strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this
household we are sons and not servants--that is intelligent
co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is
noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing
themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and
beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even
children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days,
and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you[7].' 'Why do ye
subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not[8].'
It is perfectly true to say that what {116} St. Paul is deprecating is
a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He
demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their
attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St.
Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority
which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress
upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very
far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,'
is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity.
To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian[9]. 'A man that
is heretical' (or rather 'factious') after the first and second
admonition is to be 'refused'[10]. Government is to be a constant
element in the Christian life. But the character of authority and of
obedience is to be changed. The authority is to be reasonable
authority, and the obedience intelligent obedience. Passive obedience
to an authority which does not explain itself, whether in a spiritual
director or in the Church as a whole, St. Paul would have thought of
meanly as a Christian virtue. And the multiplication of authoritative
observances he would have dreaded as a {117} bondage. Our Lord was
very unwilling to give His disciples, when He was on earth, much
direction. And St. Paul is true to his Master's spirit. Our life
should be ordered by principles, rather than directed in detail. For
to rely upon direction from outside dwarfs our sense of personal
responsibility, and personal relationship to the divine Spirit. A
certain amount of confusion, hesitation, difference, due to men feeling
their way, due to their different individualities having free scope,
St. Paul would apparently have thought preferable to that sort of order
which is the product of a very strong and exacting external government,
and to an undue exaltation of the virtue of passive obedience.
(3) St. Paul describes the Church as a sanctuary which is gradually to
be built for God to dwell in. We remember how our Lord had said of the
temple at Jerusalem, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will
raise it up.' 'He spake,' St. John explains, 'of the temple of his
body[11].' That--His own humanity proved triumphant over death--was to
be henceforth the tabernacle of God's presence among men. Where that
is God is, and the true worship of the Father in spirit and in truth.
But that body, raised again {118} the third day and become 'quickening
Spirit' as the body of the risen Christ, takes within its influence the
whole circle of believers. The 'body of Christ,' which is God's
temple, comes to mean the Church which lives in Christ's life, and
worships in Christ's Spirit. This is still the Church of the fathers
of the old covenant, but fundamentally reconstituted. God, as St.
James perceived[12], was fulfilling His promise to 'build again the
tabernacle of David which had fallen.' It was being built anew upon
the apostles and their companions the prophets, the immediate
ambassadors of Christ, as foundation-stones of the renewed building,
who themselves have their positions determined and secured by Christ
Jesus as chief corner-stone. It was a spiritual fabric combining, like
a Gothic cathedral, various parts or 'several buildings,' with their
distinctive characteristics, all however united in one construction,
one great sanctuary of a redeemed humanity in which God dwells.
The metaphor suggests the combination of national and individual
differences in real unity. It encourages us to pay due regard to the
free developement of our own characters and capacities, but also to
develope ourselves as parts of {119} a greater whole, always
remembering that the work of a Christian individual or a local church
is in God's sight measured, not by its isolated result, but by the
contribution it makes to the life of the whole body. An eccentric
individuality, a schismatic developement is, even in proportion to its
strength, a source of weakness to the whole. By its relation to the
whole life of the Church all Christian effort must be both invigorated
and restrained.
The metaphor suggests further that the social organization of the
Church is an organization for worship. It is a house and a
citizenship, because it is also a sanctuary. The strength of corporate
Christianity is to be measured by the vitality of corporate worship. A
church life in which the eucharist is not the centre, for all the
vigour which it may show in learning, or preaching, or philanthropy, is
after all but a maimed life.
(4) But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it
is--the city of God, His household and His sanctuary--only because it
is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building'
are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by
any external agency of government; they {120} are as branches of a
living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which
will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of
the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the
Church. It is verily and indeed the extension of the life of Christ.
How are we to receive this great and manifold ideal of what the Church
means[13]? It is by meditating upon it till St. Paul's
conceptions--and not any lower or narrower ones, Roman or Anglican or
Nonconformist--become vivid to our minds. Then, knowing what we aim at
restoring, we shall seek, in each parish and ecclesiastical centre, to
concentrate almost more than to extend the Church, to give it
spiritual, moral, and social reality, rather than to multiply a
membership which means little. For if men can understand the meaning
of the Church, as the city of God, the family of God, the sanctuary of
God, in the world, there is little fear that whatever is good in
humanity will fail of allegiance to her. The kings of the earth will
bring their glory and honour into her, and the nations of the earth
shall walk in her light.
[1] Sanday and Headlam's _Romans_, pp. 122-124.
[2] Hebr. ix. 8.
[3] 1 Peter ii. 4.
[4] 1 Thess. v. 14; 1 Cor. v.-vi. 11.
