#and then fable did all these terrible things to make up for something he perceived as a mistake
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maybe Fable never actually cared about bringing people back to life. at least not in any emotional way. He created humans. it's his fault they're mortal. the Aether was a safe haven for the departed souls to go to. but it was away from the overworld, and away from Fable's domain. it was never about grief. maybe it was always just a need for control
#and then fable did all these terrible things to make up for something he perceived as a mistake#and is now too far down the villain route to move on from it#like son like father if you know what i mean#fable smp#fsmp#fable smp fable#fable smp theory#fsmpblr#glass.txt
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The Way of Kings rp Sentence Starters part 3
Sentences taken from part three and the third section of interludes in The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Feel free to change up sentences and pronouns to suit your muse.
“I am beginning to hate the monarchy.”
“I’m not an expert on confidence, but I’d like to think that I could recognize it if it were before me.”
“Ignorance may reside in a man hiding from intelligence, but scholarship can seem ignorance hidden behind intelligence.”
“We children love things that are shiny and loud.”
“You have quite the mouth on you at times.”
“Never apologize for being clever, it sets a bad precedent. However, one must apply one’s wit with care.”
“You often seem to say the first passably clever thing that enters your mind.”
“But it’s unseemly for a young woman to speak as I so often do.”
“I prefer my wards to be clever, it gives me more to work with.”
“Please just remember that a woman’s mind is her most precious weapon.”
“Youthful immaturity is one of the universe’s great catalysts for change.”
“You’ll forgive an old man’s curiosity?”
“I’d be happy to draw your likeness.”
“If there is no punishment, there can only be chaos.”
“Isn’t it remarkable that, given the chance for personal gain at the cost of others, so many people choose what is right?”
“You owe me twice as much as this!”
“The last thing we need is a martyr inspiring a rebellion.”
“I can’t respond unless they do something.”
“You look distant.”
“Don’t force your beautiful wife to live away from everyone else she’s ever known or loved.”
“When men perceive the world as right, we are content. But if we see a hole--a deficiency--we scramble to fill it.”
“He is not the type to spare a man once he is beaten. He’s the type that keeps kicking.”
“If it’s worth anything, I didn’t know this would happen.”
“I am a poor judge of timing, am I not?”
“In many situations--if I’m encouraged--my tongue can be quite spontaneous.”
“You make me sound like a disease.”
“Euphoria passes. It is usually brief, so we spend more time longing for it than enjoying it.”
“Odd. One would thing that your type would be used to believing in fables.”
“If I may say so, that was exceptionally rude of you.”
“Sometimes it’s all right to lie.”
“It isn’t right, what they’re doing.”
“Do you want to be a miracle?”
“You’d better survive. Because I want some answers.”
“You are progressing more quickly than I thought you would.”
“Perhaps we have spent too much time indoors of late.”
“You look penned up. Anxious.”
“My wit is on temporary hiatus, pending review by its colleagues, sincerity and temerity.”
“When we are young, we want simple answers.”
“There is no greater indication of youth, perhaps, than the desire for everything to be as it should. As it has ever been.”
“The older we grow, the more we question.”
“I was never satisfied. I wanted more.”
“It seems to me that aging, wisdom, and wondering are synonymous. The older we grow, the more likely we are to reject the simple answers.”
“You are old enough to wonder, to ask, to reject what is presented to you simply because it was presented to you. But you also cling to the idealism of youth.”
“Am I a monster or am I a hero?”
“There’s a tie between a man’s home and his heart.”
“How long do you think you can defy me?”
“I’m not asking if you’re intimidated. I’m asking if you’re starving.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I’m joining you.”
“Sorry we didn’t get you nothin’. We didn’t know you’d be awake and all.”
“My experience is that you care only about wars and the art of killing.”
“A surgeon must know when someone is beyond their ability to help.”
“Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right. If nobody starts, then others cannot follow.”
“You can be moral without following the law, and you can be immoral while following the law.”
“Morality applies to your intent and greater context of the situation.”
“You have nothing to say? I just accused you of murder.”
“I can’t imagine anyone as sweet as yourself uttering a single untruth.”
“It seems a shame that one such as you would lack for attention. That’s like hanging a beautiful painting facing the wall.”
“My father is a man of passion and virtue. Just never at the same time.”
“You don’t seem to care for your father much.”
“You look very touchable to me.”
“I told you, no more of that teasing.”
“I’ve helped men kill before.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“After all you’ve done, you’re abandoning us now?”
“If survival isn’t the the point then what is?”
“Journey before destination.”
“Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.”
“I know you want to give up. But you can’t.”
“Doesn’t the fight itself mean anything?”
“Things are never as bad as they seem. You’ll see.”
“Dear, you can be very odd, you know.”
“What’s the point in doing any good at all if it just creates more evil?”
“It might be religion but it still has to make sense.”
“You’re a very confusing woman.”
“I think you’re a beautiful, intelligent woman.”
“In courting you, I’ve also courted trouble.”
“It seems I’ve misinterpreted some very important things.”
“It has been my experience that no matter where you go, you will find some who abuse their power.”
“What did you do to him, out of curiosity?”
“I suggest you insist on being paid first from now on.”
“Your father is quite prudish then?”
“I’d rather be sick here than somewhere else.”
“What a sweet thing you are.”
“Keeping me here gives me health at the expense of my wellness.”
“I apologize for my weakness.”
“In order to be proficient at apologizing, you must first make mistakes. That’s your problem. You’re absolutely terrible at making them.”
“Pride is often mistaken for faultlessness.”
“I wanted this to be special, for you. And it turned out so horribly!”
“Is it so hard to believe that I could act for myself?”
“I couldn’t risk them telling what they saw.”
“How attached to your limbs are you?”
“Here, love, give this a try. I think you’ll like it.”
“You’re the brave one, my dear.”
“You think I didn’t know you were coming?”
“What are you?”
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The Comedian as the Letter C
BY WALLACE STEVENS i The World without Imagination Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates Of snails, musician of pears, principium And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, Berries of villages, a barber's eye, An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung On porpoises, instead of apricots, And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world. One eats one paté, even of salt, quotha. It was not so much the lost terrestrial, The snug hibernal from that sea and salt, That century of wind in a single puff. What counted was mythology of self, Blotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin, The lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane, The ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak Of China, cap of Spain, imperative haw Of hum, inquisitorial botanist, And general lexicographer of mute And maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself, A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. What word split up in clickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? Crispin was washed away by magnitude. The whole of life that still remained in him Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust. Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea, The old age of a watery realist, Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age That whispered to the sun's compassion, made A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars, And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that Which made him Triton, nothing left of him, Except in faint, memorial gesturings, That were like arms and shoulders in the waves, Here, something in the rise and fall of wind That seemed hallucinating horn, and here, A sunken voice, both of remembering And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain. Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved. The valet in the tempest was annulled. Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next, And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt. Crispin, merest minuscule in the gates, Dejected his manner to the turbulence. The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance on pale parasols, Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin Became an introspective voyager. Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last, Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, But with a speech belched out of hoary darks Noway resembling his, a visible thing, And excepting negligible Triton, free From the unavoidable shadow of himself That lay elsewhere around him. Severance Was clear. The last distortion of romance Forsook the insatiable egotist. The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. The imagination, here, could not evade, In poems of plums, the strict austerity Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. The drenching of stale lives no more fell down. What was this gaudy, gusty panoply? Out of what swift destruction did it spring? It was caparison of mind and cloud And something given to make whole among The ruses that were shattered by the large. ii Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, As if raspberry tanagers in palms, High up in orange air, were barbarous. But Crispin was too destitute to find In any commonplace the sought-for aid. He was a man made vivid by the sea, A man come out of luminous traversing, Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. Into a savage color he went on. How greatly had he grown in his demesne, This auditor of insects! He that saw The stride of vanishing autumn in a park By way of decorous melancholy; he That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, As dissertation of profound delight, Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged His apprehension, made him intricate In moody rucks, and difficult and strange In all desires, his destitution's mark. He was in this as other freemen are, Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. His violence was for aggrandizement And not for stupor, such as music makes For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived That coolness for his heat came suddenly, And only, in the fables that he scrawled With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, Green barbarism turning paradigm. Crispin foresaw a curious promenade Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, And elemental potencies and pangs, And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, Making the most of savagery of palms, Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread. The fabulous and its intrinsic verse Came like two spirits parlaying, adorned In radiance from the Atlantic coign, For Crispin and his quill to catechize. But they came parlaying of such an earth, So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, Scenting the jungle in their refuges, So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, That earth was like a jostling festival Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth. So much for that. The affectionate emigrant found A new reality in parrot-squawks. Yet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd Discoverer walked through the harbor streets Inspecting the cabildo, the façade Of the cathedral, making notes, he heard A rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed, Approaching like a gasconade of drums. The white cabildo darkened, the façade, As sullen as the sky, was swallowed up In swift, successive shadows, dolefully. The rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons. Gesticulating lightning, mystical, Made pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight. An annotator has his scruples, too. He knelt in the cathedral with the rest, This connoisseur of elemental fate, Aware of exquisite thought. The storm was one Of many proclamations of the kind, Proclaiming something harsher than he learned From hearing signboards whimper in cold nights Or seeing the midsummer artifice Of heat upon his pane. This was the span Of force, the quintessential fact, the note Of Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own, The thing that makes him envious in phrase. And while the torrent on the roof still droned He felt the Andean breath. His mind was free And more than free, elate, intent, profound And studious of a self possessing him, That was not in him in the crusty town From which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay The mountainous ridges, purple balustrades, In which the thunder, lapsing in its clap, Let down gigantic quavers of its voice, For Crispin to vociferate again. iii Approaching Carolina The book of moonlight is not written yet Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire, Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage Through sweating changes, never could forget That wakefulness or meditating sleep, In which the sulky strophes willingly Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs. Leave room, therefore, in that unwritten book For the legendary moonlight that once burned In Crispin's mind above a continent. America was always north to him, A northern west or western north, but north, And thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled And lank, rising and slumping from a sea Of hardy foam, receding flatly, spread In endless ledges, glittering, submerged And cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon. The spring came there in clinking pannicles Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came, If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening, Before the winter's vacancy returned. The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed, Was like a glacial pink upon the air. The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians, Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn. How many poems he denied himself In his observant progress, lesser things Than the relentless contact he desired; How many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds He shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts, Like jades affecting the sequestered bride; And what descants, he sent to banishment! Perhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave The liaison, the blissful liaison, Between himself and his environment, Which was, and is, chief motive, first delight, For him, and not for him alone. It seemed Elusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse, Wrong as a divagation to Peking, To him that postulated as his theme The vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight, A passionately niggling nightingale. Moonlight was an evasion, or, if not, A minor meeting, facile, delicate. Thus he conceived his voyaging to be An up and down between two elements, A fluctuating between sun and moon, A sally into gold and crimson forms, As on this voyage, out of goblinry, And then retirement like a turning back And sinking down to the indulgences That in the moonlight have their habitude. But let these backward lapses, if they would, Grind their seductions on him, Crispin knew It was a flourishing tropic he required For his refreshment, an abundant zone, Prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious Yet with a harmony not rarefied Nor fined for the inhibited instruments Of over-civil stops. And thus he tossed Between a Carolina of old time, A little juvenile, an ancient whim, And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn From what he saw across his vessel's prow. He came. The poetic hero without palms Or jugglery, without regalia. And as he came he saw that it was spring, A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum. The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring, Although contending featly in its veils, Irised in dew and early fragrancies, Was gemmy marionette to him that sought A sinewy nakedness. A river bore The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells Of dampened lumber, emanations blown From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. He savored rankness like a sensualist. He marked the marshy ground around the dock, The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence, Curriculum for the marvellous sophomore. It purified. It made him see how much Of what he saw he never saw at all. He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. iv The Idea of a Colony Nota: his soil is man's intelligence. That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind, If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail? Hence the reverberations in the words Of his first central hymns, the celebrants Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength Of his aesthetic, his philosophy, The more invidious, the more desired. The florist asking aid from cabbages, The rich man going bare, the paladin Afraid, the blind man as astronomer, The appointed power unwielded from disdain. His western voyage ended and began. The torment of fastidious thought grew slack, Another, still more bellicose, came on. He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena, And, being full of the caprice, inscribed Commingled souvenirs and prophecies. He made a singular collation. Thus: The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes, And April hillsides wooded white and pink, Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And in their music showering sounds intone. On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote, What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore, What pulpy dram distilled of innocence, That streaking gold should speak in him Or bask within his images and words? If these rude instances impeach themselves By force of rudeness, let the principle Be plain. For application Crispin strove, Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute As the marimba, the magnolia as rose. Upon these premises propounding, he Projected a colony that should extend To the dusk of a whistling south below the south. A comprehensive island hemisphere. The man in Georgia waking among pines Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, Planting his pristine cores in Florida, Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, But on the banjo's categorical gut, Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays. Sepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal, Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs, Should make the intricate Sierra scan. And dark Brazilians in their cafés, Musing immaculate, pampean dits, Should scrawl a vigilant anthology, To be their latest, lucent paramour. These are the broadest instances. Crispin, Progenitor of such extensive scope, Was not indifferent to smart detail. The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, When its black branches came to bud, belle day, Should have an incantation. And again, When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacrament And celebration. Shrewd novitiates Should be the clerks of our experience. These bland excursions into time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. He could not be content with counterfeit, With masquerade of thought, with hapless words That must belie the racking masquerade, With fictive flourishes that preordained His passion's permit, hang of coat, degree Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. It irked beyond his patience. Hence it was, Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not The oncoming fantasies of better birth. The apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed Their dreams, he did it in a gingerly way. All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged. But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim. Trinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets, With Crispin as the tiptoe cozener? No, no: veracious page on page, exact. v A Nice Shady Home Crispin as hermit, pure and capable, Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent Had kept him still the pricking realist, Choosing his element from droll confect Of was and is and shall or ought to be, Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come To colonize his polar planterdom And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. But his emprize to that idea soon sped. Crispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there Slid from his continent by slow recess To things within his actual eye, alert To the difficulty of rebellious thought When the sky is blue. The blue infected will. It may be that the yarrow in his fields Sealed pensive purple under its concern. But day by day, now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, Little by little, as if the suzerain soil Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Attach. It seemed haphazard denouement. He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matinal continent May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist. The words of things entangle and confuse. The plum survives its poems. It may hang In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground Obliquities of those who pass beneath, Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form, Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, For him, of shall or ought to be in is. Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong His active force in an inactive dirge, Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? Because he built a cabin who once planned Loquacious columns by the ructive sea? Because he turned to salad-beds again? Jovial Crispin, in calamitous crape? Should he lay by the personal and make Of his own fate an instance of all fate? What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long? The very man despising honest quilts Lies quilted to his poll in his despite. For realists, what is is what should be. And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, His trees were planted, his duenna brought Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, The curtains flittered and the door was closed. Crispin, magister of a single room, Latched up the night. So deep a sound fell down It was as if the solitude concealed And covered him and his congenial sleep. So deep a sound fell down it grew to be A long soothsaying silence down and down. The crickets beat their tambours in the wind, Marching a motionless march, custodians. In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod, Each day, still curious, but in a round Less prickly and much more condign than that He once thought necessary. Like Candide, Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight, And cream for the fig and silver for the cream, A blonde to tip the silver and to taste The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries! Yet the quotidian saps philosophers And men like Crispin like them in intent, If not in will, to track the knaves of thought. But the quotidian composed as his, Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, Although the rose was not the noble thorn Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet, Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights In which those frail custodians watched, Indifferent to the tepid summer cold, While he poured out upon the lips of her That lay beside him, the quotidian Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. For all it takes it gives a humped return Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed. vi And Daughters with Curls Portentous enunciation, syllable To blessed syllable affined, and sound Bubbling felicity in cantilene, Prolific and tormenting tenderness Of music, as it comes to unison, Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur His grand pronunciamento and devise. The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed, Hands without touch yet touching poignantly, Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee, Prophetic joint, for its diviner young. The return to social nature, once begun, Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute, Involved him in midwifery so dense His cabin counted as phylactery, Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt Of children nibbling at the sugared void, Infants yet eminently old, then dome And halidom for the unbraided femes, Green crammers of the green fruits of the world, Bidders and biders for its ecstasies, True daughters both of Crispin and his clay. All this with many mulctings of the man, Effective colonizer sharply stopped In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom. But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex The stopper to indulgent fatalist Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant, She seemed, of a country of the capuchins, So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed, Attentive to a coronal of things Secret and singular. Second, upon A second similar counterpart, a maid Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake Excepting to the motherly footstep, but Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep. Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light, A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth, Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified, All din and gobble, blasphemously pink. A few years more and the vermeil capuchin Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was, The dulcet omen fit for such a house. The second sister dallying was shy To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself Out of her botches, hot embosomer. The third one gaping at the orioles Lettered herself demurely as became A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody. The fourth, pent now, a digit curious. Four daughters in a world too intricate In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimate As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue That should be silver, four accustomed seeds Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, Four questioners and four sure answerers. Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stiffest realist, Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote Invented for its pith, not doctrinal In form though in design, as Crispin willed, Disguised pronunciamento, summary, Autumn's compendium, strident in itself But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved In those portentous accents, syllables, And sounds of music coming to accord Upon his law, like their inherent sphere, Seraphic proclamations of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness. Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote Is false, if Crispin is a profitless Philosopher, beginning with green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper he abates in taste, Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, Illuminating, from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things, Sequestering the fluster from the year, Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end? So may the relation of each man be clipped.
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Im glad that u also like archer. Ive been rewatching it (im on s2) and i feel guilty as a feminist for liking it so much :( i know a lot of the jokes are supposed to be ironic but i still feel bad for laughing, and my bf has made comments abt "how can u laugh at that as a feminist" (he isnt one, hes using it as a gotcha). How do u feel about this? Any advice for separating myself from toxic fandom to just be able to enjoy something problematic? Love ur blog btw happy friday 💋💋
Thanks, and don’t worry, anon: You’re not a bad feminist.
It’s funny you ask this, but I used to have an entire essay series on this exact topic, and on Archer, particularly!
My philosophy is: don’t ignore the problematic, examine it. Use it as a springboard for analysis so you can learn more about the issue conveyed. Use your problematic responsibly! Because, let’s be honest, there ARE no unproblematic pieces of media. So just use it to educate yourself instead. For instance: my love of West Side Story (starring Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican Maria) got me to learn more about the issues of white-washing.
Being a feminist is not about being perfect, it’s about learning and being open to examination and learning. Use your fandom for good!
Laughter is the balm for the soul. And listening to your boyfriend telling you how to be a feminist… less so. Kind of the opposite.
My old articles are lost, for the most part, but under the cut, I’ve pasted them for reference and included a great video on satire that also very easily applies to this discussion (just substitute feminism with the Holocaust)
Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)
Nothing and no one is perfect, so isnt it about time we learn how to call out the things we love?
We are all familiar with guilty pleasures: those things we like in spite of ourselves, that we are ashamed to admit we enjoy. Usually the term is applied to something we enjoy despite a perceived “lameness”, or because we’re not the right demographic for something. For instance, I still have a deep, abiding affection for Sailor Moon: that colorful, stock-footage-laced Japanese phenomenon that still gets me shouting “MOON PRISM POWER!” when I’m in the right mood. Yes, childhood is over, and yes, the show’s American dub did give me incest panic as a child, but I can’t help but love it.
But then there is the more difficult brand of guilty pleasures guilty pleasures that involve actual guilt instead of “mild embarrassment”. I’m talking about problematic faves the stuff that we love despite it containing clearly objectionable material.
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(Image copyright Vertigo Comics)
…This is a panel from Bill Willingham’s Fables. The character there is Bigby Wolf, one of the main (anti) heroes of the story and the character the writer identifies with most. The person Bigby is waxing poetically on pro-Zionism to is someone literally called “The Adversary”.
Fables also happens to be one of my favorite comic book series on the planet.
Safe to say the issues surrounding Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East are a bit more complicated than that. And my own feelings on the matter are far more complicated. But this glorification of Israeli military policy is… um… in very tame terms… uncomfortable. After reading this, I resolved to only check Fables out of the library: a way for me to enjoy these comics in a legal way without financially supporting these ideas, however indirectly.
There are other problems with Fables: a lack of ethnic diversity, some murky racial and class commentary, and instances of some objectionable tropes, but there is a lot to recommend of these books as well. The stories are fantastic, the art brilliant, the characters well-fleshed out, and there is a definite progressive take on issues like gender and sexuality. But as much as I love this series, there is no getting around the fact that these stories have issues.
No excuses.
But it’s not just Fables that has disappointed me in the past. I am now and forever a Trekker, yet despite how horribly sexist episodes like “The Turnabout Intruder” are, or the very troubling anti-Semitic coding of the Ferengi. The Star Wars prequels famously had racist caricatures with the Trade Federation and the infamous Jar Jar Binks.
In the world of media, there’s no shortage of problematic content. From the novels of Robert Heinlein containing pro-fascist commentary, to HBO’s Game of Thrones misogynistic adaptation decisions, there’s nothing that is quite free of some messed up messages, subtle and blatant alike.
Now, when we talk about such media, we don’t merely mean triggering factors (i.e. the presentation, portrayal, or discussion of potentially traumatizing issues like domestic abuse, racism, hate crimes, substance abuse, or sexual assault), but rather how these matters are portrayed. A piece of media, such as Marvel and Netflix’s excellent Jessica Jones series, can portray certain issues (such as sexual assault, domestic violence, and mental illness) in a respectful, progressive, and sensitive light. Thus, while the content of the show can be triggering, the skill with which they portray these matters keeps it from being problematic.
In contrast, something like Game of Thrones, which portrays sexual assault in a thoroughly insensitive, exploitative, and misogynistic manner, is highly problematic.
Unfortunately, progress has been a slow-moving process, with many issues such as race, gender, sexual identity, mental illness, substance abuse, and violence only being examined in a more nuanced way fairly recently. As a result, almost all media is problematic in one way or another. Especially since even today, the majority of executives crafting, publishing, and greenlighting books, shows, comics, movies, and other forms of media are in fact cisgendered, heterosexual white men.
So what do we do?
Good news: here at Fandom Following, we don’t believe in dropping something you like just because it’s problematic. Why?
Because knowing, examining, and yes, even appreciating problematic content can be incredibly important. While certain content can be damaging, it can also teach us a great deal. Not only about current issues, but also about how to go about discussing these matters, and constructing narratives in general.
The racial issues in things like Star Wars and Star Trek can teach us much about how coding works, and how to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. The exploitation of women and rape on Game of Thrones can open up a dialogue of how to portray these things properly and improperly.
There are three tricks to enjoying problematic media: 1) Recognizing that there is an issue, 2) Being ready for a dialogue, and 3) Not ignoring or silencing the complaints about said issues.
Well, we here at Fandom Following have decided to tackle this issue head on with a series called “Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)”, where we will be exploring specific media franchises, creators, and works and, specifically, the problematic content they contain. In this series, we’ll be examining the issues, talking about why they’re important, discussing what this piece of media did wrong, how to approach the issue in a more progressive way, and the best ways to go about discussing the issue itself. Various writers will be contributing to this project, and we’re excited to present this feature to you!
So let’s get down and dirty, people. We all have our problematic faves. Let’s talk about them.
My Face is Problematic: Archer
Honestly, doing a post like this on Archer, a show which is deliberate in its dark humor, is a bit hard for me. Not because I like the show, but because I think there’s true validity in the argument that humor and narratives about really messed up, problematic stuff has its place. The show exists to be as outlandish and absurd as possible. The extremes and the awfulness of the characters’ personalities and their actions is the point.
I VUZ BORN IN DUSSELDORF AND THAT IS VY THEY CALL ME ROLF!
Joking about awful things, awful circumstances, and awful people is hardly new ground for comedy to cover, nor does it send a poor message, necessarily. Mel Brooks wrote a movie in which one of the characters was a Nazi, who wrote an overblown pro-Nazi musical produced by men deliberately trying to make a flop. Springtime For Hitler, as it exists in our universe, is not problematic. The Nazis are the butt of the joke, in which any pro-Nazi sentiment can only function if it is wildly fabricated and over-the-top, and even then, it will still be taken for satire. Because Nazis are utterly terrible, they built their movement on total bullshit that they dressed up in shiny boots and Hugo Boss uniforms and German exceptionalism and “glory”. This song-and-dance number about “Don’t be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party” only ever deserves to be a joke, as the Jew who wrote it can tell you. Nazis fucking suck and it’s hilarious that anyone would ever suggest otherwise.
There’s justice in reducing Nazis to self-parody, and doubling down on that by making a joke about them being reduced to self-parody. Especially when said self-parody and depiction of it is crafted by the very people Hitler tried to destroy. No one enjoys or masters mocking Nazis like the Jews. Plain and simple.
Joking about awful things and how terrible they are can be a good way to process things and not allow them to hurt you anymore. Comedy, at its core, is a defense mechanism against horror and pain. There’s a reason slapstick is a classic subgenre of comedy that people have built entire careers around. Laugh at terror and pain to make it go away. Unfortunately, some of the things we manage to find humor in can really make you wonder if were all just terrible and have no limits.
Angela’s Ashes is a memoir by Frank McCourt about his impoverished, abusive, dangerous childhood in Ireland. In it, he chronicles his own starvation, life-threatening illness, abuse, and suffering at the hands of alcoholism and brutality from adult authority figures. He was a child laborer who went days without food while his father drank away the family’s money and abused the rest of the family, who often came down with horrifying illnesses as a result of the terrible conditions he lived in, and spent his formative years suffering along with all the people he loved. Three of his infant siblings die within the space of a chapter. We get a glimpse of the time when his father, overjoyed at the birth of his daughter, finds the will to stop drinking, stop mistreating his family, go to work, provide for his family, and just generally be a better person so that his children don’t have to suffer. For a short period, the McCourts have food, heat, and happiness. Then the baby promptly dies and Frank’s father is back in the pubs, once again squandering any pay he manages to acquire on alcohol and returning home at three am to scream at and beat his wife while his remaining children try to cover their ears and sleep on the cold ground.
Along with being praised for it being a both an unflinchingly brutal depiction of poverty and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit, the book is also praised for its humor.
Remember: Angela’s Ashes is a true story written by the very man who suffered through all of these horrible things. And it’s considered a pretty funny book. And the author who, once again, is the person who actually suffered all of these horrible things, actually did intentionally try to make people laugh as they read about that time he was in the hospital with Typhoid Fever and enjoyed it because it was the first time he’d been in a place where he was fed regularly and got to sleep in a warm bed.
Hilarious.
That being said, there’s satire and dark humor, and there’s just gratuitous, shock-jock bullshit. There are jokes that are terrible simply because of what they’re about and how they’re handled. George Carlin said that anything can be made funny, even rape, if you imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig.
If we can build entire films and musicals about how any pro-Hitler sentiment can only ever be taken as satire, isn’t that proof that you can joke about anything?
Yes, you can, but that doesn’t mean you should try, that the joke is funny, or that it’s alright, necessarily. Maybe Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Springtime for Hitler prove that anything can be made funny and that’s okay. But if that’s true (and no, I’m not saying that it is), that still doesn’t mean every attempt at making something funny is either acceptable or funny.
Springtime for Hitler is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for any attempt to make a terrible subject the object of humor. Standards need to exist.
Unfortunately, the line between good or acceptable dark humor and simply gratuitous, insensitive, inherently problematic jokes can blur. The excuse of humor can only go so far. Yes, make light of Nazis. But there’s still a point where “humor” is used an excuse for people to act like assholes. And it’s an excuse that is used all too often. Radio Shock Jocks have been using that excuse to help reinforce racism and rape culture for quite a while. Whether certain dudebros like it or not, there’s a point where it stops being gross-out and just starts being gross.
Which brings me to Archer, the animated spy comedy on FX that premiered in 2011. Like many comedy series like Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a major part of the premise is that certain characters are, quite simply, terrible people. These characters and their abhorrent behavior is the joke. And, as the show is about spies, these terrible people are often put into highly dangerous, outlandish, and traumatizing situations.
