Adolf Harnack · 18 of 25

2. The Old Catholic Fathers’ doctrine of the Church. · Part 3

Finally, we have still to treat of the altered conceptions regarding the Old Testament which the creation of the New produced among the early-Catholic Fathers. In the case of Barnabas and the Apologists we became acquainted with a theory of the Old Testament which represented it as the Christian book of revelation and accordingly subjected it throughout to an allegorical process. Here nothing specifically new could be pointed out as having been brought by Christ. Sharply opposed to this conception was that of Marcion, according to which the whole Old Testament was regarded as the proclamation of a Jewish God hostile to the God of redemption. The views of the majority of the Gnostics occupied a middle position between the two notions. These distinguished different components of the Old Testament, some of which they traced to the supreme God himself and others to intermediate and malevolent beings. In this way they both established a connection between the Old Testament, and the Christian revelation and contrived to show that the latter contained a specific novelty. This historico-critical conception, such as we specially see it in the epistle of Ptolemy to Flora, could not be accepted by the Church because it abolished strict monotheism and endangered the proof from prophecy. No doubt, however, we already find in Justin and others the beginning of a compromise, in so far as a distinction was made between the moral law of nature contained in the Old Testament — the Decalogue — and the ceremonial law; and in so far as the literal interpretation of the latter, for which a pedagogic significance was claimed, was allowed in addition to its typical or Christian sense. With this theory it was possible, on the one hand, to do some sort of justice to the historical position of the Jewish people, and on the other, though indeed in a meagre fashion, to give expression to the novelty of Christianity. The latter now appears as the new law or the law of freedom, in so far as the moral law of nature had been restored in its full purity without the burden of ceremonies, and a particular historical relation to God was allowed to the Jewish nation, though indeed more a wrathful than a covenant one. For the ceremonial regulations were conceived partly as tokens of the judgment on Israel, partly as concessions to the stiffneckedness of the people in order to protect them from the worst evil, polytheism.

Now the struggle with the Gnostics and Marcion, and the creation of a New Testament had necessarily a double consequence. On the one hand, the proposition that the “Father of Jesus Christ is the creator of the world and the God of the Old Testament” required the strictest adherence to the unity of the two Testaments, so that the traditional apologetic view of the older book had to undergo the most rigid development; on the other hand, as soon as the New Testament was created, it was impossible to avoid seeing that this book was superior to the earlier one, and thus the theory of the novelty of the Christian doctrine worked out by the Gnostics and Marcion had in some way or other to be set forth and demonstrated. We now see the old Catholic Fathers engaged in the solution of this twofold problem; and their method of accomplishing it has continued to be the prevailing one in all Churches up to the present time, in so far as the ecclesiastical and dogmatic practice still continues to exhibit the inconsistencies of treating the Old Testament as a Christian book in the strict sense of the word and yet elevating the New above it, of giving a typical interpretation to the ceremonial law and yet acknowledging that the Jewish people had a covenant with God.

With regard to the first point, viz., the maintenance of the unity of the two Testaments, Irenæus and Tertullian gave a most detailed demonstration of it in opposition to Marcion, and primarily indeed with the same means as the older teachers had already used. It is Christ that prophesied and appeared in the Old Testament; he is the householder who produced both Old and New Testaments. Moreover, as the two have the same origin, their meaning is also the same. Like Barnabas the early-Catholic Fathers contrived to give all passages in the Old Testament a typical Christian sense: it is the same truth which we can learn from the prophets and again from Christ and the Apostles. With regard to the Old Testament the watchword is: “Seek the type” (“Typum quæras”). But they went a step further still. In opposition to Marcion’s antitheses and his demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is a petty being and has enjoined petty, external observances, they seek to show in syntheses that the same may be said of the New. (See Irenæus IV. 21-36). The effort of the older teachers to exclude everything outward and ceremonial is no longer met with to the same extent in Irenæus and Tertullian, at least when they are arguing and defending their position against the Gnostics. This has to be explained by two causes. In the first place Judaism (and Jewish Christianity) was at bottom no longer an enemy to be feared; they therefore ceased to make such efforts to avoid the “Jewish” conception of the Old Testament. Irenæus, for example, emphasised in the most naïve manner the observance of the Old Testament law by the early Apostles and also by Paul. This is to him a complete proof that they did not separate the Old Testament God from the Christian Deity. In connection with this we observe that the radical antijudaism of the earliest period more and more ceases. Irenæus and Tertullian admitted that the Jewish nation had a covenant with God and that the literal interpretation of the Old Testament was justifiable. Both repeatedly testified that the Jews had the right doctrine and that they only lacked the knowledge of the Son. These thoughts indeed do not attain clear expression with them because their works contain no systematic discussions involving these principles. In the second place the Church itself had become an institution where sacred ceremonial injunctions were necessary; and, in order to find a basis for these, they had to fall back on Old Testament commandments (see Vol. I., chap. 6, p. 291 ff.). In Tertullian we find this only in its most rudimentary form; but in the course of the third century these needs grew mightily and were satisfied. In this way the Old Testament threatened to become an authentic book of revelation to the Church, and that in a quite different and much more dangerous sense than was formerly the case with the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists.

