Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY, AS BEARING UPON THE CHRISTIAN MISSION. THE EPISCOPATE.1 Christian preaching aimed at winning souls and k bringing individuals to God, that the number of . the elect might be made up, but from the very outset it worked along the lines of a community and proposed to itself the aim of uniting all together who believed in Christ. Primarily this union was one which consisted of the disciples of Jesus. But, as we have already seen, these disciples were conscious of being tlie true Israel and the ccclesia of God. Such they held themselves to be. Hence they appropriated to themselves the form and well-knit frame of Judaism, spiritualizing it and strengthening it, so that by one stroke (we may say) they secured a firm and exclusive organization. But while this organization, embracing all Christians on earth, rested in the first instance solely upon religious ideas, as a purely ideal conception it would hardly have remained effective for any length of 1 Cp. on this 7on Dobschiitz's die urchristlichen Gemeinden (1902) [translated in this library under the title of Christian Life in the Primitive Church]. time, had it not been allied to local organization; and Christianity, at the initiative of the original apostles and the brethren of Jesus, began by borrowing this as well from Judaism, i.e. from the synagogue. Throughout the Diaspora the Christian communities developed at first out of the synagogues with their proselytes or adherents. Designed to be essentially a brotherhood, and springing out of the synagogue, the Christian society developed a local organization which was of double strength, superior to anything achieved by the societies of Judaism.1 One extremely advantageous feature of these local organization...