KURTZ'S " CHURCH HISTORY."*
Ktrarz's manual of Church History, which Mr. Macpherson has translated with admirable care and skill, is the one book of the kind adapted for present use. It is written on a fairly large scale, for the first volume now before us devotes between five and six hundred pages, for the most part in small and close type, to that period of Church history which extends from the Christian era to the Council in Trullo, A.D. 680. This, of course, would be a very brief space, if the book in question were a narrative history like those of Fleury, or Neander, or Canon Robertson. As a matter of fact, however, it is nothing of the kind : it makes no attempt to paint historical scenes, or to sketch the development of character. It is not meant for the general reader who needs to be interested, but for the student who desires information, and is glad to have it in the most compressed form. And he who goes to it with this aim will not be disappointed. He will find the chief events of each age, its chief writers, the lists of their works, the changes in doctrine and discipline, the developments of ritual, noted in brief and clear language, and arranged in the form easiest to understand and remember. No doubt work of this kind has often been attempted before ; and Gieseler's Manual, an excellent book in its day, was familiar to _English scholars even in the past generation. But it is just in literature of this sort that no book will serve the purpose, unless new or recast in new form. Our know- ledge of early Christianity has been modified by important recoveries of documents which but yesterday seemed hope- • Church History. By Professor Kurtz. Authorised Translation from Latest Revised Edition, by the Rev. John Macpherson, M.A. 3 vols. Vol. I. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 1588. lessly lost ; and, besides, much new light has arisen from the careful investigation of documents known already. Let us take one instance among several which might be given. The Tubingen school, as everybody, knows, struck out a new line, and created almost a revolution in German views of the primitive Church. We are often told that the views of this school are dead and gone; but it constantly happens that people who hold this language have a very vague idea of their own meaning. If they mean that nobody nowadays holds all Baur's. views in their full extent and in complete detail, that is undoubtedly, true, though scarcely worth saying. If they mean that Baur's characteristic theories have been abandoned by all competent scholars, the statement is far from accurate. Nobody has a right to an opinion on such matters till he knows definitely how modern scholars stand to the criticism of their predecessors, how far they have demolished it, how far built upon its foundations. Now, it is just here that the Manual before us comes to the help of the English reader. True, it was published for the first time in 1849. But the book has been remodelled over and over again, and enlarged in accordance with that enlargement of knowledge which is due partly to the accession of fresh material, partly to new methods of interrogating the facts. It is now thoroughly up to date, for in the edition of 1885, full use has been made of Harnack's brilliant researches in the history of the first three centuries. We confess to thinking that Dr. Kurtz, who belongs to the orthodox and strictly conservative school of German Protestants, has failed, particularly when he discusses the growth of dogma, in putting with sufficient strength the difficulties which confront his own position. In any case, we may be thankful for what we have. It furnishes no royal road to historical criticism, but his compendium will do something for the young learner who needs to be taught what are the chief points to be observed, the chief questions at issue. It will do more for the scholar who wishes to refresh his memory. Is it too much to hope that it will suggest to some of our popular writers on the negative and on the positive side, the need of a little modesty and a modicum of accurate knowledge P Let us add that the book has one advantage which is a very decided one, though we had all but forgotten to mention it. We mean that it begins with the life of Christ and a sketch of New• Testament. criticism. There is no other scientific way. It is monstrous to include the Epistle of Barnabas and exclude the Second Epistle of Peter from the scope of Church history; nor can we hope to understand a critic's views on the early Church till we know what he thinks of the New Testament literature. A brief• summary of results will serve, but so much is absolutely necessary ; and this Dr. Kurtz has seen.
Perhaps we shall give our readers the best idea of the value of Dr. Kurtz's Church History, if we note the advance made and the positions abandoned within the last few years. His own introduction affords some help in this direction, and nearly all that is required may be found scattered through his pages, though one who is quite strange to the course of modern investigation will be the better for a few hints to guide him in the use of this material. But apart altogether from the pur- poses of review, we are glad of an excuse for taking stock and , reckoning up the gain and the loss, the wasted energy and the permanent results in modern theories, the things on which general agreement has been reached, and the questions still sub judice. We must, of course, content ourselves with the most imperfect indications.
