28 JUNE 1873, Page 20

• REUSS'S THEOLOGY OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE.* M. EnouAno REUSS

has been for many years a distinguished professor of theology at Strasbourg. In his preface to the volumes before as be says that he was himself "the first in France 'to apply the historical method to more than one branch of theology, and that what has been called the Strasbourg School is based essentially upon the principle of making a more rational and a more constant use of this method, in studies heretofore governed by a mental habit more or less dependent on preconceived ideas " ; and though he has, like several other Strasbourg pro- fessors, accepted German citizenship since the annexation of Alsace, his habits of thought, as exhibited in this work, are rather French than German, and are exactly described in the words we have just quoted. And they are not only French rather than German, but French rather than English ; we have felt per- petually in reading Miss Harwood's translation of the first volume of this work that—notwithstanding the ability with which this lady has done her task, and which we do not question, because we do not always follow her in our extracts—the English words need a farther translation into English thoughts, before they can be properly understood; and in this feeling we have been confirmed by the criticisms of the English editor, NIA Dale, who—though he must have some considerable appreciation of the book, since he has pro- oured its translation—often oddly misunderstands and unnecessarily attempts to set right his author, in a series of notes throughout

• Histoire de is Theologie Chretienne an Siècle Apostolique. Par Edouard Reuss, Protesseur h Is Facult6 de Theologie at au Snminaire Protestant de Strasbourg. Trolsieme Edition. Strasbourg et Paris. 1864.

History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age. By Edward Reuss, Professor in the Theological Faculty and in the Protestant Seminary of Strasbourg. TI11.08- kited by Annie Harwood, from the Third Edition, with a Preface and Notes by R. W. Dale, ILA. Vol. I. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1872.

the volume. For the student the book is full of interest and in- struction ; but hardly, we fear, likely to become one for popular reading here, though M. Reuss says that in France it has obtained more attention from the general public than from the learned.

M. Reuss is a Christian; his faith is that of Paul and of Luther ; he believes that God has revealed Himself to man, and stands in actual relations with man. By theology he understands the science—the intellectual investigation of the facts—of these rela- tions, and not speculations and imaginations about them ; and by " the Christian theology of the Apostolic Age" he means the in- tellectual conclusions held by the immediate disciples of Christ as to their relations with Christ the Son of God. And here his his- torical method takes a form to which we can scarcely find a coun- terpart in our orthodox English theology. The English Christian theologian—we speak of those who teach and write—either avowedly believes that the writings of the New Testament are in all respects completely harmonious and completely true, or at least habitually turns away from any suggestion that such is not the case, and this not merely or mainly lest he should offend others, but because he fears the consequences to his own faith ; but M. Reuss has no such fears. He boldly and consistently follows his historical method to its logical results ; and when he finds himself—as be sometimes does—in the pre- sence of two apparently contradictory sets of facts, he takes the position of the true man of science, and says that he waits for the farther light and farther discovery which may be expected from farther investigation. Thus he says :—

"We repudiate that false critical method which has governed all former exegesis, and which, in contempt of the fundamental law of history, maintains, without inquiry, a complete agreement among all thinkers who are associated by common hopes and aims, and are the disciples of a common Master. If this agreement were found by fair objective inquiry, well ; but it is always and invariably the result of the preconceived system and personal conviction of the indivi- dual theologian, who never fails to find exactly what he looks for in the texts he compares Systematic theology may be under the necessity, and may have the right, of seeking above all these shades of difference the unity of the ray of divine light, of which they show the various hues as in a prism ; but historic theology has quite another task ; it is bound faithfully to note and to record every varying shade that characterises the Apostles as men, as writers, and as thinkers. By such a course unity will suffer no loss of anything that is really its due ; for if it is the first duty of the his- torian not to change authenticated facts, his highest office is to bring out their spirit, to show their relations, and to include them, so to speak, in the great plan of the Providential government of man- kind. These reflections are suggested, wo confess, by the rational point of view from which we are accustomed to regard all that belongs to history. It would be easy, however, to show that they are warranted no less by the positive declarations of the first disciples of Christ. Their history, which we shall relate, attests the existence among them of differ- ent views upon particular points, and indeed, on some general relations— the relations, for example, of the Gospel to the Mosaic institutions—they make no attempt to cloak or conceal these differences. Shall we say that the divergencies are merely apparent, and have no real existence ? or shall we not rather, without ignoring these diversities of form, seek

beyond them all a true unity of spirit and of heart? Have we not a direct interest in inquiring into the nature and purpose of this vari- ous estimate of Christian doctrines? The inspired writers confess in all humility that they are but feeble instruments in the hands of God, ever conscious of the need of divine illumination and support for the worthy fulfilment of their mission. They make a distinction between that which they have received of their master and what they have themselves added. They speak of themselves as still in a state of tutelage, their reason seeing as yet only obscurely and as in a mirror, not face to face, and of their preaching as only grasping and presenting broken portions of the absolute truth. May we not study with much edification to ourselves the travail of their spirits, the straggle they carried on courageously and perseveringly to lessen from day to day the distance which must ever separate man's conceptions of truth from the very truth of God? But the Apostles are not only conscious that their respective teaching embodies particular aspects of Christian truth ; they give prominence to the fact, insist on the significance, and boldly advocate the claims of the typo of doctrine they represent. Paul. at least, has it much at heart that the Gospel should be preserved anti propagated in the form in which he understood and preached it ; he opposes his statement of truth to every other not exactly corresponding with it. What right, then, have we to amalgamate with it that which grew up side by side with it?"

