Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

To what extent were the social aims of Jesus seized and carried out by the Church which called itself by his naine? Did his early followers have the saine all-embracing and lofty conceptions of the kingdom of God, the saine passionate love for justice, and the saine humane tenderness and brotherly freedom which make the soul of Jesus the luminous centre of our moral and spiritual world? lit would be miraculous if they had. "What hand and brain went ever paired?" There is a gap even between the ideal cherished by any lofty mind and the realization which he can give toit in his own action. There are few men who maintain their first love unchilled to their colder age and their early purposes untarnished by policy and concession to things as they are. But as soon as the thoughts of a great spiritual leader pass to others and form the animating principle of a party or school or sect, there is an inevitable drop. The disciples cannot keep pace with the sweep of the master. They flutter where he soared. They coarsen and materialize his dreams. They put their trust in forms and organization where he dared to trust in the spirit. They repeat his words, but they make mere formulas of his prophetic figures of speech. They may join the Order of St. Francis, but they will not call the birds their sisters and the sun thelr brother. Belike ]3rother Elias becomes the head of the "little brothers"

whom the poet-saint of Assisi called out to serve the Lady Poverty.  That is the tragedy of all who lead. The farther they are in advance of their times, the more will they be misunderstood and misrepresented by the very men who swear by their naine and strive to enforce their ideas and aires. If the followers of Jesus had preserved his thought and spirit without leakage, evaporation, or adulteration, it would be a fact unique in history. But they did not. Few held fast his spiritual liberty; the Jewish Christians remained in some measure of servility to the old Law; the Gentile Christians early fashioned a new Law and obeyed it in the old spirit of legalism. Few rose to his conception of worshipping God simply by a reverent and loving lire; the Church eafly developed Christian sacraments and superstitious rites with which to placate and appease the Father of Jesus. Few ruade his conceptions of the right human life their inward possession. Imagine Jesus, with the dust of Galilee on his sandals, coming into the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople in the fifth century, listening to dizzy doctrinal definitions about the relation of the divine and human in his nature, watching the priests performing the gorgeous acts of worship, reciting long and set prayers, and offering his own mystical body as a renewed sacrifice to their God! Has any one ever been misunderstood as Jesus bas? If the religious and moral thoughts and aires of Jesus were thus paralyzed an:t distorted from thé. outset, we may take it for granted as a matter of course that his social aires and ideas suffered a similar dimintltion in scope, force, and purity. If, on the other hand, we should find that primitive Christianity was still inspired by high social aims and still instinct 1 See Sabatier, "Lire of St. Francis."

with social energy, it would furnish an added argument of the highest significance for the strength of the social impetus originally imparted by Jesus and inherent in the historical movement inaugurated by him.

It is necessary to remind ourselves that our information for the purposes of such an inquiry is meagre and incomplete. The early Christians did hot belong to the literary class with whom the impulse to record its doings on paper is more or less instinctive. They had no motive for making elaborate historical records of their lire. They expected the speedy end of the world and never dreamed of a posterity that would cherish every scrap of information about them. Even the sayings of the Master were not recorded till years had gone by. Whatever was written, was to serve some ilnmediate and passing occasion, and in writings of that sort the most important facts, which really make up the bulk of the common lire, are often not even mentioned, because they are so well understood by all parties concerned that they go without saying. We have no document whatever which sets out to furnish a coherent account of the moral or social life of the early Christian communities. Moreover, if there were any radical, political, or social ideas current in early Christianity, there was good cause for hot writing them down or publishing them freely. The Roman government was tolerant and almost indifferent on questions of religious belief and worship, but suspicious and alert against anything that smelled like smouldering revolutionary fireY Even social clubs and benevolent associations were under sharp surveillance lest they mask political designs. a Harnack, " Expansc_n of Christianity," ]3k. III, Chap. V.

