Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, The
Edwin Hatch
Number of quotes: 22
Book ID: 321 Page: 1
Section: 1A,4A
It is impossible for anyone, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.
Quote ID: 7734
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 321 Page: 5
Section: 1A
...and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.*Pastor Johns Note: not “rather than the Sermon on the Mount” but rather than God’s power, is the real issue
Quote ID: 7735
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 321 Page: 32
Section: 4B
English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed.
Quote ID: 7736
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 37
Section: 4B
A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by instances of individual teachers, who might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities. The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens. (a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury.
Quote ID: 7737
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 39
Section: 4B
(b) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Caesar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded.
Quote ID: 7738
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 48
Section: 4A
This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its effect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity.
Quote ID: 7739
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 321 Page: xv
Section: 2E2
Page 150: Askesis was not indigenous to Christianity. There was both a pre-Christian pagan asceticism and also a Jewish form, reflected, for example, in the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls.
Quote ID: 7733
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 321 Page: 163
Section: 4B
In other words, the earliest communities endeavoured, both in the theory which they embodied in their manuals of Christian life, and in the practice which thy enforced by discipline, to realize what has since been know as the Puritan ideal. Each one of them was a community of saints. “Passing their days upon earth, they were in reality citizens of heaven.”.............
To be a member of the community was to be in reality, and not merely in conception, a child of God and heir of everlasting salvation: to be excluded from the community was to pass again into the outer darkness, the realm of Satan and eternal death. Over these earliest communities and the theory which they embodied there passed, in the last half of the second century and the first half of the third, an enormous change. The processes of the change and its immediate causes ore obscure.
Quote ID: 7740
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 164
Section: 4B
In both the production of this change and its further developments Greece played an important part. The net result of the active forces which it brought to bear upon Christianity was, that the attention of a majority of Christian men was turned to the intellectual as distinguished from the moral element in Christian life.
Quote ID: 7741
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 166
Section: 2E2
But early in the fourth century the practice of the ascetic life in Christianity came to be shown the same outward way, but with a more marked emphasis, as the similar practice in philosophy. It was indeed known as philosophy. It was most akin to Cynicism, with which it had sometimes already been confused, and its badges were the badges of Cynicism, the rough blanket and the unshorn hair. To wear the blanket and to let the hair grow was to profess divine philosophy, the higher life of self-discipline and sanctity. It was to claim to stand on a higher level and to be working out a nobler ideal than average Christians. The practice soon received a further development. Just as ordinary philosophers had sometimes found life in society to be intolerable and had gone into “retreat,” so the Christian philosophers began to withdraw altogether from the world, and to live their lives of self-discipline and contemplation in solitude. The retention of the old names shows the continuity of the practice. They were still practising discipline, -Greek-, or philosophy, -Greek-. So far as they retired from society, they were still said “to go into retreat,” -Greek-, whence the current appellation of -Greek-, “anchorets.”
Quote ID: 7742
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 321 Page: 168
Section: 2E2
It was inevitable that when the Puritan party had left the main body, and when the most spiritually-minded of those who remained detached themselves from the common life of their brethren, there should be a deterioration in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches. It was also inevitable that those conceptions should be largely shaped by Greek influences. The Pauline ethics vanished from the Christian world. For the average members of the churches were now the average citizens of the empire, educated by Greek methods, impregnated with the dominant ethical ideas. They accepted Christian ideas, but without the enthusiasm which made them a transforming force.....
