Church History, Volume 1 (of 3)Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
Religion
Church History, Volume 1 (of 3)
Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
Church history
partly pantheistic, partly dualistic, principles derived
from the Platonic philosophy. He shows traces of Alexandrian
influences in his conception of the person and work of
Christ, to whom he assigns merely the role of a divine
teacher, who has made known the true idea of God the Creator,
of righteousness, and of eternal life, and has won power by
death, resurrection and ascension, and will give evidence
of it by His coming again to reward the righteousness
of the saints with immortal blessedness. He was also led
into doctrinal aberrations in the anthropological domain,
because his idea of freedom and virtue borrowed from Greek
philosophy prevented him from fully grasping the Pauline
doctrine of sin. His theory of morals, with its legalistic
tendency and its righteousness of works, was grounded
not in Judaism but in Stoicism. His chiliasm, too, is not
Ebionitic but is immediately derived from scripture, and
has less significance for his speculation than the other
eschatological principles of Resurrection, Judgment, and
Recompence. His Christianity consists essentially of only
three elements: Worship of the true God, a virtuous life
according to the commandments of Christ, and belief in
rewards and punishments hereafter. Over against the pagan
philosophy it represents itself as the true philosophy,
and over against the Mosaic law as the new law freed from
the fetters of ceremonialism. Even in the natural man, in
consequence of the divine reason that is innate in him,
there dwells the power of living as a Christian: Abraham
and Elias, Socrates and Heraclitus, etc., have to such a
degree lived according to reason that they must be called
Christians. But even they possessed only σπέρματα Λόγου,
only a μέρος Λόγου; for the divine reason dwells in men
only as Λόγος σπερματικός; in Christ alone as the incarnate
Logos it dwells as ὁ πᾶς Λόγος or τὸ Λογικὸν τὸ ὅλον. He is
the only true Son of God, pre-mundane but not eternal, the
πρῶτον γέννημα τοῦ θεοῦ, or the πρωτότοκος τοῦ θεοῦ, by whom
God in the beginning created all things. The Father alone is
ὄντως θεός, and the Logos only a divine being of the second
rank, a ἕτερος θεὸς παρὰ τὸν ποιητὴν τῶν ὅλων, to whom,
however, as such, worship should be rendered. In Justin’s
theological speculation the Holy Spirit stands quite in
the background, though the baptismal and congregational
Trinitarian confession obliged him to assign to the Spirit
the rank of an independent divine being, whom the Logos had
used for the enlightening of His prophets. Justin too knows
nothing of a particular election of Israel as the people of
God; with him the Christians as such are the true Israel,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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