guise, took alarm, and in spite of the efforts of the queen mother Catherine de Medici to preserve the peace by granting the Huguenots the right to worship in certain localities, the Guises provoked, with the encouragement of Spain, a series of civil wars; these proved inconclusive, the Huguenots having acquired local control of a number of fortified towns and being served by very competent military leaders, notably Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and the Prince of Conde. In 1572, Still seeking to protect her family's interests in court and country, Catherine sponsored the marriage of her daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre, of the House of Bourbon and a Huguenot (but not too firmly). For the wedding Catholics and Huguenots congregated in Paris. During the celebrations after the wedding an attempt to assassinate Coligny failed. (At the critical moment he stooped to adjust a shoe.) In panic at the thought of Huguenot retaliation and possible damage to her family, Catherine persuaded the weakling King Charles IX to order the Massacre of St. Bartholomew (August 1572), which is said to have brought death to twenty thousand Protestants, including Admiral Coligny in Paris and thousands of Huguenots throughout France. But although the international political effect of this drastic attempt to control the internal situation in France was favorable to the Catholic cause, it failed to suppress the Huguenots, who fought on through five further wars and at last by the Edict of Nantes (1598) won complete liberty of conscience, full civil rights, and the control of two hundred towns. Protestantism in France had not grown strong, but it had won the protection of the state. However, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and caused the Huguenots to emigrate in large numbers (some two hundred thousand of them) to Switzerland, England, Holland, South Africa, Prussia and North America. Not until the time of Napoleon were Protestant rights restored.

Bitter, too, was the struggle in the Low Countries. The Spaniards were in control there, and both the Emperor Charles V and his son, Philip II of Spain, were determined to stamp out the Reformed faith wherever it showed itself. The people of the Low Countries were in some sense prepared for the Reformation by the Brethren of the Common Life, already described, who had expressed what was really a people's movement toward personal piety, accompanied by a strong love of biblical learning. Luther's writings were eagerly circulated when they appeared; later Zwingli won devoted adherents; and still later Calvin's conception of church organization was to prevail. Some Netherlanders were attracted to the radical Anabaptists (see below). Open rebellion against Spain came when Philip II sent the cruel Duke of Alva to suppress every form of heresy at any necessary cost of blood. The struggle was long‑drawn‑out, but at last William the Silent was able to form a group of northern states that won independence as the nation of Holland. Holland became a Calvinistic land, sturdy and self‑reliant, with its churches (the Dutch Reformed) organized on the democratic principles already established among the French Protestants.

The Reformation in Scotland

In a sense, the case of Scotland was critical for the whole Protestant Reformation. To many at the time it seemed very possible that Mary Queen of Scots, both by her marriage with Francis II of France (through which she became an adherent of the French Catholic party in European politics) and by making good her claim to the English throne as a Stuart (which she never was able to do), might bring both Scotland and England back to the Catholic fold.

But Mary's marriage to the French king actually gave the Protestants of Scotland a chance they were not slow to seize. She was long absent in France, and during that time John Knox led his Protestant colleagues in the rapid development of a Calvinistic church. Knox did not introduce the Protestant Reformation to Scotland; he was himself a product of it. Captured in youth by a French force sent to Scotland to apprehend a group of Protestant rebels there, he was carried to France and compelled to row in the galleys for nineteen bitter months. On release he went to England, then under the Protestant government of Edward VI, and served in various towns as a royal chaplain. On the accession of Mary Tudor he escaped to the continent and made his way to Geneva, where he became an enthusiastic disciple of Calvin. Ultimately he returned to Scotland and in 156o, not long after his return, had the great triumph of having the Scottish Parliament ratify the "Confession of Faith Professed and Believed by the Protestants within the Realm of Scotland," which he and five others prepared and which remained the creedal formula of the Church of Scotland until it was replaced by the Westminster Confession in 1647. A week later the Parliament decreed that "the bishops of Rome have no jurisdiction nor authority in this realm," and forbade the saying, hearing, or being present at mass. Eventually, the Roman Catholic bishops and priests were expelled from the Church lands, which then came largely into the possession of the Scottish nobles.

In subsequent developments the so‑called Presbyterian system of church government was worked out on a national scale. In its complete form it established a representative democracy. The congregation elected and called the minister, who thereafter was alone responsible for the conduct of public worship. But this was his only unlimited prerogative. All local matters affecting the discipline and administration of the parish were entrusted to the kirk-session, composed of the minister, who presided, and the elders, chosen by election. Above the kirk-session was the presbytery, which consisted of the ministers of the parishes of a designated area and an equal number of elders representing each parish. Above the presbyteries was the Synod, with jurisdiction over certain groups of presbyteries, and over all was the General Assembly, the supreme judicatory of the national Church, consisting of delegate ministers and an equal number of elders. The center of gravity of this system was the presbytery, which was small enough to be vitally representative of its locality and large enough to have plenty of fight in it when its survival was threatened.

It was a bad moment for the Scottish Reformers when the fascinating and calculating Mary Queen of Scots came back from France a widow. They knew she was a devout Catholic and meant to overthrow Protestantism in Scotland if she could. When she first arrived, she pursued a moderate course, insisting only on having mass for her own household but promising to maintain elsewhere the laws that made it illegal in Scotland. She summoned Knox to five interviews in which she used all her skill to win him over, but he remained firm in opposition to any concession to the papacy. In other quarters Mary had more success and might have won all had she not fallen into disgrace through her intrigue with Both well and been deposed in favor of her year old son, who later became James I of England. With her fall the Protestant forces recovered their strength, and Scotland was made secure for the Scottish Reformation.

In the meantime, the Reformation in England had won a similar firm footing.

The English Reformation

The English Reformation was one of those more or less inevitable outcomes that thrive upon accidents. A king's private whim opened the way for the religious revolution that the nation basically wanted. With the moderation so characteristic of them, the English leaders nourished a desire to enjoy at least the degree of religious self‑determination that the Reformation had brought to the continental Protestants, and yet they bowed to the forms of legality in their national life and patiently waited. Eventually, they made their will felt, which was as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

The uninhibited Henry VIII, in the grip of a personal desire for a change in his marital status, vowed that if the Roman Curia would not annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order that he might marry Ann Boleyn, he would break with the pope! The Roman Curia turned him down, and Henry did not hesitate to act. Though much that he did and said shocked all shades of opinion in the nation, he had powerful elements among his people with him when he got Parliament to declare that "the bishop of Rome" had no more jurisdiction in England than any other foreign ecclesiastic, that the only true head of the Church of England was the king of England, that bishops in England were thenceforth to be nominated by the king and were to give their oath of obedience to him instead of to the pope, and that denial of the king's supremacy in the Church was an act of high treason. Henry quickly won the support of many of his nobles by first suppressing the monasteries in his realm and then distributing generous grants of land to them from among the great possessions thereby confiscated. Besides winning these powerful supporters, he cut off the flow of papal taxes to Rome and satisfied the growing desire of the English people for national self‑determination in all things.

But Henry VIII was theologically conservative. He did not intend that there should be a doctrinal break with the past to match his jurisdictional break with the pope. In 1539 he had Parliament pass what is known as the "Bloody Statute." It declared the doctrine of transubstantiation to be the faith of the Church of England and denial of it to be punishable by burning at the stake and confiscation of goods. It forbade the marriage of priests, and disallowed communion in both read and wine. The only considerable concession he made to liberal views, aside from his break with Rome, was in having a copy of the Bible in English placed in all the churches. (The so‑called Great Bible, drawn largely from the translation of Tyndale, but with some parts taken from Coverdale's version.) Many English followers of Luther and the Swiss Reformers were put to death under the Bloody Statute. More fled to the continent, where they found their chief asylum in Switzerland.

These exiles returned when Henry was succeeded by his nine‑year‑old son, Edward VI, for then it became apparent that under the protectorate established for the immature king the national policy would shift religiously to the left. The young king's advisers, especially Somerset and Northumberland, strongly favored doctrinal as well as political changes. The Bloody Statute was repealed, communion in both kinds was allowed, private masses were brought to an end by the confiscation of the chapels where they were said, priests were permitted to marry, and images were removed from the churches as instances of papish idolatry. But Edward died when only fifteen and was succeeded by his sister Mary, an ardent Catholic, who loved and married the Spanish heir‑apparent. (Charles V's son, soon to become the intolerant Philip II). She led the return to Rome by restoring the pope's jurisdiction over the English churches, and herself earned the name of "Bloody Mary" by the ruthlessness with which leading Protestants were at her behest apprehended and burned at the stake. When she died after a reign as brief as Edward's, her sister, Elizabeth, the daughter of Ann Boleyn, brought the nation finally to the Protestant fold. "Good Queen Bess," as her subjects affectionately called her, completed the unfinished work of her young brother's reign. The Prayer Book of Edward VI was revised so as to be made palatable to Catholics and Protestants alike, and under the name of The Book of Common Prayer was, by the Act of Uniformity of 1559, prescribed for use in all churches without alteration or deviation. The beliefs of the Church were stated clearly in the famous creedal statement "The Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England," which is to this day the formally authoritative summary of its doctrines. England remained Protestant henceforth, even when Catholic monarchs were on the throne.

The Protestant Radicals

While the national Reformation movements just described were coming to terms in one way or another with the civil powers, quiet searchers of the scriptures all over Europe were finding their own way to a much more radical break with constituted authority. Some were moved by the Word of God alive within them; some followed reason solely.

