The object which I have in view in this Lecture is to show the transition by which, under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the word Faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions, propositions in abstract metaphysics.

The Greek words which designate belief or faith are used in the Old Testament chiefly in the sense of trust, and primarily trust in a person. They expressed confidence in his goodness, his veracity, his uprightness. They are as much moral as intellectual. They implied an estimate of character. Their use in application to God was not different from their use in application to men. Abraham trusted God. The Israelites also trusted God when they saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. In the first instance there was just so much of intellectual assent involved in belief, that to believe God involved an assent to the proposition that God exists. But this element was latent and implied rather than conscious and expressed. It is not difficult to see how, when this proposition came to be conscious and expressed, it should lead to other propositions. The analysis of belief led to the construction of other propositions besides the bare original proposition that God is. Why do I trust God? The answer was: Because He is wise, or good, or just. The propositions followed: I believe that God is wise, that He is good, that He is just. Belief in God came to mean the assent to certain propositions about God.[668]

In Greek philosophy the words were used rather of intellectual conviction than of moral trust, and of the higher rather than of the lower forms of conviction. Aristotle distinguishes faith from impression—for a man, he says, may have an impression and not be sure of it. He uses it both of the convictions that come through the senses and of those that come through reason.

There is in Philo a special application of this philosophical use, which led to even more important results. He blends the sense in which it is found in the Old Testament with that which is found in Greek philosophy. The mass of men, he says, trust their senses or their reason. The good man trusts God. Just as the mass of men believe that their senses and their reason do not deceive them, so the latter believes that God does not deceive him. To trust God was to trust His veracity. But the occasions on which God spoke directly to a man were rare, and what He said when He so spoke commanded an unquestioning acceptance. He more commonly spoke to men through the agency of messengers. His angels spoke to men, sometimes in visions of the night, sometimes in open manifestation by day. His prophets spoke to men. To believe God, implied a belief in what He said indirectly as well as directly. It implied the acceptance of what His prophets said, that is to say, of what they were recorded to have said in the Holy Writings. Belief in this sense is not a vague and mystical sentiment, the hazy state of mind which precedes knowledge, but the highest form of conviction. It transcends reason in certainty. It is the full assurance that certain things are so, because God has said that they are so.[669]

In this connection we may note the way in which the Christian communities were helped by the current reaction against pure speculation—the longing for certainty. The mass of men were sick of theories. They wanted certainty. The current teaching of the Christian teachers gave them certainty. It appealed to definite facts of which their predecessors were eye-witnesses. Its simple tradition of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a necessary basis for the satisfaction of men’s needs. Philosophy and poetry might be built upon that tradition; but if the tradition were shown to be only cloudland, Christian philosophy was no more than Stoicism.

We have thus to see how, under the new conditions, faith passed beyond the moral stage, or simple trust in a person, to the metaphysical stage, or belief in certain propositions or technical definitions concerning Him, His nature, relations and actions. In this latter we may distinguish two correlated and interdependent phases or forms of belief, the one more intellectual and logical, the other more historical and concrete, namely, (1) the conviction that God being of a certain nature has certain attributes; (2) the conviction that, God being true, the statements which He makes through His prophets and ministers are also true.[670] The one of these forms of belief was elaborated into what we know as the Creed; the other, into the Canon of the New Testament.

We shall first deal with these phases or forms of belief, and then with the process by which the metaphysical definitions became authoritative.

1. In the first instance the intellectual element of belief was subordinated to the ethical purpose of the religion. Belief was not insisted upon in itself and for itself, but as the ground of moral reformation. The main content of the belief was “that men are punished for their sins and honoured for their good deeds:”[671] the ground of this conviction was the underlying belief that God is, and that He rewards and punishes. The feature which differentiated Christianity from philosophy was, that this belief as to the nature of God had been made certain by a revelation. The purpose of the revelation was salvation—regeneration and amendment of life. By degrees stress came to be laid on this underlying element. The revelation had not only made some propositions certain which hitherto had been only speculative, it had also added new propositions, assertions of its distinctive or differentiating belief. But it is uncertain, except within the narrowest limits, what those assertions were. There are several phrases in the New Testament and in sub-apostolic writings which read like references to some elementary statements or rule.[672] But none of them contain or express a recognized standard. Yet the standard may be gathered partly from the formula of admission into the Christian community, partly from the formulæ in which praise was ascribed to God. The most important of these, in view of its subsequent history, is the former. But the formula is itself uncertain; it existed at least in two main forms. There is evidence to show that the injunction to baptize in the name of the three Persons of the Trinity, which is found in the last chapter of St. Matthew, was observed.[673] It is the formula in the Teaching of the Apostles.[674] But there is also evidence, side by side with this evidence as to the use of the Trinitarian formula, of baptism into the name of Christ, or into the death of Christ.[675]