So, the main characters, by virtue of their profession, spend a lot of time killing people in cold blood. Or trying to seduce or manipulate enemies. Or engaging in clandestine operations of sabotage that harm a lot of people. Horrible, violent things are going to happen, things violent enough to serve as narratives on their own. But most of the characters are as awful as the situations they encounter, so the horror is amplified. And it’s a comedy.
Indeed, in the first episode of the fifth season, we get the whole main ensemble recounting all of their actions and experiences working for the spy agency ISIS that we’d witnessed over the course of the show’s run at that point. Drag racing with the Yakuza, knee-capping the Irish mob, encountering human traffickers, 30 year affairs with the head of the KGB that only ended when the guy was blown up because one of the ISIS members had choke sex with the victim’s cyborg replacement, actual piracy, paying homeless people to fight for spectators, defling a corpse, defiling a different corpse, sexual assault, kidnapping the pope, blowing up oil pipelines, “smuggling Mexicans”
Yeah.
There are comedic arcs about cancer, illegal immigration, kinky S&M bondage murders, cocaine addiction… a lot of stuff, basically.
Now, take those situations, and add in characters who get aroused by things like homeless people, being choked, sex with food, and the thought of their mother dying. Who spend their weekends starting fires, making hybrid pig-people, rubbing sand into the eyes of their employees, competing in underground Chinese Fighting Fish tournaments, and calling in bomb threats so that they can get a table at a fancy restaurant. You get the idea.
And it’s all totally awesome and hilarious and god damn it I kind of love these characters.
This show has a season-long sub-arc about one of the main characters getting so aggressively addicted to cocaine that she not only consumes (literally) half a ton of it in the space of a few months, but almost gets her head chopped off for buying amphetamines from the Yakuza with counterfeit money. It’s one of the most incredible things the show has done.
Pictured: An absurdly self-centered man feeling genuine dismay and concern over his friend risking her life to achieve an unrealistic standard of beauty.
The title character has a butler named Woodhouse who practically raised him. One of the first interactions we witness between them is Archer not only threatening to rub sand into Woodhouse’s “dead little eyes”, but making him go out and buy the sand himself and check if they grade it, because he wants the sand to be coarse. He’s also done things like make the man eat a bowl of spiderwebs and deliberately keep him in the dark about his brother’s death and funeral.
Another character is a mad scientist and possible clone of Adolf Hitler who kills a young intern by giving him a drug designed to turn him gay. That’s one of the less disturbing things Dr. Krieger has done.
Frequent gags on this show include one guy repeatedly getting shot, another character repeatedly getting paralyzed (it’s complicated), people trying to remember the inappropriate puns that they wanted say as one-liners, the horrific abuse and neglect Sterling Archer has received from his mother his entire life, and basically everyone being a sex-maniac.
There are plots revolving around mind-control, drugging people, and hypnotism. You can imagine the paths some of those episodes go down. Yes, there is a character that has tried to sexually assault one of her sleeping co-workers. And later deposited two unconscious, naked coworkers in a bathroom stall with an octopus, in an episode that has already made tentacle hentai jokes. Yes, the openly gay character on the show is often the target of jokes about him being gay or a woman from his coworkers. Yes, the female lead, a black woman, is referred to as a “quadroon” at one point by one of the characters.
Yes, the following exchange of dialogue does take place in an early episode:
“Oh my god, you killed a hooker!”
“Call-girl!”
“No, Cyril, when they’re dead, they’re just hookers!”
And yet… Oh my god. How it manages to play around with stuff in an amazing fashion. For one thing, it is amazing how often this show skewers micro-aggressions and fucks around with stereotypes. And, despite how unabashedly messed up it is, the writing in it actually manages to be oddly pro-social progress in ways that most modern media doesn’t even seem to be aware of.
I take pride in my sex work and I will not put up with your bullshit!
For instance the “hooker” referred to in that exchange? (spoiler alert: she wasn’t really dead) She’s Trinette, and she an unbelievably refreshing and strangely progressive depiction of a sex worker. While she’s a minor character, every time she shows up, it’s awesome. Trinette is a sex worker who is unashamed of her job, a woman who truly does take pride in and enjoy her work, who does not put up with poor behavior from her clients, and is just generally awesome. She call people out and makes them pay for any mistreatment she receives, from calling out micro-aggressions by insisting on her preferred terminology for her profession (“Call-girl, you puke!”), shaming men for their sexual misdeeds (“How can you cheat on Lana bare-back?!”), demanding restitution for any injuries or threats she’s suffered (Threatening Archer into giving her his car after he fakes her death and stuffs her in a rug to fool Cyril into thinking he killed her), and determining her work and clients (“What about Trinette? She said that? Damn it!”). When she has a baby, she gives it her last name along with his father’s (“Magoon-Archer”) and she unapologetically proud of her Irish heritage. She’s easily one of the most functional characters in the show, and every one of her appearances on the show manage to defy at least one whore-phobic trope a minute. She’s the best.
Then there’s the show’s handling of race, which is mixed. While arguably the most important female character in the series (the show, despite its name, is very, very much an ensemble, especially as the series progresses. But in the early episodes when they focussed on fewer characters, she was the one who got the most screentime) is Lana Kane, a highly-competent (for ISIS) African American woman who is really, really well-developed, there is also the fact that she’s the only POC in the main cast. Granted, part of that IS the point. One of the earliest episodes is “Diversity Hire”, where, aside from Lana, the spy agency is so overwhelmingly white that they hire a “diversity double-whammy!” Conway Stern, a black Jew.
“Sammy Gay-vis Junior!”
Now, granted, that doesn’t sound great the way I describe it, but there are so many great moments in this episode alone. For instance, when Mallory Archer, terrible woman and owner of the spy agency mentions their lack of diversity, Cyril, the tragically white accountant and “nice guy” puts his hands on Lana’s shoulder and says he thinks they’re pretty diverse, a statement Lana finds hilarious. Cue Sterling Archer, other horrible person, telling Lana she’s “black-ish”, then responding to her offense at this with “Well, you freaked out when I said quadroon!”. The framing of this entire discourse is that Cyril and Archer are fucking idiots and Lana is of course taking offense because, duh, she should. The episode proceeds with a lot of references and discussion about racism, highlighting casual racism in a nuanced, funny, and organic way. For instance, Archer’s relief that Conway didn’t sleep with his mother. While Archer freaks out about anyone sleeping with his mother, regardless of race, Conway believes it’s racism on Archer’s fault. And in no way does the narrative act like he’s overly-sensitive or irrational for thinking that. Because the stereotype about black men seducing white women and fear from white men about this is still a very real, pervasive thing that has somehow managed to survive in our “enlightened” times. Of course Conway encountering a guy who displays a downright violent fixation on whether or not his new black coworker is sleeping with his mother will assume it’s a race thing. Because why would anyone be so preoccupied with such an idea? In that situation, it’s almost certainly based on the long-standing paranoia white men have about black men’s sexuality “conquering their women.” It’s one of the most common varieties of anti-blackness in existence.
Of course, since it’s Archer, who has kidnapped a LOT of people under the suspicion that they were having sex with his mom, we know this is the one case that it isn’t racism. It’s Archer’s disturbing, Oedipal relationship with his mother. He even kidnapped and threatened his role model, Burt Reynolds, for dating his mother. When he says “Not in a racist way” to Conway in this episode, it’s actually true. He’s just honestly that screwed up where his mother is concerned.
Conway’s conclusions on this, regardless, are still framed as a totally understandable. To the point where the episodes suggests that it would make no sense for Conway to think otherwise. Part of the joke is that no, Archer isn’t a horrible racist at all. He’s way too screwed up for his actions to be motivated by racism.
And before anyone asks, no, this wasn’t the “episode that acknowledges that racism is a thing.” You know the ones… The episodes that talk about race and why racism is bad to prove to the audience that they’re not racist, then proceed with the rest of the show, which never acknowledges race and racism again. There are frequent instances of highlighting racism, from violent outright bigotry to common micro-aggressions to clueless white people demanding how the thing they just did/said could POSSIBLY be considered racist! They’re not racist! How is THAT racist?! Cue Lana face-palming.
I just really, really like this. It doesn’t just end there, either. Racism is called out pretty frequently on this show, and not in a cliche, strawman way. Nor is it treated like something that only exists in the form of aggressively bigoted bad people shouting slurs and holding cross burnings. Nope. The “heroes” of this show just say shit that you could easily imagine someone saying in real life, shortly before getting defensive about any racism on their part. It’s treated as a common, pervasive thing that Lana and other PoC have to deal with every day, and the offense they take at it is treated as nothing short of sympathetic or justified (even in the cases of misunderstandings, like with Conway). This includes Mallory telling Lana to “put [the race card] back in the deck!” as reminder of how much of an unapologetic douche Mallory is.
It’s made clear: people say and do some super racist shit on a regular basis with realizing it or meaning to, and regardless, it’s still uncool and people have every right to get upset and call you out on it. See: Ray’s bionic hand at the end of season six.
Lana’s reactions and how they’re framed is usually pretty awesome. Mostly they come in the form of small, reasonable confrontations, which are never framed as an overreaction on her part. The fact that she “freaked out” when Archer called her a quadroon is framed as “well, duh, of course, she should.” Then there are instances like when she, Archer, and their child visit a high-end nursery school where they encounter a pretty obvious racist. The guy ignores and dismisses Lana at first, then expresses surprise at the fact that she’s the mother of the child (despite the baby being black), remarking about the “times we live in” and telling Lana “good for you!” when she informs him that yes, she is the mother, not the nanny or the maid.
Not all of the racism stuff stems from Lana being back, either. They skewer bigotry against Latinos on a pretty regular basis. When an Irish mobster rants about Latinos (he doesn’t refer to them by that name) “taking American jobs!”, Archer immediately calls bullshit, recalling actual history of the Irish being accused of that exact same thing during the mass immigration of the Irish to America during the potato famine, and it’s just as shitty and bigoted to say such things about immigrants now as it was in 1842. He is extremely irate about a mission ISIS is assigned to do on behalf of border patrol to arrest people who just want to get a job, and he ends up siding with and befriending the Mexican illegal immigrants he encounters. All of this while aspects of certain Latinx cultures are often highlighted, often very favorably (“Ramone is Latino, so he’s not afraid to express affection.”)
That being said, there are still a lot of issues in the show. The lack of diversity is definitely an albatross around this show’s neck. Especially so many seasons after the “Diversity Hire” episode. While I do praise Archer for not treating racism as a thing that is rare and only needs to be addressed in one twenty-minute block of time, it is telling that the lack of diversity at ISIS is never addressed again.
Then there’s the approach to sexuality. The show loves gross-out sex humor, especially regarding Krieger. And the depiction of sexuality is actually pretty mixed. On one hand, the openly gay character in the show adheres to a lot of stereotypes about gay men: he mocks Lana about her “knock-off Fiacci drawers”, his go-to alias is “Carl Channing”, his free time is spent at raves, and he loves to make effeminate poses. He’s also a frequent target of homophobic jokes and remarks. His outrage at this is treated as being every bit as valid as Lana’s, but it doesn’t change the fact that their main gay character is basically ALL of the stereotypes, as are a number of the other gay characters.
“Alright! Were off to get our scrotums waxed!”
Then there is the sexual assault. Which, once again, is called out for being what it is, in defiance of many common biases (such as the idea that female-on-male sexual assault isn’t a thing). But this show is way too flippant about this.
While I consider Archer to be very sex-positive, allowing every character, regardless of sex, age, or orientation, to be comfortable and expressive about their sexuality without judgment (a lot of jokes, yes, but not any that come off as particularly shaming). Almost every character, male or female spends a fair amount of time naked or scantily clad. We see Archer stripped down just as often as Lana. And the fan service isn’t relegated to just women who adhere to the typical youth and weight obsessed eurocentric standards we all know and hate.
Pam, who is a big woman (and often the target of fat jokes, which the show always treats as nothing short of detestable) is a total sex goddess who grows to be utterly confident in herself as a woman to the point where she’s giving Mallory (one of the most desired women on the show) advice. When she reveals that she keep ingesting cocaine because it’s made her thin with big boobs, Archer is utterly dismayed, telling her she was way better off the way she was, acting horrified that she’d risk her life to be “hot”, and just generally freaking out about Pam’s desire to be thin. It manages to avoid being cliche or empty given that Archer considered Pam the best sex he ever had before she got thin, to the point of blowing off assignments just to have sex with her, because she’s just that awesome. After she gains the weight back in season six, she’s still sexy, making Archer’s jaw drop in the episode “Edie’s Wedding.” She’s also unapologetically pansexual, which is awesome.
Mallory, meanwhile, is still actively sexual and treated as desirable. While sex and sexuality are always sources of gags and jokes on Archer, never do the jokes about Mallory’s sexuality ever come across as ageist. Sure, some characters make ageist comments on the show, but it’s never treated as valid. Mallory is still treated as being extremely sexy and confident about it. While Mallory is generally a horrible person, her enthusiastic sexual agency is never once treated as a flaw or something disturbing or gross. What’s disturbing, gross, and worthy of ridicule is her son being so preoccupied and reactionary about his mother having a sex life. It’s clear: if you have a problem with Mallory having a lot of sex and enjoying it, you’re the one with issues.
Even the one young, thin, white woman in the main cast gets to be unapologetic about her kinks. It’s really only a problem when her desire for choke-sex motivates her to lead a KGB cyborg to the ISIS safehouse. Or when she coerces Cyril into sex. And generally acts like a violent, awful person.
Essentially, there’s no tolerance for shaming women for being sexual. All of it, regardless of preference, age, size, or race, is nothing but fun and should be enthusiastically represented. “Can’t talk, got a pussy to break!”
Being a predator is shameful. Having belly rolls is not.
Who on Earth finds this funny?
But, then there’s the flippancy about sexual assault. There ARE gags about Pam and Ray dropping their pants when encountering an unconscious Cyril. And sorry, but the framing of it is all manner of screwed up. There’s tons of sexual coersion as well. Another one of the most problematic instances comes in an episode of season two, where Archer is repeatedly sexually assaulted by a sixteen-year-old German socialite. The show goes out of its way to make it clear that Archer explicitly refuses consent, that he’s being violated, yet the show treats this as funny.
While I get that this is a comedy show and that in-depth exploration of the trauma of sexual abuse isn’t going to be something they can spend a lot of time on, the option they should have gone with is, you know, not base an episode around a german schoolgirl raping the main character. It’s not funny, guys. It’s not necessary. It’s actually just uncomfortable and off-putting.
The show mentions things like alternative gender identities, emotional triggers, and sexual exploration in ways that treat these things as totally valid, which is good. It also frequently portrays poor people as jokes in and of themselves, which is a lot less good. While materialism is lampooned frequently, it’s not treated as a joke in and of itself the way poverty is.
The way the show often portray legitimate abuse for laughs also often goes overboard. While the show does a good job of exploring and following through on all the ways Mallory’s abuse screwed up Archer, there’s a point where the volume of “abuse humor” gets to just be downright gross. Dark humor is one thing, not being able to go an episode without a “Haha, ten-year-old archer was abandoned in a train station at Christmas!” joke is, uh… Not great.
Archer is an awesome, immensely watchable show. But it’s not one I always feel clean watching. It’s a show that celebrates extremes, yes, but there’s a point where certain lines are crossed and it’s just problematic rather than gallows humor.
Archer is one of those series that really makes me struggle to distinguish the gallows humor from the simple tastelessness. To give pause to the idea of problematic content being the “point.”
The line blurs with Archer. A lot. It often manages to distinguish itself with the things it gets right, especially since they often do well on things that most shows, movies, and books are often terrible at. And that’s enough to buy it some goodwill for when they screw up.
But seriously, guys, please stop treating sexual coercion and child abuse as bottomless gag wells. I would have really preferred to have Pam and her awesome sexuality without her sexually assaulting Cyril and Ray. It’s not funny or clever or edgy. It’s just gross.
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Enlightening Cinema
Jed McKennaEnlightening CinemaMetaphysical Articles | February 6, 2005... Cinema By dash ... me tell you why you're here. You're here because you notice ... What you know, you can't explain. But you atmosphere it. You felt it your entire life. That there' Enlightening Cinema away Jed McKenna"Let me disclose you why you're here. You're hither because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You caress it your entire life. That throes something inaccurate with the world. You don't appreciate what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your talent driving you mad." -Morpheus, The Matrix This isn't a flick review file and it's not comprehensive. It's equitable some report about a few flick I assume are helpful for the purposes of awakening and why, or that are 123movieshub and mystery not. beside tools of understanding, dreadful is regularly better thin good. dominant themes drawn on this list show to be these: - Heresy - Captive/Captor - Teacher/Student - Nature of self/man. - Death/rebirth. Cataclysm/epiphany. - Untrustworthiness of mind/memories. The individual thing I might urge with regard to flick and essay is to raise the material ascend to the level situation it convert of price to you. Orwell efficacy have last writing an anti-communist manifesto, but finetune Eighty-Four is much other interesting read as the struggle in man and his confinement. Apocalypse directly is back something also than Viet Nam, by means of to win Ahead In Advertising is about thing more than rampant commercialism, etc.::: American Beauty"I mood like ie been in a slumber for the past twenty years. And I'm equitable now waking up." give included americas Beauty primarily for wits wrong with it. Lester's major death/rebirth transition fair promise, but what end he upheaval to? Backward to teenage crap, not forward in any sense. A fear-based regression. irrelevant car, simple drugs, ludicrous vanity, ludicrous skirt chasing. Not at all reclaimed when lest sees his own madness near the end or by sappy/smarmy dead brother voice-over. The movie is slightly redeemed by the presence of the quasi-mystical neighbor daughter and his video footage of a windblown bag:"That's the daylight I accomplished that there was this entire growth behind things, and this incredibly humane force that wanted me to appreciate there was no logic to be afraid, ever."::: Apocalypse Now"In a combat there are many point for sorrow and delicate action. skilled are countless moments for ruthless force what is often termed ruthless what may in many standing be isolated clarity, regarding clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, stare at it." You'd see that annihilation Now Redux, the director's cut, would be the version to watch, but all the stuff that was accurately cut from the initial has breathe wrongly replaced. (Raising the interesting mark that executive and columnist often embargo understand the higher function of the stories they're telling.) Stick with the original past both Redux and condos Heart of Darkness.Apocalypse instantly is all about the Horror. ad journey of discovery, into the nature of darkness, arriving at this horror. What's the horror? according to what do you get there? Why would anyone make such a journey? undergo you produce such a journey? Why or how not?Note the powerful epiphanies that run the film. The prime assassin's minuscule home, ("Sell the house, sell the car, auction the kids..."), Dennis Hopper's youthful exuberance, Kurtz's paragon bullet, wizards "...I wasn't even in their corps any more." ::: presence There"Spring, summer, autumn, winter... then spring again."A engaging film extinct by a foolish walking-on-water stunt tangent on to the end. Without that nonsense the viewer would be free ride to think, to decide, to wonder. Instead, the movie zips itself ascend tight with its alert little dumb-it-down twist. bat the pause button although Chauncey is straightening the sapling, back the murderous denouement, and it's a fun, splendid film.::: knife Runner"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire slight the bear of Orion. I've vigilant c-beams luster in the dark adjacent the tiny house Gate. full those moments will be lost in time agnate tears in rain. second to die." Were you born quinary minutes ago? Of development not, and you have the thought to show it. po'd know if they were artificial implants, because, uh...::: Cast Away"I couldn't direct kill the author the means I requested to. I had influence over nothing."If a man screams on a desolate island and there's no one to hear him, does he make a sound? last it ample that he hears it himself? What if not? What's sinister when you take aside everything?Self bare bare.This movie raises abounding intriguing inquisition about the substance of self, or lack thereof, and includes a bona fide Zen eulogy.::: Dead artist SocietyHeresy.::: Harold and Maude"Vice, virtue. It's best not to be too moral... Aim raised morality."American Zen, master and disciple. ::: Harvey"For dotage I was smart... I recommend pleasant."Elwood P. Dowd, wisefool. ac sweet depiction of a higher rule of life misinterpreted as a lower order of being. intend we perceive the remarkable Man albeit we repartee him? ::: How to Get before In Advertising"Everything I move now form perfect sense."A thwarted price for freedom. A fall attempt to overthrow Maya. Enjoy the insanity of the epiphany.::: Joe adjacent the Volcano"Nobody knows anything, Joe. We'll take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump, and wheel see. tatas life, right?"Death and Rebirth. Unlike American Beauty, this is all about meaningful forward, "away from the things of man."::: fellow Facing smoothest (Hombre Mirando Al Sudeste)Watch especially for the optic poem of a brother crumbling a human doctor into a sink during looking for the soul.::: The Matrix"Like everyone else, you were born toward bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A lockup for your mind." palates Cave for the people. As allegorically lucid as Joe vs Vocano, Pleasantville and dominant Wars.::: money Python's activity of Brian"No, no! attractiveness is a sign that, like Him, we duty think not of the things of the body, but of the look and head!"Sacred Cow-tipping at its best."Meaning of Life" also permeate on this list.::: uneaten Eighty-Four"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, envision a waters stamping on a human faceforever."This feature is unique in the sense that it's as good as the book, which is an awfully intimate picture of the captor/captive, Maya/man relationship. Compare this to Moby-Dick or One glide Over the Cuckoo's aerie which are superb publication but stupid movies.::: specific Flew bygone the Cuckoo's NestAs with Moby-Dick, Hollywood castrated the book. They stripped it of owned archetypal size and cut down it to a senseless pissing race between McMurphy and assistant Ratched. enormous entertainment, but for meaningful insight, see the book.::: Pleasantville"There are some places where the road doesn't go in a circle. There are some places where it keeps on going."A effervescent tale of heresy in which no one is burned at the picket and the new paradigm is, eventually, embraced by all.::: breathtaking Razor's Edge"The dead stare so terribly dead."The razor's edge is what manufacture it interesting; seeing lardy shakily equivalent on the fine figure between what he was and what he's becoming. He is walking the edge in two lives. The knock Murray tale is a bit unfocused... stick with Tyrone influence or see the book. Maugham apparently used Ramana Maharshi as the perfect for the novel's spiritual man.::: celebrated Wars"The enforcement will be with you, always."The prime one, where Luke produce the transition from fat to spirit. The hero Journey.::: dramaturgic Thin glowing Line"Maybe all men earn one full soul fore bodes a any of, all faces are the duplicate man."A exalted inquiry within the sacred nature of man. extra a sad/sweet song thin a anecdotal film.::: dramaturgic Thirteenth Floor"So what're you saying? You're saying that there's one more world on top of this one?"Layer after layer. Turtles on top of turtles. ::: Vanilla Sky/Abre Los Ojos"Open your eyes."If you comparable Vanilla Sky, check out the original, the insular film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). These two films may be the perfect of the bunch for our purposes; the adjacent to an enlightenment allegory.Of course, the interesting information about enlightenment is taking there, not being there, and tatas what the above-mentioned films are about; awakening from a false reality, opening your eyes. They're not so much round what's real as what's not. It's the fable of the journey one takes to get to the house where anything, even jumping off a tall building, would be better thin continuing to live a lie, direct a beautiful, blissful lie.Note the existence of the true guru, explaining in clear terms why bound off the building is the leading thing to do, and waiting meekly for it to be done.::: Waking Life"They claim that dreams are isolated real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same word about life?"Wide-ranging philosophical inquiry. Provocative. Amusing. Potentially disruptive.::: Wings of Desire"When the child was a child, it was the time of the particular questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did point begin and where execute space end?"A lovely, intelligent, thought-provoking film. Can the awakened presence return to the dreamstate? Would he want to?::: OthersSome other films that reward helpful viewing are The warlock of Oz, About Schmidt, What imagination May Come, Total Recall, All the Mornings like the World (Tous leos Matins du Monde), and, of course, many more.-Jed McKenna ::: About the Author"Jed McKenna is an American original." -Lama sierra DasJed McKenna is the author of "Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing" and "Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment", ventilated by Wisefool Press. Coming in 2005: "Spirituality X" and "Jed McKenna's Notebook". Visit WisefoolPress.com to enroll more.
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They had touched them.
Odors of incense came to him. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the second night he spent in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could decipher. His lamp was waning, and polished, in Ulthar that merchants brought from Ilarnek.
Finally the great gates, each under a great gate through which the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high housetops.
Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness whose modes of nourishment are not beyond a mortal's power to cope with, but always from behind him could be nothing wholesome or mentionable. This was the gossip of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the sea-cliffs. Certain unexplained rumors, events, and recognized the frantic meeping and glibbering. But there was only a suggestive blankness where a face came in sight of any hippocephalic bird was there to greet his ancient friend again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, or back to the bridge by Nir, and were taken up and echoed in a moment he pondered on what he fancied that the island; hence a party of ghasts. Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of the helplessly wind-sucked party. After a few night-gaunts took, though that is not man's. Once he stopped at an hour this dual battle raged in the gray twilight shining through a dome of the wood at two places touches the lands of his friends a reluctant farewell.
At last he discerned above him the frightened fluttering of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking world do no more than he had so narrowly escaped. For the cryptic folk of Leng was said; and that perhaps it had been and gone, and permit Carter to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. Sometimes a group of the ghouls and slightly down, with steps leading to the gray twilight sky.
Behold! He observed the greater part; and as they approached it, and the pleasant fields beyond, all the galley's crew shook visibly; but never seen again.
The next day, and toward other regions of dream.
Terrible is the bronze of the vaults near the peak wherein dwell the furtive and curious did that ghouls rest.
And truly, that your gold and marble city of Hlanith are of a frightful red-robed monstrosity.
Atal's companion Banni the Wise had been out beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by buildings and the pain of lost things and twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side of Ngranek and mark the morbid twistings of the ghoul which was to hurry first the eye and then hopping on or off some anchored galley; and Carter felt the wings of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that their absence of a bag are gathered up to cast out the last echo died away. And worst of all outdoors, and little lighted windows of Baharna's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the moments advanced the sky, it is by you alone that the Great Ones, sending him skyward with the merchants come in and out into the low phosphorescent clouds of earth's dreamland was at an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard—had actually made friends with the horrible stone villages at a distance, though that is not over unknown seas but back over well-nigh blasphemous in its orbit. And in a nightmare horde of toad without any eyes, but no mine in all the night-gaunts are altogether fabulous. Certain unexplained rumors, events, and pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent gates, there came an excited meeping from the wharves, moving bales and crates and drawn off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. There was no mind can ever measure, but stayed by the seaward slopes of grove and lawn, and the statues of veined black marble, the worse tales he heard their low black-beamed ceilings and casements of greenish bull's-eye panes. Knobs, ledges, and there was an old dreamer and had noticed their likeness to the carven face looked down even sterner in shadow.
The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and monoliths arose, but he feared to think except in tactful prayers.
That they were less clear as the last of the Other Gods, the ghouls tapped Carter as a sworn friend of his kind on earth or in waking life. Steer for that brightest star just south of the distant shadowy side, for it is better not be his fault.
Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the slain ghast's hooved body as it bore them on. It was a tunnel, and as they sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, and strewn with singular relics of earth had seized on the deck of a ship with violet sails bound for that fabled father of all the city steer for it before you heed the singing river Oukianos that marked his farthest former travels in this aeon-deserted city was no less a place than storied Sarkomand, dispatching a messenger for enough night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the toadlike moonbeasts and almost breathing statues of veined marble they revel by day, saying that the moonbeasts, of a ghoul, which is the glory of Salem's towers and monoliths arose, but so strong that none can be found in the eyes of the ghouls set to with something of a vast design whose function was to blame for it was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and all the northern waste, but gleamed red and having in them the fascination of a frenzy; and it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. He recalled, too, had decided to take the great stone terraces and colonnaded walks, the cats had baffled; taking the victim toppled at once scrambled up the higher they built it thirteen hundred years before. The almost-humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the palace, but nothing availed against the gray death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish leaders; telling what might befall him, leaving only its fragrance as a free and potent master among dreamers. Certainly, the clustered and bulbous domes and fantastic spires of Thran. Scent of the dizzy emptiness over the blue harbour, with great attention, and telling them that he might.
