unity excludes, instead of suggesting, the Roman method of arguing for
the papacy from the necessity that a body must have a head. An
association of men in this world, such as the Church on earth {156}
is--a 'body of men' in this sense--may be governed in any of the
various ways in which human societies are governed, not by any means
necessarily by a monarch[13]. In this sense a body need not have a
single head; or it can be ruled by a president in a council of equals.
But in St. Paul's sense, the Church as a body must have a head, and
that head can be none other than Christ, because, according to his
spiritual physiology, from its head the Church receives its continually
inflowing life; and because the body is not completely, but only
partially, in this world, and the head must be over all the members,
and not only over some.
iii.
But if the unity of the Church, as St. Paul expounds it, is before all
else a unity of life, it is as well a unity in the truth. It is a
unity based on belief in a divine revelation, given in the person of
Christ--based on the common confession that Jesus crucified and risen
is Christ and Lord[14]. To say that 'Jesus is the Lord' {157} involves
further--what is implied in this passage of the Epistle to the
Ephesians--the confession of the threefold name--the 'one God and
Father,' the 'one Lord' Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the 'one Spirit'
which is His gift; and there can be no real question that St. Paul's
language constantly involves that the Son and Spirit are with the
Father really personal, and really divine, included, so to speak, in
the one only eternal Godhead. A creed then is at the basis of the
Christian life--a creed which finds its best expression and safeguard
in the formulated doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. There
is no reason to think that St. Paul, if the situation of the later
Church could have been made plain to him, would have shrunk from these
dogmatic safeguards of the Church's central faith.
But if we grant--what cannot really with any show of reason be
denied--that the Church is a visible organization based on a certain
revealed truth, which must be accepted by its members, and which admits
of being formulated in order to be preserved; still this truth may be
advanced and defended mainly by one of two methods--that of external
regulative authority, or that of appeal to principles, discussion,
controversy, {158} exhortation. And it can hardly be denied that St.
Paul prefers the latter. Sharp appeals to authority are indeed to be
found in St. Paul[15], but they are very rare. For example, in none of
his epistles against the Judaizers is the authority of the apostolic
decision, as to what might and what might not be required of the
Gentile Christians 'in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia[16],' brought into
requisition; though that decision 'settled the question.' He prefers
to prove that 'circumcision is nothing.' This may be in part accounted
for by St. Paul's refusal to admit that his own apostolic authority
needed the support of the twelve, and by the limited area to which the
decision was addressed; but there is another reason as well. For he
plainly, as all his epistles show, prefers to appeal not to authority
at all but to the spiritual reason; to expound principles, to argue, to
awaken the heart, conscience, and mind of Christians. It must be
admitted that there is very little in St. Paul's epistles about
differences of doctrinal views among Christians as distinct from
differences in practices. Yet there is enough--as in the vigorous
passage about the 'regarding of one {159} day above another[17]'--to
justify the belief that he would not have viewed with any disapproval
the existence in the Church of tolerated differences of opinion where
they did not touch the basis of the Church's life. Such differences of
view are hardly separable from what St. Paul glories in--a unity which
is consistent with great variety of gifts and character, and great
freedom. It is unity in variety which he has as his ideal, such a
unity as is always characteristic of a unity of life, like that of
nature or of a free people; or a unity, again, like that of a great
Gothic Church, or of the Bible.
It is quite certain that St. Paul would have deprecated that 'short and
easy' method of promoting unity which has constant recourse to the
external pressure of dogma and authority.
iv.
It follows naturally from what has been just said, that St. Paul should
look not so much to ecclesiastical enactments as to a right Christian
temper for preserving outward unity. 'Making it your moral effort,' so
we may paraphrase his exhortation to the Asiatic Christians, 'by means
{160} of the virtues which I have just specified of humility, meekness,
long-suffering, and forbearance, to maintain the unity of the Spirit in
the bond of Christian peace.' The New Testament view of heresy (a
self-willed separatism), or schism, is that it is a violation of
charity and peace in the interests of pride and impatience and
self-will. It is men like 'Diotrephes who loveth to have the
pre-eminence,' who violate it. In fact it is written in history that
the ecclesiastical schisms of the past have been due mainly either to
the impatience and wilfulness of would-be reformers, from Tertullian
downwards, or to the arrogance and love of domination in rival
individuals or rival sees.
