'Whether it were I or they, so we preach,
and so ye believed.'--1 COR. xv. 11.
Party spirit and faction were the curses of Greek civic life, and
they had crept into at least one of the Greek churches--that in the
luxurious and powerful city of Corinth. We know that there was a very
considerable body of antagonists to Paul, who ranked themselves under
the banner of Apollos or of Cephas _i.e._ Peter. Therefore, Paul,
keenly conscious that he was speaking to some unfriendly critics,
hastens in the context to remove the possible objection which might
be made, that the Gospel which he preached was peculiar to himself,
and proceeds to assert that the whole substance of what he had to say
to men, was held with unbroken unanimity by the other apostles.
'They' means all of _them_; and 'so' means the summary of the Gospel
teaching in the preceding verses.
Now, Paul would not have ventured to make that assertion, in the face
of men whom he knew to be eager to pick holes in anything that he
said, unless he had been perfectly sure of his ground. There were
broad differences between him and the others. But their partisans
might squabble, as is often the case, and the men, whose partisans
they were, be unanimous. There were differences of individual
character, of temper, and of views about certain points of Christian
truth. But there was an unbroken front of unanimity in regard to all
that lies within the compass of that little word which covers so much
ground--'_So_ we preach.'
Now, I wish to turn to that outstanding fact--which does not always
attract the attention which it deserves--of the absolute identity of
the message which all the apostles and primitive teachers delivered,
and to seek to enforce some of the considerations and lessons which
seem to me naturally to flow from it.
I. First, then, I ask you to think of the fact itself--the unbroken
unanimity of the whole body of Apostolic teachers.
As I have said, there were wide differences of characteristics
between them, but there was a broad tract of teaching wherein they
all agreed. Let me briefly gather up the points of unanimity, the
contents of the one Gospel, which every man of them felt was his
message to the world. I may take it all from the two clauses in the
preceding context, 'how that Christ died for our sins according to
the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the
third day according to the Scriptures.' These are the things about
which, as Paul declares, there was not the whisper of a dissentient
voice. There is the vital centre which he declares every Christian
teacher grasped as being the essential of his message, and in various
tones and manners, but in substantial identity of content, declared
to the world.
Now, what lies in it? The Person spoken of--the Christ, and all that
that word involves of reference to the ancient and incomplete
Revelation in the past, its shadows and types, its prophecies and
ceremonies, its priesthood and its sacrifices; with all that it
involves of reference to the ancient hopes on which a thousand
generations had lived, and which either are baseless delusions, or
are realised in Jesus--the Person whom all the Apostles proclaimed
was One anointed from God as Prophet, Priest, and King; who had come
into the world to fulfil all that the ancient system had shadowed by
sacrifice, temple, and priest, and was the Monarch of Israel and of
the world.
And not only were they absolutely unanimous in regard to the Person,
but they were unbrokenly consentient in regard to the facts of His
life, His death, and His Resurrection. But the proclamation of the
external fact is no gospel. You must add the clause 'for our sins,'
and then the record, which is a mere piece of history, with no more
good news in it than the record of the death of any other martyr,
hero, or saint, starts into being truly the good news for the world.
The least part of a historical fact is the fact; the greatest part of
it is the explanation of the fact, and the setting it in its place in
regard to other facts, the exhibition of the principles which it
expresses, and of the conclusions to which it leads. So the bare
historical declaration of a death and a resurrection is transmuted
into a gospel, by that which is the most important part of the
Gospel, the explanation of the meaning of the fact--'He died for our
sins.'
If redemption from sin through the death of a Person is the
fundamental conception of the Gospel for the world, then it is clear
that, for such a purpose, a divine nature in the Person is wanted.
Your notion of what Christ came to do will determine your notion of
who He is. If you only recognise that His work is to teach,
or to show in exercise a fair human character, then you may rest
content with the lower notion of His nature which sees in Him but the
foremost of the sons of men. But if we grasp 'died for our sins,'
then for such a task the incarnation of the Eternal Son of God is the
absolute pre-requisite.
