Church History (Volumes 1-3)Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
History
Church History (Volumes 1-3)
Kurtz, J. H. (Johann Heinrich)
Church history
way there was impressed upon the Old Catholic Church as it
grew up out of Pauline Gentile Christianity a legalistic moral
tendency that was quite foreign to the original Paulinism, and
the righteousness of faith taught by the Apostle when represented
as obedience to the “new law” passed over again unobserved into a
righteousness of works. Redemption and reconciliation are indeed
still always admitted to be conditioned by the death of Christ
and their appropriation to be by the faith of the individual;
but this faith is at bottom nothing more than the conviction
of the divinity of the person and doctrine of the new lawgiver
evidencing itself in repentance and rendering of practical
obedience, and in confident expectation of the second coming
of Christ, and in a sure confidence of a share in the life
everlasting.--The introduction of this legalistic tendency into
the Gentile Christian Church was not occasioned by the influence
of Jewish Christian legalism, nor can it be explained as
the result of a compromise effected between Jewish Christian
Petrinism and Gentile Christian Paulinism, which were supposed
by Baur, Schwegler, etc., to have been, during the Apostolic
Age, irreconcilably hostile to one another. This has been already
proved by Ritschl, who charges its intrusion rather upon the
inability of Gentile Christianity fully to understand the Old
Testament bases of the Pauline doctrine. By means of a careful
analysis of the undisputed writings of Justin Martyr and
by a comparison of these with the writings of the Apostolic
Fathers, Engelhardt has proved that anything extra-, un-, or
anti-Pauline in the Christianity of these Fathers has not so much
an Ebionitic-Jewish Christian, but rather a pagan-philosophic,
source. He shows that the prevalent religio-moral mode of thought
of the cultured paganism of that age reappears in that form
of Christianity not only as an inability to reach a profound
understanding of the Old Testament, but also just as much
as a minimising and depreciating, or disdaining of so many
characteristic features of the Pauline doctrinal resting on Old
Testament foundations.
§ 30.3. =The so-called Apostolic Fathers.=[55]--
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