'Nothing,' says Chrysostom on this passage, 'will have power to divide
the Church so much as the love of authority, and nothing provokes God
so much as that the Church should be divided. We may have done ten
thousand good actions, but if we rend the fulness of the Church, we
shall suffer punishment with those who rent His body.'
From this point of view we may find an interesting parallel to this
exhortation of St. Paul in a passage of Plato's _Laws_, which is, I
believe, one of the few passages in pre-Christian writings where the
virtue of humility is recognized. {161} 'God, as the old tradition
declares, holding in His hand the beginning, middle, and end of all
that is, moves according to His nature in a straight line towards the
accomplishment of His end. Justice always follows Him, and is the
punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. To that law he who
would be happy holds fast, and follows it in all humility and order;
but he who is lifted up with pride, or money, or honour, or beauty, who
has a soul hot with folly and guilt and insolence, and thinks that he
has no need of a guide and ruler, but is able himself to be the guide
of others, he, I say, is left deserted of God; and being thus deserted,
he takes to him others who are like himself, and dances about in wild
confusion; and many think that he is a great man, but in a short time
he pays a penalty which justice cannot but approve, and is utterly
destroyed, and his family and city with him.'
From the point of view of the moral duty of preserving ecclesiastical
unity, it is quite clear that the guilt of Christians has been
exceedingly great, and also that it has been very widely diffused. The
amount of ambition, insolence, and impatience in the Church has, in
fact, been so vast that it remains no longer a matter {162} for
astonishment that it should have made the havoc that it has made in the
divine household, and should have thwarted, as it has thwarted, the
divine intention. But the recognition of this fact lays on us the duty
of meditating continually on the divine intention, and by all that lies
in our power, by prayer and by every other means, to restore the
recognition of the divine principle of unity whether in the narrower or
the wider circle of church life.
It is not too much to say that the now popular principle of the free
voluntary association of Christians in societies organized to suit
varying phases of taste, is destructive of the moral discipline
intended for us. It was the obligation to belong to one body which was
intended as the restraint on the prejudices and eccentricities of race,
classes and individuals. If Greeks, Italians, and Englishmen are to be
content to belong to different churches; if among ourselves we are to
have one church for the well-to-do, and another for 'labour'; if any
individual who is offended in one church is to be free to go off to
another where he or she likes the minister better--where does the need
come in for the forbearance and long-suffering and humility on which
St. Paul {163} insists as the necessary virtues of the one body? We,
Christians but not in one brotherhood, may not be able to agree at
present among ourselves as to the proper basis of ecclesiastical unity,
but we ought to be able to agree that, somehow or other, Christians are
intended by Christ and by the apostle to be one body, and that the
wilful violation of outward unity is truly a refusal of the yoke of
Christ.
And a great step would have been taken towards rendering the recovery
of ecclesiastical unity more easy if those who recognize the obligation
of the principle could be brought to perceive that true Catholicism
really requires a large measure of toleration and a deliberate
reasonableness. At present it is not too much to say that the idea of
the obligation of ecclesiastical unity is widely associated with an
emphasis on ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority such as is utterly
alien to the mind of the apostle of Catholicism.
v.
