St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition
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Title: St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition
Author: Charles Gore
Release date: April 17, 2010 [eBook #32016]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS: A PRACTICAL EXPOSITION ***
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)
§ 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
§ 2 (i. 15-23) St. Paul's prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
§ 3 (ii. 1-10) Sin and redemption . . . . . . . . . . . 89
§ 4 (ii. 11-22) Salvation in the Church . . . . . . . . . 102
§ 5 (iii) Paul the apostle of catholicity . . . . . 121
his second prayer . . . . . . . . . . . 133
§ 6 (iv. 1-16) The unity of the Church . . . . . . . . . 140
{x}
DIVISION II (iv. 17-vi. 24):
Doctrine and conduct . . . . . . . . . . 172
§ 1 (iv. 17-24) Christianity a new life . . . . . . . . . 178
§ 2 (iv. 25-32) The new life a corporate life . . . . . . 184
§ 3 (v. 1-14) The new life an imitation of God . . . . 192
and a life in the light . . . . . . . . 194
§ 4 (v. 15-21) The new life a buying up of an
opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
§ 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
§ 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].
St. Paul's first activity on arriving at Ephesus illustrates the stress
he laid on the gift of the Holy Ghost as the central characteristic of
{39} Christianity. He was brought in contact with the twelve imperfect
disciples who had been baptized only with John the Baptist's baptism,
and had not so much as heard whether the Holy Ghost was given. St.
Paul baptized them anew with Christian baptism, and bestowed upon them
the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of his hands[41]. Then it
is recorded how he began his preaching as usual with the Jews in the
synagogue. The Jews of Asia Minor were regarded by the Jews of
Jerusalem as corrupted and Hellenized[42]. But at any rate they
exhibited the same antagonism to the preaching of Christianity as their
stricter brethren. Thus St. Paul, when he had given them their chance,
abandoned their synagogue and established himself in the lecture-room
of Tyrannus, where he taught for two years and more[43]. And this
became the centre of an evangelization which, even if St. Paul himself
did not visit other Asiatic towns, yet spread by the agency of his
companions over the whole of the Roman {40} province of Asia--to the
churches of the Lycus, Colossae, Laodicea, Hierapolis, and probably to
the rest of the 'seven churches' to which St. John wrote in his
Apocalypse.
Ephesus was full of superstitions of all sorts as would be expected,
and St. Paul's miracles were such as would not unnaturally have led the
magicians to regard him as a greater master in their own craft. So
among others the Jewish chief priest Sceva's seven sons began to use
the central name of Paul's preaching as a new and most efficient
formula for exorcism. 'We adjure thee by Jesus whom Paul preaches.'
But it is frequently noticeable that St. Paul refused to allow himself
to use superstition as a handmaid of religion. The providential
disaster which befell these exorcists gave St. Paul an opportunity of
striking an effective blow where it was most needed against exorcism
and magic. The Christian converts came and confessed their
participation in the black arts, and burnt their books of incantations,
in spite of their value. The whole transaction must have impressed
vividly in the minds of the Ephesians the contrast between Christianity
and superstition.
St. Paul had already encountered opposition as well as success at
Ephesus, for when, writing {41} from Ephesus, he speaks to the
Corinthians[44] of having 'fought with beasts' there, the reference is
probably to what had befallen him in the earlier part of his residence
through the plots of the Jews; that long Epistle to the Corinthians can
hardly have been written _after_ the famous tumult recorded in the
Acts. But that tumult, raised by the manufacturers of the silver
shrines of Artemis, was of course the most important persecution which
befell St. Paul at Ephesus. The narrative of it[45] is exceedingly
instructive. We notice the friendliness of the Asiarchs, i.e. the
presidents of the provincial 'union' and priests of the imperial
worship, and the opinion of the town clerk, that St. Paul must be
acquitted of any insults to the religious beliefs of the Ephesians[46].
Christianity had not, it appears, yet excited the antipathy of the
religious or civil authorities of the Empire, but it had begun to
threaten the pockets of those who were concerned in supplying the needs
of the worshippers who thronged to the great {42} temple at Ephesus.
We need not inquire exactly how the little silver shrines of Artemis
were used; but they were much sought after, and their production gave
occupation to an important trade. The trade was threatened by the
spread of Christianity. The philosophers despised indeed the
idolatrous rites, but they despised also the people who practised them,
and had no hope or idea of converting them[47]. St. Paul was the first
teacher at Ephesus who touched the fears of the idol makers by bringing
a pure religion to the hearts of the ordinary people. Hence the tumult
against the teachers of the new religion, raised not by the civil or
religious authorities of Ephesus, but simply by the trade interest.
As soon as it was over St. Paul left Ephesus not to return there again.
But on his way back to Jerusalem he came not to Ephesus but to Miletus,
and sending for the Ephesian presbyters thither, he made them a
farewell speech[48], which is in conspicuous harmony with the features
of his later Epistle to the Ephesians. Already the doctrines of a
divine purpose or {43} counsel now revealed, of the Church in general
as the object of the divine self-sacrifice and love, and of the Holy
Ghost as accomplishing her sanctification and developing her structure,
appear to be prominent in his mind, and to have become familiar topics
with the Ephesian Christians. 'I shrank not from declaring unto you
the whole counsel of God. Take heed unto yourselves and to all the
flock, in the which the Holy Ghost hath made you bishops, to feed the
church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.... And now I
commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to
build you up, and to give you the inheritance among all them that are
sanctified.' These words from St. Paul's speech to the Ephesian
presbyters are in remarkable affinity with the teaching of our epistle.
v.
We have been assuming that this epistle was addressed to Ephesus, but
there are reasons to believe that it was not addressed to Ephesus only,
but rather generally to the churches of the Roman province of Asia, of
which Ephesus was the chief. The reasons for thinking this are {44}
partly internal to the epistle. St. Paul's personal relations to
individual Ephesian Christians must have been many and close, and we
know his habit of introducing personal allusions and greetings into his
epistles; but the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians is destitute of
them altogether, contrasting in this respect even with the Epistle to
the Colossians, written at the same time to a church which St. Paul
himself never visited. This would be a most inexplicable fact if the
Epistle to the Ephesians were really a letter to this one particular
church. More than this, St. Paul speaks in several passages in a way
which implies that he and those he wrote to were dependent on what they
had heard for mutual knowledge--'having heard of the faith in the Lord
Jesus that is among you'--'if so be ye have heard of the dispensation
of the grace of God which was given me to youward.' Such language is
much more natural if he is writing to others besides the Ephesians.
And this evidence internal to the substance of the epistle coincides
with evidence of the manuscripts. Very early manuscripts, some of
those which remain to us and some which are reported to us by primitive
scholars, omit the words 'in Ephesus' from St. Paul's opening greeting
'To the saints {45} and faithful brethren which are [in Ephesus].'
This fact, coupled with the absence of personal reminiscences in the
epistle, has suggested the idea that it was in fact a circular letter
to the saints and faithful brethren at a number of churches of the
Roman province of Asia, and that where the words 'in Ephesus' stand in
our text, there was perhaps a blank left in the epistle as St. Paul
dictated it, which was intended to be filled up in each church where it
was read. This is a view which has to a certain extent a special
interest for us in Westminster because, if it was first suggested by
the Genevan commentator Beza, it was elaborated by Archbishop Ussher,
who is identified with our Abbey by residence and by the memorable
record of his entombment in our abbey church with Anglican rites by the
command of Cromwell. It follows naturally from such a view that when
St. Paul writes to the Colossians and bids them send their letter to
Laodicea, and read that which comes from Laodicea[49], the letter which
they should expect from Laodicea would be none other than the so-called
Epistle to the Ephesians which was to be read by them as well as the
other Asiatic Christians.
{46}
vi.
Enough perhaps has now been said to give a general idea of the
conditions under which this great epistle was written; and the topics
of the epistle have been already indicated. Its central theme is that
of the great catholic society, the renovated Israel, the Church of God.
In this catholic brotherhood St. Paul sees the realization of an
age-long purpose of God, the fulfilment of a long-secret counsel, now
at last disclosed to His chosen prophets. He sees nothing incongruous
in finding in the yet young and limited societies of Christian
disciples the consummation of the divine purpose for the world, for
these societies represent the breaking down of all barriers and the
bringing of all men to unity with one another through a recovered unity
with God, through Christ and in His Spirit. Therefore the work which
the Church is to accomplish is nothing less than a universal work, a
work not even limited to humanity; it is the bringing back of all
things visible or invisible into that unity which lies in God's
original purpose of creation. St. Paul long ago had spoken to the
Corinthians of a spiritual wisdom which they were not yet ready to
listen {47} to. But now St. Paul seems to feel--for reasons which we
have tried in part to interpret--that the time has come when all the
depth and richness of the divine secret may be spoken out. No wonder
that the subject stirs his imagination and gives to his whole tone an
uplifting and a glory without parallel in his other writings. And yet
it would be altogether false to attach to this epistle any associations
such as are commonly connected with flights of imagination or the
language of rhapsody. For the epistle has the most direct bearing on
matters of practical life. If St. Paul glorifies the Christian ideal
it is in order that all that weight of glory may be brought to bear
upon the Asiatic Christians to force them to see that their personal
and social conduct must have a purity, a liberality, a wisdom, a love,
a power, commensurate with the greatness of those motives which are
acting upon them in their new Christian state.
[1] The Committee of the Conference of Bishops at Lambeth, 1897, in a
report commended by the bishops as a body to the 'consideration of all
Christian people,' write: 'Your committee do not hold that a true view
of Holy Scripture forecloses any legitimate question about the literary
character or literal accuracy of different parts or statements of the
Old Testament.'
[2] Acts xxiv 14; xxvi. 6, 7, 22, 23; 2 Tim i. 3.
[3] Eph. ii. 12-19.
[4] 1 Thess. ii. 14-16.
[5] Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans.
[6] See app. note C, p. 257.
[7] Acts ix. 20; 1 Cor. viii. 6; Rom. ix. 5; 2 Cor. viii. 9; Gal. iv. 4.
[8] Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, Philemon.
[9] Col. ii. 18: 'by a voluntary humility (or 'taking delight in
humility') and worshipping of the angels.'
[10] See i. 13-20; ii. 2, 3, 9-23; iii. 11. Cf. i. 27-28.
[11] Hort, _Judaistic Christianity_ (Macmillan, 1894), p. 125.
[12] Cf. app. note C, p. 257.
[13] Cf. Hort, _Prolegomena to Romans and Ephesians_ (Macmillan, 1895),
p. 100.
[14] Col. iv. 2-4; Philemon 22; Phil. i. 12-14.
[15] Ramsay, _Paul the Traveller_ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1895), pp. 130
ff.
[16] Ramsay, _l.c._ p. 132.
[17] See Mommsen, _Provinces of Roman Empire_ (Eng. trans.), i. 344
ff.; Lightfoot, _Ign. and Polyc._ iii. pp. 404 ff.
[18] App. note A, p. 251.
[19] Tatian, _Ad Graecos_, 28, 32.
[20] Ramsay, _l.c._ p. 135.
[21] Rom. xiii. 1-7; cf. ii. Thess. ii. 6.
[22] 1 Tim. ii. 1, 2.
[23] Acts xxv. 12.
[24] Ramsay, _l.c._ p. 147.
[25] Lightfoot, _Galatians_, 'St. Paul and Seneca,' pp. 287 ff.
[26] See app. note B, p. 253.
[27] 'The zeal of its inhabitants for philosophy and general culture is
such that they have surpassed even Athens and Alexandria and all other
cities where schools of philosophy can be mentioned. And its
pre-eminence in this respect is so great because there the students are
all townspeople, and strangers do not readily settle there.' Strabo,
xiv. v. 13. I do not suppose that St. Paul received any formal
education in Greek schools at Tarsus. But I think we must assume that
at some period St. Paul had sufficient contact with Gentile educated
opinion, whether at Tarsus or elsewhere, to be acquainted with
widely-spread religious and philosophical tendencies.