The next element in the uncertainty which exists is as to how far the formula, either in the one case or the other, was conceived to involve the assent to any other propositions except those of the existence of the divine Persons or Person mentioned in the formula. Even this assent was implied rather than explicit. It is in the Apologists that the transition from the implicit was made. The teaching of Jesus Christ became to them important, especially in Justin Martyr.[676] The step by which it became explicit is of great importance, but we have no means of knowing when or how it was made.[677] It is conceivable that it was first made homiletically, in the course of exhortation to Christian duty.[678] When the intellectual contents of the formula did become explicit, the formula became a test. Concurrently with its use as a standard or test of belief, was probably the incorporation in it of so much of Christian teaching as referred to the facts of the life of Jesus Christ. But the facts were capable of different interpretations, and different propositions might be based upon them. In the first instance, speculation was free. Different facts had a different significance. The same facts of the life were interpreted in different ways. There was an agreement as to the main principle that the Christian societies were societies for the amendment of life. It is an almost ideal picture which the heathen Celsus draws of the Christians differing widely as to their speculations, and yet all agreeing to say, “The world is crucified to me, and I unto the world.”[679] The influence of Greek thought, partly by the allegorizing of history, partly by the construction of great superstructures of speculation upon slender bases, made the original standard too elastic to serve as the basis and bond of Christian society. When theories were added to fact, different theories were added. It is at this point that the fact became of special importance that the Gospel had been preached by certain persons, and that its content was the content of that preaching. It was not a philosophy which successive generations might modify. It went back to the definite teaching of a historical person. It was of importance to be sure what that teaching was. It was agreed to recognize apostolic teaching as the authoritative vehicle and interpretation of Christ’s. All parties appealed to it.[680] But there had been more than one apostle. The teaching was consequently that, not of one person, but of many.

Here was the main point of dispute. All parties within the Church agreed as to the need of a tribunal, but each party had its own. Each made its appeal to a different apostle. But since, though many in number, they were teachers, not of their own opinions, but of the doctrine which they had received from Jesus Christ, the more orthodox or Catholic tendency found it necessary to lay stress upon their unity. They were spoken of in the plural, οἱ ἀπόστολοι.[681] While the Gnostics built upon one apostle or another,[682] the Catholics built upon an apostolic consensus. Their tradition was not that of Peter or of James, but of the twelve apostles. The πίστις was ἀποστολική, an attribute which implies a uniform tradition.[683]

It was at this point that organization and confederation became important: the bishops of the several churches were regarded as the conservators of the tradition:[684] while the bishops of the apostolic churches settled down to a general agreement as to the terms of the apostolic tradition.[685] In distinction from the Gnostic standards, there came to be a standard which the majority of the churches—the middle party in the Church—accepted. It is quite uncertain when the rule came to be generally accepted, or in what form it was accepted. But it is in the main preserved for us—with undoubtedly later accretions—in the Apostles’ Creed. Tertullian’s contention is that this rule is not only apostolic and binding, but also adequate—a complete representation of apostolic teaching—that there were no necessary truths outside it.[686] The additions were made by the gradual working of the common sense, the common consciousness, of the Christian world. They were approved by the majority; they were accepted by the sees which claimed to have been founded by the apostles. The earliest form is that which may be gathered from several writers as having been generally accepted in Rome and the West: it is a bare statement. “I believe in God Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who was born of a virgin, crucified under Pontius Pilate, the third day rose again from the dead, sitteth on the right hand of the Father, from whence he is coming to judge the living and dead; and in the Holy Spirit.” The term Son came to be qualified in very early times by “only begotten;” and after “the Holy Spirit,” “the Holy Church, the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh,” were added.

