James Mozley's) is an interesting illustration of this truth: "I
consider Mr. Rickards as the type and model of a country parish and
domestic priest. _All_ his powers and energies are expended on and
exerted for teaching, preaching, and talking. _Bodily presence is his
vocation_: unlike some, writers and others, he must be seen to be
felt; and unlike others again, writers and others, the more he is
seen, the more he is felt."
[87] See note, p. 311.
XXIV
_GODLY JEALOUSY_
"Would that ye could bear with me in a little foolishness: nay
indeed bear with me. For I am jealous over you with a godly
jealousy: for I espoused you to one husband, that I might present
you _as_ a pure virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means,
as the serpent beguiled Eve in his craftiness, your minds should
be corrupted from the simplicity and the purity that is toward
Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we did
not preach, or _if_ ye receive a different spirit, which ye did
not receive, or a different gospel, which ye did not accept, ye do
well to bear with _him_. For I reckon that I am not a whit behind
the very chiefest apostles. But though _I be_ rude in speech, yet
_am I_ not in knowledge; nay, in everything we have made _it_
manifest among all men to you-ward."--2 COR. xi. 1-6 (R.V.).
All through the tenth chapter there is a conflict in the Apostle's mind.
He is repeatedly, as it were, on the verge of doing something, from
which he as often draws back. He does not like to boast--he does not
like to speak of himself at all--but the tactics of his enemies, and the
faithlessness of the Corinthians, are making it inevitable. In chap. xi.
he takes the plunge. He adopts the policy of his adversaries, and
proceeds to enlarge on his services to the Church; but with magnificent
irony, he first assumes the mask of a fool. It is not the genuine Paul
who figures here; it is Paul playing a part to which he has been
compelled against his will, acting in a character which is as remote as
possible from his own. It is the character native and proper to the
other side; and when Paul, with due deprecation, assumes it for the
nonce, he not only preserves his modesty and his self-respect, but lets
his opponents see what he thinks of them. He plays the fool for the
occasion, and of set purpose; they do it always, and without knowing it,
like men to the manner born.
But it is the Corinthians who are directly addressed. "Would that ye
could bear with me in a little foolishness: nay indeed bear with me."
In the last clause, ἀνέχεσθε may be either imperative (as the Revised
Version gives it in the text), or indicative (as in the margin: "but
indeed ye do bear with me"). The use of ἀλλὰ rather favours the last;
and it would be quite in keeping with the extremely ironical tone of
the passage to render it so. Even in the First Epistle, Paul had
reflected on the self-conceit of the Corinthians: "We are fools for
Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ." That self-conceit led them
to think lightly of him, but not just to cast him off; they still
tolerated him as a feeble sort of person: "Ye do indeed bear with me."
But whichever alternative be preferred, the irony passes swiftly into
the dead earnest of the second verse: "For I am jealous over you with
a godly jealousy: for I espoused you to one husband, that I might
present you _as_ a pure virgin to Christ."
This is the ground on which Paul claims their forbearance, even when
he indulges in a little "folly." If he is guilty of what seems to them
extravagance, it is the extravagance of jealousy--_i.e._, of love
tormented by fear. Nor is it any selfish jealousy, of which he ought
to be ashamed. He is not anxious about his private or personal
interests in the Church. He is not humiliated and provoked because
his former pupils have come to their spiritual majority, and asserted
their independence of their master. These are common dangers and
common sins; and every minister needs to be on his guard against them.
