Bruce Spreading Flame

The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England
1. Auflage 1958
ISBN: 978-1-912149-11-7
Verlag: Kingsley Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten

This story of the early Christian church - from its infancy to the conversion of the English in about A.D. 800 - pictures a church that is an unquenchable spiritual force organized for tribulation. Its spiritual resources are never stronger than in times of seeming disaster. Bruce gives the reader a feel for the evangelistic fervor of the Apostles and the early Christians in a narrative filled with solid, well-reasoned, richly researched facts. The way in which Bruce conveys the sweeping narrative of the New Testament and the early church is enthralling. Originally published as three books: 'The Dawn of Christianity' deals with the church from its infancy to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, 'The Growing Day' continues to the accession of Constantine in A.D. 313, and 'Light in the West' covers Christianity in Rome and its spread to the British Isles. These three were then revised and combined into this one volume.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bruce, F. F.

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

WHEN THE TIME WAS RIPE

IN A FAMOUS PHRASE, PAUL DECLARES that Christianity appeared on earth when the time was ripe for it: “when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son.”14

Whether we look at the Jewish people or the Greco-Roman world of the first century A.D., we can understand something of what he meant. Politically and religiously the world was ready for the gospel at that time as it had not been before. The greater part of the civilized world was politically united, but the old classical religions were bankrupt. Many people had recourse to the popular mystery cults in their search for liberation from evil powers and assurance of well-being in the after-life. Others, as we have seen, were attracted to the Jewish religion, but it laboured under the disadvantage of being too closely tied to one nation. When the Christian message began to be proclaimed among the peoples of the Roman Empire, it showed a capacity to satisfy both the craving for salvation which the mystery cults professed to meet and the ethical ideals which, as many Gentiles believed, were realized in the Jewish way of life even more than in Stoicism.15

The one writer above all others in the New Testament who is concerned to set the story of Christian origins in the context of contemporary history saw this plainly, and expresses it in the words with which he begins the story of Jesus. “In those days the Emperor Augustus issued a decree for the enrolment of the whole world.”16 Augustus, after long-lasting civil strife, had attained supreme power in the Roman Empire and imposed the Roman peace on a war weary world. And in consequence of the decree which he issued and the particular way in which it was carried into effect in a petty vassal principality on the Asiatic fringe of the Empire, the birth of Jesus took place in the Judaæn city of Bethlehem. Augustus never heard of Jesus, who was scarcely out of His teens when Augustus died. But the achievement of Augustus played no small part in the ripeness of time for the work of Jesus and His followers. And the successors of Augustus were destined to hear more and more of Jesus, until after three centuries had gone by, one of those successors acknowledged His supremacy. “When you see this orb set under the cross, remember that the whole world is subject to the power and empire of Christ, our Redeemer.”17

Yet the birth of Jesus was as obscure as anyone’s birth could be, and His days were not passed in the blaze of world publicity. He spent His life in a remote and unimportant province of the Empire, and only rarely did He cross the frontiers of that province. He did not court the attention of the world. He concentrated His activity on the Jewish people in Palestine, and it was only for two or three years at the end of His life that He played any public part among them.

What then was His world significance? How did the faith which He fostered and the community which He founded spread so rapidly throughout the world?

For an answer we must go back to Abraham. It is from him, in a sense, that the rise of Christianity is to be dated. “The gospel”, says Paul, “was preached to Abraham.”18 Historians from Eusebius in the fourth century A.D. down to recent times have understood that what is called church history really begins with him. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, appointed to the Regius Chair of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford in December, 1856, burst into his mother’s room the morning after he had accepted the appointment, exclaiming: “I have settled my first course. I shall begin with Abraham; he is the true beginning of ecclesiastical history.”19

The piece of territory in southwestern Asia which Professor Breasted taught us to call the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the frontier of Egypt, between the mountains on the north and east, the desert to die south, and the Mediterranean on the west, was the centre of great migrations of peoples in the centuries following 2000 B.C. Mountaineers from the north and east, desert rangers from the south, sea rovers from the west all pressed into it. Amid these confused waves of wanderers we have the record of one man who, with a few retainers, set out from Mesopotamia and settled in the south of Palestine about 1700 B.C. According to our records, there was something distinctive about this man’s migration. It was closely bound up with a religious motive. “The God of glory”, we are told, revealed Himself to this man, and the impulse derived from that revelation sent him away from his native land and ancestral worship and brought him to the new land of his adoption. “In you and in your progeny”, the word of revelation assured him, “blessing will come to all the nations on earth.”20