The lirr tions of informa

There is one relic of primitive Christianity which embod, les revolutionary hopes and passions, and it is significant that it purposely veils its meaning. The contemporary political powers are described under the image of beasts; the capital city is called by the mystic naine of Babylon; the keyword of its allegories is hidden in the number 666, in which the letters of the word are translated into their numerical equivalents. 1 Political thought and utterance are so absolutely free in England and America that we can scarcely conceive along what subterranean channels political and social ideas have to move under more despotic conditions; how unsigned letters and poems pass from hand to hand; how a whisper, an innocent naine, or a sprig of flowers will convey a world of meaning. But what is meant to evade contemporary scrutiny, is likely also to escape the knowledge of later rimes and to perish without trace. We make much of those passages of the New Testament which prove the political loyalty of the early Christians to the Roman Empire. But possibly one purpose in Luke's mind when he wrote the Book of Acts for the use of Theophilus was to present an apologetic of Christianity to the upper classes; and when Paul exhorted the Romans to obey the government, he may have had in mind the possibility that in the capital of the world his letter might drop into influential hands. If there was even a shade of such a side-motive in these writings, we must allow for it in constructing our conception of the political attitude of primitive Christianity. The suggestion just ruade is somewhat conjectural. The following is quite certain. No books of the first century have reached us unless later times had interest enough in them to copy them. The survival of a book depended, not on the interest it awakened in the first century, nor on the interest it would awaken to-day, but on the interest which the third or fourth century took in it. If it was written by some man whom that subsequent age revered as a Christian authority, or if it lent welcome support to doctrines or institutions then struggling for the mastery, it was copied and quoted and had a chance of coming to our hands. If not, the material on which the earliest copies were written was sure to perish in some one of a hundred ways, and the book itself disappeared from human sight forever. There were books which were widely read and loved in the Church of the second century, but which fell into disrepute and oblivion becaase they did not suit the tastes and standards of the age schooled by the great doctrinal controversies. It is wholly likely that the saine fate vould befall any popular literature in which the social feelings and hopes of the earliest generations were embodied. They, too, became antiquated and uncongenial to the churchmen of the later age, especially after the Church had emerged from its oppressed condition and was fostered and fed by the Empire. There were various important drifts and movements in early Christianity, but only those which were finally victorious in Catholic Christianity secured a fair and permanent historical record. For instance, the great Gnostic movement, which was as important in the world of thought in the second century as the evolutionary idea is in our own age, was finally thrust out by the Church, and of all its rich literature we have only one book left; otherwise we are dependent for our information on the partisan statements and garbled quotations of its enemies.

The Jewish Christian Church was at first the whole of the Christian Church. Gradually it was outstripped by the rapid growth of the Gentile churches, and through its doctrinal conservatism and prejudices, and through the force of outward events, it was left in the lurch of the larger rnovement and gradually separated from it in sympathy. Jewish Christian bodies survived to the fifth century, but they were then regarded as heretical and their literature had little chance of survival. The Epistle of Jarnes and the Revelation of John are more or less directly the product of this Jewish Christianity. They were saved from the deluge of oblivion because they were admitted into the ark of the Canon; and they were thus admitted only because they bore the narnes of apostles, and then only reluctantly. Now, the Jewish Christian churches represented the radical social wing of the primitive Church. They were leavened by the ancient democracy of the Hebrew prophets and of post-exilic Judaism. In popular Jewish thought the poor and the godly were simply identified, and there was a frequent and strident note of hostility to the upper classes. The Epistle of James shares this Jewish spirit. It is one of the most democratic books of the New Testament. "Let a brother in humble circumstances boast of his exalted rank, and a rich brother of his humble rank, for like the flower of the grass will he pass away. In the rnidst of his business will he wilt away." 1 He describes indignantly how the rich man is ushered obsequiously into a front pew, while the poor man is sent into the gallery. That seems to him a reversal of God's judgment, for the poor as a class have been chosen by God to be rich in the Christian faith and heirs of the coraing kingdora,  James I, —Io while the rich as a class are the oppressors of the Christians and the enemies of the name of Christ? He pronounces an invective against the rich which would seem intolerably denunciatory in the mouth of a modern socialist preacher: "Here now, you rich men, weep and wail for the calamities coming upon you! ¥our wealth is rotted and your garments are moth-eaten! ¥our gold and silver have rusted, and their rust shall accuse you and eat into your flesh like tire. ¥ou bave foolishly piled up wealth just before the world ends. Look now, the wages of the workingmen who bave reaped your fields, which you bave fraudulently retained, cry out against you and the outcries of the reapers have corne to the ears of the Lord of Hosts. ¥ou bave lived in luxury and wantonness on earth. ¥ou bave fattened your hearts like cattle for a day of slaughter. ¥ou bave condemned in the courts and done to death the just man who offers no resistance to you." 2 The significance of such a passage lies not in itself, but in the body of sentiment of which it is a manifestation. The Apocalypse of John is part of the popular apocalyptic literature which flourished both among the Jews and the Jewish Christians, and the hope of a revolutionaxy overturning is the essence of the apocalyptic hope, as we shall see later. The radical social spirit of the Jewish Christian churches can also be gauged in a measure by the sayings of Jesus. These sayings were kept alive and transmitted by word of mouth for years before any larger attempt was ruade to record them in writing, and the Jewish churches furnished the collective memory which treasured and preserved them. It is  James . x-'9. * James 5- x-6.

safe to say that in the main only those portions of the teachings of Jesus which in some way were dear and congenial to these ehurches were thus preserved. If, therefore, the synoptic teachings of Jesus as we now bave them are saturated with social thought, it is because such thought echoed the sentiment of the Jewish Christian community. 1 In the preceding chapter I bave declined to follow those scholars who ascribe much of the radical social teaching in Luke to Ebionitic, that is, to Jewish Christian influence. If it should be true that any part of that material is not due to Jesus, but to those who, in transmitting his thoughts, consciously or unconsciously infused something of their own social passion into them, Jesus would be relieved in part of the charge of radicalism, but the Jewish Christian Church would be dyed with a deeper scarlet. We have an interesting example of such an editorial intensification of the social animus. The "Gospel according to the Hebrews" was a very ancient gospel, which originated and circulated in Jewish Christian circles. Only a few fragments of it are preserved. One of them tells the story of the rich young ruler in this form:—

