Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

Jewish hatred of the Christian faith stopped as little with Constantine’s edict of toleration as it had with the destruction of the temple by Titus or the banishment of the people by Hadrian; but here we have only to consider it in the first period of the forty years.

This is one aspect of that first conflict with Judaism, but there is likewise another, of which the issue was the gradual severance of the Christian Church from the synagogue. As the first struggle came from the enmity of those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, so the second came from those who received Him, but at the same time clung to the Jewish law and its observances.

The problem of the first twelve years’ teaching was, whether the Jewish nation would, as a nation, receive the faith of Him whom its rulers had crucified. An ardent longing for the salvation of their people as a whole must have lain deep in the heart of those first Jewish converts. But even after it became plain that only a remnant would accept the faith, and after a great number of Gentile converts had been received throughout the empire, on conditions which exempted them from the practice of the law of Moses, when St. Paul, at a late period of his ministry, went up to Jerusalem, he was entreated, because there were many thousands among the Jews that had believed who were all zealots for the law,166 to perform in his own person publicly in the temple a vow according to the law, with which he complied.

No doubt one of the greatest difficulties experienced in these first forty years was the amalgamation of Jewish and Gentile converts in the one Christian Church; but I would draw attention only to the completeness of the result. Among the questions then settled167 were the meaning of the Old Testament law in regard to the faith in Christ, the relation of our Lord to the Jewish prophets, His superiority to them, His divine nature, and thus His relation to God the Father. I pass over the consideration of all these to make one remark. The ultimate result is the proof of power, and by the time the Jewish temple and the public worship carried on in it were destroyed by the Roman avenger of the God he did not know, the Christian Church was seen to emerge in its character of a religion for all mankind. The association of St. Paul with St. Peter in the patronage of the Roman Church is the most conclusive refutation of theories as to their enmity and rivalry. The one Christian community, ruled by one Episcopate, derived from the Person of Christ, and containing Jews and Gentiles in the one Body of Christ, is the best proof that the force of that divine unity prevailed over zeal for the law and national privileges on the one hand, as over all the errors and confusions of heathen life on the other. Jewish persecution had its completion in the ruin of the deicide city. Those thousands of believers, zealots for the law, were in a few short years merged in the ever-increasing number of the Gentile converts. That great mother Church of Jerusalem, mindful of her Lord’s prophecy dwelling in her thoughts, was warned by the Roman standards encompassing the city to migrate to Pella, beyond the Jordan, and thus the centre of Jewish influence in the Church was dissipated beyond recall. The Christian Church took over the inheritance of the synagogue, displaced and destroyed, without being confined to its rites and ceremonies. The high priest, the priest, and the levite of the old covenant, touched with the life-giving flesh of Christ, passed into the ministry of the new; and while the lamb ceased to be offered for the daily sacrifice in the temple, the Lamb of God on every Christian altar became the Sacrifice and the Food of the one Christian people.

Thus the providence of God, offering to His chosen people their Saviour, had, when they rejected Him, worked a double result of their unbelief: one, the destruction of their city and polity; the other, the coming forth in unity and independence of the true Israel, “the nation of Christ.”

In all this the Divine Kingdom accomplished its first stage, being founded by Jewish teachers in spite of the enmity of unbelieving Judaism without, and blending the Jew and the Gentile convert within by the force of its potent unity.