[28] Cf. Hort, _Christian Ecclesia_, p. 143.
[29] Acts xix. 21.
[30] Rom. i. 15, 16.
[31] Acts xxiii. 11.
[32] Acts xxvii. 24.
[33] Acts xxviii. 15.
[34] Acts xx. 29, 30.
[35] Among other articles of commerce, tents made in Ephesus had a
special reputation, and St. Paul and Aquila had special opportunities
there for the exercise of their trade. Acts xx. 34.
[36] Strabo. xiv. 1, 25.
[37] Migne, _P. L._ xxvi. 441.
[38] Acts xvi. 6-10.
[39] Acts xviii. 19.
[40] Hort, _Prolegomena_, p. 83.
[41] Acts xix. 1-7.
[42] Ramsay, _l.c._ p. 143.
[43] 'From the fifth to the tenth hour' (11 a.m. to 4 p.m.), an early
addition to the text of the Acts tells us; i. e. after work hours, when
the school would naturally be vacant and St. Paul would have finished
his manual labour at tent-making. Ramsay, _l.c._ p. 276.
[44] 1 Cor. xv. 32.
[45] Acts xix. 23 ff.
[46] Prof. Ramsay asserts that instead of 'robbers of temples' (Acts
xix. 37), we should translate 'disloyal to the established government.'
_l.c._ p. 282. But the word is used in the former sense in special
connexion with Ephesus by Strabo, xiv. 1, 22, and Pseudo-Heracleitus,
_Ep._ 7, p. 64 (Bernays).
[47] See app. note B, p. 253, on the contemporary 'letters of
Heracleitus.'
[48] Acts xx. 17 ff.
[49] Col. iv. 16.
{48}
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS
CHAPTER I. 1-2.
Salutation.
[Sidenote: _Salutation_]
St. Paul begins this, in common with his other epistles, with a brief
salutation to a particular church or group of churches, in which is
expressed in summary the authority he has for writing to them, the
light in which he regards them, and the central wish for them which he
has in his heart.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, to the saints
which are at Ephesus, and the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you
and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Here, then, we have three compressed thoughts.
1. The particular person Paul writes this letter because he is not
only a believer in Christ but also an 'apostle of Christ Jesus through
the will of God.' The word apostle is a more or less general word for
a delegate, as when St. Paul {49} speaks of the 'apostles (or
messengers) of the churches[1];' but by an apostle in its highest
sense, 'an apostle of Jesus Christ,' St. Paul meant one of those,
originally twelve in number, who had received personally from the risen
Christ a particular commission to represent Him to the world. This
particular and personal commission he claimed to have received, in
common with the twelve, though later than they--at the time of his
conversion. 'Am I not an apostle?' he cries. 'Have I not seen Jesus
our Lord[2]?' 'He appeared to me also as unto one born out of due
time[3].' 'In nothing was I behind the very chiefest apostles[4].'
And as his claim to the apostolate was challenged by his Judaizing
opponents he had to insist upon it, to insist that it is not a
commission from or through Peter and the other apostles, or dependent
upon them for its exercise, but a direct commission, like theirs, from
the Head of the Church Himself. He is, he writes to the Galatians,
'Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor (like those subsequently ordained
by himself or the other apostles, like a Timothy, or a Titus, or like
the later clergy) through man,' but directly through, {50} as well as
from, the risen Jesus whom his eyes had seen, and His eternal Father[5].
It is surely a consolation to us of the Church of England, who belong
to a church subject to constant attack on the score of apostolic
character, to remember that St. Paul's apostolate was attacked with
some excuse, and that he had to spend a great deal of effort in
vindicating it, and was in no way ashamed of doing so, because he
perceived that a certain aspect of the life and truth of the Church was
bound up with its recognition.
2. And he writes to the Asiatic Christians as 'saints' and 'faithful
in Christ Jesus.' 'Saint' does not mean primarily what we understand
by it--one pre-eminent in moral excellence; but rather one consecrated
or dedicated to the service and use of God. The idea of consecration
was common in all religions, and frequently, as in the Asiatic worships
at Ephesus and elsewhere, carried with it associations quite the
opposite of those which we assign to holiness. But the special
characteristic of the Old Testament religion had been the righteous and
holy character which it ascribed to Jehovah. Consecration to Him,
therefore, is seen to require {51} personal holiness, and this
requirement is only deepened in meaning under the Gospel. But still
'the saints' means primarily the 'consecrated ones'; and all Christians
are therefore saints--'called as saints' rather than 'called to be
saints,' in virtue of their belonging to the consecrated body into
which they were baptized; saints who because of their consecration are
therefore bound to live holily[6]. 'The saints' in the Acts of the
Apostles[7] is simply a synonym for the Church. St. Paul then writes
to the Asiatic Christians as 'consecrated' and 'faithful in Christ
Jesus,' i. e. believing members incorporated by baptism; and he writes
to them for no other purpose than to make them understand what is
implied in their common consecration and common faith.
3. And his good wishes for them he sums up in the terms 'Grace and
peace in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' Grace is that free
and unmerited favour or good-will of God towards man which takes shape
in a continuous outflow of the very riches of God's {52} inmost being
and spirit into the life of man through Christ; and peace of heart,
Godward and manward, 'central peace subsisting at the heart of endless
agitation' is that by the possession and bestowal of which Christianity
best gives assurance of its divine origin.
We notice that these divine gifts are ascribed to 'God our Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ.' St. Paul does not generally call Christ by the
title God, partly, no doubt, from long engrained habit of language, but
partly also because nothing was more important than that no language
should be used in the first propagation of Christianity which could
give excuse for confusing the Christian belief in the threefold Name
with the worship of many gods. But, from the first, Christ, in St.
Paul's language, is exalted as Lord into a simply divine supremacy, and
associated most intimately with all the most exclusively divine
operations in the world without, and in the heart of man within.
Moreover, St. Paul refuses absolutely to tolerate any association of
other, however exalted, beings with Christ in lordship or mediatorship,
all created beings whatever being simply the work of His hands[8].
There remains, therefore, no room to {53} question that St. Paul
believed Christ to be strictly divine: to be Himself no creature, no
highest archangel, but one who, with the Holy Spirit alone, is truly
proper and essential to the divine being; and it affords us, therefore,
no manner of surprise that from time to time St. Paul actually calls
Christ God, as in the Epistle to the Romans 'who is over all, God
blessed for ever[9],' and probably in the Epistle to Titus 'our great
God and saviour Jesus Christ[10].'
[1] 2 Cor. viii. 23.
[2] 1 Cor. ix. 1.
[3] 1 Cor. xv. 8.
[4] 2 Cor. xii. 11.
[5] Gal. i. 1.
[6] Tertullian, _de An._ 39, rightly interprets 1 Cor. vii. 14, 'now
are they [the children of whose parents one was a Christian] holy,' as
meaning, now are they already consecrated and marked out for baptismal
sanctification by the prerogative of their birth.
[7] Acts ix. 13, 33.
[8] Cf. 1 Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 16.
[9] Rom. ix. 5.
[10] Tit. ii. 13.
{54}
DIVISION I. CHAPTERS I. 3-IV. 17.
§ I. CHAPTER i. 3-14.
_St. Paul's leading thoughts._
[Sidenote: _St. Paul's leading thoughts_]
Before we read the opening paragraph of St. Paul's letter we had better
review the great thoughts which are prominent in his mind as he writes.
My ambition is to make my readers feel that ideas which, because they
have become Christian commonplaces or because they have been blackened
by controversy, have by this time a ring of unreality about them, or of
theological remoteness, or of controversial bitterness, are in fact, if
we will 'consider them anew,' ideas the most important, the most
practical, and the most closely adapted to the moral needs of the plain
man.
i.
St. Paul writes to the Christians as 'in Christ,' 'in the beloved,'
'blessed with all spiritual benediction in the heavenly places in
Christ,' 'adopted {55} as sons through Jesus Christ.' We are all of us
perfectly familiar with the idea of Christ as, so to speak, a personal
and individual redeemer, as the holy and righteous one, the beloved and
accepted Son, who is risen from the dead and exalted to supreme
sovereignty in heaven. But popular theology has not been quite so
familiar with the idea that Christ was and is all this in our manhood,
not simply because He was God as well as man (true as this is); but
because as man He was anointed with the Holy Spirit of God: that it was
in the power of that Spirit that He lived His life of holiness and
wrought His miracles of power: that it was in the power of that Spirit
that He taught and suffered and died and was glorified. Nor has
popular Christianity been familiar with the resulting truth: that by
that divine Spirit which possessed Him as man, the life of Christ is
extended beyond Himself to take in those who believe in Him, and make
them members of 'the church which is his body.' Yet, in fact, this
extension is implied even in the name Christ. The king Messiah, the
Christ of the Old Testament, is but the central figure of a whole
kingdom associated with Him, and all the characteristic phrases for
Christ in the New Testament {56} express the same idea. He is the
'first-born among many brethren[1]'; He is the 'first fruits[2]' of a
great harvest; He is the 'head of the body[3]'; He is the 'bridegroom'
inseparable from 'the bride[4]'; He is the second Adam, that is, head
of a new humanity[5]. Thus if the heavens closed around the ascending
Christ, and hid Him from view, they opened again around the descending
Spirit, descending into the heart of the Christian society to
perpetuate Christ's life and presence there. This historical ascent
and descent only embody in unmistakable facts the truth that the
life-giving Spirit, who made the manhood of Christ so satisfying to our
moral aspirations, is also and with the same reality, though not with
the same perfection or freedom, living and working in that great
society which He founded to represent Him on earth. Because this
society is possessed by the Spirit, therefore it lives in the same life
as Christ, it and all its individual members are 'in Christ.' In one
place, indeed, St. Paul includes the Church, the body, with its head
under the one name 'the Christ[6].'
[Sidenote: _Life in Christ_]
It is because the Church thus shares Christ's {57} life that it is
already spoken of as sharing His exaltation. We 'sit together in the
heavenly places with Christ' for no other reason than because, though
we are on earth, our life is bound up invisibly but in living reality
with the life of the glorified Christ, and we have in Him free access
into the courts of heaven. For this reason again, as the fulness of
the divine attributes dwells in the glorified Christ--all the fulness
of the Godhead bodily, so the same fulness is attributed, ideally at
least, to the Church too. It too is 'the fulness of him that filleth
all in all.' To St. Paul's mind there is one true human life in which
men are one with one another because they are at one with God. That
true human life is Christ's life, which He once lived on earth, and
which He is at present living in the glory of God, and which is
fulfilled with all the completeness of the divine life itself. But
that true human life is also shared by each and every member of His
Church, without exception, without reference to race or learning, or
wealth, or sex, or age.
I have said that this is ideally the case. This identification of
Christ with the Church, that is to say, is not yet fully realized. The
Church is not yet glorified, not yet morally perfected nor {58} full
grown in the divine attributes. Its particular members may be living
deceitful and dishonourable lives. This is to say in other words that
God's work in 'redemption of his own possession,' His acquirement of a
people to Himself, is not yet complete. The purchase-money is paid,
but it has not yet taken full effect. But redemption is an
accomplished fact in the sense that all the conditions of the final
success are already there. The ideal may be freely realized in every
Christian because he has received the 'earnest' or pledge of the
Spirit, the pledge, that is, of all that is to be accomplished in him.
And this Spirit was received by each Christian at a particular and
assignable moment. We know what stress St. Paul laid at Ephesus on
proper Christian baptism and the laying on of hands which followed
it[7]. By baptism men were spoken of as incorporated into Christ.
With the laying on of hands was associated the bestowal of the Spirit.
Henceforth a Christian had no need to ask for the Spirit as if He were
not already bestowed upon him; he had only to bring into practical use
spiritual forces and powers which the divine bounty had already put at
his disposal.
