Note (return) — Chapter II

On the contrary, the Church doctrine of faith, in the preparatory stage, from the Apologists up to the time of Origen, hardly in any point shews the traces, scarcely even the remembrance of a time in which the Gospel was not detached from Judaism. For that very reason it is absolutely impossible to understand this preparation and development solely from the writings that remain to us as monuments of that short earliest period. The attempts at deducing the genesis of the Church's doctrinal system from the theology of Paul, or from compromises between Apostolic doctrinal ideas, will always miscarry; for they fail to note that to the most important premises of the Catholic doctrine of faith belongs an element which we cannot recognise as dominant in the New Testament,48 viz., the Hellenic spirit.49 As far backwards as we can trace the history of the propagation of the Church's doctrine of faith, from the middle of the third century to the end of the first, we nowhere perceive a leap, or the sudden influx of an entirely new element. What we perceive is rather the gradual disappearance of an original element, the Enthusiastic and Apocalyptic, that is, of the sure consciousness of an immediate possession of the Divine Spirit, and the hope of the future conquering the present; individual piety conscious of itself and sovereign, living in the future world, recognising no external authority and no external barriers. This piety became ever weaker and passed away: the utilising of the Codex of Revelation, the Old Testament, proportionally increased with the Hellenic influences which controlled the process, for the two went always hand in hand. At an earlier period the Churches made very little use of either, because they had in individual religious inspiration on the basis of Christ's preaching and the sure hope of his Kingdom which was near at hand, much more than either could bestow. The factors whose co-operation we observe in the second and third centuries, were already operative among the earliest Gentile Christians. We nowhere find a yawning gulf in the great development which lies between the first Epistle of Clement and the work of Origen, Περι αρχων. Even the importance which the "Apostolic" was to obtain, was already foreshadowed by the end of the first century, and enthusiasm always had its limits.50 The most decisive division, therefore, falls before the end of the first century; or more correctly, the relatively new element, the Greek, which is of importance for the forming of the Church as a commonwealth, and consequently for the formation of its doctrine, is clearly present in the churches even in the Apostolic age. Two hundred years, however, passed before it made itself completely at home in the Gospel, although there were points of connection inherent in the Gospel.