Still further, our text brings out the contents of this gospel as
being the declaration of the Resurrection. On that I need not here
and now dwell at any length. But these are the points, the Person,
the two facts, death and resurrection, and the great meaning of the
death--viz. the expiation for the world's sins: these are the things
on which the whole of the primitive teachers of the Apostolic Church
had one voice and one message.
Now, I do not suppose that I need spend any time in showing to you
how the extant records bear out, absolutely, this contention of the
Apostle's. I need only remind you how the opposition that was waged
against him--and it was a very vigorous and a very bitter
opposition--from a section of the Church, had no bearing at all upon
the question of what he taught, but only upon the question of to whom
it was to be taught. The only objection that the so-called Judaising
party in the early Church had against Paul and his preaching, was not
the Gospel that he declared, but his assertion that the Gentile
nations might enter into the Church through faith in Jesus Christ,
without passing through the gate of circumcision. Depend upon it, if
there had been any, even the most microscopic, divergence on his part
from the general, broad stream of Christian teaching, the sleepless,
keen-eyed, unscrupulous enemies that dogged him all his days would
have pounced upon it eagerly, and would never have ceased talking
about it. But not one of them ever said a word of the sort, but
allowed his teaching to pass, because it was the teaching of every
one of the apostles.
If I had time, or if it were necessary, it would be easy to point you
to the records that we have left of the Apostolic teaching, in order
to confirm this unbroken unanimity. I do not need to spend time on
that. Proof-texts are not worth so much as the fact that these
doctrines are interwoven into the whole structure of the New
Testament as a whole--just as they are into Paul's letters. But I may
gather one or two sayings, in which the substance of each writer's
teaching has been concentrated by himself. For instance, Peter speaks
about being 'redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb
without blemish and without spot,' and declares that 'He Himself bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.' John comes in with his
doxology: 'Unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins in His
own blood'; and it is his pen that records how in the heavens there
echoed 'glory and honour and thanks and blessing, for ever and ever,
to the Lamb that was slain, and has redeemed us unto God by His
blood.' The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, steeped as he is in
ceremonial and sacrificial ideas, and having for his one purpose to
work out the thought that Jesus Christ is all that the ancient
ritual, sacerdotal and sacrificial system shadows and foretells, sums
up his teaching in the statement that Christ having come, a high
priest of good things to come, 'through His own blood, entered in,
once for all, into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption
for us.'
There were limits to the unanimity, as I have already said. Paul and
Peter had a great quarrel about circumcision and related subjects.
The Apostolic writings are wondrously diverse from one another. Peter
is far less constructive and profound than Paul. Paul and Peter are
both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the Apostle John. But, in
regard to the facts that I have signalised, the divinity, the person
of Jesus Christ, His death and Resurrection, and the significance to
be attached to that death, they are absolutely one. The instruments
in the orchestra are various, the tender flute, the ringing trumpet,
and many another, but the note they strike is the same. 'Whether it
were I or they, so we preach.'
II. Now, let me ask you to consider the only explanation of this
unanimity.
Time was when the people, who did not believe in Christ's divinity
and sacrificial death, tortured themselves to try and make out
meanings for these epistles, which should not include the obnoxious
doctrines. That is nearly antiquated. I suppose that there is nobody
now, or next to nobody, who does not admit that, right or wrong,
Paul, Peter, John--all of them--teach these two things, that Christ
is the Eternal Son of the Father, and that His death is the Sacrifice
for the world's sin. But they say that that is not the primitive,
simple teaching of the Man of Nazareth; and that the unanimity is a
unanimity of misapprehension of, and addition to, His words and to
the drift of His teaching.
