IO 4 CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS
act of consummation. Their preaching was with a view t« that event. They sought to do for his second coming what John the Baptist had sought to do for his first coming: to proclaim repentance to the people and to gather a holy remnant. The Christian hope of the Parousia was the Jewish hope of the Messianic kingdom, except that the person of the Messiah had gained wonderfully in concreteness and attractiveness, and the hope had become far more vivid and intense. The coming Messiah was the Master whom they knew and loved. He had ascended on high to receive the kingdom from his Father, and soon they would see him again, perhaps to-morrow or the day after. Ideas could well differ as to what the kingdom implied and the return of Christ would usher in. Some would place the emphasis on the spiritual blessings, others on the social justice and emancipation that would be involved in the perfect reign of God. It was an ideal, and a very capacious and elastic ideal. The early Christians were no more unanimous about their eschatology than the Jews had been, and than we are to-day. Paul expected an immediate spiritualization of the entire Cosmos) The dead would be raised in a spiritual body; the living -ould be transformed into the saine kind of body; for flesh and blood in the nature of things could not share in that spiritual kingdom. Death would cease. Nature would be glorified, and the long travail of all creation would end when the children of God would be manifested in their glory. In Paul's programme of the future there is no room for a millennium of happiness on this present earth. Only the dogmatic theory that all Scripture writers must hold the saine views can wedge the millennium into Paul's scheme of the coming events. His outlook is ahnost devoid of social elements. To him the spirit was all. This material world could be saved only by ceasing to exist. But there were others to whom the lire in the spirit was hot so intense and experimental a reality as to Paul. They clung more lovingly to this old earth and to the human intercourse which made their happiness. The material world would, of course, end some day, but first there would be a really good life on earth. When Sa.tan and his hosts were chained and imprisoned, and Christ and his saints reigned instead, then injustice and oppression would cease at last. Nature would be free from the stunting power of sin and the splendid fertility of paradise before the fall would retum. 1 Death would corne late and gently. If any one had suffered death for the testimony of Jesus, that would not deprive him of his share in that happy time; he would corne to life and be invulnerable to death till the thousand years were over. At the end of that time there would be a last rallying of the powers of evil, a final spasm of judgment, and then this earth would pass away. This is the type of the Christian hope expressed in the Apocalypse of John. The twentieth chapter describes this intermediate stage of salvation before the new heavens and the new earth appear in the twenty-first chapter. And even i See the gorgeous imaginings of Papias, a man of the second generation of Christians, quoted by Irenoeus, "Heresies," Bk. V, Chap. 33. 3-4- See "Ante-Nicene Fathers," I, 562-563. Papias was so sure that this was part and parcel of Christianity that he claimed this as a saying of Jesus.
that new earth is only a glorified old earth, with a shining city and ever bearing fruit trees and a crystal river and nations that pass in and out through its gates. The eschatology of the Apocalypse was the orthodox eschatology of primitive Christianity. Most of the writers of the post-apostolic age express or indorse it. It was opposed on principle by the Gnostic teachers and by some of the Greek Church fathers; for them salvation consisted in the emancipation of the spirit from the deadly prison-house of matter, and they could not adroit a glorification of the material world in millennial splendor. Gradually as the years rolled on and the Lord failed to corne, this hope grew fainter. Montanism in the second half of the second century sought to revive it by strenuous insistence on it, but only brought it into discredit. When the Empire accepted Christianity as the State religion, and the peace and power which, under the pressure of persecution, had seemed possible only through the direct intervention of God, had corne in other ways, the millennial hope was practically abandoned by the leaders of the Church. They had their millennium. Eusebius pleased the courtiers of Constantine by suggesting that perhaps the marble and gol.d of the Church ordered by Constantine over the Saviour's tomb was the nev Jerusalem. 1 The common people long clung to the millennial hope; they were still disinherited and longed for their inheritance. Now, the millennial hope is the social hope of Christianity. There are two personalities to which religion holds out a hope of salvation" the little personality of man, and the great collective personality of mankind. To the individual, Christianity offers victory over sin and death, and the consum- Eusebius, "Life of Constantine," Chap. .
mation of all good in the life to corne. To mankind it offers a perfect social lire, victory over all tbe evil that wounds and mars human intercourse and satisfaction for the hunger and thirst after justice, equality, and love. One or the other of these two may be emphasized in the religious lire of an individual or a nation. Ancient Israel believed intensely in the divine consummation for the community; the hope of a future lire for the individual had very little influence in Jewish religious lire before the Exile. On the other hand, in the Greek world of the first Christian centuries the longing for eternal lire was exceedingly strong, and the hope for any collective salvation almost non-existent. In the synoptic teaching of Jesus all turns on the kingdom of God, and the lire hereafter is rarely referred to; in the Gospel of John "eternal lire" is the central word and the "kingdom of God" scarcely occurs. Many men to-day longed for heaven when they were young, and the idea of a salvation for society never occurred to them; now they are almost indifferent whether they personally will survive death or not; but they would gladly give their lire if it could help forward the salvation of society. A perfect religious hope must include both: eternal lire for the individual, the kingdom of God for humanity. In early Christianity we see a gradual change of emphasis from the one hope to the other. From its Hebrew origin it brought the social hope; from its Greek environment it accepted the intensification of the individual hope. The former waned as primitive Christianity disappeared; the latter waxed as Catholic Christianity developed. Each hope was deeply and organically connected with all the other features of worship and church lire characteristic of primitive
Christianity on the one hand and Catholic Christianity on the other. But in so far as Christianity retained the first impact coming from Jesus and the Baptist and the prophets of Israel, its hope was predominantly the social hope.
