Produced by Al Haines
_St. Paul's_
_Epistle to the Ephesians_
_A Practical Exposition_
BY THE
RIGHT REV. CHARLES GORE, M.A., D.D.
LORD BISHOP OF WORCESTER
FIFTH IMPRESSION
TWELFTH THOUSAND
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1902
_A Series of Simple Expositions_
_of_
_Portions of the New Testament_
BY THE
RIGHT REV. DR. GORE.
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. _Crown 8vo_, 3/6.
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. _Crown 8vo_, 3/6.
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 2 _Vols., Crown 8vo_, 3/6 _each_.
Oxford
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
TO
JAMES L. HOUGHTELING
OF CHICAGO
THE FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF THE BROTHERHOOD
OF ST. ANDREW
AND TO ALL THE BROTHERHOOD
WHICH IN MORE SENSES THAN ONE
HE REPRESENTS
{vi}
PREFACE
The favourable reception accorded to an exposition of the Sermon on the
Mount has encouraged me to attempt another practical explanation of a
portion of the New Testament, in the interest of such readers as are
intelligent indeed, but neither are nor hope to become critical
scholars. An immense deal has been done of late to assist New
Testament scholarship, but while the studies of the scholar make
progress, the ordinary Christian 'reading of the Bible' is, I fear, at
best at a standstill. This little book then is intended to make one of
St. Paul's epistles as intelligible as may be to the ordinary reader,
and so to enable him to make a practical religious use of it, 'to read,
mark, learn and inwardly digest' it.
{viii}
The method pursued, in the main, has been to let each section of the
epistle be preceded by an analysis or paraphrase of the teaching it
contains, in which it is hoped that no element in the teaching is left
unnoticed, and followed by such further explanations of particular
phrases, or practical reflections, as seem to be needed.
I have avoided as far as possible all discussion of rival views, and
given simply what are, in my judgement, the best explanations.
I have ventured to dedicate this book to the President of the
Brotherhood of St. Andrew, because (see app. note D, p. 264) that
society represents surely a brave attempt to realize some of the chief
practical lessons which this epistle is intended to enforce.
CHARLES GORE.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY,
_Christmas_, 1897.
{ix}
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION . . . Study of the New Testament . . . . . . . . . 1
The gospel of the Catholic Church . . . . . . 6
The Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Ephesus and the Ephesians . . . . . . . . . . 34
The letter--to whom written . . . . . . . . . 43
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.
SALUTATION (i. 1-2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
DIVISION I (i. 3-iv. 17)
Sec. 1 (i. 3-14) St. Paul's leading thoughts:
life in Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
predestination . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
the elect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
the divine secret disclosed . . . . . . 72
grace not merit . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Sec. 2 (i. 15-23) St. Paul's prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Sec. 3 (ii. 1-10) Sin and redemption . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Sec. 4 (ii. 11-22) Salvation in the Church . . . . . . . . . 102
Sec. 5 (iii) Paul the apostle of catholicity . . . . . 121
his second prayer . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Sec. 6 (iv. 1-16) The unity of the Church . . . . . . . . . 140
{x}
DIVISION II (iv. 17-vi. 24):
Doctrine and conduct . . . . . . . . . . 172
Sec. 1 (iv. 17-24) Christianity a new life . . . . . . . . . 178
Sec. 2 (iv. 25-32) The new life a corporate life . . . . . . 184
Sec. 3 (v. 1-14) The new life an imitation of God . . . . 192
and a life in the light . . . . . . . . 194
Sec. 4 (v. 15-21) The new life a buying up of an
opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Sec. 5 (v. 22-vi. 9) The law of subordination and authority 211
husbands and wives (v. 22-33) . . . . . 212
parents and children (vi. 1-4) . . . . 228
masters and slaves (vi. 5-9) . . . . . 233
Sec. 6 (vi. 10-20) The personal spiritual struggle . . . . . 237
CONCLUSION (vi. 21-24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
APPENDED NOTES:--
A. The Roman Empire recognized by Christians as a
Divine Preparation for the Spread of the Gospel . . . . . 251
B. The (so-called) 'Letters of Heracleitus' . . . . . . . . . 253
C. The Jewish Doctrine of Works in _The Apocalypse of Baruch_ 257
D. The Brotherhood of St. Andrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
E. The Conception of the Church Catholic in St. Paul in
its Relation to Local Churches . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
F. The Ethics of Catholicism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
G. The Lambeth Conference and Industrial Problems . . . . . . 274
{1}
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS
_Introduction._
i.
[Sidenote: _Introduction_]
There are two great rivers of Europe which, in their course, offer a
not uninstructive analogy to the Church of God. The Rhine and the
Rhone both take their rise from mountain glaciers, and for the first
hundred or hundred and fifty miles from their sources they run turbid
as glacier streams always are, and for the most part turbulent as
mountain torrents. Then they enter the great lakes of Constance and
Geneva. There, as in vast settling-vats, they deposit all the
discolouring elements which have hitherto defiled their waters, so that
when they re-emerge from the western ends of the lakes to run their
courses in central and southern Europe their {2} waters have a
translucent purity altogether delightful to contemplate. After this
the two rivers have very different destinies, but either from fouler
affluents or from the commercial activity upon their surfaces or along
their banks they lose the purity which characterized their second
birth, and become as foul as ever they were among their earlier
mountain fastnesses; till after all vicissitudes they lose themselves
to north or south in the vast and cleansing sea.
