The real purpose of the volume is to carry into the New Testament—somewhat vi et armis, it must be confessed—the “Pan-Babylonism” which has already become an old story in Old Testament criticism. Its fundamental thesis is that “facts of Oriental archæology (including mythology) may hopefully be brought into connection with the New Testament” (p. 61); or, to be more specific, that “the form of the most peculiar and difficult New Testament statements can only be accounted for by the newly-discovered fact of the all-pervading influence of Oriental and more particularly Babylonian and Persian systems of belief” (p. 62). When stated in this broad manner there is nothing, of course, in principle to be objected to this thesis. The New Testament writers were men of their time, and wrote, of course, in language and modes of statement formed under the influence of the ideas of their time. It would be strange if there were discoverable in their thought and speech no traces of systems of belief which could with any show of right be called “all-pervading.” The mischief lies in Dr. Cheyne’s definition of what he calls “peculiar and difficult New Testament statements,” and his determination of the line which divides the “form” of these statements from their “essence.” The particular “peculiar and difficult statements” which he adduces as illustrations of his thesis are the New Testament accounts of “the Virgin-birth of Jesus Christ, His Descent into the nether world, His Resurrection, and His Ascension.” As the result of his discussion he suggests that “on the ground of facts supplied by archæology, it is plausible to hold that all these” “four forms of Christian belief” “arose out of a pre-Christian sketch of the life, death, and exaltation of the expected Messiah, itself ultimately derived from a widely current mythic tradition respecting a solar deity” (p. 128).

We must observe the slight difference in language between this last-cited proposition and the one formerly cited. There Dr. Cheyne spoke of the possibility of accounting for the “form” of certain “New Testament statements” from the influence of certain Oriental beliefs: now he speaks of these Oriental myths supplying an account of the “form” of certain “Christian beliefs.” It is, in fact, the latter and far more serious proposition which his arguments are directed to justify. His contention is not that the New Testament writers tended to express the facts of the virgin-birth, the descent into hell, the resurrection, and the ascension of our Lord in language which had been formerly employed to express certain Oriental myths, and which therefore preserved a certain coloring derived from them. It is rather that Christians had already, when the New Testament was written, come through the influence of these myths to express their fundamental ideas in terms of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension. The fundamental ideas so expressed, therefore, have in themselves no implication of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, ascension as actually occurring: these things all belong to the mythical form and are to be accounted for, not as things that really happened and are therefore recounted in the narrative, but as modes of conception inherited from immemorial mythological stories, running back, for the most part, to Babylon for their original forms. What the real nature is of “the essential Christian truths” which are enshrined in these mythical forms as in their “suitable caskets,” and to which the faith “of the Christian is pledged,” Dr. Cheyne indicates to us only with brevity—his main object in this lecture being to show whence the forms were derived, not what the substance is. In his most succinct statement he tells us that “the chief of them are,—the uniqueness of the personality of the Lord Jesus, and the immense worth of His act of absolute self-sacrifice; then, by inference, the indestructibleness of His personality, its perpetual redemptive capacity, and its identity with that manward aspect of the Divine Nature, so full of mingled grandeur and compassion, which, by early efforts of theological thought, acquired the names of the Messiah, the Son of God, the Word of God” (p. 129). It is only (or at least chiefly) these few starved and hunger-bitten dogmas that he recognizes as the substance of those “forms” of Christian belief.

Dr. Cheyne, of course, tells us that there is nothing disparaging to the Christian beliefs in his theory. He means, of course, the Christian beliefs he has just enumerated as “the essential Christian truth” enshrined in these mythological caskets. He would scarcely say that there is nothing in his theory disparaging to the Christian’s beliefs of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension for Christ. At least those who will read, even with the best will, his equation of the Messiah and Michael and Marduk, and of the virgin-mother with the mother who was virgin only in the sense that she was not a wife, will scarcely credit that Dr. Cheyne supposes that there is nothing in his theory disparaging to the Christian belief in the virgin-birth of our Lord and Saviour. But these beliefs are in his theory not Christian beliefs, but only the forms in which the real Christian beliefs have become enshrined as men have sought to give them expression, limited as they were by the modes of expression accessible or familiar to them. If any chance still to look upon such beliefs as themselves “Christian beliefs,” “essential Christian truths,” which enter into the very fabric of Christianity (as all of the Lord’s apostles did, and the Lord Himself as reported by them), why then, of course, he must recognize that the Christianity of which they are essential parts is shattered by Dr. Cheyne’s theory. The most interesting part of Dr. Cheyne’s theory thus comes to be the conception of the essential truths of Christianity—of the nature, that is, of the Christian religion—which it embodies and, if it should prove to be sound, necessitates. These essential truths—we have already enumerated them—constitute in effect Dr. Cheyne’s Confession of Faith. Do they constitute also Christianity? Certainly not—as Christianity has been hitherto understood, whether by its founders, or its propagators, or its adherents. The upshot of Dr. Cheyne’s theory, then, is that it offers us a new Christianity—a Christianity independent of such old forms of belief as the virgin-birth, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the ascension.

Is this new Christianity an improvement on the old Christianity? That is the great question. That is to say, for Dr. Cheyne. It is not an important question for the rest of us. For judging by the evidence that is here presented for it, it is not apt to become the Christianity of very many others, at least of those who are used to give a reason for the faith that is in them. But Dr. Cheyne’s main interest, one would think, since this has become his Christianity, would naturally center in the query whether this is an adequate Christianity. And one would think that, trained as he has been as a “Churchman,” Dr. Cheyne might well cherish serious doubt on that point. The new Christianity he offers us is certainly not the Christianity one would expect from a good Churchman—whose professed creed is the Thirty-nine Articles, incorporating as they do “the Three Creeds”; and whose ordinary vehicle of public worship is the Book of Common Prayer. Of course, the modes of expression—and even the conceptions expressed—found in these documents may also be represented as mere “forms,” quite as well as the modes of expression—and conceptions expressed—found in the Scriptures. But two questions will arise here—one for us, and one for Dr. Cheyne. We should ask where this interpretation of modes of expression and conceptions expressed as mere “forms”—husks concealing a kernel—is to end? Whether it may not be ultimately applied even to the essential truths of Christianity which Dr. Cheyne himself still enumerates as such? Dr. Cheyne should ask, and one would think should ask seriously, whether, if his representation be true, Socinianism has not at length won its tardy victory? For after all Dr. Cheyne’s new Christianity is just old Socinianism.

Footnotes

1. The Princeton Theological Review, iii. 1905, pp. 674–678. ↩