ent economic and political stages through which the people creating the theology have passed in its development.1

Such a fact is easily appreciated. Theology is essentially concerned with relations or situations in which man and God are both involved. But to describe relations men inevitably make use of relations already in experience. In religion men seek help; they justify that search by the use of those categories of social experience in which help has already been found and its methods of operation organized.

Such control exercised by the non-religious presuppositions of social experience over a theological system, whether it be simple or highly developed, is inevitable, since such a system is only one phase of a social mind. A philosophical treatment of religion and particularly a philosophy of religion are always apt to overlook this fact because of their tendency to deal with concepts abstracted from experience. But speaking strictly, there is no history of doctrine; there is only the history of men who hold doctrines. A "doctrinal man" is as impossible as an "economic man." Theology has been even slower than political economy to recognize this fact, but as soon as the doctrine-making process is seen to be only one phase of an evolving civilization, its social aspect at once appears clear and the approach to theology is seen to be through history and sociology rather than through philosophy. Indeed, it may be said that when philosophy becomes dominant in theology the period of creative theology like the period of creative mythology has closed.

II. THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY THE SAME AS THAT OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

1. The creative periods of theology have been those in which subconscious social presuppositions are becoming organizing

* See the interesting but not always accurate discussion of Patten, The Social Basis of Religion. See also King, The Development of Religion, chaps. ix, x; Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience, pp. 113f. Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, furnishes a corrective to some of the generalizations of those who minimize the metaphysical element of even primitive religions. It should never be forgotten that theology is only one phase of a religion, important as it is in determining the course of religious development.

Cf. my article, "The Evolution of Religion," in American Journal of Theology, January, 1911.

principles of religious thought and experience as well as of political forms. For example, in Hebraic theology the periods of theological development were those also of political development. Yahwehworship developed theologically always pari passu with the development of the Hebrew state. In the earlier stages Yahweh appears, not as a true monarch, but as the head of a clan. As Hebraic civilization developed he became the head of a tribal confederacy. As an incipient nationalism developed and particularly as the Hebrew people came under the influence of the more highly developed monarchies of Babylonia and Assyria he became a monarch and his relations with the world were similar to those of the ancient oriental conqueror with his subjects and enemies.1

It would be a mistake to think that there was any deliberately reflective use of new political ideals in the systematizing of religion. While it is true that the religious teachers of the Hebrews never undertook to organize a scientifially complete system of religious instruction, their religious thinking was none the less within a theological schema. And this schema was essentially the same as was being developed in the region of politics. Theology and the ideals of the Hebrew state alike sprang from the experience of the people. The experience of one was the principles of the other because both alike expressed the developing dynamic social presuppositions. Jehovah dealt with his people as a monarch. He gave his law to Moses as Shamash gave his law to Hammurabi. The Day of Yahweh, which at the start was hardly more than a day of battle, became a day of judgment, in which Yahweh was the supreme judge of Hebrew and Gentile alike. As the monarch was bound by nothing except his own will to which he must ever be true, so Yahweh made promises the keeping of which was conditioned only upon the loyalty of his people. It was this transcendentalized politics which shaped Hebraic religious thinking and passed on to the later Christian theology. So far as philosophy emerged, as in the case of Philo, it was a means of adjusting the fundamental theological concept to the culture of the Greek world. And no matter how much Philo might speculate regarding the

I

For a detailed study of that struggle between civilizations which shaped Hebrew religious thought, see Wallis, Sociological Study of the Bible.

Logos or with what freedom he allegorized the history of his people, he never changed those underlying political concepts which constituted the schema of his national religion. Sovereignty and subjects, law and judgment, punishment and rehabilitation, these great rubrics which express the presuppositions controlling the highest social activity of the Hebrews, became the skeleton of their religious thought.

2. Christianity considered theologically perpetuates this transcendental politics of the Hebrew. It springs genetically, however, not directly from the Hebraism of the Old Testament, but from the Judaism of New Testament times. Its principles are those of Hebraism re-expressed in the messianic hope.

How far Christianity at its start was from being a philosophy appears not only from the teaching of Jesus but also from the expressed hostility of Paul to what he called "the wisdom of this world," a hostility which was vigorously urged by such church fathers as Tertullian. The latter's treatise The Prescription of Heretics is a plea for the supremacy of a dramatic theology as over against a philosophy. But neither Paul nor Tertullian was apart from other Christian writers. The theology to which they held was the limit within which philosophically minded Christians like Justin and Origen debated. This theology epitomized in regula fidei was nothing more nor less than a transcendentalized theory of that conception of government which was an unconscious but determinative presupposition of the entire social life of the ancient world. And its schema was the messianism which had been brought over from Judaism.