Among the former were the Anabaptists (literally "rebaptizers"), groups largely recruited from the common people‑peasants and artisans‑and led in the first instance by immediate associates of Luther and Zwingli. Most took the New Testament literally and with great seriousness, determined to depart in no way from the manner of life they saw depicted in it. Others felt themselves not bound thus by the "letter" of scripture, because the "Word" is a "living spirit" expressed in but not confined to scripture nor present equally in all parts of it. The living Word of God is heard in prophetic personalities and in the inner consciousness of all who are justified by faith.

It seemed to all the Anabaptists that the first requisite of being a Christian is that one should grasp clearly in his own mind the meaning of each aspect of the Christian life and practice and then act upon that understanding no matter what the cost. Ceremonies and rituals must, they thought, have a clear meaning to the participants or cease being real and vital. Accordingly, they rejected infant baptism; plainly, the baby could not know what was being done, and so the rite could mean nothing. Those who had been baptized in infancy therefore baptized each other all over again (hence the name they bore). In the wider realm of conduct, a clear understanding and sincerity, they held, are just as imperatively needed. The New Testament teaches the principle of overcoming evil with good instead of resisting one injury with another. Most Anabaptists concluded that they should not join the armed forces of the state, contribute to warfare in any way at all, or even take part in the civil administration during peacetime, because of the policy of force all states adopt. They found New Testament warrant for never taking oaths; so, when taken to court, they insisted that their simple word be taken for truth: their yea was yea and their nay nay. Because they felt that priests and ministers were prone to please worldly powers and make compromises in vital areas, the Anabaptists were anticlerical and met outside the regular church circles in their own houses; churches were to them idolatrous "steeple‑houses." They did not agree on all matters, but they made it a principle to exercise tolerance where differences as to the literal meaning of scripture appeared. Some, for instance, took with greater literalness than others the apocalyptic or millenarian passages of the New Testament expressing the expectation that Christ would return on the clouds of heaven to be the judge on the last day. Others practiced the communism of the early Christian fellowship in Jersualem. Occasionally, some Anabaptist would proclaim himself a prophet, as did the noted Hans Hut, who won many of the working people of Austria and adjacent parts of Germany to the view that a Turkish invasion would be followed by the appearance of Christ to inaugurate the millennium.

The finality with which the Anabaptists separated themselves from the established churches and the state (whence the name Separatists that they also bore) and the radical views that many of them espoused led to intense persecution. Luther parted company with them, or, rather, they with him. Zwingli engaged them in bitter public debates, which were usually followed by the decision of the Swiss cantonal authorities that his views alone were to be recognized as lawful. A few Anabaptist leaders were executed as criminals. In 1527 Felix Manz was put to death by drowning in Zurich, Michael Sattler was burned and his wife drowned at Rottenburg; the following year Balthasar Hubmaier and his wife met the same fates in Vienna; a year later Georg Blaurock was burned in the Tyrol. One desperate group of millenarian Anabaptists seized control of the German town of MUnster and so radically revolutionized both the religious and social life there that the Catholics and Lutherans joined forces in storming the city and putting the leaders to death by torture. The erratic behavior of these Anabaptist leaders, marked as it was by communism, polygamy, and violence, gave Anabaptism an undeserved bad name in Europe.

Later on, this bad name was partially redeemed by the gentle and reasonable Anabaptist leader Menno Simons (1492‑1547), whose followers in the Netherlands and the United States were called, after him, Mennonites. They were pacifists, espoused an Arminian theology that softened the harshness of Calvinism, (In the Reformed churches, especially in Holland, the harsh predestinarianism of the strict Calvinists‑and no less of the "Formula of Concord" (1580), which was meant to unify the Lutherans‑could not be stomached by many who felt that damnation was not due solely to God's determination but also to man's erring choices. In their heartfelt conviction (for "God is love"), God has elected not just some but all men to salvation through the atonement of Christ ' which has saving efficacy for every member of the human race' but not all men reach the pitch of faith that makes forgiveness and justification available to them; hence they perish through their own lack. Those who held these views were called Arminians, after the Dutch theologian Arminius who gave expression to their convictions. The Reformed churches condemned their position at the Synod of Dort (1619), but it has spread through the Methodist churches and has gained more than a foothold in Presbyterian and other Reformed circles.) and practiced a person‑to‑person tolerance that enabled individual Mennonites to house, with simple Christian charity, such exiles as the ostracized Jew Spinoza and certain refugee English Separatists.

But the Anabaptist revolt was not the only expression of radical Christianity. The basis of Unitarianism was now laid. At a time so early in the period of the Reformation that the doctrines of the Reformers had not yet been fixed in set forms, such as the Augsburg Confession or the Heidelberg Catechism, and the extent of the doctrinal departure from Catholic dogma was not yet clear, excited minds, stirred by the possibilities opening up to a thorough going rational test of Christian doctrines, proposed unrestricted reason as the sovereign guide to sound reconstruction in theology. Such a one was the Michael Servetus whom we saw burned at the stake in Calvin's Geneva. A Spaniard by birth, he was struck on a close reading of the New Testament, while traveling in the retinue of a Catholic prelate, by the fact that the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, in whose name so many of his own country men were being burned at the stake or exiled, was not to be found in it, and that, moreover, his reason found fault with the doctrine itself. So he wrote down his ideas secretly and audaciously and in 1531 published his famous heretical treatise, Concerning the Errors of the Trinity. Hopeful of winning the Reformers to his views, he went to Switzerland, but found the leaders whom he met cool, though still not committed to any clear position. Servetus could not imagine how his reasoning failed to carry conviction. The doctrine of the Trinity he felt to be a Catholic perversion and himself to be a good New Testament Christian in combating it. He himself was far from denying the divinity of Christ. According to his conception, a Trinity composed of three distinct persons in one God is a rational impossibility; he proposed instead "a manifestation of the true substance of God in the Word (or Christ) and its communication in the Holy Spirit," ("Verae substantiae Dei manifestatio in Verbo et communicatio in Spiritu.") a view that seemed to him to preserve the full deity of Christ without destroying the unity of God. There seemed to be no good reason, he felt, to deny the virgin birth or miracles.

Finding himself in danger, Servetus now changed his name, went to France, studied and practiced medicine with success, and became the first scientist to advance the theory of the pulmonary circulation of the blood. Meanwhile, he was being sought by the Inquisition, and from motives of prudence, when he opened up an acrimonious and to himself fatal correspondence with Calvin, he wrote under an assumed name. But Calvin's friends looked him up, made his identity known, and thus obliged him to flee. At the moment, Calvin's position in Geneva was not altogether secure, and for this or some other reason Servetus went there, only to fall afoul of Calvin's supporters, have condemnation passed upon him with Calvin's assent, and perish at the stake (1553).

Servetus was associated with no organized group. He was something of an individualist and worked alone. But his writings stirred groups of already existent anti‑Trinitarians, who, when made the object of persecution both by the Inquisition and by Protestants, took refuge in the only areas that would at that time harbor them, Poland and Transylvania, now part of Rumania. Some took the Arian position, which maintained that long before the Incarnation Christ proceeded from the Father and was subordinate to him. Others denied Christ's pre‑existence but believed he should be adored as virgin‑born and risen from the dead to God's right hand (whence they were called "Adorantes"). Still others (the " Non‑ador antes"), led by the great Transylvanian preacher Francis David, would worship God only, for to them Chirst was not God but a man born of Joseph and Mary, who grew into fullness of divine powers‑a view shared with certain Anabaptists and common to Unitarians today. The reconciliation of these divergent views was to a large degree effected by Faustus Socinus (1539‑1604), an Italian, who, after living in Switzerland and in Transylvania, finally established himself in Poland. He denied the pre‑existence of Christ, holding that he was only a man, but he asserted, more positively, that Christ's life was so exemplary and his consciousness so flooded with divine wisdom that he was resurrected in triumph from the dead and elevated to God's right hand, and so one may adore and address prayers to him. In the Racovian Cathechism (1605), published by his followers after his death, this median position was explained and proved widely acceptable, becoming known as Socinianism.

Poland was then a hospitable refuge for the oppressed, and in the atmosphere of freedom of thought that existed there these views met with a warm reception. But after 1632 the Catholics returned to power, and the Unitarians were suppressed, together with all other Protestants in Poland.

The Catholic Reformation

The Protestant Reformation resulted in intensifying latent Catholic self‑criticism and stirred up a Church-wide call for reform. The popes, however, were not among the motivating forces; they were too much on the defensive. It was the Emperor Charles V, anxious like Constantine in the fourth century to reduce disunity, who earnestly sought for reforms in the Church and a redefinition of Catholic doctrine in order to offset the effectiveness of Protestant critical propaganda. He came to this position only after his prolonged efforts to bring about a reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants on the basis of projected reforms had failed. It was he who brought pressure on Pope Paul III to call the Council of Trent.

This pressure was decisive, because it had behind it all the accumulated power generated by the cries for reform, both clerical and lay, which had been heard in Europe for centuries. John Wyclif, John Huss, Savonarola, and Erasmus, not to mention Luther and Zwingli before they left the mother church, were simply the more powerful figures among those who advocated reform. But the Catholic Reformation (by Protestants labeled the Counter‑Reformation) did not get under way until momentum was imparted to it by the determined and militant forces for reform and enlightenment in Spain, where the expulsion of the Moors in the fifteenth century had been followed by the reform of the clergy under Ximenes, the great archbishop of Toledo and confessor to Queen Isabella. The Spanish Church had been purified of unworthy monks and priests, universities for the training of the clergy had been founded, the union of church and state under Ferdinand and Isabella had been made very close, and the means of keeping church and state purified had been found in the reorganization of the Inquisition on a national basis, with inquisitors appointed by the Spanish monarchs. The result had been a revitalization of the Spanish Church to match the rapid rise of Spain itself to the position of the first power in Europe. When, therefore, the Spanish king became the Holy Roman Emperor, in the person of Charles V, the drive for reform, all the more urgent because of the Protestant menace, had secured powerful support.

