MODKKNISM AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY. 



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will consent to serve it, and will suffer Himself to be drawn by 

 the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our 

 civilization." 



The rediscovered Christ of Schweitzer, " drawn by the 

 Germanic spirit/' is to replace the Christ of traditional Chris- 

 tianity ! What a demand upon faith ! Even supposing that 

 Judaism at the time of our Lord were interpenetrated with the 

 concepts of the Book of Enoch, and of other Apocalyptic litera- 

 ture, in the process of the spiritual evolution of the Church, 

 that is, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, such concepts 

 must have sloughed off at an early date. The fact that we have 

 to go to Abyssinia, converted to Christianity in the fourth or 

 fifth century, for the only complete MSS. of the Book of Enoch, 

 and that we cannot find in their original languages most of the 

 other Apocalyptic documents in question, is sufficient proof that 

 the views contained within them had ceased to be of interest to 

 the early Church. The evidence, moreover, that these particular 

 views were generally current in our Lord's time is not of a 

 convincing character. There were, as anyone reading 

 Dr. Charles's articles in the Encyclopaedia Biblica must see, 

 varied eschatological views presented in pre-Christian- Jewish 

 Apocalyptic literature. What reason, then, is there for 

 assuming that Christ culled from a mass of conflicting opinions 

 that form of eschatology, adopted by Schweitzer, and made it 

 the substance of His teaching ? There is no indication that the 

 custodians of the Jewish records knew anything in Christ's 

 time about the Schweitzer- view, and no one has as yet, I 

 believe, pointed out any survival of these cataclysmic views in 

 post- Christian- Jewish literature. * 



* Canon Charles's articles in the Encyclopaedia Biblica on Apocalyptic 

 Literature and Eschatology furnish all that is required to enable the 

 reader to come to a sane conclusion on Schweitzer's views. Dr. Charles 

 gives us an analysis of the Apocalyptic literature current in the period 

 shortly before and after our Lord's time. The works dealt with include 

 the Fourth Booh of Esdras (called the Second in the English Apocrypha), 

 which is ascribed to 81-96 a.d. ; the kindred Apocalypse of Baruch 

 (50-100 a.d.) ; The Ascension of Isaiah (50-80 a.d.) ; The Book of Jubilees 

 (72-104 a.d.) ; The Ascension of Moses (4 B.C. -30 a.d.) ; Testament of 

 the XII Patriarchs (from second century b.c-30 a.d.) ; The Psalms of 

 Solomon (anterior to 64 B.C.) ; The Book of Enoch {the groundwork written 

 before 98 B.C.) ; The Sibylline Oracles (the Jewish portions, iii, 1-62, 

 written before 31 B.C. ; ii, 97-817, about 190 B.C., book iv, about 80 a.d. ; 

 the Christian portions, iii, 63-92, and ii, 167-170, late Christian ; book v 

 is mainly Jewish, written about 80 a.d. ; books vi and vii are Gnostic, 

 written about the third century a.d. ; book viii is Christian, and belongs 

 to the second and third centuries a.d. ; the earlier and later books are 



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