The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the Corinthians
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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the Corinthians
Author: James Denney
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: January 15, 2013 [eBook #41850]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS ***
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
_Editor of "The Expositor"_
THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE
CORINTHIANS
BY
JAMES DENNEY, B.D.
=London=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCIV
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE.
_Crown 8vo, cloth, price 7s. 6d. each vol._
FIRST SERIES, 1887-8.
Colossians.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D.
St. Mark.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh.
Genesis.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
1 Samuel.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
2 Samuel.
By the same Author.
Hebrews.
By Principal T.C. EDWARDS, D.D.
SECOND SERIES, 1888-9.
Galatians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Pastoral Epistles.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Isaiah I.-XXXIX.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. I
The Book of Revelation.
By Prof. W. MILLIGAN, D.D.
1 Corinthians.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
The Epistles of St. John.
By Rt. Rev. W. ALEXANDER, D.D.
THIRD SERIES, 1889-90.
Judges and Ruth.
By Rev. R. A. WATSON, D.D.
Jeremiah.
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Isaiah XL.-LXVI.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. II.
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Exodus.
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FOURTH SERIES, 1890-1.
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SIXTH SERIES, 1892-3.
1 Kings.
By Ven. Archdeacon FARRAR.
Philippians.
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Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.
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Joshua.
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The Psalms.
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The Epistles of St. Peter.
By Prof. RAWSON LUMBY, D.D.
SEVENTH SERIES, 1893-4.
2 Kings.
By Ven. Archdeacon FARRAR.
Romans.
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The Books of Chronicles.
By Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.
2 Corinthians.
By JAMES DENNEY, B.D.
Numbers.
By R. A. WATSON, D.D.
The Psalms.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D. Vol. III.
THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE
CORINTHIANS
BY
JAMES DENNEY, B.D.
=London=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCIV
_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
I
SUFFERING AND CONSOLATION 10
II
FAITH BORN OF DESPAIR 23
III
THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 35
IV
CHRISTIAN MYSTERIES 47
V
A PASTOR'S HEART 59
VI
CHURCH DISCIPLINE 72
VII
CHRIST'S CAPTIVE 84
VIII
LIVING EPISTLES 99
IX
THE TWO COVENANTS 112
X
THE TRANSFIGURING SPIRIT 127
XI
THE GOSPEL DEFINED 144
XII
THE VICTORY OF FAITH 157
XIII
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 173
XIV
THE MEASURE OF CHRIST'S LOVE 186
XV
THE NEW WORLD 198
XVI
RECONCILIATION 210
XVII
THE SIGNS OF AN APOSTLE 224
XVIII
NEW TESTAMENT PURITANISM 237
XIX
REPENTANCE UNTO LIFE 248
XX
THE GRACE OF LIBERALITY 262
XXI
THE FRUITS OF LIBERALITY 274
XXII
WAR 289
XXIII
COMPARISONS 300
XXIV
GODLY JEALOUSY 312
XXV
FOOLISH BOASTING 325
XXVI
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 342
XXVII
NOT YOURS, BUT YOU 359
XXVIII
CONCLUSION 372
INTRODUCTION
Introduction, in the scientific sense, is not part of the expositor's
task; but it is convenient, especially when introduction and
exposition have important bearings on each other, that the expositor
should indicate his opinion on the questions common to both
departments. This is the purpose of the statement which follows.
(1) The starting-point for every inquiry into the relations between
St. Paul and the Corinthians, so far as they concern us here, is to be
found in the close connexion between the two Epistles to the
Corinthians which we possess. This close connexion is not a
hypothesis, of greater or less probability, like so much that figures
in Introductions to the Second Epistle; it is a large and solid fact,
which is worth more for our guidance than the most ingenious
conjectural combination. Stress has been justly laid on this by
Holtzmann,[1] who illustrates the general fact by details. Thus 2 Cor.
i. 8-10, ii. 12, 13, attach themselves immediately to the situation
described in 1 Cor. xvi. 8, 9. Similarly in 2 Cor. i. 12 there seems
to be a distinct echo of 1 Cor. ii. 4-14. More important is the
unquestionable reference in 2 Cor. i. 13-17, 23, to 1 Cor. xvi. 5.
From a comparison of these two passages it is plain that before Paul
wrote either he had had an intention, of which the Corinthians were
aware, to visit Corinth in a certain way. He was to leave Ephesus,
sail straight across the sea to Corinth, go from Corinth to Macedonia,
and then return, _viâ_ Corinth, to Asia again. In other words, on this
tour he was to visit Corinth twice. In the last chapter of the First
Epistle, he announces a change of plan: he is _not_ going to Corinth
direct, but _viâ_ Macedonia, and the Corinthians are only to see him
once. He does not say, in the First Epistle, why he has changed his
plan, but the announcement caused great dissatisfaction in Corinth.
Some said he was a fickle creature; some said he was afraid to show
face. This is the situation to which the Second Epistle directly
addresses itself; the very first thing Paul does in it is to explain
and justify the change of plan announced in the First. It was not
fickleness, he says, nor cowardice, that made him change his mind, but
the desire to spare the Corinthians and himself the pain which a visit
paid at the moment would certainly inflict. The close connexion
between our two Epistles, which on this point is unquestionable, may
be further illustrated. Thus, not to point to general resemblances in
feeling or temper, the correspondence is at least suggestive between
ἁγνὸς ἐν τῷ πράγματι, 2 Cor. vii. 11 (cf. the use of πρᾶγμα in 1
Thess. iv. 6), and τοιαύτη πορνεία in 1 Cor. v. 1; between ἐν προςώπῳ
Χριστῦ, 2 Cor. ii. 10, and ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τῦ Κ. ἡμῶν Ἰ. Χ., 1 Cor. v.
4; between the mention of Satan in 2 Cor. ii. 11 and 1 Cor. v. 5;
between πενθεῖν in 2 Cor. xii. 21 and 1 Cor. v. 2; between τοιοῦτος
and τις in 2 Cor. ii. 6 f., 2 Cor. ii. 5, and the same words in 1 Cor.
v. 5 and 1 Cor. v. 1. If all these are carefully examined and
compared, I think it becomes extremely difficult to believe that in 2
Cor. ii. 5 ff. and in 2 Cor. vii. 8 ff. the Apostle is dealing with
anything else than the case of the sinner treated in 1 Cor. v. The
coincidences in detail would be very striking under any circumstances;
but in combination with the fact that the two Epistles, as has just
been shown by the explanation of the change of purpose about the
journey, are in the closest connexion with each other, they seem to me
to come as nearly as possible to demonstration.
(2) If this view is accepted, it is natural and justifiable to explain
the Second Epistle as far as possible out of the First. Thus the letter
to which St. Paul refers in 2 Cor. ii. 4 and in 2 Cor. vii. 8, 12, will
be our First Epistle to the Corinthians; the persons referred to in 2
Cor. vii. 12 as "he who did the wrong" and "he to whom the wrong was
done" will be the son and the father in 1 Cor. v. 1. There are, indeed,
many who think that it is absurd to speak of the First Epistle to the
Corinthians as written "out of much affliction and anguish of heart and
with many tears"; and who cannot imagine that Paul would speak of a
great sin and crime, like that of the incestuous person, in such
language as he employs in 2 Cor. ii. 5 ff. and 2 Cor. vii. 12. Such
language, they argue, suits far better the case of a personal injury, an
insult or outrage of which Paul--either in person or in one of his
deputies--had been the victim at Corinth. Hence they argue for an
intermediate visit of a very painful character, and for an intermediate
letter, now lost, dealing with this painful incident. Paul, we are to
suppose, visited Corinth on the business of 1 Cor. v. (among other
things), and there suffered a great humiliation. He was defied by the
guilty man and his friends, and had to leave the Church without
effecting anything. Then he wrote the extremely severe letter to which
ii. 4 refers--a letter which was carried by Titus, and which produced
the change on which he congratulates himself in ii. 5 ff. and vii. 8 ff.
It is obvious that this whole combination is hypothetical; and hence,
though many have been attracted by it, it appears with an infinite
variety of detail. It is obvious also that the grounds on which it rests
are subjective; it is a question on which men will differ to the end of
time, whether the language in 2 Cor. ii. 4 is an apt description of the
mood in which Paul wrote (at least certain parts of) the First Epistle
to the Corinthians, or whether the language in 2 Cor. ii. 5 ff., vii. 8
ff. is becoming language in which to close proceedings like those opened
in 1 Cor. v. If many have believed that it is not, many, on the other
hand, have no difficulty in believing that it is; and those who take the
negative not only fail to explain the series of verbal correspondences
detailed above, but dissolve the connexion between our two Epistles
altogether. Thus Godet allows more than a year, crowded with events, to
come between them. In view of the palpable fact with which we started, I
cannot but think this quite incredible: it is far easier to suppose that
the proceedings about the incestuous person took a complexion which made
Paul's language in the second and seventh chapters natural than to come
to any confident conviction about this hypothetical visit and letter.
(3) But the visit, it may be said, at all events, is not hypothetical.
It is distinctly alluded to in 2 Cor. ii. 1, xii. 14, xiii. 1. These
passages are discussed in the exposition. The two last are certainly
not decisive; there are good scholars who hold the same opinion of
the first. Heinrici, for instance, maintains that Paul had only been
once in Corinth when he wrote the Second Epistle; it was the _third_
time he was _starting_, but once his intention had been frustrated or
deferred, so that when he reached Corinth it would only be his second
visit. A case can be stated for this, but in view of chap. ii. 1 and
chap. xiii. 2, I do not see that it can be easily maintained. These
passages practically compel us to assume that Paul had already visited
Corinth a second time, and had had very painful experiences there. But
the close connexion of our Epistles equally compels us to assume that
this second visit belongs to an earlier date than our first canonical
Epistle. We know nothing of it except that it was not pleasant, and
that Paul was very willing to save both himself and the Corinthians
the repetition of such an experience. It is nothing against this view
that the visit in question is not referred to in Acts or in the fist
letter. Hardly anything in chap. xi. 24 ff. is known to us from Acts,
and probably we should never have known of this journey unless in
explaining the change of purpose which the first letter announced it
had occurred to Paul to say: "I did not wish to come when it could
only vex you; I had enough of that before."
(4) As for the letter, which is supposed to be referred to in 2 Cor. ii.
4, it also has been relieved of its hypothetical character by being
identified with chaps. x. 1-xiii. 10 of our present Second Epistle. In
the absence of the faintest external indication that the Epistle ever
existed in any other than its present form, it is perhaps superfluous to
treat this seriously; but the comment of Godet seems to me sufficiently
to dispose of it. The hypothetical letter in question--in which Godet
himself believes--must have had two main objects: first, to accredit
Titus, who is assumed to have carried it, as the representative of Paul;
and, second, to insist on reparation for the assumed personal outrage of
which Paul had been the victim on his recent visit. This second object,
at an events, is indisputable. But chaps. x. 1-xiii. 10 have no
reference whatever to either of these things, and are wholly taken up
with what the Apostle means to do, when he comes to Corinth the third
time; they refer not to this (imaginary) insolent person, but to the
misbelieving and the immoral in general.
