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CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST FORM OF THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY, AND THE FIRST GERM OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

THE existence and first development of the Christian church rests on an historical foundation-on the acknowledgment of the fact that Jesus was the Messiah-not on a certain system of ideas. Hence, at first, all those who acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, separated from the mass of the Jewish people, and formed themselves into a distinct community. In the course of time, it became apparent, who were genuine, and who were false disciples; but all who acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah were baptized without fuller or longer instruction, such as in later times has preceded baptism. There was only one article of faith which formed the peculiar mark of the Christian profession, and from this point believers were led to a clearer and perfect knowledge of the whole contents of the Christian faith, by the continual enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Believing that Jesus was the Messiah, they ascribed to him the whole idea of what the Messiah was to be, according to the meaning and spirit of the Old Testament promises, rightly understood; they acknowledged him as the Redeemer from sin, the Ruler of the kingdom of God, to whom their whole lives were to be devoted, whose laws were to be followed in all things; while he would manifest himself as the ruler of God's kingdom, by the communication of a new divine principle of life, which to those who are redeemed and governed by him imparts the certainty of the forgiveness of sins. This divine principle of life, must (they believed) mould their whole lives to a conformity with the laws of the Messiah and his kingdom, and would be the pledge of all the blessings to be imparted to them in the kingdom of God until its consummation. Whoever acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, received him con

sequently as the infallible divine prophet, and implicitly submitted to his instructions as communicated by his personal ministry, and afterwards by his inspired organs, the apostles. Hence baptism at this period, in its peculiar Christian meaning, referred to this one article of faith, which constituted the essence of Christianity, as baptism into Jesus, into the name of Jesus; it was the holy rite which sealed the connection with Jesus as the Messiah. From this signification of baptism, we cannot indeed, conclude with certainty, that there was only one form of baptism. Still, it is probable, that in the original apostolic formula, no reference was made except to this one article. This shorter baptismal formula contains in itself every thing which is further developed in the words used by Christ at the institution of baptism, but which he did not intend to establish as an exact formula; the reference to God, who has revealed and shewn himself in and by the Son, as a Father; and to the Spirit of the Father, whom Christ imparts to believers as the new spirit of life; the Spirit of holiness, who by virtue of this intervention is distinguished as the spirit of Christ. That one article of faith included, therefore, the whole of Christian doctrine. But the distinct knowledge of its contents was by no means developed in the minds of the first converts, or freed from foreign admixtures resulting from Jewish modes of thinking, which required that religious ideas should be stripped of that national and carnal veil with which they were covered. As the popular Jewish notion of the Messiah excluded many things which were characteristic of this idea, as formed and understood in a Christian sense, and as it included many elements not in accordance with Christian views, one result was, that in the first Christian communities which were formed among the Jews, various discordant notions of religion were mingled; there were many errors arising from the prevailing Jewish mode of thinking, some of which were by degrees corrected, in the case of those who surrendered themselves to the expansive and purifying influence of the Christian spirit; but in those over whom that spirit could not exert such power, these errors formed the germ of the later

Jewish-Christian (the so-called Ebionitish) doctrine which set itself in direct hostility to the pure gospel.

Thus we are not justified in assuming that the Three Thousand who were converted on one day, became transformed at once into genuine Christians. The Holy Spirit operated then, as in all succeeding ages, by the publication of divine truth, not with a sudden transforming magical power, but according to the measure of the free self-determination of the human will. Hence, also, in these first Christian societies, as in all later ones, although originating in so mighty an operation of the Holy Spirit, the foreign and spurious were mingled with the genuine. In fact, in proportion to the might and energy of the operation, many persons were more easily carried away by the first impressions of divine truth, whose hearts were not a soil suited for the divine seed to take deep root and develope itself; and in outward appearance, there were no infallible marks of distinction between genuine and merely apparent conversions. The example of Ananias and Sapphira, and the disputes of the Palestinian and Hellenistic Christians, evince even at that early period, that the agency of the Spirit did not preserve the church entirely pure from foreign admixtures. It happened then, as in the great religious revivals of other times, that many were borne along by the force of excited feelings, without having (as their subsequent conduct proved) their disposition effectually penetrated by the Holy Spirit.