Paul's jealousy over the Corinthians was "a jealousy of God"; God had
put it into his heart, and what it had in view was God's interest in
them. It distressed him to think, not that his personal influence at
Corinth was on the wane, but that the work which God had done in their
souls was in danger of being frustrated, the inheritance He had
acquired in them of being lost. Nothing but God's interest had been in
the Apostle's mind from the beginning. "I betrothed you," he says, "to
_one_ husband"--the emphasis lies on _one_--"that I might present you
as a pure virgin to Christ."[88]
It is the Church collectively which is represented by the pure virgin,
and it ought to be observed that this is the constant use in Scripture,
alike in the Old Testament and the New. It is Israel as a whole which is
married to the Lord; it is the Christian Church as a whole (or a Church
collectively, as here) which is the Bride, the Lamb's wife. To
individualise the figure, and speak of Christ as the Bridegroom of the
soul, is not Scriptural, and almost always misleads. It introduces the
language and the associations of natural affection into a region where
they are entirely out of place; we have no terms of endearment here, and
should have none, but high thoughts of the simplicity, the purity, and
the glory of the Church. Glory is especially suggested by the idea of
"_presenting_" the Church to Christ. The presentation takes place when
Christ comes again to be glorified in His saints; that great day shines
unceasingly in the Apostle's heart, and all he does is done in its
light. The infinite issues of fidelity and infidelity to the Lord, as
that day makes them manifest, are ever present to his spirit; and it is
this which gives such divine intensity to his feelings wherever the
conduct of Christians is concerned. He sees everything, not as dull eyes
see it now, but as Christ in His glory will show it then. And it takes
nothing less than this to keep the soul absolutely pure and loyal to the
Lord.
The Apostle explains in the third verse the nature of his alarm. "I
fear," he says, "lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve in his
craftiness, your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity [and
the purity][89] which is toward Christ." The whole figure is very
expressive. "Simplicity" means singleness of mind; the heart of the
"pure virgin" is undivided; she ought not to have, and will not have,
a thought for any but the "one man" to whom she is betrothed. "Purity"
again is, as it were, one species of "simplicity"; it is "simplicity"
as shown in the keeping of the whole nature unspotted for the Lord.
What Paul dreads is the spiritual seduction of the Church, the winning
away of her heart from absolute loyalty to Christ. The serpent
beguiled Eve by his craftiness; he took advantage of her unsuspecting
innocence to wile her away from her simple belief in God and
obedience to Him. When she took into her mind the suspicions he
raised, her "simplicity" was gone, and her "purity" followed. The
serpent's agents--the servants of Satan, as Paul calls them in ver.
15--are at work in Corinth; and he fears that their craftiness may
seduce the Church from its first simple loyalty to Christ. It is
natural for us to take ἁπλότης and ἁγνότης in a purely ethical sense,
but it is by no means certain that this is all that is meant; indeed,
if καὶ τῆς ἁγνότητος be a gloss, as seems not improbable, ἁπλότης may
well have a different application. "The simplicity which is toward
Christ," from which he fears lest by any means "their _minds_" or
"_thoughts_" be corrupted, will rather be their whole-hearted
acceptance of Christ as Paul conceived of Him and preached Him, their
unreserved, unquestioning surrender to that form of doctrine (τύπον
διδαχῆς, Rom. vi. 17) to which they had been delivered. This, of
course, in Paul's mind, involved the other--there is no separation of
doctrine and practice for him; but it makes a theological rather than
an ethical interest the predominant one; and this interpretation, it
seems to me, coheres best with what follows, and with the whole
preoccupation of the Apostle in this passage. The people whose
influence he feared were not unbelievers, nor were they immoral; they
professed to be Christians, and indeed better Christians than Paul;
but their whole conception of the Gospel was at variance with his; if
they made way at Corinth, his work would be undone. The Gospel which
he preached would no longer have that unsuspicious acceptance; the
Christ whom he proclaimed would no longer have that unwavering
loyalty; instead of simplicity and purity, the heart of the "pure
virgin" would be possessed by misgivings, hesitations, perhaps by
out-right infidelity; his hope of presenting her to Christ on the
great day would be gone.