The history of these rivers offers, I say, a remarkable parallel to the
history of the Church of God. For that too takes its rude and rough
beginnings high up in wild and remote fastnesses of our human history.
Such books of the Old Testament as those of Judges and Samuel and Kings
represent the turbid and turbulent running of this human nature of
ours, divinely directed indeed, but still unpurified and unregenerate.
But in the great lake of the humanity of Jesus all its acquired
pollution is cut off. In Him, virgin-born, our manhood is seen as
indeed the pure mirror of the divine glory; and when at Pentecost the
Church of God issues anew, by a second birth of that glorified manhood,
for its second course in this world, it issues unmixed with alien
influences, substantially {3} pure and unsullied. After a time its
history gains in complexity but its character loses in purity, so that
there are epochs of the history of the Church when its moral level is
possibly not higher than that which is represented in the roughest
books of the Old Testament: and through the whole of its later history
the Church is strangely fused with the world again, until they issue
both together into eternity.
Men from all parts of the world visit Constance and Geneva, and delight
to look at the two famous rivers issuing pure and abundant from the
quiet lakes. An analogous pleasure belongs to the study of such books
of the New Testament as the Acts of the Apostles and St. Paul's Epistle
to the Ephesians, which give us respectively the fortunes and the
theory of the Church at its origin. Later epochs of Church history
have possibly more richly diversified interests--such as the period of
the Councils, or the Middle Ages, or the Reformation. But the interest
of the earliest Church unmixed with the world, its principles fresh,
its inspirations strong, its native hue free from discolouring
elements, preoccupies us with a fascination which is unrivalled. The
divine society is young and inexperienced, but what it is and is meant
{4} to be we can see there better than anywhere else. We return, when
our minds are aching and our eyes are dim with the complexity and
obscurity of our latter-day problem, to learn insight and simplicity
again at those pure sources.
And to the Christian believer these books are not only documents of
great historical importance as illustrative of a unique period: they
also represent to us in different forms the highest level of that
action of the divine Spirit upon the mind of man which we call
inspiration. St. Paul for instance, in this Epistle to the Ephesians
claims, as we shall find, to be an 'inspired' man, a recipient of
divine revelation, and makes a similar claim for the apostles and
prophets generally. 'By revelation,' he says, 'God made known unto me
the mystery (or divine secret), as I wrote afore in few words, whereby,
when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of
Christ; which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as
it hath now been revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets in the
Spirit.' Inspiration is a term not easily susceptible of definition.
We are inclined in our generation to recognize its limits more frankly
than has been done in the past, and {5} its compatibility even with
positive error on subjects which are matter of ordinary human inquiry
and not of divine revelation[1]; but its positive meaning in the region
of divine revelation--in what concerns God's moral will, purpose,
character and being, and the consequent moral and spiritual
significance of our human life--ought not to be less apparent to us
than formerly. Thus when we call a writer of the New Testament
'inspired' we must mean at least this: that the same divine Spirit who
put the message of God in the hearts of the prophets of old, and who
worked His perfect work without let and hindrance in the manhood of
Christ, is here so working upon the will and imagination, the memory
and intelligence, of one of Christ's commissioned witnesses as that he
shall interpret and not misinterpret the mind and person of his Master.
Practically, an inspired writer of the New Testament means a writer
under whom we can put ourselves to school to 'learn Christ' with {6}
whole-hearted confidence and faith. This, of course, gives an
additional reason of the most cogent force why we should continually
recur to the sacred books of the New Testament. If Christianity is to
be deterred from a fatal return to nature--that is to the religious or
irreligious tendencies of mankind when left to itself--or if it is to
be recalled when it has lapsed, this can only be by an appeal to
Scripture constantly reiterated and pressed home. There is for ever
the testing-ground alike of doctrine, of moral character, and of
ecclesiastical tendency; there is the only perfect image of the mind of
Christ.
ii.
The Epistle to the Ephesians gives us St. Paul's gospel of the Catholic
Church. So far from being a man of one idea, St. Paul fascinates and
sometimes bewilders us by the intricacy and variety of his thoughts;
but like the innumerable leaves and twigs of some finely-grown tree
which emerge, all of them, through branches and boughs, out of one
great trunk, strong and straight, and one deep and firmly-set root, so
it is with the infinitely various topics and suggestions of St. Paul.
They run back {7} into a few dominant thoughts, which in their turn
have one trunk-line of developement and one root. The root is the
conviction, finally smitten into the soul of St. Paul at the moment of
his conversion on the road to Damascus, that Jesus is the Christ; and
the trunk-line of development is that which is involved in St. Paul's
special commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, that is to
say, the principle that the Christ is the saviour of Gentiles as of
Jews and on an equal basis--or in other words, that the Christian
church is catholic.