{59}
If we compare this set of ideas with those that have been current in
our popular theology, we shall find that the main difference lies in
this, that here the stress is laid on the work of Christ _in_ man by
His Spirit, while the theology which has been popular among us has laid
the stress rather on the 'vicarious' work of Christ outside us and
_for_ us, by making a propitiation for our sins. Now in fact this
latter doctrine is an unmistakable part of St. Paul's teaching in this
epistle and elsewhere. And all the mistakes to which it has led are
due to its not having been kept in proper relation to the set of ideas
which I have just been endeavouring to expound. 'Christ for us,' the
sacrifice of propitiation has been separated from 'Christ in us,' our
new life; whereas really the sacrifice was but a necessary removal of
an obstacle, preliminary to the new life.
It was a necessary preliminary that Christ should put us on a fresh
basis, should enable us to break from our past and make a fresh start
in the divine acceptance. This He did by making atonement for our
sins, offering as a propitiatory sacrifice His life, even to the
shedding of His blood, that the Father might be enabled to forgive our
sins. This transaction is always {60} represented in the New Testament
as being the act of the Father as well as of the Son, for the divine
persons are not separable--neither an act by which the Son forces the
unwilling hand of the Father, nor an act in which the Father lays an
undeserved burden upon an unwilling Son--and the idea of propitiation
seems to St. Paul, as indeed it has seemed to men generally, a
thoroughly natural idea. Only in one place does he make any suggestion
as to why such a preliminary sacrifice of propitiation was necessary.
There[8] he seems to find the moral necessity for it in the fact that
through long ages God's 'forbearance' had left men to work through
their own resources and so to find out their need of Him. 'He suffered
all nations to walk in their own ways.' He 'winked at' or 'overlooked
times of ignorance.' He 'passed over sins[9].' This was part of His
educative process. One result of it, however, was a lowering of the
moral ideas entertained of the divine character. Thus God's
righteousness, which means holiness and compassion combined, needed to
be declared especially at that crisis of the divine dealings when God
was coming out towards {61} men, whom He had educated by His seeming
absence to feel their need of Him, with the offer of His love. The
free bounty of His mercy must not be misunderstood as if it were
indifference or laxity about moral wickedness. Thus the proclamation
of His compassion must be associated with something which would make
unmistakable the severity of His holiness and His moral claim. This
twofold end is what Christ accomplishes. Thus if He is the revealer of
the compassion of the Father, He also vindicates the divine character
by a great act of moral reparation, made in man's name and on man's
behalf, to the divine holiness which our sins have ignored and
outraged. This great act of reparation is consummated in the
bloodshedding of the Christ. The sacrifice of consummate obedience is
carried to its extreme point and accepted in its perfection. God in
Christ receives from man, and that publicly, a perfect reparation: an
acknowledgement without fault or drawback: a perfect sacrifice. Now
God can forgive the sins of men freely and without moral risk, if they
come to Him in the name of Christ. To come to God in the name of
Christ means, of course, to come in conscious moral identification of
one's self with Christ, with {62} His Spirit and His motives. The
faith which simply accepts the bounty of forgiveness through Christ's
sacrifice, must pass necessarily into the faith which corresponds
obediently with the divine love. Thus the purpose of the atonement is
never expressed as being that we should be let off punishment, or
simply that we should be forgiven, but rather that, being forgiven, we
should be united to Christ in His life[10]. The propitiation which
Christ offered is only the removal of a preliminary obstacle to our
fellowship with Him in the life of God. The work of Christ 'for us'
has no meaning or efficacy till it has begun to pass into the work of
Christ 'in us' by His assimilating Spirit. It was only as baptized
into Christ and sharing His Spirit that Christians could accept the
forgiveness of their sins through the shedding of Christ's blood. The
sacrament of new life is also the sacrament of absolution, and the
washing away of sins. Nothing in fact can be plainer in this Epistle
to the Ephesians than that 'the redemption through Christ's blood, even
the forgiveness of trespasses[11]' was only a preliminary removal of
{63} obstacles to that fellowship with God in Christ by His Spirit
which is the secret of the Church.
ii.
[Sidenote: _Predestination_]
St. Paul's mind is full of the idea of predestination. He delights to
contemplate the eternal purpose of God as lying behind what seems to us
the painfully slow method by which divine results are actually won.
What age-long processes have been necessary both among the Jews and
among the Gentiles before this young church, this divine society of man
with God has become possible! What slow working through 'times of
ignorance,' what infinite delay in the divine forbearance--as we should
now say, what age-long processes of developement! But St. Paul is
quite certain that the result is no afterthought, no accident of the
moment; but that from end to end of the universe there reaches a method
of the divine wisdom, and that here in the catholic church it has
arrived at an issue. 'God chose us in Christ before the foundation of
the world that we should be holy and without blemish (as spotless
victims) before him in love: having foreordained us unto adoption as
sons through Jesus Christ unto himself.' 'Fore-ordained {64} to be a
heritage according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after
the counsel of his will.' So he asseverates and repeats and insists.
There are, we may say, two ideas commonly associated with
predestination which St. Paul gives us no warrant for asserting. The
one is the predestination of individuals to eternal loss or
destruction. That God should create any single individual with the
intention of eternally destroying or punishing him is a horrible idea,
and, without prying into mysteries, we may say boldly that there is no
warrant for it in the Old or New Testaments. God is indeed represented
as predestinating men, like Jacob and Esau, to a higher or lower place
in the order of the world or the church. There are 'vessels' made by
the divine potter to purposes of 'honour,' and 'vessels' made to
purposes (comparatively) of 'dishonour[12]': there are more honourable
and less honourable limbs of the body[13]. But this does not prejudice
the eternal prospects of those who in this world hold the less
advantageous posts. With God is no respect of persons. Again God is
represented as predestinating men to moral hardness of heart where such
hardness is a judgement on previous wilfulness. Thus {65} men may be
predestined to temporary rejection of God, as in St. Paul's mind the
majority of the contemporary Jews were. That was their judgement, and
their punishment[14]. It was however not God's first intention for
them nor His last. Those chapters of St. Paul[15] which contain the
most terrible things about the present reprobation of the Jews contain
also the most emphatic repudiation of the idea that moral reprobation
was God's first idea for them, or His last. 'The gifts and calling of
God,' that is, His good gifts and calling, says St. Paul, speaking of
the now 'reprobate' Jews, are 'without repentance[16].' God's present
reprobation of them is only a process towards a fresh opportunity.
'God hath shut up all into disobedience that he might have mercy upon
all[17].' Men may baffle the original divine purpose, and that, so far
as their own blessedness is concerned, even finally: they may become
finally 'reprobate': but the divine purpose for them at its root
remains a purpose for good. 'God will have all men to be saved and to
come to the knowledge of the truth[18].'
{66}
And once again, the idea of a predestination for good, taking effect
necessarily and irrespective of men's co-operation, is an idea which
has been intruded unjustifiably into St. Paul's thought. It exalts his
whole being to consider that he is co-operating with God, and that the
conditions under which he lives represent a divine purpose with which
he is called to work. It is this which makes him feel it is worth
while working: it is this which nerves and sustains him in all
sufferings, and enlarges his horizon in all restraints: but he never
suggests that it does not lie within the mysterious power of his own
will to withdraw himself from co-operation with God. It is at least
conceivable to him that he should himself be rejected[19]. In that
famous list of external forces which he feels are unable to tear him
from the grasp of the divine love, his own will is not included[20],
nor could be included without gross inconsistency.
Beyond all question there is here one problem which remains for all
time unsolved and insoluble--the relation of divine fore-knowledge[21]
{67} to human freedom. If we men are free to choose, how can it be, or
can it really be the case at all, that God knows beforehand actually
how each individual will behave in each particular case? This is a
problem which we cannot fathom any more than we can fathom any of the
problems which require for their solution an experience of what an
absolute and eternal consciousness can mean. But the problem belongs
to metaphysics. It inheres in the idea of eternity and God. The Bible
neither creates it nor solves it. We may say it does not touch it.
Certainly when St. Paul dwells upon the thought of divine
predestination he dwells upon it in order to emphasize that, through
all the vicissitudes of the world's history, a divine purpose runs; and
especially that God works out His universal purposes through specially
selected agents 'his elect,' on whom His choice rests for special ends
in accordance with an eternal design and intention. And the sense of
co-operating with an eternal purpose of God inspires and strengthens
him. For God will not drop His work by the way. Whom He did foreknow
or mark out beforehand for His divine purposes, them He also
foreordained or predestinated to sonship, and in due time called into
the number {68} of His elect, and justified them, that is, pardoned
their sins and gave them a new standing-ground in Christ, and glorified
or will glorify them by the gradual operation of His grace[22]. The
steps or moments of the divine action recognized in the Epistle to the
Romans are practically the same as those alluded to in the Epistle to
the Ephesians. There also is the eternal choice, and the
predestination to sonship, and at a particular time the call into the
Church, and the justification or remission of sins through the blood of
Christ, and the gradual promotion through sanctification to glory. And
the moral fruit of contemplating God's eternal purpose for His elect,
and the stages of His work upon them, is to be cheerful confidence of a
right sort. God will not drop them by the way, nor the work which they
are 'called' to accomplish. 'God who hath begun a good work will
perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ[23].' Wherever St. Paul
recognizes a movement towards good in the single soul or in the world,
he knows that it is no accidental or passing phase: it has its roots in
the eternal will, and unless we resist it in wilful obstinacy, the
eternal will shall at last {69} carry it on to perfection. 'There
shall never be one lost good.'
It is not out of place to notice in this connexion how closely akin is
St. Paul's thought to the modern philosophy of evolution. Only to St.
Paul the slow process of cosmic or human evolution is in no kind of
opposition to the idea of divine design.
iii.
[Sidenote: _The elect_]
This predestinated body, the Church, is what in another word St. Paul
calls the 'elect' or 'chosen.' The idea of election has had a very
false turn given to it, partly through mistakes which have been already
alluded to, partly because the idea of election has been separated from
another idea with which in the Bible it is most closely associated, the
idea of a universal purpose to which the elect minister. No thought
can be more prominent in the Old Testament than the thought that some
men out of multitudes have been chosen by God to be in a special
relation of intimacy with Him. 'You only have I known, O Israel, of
all the families of the earth.' But this election to special knowledge
of God, and special spiritual opportunity, {70} carries with it a
corresponding responsibility. It is no piece of favouritism on God's
part. The greater our opportunity the more is required of us. 'You
only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore will I
visit upon you all your iniquities[24].' The fact is that the
principle of inequality in capacity and opportunity runs through the
whole world both in individuals and in societies. A great genius or a
great nation has special privileges and opportunities, but also, in the
sight of God who judges men according to their opportunities, special
responsibilities. But also (and this is by far the most important
point) the special vocation of every elect individual or body is for
the sake of others[25]. It is God's method to work through the few
upon the many. That is the law of ministry which binds all the world
of strong and weak, of rich and poor, of learned and ignorant, into
one. Thus Abraham had been chosen alone, but it was that, through his
seed, all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Israel was
exclusively the people of God, but it was in order that all nations
should learn from them at last the word of God. The apostles were {71}
the first 'elect' in Christ with a little Jewish company. 'We'--so St.
Paul speaks of the Jewish Christians--'we who had before hoped in
Christ.' But it was to show the way to all the Gentiles ('ye also, who
have heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation,') who
were also to constitute 'God's own possession' and His 'heritage.' The
purpose to be realized is a universal one: it is the re-union of man
with man, as such, by being all together reunited to God in one body.
And this idea is to have application even beyond the bounds of
humanity. Unity is the principle of all things as God created the
world. 'In Christ,' St. Paul writes to the Colossians, 'all things
consist' or 'hold together in one system[26].' It is only sin, whether
in man or in the dimly-known spiritual world which lies beyond, which
has spoiled this unity, and in separating the creatures from God has
separated them from one another. And the Church of the reconciliation
is God's elect body to represent a divine purpose of restoration far
wider than itself--extending in fact to all creation. It is the divine
purpose, with a view to 'a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to
sum up' or 'bring together again in unity' all things in {72} Christ;
the things in the heaven, the dim spiritual forces of which we have
only glimpses, and the things upon the earth which we know so much
better.