(5) Except in the points specified, the interpretation of the Epistle
is little affected by the questions raised in _Introduction_. Even in
the points specified it is the historical reference, not the ethical
import, which is affected. Whichever view we take of them, we get on
the whole substantially the same impression of the spirit of Christ as
it lives and works in the soul of the Apostle. It is part of the man's
greatness, it is the seal of his inspiration, that in his hands the
temporal becomes eternal, the incidental loses its purely incidental
character, and has significance for all time. It is the expositor's
task to deal with the spiritual rather than the historical side, and
it will be sufficient here to indicate in outline what I conceive the
series of Paul's relations with the Corinthians to have been.
(6) His first visit to Corinth was that which is recorded in Acts
xviii.; according to the statement of ver. 11 it extended over a
period of eighteen months. In all probability he had many
communications with the Church, through deputies whom he commissioned,
in the years during which he was absent; the form of the question in 2
Cor. xii. 17 (μή τινα ὧν ἀπέσταλκα πρὸς ὑμᾶς κ.τ.λ.) implies as much.
But it is only after his coming to Ephesus, in the course of his
third missionary journey, that personal intercourse with Corinth can
have been resumed. To this period I should refer the visit which we
are bound to assume on the ground of 2 Cor. ii. 1, xiii. 2. What the
occasion was, or what the circumstances, we cannot tell; all we know
is that it was painful, and perhaps disappointing. Paul had used grave
and threatening language on this occasion (2 Cor. xiii. 2), but he had
been obliged to tolerate some things which he would rather have seen
otherwise. This visit was probably made toward the close of the three
years' stay in Ephesus, and the letter referred to in 1 Cor. v. 9--the
one in which he warned the Corinthians not to associate with
fornicators--would most likely be written on his return from it. In
this letter he may very naturally have announced that purpose of
visiting Corinth twice--once on his way to Macedonia, and again on his
way back--to which reference has already been made. This letter,
plainly, did not serve its purpose, and not long afterwards Paul
received at Ephesus deputies from the Corinthian Church (1 Cor. xvi.
17), who apparently brought written instructions with them, in which
Paul's judgment was sought more minutely on a variety of ethical
questions (1 Cor. vii. 1). Before these deputies arrived, or at all
events before Paul wrote the letter (our First Epistle) in which he
addressed himself to the state of affairs in Corinth which their
reports had disclosed, Timothy had left Ephesus on a journey of some
interest. Paul meant Corinth to be his destination (1 Cor. iv. 17),
but he had to go _viâ_ Macedonia, and the Apostle was not certain that
he would get so far (1 Cor. xvi. 10: "But _if_ Timothy come," etc.).
In point of fact, he does not seem to have gone farther than
Macedonia; and Luke in Acts xix. 22 mentions Macedonia as the place to
which he had been sent. That he got no farther is suggested also by
the fact that Paul joins his name with his own in the salutation of
the Second Epistle, which was written in Macedonia, but never hints
that he owed to _him_ any information whatever on the state of the
Corinthian Church. All that he knew of this, and of the effect of his
first letter, he learned from Titus (2 Cor. ii. 13, vii. 13 f.). But
how did Titus happen to be in Corinth representing Paul? By far the
happiest suggestion here is that which makes Titus and the brother of
2 Cor. xii. 18 the same as "the brethren" of 1 Cor. xvi. 12, whose
return from Corinth Paul expected in company of Timothy. Timothy, as
we have seen, did not get so far. Paul's departure from Ephesus was
apparently hastened by a great peril; his anxiety, too, to hear the
effect produced by that letter which had cost him so much--our First
Epistle--was very great; he pressed on, past Troas, where a fair field
of labour waited for workers, and finally encountered Titus in
Macedonia, and heard his report.
(7) This is the point at which the Second Epistle to the Corinthians
begins. It falls of itself into three clearly marked divisions. The
first extends over chaps. i.-vii. In this the Apostle makes his peace,
so to speak, with the Corinthians, and does everything in his power to
remove any feeling of "soreness" which might linger in their minds
over his rigorous treatment of one particular offender. But embedded
in this there is a magnificent vindication of the spiritual apostolic
ministry, especially in contrast with that of the legalists, and an
appeal for love and confidence such as he had always bestowed on the
Church. Chaps. viii. and ix. form the second part, and are devoted to
the collection which was being made in the Gentile Churches for poor
Christians in Jerusalem. The third part consists of chaps. x. to xiii.
In this Paul confronts the disorders which still assert themselves in
the Church; the pretensions of certain Judaists, "superlative
apostles" as he calls them, who were assailing his apostolic vocation
and subverting his gospel; and the immoral licence of others,
presumably once pagans, who used liberty for a cloak to the flesh. He
writes of both with unsparing severity, yet he does not wish to be
severe. He parts from the Church with words of unaffected love, and
includes them all in his benediction.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _Einleitung_, 2nd ed., p. 255 f.
I
_SUFFERING AND CONSOLATION_
"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, and
Timothy our brother, unto the Church of God which is at Corinth,
with all the saints which are in the whole of Achaia: Grace to you
and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
"Blessed _be_ the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies and God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all
our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in
any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are
comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound unto us,
even so our comfort also aboundeth through Christ. But whether we
be afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or whether we
be comforted, it is for your comfort, which worketh in the patient
enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer: and our hope
for you is stedfast; knowing that, as ye are partakers of the
sufferings, so also are ye of the comfort."--2 COR. i. 1-7 (R.V.).
The greeting with which St. Paul introduces his Epistles is much alike
in them all, but it never becomes a mere formality, and ought not to
pass unregarded as such. It describes, as a rule, the character in
which he writes, and the character in which his correspondents are
addressed. Here he is an apostle of Jesus Christ, divinely
commissioned; and he addresses a Christian community at Corinth,
including in it, for the purposes of his letter, the scattered
Christians to be found in the other quarters of Achaia. His letters
are occasional, in the sense that some special incident or situation
called them forth; but this occasional character does not lessen
their value. He addresses himself to the incident or situation in the
consciousness of his apostolic vocation; he writes to a Church
constituted for permanence, or at least for such duration as this
transitory world can have; and what we have in his Epistles is not a
series of _obiter dicta_, the casual utterances of an irresponsible
person; it is the mind of Christ authoritatively given upon the
questions raised. When he includes any other person in the
salutation--as in this place "Timothy our brother"--it is rather as a
mark of courtesy, than as adding to the Epistle another authority
besides his own. Timothy had helped to found the Church at Corinth;
Paul had shown great anxiety about his reception by the Corinthians,
when he started to visit that turbulent Church alone (1 Cor. xvi. 10
f.); and in this new letter he honours him in their eyes by uniting
his name with his own in the superscription. The Apostle and his
affectionate fellow-worker wish the Corinthians, as they wished all
the Churches, grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ. It is not necessary to expound afresh the meaning and
connexion of these two New Testament ideas: grace is the first and
last word of the Gospel; and peace--perfect spiritual soundness--is
the finished work of grace in the soul.
The Apostle's greeting is usually followed by a thanksgiving, in which
he recalls the conversion of those to whom he is writing, or surveys
their progress in the new life, and the improvement of their gifts,
gratefully acknowledging God as the author of all. Thus in the First
Epistle to the Corinthians he thanks God for the grace given to them
in Christ Jesus, and especially for their Christian enrichment in all
utterance and in all knowledge. So, too, but with deeper gratitude,
he dwells on the virtues of the Thessalonians, remembering their work
of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope. Here also there is
a thanksgiving, but at the first glance of a totally different
character. The Apostle blesses God, not for what He has done for the
Corinthians, but for what He has done for himself. "Blessed be the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of
all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation." This departure
from the Apostle's usual custom is probably not so selfish as it
looks. When his mind travelled down from Philippi to Corinth, it
rested on the spiritual aspects of the Church there with anything but
unrelieved satisfaction. There was much for which he could not
possibly be thankful; and just as the momentary apostasy of the
Galatians led to his omitting the thanksgiving altogether, so the
unsettled mood in which he wrote to the Corinthians gave it this
peculiar turn. Nevertheless, when he thanked God for comforting him in
all his afflictions, he thanked Him on their behalf. It was they who
were eventually to have the profit both of his sorrows and his
consolations. Probably, too, there is something here which is meant to
appeal, even to those who disliked him in Corinth. There had been a
good deal of friction between the Apostle and some who had once owned
him as their father in Christ; they were blaming him, at this very
moment, for not coming to visit them; and in this thanksgiving, which
dilates on the afflictions he has endured, and on the divine
consolation he has experienced in them, there is a tacit appeal to the
sympathy even of hostile spirits. Do not, he seems to say, deal
ungenerously with one who has passed through such terrible
experiences, and lays the fruit of them at your feet. Chrysostom
presses this view, as if St. Paul had written his thanksgiving in the
character of a subtle diplomatist: to judge by one's feeling, it is
true enough to deserve mention.[2]
The subject of the thanksgiving is the Apostle's sufferings, and his
experience of God's mercies under them. He expressly calls them the
sufferings of Christ. These sufferings, he says, abound toward us.
Christ was the greatest of sufferers: the flood of pain and sorrow
went over His head; all its waves and billows broke upon Him. The
Apostle was caught and overwhelmed by the same stream; the waters came
into his soul. That is the meaning of τὰ παθήματα τοῦ Χριστοῦ
περισσεύει εἰς ἡμᾶς. In abundant measure the disciple was initiated
into his Master's stern experience; he learned, what he prayed to
learn, the fellowship of His sufferings. The boldness of the language
in which a mortal man calls his own afflictions the sufferings of
Christ is far from unexampled in the New Testament. It is repeated by
St. Paul in Col. i. 24: "I now rejoice in my sufferings on your
behalf, and fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ
in my flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church." It is varied in
Heb. xiii. 13, where the sacred writer exhorts us to go out to Jesus,
without the camp, bearing _His_ reproach. It is anticipated and
justified by the words of the Lord Himself: "Ye shall indeed drink of
My cup; and with the baptism with which I am baptised shall ye be
baptised withal." One lot, and that a cross, awaits all the children
of God in this world, from the Only-begotten who came from the bosom
of the Father, to the latest-born among His brethren. But let us
beware of the hasty assertion that, because the Christian's sufferings
can thus be described as of a piece with Christ's, the key to the
mystery of Gethsemane and Calvary is to be found in the
self-consciousness of martyrs and confessors. The very man who speaks
of filling up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ for
the Church's sake, and who says that the sufferings of Christ came on
him in their fulness, would have been the first to protest against
such an idea. "Was Paul crucified for you?" Christ suffered alone;
there is, in spite of our fellowship with His sufferings, a solitary,
incommunicable greatness in His Cross, which the Apostle will expound
in another place (chap. v.). Even when Christ's sufferings come upon
us there is a difference. At the very lowest, as Vinet has it, we do
from gratitude what he did from pure love. We suffer in His company,
sustained by His comfort; He suffered uncomforted and unsustained. We
are afflicted, when it so happens, "under the auspices of the divine
mercy"; He was afflicted that there might be mercy for us.
