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The Lord of History, by Msgr. Eugene Kevane. ©2003 The Miriam Press. All Rights Reserved Contents Directory • Next • Previous II. Hebrew and Christian Historical Understanding Christian culture is the historic reality which succeeds in the West to the Graeco-Roman culture of classical antiquity.17 It is affiliated to that earlier civilization; qualitatively, however, it is quite different from it. The essential reason for the difference is to be found among the Hebrews. The Hebrew Fact stands as a historic reality in its own right. It is documented in the priestly annals of Jerusalem, the capital city of the Hebrews, known today as the historical books of the Old Testament and available everywhere today in the Bible. For these books are written “history,” independent and indeed strikingly unique in their literary genre.18 In form they go beyond the mere chronicles of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cities; in content they enter entirely upon God as operating in the events of their national history, putting this people descending from Abraham into a special relationship to Himself, called the Covenant or Testament, and thus making of it the chosen People of God with a new and unique purpose.19 The Doctrine Of Creation These writings present God as the thrice-holy One, the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the universality of the doctrine of Creation in the pages of the Hebrew writings. Its history is a record of the interventions of God into the ongoing processes of human life, something that already belongs to Him because He made it and hence is in a position to rule and to guide its unfolding development. “Lord, Lord, King and Master of all things,” a Hebrew prays in a national crisis, “everything is subject to your power.... Yes, you have made heaven and earth and all the marvels that are under heaven.”20 The Psalm which calls Israel to its daily prayer expresses the mind of the Hebrew people:
These instances, which could be multiplied indefinitely from the Bible, illustrate the profound difference between “history” as this people understood and wrote it, and the discipline cultivated under the same name by the Greeks and the Romans. This is history that records contact with the Supreme Being of the universe: at one and the same time contact with the Creator of the cosmos and the Lord of history. Rome in the conquest of her Empire was able to subjugate every city, snuffing out its local religious and political life, terminating its local priestly annals, replacing them with her own cult and code and educational system — save one city alone.22 Jerusalem she could not conquer in this way of education and culture which she preferred. In the end she had to destroy Jerusalem utterly, pulling apart every stone of her buildings and running a plow over her site. And even then this remarkable nation refused to yield: it kept its treasure of these unique writings and continued its life clustered about its synagogues in every place, always hoping for the great return to Jerusalem and the re-building of that Temple which Titus had destroyed. Each year, for centuries, the aspiration has been voiced: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Historical Succession What was (and is) unique about this durable Hebrew Fact? It was the paradoxical understanding of itself as provisional and temporary. Moses and after him all the Prophets wrote of a Coming One who would establish a new and final Testament.
Thus the Hebrews envisaged a vast religious succession in human history, descending parallel to the succession of the politico-cultural Empires of the Gentiles, but qualitatively quite different from them: “Yahweh..., to you the nations will come from the confines of the earth” (Jer. 16, 19). “My heart is stirred by a noble theme,” Psalm 45 sings, describing an everlasting throne and addressing a queen in gold from Ophir:
A Coming One No theme is more common or more characteristic of the Hebrew writings than this prophetic expectation of a new historical order in which a new covenant or testament with all nations will replace the present one with the Hebrew nation. And all the peoples, including the Hebrews, will be renewed in this coming dispensation. Let one passage from the Prophets serve as an example:
Always this new and universal religious dispensation is expected to be the work of the Coming One. It is important to recognize the universality of this understanding of succession, meaning and direction in human affairs. The Hebrews professed as basic articles of their Faith the origin of all mankind by creation of the first human pair, and the Fall of all mankind in a sin of that first man. Their writings and their national religion transcend their own national origin in Abraham. The Coming One was to be like Moses, indeed, but not a new Moses or even a new Abraham. He was to be the New Adam, from whom a new race and kind of man would proceed and populate the earth, new men with hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. Jesus Christ Jesus Christ is the world-historical figure who intervenes at this point with transforming power over human thought upon the meaning and direction of universal history. He appeared as a Rabbi or Teacher according to the accepted pattern among the Hebrews. The key to the situation emerges in the very beginning of His Talmudim, when His group of disciples clustered about Him, attaching themselves to Him as students in the common didactic procedure of the day. John the Baptist pointed Him out to his own disciples, and two of them went to explore. “Jesus turned around, saw them following and said, ‘What do you want?’ They answered, ‘Rabbi’ — which means Teacher — ‘where do you live?’ ‘Come and see,’ he replied.” They stayed with Him the rest of that day, and forthwith began to contact and enlist their companions: “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, the one about whom the prophets wrote: he is Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth” (John 1, 37-46).23 The Teacher proceeded with an intensive program of teaching and formation designed to prepare His twelve ordinary Hebrew men, outdoor men of the common people, men with only the common elementary schooling of the Synagogue, to receive His own mission and to be sent out with it to all nations.
His teaching came to a sudden shattering end in the ignominious crucifixion. It resulted directly from betrayal. He died and was buried. Then on the third day the illuminating and transforming fact of His Resurrection from the dead burst upon His scattered and demoralized followers. The effect was of course electrifying, for His disciples were convinced from His appearances that it was really He, alive again after death. But not all accepted their witness easily.