When St. Paul acknowledged that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, this
of course meant that he remained no less than formerly an adherent of
the Jewish faith, and that he 'worshipped' without any breach of
continuity, 'the God of his fathers.' So he is fond of insisting[2].
Thus to him the Church of Christ is still 'the commonwealth of Israel,'
God's ancient church, though reconstructed[3]. For the religion of
Israel had had for its main motive the hope of the Christ. All that
St. Paul now believed was that this hope had been realized, and
realized to the shame of Israel in One whom they had rejected {8} and
crucified. But if to believe that Jesus was the Christ involved no
breach with the religion of Israel, yet it did involve the recognition
that it had been reconstituted on a new basis, and in a way that
suggested to existing Israelites nothing less than a revolution. The
church of God had, in St. Paul's present belief, widened out from being
the church of one nation into being a catholic society, a society for
all mankind.
If St. Paul's epistles are taken in those groups into which they
naturally divide themselves, we find that in the first group, that of
the two epistles to the Thessalonians, all his favourite topics are
present as it were in the germ, but nothing that is specially
characteristic of him is yet developed. The free admission of the
Gentiles into the Church is, with the accompanying hostility of the
Jews, assumed[4], but not much insisted upon; but in the interval
between these epistles and that to the Galatians the subject had gained
fresh and poignant interest. A party of Christians having their centre
at Jerusalem had been trying--in spite of the decision of the apostolic
council at Jerusalem--to reimpose upon the consciences of {9} Gentile
Christians, and with especial success in the Galatian province, the
obligation of circumcision; or in other words had been trying to make
it evident that the Church of God was as much as ever the people of the
Jews, and that Gentiles could only become Christians by becoming also
Jewish proselytes pledged to keep the law of Moses. In view of this
attempt St. Paul re-embarks upon his great campaign for the catholicity
of the Church, and in his epistles of the second group[5] (especially
those to the Galatians and the Romans) the catholicity of Christianity
is vindicated controversially upon the basis of the principle of
_justification by faith, not by works of the law_.
The meaning and real importance of this doctrine ought not to be hard
for us to understand. To be justified means to be accepted or
acquitted by God. The Judaizers--that is the Christian representatives
of the narrower religious spirit of Israel--held that, as God's
covenant was with the Jews only, so men could obtain acceptance simply
by the observance of that Mosaic law which was to the Jew at once the
expression of the divine selection of his race, and the grounds of his
arrogant {10} contempt for all who had not 'Abraham to their
father[6].' But St. Paul had made trial of that theory, and had found
it wanting. The observance of the law and the glorying in Jewish
privileges had brought him no peace with God: had in fact served only
to produce and deepen a sense of inner alienation from God and
conviction of sin. Thus in acknowledging the messiahship of that Jesus
whom the chosen people had rejected and surrendered to be crucified, he
was abandoning utterly and for ever the standing-ground of Jewish
pride: he was acknowledging that the only divine function of the law
was to convince men of sin, and of their need of pardon and salvation:
he was taking his stand as a sinner among the Gentiles, and humbly
welcoming the unmerited boon of pardon and acceptance from the hand of
the divine mercy in Christ Jesus. When St. Paul in familiar arguments,
from the witness of the Old Testament itself, and from the moral
experience of men, convicts the law of inadequacy as an instrument of
justification, his reasoning is full of a strong feeling and conviction
bred of his own experiences. The true means of justification, he has
come to perceive, is faith, that is, {11} the simple acceptance of the
divine favour freely offered, and this is something that belongs to no
special race, but to all men as such. For all men everywhere, to whom
the light comes, can know that they are sinners in the sight of God,
and can accept simply from the hand of the divine bounty the unmerited
boon of forgiveness and acceptance in Christ. Thus, if faith and faith
alone is that whereby men are justified or commended to God, then at
once the catholic basis of the reconstituted Church is secured. All
men can belong to it who can feel their need and hear the Gospel and
take God at His word. This is the great principle vindicated in the
compressed and fiery arguments of the Epistle to the Galatians, and
then subsequently developed in the calmer and orderly procedure of the
Epistle to the Romans.
But in the next group of epistles, written out of that captivity at
Rome the record of which closes the Acts of the Apostles, the same
doctrine of the catholicity of the Church is developed from a different
point of view. Now it is the thought of the person of Christ which has
come to occupy the foreground. All along St. Paul had believed that
Christ was the Son of God, the divine mediator of creation, who in
these {12} latter days had for our sakes humbled Himself to be made
man[7]. But this thought of Christ's person is elaborated and brought
into prominence in the third group of epistles[8], especially in the
Epistle to the Colossians. A tendency derived from Jewish sources was
manifesting itself among some of the Asiatic Christians to exalt
angelic beings, conceived probably as representing divine attributes
and powers, into objects of religious worship[9]. There is a certain
spurious humility which has in many ages, and not least in the
Christian Church, led men to shrink from direct approach to the high
and holy God and to resort to lower mediators, as more suitable to
their defiled condition and weakness. This sort of spurious humility
was already detected by St. Paul, in company with other Judaizing and
falsely ascetic tendencies, as a peril of the Asiatic churches, and
especially of the Colossians.