Few parts of Bible teaching are more recklessly applied than those
about suffering and consolation. If all that men endured was of the
character here described, if all their sufferings were sufferings of
Christ, which came on them because they were walking in His steps and
assailed by the forces which buffeted Him, consolation would be an
easy task. The presence of God with the soul would make it almost
unnecessary. The answer of a good conscience would take all the
bitterness out of pain; and then, however it tortured, it could not
poison the soul. The mere sense that our sufferings _are_ the
sufferings of Christ--that we are drinking of His cup--is itself a
comfort and an inspiration beyond words. But much of our suffering, we
know very well, is of a different character. It does not come on us
because we are united to Christ, but because we are estranged from
Him; it is the proof and the fruit, not of our righteousness, but of
our guilt. It is our sin finding us out, and avenging itself upon us,
and in no sense the suffering of Christ. Such suffering, no doubt, has
its use and its purpose. It is meant to drive the soul in upon itself,
to compel it to reflection, to give it no rest till it awakes to
penitence, to urge it through despair to God. Those who suffer thus
will have cause to thank God afterwards if His discipline leads to
their amendment, but they have no title to take to themselves the
consolation prepared for those who are partners in the sufferings of
Christ. Nor is the minister of Christ at liberty to apply a passage
like this to any case of affliction which he encounters in his work.
There are sufferings and sufferings; there is a divine intention in
them all, if we could only discover it; but the divine intention and
the divinely wrought result are only explained here for one particular
kind--those sufferings, namely, which come upon men in virtue of their
following Jesus Christ. What, then does the Apostle's experience
enable him to say on this hard question?
(1) His sufferings have brought him a new revelation of God, which is
expressed in the new name, "The Father of mercies and God of all
comfort." The name is wonderful in its tenderness; we feel as we
pronounce it that a new conception of what love can be has been
imparted to the Apostle's soul. It is in the sufferings and sorrows of
life that we discover what we possess in our human friends. Perhaps
one abandons us in our extremity, and another betrays us; but most of
us find ourselves unexpectedly and astonishingly rich. People of whom
we have hardly ever had a kind thought show us kindness; the
unsuspected, unmerited goodness which comes to our relief makes us
ashamed. This is the rule which is illustrated here by the example of
God Himself. It is as if the Apostle said: "I never knew, till the
sufferings of Christ abounded in me, how near God could come to man; I
never knew how rich His mercies could be, how intimate His sympathy,
how inspiriting His comfort." This is an utterance well worth
considering. The sufferings of men, and especially the sufferings of
the innocent and the good, are often made the ground of hasty charges
against God; nay, they are often turned into arguments for Atheism.
But who are they who make such charges? Not the righteous sufferers,
at least in New Testament times. The Apostle here is their
representative and spokesman, and he assures us that God never was so
much to him as when he was in the sorest straits. The divine love was
so far from being doubtful to him that it shone out then in
unanticipated brightness; the very heart of the Father was
revealed--all mercy, all encouragement and comfort. If the martyrs
have no doubts of their own, is it not very gratuitous for the
spectators to become sceptics on their account? "The sufferings of
Christ" in His people may be an insoluble problem to the disinterested
onlooker, but they are no problem to the sufferers. What is a mystery,
when viewed from without, a mystery in which God seems to be
conspicuous by His absence, is, when viewed from within, a new and
priceless revelation of God Himself. "The Father of mercies and God of
all comfort" is making Himself known now as for want of opportunity He
could not be known before.
Notice especially that the consolation is said to abound "through
Christ." He is the mediator through whom it comes. To partake in His
sufferings is to be united to _Him_; and to be united to Him is to
partake in His _life_. The Apostle anticipates here a thought on which
he enlarges in the fourth chapter: "Always bearing about in the body
the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in
our body." In our eagerness to emphasise the nearness and the sympathy
of Jesus, it is to be feared that we do less than justice to the New
Testament revelation of His glory. He does not suffer now. He is
enthroned on high, far above all principality and power and might and
dominion. The Spirit which brings His presence to our hearts is the
Spirit of the Prince of Life; its function is not to be weak with our
weakness, but to help our infirmity, and to strengthen us with all
might in the inner man. The Christ who dwells in us through His Spirit
is not the Man of Sorrows, wearing the crown of thorns; it is the King
of kings and Lord of lords, making us partakers of His triumph. There
is a weak tone in much of the religious literature which deals with
suffering, utterly unlike that of the New Testament. It is a
degradation of Christ to our level which it teaches, instead of an
exaltation of man toward Christ's. But the last is the apostolic
ideal: "More than conquerors through Him that loved us." The comfort
of which St. Paul makes so much here is not necessarily deliverance
from suffering for Christ's sake, still less exemption from it; it is
the strength and courage and immortal hope which rise up, even in the
midst of suffering, in the heart in which the Lord of glory dwells.
Through Him such comfort abounds; it wells up to match and more than
match the rising tide of suffering.
(2) But Paul's sufferings have done more than give him a new knowledge
of God; they have given him at the same time a new power to comfort
others. He is bold enough to make this ministry of consolation the key
to his recent experiences. "He comforteth us in all our affliction, that
we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the
comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." His sufferings and
his consolation together had a purpose that went beyond himself. How
significant that is for some perplexing aspects of man's life! We are
selfish, and instinctively regard ourselves as the centre of all
providences; we naturally seek to explain everything by its bearing on
ourselves alone. But God has not made us for selfishness and isolation,
and some mysteries would be cleared up if we had love enough to see the
ties by which our life is indissolubly linked to others. This, however,
is less definite than the Apostle's thought; what he tells us is that he
has gained a new power at a great price. It is a power which almost
every Christian man will covet; but how many are willing to pass through
the fire to obtain it? We must ourselves have needed and have found
comfort, before we know what it is; we must ourselves have learned the
art of consoling in the school of suffering, before we can practise it
for the benefit of others. The most painfully tried, the most proved in
suffering, the souls that are best acquainted with grief, provided
their consolation has abounded through Christ, are specially called to
this ministry. Their experience is their preparation for it. Nature is
something, and age is something; but far more than nature and age is
that discipline of God to which they have been submitted, that
initiation into the sufferings of Christ which has made them acquainted
with His consolations also, and has taught them to know the Father of
mercies and the God of all comfort. Are they not among His best gifts to
the Church, those whom He has qualified to console, by consoling them in
the fire?
In the sixth verse the Apostle dwells on the interest of the Corinthians
in his sufferings and his consolation. It is a practical illustration of
the communion of the saints in Christ. "All that befalls _me_," says St.
Paul, "has _your_ interest in view. If I am afflicted, it is in the
interest of your comfort: when you look at me, and see how I bear myself
in the sufferings of Christ, you will be encouraged to become imitators
of me, even as I am of Him. If, again, I am comforted, this also is in
the interest of _your_ comfort; God enables me to impart to you what He
has imparted to me; and the comfort in question is no impotent thing; it
proves its power in this--that when you have received it, you endure
with brave patience the same sufferings which we also suffer." This last
is a favourite thought with the Apostle, and connects itself readily
with the idea, which may or may not have a right to be expressed in the
text, that all this is in furtherance of the salvation of the
Corinthians.[3] For if there is one note of the saved more certain than
another, it is the brave patience with which they take upon them the
sufferings of Christ. ὁ δὲ ὑπομείνας εἰς τέλος, οὗτος σωθήσεται (Matt.
x. 22). All that helps men to endure to the end, helps them to
salvation. All that tends to break the spirit and to sink men
despondency, or hurry them into impatience or fear, leads in the
opposite direction. The great service that a true comforter does is to
put the strength and courage into us which enable us to take up our
cross, however sharp and heavy, and to bear it to the last step and the
last breath. No comfort is worth the name--none is taught of God--which
has another efficacy than this. The saved are those whose souls rise to
this description, and who recognise their spiritual kindred in such
brave and patient sufferers as Paul.
The thanksgiving ends appropriately with a cheerful word about the
Corinthians. "Our hope for you is stedfast; knowing that, as ye are
partakers of the sufferings, so are ye also of the comfort." These two
things go together; it is the appointed lot of the children of God to
become acquainted with both. If the sufferings could come alone, if
_they_ could be assigned as the portion of the Church apart from the
consolation, Paul could have no hope that the Corinthians would endure
to the end; but as it is, he is not afraid. The force of his words is
perhaps best felt by us, if instead of saying that the sufferings and
the consolation are inseparable, we say that the consolation depends
upon the sufferings. And what is the consolation? It is the presence
of the exalted Saviour in the heart through His Spirit. It is a clear
perception, and a firm hold, of the things which are unseen and
eternal. It is a conviction of the divine love which cannot be shaken,
and of its sovereignty and omnipotence in the Risen Christ. This
infinite comfort is contingent upon our partaking of the sufferings of
Christ. There is a point, the Apostle seems to say, at which the
invisible world and its glories intersect this world in which we live,
and become visible, real, and inspiring to men. It is the point at
which we suffer with Christ's sufferings. At any other point the
vision of this glory is unneeded, and therefore withheld. The worldly,
the selfish, the cowardly; those who shrink from self-denial; those
who evade pain; those who root themselves in the world that lies
around us, and when they move at all move in the line of least
resistance; those who have never carried Christ's Cross,--none of
these can ever have the triumphant conviction of things unseen and
eternal which throbs in every page of the New Testament. None of these
can have what the Apostle elsewhere calls "eternal consolation." It is
easy for unbelievers, and for Christians lapsing into unbelief, to
mock this faith as faith in "the transcendent"; but would a single
line of the New Testament have been written without it? When we weigh
what is here asserted about its connexion with the sufferings of
Christ, could a graver charge be brought against any Church than that
its faith in this "transcendent" languished or was extinct? Do not let
us hearken to the sceptical insinuations which would rob us of all
that has been revealed in Christ's resurrection; and do not let us
imagine, on the other hand, that we can retain a living faith in this
revelation if we decline to take up our cross. It was only when the
sufferings of Christ abounded in him that Paul's consolation was
abundant through Christ; it was only when he laid down his life for
His sake that Stephen saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man
standing at the right hand of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The same view is strongly held by Schmiedel. He infers from chap.
vi. 9 that Paul's sufferings had been interpreted at Corinth as a divine
chastisement; in opposition to this the Apostle shows that they are
divinely intended to profit the Corinthians. Hence the opening of the
letter is not a simple outpouring of his heart, but is delicately
calculated to set aside a reproach without naming it. The same purpose
rules in the assumption that the Corinthians will intercede and give
thanks on his behalf; it takes for granted their reconciliation to him.
[3] The text is incurably perplexed. The variations can be seen in any
critical edition. The MS. authority does not justify any confident
decision, and the happiest suggestion yet made seems to be that of
Professor Warfield, who would omit altogether the words καὶ σωτηρίας
(_and salvation_). The MSS. vary most in regard to these words,
inserting, omitting, and transposing them. Hence they are very
probably an old gloss, and their omission simplifies both the grammar
and the sense.
II
_FAITH BORN OF DESPAIR_
"For we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning our
affliction which befell us in Asia, that we were weighed down
exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of
life: yea, we ourselves have had the answer of death within
ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which
raiseth the dead: who delivered us out of so great a death, and
will deliver: on whom we have set our hope that He will also still
deliver us; ye also helping together on our behalf by your
supplication; that, for the gift bestowed upon us by means of
many, thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf.
"For our glorying is this, the testimony of our conscience, that
in holiness and sincerity of God, not in fleshly wisdom but in the
grace of God, we behaved ourselves in the world, and more
abundantly to you-ward. For we write none other things unto you,
than what ye read or even acknowledge, and I hope ye will
acknowledge unto the end: as also ye did acknowledge us in part,
that we are your glorying, even as ye also are ours, in the day of
our Lord Jesus."--2 COR. i. 8-14 (R.V.).