If we were asked to name the one characteristic of that new• epoch in Church history which begins with Neander, we should say that it consisted in enlarged sympathy. Three hundred years ago, when first advantage was taken of the new learning, and Christian antiquity was studied in the original sources, two great Church Histories appeared,—the former. Protestant as no work of like calibre could be Protestant now, the other Roman Catholic as no similar work could be Roman Catholic now. For the avowed object of the Magdeburg, Centuriators was to collect testes veritatis, i.e., witnesses to Lutheran orthodoxy ; while Cardinal Bavenins tells us plainly that he undertook his great work to undo this mischief and establish the claims of the Roman See. A. mighty-advance was made by the great critics of, the French Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were men inspired by larger interests than those of the polemical controversialist. They brought to their task a learning unsurpassed to this day, and an accuracy which approaches genius. They discussed the authenticity of docu- ments with fearless impartiality, and we have onlyto remember that before they began their labours it was a matter of Roman Catholic orthodoxy to believe in the absurdities fathered upon Dionysius the Areopagite and the fictions of the forged decretals, if we would understand the slavery from which they freed the members of the Roman Church. And yet their Church history lacked the one essential element of all Church history; viz., movement. In one sense, 'it is true, they were eager, too eager, to acknowledge move- ment, for they regarded all history as innovation; and in the same spirit they rejected a multitude of Romish beliefs held sacred hitherto, and the whole fabric of Transalpine Ultramontanism. But having conceded thus much, they stood firm. Having reduced the Roman Catholic faith to a minimum, they held fast to the contention that it had existed complete from the first. The one man who had clearer insight into the growth of doctrine was the French Jesuit Petavius, a scholar so far in advance of the Anglican, let alone the Roman, Church of his own day, that Bull wrote his Defence of the Nicene Faith in answer to Petavius's great treatise on the Trinity. This attack of his upon the French Jesuit was applauded by the authorities of the French Church, and reprinted in Italy. The orthodox Protestant was much the same as the Galliean spirit, though, of coarse, the point of view was to some extent different; and besides, Mosheim is probably the single Pro- testant historian previous to this century whose learning enabled him to rank with French Catholics like Thomassin, or Tillemont, or Pagi, or even Fleury. But Neander, who published his first volume in 1824, broke new ground. Inferior to none of his predecessors in mastery of the original authorities, he had a heart too large for the restraints of a narrow dogmatism or a narrower rationalism ; and his deep Christian feeling made him welcome every manifestation of Christian feeling, every forward step in Christian life, whether it showed itself in an early heretic like Marcion or a medimval saint like Bernard. The same sympathy which Neander had shown for the varied phases of the Christian life was shown by Baur, who was ably assisted by disciples like Schwegler and Zeller, for the develop- ment of doctrine. His inquiry was pursued in a series of monographs, and the results are collected in that most brilliant and fascinating book of his, the Church History of the First Three Centuries. Dr. Kurtz concedes at least the fact that Baur " established " new views, and Dr. Lightfoot acknowledges his obligations to him. To him, more than to any other man, we owe clearer views of the Judaistic contro- versy which distracted the Apostolic age, and a more careful estimate of the doctrinal position taken by -New Testament writers. Make what abatements we will for Baur's exaggera- tions, the perception of difference in the view, e.g., of justifying faith as held by Pauline and Jewish Christians, has become the common property of all schools. Again, Baur has traced, once for all, the gradual rise of the old Catholic Church, with
its ordered hierarchy, as the natural and necessary defence against systems of Gnostic speculation which would have proved the dissolution of all Christianity. Now, too, all admit the positive elements which Gnosticism contributed to Church doctrine. Not only did it transform, to use the words of Kurtz, "the primitive Christian idea of unity into a unity based on a common doctrinal formula," but it furnished "the oldest collection of a 'New Testament canon." To the Gnostic Heracleon we owe the first commentary on St. John's Gospel.
And while the Gnostics helped to create the Catholic order of things which undid them, the Montanists have this special interest, that they struggled to keep the old enthusiastic life of the early Christians when the time for such things was already past.
Those are some out of the many permanent contributions of the Tubingen school. Yet things have changed in important respects since the school, in the strict sense, ceased to be. Baur and his disciples were full of the controversy between Pauline and Jewish Christians, and they looked on every writing of the Apostolic or Sub-Apostolic age as Pauline or Judmo-Christian, or, lastly, as written with the view of reconciling the Jewish party by modifying Pauline doctrine and falsifying history so as to obscure the remembrance of the old quarrel. This theory of " tendencies," as it was called, is gone, as we believe; for
ever, and assuredly is gone for the present. There was no in- ducement for concessions of this kind to the Jewish zealots. Their influence was decaying even when. St. Paul 'wrote to the Romans, and in Justin's time had all but disappeared. Be- sides, the way in which, e.g., the Acts of the Apostles dwells on the rejection of the Jews without any expression of belief, like that of St. Paul, in their final restoration, would have been the most unlikely means of recommending Paul's teaching to the Judaisers. The truth is, that though St. Paul's opposition of faith and works, of law and gospel, is toned down in later writers, this is due, not to conscious" tendency," but to the fact that the interest in these disputes had lost the keenness of its edge. Above all and before all, the modification of Paulinism is due to Greek and not to Jewish influence. A heathen could not think of faith as a deliverance from a law.under which he had never groaned, from a seeking after his own righteousness in which he had never engaged. Rather, faith was to him the deliverance from lawlessness and the mainspring of a holy life, while to him the Old Testament 'was a precious book which gave his faith roots in the past and supplied him with a moral code. And when once "the vigour and rigour" of the Tubingen principle had been modified, much alteration in detail followed. Nobody of serious account now contests the authenticity of Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, or his First Epistle to the Thessalonians, or the historical existence of Simon Magus. The Ignatian Epistles can -no longer be scornfully set aside as forgeries. Moreover, even' the most sceptical critics, no longer believing that the book of the Acta was written with a " tendency," admit that it contains a far larger substance of fact than Baur allowed.
But the most striking of all changes is the increased attention given by modern scholars to the organisation of the early communities, their social life, their ethical spirit, their common worship. For the infant Christian Church was neither a school of speculation nor an arena of dogmatic con- troversy, but a brotherhood hound by the ties of a common hope, mutual and active love, unworldly life. Here, however, we can only draw attention to the subject, and refer to the pages upon it which form the most valuable portion of Dr. Kurtz's Manual.
Previous page