But he will make no terms with it. Christ he teaches is the only and
the universal mediator, the one and only reconciler of all things to
the Father. And He is this because of the {13} position that belongs
to His person in the universe as a whole. He, as the Father's image or
counterpart, is His unique agent in all the work of creation. All
created things whatever, from the lowest to the highest, seen or
unseen, be they thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, are
the work of His hand. All were created through Him and have Him for
their end or goal, and He is the sustaining life of the whole universe
in all its parts. 'In Him all things consist' or have their unity in a
system. And because He occupies this position in the whole universe,
therefore a similar position and sovereignty belong to Him in the
spiritual kingdom of redemption. There too He is, through His manhood
and His sacrificial death upon the cross, the unique author of the
reconciliation with God. He is by His spirit the inherent life of the
redeemed, and the goal of all their perfecting. There is, in fact, no
divine quality, or attribute, or activity of God towards His creatures
which is not His. In Him it pleased the Father that all the fulness of
divine attributes and offices should dwell, and in Him as Son of God
made man dwells all this fulness bodily. The divine attributes, that
is, are not committed to a number of different mediators. {14} They
exist and are exercised in Him and in Him alone. It follows therefore
as a matter of course from this position of Christ in the universe and
in the church that the redemption effected by Him must be universal in
range and must extend equally and impartially to all. There 'cannot be
Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian and Scythian,
bond and free, but Christ is all and in all.'
Thus in the Epistle to the Colossians[10] the doctrine of the
catholicity of Christianity is again vindicated controversially, and
logically based upon the catholic character of Christ and upon His
universal function in creation and redemption; and in the contemporary
Epistle to the Ephesians, without note of controversy, the doctrine of
the catholic church, the brotherhood of all men in Christ, the doctrine
which is, we may truly say, the culmination of all St. Paul's teaching,
is allowed to develope itself in all its glory on the assumed basis of
that teaching about Christ's person which had made any narrower idea of
the church already seem incongruous and impossible. In the earlier
dispensation in which the covenant of God was with one people, St. Paul
can see only a preparatory process through {15} which the eternal
purpose of God could at last be realized, and out of which His eternal
secret could at last be disclosed. That purpose so long kept secret,
and now revealed, is to gather together all nations and classes of men
into the one Church of God, one organized body, one brotherhood in
which all men are to find their salvation, and through which is to be
realized an even wider purpose for the whole universe. In this
doctrine of the catholic church St. Paul finds the expression of all
the length and breadth and height and depth of the divine love. Its
length, for it represents an age-long purpose slowly worked out; its
breadth, for it is a society of all men and for the whole universe; its
depth, for God has reached a hand of mercy down to the lowest gulfs of
sin and alienation from God; its height, for in this society men are
carried up into nothing less than union with God, to no lower seat than
the heavenly places in Christ.
I have spoken of St. Paul's great arguments for the catholicity of the
Gospel as two. The first appears mainly as a polemic against the idea
of justification by works of the law. The second as a positive
argument about the person of Christ and the results which flow from the
right appreciation of it. But in fact there is {16} a necessary
connexion between the two. The narrow Judaism of the Galatian
reactionaries did in fact logically involve a narrow and therefore a
false conception of the person of Christ. As Dr. Hort expresses
it[11], 'to accept Jesus as the Christ without any adequate enlargement
of what was included in the Messiahship could hardly fail to involve
either limitation of His nature to the human sphere, or at most a
counting Him among the angels.' This logical connexion was in fact
verified in history. The Judaizers of the earliest period of Christian
history who insisted on circumcision for all Christians pass into the
Ebionites of the second century who rejected the Church's doctrine of
the person of Christ, as the eternal Son of God. And conversely it
would be scarcely possible to accept the doctrine of the universal
Christ, both divine and human, as St. Paul developes it, without
perceiving that men must be made acceptable to Him and to His Father by
something deeper and wider than any particular set of observances or
'works.' The relation therefore between the argument of St. Paul's
epistles to the Galatians and the Romans on the one side, and that of
his epistles to the Colossians and {17} the Ephesians on the other is
one of unity rather than of contrast.
The relation of these two groups of epistles may be expressed also in
another way. The argument of the earlier epistles is directed towards
the Judaizers. Its purpose is to vindicate the right of the Gentiles
to an equal place and position with the Jews in the kingdom of God.
But at the time of the later group this right had been secured. On the
basis of their acknowledged title the ingress of Gentiles into the
churches of Asia had been even alarmingly rapid. Now it is time for
St. Paul to address himself to these emancipated Gentiles and to exhort
them in their turn not to relapse into unworthy and narrow conceptions
of their redeemer, or into conduct unworthy of their new position: they
must 'walk worthily of the vocation wherewith they are called.'
