Christianity and Modern Thought

Were we to go through what was spoken on the Mount, we might show its truth commanding unquestionably the assent of our moral natures. It all takes hold of our mind and life. It comes to us to throw light on what we do and suffer, and to borrow confirmation from it in turn. Though we fall so far short of it, and could not have conceived it originally and from ourselves, as Jesus did, it so accords with the laws of our being as to seem to be the suggestion of our experience, some admonition floating to us by intent of God on that ever-heaving sea of life, of ambition, of passion, of mutual misunderstanding, of strong loves and piercing griefs, of various mingling sympathies, on whose shore we do now stand, and whose tide, for our few seconds here in time, laves our feet and dashes upon us its spray.

We might turn over other pages of Jesus' instruction beyond that introductory statement of the principles of the kingdom of God, and evolve its sense in terms presenting an undeniable spiritual fact to all our race. For instance, "To him who hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he seemeth to have." How true! It is verified in the mental condition of every man at this moment. We only seem to have the faculty we do not use. There is no long, healthy sleep to the mind and the moral will any more than to the body; but the alternative is, live or die. And thus Jesus was ever holding up the law of the spiritual life to the light of that day which dawned with his advent. He dwelt on what is inward. Although you cannot find that once, in his popular teaching, he laid stress upon observances, times without number he studiously distinguished between every thing of the nature of ceremonial and those everlasting obligations of justice and humanity, of inward and outward purity, which ought to be recognized in the home and in the state, in all the intercourse of man with man, and in watching over the secret heart. We may not infer that he was hostile to religious forms. He observed them. He knew that man needed them, and that souls instinct with life would perpetuate them and adapt them to their own wants. But he saw in the spirit of the Scribes the evil of teaching that any arbitrarily imposed outward act can in itself please God; and, in regard to such, the whole emphasis of his teaching was, "These ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone." He quoted from the prophets habitually, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice."

Such is the genius of Christianity, – of Christianity as it came from its Founder, – the religion which is said to have ripened into the mediæval theology and the Roman hierarchy. Too little, indeed, has this genius of Christianity been regarded! The old Judaic spirit which brought Jesus to the cross has, among Protestants as well as Catholics, too often crucified the Christianity of Christ. Human metaphysics have been put into creeds and catechisms. Sects have been founded and built up on the importance attached to the form of a rite as a part of essential Christianity. Disputes have raged which the traditions of the Church and the letter of Scripture have failed to settle, and about which Jesus, if teaching among us, would not waste a minute's breath.

If further proof were wanting of the breadth and spirituality of Jesus' view, it might be found in the fact that he was brought to the cross by the pro-Judaism party. His friends would interpret him differently from his enemies. The universality and spirituality of his aim were not at once apprehended by his followers. Their very trust in him would make them slow to perceive his radical meaning; for, to impute to him what was in his mind, would seem to be distrust. They would put a limited construction upon what he said. It would be otherwise with his enemies, who would be sharp and quick to see the full extent to which his words would carry him.