This great and rich idea of the election of the Church as a special
body to fulfil a universal purpose of recovery, cannot be expressed
better than in the very ancient prayer which forms part of the paschal
ceremonies of the Latin liturgy. 'O God of unchangeable power and
eternal light, look favourably on Thy whole Church, that wonderful and
sacred mystery, and by the tranquil operation of Thy perpetual
providence, carry out the work of man's salvation; and let the whole
world feel and see that things which were cast down are being raised
up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and all things
are returning to perfection through Him, from whom they took their
origin, even through our Lord Jesus Christ.'
iv.
[Sidenote: _The divine secret disclosed_]
This universal reconciliation through a catholic church was God's
eternal purpose, but it was kept secret from the ages and the
generations, only at last to be disclosed to His {73} apostles and
prophets. The word 'mystery' in the New Testament means mostly a
divine secret which has now been disclosed. Just as the secret of
Nebuchadnezzar's dream, i.e. the purpose of God in the then order of
the world, was imparted to Daniel, so now the great disclosure of the
divine mystery or secret has been made, primarily indeed to apostles
and prophets, but through them to the whole body of the faithful. The
faithful must of course begin by receiving that simplest spiritual
nourishment which is milk for babes. They are to welcome the divine
forgiveness of their sins in Christ, and the gift of new life through
Him in their baptism and the laying-on of hands. They are to be taught
the rudimentary truths and moral lessons which are the first principles
of the oracles of Christ. But they are not to stop with this. They
are, and they are all of them without exception[27], intended to grow
up to the full apprehension of the wisdom of the 'perfect' or perfectly
initiated. They are to dwell upon the divine secret, now revealed, of
God's purpose for the universe through the church till their whole
heart and intellect and imagination is enlightened and enriched by it.
{74}
v.
[Sidenote: _It is all of grace_]
And is the greatness of this exaltation and knowledge vouchsafed to the
Church to be a renewed occasion of pride--that spiritual pride, the
fatal results of which had already become apparent through the
rejection of the Jews? No: unless through a complete mistake, the very
opposite must be the result. The strength of human pride, as St. Paul
had seen long ago, lay in the idea that man could have merit of his
own, face to face with God: could have good works which were his own
and not God's, and which gave him a claim upon God. That Jewish
doctrine of merit[28] had been convicted of utter falsity in St. Paul's
own spiritual experience. He had found himself brought to acknowledge,
like any sinner of the Gentiles, his simple dependence upon the divine
compassion for forgiveness and acceptance. This spiritual experience
of St. Paul was only the realizing through one channel of what is, in
fact, an elementary truth about human nature. The idea of human
independence is demonstrably a false idea. As a matter of fact, man
draws his life, physical and spiritual, from {75} sources beyond
himself--from the one source, God. In constant dependence on God he
lives necessarily from moment to moment, whether to breathe, or think,
or will. The freedom of will which he has is not really originative or
creative power, but a capacity of voluntary correspondence with what is
given him from beyond himself. In that power of correspondence, or
refusal to correspond, man's liberty begins and ends. He creates
nothing. It is not that man does something and then God does the rest.
The truth is that when we track man's good action to its root in his
will, we find for certain that God has been beforehand with him. The
good he does is in correspondence with moral and physical laws and
forces of the universe, or, in other words, with divine powers and
purposes lent and suggested to him. To attempt independence of God, to
have schemes and plans absolutely one's own, is to work arbitrarily and
ignorantly, and ultimately to fail and to know that one has failed.
Thus men, when they realize the facts of their condition, must depend,
and rejoice to depend, wholly upon God as for forgiveness where they
have done wrong, so also for suggestion and power that they may do
anything aright. There is {76} then no room for human pride. It is a
mistake. We come back to recognize, what St. Paul realized in his own
deep spiritual experience and taught the Church at the beginning.
Whatever is good in the world is all of divine initiation and of divine
grace. It is all, not to our glory, but (as St. Paul three times
repeats in the opening paragraphs of our epistle) 'to the praise of his
glory,' or 'to the praise of the glory of his grace which he freely
bestows on us' out of His pure love and goodwill.
[Sidenote: _St. Paul's leading thoughts_]
These are the great leading thoughts which are in St. Paul's mind as he
begins to write to the Asiatic Christians. His heart, his imagination,
his intellect is full of the thought of the catholic society as it
exists in Christ, the extension of His life; of this society as the
outcome of an eternal and slow-working purpose of God; of this society,
as serving universal divine ends for humanity and for the universe; of
this society, as affording a sphere in which all men's faculties may be
enlightened and delighted with the depth and largeness of the divine
purpose; while his whole being is kept, safe from all the delusions of
pride, in continual and conscious dependence upon divine grace. {77}
With these thoughts reflected in our minds we shall find that we have
the main clue to the whole of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and more
particularly to all the words of the opening chapter, which St. Paul
begins with a great ascription of praise to God for the blessing of the
Church.
Blessed _be_ the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath
blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly _places_ in
Christ: even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love: having
foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto
himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of
the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved:
in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he made to
abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us
the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he
purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum
up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon
the earth; in him, _I say_, in whom also we were made a heritage,
having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who worketh
all things after the counsel of his will; to the end that we should be
unto the praise of his glory, we who had before hoped in Christ: in
whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your
salvation,--in whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy
Spirit of promise, which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the
redemption of _God's_ own possession, unto the praise of his glory.
[1] Rom. viii. 29.
[2] 1 Cor. xv. 23.
[3] Eph. iv. 15, 16.
[4] Eph. v. 32; Rev. xxi. 9.
[5] 1 Cor. xv. 45; Rom. v. 12-19.
[6] 1 Cor. xii. 12.
[7] Acts xix. 1-7.
[8] Rom. iii. 24-26. I have tried to develope St. Paul's hint.
[9] Rom. iii. 25; Acts xiv. 16; Acts xvii. 30.
[10] The earliest and simplest expression of the matter is that in St.
Paul's earliest epistle (1 Thess. v. 10), Christ 'died for us ... that
we should live together with him.'
[11] Eph. i. 7; cf. ii. 13 ff.
[12] Rom. ix. 21.
[13] 1 Cor. xii. 22 ff.
[14] Cf. St. Matt. xiii. 13-15; St. John xii. 39, 40. We are not (Rom.
ix. 17) told _why_ Pharaoh was brought out on the stage of history as
an example of God's hardening judgement. But no doubt there was a
moral reason.
[15] Rom. ix-xi.
[16] Rom. xi. 29.
[17] Rom. xi. 33.
[18] 1 Tim. ii. 4.
[19] 1 Cor. ix. 27.
[20] Rom. viii. 38, 39
[21] I am using the word here not in its Bible sense, for in the Bible
God is said to 'know' men in the sense of fixing His choice or approval
upon them; and to 'foreknow' is therefore to approve or choose
beforehand, as suitable instruments for a divine purpose. I am using
the word in its ordinary sense.
[22] Rom. viii. 28-30.
[23] Phil. i. 6.
[24] Amos iii. 2.
[25] On the Jewish idea of election, cf. app. note C, p. 261.
[26] Col. i. 1.
[27] Col. i. 28.
[28] See app. note C, p. 257.
{78}
DIVISION I. § 2. CHAPTER I. 15-23.
_St. Paul's Prayer._
St. Paul follows up this first expression of the great thoughts that
fill his mind with a deep and comprehensive thanksgiving for that large
measure of correspondence with the divine purpose which is reported
from the Asiatic churches, and with a prayer for their full
enlightenment in heart and intellect. He prays that they may rise to
the true science of what their Christian calling, as fellow-inheritors
with the saints of the divine blessing, really means; and to an
adequate expectation of what God intends to do in them, on the analogy
of what He has already done in Christ their head.
For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus
which is among you, and which _ye shew_ toward all the saints, cease
not to give thanks for you, making mention _of you_ in my prayers; that
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto
you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having
the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope
of his calling, what the riches {79} of the glory of his inheritance in
the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward
who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might
which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and made
him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly _places_, far above all
rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is
named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and
he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head
over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him
that filleth all in all.
There is very little further explanation needed for this passage. But
three phrases may be noted:--
(1) St. Paul calls the Father 'the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,' as
our Lord Himself calls Him 'my God' (John xx. 17) in His resurrection
state. It is no doubt of Christ _as man_ that the Father is God; but
this relation of the Son as man to the Father depends upon an eternal
subordination in which the Son, even as God, stands to the Father from
whom He derives His divine life. The essential subordination of the
Son (and Spirit) to the Father as the one fount of Godhead, is
continually suggested in the New Testament; but it involves no
inferiority in Godhead, or subsequence in time--'nothing before or
after, nothing greater or less,' as the _Quicunque vult_ says. And it
conveys to us the moral lesson that a subordinate position is not to be
resented as if it were a dishonour.
(2) The spirit of 'wisdom and revelation' vouchsafed to us is to enable
us to apprehend in a measure the divine 'wisdom and prudence[1]'
manifested in God's work of creation and redemption. The humility
which is content to correspond patiently and teachably with the method
of God is, as Francis Bacon was at pains to teach, of the essence of
all fruitful human science.
(3) The expression 'the fulness' or 'the fulness of the Godhead[2]'
means the sum total of the divine attributes, which, instead of being
spread over different angelic mediators, as the Colossians were
disposed to imagine, are, by the divine will, all concentrated and
combined in the glorified Christ. And here St. Paul teaches the
Ephesian Christians that all that belongs to the glorified Christ is to
belong also to the Church, which is His body. It is Christ who gives
to all creatures whatever various gifts of life they have. He 'filleth
all in all'; that is, 'He filleth the whole universe with all variety
of {81} gifts.' But something much more than various gifts--the sum
total of all He is--He pours, or intends to pour, into the Church, so
that the Church as well as the Christ shall embody, and thus be
identified with, the fulness of the divine attributes. At present the
Church is this only ideally, or in the divine intention: the actually
existing Church has still much need of growth that her members 'may be
filled (as they are not at present) up to the measure of the divine
fulness'; or, in other words, up to 'the measure of the stature of the
fulness of the Christ[3].'
The fulness, according to St. Paul's doctrine, is to be sought first in
the eternal God; then in the glorified Christ; then, through Him, in
the fully developed Church; and, finally, through the Church, in a
sense in the universe as a whole, when the work of redemption is done
and God is at last 'all in all' throughout His creation.
It may be noticed that St. Paul, in this doctrine of 'the fulness,' is
thinking rather of the divine attributes as manifested, than as they
are in themselves: and of Christ, not as the eternal {82} Son of God,
but, more particularly, as incarnate and glorified. It was the 'good
pleasure' of the Father to fill the exalted Christ, the first-begotten
from the dead, with the fulness of divine glory and power as the reward
of the humility and love which He showed when He 'emptied himself in
taking the form of a servant[4].' This bestowal was no doubt a giving
anew to Him, as man and as head of the Church, what was eternally His
as Son of the Father.
There is another interpretation adopted by Chrysostom in ancient times,
and by Dr. Hort among moderns, of the phrase 'the church which is his
body, the fulness of him who filleth all in all.' According to them
the Church is regarded as making the Christ complete. It is in this
sense the 'fulfilment' of Christ, because without the Church He would
be a head without its members: and then the rest of the sentence should
be translated differently--'the church which is his body, the
fulfilment of him who is fulfilled in all ways with all things.' But
this is decidedly less agreeable to the general use of the expression
'the fulness' in the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians[5].
{83}
[Sidenote: _Some practical lessons_]
We may also pause to recognize one or two ways in which St. Paul's view
of the Christian religion, as exhibited in the opening of this epistle,
suggests special deficiencies among ourselves.