With reference to the second point, we may remark that just when the decay of antijudaism, the polemic against Marcion, and the new needs of the ecclesiastical system threatened the Church with an estimate of the Old Testament hitherto unheard of, the latter was nevertheless thrust back by the creation and authority of the New Testament, and this consequently revived the uncertain position in which the sacred book was henceforth to remain. Here also, as in every other case, the development in the Church ends with the complexus oppositorum, which nowhere allows all the conclusions to be drawn, but offers the great advantage of removing every perplexity up to a certain point. The early-Catholic Fathers adopted from Justin the distinction between the Decalogue, as the moral law of nature, and the ceremonial law; whilst the oldest theologians (the Gnostics) and the New Testament suggested to them the thought of the (relative) novelty of Christianity and therefore also of the New Testament. Like Marcion they acknowledged the literal sense of the ceremonial law and God’s covenant with the Jews; and they sought to sum up and harmonise all these features in the thought of an economy of salvation and of a history of salvation. This economy and history of salvation which contained the conception of a divine accommodation and pedagogy, and which accordingly distinguished between constituent parts of different degrees of value (in the Old Testament also), is the great result presented in the main work of Irenæus and accepted by Tertullian. It is to exist beside the proof from prophecy without modifying it; and thus appears as something intermediate between the Valentinian conception that destroyed the unity of origin of the Old Testament and the old idea which neither acknowledged various constituents in the book nor recognised the peculiarities of Christianity. We are therefore justified in regarding this history of salvation approved by the Church, as well as the theological propositions of Irenæus and Tertullian generally, as a Gnosis “toned down” and reconciled with Monotheism. This is shown too in the faint gleam of a historical view that still shines forth from this “history of salvation” as a remnant of that bright light which may be recognised in the Gnostic conception of the Old Testament. Still, it is a striking advance that Irenæus has made beyond Justin and especially beyond Barnabas. No doubt it is mythological history that appears in this history of salvation and the recapitulating story of Jesus with its saving facts that is associated with it; and it is a view that is not even logically worked out, but ever and anon crossed by the proof from prophecy; yet for all that it is development and history.