A. The Council of Trent. When Charles V got Pope Paul III to call the Council of Trent in 1545, he hoped first to get needed reforms and afterwards a redefinition of the Catholic position. It was thus that he planned to conciliate the Protestant leadership and follow up his military victories over the German Protestant princes with a psychological master‑stroke that would bring the recalcitrants back into the Catholic fold. But the Catholic leaders insisted that doctrine be discussed alternately with reform and soon made reconciliation with the Protestants impossible by firmly redefining the medieval Catholic doctrines. The council met over a period of eighteen years (1545‑1563) and during its course declared:

1. Catholic tradition is co‑equal with scripture as a source of truth and in authority over Christian life.

2. The Latin Vulgate is the sacred canon.

3. The Catholic Church has sole right of scriptural interpretation.

4. The sacraments are the seven recognized by the medieval Church, not just the two of the Protestants. (The Roman Catholic sacraments are baptism, the eucharist, confirmation, matrimony, holy orders, penance, and extreme unction. The Protestant sacraments are baptism and holy communion.)

They are, as Thomas Aquinas declared, the visible forms of invisible grace bestowed through the Church on the worthy.

5. justification rests on faith, but not on faith alone as the Protestants assert. Good works also procure God's grace.

In the sphere of discipline and church management, the council turned to the broad task of preserving morals and furthering education. It ordered stricter regulation of the issuance of indulgences and the veneration of saints, it limited the number of holy days observed during the year (in deference in part to demands of economic interests), and it ordered bishops and priests in the larger towns to offer public expositions and interpretations of scripture and in general to preach and teach what is necessary for salvation. Of far reaching effect was the council's instruction to the pope to prepare an index of prohibited books, a step that helped to limit the reading of Protestant literature by Catholics.

B. The Reorganization of the Inquisition for Church‑Wide Operation. In 1542 Pope Paul III was persuaded by his advisers to reorganize the Inquisition on a scale that made its immediate use possible in any part of Europe where the civil authorities asked for it or were willing to support it. The Catholic Reformation thus acquired the instrumentality by which Catholic areas could quickly be purged of Protestants. The first country to be thus cleared was Italy.

C. The Jesuits and Other Religious Orders. Of the greatest importance for the revival of Catholic spirit and zeal was the rise of new religious orders, the most famous of which has been the Jesuit order founded by Ignatius Loyola.

The Jesuits

Loyola (1491 ‑ 1556) was a Spanish nobleman, who, after being a page at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, became a soldier and was seriously wounded in a battle with the French. During convalescence he read the lives of Christ, St. Dominic, and St. Francis and resolved to become a "knight of the Virgin." He accordingly hung his weapons on the Virgin's altar at Monserrat and at a Dominican monastery began the self‑directed visualizations of the life and work of Christ and of Christian warfare against evil that he later systematized as the Jesuit spiritual "exercises." While on a pilgrimage to Jersualem he came to feel the need of more education, so he hurried home to study in Spain and at the University of Paris. He gathered around him student associates with whom he practiced his spiritual exercises. It was thus that he attracted to himself Francis Xavier, who became the famous missionary to India and Japan, and men like Diego Lainez and Simon Rodriguez. In Paris in 1534 he organized these friends into a military "company of Jesus" vowed to go to Jerusalem, if possible, as missionaries to the infidel Muslims, or, failing that, to offer their services to the pope. When war with the Turks barred the way to Jerusalem, they went to Rome and in 1540 obtained the authorization of the pope, Paul III, to establish the Society of Jesus, with Loyola as the first general.

Known as the Jesuits, they dedicated themselves to study and to translating into their own everyday activities the life and spirit of Christ himself. To this end, as "good soldiers of the cross," they bound themselves to a life of strict militia like discipline, spiritual exercises, and absolute obedience to their superiors short of sin, never ceasing to train their wills to serve Christ absolutely, unreservedly, and unselfishly. Yet "sin" was so defined that it was seldom confronted in the course of carrying out the instructions of their superiors, for they held that there could be no sin in a doubtful course of action if "probable" grounds for it existed or it had been accepted by men of greater experience or had authority for it. Moreover, so sure were they that a good end justifies secrecy about means that they sanctioned "mental reservation" on being required to tell the whole truth: one was not bound to give the whole truth even under oath. The main thing was absolute self‑commitment to the aims of the Jesuit order and unreserved and complete surrender of self in doing what one's superiors considered to be in the interests of Christ. This sacrificial devotion was intensively cultivated in each Jesuit during his novitiate, a regimen that included a unique and very effective four weeks of spiritual exercises under the point‑to‑point direction of a spiritual drill‑master. On the basis of the capacities revealed during this period, each Jesuit was assigned by his superiors to the tasks he was judged best suited to, and when sent to some post, no matter how far away, he was under an obligation to send back a continuous stream of reports to his superiors who had sent him.

The Jesuit order had spectacular success in the field of missions. Not only did Francis Xavier and his associates carry Catholicism to India, Japan, and China, but others during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries won their way into South America, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys, Mexico, and California.

Here it is important to observe that the natives sensed that the priests had come not to exploit and rob them, as the conquistadors often did, but to save them. In Europe itself Jesuits diligently and intelligently sought and occupied important commercial and governmental posts, which took them into far‑flung places abroad as well as into the council chambers of kings and princes at home. Their political influence in France, Portugal, Spain, and Austria during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was very great. They led in checking the spread of Lutheranism into south Germany and were powerful factors behind the scenes when the Huguenots in France were fought and massacred. But they aroused the enmity eventually not only of all Protestant but also of many Catholic groups. In the eighteenth century they found Portugal, France, and Spain successively closed to them. At last they lost their temporal power, but they have continued to this day to promote the supremacy of the pope implied in the decrees of the Council of Trent.

Other Orders

The Jesuit was not the only new organization to witness to the forces of Catholic renewal. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of the Oratorians, Theatines, Ursulines, Visitandines, and Lazaristes. The first two sought respectively the reform of the breviary and the improvement of preaching; the last three were orders for women that laid emphasis on education for women and remedial social work.

These movements were both effects and causes. They sprang from the heightened Catholic sense of the seriousness of the Church's mission in the world, and they caused the older organizations in the Church to look into their ways and to replace their former laxity with greater earnestness. The Franciscan and Dominican orders were thus revitalized. Even the papal office was affected. The popes from this time forward were uniformly men of more austere character and earnestly Catholic aims.

VII Crosscurrents in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In the first half of the seventeenth century wars of religion broke out on the continent of Europe. The emperor and the pope, alike subscribing to the decisions of the Council of Trent, sought Catholic recovery of lost ground, while the Protestants fought for freedom from suppression and for dominance in central Europe. The Thirty Years' War, which decimated central Europe, changed little territorially. However, the Catholics regained some ground and the Protestants established their right to exist independently of pope or emperor. An exhausted Europe breathed a sigh of relief when the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) drew lines that granted Calvinists and Lutherans the right to certain territories without further interference by emperor or pope, and recognized Catholic dominance in other, largely southern, areas of central Europe.

England was comparatively uninvolved in the Thirty Years' War, and so there, although persecution and suppression were not uncommon, sufficient tolerance existed to allow the rise of nonconformists and dissidents who broke away from the Church of England and survived as independent religious bodies destined to spread their views to the New World. The independents were alike in demanding self‑determination in matters of belief and of polity or church administration as their Protestant right.

We have to go back a little in time to consider the first of these groups.

The Puritans

The Puritans got their name in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Her accession in 1558 brought back to England, as we have seen, many exiles who had fled from "Bloody Mary." Their residence abroad in Calvinistic areas had inclined them toward Presbyterial forms of church government and simplicity of worship and life, but they had no wish to be Separatists. Rather, they desired only to purify the worship of the Church of England of what they called its "Romish" elements (Such as kneeling to receive the bread and wine at communion services, the sign of the cross at baptism and confirmation, the use of the ring at weddings, and special clerical garb for ministers.) and to give emphasis to preaching the Word rather than to ritual and sacraments. Most of them resigned themselves, at least for the time being, to episcopacy bishops, archbishops, archdeacons, and the like provided locally they could be served by sympathetic parish ministers, but a few openly advocated a Presbyterial system such as existed in Scotland. When these Presbyterial Puritans increased in numbers, the Puritans became divided. Those who wished to reform the Church of England from within retained their membership in it in patience and hope; those who could not wait broke away from time to time as Separatists and found the government so determined to crush them that they emigrated to Holland. They were the first Congregationalists and Baptists, and we shall return to them shortly.