In what has been said above we have been attending chiefly to the
restraints which St. Paul's idea of church unity appears to set upon
what are commonly known as 'ecclesiastical tendencies.' {164} Now it is
time to emphasize the other side of the representation. For without a
strongly engrained prejudice, there is not, it seems to the present
writer, any possibility of doubting that St. Paul meant by 'the Church'
in general, a society visible and organized, represented by a number of
visible and organized local societies or churches[18]. The Church is
in fact ideal in its spiritual character, but not one bit the less an
association of human beings, a society with quite definite limits,
ties, and obligations. For, to begin with, the 'one baptism' which
conveyed the spiritual gift of incorporation into Christ was also the
initiation into an actual brotherhood, with its rules of conduct,
worship, and belief: 'we were all baptized into one body[19].' The
'one Spirit' was normally bestowed by the 'laying on of' apostolic
'hands'--that is, the hands of the chief governors of the Christian
corporation. This rite followed upon and completed baptism, and its
administration had {165} been one of St. Paul's first ministerial acts
after he began his preaching at Ephesus[20]. Again, 'the breaking of
the bread' or eucharist, according to St. Paul's teaching, both
nourished the life of Christ in the Church, as being the communion of
His body and blood, and also, in the 'one loaf,' symbolized its outward
corporate unity[21].
Thus the bestowal of gifts of grace through outward rites, which
belonged to the corporate life of a society, insured that a Christian
should be no isolated and independent individual. More than this, the
necessary dependence of each individual Christian upon the one
organized society is made further evident by the existence of
spiritually endowed officers of the society who were as 'the more
honourable limbs of the body'--'some apostles, some prophets, some
evangelists, some pastors and teachers'--without whom the body would
have lacked its divinely-given equipment for ministry and edification.
These were not merely more or less gifted or (as we say) talented
individuals who undertook particular sorts of work on their own
initiative, or by the invitation of any group of Christian individuals.
We find that the apostles at least were a definite {166} body of men
who had received special commission from Christ Himself to govern His
Church[22]. The Christian 'prophets' were men of special supernatural
endowment, to know and declare God's will, and foretell His purposes.
They ranked after the apostles in virtue of their prophetic gift[23].
But even they were to be restrained by the exigencies of church order.
'The spirits of the prophets are subject unto the prophets; for God is
not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the
saints.' Next to the prophets, St. Paul specifies the 'evangelists.'
They were no doubt, as their name implies, officers engaged with the
apostles in the general work of spreading the gospel, that is of
founding and organizing churches. Timothy, who is exhorted to 'do the
work of an evangelist[24],' would probably have ranked amongst them;
and if so, Titus and other similar companions and delegates of
apostles. At any rate, by whatever name they were called, such men
belonged to {167} the specially 'gifted' class, if we may judge by the
case of Timothy. But he, though marked out by prophecy, received his
'gift,' as a church officer, with the laying on of the hands of a whole
presbytery, while the hands of the apostle himself were the divine
instruments for imparting the gift to him[25]. The 'pastors and
teachers'--one class of men and not two--are, we may say certainly,
identical with the presbyters or 'bishops' as they were called by St.
Paul at Ephesus; and these again were men of spiritual endowment, but
also local church officers who had received a definite apostolic
appointment[26], and there is no reason to doubt by laying on of hands.
Thus the Church, as St. Paul conceives it, is a body differentiated by
varieties of spiritual endowments imparted to definite officers, for
the fulfilment of functions necessary to the life and development of
the whole body. Thus the outward unity of the {168} society at any
particular moment, and the necessary connexion of each individual
Christian with it, is secured both by the existence of social
sacraments or means of grace, and by the existence of a ministry
spiritually endowed and commissioned, to whom individual Christians
owed allegiance, and who ranked as the more honourable limbs of that
body to which they must belong if they would belong to Christ.
vi.
St. Paul is not here thinking of the unity of the Church otherwise than
at a particular moment. But if one turns one's attention to its
continuous unity down the ages, again it must be recognized that one
main link of unity has been in fact the apostolic succession of the
ministry; that is the permanence in the Church of a spiritually-endowed
'stewardship of divine mysteries' received continually by the original
method of the laying on of hands in succession from apostolic men. The
necessity for each individual Christian to remain in relation to these
commissioned stewards if he wishes to continue to be of the divine
household, has kept men together in one body. And any one who looks at
St. Paul's method of imparting spiritual authority {169} and office to
Timothy and Titus, and directing them in their turn to hand it on by
ordaining others, can scarcely doubt that he contemplated the
institution in the Church of a permanent ministry deriving its
authority from above.