[5] Col. i. 28.
[6] Luke xii. 42.
[7] Gal. iv. 11; v. 1.
[8] Col. ii. 20-22.
[9] Cor. xi. 2, 16.
[10] Tit. iii. 10.
[11] John ii. 19-21.
[12] Acts xv. 16.
[13] See app. note D, p. 264, on the Brotherhood of St. Andrew.
{121}
DIVISION I. Sec. 5. CHAPTER III.
_Paul the apostle of catholicity._
[Sidenote: _Paul the apostle of catholicity_]
St. Paul has unfolded the dimensions of the revelation of God given in
the catholic church. The interests of the whole of mankind and of the
whole universe which it is to subserve--that is its breadth: the
eternal and slowly realized intention of God of which it is the
expression--that is its length: the spiritual elevation up to which it
takes men--that is its height: the gulf of sin and misery from which it
rescues them--that is its depth. And now he is about to press upon the
Asiatic Christians the moral obligations which this great catholic
brotherhood involves. He begins his exhortation and enforces it by
reminding them of what he was enduring as a prisoner for Christ's
sake--'For this cause (i.e. seeing that all this is true), I, Paul, the
prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you, the Gentiles.' But when he
has thus made a beginning, he pauses to add weight {122} to his appeal
by emphasizing a personal but very important consideration. The
particular truth of the catholicity of the Church had been in quite a
special sense entrusted to him, Paul, personally, as apostle of the
Gentiles. He assumes that they have heard of this, his special
commission, and that it was the subject of a special revelation to
himself[1]. Indeed the fact must have formed part of his teaching at
Ephesus and throughout Asia, for his mind was full of it; he had
contended for it against strong opposition in his epistle to the
Galatians[2]; he had asserted it in his speech on the occasion of his
being made a prisoner at Jerusalem: and he had quite recently explained
it 'in brief compass' in the letter to the Colossians which was
intended to have, in part at least, the same readers as his present
epistle[3]. This special revelation then and accompanying commission
justifies him in particular, and more than any of {123} the other
apostles, in pressing upon his converts the doctrine which forms the
special topic of this epistle.
But to think of his special office as apostle of a catholic society, is
to think also of its extraordinary difficulty.
[Sidenote: _The difficulty of catholicity_]
When we set ourselves in our own later age to rehabilitate the sense of
church membership, we feel at once the strength of the forces against
us; we realize how much the feeling of blood-kinship in the family
counts for, or the wider kinship of national life, or the common
interests of our professions or our classes, compared to the feeble
sense of fellowship which comes from a church membership which is so
largely conventional. Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we
have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt
the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in
which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of
unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it
embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their
own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the
barriers of Jewish isolation. A society in which men should be neither
Jews nor {124} Gentiles, Greeks nor barbarians, bond nor free, but all
should be welded into one manhood by the pressure of a common and
constraining bond of brotherhood--a society in which even the savage
and brutal Scythian should have equal fellowship with Greeks and
Jews[4]--represented what had never yet been accomplished, and what the
most sanguine might reasonably have thought impossible. The history of
the Church, though not yet much more than thirty years old, had served
already to emphasize the difficulty of the undertaking. We read the
record of the first Jerusalem Church with its communism of love and
sympathy, and it seems the perfect realization of the Christian spirit
of brotherhood. So it was, but under comparatively easy conditions.
For all that community were Jews with common traditions, sympathies,
habits, ways of looking at things. They could behave as brethren, in
the glow of their fresh enthusiasm at finding that the long-expected
kingdom of Christ was now an actual fact, and its triumph to be
immediately expected, without any real bridging of the gulfs which yawn
between different sorts of men. That these gulfs still remained to be
bridged soon appeared. It became manifest that {125} Gentiles,
'sinners of the Gentiles,' had to be received into Christian
brotherhood upon equal terms, and without their accepting the Jewish
law and customs. The Council at Jerusalem attempted a compromise by
requiring of the Gentile converts certain accommodations to Jewish
manners. But the compromise did not avail to overcome the difficulty.
St. Paul found the centre of opposition to the equal admission of the
Gentiles in that very Church of Jerusalem which had been previously
foremost in the race of love. In fact, the true difficulty of the law
of brotherhood only then appeared when the obligation to fuse
inveterate national distinctions began to be enforced. Then indeed
flesh and blood rebelled. Without going any further than this single
piece of Christian experience, there is every reason why St. John
should warn Christians that the old commandment, 'ye shall love one
another,' is constantly, with every change of circumstance, becoming 'a
new commandment,' involving new difficulties, and challenging afresh
the efforts of the human will[5]. The same difficulty, only in a less
acute form, is in St. Paul's mind, and makes him measure and weigh his
words, when he writes to Philemon {126} to beg him to receive his
former runaway slave, 'no longer as a slave, but as a brother
beloved[6].'