The Puritans still within the Church of England found the government hardening against them when James I became king. Charles I after him was more resolved even than his father not only to make the English Puritans conform in full to the practices of the Established Church but to carry further his father's attempt to force episcopacy on the Scots. It was a literally fatal attempt on his part. To his astonishment, he provoked the Scots (thousands of them as "Covenanters" sworn to a life‑and‑death struggle against him) to rebellion, and their success in arms brought him to such a pass that he had to summon Parliament, only to find that the Puritans were now in the majority in that body! The Puritans had not for some time been faring so well. They had fared so ill while Archbishop Laud was in power, that twenty thousand of them in the period from 1628 to 1640 followed the Pilgrims (see below) over the sea, and in Massachusetts and Connecticut became New England Congregationalists. But now in 1640 they were in such majority in Parliament that they could cast Laud into prison. When the angered king opposed them, they as angrily rose to arms as representatives of the people driven by their sovereign's stubbornness to make a six‑year war upon him. So came about Charles I's beheading and the Puritan Revolution under Oliver Cromwell. For twelve years England was a Puritan land, and all the people were bound by a stern religion's purifying restraints.

Not only the Puritan way of life but also Presbyterianism seemed about to triumph in England, for in 1646 the Westminster Assembly, called to advise Parliament and composed of English ministers and laymen, with Scottish commissioners sitting in an advisory capacity, presented to Parliament the "Westminster Confession," the last of the great confessional standards of the Reformation and still the doctrinal norm of Presbyterians throughout the world. The Parliament rather hesitantly adopted it, as well as the Larger and Shorter Catechisms prepared to accompany it. But, as it happened, little came of the Parliament's action, for the return of Charles II to England in 1660 brought with it the Restoration, and reaction was thereafter so triumphant that by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 the Puritans were forced out of the Church of England into the ranks of the Dissenters, ultimately to become Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Unitarians.

The Congregationalists and Baptists

Meanwhile, the Separatists who had left England prior to the Puritan Revolution had had an interesting and important history abroad. One group that settled at Amsterdam about 1607 was led by a John Smyth, formerly a Church of England minister, who, upon learning from Mennonite neighbors their views on adult baptism and being convinced by study of the New Testament that it was not the early Christian practice to baptize infants, rebaptized himself and his whole flock. Members of his congregation returned to London and established there about 1612 the first Baptist Church in England that endured. This was the beginning of the Baptist denomination, soon to spread throughout the British Isles. Though some Baptists are Arminian and others Calvinist in theology, they finally found unity in one distinctive position: baptism of believers only, and that by total immersion. In 1639 a group of Baptists, to whose number Roger Williams belonged, founded a church in Rhode Island. Baptists subsequently appeared in all the American colonies, especially in the south.

Other emigrants in Holland passed their first years of exile there quietly enough. At Middelburg in 1582 Robert Browne, a Cambridge man, published the clearest definition of Congregationalism ever to be penned. His logic was firm. Said he, the Church of Christ, in the view of true Christians, is not an ecclesiastical organization but a local group of believers who have experienced union with Christ, the only real and permanent head of the Church, and by a voluntary convenant with each other have consented to be ruled by officers ‑ pastor, elders, deacons, teachers ‑ chosen by themselves as moved by the spirit of Christ. Each church is absolutely self‑governing, none has authority over any other, but all are under the Christian obligation to extend each other brotherly help and goodwill.

But if all this was quietly done and said, a notable course in history was run by one group among them.. In 1609 a Congregationalist group that had come over from Scrooby, England, under the leadership of John Robinson and William Brewster, with William Bradford of their number, settled in Leyden. Not content there, they made a momentous decision: to return to England in order to send their more adventurous and able-bodied members to America. On the Mayflower, then, in 1620 the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic, and, in the spirit of their solemn convenant made at sea founded the colony of Plymouth. Other immigrants, mostly Puritans from England, followed them over the waters, until the whole of New England, except Rhode Island, was won for Congregationalism. There it enjoyed the status virtually of a state religion for two centuries.

FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETTS. Built in 1816 to 1817, this church is considered the masterpiece of Charles Buffinch in his Adamesque or late Georgian style. A fine example of colonial architecture, it suggests both the dignity and the simplicity of New England Protestantism. Whereas the conventional New England steeple rises into a high spire, this church is surmounted by a graceful dome on engaged columns.

The Unitarians

We last saw the Unitarians concentrating early in the seventeenth century in a hospitable Poland; but when the Catholics returned to power there, the religious climate changed from permissiveness to opposition. Driven into exile, they fled to eastern Germany, Holland, and England. When the English passed a law in 1648 making the denial of the divinity of Christ a crime punishable by death, some of the more liberal Unitarians were obliged to flee again to Holland. During the eighteenth century many of them quietly appeared in New England, and in the early nineteenth century, under the preaching of Ellery Charming and Theodore Parker, they grew in strength, formed the American Unitarian Association (1825), and received many Congregational ministers and churches into their organized fellowship. (In 1961 they united with the Universalist Church, a denomination formed in the eighteenth century to proclaim that a God of love, truth, and right can have no less a purpose than to save every member of the human race.)

The Quakers

One more English Nonconformist group of this period, the Quakers, requires our attention. They were in many respects the most radical of all. Founded during the civil war that resulted in the Puritan Revolution, the Quaker movement was in essence a revolt against formalism and sham. The Quakers were nick named so, but preferred to call themselves the Society of Friends. Their founder was George Fox (1624-1691), a religious genius who may be reckoned one of the world's great mystics. In a profound experience of conversion, which occurred in 1646, he came to a belief much like that of some of the early Anabaptists. True Christianity was to him not a matter of conforming to a set of doctrines or of believing in scripture without having "a concern" as the result of so doing, nor was it a going to a "steeple‑house" to listen to a sermon or prayers read by a professional priest. It was a being illuminated by an inner light. The Word of God is a living thing not confined to the scriptures, though it is there. It comes directly into the consciousness of the believer whom God chooses for the purpose of speaking through him.

Fox would not hear of training a professional clergy. God speaks through whom he will when he will. Every man ‑ or woman, for that matter ‑ is potentially God's spokesman. Fellow men are to be treated as friends, with infinite reverence for the divine possibilities in any personality. War and any violence are therefore thoroughly wicked. Slavery is abhorrent. The requirement to take an oath should not be imposed upon a Christian, for he always speaks soberly and truthfully.

At a religious meeting of Friends there were no sacraments (sacraments by their material symbolism are the occasion of leading the mind out of its subjective state of contemplation into the idolatry of fixation on an object) and no prepared discourses (God will stir up thought in someone present, at need). It was admitted that prayer is appropriate to begin with, but let it be followed by silent meditation, until the inner light illumines someone's understanding.

Fox and his followers promptly obeyed every prophetic impulse to action. Fox, for instance, would march boldly into a "steeple‑house," if inspired to do so, interrupt the "priest" in the middle of his sermon, and denounce the proceedings, to the accompaniment of outcries and tumult. Consequently, the authorities vigorously opposed Quakers as disturbers of the peace. Thousands were imprisoned or heavily fined. Fox himself was often jailed. But no persecution could quench his ardor.

During the intensely repressive persecutions of the Restoration period, William Penn (1644‑1718) became a Quaker, and after obtaining in 1681 the grant of Pennsylvania from Charles II, he threw it open to colonization by all who might desire freedom of religion, the Quakers being especially invited to Philadelphia. In England it was not until the "Glorious Revolution" that accompanied the accession of William and Mary (1689) that full religious toleration for the Quakers and all other dissenting groups was made into law.

Nonconformism on the Continent

When we move from England to central Europe, we find that, after the Thirty Years' War was settled by the Treaty of Westphalia (164 8), nonconformist movements appeared in the Protestant areas.

Common to the nonconformists was a shift of emphasis from doctrinal orthodoxy (which was taken for granted) to conversion or new birth. Conversion seemed the one infallible test of the possession of true Christianity. Abandonment of the doctrine of human sin and depravity was not contemplated, nor were the standard Reformation theologies called in question. All that was sought was a heightened sense of reality in the emotional life. The accent lay on having new life in Christ. Everyone was dead in sin, lost, guilty before God, certain to be damned, until "reborn," made a "new man in Christ Jesus," by the quick inflow of divine grace, bringing joy and peace to the distracted sinner and a sense of divine forgiveness crowned by reconciliation with God and personal communion with Christ. It cannot be overemphasized that to most of these men and women of deep personal piety Christ had the reality of a living presence, who, though he was a visitant from another world, was as real and near as any earthly person.

Pietism

We see all this with particular clarity in Pietism, which was in origin a reaction from seventeenth-century German doctrinalism, the latter being regarded by the Pietists as infected with moral unconcern and a cold indifference toward right feeling in religion. The cultivation of right feeling was held to lead not to a coming to terms with the world, as worldings might expect, but to its opposite, an ascetic emphasis on purity and holiness of life. This is the reason why Pietism was initially separatist in tendency.

Two figures were important in the development of Pietism. One, Philipp Spener (1635‑1705), was an earnest Lutheran minister who felt keenly the lack of "heart" and "life" in the current Lutheran absorption in "pure doctrine." He invited a group of similarly minded people to meet in his home as a "church within the church" (as he put it, as an ecclesiola in ecclesia) for Bible study, prayer, and the further discussion of Sunday sermons. The result was their common conviction that the world was too much for them: the state was too interfering, the clergy quarreled too much over theological matters to live a holy life, the clergy were even morally lax, and the laity were immoderate in eating, drinking, and dress and spent too much time on worldly amusements, dances, the theater, and cards. In his writings Spener advocated the formation every where of similar study groups and found immediate response in all German‑speaking areas, but the movement, spreading rapidly, soon ran into stiff opposition on the part of the clergy, who did not relish a church within the church nor criticisms of their piety or morality. Their hostility increased when some of Spener's followers, against his wish, exhibited their separatist tendency by refraining from church attendance and the sacraments.