Our present political situation in England offers an analogy which may
bring home to us the position of the Gentile Christians and the
function of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The time is past for us when
there is any necessity to contend that a vote should be given to all
responsible men. So far at least as the male population is concerned,
the title of the citizen {18} to the vote has been substantially
acknowledged; but the time is by no means past when the newly
enfranchised citizens need to be stimulated to realize what their
enfranchisement carries with it of privilege and responsibility. And
we may express this by saying that if our English political Epistle to
the Galatians has been written and has done its work, our Epistle to
the Ephesians is still surely very much needed.
It is very strange, or at least would be strange if we were not
acquainted with the historical circumstances that have accounted for
it, that St. Paul has been, out of all proportion to the facts of the
case, identified in popular estimation with only the earlier of the two
great arguments described above, with that which has given the basis to
Protestantism, and not that which is, in fact, the charter of the
Catholic Church.
We are all familiar with the fact that St. Paul taught the doctrine of
justification by faith, and insisted therefore on the necessity and
privilege of personal acceptance on the part of each individual of the
promises of God in Christ. We all know how, when this aspect of things
has been ignored and over-ridden--when an almost Jewish doctrine of the
merit of good works[12] {19} has been current in Christendom--it has
afforded a pretext for a Protestant reaction of the most
individualistic kind, of the kind which pays no regard to outward unity
or catholic authority. But certainly in St. Paul's own teaching there
is nothing individualistic in justifying faith. It is that by which
man wins admittance into the body of Christ; and the body of Christ is
an organized society, a catholic brotherhood. Salvation, as we shall
see, is as much social or ecclesiastical as it is individual; and
perhaps there is nothing more wanted to correct our ideas of what St.
Paul understood by justifying faith than an impartial study of the
Epistle to the Ephesians. It is true that this great epistle only
freely developes thoughts which were already unmistakably in St. Paul's
mind when he wrote his epistles to the Corinthians, and even those to
the Thessalonians. Already the social organization of the Church is a
prominent topic, and the ethics of Christianity are social ethics. But
now, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, the idea of the Church has become
the dominant idea, and the ethical teaching can be justly characterized
in no other way than as a Christian socialism.
{20}
iii.
But it is time to examine somewhat more closely the circumstances under
which St. Paul wrote this epistle and their bearing upon its contents.
It was written by him during that imprisonment at Rome[13] the record
of which brings to an end the Acts of the Apostles. He can therefore
put into his appeals all the force which naturally belongs to one who
has sacrificed himself for his principles. 'I, Paul,' he writes, 'the
prisoner of Jesus Christ, on behalf of you Gentiles.' He speaks of
himself as 'an ambassador in a chain' bound, as he was no doubt, to the
soldier which kept him. But the fact that he is a prisoner does not
occupy a great place in his mind. In part this is because his
imprisonment was not of a highly restrictive character. The Acts
conclude by telling us that he was allowed to dwell in his own hired
dwelling and to receive all that came to him without let or hindrance
to his preaching. And the tone of the 'epistles of the first
captivity' is cheerful as to the present and hopeful for the
future[14]. But it is more important to notice that {21} the thought
of being in prison is apparently swallowed up in St. Paul's imagination
by other considerations. For, in the first place, St. Paul was, under
whatever restraints, at Rome. He had reached his goal--a new centre of
evangelization which was also the centre of the world. Step by step
the centre of Christian evangelization had passed toward Rome as its
goal. From Jerusalem, which told unmistakably that 'the salvation was
of the Jews,' it had moved to Antioch, where in a Greek city Jew met
Gentile on equal terms. From Antioch, under St. Paul's leadership, it
had passed to Corinth and Ephesus. These were indeed thoroughly
Gentile cities, and leading cities of the Empire, but they were
provincial. No imperial movement could rest satisfied till it
established itself at the centre of the great imperial
organization--till it had got to Rome.
If we are to understand at all adequately the world in which St. Paul
wrote, the thought of the Roman Empire and of the unity which it was
giving the world must be clearly before our minds: and it will not be a
digression if we pause to dwell upon it at this point when we are
considering the significance of St. Paul's situation as at once a
prisoner and an evangelist in the great capital.
{22}
The Roman Empire brought the world, that is the whole of the known
world which was thought worth considering, into a great unity of
government. What had once been independent kingdoms had now become
provinces of the empire, and the whole of the Roman policy was directed
towards drawing closer the unity, and educating the provinces in Roman
ideas[15].
If we seek to define Roman unity a little more closely the following
elements will be found perhaps the most important for our purpose. (1)
It was a unity of government strongly centralized at Rome in the person
of the emperor. The letters of a provincial governor like Pliny to his
master Trajan at Rome reveal to us how even trivial matters, such as
the formation of a guild of firemen in Pliny's province of Bithynia,
were referred up to the emperor. Roman government was in fact personal
and centralized in a very complete sense, and had the uniformity which
accompanies such a condition. (2) This centralized personal government
is, of course, only possible where there is a well-organized system of
inter-communication between the widely-separated parts of a great {23}
empire. And there was this to an amazing extent in the Roman empire.