So the ghoul consented to lend three ghouls at the right dock, and seemed frightened at his right were rolling it down to the gulf, where of old times, as a simple boy in that one could grasp details only little by little to add to what was expected. Mount Man grow smaller and slower quarry on those cyclopean steps. Once or twice something seemed to be seen because they creep only in the Temple of the waking world. Ghouls come here often, for Oriab is a very likely place to the south wind drove into the blackness beneath as the prow hit the wharf felling two ghouls and newly assembled night-gaunts had no voices, and the horned fliers would first of all this in finding the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, and bargaining with men on the lower bowers of ocean. Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like mountains carven into leering chimeras, while the merchants of the revolting procession that once filed through it; though he was moved to deep thought, for in those parts of dreamland.
These, Randolph Carter steal to the seven lodges by the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. Meanwhile he did not mourn because those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.
This man was further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where they had ever found what the night, and the peal of the void of the pinnacle proper.
He was now thick, and from all points; and it seemed that the inner blacknesses out of sight toward higher ledges of the impassable peaks from the ground while the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbors his grandfather had heard in the land of Inquanok, and the night, but no man had ever found it grew darker and colder.
So at length the slimy touch they have indeed beheld it. All the afternoon he followed that rising road, which is yours, no man knows, for one grows accustomed to the toad-things! All golden and lovely it blazed in the narrow ridges of the changed state of things wafted over the sea; having found through their help and sending his gratitude to the unwholesome mane of that, but mainly that they had warned him not to be led away northward toward the pinnacle to see him from your window on Beacon Hill at evening behind lattice windows, and promised that he now meant to do, and the vividness all too soon worn out, and when the cold waste.
The Council of Sages, recognizing the visitor, offered to deposit him in the vale of Pnoth; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern he found it in the dreamlands around our own dreamland and having no power to cope with, and thought that perhaps he might do no business in the bazaars of Celephaïs, and there the galleon reached those bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse gables peeped out from the altar and darted out into the rock and ice and snow. So worn and narrow. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like tenants. These latter did not know the way to that unknown southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and sterile abysses of lava. Odors from those galleys which the fragrance of the waking world. So he had learned from the moonbeasts, so that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the gray dusk. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with grotesque termini and the cloudy phosphorescence of low clouds, but three of the tide turned, and there on a floor of the flower-fragrant wharves, where a face ought to be comfortable, and it would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and then came the deeper blackness of the old chief of the marvelous sunset city of vision that many ships had been rightly timed, there must be to see much slaughter, but which wise dreamers well know are the ears of earth's dreamland.
As the Shantak, sending them back gently to those scenes which are said to be. The thin hellish flutes of the clan had been up the rocks and lean back away from an unseen thing, Carter went to sleep in his youth, rose eagerly to meet the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Carter tried to think just what a night-gaunt would seize and pull its quivering pink tentacles expectantly. This was the plan of the onyx castle of Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with clouds and beheld in the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded, and the mountains were so placed that they may shine more lovely over the rail Carter saw that it might be assembled and brought against the stars in the monstrous castle, and once he thought of the more easterly of the head of Ulthar's detachment, a vast central plaza and the Shantak-birds of Celephaïs, asking the way.
Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, and pausing not at once, while at the vast gray peaks to the foot of the authentic race of the ghouls and slightly wounding another; but he is winking at this point all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than Throk's peaks. Where the mild gods of earth, and with a pshent of unknown places, or chant long tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. Less and less reluctant to visit the scattered rocks.
This loveliness, molded, crystallized, and Carter nodded as the highway passed through, and Carter knew at last those endless voids of that cyclopean cliff. Swiftly there came a cough from the black men of Parg up the winding road at the trailing Zoogs revealed the downward hopping of at least within a quarter of the great highway, and there were remade a waking world. Much of the ghouls gave the small hours. Then, the vindictive ghasts were upon him by the artists of Baharna, inhabiting a very great, and even to that jagged granite place, or whether in dream, and did not at once, while the guest had been smiling more and more gradual hills that lay around.
Showers of bones, and mixed, and promised that he had fared so long ago had I not been unmarked in Ulthar.
Then the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety. It was clear that these men the sailors and merchants were of one whom I need not necessarily be dead, and there was only the sum of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did they give any favoring sign when he crept closer, down the seventy steps of light appeared; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from impertinent curiosity.
#H.P. Lovecraft#automatically generated text#Patrick Mooney#Python#Markov chains#The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath#1926#The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath week
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The Art of Creating Synchronicities: The 12 Keys to Experiencing Mystical Reality
An excerpt on synchronicity is from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life ©2015 by Robert Moss
The Twelve Rules of Kairomancy: How to Experience Synchronistic Reality
Kairomancy - the practice of navigating by synchronicities. Divination by special moments. Alternative version: making magic by seizing those special moments.
1. Whatever You Think or Feel, the Universe Says Yes Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation (and potential synchronicity) you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you.
What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?
“ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.” - Honoré de Balzac
synchronicity is ultimately a reflection of our own consciousness and perception.
“We are magnets in an iron globe,” declared Emerson. If we are upbeat and positive, “we have keys to all doors…T he world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” Conversely, “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst… dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”
2. Chance Favors the Prepared Mind
“creators actively court chance. They’re always ready to notice and amplify with insight some accident of their environment virtually everybody else thinks is trivial or fails to notice. This capacity is, in a deep sense, what makes creators creative.” --John Briggs
“The writing of a book gets under way when the writer discovers that he is magnetized in a certain direction… Then everything he comes across — even a poster or a sign or a newspaper headline or words heard by chance in a café or in a dream — is deposited in a protected area like material waiting to be elaborated.” --Roberto Calasso
3. Your Own Will Come to You
“I found that every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect [is] endowed with magnetic power to attract to it its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities….One person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered.” -- George Russell on the law of spiritual gravitation
What we feed our minds and our bodies attracts or repels different parts of ourselves as well as different people and different classes of spirits.
4. You Live in the Speaking Land
As Australian Aborigines say, we live in a Speaking Land. How well we can hear depends on how we use our senses, both inner and outer. How much we can use and understand depends on selection, on grasping what matters.
Spirits of place include the spirits and holographic memories of humans who have lived and loved and struggled on the land before us.
5. Grow Your Poetic Health
“The bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads,” -- Paul Valéry
Kairomancers take care of their poetic health by developing a tolerance for ambiguity and a readiness to see more angles and options than the surface mind perceives.
Pay attention when the same theme, or symbol, or image comes up again and again synchronistically, just as you might pay attention to recurring dreams. When a theme or situation comes at you again and again in dreams, that is often a signal that there is a message coming through that you need to read correctly — and that, beyond merely getting the message, you need to do something about it, to take action. It is the same with rhyming sequences and repeating symbols in waking life.
When you begin to notice a repetition of a certain situation in life, you may say, “Okay, we’re going around the track again. Maybe I want to make sure that I’m not just going around and around in my life in circles of repetition, but that I am on a spiral path.” Which would mean that each time life loops around to where you think you were before, you’ve risen to a slightly higher level, so you can see things with greater awareness and, hopefully, make better choices.
There is a whole education in the art of poetic living in Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances”:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Nature is a temple whose living pillars Sometimes let slip mysterious messages; We walk here through a forest of symbols That watch us with knowing eyes.
Baudelaire, the urban dandy, has it exactly right: we are walking in a forest of living, synchronistic symbols that are looking at us. When we are in a state of poetic health, we understand that “the imagination is the most scientific of the faculties, because it is the only one to understand the universal analogy, or that which a mystical religion calls correspondence.”
6. Coincidence Multiplies on the Road
This refers both to outer movement and to inner transitions, especially when either carries you outside your normal rounds. You’re not just going through the constant rounds of your life. You’re out and about. You’re going somewhere new.
Nonetheless, unless you’ve changed your eyes, you won’t see the new things. You have to have different eyes in order to see different landscapes. Even so, it is generally true that when we are in movement, not in the familiar rut, we are more likely to notice and to generate and experience coincidence.
The bigger side of it is that when we are in motion in terms of life passages, including challenging passages, when we are falling in or out of love, falling in or out of relationships, when birth or death is in the field, coincidence and synchronicity tends to multiply not just in our perception, but in objective reality. It multiplies because everything is astir. Things are not constant. They are themselves in motion.
“If I think that my life is linked to the dramas of other people in other times and that I have inherited karma from what they did or did not do, maybe I can reach back to them, launching from the moment of Now. Maybe my thoughts and actions now help or hinder in their own time — which is also now — and may be more helpful as I rise to greater consciousness of how all this works.”
It is possible to operate with these two seemingly contradictory visions of reality: linear karma in Chronos time and the simultaneity of synchronistic experience in the multiverse in a spacious Now. It is like the observation in physics that something can be both a particle and a wave, and you will see it one way or the other according to how you observe it.
7. By What You Fall, You May Rise
When we are seized by terrible emotions of rage or grief in our own lives, we can choose to try to harness the raw energy involved and turn it — like a fire hose — toward creative or healing action.
You will want to remember that on the path of transformation and synchronicity, you reach a point where you break down or you break through, and sometimes the breakdown comes before the breakthrough.
Sometimes a fair amount of Chronos time is required to appreciate what Emerson called “the compensations of calamity.” He wrote that such compensations become apparent “after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the remedial force that underlies all facts.”
8. Invoked or Uninvoked, Gods Are Present
“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,”
In the Odyssey, as in ancient Greek society, dreams and visions are the most important mode of divination and signposts of synchronicity.
Consciously or unconsciously, we walk on a kind of mythic edge. Just behind that gauzy veil of ordinary understanding, there are other powers, beings who live in the fifth dimension or dimensions beyond. To them, our lives may be as open as the lives of others would be to us if we could fly over the rooftops — and nobody had a roof on their house, and we could look in and see it from every possible angle.
A kairomancer is always going to be willing to look for the hidden hand in the play of coincidence and synchronicity, and to turn to more than one kind of oracle to check on the exact nature of the game.
9. You Walk in Many Worlds
Part of the secret logic of our lives is that we are all connected to counterpart personalities — Seth calls them “probable selves” — living in other times and other probable universes. Their gifts and challenges can become part of our current stories, not only through linear karma, but through the synchronistic interaction now across time and dimensions. The dramas of past, future, or parallel personalities can affect us now. We can help or hinder each other.
In the model of understanding I have developed, this family of counterpart souls is joined on a higher level by a sort of hub personality, an “oversoul,” a higher self within a hierarchy of higher selves going up and up. The choices that you make, the moves that you make, can attract or repel other parts of your larger self.
The hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.
10. Marry Your Field
“The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.” --W. H. Auden,
What is your field? It’s not work in the ordinary sense, or what your diplomas say you are certified to do, or how you describe yourself in a job résumé — although it can encompass all of those things. Your field is where you ache to be. Your field is what you will do, day or night, for the sheer joy of the doing, without counting the cost or the consequences. Your field is the territory within which you can do the Work that your deeper life is calling you to do. Your field is not limitless. You can’t bring anything into creative manifestation without accepting a certain form or channel, which requires you to set limits and boundaries. So your field is also the place within which the creative force that is in you will develop a form.
And out of this constancy — through tantrums and all — will come that blaze of synchronous creation when the sun shines at midnight, when time will stop or speed up for you, as you will when you are so deep in the Zone that no move can be wrong. Depending on your choice of theme and direction, you may find you are joined by other creative intelligences, reaching to you synchronistically from across time and dimensions in that blessed union that another poet, Yeats, defined as the “mingling of minds.”
When the sun no longer shines at midnight, when you are back on clock time, you won’t waste yourself regretting that today you’re not in the Zone. You are still married. You’ll do the work that now belongs to the Work.
11. Dance with the Trickster
The Gatekeeper is one of the most important archetypes that is active in our lives and is one of the keys to calling in more synchronicities. He or she is that power that opens and closes our doors and roads. The Gatekeeper is personified in many traditions: as the elephant-headed Ganesa in India; as Eshu/Eleggua in West Africa; as Anubis in ancient Egypt; as Hermes or Hecate in ancient Greece.
Trickster is the mode the Gatekeeper — that power that opens doors in your life — adopts when you need to change and adapt and recover your sense of humor. If you are set in your ways and wedded to a linear agenda, the Trickster can be your devil. If you are open to the unexpected gift of synchronicity, and willing to turn on a dime (or something smaller), the Trickster can be a very good friend.
The Trickster will find ways to correct unbalanced and overcontrolling or ego-driven agendas, just as spontaneous night dreams can explode waking fantasies and delusions. Our thoughts shape our realities, but sometimes they produce a distinctly synchronistic boomerang effect. The Trickster wears animal guise in folklore and mythology, appearing as the fox or the squirrel, as spider or coyote or raven.
The well-known psychic and paranormal investigator Alan Vaughan tells a great story against himself about the peril of taking synchronistic signs too seriously. He read that Jung had noted a perfect correspondence between the number of his tram ticket, the number of a theater ticket he bought the same day, and a telephone number that someone gave him that evening.
Vaughan decided to make his own experiment with numbers that day in Freiburg, where he was taking a course. He boarded a tram and carefully noted the ticket number, 096960. The number of the tram car itself was 111. He noticed that if you turned the numbers upside down, they still read the same. He was now alert for the appearance of more synchronistic reversible numbers. Still focused on his theme of upside-down numbers, he banged into a trash can during his walk home. He observed ruefully, “I nearly ended by being upside down myself.” When he inspected the trash can, he saw that it bore a painted name: JUNG.
It was impossible not to feel the Trickster in play. Alan felt he had been reminded — in an entirely personal way — that the further we go with this stuff, the more important it is to keep our sense of humor.
A title of Eshu, who is both Trickster and Gatekeeper in the Yoruba tradition of West Africa, is Enforcer of Sacrifice. He is the one who makes sure that the gods receive their offerings. The price of entry may be a story, told with humor.
12. The Way Will Show the Way
Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Wayfarer, there is no way, you make the way by walking it.
Make it up as you go along Make it up as you go along Make it up Make it up The way will show the way
Make it up Shake it up Fake it up Bake it up The fox may know the way The star will light the way The dream will show the way The heart will find the way The way will show the way
Creating Synchronicities: The Oath of the Kairomancer
Twelve rules for the kairomancer, and one OATH, which will help us to remember the heart of the practice. To navigate by synchronicity and catch those Kairos moments, we need to be:
1. Open to new experience;
2. Available, willing to set aside plans and step out of boxes;
3. Thankful, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises; and ready to
4. Honor our special moments by taking appropriate action.
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The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme -- When the Lights Went Out Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy -- HUGH NIBLEY 2001
The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme
A Somber Theme
Ever since Eusebius sought with dedicated zeal to prove the survival of the church by blazing a trail back to the apostles, the program of church history has been the same: “To give a clear and comprehensive, scientifically established view of the development of the visible institution of salvation founded by Christ.”1 To describe it—not to question it. By its very definition church history requires unquestioning acceptance of the basic proposition that the church did survive. One may write endlessly about the Infant Church, l’Eglise naissante, die Pflanzung der Kirche, etc., but one may not ask why the early Christians themselves described their church not as a lusty infant but as an old and failing woman; one may trace the triumphant spread of the Unquenchable Light through storm and shadow, but one may not ask why Jesus himself insisted that the Light was to be taken away.2 Church history seems to be resolved never to raise the fundamental question of survival as the only way of avoiding a disastrous answer, and the normal reaction to the question—did the church remain on earth?—has not been serious inquiry in a richly documented field but shocked recoil from the edge of an abyss into which few can look without a shudder.3
Yet today that question is being asked again, as it has been in other times of stress and crisis, not with the journalistic flourish of Soltau’s Sind wir noch Christen? but with the cautious historical appraisal of a Hans J. Schoeps, contemplating the age-old tension between eschatology and church with their conflicting ideas about the church’s future. Can it be that the repugnance of churchmen to eschatology and their coolness toward the authentic writings of the early fathers are due in no small part to the dim view which the primitive Christians took of the prospects of the church?4 The purpose of this paper is to list briefly the principal arguments supporting the thesis that the church founded by Jesus and the apostles did not survive and was not expected to. We shall consider the fate of the church under three heads: (a) the declarations of the early Christians concerning what was to befall it; (b) their strange behavior in the light of those declarations; (c) the affirmations and denials, doubts and misgivings of the church leaders of a later day. Our theme is the passing of the church; our variations, designated below by parenthetical numbers, are an abundance of striking and often neglected facets of church history.
The Early Christian View
Christian apologists had a ready answer to those shallow-minded critics who made merry over Christ’s failure to convert the world and God’s failure to protect his saints from persecution and death: God does not work that way, it was explained; his rewards are on the other side, and his overwhelming intervention is reserved for the eschaton, until which all sorts of reverses can be expected—nihil enim est nobis promissum ad hanc vitam; the prospect of failure and defeat in the world, far from being incompatible with the gospel message, is an integral part of it.5
(1) Jesus announced in no uncertain terms that his message would be rejected by all men, as the message of the prophets had been before,6 and that he would soon leave the world to die in its sins and seek after him in vain.7 The light was soon to depart, leaving a great darkness “in which no man can work,” while “the prince of this world” would remain, as usual, in possession of the field.8 (2) In their turn the disciples were to succeed no better than their Lord: “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?”9 Like him they were to be “hated of all men,” going forth as sheep among wolves, “sent last as it were appointed unto death,”10 with the promise that as soon as they completed their mission the end would come.11
(3) But what of the church? Those who accepted the teaching were to suffer exactly the same fate as the Lord and the apostles; they were advised to “take . . . the prophets . . . for an example of suffering affliction and of patience,” and to “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try” them, but rejoice rather to suffer as Christ did “in the flesh . . . that we may be also glorified together.”12 After them too the prince of this world was waiting to take over; they too were to be lambs among wolves, rejected as were the Master and the disciples: “The world knoweth us not because it knew him not.”13 Knowing that “whosoever will save his life must lose it,” they openly disavowed any expectation of success, individual or collective, in this world.14 (4) As for the doctrine, it was to receive the same rough treatment, soon falling into the hands of worldly men who would pervert the gospel of Christ from a thing the world found highly obnoxious to something it was willing to embrace, for such has always been the fate of God’s revelations to men.15
(5) All this bodes ill for the interval between the ascension and the parousia, or second coming; the Zwischenzeit was to be a bad time and a long one.16 What is more, it begins almost immediately, the apostles themselves calling attention to all the fatal signs, and marveling only that it has come so soon.17 As soon as the Lord departs there comes “the lord of this world, and hath nothing in me”; in the very act of casting out the Lord of the vineyard the usurpers seize it for themselves, to remain in possession until his return;18 no sooner does he sow his wheat than the adversary sows tares, and only when the Lord returns again can the grain be “gathered together,” that is, into a church, the ruined field itself being not the church but specifically “the world.”19 After the sheep come the wolves, “not sparing the flock,” which enjoys no immunity (Acts 20:29); after sound doctrine come fables;20 after the charismatic gifts only human virtues (1 Corinthians 13:8, 13). The list is a grim one, but it is no more impressive than (6) the repeated insistence that there is to be an end, not the end of the world, but “the consummation of the age.”21 It is to come with the completion of the missionary activities of the apostles, and there is no more firmly rooted tradition in Christendom than the teaching that the apostles completed the assigned preaching to the nations in their own persons and in their own time, so that the end could come in their generation.22
(7) It was no imaginary end. When the saints were asked to “endure to the end,” that meant just one thing, as Tertullian observes—to suffer death.23 When the sorely pressed Christians need “a strong comfort,” the only comfort forthcoming is the promise of the resurrection and the assurance of salvation “whether we live or die.”24Never is there any mention of relief on the way, of happy times ahead, of final victory for the cause, or of the consoling thought that generations yet unborn will call one blessed. Such assurances belong to a later age; the only encouragement the first Christians ever got is that given to soldiers making a last-ditch stand: they are ordered not to attack but “to have long patience,” grimly hanging on “to the end,” because only by so doing can they show their worthiness to inherit eternal life.25
But we are told not only of one but explicitly of two ways in which the ancient church was to make its exit. (8) For far more numerous than those true saints who were to give their lives as witnesses were those who were to succumb to the blandishments of false teachers. The fate of the vast majority of Christians was not to be overcome by a frontal attack—true martyrs were relatively few—but to be led astray by perverters.26 The spoilers do not destroy the vineyard but “seize the inheritance” for themselves; we read of betrayal, disobedience, corruptions; of deceivers, perverters, traitors; of wresting the scriptures, denying the gifts, quenching the Spirit, turning love into hate, truth to fables, sheep to wolves; of embracing “another gospel,” and so forth. The offenders are not pagans but loudly professing Christians.27 As, once the prophets are dead, everyone paints their tombs with protestations of devotion, so “when the master of the house has risen up and shut the door,” shall the eager host apply for admission to his company—too late.28 The apostasy described in the New Testament is not desertion of the cause, but perversion of it, a process by which “the righteous are removed, and none perceives it.”29 The Christian masses do not realize what is happening to them; they are “bewitched” by a thing that comes as softly and insidiously as the slinging of a noose.30 It is an old familiar story, as Rudolf Bultmann notes: “The preaching of Jesus does not hold out any prospect for the future of the people. . . . The present people does not behave otherwise than its predecessors who had persecuted and killed the prophets. . . . The message of Jesus does not contain any promise of the splendid future of Israel.”31 (9) As is well known, the early Christians viewed the future with a mixture of fear and longing, of longing for the triumphant return of the Lord but of deadly fear of the long and terrible rule of the cosmoplanes that had to come first. So great is the dread of what they know lies ahead, that devout fathers of the church pray for the indefinite postponement of the Day of the Lord itself as the price of delaying the rule of darkness.32
(10) The apostolic fathers denounce with feeling the all too popular doctrine that God’s church simply cannot fail. All past triumphs, tribulations, and promises, they insist, will count for nothing unless the people now repent and stand firm in a final test that lies just ahead; God’s past blessings and covenants, far from being a guarantee of immunity (as many fondly believe) are the very opposite, for “the greater the knowledge we have received, the greater rather is the danger in which we lie.”33 The case of the Jews, to say nothing of the fallen angels, should prove that we are never safe.34 God will surely allow his people to perish if they continue in the way they are going—he will hasten their dissolution: “Since I called and ye hearkened not . . . therefore I in my turn will laugh at your destruction. . . . For there will come a time when you will call upon me and I shall not hear you.”35 The apostolic fathers compare the church to fallen Israel and confirm their solemn warnings by citing the most lurid and uncompromising passages of scripture.36 (11) They see the church running full speed in the wrong direction and in great distress of mind plead with it to do an about-face “before it is too late,” as it soon will be.37 For their whole concern is not to make new converts but rather “to save from perishing a soul that has already known Christ,” seeing to it that as many as possible pass “the fiery test ahead,” keep the faith that most are losing, and so reach the goal of glory beyond.38 They know that the names of Christ and Christian carry on but find no comfort in that since those names are being freely used by impostors and corrupters,39 whom “the many” are gladly following.40
(12) The call to repentance of the apostolic fathers is a last call; they labor the doctrine of the Two Ways as offering to Christian society a last chance to choose between saving its soul by dying in the faith or saving its skin by coming to terms with the world.41 They have no illusions as to the way things are going: the church has lost the gains it once made, the people are being led by false teachers,42 there is little to hinder the fulfillment of the dread (and oft-quoted) prophecy, “the Lord shall deliver the sheep of his pasture and their fold and their tower to destructions.”43 The original tower with its perfectly cut and well-fitted stones is soon to be taken from the earth, and in its place will remain only a second-class tower of defective stones which could not pass the test.44 In the Visions of the Shepherd of Hermas, the church is represented as an old and failing lady—”because your spirit is old and already fading away”—who is carried out of the world; only in the world beyond does she appear as a blooming and ageless maiden.45 The apostolic fathers take their leave of a church not busily engaged in realizing the kingdom but fast falling asleep; the lights are going out, the Master has departed on his long journey, and until he returns all shall sleep. What lies ahead is the Wintertime of the Just, the time of mourning for the Bridegroom, when men shall seek the Lord and not find him, and “seek to do good, but no longer be able to.”46
Strange Behavior
What the strangely negative behavior of the first Christians suggests is less the expectation of an immediate parousia than the shutting up of the shop until a distant reopening. (13) It has often been noted that their public relations were the world’s worst, that they “could not and did not court publicity outside the movement.”47 In sharp contrast to the later church, they were convinced, as Hilary observes, that the church “could not be Christ’s unless the world hated it.”48 The disciples, following the example and precept of their Master, made no effort to win public sympathy and support.49 This hard and uncompromising attitude has puzzled observers in every age, and indeed it makes little sense in an institution seeking either to convert the world or to survive in it.50 None knew better than the Christians themselves that their intransigence had no survival value, and yet they went right on “turning the world upside down” and mortally offending respectable people.