(1) St. Paul's Christianity is a religion of thankfulness. This
epistle is a burst of exuberant praise. Yet he was himself a prisoner,
and the church of Ephesus, with the other Asiatic churches, was sorely
threatened with moral and spiritual perils of all kinds. The secret of
this thankfulness is that he looks straight away from himself and his
surroundings up to God. He measures the value of human life and work
not by what immediate experience suggests, but by what he knows of the
purpose of God. In spite of all the obstacles opposed by human
wilfulness and weakness and sin, he knows that His purpose will effect
itself: therefore he 'rejoices in the Lord always,' and no discouraging
circumstances can quench the springs of his rejoicing. Our
Christianity is apt to be of a very 'dutiful' kind. We mean to do our
duty, we attend church and go to our communions. But our hearts are
full of the difficulties, the hardships, {84} the obstacles which the
situation presents, and we go on our way sadly, downhearted and
despondent. We need to learn or learn anew from St. Paul that true
Christianity is inseparable from deep joy; and the secret of that joy
lies in a continual looking away from all else--away from sin and its
ways, and from the manifold hindrances to the good we would do--up to
God, His love, His purpose, His will. In proportion as we do look up
to Him we shall rejoice, and in proportion as we rejoice in the Lord
will our religion have tone and power and attractiveness.
(2) St. Paul appeals to the Asiatic Christians not to become something
they are not, or to acquire some spiritual gift that they have not
received, but simply to realize what they already are, and to claim the
privileges of their baptized state. They are already 'adopted as
sons[6].' They have, like the Galatians, received 'the Spirit of
adoption.' The point now is that they should realize and put into
practice what already belongs to them. This mode of appeal is based on
the doctrine--in spite of its many perversions the most valuable
doctrine--of baptismal {85} regeneration. The false method of
appeal--as if careless Christians needed to _become_ sons of God--which
involves a false idea of 'regeneration,' has been so much identified
with popular Protestantism, that I cannot do better than quote some
very apposite remarks by the late Congregationalist teacher, Dr. Dale,
of blessed memory, from his noble commentary on this very epistle to
the Ephesians:--
'This adoption of which Paul speaks is something more than a mere legal
and formal act, conveying certain high prerogatives. We are "called
the sons of God" because we are really made His sons by a new and
supernatural birth. Regeneration is sometimes described as though it
were merely a change in a man's principles of conduct in his character,
his tastes, his habits. The description is theologically false, and
practically most pernicious and misleading. If regeneration were
nothing more than this, we should have to speak of a man as being more
or less regenerate, according to the extent of his moral reformation;
but this would be contrary to the idiom of New Testament thought. That
a great change in the moral region of a man's nature will certainly
follow regeneration is true; this change, however, is not regeneration
itself, but the effect of regeneration; and the moral change which
regeneration produces varies in many ways in different men. In some
the change is immediate, decisive, and apparently complete. In others
it is extremely gradual, and may be for a long time hardly discernible.
In some regenerate men grave sins remain for a time unforsaken, perhaps
unrecognized. Look at these Ephesian Christians. {86} The Apostle has
to tell them that they must put away falsehood and speak the truth;
that they must give up thieving, and foul talk, and covetousness, and
gross sensual sin.
'He addresses them as "saints." He describes them as having been
chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, and foreordained
by God unto adoption as sons unto Himself; and yet he knows that they
are in danger of committing these base and flagrant offences. It was
hard for them to escape from the vices of heathenism. They were
regenerate; but as yet, in some of them, the moral effects of
regeneration were very incomplete, the change which regeneration was
ultimately certain to produce in their moral life had only begun, and
it was checked and hindered by a thousand hostile influences.
'The simplest and most obvious account of regeneration is the truest.
When a man is regenerated he receives a new life and receives it from
God. In itself regeneration is not a change in his old life, but the
beginning of a new life which is conferred by the immediate and
supernatural act of the Holy Spirit. The man is really "born again."
A higher nature comes to him than that which he inherited from his
human parents; he is "begotten of God," "born of the Spirit."'
This passage, especially as coming from Dr. Dale, supplies a very
valuable corrective to still current religious mistakes. But surely we
have no ground for saying that the moral effects 'certainly' follow
regeneration, or follow it in all cases. It is not 'ultimately certain
to produce' them in all persons, but only in those who {87} exhibit,
sooner or later, the moral correspondence of a converted will.
(3) Most Christians who have reacted from Calvinism and its false
doctrine of predestination have ceased to think about the truth which
it represents. But we need to make a right instead of a wrong use of
these great ideas of predestination and election, and thus to get rid
of all the miserable narrowness and hopelessness which settles down
upon us when we allow ourselves to think of religion as mainly a
process of saving our own souls, and when we live only in our present
feelings.
What can be more inspiring and strengthening than to believe that there
is an eternal purpose of God working itself out in the universe through
all its stages and parts; that this eternal purpose includes us, and
has fastened upon us individually and brought us into Christ and His
Church, to make true men of us; and that it has done all this not for
our own sakes only, but to disclose something more of God's glory and
for the fulfilment of great and universal purposes, which are to
radiate out even from us? Wherever St. Paul sees the hand of God in
present experience, at once his mind works back to an eternal will and
therefore also {88} forward to an eternal and adequate result. And
this backward and forward look transfigures the present with a new
glory and a fresh hope. So will it be with us if this same
characteristically Christian way of looking at any apparent movement of
God in the present, in our own souls or in the world outside us,
becomes habitually and instinctively ours. God never acts on a sudden
impulse or without purpose of continuance. Certainly He can be trusted
not to stop and leave things unfinished. When He hath begun any good
work He will assuredly perfect it, if we will let Him.
[1] i. 8.
[2] See Col. i. 19; ii. 9; cf. ii. 3, 'in Christ are all the treasures
of wisdom and knowledge hidden.'
[3] Eph. iii. 19; iv. 13. It is not certain that by Him 'who filleth
all in all' St. Paul does not mean the Father rather than the Son. But
iv. 10 supports the interpretation given above.
[4] Col. i. 19; Phil. ii. 9-11.
[5] And the word rendered 'filleth' may have a middle and not a passive
sense, the idea being perhaps suggested that God 'fills all things for
his own purpose.'
[6] That is, they were 'predestined to an adoption' (Eph. i. 5) which
it is implied they have already received.
{89}
DIVISION I. § 3. CHAPTER II. 1-10.
_Sin and redemption._
[Sidenote: _The depth of sin_]
In the first chapter of the epistle, St. Paul has had before his eyes
the glory of God's redemptive work--the wonder of His purpose of pure
love for the universe through the Church. His imagination has kindled
at the thought of the length, the breadth, the height of the divine
operation:--the length, for it is an eternal purpose slowly worked out
through the ages; the breadth, for it is to extend over the whole
universe; the height, for it is to carry men up to no lower point than
the throne of Christ in the heavenly places. But now he stops to call
the attention of his converts to what we may call a 'fourth dimension'
of the divine operation--its depth. How wonderfully low God had
stooped, in order to reach the point to which man had sunk! The
Asiatic Christians are bidden to ponder anew, and by {90} contrast to
their present experience, the life which they had once lived before
they knew Christ or were found in Him.
Let us read the apostle's words, and then consider them in detail:--
And you _did he quicken_, when ye were dead through your trespasses and
sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this
world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit
that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all
once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh
and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this
epistle (iv. 17-19) the terrible passage in Romans i, where St. Paul
describes the developement of sin in the Gentile world; how it had its
origin in the refusal of the human will to recognize God, how out of
the perversion of will it spread to the blinding of the understanding,
and then to giving an overmastering power and an unnatural distortion
to the passions, so that a state of moral lawlessness was produced and
maintained.
What are we to say as to the truth of these accounts of the moral
condition of the heathen world? No doubt there is a good deal to be
{91} said on the other side. Roman simplicity and virtue, and the
sanctity of domestic life, had not, as contemporary inscriptions and
historical records make perfectly evident, faded out of the Roman
Empire, and philanthropy and love of the poor were recognized
excellences. Nor had philosophic virtue vanished from the schools[1].
And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle
to the Romans[2] itself he speaks in language, such as a Stoic might
have used, of those who, uninstructed by any special divine law, were a
law unto themselves, in that they showed the practical effect of the
law written in their hearts. We must therefore recognize that St. Paul
is, in the passage we are now considering, speaking ideally; that is to
say, he is speaking of the general tendency of the heathen life, just
as he speaks ideally of the Christian church in view of its general
tendency; and he is speaking of it as he mostly knew it himself in the
notoriously corrupt cities of the east, Antioch and Ephesus. Ephesus,
in particular, had an extraordinarily bad character for vice as much as
for superstition; and what {92} St. Paul says of the heathen life does
not in fact make up a stronger indictment or present a blacker picture
than what is said by a Stoic philosopher, perhaps his contemporary, who
wrote at Ephesus, under the shelter of the name of the great Ephesian
of ancient days, Heracleitus[3]. Moreover, St. Paul appeals
unhesitatingly to the actual experience of these Asiatic Christians,
and there is no reason to doubt that their consciences would have
responded to what he said to them about the old life out of which they
had been brought.
Let us now analyze a little more exactly this account St. Paul gives of
the state of sin which he saw around him in contemporary society.
(1) 'Ye walked according to the course of this world.' By 'this world'
St. Paul, like the other New Testament writers, means practically human
society as it organizes itself for its own purposes of pleasure or
profit without thought of God, or at least without thought of God as He
truly is. These Asiatic Christians, then, had formerly ordered their
life and conduct according to the demands and expectations of the
worldly world, obeying its motives, governed {93} by its fashions and
its laws, and indifferent to those considerations which it repudiated
or ignored.
(2) But to belong to the world in this sense is, in St. Paul's mind, to
belong to the kingdom of Satan. The worldly world had its origin from
a false desire of independence on man's part. He did not want to be
controlled by God; he wanted to live his own life for himself. But in
liberating himself according to his wishes from the control of God he
fell, according to St. Paul's belief, under another control. Rebellion
had been in the universe before man. There are invisible rebel
spirits, of whose real existence and influence St. Paul had no more
doubt than any other Jew who was not a Sadducee. And, indeed, our Lord
had so spoken of good and evil spirits as to assure His disciples of
their existence and influence. These rebel wills are unseen by us and
in most respects unknown, but they organize and give a certain
coherence and continuity to evil in the world. There thus arises a
sort of kingdom of evil over against the kingdom of God, and those who
will not surrender themselves to God and His kingdom, become perforce
servants of Satan and his kingdom. It is in view of this truth that
St. Paul {94} tells these Asiatic Christians that they used to walk
according 'to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now
worketh in the sons of disobedience.' (These evil spirits were, by a
natural way of thinking, located in the air, according to the
contemporary Jewish ideas; and the idea is, if nothing more, a
convenient metaphor for a subtle and pervading influence.) This view
of their old life, as a bondage to evil spirits, is one which would be
as easily realized by inhabitants of Asiatic cities, where men were
largely occupied in finding charms against bad spirits, as by modern
Indian converts from devil-worship. Christianity recognizes a basis of
reality in the superstition from which at the same time it delivers men.
(3) The main characteristic of this old godless life had been
lawlessness, but St. Paul here, as in his Epistle to the Romans,
associates Jews with Gentiles, 'we' with 'you,' in the same
condemnation. The spirits, or real selves of the Christians, had been,
in their former state, dominated by their appetites or their
imaginations. They were occupied in doing what their flesh or their
thoughts suggested. It is noticeable that St. Paul puts 'the mind'
side by side with 'the flesh' as a cause of sin, the intellectual {95}
side by side with the sensual and emotional nature. We often in fact,
in our age, have experience of people who are not 'sensual' in the
ordinary sense, but who live lives which have no goodness, no
perseverance, no order, no fruitfulness in them, because they are the
slaves of the ideas of their own mind as they present themselves, now
one, now another; unregulated ideas being in fact, just as much as
unregulated passions, fluctuating, arbitrary, and tyrannous. Nothing
is more truly needed to-day than the discipline of the imagination.