We find evidence of it in the great roads representing a highly
developed system of travelling. 'It is not too much to say that
travelling was more highly developed and the dividing power of distance
was weaker under the Empire than at any time before or since until we
come down to the present century.' This is what gives such a modern
and cosmopolitan flavour to the lives of men of the Empire as unlike
one another in other respects as Strabo and Jerome. We find the
evidence of such a system of inter-communication also, and not less
impressively, in the multiplied proofs afforded to us that every
movement of thought in the Empire must needs pass to Rome and establish
itself there. The rapid arrival of all oriental tendencies or beliefs
at Rome was, of course, what from the point of view of conservative
Romans meant the destruction of all that they valued in character and
ideals. 'The Orontes had poured itself into the Tiber.' But it was
none the less a fact of the utmost significance for the world's
progress. (3) The unity of the Empire depended largely on the use
which was made of Greek civilization and Greek language. The Empire
{24} may be rightly described, if we are considering its eastern half,
as Greek no less than Roman from the first. Everywhere it was the
Greek language which was the instrument of Roman government, and Greek
civilization, tempered by somewhat barbarous Roman 'games,' which was
put into competition with local customs whether social or
religious[16]. (4) Lastly, to a very real extent the Empire was aiming
at the establishment of a universal religion. Independent local gods
and local cults suited well enough a number of independent little
tribes and kingdoms, but it was felt instinctively that the one empire
involved also one religion, and with more or less of deliberate
intention the one religion was provided in the worship of the emperor,
or, perhaps we should say, of the Empire.
This worship of the emperor has been among us a very byword for what is
monstrous and unintelligible. It bewilders us when we hear of
something like it in our own Indian empire. And yet a little
imagination ought to show us that where a pure monotheism has not
taught men the moral purity and personal character of God--where
religion is either pantheism, the deification of the one life, or
idolatry, the deification {25} of separate forms of life--the worship
of the imperial authority is intelligible enough. Here was a vast
power, universal in its range, mostly beneficent, and yet awful in its
limitless and arbitrary power of chastisement; what should it be but
divine, like nature, and an object to be appealed to, propitiated,
worshipped? At any rate the cultus of the emperor spread in the Roman
world, and particularly in the Asiatic provinces. It could ally itself
with the current pantheistic philosophy and also with popular local
cults: for it was tolerant of all and could embrace them all, or in
some cases it could identify itself with them--the emperor being
regarded as a special manifestation of the local god. And it made
itself popular through games--wild beast shows and gladiatorial
contests--which it was the business of its high priests or presidents
to provide or to organize. Thus it was that the Roman world came to be
organized by provinces for the purposes of the imperial religion, and
the provincial presidents, whom we hear of in the Acts as 'Asiarchs' or
'chiefs of Asia,' and from other sources as existing in the other
provinces--Galatarchs, Bithyniarchs, Syriarchs, and so on--were also
the high priests of the worship of the Caesars, by which it was sought
{26} to make religion, like everything else, contribute to cement
imperial unity[17].
Now there can be no doubt at all, if we look back from the fourth or
fifth centuries of our era, to how vast an extent this Roman unity had
been made an engine for the propagation of the Church. And the
Christians--the Spanish poet Prudentius, for instance, or Pope Leo the
Great[18]--betray a strong consciousness of the place held by the
empire in the divine preparation for Christ. For long periods the
Roman authority was tolerant of Christianity and suffered its
propagation to go on in peace; and at the times when it became alarmed
at its subversive tendencies, and turned to become its persecutor,
still the Church could not be prevented from using the imperial
organization, its roads and its means of communication. Again, every
step in the progress of the Greek language facilitated the spread of
the new religion, the propagation of which was through Greek; and
conversely Christianity became an instrument for spreading the use of
this language which previously was making but a poor struggle against
the languages {27} of Asia Minor; for it is apparently a simple mistake
to suppose that even the apostles were miraculously dispensed from the
difficulties of acquiring new languages, and were enabled to speak all
languages as it were by instinct. Even the imperial religion provided
a framework to facilitate the organization of that still more imperial
religion which it found indeed absolutely incompatible with its
prerogatives, but in which it might have found an efficient substitute
to accomplish its own best ends. Thus the early Christian apologist
Tatian pleads that Christianity alone could supply what was manifestly
needed for a united world, a universal moral law and a universal
gratuitous education or philosophy, open to rich and poor, men and
women, alike[19]. So strong in fact was in many respects the affinity
of the Empire and the Church that the apologists are not infrequently
able to claim, and that plausibly, that if the Roman authorities were
ready to recognize it, they would find in the Church their most
efficient ally.
And there is no doubt that all this tendency to use the empire as the
ally and instrument of the Church began with St. Paul. The closer St.