(14) The first Christians maintained a strange and stubborn reticence on certain matters (including their beliefs about the second coming), even when their silence led to serious misunderstanding and persecution.51 Even among the members the teaching was carefully rationed, for it was not the trivia but the high and holy mysteries, the most prized things of the kingdom, that were carefully kept out of circulation,52 so that Origen can report no clear official teaching in his day “not only regarding minor matters, but on the very first principles of the gospel.”53 Critics and scholars since Celsus have been puzzled by this early Christian reticence on matters which, if the church was to carry on, should have been highly publicized.54 And while Christians since Irenaeus have categorically denied that any teachings of the apostolic church were withheld, they have done so only to avoid the alarming implications of the primitive Christian reticence.55
(15) Consistent with the policy of reticence is the strict limitation placed on the missionary activities of Jesus and his disciples, both in time and place, and their firm rejection of the highly successful proselytizing methods of the Jews. In his recent study of this anomaly, Joachim Jeremias has concluded that while Jesus did indeed envisage a universal call to the nations, he thought of it as coming only at the eschaton and not at the time of his mortal mission, which clearly did not have world conversion as its objective.56
(16) No less striking is the conspicuous absence of any missionary organization in the apostolic church and the complete indifference of the apostolic fathers to the great business of converting the world.57 Their prayer for the church is to be gathered out of the world, not spread abroad in it, and to be caught up into the kingdom, not to build it here.58
(17) Instead of settling down as the later Christians sensibly did to long-term projects of conversion, the early Christians were driven by the “keen sense of urgency and stress” that fills their writings. “The time is short” was the refrain, and the missionaries had only time to give a hasty warning message and be on their way. It seems, according to K. Holl, that the apostles went about their business ohne für die Zukunft zu sorgen—without a thought for the future.59 What strange missionaries! They never speak of the bright future ahead nor glory in its prospects but seem quite prepared to accept the assurance that they would preach to a generation that would not hear them and that, as in the days of Noah, the end would follow hard upon their preaching.60
(18) But if the early saints mention no glorious future for the church, when that should be their strongest comfort, they do shed abundant tears when they look ahead. If the fall of Jerusalem and the temple was to be the great opportunity for the church that later theologians insist it was, Christ and the early saints were not aware of it, for they give no indication of regarding the event as anything but tragic.61 Paul viewed the future of the church “with tears” as, according to early accounts, did other leaders.62 Apocryphal writings describe the apostles as weeping inconsolably when Jesus leaves them to their fates, and in turn the church shedding bitter tears for the loss of the apostles, leaving it without guidance and counsel.63 Whatever their historical value, such accounts convincingly convey a mood, and Kirsopp Lake recommended Browning’s terrible Death in the Desert as the best background reading for understanding the state of mind of the church at the passing of the apostles—all is lost.64
(19) The failure of the apostles to leave behind them written instructions for the future guidance of the church has often been noted and sadly regretted. It is hard to conceive of such a colossal oversight if the founders had actually envisaged a long future for the church. The awkwardness of the situation is apparent from Robert M. Grant’s explanation of it, namely, that the apostles “did not live to see the Church fully organized and at work.”65 As if they should wait until the work was completed before giving instructions for completing it!66 Actually the most tragic disorganization and confusion followed hard upon the passing of the apostles, according to Hegesippus, and as a direct result of it. Plainly the early leaders made no careful provision for the future, even as they “failed to compose anything that could properly be described as ‘church-history'” in spite of their great interest in times, seasons, and dispensations and the imperative need and accepted use of sacred history in the economy of religious organizations.67
(20) Then there is the total neglect of education in the early church, which Gustave Bardy would justify with desperate logic, arguing that education for the young was neglected because the church got its membership from converts among the adult population—fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani.68 And were all those converts childless, and were there no children in the church for those three long centuries during which it was without schools? In view of the great emphasis placed on education by the church in the fourth century, its total neglect in the preceding centuries can only have been deliberate. Well might Eugéne de Faye find it strange that Jesus “ne songe nullement î former une école de jeunes hommes qui . . . seraient les hérétiers de sa doctrine” (does not think to form a school of young men who would be the heirs of his teaching), for if there were to be heirs of the teaching such a provision was indispensable.69 Why no education, then? Actually the apostolic fathers were greatly concerned about education, warning their people against the bad education of the world and chiding them for their neglect of the only education that counted—that which prepared the young for the next life.70
(21) Neglect of standard education was matched by an equally disturbing indifference to the social and political problems which would necessarily be of vital concern to any enduring social institution. For years liberal scholars sought to discover a social gospel where none was to be found, and it is indeed hard to believe that a religion of brotherly love could so persistently ignore the crying social ills of the day.71 But the Christians excused themselves with the explanation that more urgent business had priority—they had no time for such things.72 Why not, if the church was to continue? (22) And why should a permanent and growing church refuse to invest in lands and buildings? For a long time eminent churchmen endorsed the old Christian prejudice against the construction of sorely needed church buildings.73But what could have been the original objection to anything as innocent and salutary as the building of a church? The early Christians tell us: the church cannot own real estate (they explain) because it is only here temporarily, and it must never be allowed to forget that fact.74 (23) Hans Lietzmann has shown that when “the Church sojourning at Rome” or elsewhere writes to “the Church sojourning at Corinth” or elsewhere it means that both churches are thought of only as temporary visitors in their cities; collectively and individually the church was here only on a brief pilgrimage. They were das wandernde Gottesvolk, strangers and pilgrims all, destined for but a short time upon the earth.75
Planned Martyrdom
The strongest argument for the survival of the church is the natural reluctance of men to accept defeat—even temporary defeat—for the work of God: “Tot denique martyria in vacuum coronata?” cries Tertullian, ignoring Polycarp’s assurance that “all of these ran not in vain, because they are with the Lord in the place which is their due, with whom they also suffered. For they did not love this present world.”76 (24) The loudly proclaimed objectives of the first martyrs do not include the future prosperity of the church. In bidding farewell to Jews and Gentiles, Paul announces that his missions to them have been successful, not in terms of converts, but of clearing himself of a terrible responsibility: henceforth their blood is on their own heads; he has fulfilled his assignment successfully, for a crown awaits him—on the other side.77 “Thus it appears,” writes Oscar Cullmann, “that the coming of the Kingdom does not depend upon the success of this ‘preaching’ but only on the fact of the proclamation itself.”78 What does depend on the preaching is (a) the salvation of the preacher, who is under condemnation unless he bears witness and frees himself of “the blood of this generation,” and (b) the convicting of a wicked world which must be “without excuse” in the day of judgment.79 The preaching is not to convert the world but “for a witness”—martyria occurs more than six times as frequently as kerygma in the New Testament—and it has long been recognized that the primary qualification and calling of an apostle was to be an eyewitness.80 The calling of a witness is to preach to an unbelieving generation ripe for destruction, with the usual expectation (as the name “martyr” indicates) of being rejected and put to death.
(25) The strange indifference of the early martyrs to the future of a church for which later ages fondly believed they gave their lives has not received the comment it deserves. In a world in which a noble altruism was constantly on the lips of orators, in a society whose model citizen was that Pius Aeneas who promised his afflicted followers that grateful generations to come would call them blessed, and in a sect which placed brotherly love before all else, the Christian martyrs, unlike the pagan martyrs or Christian heroes of later times, never take comfort in the thought that others will profit by their sufferings, or that their deeds will be remembered and their names revered in ages to come. Ignatius, Andrew, and Perpetua will neither live nor die for the church but talk of nothing but their personal glory with Christ hereafter, “for while he suffered for us, we suffer for ourselves.”81 This concept of martyrdom is the opposite of that which later prevailed, as Dionysius of Alexandria points out in a letter to Novatus, noting that whereas the early martyr was concerned “for his own soul alone . . . today the martyr thinks in terms of the whole Church.”82 Since the latter is the more humane and natural view, there must have been a very good reason for ignoring it. It could not have been that primitive Christians enjoyed suffering, for they did not;83 nor were they as self-centered even as the later Christians, who found in martyrdom the solace of matchless public acclaim and undying earthly renown.84 The very tears of the early leaders show plainly enough (as Chrysostom often observes) that they were genuinely concerned about the future. If, then, the martyrs refuse to think and speak in terms of a continuing church, it is not because they are peculiarly self-centered people, but simply because they see no future for the church.
(26) So firmly fixed in the Christian mind is the conviction that every true Christian, every saint, is by very definition a martyr, that when persecutions ceased devout souls felt themselves cheated, and new ways and means of achieving martyrdom had to be devised, though they were never more than substitutes for the real thing.85 A telling argument for any sect seeking to prove its authenticity has ever been the claim to have more martyrs than the others,86 while the largest church of all at the peak of its power must needs describe itself in pathetic terms as a persecuted little band of saints—for tradition will not allow any other kind of church to be the true one.87 From the beginning the church is a community of martyrs, whose proper business is “nothing else than to study how to die”;88 and though “the final note is of the victory of God,” as Clarence T. Craig observes, before that happy culmination John “seems to have anticipated a universal martyrdom for the Church.”89
The Great Gap
That ominous gap in the records which comes just at the moment of transition from a world-hostile to a world-conditioned Christianity has recently received growing attention and a number of interesting labels, such as the lacuna, the eclipse, the void, the great vacuum, the narrows, the period of oblivion, etc.90 S. G. F. Brandon compares it to a tunnel “from which we emerge to find a situation which is unexpected in terms of the situation which went before.”91 (27) The church, that is, which comes out of the tunnel is not the church that went into it. The great gap is more than a mere absence of documents; it is an abrupt break in the continuity of the church, so complete as to prove to Theodore Brandt that “the living faith cannot be transmitted from past ages,” which is at least an admission that it has not been.92The early Christians knew they were approaching a tunnel; they were acutely aware of “the terrible possibility of apostasy for the church”—not merely of apostasy from it93—and never doubted “the general apostasy which would precede the coming of the Messiah.”94 And the church of the next age is just as aware of having passed through the tunnel and losing its more precious possessions in the process. (28) For after the passing of the apostles “le vide est immense” (the void is immense), since it was the presence of living witnesses that had made the original church what it was.95 Henceforth the “elders” of old are referred to as a fabulous race of beings endowed with gifts, powers, and knowledge far exceeding anything found on earth any more, and mere proximity to the apostles and the elders becomes a special mark of sanctity and authority.96 As “the great lights went out” the most devoted Christians engaged in a wistful “Operation Salvage” to rescue what might still be saved of “those things which came by the living voices that yet remained.”97 What more eloquent commentary on the passing of the church?
(29) At the same time a horde of deceivers, “who up until then had been lurking in dark corners,” as soon as they saw that there were no more apostles left to call them to account, came boldly forth, each claiming that he alone had the gnosis which the Lord had secretly imparted to the apostles after the resurrection.98Strangely, they met with no official opposition: the fathers who oppose them emphatically disclaim any apostolic authority and, what is more, know of no one else who might have it.99 “Nous sommes incapable,” writes D. Busy, “d’expliquer comment, la terre enti≤re se trouvant évangélisée, les prédicateurs de l’évangile ont l’air de disparaître et laissent le champ libre aux faux méssies et aux faux proph≤tes; comme . . . la bête de la mer ne rencontre plus la moindre résistance” (We are unable to explain how, while the whole was being evangelized, the preachers of the gospel seem to disappear and leave the field free for false messiahs and false prophets; how . . . the beast of the sea does not meet the least resistance).100 The prophecy (2 Thessalonians 2:2–3) is no more puzzling than the event; for the second century, the great moment of transition, is no age of faith but “par excellence the age of Heresy.”101
It was not a case of reformers or schismatics attacking the main church—the problem was, since the Christians had always rejected with contempt the argument of mere numbers, to find the true church among a great number of sects, each claiming to be the one true original article and displaying facsimiles of ancient spiritual gifts, rites, and officers to prove it.102 Justin knows of no certain norm for distinguishing true Christians from false, and Irenaeus struggles manfully but vainly to discover one.103 While the perplexed masses asked embarrassing questions and flocked to the banner of any quack who gave promise of possessing the gifts and powers, especially prophecy, which it was commonly felt the church should have inherited,104 even the greatest churchmen hesitated and wavered, unable to resist the appeal of the old charismatic Christianity or to decide just where it was to be found.105 In the end, in Adolf von Harnack’s words, “Gnosticism won half a victory,” for if the “Gnostics-so-called” had to default on electrifying promises which they could not fulfill, neither was any found to match their false claims with the genuine article, and the great surge of hope and enthusiasm that had carried the gnostics on its crest subsided in disillusionment and compromise.106
(30) Still, the constant revival through the centuries of the old stock gnostic claim that the one true apostolic church has by some miracle of survival come down to the possession of this or that group, is a perpetual reminder of the failure of subsequent Christianity to come up to the expectations of the first church.107 (31) For the chronic discontent which haunts the Christian churches is by no means limited to the lunatic fringe. The vigorous beginnings of monasticism and pilgrimage were frankly attempts to return to the first order of the church, with its unworldly austerities and its spiritual manifestations, and as such were viewed by official Christianity as a clear vote of no-confidence—a rebuke and repudiation of the system.108
(32) Modern students have agreed in describing the second generation of the church as a time of spiritual decline and low vitality, of torpor and exhaustion, “a dull period of feeble originality and a dearth of great personalities.”109 “Enfin,” writes Bardy, “c’est le tiedeur que domine.”110 Doctrinally it was a definite “Abfall vom Evangelium,” with the basic teachings altered and denatured beyond recognition.111 As “the understanding of the Spirit . . . became lost . . . and the Christian had to rely on his own powers,” that Christian became calculating, complacent, and respectable, in a word, all that the first Christian was not.112 The overall impression, Maurice Goguel reports, is “definitely one of decadence.”113
Yet the same voices that bring these charges against the second generation unanimously approve the new mentality as a necessary coming down out of the clouds, a new-found sobriety and maturity, a sensible acceptance of the facts of life, as “uplifted eyes . . . [turned back] to earth . . . to find their assurance in hard facts.”114 At last, we are told, the Christian could enjoy “what he had been missing so long, the consideration and respect of the outside world.”115 Only by scrapping the old “evangelical eschatology,” according to one Catholic authority, could “Christian morality and the Church itself . . . take on larger dimensions,” this being (according to another) a necessary step “towards wider horizons than those to which the Galilean nucleus had chosen to confine itself.”116 One may well ask how wider horizons and larger dimensions could be achieved by a Christianity admittedly “more hard and fast, less spontaneous, and in a sense, more cramped” than what had gone before; Johannes de Zwaan, who describes it thus, marvels “that the main stream of Gospel-tradition could pass through these narrows.”117 But the larger dimensions were the intellectual splendors of Hellenism, toward which the gnostic agitation had hurried the feet of the church, the new Christian culture substituting erudition for inspiration, the rhetoric of the schools for the gift of tongues, a numerus episcoporum for the Spiritus per spiritalem hominem,118 and the orderly mechanics of ritual for the unpredictable operation of the spiritual gifts as “eschatological consciousness changed into sacramental piety.”119 “Christianity,” wrote Wilhelm Christ, “was squeezed into a system congenial to pagan-Greek-rationalist thought, and in that safe protective suit of armor was able to face up to the world; but in the process it had to sacrifice its noblest moral and spiritual forces.”120 In paying the stipulated price for survival, the church of the second century proved what the early church knew so well, that whosoever would save his life must lose it.121
(33) The sensational change from the first to the second generation of the church was not, as it is usually depicted, a normal and necessary step in a long steady process of evolution. It was radical and abrupt, giving the old Christianity when set beside the new “tout l’aspect d’une anomalie,” as Louis Duchesne puts it—an anomaly so extreme that many scholars have doubted that the primitive church ever existed.122 “Rapidity of evolution explains the difference between the gospels and the second century,” we are assured.123 But rapidity is the sign not of evolution but of revolution, and the second-century upheaval was no part of a continuing trend at all, for after that one tremendous shift there are no more such changes of course in the way of the church: henceforward fundamental attitudes and concepts remain substantially unchanged.124 Eduard Norden has noted that early Christian literature had no literary predecessors and no successors but appears as a completely alien intrusion into the classical tradition, an incongruous and unwelcome interruption, an indigestible lump which, however, disappears as suddenly as it came, leaving the schoolmen to resume operations as if nothing had happened.125 The march of civilization continued, but it was not the march of the church.
Arguments for Survival
The arguments put forth by those who would prove the survival of the church are enough in themselves to cast serious doubts upon it. (34) The first thing that strikes one is the failure of the ingenuity of scholarship to discover any serious scriptural support for the thesis. There are remarkably few passages in the Bible that yield encouragement even to the most determined exegesis, and it is not until centuries of discussion have passed that we meet with the now familiar interpretations of the “mustard seed” and “gates-of-hell” imagery, which some now hold to be eschatological teachings having no reference whatever to the success of the church on earth.126
The most effective assertions of survival are the rhetorical ones. We have already referred to the subtle use of such loaded terms as the Infant Church, the Unquenchable Light, etc., which merely beg the question. Equally effective is the “quand même” (even though) argument, which frankly admits the exceedingly dim prospects of the early church and the scant possibility of survival and then, without further explanation, announces in awed and triumphant tones: “But in spite of everything it did survive!” (35) Survival is admittedly a miracle and a paradox; its very incredibility is what makes it so wonderful.127 Ecstatic assertion alone carries the day where any serious discussion of evidence would mark one a cavilling cynic, for this argument comes right out of the schools of rhetoric; its favorite image, that of the storm-tossed ship which somehow never sinks because it bears virtuous souls, is already a commonplace in the Roman schools of declamation.128 The thrilling voices that assure us that all the powers of evil rage in vain are not those of the early fathers, but of imperial panegyrists and spell-binding bishops of another day, with their comforting pronouncements that God has, as it were, invested so heavily in his church that he simply would not think of letting it fail at this late date.129
The strongest support of this “facile and dangerous optimism” has always been the decisive fact of survival itself, as proven by the undiminished eminence of the Christian name; only, in fact, if one defines apostasy as “a more or less express renunciation” of that name can the survival of the church be taken for granted, as it generally is.130 But what is the authority of the Christian label when early apologists can declare that it has become meaningless in their time, being as freely employed by false as by true Christians?131 Or when the apostolic fathers protest that vast numbers “bear the name deceitfully”? Or when Jesus himself warns that “many shall come in my name,” and all of them falsely: “Believe none of them!”132
A favorite theme of fiction and drama has ever been the stirring victory of Christianity over all the powers and blandishments of paganism. But this was victory over a straw man, a papier-mâché dragon brought onto the stage to prove to a confused and doubting world that the right had been victorious after all.133 The early leaders worried constantly, and only, about the enemy within; paganism, long dead on its feet, the butt of the schoolmen for centuries, was not the real enemy at all. (36) There were, to be sure, areas of doctrine and ritual in which paganism did present a real threat, but precisely there the church chose to surrender to the heathen, the pious economy of whose splendid festivals and the proud preeminence of whose venerated schools became an integral part of the Christian heritage.134
Christians have often taken comfort in the axiom that it is perfectly unthinkable that God should allow his church to suffer annihilation, that he would certainly draw the line somewhere. This is the very doctrine of ultimate immunity against which the apostolic fathers thunder, and later fathers remind us that we may not reject the appalling possibility simply because it is appalling.135 (37) If wicked men can “kill the Prince of Peace” and Belial enjoy free reign as “the prince of this world,” where is one to draw the line at what is unthinkable? For Hilary the suggestion that Jesus actually wept is baffling, paradoxical, and unthinkable—”yet he wept!”136 If “after the prophets came the false prophets, and after the Apostles the false apostles, and after the Christ the Antichrist,” is it unthinkable that the church should likewise have a dubious successor?137 After all, Christians like Jerome found it quite unthinkable that Rome could ever fall and used identical arguments to affirm the ultimate impregnability of the church and the empire.138 The hollowness of the rhetorical arguments for sure survival has become apparent in times of world calamity, when the orators themselves have, like Basil and Chrysostom, suddenly reverted to the all-but-forgotten idiom of apocalyptic and eschatology and asked, “Is it not possible that the Lord has already deserted us entirely?”139 The question is the more revealing for being uttered with heavy reluctance and in times of deepest soul-searching.
(38) How deeply rooted in Christian thinking was the belief that the church would pass away is seen in the remarkable insistence of the orators of the fourth century that the great victory of the church, which at that time took everyone by surprise, was actually a restoration of the church, which had passed away entirely: “We of the church were not half-dead but wholly dead and buried in our graves,” the apostasy and the age of darkness had actually come as predicted, and were now being followed, as prophesied, by a new day of restoration.140 Here was an explanation that fitted the traditional view of the future: the church, it was explained, is like the moon, a thing that disappears and reappears from time to time.141 But if the fourth-century triumph was really that “restitution of all things” foretold by the apostle (Acts 3:21), it could only betoken the arrival of the eschaton, and so the orators duly proclaimed the dawn of the millennial day and the coming of the New Jerusalem.142
(39) One of the most significant things about “the glorious and unexpected triumph of the Church” was precisely that it was unexpected; everybody was surprised and puzzled by it.143 It was not what people had been taught to expect, and the remedy for their perplexity was a bold revamping of the story: “The facts speak for themselves,” is Chrysostom’s appeal,144 and Eusebius sets his hand to a new kind of church history, with success—easy, inevitable success—as his theme.145Traditional concepts were quickly and radically overhauled. The familiar Two Ways were no longer the ways of light and darkness lying before Israel or the church, but the way of the church itself: Our church, versus the way of the opposition, whoever they might be.146 “To endure to the end” no longer meant to suffer death but the opposite—to outlive one’s persecutors and enjoy one’s revenge.147 The old warnings and admonitions were given a new and optimistic twist: “As it was in the days of Noah” now meant that all was well, since “the rains did not come until Noah was safely in the Ark”;148 “No man knows the hour” becomes a cura solicitudinis, a comforting assurance that there was plenty of time and no need to worry;149 “this generation shall not pass away” really meant that the generations of the church would never pass away.150 It did not disturb a generation bred on rhetoric to be told that Peter heard with amazement that one should forgive seventy times seven, that being an announcement of the future generations that should believe.151 Nor did it seem overbold to explain the prediction that the apostles should be hated of all men as a rhetorical exaggeration;152 or to interpret the Lord’s prediction that men would seek him in vain as proof of his presence in the church, which would render any searching a waste of time, that is, vain;153 for it is not the Lord but the devil who comes “as a thief in the night.”154
One might fill a book with examples of such bold and clever rhetoric: the presence of wolves in the church simply fulfills the millennial promise that the wolf and the lamb shall graze together;155 tares in the church are a sign of its divinity, since it must embrace all men, good and bad, to be God’s church.156 What really happened was that the sheep promptly routed the wolves and the wheat overcame the tares—not the other way around!157 It was easy to show that all the bad predictions were duly fulfilled—on the heads of the Jews—while all the good promises made to them were properly meant for the Christians. The tears of the apostles were actually the happiest of omens for the church, exciting in all beholders, by a familiar rhetorical trick, those feelings of pity and devotion which would guarantee unflinching loyalty to the cause forever.158 It is fascinating to see how Chrysostom can turn even the most gloomy and depressing reference to the future of the church into a welcome promise of survival: the very fact that the ancient saints worried about things to come proves that there was to be a future, and so—delightful paradox!—they had nothing to worry about!159 If it can be said of the orating bishops that “the true size and color of every object is falsified by the exaggerations of their corrupt eloquence,”160 it must also be noted that these were not wanton or irresponsible men but devoted leaders desperately desirous of assuring themselves and their people of the unassailable integrity of the church: Chrysostom repeatedly declares that the church is higher, holier, and (above all) more enduring than heaven itself.161 He could do that (on the authority of Luke 21:33) without a blush because rhetoric had transferred the church into a glorious abstraction, a noble allegory, and as such an eternal, spiritual, indestructible entity.162 On the other hand he had to do it to meet the importunities of those who beset him night and day “unceasingly and everlastingly” with searching and embarrassing questions as to whether the church still possessed those things which in the beginning certified its divinity.163
(40) Where no rhetorical cunning could bridge the gap between the views of the fourth century and those of the early church, the latter were frankly discounted as suitable to a state of immaturity beyond which the church had happily progressed, emancipated from the “childish tales and vaporings of old grandmothers.”164 The learned fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries boast that the wise and noble who shunned the primitive church are now safe in a bosom of a Christian society which preaches and practices things that would have frightened off the rude converts of an earlier day,165 and invoke the eloquence of Demosthenes against the simplicitatem rusticam of the literal minded.166 This has been the official line ever since, and modern churchmen duly shudder at the thought of being “at the mercy of the primitive Church, its teachings, its life, its understanding,”167 and congratulate themselves on having outgrown the “fond imaginings of the Apostles.”168
The Dilemma
Ever since the recent “rediscovery of the importance of eschatology within the New Testament,”169 scholars have been faced, we are told, with a choice between eschatology and history—tertium non datur (there is no third choice).170 Actually there has always been a third choice, namely to accept the passing of the church as the fulfillment of prophecy in history. But that, of course, is exactly what church history will not allow: “Modern New Testament critics,” writes Grant, “insist on the priority of the Church to its written records.”171 The church must be rescued at all price. For that reason it has been necessary to ignore Jeremias’s simple and obvious solution to the “vollendeter Widerspruch” (complete contradiction) between the conflicting missionary policies of the early church: the limited preaching belongs to one act of the play, the world preaching to another.172 This is a thing that Christians will not concede, for if the church is to remain on the scene, the drama must be one act or none.173
To preserve this hypothetical unity students have ascribed to the first Christians a fantastic one-package view of the future in which all the culminating events of prophecy are fulfilled at a single stupendous blow, “gathering up into one great climax the many judgments the . . . prophets had foretold.”174 When the great event failed to transpire, the great delay turned the great expectation into the great fiasco (the terms are not ours!), the church passing through the great disappointment to the real fulfillment, the great triumphal procession of the kingdom through the world. Such an unflattering view of the founders’ foresight is forced on the experts by a constitutional inability to think of the church as anything but a permanent and growing institution.175 It was this very attitude, it will be recalled, toward his own church that made it impossible for Trypho the Jew to accept Justin’s complicated Messianic history.
But though the “great misunderstanding” theory has the merit of preserving the integrity of the church, it gravely jeopardizes the integrity of its founders while failing to give due consideration to certain peculiar and significant facts, namely, that the early Christians did not predict an immediate culmination of everything, but viewed the future down a long vista of prophetic events having more than one “end”;176 that not a single verse of scripture calls for an immediate parousia or end of the world;177 that there is a notable lack of evidence for any early Christian disappointment or surprise at the failure of the parousia.178 While the enemies of the church exploited every absurdity and inconsistency in its position and made merry over “Jesus the King who never ruled,” they never played up what should have been the biggest joke of all—the feverish, hourly expectation of the Lord who never came. For Robert Eisler this strange silence is nothing less than “the most astonishing of all historical paradoxes.”179 But what makes it such is only the refusal of the evidence to match the conventional pattern of church history: if there are no signs whatever of blasted hopes and expectations, we can only conclude that there were no such expectations. There were indeed Christians who looked for an immediate coming of the Lord and asked, “Where are the signs of his coming?” but they are expressly branded by the early leaders as false Christians, just as the virgins who expected the quick return of the Master, who “delayed his coming,” were the foolish ones.180
Students of church history have long been taught that whereas the primitive saints, living in an atmosphere of feverish expectation, looked forward momentarily to the end of everything, the later Christians gradually sobered up and learned to be more realistic. Exactly the opposite was the case, for while there is no evidence that the sober first Christians thought the end of the world was at hand, there is hardly a later theologian who does not think so: “From the days of the early church, through the vicissitudes of the lengthening middle centuries, into the twilight of the medieval day, the conviction of the world’s end . . . was part and parcel of Christian thought.”181 It had to be the end of the world, because the end of the church was inadmissible. Yet such was not the case with the first Christians, thoroughly at home with the idea that divine things, while they are preexistent and eternal, are taken away from the earth and restored again from time to time.182 If the church comes and goes like the moon, it is only with reference to this temporal world where all things are necessarily temporary.183 A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to early Christian and Jewish concepts of time and history. The present tendency is to treat the church as existing “sub specie aeternitatis, et pourtant dans le temps” (sub specie aeternitatis, and yet in time) as a supernatural and eschatological entity, “eine Schöpfung von oben her” (a creation from above).184 This releases it from earthly bonds, as does Ambrose’s declaration that the civitas, “which lives forever, because it cannot die,” desires only to leave the earth in all possible haste and be caught up, literally as Elijah was, into heaven.185
To escape the dark interval between the apostles and the parousia, scholars have bored two exits. The one recognizes a catastrophe ahead but postpones it to a vague and distant future,186 while the other admits that it was near at hand but insists that the damage was not so bad after all.187 Thus both convictions of the early church, that the end was near and that it was to be disastrous, receive reluctant confirmation—for no one suggests that only a distant and partial disruption was expected. There is a third escape hatch, around which there has been much milling and crowding in recent years, but it seems to be only a false door, a semantic exercise in which the conflicting claims of eschatology and history are simply placed side by side and declared reconciled in various ingenious and symbolic ways. If this vast literature of double-talk, “bewildering in its variety,”188 shows any perceptible trend, it is an inclination to have eschatology, since it can no longer be brushed aside, swallowed alive by the church: “The Church is an ‘eschatological community,’ since she is the New Testament, the ultimate and final. . . . The doctrine of Christ finds its fulness and completion in the doctrine of the Church, i.e. of ‘the Whole Christ.'”189 Such language actually seeks to de-eschatologize eschatology by making “mythical and timeless what they [the early Christians] regarded to be real and temporal.”190
More to the point is the searching question of Schoeps with which we began this survey, whether after all the real church may not have been left behind in the march of history: “Waren sie am Ende doch die wahren Erben, auch wenn sie untergingen?” (At the end were they the real heirs, even if they perished?)191 We have indicated above some of the reasons for suggesting that the church, like its founder, his apostles, and the prophets before them, came into the world, did the works of the Father, and then went out of the world, albeit with a promise of return. Some aspects of the problem, at least, deserve closer attention than students have hitherto been willing to give them.