The movement of Jesus, then, may be called revolutionary, not in the sense of aiming directly at political revolution, but in the sense of his expecting to found a free, spiritual, and universal religion, which would uproot and remove in time the partial religions, Judaism included. Still he designed to connect himself with the Old Dispensation. He recognized the Divine mission of Moses and the Providential office of the prophets in preparing for him. In the expectations which they fostered there was something true as well as something false. When they depicted a glorious and happy political condition of the Jewish nation under the Messiah as an earthly king, Jesus must have regarded them as being in error. We find him pronouncing John the Baptist the greatest of the prophets of the old order, and declaring that the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he; and the reason is shown by the context of the words (Matt. xi.) to be that John as a Jewish prophet regarded the kingdom of God in part as a political kingdom. But the fundamental idea of the Theocracy, that other nations would be united with Israel under the dominion of the One True God, was one in harmony with Jesus' thought.34 This expectation Jesus regarded it as his mission to realize and fulfil. He had only to separate from the Theocratic predictions of the prophets the partial political element, to bring them into unison with his universal aim. Whatever in the hitherto prevailing ideas and hopes was capable of expansion he absorbed into himself, that it might be given out in a wider and higher form, and live for ever. A case somewhat parallel might be found in the changes wrought by our late war. Those who took a radical view of the issue of the contest were exposed to the charge of being revolutionary and destroying the Constitution. They could reply, "Yes: the issue will be revolutionary. There will be a new state of law, and of the relations of the people in important respects, effected by carrying out fundamental principles. But those principles were the essence of the Constitution; and to carry them out is only fully to accomplish its purpose, by annihilating transient provisions at war with liberty and social justice, and giving scope to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We hold to the Constitution. We have come not to destroy, but to fulfil." So Jesus Christ came not to destroy all that had gone before, but to fulfil whatever in it was fundamental to the Divine purpose in relation to man. In this feeling of a real connection between his movement and the Hebrew ideas and hopes is to be found the principal explanation of his confining his labors, and those of the apostles when first sent forth, chiefly to Judea and Galilee. Not only must his own work be limited in its local scope, – for he could not go everywhere, – but the historical basis of his movement lay in the Hebrew history. Among the Hebrew people only could he find suitably prepared immediate disciples. Salvation was to be from the Jews. And, foreseeing that the nation as such would reject him, he saw that it was essential to the extension among the Gentiles of the truths and hopes he inherited as a Jew, essential to the breaking down of the partition wall which now kept out the true doctrine of God from the heathen world, that he should come to a distinct issue with the Jewish authorities, and make it clear and notorious that it was the narrow spirit of Pharisaism and legal formality which crucified him. (If he were lifted up, he would draw all men to him.) And from the first the ruling sect, with the acute instinct of self-interest, discerned the revolutionary character of his movement, – that it elevated man above the Jew, and struck at the root of the idolized Hebrew pre-eminence.

I pass now to a more subtle hypothesis, that Jesus expected to establish the Theocratic empire by angelic assistance on occasion of his return to earth, which would occur at the same time with the great outward change of the world. It is founded on such passages as this: "For the Son of Man is to come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and then he will render to every one according to his works." (Matt. xvi. 27. Comp. Matt. xiii. 41, and xxvi. 29-60.) It is thus stated by Strauss:35 "He waited for a signal from his heavenly Father, who alone knew the time of this catastrophe; and he was not disconcerted when his end approached without his having received the expected intimation." His Messianic hope was not political or even earthly. He referred its fulfilment to a supermundane theatre.