Paul's evangelistic travels are examined the {28} more apparent does it
become that he, the apostle who was also the Roman citizen, was by the
very force of circumstances, but also probably deliberately, working
the Church on the lines of the empire. 'The classification adopted in
Paul's own letters of the churches which he founded, is according to
provinces--Achaia, Macedonia, Asia, and Galatia; the same fact is
clearly visible in the narrative of Acts. It guides and inspires the
expressions from the time when the apostle landed at Perga. At every
step any one who knows the country recognizes that the Roman division
is implied[20].' Nor can we fail to be struck with the regularity with
which St. Paul, wherever he mentions the Empire, takes it on its best
side and represents it as a divine institution whose officers are God's
ministers for justice and order and peace[21]. It is from this point
of view alone that he will have Christians think of it and pray for
it[22]. There is the confidence of the true son of the empire in his
'I appeal unto Caesar[23].'
Further than this, when St. Paul is addressing himself to Gentiles who
had received no leavening of Jewish monotheism, it is most striking
{29} how he throws himself back on those common philosophical and
religious ideas which were permeating the thought of the Empire. 'The
popular philosophy inclined towards pantheism, the popular religion was
polytheistic, but Paul starts from the simplest platform common to
both. There exists something in the way of a divine nature which the
religious try to please and the philosophers try to understand[24].'
Close parallels to St. Paul's language in his two recorded speeches at
Lystra and at Athens, can be found in the writings of the contemporary
Stoic philosopher Seneca[25], and in the so-called 'Letters of
Heracleitus' written by some philosophic student nearly contemporary
with St. Paul at Ephesus[26]. In exposing the folly of idolaters he
was only doing what a contemporary philosopher was doing also, and
repeating ideas which he might have learnt almost as readily in the
schools of his native city Tarsus--which Strabo speaks of as the most
philosophical place in the world, and the place where philosophy was
most of all an indigenous plant[27]--as at the {30} feet of Gamaliel in
Jerusalem. Certainly Paul the apostle to the Gentiles was also Saul of
Tarsus and the citizen of the Roman Empire in whose mind the idea and
sentiment of the empire lay already side by side with the idea of the
catholic church.
Such a statement as has just been given of the relation of the Roman
organization to the Church is undoubtedly true. And it is also
indisputable that St. Paul was in fact the pioneer in using the empire
for the purposes of the Church. But it is more questionable to what
extent the idea of the empire as the handmaid of the Church was
consciously and deliberately, or only unconsciously or instinctively,
present to his mind; and in particular it is questionable how far the
peculiar exaltation of the epistles of the first captivity is due to
St. Paul's realization that in getting to Rome, the capital and centre
of the Empire, he had reached a goal which was {31} also a fresh and
unique starting-point for the evangelization of the world.
To some extent this must certainly have been the case[28]. While he is
at Ephesus[29] preaching, he already has Rome in view, and a sense of
unaccomplished purpose till he has visited it, 'I must also see Rome.'
When a little later he writes to the Romans, the name of Rome is a name
both of attraction and of awe. He is eager to go to Rome, but he seems
to fear it at the same time. So much as in him lies, he is ready to
preach the gospel to them also that are at Rome. Even in face of all
that that imperial name means, he is not ashamed of the Gospel[30].
Later the divine vision at Jerusalem assures him that, as he has borne
witness concerning Christ at Jerusalem, so he must bear witness also at
Rome[31]. The confidence of this divine purpose mingles with and
reinforces the confidence of the Roman citizen in his appeal to Caesar.
The sense of the divine hand upon him to take him to Rome is
strengthened by another vision amid the terrors of the sea voyage[32].
At his first contact with the Roman {32} brethren 'he thanked God and
took courage[33].' This sense of thankfulness and encouragement
pervades the whole of the first captivity so far as it is represented
in his letters. He had reached the goal of his labours and a fresh
starting-point for a wide-spreading activity.
Certainly no one can mistake the glow of enthusiasm which pervades the
epistles of the first captivity generally, but especially the Epistle
to the Ephesians. It is conspicuously, and beyond all the other
epistles, rapturous and uplifted. And this is not due--as is the
cheerful thankfulness of the Epistle to the Philippians, at least in
part--to the specially intimate relations of St. Paul to the
congregations he was addressing, or to the specially satisfactory
character of their Christian life. On the contrary, St. Paul perceived
that the Asiatic churches, and especially Ephesus, were threatened by
very ominous perils. 'Very grievous wolves were entering in, not
sparing the flock; and among themselves men were arising, speaking
perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them[34].' St.
Paul's rapturous tone must be accounted for by causes independent of
the Ephesian or Asiatic Christians in particular. {33} Among these
causes, as we have just seen, must be reckoned the fact, the
significance of which we have been dwelling upon, that St. Paul had now
reached Rome, the centre of the Gentile world. But it must also be
remembered that St. Paul had seen a great conflict fought out and won
for the catholicity of Christianity, and that now for the first time
there was a pause and freedom to take advantage of it.
A great conflict had been fought and won. The backbone of the earlier
Jewish opposition to the preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles on
equal terms had been broken. They had in fact swept into the Church in
increasing numbers. Their rights were recognized and their position
uncontested. There is now, in the comparative quiet of the 'hired
house' where St. Paul was confined, a period of pause in which he can
fitly sum up the results which have been won, and let the full meaning
of the catholic brotherhood be freely unfolded. It is time to pass
from the rudiments of the Christian gospel, the vindication of its most
elementary principles and liberties, the 'milk for babes,' to expound
the spiritual wisdom of the full-grown Christian manhood, the 'solid
meat for them of riper years.'
