The monotheism of Christianity, as we have already seen, while accepting the absolute supremacy of the Infinite Being, so as to displace forever all secondary or subordinate gods, yet conceives of him as the present inspiration of all his children.  It sees him coming down, to bless them in the sunshine and the shower, as inspiring every good thought, as a providence guiding all human lives.  And by this view it fulfils both Judaism and Mohammedanism, and takes a long step beyond them both.

Sec. 7.  The Fulness of Christianity is derived from the Life of Jesus.

Christianity has thus shown itself to be a universal solvent, capable of receiving into itself the existing truths of the ethnic religions, and fulfilling them with something higher.  Whenever it has come in contact with natural religion, it has assimilated it and elevated it.  This is one evidence that it is intended to become the universal religion of mankind.

This pleroma, or fulness, integrity, all-sidedness, or by whatever name we call it, is something deeper than thought.  A system of thought might be devised large enough to include all the truths in all the religions of the world, putting each in its own place in relation to the rest.  Such a system might show how they all are related to each other, and all are in harmony.  But this would be a philosophy, not a religion.  No such philosophy appears in the original records of Christianity.  The New Testament does not present Jesus as a philosopher, nor Paul as a metaphysician.  There is no systematic teaching in the Gospels, nor in the Epistles.  Yet we find there, in incidental utterances, the elements of this many-sided truth, in regard to God, man, duty, and immortality.  But we find it as life, not as thought.  It is a fulness of life in the soul of Jesus, passing into the souls of his disciples and apostles, and from them in a continuous stream of Christian experience, down to the present time.

The word pleroma ([Greek:  plaeroma]), in the New Testament, means that which fills up; fulness, fulfilling, filling full.  The verb “to fulfil” ([Greek:  plaerhoo]) carries the same significance.  To “fulfil that which was spoken by the prophets,” means to fill it full of meaning and truth.  Jesus came, not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it; that is, to carry it out further.  He fulfilled Moses and the prophets, not by doing exactly what they foretold, in their sense, but by doing it in a higher, deeper, and larger sense.  He fulfilled their thought as the flower fulfils the bud, and as the fruit fulfils the flower.  The sense of the fulness of life in Jesus and in the Gospel seems to have struck the minds of the early disciples, and powerfully impressed them.  Hence the frequency with which they use this verb and noun, signifying fulness.  Jesus fulfilled the law, the prophets, all righteousness, the Scriptures.  He came in the fulness of time.  His joy was fulfilled.  Paul prays that the disciples may be filled full of joy, peace, and hope, with the fruits of righteousness, with all knowledge, with the spirit of God, and with all the fulness of God.  He teaches that love fulfils the law, that the Church is the fulness of Christ, that Christ fills all things full of himself, and that in him dwells all the fulness of the godhead bodily.