Strauss speaks of Jesus' hope as corresponding with the Messianic ideas of the Jews. It took its form from those ideas. Scherer also represents Jesus' idea of the kingdom as wholly Apocalyptic. The first criticism to be made upon this hypothesis is, that a Theocratic idea arising out of the Jewish expectations and conformed to them could not dispense with all thought of earthly conflict. The struggle could not have been altogether upon a supermundane theatre, nor the triumph of the Messiah achieved without common warlike agencies. The common Jewish idea was founded on the language of some Hebrew prophets, and appears in the Apocalyptic writings of Christ's age; and his own mind in cherishing the hope attributed to him must have quite surrendered itself to the popular expectation. This expectation supposed some outward conflict as the occasion of supernatural interference. Nor do I know any ground for thinking that in Christ's time the Jews expected the Messiah to prevail with angelic aid without a conflict of arms. Whoever will read Ezekiel and Daniel will see that those prophets expected a contest on earth with earthly weapons, as the occasion for the intervention of Jehovah. And whoever will read the wars of the Maccabees will see how Jewish courage, fired with the expectation of celestial assistance, never stopped to compare the apparent strength of the respective forces. Nor did the Apocalyptic seers dismiss this thought of earthly battle. The book of Enoch speaks of the unconverted as delivered at the judgment into the hands of the righteous, whose horses shall wade in the blood of sinners, and whom the angels shall come to help.36 The Apocalypse of the New Testament presents the picture of the Messiah as mounted on a white horse, and riding forth to judge and make war; and the comment of Dr. Noyes on this and similar passages is that, in the mind of the writer, there was to be war in heaven and upon earth, before Christ should reign in final triumph.37 This theory has no distinctive character without supposing the angels acting on the stage of sense and time, and giving the Hebrews the victory. With this expectation is probably connected the "sign from heaven" demanded of Jesus by the Pharisees, a sign which should stimulate Hebrew faith to irresistible warlike ardor. The unconverted were to be vanquished by some mysterious exercise of Messianic power. Hence many were not satisfied with Christ's miracles; not that they disputed their reality, but as being not decisive of his Messianic character. Now, if this had been the thought of Jesus, he would have been disposed to seek an occasion for such interference from on high. It is true, in saying this, we say he must have given himself up to the enthusiasm which so often fanatically manifested itself in his age, and was always ready to break forth. But the idea supposed, when one's whole being was yielded to it, – as Jesus did yield his whole being to the ideas which possessed him, – could not have stopped short of practical action. He must have been prepared in his thought to act with fanaticism. Strauss says, "He did not try to bring about all this by his own will; but awaited a signal from his heavenly Father." The actual Jesus did undoubtedly as Strauss says; but the supposed Jesus would have at some time believed the signal to be given. The idea, and the sort of faith in supernatural aid which accompanied it, would lead him to think the moment had come for this demonstration. "If such were the ideal of Jesus in fact, why did he not seek to realize it at once? Why did he prefer the way of renunciation and self-sacrifice to the possession of the kingdoms of the world? Why, in the place of the Son of Man, have we not a Mahomet six hundred years in advance." The logical and necessary result of belief in his Messiahship, and of faith in this sort of supernatural aid in realizing it, was that he should bring about an occasion for this demonstration. It was an encounter with the Romans, in the hope that Jehovah and the angels would fight for God's people, and be more than strong enough against all odds. "The Messianic Theocracy could not exist as a Roman province."38 But Jesus studiously avoids conflict with Rome. Besides, the second part of the temptation of Christ sets aside at once this ideal. His early consciousness of wonderful power had not the effect of disposing his mind favorably toward such Jewish Messianic ideas. That consciousness tended rather to spiritualize his thought: we may say, it subdued him. It made his whole feeling moderate, and his whole thought wise and temperate. This is a very remarkable part of the representation of him by the evangelists.

But, secondly, I will now suppose the expectation of Jesus to have been purified from every notion of warlike action. The regeneration (palingenesia) was to be not a political revolution, but a renovation of the earth and the heavens, attended by a resurrection of the dead, of whom the accepted were to dwell with Christ in the renovated world, – not the present earth, but the earth restored, – and that his presence and return were to be visible. This is his coming with the angels to set up his kingdom and to reign.

I. The very language which this hypothesis is adopted to explain, taken in its proper sense, proves too much. Jesus was to be a king on the renewed earth, yet his kingdom was to be different from those of this world. "It is not," he says, "of this world." It is a real kingdom as much as that of David; but it is not to be a worldly rule on the one hand, nor a purely spiritual rule on the other. It is political, and not political. According to the writer of the Apocalypse, whose views are supposed to have been sanctioned by Jesus, this king must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. When the kingdom is consummated, he is to surrender it to his Father. The hypothesis under consideration represents the kingdom as to be consummated at the time of the world-catastrophe which, with the second or real coming of Jesus as Messiah, will occur, according to the alleged words of Christ himself, immediately after the destruction of the city. Why shall not the kingdom be given up immediately to the Father? This king in "the proper sense," and in no purely spiritual sense, who comes visibly, will have no occasion for a reign in the proper sense of the word. Strauss says, "Jesus expected to restore the throne of David, and with his disciples to govern a liberated people. But in no degree did he rest his hopes on the sword of his adherents, but on the legions of angels which the Father would send him. He was not disconcerted when his end approached without the kingdom having come. It would come with his return." But how when he returned was the throne of David to be restored, and a proper, literal reign to exist, and not a mere spiritual reign? This king has no business to perform: his work is all accomplished immediately by a stupendous miracle. And he and his apostles have nothing to do but to sit on idle thrones, or to feast at tables loaded with luxuries which are at the same time mundane and supermundane; to enjoy a sensual paradise, which differs from a Mohammedan paradise only in that it does not consist of the coarsest forms of sensual life. They are to partake of an actual wine, a fruit of the vine, – a new kind of wine; to observe the passover with supermundane food, but food pleasurable to the taste. This Jesus is thought to have expected and promised.39 I sometimes think this attempt to find a half-way doctrine of Jesus' expectation concerning the future ascribes to him an apocalypticism more inept and fatuous than that of the Jews themselves. It attempts to unite the contradictory. It cannot be stated by Strauss in any thing like the literal sense of the passages on which it is founded, without supposing something of that political element which it is designed to exclude; or else entirely dropping that relation to Jewish hopes to which it is believed to owe its origin, and thus leaving it unexplained. For, if Jesus gave up all expectation whatever of a kingdom of this world, we have no occasion for a visible return.