Paul seems to have felt that the thanksgiving with which he opens this
letter to the Corinthians was so peculiar as to require explanation. It
was not his way to burst upon his readers thus with his private
experiences either of joy or sorrow; and though he had good reason for
what he did--in that abundance of the heart out of which the mouth
speaks, in his desire to conciliate the good-will of the Corinthians for
a much-tried man, and in his faith in the real communion of the
saints--he instinctively stops here a moment to vindicate what he has
done. He does not wish them to be ignorant of an experience which has
been so much to him, and ought to have the liveliest interest for them.
Evidently they knew that he had been in trouble, but they had no
sufficient idea of the extremity to which he had been reduced. We were
weighed down, he writes, in excess, beyond our power; the trial that
came upon us was one not measured to man's strength. We despaired even
of life. Nay, we have had[4] the answer of death in ourselves. When we
looked about us, when we faced our circumstances, and asked ourselves
whether death or life was to be the end of this, we could only answer,
Death. We were like men under sentence; it was only a question of a
little sooner or a little later, when the fatal stroke should fall.
The Apostle, who has a divine gift for interpreting experience and
reading its lessons, tells us why he and his friends had to pass such a
terrible time. It was that they might trust, not in themselves, but in
God who raises the dead. It is natural, he implies, for us to trust in
ourselves. It is so natural, and so confirmed by the habits of a
lifetime, that no ordinary difficulties or perplexities avail to break
us of it. It takes all God can do to root up our self-confidence. He
must reduce us to despair; He must bring us to such an extremity that
the one voice we have in our hearts, the one voice that cries to us
wherever we look round for help, is Death, death, death. It is out of
this despair that the superhuman hope is born. It is out of this abject
helplessness that the soul learns to look up with new trust to God.
It is a melancholy reflection upon human nature that we have, as the
Apostle expresses it elsewhere, to be "shut up" to all the mercies of
God. If we could evade them, notwithstanding their freeness and their
worth, we would. How do most of us attain to any faith in Providence?
Is it not by proving, through numberless experiments, that it is not
in man that walketh to direct his steps? Is it not by coming, again
and again, to the limit of our resources, and being compelled to feel
that unless there is a wisdom and a love at work on our behalf,
immeasurably wiser and more benignant than our own, life is a moral
chaos? How, above all, do we come to any faith in redemption? to any
abiding trust in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of our souls? Is it not
by this same way of despair? Is it not by the profound consciousness
that in ourselves there is _no_ answer to the question, How shall man
be just with God? and that the answer must be sought in Him? Is it not
by failure, by defeat, by deep disappointments, by ominous forebodings
hardening into the awful certainty that we cannot with our own
resources make ourselves good men--is it not by experiences like these
that we are led to the Cross? This principle has many other
illustrations in human life, and every one of them is something to our
discredit. They all mean that only desperation opens our eyes to God's
love. We do not heartily own Him as the author of life and health,
unless He has raised us from sickness after the doctor had given us
up. We do not acknowledge His paternal guidance of our life, unless in
some sudden peril, or some impending disaster, He provides an
unexpected deliverance. We do not confess that salvation is of the
Lord, till our very soul has been convinced that in it there dwells no
good thing. Happy are those who are taught, even by despair, to set
their hope in God; and who, when they learn this lesson once, learn
it, like St. Paul, once for all (see note on ἐσχήκαμεν above). Faith
and hope like those which burn through this Epistle were well worth
purchasing, even at such a price; they were blessings so valuable that
the love of God did not shrink from reducing Paul to despair that he
might be compelled to grasp them. Let us believe when such trials come
into our lives--when we are weighed down exceedingly, beyond our
strength, and are in darkness without light, in a valley of the shadow
of death with no outlet--that God is not dealing with us cruelly or at
random, but shutting us up to an experience of His love which we have
hitherto declined. "After two days will He revive us; on the third day
He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him."
The Apostle describes the God on whom he learned to hope as "God who
raises the dead." He himself had been as good as dead, and his
deliverance was as good as a resurrection. The phrase, however, seems
to be the Apostle's equivalent for omnipotence: when he thinks of the
utmost that God can do, he expresses it thus. Sometimes the
application of it is merely physical (_e.g._, Rom. iv. 17); sometimes
it is spiritual as well. Thus in Eph. i. 19 ff. the possibilities of
the Christian life are measured by this--that that power is at work in
believers with which God wrought in Christ when _He raised Him from
the dead_, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places.
Is not that power sufficient to do for the weakest and most desperate
of men far more than all he needs? Yet it is his need, somehow, when
brought home to him in despair, that opens his eyes to this omnipotent
saving power.
The text of the words in which Paul tells of his deliverance can
hardly be said to be quite certain, but the general meaning is plain.
God delivered him from the awful death which was impending over him;
he had his hope now firmly set on Him; he was sure that He would
deliver him in the future also.[5] What the danger had been, which had
made so powerful an impression on this hardy soul, we cannot now tell.
It must have been something which happened after the First Epistle was
written, and therefore was not the fighting with wild beasts at
Ephesus, whatever that may have been (1 Cor. xv. 32). It may have been
a serious bodily illness, which had brought him to death's door, and
left him so weak, that still, at every step, he felt it was God's
mercy that was holding him up. It may have been a plot to make away
with him on the part of the many adversaries mentioned in the First
Epistle (xvi. 9)--a plot which had failed, as it were, by a miracle,
but the malignity of which still dogged his steps, and was only
warded off by the constant presence of God. Both these suggestions
require, and would satisfy, the reading, "who delivered us from so
great a death, and _doth deliver_." If, however, we take the reading
of the R.V.--"who delivered us from so great a death, and _will
deliver_; on whom we have set our hope that He will also still deliver
us"--the existence of the danger, at the moment at which Paul writes,
is not necessarily involved; and the danger itself may have been more
of what we might call an accidental character. The imminent peril of
drowning referred to in chap. xi. 25 would meet the case; and the
confidence expressed by Paul with such emphatic reference to the
future will not seem without motive when we consider that he had
several sea voyages in prospect--as those from Corinth to Syria, from
Syria to Rome, and probably from Rome to Spain. So Hofmann interprets
the whole passage: but whether the interpretation be good or bad, it
is elsewhere than in its accidental circumstances that the interest of
the transaction lies for the writer and for us. To Paul it was not
merely a historical but a spiritual experience; not an incident
without meaning, but a divinely ordered discipline; and it is thus
that we must learn to read our own lives if the purpose of God is to
be wrought out in them.
Notice in this connexion, in the eleventh verse, how simply Paul
assumes the spiritual participation of the Corinthians in his
fortunes. It is God indeed who delivers him, but the deliverance is
wrought while they, as well as other Churches, co-operate in
supplication on his behalf. In the strained relations existing between
himself and the Corinthians, the assumption here made so graciously
probably did them more than justice; if there were unsympathetic souls
among them, they must have felt in it a delicate rebuke. What
follows--"that, for the gift bestowed upon us by the means of many,
thanks may be given by many persons on our behalf" (R.V.)--simple and
intelligible as it looks in English, is one of the passages which
justify M. Sabatier's remark that Paul is difficult to understand and
impossible to translate. The Revisers seem to have construed τὸ ἐις
ἡμᾶς χάρισμα διὰ πολλῶν together, as if it had been τὸ διὰ π. ε. ἡ.
χάρισμα, the meaning being that the favour bestowed on Paul in his
deliverance from this peril had been bestowed at the intercession of
many. Others get virtually the same meaning by construing τὸ εἰς ἡμᾶς
χάρισμα with ἐκ πολλῶν προςώπων: the inversion is supposed to
emphasise these last words; and as it was, on this view, prayer on the
part of many persons that procured his deliverance, Paul is anxious
that the deliverance itself should be acknowledged by the thanksgiving
of many. It cannot be denied that both these renderings are
grammatically violent, and it seems to me preferable to keep τὸ ἐις
ἡμᾶς χάρισμα by itself, even though ἐκ πολλῶν προςώπων and διὰ πολλῶν
should then reduplicate the same idea with only a slight variation. We
should then render: "in order that, on the part of many persons, the
favour shown to us may be gratefully acknowledged by many on our
behalf." The pleonasm thus resulting strikes one rather as
characteristic of St. Paul's mood in such passages, than as a thing
open to objection.[6] But grammar apart, what really has to be
emphasised here is again the communion of the saints. All the
Churches pray for St. Paul--at least he takes it for granted that they
do; and when he is rescued from danger, his own thanksgiving is
multiplied a thousandfold by the thanksgivings of others on his
behalf. This is the ideal of an evangelist's life; in all its
incidents and emergencies, in all its perils and salvations, it ought
to float in an atmosphere of prayer. Every interposition of God on the
missionary's behalf is then recognised by him as a gift of grace
(χάρισμα)--not, be it understood, a private favour, but a blessing and
a power capacitating him for further service to the Church. Those who
have lived through his straits and his triumphs with him in their
prayers know how true that is.
At this point (ver. 12) the key in which Paul writes begins to change.
We are conscious of a slight discord the instant he speaks about the
testimony of his conscience. Yet the transition is as unforced as any
such transition can be. I may well take for granted, seems to be the
thought in his mind, that you pray for me; I may well ask you to unite
with me in thanks to God for my deliverance; for if there is one thing
I am sure of, and proud of, it is that I have been a loyal minister of
God in the world, and especially to you. Fleshly wisdom has not been
my guide. I have used no worldly policy; I have sought no selfish
ends. In a holiness and sincerity which God bestows, in an element of
crystal transparency, I have led my apostolic life. The world has
never convicted me of anything dark or underhand; and in all the world
none know better than you, among whom I lived longer than elsewhere,
working with my hands, and preaching the Gospel as freely as God
offers it, that I have walked in the light as He is in the light.
This general defence, which is not without its note of defiance,
becomes defined in ver. 13. Plainly charges of insincerity had been
made against Paul, particularly affecting his correspondence, and it
is to these he addresses himself. It is not easy to be outspoken and
conciliatory in the same sentence, to show your indignation to the man
who charges you with double-dealing, and at the same time take him to
your heart; and the Apostle's effort to do all these things at once
has proved embarrassing to himself, and more than embarrassing to his
interpreters. He begins, indeed, lucidly enough. "We write nothing
else to you than what you read." He does not mean that he had no
correspondence with members of the Church except in his public
epistles; but that in these public epistles his meaning was obvious
and on the surface. His style was not, as some had hinted, obscure,
tortuous, elaborately ambiguous, full of loop-holes; he wrote like a
plain man to plain men; he said what he meant, and meant what he said.
Then he qualifies this slightly. "We write nothing to you but what you
read--or in point of fact acknowledge," even apart from our writing.
This seems to me the simplest interpretation of the words ἢ καὶ
ἐπιγινώσκετε; and the simplest construction is then that of Hofmann,
who puts a colon at ἐπιγινώσκετε, and with ἐλπίζω δὲ begins what is
virtually a separate sentence. "And I hope that to the end ye will
acknowledge, as in fact you acknowledged us in part, that we are your
boast, as you also are ours, in the day of the Lord Jesus." Other
possibilities of punctuation and construction are so numerous that it
would be endless to exhibit them; and in the long-run they do not much
affect the sense. What the reader has to seize is that Paul has been
accused of insincerity, especially in his correspondence, and that he
indignantly denies the charge; that, in spite of such accusations, he
can point to at least a partial recognition among the Corinthians of
what he and his fellow-workers really are; and that he hopes their
confidence in him will increase and continue to the end. Should this
bright hope be gratified, then in the day of the Lord Jesus it will be
the boast of the Corinthians that they had the great Apostle Paul as
their spiritual father, and the boast of the Apostle that the
Corinthians were his spiritual children.