(4) Men living such a life of bondage are described further as 'dead
through their trespasses and sins.' St. Paul means by death to
describe any state of intellectual and moral insensibility. He would
have the Christian 'dead' to the motives and voices of the worldly and
sensual world. So in the same way he reminds the Asiatic Christians
that to all that life of God in which they were now fruitfully living,
they had at one time been insensible or dead--that is, blind to those
things which now seemed most apparent, unterrified at what would now
seem most horrible, unmoved by what now seemed most fascinating. And
if this was their state viewed in itself, in their relation to God {96}
they were, like the Jews also, 'children of wrath.' This expression is
used in our catechism to describe 'original sin,' that is to say, that
moral disorder or weakness which belongs to our nature as we inherit
it, before we have had the opportunity of personal wrong doing. But
the application of the phrase by St. Paul is to describe rather the
state of _actual_ sin in which Jew and Gentile alike 'naturally' lived.
It implies not that God hated them, for in the whole context St. Paul
is emphasizing 'the great love wherewith he loved them'; but that there
was a necessary moral incompatibility between them as they then were,
and God as He essentially and permanently is. God is so necessarily
holy that His being is, and must be, intolerable to the unholy. It
must be the case that at the bare idea of the divine coming, 'sinners
in Zion' should be 'afraid,' and should say one to another, 'who among
us shall dwell with the devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with
everlasting burnings[4]?' God necessarily presents Himself as a terror
to the godless; and from the point of view of God that means that our
sinful nature is the subject of His necessary wrath. He resents the
{97} perversion, the spoiling, of His own handiwork in us. He cannot
tolerate uncleanness, rebellion, unbelief. This wrath of God, in the
case of those whose wills are set to 'hate the light,' is directed
against men's persons. But so far as sin is only in our natures, and
is something of which we are the unwilling subjects, it appeals only to
God's compassion to lead Him to apply effective remedies. His wrath is
so far against sin, not against sinners; and none could know better
than these Asiatic Christians what lengths of resourcefulness and
self-sacrifice the divine compassion had gone in order to redeem men
from its tyranny. Thus St. Paul continues:--
But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together
with Christ (by grace have ye been saved), and raised us up with him,
and made us to sit with him in the heavenly _places_, in Christ Jesus:
that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his
grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus: for by grace have ye been
saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: _it is_ the gift of
God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore
prepared that we should walk in them.
[Sidenote: _The method of redemption_]
Here is St. Paul's description of the method of God in dealing with men
when they were in {98} that state of sin, the conditions of which he
has just summarised. We take note of the chief points in the method.
(1) St. Paul has in mind here, as always, the divine predestination.
There was an eternal purpose in the divine mind to make St. Paul and
those to whom he wrote such as they were now on the way to become; it
was a purpose not merely general, but extending to details. It
belongs, in fact, to the divine perfection, that God does nothing, and
purposes nothing, in mere vague generality. The universal range and
scope of the divine activity as over all creatures whatsoever, hinders
not at all its perfect application to detail. Thus God had
'predestined,' or held in His eternal purpose, not merely the state of
Christians as a whole or even of the Asiatic Christians in particular,
but the details of conduct which He willed them individually to
exhibit. It is the particular 'good works' which God 'prepared
beforehand in order that they should walk in them[5].'
(2) What God predestined He accomplished first in summary 'in Christ
Jesus.' In Him all that God meant to do for man was exhibited {99} and
accomplished as God's own and perfect handiwork, as an effective and
final disclosure. Men are to look for everything, for every kind of
development and progress, in Christ, but for nothing outside or beyond
Him. All is there--'all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' all
'the fulness of the Godhead,' all the perfections of mankind, the
reconciliation of all seeming opposites. All is brought to the highest
possible level of attainment, 'the heavenly place.'
(3) What had been summarily realized in Christ is progressively
realized in those who are 'in Him.' Undeterred by their condition of
moral and spiritual death, God, out of the heart of His rich mercy,
simply because of the great love He bore to men, has brought them, by
one act of regeneration, into the new life of His Son; has 'quickened
them together with Christ,' that is, has introduced them, at a definite
moment of initiation, into the life which has once for all triumphed
over death, and been glorified in the heavenly places; and has
introduced them into this life in order that, by the gradual
assimilation of its forces, future ages might witness in them all the
wealth of the goodness which had lain hid in the original act {100} of
incorporation. Meanwhile, while their growth is yet imperfect, God
sees those who are Christ's as 'in Christ': imputes His merits to them,
so we may legitimately say: that is, sees them and deals with them in
view of the fact that Christ's Spirit is at work in them; sees them and
deals with them 'not as they are, but as they are becoming.' _This_
doctrine of imputation, instead of being full of moral unreality, is in
accordance with all that is deepest in the philosophy of evolution.
For are we not continually being taught that in order to take a true
view of the value of any single thing, we must view it not as it is at
a particular moment, but in the light of its tendency? We must ask not
merely 'what,' but 'whence' and 'whither.'
(4) It is all pure grace--the free outpouring of unmerited love. The
Christians are 'God's workmanship,' His new creation. He, in Christ,
had wrought the work all by Himself. They, the subjects of it, had
contributed nothing. It remained for them only to welcome and to
correspond. This is the summing up of man's legitimate attitude
towards God. This is faith. It is at its first stage simply the
acceptance of a divine mercy in all its undeserved and unconditional
largeness; but it passes at once, as {101} soon as ever the nature of
the divine gift is realized, into a glad co-operation with the divine
purpose.
This then is, in outline, the method of the great salvation, of which
the Asiatic Christians had been and were the subjects.
[1] On the virtuous aspect of the contemporary empire, see Renan, _Les
Apôtres_, pp. 306 ff.
[2] Rom. ii. 14.
[3] See app. note B, p. 255.
[4] Is. xxxiii. 14, 15.
[5] Cf. app. note C, p. 263, for a similar thought in a contemporary
Jewish book.
{102}
DIVISION I. § 4. CHAPTER II. 11-22.
_Salvation in the church._
[Sidenote: _The salvation social_]
God's deliverance or 'salvation' of mankind is a deliverance of
individuals indeed, but of individuals in and through a society; not of
isolated individuals, but of members of a body.
It is and has been a popular religious idea that the primary aim of the
gospel is to produce saved individuals; and that it is a matter of
secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards
combine to form churches for their mutual spiritual profit, and for
promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this way of conceiving
the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas in the Bible. 'The
salvation' in the Bible is supposed usually 'to reach the individual
through the community[1].' God's dealings with us in redemption thus
follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural developement.
For man stands {103} out in history as a 'social animal.' His
individual developement, by a divine law of his constitution, is only
rendered possible because he is first of all a member of some society,
tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society
alone, and through the submissions and limitations on his personal
liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any
degree of free or high developement as an individual. This law, then,
of man's nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under
the old covenant it was to members of the 'commonwealth of Israel' that
the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St.
Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting (as we
shall see directly), and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same
religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and
enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one
nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church;
and it is still through the church that God's 'covenant' dealings reach
the individual.
It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of
the Asiatic Christians, {104} before their conversion, as a state of
alienation from the 'commonwealth of Israel.' They were 'Gentiles in
the flesh,' that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and
were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as
Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be
only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold
covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of
mankind. They were without the Church of God, and therefore presumably
without God and without hope.
Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who
are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in the
flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ,
alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the
covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the
blood of Christ.
This alienation of Gentiles from the divine covenant was represented in
the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully-worked marble
balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood
columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and
some in Latin characters, to warn {105} aliens not to enter the holy
place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago,
and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus:
'No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the
enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for
the penalty of death which he will incur.'
This 'middle wall of partition' was vividly in St. Paul's memory. He
was in prison at Rome at the time of his writing this epistle, in part
at least because he was believed to have brought Trophimus, an
Ephesian, within the sacred enclosure at Jerusalem. 'He brought Greeks
also into the temple, and hath defiled the holy place.'
It was this 'middle wall of partition,' representing the exclusiveness
of Jewish ordinances, which St. Paul rejoiced to believe Christ had
abolished. He had made Jew and Gentile one by bringing both alike to
God in one body and on a new basis.
There were in fact two partitions in the Jewish temple of great
symbolical importance. There was the veil which hid the holy of
holies, and symbolized the alienation of man from God[2]; and there was
'the middle wall of partition' {106} already described, representing
the exclusion of the world from the privileges of the people of God.
The Pharisaic Jews ignored the spiritual lessons of the first
partition, and devoutly believed in the permanence of the second. But
Saul, while yet a Pharisee, had felt the reality of the first, and had
found in his own experience that the abolition of this first barrier by
Christ involved also the annihilation of the second.
[Sidenote: _The breaking down of partitions_]
It is in the Epistle to the Colossians that he lays stress upon the
abolition in Christ of the enmity between man and God. 'It was the
good pleasure of the Father ... through him to reconcile all things
unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.' 'You,
being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh
... did he quicken together with Christ, having forgiven us all our
trespasses; having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was
against us, which was contrary to us: and he hath taken it out of the
way, nailing it to the cross.' So with the help of various metaphors
does St. Paul strive to express the mighty truth that, by the shedding
of Christ's blood, that is to say by His sacrifice of perfected
obedience, the way had been opened for the forgiveness of our sins and
our {107} reconciliation to God in one life, one Spirit. But the
symbols and instruments of that former alienation from God which St.
Paul had experienced so bitterly, were to his mind the 'ordinances' of
the Jewish law. These, he had come to feel, had no other function than
to awaken and deepen the sense of sin which they were powerless to
overcome. They were nothing but 'a bond written against us'; a
continual record of condemnation. To trust in the observance of
ordinances was to remain an unreconciled sinner, alienated in mind and
unpurified in heart. On the other hand, to have faith in Jesus and
receive from Him the unmerited gift of the divine pardon and the Spirit
of sonship was, for a Jew, to cast away all that trust in the
observance of the ordinances of his nation which was so dear to his
heart. It was at once to place himself among the sinners of the
Gentiles. For in Jesus Christ all men were indeed brought near to God,
but not as meritorious Jews; rather as common men and common sinners,
needing and accepting all alike the undeserved mercy of a heavenly
Father. Thus it was that Christ, in breaking down one partition, had
broken down the other also. In opening the way to God by a simple
human trust in a {108} heavenly Father, and not by the complicated
arrangements of a special law, He had put all men on the same level of
need and of acceptance. He had not indeed abolished the covenant or
the covenant people, but He had enlarged its area and altered its
basis: there was still to be one visible body or people of the
covenant, but membership in it was to be open to all, Jew and Gentile
alike, who would feel their need of and put their trust in Jesus. This
is what St. Paul proceeds to express, and little more need be added to
explain his words. In the 'blood' or 'blood-shedding' of Jesus--that
is, His self-sacrifice for men, His obedience carried to the point of
the surrender of His life--a way had been opened to the Father that was
purely human, that belonged to the Gentiles who had been 'far off' as
well as to Jews who were already 'nigh' in the divine covenant. And in
being brought near to God by faith, and not by Jewish ordinances, Jew
and Gentile had been reconciled on a common basis--the two had been
made one in 'the flesh,' that is, the manhood of Christ, for no other
reason than because the 'law of commandments contained in (special
Jewish) ordinances,' which had hitherto been the basis of separation,
was now once for all {109} 'abolished.' Henceforth there was one new
man, or new manhood, in Christ, in which all men were, potentially at
least, reconciled to God and to one another by His self-sacrifice upon
the cross. And to the knowledge of this new manhood all men were being
gradually brought by the 'preaching of peace' or of the gospel, which
had its origin from Jesus crucified and risen, and which, even now that
Jesus was invisibly acting through His apostolic and other ministers,
St. Paul attributes directly to Him.
[Sidenote: _The admission of Gentiles_]
But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the
blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who made both one, and brake
down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in his flesh the
enmity, even the law of commandments _contained_ in ordinances; that he
might create in himself of the twain one new man, so making peace; and
might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross,
having slain the enmity thereby: and he came and preached peace to you
that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we
both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.
Now we can turn from the negative to the positive statement, and
observe what St. Paul says of the new privileges of the once heathen
converts. He pictures them under four metaphors, each describing a
social state.
