Yet beneath the glittering decay of classical culture, and from within the wellspring of the Hellenistic religious matrix, a new world had been slowly and inexorably taking form.
The Emergence of Christianity
Considered as a single entity, classical Greco-Roman civilization arose, flourished, and declined in the course of a thousand years. At about the midpoint of this millennium, in the remote districts of Galilee and Judaea on the periphery of the Roman Empire, the young Jewish religious leader Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, and died. His radical religious message was embraced by a small but fervently inspired group of Jewish disciples, who believed that after his death by crucifixion, Jesus had risen again and revealed himself as the Christ (“the anointed one”), the world’s Lord and Savior. A new stage in the religion was reached with the advent of Paul of Tarsus, who was Jewish by birth, Roman by citizenship, and Greek by culture. While on his way to Damascus to restrain further spread of what he viewed as a heretical sect dangerous to Judaic orthodoxy, Paul was overwhelmed by a vision of the risen Christ. He then ardently espoused the very religion of which he had been the most forceful opponent, and indeed became its preeminent missionary and foundational theologian. Under Paul’s leadership, the small religious movement rapidly spread to the other parts of the empire—Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, to Rome itself—and began to constitute itself as a world church.
In the course of the unsettled Hellenistic era, something like a spiritual crisis appears to have arisen in the culture, its members impelled by newly conscious needs for personal significance in the cosmos and personal knowledge of life’s meaning. To these needs the various mystery religions, public cults, esoteric systems, and philosophical schools all spoke, but it was Christianity that, after intermittent periods of severe persecution by the Roman state, gradually emerged as the victor. The turning point of this process came in the early fourth century with the epochal conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, who thereafter committed himself and his imperial power to Christianity’s propagation.3
The classical world was drastically transformed in its final centuries by the influx of the Christian religion from the east and the massive invasions of the Germanic barbarians from the north. By the end of the fourth century, Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, and by the end of the fifth, the last Roman emperor in the West had been deposed by a barbarian king. On the face of it, classical civilization had been snuffed out in the West, its great works and ideas left to the Byzantines and later the Moslems to be preserved as in a museum. As Edward Gibbon would pointedly epitomize his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” But from a long view of the West’s complex evolution, these new forces did not entirely eliminate or supplant the Greco-Roman culture as much as they engrafted their own distinctive elements onto the highly developed and deeply rooted classical foundation.4
Despite the decline of Europe into cultural isolation and inactivity during the following centuries (especially as compared with the flourishing Byzantine and Islamic empires), the restless enterprising vigor of the Germanic peoples combined with the civilizing influence of the Roman Catholic Church to forge a culture that was, in another thousand years, to give birth to the modern West. These “Middle” Ages between the classical era and the Renaissance were thus a gestation period of considerable consequence. The Church served as the one institution uniting the West and sustaining a connection with classical civilization. The barbarians for their part did two remarkable things: they converted to Christianity, while they simultaneously set about the enormous task of learning and integrating the rich intellectual heritage of the classical culture they had just conquered. This great scholastic labor, slowly carried out over the thousand-year period first in the monasteries and later in the universities, encompassed not only Greek philosophy and letters as well as Roman political thought, but also the now impressive body of theological writings by the ancient Christian fathers culminating in the work of Augustine—who wrote in the early fifth century just as the Roman Empire was collapsing around him under the impact of the barbarian invasions. It was from this complex fusion of racial, political, religious, and philosophical elements that there gradually arose a comprehensive world view common to Western Christendom. Succeeding that of the classical Greeks as the governing vision of the culture, the Christian outlook would inform and inspire the lives and thinking of millions until the modern era—and, for many, continues to do so.
III
The Christian World View
Our next task is to attempt an understanding of the Christian belief system. Any recapitulation of our cultural and intellectual history must address this task with care, for Christianity has presided over Western culture for most of the latter’s existence, not only bearing its central spiritual impulse for two millennia but also influencing its philosophical and scientific evolution well on through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Even now, in less obvious but no less significant ways, the Christian world view still affects—indeed, permeates—the Western cultural psyche, even when the latter is most apparently secular in disposition.
Precisely what the historical Jesus of Nazareth said, did, or believed himself to be cannot now be ascertained. Like Socrates, Jesus wrote nothing for posterity. It is relatively well established by historical studies and scriptural exegesis that he preached, within the Judaic religious tradition, a call for repentance in anticipation of the imminent coming of God’s Kingdom, that he saw this dawning Kingdom as already present in his own words and deeds, and that for these claims he was put to death under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate in about 30 A.D. Whether he knew himself to be the Son of God is not unequivocally established, and many of the other major elements of Jesus’s life held sacred by the Christian faith—the dramatic nativity narrative, the various miracle stories, Jesus’s knowledge of the Trinity, his intention to found a new religion—cannot be conclusively verified from the historical and textual evidence.