2. Side by side with this question of the standard or authentic minimum of traditional teaching, and growing necessarily with it and out of it, was the question of the sources from which that teaching could be drawn, and of the materials by which the standard might be interpreted. The greater part of apostolic teaching had been oral. The tradition was mostly oral. But as the generations of men receded farther from the apostolic age, and as the oral tradition which was delivered came necessarily to vary, it became more and more uncertain what was the true form and content of the tradition. Written records came to be of more importance than oral tradition. They had at first only the authority which attached to tradition. Their elevation to an independent rank was due to the influence of the Old Testament. There had been already a series of revelations of God to men, which having once been oral had become written. The revelation consisted of what was then known as the Scriptures, and what we now know as the Old Testament. The proofs of Christianity consisted to a large extent in its consonance with those Scriptures. But the term Holy Scriptures was less strictly used than is sometimes supposed. The hedge round them had gaps, and there were patches lying outside what has since come to be its line. It was partly the indefiniteness of the Old Testament canon which caused the term Scripture to be applied to some writings of the apostolic age. But the question, Which writings? was only answered gradually. The spirit of prophecy had only gradually passed away. It was the common ground for the reception of the Old Testament and the New Testament; as the spirit of prophecy was common to both, it was but natural that both should have the same attributes. But prophecy was not in the first instance conceived as having suddenly ceased in the Church. The term Scripture (ἡ γραφή) is applied to the Shepherd of Hermas by Irenæus.[687] The delimitation of the body of writings that could be so denoted was connected with the necessity of being sure about the apostolical teaching—the παράδοσις.[688] The term Scripture was applied to the recorded sayings of Jesus Christ (the λόγια) without demur.[689] It came to be applied also to the records which the apostles had left of the facts of the life of Christ. Then, finally, it tended more gradually to be applied to the writings of the apostles and of apostolic men.

But questions arose in regard to all these classes, which were not immediately answered. There were several recensions current both of the sayings of Jesus Christ and of the memoirs of the apostles. There were many writings attributed to apostles and apostolic men which were of doubtful authority. But the determination was slow, and the date when a general settlement was made is uncertain.[690] There is no distinction between canonical and uncanonical books either in Justin Martyr or in Irenæus. The first Biblical critic was Marcion: the controversy with his followers, which reaches its height in Tertullian, forced on the Church the first serious consideration of the question,—Which recensions of the words and memoirs of Christ, and which of the letters and other writings of the apostles and apostolic men, should be accepted? There came to be a recognized list of the writings of the new revelations, as there came to be—though it is doubtful whether there had yet come to be—a list of the writings of the earlier revelations to the Jews. Writings on the recognized list came in as the voices of the Holy Ghost.[691] They were, as the writings of the prophets had been, the revelation of the Father to His children. Hence faith or belief came to take in the Christian world the sense that it had in Philo—of assent not only to the great conceptions which were contained in the notion of God, but also to the divine revelation which was recorded in the two Testaments.