II. The second objection to this view is that it is incompatible with the most important expressions and opinions of Jesus.

1. The kingdom is to come with the world-catastrophe; and the King is then to come in some mysterious manner on the clouds of heaven. How, then, could Jesus say the kingdom of God cometh not with observation? Could any political kingdom arise in a more outwardly striking manner? How does that saying of Christ comport with his promising a literal miraculous light in the heaven (Matt. xxiv. 30) which shall betoken his own coming and the great world-change? That form of coming with a precursive sign in the heaven is just what he contradicted. Such a kingdom would come with a sign which could be watched for, – a sign very different from those signs of the time, the moral indications, which a spiritual insight might discern. How could he say the kingdom of God was among them already, if it were yet to come at the time of the great world-change? How could he say to Caiaphas: "Yes, I am the Messiah; and moreover from this moment you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven"? It was equivalent to saying, "You have arrested me, you have already doomed me to death. But I am the Anointed of God to introduce the new spiritual kingdom of Humanity; and, from this moment in which you decree my death, my cause takes a Divine impulse, and my purpose strides on to the triumph God has destined for it."

2. This expectation is incompatible with what he says on other topics related to the kingdom, the resurrection, and the future life. This expectation implies the Apocalyptic view of the resurrection. The Messiah was to come to raise the dead. (The Christian world has generally entertained the same view.) The visible return and the resurrection coexisted, probably, in Jesus' mind. If he held the one, he held the other. The two opinions were Siamese twins, connected by a vital bond; separate them and you would kill them both. But Jesus gave a view of the resurrection and the future life totally different from the Apocalyptic one. He taught the continuance of life. His argument with the Sadducees proves that doctrine, or it amounts to nothing. God is the God not of the dead, but of the living. The Rich Man and Lazarus, of the parable, are already in a future state of retribution. He who believes on him has "already passed from death unto life." Jesus could not suppose that one who had received from him the quickening of spiritual life could pass into the under-world, and grope as a shade in the intermediate state. "Whosoever liveth and believeth in him shall never die." Now, to one who is satisfied that Jesus was emancipated from the doctrine of an intermediate state, it must be evident that he could not have held the Apocalyptic notion resting on it of a raising of the dead at the coming of the Messiah, and could not have held to the visible coming of the Messiah who was to come to do that very thing.

The same observation is to be made of the judgment. Jesus shows himself emancipated from the common notion of the judgment, and of a future simultaneous judgment-day. He that believeth on him is not judged. He that believeth not is judged already, in that he has not believed in the only-begotten Son of God. God sent him not to judge or to punish the world, but to save it. The judgment of the world is not to be exclusively at a remote day. It has begun. It is now. Christ says, Now is the judgment of this world; now is the Prince of this world to be cast out; now, when Jesus is about to consummate by dying the moral means of that result. Jesus is not to be a personal Judge of men at a remote time. His principles are for ever to judge men, to judge them finally. Not himself as the personal Logos, or as the reappearing Messiah, is to judge men, but "the word he has spoken." These thoughts in the fourth Gospel must have come from Jesus, not from the writer, who shows himself in places not emancipated from the view of his time.