How, in fact, did the later church ministry connect itself with that
which we find existing in the apostolic age? The apostolic ministry
divides itself broadly into the general and the local. There are
'ministers' or 'stewards' who are officers of the church catholic and
have a general commission. Such general commission belonged, of
course, to the apostles, though mutual delimitations were arranged
among themselves and though St. James, who ranked with the apostles,
was settled at Jerusalem. It belonged also, more or less, to
'evangelists' and other 'apostolic men,' who, however, might be
temporarily located in particular churches and districts, like Timothy
in Ephesus, and Titus in Crete. It belonged also to the prophets, who
would have been recognized as men inspired of God in all the churches,
and who in the subapostolic age are found in some districts exercising
functions like those of the apostles in the first age. The local
officers, on the other hand, were the presbyters, who are called also
bishops, and the {170} deacons. With this earliest state of things in
our mind, we shall perceive that where an apostle or apostolic man was
permanently resident in one particular church, a threefold ministry,
like that of later church history already existed. So it was at
Jerusalem where the presbyters and deacons were presided over by St.
James. So it was in Crete under Titus, and in Ephesus under Timothy.
So it was a few decades later in all the churches of Asia as organized
by St. John. In other parts of the world the exact method by which the
ministry developed is a matter of much dispute. But it seems to the
present writer most probable that everywhere the threefold ministry
came into existence by (1) a change of arrangement, and (2) a change of
name. (1) The change of arrangement was the establishment in each
local church of a prophet, or one, like Timothy or Titus, who had been
ordained to quasi-apostolic office by an apostle or man of apostolic
rank; such a change taking place first at the greatest centres, and
then in lesser cities. (2) The change of name was the appropriation to
this now localized ruler of the title of bishop or 'overseer' which had
hitherto appertained more or less to the presbyters generally.
{171}
But in any case it is certain that the developement of the ministry
occurred on the principle of the apostolic succession. Those who were
to be ministers were the elect of the church in which they were to
minister: but they were authoritatively ordained to their office from
above, and by succession from the apostolic men. And such a principle
of ministerial authority appears to be not only historical, but also
most rational. For a continuous corporate unity was to be maintained
in a society which, as being catholic, must lack all such natural links
of connexion as are afforded by a common language or common race. And
how could such continuous corporate unity have been so well secured as
by a succession of persons whose function should be to maintain a
tradition, and whose ministerial authority should make them necessary
centres of the unity?
[1] And not as Dr. Robertson (Smith's _Dict. of Bible_, ed. ii. vol. i.
pt. ii. p. 951) suggests, to introduce a prayer to God, which is
resumed in iii. 14. The 'For this cause' which is repeated in iii. 14
is not nearly so significant as 'the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you
Gentiles,' which is taken up again in iv. 1.
[2] I have interpreted this word in the light of what is said in verse
16.
[3] Tit. iii. 5.
[4] Ps. lxviii. 18 (Delitzsch).
[5] I do not think St. Paul need refer to the descent into Hades. 'The
lower parts of the earth,' Is. xliv. 23, may also refer not to Hades
(see Delitzsch _in loco_) but to 'the earth beneath.'
[6] The 'filling all things' is, in the epistles to the Ephesians and
Colossians, the characteristic action of the exalted Christ and the
result of the reconciliation and atonement won. Cf. 1 Cor. xv. 24-28,
'That God may be all in all.'
[7] See Delitzsch's and Perowne's notes.
[8] Calvin, _in loc._
[9] Hil. _de Trin._ viii. 7-9. The last sentence is condensed.
[10] Vol. i. p. 317 (Longmans, 1895).
[11] 1 Thess. iv. 14.