The other leader of Pietism was Hermann Francke (1663‑1727), an instructor in the University of Leipzig, who introduced Pietism into German academic circles by establishing a collegium philobiblicum (a "gathering of Bible lovers"). Driven from the university by the opposition of his colleagues, he ultimately joined Spener and others at Halle, where the elector of Brandenburg, who was to become King Frederick I of Prussia, founded a university and encouraged, without becoming identified with, their activities. In this new environment Francke proceeded to demonstrate the implicit social consciousness of Pietism by successively founding a school for poor children, a Latin school, an orphans' home, and a Bible institute, all of which had great contemporary support. The Halle group also displayed a zeal for missions, a development of interest that prompted the earliest Protestant attempts to evangelize India.

The Moravians

After the time of Spener and Francke, Pietism gradually declined, perhaps because it had largely attained its initial objectives, but it survived as a special form of impetus in the revival of the Moravian Brethren. This occurred under the guidance of Count Zinzendorf, a land‑owner in eastern Saxony to whose estates came a group of refugee Moravian Hussites displaced by the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War. Zinzendorf had had a Pietist education at Halle, modified by law studies at Wittenberg, a center of orthodox Lutheran influence, and by his travels in Holland and France. He had the compassion to allow the Hussites to establish a Moravian village on his estates, which they called Hernhut, and it was also in his nature to enter into their communal life, with the result that a communion service into which he entered with them led in 1727 to a revived and revitalized form of the Moravian Church. Though Zinzendorf strove to keep it within the Lutheran fellowship, the new church gradually became a separatist sect with a special life of its own and a sense of mission to the world. Missions, in fact, became the hallmark of the movement. Zinzendorf himself inspired the first Moravian missionaries to go to the Danish West Indies, Greenland, and Georgia. When Lutheran opposition caused him to be expelled from Saxony, he traveled widely, first in the European areas to which the Moravians spread, including London, then in the West Indies and the American colonies. He also instituted missions among the American Indians. But he did not live to see the full extent of the far‑flung missionary efforts of the Moravian Church, the successful establishment of missions in Egypt, South Africa, Surinam, Guiana, and Labrador.

VIII Catholicism and Protestantism in the Modern World

So far, much of our story has been about differentiation and divergence, even conflict. Now at long last we shall see a gradual turn toward agreement, of which there has been growing awareness, and moves toward reconciliation and reunion.

A. Catholicism and the Modern World

The eighteenth century saw much of the force of the Catholic Reformation wane. In France Louis XIV had already stemmed the power of the papacy by appropriating the income of vacant bishoprics and by encouraging the French clergy to assert openly their right to certain "Gallic liberties," which included the view that the pope was not infallible because general councils are superior to him. The rise of the rationalistic spirit among great numbers of Frenchmen during the eighteenth century reached a climax in the French Revolution, when anti‑clericalism developed to the point of violence and Christianity itself was for a time "abolished." Although religious freedom for all men was later proclaimed, Napoleon, in coming to terms with the Catholic Church, was determined to keep it within government control. In Germany the Catholics painfully recovered from the effects of the Thirty Years' War, which had reduced the population of the German states by sixty‑five per cent without effecting any real changes in the lines separating Catholics and Protestants. Not until after the Napoleonic wars, when romanticism led the reaction against the rationalistic spirit of the eighteenth century, did the Catholic Church revive some of its old power.

In Europe generally, during the nineteenth century, the assertion of papal supremacy in the name of worldwide Catholic unity reappeared in Ultramontanism, or the movement among Catholics north of the Alps in favor of the view that final authority lay "beyond the mountains," that is, in the Vatican and the regularized channels of the papal government (the Roman Congregation). The popes for obvious reasons encouraged this opinion to the limit of their influence.

Some major doctrinal developments mark the nineteenth century. In 1854 Pius IX, after consulting with cardinals concerning a doctrine that had been discussed since the Middle Ages, proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin to be a dogma of the Catholic Church. The meaning of this was that all Catholics must believe that Mary, in order to be fitted to conceive Christ while still a virgin, was freed from original sin by the immaculate purity in which her parents conceived her.

By the mid‑nineteenth century accelerating developments in science, social theory, and the democratization of society, and of governments, so menaced the authority of the papacy that Pope Pius issued in 1864 a blunt Syllabus of Errors, in which he condemned socialism, communism, rationalism, naturalism, the separation of church and state, and freedom of the press and of religion. "The Roman pontiff," he said, "cannot and should not be reconciled and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." This pronouncement stunned and inhibited the Catholic liberals without totally silencing them. (Since then they have accomodated themselves to the pope's declaration by reading it in context, that is, by maintaining that he was inveying against particular contemporary errors and not against all liberal movements.)

The same embattled pope, still fearing the erosion of papal authority, issued in 1870 a declaration of the infallibility of popes under certain conditions: not all utterances of the pope are without error, but only those that he pronounces ex cathedra in exposition of "the revelation or deposit of faith delivered through the Apostles" and the Catholic tradition. The declaration affirms:

The Roman pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal church, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that His church should be endowed.

This doctrine elevated the pope to a supreme height in the field of faith and morals. But it did not save him from the consequences of the rise of Italian nationalism in the wake of the agitations of Mazzini and Garibaldi. For no sooner had the Vatican Council made its declaration than King Victor Emmanuel came along to capture Rome, and after a plebiscite of the inhabitants overwhelmingly directed him to do so, took from the pope the States of the Church, leaving only the Vatican, the Lateran, and Castel Gondolfc, as the area where papal secular sovereignty could be exercised.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century modernism showed itself again, when many thoughtful Catholics, both clerical and lay, began to see the need of taking into account theories based on modern historical and biblical criticism and the discoveries of modern science. There thus came into being the short‑lived movement called Catholic Modernism, which sought the reconciliation of Catholicism with modern scientific knowledge and critical methods. A group of Catholic scholars tried to come to terms with the theories of biological and geophysical evolution, while others adopted the methods of biblical criticism current among Protestant scholars, and among other things went so far as to question the historicity of the Virgin Birth, although they were willing to accept its truth as an enlightening myth. Modernist voices were heard suddenly in all parts of Europe. Notable were those of George Tyrrell in England, Alfred Loisy in France, and Hermann Schell in Germany. But Pope Pius X found their thought dangerous and firmly condemned it in an encyclical in 1907, which, together with a number of excommunications in 1910, effectively brought the movement to an end.

More successful as an attempt to put Catholic doctrine into current thought‑forms is recent Neo‑Thomism‑so‑called because its representatives, Jacques Maritain and others, seek to state the entire philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in modern terms and to apply it to modern issues. But the pope is still the final arbiter of what is sound in theology and morals and what is not.

In fulfilling his theological responsibilities, the pope (Pius XII) in 1950 proclaimed as a dogma of the Church the assumption of the uncorrupted body of the Virgin Mary to heaven after her death.

The pontiffs have also been conscious of worldwide responsibility in overseeing morals. Recent years have found them more and more disposed to make moral pronouncements, international in scope, in the name of God and the Church. Recent popes have taken a strong anti‑Communist stand.

In like manner, the Catholic Church as a whole has become intensely aware of the value of action on an international scale. One of the significant new features of its effort is the institution of Church‑wide Eucharistic Congresses, held every few years, when world conditions permit, in different parts of the Catholic world.

But the most significant and far‑reaching developments have been the most recent. For the concern throughout the Christian world with church unity has affected the Catholic Church.

Recent Developments in the Catholic World.

In 1959 Pope John XXIII issued a summons embracing the entire Catholic world. He asked that delegates be sent to an ecumenical council, to be known as Vatican II. It met for its first session in 1962 in Rome and was attended by 2,500 bishops of the Catholic Church. It met in three further sessions in 1963, 1964, and 1965, at the call of Pope Paul VI, the successor of Pope John, who died in 1963. Official observers from Protestant and Orthodox churches (including the Russian but not the Greek) and selected laymen and women "auditors" were present. The council during its four sessions sought adjustment to the twentieth‑century world and the promotion of Christian unity. Its decisions included the following: authorization of a more extensive use of vernaculars in the celebration of the sacraments and in public worship (with the effect of worldwide liturgical change and increased congregational participation in ritual responses and singing); endorsement of "collegiality" or the principle that all bishops as successors of the Apostles share with the pope in the government of the Church; provision for greater lay participation in church administration by creation of a permanent separate order of deacons, to include mature married men and not merely celibate youths preparing for the priesthood as heretofore; approval of a declaration that no man should be forced to act against his conscience and that nations should neither impose religion nor prohibit freedom of religious belief and association; authorization of worship by Catholics with non-Catholics in special circumstances; recognition of the possibility of salvation outside the Catholic Church; and a declaration that Jews are not to be held collectively responsible for the death of Christ.

The Council's declaration on the relation of the Church to non‑Christian religions contains these highly significant passages:

From ancient times to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that mysterious power abiding in the course of nature and in the happenings of human life; at times sonic indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.

Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Buddhism, in its various forms, realises the radical insufficiency of the changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination. Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways," comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many respects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. . . .

The Church therefore exhorts her children to recognize, preserve and foster the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio‑cultural values found among the followers of other religions. . . .

ST. PETER'S CATHEDRAL, ROME. A notable example of the Renaissance style, St. Peter's is a basilica rebuilt in theform of a Roman cross. Its dome and cupola were designed by Michelangelo, its splendid plaza and colonnade by Bernini. The Vatican Palace, the residence of the pope, adjoins it. The whole is known as Vatican City, the ecclesiastical center of the Roman Catholic Church. (Courtesy of the Italian Government Travel Office.)