This is what we are led to by ver. 4, one of the most vexed passages
in the New Testament. The text of the last word is uncertain: some
read the imperfect ἀνείχεσθε; others, including our Revisers, the
present ἀνέχεσθε. The last is the better attested, and suits best the
connexion of thought. The interpretations may be divided into two
classes. First, there are those which assume that the suppositions
made in this verse are not true. This is evidently the intention in
our Authorised Version. It renders, "For if he that cometh preacheth
another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another
spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have
not accepted, _ye might well bear with him_." But--we must
interpolate--nothing of this sort has really taken place; for Paul
counts himself not a whit inferior to the very chiefest Apostles. No
one--not even Peter or James or John--could have imparted anything to
the Corinthians which Paul had failed to impart; and hence their
spiritual seduction, no matter how or by whom accomplished, was
perfectly unreasonable and gratuitous. This interpretation, with
variations in detail which need not be pursued, is represented by many
of the best expositors, from Chrysostom to Meyer. "If," says
Chrysostom in his paraphrase, "if we had omitted anything that should
have been said, and they had made up the omission, we do not forbid
you to attend to them. But if everything has been perfectly done on
our part, and no blank left, how did they [the Apostle's adversaries]
get hold of you?" This is the broad result of many discussions; and it
is usual--though not invariable--for those who read the passage thus
to take τῶν ὑπερλίαν ἀποστόλων in a complimentary, not a
contemptuous, sense, and to refer it, as Chrysostom expressly does, to
the three pillars of the primitive Church.
The objections to this interpretation are obvious enough. There is
first the grammatical objection, that a hypothetical sentence, with
the present indicative in the protasis (εἰ ... κηρύσσει, εἰ ...
λαμβάνετε), and the present indicative in the apodosis (ἀνέχεσθε), can
by no plausibility of argument be made to mean, "If the interloper
_were_ preaching another Jesus ... you _would_ be right to bear with
him." Even if the imperfect is the true reading, which is improbable,
this translation is unjustified.[90] But there is a logical as well as
a grammatical objection. The use of γὰρ ("for") surely implies that in
the sentence which it introduces we are to find the reason for what
precedes. Paul is afraid, he has told us, lest the Church should be
seduced from the one husband to whom he has betrothed her. But he can
never mean to explain a _real_ fear by making a number of _imaginary_
suppositions; and so we must find in the hypothetical clauses here the
_real_ grounds of his alarm. People had come to Corinth--ὁ ἐρχόμενος
is no doubt collective, and characterises the troublers of the Church
as intruders, not native to it, but separable from it--doing all the
things here supposed. Paul has espoused the Church to _One_ Husband;
they preach _another_ Jesus. Not, of course, a distinct Person, but
certainly a distinct conception of the same Person. Paul's Christ was
the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, He who by His death on the cross
became Universal Redeemer, and by His ascension Universal Lord--the
end of the law, the giver of the Spirit; it would be another Jesus if
the intruders preached only the Son of David, or the Carpenter of
Nazareth, or the King of Israel. According to the conception of
Christ, too, would be "the spirit" which accompanied this preaching,
the characteristic temper and power of the religion it proclaimed. The
spirit ministered by Paul in his apostolic work was one of power, and
love, and, above all things, liberty; it emancipated the soul from
weakness, from scruples, from moral inability, from slavery to sin and
law; but the spirit generated by the Judaising ministry, the
characteristic temper of the religion it proclaimed, was servile and
cowardly. It was a spirit of bondage tending always to fear (Rom.
viii. 15). Their whole gospel--to give their preaching a name it did
not deserve (Gal. i. 6-9)--was something entirely unlike Paul's both
in its ideas and in its spiritual fruits. Unlike--yes, and
immeasurably inferior, and yet in spite of this the Corinthians put up
with it well enough. This is the plain fact (ἀνέχεσθε) which the
Apostle plainly states. _He_ had to plead for their toleration, but
they had no difficulty in tolerating men who by a spurious gospel, an
unspiritual conception of Christ, and an unworthy incapacity for
understanding freedom, were undermining his work, and seducing their
souls. No wonder he was jealous, and angry, and scornful, when he saw
the true Christian religion, which has all time and all nations for
its inheritance, in danger of being degraded into a narrow Jewish
sectarianism; the kingdom of the Spirit lost in a society in which
race gave a prerogative, and carnal ordinances were revived; and,
worse still, Christ the Son of God, the Universal Reconciler, known
only "after the flesh," and appropriated to a race, instead of being
exalted as Lord of all, in whom there is no room for Greek or Jew,
barbarian or Scythian, bond or free. The Corinthians bore with this
nobly (καλῶς); but he who had begotten them in the true Gospel had to
beg them to bear with him.
