15. Dobschütz. Christian Life in the Primitive Church
By Ernst von Dobschütz, D.D. Translated by the Rev.
George Bremner, B.D., and Edited by the Rev. W. D.
Morrison, LL.D. London: Williams & Norgate; New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904. 1 he task which Prof. von Dobschütz has set himself in this attractive
T volume is to present an exact and detailed picture of the moral condition of Christians during the first century of the Church's existence
(a.d. 30–a.d. 130). Perhaps the title under which the book is published is a little too broad. There are two sides to what we commonly know as "Christian life"—a Godward and a manward side, or perhaps we may better say a religious and a moral side. It is the latter of these to which Prof. von Dobschütz confines his survey. The mystical side of the Christian life he puts out of sight. What he undertakes to investigate is its ethical manifestation. He is not attempting, however, a history of Christian Ethics in the first age: he has nothing to do here with the teaching of the apostles
and their successors. What he is essaying is to determine the actual practice of Christians during the first century of their existence in the world. The question he raises is, What kind of people were these early Christians? He wishes to determine by an exact and detailed study whether the Christians did or did not introduce into the world actual moral health: whether they were, or were not, "good men."
The answer Prof. von Dobschütz returns to his question is an affirmative one. The early Christians were good people. As over against the background of heathen immorality—even of Jewish formalism—they stand forth as lights in the world. They not only taught a high and searching morality: they lived it. He thinks it worth while to emphasize this answer and to substantiate it by an exhibition of the evidence for it drawn out with convincing detail. For it is not the answer which has of late been universally given. At an earlier period, indeed, it was customary to idealize the first Christian communities. Of late, however, too black a picture has often been painted. Hausrath, for example, "from all sorts of statements gleaned in the darkest corners and dipped in the deepest hues" has drawn "a picture so gloomy that one is compelled to wonder where Christianity ever found the power to conquer the ancient world" (p. vii.). In his view the worst of Christian Churches of to-day "approaches the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount more closely" (p. 363) than the best of the second century. If we understand Prof. von Dobschütz, he believes Hausrath has exaggerated both the end-terms of the development. He agrees perfectly with Hausrath that Christianity has developed from the beginning until now—if not steadily yet substantially—in moral fiber and moral manifestation. Only he believes it started at a higher level and (probably) has reached at the present a lower level than Hausrath maintained. The difference between the earliest
Christianity and the latest in point of moral attainment is less in his view
than in Hausrath's. It is the purpose of this volume to show that it started at a higher level and to establish the height of this level.
In Prof. von Dobschütz's view—a view which in our judgment he substantiates—the level from which it started was very high. "It is astonishing," he remarks at the end of his survey of the condition of the Pauline Churches as reflected in Paul's letters—"it is astonishing what
Christianity in a relatively short time made out of these motley and confused heathen groups; earnest men working out their salvation with fear and trembling, saints fully aware of the moral tasks of their consecration. If their judgment was often immature, their goodwill and vigour were great"
(p. 137). Of course the ideal was not realized, least of all by every Christian.
"But," Prof. von Dobschütz remarks as he closes his survey of the whole century, "offences against it were exceptions, and have less significance, as they awoke at once the moral consciousness of the spiritual leaders and of the congregations. If even one half of the Christians lived as we have described, something great was already achieved. Certainly more of them did. The discipline exerted by this majority was, apart from other considerations, an invaluable moral achievement" (p. 371). The actual morality of the Christians constituted and constitutes to Prof. von
Dobschütz's mind, indeed, its best apologetic. "It is the most effective proof of the truth of Christianity" (p. xiii.). It was so in those early ages themselves: the Apologists appeal, as they were thoroughly entitled to appeal, to what Christians were as a proof of their divine calling. The heathen—Pliny, Lucian, Celsus—were compelled even, against their will, to witness to the correctness of the picture the Apologists drew. As a fact, it was not the superiority of Christianity's dogmatic system, nor even of its ethical teaching which constituted its power. It was (and it is) the superiority of its life. "Stoicism and Neoplatonism after all produced moral thoughts of great beauty and purity, thoughts which are more imposing to
superficial contemplation than the simple commandments of Christianity.
Yet neither of them could enable artisans and old women to lead a truly philosophical life. Christianity could and did; the apologists point triumphantly to the realisation of the moral ideal among Christians of every standing. That was due to the power which issued from Jesus Christ and actually transformed men" (p. 379). It was in this sign that Christianity conquered, and in it that it must ever conquer, when conquer it will and does.
Prof. von Dobschütz's method is to pass the literary remains of the period from a.d. 30 to a.d. 130 in review, reproducing the moral condition of the Churches as reflected in them, in the form of a running comment.