It was not until the later part of the first century that the four Gospels of the New Testament were composed and the foundations of Christian belief laid out by the descendants of Jesus’s immediate followers, and by then an elaborate and at times inconsistent belief structure had developed. This structure involved not only the remembered facts of Jesus’s life, but also various oral traditions, legends, parables and sayings, subsequent visions and prophecies, hymns and prayers, apocalyptic beliefs, the young Church’s didactic requirements, interpolated parallels with the Hebrew Scriptures, other Jewish, Greek, and Gnostic influences, and a complex redemptive theology and view of history—all unified by the biblical authors’ commitment of faith to the new religion. How much this final compound reflected the actual events and teachings of Jesus’s life remains problematic. The earliest extant Christian documents are the letters of Paul, who never met Jesus. Hence the Jesus that history came to know is the Jesus portrayed—recalled, reconstructed, interpreted, embellished, vividly imagined—in the New Testament by writers living one or two generations after the period covered by their narratives, the authorship of which they ascribed to Jesus’s original disciples.
Even these writings were gradually selected as God’s authentic revelation by the early Church hierarchy out of a larger group of such materials, some of which (generally composed later) offered radically different perspectives on the events in question. The orthodox Church that made these judgments, so decisive for the subsequent formation of the Christian belief system, understood itself to be an authority founded with the first apostles and divinely sanctioned by Holy Scripture. The Church was God’s representative on earth, a sacred institution whose continuing tradition would serve as the exclusive interpreter of God’s revelation to humanity. With the Church’s gradual emergence as the dominant structure and influence in the early Christian religion, the writings that now constitute the New Testament, added to the Hebrew Bible, were estab
lished as the canonical basis for the Christian tradition, and these effectively determined the parameters of the evolving Christian world view.
These writings will therefore serve as the basis for our present study of the Christian phenomenon. Because our topic is the nature of and dynamic relationship between the dominant world views of Western civilization, our main concern here is with the tradition of Christianity that held cultural sway over the West from the fall of Rome to the modern era. What the Christian West believed to be true about the world and the human being’s place in it is our specific interest, and that world view was grounded in the canonical revelation, and gradually modified, developed, and extended by various subsequent factors largely under the authoritative guidance of Church tradition. That it was the Church that established the divine authority of the scriptural canon, and the scriptural canon that established the divine authority of the Church, may appear circuitous, but that symbiotic mutual endorsement, affirmed in faith by the continuing Church community, effectively ruled the formation of the Christian outlook. This tradition, then, both in its foundational biblical form and in its later developments, is the subject of our inquiry.
To begin, let us turn our attention to that from which Christianity emerged—the intensely focused, morally rigorous, richly religious tradition of the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham and Moses.
Judaic Monotheism and the Divinization of History
Theology and history were inextricably conjoined in the Hebrew vision. Acts of God and the events of human experience constituted one reality, and the biblical narrative of the Hebrew past was intended rather to reveal its divine logic than to reconstruct an exact historical record. As with Christianity, legend and fact in the early history of Judaism cannot now be clearly distinguished. Nevertheless, although later biblical interpolations obscure the precise emergence in the ancient Near East of a specific people with a monotheistic religion out of an earlier background (extending to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the early second millennium B.C.) of seminomadic tribes with elements of polytheism in their worship, there would appear to be a definite historical core to the traditional Judaic self-understanding.
Certainly the history and mission of the Hebrew people and its religion were unlike any other in the ancient world. In the midst of many nations, often more powerful and advanced than their own, the Hebrews came to experience themselves as the Chosen People, singled out as a nation whose history would have weighty spiritual consequences for the entire world. In the midst of a land where a multiplicity of nature deities were worshiped by surrounding tribes and nations, the Hebrews came to believe that they existed in a unique and direct relationship to the one absolute God who stood above and beyond all other beings as both creator of the world and director of its history. Indeed, the Hebrews perceived their own history as continuous with and reflective of the very beginnings of Creation, when God had made the world and, in his own image, man. With Adam and Eve’s primal disobedience and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the drama of man’s exile from divinity had begun, to be renewed again and again—Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel—until Abraham was called forth in faith to follow God’s plan for his people.