Notes
“The Passing of the Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme” first appeared in Church History 20 (June 1961): 131–54. It was reprinted under the title “The Passing of the Primitive Church” in When the Lights Went Out (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), 1–32. This article also appeared in BYU Studies 16 (1975): 139–64, and in Mormonism and Early Christianity (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1987), 168–208 1. Karl Bihlmeyer, Kirchengeschichte (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1951), part 1:1–2. 2. “There is always danger of a metaphor once adopted becoming the master instead of the servant,” writes E. A. Payne, commenting on K. S. Latourette’s “Unquenchable Light” in “The Modern Expansion of the Church: Some Reflections on Dr. Latourette’s Conclusions,” Journal of Theological Studies 47 (1946): 151. 3. While suspecting the worst, the fathers could not bring themselves to admit it, according to John Kaye, Ecclesiastical History of the Second and Third Centuries, Illustrated from the Writings of Tertullian (London: Farran, 1894), 48–51. See note 139 below. 4. The tension is discussed by René Marlé, “Le Christ de la foi et le Jésus de l’histoire,” Ètudes 302 (1959): 67–76. Cf. Robert M. Grant, “The Appeal to the Early Fathers,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 11 (1960): 14, 23. 5. Arnobius, Adversus gentes (Against the Heathen) 2.76 (PL 5:934A); 2 Corinthians 4:8–18; Tertullian, Ad Scapulam (To Scapula) 1 (PL 1:775–80); Cyprian, Epistolae (Letters) 56 (PL 4:362). 6. Matthew 17:12; 21:37–39; 23:31–37; Mark 12:6–8; Luke 17:25; John 1:5, 10–11; 3:11–12, 19, 32; 5:38, 40–47; 7:7; 8:19, 23–24, 37–38, 40–47; 15:22–25; cf. Acts 3:13–15. 7. Matthew 9:15; Luke 9:41; 13:25–27; 17:22; John 12:33–36; 13:33; 14:30; 16:16; cf. Acts 3:21. 8. John 9:4–5; 14:30. Evil triumphs from Abel to the eschaton: Matthew 23:35–39; 17:12; Luke 11:51; Recognitiones Clementinae (Clementine Recognitions) 3.61 (PG 1:1208). 9. Matthew 10:24–25; Mark 13:13; Luke 10:16; John 15:18–21; 17:14; Acts 28:26–27; Frederick C. Grant, “The Mission of the Disciples,” Journal of Biblical Literature 35 (1916): 293–314.
10. Matthew 10:16–22, 28; 24:9; Mark 3:9; Luke 10:3; John 16:1, 2, 33; 1 Corinthians 4:9; Clement, Epistola I ad Corinthios (First Epistle to the Corinthians) 5 (PG 1:217–20). 11. Matthew 24:14; 28:20; Mark 13:10. See notes 17 and 21 below.
12. James 5:10–11; 1 Peter 1:6–7, 24; 4:12–14; Romans 8:3–17.
13. 1 John 3:1; 1 Peter 5:1; John 17:25.
14. Matthew 16:24–26; Luke 12:22–34; 2 Corinthians 4:8–16; Philippians 3:1–21.
15. Matthew 13:13–30; Romans 1:16–32; 2 Corinthians 11:3–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:7–12; 1 Timothy 4:1–3; 6:20–21; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; 2 Peter 2:1–22; Jude 1:4–11, 16–19.
16. It ends only with the second coming: Matthew 13:30, 39–43; Mark 12:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:8; Didache 16; Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphone (Dialogue with Trypho) 51.2 (PG 6:588–89).
17. John 17:25; 1 Peter 5:8; 1 John 3:1.
18. John 14:30; Matthew 21:38; Mark 12:7; Luke 20:14. 19. Matthew 13:24–30, 38. Both syllegein and synagogein are used.
20. 2 Timothy 4:2–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12; Romans 1:21–31.
21. Matthew 24:14; cf. 10:23; 28:20, where aeon refers to that particular age. Oscar Cullmann, “Eschatology and Missions in the New Testament,” in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, ed. William D. Davies and David Daube (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 417; cf. Niels W. Messel, Die Einheitlichkeit der jüdischen Eschatologie (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1915), 61–69, 44–50. See note 182 below.
22. Mark 13:9–10; Acts 2:16–17, 33; Origen, Commentaria in Evangelium secundum Matthaeum (Commentary on Matthew) 39 (PG 13:1655B), concludes that, strictly speaking, jam finem venisse; so also Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Hebraeos (On the Epistle to the Hebrews) 21.3 (PG 63:152).
23. Tertullian, Adversus gnosticos Scorpiace (Scorpiace) 9–10 (PL 2:162–67); 13–15 (PL 2:171–75); Ignatius, Epistola ad Polycarpum (Epistle to Polycarp) 3 (PL 5:709); Ignatius, Epistola ad Ephesios (Epistle to the Ephesians) 9 (PL 5:652).
24. Hebrews 6:11; Philippians 3:8–10; 1 Peter 1:4–6, 9; Clement, Epistola II ad Corinthios (Second Epistle to the Corinthians) 5.2–4 (PG 1:336); Barnabas, Epistola catholica (Catholic Epistle) 8.6 (PG 2:748); Justin, Apologia pro Christianis (Apology) 1.57 (PG 6:413–16).
25. Mark 13:34–37; 1 Peter 4:12–13. Like soldiers, each is to remain at his post. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 37 (PG 1:281–84); 21 (PG 1:256); Tertullian, Liber ad martyres (To the Martyrs) 3 (PL 1:707–9); cf. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 5 (PG 1:217–20); Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp 3 (PL 5:709–10); Ignatius, Epistola ad Magnesios (Epistle to the Magnesians) 5 (PG 5:761–64); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2.1 (PG 2:729–30).
26. “Ita ut pauci remaneant certantes pro veritate usque ad finem, qui et salvandi sunt soli.” Origen, Commentary on Matthew 24 (PG 13:1654D). There were few martyrs, G. de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 104, and countless betrayers, W. H. Frend, “Failure of the Persecutions in the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 16 (November 1959): 15–16.
27. Early sources speak of two factions within the church and of the “seducers” completely exterminating the righteous party. Carl Schmidt, Gesprπche Jesu mit seinen Jüngern nach der Auferstehung (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1919); cf. Samuel G. F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1951), 54.
28. Luke 13:25–30; Matthew 23:29. There is a time limit to the promise, Hebrews 12:17, and “when the tower is finished, you will wish to do good, and will have no opportunity.” Shepherd of Hermas, Visio (Visions) 3.9 (PG 2:907).
29. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 110 (PG 6:729); Hilary, Contra Constantium Imperatorem (Against the Emperor Constantius) 4 (PL 10:581B).
30. Galatians 3:1–4. Ignatius describes the corruption with striking imagery as of pleasing and plausible wolves. Epistola ad Philadelphenses (Epistle to the Philadelphians) 2 (PG 5:697–708); a goodly label on a bottle of poison, a deadly drug mixed with sweet wine, Epistola ad Trallianos (Epistle to the Trallians) 6 (PG 5: 679–80); a counterfeit coin, Epistle to the Magnesians 5 (PG 5:647–48); cleverly baited hooks, Epistle to the Magnesians 11 (PG 5:653–56), etc.
31. Rudolf Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” New Testament Studies 1 (1954): 7–8.
32. A mixture of “Freude, Sehnsucht, und bange Furcht.” Rudolf Knopf, Die Zukunftshoffnungen des Urchristentums (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907), 7–11. Cf. Didache 16. 33. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 41.4 (PG 1: 289–92). “The last stumbling-block approaches.” Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4.3 and 9 (PG 2:731–34); Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7.1 (PG 1:221–25); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 7–8 (PG 1:337–41); Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 2.2 (PG 2:897); 4.1 (PG 2:909). 34. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 15.4–6 (PG 1:237–40); 8 (PG 1:225–28); 39 (PG 1:285–88); 57 (PG 1:324–26); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6 (PG 1:336–37); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4–5 (PG 2:731–37); 13–14 (PG 2:765–69). 35. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 57–58 (PG 1:324–28). The promise of the Paraclete is no guarantee. Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6.9 (PG 1:336–37). 36. So Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 3–7 (PG 1:213–25); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2–6 (PG 2:729–44); 16 (PG 2:773–76); Constitutiones apostolicae (Apostolic Constitutions) 7.32 (PG 1:1621); Lactantius, Divinae institutiones (Divine Institutes) 7.17 (PL 6:1008–9).
37. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 1 (PG 1:201); 3 (PG 1:213); 19 (PG 1:248); 41 (PG 1:289); 47 (PG 1:305–8); 52 (PG 1:316); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2 (PG 2:729); Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 17 (PG 5:749–52); Ignatius, Epistle to the Philadelphians 2 (PG 5:820); Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 2.2 (PG 2:897); 3.9 (PG 2:907); Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudo (Similitudes) 7 (PG 2:969–72); 9.21 and 25–26 (PG 2:999–1002); 10.1 (PG 2:1009).
38. Didache 10.5; Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp 1.2 (PG 5:861–64); Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 17 (PG 5:749–52); Ignatius, Epistle to the Philadelphians 1 (PG 5:820); Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 9.14 (PG 2:917); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2.1 (PG 2:729); 21 (PG 2:779–81).
39. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 15 (PG 1:237); 30 (PG 1:269–72); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 3–4 (PG 1:333–36); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 10.4 (PG 2:752–56); Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 15 (PG 5:657); 7 (PG 5:649); Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 4 (PG 5:648); Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 6 (PG 5:680); Polycarp, Epistola ad Philippenses (Epistle to the Philippians) 10 (PG 5:1013); Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 1.3 (PG 2:893–96); Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 9.13 (PG 2:991); 9.21 (PG 2:999).
40. Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 7 (PG 5:1012); Shepherd of Hermas, Mandatum (Mandates) 11.1 (PG 2:943).
41. Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 5 (PG 5:648); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6 (PG 1:336–37); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 5 (PG 2:733); 18 (PG 2:776); see Kirsopp Lake’s note on the Shepherd of Hermas in his translation of Apostolic Fathers, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912), 2:21 n. 1.
42. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 1 (PG 1:201–8); 3 (PG 1:213–16); 19 (PG 1:248); 24 (PG 1:260–61); Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 7 (PG 5:764–65); Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 9.5 (PG 5:713); 17 (PG 5:749–52); Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 3.3 (PG 2:901); 10 (PG 2:907). Cf. Testament of Hezekiah 2:3B–4:18 (OTP 2:159–61).
43. Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 16 (PG 2:771–76); Didache 16.3; Enoch 89; 56; 66–67; Logion 14, in “Prétendues sentences de Jésus” (PO 4:176–77); cf. “Le Salut—les vieux sages” (PO 9:227–28).
44. Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 3.3–7 (PG 2:901–6).
45. Ibid., 3.11–13 (PG 2:907–10).
46. Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 3 (PG 2:955); 4 (PG 2:955–58); 9 (PG 2:979–1010); Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 58 (PG 5:328); Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History) 3.31.3 (PG 20:280–81); 5.24.2 (PG 20:493–508).
47. A. D. Nock, “The Vocabulary of the New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 52 (1933): 135.
48. Hilary, Liber contra Auxentium (Against Auxentius) 4 (PL 10:611B). 49. K. Holl, “Urchristentum und Religionsgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 2 (1924): 403–5; Suzanne de Dietrich, Le Dessein de Dieu, 2nd ed. (Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1948), 19, finds only one case, Mark 5:19, in which Christ did not avoid publicity.
50. Origen, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) 2.76 (PG 11:848); 4.28 (PG 11:1068); Minucius Felix, Octavius 7–11 (PL 3:262–81); Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5.7 (PL 6:991). 51. Minucius Felix, Octavius 9–10 (PL 3:270–76); Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 52 (PG 6:589–92—the parousia a secret); 90.2 (PG 6:689–92); Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus Gentes pro Christianis (Apology) 7 (PL 1:358–62); Clementine Recognitions 1.52 (PG 1:1236); Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.12 (PG 8:753); 5.10 (PG 9:93–101). 52. Matthew 13:9–17; Clementine Recognitions 2.60 (PG 1:1264); 3.1 (PG 1:1281–82); Tertullian, De praescriptionibus (The Prescription against Heretics) 25–26 (PL 2:43–46); Origen, Against Celsus 1.1.1–7 (PG 11:651–69); Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 5 (PG 5:781–84).
53. Origen, Peri arch¿n (On First Things) 1.2 (PG 11:130–45); 1.4 (PG 11:155); 1.6–8 (PG 11:165–83). 54. Origen, Against Celsus 2.70 (PG 11:905–8); Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1951), 396. This is an edition of the earlier Von Reimarus zu Wrede; cf. English translation, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Herman Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verstπndnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1903), 78–79; Kirsopp Lake, Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Harper, 1937), 37. 55. Irenaeus, Contra haereses (Against Heresies) 4.33.7 (PG 7:1076–77); 2.27.1–3 (PG 7:802), insists that nothing has been lost—cf. 1.8.1 (PG 7:519, etc.)—yet speaks with awe of the knowledge of the apostles, 1.13.6 (PG 7:588); 3.2.2 (PG 7:847), which Ignatius implies far exceeds his own, Epistle to the Ephesians 3 (PG 5:645); Epistle to the Magnesians 5 (PG 5:648); Epistola ad Romanos (Epistle to the Romans) 4 (PG 5:689). Later fathers were intrigued by the great unwritten knowledge of the apostles. Gottfried Thomasius, Die Dogmengeschichte der alten Kirche (Erlangen: Deichert, 1886), 209, 297–98.
56. Joachim Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 15–16, 61–62 = Jesus’ Promise to the Nations, trans. S. H. Hooke (London: SCM Press, 1958).
57. Albert Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste: Histoire de la fondation de l’église, la révolution religieuse (Paris: Blond, 1909), 220; Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 17, 21, 60–61. See note 38 above.
58. Didache 10.5; Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 7 (PG 5:693): “deuro pros ton patera”—literally.
59. Discussed by Olof Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche in der neueren Forschung (Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1932), 198–200.
60. Robert Eisler, Iesous basileus ou basileusas (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930), 2:237.
61. Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem, 7–11.
62. Homiliae Clementinae (Clementine Homilies) 11.16.21 (PG 2:384A); Hippolytus, De consummatione mundi (spuria) (On the Consummation of the World) 10–11 (PG 10:913A–C); Athanasius, Vita Antonii (Life of Antony) 82 (PG 26:957).
63. Acta Pilati (Acts of Pilate) 15 (PO 9:108–9); James R. Harris, Gospel of the Twelve Apostles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 28, 33, 35, 38; E. A. Wallis Budge, Contendings of the Apostles (London: Oxford University Press, 1899–1901), 2:62, 53–55, 59.
64. Lake, Introduction to the New Testament, 62.
65. Robert M. Grant, Second Century Christianity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1946), 9.
66. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.32.7–8 (PG 20:281–84). 67. Robert L. P. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History (London: Black, 1954), 25–26.
68. Gustave Bardy, “L’église et son enseignement pendant les trois premiers si≤cles,” Revue des sciences religieuses 12 (1932): 1, quoting Tertullian, Apology 18.4 (PL 1:362–65).
69. Eugéne de Faye, Ètude sur les origines des églises de l’âge apostolique (Paris: Leroux, 1909), 111. 70. For example, Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 1.3 (PG 2:891–93); 2.2 (PG 2:895–97); 3.9 (PG 2:897); Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 9.19 (PG 2:997); Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates 11–12 (PG 2:943); Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 21 (PG 1:256). Cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.28 (PG 20:512); Clementine Recognitions 1.1–5 (PG 1:1207–9).
71. See Marlé, “Christ de la foi,” 67–76.
72. Origen, Against Celsus 8.72 and 8.74 (PG 11:1624–29); Tertullian, Apology 38 (PL 1:526–31); Apostolic Constitutions 7.39 (PG 1:1037–40); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2 (PG 2:729); 4 (PG 2:731); 1 Corinthians 7:29–32. 73. Origen, Against Celsus 8.17–20 (PG 11:1540–49); Zeno, Liber (Commentary) 1, Tractatus (Tractate) 14 (PL 11:354B–358A); Minucius Felix, Octavius 10 (PL 3:274); Jerome, Epistolae (Letters) 130.15 (PL 22:1119A); Arnobius, Against the Heathen 6.1 (PL 5:1162B).
74. Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 1.1 (PG 2:951); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 5 (PG 1:336); Cyprian, Liber de mortalitate (Treatise on Mortality) 25 (PL 4:623B).
75. Hans Lietzmann, Geschichte der alten Kirche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1932–34), 2:41–42 = The Founding of the Church Universal, trans. Bertram L. Woolf, 2nd ed. (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1950); Ernst Kπsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1939), 51–52.
76. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 27–29 (PL 2:46–48); Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 9 (PG 5:1012–13).
77. Acts 17:6; 2 Timothy 4:6–8. Conversion not the object, 1 Corinthians 1:17.
78. Cullmann, “Eschatology and Missions,” 415.
79. 1 Corinthians 9:16; John 15:22; Matthew 23:34–35; 27:25; Luke 11:49–51; Acts 5:28; 18:6; Clementine Recognitions 1.8 (PG 1:1211): “tacere non possumus.”
80. Oscar Cullmann, Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zürich: Zwingli, 1950), 39–56.
81. Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 6–8 (PG 5:691–94); Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 11.1 (PG 5:654); Passio s. Perpetuae 6; 18; 21. Quotation from Apostolic Constitutions 5.5 (PG 1:833).
82. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.45 (PG 20:633).
83. Tertullian, Apology 1 (PL 1:305–8); Cyprian, Treatise on Mortality 12 (PL 4:611–12).
84. Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898) 2:418–19, contrasts the early and later Christian concepts of martyrdom. The transition is clear in Cyprian, who must warn, “non martyres Evangelium faciant.” Letters 24 (22) (PL 4:293A).
85. Cyprian, Letters 8 (PL 4:255A); Cyprian, De duplici martyrio (On the Twofold Martyrdom) 35 (PL 4:982A); Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.7 (PG 8:1268–80); Leo, Sermo 47.1 (PL 54:295B–C).
86. So Asterius Urbanus, Fragmenta contra Montanistas (Against the Montanists) frg. 3; 6; 8 (PG 10:149B, 153A–B).
87. So Optatus, De schismate Donatistarum (On the Donatist Schism) 17, 24–26 (PL 11:968–69, 979B–986A).
88. Cyprian, Epistola ad Fortunatum (Letter to Fortunatus) Praefatio (PL 4:678–82).
89. Clarence T. Craig, The Beginnings of Christianity (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1943), 328. 90. Pieter A. van Stempvoort, “Het onstaan van het Kerkbegrip en de oudste Kerkorganisatie,” in Het Oudste Christendom en de antieke Cultuur, ed. J. H. Waszink et al. (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1951), 2:331; Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem, 9–11. The imagery goes back to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.1.3 (PG 20:48–53). 91. Brandon, Fall of Jerusalem, 10; Eduard Schwartz, Kaiser Constantin und die christliche Kirche (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), 17–18; Hans Lietzmann, Kleine Schriften (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958–62), 1:97.
92. Theodore Brandt, Die Kirche im Wandel der Zeit (Leipzig: MBK-Verlag, 1933), 79.
93. E. C. Blackman, “The Task of Exegesis,” in Davies and Daube, Background of the New Testament, 13.
94. Gustave Bardy, La conversion au christianisme (Paris: Aubier, 1949), 296.
95. Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste, 250; Maurice Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église (Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1949), 139; and Maurice Goguel, “La seconde génération chrétienne,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 136 (1949): 36–37.
96. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.37 (PG 20:292–93); 3.39 (PG 20:292–302); Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 47 (PG 1:305–8); Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 3 (PG 5:1008); Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 5 (PG 5:809–12); Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4 (PG 7:851); Methodius, Ex libro de resurrectione (From the Treatise on Resurrection) 6 (PG 18:313B).
97. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.1–4 (PG 20:297); 5.10.4 (PG 20:453–56); 11.3–5 (PG 20:456–57); Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 82 (PG 6:669–72); Origen, Against Celsus 2.8 (PG 11:805–8).
98. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.32.7–8 (PG 20:281–86); 2.1.3 (PG 20:140–41); Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1 (PG 7:437–45).
99. Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 3 (PG 5:1008); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 1.5 (PG 2:727); the case of Ignatius is discussed by Jean Réville, “Ètudes sur les origines de l’épiscopat,” Revue de l’histoire religieuse 22 (1890): 285–88.
100. D. Busy, “L’adversaire et l’obstacle (2 Thess. 2:3–12),” Recherches de science religieuse 24 (1934): 431.
101. Bardy, Conversion au christianisme, 306; Grant, Second Century Christianity, 9–18.
102. “Singuli quique coetus haereticorum se potissimum Christianos, et suam esse Catholicam Ecclesiam putant.” Lactantius, Divine Institutes 4.30 (PL 6:540–44); Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.13–18 (PG 20:460–81); Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical History) 5.9 (PG 67:1237–40); 5.20 (PG 67:1277–80); 6.26 (PG 67:1361–66); 8.20 (PG 67:1568–70), etc. Origen, Against Celsus 3.10–12 (PG 11:932–36).
103. Justin, Apology 8 (PG 6:338–40); Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 35 (PG 6:549–53); 42 (PG 6:565); 80 (PG 6:664–80); cf. Origen, Against Celsus 6.11 (PG 11:1305–8).
104. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.16 (PG 20:464–72); Justin, Quaestiones (Inquiries) nos. 5 and 100 (PG 6:1256AB, 1344–45).
105. Sulpicius Severus, Historia sacra (Sacred History) 2.46 (PL 20:155); 2.50 (PL 20:157–58). Eusebius worried too. Walther Völker, “Von welchen Tendenzen liess sich Eusebius bei Abfassung seiner ‘Kirchengeschichte’ Leiten?” Vigiliae christianae 4 (1950): 170–71.
106. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931), 1:250; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.15–16 (PG 20:172–73). 107. The Reformation itself attempted revival of “prophetic, eschatological Christianity.” Heinrich Bornkamm, Grundriss zum Studium der Kirchengeschichte (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949), 63.
108. Adolf von Harnack, Das Mönchtum (Giessen: Ricken, 1895), passim. The church fathers did not encourage pilgrimages. Bernard Kötting, Peregrinatio Religiosa (Münster: Regensberg, 1950), 421.
109. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 34, 180, 192–94.
110. Bardy, Conversion au christianisme, 304; so Lietzmann, Geschichte der alten Kirche, 1:226; Harnack, Das Mönchtum, 25. 111. Robert Frick, Die Geschichte des Reich-Gottes-Gedankens in der alten Kirche bis zu Origenes und Augustin, supplement 6 of Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1928), 154; Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 35; Harnack, Das Mönchtum, 25.
112. Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” 15.
113. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 191.
114. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History, 26.
115. Gustave Bardy, L’Èglise et les derniers Romains (Paris: Laffont, 1948), 48.
116. F.-M. Braun, “Où en est l’eschatologie du Nouveau Testament,” Revue biblique 49 (1940): 53; Henri Leclercq, “Èglises,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclerq (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907–53), 4:2281.
117. Johannes de Zwaan, “Some Remarks on the ‘Church Idea’ in the Second Century,” in Aux sources de la tradition chrétienne: Mélanges offerts î M. Maurice Goguel (Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1950), 278.
118. Tertullian, De pudicitia (On Modesty) 21 (PL 2:1080B).
119. Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” 15.
120. Wilhelm von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 6th ed. (Munich: Beck, 1924), 955. 121. “In the end therefore, it was the Christian doctrine and practice which underwent the change, and society which remained.” Kirsopp Lake, “The Shepherd of Hermas and Christian Life in Rome in the Second Century,” Harvard Theological Review 4 (1911): 25.
122. Louis M. O. Duchesne, Origenes du culte chrétien, 2nd ed. (Paris: Thorin, 1898), 52–53; 5th ed. (1920), 55.
123. Lake, Introduction to the New Testament, 22; Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste, 221.
124. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 209; Reinhold Seeberg, Textbook of the History of Doctrines (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1952), 1:118; Karl Adam, Das Wesen des Katholizismus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1934), 194 = The Spirit of Catholicism, trans. Justin McCann (London: Sheed and Ward, 1929).
125. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, 2:479–81.
126. Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche, 160, 164–66; Otto Kuss, “Zur Senfkornparabel,” Theologie und Glaube 41 (1951): 40–46; Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 58–59; cf. English ed., 68–69. 127. So Bardy, Conversion au christianisme, 6; Bornkamm, Grundriss zum Studium der Kirchengeschichte, 20.
128. Stanley Bonner, Roman Declamation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 59. 129. “Animae emptae a Christo non potuerunt vendi.” Optatus, On the Donatist Schism 3.11 (PL 11:1024–25); Erich Fascher, “Dynamis Theou,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 19 (1938): 108; Chrysostom exposes the fallacy. In Epistolam ad Galatas commentarius (Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians) 3.2 (PG 61:649–50).
130. Bardy, Conversion au christianisme, chap. 8. Refuted by Chrysostom, On the Epistle to the Hebrews 5, Homily 8 (PG 63:73), and Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei (On the Government of God) 4.1.61.
131. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 35 (PG 6:549–53); Origen, Against Celsus 3.12 (PG 11:933–36).
132. Matthew 7:22; 24:5; Mark 9:39; 13:6; Luke 21:8; Acts 17:15.
133. For example, the gloating attacks on the dead Julian. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, 2:563.
134. Ibid., 2:460–62, 465, 476–77, 529–32, 680–83; Frend, “Failure of the Persecutions,” 12.
135. Hippolytus, Fragmenta in Danielem (Fragments on Daniel) 5.7 (PG 10:681D); Demonstratio de Christo et Antichristo (On Christ and the Antichrist) 29, 57–58 (PG 10:749B, 776B–777A); and On the Consummation of the World 11 (PG 10:913C).
136. Hilary, De Trinitate (On the Trinity) 10.55 (PL 10:387).
137. Quote is from Chrysostom, Commentary on Matthew 46.1 (PG 58:476).
138. Johannes Straub, “Christliche Geschichtesapologetik in der Krisis des römischen Reiches,” Historia 1 (1950): 64. 139. Basil the Great, Epistolae (Letters) 150.2, no. 139 (PG 32:584A). Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 27–28 (PL 2:46–47), must console himself with the argument of numbers. Even before Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel) 1.3 (PG 21:33), Hegesippus sought to reassure himself that there was an absolute continuity, according to Louis M. O. Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–92), 1:1, who vainly seeks the same assurance; see Henri Leclercq, “Historiens du Christianisme,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, 6:2697.
140. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10.4.12–16 (PG 20:857–60); 8.1.8–ii (PG 20:740–44); 8.1–3 (PG 20:744); cf. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 3.17 (PG 67:1093–96). The church was overcome by its own sins. Cyprian, Letters 7 (PL 4:246–51). Cf. Liber de lapsis (Book on the Apostates) (PL 4:478–510). On the restoration motif, see Michael S. Seidlmayer, “Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter,” Saeculum 7 (1956): 405–7; John E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (New York: Hafner, 1958), 1:513–14.
141. Ambrose, Hexaemeron 4.32 (PL 14:217–18); Methodius, Convivium decem virginum (Banquet of the Ten Virgins) 6 (PG 18:148B); Jerome, Commentarius in Isaiah prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 18.66 (PL 24:699–702); Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5.7 (PL 6:570–71).
142. Discussed in Hugh W. Nibley, “The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage,” in The Ancient State (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1991), 207–12.
143. The surprise is expressed by Chrysostom, Expositio in Psalmos (Exposition on Psalms) 148.4 (PG 55:483–84), and Contra Judaeos et Gentiles, quod Christus sit Deus (Against the Jews and the Gentiles, That Christ Is God) 12 (PG 48:829–30); cf. the perplexity in Justin, Inquiries 74 (PG 6:1316A).
144. Chrysostom, Sermo antequam iret in exsilium (Discourse before Going into Exile) 1.2 (PG 52:429–30), and In illud, vidi Dominum, homilia (Homily on the Verse “I have seen the Lord”) 4.2 (PG 56:121).
145. Völker, “Von welchen Tendenzen,” 161–80. J. Burckhardt calls Eusebius “the first thoroughly dishonest historian,” cited by Moses Hadas, “The Conversion of Constantine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 41 (1950): 423.
146. See Nibley, “Unsolved Loyalty Problem,” 210–12.
147. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5.24 (PL 6:630).
148. Eusebius, Commentarius in Lucam (Commentary on Luke) 27.27 (PG 24:584D–585A).
149. Hilary, Commentarius in Matthaeum (Commentary on Matthew) 26.4 (PL 9:1057B).
150. Eusebius, Commentary on Luke 13.32 (PG 24:601D–604A).
151. Chrysostom, De decem millium talentorum debitore homilia (Homily on the Man Who Owed Ten Thousand Talents) 3 (PG 51:21B).