{110}
(1) They are citizens in the holy state, the commonwealth of the people
consecrated to God--citizens with full rights, and no longer strangers
or unenfranchised residents (sojourners).
(2) More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of
God.
(3) They are being built all together into a sanctuary for God to dwell
in--a holy structure of which the foundation stones are the apostles,
and the Christian prophets who were their companions; and of which the
corner-stone, determining the lines of the building and compacting it
into one, is Jesus Christ, according to the word of God by Isaiah,
'Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious
corner stone of sure foundation.'
(4) But the metaphor of the building passes into the metaphor of the
growing plant. Christ is, as St. Peter says, 'a _living_ stone[3].'
He not only determines the lines of the spiritual structure, but He
pervades the whole of it as a presence and spirit, so that every other
human 'stone' is also alive and growing with His life.
So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are
fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the {111} household of God,
being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ
Jesus himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several
building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the
Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in
the Spirit.
These are indeed metaphors expressive of glorious realities, which have
no doubt become dulled in meaning through a conventional Christianity,
which involves no sacrifice and therefore attains no sense of
blessedness, but which a little meditation may easily restore to
something of their original freshness.
(1) The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that
they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by
God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the
national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost that the entire
nation is holy, 'a kingdom of priests.' It is because this is true
that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as
well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility
of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only
deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its
divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the
one body, but the whole {112} body is priestly, and all are
citizens--not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent
participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God. How truly
realized this idea was in the early Christian communities, St. Paul's
letters are our best witnesses. They are really--except the pastoral
epistles--letters to the churches and not to the clergy. It is the
whole body which is at Thessalonica and Corinth to concern itself with
the exercise of moral discipline[4]--the whole body in the Galatian
churches and at Colossae who are to concern themselves with the
apprehension and protection of the full Christian truth. They are all
to be 'perfectly initiated' in Christ Jesus, full participators in the
affairs of the divine society[5]. Whatever needs to be said afterwards
about the special functions of special officers, this is the first
thing to be said and recognized; and it gives us a profound sense of
the distance we have fallen from our ideal. The laity, it is generally
understood among us, are to come to church and perhaps to communion,
are to accept the ministries of religion at marriages and funerals, and
are to subscribe a little money to religious objects; but they may
leave it to the clergy, as a matter of course, to carry on {113} the
business of religion--that is, worship and doctrine, for discipline has
been dropped out--and confine themselves to a certain amount of
irresponsible criticism of the sermons of the clergy and their
proceedings generally.
[Sidenote: _The catholic church_]
For this state of things--this very false sacerdotalism--the
responsibility is generally laid at the door of 'clerical arrogance.'
It is not necessary to consider how large a factor in the result
clerical arrogance has really been, for certainly what alone has given
the clergy the opportunity to put themselves in false isolation, and
what has been an immensely more powerful factor in the general result,
has been the spiritual apathy of the mass of church members, an apathy
which began as soon as the Christian profession began to cost men
little or nothing.
Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul's ideal of the life of a
Church? If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better
Christians. We want to make the moral meaning of church membership
understood and its conditions appreciated. We want to make men
understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a
Christian, that is a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in
a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern {114} oneself
therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate
life--its external as well as its spiritual conditions. For the houses
people live in, their wages, their social and commercial relations to
one another, their amusements, the education they receive, the
literature they read, these, no less truly than religious forces
strictly so called, affect intimately the health and well-being of any
society of men. We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the
commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men
with bodies as well as souls.
(2) But St. Paul also describes the Church as the 'household of God.'
When our Lord was speaking to St. Peter about the ministry which was
being entrusted to the apostles, He said to him, 'Who then is the
faithful and wise steward whom his Lord shall set over his household to
give them their portion of food in due season[6]?' This description
opens to us part of the meaning of the divine household. A household
is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and
orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the divine
household in which God has provided stewards to make {115} regular
spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know
themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped,
encouraged, disciplined, fed. What in fact are the sacraments and
sacramental rites, what are baptism, confirmation and communion,
marriage and ordination, the administration of the word of God, the
dealings with the penitent, the sick, the dead, but the 'portions of
food in due season,' the orderly distribution of the bread of life in
the family or household of God?
But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself
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. § 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.
St. Augustine, with his eye on the imperfections of the Church,
speaks[13] of 'the glory of love ... alive but yet frost-bound. The
root is alive, but the branches are almost dry. There is a heart alive
within, and within are leaves and fruits; but they are waiting for a
summer.' That is surely what we feel. The world cries out for
brotherhood. We are perpetually explaining that brotherhood can only
become actual, in the long run, where men know themselves to be, and in
fact are, sons of God. We are continually pointing out that external
legislative social reforms can only effect good where there exists, to
respond to them and to use them, some strength and purity of inward
character: that outward reforms without moral redemption would effect
evil rather than good. All this is true and it is necessary to explain
it. But the convincing demonstration begins at that point where
Christianity makes man feel, and see in fact, that it contains in
itself the remedy for social evils, because it has the spirit of love:
where the Church is so actually presented as that men should feel and
know that this is a true human {137} brotherhood. It is the social,
human, brotherly power of the Church which is what is at the present
moment best calculated to win the consciences and convince the
intellects of men. But this actual living spirit of self-sacrificing
love--this spirit of real brotherhood--how 'frost-bound' it is! How
large the area of the Church, how many its institutions, where it is
not (to say the least) the most obvious thing represented! In fact,
social reform, and that the most thorough and the most permanent,
requires nothing more than that professing Christians should be better
Christians, Christians who really believe what St. Paul and St. John
say about the love of the brethren. Come then, O breath of the divine
Spirit, and breathe upon these bones of the Christian Church, that they
may live!
And outside the area of nominal Christianity how 'frost-bound' our
evangelizing love. Surely the Church of England, as part of the
expansive British nation, has an apostleship to the nations comparable
to St. Paul's. Yet missionary zeal, as directed towards the natives of
India, or Japan, or Africa, is a very restricted thing; noticeably
restricted it must be confessed among those who most love the name of
Catholic: and almost non-existent in the great majority of those who
are {138} yet members of the national Church. But it cannot be too
deeply felt that to St. Paul the reconciliation of men with God is
inseparable from the reconciliation of man with man. The atonement
with God that is not an atonement among men he would not own. A peace
with God that leaves us content that Hindoos and Japanese and Africans
should not be of our religion is a false peace. A Christian who is not
really in heart and will a missionary is not a Christian at all.
Missionary effort is not a speciality of a few Christians, though, like
every other part of Christian life, it has its special organs. It is
an essential, never to be forgotten, part of all true Christian living,
and thinking, and praying.
The missionary obligation of the Church depends, no doubt, chiefly on
the command of Christ, 'Go ye and make disciples of all the nations.'
But it is made intelligible when we realize that Christianity is really
a catholic religion, and that only in proportion as its catholicity
becomes a reality is its true power and richness exhibited. Each new
race which is introduced into the Church not only itself receives the
blessings of our religion, but reacts upon it to bring out new and
unsuspected aspects and {139} beauties of its truth and influence. It
has been so when Greeks, and Latins, and Teutons, and Kelts, and Slavs
have each in turn been brought into the growing circle of believers.
How impoverished was the exhibition of Christianity which the Jewish
Christians were capable of giving by themselves! How much of the
treasures of wisdom and power which lie hid in Christ awaited the Greek
intellect, and the Roman spirit of government, and the Teutonic
individuality, and the temper and character of the Kelt and the Slav,
before they could leap into light! And can we doubt that now again not
only would Indians, and Japanese, and Africans, and Chinamen be the
better for Christianity, but that Christianity would be unspeakably
also the richer for their adhesion--for the gifts which the subtlety of
India, and the grace of Japan, and the silent patience of China are
capable of bringing into the city of God.
Come, then, O breath of the divine Spirit, and breathe upon the dead
bones of the Christian churches that forget that they are evangelists
of the nations, that they may live and stand upon their feet, an
exceeding great army, an army with banners.
[1] Acts xxii. 17-21. 'While I prayed in the temple, I fell into a
trance, and saw him saying unto me, Make haste, and get thee quickly
out of Jerusalem.... Depart: for I will send thee forth far hence unto
the Gentiles.'
[2] Gal. i. 15. 'It was the good pleasure of God, who separated me,
_even_ from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to
reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.'
[3] Col. i. 24-29; iv. 3, 4.
[4] Col. iii. 11.
[5] 1 John ii. 7, 8.
[6] Phil. 16.
[7] Eph. iv. 1-3.
[8] Acts xxii. 21; xxvi. 17, 18.
[9] Thus the limitation of the term 'brotherhood' to Christians is
implied in 1 Pet. ii. 17, 'Honour all men. Love the brotherhood;' and
in 2 Pet. i. 7, 'In your love of the brethren supply love' (i.e. in the
narrower and closer circle of believers, learn the wider and all
embracing attitude towards men as men); and in 1 Cor. v. 11, 'Any man
that is named a brother.' The word brother is throughout the New
Testament used of _Christians_ only, except where, in the Acts, it is
used by Jews of Jews. Our Lord's language about brotherhood applies to
the circle of the disciples, except Matt. xxv. 40, 'One of these my
brethren,' i.e. the wretched.
[10] Acts xvii. 28.
[11] Acts xvii. 26.
[12] Dr. Hort thinks 'read' is a technical word for reading the
Scriptures, and that this reading of the Old Testament Scriptures is to
enable them to appreciate St. Paul's 'understanding in the secret of
the Christ.' But I doubt if so technical a use of 'read' can be made
out.
[13] _In Epist. Joan, ad Parth._ v. 10.
{140}
DIVISION I. § 6. CHAPTER IV. 1-16.
_The unity of the church._
[Sidenote: _Connexion of thought_]
This Epistle to the Ephesians, viewed as a whole and from the point of
view of a sympathetic intelligence, has a remarkable unity, and a unity
progressively developed. Thus, first of all, the apostle opened the
imagination of his hearers or readers to consider the place which the
catholic church holds in the divine counsels for the universe, in the
realization of the human ideal, and in the work of redemption from sin
(chap. i and ii). Then he proceeded to justify and explain his own
activity in the cause of catholicity, and made them feel at once the
glory and the profound difficulty of the ideal of unity in diversity
which it involves (chap. iii). It follows naturally and logically that
he should set the Church before them as an actually existing
organization, and bid them study it exactly and note the grounds of its
unity and the common end to which its different elements or members
{141} are meant to minister; and this is what he actually does in the
fourth chapter (1-16). Viewed, however, as a matter of grammatical
structure, it is probable that this passage forms another
digression--the real necessity of the argument acting as an
overmastering motive which pulls contrary to the immediate grammatical
purpose of the writer. Thus he had begun, at the beginning of chapter
iii, to pass from the doctrinal exposition which is involved in his
opening chapters to practical exhortation. The Asiatic members of the
catholic church are to be exhorted to live up to their calling: to turn
their backs deliberately on their old heathen habits, and to conform
themselves entirely to the principles of their new state. To this
exhortation he actually and finally attains at chapter iv. 17. The
intervening passage (a chapter and a half) is occupied, first, with the
digression which we have just considered at length, about St. Paul's
mission to the Gentiles and the difficulty of its realization, and with
the great prayer which that topic suggests (chap. iii); secondly, with
another digression on the character of the unity of the Church. This
is, I say, probably the case grammatically. For 'I, Paul, the prisoner
of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles' (iii. 1) is almost {142} unmistakably
intended to introduce a moral appeal to which his imprisonment for the
sake of those to whom he writes adds weight and force[1]. It is taken
up, after a digression, in iv. i, 'I, therefore, the prisoner of the
Lord, beseech you to walk worthily'; but the appeal there begun yields
anew to the necessity of further exposition, and only reaches its free
expression in iv. 17, 'This therefore I say and testify in the Lord';
after which point we have moral exhortation and little else.