A passage like this--and there are many like it in St. Paul--has
something in it humiliating. Is it not a disgrace to human nature that
a man so open, so truthful, so brave, should be put to his defence on
a charge of underhand dealing? Ought not somebody to have been deeply
ashamed, for bringing this shame on the Apostle? Let us be very
careful how we lend motives, especially to men whom we know to be
better than ourselves. There is that in all our hearts which is
hostile to them, and would not be grieved to see them degraded a
little; and it is that, and nothing else, which supplies bad motives
for their good actions, and puts an ambiguous face on their simplest
behaviour. "Deceit," says Solomon, "is in the heart of them that
imagine evil"; it is our own selves that we condemn most surely when
we pass our bad sentence upon others.
The immediate result of imputing motives, and putting a sinister
interpretation on actions, is that mutual confidence is destroyed; and
mutual confidence is the very element and atmosphere in which any
spiritual good can be done. Unless a minister and his congregation
recognise each other as in the main what they profess to be, their
relation is destitute of spiritual reality; it may be an infinite
weariness, or an infinite torment; it can never be a comfort or a
delight on one side or the other. What would a family be, without the
mutual confidence of husband and wife, of parents and children? What
is a state worth, for any of the ideal ends for which a state exists,
if those who represent it to the world have no instinctive sympathy
with the general life, and if the collective conscience regards the
leaders from a distance with dislike or distrust? And what is the
pastoral relation worth, if, instead of mutual cordiality, openness,
readiness to believe and to hope the best, instead of mutual
intercession and thanksgiving, of mutual rejoicing in each other,
there is suspicion, reserve, insinuation, coldness, a grudging
recognition of what it is impossible to deny, a willingness to shake
the head and to make mischief? What an experience of life we see, what
a final appreciation of the best thing, in that utterance of St. John
in extreme age: "Beloved, let us love one another." All that is good
for us, all glory and joy, is summarily comprehended in that.
The last words of the text--"the day of the Lord Jesus"--recall a very
similar passage in 1 Thess. ii. 19: "What is our hope, or joy, or crown
of rejoicing--is it not even ye--before our Lord Jesus at His coming?"
In both cases our minds are lifted to that great presence in which St.
Paul habitually lived; and as we stand there our disagreements sink into
their true proportions; our judgments of each other are seen in their
true colours. No one will rejoice then that he has made evil out of
good, that he has cunningly perverted simple actions, that he has
discovered the infirmities of preachers, or set the saints at variance;
the joy will be for those who have loved and trusted each other, who
have borne each other's faults and laboured for their healing, who have
believed all things, hoped all things, endured all things, rather than
be parted from each other by any failure of love. The mutual confidence
of Christian ministers and Christian people will then, after all its
trials, have its exceeding great reward.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Notice the perfect ἐσχήκαμεν. We _had_ this experience, and in its
fruit--a newer and deeper faith in God--we _have_ it still. It is a
permanent possession in this happy form. The same idea is expressed in
the pft. ἠλπίκαμεν, ver. 10.
[5] The doubtful words here are καὶ ῥύεται in ver. 10 of the Received
Text, from D^C, E, F, G, K, etc. ("_and doth deliver_," in the
Authorised Version). They are not found in A, D, Syr., Chrys., while the
most authoritative MSS., א, B, C, P, have καὶ ῥύσεται ("and _will_
deliver," of the Revised Version). Most editors take the last reading,
as best attested; but on internal grounds two of the most recent and
acute interpreters, Schmiedel and Heinrici, prefer the Received Text.
The present tense ("_doth_ deliver") presupposes that the danger to
which Paul had been exposed in some form or in some sense continued. If
this were the case, of course it could not have been, as Hofmann
supposes, the shipwreck in which the Apostle spent a night and a day in
the deep. Otherwise this would be a plausible and tempting supposition.
[6] To render διὰ πολλῶν _prolixe_, copiously, is at least precarious;
and to take πρόσωπα as "faces" ("that from many faces upturned in
prayer to God"), though lexically admissible, seems on all other
grounds out of place.
III
_THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION_
"And in this confidence I was minded to come before unto you, that
ye might have a second benefit; and by you to pass into Macedonia,
and again from Macedonia to come unto you, and of you to be set
forward on my journey unto Judæa. When I therefore was thus minded,
did I show fickleness? or the things that I purpose, do I purpose
according to the flesh, that with me there should be the yea yea and
the nay nay? But as God is faithful, our word toward you is not yea
and nay. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among
you by us, _even_ by me and Silvanus and Timothy, was not yea and
nay, but in Him is yea. For how many soever be the promises of God,
in Him is the yea: wherefore also through Him is the Amen, unto the
glory of God through us."--2 COR. i. 15-20 (R.V.).
The emphatic words in the first sentence are "in this confidence." All
the Apostle's plans for visiting Corinth, both in general and in their
details, depended upon the maintenance of a good understanding between
himself and the Church; and the very prominence here given to this
condition is a tacit accusation of those whose conduct had destroyed
his confidence. When he intimated his intention of visiting them,
according to the programme of vv. 15 and 16, he had felt sure of a
friendly welcome, and of the cordial recognition of his apostolic
authority; it was only when that assurance was taken away from him by
news of what was being said and done at Corinth, that he had changed
his plan. He had originally intended to go from Ephesus to Corinth,
then from Corinth north into Macedonia, then back to Corinth again,
and thence, with the assistance of the Corinthians, or their convoy
for part of the way, to Jerusalem. Had this purpose been carried out,
he would of course have been twice in Corinth, and it is to this that
most scholars refer the words "a second benefit,"[7] or rather
"grace." This reference, indeed, is not quite certain; and it cannot
be proved, though it is made more probable, by using πρότερον and
δευτέραν to interpret each other. It remains possible that when Paul
said, "I was minded to come before unto you, that ye might have a
second benefit," he was thinking of his original visit as the first,
and of this purposed one as the second, "grace." This reading of his
words has commended itself to scholars like Calvin, Bengel, and
Heinrici. Whichever of these interpretations be correct, the Apostle
had abandoned his purpose of going from Ephesus to Macedonia _viâ_
Corinth, and had intimated in the First Epistle (chap. xvi. 5) his
intention of reaching Corinth _viâ_ Macedonia. This change of purpose
is not sufficient to explain what follows. Unless there had been at
Corinth a great deal of bad feeling, it would have passed without
remark, as a thing which had no doubt good reasons, though the
Corinthians were ignorant of them; at the very most, it would have
called forth expressions of disappointment and regret. They would have
been sorry that the benefit (χάρις), the token of Divine favour which
was always bestowed when the Apostle came "in the fulness of the
blessing of Christ," and "longing to impart some spiritual gift," had
been delayed; but they would have acquiesced as in any other natural
disappointment. But this was not what took place. They used the
Apostle's change of purpose to assail his character. They charged him
with "lightness," with worthless levity. They called him a
weathercock, a Yes and No man, who said now one thing and now the
opposite, who said both at once and with equal emphasis, who had his
own interests in view in his fickleness, and whose word, to speak
plainly, could never be depended upon.
The responsibility for the change of plan has already, in the emphatic
ταύτῃ τῇ πεποιθήσει, been indirectly transferred to his accusers; but
the Apostle stoops to answer them quite straightforwardly. His answer is
indeed a challenge: "When I cherished that first wish to visit you,
_was_ I--dare you say I was--guilty of the levity with which you charge
me? Or--to enlarge the question, and, seeing that my whole character is
attacked, to bring my character as a whole into the discussion--the
things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the flesh, that with me
there should be the yea yea and the nay nay?" Am I, he seems to say, in
my character and conduct, like a shifty, unprincipled politician--a man
who has no convictions, or no conscience about his convictions--a man
who is guided, not by any higher spirit dwelling in him, but solely by
considerations of selfish interest? Do I say things out of mere
compliment, not meaning them? When I make promises, or announce
intentions, is it always with the tacit reservation that they may be
cancelled if they turn out inconvenient? Do you suppose that I
_purposely_ represent myself (ἵνα ᾖ παρ' ἐμοί) as a man who affirms and
denies, makes promises and breaks them, has Yes yes and No no dwelling
side by side in his soul?[8] You know me far better than to suppose any
such thing. All my communications with you have been inconsistent with
such a view of my character. As God is faithful, our word to you is not
Yes and No. It is not incoherent, or equivocal, or self-contradictory.
It is entirely truthful and self-consistent.
In this eighteenth verse the Apostle's mind is reaching out already to
what he is going to make his real defence, and ὁ λόγος ἡμῶν ("our word")
therefore carries a double weight. It covers at once whatever he had
said to them about the proposed journey, and whatever he had said in his
evangelistic ministry at Corinth. It is this latter sense of it that is
continued in ver. 19: "For the Son of God, Christ Jesus, who was
preached among you by us, by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not Yes
and No, but in him Yes has found place. For how many soever are the
promises of God, in Him is the Yes." Let us notice first the
argumentative force of this. Paul is engaged in vindicating his
character, and especially in maintaining his truthfulness and sincerity.
How does he do so here? His unspoken assumption is, that character is
determined by the main interest of life; that the work to which a man
gives his soul will react upon the soul, changing it into its own
likeness. As the dyer's hand is subdued to the element it works in, so
was the whole being of Paul--such is the argument--subdued to the
element in which he wrought, conformed to it, impregnated by it. And
what was that element? It was the Gospel concerning God's Son, Jesus
Christ. Was there any dubiety about what that was? any equivocal mixture
of Yes and No there? Far from it. Paul was so certain of what it was
that he repeatedly and solemnly anathematised man or angel who should
venture to qualify, let alone deny it. There is no mixture of Yes and No
in Christ. As the Apostle says elsewhere (Rom. xv. 8), Jesus Christ was
a minister of the circumcision "_in the interest of the truth of God,
with a view to the confirmation of the promises_." However many the
promises might be, in Him a mighty affirmation, a mighty fulfilment, was
given of every one. The ministry of the Gospel has this, then, as its
very subject, its constant preoccupation, its highest glory--the
absolute faithfulness of God. Who would venture to assert that Paul, or
that anybody,[9] could catch the trick of equivocation in such a
service? Who does not see that such a service must needs create true
men?
To this argument there is, for the natural man, a ready answer. It by
no means follows, he will say, that because the Gospel is devoid of
ambiguity or inconsistency, equivocation and insincerity must be
unknown to its preachers. A man may proclaim the true Gospel and in
his other dealings be far from a true man. Experience justifies this
reply; and yet it does not invalidate Paul's argument. That argument
is good for the case in which it is applied. It might be _repeated_ by
a hypocrite, but no hypocrite could ever have _invented_ it. It bears,
indeed, a striking because an unintentional testimony to the height at
which Paul habitually lived, and to his unqualified identification of
himself with his apostolic calling. If a man has ten interests in
life, more or less divergent, he may have as many inconsistencies in
his behaviour; but if he has said with St. Paul, "This one thing I
do," and if the one thing which absorbs his very soul is an unceasing
testimony to the truth and faithfulness of God, then it is utterly
incredible that he should be a false and faithless man. The work which
claims him for its own with this absolute authority will seal him with
its own greatness, its own simplicity and truth. He will not use
levity. The things which he purposes, he will not purpose according to
the flesh. He will not be guided by considerations perpetually
varying, except in the point of being all alike selfish. He will not
be a Yes and No man, whom nobody can trust.