The contest with Judaism in both its phases had but a restricted scope, if we compare it with that manifold contest with error which filled the whole history of the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council. It is not easy to realise the circumstances under which that contest was waged. First, from the persecution begun under Nero in the year 64, to the edicts of Constantine in 311-313, the Christian Church lay under the ban of the Empire as an illicit religion. It is indeed true that the whole of this long period of two hundred and fifty years is not a time of active persecution. There are intervals throughout, of considerable length, in which the Church carried on her silent course of conversion, without the law being executed against her, with at least anything like a general intention to destroy her. Still, even in these intervals, she was in the condition of a society in opposition at all points to the powers of the world, and, to say the least, discouraged by the spirit of the time. She could not unfold and publish her constitution. The thing of all others which she could least venture to disclose was her polity, that episcopate with its centre in Rome which was the bond of her strength as a regimen. In spite of herself, Roman law forced her into the position, in many respects at least, of a secret society; secret, not because her doctrines in themselves required concealment; secret, not because her polity was in itself an infringement of the Empire’s civil rights, but because both doctrine and polity involved a change in the religious, social, and civil relations of the world which the Roman Empire was not prepared to concede, and which, had it divined, not Nero alone, or Domitian, “a portion of Nero in his cruelty,”168 but every Roman emperor, with Trajan at their head, would have stamped out. Again, it is difficult to realise the condition of a religious society which could not carry out its worship under the protection which publicity confers. Yet as to this we have no authority to show that there were public Christian churches before the reign of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after the Church began. Her eucharistic liturgy was a secret; her sacred books were kept out of the sight of the heathen; but even so the language and the treatment of subjects in these books, not to speak of the choice of those subjects, betoken that they belonged to a society which needed not only the harmlessness of the dove but the wisdom of the serpent. It had need to keep its head under cover. To take one instance out of many. I do not know a more remarkable example of reticence than that passage in the Acts of the Apostles wherein it is said of Peter, that when delivered by the angel from prison, he sent a message to James and the brethren, and then “went out and departed into another place.” Here St. Luke, writing in a time of active persecution, rather more than twenty years after the event which he was recording, and when Nero had broken out against the Church, carefully abstains from saying that the place to which St. Peter went was Rome, and that he went to found the Church there, for such foundation was the thing above all others which Roman law looked upon with most suspicion, in its confusion of temporal with spiritual rule. Now we have to bear in mind, in order to realise the condition of the Church in this whole period, that all her work of promulgation, her daily administration of sacraments, her worship, her defence of the truth which she had received and which she was to guard, were carried on under this state of compression, a perpetual outlawry in the letter of the law, which might be put into exercise at the will of a local magistrate or the rising of a discontented populace, and which on many occasions was actually enforced by the supreme authority of the emperor. And it is not a little to be borne in mind what the political condition of the empire then was. The rights of the citizen, as opposed to the government, were overborne by a tremendous despotism, which only allowed light and air to its subjects so far as the science of government had not reached the complete development of modern times. The Roman emperors were not enabled to wield a secret police, because such an instrument of servitude had not yet been invented, nor had they reached an universal military conscription, because the Roman peace rendered such a sacrifice unnecessary; they had only the supreme power of life and death in their hands without restriction. Into the midst of such a despotism the Christian religion was cast. The seed silently deposited in each city in the episcopal germ grew with its individual life, which was yet the life of one tree; but how little was that secret unity of root apparent to the world, at least in the first half of this time! How truly, indeed, was the prophecy of the Lord fulfilled: “Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves;”169 and how apposite the warning, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves!”

But as the Episcopate was a tree growing upon one root, so the faith on which it lived was one sap. Yet to what danger of isolation, especially in those first times, were small communities of Christians in so many several cities exposed. The Sees, it is true, were not crystallised units, but associated in provinces under Metropolitans. Yet their bishops did not possess the civil liberty of meeting when they chose. Upon the whole action of the Church there was a perpetual constraint from without. The two forces which held the Church together were the Episcopate viewed as one body, and the directing, controlling, regulating authority of St. Peter’s See at its centre. Yet not once in the well-nigh three hundred years could the Episcopate meet in universal councils, and the action of the Roman Church, an action which of all others within the bosom of the Christian society the Roman State would regard with the most jealousy, could only be exercised with a due respect to that jealousy, and in conjunction with that large measure of autonomy which the condition of a compressed and often-persecuted society, sprinkled over a vast number of provinces, imposed.

One of the most effective means for maintaining unity and overcoming error was the regular meeting of Councils. In ante-Nicene times these took place in various provinces of the Church, but did not extend to the whole Church. The first Western General Council was held at Arles in 314, and it needed the permission of the Emperor Constantine to take place. Before the peace of the Church its various provinces stand out in groups, under the presiding influence of the greater Sees. Thus, Alexandria unites all the Churches of Egypt and Libya, and the great See of Antioch serves as a centre for the numerous Sees of the East. Ephesus collects the churches of Asia Minor, and Carthage those of Africa. A certain local spirit and certain tendencies of thought would grow up. Perhaps a certain school of teaching may be said to characterise each of these groups. Even the natural temperament170 of the African, the Egyptian, the Asiatic, and the Oriental character, receiving the one seed of Christian doctrine, would show itself in their several developments. The correction of such local tendencies lay in the free and unfettered intercourse and relation with St. Peter’s See; but it was this precisely which the above-noted circumstances of the times rendered difficult.

For all these reasons we may look upon the period stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council as one whole, in which the contest between the faith of the Church and the various forms of emergent or antagonistic error was carried on under trials which tested to the utmost her inherent vigour.

