Edited by James Hastings, D.D. Vol. II: Macedonia—Zion, with Indexes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1918.1
This concluding volume of Dr. Hastings’ “Dictionary of the Apostolic Church” is the product of the labors of about a hundred scholars. Five of these are from the Continent, and a dozen are Americans. The material contributed by the Continental scholars is not large in amount nor of the first importance. P. Batiffol writes on Polycarp; E. von Dobschütz on Philo; H. Jordan on Writing; O. E. Moe on Moses; A. von Schlatter on Paraclete. The American writers are C. A. Beckwith, S. J. Case, J. A. Faulkner, W. M. Groton, K. Kohler (who, although a Jew, has been intrusted, among others, with so intimately Christian a subject as “Shepherd”), A. T. Robertson, G. L. Robinson, T. G. Soares, G. Vos, B. B. Warfield, and A. C. Zenos. Of these the largest contributions have been made by the late Prof. Groton of the Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia, and Prof. Case of the University of Chicago. Prof. Groton writes the long (thirteen pages) and valuable article on “Mystery, Mysteries,” which will serve admirably as a succinct introduction to the study of this obscure subject. Besides some shorter articles (“Seed,” “Theudas,” “Tribute”) Prof. Case writes the long articles (nineteen pages in combination) on “Peter” and the “Epistles of Peter.” The even longer article on “Paul” (twenty-one pages) is written by Prof. James Stalker, an old hand at the subject. Articles on such topics legitimately occupy large space in a Dictionary of the Apostolic Church. When we say Peter and Paul we almost say Apostolic Church—as the narrative of the Book of Acts may suggest to us. There are other long articles in the volume, however, the scope of which passes so far beyond the Apostolic Church as to set the reader to wondering as to the principle on which they have been admitted. There is, for example, Prof. James Moffatt’s article on “War.” It is an altogether admirable treatise on the attitude of the early Church to war. It quickly, however, gets beyond anything that can be called the Apostolic Church and does not stop till it reaches Augustine. And there is Principal Thomas Lewis’ excellent article on “Persecution.” It finds no stopping-place short of the Reformation.
It is the policy of this Dictionary to interpret the phrase “Apostolic Church” purely temporally. It means to it merely the Church of the first century. It is an incidental good result of this bad point of view that besides articles on the New Testament books we get admirable articles on what we may perhaps still speak of as subapostolic writings, and indeed on Jewish writings dating from a time somewhere about the Apostolic Age. We have not only articles on Polycarp (P. Batiffol)—poor Papias is left out—and the Odes of Solomon (A Mingana), but also articles on Philo (E. von Dobschütz), Sirach and Wisdom (D. S. Margoliouth), the Psalms of Solomon (G. B. Gray), the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (A. L. Davies), and Sibylline Oracles (James Moffatt). It may no doubt be said that a knowledge of these writings is important, both as regards their language and their thought, for a complete understanding of the Apostolic Age. Such a plea would be much more valid for the Jewish writings antedating the apostolic times than for the subapostolic writings. There is really no good reason for including subapostolic writings in a Dictionary of the Apostolic Church. The gulf between the two groups of writings is as wide as that which divides any two groups of writings, contiguous in time, known to history. If we needed any proof of that, it would be supported by the result of attempting to smelt the two groups together in this Dictionary. For, if the excellence of the articles on the several subapostolic books tends to lead us to condone their intrusion into the Dictionary, the case is far different with the habit of tacking on to article after article on apostolic teaching on this or that subject, a paragraph on the teaching of the subapostolic writers on it also. If this begins by being amusing, it ends by becoming wearisome. There is no section of the history of doctrine less exhilarating than that which deals with the subapostolic Fathers. It was a true saying of a great man long ago that they would be better named supapostolic babies. No matter how close they stand to one another in time, the apostolic and the subapostolic writers cannot be compressed into the same category. The attempt to do so is a blunder.
Underlying the attempt to wash out the boundary line which separates between the apostolic and subapostolic writings, and the consequent habit of speaking of the latter as “first century writers outside the New Testament,” a low view of the inspiration and authority of the New Testament writings is usually discoverable, and in general a chariness with respect to the immediately supernatural in the origins of Christianity. Of course one would not require to look long before he found something of this sort among the hundred or so writers who have coöperated in the preparation of this volume. On the whole, however, even those whose personal views leave little place for an authoritative Scripture or for direct supernaturalism appear to have sought to write objectively. Prof. A. R. Gordon, of M’Gill University, who writes the good article on “Scripture,” seems to doubt whether the Christian can take the Old Testament, in its own sense, as authoritative to him, but he nevertheless tells us frankly that “the high Jewish theory of the inspiration of Scripture is fully accepted in the New Testament,” where the words of Moses, David, Isaiah and the other prophets are “attributed directly to God” and are looked upon as the final norm alike of faith and of conduct. In the article “Miracles” by Bishop Maclean, we meet on the other hand with an attempt to explain miracles away, which was rather unexpected in this quarter. Many of the “miracles” recorded in the New Testament, we are told, are clearly not miracles in the strict sense; many which seemed miracles to those who witnessed them we can now see were not really miracles; many more, the natural mode of working which, that even we may not yet see, no doubt those who come after us will see. Perhaps “the theory of ‘relative miracles’ propounded by Schleiermacher” may commend itself to us. “This theory substitutes for a contravention of nature a miraculous knowledge. Certain persons had a greater hold upon the secrets of nature than their contemporaries.” “But,” it is added, “this was by a divine interposition”; and is not the essential thing, as Dr. Sanday says, “the divine act”? What is troubling Bishop Maclean is the conception of nature as an absolutely closed system, in which everything that occurs must be the product of its own intrinsic forces operating normally; no intrusion from without is possible, or, at least, can be admitted to have ever occurred. Doubtless God made it; but having made it, He never afterwards has interfered with its mechanical working, for any purpose whatever. Whatever occurs is “natural.” Of course Bishop Maclean seizes hold of that remark of Augustine’s—which has frequently before been as gravely misused as he misuses it—that a “portent” happens not against nature but against “known nature.” On the repeated occasions when he made this remark Augustine was not reducing our conception of miracles to merely “natural” events but elevating and enlarging our conception of “nature.” There is a “nature,” he says, above the nature spread out for our observation, the “nature,” to wit, of the Divine Decree: for everything that God wills becomes by that act a natural thing to occur although it does not occur by means of the “natural” forces: it cannot be said to be “unnatural” though it be “supernatural,” for the constitutive fact of all nature is the will of God. It is enough to dispose of Bishop Maclean’s theory of “relative miracles” to ask what is the difference, on its basis, between a miracle and a trick, between the miracles of Moses before Pharaoh, say, and those of the Egyptian magicians? Despite his reduction of miracles to tricks, we observe, Bishop Maclean is concerned to show that the Apostolic Age was marked by abounding miracles, while the Post-Apostolic Age lacked them.