The Harvard Theological Review Author:George Foot Moore 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: THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH AMBROSE W. VERNON Brookline, Massachusetts The church has come to have an enduring place not only in history but in thought. ... more »At least since the writing of The City of God it has decided some of the most vital questions confronting us because of a peculiar sanctity attached to it. It is not therefore out of place to demand from time to time that it show us its credentials. The present essay is an attempt to discover if there is anything peculiarly sacred about the manner of its founding that would justify us in ascribing unique spiritual authority to it. And the surprising fact which we discover is, that we cannot discover any actual founding of the church whatever. We cannot be sure that the church was founded in any accurate sense of that term; it is probably more in accord with the facts to say that the movement which eventually became known as the church grew. Creation by fiat seems as mythical in this sphere as in more material realms. It seems as if there were a church almost before its members knew it. In endeavoring to show that the founding of the church is obscure and to discover some reasons for such obscurity, we shall be obliged to see if we can trace the rise of the idea of the church in the minds of the early friends and disciples of Jesus. Of course ideas and words are never quite conterminous. A word never covers an idea. If a word is laid on top of an idea, the idea peeps out all around it. Yet at the same time before an idea can clothe itself with a word it is in a pre-natal state and cannot be said to be properly born. And so, it seems to me, our first, but not our only, duty in attempting tocome upon the birth-hour of the Christian church, is to discover, if we may, when the word "church" was first applied either by its...« less