We may approach the subject by reflecting that the first condition of Christians was one of simple faith. The Son of God had come upon earth, and being found in fashion as a man, had taught, worked miracles, suffered, died, and risen again. He had thus delivered a divine truth to His Apostles for communication to the world. It was not the result of human inquiry, but the working of a new life derived from the Person of the Incarnate God. A new knowledge formed part of this life, and a new speculation was thus begun. But the complete thing was the life, that is, the Church as an institution, with her sacrifice, her sacraments, her daily discipline, her hierarchy; Jesus Christ dwelling in His people, perpetuating in that people the life which He had begun on earth.

This life was received by an act of faith. It was based upon authority, continued by a tradition which carried in its bosom all the things just enumerated. Such a state is borne witness to in the letters of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, and again in the letters of St. Ignatius and in the Epistle to Diognetus. Its force lay in the strength, simplicity, and earnestness of the faith received as a divine revelation. It is vividly expressed by St. John in his opening words: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life; for the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal which was with the Father, and hath appeared to us: that which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

The fulness of truth had thus appeared corporally in the Word become flesh, and by this appearance a new epoch had begun to man,171 and henceforth there were only two attitudes of the human spirit possible towards the truth thus revealed. On the one hand, it might recognise the revelation as truth given by God, and make it the standard and guiding principle of speculation. On the other hand, it might use its freedom to assume an independent standing-point over against this revelation, which it might subject to its private reason. In the former case revelation would be primary and reason secondary; in the latter case the position would be reversed. Reason would take what it liked and reject what it disliked in revelation. In the former, reason, using the natural powers of the human mind in subordination to revealed truth, and accepting the Christian mysteries as data, would proceed by profound meditation upon them, would connect doctrine with doctrine, and come to the perception of the harmony contained in the structure of the revelation made in Christ; to a system, in fine, of speculative theology. In the latter, following its particular bias, according to the spirit of the time in each period, it would attempt to subject revelation to itself, to alter some parts, to discard others, to improve or reject according to its own inward attraction.

The one is the principle of orthodoxy, the other that of heresy.

As a matter of fact, we find from the institution of the Christian Church – that is, the entrance of Christ’s Person into the world – a spiritual war commence, which runs through all the ages, and of which the time from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council is only the first period. But in that period the combatants are already well defined, the two standing-points definitely taken up, and the battle waged even upon the most important of all truth, the existence and the character of God Himself. The Christian God is carried through three centuries, and impressed upon the belief of men by the Christian Church; the philosophic god is set up against Him by those who subjected faith to reason; and in the collision between the two the pantheon of false gods is dispersed and shattered, and dissolved in the pure light of the Christian heaven.

That first condition of the Christian Church, during which it lived on pure faith – I mean the simple historical transmission of its worship, its sacraments, its discipline, and its government, as they were instituted – lasted for several generations; it may be said quite to the end of the second century. During this whole time the attacks of human reason acting upon the principle of heresy were incessant, and it was to defend themselves against these attacks that those who stood entirely upon the ground of faith and tradition in the first instance gradually betook themselves to the arms of reason, reflection, and learning superadded to the faith.

But before passing to any intellectual defence of the faith, it is well to remark that the only adequate defence against error in doctrine consisted in the Church’s own life diffused amongst its members; that is, the ordinary teaching office, comprehended in worship, sacraments, discipline, and government, including therein the dispensing of the Scriptures, whether of the Old or New Testaments. Wherever error appeared, this was the power which met it first, met it continuously, and in the end met it successfully; and part of this teaching office was the unity of the Episcopate and the uniformity of its teaching, while error was ever various and changing.

Now let us proceed to the assaults of innovators or one-sided thinkers upon this institution of the Church and her faith. No sooner was the Church in action than the attack began. We have a proof of this in the constant warning against false teachers which occurs in the Apostolic writings. It would be hard to say whether St. Peter, St. Paul, or St. John is the stronger in this warning. It shows us that great as the authority of the Apostles was, and built as the Church was upon their living word, transmitting the charge of their Lord intrusted to them, there was full freedom as to the manner in which it would be received. If Hymeneus and Philetus afflicted St. Paul, “and were delivered by him up to Satan, that they might learn not to blaspheme;” if their “speech spread like a cancer;” if St. Peter, using against error words as strong as any used by his successors in the Papal chair, denounced false teachers as “fountains without water and clouds tossed with whirlwinds, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved;” if St. John even wrote his Gospel against Gnostic errors, and in his first chapter attested the Godhead of the Eternal Word, with His relation to the Father and His assumption of human flesh, in the face of their imaginary æons, and their placing the seat of evil in matter – this is but the first page of the never-ending conflict between truth and error; between “the men of good will” on the one hand, and “the children of malediction” on the other, “who left the right way and went astray.”172