Islam. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems They adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself, merciful and all‑powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men. [Here follows a statement of Muslim beliefs in Abraham, Jesus as prophet, Mary as virgin mother, and a last judgment after a general resurrection.] Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, ahnsgiving and fasting.

In the course of centuries there have indeed been many quarrels and hostilities between Christians and Moslems. But now the Council exhorts everyone to forget the past, to make sincere efforts for mutual understanding, and so to work together for the preservation and fostering of social justice, moral welfare, and peace and freedom for all mankind.

Judaism. As the Council searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond which spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to the offspring of Abraham. [Here follows a paragraph on the Church's debt to the revelation of the Old Testament.]

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "Theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenant and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Romans 9:4‑5). . . .

Since, then, the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is so great, the Council wishes to foster and commend mutual understanding and esteem. This will be the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies and of brotherly dialogues.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. . . . In her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and led not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, manifestations of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone . . . .

In opening the second session of the council Pope Paul said that the long‑range goal of the council was the complete and universal union of all Christians. He demonstrated the Church's spirit of rapprochement by visiting on different occasions over the next few years Jerusalem, India (twice), the United States, Portugal, Istanbul, Asia Minor, Asia, and the Pacific; and he has met in Rome and elsewhere with leading figures in Protestantism and the Eastern Orthodox churches.

In accordance with the principle of collegiality and at the request of the Council, the pope organized in 1967 a Synod of Bishops, representing national hierarchies from all over the world, to advise him in doctrinal matters and administrative decisions. It meets in Rome.

But turmoil within the Church has developed, not only over liturgical changes, but also over the issues of birth control and optional marriage of the clergy. The Pope's encyclical on birth control Humanae vitae (1968) reiterated the Church's previous stand against all forms of artificial birth control; but it met with considerable resistance throughout the Catholic world, not only among the laity but also among priests and nuns. Some hierarchies, while upholding the encyclical officially, have left to the conscience of the individual its application. There has developed also within religious orders dissatisfaction both with the slowness with which Vatican II's decisions have been implemented and with the Pope's firm stand that the vow of celibacy does not permit optional marriage of the clergy. The tension between "Progressives" and "conservatives" continues, with numbers of priests and nuns leaving their orders to engage in secular social work.

B. Protestantism in the Modern World

With perhaps one exception, the basic diversifications within the Protestant world all occurred before the eighteenth century. The exception might be Methodism. Methodism, however, was not really a Reformation movement. It was essentially an awakening in response to new conditions created by the development of science and the rapid rise of industrial capitalism, and it is therefore to be considered a phenomenon not immediately related to the Reformation. Methodism stands in fact at the beginning of the shifts and changes characteristic of modern times.

Deism in the Eighteenth Century. It was not until the eighteenth century that Western science in its modern sense became generally diffused among thinking men. When it did, the eighteenth century Enlightenment came. Religion was for the first time in the Western world compelled to justify its case inductively. The empirically‑minded men of the eighteenth century were so little content with the dogmas of the Church that they asked themselves curiously what made primitives religious, or what "natural religion" was. The whole structure of revealed religion was abandoned, and in the estimation of many wide‑eyed men of reason it came tumbling down. In their awe before the iron laws of the beautifully running mechanical universe, viewed as through the eyes of a Galileo or a Newton in mathematical terms, they ruled out all miracles and special divine providences. God was no longer invoked to explain immediate causes; he was not any longer necessarily inside the physical frame of nature. He seemed distant in both space and time. The Deists, who adopted these views, "ushered God to the frontiers of the universe." To them he was the Ancient of Days, who was to be revered as the creator who made all, but they virtually "bowed Him out over the threshold of the world," courteously but firmly.

The Deists were representative of their age in avoiding a clash between religion and science by thus separating God from his creation and conceiving that the latter ran by itself and could therefore be a separate object of study.

A great many clergymen of the English churches, and many also on the continent, highly educated as a class, held views similar to those of the Deists. Indeed, they were at heart Unitarians, or even privately agnostic, and so lukewarm were their devotions, so utterly non‑mystical their public utterances, that it was inevitable that something like Methodism should appear to bring heart and soul back into English Christianity. When this renewal of religious warmth among the clergy came to pass the people responded eagerly.

Methodism. The industrial revolution was in the making. Drawn from the land to the towns, the people had lost anchorage. Drunkenness was so widespread among them as to menace the national well‑being. The spiritual hunger of the common people was not satisfied by the sceptical intellectualism of the sermons they heard in the Established Church‑mere discourses, virtually essays, prepared as an accompaniment to the formal reading of the Book of Common Prayer. John Wesley and his associates, enhungered too, brought them the emotional fire and hearty conviction which they most needed.

The name Methodist was applied at first in sarcasm by Wesley's fellow‑students at Oxford to the little group ‑ also derisively called the "Holy Club" ‑ of which he was a leader, and which met regularly for methodical study and prayer in their rooms, endeavoring to bring God down to them out of the skies to which he had been relegated by their Deist teachers. They strove to cultivate something of the sense of the immediacy of God's presence in human lives that the Quakers felt. In an unmistakably decisive experience, since known as conversion, they underwent a complete change of life and faith and came to know that religion was real and vital for every act of existence. Afterwards, in seeking to "revive" their fellow‑Christians of the churches, they had no intention of leaving the Church of England; they hoped only to reform that Church from within. But when the Wesley brothers and George Whitefield began to preach up and down the British Isles, and the people flocking to them in all the towns were converted in astonishing numbers, it was natural to form a new denomination, and to call it the Methodist Church.

John Wesley had been born in an Anglican manse in 1703, the fifteenth child of Samuel and Susannah Wesley. His brother Charles was the eighteenth. After their years at Oxford, during which the most important accession to their Methodist Club was George Whitefield, the talented son of an innkeeper, John and Charles Wesley went as missionaries to Georgia, where neither met with much success, though John Wesley made fruitful friendships with Moravians. On return to England both brothers resorted to a Moravian, Peter Bohler, in London, who convinced them that they would not be true Christians until they had experienced genuine conversion. That experience subsequently came to both. Together with Whitefield, also changed, they were soon preaching in the open fields to tens of thousands of deeply stirred miners and workmen in England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was common for their hearers to exhibit their emotion in ecstasies, bodily excitement, cries and groans, and lapses of consciousness. Methodist "chapels" were soon erected for more orderly worship, and as circumstances showed the need for them, characteristically Methodist innovations appeared: "classes," "bands," "circuits," "stewards," "superintendents," and the like. On the devotional side, Charles Wesley contributed to the cause the highly emotional hymns that were to have the usefulness to evangelistic Christianity that the hymns of Isaac Watts and of the Lutherans and Moravians had to the older Churches.

The new Church spread to the American colonies. Whitefield had prepared the way by seven immensely successful visits that greatly extended the area swept by an earlier wave of revivals, also marked by the experience of conversion, that had suddenly made its appearance in staid Congregationalist New England under Jonathan Edwards' powerful preaching in Northampton, Mass., and was called "the Great Awakening. "

Edwards had been pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Mass., for five years when his powerful sermons on sin, salvation, and hell brought the young people and then the whole town to a state of terror and "great awakening." How terrifying to the people of his time (the 1730s) his preaching was may be judged from the impression he made on the little village of Enfield, Connecticut, where he went to preach one Sunday morning in July, 1741. The congregation sat under him at first with but mild interest, little expecting the fury that was to be let loose on them. He read his sermon from a manuscript, but it frightened the people almost to death. Swept into panic, they began to sob out their distress, weeping, crying out, and fainting. The preacher at length could scarcely be heard, and paused to bid them be quiet. Speaking on the topic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards pointed out the precarious position of the wicked, of whom his text declared, "Their foot shall slide in due time." Only the restraining grace of God, he said, kept the wicked from sliding on the slippery ground into the pit, where the flames raged and the devils were waiting like lions greedy for their prey. That some of those in the audience had not dropped into hell since they rose in the morning, or since they had come to church, the preacher declared to be but additional proof of God's merciful restraint. Perhaps in all sermonic literature there is no climax as intense and breath‑taking as that of his last paragraph. "If we knew that there was one person and but one, in the whole congregation, that was to be the subject of this misery, what an awful thing it would be to think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight would it be to see such a person! How might all the rest of the congregation lift up a lamentable and bitter cry over him! But, alas! instead of one, how many it is likely will remember this discourse in hell! And it would be a wonder if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons that now sit here in some seats of this meeting‑house, in health and quiet and secure, should not be there before tomorrow morning."

Whitefield's visits to America began in 1739. His message was much less disturbing than that of Jonathan Edwards, for he proclaimed God's forgiving grace to sinners and the peace that comes through acceptance of Christ through faith. He frequently preached to immense throngs in the open air. Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, recounts in his dryly objective manner how, after having experienced Whitefield's persuasiveness indoors (and emptied his pocket into the collection plate), he responded to him out of doors in downtown Philadelphia.

He had a loud and clear voice, and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly, that he might be heard and understood at a great distance.... He preach'd one evening from the top of the Court‑house steps, which are in the middle of Market‑street, and on the west side of Secondstreet.... Being among the hindmost in Market‑street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front‑street, when some noise in that street obscur'd it. Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were fill'd with auditors, to each of whom I allow'd two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts of his having preach'd to twenty‑five thousand people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.'