At the end of the fourth century the new state of things was formally recognized by ecclesiastical writers. Love was no more “the handbook of divine philosophy:” the chief contemporary theologian of the West, Ambrose of Milan, formulated the current theory in a book which is the more important because it not merely expresses the ideas of his time and seals the proof of their prevalence, but also became the basis of the moral philosophy of the Middle Ages. But the book is less Christian than Stoical. It is a rechauffe of the book which Cicero had compiled more than three centuries before, chiefly from Panaetius. It is Stoical, not only in conception, but also in detail. It makes virtue the highest good. It makes the hope of the life to come to a subsidiary and not a primary motive. Its ideal of life is happiness: it holds that a happy life is a life according to nature, that it is realized by virtue, and that it is capable of being realized here on earth. Its virtues are the ancient virtues of wisdom and justice, courage and temperance. It tinges each of them with a Christian, or at least with a Theistic colouring; but the conception of each of them remains what it had been to the Greek moralists. Wisdom, for example, is Greek wisdom, with the addition that no man can be wise who is ignorant of God: justice is Greek justice, with the addition that its subsidiary form of beneficence is helped by the Christian society. The victory of Greek ethics was complete.
Quote ID: 7743
Time Periods: 4567
Book ID: 321 Page: 169
Section: 4B
The ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, which the earliest Christian communities endeavoured to carry into practice, have been transmuted by the slow alchemy of history into the ethics of Roman law. The basis of Christian society is not Christian, but Roman and Stoical. A fusion of the Roman conception of rights with the Stoical conception of relations involving reciprocal actions, is in possession of practically the whole field of civilized society.....
The conversion of the Church to Christian theory must precede the conversion of the world to Christian practice. But meanwhile there is working in Christianity the same higher morality which worked in the ancient world, and the maxim, Follow God, belongs to a plane on which Epictetus and Thomas a Kempis meet.
Quote ID: 7744
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 171
Section: 2B
Slowly there loomed through the mists of earlier Greek thought the consciousness of one God.
Quote ID: 7745
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 321 Page: 173
Section: 2B
There was one God. The gods of the old mythology were passing away, like a splendid pageantry of clouds moving across the horizon to be absorbed in the clear and infinite heaven. “But though God is one,” it was said, “He has many names, deriving a name from each of the spheres of His government.....He is called the Son of Kronos, that is of Time, because He continues from eternity to eternity; and Lightning-God, and Thunder-God, and Rain-God, from the lightnings and thunders and rains; and the Fruit-God, from the fruits (which he protects); and the God of births, and homesteads, and kinsmen, and families, of companions, and friends, and armies.....God, in short, of heaven and earth, named after all forms of nature and events as being Himself the cause of it all.” “There are not different gods among different peoples,” says Plutarch, “nor foreign gods and Greek gods, nor gods of the south and gods of the north; but just as sun and moon and sky and earth and sea are common to all mankind, but have different names among different races, so, though there be one Reason who orders these things and one Providence who administers them....there are different honours and appellations among different races; and men use consecrated symbols, some of them obscure and some more clear."
Quote ID: 7746
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 321 Page: 181
Section: 2B1
...the dualism of the Platonists, by laying stress upon the distinction between the creative energy of God and the form in the mind of God which His energy embodied in the material universe, was tending to introduce a third factor into the conception of creation. It became common to speak, not of two principles, but of three--God, Matter, and the Form, or Pattern. {2} Hence came a new fusion of conceptions.....
{2} The three -Greek- are expressed by varying but identical terms: God, Matter, and the Form -(greek word)-, or the By Whom, From What, In view of What -(Greek)-, in the Placita of Aetius, 1. 3. 21, ap. Plut. de placit. phil. 1. 3, Stob. Ecl. 1. 10. (Diels, p. 288), and in Timaeus Locrus, de an. mundi 2 (Mullach F P G 2. 38): God, Matter, and the Pattern -(Greek)-, Hippol. Philosoph. 1. 19, Herm. Irris. Gent. Phil. 11: the Active -(Greek)-, Matter, and the Pattern, Alexand. Aphrod. ap. Simplic. in phys. f. 6 (Diels, p. 485), where Simplicius contrasts this with Plato’s own strict dualism.
Quote ID: 7747
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 321 Page: 207
Section: 2B,4A
We may sum up the result of the influence of Greece on the conception of God in His relation to the material universe, by saying that it found a reasoned basis for Hebrew monotheism. It helped the Christian communities to believe as an intellectual conviction that which they had first accepted as a spiritual revelation.
