November 1994
Dear Co-laborer,
Thanksgiving and Christmas afford us opportunity to reflect
on how good God has been and our hope for an eternity with Him that is better
still. It is appropriate,
therefore, that we celebrate Thanksgiving followed by Christmas; it celebrates a
past and present blessing with a future hope in Christ.
It is Leette's and my prayer that you can see the goodness
of God in your past and that your heart is fixed on the eternal hope of our
risen Christ. May yours be a
delightful holiday.
Eschatology, Part
8
In the last issue we saw that the appropriation of God's
promises to the nation of Israel by the church, served the church's interests.
To accomplish this, they had
to interpret the Bible figuratively. For
example, when Eusebius, a strong proponent of the "Imperial Church,"
chided the patristic Papias for his millenarianism, he said of Papias that he
did "not understand(ing) correctly those
matters which they (i.e., the NT writers) propounded mystically
in their representations(highlight mine)."
The "mystical" interpretation, according to Eusebius, is the
correct interpretation.
Adolf Harnack (1851-1930) was a German theologian and
historian of the famous German school of rationalism. His views regarding the Bible, especially the fourth gospel,
were often unorthodox. Still,
he is considered one of the great scholars of the last hundred years, and an
expert without peer in the writings of the Patristics.
He writes without any particular ecclesiological or
eschatological bias, affording a broad, insightful view of the historical
setting of the early Church. In the
next two issues I will quote extensively from his writings.
His observations are nothing short of spectacular.
I urge you to read and reread my summation and quotes from his writings,
contemplating the implications.
THE CHURCH AS THE NEW ISRAEL
The Christian community, as a separate entity from Israel,
was a new creation. In order to
root itself in antiquity, it transferred all the prerogatives and claims of the
Jewish people to itself. The church
was "the true Israel," "the new people," "the original
people," and "the people of the future," that is, of eternity.
"This estimate of themselves rendered Christians impregnable against
all attacks and movements of polemical criticism, while it further enabled them
to advance in every direction for a war of conquest.
Was the cry raised, 'You are renegade Jews' - the answer came, 'We are
the community of the Messiah, and therefore the true Israelites.'
If people said, 'You are simply Jew,' the reply was, 'We are a new
creation and a new people.'"
"There were one or two other quite definite
convictions of a general nature specially taken over by the early Christians at
the very outset from the stories accumulated by a survey of history made from
the Jewish standpoint. Applied to
their own purposes, these were as follows: (1) Our people is older than the
world; (2) the world was created for our sakes; (3) the world is carried on for
our sakes; we retard the judgment of the world; (4) everything in the world is
subject to us and must serve us; (5) everything in the world, the beginning and
course and end of all history, is revealed to us and lies transparent to our
eyes; (6) we shall take part in the judgment of the world and ourselves enjoy
eternal bliss. In various early
Christian documents, dating from before the middle of the second century, these
convictions find expression, in homilies, apocalypses, epistles, and apologies,
..."
CONFUSION BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND ISRAEL
Regarding Israel and the Church being separate entities in
the economy of God, Harnack argues that there was a clarity in the thinking of
Paul that eluded many of the other New Testament writers, and all of the
Patristics. Paul may have been
responsible for the absolute cleavage between Judaism and Christianity at the
Acts 15 council, but he was clear that God had a future for the nation of
Israel. This theme, argued
especially in Romans 9-11, is not found in the writings of the Patristics.
"Finally, in Rom. ix-xi, Paul promulgates a philosophy
of history, according to which the new People, whose previous history fell
within the limits of Israel, includes the Gentile world, now that Israel has
been rejected, but will embrace in the end not merely 'the fullness of the
Gentiles' but also 'all Israel.'"
Judaism prepared the way for Christianity.
"To the Jewish mission which preceded it, the Christian mission was
indebted, in the first place, for a field tilled all over the empire; in the
second place, for religious communities already formed everywhere in the towns;
thirdly, for what Axenfeld calls 'the help of materials' furnished by the
preliminary knowledge of the Old Testament, in addition to catechetical and
liturgical materials which could be employed without much alteration; fourthly,
for the habit of regular worship and a control of private life; fifthly, for an
impressive apologetic on behalf of monotheism, historical theology, and ethics;
and finally, for the feeling that self-diffusion was a duty.
The amount of this debt is so large, that one might venture to claim the
Christian mission as a continuation of the Jewish propaganda.
'Judaism,' said Renan, 'was robbed of its due reward by a generation of
fanatics, and it was prevented from gathering in the harvest which it had
prepared.'
"The extent to which Judaism was prepared for the
gospel may also be judged by means of the syncretism into which it had
developed. The development was
along no mere side-issues. The
transformation of a national into a universal religion may take place in two
ways: either by the national religion being reduced to great central principles,
or by its assimilation of a wealth of new elements from other religions. Both processes developed simultaneously in Judaism.