Systematic organizational work in behalf of Methodism was begun in New York by 1766, and the epic labors of Francis Asbury (1745‑1816), the great “circuit‑rider," secured the spread of Methodism across the Alleghenies into the vast spaces of the Middle West. Since then, the Methodist Church has become one of the great denominations of the United States.

The Missionary Movement. The nineteenth may be reckoned a great Protestant century. It opened with a second "great awakening" in the United States, a series of revivals that much increased the number of Baptists and Methodists in the mid western states. In Great Britain the Church of England was powerfully moved by a pietistic Evangelical movement, which in later decades issued in the Oxford or Tractarian movement, the formation of the Young Men's Christian Association (in London in 1844), and the organization of the Salvation Army (by William Booth in 1865). In Germany the theologians Schleiermacher (1768‑1834) and Ritschl (1822‑1889) gave a new and liberal turn to Protestant religious thought. But perhaps the two most significant developments of the century were the organization of worldwide Protestant missions and the rapid expansion of the Sunday School movement, two developments to which we now turn.

In missionary activity the Catholics had long shown the way. The Protestants gathered momentum more slowly. When the Dutch established trading stations in the East Indies in the seventeenth century, they encouraged missionaries to follow behind them. In the same century the Church of England felt a responsibility for the American Indians and organized the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, a group that at the beginning of the eighteenth century was largely superseded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The Quakers from the start sent missionaries to the West Indies, Palestine, and various parts of Europe. We have already seen how vigorously the Moravians fostered missions during the eighteenth century.

A new phase of missionary effort began with the publication of the journals of Captain Cook, whose vivid descriptions of the condition of the primitives of the many South Pacific islands that he visited from 1768‑1779 stirred up William Carey to go to India as the first missionary of the Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, which he helped to organize in 1792. In 1795 an interdenominational group formed the London Missionary Society, which sent its first appointees to Tahiti. (This society has since been Congregationalist.) There followed the formation of the Edinburgh Missionary Society, the Glasgow Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society (of the Church of England), and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society.

To match these British efforts with like devotion to the expansion of the Christian world, a group of students at Williams College in Massachusetts joined in mutual commitments that led in i8io to the birth of the famous missionary organ of American Congregationalism, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Subsequently, like organizations were formed in the other American churches.

Continental Europe was not idle. Similar societies appeared in Denmark, Germany, France, and Switzerland.

In the years that followed, the reports brought back by the missionaries from every part of the world had a pronounced quickening effect on the life of the churches at home. The whole tone of Christian life was raised. With the dawn of the twentieth century incalculable benefits to Christendom as a whole were seen to have sprung from the development of worldwide fellowship among Christians of every culture and color. Recent changes in missionary objectives have led to the concept of total service in every area of life. Indigenous church leadership is encouraged, and one missionary aim is now the eventual development of "two‑way evangelization"‑the mission fields producing interpretations and interpreters of Christianity to minister to churches at home. An early instance was the American crusade of Toyohiko Kagawa of Japan in behalf of a worldwide Christian social ministry.

The Sunday School Movement and Religious Education.. The older Protestant churches were conscious from the very beginning of the need to instruct their young people in the doctrines and duties of the Christian religion before confirming them as members of the church. This, of course, was the origin of catechetical instruction. But the religious education thus attempted was brief and of limited effect, and it did not embrace all the children of the community. There was therefore great need for more frequent instruction, and particularly for instruction open to the children of the religiously illiterate and the unchurched. Realization of this need came in Gloucester, England, to Robert Raikes, whose interest in prison reform led to his study of the social conditions producing delinquency in city slums. In order to provide schooling for the neglected waifs of Gloucester, he organized in 1780 the first Sunday School, to teach them how to read the Bible.

Thus began the Sunday School movement that became so significant a feature of the religious life of the nineteenth century. It spread rapidly through the British Isles, in the Protestant areas of the European continent, and on the other side of the Atlantic. The Sunday School Society of London, its analogues on the continent, and the state Sunday School associations of the United States held, during a century of effort, numerous conventions to advance the cause. These societies actively fostered teacher‑training programs, prepared and published lesson‑materials, and worked with each other on an international basis. In 1907 they organized the World's Sunday School Association.

So valuable were the Sunday Schools and their teachers to the churches during this period that no Protestant congregation could afford to be without them. Indeed, they were the chief source of the new members brought into the churches by confirmation. Their altruistic purpose shone clear and strong. The teachers and superintendents, with very rare exceptions, served without salary on a purely voluntary basis. The instruction was too often inadequate and illprepared, but it was always meant to supply the highest kind of moral and religious guidance.

The shortcomings of the Sunday Schools of the nineteenth century have been clearly seen in the twentieth. A better‑informed leadership has been seeking to turn them into an effective means of Christian education by applying the principles and techniques discovered in secular public instruction. The Sunday School has now acquired the more comprehensive and dignified name of the Church School.

No more serious and sustained educational effort to bring Christianity home to men's hearts and lives as a discipline for the whole of human life has ever been attempted in any period of the history of the Christian Church.

Protestantism and Science, The nineteenth century dawned with little inkling of the hazards that science was to place in the way of faith, but long before the century was out, a momentous struggle between orthodox religion and a naturalism bred by science was joined, and many a devout Christian felt his heart turn faint within him as he watched and listened.

One of the earliest controversies was precipitated by the development of historical criticism and the rewriting of history. Hume and Gibbon in the eighteenth century had cast doubt on many a feature of Christian belief, but they did not subject the life of Jesus, nor the Bible as a whole, to detailed examination. The nineteenth century was to supply such "biblical criticism." David Strauss and Ernest Renan, in epoch making German and French works, radically rewrote the life of Jesus. Lower (or textual) and higher (or historico‑literary) criticism of the Bible demonstrated that its books were the work of many different authors at many different times. The Pentateuch was shown to have had a composite authorship stretching over at least five centuries. The New Testament gospels were dissected into "Q," "M," "L," and other strata of tradition. Violent controversy over these findings, as they were made, divided Protestantism into two camps, later to be called Fundamentalists (who rejected biblical criticism as gross unbelief) and Modernists (who accepted it as sound).

But though bitter and long‑drawn‑out, this controversy was all but overshadowed during the last half of the nineteenth century by the chorus of angry protest that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin Of Species. For Darwin, and his predecessor in formulating the evolutionary theory, Lamarck, were interpreted not only to deny the story of creation in the first chapters of Genesis but to rule out any theory of creation whatever. At the same time, some of the philosophic successors of Hegel had transformed his spiritual monism into materialism, and they loudly welcomed the support of the theory of evolution. Ludwig Buichner and Ernst Haeckel, particularly, sprang forward as champions of a mechanistic materialism that left no room for God. (Feuerbach had concluded thirty years earlier, in 1841: "Anthropology is the secret of theology. God is man worshiping himself. The Trinity is the human family deified."') And in England, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer increased the sense of outrage among the conservatives by rejecting the doctrine of an impassable gulf between man and the beasts and arguing instead for the theory that man has emerged by slow evolution from the anthropoid apes, and is not a separate, special creation of God.

To all these views conservative Christians entered a heated denial in the name of the immutability of the species God had separately created. When geologists had worked out Lyell's theory of gradual evolutionary change in the history of the earth and presented fossils taken from the rocks as evidence of the biological evolution of the various species, the only reply the orthodox could make was that God had planted the fossils in the rocks on the day of creation to confound the judgment of unbelievers, whose rejection of God's truth was thus made manifest and their damnation justified. Confronted, by the end of the century, with bio‑chemical theories that sought to explain away as non‑existent the vital principle in living things, and psychological theories that denied the existence of the soul (and later of the mind and consciousness as such), many devout believers felt they were faced by an inflexible choice between irreconcilable positions: one that science is true and religion is false, and the other that science is preposterous guess‑work and the biblical revelation God's own infallible word, true from beginning to end exactly as it is contained in the Bible.

But amidst the clamor, liberal Christians remained sure no such irreconcilability between science and religion existed. Men like Henry Drummond in Scotland (in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World) and John Fiske in New England (in Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy and The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge) endeavored to show that on the theory that evolution is God's method of creation, religion and science can indeed be reconciled. The biblical story of creation has to be taken as devout, prescientific theorizing, poetically if not literally true, its essence not disproved, though its form requires reinterpretation. With this beginning, the liberals proceeded confidently to a task of reconstruction, assured that the essentials of the Christian faith are never shaken by the findings of a careful, non‑metaphysical (or "pure") science. Science itself, they pointed out, moves on assumptions that are beyond proof, and these are its faith. More recently, the liberals have been saying that the dogmatic materialism of the nineteenth century is no longer tenable. Scientists, for lack of any definite indication of what electrons and protons are made of, must be more open‑minded toward organic as against mechanistic conceptions of the universe. Even psychology, with its emphasis on integrations, configurations, orgestalts, can no longer be dogmatically sure about the detailed analyses that once seemed to destroy any evidence of the existence of the soul. The Christian faith is thus, say the liberals, unshaken in its major assumptions, and its adherents may give credence to the assured findings of science. For truth is one and indivisible, and to see life steadily and to see it whole is still to gain the pure heart of those who see God.