There is only one difficulty in this interpretation, and that is not a
serious one: it is the connexion of ver. 5 with what precedes. Those
who connect it immediately with ver. 4 are obliged to supply
something: for example, "But you _ought_ not to bear with them, for I
consider that I am in nothing behind the very chiefest apostles." I
have no doubt at all that ὁι ὑπερλίαν ἀπόστολοι--the superlative
apostles--are _not_ Peter, James, and John, but the teachers aimed at
in ver. 4, the ψευδαπόστολοι of ver. 13; it is with them, and not with
the Twelve or the eminent Three, that Paul is comparing himself.[91]
But even so, I agree with Weizsäcker that the connexion for the γὰρ in
ver. 5 must be sought further back--as far back, indeed, as ver. 1.
"You bear well enough with them, and so you may well bear with me, as
I beg you to do; for I consider," etc. This is effective enough, and
brings us back again to the main subject. If there is a point in which
Paul is willing to his inferiority to these superlative apostles, it
is the non-essential one of utterance. He grants that he is rude in
speech--not rhetorically gifted or trained--a plain, blunt man who
speaks right on. But he is not rude in knowledge: in every respect he
has made _that_ manifest, among all men, toward them. The last clause
is hardly intelligible, and the text is insecure.[92] The reading
φανερώσαντες is that of all the critical editors; the object may
either be indefinite (his competence in point of knowledge), or, more
precisely, τὴν γνῶσιν itself, supplied from the previous clause. In no
point whatever, under no circumstances, has Paul ever failed to
exhibit to the Corinthians the whole truth of God in the Gospel. This
it is which makes him scornful even when he thinks of the men whom the
Corinthians are preferring to himself.
When we look from the details of this passage to its scope, some
reflections are suggested, which have their application still.
(1) Our conception of the Person of Christ determines our conception
of the whole Christian religion. What we have to proclaim to men as
gospel--what we have to offer to them as the characteristic temper and
virtue of the life which the Gospel originates--depends on the answer
we give to Jesus' own question, "Whom say ye that I am?" A Christ who
is simply human cannot be to men what a Christ is who is truly
divine. The Gospel identified with Him cannot be the same; the spirit
of the society which gathers round Him cannot be the same. It is
futile to ask whether such a gospel and such a spirit can fairly be
called Christian; they are in point of fact quite other things from
the Gospel and the Spirit which are historically associated with the
name. It is plain from this passage that the Apostle attached the
utmost importance to his conceptions of the Person and Work of the
Lord: ought not this to give pause to those who evacuate his theology
of many of its distinctive ideas--especially that of the Pre-existence
of Christ--on the plea that they are merely theologoumena of an
individual Christian, and that to discard them leaves the Gospel
unaffected? Certainly this was not what he thought. Another Jesus
meant another spirit, another gospel--to use modern words, another
religion and another religious consciousness; and _any_ other, the
Apostle was perfectly sure, came short of the grandeur of the truth.
The spirit of the passage is the same with that in Gal. i. 6 ff.,
where he erects the Gospel he has preached as the standard of absolute
religious truth. "Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach
unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let
him be anathema. As we have said before, so say I now again, If any
man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received,
let him be anathema."
(2) "The simplicity that is toward Christ"--the simple acceptance of the
truth about Him, and undivided loyalty of heart to Him--may be corrupted
by influences originating within, as well as without, the Church. The
infidelity which is subtlest, and most to be dreaded, is not the gross
materialism or atheism which will not so much as hear the name of God
or Christ; but that which uses all sacred names, speaking readily of
Jesus, the Spirit, and the Gospel, but meaning something else, and
something less, than these words meant in apostolic lips. This it was
which alarmed the jealous love of Paul; this it is, in its insidious
influence, which constitutes one of the most real perils of Christianity
at the present time. The Jew in the first century, who reduced the
Person and Work of Christ to the scale of his national prejudices, and
the theologian in the nineteenth, who discounts apostolic ideas when
they do not suit the presuppositions of his philosophy, are open to the
same suspicion, if they do not fall under the same condemnation. True
thoughts about Christ--in spite of all the smart sayings about
theological subtleties which have nothing to do with piety--are
essential to the very existence of the Christian religion.