3. It might have been well if the Christian Church had been content to rest with this first stage in the transformation of the idea of belief, and to take as its intellectual basis only the simple statements of the primitive creed interpreted by the New Testament. But the conflict of speculations which had compelled the middle party in the Christian churches to adopt a standard of belief and a limitation of the sources from which the belief might be interpreted, had also had the effect of bringing into the Church the philosophical temper.[692] In the creed of the end of the second century, the age of Tertullian, there are already philosophical ideas—the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the relation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father, and of both to men. The Creed, as given in the treatise against Praxeas, is equally elaborate.[693] With that Creed—traditional as he believed it to be—Tertullian himself was satisfied. He deprecates the “curiositas” of the brethren no less than the “scrupulositas” of the heretics. He denies the applicability of the text, “Seek and ye shall find,” to research into the content of Christian doctrine: it relates only to the traditional teaching: when a man has found that, he has all that he needs: further “seeking” is incompatible with having found. In other words, as among modern Ultramontanes, faith must rest not on search but on tradition (authority).[694] The absolute freedom of speculation was checked, but the tendency to speculate remained, and it had in the “rule of faith” a vantage-ground within the Church. There grew up within the lines that had been marked out a tendency which, accepting the rule of faith, and accepting also, with possibly slight variations, the canonical Scriptures, tried to build theories out of them: γνῶσις took its place side by side with πίστις.[695] It grew up in several parts of Christendom. In Cappadocia, in Asia, in Edessa, in Palestine, in Alexandria, were different small groups of men who within the recognized lines were working out philosophical theories of Christianity.[696] We know most about Alexandria. There was a recognized school—on the type of the existing philosophical schools—for the study of philosophical Christianity. Its first great teacher was Clement. He was the first to construct a large philosophy of Christian doctrine, with a recognition of the conventional limits, but by the help and in the domain of Greek thought. But he is of less importance than his great disciple Origen. In the De Principiis of the latter we have the first complete system of dogma; and I recommend the study of it, of its omissions as well as of its assertions, of the strange fact that the features of it which are in strongest contrast to later dogmatics are in fact its most archaic and conservative elements.

It is not to my present purpose to state the results of these speculations. The two points to which I wish to draw your attention in reference to this tendency to philosophize, are these:

(1) The distinction between what was either an original and ground belief or a historical fact of which a trustworthy tradition had come down, and speculations in regard to such primary beliefs and historical facts, tended to disappear in the strong philosophical current of the time. It did not disappear without a struggle. Tertullian, among others, gives indications of it. The doctrine of the Divine Word had begun in his time to make its way into the Creed: it was known as the “dispensation” (œconomia). “The simpler-minded men,” he remarks, “not to say ignorant and uneducated, who always constitute the majority of believers—since the rule of faith itself transfers us from the belief in polytheism to the belief in one only true God—not understanding that though God be one, yet His oneness is to be understood as involving a dispensation, are frightened at this idea of dispensation.”[697] But the ancient conservatism was crushed. It came to be considered as important to have the right belief in the speculation as it confessedly was to have it in the fact.

(2) The result of the fading away of this distinction, and of the consequent growth in importance of the speculative element, was a tendency to check individual speculations, and to fuse all speculation in the average speculations of the majority. The battle of the second century had been a battle between those who asserted that there was a single and final tradition of truth, and those who claimed that the Holy Spirit spoke to them as truly as He had spoken to men in the days of the apostles. The victorious opinion had been that the revelation was final, and that what was contained in the records of the apostles was the sufficient sum of Christian teaching: hence the stress laid upon apostolic doctrine.

The battle of the third century was between those who claimed, as Marcion claimed, that inspired documents were to be taken in their literal sense, and those who claimed that they needed a philosophical interpretation,[698]—that while these monuments of the apostolic age required interpretation,[699] yet they were of no private interpretation, and that theories based upon them must be the theories of the apostolical churches. In other words, the contention that Christianity rested upon the basis of a traditional doctrine and a traditional standard, was necessarily supplemented by the contention that the doctrine and standard must have a traditional interpretation. A rule of faith and a canon were comparatively useless, and were felt to be so, without a traditionally authoritative interpretation. The Gnostics were prepared to accept all but this. They also appealed to tradition and to the Scriptures.[700] So far it was an even battle: each side in such a controversy might retort upon the other, and did so.[701] If it were allowed to each side to argue on the same bases and by the same methods, each side might claim a victory. A new principle had to be introduced—the denial of the right of private interpretation. In regard both to the primary articles of belief and to the majority of apostolic writings, no serious difference of opinion had existed among the apostolical churches. It was otherwise with the speculations that were based upon the rule of faith and the canon. They required discussion. The Christological ideas that were growing up on all sides had much in common with the Gnostic opinions. They needed a limitation and a check. The check was conterminous with the sources of the tradition itself; the meaning of the canon, as well as the canon itself, was deposited with the bishops of apostolical churches; and their method of enforcing the check was the holding of meetings and the framing of resolutions. Such meetings had long been held to ensure unity on points of discipline. They came now to be held to ensure unity on that which had come to be no less important—the interpretation of the recognized standard of belief. They were meetings of bishops. Bishops had added to their original functions the function of teachers (διδάσκαλοι) and interpreters of the will of God (προφῆται).[702] Accordingly meetings of bishops were held, and through the operation of political rather than of religious causes their decisions were held to be final. Two important results followed.