Quote ID: 7748
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 321 Page: 310
Section: 3A2,4A
...under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the word Faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions, propositions in abstract metaphysics.
Quote ID: 7749
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 321 Page: 330
Section: 3A2
The importance which attaches to the whole subject with which we are dealing, lies less in the history of the formation of a body of doctrine, than in the growth and permanence of the conceptions which underlie that formation. (1) the first conception comes from the antecedent belief which was rooted in the Greek mind, that, given certain primary beliefs which are admitted on all sides to be necessary, it is requisite that a man should define those beliefs 1---that it is as necessary that a man should be able to say with minute exactness what he means by God, as that he should say, I believe in God. It is purely philosophical. A philosopher cannot be satisfied with unanalyzed ideas. (2) The second conception comes rather from politics than from philosophy. It is the belief in a majority of a meeting. It is the conception that the definitions and interpretations of primary beliefs which are made by the majority of church officers assembled under certain conditions, are in all cases and so certainly true, that the duty of the individual is, not to endeavour, by whatever light of nature or whatever illumination of the Holy Spirit may be given to him, to understand them, but to acquiesce in the verdict of the majority. The theory assumes that God never speaks to men except through the voice of the majority. It is a large assumption.
Quote ID: 7750
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 321 Page: 332
Section: 2B1
It is a conceivable view that once, and once only, did God speak to men, and that the revelation of Himself in the Gospels is a unique fact in the history of the universe. It is also a conceivable view that God is continually speaking to men, and that now, no less than in the early ages of Christianity, there is a divine Voice that whispers in men’s souls, and divine interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel history. The difficulty is in the assumption which is sometimes made, that the interpretation of the divine Voice was developed gradually through three centuries, and that it was then suddenly arrested. The difficulty has sometimes been evaded by the further assumption that there was no development of the truth, and that the Nicene theology was part of the original revelation---a theology divinely communicated to the apostles by Jesus Christ himself. The point of most importance in the line of study which we have been following together, is the demonstration which it affords that this latter assumption is wholly untenable. We have been able to see, not only that the several elements of what is distinctive in the Nicene theology were gradually formed, but also that the whole temper and frame of mind which led to the formation of those elements were extraneous to the first form of Christianity, and were added to it by the operation of causes which can be traced.
Quote ID: 7751
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 321 Page: 334
Section: 2A5
There is no adequate evidence that, in the first age of Christianity, association was other than voluntary. It was profoundly individual. It assumed for the first time in human history the infinite worth of the individual soul. The ground of that individual worth was a divine sonship. And the sons of God were brethren. They were drawn together by the constraining force of love. But the clustering together under that constraining force was not necessarily the formation of an association. There was not necessarily any organization.1 The tendency to organization came partly from the tendency of the Jewish colonies in the great cities of the empire to combine, and to a far greater extent from the large tendency of the Greek and Roman world to form societies for both religious and social purposes.
Quote ID: 7752
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 321 Page: 346
Section: 3C
When Christianity came to be recognized by the State, Constantine adopted the plan of assembling the bishops on his own authority, and of giving whatever sanction the State could give to their resolutions. He said in effect, “I, as Emperor, cannot determine what Christian doctrine is, but I will take the opinion of the majority, and I will so far recognize that opinion that no one shall have the privileges of Christians, a right to hold property and an exemption from civil burdens, who does not assent to that opinion.” The succeeding Christian Emperors followed in his track. The test of being a Christian was conformity to the resolutions of the Councils. One who accepted them received immunity and privileges. One who did not was liable to confiscation, to banishment, to death. I need hardly draw out for you, who know what human nature is, the importance which those resolutions for the Councils assumed.
Quote ID: 7754
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 321 Page: 349
Section: 3A1
The church became, not an assembly of devout men, grimly earnest about living a holy life - its bishops were statesmen; its officers were men of the world; its members were of the world, basing their conduct on the current maxims of society, held together by the loose bond of a common name, and of a creed which they did not understand.
Quote ID: 7755
Time Periods: 456
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