The descendants of this man Abraham in the third generation went down from Palestine to Egypt in a time of famine and settled down to a pastoral life in the Wadi Tumilat, near what we know today as the Suez Canal. But the building frenzy of the Egyptian king Rameses II (1301-1234 B.C.) drew them from their free pastoral life and conscribed them in his forced labour gangs. They endured this bondage for several decades, until under the leadership of one Moses they made their escape from Egypt in circumstances which could have no other meaning for them than that, when all hope was gone, the God of their fathers had intervened miraculously and decisively on their behalf. A period of nomad life in northwest Arabia followed, during which they were solemnly constituted as the nation of Israel, bound by covenant to the God of their fathers who had chosen them as His own people and delivered them from their slavery in Egypt. The terms of this covenant had a markedly ethical character. They insisted that as Israel’s God was righteous and merciful, so also must His people Israel be.

The people who had escaped from Egypt as an undisciplined crowd of slaves marched out of northwest Arabia in the next generation as a well-organized federation of tribes bent on the conquest and occupation of the land of Palestine where their ancestor Abraham had lived as an alien. The process of conquest and occupation was long drawn out. It was completed about 1000 B.C. under David their king, who seized the opportunity afforded by the weakness of the contemporary empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt to win an empire for Israel, stretching from the Gulf of Akaba on the south to the Upper Euphrates on the north. This empire, however, was short-lived. Towards the end of the reign of David’s son Solomon, it fell to pieces, and even the home territory itself was split into two kingdoms, each acknowledging (formally at least) the God of Israel. Both these small kingdoms came to an inglorious end—the one at the hands of the Assyrian Empire in 721 B.C. and the other at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 B.C.

Politically the history of Israel had been disastrous. But the spiritual seed sown in the days of Abraham and Moses was not extinguished. In the days of the two kingdoms a succession of men had arisen, spokesmen of Yahweh,21 the God of Israel, recalling the nation to the terms of the covenant which he had made with them and pointing forward to a glorious future, when the knowledge of God, communicated to Israel through Moses and the prophets (as these spokesmen are usually called), would spread out from Israel to cover the whole world so that the blessing promised by God to all mankind through Abraham’s progeny might be realized. Nor did these hopes cease to be proclaimed with the cessation of national independence.

The high water mark of the hope of Israel is to be found in the second part of the book of Isaiah, where the character of Israel’s world mission is expressed more clearly than anywhere else in the Hebrew writings. In these chapters the nation of Israel is addressed as the “servant of Yahweh”, called to make Him known to the world.

But Israel has not been an obedient servant; the task of communicating the knowledge of God to other nations is therefore entrusted to another who is similarly called the servant of Yahweh. This servant is to make known the divine law to the Gentiles and establish divine righteousness on earth. He is to restore Israel to God and bring divine illumination to all mankind:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
To raise up the tribes of Jacob and bring back Israel’s refugees:
I will also give you as a light to the nations,
That my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.22

Here the servant who undertakes Israel’s task is intimately associated with Israel and yet distinguished from her. In him the faithful remnant of Israel is reduced to a single individual. In the carrying out of his task he is to suffer contempt, unjust judgment, and death; but by his suffering he will achieve his object, and blessing and liberation for multitudes will be the outcome of his death.

This was not, however, the only form which the hope of the future took. Alongside the idea of the servant of Yahweh we have to set the messianic idea.23 The kings of Israel had not been absolute monarchs; they ruled as the representatives of God. Each king was the Lord’s anointed (the Messiah of Yahweh), deriving his sovereignty from the heavenly King, whose vicegerent he was, and to whom he was responsible for the manner in which he exercised this delegated rule. When the royal house of David fell in 587 B.C., the contemporary prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel pictured the crown as remaining without...