This liberal view, so confident and optimistic in its faith in God and man, was itself severely shaken by the catastrophe of World War I. There emerged thereafter a Neo‑Orthodoxy, which accepted the findings of science and of historical criticism but insisted that God is not immanent in nature and history in the way in which the liberals say he is, but is transcendent, existing quite apart from nature and man, indeed is the Wholly Other, the Absolute, who must break through the wall of human error and self‑contradiction that separates him from men in order to appear in human history. Without such breaking through, man is lost. The champions‑Karl Barth and his followers of a going "beyond fundamentalism and modernism" to a theology resting on a dualism of God and the world for awhile swept the field; but the champions of divine immanence in one sense or another returned to deny that the God of Neo‑Orthodoxy has any contemporary relevance. Many different voices were listened to: Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, defining a post‑liberal Christian realism; Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann, speaking for a Christian existentialism; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his "secularist" and "death of God" followers; and others, like the neo-Whiteheadian panentheists, committed to the thesis that God interpenetrates all things, without canceling their existence independently of him.

The Social Gospel. With the advent of the era of "big business" and the onset of labor‑capital tension, socialism took on new life. In Europe, as the nineteenth century approached and passed its half‑way mark, it had great and increasing political significance. The social upheavals of 1848 brought sharply home to thoughtful churchmen the need of finding a Christian solution to poverty and social injustice. In England, Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley made a beginning of discussing the application of the Christian gospel to these social problems. Liberals in the Church of England were moved to form the Christian Social Union and the Church Socialist League (subsequently renamed the League of the Kingdom of God). Bishops and archbishops associated themselves with these and later efforts to bring Protestantism to bear on social issues. In the United States men like Francis G. Peabody, Washington Gladden, Shailer Mathews, and Walter Rauschenbusch searched the scriptures and discovered a neglected theme in the teaching of Jesus‑the Kingdom of God. They brought together all the sayings of Jesus referring to it and found in the carpenter of Nazareth a prophet of social justice whose principles seemed still the key to happier human relationships in every variety of social context. Here was a social gospel whose practice would solve modern man's economic, industrial, political, racial, and international problems; it could bring peace to the nations, justice among the peoples, and good will among the races.

A new note had been sounded in Protestant Christianity. In general, the liberals rallied to the ardent exposition of the social gospel; the conservatives as generally drew back, decrying the dabbling in politics and the involvement in merely worldly matters that they declared was the pit into which the preachers of the social gospel fell. The critics complained that the New Testament contained no social message to speak of, the appeal of Jesus being almost exclusively to individuals that they might be saved one by one. But advocates of the social gospel replied that although the redemption of the individual is a necessary aim of all religion, it is almost impossible to bring about the moral redemption of individuals in an immoral society, and that the Church will lose all relevance to modern life, as it seemed to have already lost relevance for a large part of the laboring classes, unless the Christian religion is brought to bear on the moral redemption of society. If the Christian religion, they cried, has nothing to say and no program to offer on the chief problems of the hour, it is no longer of any use to men! Its day is over!

The critical question of how much social gospel there is in the New Testament is not yet settled and may never be settled, but the great Protestant denominations, at least of the English‑speaking world, have all formulated detailed social policies and programs and in all their major conferences devote a large part of their attention to questions of Christian social action. The determination of the social bearing of Christianity is indeed one of the principal factors now drawing Protestantism together. This has been quite evident in the participation by both the clergy and laity of all denominations in civil rights movements, anti‑poverty programs, and anti‑war demonstrations.

Movements Totvard Union of the Churches. The fissions and separations within Protestantism have slowed down markedly in the last fifty years and have all but ceased. Union among the Protestant churches has been urged for over a century, and the recent turn to active ecumenism by the Roman Catholic Church has broadened the purview to include the prospect of the reunion of all Christians. The century‑old Protestant trend toward rapprochement has been due, not only to the attitude of the liberals in all denominations who have stressed agreement on essentials as a basis for unity, but also to many other factors: the social changes that an economy marked by rapid communications and general inderdependence has brought about; the fact that scientific scepticism and widespread secularism have tended to drive adherents of religion together; the very expansion of the Christian effort into all the world; the growing interchange between denominations of helpful literature, such as hymns, lesson‑materials, and devotional aids; the meeting and intermingling of ministers and laymen from many different denominations on interdenominational boards and committees and at conferences and camps; and, not least, the realization that a divided Protestantism is a weakened Protestantism, particularly in a day when the problems of society are no longer those of the frontier, nor yet those of the village or town, but those arising from the closely interwoven destinies of the peoples of the entire world. All these factors suggest that only a united Church can effectively seek social and individual redemption. The most natural starting point for the union of the Protestant churches has been the creation of interdenominational agencies and boards. From such beginnings the ecumenical movement has grown into one of the most significant developments in modern Protestantism.

In the area of interdonominational cooperation, lesser and greater federations of churches (city, county, state, and nationwide) have been organized. The out-standing example of a nationwide federation was the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America organized in 1908, the predecessor of the present National Council of Churches. Although the latter body meets only biennially, it functions constantly through standing committees dealing with home missions, race relations, international justice and goodwill, mercy and relief, and relations with churches abroad. In Europe the first great achievements in unity were in the area of foreign missions. The problems of interdenominational comity on the mission fields led to the calling of the great Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, which resulted in the formation of the International Missionary Council (1921), a body which has now merged with the World Council of Churches. The World Council itself emerged from Church of England (or Episcopal) hopes of serving as a mediator between the Protestant and Catholic worlds; these hopes finally led in 1937 to two Protestant world conferences, one on Faith and Order (in Edinburgh), the other on Christian Life and Work (in Oxford). Held in close succession, for the sake of the delegates who came from all parts of the world, the 1937 Oxford and Edinburgh conferences gave rise to the World Council of Churches, designed to parallel on a worldwide scale the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. The first assembly of the World Council of Churches was held in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1948, and it has since met in Evanston (Illinois), New Delhi (India), and Uppsala (Sweden). It has admitted to its membership all of the Eastern Orthodox churches; it has also always invited observers from the Roman Catholic Church, who have attended each session in increasing numbers; in fact, the World Council has enlisted nine Roman Catholics for its Commission on Faith and Order, a historic break‑through made at Uppsala.

Two separate methods of union have emerged: (1) federal union of the churches without abolishing the member denominations, as in the World Council of Churches and in certain proposed smaller federal unions, and (2) complete organic union through merger. Of the latter kind was the organic union in Canada of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists in the United Church of Canada (1925). Along denominational lines separate branches of the Lutheran and also of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States have united. Ecumenically more significant was the organic union in ig6i of the Congregational‑Christian Church (itself the result of the union of the Congregational and Christian Churches) and the Evangelical and Reformed Church (formed from the Reformed Church in the United States and the Evangelical Synod of North America), under the name of the United Church of Christ. But a much larger union is now being contemplated. The discussions began as a Consultation on Church Union (COCU) involving four major denominations‑the United Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the United Church of Christ. (These have since been joined by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern), the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Evangelical United Brethren Church (which merged with the Methodist Church in 1968 to form the present United Methodist Church), and three churches with a predominantly black constituency, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.) The participants in the consultation do not anticipate an early union but express the hope that a concrete plan for eventual merger can be arrived at. In 1970 a tentative "Plan of Union for the Church of Christ Uniting" was issued and sent to the participating churches for a two‑year period of study and revision. At this writing (1973) this plan has encountered unanticipated resistance. The United Presbyterian Church in mistrust of the plan withdrew from the consultation itself for a year before rejoining it, while the other participants paused to consider the plan's amendment.

On an international level some thirty Reformed and Presbyterian Churches in more than twenty countries on five continents are engaged in consultations on, or actual, union. Other major union projects are being contemplated in England, Canada, Africa, and Asia.

The reunion of Christians throughout the world is a major phenomenon of the twentieth century.

C. Religious Activities Crossing Inter‑Faith Lines

While the more general ("from the top") ecumenical approaches of Catholics and Protestants have been thus in progress, individual Catholics and Protestants, both clerical and lay, have been seeking active association with each other in social, religious, educational, and civic activities. This is not new, for it has been going on for a long time, but in recent years such activities have been more extensive and more open. It is not necessary to do more here than to make a listing of these activities, with brief comments, since inter‑faith activities (in which Jews also have part) have been a major source of news during the last decade, in both Europe and America.

For the sake of conciseness, the following listing is drawn from activities in the United States only.

Civil rights. Catholic priests, seminarians, and nuns have joined with Protestant clergy and lay persons of both faiths in supporting the cause of black rights by sit‑ins, demonstrations, and court battles.Jews have also participated.

Socialjustice. The same inter‑faith support is given to the cause of social justice in its many aspects. Father Groppi symbolizes this kind of activism.

The anti‑war movement. Wide support of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews has been given to this cause that so arouses the youth of both sexes. It has a long tradition back of it.

Education. Sharing of educational resources by Catholics, Protestants, and Jews is more and more common, especially in metropolitan areas. One example is furnished by the Greater Boston area, where four Protestant divinity schools and three Catholic theological institutions cooperate in the Boston Theological Institute. It is not uncommon to find, in both Protestant and Catholic colleges and seminaries, that Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant professors of religion and theology are teaching on the same faculty.

Inter‑faith worship. It is more and more common to find representatives of the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths preaching in each other's churches and synagogues, and assisting each other in marriages, community‑wide celebrations, anniversaries, and other observances.

Inter‑faith religious centers. A number of religious centers have been built in American cities to accomodate the activities of the three major faiths and provide for joint as well as separate religious activities. These centers are staffed by Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, and rabbis.

Our space is at an end. Perhaps the story here unfolded suggests that basic Christianity is not a way of looking back into the past but a way of going forward into the future; not an escape from the world into solitariness, but a way of spending one's life for others in order to find it; not a retreat into ultimate truth, but a redemptive mission, a way of salvation leading into the world and through the world, in the love of God and man.