The form of the Christian community and of the public Christian worship, the archetype of all the later Christian Cultus, arose at first, without any preconceived plan, from the peculiar nature of the higher life that belonged to all true Christians. There was, however, this difference, that the first Christian community formed as it were one family; the power of the newly awakened feeling of Christian fellowship, the feeling of the common grace of redemption, outweighed all other personal and public feelings, and all other relations were subordinated to this one great relation. But, in later times, the distinction between the church and the family became more mark

ed, and many things which were at first accomplished in the church as a family community, could latterly be duly attended to only in the narrower communion of Christian family life.

The first Christians assembled daily either in the Temple, or in private houses; in the latter case, they met in small companies, since their numbers were already too great for one chamber to hold them all. Discourses on the doctrine of salvation were addressed to believers and to those who were just won over to the faith, and prayers were offered up. As the predominant consciousness of the enjoyment of redemption brought under its influence and sanctified the whole of earthly life, nothing earthly could remain untransformed by this relation to a higher state. The daily meal of which believers partook as members of one family was sanctified by it. They commemorated the last Supper of the disciples with Christ, and their brotherly union with one another. At the close of the meal, the president distributed bread and wine to the persons present, as a memorial of Christ's similar distribution to the disciples. Thus every meal was consecrated to the Lord, and, at the same time, was a meal of brotherly love. Hence the designations afterwards chosen were, δεῖπνον κυρίου and ἀγάπη. †

*The hypothesis lately revived, that such institutions were borrowed from the Essenes, is so entirely gratuitous as to require no refutation.

† In Acts ii. 42, we find the first general account of what passed in the assemblies of the first Christians. Mosheim thinks, since every thing else is mentioned that is found in later meetings of the church, that the xovwvia refers to the collections made on these occasions. But the context does not favour the use of the word xovava in so restricted a signification, which, therefore, if it were the meaning intended, would require a more definite term. See Meyer's Commentary. We may most naturally consider it as referring to the whole of the social Christian intercourse, two principal parts of which were, the common meal and prayer. Luke mentions prayer last of all, probably because the connection between the common meal and prayer, which made an essential

From ancient times, an opinion has prevailed, which is apparently favoured by many passages in the Acts, that the spirit of brotherly love impelled the first Christians to renounce all their earthly possessions, and to establish a perfect intercommunity of goods. When, in later times, it was perceived how very much the Christian life had receded from the model of this fellowship of brotherly love, an earnest longing to regain it was awakened, to which we must attribute some attempts to effect what had been realized by the first glow of love in the apostolic times-such were the orders of Monkhood, the Mendicant Friars, the Apostolici, and the Waldenses in the 12th and 13th centuries. At all events, supposing this opinion to be well founded, this practice of the apostolic church ought not to be considered as in a literal sense the ideal for imitation in all succeeding ages; it must have been a deviation from the natural course of social development, such as could agree only with the extraordinary manifestation of the divine life in the human race at that particular period. Only the spirit and disposition here manifested in thus amalgamating the earthly possessions of numbers into one common fund, are the models for the church in its

part of the love-feast, was floating in his mind. Olshausen maintains (see his Commentary, 2d ed. p. 629), that this interpretation is inadmissible, because in this enumeration, every thing relates to divine worship, as may be inferred from the preceding expression didan. But this supposition is wanting in proof. According to what we have before remarked, the communion of the church, and of the family, were not at that time separated from one another; no strict line of demarcation was drawn between what belonged to the Christian Cultus in a narrower sense, and what related to the Christian life and communion generally. Nor can the reason alleged by Olshausen be valid, that if my interpretation were correct, the word xowvwvia must have been placed first, for it is altogether in order that that should be placed first, which alone refers to the directive functions of the apostles, that then the mention should follow of the reciprocal Christian communion of all the members with one another, and that of this communion, two particulars should be especially noticed.

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