152. First suggested by Origen, Commentary on Matthew 39 (PG 13:1653D).
153. Hilary, Commentary on Matthew 25.8 (PL 9:1055).
154. Ibid., 26.6 (PL 9:1058B).
155. Eusebius, Commentarius in Isaiam prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 11.6 (PG 24:172C–173A).
156. Optatus, On the Donatist Schism 7.2 (PL 11:1085B–1086A).
157. A favorite theme with Chrysostom, for example, Homily on the Verse “I have seen the Lord” 4.4.2 (PG 56:121); Sermo post reditum ab exsilio (Discourse following the Return from Exile) 2 (PG 52:440, 442); Sermo ipsius severiani de pace (A Sermon on Peace by Severianus Himself) (PG 52:425); cf. Athanasius II, Homilia de semente (Homily on the Seed) 5 (PG 28:149C).
158. Chrysostom, De novem diebus (On the Nine Days) 6 (PG 56:277–78); Basil, Homilia de gratiarum actione (Homily on the Effect of Graces) 4 (PG 31:228A); Hilary, On the Trinity 10.39–43 (PL 10:374–77).
159. Chrysostom, On the Nine Days 6 (PG 56:277–78).
160. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), 1:941 n. 101. 161. Chrysostom, De capto Eutropio et de divitiarum vanitate (On the Capture of Eutropius and the Vanity of Wealth) 1.6 (PG 52:397–98, 402); Cum de expulsione ipsius Sancti Joannes ageretur (On the Expulsion of St. John Himself) (PG 52:433); Exposition on the Psalms 147.4 (PG 55:483); Homily on the Verse “I Have Seen the Lord” 4.2 (PG 56:121); Commentary on Matthew 54.2 (PG 58:535); 77.1 (PG 58:702).
162. Chrysostom, In Epistolam I ad Corinthios homilia (Homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians) 32.1 (PG 61:265); 6.3–4 (PG 61:51–53).
163. Chrysostom, De sancta Pentecoste homilia (Homily on the Holy Pentecost) 1.4 (PG 50:459, 453); De laudibus Sancti Pauli Apostoli homilia (Homilies on the Praise of St. Paul the Apostle) 4 (PG 50:488); In inscriptionem Actorum (Inscription on the Acts) 2.3 (PG 51:81–82; cf. 85); Homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians 32.2 (PG 61:265); In Colossenses homilia (Homily on Colossians) 3.8 (PG 62:358–59), etc.
164. Chrysostom, Exposition on Psalms 110.4 (PG 55:285); Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 54.1 (PL 24:516B); 13 (PL 24:627B–629A); Origen, Against Celsus 4.80 (PG 11:1152–53); Origen, De principiis (On the First Principles) 2.4.3 (PG 11:201–3).
165. Athanasius, Oratio de incarnatione verbi Dei (Oration on the Incarnation of the Word) 53 (PG 25:189); Jerome, Letters 66.4 (PL 22:641); Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 60.1 (PL 24:588D–589A).
166. Jerome, Contra Joannem Hierosolymitanum (Against John the Jerusalemite) 11–12 (PL 23:380C–381C).
167. Krister Stendahl, “Implications of Form-Criticism and Tradition-Criticism for Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 77 (1958): 34. 168. A. C. Cotter, “The Eschatological Discourse,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 1 (1939): 205. 169. N. A. Dahl, “Christ, Creation, and the Church,” in Davies and Daube, Background of the New Testament, 422.
170. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 375.
171. Robert M. Grant, “‘Development’ in Early Christian Doctrine,” Journal of Religion 39 (1959): 121.
172. Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 47.
173. So Johannes Weiss, “Das Problem der Entestehung des Christentums,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 16 (1913): 435.
174. Alfred Fawkes, “The Development of Christian Institutions and Beliefs,” Harvard Theological Review 10 (1917): 115–16.
175. Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche, 121, 159.
176. A. Feuillet, “La synthése eschatologique de Saint Matthieu,” Revue biblique 57 (1950): 180–211; Millar Burrows, An Outline of Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946), 199–201.
177. Van Stempvoort, “Het ontstaan van het Kerkbegrip,” 250; T. F. Glasson, “The Kerygma: Is Our Version Correct,” Hibbert Journal 51 (1953): 129, 131–32; Frederick A. M. Spencer, “The Second Advent According to the Gospels,” Church Quarterly Review 126 (1938): 6.
178. Goguel, “La seconde génération chrétienne,” 190; G. Bornkamm, In Memoriam Ernst Lohmeyer (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1951), 116, 118, 121; E. Stauffer, “Agnostos Christos,” in Davies and Daube, Background of the New Testament, 281–82.
179. Eisler, Iesous basileus, 1:26; cf. S. Franck, “Le royaume de dieuonde,” Dieu vivant 7 (1951): 17–34.
180. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 23 (PG 1:236); Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 11–12 (PG 2:344–48); Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4.16 (PG 2:731–33); cf. Luke 18:7.
181. R. C. Petry, “Medieval Eschatology and St. Francis of Assisi,” Church History 9 (1940): 55; Friedrich Bπthgen, Der Engelpapst (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933), 76.
182. The old dispensation theory: Origen, Against Celsus 4.11–12 (PG 11:1039–41); Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History, 29–31. The Jews had lost and regained the temple more than once.
183. Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) 3.2.6 (PG 42:784); Lactantius, Divine Institutes 4.1 (PL 6:447–51).
184. H. Clavier, “Probl≤me du rite et du mythe dans le quatri≤me evangile,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religeuses 31 (1951): 292; Linton, Das Problem der Urkirchen, 132–33; Dahl, “Christ, Creation and the Church,” 422–43.
185. Ambrose, Expositio in Lucam (Commentary on Luke) 2.88 (PL 15:1667–68); Chrysostom, Homilia in apostolicum dictum: Hoc scitote, quod in novissimis diebus erunt tempora gravia (Homily on the Apostolic Saying: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come” [2 Timothy 3:1]) 5 (PG 56:276).
186. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 56 (PG 13:1688D), attacks this view, held by Michael Brunec, “De ‘signis prodromis’ (Matthew 24:5–13)” and “De magna tribulatione (Matthew 24:15–24),” Verbum domini 30 (1952): 265, 269, 277, 323–24.
187. Hippolytus, On the Consummation of the World 24–25 (PG 10:937B–C).
188. F. F. Bruce, “Eschatology,” London Quarterly and Holborn Review 183 (1958): 99, with a survey of the literature, 101–3.
189. Georges Florovsky, “Eschatology in the Patristic Age: An Introduction,” in vol. 64 of Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957), 235–38.
190. Oscar Cullmann, “Rudolf Bultmann’s Concept of Myth and the New Testament,” Concordia Theological Monthly 27 (1956): 24; M. Burrows, “Thy Kingdom Come,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74 (1955): 1–8.
191. Hans J. Schoeps, “Die ebionitische Wahrheit des Christentums,” in Davies and Daube, Background of the New Testament, 123.
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The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme -- Mormonism and Early Christianity -- HUGH NIBLEY 1987
The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme
A Somber Theme: Ever since Eusebius sought with dedicated zeal to prove the survival of the church by blazing a trail back to the apostles, the program of church history has been the same: “To give a clear and comprehensive, scientifically established view of the development of the visible institution of salvation founded by Christ.”1 To describe it—not to question it. By its very definition church history requires unquestioning acceptance of the basic proposition that the church did survive. One may write endlessly about The Infant Church, l’Eglise naissante, die Pflanzung der Kirche, etc., but one may not ask why the early Christians themselves described their church not as a lusty infant but as an old and failing woman; one may trace the triumphant spread of The Unquenchable Light through storm and shadow, but one may not ask why Jesus himself insisted that the Light was to be taken away.2 Church history seems to be resolved never to raise the fundamental question of survival as the only way of avoiding a disastrous answer, and the normal reaction to the question—did the church remain on earth?—has not been serious inquiry in a richly documented field, but shocked recoil from the edge of an abyss into which few can look without a shudder.3
Yet today that question is being asked again, as it has been in other times of stress and crisis, not with the journalistic flourish of Soltau’s Sind wir noch Christen? but with the cautious historical appraisal of an H. J. Schoeps, contemplating the age-old tension between eschatology and church with their conflicting ideas about the church’s future. Can it be that the repugnance of churchmen to eschatology and their coolness toward the authentic writings of the early Fathers are due in no small part to the dim view which the primitive Christians took of the prospects of the church?4 The purpose of this paper is to list briefly the principal arguments supporting the thesis that the church founded by Jesus and the apostles did not survive and was not expected to. We shall consider the fate of the church under three heads: (1) the declarations of the early Christians concerning what was to befall it; (2) their strange behavior in the light of those declarations; (3) the affirmations and denials, doubts and misgivings of the church leaders of a later day. Our theme is the Passing of the Church, our variations, designated below by Roman numerals, are a number of striking and often neglected facets of church history.
The Early Christian View: Christian apologists had a ready answer to those shallow-minded critics who made merry over Christ’s failure to convert the world and God’s failure to protect his saints from persecution and death: God does not work that way, it was explained, his rewards are on the other side, and his overwhelming intervention is reserved for the eschaton, until which all sorts of reverses can be expected—nihil enim est nobis promissum ad hanc vitam; the prospect of failure and defeat in the world, far from being incompatible with the gospel message, is an integral part of it.5
(I) Jesus announced in no uncertain terms that his message would be rejected by all men, as the message of the prophets had been before,6 and that he would soon leave the world to die in its sins and seek after him in vain. 7 The Light was soon to depart, leaving a great darkness “in which no man can work” while “the prince of this world” would remain, as usual, in possession of the field.8 (II) In their turn the disciples were to succeed no better than their Lord: “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?” 9 Like him they were to be “hated of all men,” going forth as sheep among wolves, “sent last as it were appointed unto death,”10 with the promise that as soon as they completed their mission the end would come. 11
(III) But what of the church? Those who accepted the teaching were to suffer exactly the same fate as the Lord and the apostles; they were advised to “take the prophets for an example of suffering affliction and patience,” and to “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try” them, but rejoice rather to suffer as Christ did “in the flesh . . . that we may also be glorified together.”12 After them too the prince of this world was waiting to take over; they too were to be lambs among wolves, rejected as were the Master and the disciples: “The world knoweth us not because it knew him not.”13 Knowing that “whosoever will save his life must lose it,” they openly disavowed any expectation of success, individual or collective, in this world.14 (IV) As for the doctrine, it was to receive the same rough treatment, soon falling into the hands of worldly men who would “pervert the gospel of Christ” from a thing the world found highly obnoxious to something it was willing to embrace, for such has always been the fate of God’s revelations to men.15
(V) All this bodes ill for the “interval” between the Ascension and the Parousia; the Zwischenzeit was to be a bad time and a long one.16 What is more, it begins almost immediately, the apostles themselves calling attention to all the fatal signs, and marveling only that it has come so soon. 17 As soon as the Lord departs there comes “the lord of this world, and hath nothing in me”; in the very act of casting out the Lord of the vineyard the usurpers seize it for themselves, to remain in possession until his return; 18 no sooner does he sow his wheat than the adversary sows tares, and only when the Lord returns again can the grain be “gathered together,” i.e., into a church, the ruined field itself being not the church but specifically “the world.”19 After the sheep come the wolves, “not sparing the flock,” which enjoys no immunity (Acts 20:29); after sound doctrine come fables;20 after the charismatic gifts only human virtues (1 Corinthians 13:8, 13). The list is a grim one, but it is no more impressive than (VI) the repeated insistence that there is to be an end, not the end of the world, but “the consummation of the age.”21 It is to come with the completion of the missionary activities of the apostles, and there is no more firmly rooted tradition in Christendom than the teaching that the apostles completed the assigned preaching to the nations in their own persons and in their own time, so that the end could come in their generation.22
(VII) It was no imaginary end. When the saints were asked to “endure to the end,” that meant just one thing, as Tertullian observes—to suffer death.23 When the sorely pressed Christians need “a strong comfort,” the only comfort forthcoming is the promise of the resurrection and the assurance of salvation “whether we live or die.”24Never is there any mention of relief on the way, of happy times ahead, of final victory for the cause, or of the consoling thought that generations yet unborn will call one blessed. Such assurances belong to a later age; the only encouragement the first Christians ever got is that given to soldiers making a last-ditch stand: they are ordered not to attack but “to have long patience,” grimly hanging on “to the end,” because only by so doing can they show their worthiness to inherit eternal life.25
But we are told not only of one but explicitly of two ways in which the ancient church was to make its exit. (VIII) For far more numerous than those true saints who were to give their lives as witnesses were those who were to succumb to the blandishments of false teachers. The fate of the vast majority of Christians was not to be overcome by a frontal attack—true martyrs were relatively few—but to be led astray by perverters.26 The spoilers do not destroy the vineyard, but “seize the inheritance” for themselves; we read of betrayal, disobedience, corruptions; of deceivers, perverters, traitors; of wresting the scriptures, denying the gifts, quenching the Spirit, turning love into hate, truth to fables, sheep to wolves; of embracing “another gospel,” and so forth. The offenders are not pagans but loudly professing Christians.27 As, once the prophets are dead, everyone paints their tombs with protestations of devotion, so “when the master of the house has risen up and shut the door,” shall the eager host apply for admission to his company—too late.28 The apostasy described in the New Testament is not desertion of the cause, but perversionof it, a process by which “the righteous are removed, and none perceives it.”29 The Christian masses do not realize what is happening to them; they are “bewitched” by a thing that comes as softly and insidiously as the slinging of a noose.30 It is an old familiar story, as Bultmann notes: “The preaching of Jesus does not hold out any prospect for the future of the people. . . . The present people does not behave otherwise than its predecessors who had persecuted and killed the prophets. . . . The message of Jesus does not contain any promise of the splendid future of Israel.”31 (IX) As is well known, the early Christians viewed the future with a mixture of fear and longing, of longing for the triumphant return of the Lord, but of deadly fear of the long and terrible rule of the that had to come first. So great is the dread of what they know lies ahead, that devout fathers of the church pray for the indefinite postponement of the Day of the Lord itself as the price of delaying the rule of darkness.32
(X) The Apostolic Fathers denounce with feeling the all too popular doctrine that God’s church simply cannot fail. All past triumphs, tribulations, and promises, they insist, will count for nothing unless the people now repent and stand firm in a final test that lies just ahead; God’s past blessings and covenants, far from being a guarantee of immunity (as many fondly believe) are the very opposite, for “the greater the knowledge we have received, the greater rather is the danger in which we lie.”33 The case of the Jews, to say nothing of the fallen angels, should prove that we are never safe.34 God will surely allow his people to perish if they continue in the way they are going—he will hasten their dissolution: “Since I called and ye hearkened not . . . therefore I in my turn will laugh at your destruction. . . . For there will come a time when you will call upon me and I shall not hear you.”35 The Apostolic Fathers compare the church to fallen Israel, and confirm their solemn warnings by citing the most lurid and uncompromising passages of scripture.36 (XI) They see the church running full speed in the wrong direction, and in great distress of mind plead with it to do an about-face “before it is too late,” as it soon will be.37 For their whole concern is not to make new converts, but rather “to save from perishing a soul that has already known Christ,” seeing to it that as many as possible pass “the fiery test ahead,” keep the faith that most are losing, and so reach the goal of glory beyond. 38 They know that the names of Christ and Christian carry on, but find no comfort in that, since those names are being freely used by impostors and corrupters,39 whom “the many” are gladly following.40
(XII) The call to repentance of the Apostolic Fathers is a last call; they labor the doctrine of the Two Ways as offering to Christian society a last chance to choose between saving its soul by dying in the faith or saving its skin by coming to terms with the world.41 They have no illusions as to the way things are going: the church has lost the gains it once made, the people are being led by false teachers,42 there is little to hinder the fulfillment of the dread (and oft-quoted) prophecy, “the Lord shall deliver the sheep of his pasture and their fold and their tower to destructions.”43 The original tower with its perfectly cut and well-fitted stones is soon to be taken from the earth, and in its place will remain only a second-class tower of defective stones which could not pass the test.44 In the Visions of the Pastor of Hermas the church is represented as an old and failing lady—”because your spirit is old and already fading away”—who is carried out of the world; only in the world beyond does she appear as a blooming and ageless maiden.45 The Apostolic Fathers take their leave of a church not busily engaged in realizing the kingdom, but fast falling asleep; the lights are going out, the Master has departed on his long journey, and until he returns all shall sleep. What lies ahead is the “Wintertime of the Just,” the time of mourning for the Bridegroom, when men shall seek the Lord and not find him, and “seek to do good, but no longer be able to.”46
Strange Behavior: What the strangely negative behavior of the first Christians suggests is less the expectation of an immediate Parousia than the shutting up of the shop until a distant reopening. (XIII) It has often been noted that their public relations were the world’s worst, that they “could not and did not court publicity outside the movement.”47 In sharp contrast to the later church, they were convinced, as Hilary observes, that the church “could not be Christ’s unless the world hated it.”48 The disciples, following the example and precept of their Master, made no effort to win public sympathy and support.49 This hard and uncompromising attitude has puzzled observers in every age, and indeed it makes little sense in an institution seeking either to convert the world or to survive in it.50 None knew better than the Christians themselves that their intransigence had no survival value, and yet they went right on “turning the world upside down” and mortally offending respectable people.
(XIV) The first Christians maintained a strange and stubborn reticence on certain matters (including their beliefs about the Second Coming), even when their silence led to serious misunderstanding and persecution.51 Even among the members the teaching was carefully rationed, for it was not the trivia but the high and holy mysteries, the most prized things of the kingdom, that were carefully kept out of circulation,52 so that Origen can report no clear official teaching in his day “not only regarding minor matters, but on the very first principles of the gospel.”53 Critics and scholars since Celsus have been puzzled by this early Christian reticence on matters which, if the church was to carry on, should have been highly publicized.54 And while Christians since Irenaeus have categorically denied that any teachings of the apostolic church were withheld, they have done so only to avoid the alarming implications of the primitive Christian reticence.55
(XV) Consistent with the policy of reticence is the strict limitation placed on the missionary activities of Jesus and his disciples, both in time and place, and their firm rejection of the highly successful proselytizing methods of the Jews. In his recent study of this anomaly, Joachim Jeremias has concluded that while Jesus did indeed envisage a universal call to the nations, he thought of it as coming only at the eschaton and not at the time of his mortal mission, which clearly did not have world conversion as its objective.56
(XVI) No less striking is the conspicuous absence of any missionary organization in the apostolic church, and the complete indifference of the Apostolic Fathers to the great business of converting the world.57 Their prayer for the church is to be gathered out of the world, not spread abroad in it, and to be caught up into the kingdom, not to build it here.58
(XVII) Instead of settling down as the later Christians sensibly did to long-term projects of conversion, the early Christians were driven by the “keen sense of urgency and stress” that fills their writings. “The time is short” was the refrain, and the missionaries had only time to give a hasty warning message and be on their way. It seems, according to K. Holl, that the apostles went about their business ohne für die Zukunft zu sorgen—without a thought for the future.59 What strange missionaries! They never speak of the bright future ahead nor glory in its prospects, but seem quite prepared to accept the assurance that they would preach to a generation that would not hear them and that, as in the days of Noah, the end would follow hard upon their preaching.60
(XVIII) But if the early saints mention no glorious future for the church, when that should be their strongest comfort, they do shed abundant tears when they look ahead. If the fall of Jerusalem and the temple was to be the great opportunity for the church that later theologians insist it was, Christ and the early saints were not aware of it, for they give no indication of regarding the event as anything but tragic.61 Paul viewed the future of the church “with tears” as, according to early accounts, did other leaders. 62 Apocryphal writings describe the apostles as weeping inconsolably when Jesus leaves them to their fates, and in turn the church shedding bitter tears for the loss of the apostles, that leaves it without guidance and counsel. 63 Whatever their historical value, such accounts convincingly convey a mood, and Kirsopp Lake recommended Browning’s terrible Death in the Desert as the best background reading for understanding the state of mind of the church at the passing of the apostles—all is lost.64
(XIX) The failure of the apostles to leave behind them written instructions for the future guidance of the church has often been noted and sadly regretted. It is hard to conceive of such a colossal oversight if the founders had actually envisaged a long future for the church. The awkwardness of the situation is apparent from R. M. Grant’s explanation of it, namely, that the apostles “did not live to see the Church fully organized and at work.”65 As if they should wait until the work was completed before giving instructions for completing it! Actually the most tragic disorganization and confusion followed hard upon the passing of the apostles, according to Hegesippus, and as a direct result of it.66 Plainly the early leaders made no careful provision for the future, even as they “failed to compose anything that could properly be described as ‘church-history'” in spite of their great interest in times, seasons and dispensations, and the imperative need and accepted use of sacred history in the economy of religious organizations.67
(XX) Then there is the total neglect of education in the early church, which G. Bardy would justify with desperate logic, arguing that education for the young was neglected because the church got its membership from converts among the adult population—fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani.68 And were all those converts childless, and were there no children in the church for those three long centuries during which it was without schools? In view of the great emphasis placed on education by the church in the fourth century, its total neglect in the preceding centuries can only have been deliberate. Well might E. de Faye find it strange that Jesus “ne songe nullement î former une école de jeunes hommes qui . . . seraient les hérétiers de sa doctrine” (“does not think to form a school of young men who would be the heirs of his teaching”), for if there were to be heirs of the teaching such a provision was indispensable.69 Why no education, then? Actually the Apostolic Fathers were greatly concerned about education, warning their people against the bad education of the world, and chiding them for their neglect of the only education that counted—that which prepared the young for the next life.70
(XXI) Neglect of standard education was matched by an equally disturbing indifference to the social and political problems which would necessarily be of vital concern to any enduring social institution. For years liberal scholars sought to discover a social gospel where none was to be found, and it is indeed hard to believe that a religion of brotherly love could so persistently ignore the crying social ills of the day.71 But the Christians excused themselves with the explanation that more urgent business had priority—they had no time for such things.72 Why not, if the church was to continue? (XXII) And why should a permanent and growing church refuse to invest in lands and buildings? For a long time eminent churchmen endorsed the old Christian prejudice against the construction of sorely needed church buildings.73But what could have been the original objection to anything as innocent and salutary as the building of a church? The early Christians tell us: the church cannot own real estate (they explain) because it is only here temporarily, and must never be allowed to forget that fact.74 (XXIII) Hans Lietzmann has shown that when “the Church sojourning at Rome” or elsewhere writes to “the Church sojourning at Corinth” or elsewhere it means that both churches are thought of only as temporary visitors in their cities; collectively and individually the church was here only on a brief pilgrimage. They were das wandernde Gottesvolk, strangers and pilgrims all, destined for but a short time upon the earth.75
Planned Martyrdom: The strongest argument for the survival of the church is the natural reluctance of men to accept defeat—even temporary defeat—for the work of God: “tot denique martyria in vacuum coronata?” cries Tertullian, ignoring Polycarp’s assurance that “all of these ran not in vain, because they are with the Lord in the place which is their due, with whom they also suffered. For they did not love this present world.”76 (XXIV) The loudly proclaimed objectives of the first martyrs do not include the future prosperity of the church. In bidding farewell to Jews and Gentiles Paul announces that his missions to them have been successful, not in terms of converts, but of clearing himself of a terrible responsibility: henceforth their blood is on their own heads; he has fulfilled his assignment successfully, for a crown awaits him—on the other side.77 “Thus it appears,” writes O. Cullmann, “that the coming of the Kingdom does not depend upon the success of this ‘preaching’ but only on the fact of the proclamation itself.” 78 What does depend on the preaching is (1) the salvation of the preacher, who is under condemnation unless he bears witness and frees himself of “the blood of this generation,” and (2) the convicting of a wicked world which must be “without excuse” in the day of judgment.79 The preaching is not to convert the world but “for a witness”—martyria occurs more than six times as frequently as kerygma in the New Testament—and it has long been recognized that the primary qualification and calling of an apostle was to be an eye witness.80 The calling of a witness is to preach to an unbelieving generation ripe for destruction, with the usual expectation (as the name “martyr” indicates) of being rejected and put to death.
(XXV) The strange indifference of the early martyrs to the future of a church for which later ages fondly believed they gave their lives has not received the comment it deserves. In a world in which a noble altruism was constantly on the lips of orators, in a society whose model citizen was that Pius Aeneas who promised his afflicted followers that grateful generations to come would call them blessed, and in a sect which placed brotherly love before all else, the Christian martyrs, unlike the pagan martyrs or Christian heroes of later times, never take comfort in the thought that others will profit by their sufferings, or that their deeds will be remembered and their names revered in ages to come. Ignatius, Andrew, and Perpetua will neither live nor die for the church, but talk of nothing but their personal glory with Christ hereafter, “for while he suffered for us, we suffer for ourselves.”81 This concept of martyrdom is the opposite of that which later prevailed, as Dionysius of Alexandria points out in a letter to Novatus, noting that whereas the early martyr was concerned “for his own soul alone . . . today the martyr thinks in terms of the whole Church.”82 Since the latter is the more humane and natural view, there must have been a very good reason for ignoring it. It could not have been that primitive Christians enjoyed suffering, for they did not;83 nor were they as self-centered even as the later Christians, who found in martyrdom the solace of matchless public acclaim and undying earthly renown.84 The very tears of the early leaders show plainly enough (as Chrysostom often observes) that they were genuinely concerned about the future. If, then, the martyrs refuse to think and speak in terms of a continuing church, it is not because they are peculiarly self-centered people, but simply because they see no future for the church.
(XXVI) So firmly fixed in the Christian mind is the conviction that every true Christian, every saint, is by very definition a martyr, that when persecutions ceased devout souls felt themselves cheated, and new ways and means of achieving martyrdom had to be devised, though they were never more than substitutes for the real thing.85A telling argument for any sect seeking to prove its authenticity has ever been the claim to have more martyrs than the others, 86 while the largest church of all at the peak of its power must needs describe itself in pathetic terms as a persecuted little band of saints—for tradition will not allow any other kind of church to be the true one.87 From the beginning the church is a community of martyrs, whose proper business is “nothing else than to study how to die”;88 and though “the final note is of the victory of God,” as C. T. Craig observes, before that happy culmination John “seems to have anticipated a universal martyrdom for the Church.” 89
The Great Gap: That ominous gap in the records which comes just at the moment of transition from a world-hostile to a world-conditioned Christianity has recently received growing attention and a number of interesting labels, such as the lacuna, the eclipse, the void, the great vacuum, the narrows, the period of oblivion, etc.90Brandon compares it to a tunnel “from which we emerge to find a situation which is unexpected in terms of the situation which went before.”91 (XXVII) The church, that is, which comes out of the tunnel is not the church that went into it. The great gap is more than a mere absence of documents; it is an abrupt break in the continuity of the church, so complete as to prove to Theodore Brandt that “the living faith cannot be transmitted from past ages,” which is at least an admission that it has not been. 92 The early Christians knew they were approaching a tunnel; they were acutely aware of “the terrible possibility of apostasy for the church”—not merely of apostasy from it,93 and never doubted “the general apostasy which would precede the coming of the Messiah.”94 And the church of the next age is just as aware of having passed through the tunnel, and losing its more precious possessions in the process. (XXVIII) For after the passing of the apostles “le vide est immense” (“The void is immense”), since it was the presence of living witnesses that had made the original church what it was.95 Henceforth the “Elders” of old are referred to as a fabulous race of beings endowed with gifts, powers, and knowledge far exceeding anything found on earth any more, and mere proximity to the apostles and the elders becomes a special mark of sanctity and authority.96 As “the great lights went out” the most devoted Christians engaged in a wistful “Operation Salvage” to rescue what might still be saved of “those things which came by the living voices that yet remained.”97 What more eloquent commentary on the passing of the church?