Upon which passage, Mr. Dale, the editor, from the English point of view observes :—

" The general proposition is perfectly true ; there are distinct types of apostolic doctrine. But the alleged differences between St. Paul and the other Apostles on the relations of the new faith to the ancient in- stitutions is not sustained by the passages to which Reuss refers in this note [Gal. ii. 1, foil., and 11, foll.]. See pp. 334 and 338 in Lightfoot's essay on 'St. Paul and the Three,' in his 'Epistle to the Galatians.' See Edition 1866."

M. Reuss uses still stronger language in reference to the synoptic accounts of our Lord's "Revelations on the subject of the Future," in which he says, "it is evident that the narrators who serve as our guides took every word literally, and had not a shadow of doubt in reference to the matter ; " and he asks,

Can it be that Jesus, who in every part of his teaching had so much that was new to reveal to mankind, who opens to our gaze in every direction such strange and surprising vistas of vision, whose lead we follow marvelling through the mazes of Divine Providence,—can it be that on this subject Ile should merely have repeated that which the most ordinary rabbi had long preached in the synagogue?" And then he contrasts, at a length which forbids quotation here, what Jesus really did teach on these subjects with what his still Judaising disciples supposed and asserted Him to have taught. We may say, indeed, that a great part of our author's work consists in tracing out, in every direction, the Judaic element which mingled with the earliest Christian theology, and ascertaining the real relations of the two, and how far the former passed into and was permanently assimilated with the latter, and how far it was eliminated and thrown off after it had served the temporary purpose of protecting and fostering the germs of the new faith while in their unde- veloped state. In his first book he examines at length the religious condition of Judaism at the time of Christ's appearing, under the several heads of Mosaism before the Exile, the Restoration, the Synagogue, Pharisaism, Sadduceeism, Jewish Theology, Hellenism, Alexandrine Philosophy, Ebionistn and Essenism, Messianic Hopes, and John the Baptist. With all these subjects the student is more .or less familiar, yet we think he will find a fresh interest in M. Reuss's treatment of them, and especially in his chapter on the Synagogue, which strikes us as specially valuable. He shows how it realised the old Mosaic idea of the national edu- cation of the people, while it became "the complement, or rather, we should say, the indispensable counterpoise, of the centralisation of worship ;" how it made practicable that centrali- sation, and with it that worship of Jehovah alone, which the earlier legislators had found it so impossible to enforce ; how it raised the body of the people to "a degree of religious civilisation and of purity in spiritual and moral ideas to which the prophets had failed

to lead their ancestors, and by which they left far behind all con- temporary nations ;" and how this organisation, while so national, was yet BO elastic, that in the remotest parts of the world in which Jews gathered in any numbers the Synagogue became a centre of national and spiritual life to them. In contrast with

-Judaism, the author proceeds in the second book to treat of the Gospel, inquiring what was the good news which the Son of Mau and the Son of God brought to man ; what was the kingdom of God which He preached ; what was his teaching, to the complete and final understanding of the whole of which eighteen centuries

have not sufficed to bring us ; and above all, what was He himself more than all his teaching ; and thus endeavouring to show that— "It never was His aim and end to put a new doctrine in the place of an old one, but to bring a new life where there had been none before. 'Other reformers may have sought to change the ideas and beliefs cur- xent in the world, or even the laws governing society ; Jesus sought to change the men themselves ; and such an end lies far beyond the scope .of any dogmatic teaching whatever. In truth, this new life, which He came to bring, He designed not for theologians only; it was therefore

not a theology at all The pivot of the Gospel is not a formula, a principle, an idea, more or less large and lofty ; it is the person of Jesus himself, but the living person whose regenerating action every man must experience for himself."

The third book traces historically how this Gospel, so different in kind from Judaism, was yet at its beginning so completely Judaic in its outward form that to the first disciples it was not a new reli- gion, but only the fulfilment of the old. They were pious Jews, attached to the law and to the traditions of the synagogue above ether Jews, recognising in Jesus the Messiah of those traditions, and never conceiving that others, not Jews, might possibly enter their society. But because there was the reality of a new life under these Judaic forms of the earliest Christianity it could not but soon manifest itself, though it was not by the Galilean disciples, but by the Hellenists, that it was first called into activity, the

reception of Cornelius into the Church having been only " sanc- tioned as an exceptional case, and even then not without reluct-

ance." Then, as the reality of the new life did make itself visible among the Gentiles, and they showed their capacity for receiving it, the Apostles of the Hebrew Church gradually—though not without hesitation and reluctance—came to understand that there might be, and that it was the will of God that there should be, a Gentile Church by the side of the Jewish, though not bound to the Jewish Law. And then the conflict and the re- conciliation of principles and ideas which took form in the contro- versy between Peter and Paul led to the gradual development of that which is Christian Theology, properly so called. The very honesty and earnestness with which the Hebrew Church maintained that the Judaic forms were an essential part of the faith ended by making it the clearer that the same faith did exist in the Gentile Church without any such forms ; and so, finally, the Gospel, which at first appeared as a higher form of the Law, and then as having a place side by side with the Law, asserted its complete freedom, and remained as the power of a new life and the light of a new science, when the Judaic Law had passed away for ever.

The last four books "contain a thorough investigation of the various documents in which the Apostolic teaching comes down to us." The volume of the English translation before us includes the first of these—"Jadmo-Christian Theology"—which examines the Book of Revelation and the Epistle of St. James. The second volume of the original, under the three divisions of "The Pauline Theology," "The Theology of Transition," and "The Johannine Theology," treats respectively of the Epistles of Paul ; of those of the Writer to the Hebrews and of Peter Barnabas and Clement, of the Acts and the Gospels of Matthew Luke and Mark ; and of the Gospel of John ; including comparisons of these theologies with each other.