(3) There is no comparison between the Gospel of God in Jesus Christ
His Son and any other religion. The science of comparative religion is
interesting as a science; but a Christian may be excused for finding
the religious use of it tiresome. There is nothing true in any of the
religions which is not already in his possession. He never finds a
moral idea, a law of the spiritual life, a word of God, in any of
them, to which he cannot immediately offer a parallel, far more simple
and penetrating, from the revelation of Christ. He has no interest in
disparaging the light by which millions of his fellow-creatures have
walked, generation after generation, in the mysterious providence of
God; but he sees no reason for pretending that that light--which
Scripture calls darkness and the shadow of death--can bear comparison
with the radiance in which he lives. "If," he might say, misapplying
the fourth verse--"if they brought us another saviour, another
spirit, another gospel, we might be religiously interested in them;
but, as it is, we have everything already, and they, in comparison,
have nothing." The same remark applies to "theosophy," "spiritualism,"
and other "gospels." It will be time to take them seriously when they
utter one wise or true word on God or the soul which is not an echo of
something in the old familiar Scriptures.
FOOTNOTES:
[88] "Woods, trees, meadows, and hills are my witnesses that I drew on
a fair match betwixt Christ and Anwoth."--S. RUTHERFORD.
[89] The words καὶ τῆς ἁγνότητος are bracketed by Westcott and Hort.
They are very strongly attested (by א, B, F, gr., G, etc.); but as
they are found in some authorities _before_, instead of _after_, τῆς
ἁπλότητος, it is not improbable that they may be a gloss on these last
words, suggested by ἁγνὴν in ver. 2, and incorporated in the text.
They rather blur than emphasise the thought.
[90] It is worth appending two ingenious notes on this. Bengel, who
holds that the suppositions are untrue, says: "Ponit conditionem, ex
parte rei, impossibilem; ideo dicit in imperfecto _toleraretis_: sed
pro conatu pseudo-apostolorum, non modo possibilem, sed plane
præsentem; ideo dicit in præsenti, _prædicat_." Schmiedel, who holds
that the suppositions are true, explains the impft. by saying that
Paul resolved, while dictating, to add the apodosis _in the historical
tense_ to the timeless protasis, because the fact which it described
actually lay before him. They _were tolerating_ the other teachers:
that is why Paul says ἀνείχεσθε. He happily compares Plato, _Apol._,
33 A.: Εἰ δέ τίς μου λέγοντος ... ἐπιθυμεῖ ἀκούειν ... οὐδεvὶ πώποτε
ἐφθόνησα. Still, he prefers the present.
[91] It is gratuitous to drag in a reference to the first Apostles,
and then to suppose the Corinthians drawing the inference--"if he is
not inferior to them, still less is he inferior to our new teachers."
Such an inference depends on a traditional conception of apostleship
which the Corinthians were not likely to share, and it is equally
unnecessary and improbable.
[92] Probably either ἐν παντὶ or ἐν πᾶσιν, the latter of which is
omitted in some authorities, is a gloss.
XXV
_FOOLISH BOASTING_
"Or did I commit a sin in abasing myself that ye might be exalted,
because I preached to you the Gospel of God for nought? I robbed
other Churches, taking wages _of them_ that I might minister unto
you; and when I was present with you and was in want, I was not a
burden on any man; for the brethren, when they came from
Macedonia, supplied the measure of my want; and in everything I
kept myself from being burdensome unto you, and _so_ will I keep
_myself_. As the truth of Christ is in me, no man shall stop me of
this glorying in the regions of Achaia. Wherefore? because I love
you not? God knoweth. But what I do, that I will do, that I may
cut off occasion from them which desire an occasion; that wherein
they glory, they may be found even as we. For such men are false
apostles, deceitful workers, fashioning themselves into apostles
of Christ. And no marvel; for even Satan fashioneth himself into
an angel of light. It is no great thing therefore if his ministers
also fashion themselves as ministers of righteousness; whose end
shall be according to their works.