Part Three. Christianity

Chapter 1. The Historical Background of Christianity

p. 93 To understand Buddhism one must examine the religion of the Vedas and the Upanishads, and to understand Confucianism one must study the Confucian tradition.¹ In the same way, to know what Christianity is, we must first study historically the religion of the Jews, which before Christianity arose laid down its source and its foundation, and we must understand the system of truth that appeared in the course of that religion's development and decline.²

The Jews, seen in their social and historical circumstances, are a people schooled for a long time in the hardest adversity, and today they draw the eyes and ears of the world. Their singular consciousness as a people, their superior economic position and their astonishing religious zeal hold no small interest for us today. Above all, the pure religion they have handed down to us has been an immense contribution to world culture. If the groundwork of modern culture was the law and institutions of the Romans and the science and philosophy of the Greeks, we may say that the Jews supplied it with a lofty religion.³

Of course the religion of the Jews was not an original product of the Jewish people. It is a fact that it received much influence from the religious thought and ritual of the neighbouring lands, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Asia Minor p. 94 and others.⁴ But the Jews, through their distinctive character as a people and their hard fate, keenly sensed the reality of life that other peoples had not yet grasped, and were able to see into the spiritual world. Even if their religious thought and practice were somewhat influenced by those of the pagans, they took in almost nothing without first digesting it through their own distinctive character as a people and their traditional culture. Indeed, as they believed, the long history of Israel was God's continuous revelation. Their life, economic, political, social, educational, ethical and artistic, all centred on religion, and nothing in it was not religious. For them too there were times when religion went through a process of decay and came near to ruin, and times when they halted on the road and wandered in the maze of doubt. But their prophets again and again stirred up the consciousness of being the chosen people and gave them new stimulus and awakening, and the Jewish populace believed, without doubting, that the time would come when the ideal of "Zion" would be realized. In this way, as their knowledge grew and their historical experience accumulated, their religion developed through several stages.

(1) Primitive Hebrew Religion

The primitive religion of the Hebrews was on the whole a tribal product, centred on mystical rites of many kinds, organized locally. Their rites rested on the social customs each tribe had inherited, and as to their religious meaning things were rather vague:⁵ their interpretation was not necessarily the same from one person to another. p. 95 Their mystical religion may at times have received some influence from the polytheistic pagan thought of their neighbours, but on the whole it was based on mythical legends about the tribe's origin and on oral anecdotes about the patriarchs and heroes of each generation. Yet even these legends and myths were not essential to the religious rites; they did no more than add a kind of fireside interest.⁶

The motive for which they kept these mystical rites was on the whole utilitarian, and their aims were for the most part material. The Hebrews did have from the first a pure religious ideal of the one God, but their experience as a people and local circumstances made their religion eager for the practical gains of "use and livelihood."⁷ Its chief aim was on the whole the preservation and prosperity of the tribe, the destruction of foreign enemies and defence against them, the increase of the herds and a rich harvest of grain. There may have been a consciousness of sin and prayers for atonement, but these were very faint, and the chief motive was not moral: it was to escape God's wrath at the people's unfaithfulness and betrayal, and to receive his favour.

(2) Religion in the Age of the Prophets

From the eighth to the sixth century before Christ was the golden age of "Hebraism."⁸ In this period, as the state was organized and the consciousness of the state grew, religious rites were unified; and as their religious ideals were gradually purified, their religious literature too developed in an epoch-making way.

p. 96 The prophets of Israel were religious reformers and at the same time social revolutionaries.⁹ Their religious ideal, broadly speaking, was grounded in social ethics. They felt keenly how far the cumbersome inherited rites and the lifeless, superficial forms stood from the people's inner religious life, empty ceremony and sham as they were, and they stressed that the fundamental aim of religion lies in making actual living pure and righteous.¹⁰

"Jehovah says:¹¹ What use to me are the many sacrifices you offer? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts, and I take no delight in the blood of bullocks, or the blood of lambs, or the blood of he-goats. When you come before me, who asked this of you, to trample my courts? Bring no more vain offerings. Incense has become an abomination to me; your new moons and your sabbaths and your assemblies I hate, for I will not tolerate that you gather in holiness and do evil as well. Your new moons and your feasts I hate in my heart; they have become a heavy burden to me, and I am weary of carrying them. When you spread out your hands I will cover my eyes; even when you pray much I will not listen, for your hands are full of blood. You must wash and make yourselves clean; put away your evil deeds from before my eyes; cease from evil and learn good; seek justice; raise up the bowed down; vindicate the lonely child; plead the widow's cause."¹² (Isaiah 1:10–17)¹³