This method has some obvious advantages. Not least among them is to be accounted the vividness and life it enables Prof. von Dobschütz to impart to his pages. The result is that he has given us a most engaging book, and the attention of the reader is held unflaggingly to the end. We have been especially attracted by the portrayal of the situation underlying the Shepherd of Hennas in the final chapter. But this method is attended also with some disadvantages. Among these is that it tempts the writer to overload his pages with material not germane or only remotely germane to his subject. Prof. von Dobschütz has not escaped this danger, and his successive chapters read often more like studies in the general situation of the Churches addressed in the several epistles or presupposed in the documents he analyzes, than like specific investigations into the moral condition of the primitive Churches; in a word, like sections in Biblical or Patristic Introduction. The reader finds it almost as much of a task to gather from his flowing and interesting pages a clearly-cut and sufficing account of the morals of the early Christians as it would be to derive this from the original documents themselves. It is a graver matter that it throws into exaggerated prominence an inconvenience which would, no doubt,
attend any mode of studying such a subject—we mean the influence on the result of the author's individual opinions as to problems of literary history.
The consecution of the New Testament books, for example, and the authenticity, authorship, and provenience of them—in this mode of presenting the material—become very important matters indeed, and dominate not only the structure of the volume but the outline of the picture presented in it of early Christian morals.
This is a specially important matter to us, since we do not at all share Prof. von Dobschütz's opinions as to the problems of New Testament
Introduction. There is nothing in them, to be sure, peculiar to Prof. von Dobschütz; his views are just the views prevailing in the extremer wing of modern critical reconstruction of the literary history of the New
Testament. And no one could expect him (as he himself suggests in the Preface) to include a justification of his views on literary history in this volume. But the value of the volume to all who do not share these views is seriously impaired by the unnecessary prominence given them in its structure; and this the more since Prof. von Dobschütz strives to present his material not statically but dynamically—that is to say, in perspective, with an indication of what he deems the development of Christian morals through the century of which he treats. Obviously divergent views of the consecution of the witnessing documents will work havoc here. If Colossians is to be treated as Paul's; and Ephesians as an imitation of it from the hands of the next generation; and the Pastorals as ecclesiastical documents of a generation later—why, clearly the picture of "the development of morals" (if any such development can be traced) will be different from that derived from these documents conceived as the product of a single pen and of a period covering only five or six years. From the latter point of view the confident tracing of a development as witnessed by these documents must seem to rest on an illusion supported by overstrained
niceties of interpretation. And in any case Prof. von Dobschütz cannot be acquitted of this fault. When no marked distinction is discovered in the moral condition of Christians as pictured in Philippians, and that pictured in the two Epistles to the Thessalonians; and yet a significant development is traced between the moral assumptions underlying Colossians and Ephesians, it seems obvious that the scales employed do not give equal weights.
We rise from the perusal of Prof. von Dobschütz's book, accordingly, with a great sense of indebtedness to the author and with much spoil in our hands: but we rise from it also with a conviction that there are some things in it which are not derived from the sources. We feel confident that if Prof. von Dobschütz had begun simply by investigating the moral condition of the Churches underlying each document in turn, and then had compared these results and combined them in a single account, he would have spoken less of a regular development through the century; and certainly he would have put the documents into classes differing somewhat from the arrangement he has given them, in what seems to us, so far as the New
Testament documents are concerned, not only an unhistorical but also an unnatural order. And, then, had he presented the material thus gained under rubrics derived from the moral categories, instead of in the quasichronological order he has preferred, derived from his personal opinions as to the consecution of the documents, his readers would have gained from him not only a truer but a much clearer and more convincing conception of the state of Christian morals during the first Christian century. In a word, in our judgment, Prof. von Dobschütz's study of the morals of the early Church suffers from his wrong views of the composition of the documents with which he deals; and suffers from this unduly on account of the method of presentation which he has adopted.
At the close of the volume, a series of "Notes" (six in all) are printed, in which some interesting ancillary questions are discussed in a more scholastic way than was consonant with the more popular style of the body of the work. One of these is devoted partly to a justification of the author's view of Paul's curse upon the incestuous man at Corinth; this view we do not find it possible to share. The most important of them is an attempt— the author emphasizes that it is only an "attempt"—to survey the terms employed in early Christian literature to express moral ideas. This is a valuable contribution to a department of study hitherto much neglected: and it may be commended to students as a beginning of importance in a new line of research. The book is fairly well translated, and reads in general smoothly and clearly. The proof-reading is not immaculate. There is even an appearance (perhaps it is only appearance) of assigning a new work to Ignatius with the title of "Heresy" (p. 246), even a treatise to our Lord bearing the designation of "Life of Poverty" (p. 265; what is really meant appears—though even then somewhat awkwardly—upon p. 376).
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, v. 1907, pp. 139–143.