The argumentative force of the passage being admitted, its doctrinal
import deserves attention. The Gospel--which is identified with God's
Son, Jesus Christ--is here described as a mighty affirmation. It is
not Yes and No, a message full of inconsistencies, or ambiguities, a
proclamation the sense of which no one can ever be sure he has
grasped. In it (ἐν αὐτῷ means "in Christ") the everlasting Yea has
found place. The perfect tense (γέγονεν) means that this grand
affirmation has come to us, and is with us, for good and all. What it
was and continued to be in Paul's time, it is to this day. It is in
this positive, definite, unmistakable character that the strength of
the Gospel lies. What a man cannot know, cannot seize, cannot tell, he
cannot preach. The refutation of popular errors, even in theology, is
not gospel; the criticism of traditional theories, even about
Scripture, is not gospel; the intellectual "economy," with which a
clever man in a dubious position uses language about the Bible or its
doctrines which to the simple means Yes, and to the subtle qualifies
the Yes enormously, is not gospel. There is no strength in any of
these things. Dealing in them does not make character simple, sincere,
massive, Christian. When they stamp themselves on the soul, the result
is not one to which we could make the appeal which Paul makes here. If
we have any gospel at all, it is because there are things which stand
for us above all doubts, truths so sure that we cannot question them,
so absolute that we cannot qualify them, so much our life that to
tamper with them is to touch our very heart. Nobody has any right to
preach who has not mighty affirmations to make concerning God's Son,
Jesus Christ--affirmations in which there is no ambiguity, and which
no questioning can reach.
In the Apostle's mind a particular turn is given to this thought by
its connexion with the Old Testament. In Christ, he says, the Yes has
been realised; for how many soever are the promises of God, in Him is
the Yes. The mode of expression is rather peculiar, but the meaning is
quite plain. Is there a single word of good, Paul asks, that God has
ever spoken concerning man? Then that word is reaffirmed, it is
confirmed, it is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. It is no longer a word,
but an actual gift to men, which they may take hold of and possess. Of
course when Paul says "how many soever are the promises," he is
thinking of the Old Testament. It was there the promises stood in
God's name; and hence he tells us in this passage that Christ is the
fulfilment of the Old Testament; in Him God has kept His word given to
the fathers. All that the holy men of old were bidden to hope for, as
the Spirit spoke through them in many parts and in many ways, is given
to the world at last: he who has God's Son, Jesus Christ, has all God
has promised, and all He can give.
There are two opposite ways of looking at the Old Testament with which
this apostolic teaching is inconsistent, and which, by anticipation,
it condemns.
There is the opinion of those who say that God's promises to His
people in the Old Testament have not been fulfilled, and never will
be. That is the opinion held by many among the modern Jews, who have
renounced all that was most characteristic in the religion of their
fathers, and attenuated it into the merest deistical film of a creed.
It is the opinion also of many who study the Bible as a piece of
literary antiquity, but get to no perception of the life which is in
it, or of the organic connexion between the Old Testament and the New.
What the Apostle says of his countrymen in his own time is true of
both these classes--when they read the Scriptures, there is a veil
upon their hearts. The Old Testament promises have been fulfilled,
every one of them. Let a man be taught what they mean, not as dead
letters in an ancient scroll, but as present words of the living God;
and then let him look to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and see whether
there is not in Him the mighty, the perpetual confirmation of them
all. We smile sometimes at what seems the whimsical way in which the
early Christians, who had not yet a New Testament, found Christ
everywhere in the Old; but though it may be possible to err in detail
in this pursuit, it is not possible to err on the whole. The Old
Testament is gathered up, every living word of it, in Him; we are
misunderstanding it if we take it otherwise.
The opinion just described is a species of rationalism. There is another
opinion, which, while agreeing with the rationalistic one that many of
God's promises in the Old Testament have not yet been fulfilled,
believes that their fulfilment is still to be awaited. If one might do
so without offence, I should call this a species of fanaticism. It is
the error of those who take the Jewish nation as such to be the subject
of prophecy, and hope for its restoration to Palestine, for a revived
Jerusalem, a new Davidic monarchy, even a reign of Christ over such an
earthly kingdom. All this, if we may take the Apostle's word for it, is
beside the mark. Equally with rationalism it loses the spirit of God's
word in the letter. The promises have been fulfilled already, and we are
not to look for another fulfilment. Those who have seen Christ have seen
all that God is going to do--and it is quite adequate--to make His word
good. He who has welcomed Christ knows that not one good word of all
that God has spoken has failed. God has never, by the promises of the
Old Testament, or by the instincts of human nature, put a hope or a
prayer into man's heart that is not answered and satisfied abundantly in
His Son.
But leaving the reference to the Old Testament on one side, it is well
worth while for us to consider the practical meaning of the truth, that
_all_ God's promises are Yea in Christ. God's promises are His
declarations of what He is willing to do for men; and in the very nature
of the case they are at once the inspiration and the limit of our
prayers. We are encouraged to ask all that God promises, and we must
stop there. Christ Himself then is the measure of prayer to man; we can
ask all that is in Him; we dare not ask anything that lies outside of
Him. How the consideration of this should expand our prayers in some
directions, and contract them in others! We can ask God to give us
Christ's purity, Christ's simplicity, Christ's meekness and gentleness,
Christ's faithfulness and obedience, Christ's victory over the world.
Have we ever measured these things? Have we ever put them into our
prayers with any glimmering consciousness of their dimensions, any sense
of the vastness of our request? Nay, we can ask Christ's glory, His
Resurrection Life of splendour and incorruption--the image of the
heavenly. God has promised us all these things, and far more: but has He
always promised what we ask? Can we fix our eyes on His Son, as He lived
our life in this world, and remembering that this, so far as this world
is concerned, is the measure of promise, ask without any qualification
that our course here may be free from every trouble? Had Christ no
sorrow? Did He never meet with ingratitude? Was He never misunderstood?
Was He never hungry, thirsty, weary? If all God's promises are summed up
in Him--if He is everything that God has to give--can we go boldly to
the throne of grace, and pray to be exempted from what He had to bear,
or to be richly provided with indulgences which He never knew? What if
all unanswered prayers might be defined as prayers for things not
included in the promises--prayers that we might get what Christ did not
get, or be spared what He was not spared? The spirit of this passage,
however, does not urge so much the definiteness as the compass and the
certainty of the promises of God. They are so many that Paul could never
enumerate them, and all of them are sure in Christ. And when our eyes
are once opened on Him, does not He Himself become as it were inevitably
the substance of our prayers? Is not our whole heart's desire, Oh that I
might win _Him_! Oh that _He_ might live in me, and make me what He is!
Oh that _that_ Man might arise in me, that the man I am may cease to be!
Do we not feel that if God would give us His Son, all would be ours that
we could take or He could give?
It is in this mood--with the consciousness, I mean, that in Jesus
Christ the sure promises of God are inconceivably rich and good--that
the Apostle adds: "wherefore also through Him is the Amen." It is not
easy to put a prayer into words, whether of petition or thanksgiving,
for men are not much in the habit of speaking to God; but it is easy
to say Amen. That is the part of the Church when God's Son, Jesus
Christ, is proclaimed, clothed in His Gospel. Apart from the Gospel,
we do not know God, or what He will do, or will not do, for sinful
men; but as we listen to the proclamation of His mercy and His
faithfulness, as our eyes are opened to see in His Son all He has
promised to do for us, nay, in a sense, all He has already done, our
grateful hearts break forth in one grand responsive Amen! So let it
be! we cry. Unless God had first prompted us by sending His Son, we
could never have found it in our hearts to present such requests to
Him; but through Christ we are enabled to present them, though it
should be at first with only a look at Him, and an appropriating Amen.
It is the very nature of prayer, indeed, to be the answer to promise.
Amen is all, at bottom, that God leaves for us to say.
The solemn acceptance of a mercy so great--an acceptance as joyful as
it is solemn, since the Amen is one rising out of thankful
hearts--redounds to the glory of God. This is the final cause of
redemption, and however it may be lost sight of in theologies which
make man their centre, it is always magnified in the New Testament.
The Apostle rejoices that his ministry and that of his friends (δι'
ἡμῶν) contributes to this glory; and the whole connexion of thought in
the passage throws a light on a great Bible word. God's glory is
identified here with the recognition and appropriation by men of His
goodness and faithfulness in Jesus Christ. He is glorified when it
dawns on human souls that He has spoken good concerning them beyond
their utmost imaginings, and when that good is seen to be indubitably
safe and sure in His Son. The Amen in which such souls welcome His
mercy is the equivalent of the Old Testament word, "Salvation is of
the Lord." It is expanded in an apostolic doxology: "Of Him, and
through Him, and to Him are all things: to Him be glory for ever."
FOOTNOTES:
[7] For χάριν, (benefit) א^C, B, L, P, have χαράν (joy.) Though
Westcott and Hort put this in the text, and χάριν in the margin, most
scholars are agreed that χάριν is the Apostle's word, and χαράν a slip
or a correction.
[8] Mention may be made here of another interpretation of ver. 17,
modifications of which recur from Chrysostom to Hofmann. In substance
it is this: "The things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the
flesh (_i.e._, with the stubborn consistency of a proud man, who
disposes as well as proposes), that with _me_ (ἐμοί emphatic: _me_, as
if _I_ were God, always to do what I would like to do) the Yes should
be yes, and the No, no--_i.e._, every promise inviolably kept?" This
is grammatically quite good, but contextually impossible.
[9] According to Schmiedel, in the words δι' ἡμῶν ... δι' ἐμοῦ καὶ
Σιλουανοῦ καὶ Τιμοθέου we ought to discover an emphatic reference, by
way of contrast, to Judaising opponents of Paul in Corinth. These are
said to have brought _another_ Jesus (xi. 4), who was _notì_ God's
ἴδιος υἱὸς in Paul's sense (Rom. viii. 32), and in whom there _was_
Yea and Nay--namely, the confirmation of the promises to the Jews or
those who became Jews to receive them, and the refusal of the promises
to the Gentiles as such. It needs a keen scent to discover this, and
as the Corinthians read without a commentator it would probably be
thrown away upon them.
IV
_CHRISTIAN MYSTERIES_
"Now He that stablisheth us with you in Christ, and anointed us,
is God; who also sealed us, and gave _us_ the earnest of the
Spirit in our hearts."--2 COR. i. 21, 22 (R.V.).
It is not easy to show the precise connexion between these words and
those which immediately precede. Possibly it is emotional, rather than
logical. The Apostle's heart swells as he contemplates in the Gospel
the goodness and faithfulness of God; and though his argument is
complete when he has exhibited the Gospel in that light, his mind
dwells upon it involuntarily, past the mere point of proof; he lingers
over the wonderful experience which Christians have of the rich and
sure mercies. Those who try to make out a more precise sequence of
thought than this are not very successful. Of course it is apparent
that the keynote of the passage is in harmony with that of the
previous verses. The ideas of "stablishing," of "sealing," and of an
"earnest," are all of one family; they are all, as it were, variations
of the one mighty _affirmation_ which has been made of God's promises
in Christ. From this point of view they have an argumentative value.
