SOCIALISM AND CHRISTIANITY.

 That primitive Christianity was a movement largely confined to the proletariat is a widely accepted view of Christian origins. But something more is made of this view in these days. It is now being adapted to give weight and currency to the claim that Christianity was originally a class movement of the poor against the rich. Not long ago Professor Deismann, of the University of Berlin, exploited this theory in a book on "Primitive Christianity and the Lower Classes of Society." This position of Deismann and others is now being used by the learned protagonists of Social Democracy to show that in its beginnings Christianity was really a Social Democratic agitation ; that it was a bread-and-butter question of the masses, and really not a religious movement at all. The ablest and most scholarly exponent of this rather startling explanation of the beginnings of the Christian religion is the literary leader of the theory of Social Democracy, Karl Kautsky, who has lately published a book, entitled "The Origins of Christianity." In it we find the following radical views :

"The proper method for the judgment of great movements in history is the 'materialistic,' which should be substituted for the 'individualistic' current among theologians and historians. Not the ideas and the deeds of individual men are the active factors in the development of historical movements, but solely the movements of the masses that operate in accordance with certain laws. Christianity in its beginnings and early development too must be judged from this viewpoint. Not the personalities that are reported as prominently active in primitive Christianity, such as Jesus and Paul, were really the powers that produced and developed this new religious agitation. This grew rather out of the social conditions and problems of the times that produced it. The social conditions that prevailed among the Jews at that time would readily produce a movement such as Christianity originally was.

"The real milieu out of which the Christian agitation grew was the party of zealots, the most radical protagonists of the Messianic idea and expectations. According to the testimony of Josephus, the historian, this party produced in the age before and after Jesus of Nazareth a large number of Messianic leaders with larger or smaller bands of followers, all of whom died violent deaths. Jesus, too, can be historically understood only if looked upon in this light. Not much that we know of him is historically reliable ; but from Luke xxii. 36, sqq., we can learn with considerable certainty that on the occasion of a great religious festival in Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth started an agitation which ended in a fiasco, because he was betrayed, and Jesus then died the death as an ordinary rebel.

"The movement which he intended to inaugurate has really very little in common with what was later or is now known, as Christianity. The Christian movement of history is almost entirely independent of the person of Jesus. The real root of this movement is to be found in the communistic organisations at that time being established among the supprest masses. It was a social and not a religious movement, and was not in its kind and character absolutely new. The Essenes and the Therapeutae had already tried to realise such ideals of emancipation and elevation of the proletariat masses, but primitive Christianity was the first to do this with any success. It was through the agitation of Jesus and his immediate followers that the supprest proletariat tried to rid itself of its hard lot. All its ideals Christianity afterward transferred to its martyr hero Jesus, until finally it, was changed into the unhistorical Jesus of the New Testament. The fact that Christianity was originally such a communistic and social democratic agitation is proved by the opening chapters of Acts and a number of passages in Luke.

"But the radical communism of the first century of primitive Christianity did not attain to victory. Through the fact that the classes and the higher ranks of society forced their way into the Church, and especially through the establishment of an official bureaucracy in the shape of an episcopacy, a reactionary element found its way into Christianity, and in the third and fourth centuries this led to an extensive revisionism. In this way the originally democratic primitive Christianity became in the course of time an Episcopal bureaucracy. It was not until Christianity had assumed this form that it became satisfactory for the uses of imperial despotism and in a shape to be made the religion of the State. An effort to reintroduce the communistic and proletariat spirit of Christianity found its expression in the monastic system, but only with partial success. It was subdued by the greed of the clergy, and Christianity became more than ever divorced from its original purposes."

As this is a quasi-official statement of what Social Democracy thinks of primitive Christianity and Christ, the work of Kautsky is considered more than a mere curiosity of literature and is calling forth replies on an extensive scale. One of the best and most complete is that of Joachim Schluter, found in "Glauben and Wissen," whose argument is in outline the following :

"The fundamental principle of Kautsky's Social Democratic reconstruction of the beginnings of Christianity is false, or at best contains only a partial truth. The principle itself is practically like a mechanical law of nature, and this can never explain the diversities in a movement of thought. It is simply not a fact, that great thought movements grow out of the agitations and movements of the masses ; they originate in the intermingling of the personal and individual with the creations of the masses, and least of all in the sphere of religion are the individuals to be ignored. Religion is pre-eminently something individual, and in the history of the ups and downs of religious thought and life, the leading agencies are usually men and individual ideas and ideals, and not the blind longings of the masses, although these latter may be readily utilized by the men who lead.

"Then, too, this strange picture of primitive Christianity is secured by this Social Democratic servant only by a more arbitrary abuse of the sources. He accepts as historical the opening chapters of Acts and a few verses in Luke, but the rest of the gospels he discards as worthless. He ignores altogether the Pauline writings, and in this radical way claims to have found the historical Christ and historical Christianity. And yet Paul, who reports matters up to five years after the crucifixion, knows Jesus only as a religious and not as a social leader ; for Paul he is not a revolutionary martyr, but an authority in the deepest problems and perplexities of religion. How could half a decade have so utterly perverted the popular conception of so influential a leader !

"Then, too, the communism of primitive Christianity had for it not the vital importance that communism has for the Social Democratic ideals of to-day. Early Christians did not have their minds and hearts fixed on the things of this world ; they thought chiefly of the return of the Messiah. In the Pauline congregations we find the differences of the classes, between the rich and the poor, the master and the slave, amply recognised, and not a word of criticism do we hear against this arrangement as such, but only against its abuse. Indeed, as has been shown so clearly, particularly by the veteran Bernhard Weiss, of Berlin, in his recent commentaries, early Christianity proceeded on the avowed principle that the social status of the people as it existed then was to be recognised and maintained, provided that this does not conflict with the higher duties of Christianity."

Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton, NSW ), 1909, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article61506722