An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

We spoke above of the new conception of the relation of the canonical literature of the New Testament to the extracanonical.  We alluded to the new sense of the continuity of the history of the apostolic churches with that of the Church of the succeeding age.  The influence of these ideas has been to set all problems here involved in a new light.  Until 1886 it might have been said with truth that we had no good history of the apostolic age.  In that year Weizsaecker’s book, Das Apostolische Zeitalter der Christlichen Kirche, admirably filled the place.  A part of the problem of the historian of the apostolic age is difficult for the same reason which was given when we were speaking of the biography of Jesus.  Our materials are inadequate.  First with the beginning of the activities of Paul have we sources of the first rank.  The relation of statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was one of the earliest problems which the Tuebingen school set itself.  An attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our limitations.  We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the beginnings of his work at Rome.  Harnack’s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of Paul’s successors in that cardinal activity.  It offers, strange as it may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity which has dealt adequately with the sources.  It gives also a picture of the world into which the Christian movement went.  It emphasises anew the truth which has for a generation past grown in men’s apprehension that there is no possibility of understanding Christianity, except against the background of the religious life and thought of the world into which it came.  Christianity had vital relation, at every step of its progress, to the religious movements and impulses of the ancient world, especially in those centres of civilisation which Paul singled out for his endeavour and which remained the centres of the Christian growth.  It was an age which has often been summarily described as corrupt.  Despite its corruption, or possibly because it was corrupt, it gives evidence, however, of religious stirring, of strong ethical reaction, of spiritual endeavour rarely paralleled.  In the Roman Empire everything travelled.  Religions travelled.  In the centres of civilisation there was scarcely a faith of mankind which had not its votaries.

It was an age of religious syncretism, of hospitality to diverse religious ideas, of the commingling of those ideas.  These things facilitated the progress of Christianity.  They made certain that if the Christian movement had in it the divine vitality which men claimed, it would one day conquer the world.  Equally, they made certain that, as the very condition of this conquest, Christianity would be itself transformed.  This it is which has happened in the evolution of

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An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.