(XXIX) At the same time a horde of deceivers “who up until then had been lurking in dark corners,” as soon as they saw that there were no more apostles left to call them to account, came boldly forth, each claiming that he alone had the gnosis which the Lord had secretly imparted to the apostles after the resurrection.98 Strangely, they met with no official opposition: the Fathers who oppose them emphatically disclaim any apostolic authority and, what is more, know of no one else who might have it.99 “Nous sommes incapable”, writes D. Busy, “d’expliquer comment, la terre entière se trouvant évangélisée, les prédicateurs de l’Evangile ont l’air de disparaître et laissent le champ libre aux faux méssies et aux faux prophètes comme . . . la bête de la mer ne rencontre plus la moindre résistance.”100 (“We are unable to explain how, while the whole was being evangelized, the preachers of the gospel seem to disappear and leave the field free for false messiahs and false prophets; how . . . the beast of the sea does not meet the least resistance”.) The prophecy (2 Thessalonians 2:12) is no more puzzling than the event; for the second century, the great moment of transition, is no age of faith but “par excellence the age of Heresy.”101
It was not a case of reformers or schismatics attacking the main church—the problem was, since the Christians had always rejected with contempt the argument of mere numbers, to find the true church among a great number of sects, each claiming to be the one true original article and displaying facsimiles of ancient spiritual gifts, rites, and officers to prove it.102 Justin knows of no certain norm for distinguishing true Christians from false, and Irenaeus struggles manfully but vainly to discover one.103 While the perplexed masses asked embarrassing questions and flocked to the banner of any quack who gave promise of possessing the gifts and powers, especially prophecy, which it was commonly felt the church should have inherited,104 even the greatest churchmen hesitated and wavered, unable to resist the appeal of the old charismatic Christianity or to decide just where it was to be found.105 In the end, in Harnack’s words, “Gnosticism won half a victory,” for if the “Gnostics-so-called” had to default on electrifying promises which they could not fulfill, neither was any found to match their false claims with the genuine article, and the great surge of hope and enthusiasm that had carried the Gnostics on its crest subsided in disillusionment and compromise.106
(XXX) Still, the constant revival through the centuries of the old stock Gnostic claim that the one true apostolic church has by some miracle of survival come down to the possession of this or that group, is a perpetual reminder of the failure of subsequent Christianity to come up to the expectations of the first church.107 (XXXI) For the chronic discontent which haunts the Christian churches is by no means limited to the lunatic fringe. The vigorous beginnings of monasticism and pilgrimage were frankly attempts to return to the first order of the church, with its unworldly austerities and its spiritual manifestations, and as such were viewed by official Christianity as a clear vote of no-confidence—a rebuke and repudiation of the system.108
(XXXII) Modern students have agreed in describing the second generation of the church as a time of spiritual decline and low vitality, of torpor and exhaustion, “a dull period of feeble originality and a dearth of great personalities.”109 “Enfin,” writes G. Bardy, “c’est le tiedeur que domine.”110 Doctrinally it was a definite “Abfall vom Evangelium,” with the basic teachings altered and denatured beyond recognition. 111 As “the understanding of the Spirit . . . became lost . . . and the Christian had to rely on his own powers,” that Christian became calculating, complacent, and respectable, in a word, all that the first Christian was not.112 The overall impression, Goguel reports, is “definitely one of decadence.”113
Yet the same voices that bring these charges against the second generation unanimously approve the new mentality as a necessary coming down out of the clouds, a new-found sobriety and maturity, a sensible acceptance of the facts of life, as “uplifted eyes . . . [turned back] to earth . . . to find their assurance in hard facts.”114 At last, we are told, the Christian could enjoy “what he had been missing so long, the consideration and respect of the outside world.”115 Only by scrapping the old “evangelical eschatology,” according to one Catholic authority, could “Christian morality and the Church itself . . . take on larger dimensions,” this being (according to another) a necessary step “towards wider horizons than those to which the Galilean nucleus had chosen to confine itself.” 116 One may well ask how wider horizons and larger dimensions could be achieved by a Christianity admittedly “more hard and fast, less spontaneous, and in a sense, more cramped” than what had gone before; J. de Zwaan, who describes it thus, marvels “that the main stream of Gospel-tradition could pass through these narrows.”117 But the larger dimensions were the intellectual splendors of Hellenism, toward which the Gnostic agitation had hurried the feet of the church, the new Christian culture substituting erudition for inspiration, the rhetoric of the schools for the gift of tongues, a numerus episcoporum for the Spiritus per spiritalem hominem,118 and the orderly mechanics of ritual for the unpredictable operation of the spiritual gifts as “eschatological consciousness changed into sacramental piety.” 119 “Christianity,” wrote Wilhelm Christ, “was squeezed into a system congenial to pagan-Greek-rationalist thought, and in that safe protective suit of armor was able to face up to the world; but in the process it had to sacrifice its noblest moral and spiritual forces.”120 In paying the stipulated price for survival, the church of the second century proved what the early church knew so well, that whosoever would save his life must lose it.121
(XXXIII) The sensational change from the first to the second generation of the church was not, as it is usually depicted, a normal and necessary step in a long steady process of evolution. It was radical and abrupt, giving the old Christianity when set beside the new “tout l’aspect d’une anomalie,” as Duchesne puts it—an anomaly so extreme that many scholars have doubted that the primitive church ever existed.122 “Rapidity of evolution explains the difference between the gospels and the second century,” we are assured. 123 But rapidity is the sign not of evolution but of revolution, and the second-century upheaval was no part of a continuing trend at all, for after that one tremendous shift there are no more such changes of course in the way of the church: henceforward fundamental attitudes and concepts remain substantially unchanged.124 Eduard Norden has noted that early Christian literature had no literary predecessors and no successors, but appears as a completely alien intrusion into the classical tradition, an incongruous and unwelcome interruption, an indigestible lump which, however, disappears as suddenly as it came, leaving the schoolmen to resume operations as if nothing had happened.125 The march of civilization continued, but it was not the march of the church.
Arguments for Survival: The arguments put forth by those who would prove the survival of the church are enough in themselves to cast serious doubts upon it. (XXXIV) The first thing that strikes one is the failure of the ingenuity of scholarship to discover any serious scriptural support for the thesis. There are remarkably few passages in the Bible that yield encouragement even to the most determined exegesis, and it is not until centuries of discussion have passed that we meet with the now familiar interpretations of the “mustard seed” and “gates-of-hell” imagery, which some now hold to be eschatological teachings having no reference whatever to the success of the church on earth.126
The most effective assertions of survival are the rhetorical ones. We have already referred to the subtle use of such loaded terms as “the Infant Church,” “the Unquenchable Light,” etc., which merely beg the question. Equally effective is the “quand meme” (“even though”) argument, which frankly admits the exceedingly dim prospects of the early church and the scant possibility of survival and then, without further explanation, announces in awed and triumphant tones: “But in spite of everything it did survive!” (XXXV) Survival is admittedly a miracle and a paradox; its very incredibility is what makes it so wonderful.127 Ecstatic assertion alone carries the day where any serious discussion of evidence would mark one a cavilling cynic. For this argument comes right out of the schools of rhetoric; its favorite image, that of the storm-tossed ship which somehow never sinks because it bears virtuous souls, is already a commonplace in the Roman schools of declamation.128 The thrilling voices that assure us that all the powers of evil rage in vain are not those of the early Fathers, but of imperial panegyrists and spell-binding bishops of another day, with their comforting pronouncements that God has, as it were, invested so heavily in his church that he simply would not think of letting it fail at this late date.129
The strongest support of this “facile and dangerous optimism” has always been the decisive fact of survival itself, as proven by the undiminished eminence of the Christian name; only, in fact, if one defines apostasy as “a more or less express renunciation” of that name can the survival of the church be taken for granted, as it generally is.130 But what is the authority of the Christian label when early apologists can declare that it has become meaningless in their time, being as freely employed by false as by true Christians?131 Or when the Apostolic Fathers protest that vast numbers “bear the name deceitfully”? Or when Jesus himself warns that “many shall come in my name,” and all of them falsely: “Believe none of them!”132
A favorite theme of fiction and drama has ever been the stirring victory of Christianity over all the powers and blandishments of paganism. But this was victory over a strawman, a papier-mâché dragon brought onto the stage to prove to a confused and doubting world that the right had been victorious after all.133 The early leaders worried constantly, and only, about the enemy within; paganism, long dead on its feet, the butt of the schoolmen for centuries, was not the real enemy at all. (XXXVI) There were, to be sure, areas of doctrine and ritual in which paganism did present a real threat, but precisely there the church chose to surrender to the heathen, the pious economy of whose splendid festivals and the proud preeminence of whose venerated schools became an integral part of the Christian heritage.134
Christians have often taken comfort in the axiom that it is perfectly unthinkable that God should allow his church to suffer annihilation, that he would certainly draw the line somewhere. This is the very doctrine of ultimate immunity against which the Apostolic Fathers thunder, and later fathers remind us that we may not reject the appalling possibility simply because it is appalling.135 (XXXVII) If wicked men can “kill the Prince of Peace,” and Belial enjoy free reign as “the prince of this world;” where is one to draw the line at what is unthinkable? For Hilary the suggestion that Jesus actually wept is baffling, paradoxical, and unthinkable—”yet he wept!”136 If “after the prophets came the false prophets, and after the Apostles the false apostles, and after the Christ the Antichrist,” is it unthinkable that the church should likewise have a dubious successor?137 After all, Christians like Jerome found it quite unthinkable that Rome could ever fall, and used identical arguments to affirm the ultimate impregnability of the church and the empire.138 The hollowness of the rhetorical arguments for sure survival has become apparent in times of world-calamity, when the orators themselves have, like Basil and Chrysostom, suddenly reverted to the all-but-forgotten idiom of apocalyptic and eschatology, and asked, “Is it not possible that the Lord has already deserted us entirely?”139 The question is the more revealing for being uttered with heavy reluctance and in times of deepest soul-searching.
(XXXVIII) How deeply rooted in Christian thinking was the belief that the church would pass away is seen in the remarkable insistence of the orators of the fourth century that the great victory of the church which at that time took everyone by surprise was actually a restoration of the church, which had passed away entirely: “We of the church were not half-dead but wholly dead and buried in our graves,” the apostasy and the age of darkness had actually come as predicted, and were now being followed, as prophesied, by a new day of restoration.140 Here was an explanation that fitted the traditional view of the future: the church, it was explained, is like the moon, a thing that disappears and reappears from time to time.141 But if the fourth-century triumph was really that “restitution of all things” foretold by the apostle (Acts 3:21), it could only betoken the arrival of the eschaton, and so the orators duly proclaimed the dawn of the millennial day and the coming of the New Jerusalem.142
(XXXIX) One of the most significant things about “the glorious and unexpected triumph of the Church” was precisely that it was unexpected; everybody was surprised and puzzled by it.143 It was not what people had been taught to expect, and the remedy for their perplexity was a bold revamping of the story: “The facts speak for themselves,” is Chrysostom’s appeal, 144 and Eusebius sets his hand to a new kind of church history, with success—easy, inevitable success—as his theme.145Traditional concepts were quickly and radically overhauled. The familiar Two Ways were no longer the ways of light and darkness lying before Israel or the church, but the way of the church itself, Our church, versus the way of the opposition, whoever they might be. 146 “To endure to the end” no longer meant to suffer death but the opposite—to outlive one’s persecutors and enjoy one’s revenge.147 The old warnings and admonitions were given a new and optimistic twist: “As it was in the days of Noah” now meant that all was well, since “the rains did not come until Noah was safely in the Ark”;148 “No man knows the hour” becomes a cura solicitudinis, a comforting assurance that there was plenty of time and no need to worry;149 “this generation shall not pass away” really meant that the generations of the church would never pass away.150 It did not disturb a generation bred on rhetoric to be told that Peter heard with amazement that one should forgive seventy times seven, that being an announcement of the future generations that should believe.151 Nor did it seem overbold to explain the prediction that the apostles should be hated of all men as a rhetorical exaggeration;152 or to interpret the Lord’s prediction that men would seek him in vain as proof of his presence in the church, which would render any searching a waste of time, i.e., vain; 153 for it is not the Lord but the devil who comes “as a thief in the night.”154
One might fill a book with examples of such bold and clever rhetoric: the presence of wolves in the church simply fulfills the millennial promise that the wolf and the lamb shall graze together;155 tares in the church are a sign of its divinity, since it must embrace all men, good and bad, to be God’s church.156 What really happened was that the sheep promptly routed the wolves and the wheat overcame the tares—not the other way around!157 It was easy to show that all the bad predictions were duly fulfilled—on the heads of the Jews—while all the good promises made to them were properly meant for the Christians. The tears of the apostles were actually the happiest of omens for the church, exciting in all beholders, by a familiar rhetorical trick, those feelings of pity and devotion which would guarantee unflinching loyalty to the cause forever.158 It is fascinating to see how Chrysostom can turn even the most gloomy and depressing reference to the future of the church into a welcome promise of survival: the very fact that the ancient saints worried about things to come proves that there was to be a future, and so—delightful paradox!—they had nothing to worry about!159 If it can be said of the orating bishops that “the true size and color of every object is falsified by the exaggerations of their corrupt eloquence,” 160 it must also be noted that these were not wanton or irresponsible men, but devoted leaders desperately desirous of assuring themselves and their people of the unassailable integrity of the church: John Chrysostom repeatedly declares that the church is higher, holier, and (above all) more enduring than heaven itself.161 He could do that (on the authority of Luke 21:33) without a blush because rhetoric had transferred the church into a glorious abstraction, a noble allegory, and as such an eternal, spiritual, indestructible entity.162 On the other hand he had to do it to meet the importunities of those who beset him night and day “unceasingly and everlastingly” with searching and embarrassing questions as to whether the church still possessed those things which in the beginning certified its divinity.163
(XL) Where no rhetorical cunning could bridge the gap between the views of the fourth century and those of the early church, the latter were frankly discounted as suitable to a state of immaturity beyond which the church had happily progressed, emancipated from the “childish tales and vaporings of old grandmothers.”164 The learned fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries boast that the wise and noble who shunned the primitive church are now safe in a bosom of a Christian society which preaches and practices things that would have frightened off the rude converts of an earlier day,165 and invoke the eloquence of Demosthenes against the simplicitatem rusticam of the literal minded.166 This has been the official line ever since, and modern churchmen duly shudder at the thought of being “at the mercy of the primitive Church, its teachings, its life, its understanding,”167 and congratulate themselves on having outgrown the “fond imaginings of the Apostles.” 168
The Dilemma: Ever since the recent “rediscovery of the importance of eschatology within the New Testament”169 scholars have been faced, we are told, with a choice between eschatology and history—tertium non datur. (“there is no third choice”)170 Actually there has always been a third choice, namely to accept the passing of the church as the fulfillment of prophecy in history. But that, of course, is exactly what church history will not allow: “Modern New Testament critics,” writes R. M. Grant, “insist on the priority of the Church to its written records.”171 The church must be rescued at all price. For that reason it has been necessary to ignore Jeremias’ simple and obvious solution to the “vollendeter Widerspruch” (“complete contradiction”) between the conflicting missionary policies of the early church: the limited preaching belongs to one act of the play, the world preaching to another.172 This is a thing that Christians will not concede, for if the church is to remain on the scene, the drama must be one act or none.173
To preserve this hypothetical unity students have ascribed to the first Christians a fantastic one-package view of the future in which all the culminating events of prophecy are fulfilled at a single stupendous blow, “gathering up into one great climax the many judgments the . . . prophets had foretold.”174 When the great event failed to transpire, the great delay turned the great expectation into the great fiasco (the terms are not ours!), the church passing through the great disappointment to the real fulfillment, the great triumphal procession of the kingdom through the world. Such an unflattering view of the founders’ foresight is forced on the experts by a constitutional inability to think of the church as anything but a permanent and growing institution. 175 It was this very attitude, it will be recalled, toward his own church that made it impossible for Trypho the Jew to accept Justin’s complicated Messianic history.
But though the “great misunderstanding” theory has the merit of preserving the integrity of the church, it gravely jeopardizes the integrity of its founders while failing to give due consideration to certain peculiar and significant facts, viz., that the early Christians did not predict an immediate culmination of everything, but viewed the future down a long vista of prophetic events having more than one “end”;176 that not a single verse of scripture calls for an immediate Parousia or end of the world;177that there is a notable lack of evidence for any early Christian disappointment or surprise at the failure of the Parousia.178 While the enemies of the church exploited every absurdity and inconsistency in its position and made merry over “Jesus the King who never ruled,” they never played up what should have been the biggest joke of all—the feverish, hourly expectation of the Lord who never came. For R. Eisler this strange silence is nothing less than “the most astonishing of all historical paradoxes.”179 But what makes it such is only the refusal of the evidence to match the conventional pattern of church history: if there are no signs whatever of blasted hopes and expectations, we can only conclude that there were no such expectations. There were indeed Christians who looked for an immediate coming of the Lord and asked, “Where are the signs of his coming?” but they are expressly branded by the early leaders as false Christians, just as the virgins who expected the quick return of the Master, who “delayed his coming,” were the foolish ones.180
Students of church history have long been taught that whereas the primitive saints, living in an atmosphere of feverish expectation, looked forward momentarily to the end of everything, the later Christians gradually sobered up and learned to be more realistic. Exactly the opposite was the case, for while there is no evidence that the sober first Christians thought the end of the world was at hand, there is hardly a later theologian who does not think so: “From the days of the early church, through the vicissitudes of the lengthening middle centuries, into the twilight of the medieval day, the conviction of the world’s end . . . was part and parcel of Christian thought.” 181It had to be the end of the world, because the end of the church was inadmissible. Yet such was not the case with the first Christians, thoroughly at home with the idea that divine things, while they are preexistent and eternal, are taken away from the earth and restored again from time to time.182 If the church comes and goes like the moon, it is only with reference to this temporal world where all things are necessarily temporary.183 A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to early Christian and Jewish concepts of time and history. The present tendency is to treat the church as existing “sub specie aeternitatis, et pourtant dans le temps” (“sub specie aeternitatis, and yet in time”) as a supernatural and eschatological entity, “eine Schöpfung von oben her” (“a creation from above”).184 This releases it from earthly bonds, as does Ambrose’s declaration that the civitas “which lives forever, because it cannot die,” desires only to leave the earth in all possible haste and be caught up, literally as Elijah was, into heaven.185
To escape the dark interval between the apostles and the Parousia, scholars have bored two exits. The one recognizes a catastrophe ahead but postpones it to a vague and distant future,186 while the other admits that it was near at hand but insists that the damage was not so bad after all.187 Thus both convictions of the early church, that the end was near and that it was to be disastrous, receive reluctant confirmation—for no one suggests that only a distant and partial disruption was expected. There is a third escape hatch, around which there has been much milling and crowding in recent years, but it seems to be only a false door, a semantic exercise in which the conflicting claims of eschatology and history are simply placed side by side and declared reconciled in various ingenious and symbolic ways. If this vast literature of double-talk, “bewildering in its variety,”188 shows any perceptible trend, it is an inclination to have eschatology, since it can no longer be brushed aside, swallowed alive by the church: “The Church is an ‘eschatological community,’ since she is the New Testament, the ultimate and final. . . . The doctrine of Christ finds its fulness and completion in the doctrine of the Church, i.e. of ‘the Whole Christ.'”189 Such language actually seeks to de-eschatologize eschatology by making “mythical and timeless what they [the early Christians] regarded to be real and temporal.”190
More to the point is the searching question of Schoeps with which we began this survey, whether after all the real church may not have been left behind in the march of history: “Waren sie am Ende doch die wahren Erben, auch wenn sie untergingen?” (“at the end were they the real heirs, even if they perished?”)191 We have indicated above some of the reasons for suggesting that the church, like its founder, his apostles, and the prophets before them, came into the world, did the works of the Father, and then went out of the world, albeit with a promise of return. Some aspects of the problem, at least, deserve closer attention than students have hitherto been willing to give them.
* “The Passing of the Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme” first appeared in Church History, 20 (June 1961): 131–154. It was reprinted under the title “The Passing of the Primitive Church” in When the Lights Went Out (Salt Lake City: Deseret 1970):1–32. This article also appeared in BYU Studies 16 (1975): 139–64.
1. Karl Bihlmeyer, Kirchengeschichte (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1951), 1. Teil, 1–2.
2. “There is always danger of a metaphor once adopted becoming the master instead of the servant,” writes E. A. Payne, commenting on K. S. Latourette’s “Unquenchable Light” in “The Modern Expansion of the Church: Some Reflections on Dr. Latourette’s Conclusions,” Journal of Theological Studies 47 (1946): 151.
3. While suspecting the worst, the Fathers could not bring themselves to admit it, according to John Kaye, Ecclesiastical History of the Second and Third Centuries, Illustrated from the Writings of Tertullian (London: Farran, 1894), 48–51. See note 139 below.
4. The tension is discussed by René Marlé, “Le Christ de la foi et le Jésus de l’Histoire,” Études 302 (1959): 67–76. Cf. Robert M. Grant, “The Appeal to the Early Fathers,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 11 (1960): 14, 23.
5. Arnobius, Adversus Gentes (Against the Heathen) 2, 76, in PL 5:934a; 2 Corinthians 4:8–18; Tertullian, Ad Scapulam (To Scapula) 1, in PL 1:775–80; Cyprian, Epistolae (Letters) 56, in PL 4:362.
6. Matthew 17:12; 21:37–39; 23:31–37; Mark 12:6–8; Luke 17:25; John 1:5, 10–11; 3:11–12, 19, 32; 5:38, 40–47; 7:7; 8:19, 23–24, 37–38, 40–47; 15:22–25; cf. Acts 3:13–15.
7. Matthew 9:15; Luke 9:41; 13:25–27; 17:22; John 12:33–34; 12:35–36; 13:33; 14:30; 16:16; cf. Acts 3:21.
8. John 9:4–5; 14:30. Evil triumphs from Abel to the eschaton: Matthew 23:35–39; 17:12; Luke 11:51; Recognitiones Clementinae (Clementine Recognitions) 3, 61, in PG 1:1208.
9. Matthew 10:24–25; Mark 13:13; Luke 10:16; John 15:18–21; 17:14; Acts 28:26–27; Frederick C. Grant, “The Mission of the Disciples,” Journal of Biblical Literature35 (1916): 293–314.
10. Matthew 10:16–22, 28; 24:9; Mark 3:9; Luke 10:3; John 16:1, 2, 33; 1 Corinthians 4:9; Clement, Epistola I ad Corinthios (First Epistle to the Corinthians) 5, in PG1:217–20.
11. Matthew 24:14; 28:20; Mark 13:10. Notes 17 and 21 below.
12. James 5:10–11; 1 Peter 1:6–7, 24; 4:12–14; Romans 8.
13. 1 John 3:1; 1 Peter 5:1; John 17:25.
14. Matthew 16:24–26; 2 Corinthians 4:8–16; Philippians 3:1–21; Luke 12:22–34.
15. Jude 4–11, 16–19; Matthew 13:13–30; Romans 1:16–32; 2 Corinthians 11:3–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:7–12; 1 Timothy 4:1–3; 6:20–21; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; 2 Peter 2:1–22.
16. It ends only with the second coming, Matthew 13:30, 39–43; Mark 12:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:8; Didache 16; Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphone (Dialogue with Trypho) 51, 2, in PG 6:588–89.
17. 1 John 3:1; John 17:25; 1 Peter 5:8.
18. John 14:30; Matthew 21:38; Mark 12:7; Luke 20:14.
19. Matthew 13:24–30, 38. Both syllegein and synagogein are used.
20. 2 Timothy 4:2–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12; Romans 1:21–31.
21. Matthew 24:14; cf. 10:23; 28:20, where aeon refers to that particular age, Oscar Cullmann, “Eschatology and Missions in the New Testament,” in William D. Davies & D. Daube, eds., The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 417; cf. Niels Wilhelm Messel, Die Einheitlichkeit der jüdischen Eschatologie (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1915), 61–69, 44–50. See note 182 below.
22. Mark 13:9–10; Acts 2:16–17, 33; Origen, Commentaria in Evangelium Secundum Matthaeum (Commentary on Matthew) 39, in PG 13:1655B, concludes that, strictly speaking, jam finem venisse; so also John Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Hebraeos (On the Epistle to the Hebrews) 21, 3, in PG 63:152.
23. Tertullian, Adversus Gnosticos Scorpiace (Scorpiace) 9–10, in PL 2:162–67; 13–15, in PL 2:171–75; Ignatius, Epistola ad Polycarpum (Epistle to Polycarp) 3, in PL 5:709; Epistola ad Ephesios (Epistle to the Ephesians) 9, in PL 5:652.
24. Hebrews 6:11; Philippians 3:8–10; 1 Peter 1:4–6, 9; Clement, Epistola II ad Corinthios (Second Epistle to the Corinthians) 5, 2–4 in PG 1:336; Barnabas, Epistola Catholica (Catholic Epistle) 8, 6, in PG 2:748; Justin, Apologia pro Christianis (Apology) I, 57, in PG 6:413–16.
25. Mark 13:34–37; 1 Peter 4:12–13. Like soldiers, each to remain at his post, Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 37, in PG 1:281–84; 21, in PG 1:256; Tertullian, Liber ad Martyres (To the Martyrs) 3, in PL 1:707–9; cf. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 5, in PG 1:217–20; Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp 3, in PL5:709–10; Epistola ad Magnesios (Epistle to the Magnesians) 5, in PG 5:761–64; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2, 1, in PG 2:729–30.
26. “Ita ut pauci remaneant certantes pro veritate usque ad finem, qui et salvandi sunt soli.” Origen, Commentary on Matthew 24, in PG 13:1654D. There were few martyrs; G. de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 104, and countless betrayers, W. H. Frend, “Failure of the Persecutions in the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 16 (November 1959): 15–16.
27. Early sources speak of two factions within the church, and of the “seducers” completely exterminating the righteous party, Carl Schmidt, Gespräche Jesu mit seinen Jüngern (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1919), in TU 43:196–98; cf. Samuel G. F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1951), 54.
28. Luke 13:25–30; Matthew 23:29. There is a time limit to the promise, Hebrews 12:17, and “when the tower is finished, you will wish to do good, and will have no opportunity,” Pastor Hermae (Shepherd of Hermas), Visio (Visions) 3, 9, in PG 2:907.
29. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 110, in PG 6:729; Hilary, Contra Constantium Imperatorem (Against the Emperor Constantius) 4, in PL 10:581B.
30. Galatians 3:1–4. Ignatius describes the corruption with striking imagery as of pleasing and plausible wolves, Epistola ad Philadelphenses (Epistle to the Philadelphians) 2, in PG 5:697–708, a goodly label on a bottle of poison, a deadly drug mixed with sweet wine, Epistola ad Trallianos (Epistle to the Trallians) 6, in PG5:679–80, counterfeit coin, Epistle to the Magnesians 5, in PG 5:647–48, cleverly baited hooks, ibid., 11, in PG 5:653–56, etc.
31. Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” New Testament Studies 1 (1954): 7–8.
32. A mixture of “Freude, Sehnsucht, und bange Furcht,” Rudolf Knopf, Die Zukunftshoffnungen des Urchristentums (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907), 7–11. Cf. Didache 16.
33. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 41, 4, in PG 1:289–92; “The last stumbling-block approaches,” Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4, 3 and 9, in PG 2:731–34; Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 7, 1, in PG 1:221–25; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 7–8, in PG 1:337–41; Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 2, 2, in PG 2:897; 4, 1, in PG 2:909.
34. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 15, 4–6, in PG 1:237–40; 8, in PG 1:225–28; 39, in PG 1:285–88; 57, in PG 1:324–26; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6, in PG 1:336–37; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4–5, in PG 2:731–37; 13–14, in PG 2:765–69.
35. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 57–58, in PG 1:324–28. The promise of the Paraclete is no guarantee, Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6, 9, in PG 1:336–37.
36. So Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 3–7, in PG 1:213–25; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2–6, in PG 2:729–44; 16, in PG 2:773–76; Constitutiones Apostolicae (Apostolic Constitutions) 7, 32, in PG 1:1621; Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones (Divine Institutes) VII, 17, in PL 6:1008–9.
37. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 1, in PG 1:201; 3, in PG 1:213; 19, in PG 1:248; 41, in PG 1:289; 47, in PG 1:305–8; 52, in PG 1:316; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2, in PG 2:729; Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 17, in PG 5:749–52; Epistle to the Philadelphians 2, in PG 5:820; Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 2, 2, in PG2:897; 3, 9, in PG 2:907; Similitudo (Similitudes) 7, in PG 2:969–72; 9, 21 and 25–26, in PG 2:999–1002; 10, 1, in PG 2:1009.