"Said to him the other rich man, 'Master, what good thing must I do to live?' He said to him, 'Man, do the law and the prophets.' He replied, 'I bave.' He said to him, 'Go, sell all thou possessest and distribute it to the poor and corne follow me.' But the rich man began to scratch his head and it pleased him not. And the Lord said to him: 'How sayest thou, I have done the law and the

1 This line of investigation is followed with great skill and effectiveness in Weizsaecker, "Histol-y of the Apostolic Age." * Hilgenfeld, "Novum Testamentum extra canonem," p. I6; E. B. Nicholson, "The Gospel according to the Hebrews," London, x879.

prophets? For it is written in the law: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; and see, many of thy brothers, sons of Abraham, are covered with filth, dying of hunger, and thy house is full of much goods, and nothing at all cornes out of it to them.' And turning he said to his disciple Simon, who sat by him, 'Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.' "

The point of our argument is this. The Jewish Christian communities were numerically and spiritually an important part of earliest Christianity. In many respects they most faithfully preserved the direct impress of Jesus, for they were the product of the saine moral environment which had nurtured his mind. But the main current of Christian life, which finally resuIted in Catholic Christianity, followed other channels and left Jewish Christianity like a land-locked bay, and of its literary products only a few remnants were preserved. Consequently the social spirit which glowed in that part of the Christian Church is not adequately represented in early Christian literature as we now know it, and our general impression of the social impetus in primitive Christianity is to that extent weakened and imperfect. It is not at all unlikely that a similar fate befell other writings which shared the saine qualifies. Again, of those writings which did survive, only a limited number were embodied in the Canon of the New Testament, and only those that were embodied are known to the mass of Christian readers to-day. They have to form their judgment of the nature of original Christianity solely from their impressions of the New Testament. But an impression based only on that material is bound to be one-sided. If the gospels and the writings of one man were eliminated from out New Testament, the compass of what remains would be very slight. Paul immensely preponderates in the bulk of out material, and so we get the impression that his ideas and points of view were those generally prevailing in the apostolic age. That is probably far from true. In many respects Paul was a free lance, the propagandist of a new theology, a great dissenter and nonconformist, who was viewed with distrust or hostility by the representatives of an older theology and a more authoritative organization. He was a mind of immense stature and virility, but it was impossible that so intense a spirit should embody all sides of Christianity with equal vigor and in rounded harnaony. Paul was a radical in theology, but a social conservative, a combination frequently met to-day. If we assume that in this respect he is an exportent of the whole of primitive Christianity, we may be misled. Yet even Paul was hot as apathetic toward social questions as is usually assumed. And finally the saine caution with which we began our study of the social aires of Jesus applies to any study of the social contents of early Christianity. We have hot been accustomed to read the records from this point of view. We have read them for spiritual devotion. We have studied them from the theological and ecclesiastical point of view. The records as they lie belote us are incomplete and onesided, and even what does bear on our purposes is overlaid for us by other interests, by preconceptions and long-standing habits of mind. We must stretch a sympathetic hand back to out brothers of the first and second century and see if they do not respond with the warm and mystic clasp that belongs to the order of social Christians of ail times. Of course this discussion will be one-sided too. There is no intention of presenting a rounded picture of the moral and religious life of primitive Christianity. We shall simply try to do justice to the force of the social impetus quivering in it.

The hope of the immediate return of Christ dominated the life of primitive Christianity. Its missionary zeal, its moral energy, its theological conceptions and its outlook on the world, the interests it cherished and the interests it repudiated, can all be understood only under the high atmospheric pressure of ttat expectation. This great culminating event was believed to be very near. Paul, too, believed that. It is often asserted that he modified his expectations as time went on. It would be strange if he did not, but there is no change traceable in his thought on this point sucient to modify his conception of the historic mission of Christianity. The possibility that he personally might depart before the Lord returned, deepened into probability and then into certainty; but it was always a question of years and decades with Paul, and never of centuries. The return of the Lord meant the inauguration of the kingdom of God. What the prophets had foretold, what the people had longed for, and what John the Baptist had proclaimed as close at hand, would corne to pass when Jesus returned from heaven to reign. He had not achieved his real mission during his earthly life; the opposition of the rulers had frustrated that; it had been God's will so. But he was still the Messiah of Israel; the national salvation was bound to corne; the kingdom would yet be restored to Israel. In a very short rime he would descend from heaven and then all their hopes would be fulfilled in one glorious and divine

The ho l the cor of the I