But the former is the more important of the two, as a preparation for
Christianity."
Harnack then quotes Jesus' summary of the law, as loving God and
neighbor,
to substantiate the claim that Christianity had taken the national religion of
Israel and reduced it to two great principles.
Paul experienced opposition on his missionary journeys by
Christian Jews who insisted that Gentiles accept Jewish dogma.
"Still, two Jewish Christian parties continued to exist.
One of these held by the agreement of the apostolic council; it gave the
Gentile Christians its blessing, but held aloof from them in actual life.
The other persisted in fighting the Gentile Church as a false church.
Neither party accounts in the subsequent history of the church, owing to
their numerical weakness. According
to Justin (Apol., I. liii.), who must have known the facts, Jesus was rejected
by the Jewish nation 'with few exceptions'....In the Diaspora, apart from Syria
and Egypt, Jewish Christians were hardly to be met with; there the Gentile
Christians felt themselves supreme, in fact they were almost masters of the
field.
This did not last, however, beyond 180 AD., when the Catholic church put
Jewish Christians upon her roll of heretics.
They were thus paid back in their own coin by Gentile Christianity; the
heretics turned the former judges into heretics.
"Before long the relations of Jewish Christians to their kinsmen the Jews
also took a turn for the worse - that is, so far as actual relations existed
between them at all.
It was the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple which seems to have
provoked the final crisis, and led to a complete breach between the two parties.
No Christian, even supposing he were a simple Jewish Christian, could
view the catastrophe which befell the Jewish state, with its capital and
sanctuary, as anything else than the just punishment of the nation for having
crucified the Messiah. Strictly
speaking, he ceased from that moment to be a Jew; for a Jew who accepted the
downfall of his state and temple as a divine
dispensation, thereby committed national suicide....There were Jewish
Christians still, who remained after the fall of Jerusalem just where they had
stood before; evidently they bewailed the fall of the temple, and yet they saw
in its fall a merited punishment. Did
they, we ask, or did they not, venture to desire the rebuilding of the temple?
We can easily understand how such people proved a double offense to their
fellow-countrymen, the genuine Jews. Indeed
they were always falling between two fires, for the Jews persecuted them with
bitter hatred,
while the Gentile church censured them as heretics - i.e., as
non-Christians. They are dubbed
indifferently by Jerome, who knew them personally, ‘semi-Judaei’ and ‘semi-Christiani'....They
followed the course of life which Jesus had himself observed. Crushed
by the letter of Jesus, they died a lingering death.
“There is hardly any fact which deserves to be turned over and thought over
so much as this, that the religion of Jesus has never been able to root itself
in Jewish or even Semitic soil. Certainly there must have been, and certainly must be still,
some element in this religion which is allied to the greater freedom of the
Greek spirit. In one sense
Christianity has really remained Greek down to the present day.
The forms it acquired on Greek soil have been modified, but they have
never been laid aside within the church at large, not even within Protestantism
itself....Islam rose in Arabia and has remained upon the whole an Arabic
religion; the strength of its youth was also the strength of its manhood.
Christianity, almost immediately after it arose, was dislodged from the
nation to which it belonged; and thus from the very outset it was forced to
learn how to distinguish between the kernel and the husk.
“Paul is only responsible in part for the sharp anti-Judaism which developed
within the very earliest phases of Gentile Christianity. Though
he held that the day of the Jews (I Thess. ii.15) was past and gone, yet he
neither could nor would believe in a final repudiation of God’s people; on
that point his last word is said in Rom xi. 25, 29....In this sense Paul
remained a Jewish Christian to the end. The
duality of mankind (Jews and ‘nations’) remained, in a way, intact, despite
the one
church of God which embraced them both. This
church did not abrogate the special promises made to the Jews.
“But this standpoint remained a Pauline idiosyncrasy.
When people had recourse, as the large majority of Christians had, simply
to the allegorical method in order to emancipate themselves from the letter, and
even from the contents, of Old Testament religion, the Pauline view had no
attraction for them; in fact it was quite inadmissible, since the legitimacy of
the allegorical conception, and inferentially the legitimacy of the Gentile
church in general, was called in question, if the Pauline view held good at any
single point."
CONCLUSION
In other words, by the year 180 the tables had been turned
on the Jews; instead of their stalking Gentiles, calling them heretics for not
adhering to Judaism, the Gentiles judged the Jews as heretics, something similar
to what Paul did in Gal 2:14f. The
Jews now became the enemy. They
were rejected of God. To
substantiate this biblically, the Old Testament was interpreted allegorically or
figuratively.
Paul was the only one who saw a place for a future, restored Israel. In
the early writings we find no one from the early church sharing his viewpoint. If the Jews have any future, then how can the OT be taken
allegorically? To solve this, they
ignored Paul’s teaching in Rom 11.
Next time we will look at how this influenced their rules
of interpretation.
Rejoicing in His grace,