These are the words the prophet Isaiah cried out to his age,¹⁴ and from them we can plainly see the religious tendency of the time. The eighth-century prophet Amos, too, opposed the unjust exploitation and oppression of the propertyless class (2:6–7), p. 97 attacked the low moral standard of family life,¹⁵ rebuked the capitalists who greedily seek private gain by unjust means (8:4–6),¹⁶ condemned the leaders who governed the church because their thought and life had lost all resilience and they had grown dull to their social duty,¹⁷ and again and again denounced the ignorance and the corrupt living of those who led the people.

(3) Religion of the Law

From the return of the Jewish people from captivity in Babylon until the third century before Christ, their religion turned into legalism and formalism.¹⁸ The Jews' experience of captivity gave a great stimulus to their religion too. Since they came to despise the pagan religions,¹⁹ their old leaning toward idolatry was swept away; they held fast to the Jews' traditional, moral conception of the one God; and gradually a confidence in their own people's traditional religion arose, so that they came to claim that through them a standard of spiritual guidance would be given to all humanity.²⁰ As soon as they returned to their homeland they rebuilt the ruined temple and raised up a revival of religion.²¹ But their religion, following "the tradition of the elders,"²² made a business of keeping the details of an inherited law mechanically. Since this was the crystallized experience the Jewish people had gathered from the most ancient times, it had a weighty and great value in their religious life. But when vital experience had died out and the vigour of faith had decayed, and nothing remained but forms, the relics of a past creative age, and people did nothing but interpret the old law and cling to it, religion could hardly be vital any longer. Their formalism was a means of patching over an age in which the springs of inner faith had dried up, and their law-keeping p. 98 made it possible to set up a double standard, suited to human weakness.²³

(4) Apocalyptic Religion

The religion of the so-called "age of intertestamental literature," from the third century before Christ to the first century after,²⁴ was on one side a reaction against a hereditary "Judaism,"²⁵ and on the other the expression of a new view of human life, stimulated by economic and political misfortune.

They lost their hope in the present world. Time and again they tried to restore the fortunes of the state and to revive religion, but every attempt ended in failure. At last they suffered shame as a people and cruelty beyond words, and not only once or twice. Now this world looked to them like a playground of devils, and human beings looked benighted and wicked.²⁶ So they thought there was nothing more to hope for from this world and from human beings. Their messianic ideal, accordingly, changed from a this-worldly to an otherworldly one. They came to think that to expect an ideal kingdom of heaven to be built in this world, a glorious society where the wicked perish and only the righteous gather to enjoy bliss, was a fantasy born of overrating human beings and trusting them too far. The kingdom of heaven is not built by human plans or efforts; it comes to be present transcendently, by the power of God.²⁷ They were deeply impressed that there was no way to correct human malice and ignorance except the miraculous power of God. In other words, they gave up the distinctive realism of "Hebraism"²⁸ and drew a strict dualistic line between the spiritual world and the material world, and between the present world and the world to come; and they clung to a religion built on it, mystical, contemplative, miraculous and otherworldly. p. 99 Here their religion came to take on two chief features. First, because they longed for a superhuman world ruled by the sovereign will and power of God,²⁹ they made much of God's miraculous revelation and miraculous providence. Second, because they were dissatisfied with the ethical ideals of actual society, their faith in society weakened, and there developed a religious individualism that honoured the value and the independent standing of individuality.

We have surveyed above the religion of the Jewish people before Christianity, and we have seen that it unfolded in so many branches and leaves, and in such complex directions, that it cannot be summed up as a single system.³⁰ Although they held fast to a distinctive and strict religious tradition, if we look at it historically we could even say that they experienced several religions rather than believed in one. It is a most meaningful thing that religions of such different character came together, as one, to be the preparatory stage that gave rise to Christianity. The realistic "Hebraism," the "moral" "Prophetism," the institutional "Judaism" and the "mystical" "Apocalypticism" all left deep marks on the thought and life of Christianity.³¹ Of course, it cannot be said that Christianity had no groundwork, besides the religious tradition of the Jews, that deserves our attention.³² But as to the sources of Christian thought, seen from the standpoint of its historical preparation, there is no doubt that the religious tradition of the Jews held the chief place.