3. The doctrine of Christ's expectation which I am considering is not congruous with the means which he contemplates for accomplishing his work, and with the view he took of the progress of his kingdom, and of the moral duties and retributions of Humanity. Nothing is clearer than that his kingdom of God was to be a communion of men on earth bound together by the same consciousness of the heavenly Father. It was to extend into another life. But it was to spread more and more widely, and subdue the world to his spiritual dominion. By moral influence he is to be King. This communion is to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world. It is to extend its influence by holy example, by good works. He will be in spirit with the apostles and with his church. He trains them to carry on his work, and tells them to preach the good news to all nations. He does this as if founding a work which shall go on indefinitely. He declares early, in a discourse designed to explain his kingdom, that the law shall not pass away; that it shall in its moral requirements be all realized. Heaven and earth shall not pass away until all shall be. And he directs his disciples to pray as much as for daily bread that God's kingdom may come, and that God's will may be done on earth as it is done in heaven. Is it possible that this teacher expects all this to be closed in thirty or forty years, by a violent catastrophe, and by the substituting of a universal miracle for this moral instrumentality? He says it is not the Father's will that one of the lowliest shall perish. Did he mean to limit the opportunity of salvation for the race to forty years, and to consign to the torment of Gehenna all who did not accept the new truth in that time? And all this impossibility is heightened by the nature of some of those parables in which he treated of his kingdom. "If the kingdom of God were to be established by an irresistible miracle, on a fixed day, in a manner so splendid, what signify those admirable parables of the mustard-seed, of the leaven, of the net, of the grain growing from itself, which suppose a development, slow, regular, organic, proceeding from an imperceptible point, but endowed with a Divine vitality, and displaying successively its latent energies?"40 Besides, no one ever more strictly enjoined the duties of life, the everlasting obligations. He contemplates such duties as are to be done in such a world as ours was then and is now, as the essential sphere in which the heavenly spirit must be formed in man. His principle of final judgment is, "Inasmuch as ye have done the duties of Humanity unto your fellow-men, ye have done them unto me. Come, ye blessed of my Father." Could that teacher suppose that the opportunity for performing such duties would cease for ever before the last of his apostles should have died? Could he think that within that time the destinies of Humanity as he knew it would be closed?

These are the principal reasons which determine me to believe that Jesus did not expect to return visibly to raise the dead, judge the world, and be the head of an external Theocratic kingdom on the renewed earth. What, then, shall be said of the language which appears to express that opinion? "Ye shall drink the wine new with me in my Father's kingdom." "Ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel," &c. Two considerations are to be kept in sight in establishing the views and expectations of Jesus: first, that he used this language – so far as he used it – in a figurative sense, to represent spiritual and providential facts as he conceived them; second, that the evangelists may have sometimes given to his language a precision and a connection which did not belong to it, as delivered. That he could not have employed this language as it is reported to us, in its literal and proper sense, is to my mind a necessary conviction in the premises. This would suppose that he entertained two orders of conceptions, which were opposed to one another, with a clear profound conviction, and gave them as revelations of God: one his spiritual and rational beliefs; the other his Apocalyptic beliefs. This supposition is the vice of Renan's seventeenth chapter. The language of the Apocalyptic beliefs Jesus might use to some extent as a vehicle for conveying the spiritual and rational to others; and the most explicit language in which he conveyed his spiritual beliefs, so far as it was retained in their feebler minds, might be forced into harmony with their traditional opinions. But that in Jesus' mind, so original, so manifestly filled with fresh thought on every theme of Providence and man, these spiritual apprehensions of a kingdom or communion of God which should act under and within the state, renovating human life and society; of a Messiah who by such a kingdom should fulfil the missionary function of Israel to the race of man; of a resurrection which should be the uninterrupted continuance of the blessed life, or an immediate renewal of the sense of wasted opportunity and law violated on earth; of a judgment both immediate and continual of every soul despising the truth revealed to it; of a retribution to civil societies according to Divine law, – should arise as original conceptions, be held with firm decisive grasp, be of the essence of his instruction, and so pronounced in him that our most advanced modern thought is but the distant echo of his profound and distinct enunciations; and that at the same time he should hold those Apocalyptic traditions, of a visible coming, of a Theocratic throne before whose splendor that of Cæsar would fade away, of a simultaneous resurrection and judgment, – hold them in unimpaired conviction, as truths to be solemnly insisted upon as a part of his revelation, – this, it seems to me, comes as near a psychological contradiction as we can well conceive. And besides, if Jesus had clung to those beliefs as Divine convictions, the language ascribed to him would have had the unity of that of the Epistles and the Apocalypse on this subject. We should not be perplexed with apparent contradictions. As it is, we are obliged to use those words which inculcate his spiritual thought for explaining that part of his language which is conformed to Jewish conceptions.