Now, just think what a huge--I was going to say--inconceivability
that supposition is. For there is no point, say from the time at
which the Apostle who wrote the words of my text, which was somewhere
about the year 56 or 57 A.D.,--there is no point between that period,
working backwards through the history of the Church to the
Crucifixion, where you can insert such a tremendous revolution of
teaching as this. There is no trace of such a change. Peter's
earliest speeches, as recorded in Acts, are in some important
respects less developed doctrinally than are the epistles, but
Christ's Messiahship, death, and Resurrection, with which is
connected the remission of sins, are as clearly and emphatically
proclaimed as at any later time. So these points of the Apostolic
testimony were preached from the first, and, if in preaching them,
the witnesses perverted the simple teaching of the Carpenter of
Nazareth, and ascribed to Him a character which He had not claimed,
and to His death a power of which He had not dreamed, they did so at
the very time when the impressions of His personality and teaching
were most recent and strong. It seems to me, apart altogether from
other considerations, that such a right-about-face movement on the
part of the early teachers of Christianity, is an absolute
impossibility, regard being had to the facts of the case, even if you
make much allowance for possible errors in the record.
But I would make another remark. If misapprehension came in, if these
men, in their unanimous declaration of Christ's death as the
Sacrifice for sin, were not fairly representing the conclusions
inevitable from the facts of Christ's life and death, and from His
own words, is it not an odd thing that the same misapprehension
affected them all? When people misconceive a teacher's doctrine, they
generally differ in the nature of their misconceptions, and split
into sections and parties. But here you have to account for the fact
that every man of them, with all their diversity of idiosyncrasy and
character, tumbled into the same pit of error, and that there was not
one of them left sane enough to protest. Does that seem to be a
likely thing?
And what about the worth of the teacher's teaching, that did not
guard its receivers from such absolute misapprehension as that? If
the whole Church unanimously mistook everything that Jesus Christ had
said to them, and unwarrantably made out of Him what they did, on
this hypothesis, I do not think that there is much left to honour or
admire in a teacher, whose teaching was so ambiguous, as that it led
all that received it into such an error as that into which, by the
supposition, they fell.
No, brethren; they were one, because their Gospel was the only
possible statement of the principles that underlay, and the
conclusions that flowed from, the plain facts of the life and the
teaching of Jesus Christ. I am not going to spend time in quoting His
own words. I can only refer to one or two of them very succinctly.
'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' 'As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son
of Man be lifted up.' 'My flesh is the bread which I will give for
the life of the world.' 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered
unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.' 'This
is My body broken for you; take, eat, in remembrance of Me.' 'This is
My blood, shed for many for the remission of sins; this do ye, as
often as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.' What possible
explanation, doing justice to these words, is there, except 'Jesus
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures'? And how could
men who had heard them with their own ears, and with their own eyes
had seen Him risen from the dead and ascending into heaven, do
otherwise than eagerly, enthusiastically, at the cost of all, and
with unhesitating voice of unbroken unanimity, 'so preach'?
I quite admit that in Christ's teaching in the gospels you will not
find the articulate drawing out into doctrinal statement of the
principles that underlay, and the conclusions that flow from, the
historical fact of Christ's propitiatory death. I do not wonder at
that, nor do I admit that it is any argument against the truth of the
divine revelation which is made in these doctrinal statements, to
allege that we find nothing corresponding to them in Jesus Christ's
own words. The silence is not as absolute as is alleged, as the
quotations which I have made, and which might have been multiplied,
do distinctly enough show. Even if it were more absolute than it is,
the silence is by no means unintelligible. Christ had to offer the
Sacrifice before the Sacrifice could be preached. He Himself warned
His disciples against accepting His own words prior to the Cross, as
the conclusive and ultimate revelation. 'I have many things to say
unto you, but you cannot carry them now.' There was need that the
Cross should be a fact before it was evolved into a doctrine. And so
I venture to say that the unanimity of the preaching is only
explicable on the ground of that preaching in both its parts--its
assertion of Jesus' Messiahship and of His propitiatory death--being
the repetition on the housetop of the lessons which they had heard in
the ear from Him.