(i.) The first result was the formulating of the speculations in definite propositions, and the insertion of such propositions in the Creed. The theory was that such insertions were of the nature of definitions and interpretations of the original belief. The mass of communities have never wandered from the belief that they rest upon an original revelation preserved by a continuous tradition. But a definition of what has hitherto been undefined is necessarily of the nature of an addition. Perhaps the earliest instance which has come down to us of such an expansion of the Creed, is in the letter sent by Hymenæus, Bishop of Jerusalem, and his colleagues to Paul of Samosata.[703] The faith which had been handed down from the beginning is “that God is unbegotten, one, without beginning, unseen, unchangeable, whom no man hath seen nor can see, whose glory and greatness it is impossible for human nature to trace out adequately; but we must be content to have a moderate conception of Him: His Son reveals Him ... as he himself says, ‘No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son revealeth Him.’ We confess and proclaim His begotten Son, the only begotten, the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature, the wisdom and word and power of God, being before the worlds, God not by foreknowledge but by essence and substance.”

They had passed into the realm of metaphysics. The historical facts of the earlier creed were altogether obscured. Belief was belief in certain speculations. The conception of the nature of belief had travelled round a wide circuit. It will be noted that there had been a change in the meaning of the word which has lasted until our own day. The belief in the veracity of a witness, or in facts of which we are cognizant through our senses, or the primary convictions of our minds—in which I may include the belief in God—admit of a degree of certainty which cannot attach to the belief in deductions from metaphysical premises.[704] Belief came to mean, not the highest form of conviction, but something lower than conviction, and it tends to have that meaning still. But with this change in the nature of belief, there had been no change in the importance which was attached to it. The acceptance of these philosophical speculations was as important as the belief in God and in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The tendency developed, and we find it developing all through the fourth century. In the Nicene Council the tendency was politically more important, but it was not theologically different from what had gone before. The habit of defining and of making inferences from definitions, grew the more as the philosophers passed over into the Christian lines, and logicians and metaphysicians presided over Christian churches. The speculations which were then agreed upon became stamped as a body of truth, and with the still deeper speculations of the Councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon, the resolutions of the Nicene Fathers have come to be looked upon as almost a new revelation, and the rejection of them as a greater bar to Christian fellowship than the rejection of the New Testament itself.

(ii.) The second result was the creation of a distinction between what was accepted by the majority at a meeting and what was accepted only by a minority. The distinction had long been growing. There had been parties in the Christian communities from the first. And the existence of such parties was admissible.[705] They broke the concord of the brethren, but they did not break the unity of the faith. Now heretics and schismatics were identified; difference in speculative belief was followed by political penalty. The original contention, still preserved in Tertullian,[706] that every man should worship God according to his own conviction, that one man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man, was exchanged for the contention that the officers of Christian communities were the guardians of the faith. Controversy on these lines, and with these assumptions, soon began to breed its offspring of venom and abuse. But I will not pain your ears by quoting, though I have them at hand, the torrents of abuse which one saint poured upon another, because the one assented to the speculations of a majority, and the other had speculations of his own.[707]

It was by these stages, which passed one into the other by a slow evolution, that the idea of trust in God, which is the basis of all religion, changed into the idea of a creed, blending theory with fact, and metaphysical speculation with spiritual truth.

It began by being (1) a simple trust in God; then followed (2) a simple expansion of that trust into the assent to the proposition that God is good, and (3) a simple acceptance of the proposition that Jesus Christ was His Son; then (4) came in the definition of terms, and each definition of terms involved a new theory; finally, (5) the theories were gathered together into systems, and the martyrs and witnesses of Christ died for their faith, not outside but inside the Christian sphere; and instead of a world of religious belief, which resembled the world of actual fact in the sublime unsymmetry of its foliage and the deep harmony of its discords, there prevailed the most fatal assumption of all, that the symmetry of a system is the test of its truth and a proof thereof.