And we cannot but pause and ask, in view of all the moral discipline
for men of various kinds which St. Paul sees to be involved in the
simple obligation to belong to one Christian body[7],--what would have
been his feelings if he had heard of the doctrine which cuts at the
root of all this discipline by declaring that religion is only
concerned with the relation of the soul to God, and that Christians may
combine as they please in as many religious bodies as suits their
varying tastes?
This difficulty in the very idea of a catholic brotherhood of men
explains the extraordinary earnestness with which St. Paul proceeds to
emphasize that indeed this, and nothing less than this, is the divine
mystery (or 'secret'), which, held back from all eternity in the mind
of God, was only now being disclosed through Christ's consecrated
messengers, and specially through St. Paul himself, the apostle of the
Gentiles. The incredible nature of the idea clogs St. Paul's language,
and almost makes shipwreck of his grammar. All the depth of Christian
doctrine is necessary as background {127} to recommend and justify this
otherwise entirely 'supernatural' ideal--this marvellous climax of the
workings and revelations of God. The spectacle of a catholic
brotherhood, with all that it promises of universal unity beyond
itself, is a lesson even to the angels of what the manifold wisdom of
God can conceive and accomplish.
We have got into a habit of talking about the 'brotherhood of man' as
if it was an easy and obvious truth. All our experience of our English
relations with races of a different colour to our own, nay, all our
experience of class divisions at home, might have served to check this
easy-going sort of language. If we will consent to pause and reflect
on the actual difficulty of behaving or feeling as brethren should
behave and feel towards men of other races and of other educations and
habits than our own, we may be more inclined to believe that it is only
through some fundamental eradication of selfishness and inherent
narrowness that it can be made possible; only when we begin to live
from some centre greater than ourselves. And that is the moral meaning
of the constant doctrine of the New Testament, that only through being
reconciled to God can we be reconciled to one {128} another--only in
Christ that men can permanently and satisfactorily learn to love one
another, when racial and educational and personal antipathies make for
separation and not for unity.
Now perhaps we are in a position to read with greater intelligence what
St. Paul wrote about 'the dispensation of the divine mystery,' i.e.
'the stewardship of the divine secret,' of the brotherhood of all men
in Christ or the catholicity of the Church, which had been committed to
him by the 'revelation' which followed his conversion to Christ[8].
The doctrine of the brotherhood of men is in fact as much a peculiarly
Christian doctrine as that of divine sonship, and both alike are, in
the New Testament language, represented as realized only within the
community of the baptized. The facts of New Testament language compel
us to say and to recognize this[9]. But {129} we are bound to
recognize also that they are truths which, when they are heard, are
welcomed by the natural conscience everywhere. For as all men are
'God's offspring[10],' by the very fact of their creation as men, so
they are fitted to receive the privilege of sonship: and as they are
'made of one[11],' so they are fitted to realize the privilege of
brotherhood. It is but to say the same thing in other words, if we
insist that Christians are the elect body, to realize and express among
men an idea of human nature which is the only true idea, and which,
overlaid and forgotten as it may have been, has never ceased to stir in
man's heart and conscience everywhere. The elect are elected for no
other purpose than to make manifest what all men are capable of
becoming, and, if they will obey God, are destined to become.
For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you
Gentiles,--if so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of that
grace of God which was given me to you-ward; how that by revelation was
made known unto me the mystery, as I wrote afore in few words, whereby,
when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of
Christ; which in other {130} generations was not made known unto the
sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto his holy apostles and
prophets in the Spirit; _to wit_, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs,
and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in
Christ Jesus through the gospel, whereof I was made a minister,
according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according
to the working of his power. Unto me, who am less than the least of
all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the
unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the
dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God
who created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities
and the powers in the heavenly _places_ might be made known through the
church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose
which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness
and access in confidence through our faith in him. Wherefore I ask
that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.
There are a few points in this passage which still require explanation.