We possess very few written remnants of the time immediately succeeding the Apostles. The writers are St. Clement of Rome, St. Barnabas, Hermas, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp, Papias, and the writer of the letter to Diognetus. With the exception of the “Pastor,” these are all in the form of letters, conveying strong feelings expressed in few words, short and touching exhortations, simple narratives of joys and sorrows. These first Christians were anything but literary; they were only conscious of possessing a divine truth which had incomparable value above all earthly things. Nevertheless it deserves to be remarked, that short as these writings are, we have in them the first outlines of all future learned teaching.173 In the letter to Diognetus we have a sketch of the course which Christian apology against heathens afterwards took; in the letters of St. Ignatius, the first features of the Church’s defence against heretics; in the letter of Barnabas, an approach to speculative theology; in the “Pastor,” the first attempt at a Christian science of morals; in the letter of Pope St. Clement, the first development of the government which afterwards produced the Canon Law; and in the Acts of St. Ignatius’ martyrdom, the earliest historical production. In these, as it were, infantine movements of His first disciples, the Divine Child was manifesting the future conquests which He would achieve in leading His people through the whole range of the divine science.

In the second century the Church vastly increased in the number of her faithful and in her influence; at the same time she was exposed to much severer attacks from within and without. Through the whole century the false Gnosis afflicted her. The Greek and the Oriental philosophy had fully detected the presence of a great enemy, and fought against her with all the arms of learning, the brilliance of Eastern imagination, the fire of religious zeal. It is said that in the first fifteen hundred years no sect has pushed the Church more hardly than Gnosticism, which through the brilliant talent of its leaders in Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, and other great cities gained many adherents. The attacks from the heathen and the defacements which Christian doctrine received through heretics formed thus the strongest challenge to Christians to defend themselves with the arms of learning and science on their own side.

There were great difficulties in the way. The mass of Christians was still drawn from the lower ranks, and was accordingly unlettered. All, too, that were of higher rank had no other than the heathen schools to frequent, and were thus in great danger themselves from the force of heathen culture. A remarkable result ensued: for, one after another, champions of the Christian cause arose from among the heathen themselves who were converted to the Christian faith. Justin, we are told, sought for truth about the being of God and the soul’s immortality in the schools of the Greek philosophy. He tried successively the Stoic, the Peripatetic, the Pythagorean, and the Platonic, and thought that he had found truth in the last; when, in the midst of these dreams, walking out one day in a lonely place by the sea-shore, he met with an old man with whom he entered into conversation. This man, pointing out the futility of his past search, directed him to the Christian teaching. Justin says that he felt a fire in his heart kindled by the old man’s words; he followed his advice, and found here what he had in vain sought elsewhere – the only true philosophy. He became a Christian in middle age, dedicated his life to propagate the faith which he had embraced, and died a martyr for it.

His pupil, Tatian, seems to repeat this history. An Assyrian by birth, he was instructed in all branches of Grecian literature, and had tried every shade of the old heathen wisdom. But the corruption of the heathen world inspired him with abhorrence; he was converted by Justin, and found in the Christian doctrine the ideal which he sought. Yet afterwards certain rigorous views led him into error, and he became the head of a Gnostic sect.

Athenagoras of Athens supplies us with another like conversion. He was an adept in the Greek, especially the Platonic philosophy, and was devoted to heathendom. With the intention of writing against Christians he studied the Holy Scriptures, and in doing so was converted. He has left us two brilliant writings, one an apology in defence of Christians, addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and another setting forth the doctrine of the resurrection with admirable skill.

Theophilus of Antioch continues the list of converts. The study of the Holy Scripture led him to become a Christian, and he afterwards rose to the great See of Antioch, and has left learned writings in defence of the faith.

More brilliant than all these, the first as well as the greatest Latin writer in the West of the whole ante-nicene period, Tertullian, born of heathen parents, studied philosophy and literature, was converted about the age of thirty, became a priest, and dedicated himself by word and writing to the defence of the faith. Every subsequent age has admired the force of his reason. It amounted to genius, yet a rigoristic spirit led him to fall off to a sect.

Pantænus, who became head of the catechetical school at Alexandria about 180, had been a Stoic. His conversion repeats that of Justin. A man of the highest renown for his Grecian learning, he became equally distinguished as a Christian. He devoted himself to preaching. He was also noted as the first who not only commented by word of mouth on the Sacred Scriptures, but wrote his commentaries against Gnostic commentators of the day. For it is remarkable that, in their zeal to get the Scriptures on their side, the Gnostics had preceded the Christians in the explanation of Scripture, which they treated with the utmost latitude of private judgment.