[12] _In Ps._ lvi. i.
[13] It is one very noticeable feature of the recent Encyclical of Leo
XIII on the Unity of the Church ('satis cognitum') that it assumes that
'only a despotic monarch can secure to any society unity and strength.'
[14] Romans x. 9.
[15] For example, see Gal. i. 6-9.
[16] Acts xv. 23-29.
[17] Romans xiv. 56; cf. Phil. iii. 15-16.
[18] Cf. Hort, _Ecclesia_, p. 169, who brings out that _all_ members of
the local churches, better and worse, are regarded as members of the
universal Church. 'There is no evidence that St. Paul regarded
membership of the universal Church as invisible and exclusively
spiritual, and shared by only a limited number of the members of the
external Ecclesiae.' See also app. note E, p. 267.
[19] 1 Cor. xii. 13.
[20] Acts xix. 1-7.
[21] 1 Cor. x. 16, 17.
[22] See app. note E, p. 269.
[23] In ii. 20 and iii. 5, 'Apostles and prophets' are spoken of
together almost as one class included under one definite article. And
of course the apostle Paul remained also, what he is first called, a
prophet (Acts xiii. i). Apostles were also prophets; but not all
prophets were apostles. They can be, therefore, grouped apart as they
are here (iv. 11).
[24] 2 Tim. iv. 5.
[25] 1 Tim. iv. 14; 2 Tim. i. 6.
[26] Acts xiv. 23. This is interpreted by the phrase (Acts xx. 28)
'The Holy Ghost made you bishops.' Cf. Titus i. 5, 'I left thee ... to
appoint elders in every city.... For the bishop must be blameless.' I
assume here the _practical_ identity of bishops and presbyters, as Acts
xx. 28, Tit. i. 5-7, Acts xiv. 23 (with Phil. i. 1) seem to require.
But 'the presbyters' or the 'presbyterate' was the more general name
for the governing body of a church, and an apostle can therefore call
himself a presbyter or include himself in the presbyterate (1 Peter v.
1; 1 Tim. iv. 14), whereas he would hardly call himself a 'bishop.'
{172}
DIVISION II. CHAPTERS IV. 17-VI. 24.
_Doctrine and conduct._
[Sidenote: _Doctrine and conduct_]
Here the apostle, with a final 'therefore,' resuming the 'therefore' of
IV. i, passes without further delay to the entirely practical portion
of the epistle.
These 'therefores' are characteristic of St. Paul. They indicate his
deep sense of the vital and necessary connexion between the Christian
mode of living and the doctrines of Christian belief. Christian belief
is a mould fashioning human conduct by a constant and uniform pressure
into a characteristic type, or a set of forces urging it along certain
lines of movement. Thus when some point of Christian belief has been
expounded there follows a 'therefore' indicating the inevitable moral
consequence of such belief where it is intelligently and voluntarily
held. Of course the consequence does not follow of mechanical
necessity. The doctrine acts by an appeal to the will. 'I beseech you
{173} therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God'--so St. Paul makes
his appeal to the Romans, when he had given them his great exposition
of the doctrines of grace and justification[1]. When he has expounded
the doctrine of the resurrection to the Corinthians[2], he
concludes--'_Therefore_, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast,' &c. The
doctrine of the Epistle to the Colossians leads to two conclusions:
'mortify _therefore_' and 'put on _therefore_, as God's elect, holy and
beloved, a heart of compassion[3].' The Epistle to the Hebrews
contains similar moral appeals based on dogmatic statements.
'_Therefore_ let us give the more earnest heed.' 'Having _therefore_,
brethren, boldness by the blood of Jesus, let us draw near with a true
heart.' '_Therefore_ let us lay aside every weight[4].' These
'therefores,' I say, indicate a fundamental characteristic of
Christianity: it is a manner of living based upon a disclosure of
divine truth about God and His will, about man's nature and his sin,
about God's redemptive action and its methods and intentions.