It was in the course of the Exodus, when Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage from Egypt, that the sacred covenant was established by which Israel identified itself and recognized its God, Yahweh, as the saving Lord of history. On this historical foundation rested the Israelites’ continuing faith in God’s promise for their future fulfillment. By accepting the divine commandments revealed on Mount Sinai, the Hebrews betrothed themselves in obedience to their God and his insuperable and inscrutable will. For the God of the Hebrews was a God of miracle and purpose, who saved nations or crushed them at will, who brought forth water from rocks, food from heaven, children from the barren womb, to accomplish his plan for Israel. Their God was not only creator but liberator, and had assured his people a glorious destiny if they would remain faithful and obedient to his law.
The imperative of trust in the Lord, and fear of the Lord, dominated Jewish life as the prerequisite for enjoying his saving power in the world. Here was the overriding sense of moral urgency, of ultimate fate’s being decided by present human actions, of the individual’s direct accountability to the all-seeing and all-just God. Here too was the denunciation of an unjust society, the contempt for hollow secular success, the prophetic call for moral regeneration. A divine summons had been given to the Jews to recognize God’s sovereignty over the world, and to aid in the realization of his purpose—to bring peace, justice, and fulfillment to all mankind. This final design became explicit in the later centuries of ancient Israel’s fluctuating history, during the Babylonian captivity (sixth century B.C.) and afterward, when there developed an increasing sense of the coming “Day of the Lord.” Then the Kingdom of God would be established, the righteous would be elevated and the wicked punished, and Israel would be honored as the spiritual light of mankind. Then the present sufferings of the Chosen People would bring forth a new era of universal justice, true piety, and the revelation of God’s full glory to the world. After the centuries of anguish and defeat, a messianic figure would appear, through whose divine power history itself would find its triumphant end. Israel’s “Promised Land,” flowing with milk and honey, had now expanded to become Israel’s bringing the Kingdom of God to all humanity. It was this faith, this hope in the future, this unique historical impulse carried forward by the prophets and compellingly recorded in the poetry and prose of the Bible, that had sustained the Jewish people for two millennia.
When Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry, he did so in a Jewish cultural ambiance in which expectations of a messiah and an apocalyptic denouement of history had reached extreme proportions. Such a context gave singularly dramatic weight to Jesus’s announcement to his fellow Galileans that in his person the time had at last arrived for the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” But it was not just Jesus’s teachings about the dawning Kingdom that inspired the new faith, nor the eschatological expectations aroused by wandering preachers like John the Baptist. Most decisive was the reaction by Jesus’s disciples to his death by crucifixion and their fervent belief in his resurrection. For in that resurrection, the Christian faithful perceived the triumph of God over mortality and evil, and recognized the type and promise of their own resurrection. Whatever the basis for that belief—the intense conviction of which can scarcely be overestimated—it would seem that not long after Jesus’s death his followers had achieved a remarkably rapid and comprehensive recasting of their religious faith that exploded old assumptions and initiated a new understanding of God and humanity.
This new vision emerged soon after the crucifixion from a series of revelatory experiences, through which a number of Jesus’s followers became convinced their master was again alive. These “appearances,” later bolstered by Paul’s visionary experience of the risen Christ, led the disciples to believe that Jesus in some sense had been wholly restored by God’s power, and reunited in glory with God to share his eternal life in heaven. Jesus, then, was not just a man, nor even a great prophet, but was the Messiah himself, the Son of God, the long awaited divine savior whose passion and death had inaugurated the world’s redemption and the birth of a new aeon. The Judaic biblical prophecies could now be properly understood: The Messiah was not a mundane king but a spiritual one, and God’s Kingdom not a political victory for Israel but a divine redemption for humanity, bringing a new life suffused with God’s Spirit. Thus the bitterly disappointing event of their leader’s crucifixion was mysteriously transformed in the minds of his disciples into the basis for a seemingly unlimited faith in the ultimate salvation of mankind, and an extraordinarily dynamic impulse to propagate that faith.
Jesus had challenged his fellow Jews to accept God’s saving activity in history, an activity visible in his own person and ministry. This challenge was paralleled—developed, r
eformulated, magnified—by the early Church in its call to recognize Jesus as the Son of God and Messiah.2 Thus did Christianity claim to be the fulfillment of the Judaic hopes: The longed for future of God had now entered history in Christ. In a paradoxical combination of the linear and the timeless, Christianity declared that Christ’s presence in the world was the presence of God’s promised future, just as God’s future lay in the full realization of the presence of Christ. The Kingdom of God was now already present, and yet was just dawning, to be fulfilled at the end of history with Christ’s triumphant return. For in Christ, the world had been reconciled, but it had not yet been fully redeemed. Christianity thereby both culminated the Judaic hope and yet also continued a hope for a cosmic spiritual triumph in the imminent future, when there would come a new creation and a new humanity enjoying the unhindered presence of God.
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