They suggest that God, in all sorts of ways, makes believers as sure
of the Gospel, and as constant to it, as He has made it sure and
certain to them; and thus they exclude more decisively than ever the
idea that the minister of the Gospel can be a man of Yes and No. But
though this is true, it fails to do justice to the word on which the
emphasis falls--namely, God. This, according to some interpreters, is
done, if we suppose the whole passage to be, in the first instance, a
disclaimer of any false inference which might be drawn from the words,
"to the glory of God _by us_." "By us," Paul writes; for it was
through the apostolic preaching that men were led to receive the
Gospel, to look at God's promises, confirmed in Christ, with an
appropriating Amen to His glory; but he hastens to add that it was God
himself whose grace in its various workings was the beginning, middle,
and end both of their faith and of their preaching. This seems to me
rather artificial, and I do not think more than a connexion in
sentiment, rather than in argument, can be insisted upon.
But setting this question aside, the interpretation of the two verses
is of much interest. They contain some of the most peculiar and
characteristic words of the New Testament--words to which, it is to be
feared, many readers attach no very distinct idea. The simplest plan
is to take the assertions one by one, as if God were the subject.
Grammatically this is incorrect, for Θεός is certainly the predicate;
but for the elucidation of the meaning this may be disregarded.
(1) First of all, then, God confirms us into Christ. "Us," of course,
means St. Paul and the preachers whom he associates with
himself,--Silas and Timothy. But when he adds "with you," he includes
the Corinthians also, and all believers. He does not claim for himself
any stedfastness in Christ, or any trustworthiness as dependent upon
it, which he would on principle refuse to others. God, who makes His
promises sure to those who receive them, gives those who receive them
a firm grasp of the promises. Christ is here, with all the wealth of
grace in Him, indubitable, unmistakable; and what God has done on that
side, He does on the other also. He confirms believers into Christ. He
makes their attachment to Christ, their possession of Him, a thing
indubitable and irreversible. Salvation, to use the words of St. John,
is true _in Him and in them_; in them, so far as God's purpose and
work go, as much as in Him. He who is confirmed into Christ is in
principle as trustworthy, as absolutely to be depended upon, as Christ
Himself. The same character of pure truth is common to them both.
Christ's existence as the Saviour, in whom all God's promises are
guaranteed, and Paul's existence as a saved man with a sure grasp on
all these promises, are alike proofs that God is faithful; the truth
of God stands behind them both. It is to this that the appeal of vv.
15-20 is virtually made; it is this in the long-run which is called in
question when the trustworthiness of Paul is impeached.
All this, it may be said, is ideal; but in what sense is it so? Not in
the sense that it is fanciful or unreal; but in the sense that the
divine law of our life, and the divine action upon our life, are
represented in it. It is our calling as Christian people to be
stedfast in Christ. Such stedfastness God is ever seeking to impart,
and in striving to attain to it we can always appeal to Him for help.
It is the opposite of instability; in a special sense it is the
opposite of untrustworthiness. If we are letting God have His way with
us in this respect, we are persons who can always be depended upon,
and depended upon for conduct in keeping with the goodness and
faithfulness of God, into which we have been confirmed by Him.
(2) From this general truth, with its application to all believers, the
Apostle passes to another of more limited range. By including the
Corinthians with himself in the first clause, he virtually excludes them
in the second--"God anointed us." It is true that the New Testament
speaks of an anointing which is common to all believers--"_Ye_ have an
anointing from the Holy One; ye all know" (1 John ii. 20): but here, on
the contrary, something special is meant. This can only be the
consecration of Paul, and of those for whom he speaks, to the apostolic
or evangelistic ministry. It is worth noticing that in the New Testament
the act of anointing is never ascribed to any one but God. The only
unction which qualifies for service in the Christian dispensation, or
which confers dignity in the Christian community, is the unction from on
high. "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with
power," and it is the participation in this great anointing which
capacitates any one to work in the Gospel.[10] Paul undoubtedly claimed,
in virtue of his divine call to apostleship, a peculiar authority in the
Church; but we cannot define any peculiarity in his possession of the
Spirit. The great gift which must be held in some sense by all
Christians--"for if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of
His"--was in him intensified, or specialised, for the work he had to do.
But it is one Spirit in him and in us, and that is why we do not find
the exercise of his authority alien or galling. It is authority
divorced from "unction"--authority without this divine
qualification--against which the Christian spirit rebels. And though
"unction" cannot be defined; though no material guarantee can be given
or taken for the possession of the Spirit; though a merely historical
succession is, so far as this spiritual competence and dignity are
concerned, a mere irrelevance; though, as Vinet said, we think of
unction rather when it is absent than when it is present,--still, the
thing itself is recognisable enough. It bears witness to itself, as
light does; it carries its own authority, its own dignity, with it; it
is the _ultima ratio_, the last court of appeal, in the Christian
community. It may be that Paul is preparing already, by this reference
to his commission, for the bolder assertion of his authority at a later
stage.
(3) These two actions of God, however--the establishing of believers
in Christ, which goes on continually (βεβαιῶν), and the consecration
of Paul to the apostleship, which was accomplished once for all
(χρίσας)--go back to prior actions, in which, again, all believers
have an interest. They have a common basis in the great deeds of grace
in which the Christian life began. God, he says, is He who also sealed
us, and gave the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.
"He also sealed us." It seems strange that so figurative a word should
be used without a hint of explanation, and we must assume that it was
so familiar in the Church that the right application could be taken
for granted. The middle voice (σφραγισάμενος) makes it certain that
the main idea is, "He marked us as His own." This is the sense in
which the word is frequently used in the Book of Revelation: the
servants of God are sealed on their foreheads, that they may be
recognised as His. But what is the seal? Under the Old Testament, the
mark which God set upon His people--the covenant sign by which they
were identified as His--was circumcision. Under the New Testament,
where everything carnal has passed away, and religious materialism is
abolished, the sign is no longer in the body; we are sealed with the
Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. i. 13 f.). But the past tense ("He
_sealed_ us"), and its recurrence in Eph. i. 13 ("ye _were_ sealed"),
suggest a very definite reference of this word, and beyond doubt it
alludes to baptism. In the New Testament, baptism and the giving of
the Holy Spirit are regularly connected with each other. Christians
are born of water and of the Spirit. "Repent," is the earliest
preaching of the Gospel (Acts ii. 38), "and be baptised every one of
you, ... and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." In early
Christian writers the use of the word "seal" (σφραγίς) as a technical
term for baptism is practically universal; and when we combine this
practice with the New Testament usage in question, the inference is
inevitable. God puts His _seal_ upon us, He _marks_ us as His own,
when we are baptised.[11]
But the seal is not baptism as a ceremonial act. It is neither
immersion nor sprinkling nor any other mode of lustration which marks
us out as God's. The seal by which "the Lord knoweth them that are
His" is His Spirit; it is the impress of His Spirit upon them. When
that impress can be traced upon our souls, by Him, or by us, or by
others, then we have the witness in ourselves; the Spirit bears
witness with our spirits that we are children of God.
But of all words "spirit" is the vaguest; and if we had nothing but
the word itself to guide us, we should either lapse into superstitious
ideas about the virtue of the sacrament, or into fanatical ideas about
incommunicable inward experiences in which God marked us for His own.
The New Testament provides us with a more excellent way than either;
it gives the word "spirit" a rich but definite moral content; it
compels us, if we say we have been sealed with the Spirit, and claimed
by God as His, to exhibit the distinguishing features of those who are
His. "The Lord is the Spirit" (2 Cor. iii. 17). To be sealed with the
Spirit is to bear, in however imperfect a degree, in however
inconspicuous a style, the image of the heavenly man, the likeness of
Jesus Christ. There are many passages in his Epistles in which St.
Paul enlarges on the work of the Spirit in the soul; all the various
dispositions which it creates, all the fruits of the Spirit, may be
conceived as different parts of the impression made by the seal. We
must think of these in detail, if we wish to give the word its
meaning; we must think of them in contrast with the unspiritual
nature, if we wish to give it any edge. Once, say, we walked in the
lusts of the flesh: has Christ redeemed us, and set on our souls and
our bodies the seal of His purity? Once we were hot and passionate,
given to angry words and hasty, intemperate deeds: are we sealed now
with the meekness and gentleness of Jesus? Once we were grasping and
covetous, even to the verge of dishonesty; we could not let money pass
us, and we could not part with it: have we been sealed with the
liberality of Him who says, "It is more blessed to give than to
receive"? Once a wrong rankled in our hearts; the sun went down upon
our wrath, not once or twice, but a thousand times, and found it as
implacable as ever: is that deep brand of vindictiveness effaced now,
and in its stead imprinted deep the Cross of Christ, where He loved
us, and gave Himself for us, and prayed, "Father, forgive them"? Once
our conversation was corrupt; it had a taint in it; it startled and
betrayed the innocent; it was vile and foolish and unseemly: are these
things of the past now? and has Christ set upon our lips the seal of
His own grace and truth, of His own purity and love, so that every
word we speak is good, and brings blessing to those who hear us? These
things, and such as these, are the seal of the Spirit. They are Christ
in us. They are the stamp which God sets upon men when He exhibits
them as His own.
The seal, however, has another use than that of marking and identifying
property. It is a symbol of assurance. It is the answer to a challenge.
It is in this sense that it is easiest to apply the figure to baptism.
Baptism does not, indeed, carry with it the actual possession of all
these spiritual features; it is not even, as an _opus operatum_, the
implanting of them in the soul; but it is a divine pledge that they are
within our reach; we can appeal to it as an assurance that God has come
to us in His grace, has claimed us as His own, and is willing to
conform us to the image of His Son. In this sense, it is legitimate and
natural to call it God's seal upon His people.
(4) Side by side with "He sealed us," the Apostle writes, "He gave the
earnest of the Spirit in our hearts." After what has been said, it is
obvious that this is another aspect of the same thing. We are sealed
with the Spirit, and we get the earnest of the Spirit. In other words,
the Spirit is viewed in two characters: first, as a seal; and then as
an earnest. This last word has a very ancient history. It is found in
the Book of Genesis (xxxviii. 18: עֵרָבוׄן), and was carried, no
doubt, by Phœnician traders, who had much occasion to use it, both to
Greece and Italy. From the classical peoples it has come more or less
directly to us. It means properly a small sum of money paid to clench
a bargain, or to ratify an engagement. Where there is an earnest,
there is more to follow, and more of essentially the same kind--that
is what it signifies. Let us apply this now to the expression of St.
Paul, "the earnest of the Spirit." It means, we must see, that in the
gift of this Spirit, in that measure in which we now possess it, God
has not given all He has to give. On the contrary, He has come under
an obligation to give more: what we have now is but "the firstfruits
of the Spirit" (Rom. viii. 23). It is an indication and a pledge of
what is yet to be, but bears no proportion to it. All we can say on
the basis of this text is, that between the present and the future
gift--between the earnest and that which it guarantees--there must be
some kind of congruity, some affinity which makes the one a natural
and not an arbitrary reason for believing in the other.