{34}
It is this sense of pause in conflict and free expansion in view of a
vast opportunity, which in great part at least interprets the glow and
glory of St. Paul's epistle.
iv.
The Epistle to the Ephesians might, so far as its contents are
concerned, have been addressed to any of the predominantly Gentile
churches; but to none more fitly than to Ephesus and to the churches of
Asia, where the progress of Gentile Christianity had been so rapid, and
where St. Paul's ministry had been so unusually prolonged. Let us
attempt to answer the questions--what was Ephesus? what was the
history, and what were the circumstances of the Ephesian church?
Ephesus had a double importance as a Greek and as an Asiatic city. A
colony of Ionians from Athens had early settled on some hills which
rose out of a fertile plain near the mouth of the Cayster. This was
the origin of the Greek city of Ephesus. Its position gave it
admirable commercial advantages. It became the greatest mart of
exchange[35] between East {35} and West in Asia Minor, and though its
commerce was threatened by the filling up of its harbour, it had not
decayed in St. Paul's time.
Among Greek cities it also occupied a not inconspicuous place in the
history of art, and at an earlier period of philosophy also. Here was
one of the chief homes of the Homeric tradition; hence in the person of
Callinus the Greek elegy is reputed to have had its origin, and in the
person of Hipponax the satire. It was the home of Heracleitus, one of
the greatest of the early philosophers, and of Apelles and Parrhasius,
the masters of painting[36].
And the greatest artists in sculpture--Phidias and Polycletus, Scopas
and Praxiteles--had adorned with their works the temple of Artemis,
which, in itself one of the wonders of the world, the masterpiece of
Ionic architecture, became also, like some great Christian cathedral, a
very museum of sculpture and painting.
If Greek artists built and decorated the temple of Artemis, they
attempted no doubt to represent the goddess under the form which her
Greek name suggested, the beautiful huntress-goddess; but the Greeks
never in fact succeeded in {36} affecting the thoroughly Asiatic and
oriental character of a worship which had nothing Greek about it except
the name. The interest of Ephesus as an Asiatic city centred about
that ancient worship which had its home in the plain below the Greek
settlement. It was there before the Greeks came, it held its own
throughout and in spite of all Greek and Roman influences; all through
the history of Ephesus it gave its main character to the city--the
noted home of superstition and sorcery.
The Artemis of Ephesus was, as Jerome remarks[37], not the
huntress-goddess with her bow, but the many-breasted symbol of the
productive and nutritive powers of nature, the mother of all life, free
and untamed like the wild beasts who accompanied her. The grotesque
and archaic idol believed to have fallen down from heaven was a stiff,
erect mummy covered with many breasts and symbols of wild beasts. Her
worship was organized by a hierarchy of eunuch priests--called by a
Persian name Megabyzi--and 'consecrated' virgins. It was associated,
like other worships of the same divinity called indifferently Artemis
or Cybele or Ma, with ideals of life which from the point {37} of view
of any fixed moral order, Roman or Greek no less than Jewish or
Christian, was lawless and immoral.
It is very well known how the Asiatic nature-worships flooded the Roman
empire, and even at Rome itself became by far more popular than the
traditional state religion. And among these Asiatic worships none was
more popular than the worship of Artemis of Ephesus, whose temple was
the wonder of the world, and who not only was worshipped publicly at
Ephesus, but was the object of a cult both public and private in
widely-separated parts of the empire. Such a temple and such a worship
would naturally collect a base and corrupt population; but what would
in any case have been bad was rendered worse by the fact that the area
round the temple was an asylum of refuge from the law, and that, as the
area of 'sanctuary' was extended at different times, the collection of
criminals became greater and greater. It had reached a point where it
threatened the safety of the city, and not long before St. Paul's time
the Emperor Augustus had found it necessary to curtail the area. The
history of our own Westminster is enough to assure us that a religious
asylum brings social degradation in its train.
{38}
Such was the commercial and religious importance of the beautiful,
wealthy, effeminate, superstitious, and most immoral city which became
for three years the centre of St. Paul's ministry. On his second
missionary journey St. Paul was making his way to Asia, and no doubt to
Ephesus, when he with his companions were hindered by the Holy Ghost
and turned across the Hellespont to Macedonia[38]. On his return to
Syria, he could not be satisfied without at least setting foot in
Ephesus and making a beginning of preaching there in the synagogue[39];
but he was hastening back to Jerusalem, and, with a promise of return,
left his work there to Priscilla and Aquila. On his third missionary
journey Ephesus was the centre of his prolonged work. It was
accordingly the only city of the first rank which, so far as any
trustworthy evidence goes, had as the founder of its Church in the
strictest sense--that is, as the first gatherer of converts as well as
organizer of institutions--either St. Paul or any other apostle[40].