[Sidenote: _Paul the apostle of catholicity_]
1. What is St. Paul referring to when he says 'As I wrote afore in few
words whereby, when ye read[12], ye can perceive my understanding in
the mystery of Christ' or (if I may venture to retranslate it) 'as I
wrote before in brief, by {131} comparison with which, as ye read, ye
can perceive my understanding in the secret of the Christ'? It is
generally supposed that he is referring to the verses in the first
chapter of this epistle (i. 9, 10, &c.), in which he speaks of the
'mystery' or 'secret' of the divine will now disclosed. But his point
appears to be rather that he had elsewhere written in brief about his
own special commission to preach the Gentile gospel; and the more
probable reference seems to be to the Epistle to the Colossians which
was written almost simultaneously with this epistle, probably just
previously, and was intended to be read at some at least, if not all,
of the same churches as this circular epistle, that is to say at
Laodicea and Colossae at least, and probabfxly more widely. In that
epistle (i. 25 ff.) he had really dwelt on his special commission in
almost the same terms as here, and comparison with what he said there
would indeed assist those he was now addressing to understand his
knowledge in the 'revealed secret of the Christ.'
2. How can St. Paul, who insists continually that he is one of the
apostles, call them, without self-complacency, God's holy apostles?
The answer to this is that 'holiness' means 'consecration.' Any one is
'holy' or a 'saint' (the {132} same word) who is consecrated to God in
any special way. Such consecration lays upon him an obligation to
moral goodness, which is what we mean by holiness, but it precedes the
fulfilment of the obligation. All Christians are holy (or 'saints')
because they are Christians, all apostles because they are apostles.
As for St. Paul's personal estimate of himself as an individual, we
have it just below. In view of his past sins, when he was 'kicking
against the pricks,' and, albeit in ignorance, persecuting the Church,
he calls himself 'less than the least of all the holy.'
3. St. Paul conceives his function to be to 'make men see,' or 'bring
into the light' a long hidden secret of God now in part disclosed to
the apostles, and to be by them disclosed to the world--in part, for
its contents are still 'unsearchable' in their depth and in the
'manifoldness' of divine wisdom which they imply. But what is
disclosed is no afterthought of God. It is an eternal purpose; and it
is all of a piece with the original idea of creation: it is a 'secret
... hidden in God who created all things.' Redemption in fact
interprets to angels and men what God's purpose in creation originally
was. To minister to this disclosure is enough for any {133} man. It
makes all St. Paul's tribulations only such as it is worth while to
bear; and the Gentiles, in their turn, should find their glory in his
tribulations as an evidence of how much he thought it worth while to
suffer in what is their cause no less truly than his.
[Sidenote: St. Paul's second prayer]
Here, as in the first chapter, the consideration of the glory, and
consequently the difficulty, of the gospel which St. Paul has to
deliver leads him off--just at the point where he seems to be resuming
the uncompleted sentence with which he began--into a prayer that the
Asiatic Christians may have strength given them to apprehend the wealth
of their spiritual position and opportunity. He invokes God as the
universal 'father (_pater_) from whom every family (_patria_)--every
company of men knit together by common relation to one father--is
named,' because this has direct reference to his purpose. All men
recognize family, or blood relations and obligations. St. Paul reminds
them that every conceivable society on earth or in heaven which is
bound by the ties of a common fatherhood, derives its 'name' and
therefore its significance from a larger relationship, an all-embracing
relationship of which these lower ones are but shadows--the
relationship to the one Father: {134} and he calls upon the one Father
to strengthen men to transcend all narrownesses of family or blood, and
rise to realize their position in the great family, the great
brotherhood under the one Father. To do this a strengthening of the
inner man, or inner life, by the divine Spirit is indeed needed.
Christ must be not only possessed by Christians, but realized. He must
dwell in their hearts by the realizing power of an active personal
faith. Where this is so--where faith is vigorous--there life must be
rooted and founded on love. Christian faith involves love. For it is
faith in a Father and His Son and His Spirit; and love, and nothing but
love, is the gift of the Father in the Son by the Spirit. This love
then will strengthen them, in the fellowship of the saints or
consecrated ones altogether, to apprehend God's work and purpose in all
its dimensions--breadth and length and depth and height--and to know
Christ's love (which yet passes knowledge and remains unknowable), and
to find their whole being, not as separate individuals, but as one body
praying and working and thinking together, expanded to take in the
fulness of what God is, the full complement of the divine life. To be
thus enlightened and enlarged is what St. Paul {135} understands by
being a 'good catholic': that is what he prays all these Asiatic
Christians may become.
And his prayer passes into a doxology--an ascription of glory to God
because He is able to realize even what passes our power to conceive or
to ask for; and that without doing more for us than He has already
pledged Himself to do and actually begun to accomplish in us. And this
glory he would have eternally ascribed to God in the Church which lives
by His life; and also (where alone God can never fail of His full
rights) in Him in whom alone God's life is perfectly realized, and
worship perfectly rendered Him under conditions of manhood, in Jesus
the Christ.
For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family
in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you, according to
the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through
his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts
through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and
length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.
Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we
ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him _be_
the glory in the {136} church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations
for ever and ever. Amen.