I am far from saying that those theories are not true. The point to which I would draw attention is, first, that they are speculations; secondly, that their place in Christian thought arises from the fact that they are the speculations of a majority at certain meetings. The importance which attaches to the whole subject with which we are dealing, lies less in the history of the formation of a body of doctrine, than in the growth and permanence of the conceptions which underlie that formation.

(1) The first conception comes from the antecedent belief which was rooted in the Greek mind, that, given certain primary beliefs which are admitted on all sides to be necessary, it is requisite that a man should define those beliefs[708]—that it is as necessary that a man should be able to say with minute exactness what he means by God, as that he should say, I believe in God. It is purely philosophical. A philosopher cannot be satisfied with unanalyzed ideas.

(2) The second conception comes rather from politics than from philosophy. It is the belief in a majority of a meeting. It is the conception that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which are made by the majority of church officers assembled under certain conditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the duty of the individual is, not to endeavour, by whatever light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit may be given to him, to understand them, but to acquiesce in the verdict of the majority. The theory assumes that God never speaks to men except through the voice of the majority. It is a large assumption. It is a transference to the transcendental sphere in which the highest conceptions of the Divine Nature move, of what is a convenient practical rule for conducting the business of human society: “Let the majority decide.” I do not say that it is untrue, or that it has not some arguments in its favour; but I do venture to point out that the fact of its being an assumption must at least be recognized.

(3) The third conception is, that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which were made by the majority, or even by the unanimous voice of a church assembly, in a particular age, and which were both relative to the dominant mental tendencies of that age and adequately expressed them, are not only true but final. It is a conceivable view that once, and once only, did God speak to men, and that the revelation of Himself in the Gospels is a unique fact in the history of the universe. It is also a conceivable view that God is continually speaking to men, and that now, no less than in the early ages of Christianity, there is a divine Voice that whispers in men’s souls, and a divine interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel history. The difficulty is in the assumption which is sometimes made, that the interpretation of the divine Voice was developed gradually through three centuries, and that it was then suddenly arrested. The difficulty has sometimes been evaded by the further assumption that there was no development of the truth, and that the Nicene theology was part of the original revelation—a theology divinely communicated to the apostles by Jesus Christ himself. The point of most importance in the line of study which we have been following together, is the demonstration which it affords that this latter assumption is wholly untenable. We have been able to see, not only that the several elements of what is distinctive in the Nicene theology were gradually formed, but also that the whole temper and frame of mind which led to the formation of those elements were extraneous to the first form of Christianity, and were added to it by the operation of causes which can be traced. If this be so, the assumption of the finality of the Nicene theology is the hypothesis of a development which went on for three centuries, and was then suddenly and for ever arrested. Such a hypothesis, even if it be à priori conceivable, would require an overwhelming amount of positive testimony. Of such testimony there is absolutely none. But it may be that the time has come in which, instead of travelling once more along the beaten tracks of these ancient controversies as to particular speculations, we should rather consider the prior question of the place which speculation as such should occupy in the economy of religion and of the criterion by which speculations are to be judged. We have to learn also that although for the needs of this life, for the solace of its sorrow, for the development of its possibilities, we must combine into societies and frame our rules of conduct, and possibly our articles of belief, by striking an average, yet for the highest knowledge we must go alone upon the mountain-top; and that though the moral law is thundered forth so that even the deaf may hear, the deepest secrets of God’s nature and of our own are whispered still in the silence of the night to the individual soul.

It may be that too much time has been spent upon speculations about Christianity, whether true or false, and that that which is essential consists not of speculations but of facts, and not in technical accuracy on questions of metaphysics, but in the attitude of mind in which we regard them. It would be a cold world in which no sun shone until the inhabitants thereof had arrived at a true chemical analysis of sunlight. And it may be that the knowledge and thought of our time, which is drawing us away from the speculative elements in religion to that conception of it which builds it upon the character and not only upon the intellect, is drawing us thereby to that conception of it which the life of Christ was intended to set forth, and which will yet regenerate the world.