The Profession Of The Apostolic Faith This is one of the original forms of the Profession of the Apostolic Faith. Many instances of this nucleus of the Profession are scattered through the pages of the New Testament, the sudden and dramatic conclusion of the Old Testament, as men everywhere find it to this day in the Bible. Sent by the Risen Lord to teach all nations and to baptize them in the Names of the Three Persons in the Unity of Yahweh’s Godhead, the Apostles now recognized with new clarity that Jesus Himself had taught and trained and formed them precisely for this mission when they were with Him in His rabbinical school. It is readily understandable, as a simple practical necessity in taking up their assignment, that they needed a brief summary of the news about Jesus, His events and His doctrine on the Three Persons in the One God of the Hebrews. This summary gathered the content of their evangelization into a set of articles which state the Apostolic Faith. This was the pattern or standard of their catechetical teaching which prepared men and women for baptism.25 The profession of this same Faith at baptism was required from the beginning for the reception of members into what He had called “My Church,” and it has been required consistently across the centuries to the present. This official summary of the Apostolic Faith is known popularly today, in a particular verbal form at home among peoples whose languages derive from the Latin, as the Apostles’ Creed. It is a marvelously compact statement of the Christian message about Jesus, relating Him, His Person and His work, to the Three Divine Persons, and stating that everything about Him took place “according to the Scriptures,” meaning the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament. For everything about Jesus, Peter insists, took place “by the settled purpose and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2, 23). The Profession of the Apostolic Faith, furthermore, recognizes two Comings of Jesus Christ: this first one, now accomplished and completed, and a second one in glory, at the end of this present world and its history, as the Judge of the living and the dead.26 The New Center Of History It is clear that this Profession of the Apostolic Faith contains a new and specifically Christian understanding of the universal history of mankind. In fact, the event to which it bears witness and makes known by its witness, the Incarnation of the Supreme Being and the Redemption of mankind on His Cross, changes the character of history itself. “From the moment that it takes place,” writes Gigon, “it necessarily takes its position as the center of all history, as the midpoint in the strict sense, insofar as it simultaneously establishes the beginning and ending points of universal history to which it itself as midpoint is related.”27 The historical time which reaches from the beginning, the creation of the world and its history, to the midpoint, stands revealed as a time of preparation precisely for this central event. This is the meaning of the phrase “according to the Scriptures” in the Profession of Faith. “And this preparatory movement of history forward toward the Incarnation of God correlates with the subsequent movement of history from this event toward the End of the World.”28 It is fundamentally important to note that the Profession of the Apostolic Faith, by its First Article, continues and fulfills the Hebrew doctrine of creation. It is through this same Eternal Son, now incarnate, that God the Father created heaven and earth, meaning all things visible and invisible. The plan which the Almighty put into His creation is a plan for the redemption of mankind.29 This is accomplished through the sending of His Eternal Son, and then through the consequent sending of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son upon the new entity which Jesus organized as a part of his teaching program and called “My Church” (Mt. 16, 18). Hence the three-fold division of the Apostles’ Profession and its resulting masterful synthesis of the meaning and direction of history as salvation history, built by God into reality as an integral part of creation as such.30 And it is the Third Article on the work of the Holy Spirit, raising up “a standard for the nations” (cf. Is. 11, 12), which bears directly upon the Christian understanding of universal history. The Apostles, particularly Sts. Peter and Paul, made this standard, the Catholic Church, visible on the stage of history already in the First Century by their energetic apostolate. Quickly they moved out from the original base at Jerusalem to Antioch and then to Rome. Soon afterward the fourth original Apostolic See was established at Alexandria, an action traditionally attributed to St. Mark, who had been with St. Peter at Rome as his younger associate. For the Apostles did not share an erroneous opinion on the imminence of the Second Coming which was widespread among Christians in the decades immediately following the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The Apostles themselves were careful to clarify the official teaching of the Church to the contrary. As St. Paul explains to the Thessalonians, the day of the Lord is not yet near at hand.
Thus the Apostles saw the time before them as divided into two moments: first, the period of the mission to all peoples and nations with the Christian message; and after that, the mysterious events leading directly and immediately to the Second Coming. For the Apostles, the obvious answer regarding the delay was to use the time for the formation of the Christian assemblies or ecclesiae, the churches being actively organized ever more widely out into every place from the four original Apostolic Sees. St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, was witnessing already the conversion of the pagan peoples to God in the universal Church of Jesus Christ: for him it was already a present fact which he was able to see and to experience. And he states clearly his understanding of it. The Catholic Act A New Israel is being formed by means of these ecclesiae, an eschatological Israel arising out of Abraham’s seed and formed out of Jews and Gentiles without the distinctions and national customs of the Old Testament.31 The Hebrew Torah is recognized as preparatory for this new fact. St. Paul, and the entire Early Church with him, recognizes what is beginning to take place as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures in their prophecy of the calling of the Gentiles into the world-wide New Testament which is to succeed in the times of the Coming One. The emergence of this New Israel on the stage of universal history, furthermore, is in turn preparatory to coming events regarding the Hebrew nation itself. For the refusal of this people to join the universal movement of the Gentile nations into the unity of the New Israel is seen by the Apostles as an apostasy which is itself a fulfillment of prophecy; and Saint Paul in his profound chapters to the Romans looks forward to the conversion of a remnant of the Hebrew people sometime in the future, on the eve of the final manifestation of divine power.32 This is the substance of the Christian understanding of history. The Fathers of the Church from Justin through Augustine to Gregory the Great will develop it greatly, but they will not change it. The Catholic Fact emerges in this way and becomes visible on the panorama of universal history. It results from the apostolate, through the distinct yet interrelated processes of evangelization and catechesis. It is the work of the catechumenate, the apostolic teaching program which explained the creedal facts about Jesus secundum Scripturas, as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures, and then baptized into membership in the New Israel of God and its way of life. Thus the Catholic Fact follows upon the Hebrew Fact, and is one thing with it in the continuity of religious succession, the succession of the Testaments as an actual happening of history. | ||
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