Messianism undoubtedly had deep roots which must be traced back into the hopes and mythologies of ancient nations, particularly those of Babylonia and Persia, whose civilizations had affected Judaism. But there is no chief root that does not finally end in social practice. However great or, as it seems to me more probable, however slight may have been the rôle of the Gilgamesh epic in Jewish messianism, it is colored by the political habits of the age in which it arose. Similarly in the case of the influence of the Persian religion. Whatever may have been the relative importance of the reciprocal influence of Mazdaism and Hebraism, the outcome

in either case was a religious hope that involved transcendental politics.

The Jewish messianic hope passed through two stages both formally political. In the first the Jews believed that Yahweh would re-establish through ordinary methods the Jewish state as supreme over all its enemies; and in the second they hoped that the same triumphant nation would be established, not in the ordinary course of history, but by the miraculous intervention of God through his Anointed. Messianism is as truly political in its transcendental as in its politico-revolutionary stage. A sovereign God who seeks to establish his kingdom by the conquest of the rival kingdom of Satan; a vice-gerent through whom the divine sovereign works and who is to conquer the hostile kingdom and establish the kingdom of God in which the law of God is to be established; a new age in which God is to be the supreme sovereign and his people' supremely blessed while the arch-antagonist is bound and punished with his followers; a day of judgment in which the triumphant king metes out the fate of all mankind in accordance with its loyalty or disloyalty: these are the fundamental elements of the program of messianism. The resurrection simply assured the disposition of all mankind in the final world-order. It requires no argument to show that this schema is fundamental to Christian theology, and that it is indeed the organizing principle of theology as it subsequently was developed in the western world and less imperfectly in the Greek church. Whatever else philosophy may have accomplished in the development of doctrine, it has never obscured these fundamental rubrics which were carried over into religion from the social presuppositions on which the ancient civilization was ultimately based. Indeed Christian theology as an organized system might be described as a political dramatic scenario in which the future and present relations of men and God are set forth in terms drawn from the political experience of the Jewish people.' 3. At two points this schema is modified in the New Testament and by later writers by the addition of non-political elements which

A striking use of the strict political concept to prove polytheism is quoted by Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, I, 37 n., from Macarius Magnes, iv. 20. A god, Porphyry insists, if he is to be a monarch must rule over subjects of his own genus.

are really the most essential in Christianity. There is first the spiritual experience of the Christian. This is in turn twofold. Those phenomena which are called in the New Testament the gifts of the Holy Ghost have never been thoroughly worked into orthodoxy and have always been emphasized among groups (e.g., the Montanists) who have been to a considerable degree regarded as heretical. The reason is very plain. The general schema of historical orthodoxy is transcendental politics redefined by the use of other elements of social experience and rationalized in detail by current philosophy. In such a schema there is no room for mysticism. That must always be extra-orthodox.

Yet the second sort of spiritual experience, the actual transformation of the believer by God, has always been emphasized by theology. In Greek Christianity this element played a very large rôle. We see it in the "recapitulation" by Jesus, so attractive to Irenaeus, and even more in the conception of salvation as the theizing of human nature into incorruption. At one time it even bade fair to become the organizing principle for an entire system. But the development of Greek theology was arrested in its christological epoch, and western theology became so far committed to a forensic outline of teaching, that the saving transformation of the believer was attached to the idea of the church and its sacraments instead of being allowed to organize Christian teaching into a vital system. Yet it has always persisted in western theology as a sort of parallel orthodoxy. If it instead of the messianic drama had become really central in orthodoxy, doctrinal development would have been far more vital and less authoritative. In modern theology this spiritual and vital element is assuming a new importance and constitutes one of the great constructive principles for a theology which shall be more in accord with the presuppositions of modern social life so radically different from those expressed in absolute monarchy. Completely outside of the inherited messianic drama, it is essential Christianity itself.

A second element, too little used by orthodoxy because it also lies outside of the politico-religious drama of messianism, is the experience of Jesus himself. All theologians, it is true, have generalized this element of historical Christianity in the same