» The millennium was the early Christian Utopia. It occupied the saine place in the imagination and hope of the first generations of Christians which the coSperative commonwealth occupies in the fancies of modern socialists. The "woes" which always preceded the inauguration of the golden age corresponded to that forcible clash of the contending interests which is expected as inevitable in the coming transition of power from the possessing classes to the proletariat. It is true, all hope was put in the intervention of God and none at all in economic development or the forcible or political action of Christians. But their hope was a revolutionary hope, even though the revolutionists were as passive as sheep led to the slaughter and as meek as their Master. They hoped for a change complete and thorough; for an overturning swift and catastrophic; for an absolute transition of power from those who now rule to those who now surfer and are oppressed. What else is a revolution? The entire complexion of this hope had been inherited from Judaism. The general framework of the successive eras, the woes, the angelic hosts, the mystic arithmetic of sevens and tens, were common to Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. With slight changes Christians could adapt and Christianize Jewish apocalyptic writings, and they did so. 1 One most important point in which the Jewish attitude was 1 See Shailer Mathews, "The Messianic Hope'in the New Testament"; Schfirer, "The Jewish People in the Time ef Jesus Christ," § 2 9 and § 3 2, V.
copied by sorne Christians was the hostility to Rome. The oppressed and tortured spirit of post-exilic Judaism had turned in tierce hatred against the nations that oppressed Israel. Rorne was the last and rnost terrible of thern all. They were all but agents of great dernon powers who hated Israel and thwarted its God. When the hurricane of God's judgrnent should corne at last, it would rnean deliverance to Israel, but necessarily it would rnean also vengeance and overthrow for Rorne. This attitude toward the dominant political power was readily irnported into Christian thought with the apocaiyptic literature which ernbodied it. Jews who becarne Christians could hardly help retaining that philosophy of contemporary history. Was not Rorne built up by the aid of its gods? And what were its gods but the dernons whorn Christ was to overthrow and strip of their power? As surely as the true God was in irreconcilable conflict with the dernon powers of idolatry, so surely would there have to be a death-struggle with the Empire before the kingdorn of Christ could be set up. In the Apocalypse of John, before the shout of the multitude could proclairn the final "Hallelujah! for the Lord our God the Omnipotent reigneth!" the other shout had to go up, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!" t In the Middle Ages the whisper began to go abroad that the scarlet wornan that rides on the beast, the great city seated on the seven hills, was papal Rorne. That interpretation has been so useful in the long battle of Protestantism with Rornanism that it has acquired a kind of canonical authority, so that to rnany readers of the Bible it seerns a self-evident matter that the Apocalypse prophesies the antit Apoc. x 9. 6 and xS. 2.
Christian power of papal Rome. But neither the writer nor the early readers of the book had the faintest conception of the papacy or its far-off corruption. Not even the tiniest germ of that institution was in existence when the book was written. To any contemporary reader the great city enthroned on the seven hills, ruling over all nations, the luxurious market for all the merchants of silver and pearls and purple and silk and scarlet, could mean only one thing: the capltal of the Empire. Her fall and ruin meant the overthrow of the Empire) But surely the shout of triumph hailing that event was not expressive either of political indifference nor political loyalty. Not all Christians shared this attitude of hostility to the State. Paul certainly did not regard the Empire as Satanic in character, but as a divine instrument of order and justice, a power holding the anti-Christian malignity in check. 3 But Paul wrote his commendation of Roman justice during the early and happy years of Nero's reign, when that gifted and impressionable mind was still under the influence of Seneca. Up to that rime the persecution of the Christians had all proceeded from the hatred of the Jews, and the-strong arm of the Roman government had often served to protect the Christians from the influential malice of the Jews. On the other hand, the Apocalypse was written when the iron hand of Rome had turned against the Christians as such under Nero and perhaps under Domitian. 4 All the world had listened aghast to the news of the burning of great Rome. But to the Christian communities the most significant fact was the death-moan of their brethren that followed. The glare of 1 Apoc. I7-19. Romans 13. 1- 7. Thessalonians 2. -i2. * Under Nero A.9. 64; under Domitian A.9. 95 or 96.
burning Rome and the blood of the Christian martyrs combine in the lurid colors of the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of the Apocalypse. The prayer for vengeance against Rome was the answer in some Christian minds to the beginnings of persecution by Rome. It was not Christian, but it was very human. 1 The hope of Christ's return dominated the thoughts of primitive Christianity. Christ's return was the inauguration of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was the hope of social perfection. The reign of Christ involved the overthrow of the present vorld-powers. Thus the millennial hope was necessarily a political hope and in antagonism to the existing political situation. As soon as the Roman Empire took an attitude of active hostility toward the followers of Christ, some at least of them took an attitude of passive hostility toward the Empire. This was neither wise nor Christian, but in estimating the social impetus of primitive Christianity we cannot overlook these revolutionary tendencies. If the broadening current of the Christian movement had such sucking whirlpools on one of its edges, it helps us to estimate the swiftness and force of the entire stream.
The apocalyptic hope expressed a tremendous sense of political destiny. Ail the world was to be ruade over and the Christians placed in the centre of things. The reins of power were to be torn from the hands of the mighty and given to the followers of Jesus. The history of the world
1 There are historical scholars who are so impressed by the latent hostility of the Christians to Rome that they incline to think some of them may bave been guilty of setting Rome on tire, as was charged at the time. Cf. Tacitu_% «, AJlales»" XV, 44-
The pol cal consciousnc of Chri tians.