Now, therefore, we are to occupy ourselves with what is grammatically a
second digression, but logically and really a most necessary step in
the exposition of St. Paul's thoughts--the subject of the unity of the
church catholic, its nature and obligations. Conscious of the profound
difficulty of welding naturally antagonistic elements, such as Jews and
Gentiles, slaves and free men, into one catholic fellowship, St. Paul
appeals to the Asiatic churches with all the force which he can command
as a prisoner on their account, to 'walk' as their catholic calling
{143} involves; that is, to exhibit all those moral qualities which are
necessary to maintain peace under difficult circumstance--a modest
estimate of oneself (humility or 'lowliness'), a mildness in mutual
relations ('meekness'), an habitual refusal to pass quick judgements on
what one cannot but condemn or dislike ('longsuffering'), a deliberate
forbearance one of another based on love. They are to accept one
another as brethren, with the rights of brethren. And the reason why
they should exhibit these qualities is not far to seek: they actually
share one common supernatural life--the imparted life of the
Spirit--and they are, therefore, to make it their deliberate object to
preserve this actual spiritual unity in its appropriate outward
expression, that is in harmonious fellowship,--'giving diligence to
keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.'
[Sidenote: _The unity of the church_]
But at this point the idea of the unity of the Church is felt to need
fuller exposition. In what sense are Christians one? They are one as
_one body_ or organization, made up no doubt of a multitude of
differing individual members, but all bound into one, under Christ for
their head, by the fact that the _one Spirit_, which is Christ's
supreme gift, is imparted to the whole {144} organization and every
member of it: and this common corporate life, where the elements are so
different, is made possible by the _one hope_ reaching forward into an
eternal world, which was set before them all when they received their
call into the body of Christ. This should be enough to annihilate
lower and shorter-lived differences. 'There is one body[2] and one
spirit even as ye are called in one hope of your calling.' It follows
from this that there is another threefold unity. For the existence of
the common head involves a common _allegiance to Him as Lord_, an
allegiance which is justified by what He is _believed to be_ by all
Christians; an allegiance, further, which is more than an outward
fealty, being cemented by an actual incorporation into His life which
takes place through the speaking symbol of the _laver of
regeneration_[3]. 'One Lord, one faith, one baptism.' But once more.
This common union with and under Christ in the Spirit, is not anything
less than union with _the one and only God and Father_, who is _over
all_ as the one head (even 'the head of Christ is God'), _through all_
as the pervading presence, _in all_ as the active {145} life, 'one God
and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all things.'
Thus their unity is the deepest and most ultimate conceivable: it has a
width and range from which no one can be excluded: while it has a
closeness and cogency like the unity of blood.
To realize what this unity is and may be, involves on our part a
continual looking out of ourselves, out of all individual, social and
national differences, up to the common source of all the gifts of all
Christians. Whatever each one possesses is simply the gift of the
divine bounty or grace, given to him by a definite act of bestowal,
varying merely in kind and degree according to the sovereign will of
Christ the Lord, the only giver; and it is therefore to be used in His
service and for His ends. The Psalmist had sung of the divine king of
Israel mounting as an earthly conqueror unto his sanctuary throne in
Zion after making captives and receiving gifts from among his enemies
without exception.
'Thou hast gone up into the heights,
Thou hast led captives captive;
Thou hast received gifts among men, yea from the rebellious also[4].'
It stands to reason that to St. Paul's mind this {146} conception is
realized nowhere but in Christ. Its application to Christ is in fact
assumed--'therefore,' i.e. with a view to Christ, 'he' or rather 'it,'
the Scripture 'saith'--and the passage is given free interpretation,
and, more than this, free modification, on the basis of this
assumption. For (1) the ascension of the conquering king is spoken of
as the result of a previous descent to the 'lower regions of this earth
of ours[5].' No man, as St. John says, hath ascended up to heaven but
He that came down from heaven. The person who 'beggared himself' to
come down to our earth and who subsequently mounted into the divine
glory is one and the same person, Christ the incarnate Son; and He thus
descended and re-ascended in order that He might, through the atonement
wrought by Him in the flesh and through the exaltation which rewarded
it, restore to the universe that unity of which sin and rebellion had
robbed it, and 'fill all things' once again with the divine bounty and
presence[6].
{147}
(2) The sense of the psalm is--possibly not without Jewish
precedent[7]--altered in expression so that, instead of the conqueror
receiving gifts from men, his conquered enemies, we have him
represented as 'giving gifts to men.' This modification, whether
original in St. Paul or accepted by him, is no doubt due to the fact
that his mind is full of the idea of Christ as conquering only to
bless, receiving homage only to be enabled to bestow on them who offer
it the fulness of the divine bounty. And the 'captives' of Christ, to
St. Paul's mind, are no doubt not men, but the hosts of Satan reduced
to impotence. The exalted Christ, then, is the source of all gifts in
His Church, and He bestows on men various endowments in such a way as
to maintain among them a necessary relation. 'No member of the body of
Christ is endued with such perfection as to be able, without the
assistance of others, to supply his own necessities. A certain
proportion is allotted to each, and it is only by communicating with
others that all enjoy what is sufficient for maintaining their
respective places in the body[8].' This is the principle of mutual
dependence, the fundamental principle of corporate life. Thus 'He gave
{148} some as apostles, some prophets,' others in other varying
capacities to fulfil varying functions; the principle of the bestowal
being the same throughout. Each 'gifted' individual becomes himself a
gift to the Church. He is 'gifted' not for his own sake but for the
Church's sake--'with a view to the perfecting of the saints,' or 'the
complete equipment of the consecrated body,' for the manifold 'work of
ministry' entrusted to it; or to look at the matter from a rather
different point of view, 'for the purpose of completing the structure
of the body of Christ'--that living company of men in whom Christ
expresses Himself and through whom He acts upon the world. And that
structure is not complete till all together attain what is impossible
to any isolated Christian individual, the unity not only of a common
faith, but also of a common knowledge of what is revealed in the Son of
God; or, in other words, to the full-grown manhood; which, once again,
means that complete developement in which the fulness of the
Christ--all the complete array of His attributes and qualities--finds
harmonious exhibition over again in His people, His body.
But the possibility of this completeness on the part of the Church as a
whole, depends on the {149} stability of the individual members in the
common faith. Thus it is Christ's purpose that His members should
cease to be as children, stirred up like the waves of the sea, or
carried about like feathers, by every wind of false teaching. There
is, it must be remembered, a kingdom of deception, an organized attempt
to seduce souls, of which wicked men make themselves the instruments.
In view of this hostile kingdom of error, the Christians must abide in
the truth revealed to them in love, and so grow up into the completed
life of Christ. For He is the head, and in Him they are the body. And
the body is a unit of many parts fitted and held together in one life
by a supply from the head, which circulates through every joint, and
for the full and unimpeded communication of which each several limb
must do its proper work, so that the whole body may grow into completed
life in that mutual coherence which is Christian love.
This prolonged paraphrase may serve to bring out the innumerable points
of interest in that rich passage in which St. Paul as it were gives the
reins to his imagination and his feelings in order to describe the
glory of the unity of the Church.
{150} I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk
worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called, with all lowliness
and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love;
giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
_There_ is one body, and one Spirit, even as also ye were called in one
hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and
Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all. But unto
each one of us was the grace given according to the measure of the gift
of Christ. Wherefore he saith,
When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive,
And gave gifts unto men.
(Now this, He ascended, what is it but that he also descended into the
lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that
ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)
And he gave some _to be_ apostles; and some, prophets; and some
evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the
saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body
of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we may be no longer
children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of
doctrine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of
error; but speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into him,
which is the head, _even_ Christ; from whom all the body fitly framed
and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according
to the working in _due_ measure of each several part, maketh the
increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.
{151}
In this great conception of church unity there are several points to
which special attention must be given.
i.
The Church is one, first of all, because a common inward life, the
Spirit, from a common source, Christ, flows in her veins and makes her
to be one body. What is this 'unity of Spirit?' says Chrysostom. 'As
in a body it is spirit which holds all together, and makes that to be a
unity which consists of different limbs, so it is in the Church. For
the Spirit was given for this purpose that He might unify those who
differ in race and variety of habits.' This inward life is no doubt,
as we shall see, imparted, maintained and perfected through outward
means or institutions--baptism, the eucharist, human offices and
ministries; but none the less it is the inward life which makes the
Church one. So that her unity is like the unity of a family or a race,
a unity of blood and life which exists in spite of all outward
differences: and not like such a unity as is produced by outward
government, as, for example, Armenians, Syrians, Kurds, and Turks make
up the unity of the Turkish empire, or Englishmen and Frenchmen the
Dominion of {152} Canada. The unity of the Christian Church is thus a
unity which ought to express itself in 'the bond of peace,' but which
does not consist in that, any more than the unity of a family consists
in the affection and sympathy which yet brothers ought to have one to
another. This Pauline idea of church unity--which is the idea also of
the New Testament as a whole--constantly finds expression in early
Christian writings, but one particular expression of it may be cited.
Hilary of Poitiers, in argument with the Arians, is confronted with the
position that the phrase 'I and my Father are one' means only one in
will, not one in nature, like the phrase used of the Church, 'one heart
and soul.' He refutes the argument by urging that, in the latter case
also, what is referred to is not a unity of wills but of nature:
believers are 'one thing through a new birth into the same (new)
nature.' 'Ye are all one,' says St. Paul, 'in Christ Jesus.' 'The
apostle teaches that this unity of the faithful comes from the nature
of the sacraments.... What then can concord of minds have to do with a
case where men are already made one by being clothed with one Christ
through the nature of one baptism?[9]' This passage gives {153} a
striking view of what ultimately constitutes church unity.
It is necessary to call attention to this position because the great
Roman church, which occupies so large a space in the whole area of the
church, and impresses its ideas so powerfully upon men's imagination,
has perverted this idea of church unity by a one-sided emphasis on
unity of government. I find a typical modern Roman statement in Dr.
Hunter's _Outlines of Dogmatic Theology_[10]: 'The Church has a
principle of oneness which joins the members together, and
distinguishes the society from a mere aggregate of unconnected units.
The members are associated in order that, believing the revelation that
God has given, and using the means of grace which He has provided,
under the direction of the governors who have their authority from Him,
they may attain the end of their being, the salvation of their souls.
In other words, the unity which the Church must have includes the unity
of faith, unity of worship, and unity of government.' Here we have
church unity described as an outward association of individuals to
attain a certain end by submitting to a common authority in matters of
belief and worship. The {154} unity of spiritual life which St. Paul
and St. Hilary put distinctly first, becomes secondary or subordinate.
It is not even specified among the three chief elements of unity. But
it makes the greatest possible difference whether you say 'the Church
is one because all baptized persons share a common life in Christ, and
ought therefore to behave as "one body,"' or 'the Church is one by
submitting to a common authority in belief, worship, and government.'
The second is the Roman, the first is the apostolic statement.
ii.
Once more, St. Paul's idea of the unity of the Church forbids us to
conceive of it as complete in this world. Each particular church with
its own organization has a certain relative completeness, but it gains
all its meaning and life through fellowship in the body of Christ--the
whole society of men who, having Christ for their head, live in the
unity of a life derived from Him. The head of the body is out of
sight. So also are the members of the body who 'are fallen asleep' but
are still 'in Jesus[11].' It is, so to speak--and increasingly as
history goes {155} on--only the lower limbs of the body who are on the
earth at any particular moment. And they find their centre of unity at
no lower point than Christ, the unseen head. This idea is vigorously
expressed by St. Augustine[12]: 'Since the whole Church is made up of
the head and the body, the head is our Saviour Himself, who suffered
under Pontius Pilate, who now, after He has risen from the dead, sits
at the right hand of God; but the body is the Church--not this church
or that, but the Church scattered over all the world; nor is it that
only which exists among men now living; but they also belong to it who
were before us and are to be after us to the end of the world. For the
whole Church, made up of all the faithful, because all the faithful are
members of Christ, has its head situate in the heavens which governs
this body: though it is separated from their sight, yet it is bound to
them by love."
Now it is obvious that this Pauline and Augustinian idea of church
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 r
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