The fundamental features of Irenæus’ conception are as follow: The Mosaic law and the New Testament dispensation of grace both emanated from one and the same God, and were granted for the salvation of the human race in a form appropriate to the times. The two are in part different; but the difference must be conceived as due to causes that do not affect the unity of the author and of the main points. We must make the nature of God and the nature of man our point of departure. God is always the same, man is ever advancing towards God; God is always the giver, man always the receiver; God leads us ever to the highest goal; man, however, is not God from the beginning, but is destined to incorruptibility, which he is to attain step by step, advancing from the childhood stage to perfection (see above, p. 267 f.). This progress, conditioned by the nature and destination of man, is, however, dependent on the revelation of God by his Son, culminating in the incarnation of the latter and closing with the subsequent bestowal of the Spirit on the human race. In Irenæus therefore the place of the many different revelation-hypostases of the Valentinians is occupied by the one God, who stoops to the level of developing humanity, accommodates himself to it, guides it, and bestows on it increasing revelations of grace. The fundamental knowledge of God and the moral law of nature, i.e., natural morality, were already revealed to man and placed in his heart by the creator. He who preserves these, as for example the patriarchs did, is justified. (In this case Irenæus leaves Adam’s sin entirely out of sight). But it was God’s will to bring men into a higher union with himself; wherefore his Son descended to men from the beginning and accustomed himself to dwell among them. The patriarchs loved God and refrained from injustice towards their neighbours; hence it was not necessary that they should be exhorted with the strict letter of the law, since they had the righteousness of the law in themselves. But, as far as the great majority of men are concerned, they wandered away from God and fell into the sorriest condition. From this moment Irenæus, keeping strictly to the Old Testament, only concerns himself with the Jewish people. These are to him the representatives of humanity. It is only at this period that the training of the human race is given to them; but it is really the Jewish nation that he keeps in view, and through this he differs very decidedly from such as Barnabas. When righteousness and love to God died out in Egypt, God led his people forth so that man might again become a disciple and imitator of God. He gave him the written law (the Decalogue), which contains nothing else than the moral law of nature that had fallen into oblivion. But when they made to themselves a golden calf and chose to be slaves rather than free men, then the Word, through the instrumentality of Moses, gave to them, as a particular addition, the commandments of slavery (the ceremonial law) in a form suitable for their training. These were bodily commandments of bondage which did not separate them from God, but held them in the yoke. The ceremonial law was thus a pedagogic means of preserving the people from idolatry; but it was at the same time a type of the future. Each constituent of the ceremonial law has this double signification, and both of these meanings originate with God, i.e., with Christ; for “how is Christ the end of the law, if he be not the beginning of it?” (“quomodo finis legis Christus, si non et initium eius esset”) IV. 12. 4. Everything in the law is therefore holy, and moreover we are only entitled to blame such portions of the history of the Jewish nation as Holy Scripture itself condemns. This nation was obliged to circumcise itself, keep Sabbaths, offer up sacrifices, and do whatever is related of it, so far as its action is not censured. All this belonged to the state of bondage in which men had a covenant with God and in which they also possessed the right faith in the one God and were taught before hand to follow his Son (IV. 12, 5; “lex prædocuit hominem sequi oportere Christum”). In addition to this, Christ continually manifested himself to the people in the prophets, through whom also he indicated the future and prepared men for his appearance. In the prophets the Son of God accustomed men to be instruments of the Spirit of God and to have fellowship with the Father in them; and in them he habituated himself to enter bodily into humanity. Hereupon began the last stage, in which men, being now sufficiently trained, were to receive the “testamentum libertatis” and be adopted as Sons of God. By the union of the Son of God with the flesh the agnitio filii first became possible to all; that is the fundamental novelty. The next problem was to restore the law of freedom. Here a threefold process was necessary. In the first place the Law of Moses, the Decalogue, had been disfigured and blunted by the “traditio seniorum”. First of all then the pure moral law had to be restored; secondly, it was now necessary to extend and fulfil it by expressly searching out the inclinations of the heart in all cases, thus unveiling the law in its whole severity; and lastly the particularia legis, i.e., the law of bondage, had to be abolished. But in the latter connection Christ and the Apostles themselves avoided every transgression of the ceremonial law, in order to prove that this also had a divine origin. The non-observance of this law was first permitted to the Gentile Christians, Thus, no doubt, Christ himself is the end of the law, but only in so far as he has abolished the law of bondage and restored the moral law in its whole purity and severity, and given us himself.

The question as to the difference between the New Testament and the Old is therefore answered by Irenæus in the following manner. It consists (1) in the agnitio filii and consequent transformation of the slaves into children of God; and (2) in the restoration of the law, which is a law of freedom just because it excludes bodily commandments, and with stricter interpretation lays the whole stress on the inclinations of the heart. But in these two respects he finds a real addition, and hence, in his opinion, the Apostles stand higher than the prophets. He proves this higher position of the Apostles by a surprising interpretation of 1 Cor. XII. 28, conceiving the prophets named in that passage to be those of the Old Testament. He therefore views the two Testaments as of the same nature, but “greater is the legislation which confers liberty than that which brings bondage” (“maior est legisdatio quæ in libertatem, quam quæ data est in servitutem”). Through the two covenants the accomplishment of salvation was to be hastened “for there is one salvation and one God; but the precepts that form man are numerous, and the steps that lead man to God are not a few; (“una est enim salus et unus deus; quæ autem formant hominem, præcepta multa et non pauci gradus, qui adducunt hominem ad deum”). A worldly king can increase his benefits to his subjects; and should it not also be lawful for God, though he is always the same, to honour continually with greater gifts those who are well pleasing to him? (IV. 9. 3). Irenæus makes no direct statement as to the further importance which the Jewish people have, and in any case regards them as of no consequence after the appearance of the covenant of freedom. Nor does this nation appear any further even in the chiliastic train of thought. It furnishes the Antichrist and its holy city becomes the capital of Christ’s earthly kingdom; but the nation itself, which, according to this theory, had represented all mankind from Moses to Christ, just as if all men had been Jews, now entirely disappears.

This conception, in spite of its want of stringency, made an immense impression, and has continued to prevail down to the present time. It has, however, been modified by a combination with the Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace. It was soon reckoned as Paul’s conception, to which in fact it has a distant relationship. Tertullian had already adopted it in its essential features, amplified it in some points, and, in accordance with his Montanist ideas, enriched it by adding a fourth stage (ab initio — Moses-Christ — Paraclete). But this addition was not accepted by the Church.