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Christianity
4 1/2"x6 3/4" 255 page brown cloth hardcover on Christianity published by Oxford University Press in 1953
258 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1932
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January 7, 2025
I ORIGINS
II THE CHURCH AMONGST THE GENTILES
III THE PAGAN WORLD AND THE CHURCH
IV INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION DURING FIRST THREE CENTURIES
V CONTROVERSIES AND COUNCILS
VI THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE
VII THE MIDDLE AGES
VIII THE REFORMATION
IX FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
X FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT DAY
XI THE SITUATION TO-DAY
“…christos in Greek meant "smeared"; to the Jews the name was profoundly significant, because a rite of smearing the head with oil corresponded in ancient Israel to our ceremony of coronation, and the Christos specially so called (in the language of Palestine, the Messiah) was the expected King who would establish the Kingdom of God on earth.”
“As a matter of mere psychological fact, the thought of the Cross, in the significance given to it by Paul, has counted for far more, as the mainspring, throughout nineteen centuries, of Christian devotion, of Christian service and self-sacrifice, than the Sermon on the Mount. What Jesus was and did, according to this belief, is greater and more wonderful than what he said.”
“An incredible thing had come about. The Emperor professed himself a Christian! This was not quite what the first Christians had pictured. They had thought of Jesus returning on the clouds of heaven to destroy the Roman Empire. They had never pictured the Empire becoming Christian. Yet had anyone suggested such an idea to them, it would no doubt have seemed to them almost as miraculous as the other. But it happened.”
“Of course, the truth is that the world was very far from being converted to Christianity. Vast masses of people everywhere now called themselves Christians and were formally incorporated in the Christian Church, who were as pagan as ever in heart. This made a great difference to Christianity. It has not yet, in the sixteen centuries since, recovered from the influx of worldly elements which began under Constantine.”
“[Protestants] built up their own theology upon the New Testament as the infallible word of God, while the only ground they had for regarding this particular set of writings as specially inspired was the Church's tradition, which in other instances they repudiated as fallible. That was the weakness in the structure of old-fashioned Protestantism, which has brought it in our day to ruin.”
“Since the Renaissance, it was just now said, the intellect of Europe had become in large part critical of Christianity or hostile to it. In the eighteenth century this was more the case than it had ever been since the days of the old Graco-Roman paganism. It has been called the "Age of Rationalism." The richer educated class, "polite society," was pervaded by artificial manners and religious scepticism. Curiously enough, atheism was not at all fashionable, and had few representatives. Most of the prominent men known as "infidels" who during the course of the eighteenth century ridiculed Christianity either believed strongly in a "Supreme Being," as Voltaire and the French Revolutionaries did, or at any rate thought the existence of a Supreme Being probable, though they regarded it as superstitious to believe that the Supreme Being, having once set the Universe going, did anything further in it. Their theory of the Universe is commonly known as Deism. The essence of the eighteenth-century Rationalism was the disposition to believe that this was a plain, easily intelligible world, clear and regular and without mystery, like the buildings and the formal gardens of that age. Just as morals were simple, because you had only to take the "common-sense" rules of decency recognized by European society in the eighteenth century as laws of reason universally valid for the human race, so human history was simple if you explained everything by the "common-sense" generalizations got by observing the everyday conduct of contemporary men. To such a view Christianity was, of course, repugnant. Christianity implied that something wholly new had broken in at a particular moment of history, which those common-sense generalizations could not explain; it purported to set before the mind a Reality which transcended satisfactory formulation by human thoughts working on the basis of human experience. It implied even that there were fields of human experience outside the circle lit up by lucid syllogistic common sense. All this made Christianity an offence and an absurdity in the formal eighteenth-century world.”
“Any religion which becomes the religion of the majority and turns into habit tends to grow humdrum and flat, in whatever flame of enthusiasm it may have originated. It is only by new movements making here and there new starts that life in a church can be revived, which new movements often themselves with time become dead habit.”
II THE CHURCH AMONGST THE GENTILES
III THE PAGAN WORLD AND THE CHURCH
IV INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION DURING FIRST THREE CENTURIES
V CONTROVERSIES AND COUNCILS
VI THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE
VII THE MIDDLE AGES
VIII THE REFORMATION
IX FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
X FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT DAY
XI THE SITUATION TO-DAY
“…christos in Greek meant "smeared"; to the Jews the name was profoundly significant, because a rite of smearing the head with oil corresponded in ancient Israel to our ceremony of coronation, and the Christos specially so called (in the language of Palestine, the Messiah) was the expected King who would establish the Kingdom of God on earth.”
“As a matter of mere psychological fact, the thought of the Cross, in the significance given to it by Paul, has counted for far more, as the mainspring, throughout nineteen centuries, of Christian devotion, of Christian service and self-sacrifice, than the Sermon on the Mount. What Jesus was and did, according to this belief, is greater and more wonderful than what he said.”
“An incredible thing had come about. The Emperor professed himself a Christian! This was not quite what the first Christians had pictured. They had thought of Jesus returning on the clouds of heaven to destroy the Roman Empire. They had never pictured the Empire becoming Christian. Yet had anyone suggested such an idea to them, it would no doubt have seemed to them almost as miraculous as the other. But it happened.”
“Of course, the truth is that the world was very far from being converted to Christianity. Vast masses of people everywhere now called themselves Christians and were formally incorporated in the Christian Church, who were as pagan as ever in heart. This made a great difference to Christianity. It has not yet, in the sixteen centuries since, recovered from the influx of worldly elements which began under Constantine.”
“[Protestants] built up their own theology upon the New Testament as the infallible word of God, while the only ground they had for regarding this particular set of writings as specially inspired was the Church's tradition, which in other instances they repudiated as fallible. That was the weakness in the structure of old-fashioned Protestantism, which has brought it in our day to ruin.”
“Since the Renaissance, it was just now said, the intellect of Europe had become in large part critical of Christianity or hostile to it. In the eighteenth century this was more the case than it had ever been since the days of the old Graco-Roman paganism. It has been called the "Age of Rationalism." The richer educated class, "polite society," was pervaded by artificial manners and religious scepticism. Curiously enough, atheism was not at all fashionable, and had few representatives. Most of the prominent men known as "infidels" who during the course of the eighteenth century ridiculed Christianity either believed strongly in a "Supreme Being," as Voltaire and the French Revolutionaries did, or at any rate thought the existence of a Supreme Being probable, though they regarded it as superstitious to believe that the Supreme Being, having once set the Universe going, did anything further in it. Their theory of the Universe is commonly known as Deism. The essence of the eighteenth-century Rationalism was the disposition to believe that this was a plain, easily intelligible world, clear and regular and without mystery, like the buildings and the formal gardens of that age. Just as morals were simple, because you had only to take the "common-sense" rules of decency recognized by European society in the eighteenth century as laws of reason universally valid for the human race, so human history was simple if you explained everything by the "common-sense" generalizations got by observing the everyday conduct of contemporary men. To such a view Christianity was, of course, repugnant. Christianity implied that something wholly new had broken in at a particular moment of history, which those common-sense generalizations could not explain; it purported to set before the mind a Reality which transcended satisfactory formulation by human thoughts working on the basis of human experience. It implied even that there were fields of human experience outside the circle lit up by lucid syllogistic common sense. All this made Christianity an offence and an absurdity in the formal eighteenth-century world.”
“Any religion which becomes the religion of the majority and turns into habit tends to grow humdrum and flat, in whatever flame of enthusiasm it may have originated. It is only by new movements making here and there new starts that life in a church can be revived, which new movements often themselves with time become dead habit.”
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