"
What is new in the Christian position is not the magnifying of faith;
it is the severance of faith from the law and the particular faith
which is magnified. Philo, and the rabbis, too, believed that faith
was the goal of virtue, and the culmination of the moral life; but
faith to them implied the sanctification of the whole of life, the
love of God "shown in obedience to a law of conduct." Paul, however,
hating the law, set up a new faith in the saving power of Jesus and in
certain beliefs about him, which afterwards were crystallized, or
petrified, into merciless dogmas, contrary alike to the Jewish ideas
of God and of life. The new religion, when it was denationalized,
inevitably became ecclesiastical: for as the national regulation of
life was rejected, in order to ensure some kind of uniformity, it had
to bind its members together by definite articles of belief imposed by
a central authority. The true alternative was not between a legal and
a spiritual religion--for every religion must have some external
rule--but between a law of conduct and a law of belief. Philo and the
rabbis chose the former way; Paul and the Church, the latter.
Christian theology, no less than the Christian conception of religion,
exhibits also a complete breach with the Jewish spirit of Philo. In
the Epistles there are, indeed, in many places doctrines of the Logos
in the same images and the same Hebraic metaphors as Philo had worked
into his system; but their purport is entirely changed by association
with new un-Jewish dogmas.
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