Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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the unity of the Johannine corpus and its authorship by the disciple John. John wrote the Apocalypse first, then the epistles, and late in the first century, the Gospel (“God’s Love Letter to Man”); all share the same theology and Christology.208 Were it not for John’s writings, the period between 70 and 100 a.d. would be nearly blank. Some nineteenth-century critics, Schaff protested, have assailed the “citadel” (i.e., the disciple John’s authorship of the Fourth Gospel): this for Schaff is “a question of life and death between constructive and destructive criticism.” No second-century writer (such as Strauss and Baur had proposed) could have produced this “marvelous book,” he argued. Are we to imagine that for 1800 years, deluded Christians have mistaken “a Gnostic dream for the genuine history of the Saviour of mankind … drinking the water of life from the muddy source of fraud”?209 Such is unthinkable for Schaff.
Schaff, like most other Protestant colleagues of his day, downplayed the status of Jesus and the disciples as Jews. Schaff’s Jesus is distinctly non-Jewish: he had no “repugnant or exclusive” Jewish characteristics that would mar his proclamation of a universal religion.210 Paul, for his part, led congregations away from “the darkness of heathen idolatry and Jewish bigotry to the light of Christian truth and freedom.”211 As Chapter 7 will document, Schaff and the other professors held that Judaism and Roman Catholicism shared various features—an “externality,” a reliance on ceremony and priesthood—that the spiritual, universal religion of Jesus displaced. Schaff’s anti-Jewish tone, however, is bested by that of George Fisher of Yale, as we shall shortly see.
Schaff: Faulting European Criticism. Schaff urged professors to fortify their students against “the attacks of the infidel and semi-infidel criticism of the age.”212 He faulted the reconstructions of primitive Christianity by Renan and Strauss as “imaginative”: early Christianity, he protested, was born into “a critical and philosophical age,” not one (like the nineteenth century) of “imagination.”213
Schaff generously credited Baur with revolutionizing the history of apostolic and post-apostolic Christianity, despite his overvaluing “tendencies” and undervaluing “persons and facts.” Baur, in Schaff’s judgment, had reduced early Christianity’s “rich spiritual life” into conflicting tendencies of Petrinism and Paulinism, resolved in a Hegelian synthesis.214 Baur and his followers, Schaff charged,
ignore the supernatural element of inspiration, lack spiritual sympathy with the faith of the apostles, overstrain his [Paul’s] antagonism to Judaism …, and confine the authentic sources to the four anti-Judaic Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians, although recognizing in the minor Epistles the “paulinische Grundlage.”215
Unlike August Neander,216 the Tübingen critics have no sense of a “living, practical Christianity.” Baur, Schaff concluded, is “too philosophical to be a true historian and too historical to be an original philosopher.” His school makes the history of doctrine nothing more than a dialectical process of thought that runs into Hegelian Pantheism, sundering early Christian thought from its “religious life-ground.”217 In Schaff’s eyes, Baur made early Christianity seem merely like a form of Judaism.
Schaff objected particularly to Baur’s acknowledgment of only four genuine Pauline letters,218 his claim that Acts misrepresents Paul, and his dating of John to the mid-second century.219 Tübingen scholars, in Schaff’s opinion, “show great want of spiritual discernment in assigning so many N.T. writings, even the Gospel of John, to the borrowed moonlight of the postapostolic age.”220 Radical biblical critics (like Baur) could never get a chair in America, “not even in the Divinity School of Harvard University,” Schaff exclaimed—whereas they win professorships in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland.221
Nevertheless, Schaff, like Smith, adopted (in modified form) the claim of both F. W. J. Schelling and the Tübingen School that Petrine and Pauline strains of Christianity were united in Johannine theology.222 Schaff’s modification de-emphasized the motif of conflict and the notion of development within the New Testament books. Since Schaff believed that all New Testament books had been composed within about a thirty-five-year period, there was not much chronological room for development, in any event. Differences among New Testament authors do not reflect development, but only slightly varying viewpoints on the same historical given, the life and teachings of Jesus.
Both Smith and Schaff, however, extracted the Tübingen critics’ theme of historical development for the study of post-New Testament Christianity. Schaff later credited Baur (whose lectures on history of Christian doctrine and on symbolics he had attended as a student) for first stimulating his thinking about historical development. Despite Schaff’s rejection of Baur’s views on the New Testament, he judged him the most able modern opponent of traditional Christianity.223
GEORGE FISHER
George Fisher of Yale took a more generous view of acceptable approaches to the Bible than many Protestants of his time: those who espouse Christianity’s essential truths should not be “denied the title of Christian” on the grounds of their beliefs concerning biblical inspiration. Deviant opinions, however wrong or ill-founded, do not warrant expulsion from the fold of any who claim the name Christian.224
Rather surprisingly, Fisher argued that the Old Testament—“an earlier stage of revelation”—was not Christian Scripture. By accenting the “difference in times” between ancient Israel and the early Christian era, he avoided the need to explain, or explain away, what he considered the theological, ethical, and scientific “embarrassments” of the Old Testament225—but he hastened to add that he does not aim to detract from the dignity of the Old Testament. Revelation being progressive, Christians today can admit that the ancients had but limited knowledge. The New Testament remains “the touchstone”: “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” Fisher concluded, citing John 1:17.226
Jesus’ first Jewish followers, like their ancestors, went astray on several points. They misguidedly looked for the Second Coming of Jesus227 and his establishment of an earthly Kingdom. Jewish notions of the Kingdom encompassed an “externality” that later believers were “destined to outgrow, and finally to shuffle off.”228 Only later could the Kingdom be correctly conceived as a “community … bound together by a moral and spiritual bond of union,” rooted in the human heart.229 Fisher worried that the growing popularity enjoyed by the study of comparative religions might mistakenly lead his contemporaries to place Christianity on “the level of the Jewish or even the ethnic systems.”230 All in all, Fisher’s downplaying of the Old Testament and “Jewish systems” seems in accord with his anti-Jewish remarks that will be detailed in Chapter 5: his notion of early Christianity’s decline was strongly linked to factors he associated with Jewishness. The negative characteristics he ascribed to ancient Jews remained stamped on their descendants in his own day.
Fisher on the New Testament. The Gospels for Fisher are truthful but incomplete “memoirs,” not “formal histories.”231 Fisher’s approach to Jesus—one that seemingly owes much to Schleiermacher—appeals strongly to the subjective impression that Jesus made on believers over the centuries. The unity and harmony of his character convinces them that the Gospels’ image is “substantially faithful.”232 That Jesus exhibited no consciousness of guilt, for example, prompts Christians to affirm that he was sinless, that he stood in a singular relationship to God.233 Fisher, unlike Schaff, did not here appeal so much to biblical “facts” as to the subjective impression that the Gospel accounts made, and still make, on the minds of receptive readers and hearers.
Like Smith, Fisher rested his case regarding the “genuineness” of the Gospels (especially the Synoptics) on their reception history: they were accorded exclusive authority in the church by the later second century, accepted as ancient and “genuine” by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Papias, and the author of the Muratorian Canon.234