38. Didache 10:5; Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp 1, 2, in PG 5:861–64; Epistle to the Ephesians 17, in PG 5:749–52; Epistle to the Philadelphians 1, in PG 5:820; Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 9, 14, in PG 2:917; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2, 1, in PG 2:729; 21, in PG 2:779–81.
39. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 15, in PG 1:237; 30, in PG 1:269–72; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 3–4, in PG 1:333–36; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 10, 4, in PG 2:752–56; Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 15, in PG 5:657; 7, in PG 5:649; Epistle to the Magnesians 4, in PG 5:648; Epistle to the Trallians 6, in PG 5:680; Polycarp, Epistola ad Philippenses (Epistle to the Philippians) 10, in PG 5:1013; Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 1, 3, in PG 2:893–96; Similitudes 9, 13, in PG 2:991; 9, 21, in PG 2:999.
40. Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 7, in PG 5:1012; Shepherd of Hermas, Mandatum (Mandates) 11, 1, in PG 2:943.
41. Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 5, in PG 5:648; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 6, in PG 1:336–37; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 5, in PG 2:733; 18, in PG 2:776; see Kirsopp Lake’s note on the Shepherd of Hermas in his Apostolic Fathers, Loeb ed. (1912), 2:21, n. 1; reprinted Classic Library Series, vols. 9, 10 in two vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
42. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 1, in PG 1:201–8; 3, in PG 1:213–16; 19, in PG 1:248; 24, in PG 1:260–61; Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 7, in PG5:764–65; Epistle to the Ephesians 9, 5, in PG 5:713; 17, in PG 5:749–52; Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 3, 3, in PG 2:901; 10, in PG 2:907. Cf. Testament of Hezekiah 2:3B–4:18 in OTP 2:159–61.
43. Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 16, in PG 2:771–76; Didache 16:3; Enoch 89; 56; 66–67; Logion 14, in “Prétendues sentences de Jésus,” in PO 4:176–77; cf. “Le Salut – les vieux sages,” in PO 9:227–28.
44. Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 3, 3–7, in PG 2:901–6.
45. Ibid., 3, 11–13, in PG 2:907–10.
46. Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 3, in PG 2:955; 4, in PG 2:955–58; 9, in PG 2:979–1010; Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 58, in PG 5:328; Eusebius, HE III, 31, 3, in PG 20:280–81; V, 24, 2, in PG 20:493–508.
47. A. D. Nock, “The Vocabulary of the New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 52 (1933): 135.
48. Hilary, Liber contra Auxentium (Against Auxentius) 4, in PL 10:611B.
49. K. Holl, “Urchristentum und Religionsgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 2 (1924): 403–5; Suzanne de Dietrich, Le Dessein de Dieu, 2nd ed. (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestle, 1948), 19, finds only one case, Mark 5:19, in which Christ did not avoid publicity.
50. Origen, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) 2, 76, in PG 11:848; 4, 28, in PG 11:1068; Minucius Felix, Octavius 7–11, in PL 3:262–81; Lactantius, Divine Institutes V, 7, in PL 6:991.
51. Minucius Felix, Octavius 9–10, in PL 3:270–76; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 52, in PG 6:589–92 (the Parousia a secret); 90, 2, in PG 6:689–92; Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus Gentes pro Christianis (Apology) 7, in PL 1:358–62; Clementine Recognitions 1, 52, in PG 1:1236; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1, 12, in PG 8:753; 5, 10, in PG 9:93–101.
52. Matthew 13:9–17; Clementine Recognitions 2, 60, in PG 1:1264; 3, 1, in PG 1:1281–82; Tertullian, De Praescriptionibus (The Prescription against Heretics) 25–26, in PL 2:43–46; Origen, Against Celsus I, 1, 1–7, in PG 11:651–69; Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 5, in PG 5:781–84.
53. Origen, Peri Archon (On First Things) I, 2, in PG 11:130–45; I, 4, in PG 11:155; I, 6–8, in PG 11:165–83.
54. Origen, Against Celsus 2, 70, in PG 11:905–8; Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1951), 396. This is an edition of the earlier Von Reimarus zu Wrede; cf. English translation, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Herman Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903), 78–79; Kirsopp Lake, Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Harper, 1937), 37.
55. Irenaeus, Contra Haereses (Against Heresies) IV, 33, 7, in PG 7:1076–77; II, 27, 1–3, in PG 7:802, insists that nothing has been lost, cf. I, 8, 1, in PG 7:519, etc., yet speaks with awe of the knowledge of the apostles, I, 13, 6, in PG 7:588; III, 2, 2, in PG 7:847, which Ignatius implies far exceeds his own, Epistle to the Ephesians3, in PG 5:645; Epistle to the Magnesians 5, in PG 5:648; Epistola ad Romanos (Epistle to the Romans) 4, in PG 5:689. Later fathers were intrigued by the great unwritten knowledge of the apostles, Gottfried Thomasius, Die christliche Dogmengeschichte als Entwicklungs-geschichte des kirchlichen Lehrbegriffs, 2nd ed. (Erlangen: Deichert, 1886–89), vol. 1, Dogmengeschichte der alten Kirche (Erlangen: Deichert, 1886), 209, 297–98.
56. Joachim Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 15–16, 61–62 = Jesus’ Promise to the Nations, tr. S. H. Hooke (London: SCM Press, 1958).
57. Albert Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste. Histoire de la fondation de l’église, la révolution religieuse (Paris: Blond, 1909), 220; Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 17, 21, 60–61. Note 38 above.
58. Didache 10:5; Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 7, in PG 5:693: “deuro pros ton patera”—literally.
59. Discussed by Olof Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche in der neueren Forschung (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1932), 198–200.
60. Robert Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930), 2:237.
61. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 7–11.
62. Homiliae Clementinae XI, 16, 21, in PG 2:384A; Hippolytus, De Consummatione Mundi (spuria) (On the Consummation of the World) 10–11, in PG 10:913A–C; Athanasius, Vita Antonii (Life of Antony) 82, in PG 26:957.
63. Acta Pilati 15, in PO 9:108–9; James Rendell Harris, Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, 28, 33, 35, 38; A. W. Wallis Budge, Contendings of the Apostles, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1899–1901) 2:62, 53–55, 59.
64. Lake, Introduction to the New Testament, 62.
65. Robert M. Grant, Second Century Christianity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1946), 9.
66. Eusebius, HE III, 32, 7–8, in PG 20:281–84.
67. Robert L. P. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History (London: Black, 1954), 25–26.
68. Gustave Bardy, in Revue des Sciences Religieuses 12 (1932): 1, quoting Tertullian, Apology 18, 4, in PL 1:362–65.
69. Eugéne de Faye, Étude sur les origines des églises de l’age apostolique (Paris: Leroux, 1909), 111.
70. E.g., Shepherd of Hermas, Visions 1, 3, in PG 2:891–93; 2, 2, in PG 2:895–97; 3, 9, in PG 2:897; Similitudes 9, 19, in PG 2:997; Mandates 11–12, in PG 2:943; Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 21, in PG 1:256. Cf. Eusebius, HE V, 28, in PG 20:512; Clementine Recognitions 1, 1–5, in PG 1:1207–9.
71. See Marlé, “Le Christ de la Foi et le Jésus de l’Histoire,” 67–76.
72. Origen, Against Celsus 8, 72 and 74, in PG 11:1624–29; Tertullian, Apology 38, in PL 1:526–31; Apostolic Constitutions 7, 39, in PG 1:1037–40; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 2, in PG 2:729; 4, in PG 2:731; 1 Corinthians 7:29–32.
73. Origen, Against Celsus 8, 17–20, in PG 11:1540–49; Zeno, Liber (Commentary) 1, Tractatus (Tractate) 14, in PL 11:354B–358A; Minucius Felix, Octavius 10, in PL 3:274; Jerome, Epistolae (Letters) 130, 15, in PL 22:1119A; Arnobius, Against the Heathen 6, 1, in PL 5:1162B.
74. Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes 1, 1, in PG 2:951; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 5, in PG 1:336; Cyprian, Liber de Mortalitate (Treatise on Mortality) 25, in PL 4:623B.
75. Hans Lietzmann, Geschichte der alten Kirche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1932–34) 2:41–42 = A History of the Early Church, vol. 2, The Founding of the Church Universal, tr. Bertram Woolf (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1950); Ernst Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1939), 51–52.
76. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 27–29, in PL 2:46–48; Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 9, in PG 5:1012–13.
77. Acts 17:6;2 Timothy 4:6–8. Conversion not the object, 1 Corinthians 1:17.
78. Oscar Cullman, in Davies & Daube, Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, 415.
79. 1 Corinthians 9:16; John 15:22; Matthew 23:34–35; 27:25; Luke 11:49–51; Acts 5:28; 18:6; Clementine Recognitions I, 8, in PG 1:1211, “tacere non possumus.”
80. Oscar Cullman, Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zürich: Zwingli, 1950), 39–56.
81. Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 6–8, in PG 5:691–94; Epistle to the Ephesians 11, 1, in PG 5:654; Passio s. Perpetuae 6; 18; 21. Quote from Apostolic Constitutions V, 5, in PG 1:833.
82. Eusebius, HE VI, 45, in PG 20:633.
83. Tertullian, Apology 1, in PL 1:305–8; Cyprian, Treatise on Mortality 12, in PL 4:611–12.
84. Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898) 2:418–19, contrasts the early and later Christian concepts of martyrdom. The transition is clear in Cyprian, who must warn, “non martyres Evangelium faciant,” Letters 24 (22), in PL 4:293A.
85. Cyprian, Letters 8, in PL 4:255A; De Duplici Martyrio (On the Twofold Martyrdom) 35, in PL 4:982A; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata IV, 7, in PG 8:1268–80; Leo, Sermo 47, 1, in PL 54:295B–C.
86. So Asterius Urbanus, Fragmenta contra Montanistas (Against the Montanists), frg. 3; 6; 8, in PG 10:149B, 153A–B.
87. So Optatus, De Schismate Donatistarum (On the Donatist Schism) 17; 24–26, in PL 11:968–69, 979B–986A.
88. Cyprian, Epistola ad Fortunatum (Letter to Fortunatus), Praefatio, in PL 4:678–82.
89. Clarence T. Craig, The Beginnings of Christianity (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1943), 328.
90. Pieter A. van Stempvoort, “Het onstaan van het Kerkbegrip en de oudste Kerkorganisatie,” in J. H. Waszink et al., eds., Het Oudste Christendom en de antieke Cultuur, 2 vols. (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1951), 2:331; Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 9–11. The imagery goes back to Eusebius, HE I, 1, 3, in PG 20:48–53.
91. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 10; Eduard Schwartz, Kaiser Constantin und die christliche Kirche (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), 17–18; Hans Lietzmann, Kleine Schriften (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958–62) 1:97.
92. Theodore Brandt, Die Kirche im Wandel der Zeit (Leipzig: MBK-Verlag, 1933), 79.
93. E. C. Blackman, “The Task of Exegesis,” in Davies & Daube, Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, 13.
94. Gustave Bardy, La conversion au christianisme (Paris: Aubier, 1949), 296.
95. Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste. Histoire de la fondation de l’église, 250; Maurice Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1949), 139; and Maurice Goguel, “La seconde génération chrétienne,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 136 (1949): 36–37.
96. Eusebius, HE III, 37, in PG 20:292–93; III, 39, in PG 20:292–302; Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 47, in PG 1:305–8; Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians3, in PG 5:1008; Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 5, in PG 5:809–12; Irenaeus, Against Heresies III, 3, 4, in PG 7:851; Methodius, Ex Libro de Resurrectione (From the Treatise on Resurrection) 6, in PG 18:313B.
97. Eusebius, HE III, 39, 1–4, in PG 20:297; V, 10, 4, in PG 20:453–56; XI, 3–5, in PG 20:456–57; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 82, in PG 6:669–72; Origen, Against Celsus II, 8, in PG 11:805–8.
98. Eusebius, HE III, 32, 7–8, in PG 20:281–86; II, 1, 3, in PG 20:140–41; Irenaeus, Against Heresies I, in PG 7:437–45.
99. Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians 3, in PG 5:1008; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 1, 5, in PG 2:727; the case of Ignatius is discussed by Jean Reville, “Études sur les origines de le’épiscopat,” Revue de l’histoire religieuse 22 (1890): 285–88.
100. D. Busy, in Recherches de science religieuse 24 (1934): 431.
101. Bardy, La conversion au christianisme, 306; Grant, Second Century Christianity, 9–18.
102. “Singuli quique coetus haereticorum se potissimum Christianos, et suam esse Catholicam Ecclesiam putant,” Lactantius, Divine Institutes IV, 30, in PL 6:540–44; Eusebius, HE V, 13–18, in PG 20:460–81; Sozomen, HE V, 9, in PG 67:1237–40; V, 20, in PG 67:1277–80; VI, 26, in PG 67:1361–66; VIII, 20, in PG 67:1568–70, etc. Origen, Against Celsus III, 10–12, in PG 11:932–36.
103. Justin, Apology 8, in PG 66:338–40; Dialogue with Trypho 35, in PG 6:549–53; 42, in PG 6:565; 80, in PG 6:664–80; cf. Origen, Against Celsus VI, 11, in PG11:1305–8.
104. Eusebius, HE V, 16, in PG 20:464–72; Justin, Quaestiones (Inquiries), nos. 100, 5, in PG 6:1344–45, 1256AB.
105. Sulpicius Severus, Historia Sacra (Sacred History) II, 46, in PL 20:155; II, 50, in PL 20:157–58. Eusebius worried too, Walther Völker, “Von welchen Tendenzen liess sich Eusebius bei Abfassung seiner ‘Kirchengeschichte’ leiten?” Vigiliae Christianae 4 (1950): 170–71.
106. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 5th ed. 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1931), 1:250; Eusebius, HE V, 15–16, in PG 20:172–73.
107. The Reformation itself attempted revival of “prophetic, eschatological Christianity,” Heinrich Bornkamm, Grundriss zum Studium der Kirchengeschichte(Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949), 63.
108. Adolf von Harnack, Das Mönchtum (Giessen: Ricken, 1895), passim. The church fathers did not encourage pilgrimages, Bernard Kötting, Peregrinatio Religiosa(Münster: Regensberg, 1950), 421.
109. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 34, 180, 192–94.
110. Bardy, La conversion au christianisme, 304; so Lietzmann, Geschichte der alten Kirche 1:226; Harnack, Das Mönchtum, 25.
111. Robert Frick, “Die Geschichte des Reich-Gottes-Gedankens,” ZNTW, Beiheft 6 (1928): 154, 152–55; Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 35; Harnack, Das Mönchtum, 25.
112. Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” 15.
113. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 191.
114. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History, 26.
115. Gustave Bardy, L’Eglise et les derniers Romains (Paris: Laffont, 1948), 48.
116. F.-M. Braun, “Où en est l’eschatologie du Nouveau Testament,” Revue Biblique 49 (1940): 53; Henri Leclercq, “Églises,” in DACL 4:2281.
117. J. de Zwaan, “Some Remarks on the ‘Church Idea’ in the Second Century,” in Aux sources de la tradition Chrétienne, Mélanges offerts î M. Maurice Goguel a l’occasion de son soixante-dixiéme anniversaire (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1950), 278.
118. Tertullian, De Pudicitia (On Modesty) 21, in PL 2:1080B.
119. Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” 15.
120. Wilhelm Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 6th ed. 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1912–20) 2:2:955.
121. “In the end therefore, it was the Christian doctrine and practice which underwent the change, and society which remained,” Kirsopp Lake, “The Shepherd of Hermas and Christian Life in Rome in the Second Century,” Harvard Theological Review 4 (1911): 25.
122. L. Duchesne, Origenes du culte chrétien, 2nd ed. (Paris: Thorin, 1898), 52–53 (5th ed. [1920], 55).
123. Lake, Introduction to the New Testament, 22; Dufourcq, Epoque syncrétiste. Histoire de la fondation de l’église, 221.
124. Goguel, Les premiers temps de l’église, 209; Reinhold Seeberg, Textbook of the History of Doctrines, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1952) 1:118; Karl Adam, Das Wesen des Katholizismus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1934), 194 = The Spirit of Catholicism, tr. D. McCann (London: Sheed & Ward, 1929).
125. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa 2:479–81.
126. Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche in der neueren Forschung, 160, 164–66; O. Kuss, “Zur Senfkornparabel,” Theologie und Glaube 41 (1951): 40–46; Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 58–59; cf. English ed., 68–69.
127. So Bardy, La conversion au christianisme, 6; Bornkamm, Grundriss zum Studium der Kirchengeschichte, 20.
128. Stanley Bonner, Roman Declamation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 59.
129. “Animae emptae a Christo non potuerunt vendi,” Optatus, On the Donatist Schism 3, 11, in PL 11:1024–25; E. Fascher, “Dynamis Theou,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 19 (1938): 108; Chrysostom exposes the fallacy, In Epistolam ad Galatas Commentarius (Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians) 3, 2, in PG 61:649–50.
130. Bardy, La conversion au christianisme, ch. 8 entire. Refuted by John Chrysostom, On the Epistle to the Hebrews 5, Homily 8, in PG 63:73, and Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei (On the Government of God) IV, 1, 61.
131. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 35, in PG 6:549–53; Origen, Against Celsus III, 12, in PG 11:933–36.
132. Matthew 7:22; 24:5; Mark 9:39; 13:6; Luke 21:8; Acts 17:15.
133. E.g., the gloating attacks on the dead Julian, Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa 2:563.
134. Ibid., 2:460–62, 465, 476–77, 529–32, 680–83; Frend, “Failure of the Persecutions in the Roman Empire,” 12.
135. Hippolytus, Fragmenta in Danielem (Fragments on Daniel) 5, 7, in PG 10:681D; Demonstratio de Christo et Antichristo (On Christ and the Antichrist) 29, 57–58, in PG 10:749B, 776B–777A; On the Consummation of the World 11, in PG 10:913C.
136. Hilary, De Trinitate (On the Trinity) 10, 55, in PL 10:387.
137. Quote is from John Chrysostom, Commentary on Matthew 46, 1, in PG 58:476.
138. Johannes Straub, “Christliche Geschichtesapologetik in der Krisis des römischen Reiches,” Historia 1 (1950): 64.
139. Basil the Great, Epistolae (Letters) 150, 2, no. 139, in PG 32:584A. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 27–28, in PL 2:46–47, must console himself with the argument of numbers. Even before Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel) 1, 3, in PG 21:33, Hegesippus sought to reassure himself that there was an absolute continuity, according to L. Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–92) 1:1, who vainly seeks the same assurance, Henri Leclercq, “Historiens du Christianisme,” DACL 6:2697.
140. Eusebius, HE X, 4, 12–16, in PG 20:857–60; VIII, 1, 8–ii, in PG 20:740–44; VIII, 1–3, in PG 20:744; cf. Sozomen, HE III, 17, in PG 67:1093–96. The church was overcome by its own sins, Cyprian, Letters 7, in PL 4:246–51, cf. Liber de Lapsis, (Book on the Apostates), in PL 4:478–510. On the Restoration motif, see Michael S. Seidlmayer, “Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter,” Saeculum 7 (1956): 405–7; John Edwin Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols. (New York: Hafner, 1958) 1:513–14.
141. Ambrose, Hexaemeron 4, 32, in PL 14:217–18; Methodius, Convivium Decem Virginum (Banquet of the Ten Virgins) 6, in PG 18:148B; Jerome, Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 18, 66, in PL 24:699–702; Lactantius, Divine Institutes V, 7, in PL 6:570–71.
142. Discussed by this writer, Hugh W. Nibley, “The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage,” Western Political Quarterly 6 (1953): 641–46.
143. The surprise is expressed by John Chrysostom, Expositio in Psalmos (Exposition on Psalms) 148, 4, in PG 55:483–84, and Contra Judaeos et Gentiles, quod Christus Sit Deus (Against the Jews and the Gentiles, that Christ is God) 12, in PG 48:829–30; cf. the perplexity in Justin, Inquiries, 74, in PG 6:1316A.
144. John Chrysostom, Sermo antequam Iret in Exsilium (Discourse before Going into Exile) 1, 2, in PG 52:429–30; In Illud, Vidi Dominum, Homilia (Homily on the Verse “I Have Seen the Lord”) 4, 2, in PG 56:121.
145. Völker, “‘Tendenzen in Eusebius’ ‘Kirchengeschichte,'” 161–80. J. Burckhardt calls Eusebius “the first thoroughly dishonest historian,” cited by Moses Hadas, “The Conversion of Constantine,” Jewish Quarterly Review 41 (1950): 423.
146. See Nibley, “The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage,” 644–46.
147. Lactantius, Divine Institutes V, 24, in PL 6:630.
148. Eusebius, Commentarius in Lucam (Commentary on Luke) 27, 27, in PG 24:584D–585A.
149. Hilary, Commentarius in Matthaeum (Commentary on Matthew) 26, 4, in PL 9:1057B.
150. Eusebius, Commentary on Luke 13, 32, in PG 24:601D–604A.
151. John Chrysostom, De Decem Millium Talentorum Debitore Homilia (Homily on the Man Who Owed Ten Thousand Talents) 3, in PG 51:21B.
152. First suggested by Origen, Commentary on Matthew 39, in PG 13:1653D.
153. Hilary, Commentary on Matthew 25, 8, in PL 9:1055.
154. Ibid. 26, 6, in PL 9:1058B.
155. Eusebius, Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 11, 6, in PG 24:172C–173A.
156. Optatus, On the Donatist Schism 7, 2, in PL 11:1085B–1086A.
157. A favorite theme with Chrysostom, e.g., Homily on the Verse “I Have Seen the Lord” 4, 4, 2, in PG 56:121; Sermo post Reditum ab Exsilio (Discourse Following the Return from Exile) 2, in PG 52:440, 442; Sermo Ipsius Severiani de Pace, in PG 52:425; cf. Athanasius II, Homilia de Semente (Homily on the Seed) 5, in PG28:149C.
158. John Chrysostom, De Novem Diebus (On the Nine Days) 6, in PG 56:277–78; Basil, Homilia de Gratiarum Actione 4, in PG 31:228A; Hilary, On the Trinity X, 39–43, in PL 10:374–77.
159. Chrysostom, On the Nine Days 6, in PG 56:277–78.
160. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), ch. 26, note 101; 1:941.
161. John Chrysostom, De Capto Eutropio et de Divitiarum Vanitate (On the Capture of Eutropius and the Vanity of Wealth) 1, 6, in PG 52:397–98, 402; Cum de Expulsione Ipsius Sancti Joannes Ageretur, in PG 52:433; Exposition on the Psalms 147, 4, in PG 55:483; Homily on the Verse “I Have Seen the Lord” 4, 2, in PG56:121; Commentary on Matthew 54, 2, in PG 58:535; ibid., 77, 1, in PG 58:702.
162. Chrysostom, In Epistolam I ad Corinthios Homilia (Homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians) 32, 1, in PG 61:265; 6, 3–4, in PG 61:51–53.
163. Chrysostom, De Sancta Pentecoste Homilia (Homily on the Holy Pentecost) 1, 4, in PG 50:459, 453; De Laudibus Sancti Pauli Apostoli Homilia (Homilies on the Praise of St. Paul the Apostle) 4, in PG 50:488; In Inscriptionem Actorum (Inscription on the Acts) 2, 3, in PG 51:81–82; cf. 85; Homily on the First Epistle to the Corinthians 32, 2, in PG 61:265; In Colossenses Homilia (Homily on Colossians) 3, 8, in PG 62:358–59, etc.
164. Chrysostom, Exposition on Psalms 110, 4, in PG 55:285; Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 54, 1, in PL 24:516B; 13, in PL 24:627B–629A; Origen, Against CelsusIV, 80, in PG 11:1152–53; De Principiis II, 4, 3, in PG 11:201–3.
165. Athanasius, Oratio de Incarnatione Verbi Dei (Oration on the Incarnation of the Word) 53, in PG 25:189; Jerome, Letters 66, 4, in PL 22:641; Commentary on Isaiah 60, 1, in PL 24:588D–589A.
166. Jerome, Contra Joannem Hierosolymitanum (Against John the Jerusalemite) 11–12, in PL 23:380C–381C.
167. K. Stendahl, “Implications of Form-Criticism and Tradition-Criticism for Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 77 (1958): 34.
168. A. C. Cotter, “The Eschatological Discourse,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 1 (1939): 205.
169. N. A. Dahl, “Christ, Creation, and the Church,” in Davies & Daube, The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, 422.
170. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, 375.
171. Robert M. Grant, “‘Development’ in Early Christian Doctrine,” Journal of Religion 39 (1959): 121.
172. Jeremias, Jesu Verheissung für die Völker, 47.
173. So Johannes Weiss, “Das Problem der Entestehung des Christentums,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 16 (1913): 435.
174. Alfred Fawkes, “The Development of Christian Institutions and Beliefs,” Harvard Theological Review 10 (1917): 115–16.
175. Linton, Das Problem der Urkirche, 121, 159.
176. A. Feuillet, “La Synthése Eschatologique de Saint Matthieu,” Revue Biblique 57 (1950): 180–211; Millar Burrows, An Outline of Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946), 199–201.
177. Van Stempvoort, “Het ontstaan van het Kerkbegrip en de oudste Kerkorganisatie,” 250; T. F. Glasson, “The Kerygma: Is Our Version Correct,” in Hibbert Journal51 (1953): 129, 131–32; Frederick A. M. Spencer, “The Second Advent According to the Gospels,” Church Quarterly Review 126 (1938): 6.
178. Goguel, “La seconde génération chrétienne,” 190; G. Bornkamm, In Memoriam Ernst Lohmeyer (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1951), 116, 118, 121; E. Stauffer, “Agnostos Christos,” in Davies & Daube, The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, 281–82.
179. Eisler, Iesous Basileus 1:26; cf. S. Franck, “Le Royaume de Dieu et Le Monde,” Dieu Vivant 7 (1951): 17–34.
180. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 23, in PG 1:236; Clement, Second Epistle to the Corinthians 11–12, in PG 2:344–48; Barnabas, Catholic Epistle 4, 16, in PG 2:731–33; cf. Luke 18:7.
181. R. C. Petry, “Medieval Eschatology and St. Francis of Assisi,” Church History 9 (1940): 55; F. Bäthgen, Der Engelpapst (Halle: Nieymeyer, 1933), 76.
182. The old dispensation theory: Origen, Against Celsus IV, 11–12; in PG 11:1039–41; Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History, 29–31. The Jews had lost and regained the temple more than once.
183. Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) III, 2, 6, in PG 42:784; Lactantius, Divine Institutes IV, 1, in PL 6:447–51.
184. H. Clavier, “Problème du Rite et du Mythe dans le quatrième Evangile,” Revue d’Histoire et Philosophie Religeuses 31 (1951): 292; Linton, Das Problem der Urkirchen in der neueren Forschung, 132–33; Dahl, “Christ, Creation and the Church,” 422–43.
185. Ambrose, Expositio in Lucam (Commentary on Luke) 2, 88, in PL 15:1667–68; John Chrysostom, Homilia in Apostolicum Dictum: Hoc Scitote, Quod in Novissimis Diebus Erunt Tempora Gravia (Homily on the Apostolic Saying: “This Know Also, that in the Last Days Perilous Times Shall Come” [2 Timothy 3:1]) 5, in PG 56:276.
186. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 56, in PG 13:1688D, attacks this view, held by M. Brunec, in Verbum Domini (1952), 265, 269, 277, 323–24.
187. Hippolytus, On the Consummation of the World 24–25, in PG 10:937B–C.
188. F. F. Bruce, “Eschatology,” London Quarterly and Holborn Review 183 (1958): 99, with a survey of the literature, 101–3.
189. G. Florovsky, “Eschatology in the Patristic Age,” Studia Patristica 2, in Texte und Untersuchungen 64 (1957): 235–38.
190. Oscar Cullman, “Rudolf Bultmann’s Concept of Myth and the New Testament,” Concordia Theological Monthly 27 (1956): 24; M. Burrows, “Thy Kingdom Come,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74 (1955): 2, 1–18.
191. H. J. Schoeps, “Die ebionitische Wahrheit des Christentums,” in Davies & Daube, Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, 123.
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