But the Corinthians were not limited to this text. They had St. Paul's
general teaching in their minds to interpret it by; and if we wish to
know what it meant even for them, we must fill out this vague idea with
what the Apostle tells us elsewhere. Thus in the great text in Ephesians
(i. 13 f.), so often referred to, he speaks of the Holy Spirit with
which we were sealed as the earnest _of our inheritance_. God has an
"inheritance" in store for us. His Spirit makes us sons; and if sons,
then heirs; heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ. This connexion of the
Spirit, sonship, and inheritance, is constant in St. Paul; it is one of
his most characteristic combinations. What then _is_ the inheritance of
which the Spirit is the earnest? That no one can tell. "Eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the
things that God hath prepared for them that love Him." But though we
cannot tell more precisely, we can say that if the Spirit is the earnest
of it, it must be in some sense a development of the Spirit; life in an
order of being which matches the Spirit, and for which the Spirit
qualifies. If we say it is "glory," then we must remember that only
Christ in us (the seal of the Spirit) can be _the hope_ of glory.
The application of this can be made very plain. Our whole life in this
world looks to some future, however near or bounded it may be; and
every power we perfect, every capacity we acquire, every disposition
and spirit we foster, is an earnest of something in that future. Here
is a man who gives himself to the mastery of a trade. He acquires all
its skill, all its methods, all its resources. There is nothing any
tradesman can do that he cannot do as well or better. What is that the
earnest of? What does it ensure, and as it were put into his hand by
anticipation? It is the earnest of constant employment, of good
wages, of respect from fellow-workmen, perhaps of wealth. Here, again,
is a man with the scientific spirit. He is keenly inquisitive about
the facts and laws of the world in which we live. Everything is
interesting to him--astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, history.
What is this the earnest of? It is the earnest, probably, of
scientific achievements of some kind, of intellectual toils and
intellectual victories. This man will enter into the inheritance of
science; he will walk through the kingdoms of knowledge in the length
of them and the breadth of them, and will claim them as his own. And
so it is wherever we choose to take our illustrations. Every spirit
that dwells in us, and is cultivated and cherished by us, is an
_earnest_, because it fits and furnishes us for some particular thing.
_God's_ Spirit also is an earnest of an inheritance which is
incorruptible, undefiled, imperishable: can we assure ourselves that
we have anything in our souls which promises, because it matches with,
an inheritance like this? When we come to die, this will be a serious
question. The faculties of accumulation, of mechanical skill, of
scientific research, of trade on a great or a small scale, of
agreeable social intercourse, of comfortable domestic life, may have
been brought to perfection in us; but can we console ourselves with
the thought that _these_ have the earnest of immortality? Do they
qualify us for, and by qualifying assure us of, the incorruptible
kingdom? Or do we not see at once that a totally different equipment
is needed to make men at home there, and that nothing can be the
earnest of an eternal life of blessedness with God except that Holy
Spirit with which He seals His own, and through which He makes them,
even here, partakers of the divine nature?
We cannot study these words without becoming conscious of the immense
enlargement which the Christian religion has brought to the human
mind, of the vast expansion of hope which is due to the Gospel, and at
the same time of the moral soundness and sobriety with which that hope
is conceived. The promises of God were first really apprehended in
Jesus Christ; in Him as He lived and died and rose again from the
dead, in Him especially as He lives in immortal glory, men first saw
what God was able and willing to do for them, and they saw this in its
true relations. They saw it under its moral and spiritual conditions.
It was not a future unconnected with the present, or connected with it
in an arbitrary or incalculable way. It was a future which had its
earnest in the present, a guarantee not alien to it, but akin--the
Spirit of Christ implanted in the heart, the likeness of Christ sealed
upon the nature. The glorious inheritance was the inheritance, not of
strangers, but of sons; and it still becomes sure as the Spirit of
sonship is received, and fades into incredibility when that Spirit is
extinguished or depressed. If we could live in the Spirit with the
completeness of Christ, or even of St. Paul, we should feel that we
really had an earnest of immortality; the glory of heaven would be as
certain to us as the faithfulness of God to His promise.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Observe the play on the words in βεβαιῶν εἰς Χ ρ ι σ τ ό ν and
Χ ρ ί σ α ς.
[11] When we consider the New Testament use of this idea (cf. Rom. iv.
11; Rev. vii. 2 ff.; Eph. i. 13 f., and this passage), and remember
that Paul and John can have had nothing to do with the Greek
mysteries, it will be apparent that to adduce the ecclesiastical use
of σφραγίς as a proof that the conceptions current in these mysteries
had a powerful influence from the earliest times on the Christian
conception of baptism is beside the mark. One of the earliest examples
outside the New Testament is in the Shepherd of Hermas, _Simil._,
viii. 6: οἱ πιστεύσαντες καὶ εἰληφότες τὴν σφραγῖδα καὶ τεθλακότες
αὐτὴν καὶ μὴ τηρήσαντες ὑγιῆ. This figure of _breaking the seal_, by
falling into sin and losing what baptism confers, is common. Sometimes
it is varied: "Keep the flesh pure, καὶ τὴν σφραγῖδα ἄσπιλον," in 2
Clem. viii. 6. This may be made to carry superstition, but there is
nothing superstitious or unscriptural in it to begin with.
V
_A PASTOR'S HEART_
"But I call God for a witness upon my soul, that to spare you I
forbare to come unto Corinth. Not that we have lordship over your
faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand. But I
determined this for myself, that I would not come again to you
with sorrow. For if I make you sorry, who then is he that maketh
me glad, but he that is made sorry by me? And I wrote this very
thing, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I
ought to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is
_the joy_ of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of
heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be made
sorry, but that ye might know the love which I have more
abundantly unto you."--2 COR. i. 23-ii. 4 (R.V.).
When Paul came to the end of the paragraph in which he defends himself
from the charge of levity and untrustworthiness by appealing to the
nature of the Gospel which he preached, he seems to have felt that it
was hardly sufficient for his purpose. It might be perfectly true that
the Gospel was one mighty affirmation, with no dubiety or
inconsistency about it; it might be as true that it was a supreme
testimony to the faithfulness of God; but bad men, or suspicious men,
would not admit that its character covered his. Their own
insincerities would keep them from understanding its power to change
its loyal ministers into its own likeness, and to stamp them with its
own simplicity and truth. The mere invention of the argument in vv.
18-20 is of itself the highest possible testimony to the ideal height
at which the Apostle lived; no man conscious of duplicity could ever
have had it occur to him. But it had the defect of being too good for
his purpose; the foolish and the false could see a triumphant reply to
it; and he leaves it for a solemn asseveration of the reason which
actually kept him from carrying out his first intention. "I call God
to witness against my soul, that sparing you I forbore to come[12] to
Corinth." The soul is the seat of life; he stakes his life, as it
were, in God's sight, upon the truth of his words. It was not
consideration for himself, in any selfish spirit, but consideration
for them, which explained his change of purpose. If he had carried out
his intention, and gone to Corinth, he would have had to do so, as he
says in 1 Cor. iv. 21, with a rod, and this would not have been
pleasant either for him or for them.
This is very plain--plain even to the dullest; the Apostle has no
sooner set it down than he feels it is too plain. "To spare us," he
hears the Corinthians say to themselves as they read: "who is he that
he should take this tone in speaking to us?" And so he hastens to
anticipate and deprecate their touchy criticism: "Not that we lord it
over your faith, but we are helpers of your joy; as far as faith is
concerned, your position, of course, is secure."
This is a very interesting aside; the digressions in St. Paul, as in
Plato, are sometimes more attractive than the arguments. It shows us,
for one thing, the freedom of the Christian faith. Those who have
received the Gospel have all the responsibilities of mature men; they
have come to their majority as spiritual beings; they are not, in
their character and standing as Christians, subject to arbitrary and
irresponsible interference on the part of others. Paul himself was the
great preacher of this spiritual emancipation: he gloried in the
liberty with which Christ made men free. For him the days of bondage
were over; there was no subjection for the Christian to any custom or
tradition of men, no enslavement of his conscience to the judgment or
the will of others, no coercion of the spirit except by itself. He had
great confidence in this Gospel and in its power to produce generous
and beautiful characters. That it was capable of perversion also he
knew very well. It was open to the infusion of self-will; in the
intoxication of freedom from arbitrary and unspiritual restraint, men
might forget that the believer was bound to be a law to himself, that
he was free, not in lawless self-will, but only in the Lord.
Nevertheless, the principle of freedom was too sacred to be tampered
with; it was necessary both for the education of the conscience and
for the enrichment of spiritual life with the most various and
independent types of goodness; and the Apostle took all the risks, and
all the inconveniences even, rather than limit it in the least.
This passage shows us one of the inconveniences. The newly
enfranchised are mightily sensible of their freedom, and it is
extremely difficult to tell them of their faults. At the very mention
of authority all that is bad in them, as well as all that is good, is
on the alert; and spiritual independence and the liberty of the
Christian people have been represented and defended again and again,
not only by an awful sense of responsibility to Christ, which lifts
the lowliest lives into supreme greatness, but by pride, bigotry,
moral insolence, and every bad passion. What is to be done in such
cases as these, where liberty has forgotten the law of Christ? It is
certainly not to be denied in principle: Paul, even with the peculiar
position of an apostle, and of the spiritual father of those to whom
he writes (1 Cor. iv. 15), does not claim such an authority over their
faith--that is, over the people themselves in their character of
believers--as a master has over his slaves. Their position as
Christians is secure; it is taken for granted by him as by them; and
this being so, no arbitrary _ipse dixit_ can settle anything in
dispute between them; he can issue no orders to the Church such as the
Roman Emperor could issue to his soldiers. He may appeal to them on
spiritual grounds; he may enlighten their consciences by interpreting
to them the law of Christ; he may try to reach them by praise or
blame; but simple compulsion is not one of his resources. If St. Paul
says this, occupying as he does a position which contains in itself a
natural authority which most ministers can never have, ought not all
official persons and classes in the Church to beware of the claims
they make for themselves? A clerical hierarchy, such as has been
developed and perfected in the Church of Rome, does lord it over
faith; it _legislates_ for the laity, both in faith and practice,
without their co-operation, or even their consent; it keeps the _cœtus
fidelium_, the mass of believing men, which _is_ the Church, in a
perpetual minority. All this, in a so-called apostolic succession, is
not only anti-apostolic, but anti-Christian. It is the confiscation of
Christian freedom; the keeping of believers in leading-strings all
their days, lest in their liberty they should go astray. In the
Protestant Churches, on the other hand, the danger on the whole is of
the opposite kind. We are too jealous of authority. We are too proud
of our own competence. We are too unwilling, individually, to be
taught and corrected. We resent, I will not say criticism, but the
most serious and loving voice which speaks to us to disapprove. Now
liberty, when it does not deepen the sense of responsibility to God
and to the brotherhood--and it does not always do so--is an anarchic
and disintegrating force. In all the Churches it exists, to some
extent, in this degraded form; and it is this which makes Christian
education difficult, and Church discipline often impossible. These are
serious evils, and we can only overcome them if we cultivate the sense
of responsibility at the same time that we maintain the principle of
liberty, remembering that it is those only of whom he says, "Ye were
bought with a price" (and are therefore Christ's slaves), to whom St.
Paul also gives the charge: "Be not ye slaves of men."
This passage not only illustrates the freedom of Christian faith, it
presents us with an ideal of the Christian ministry. "We are not lords
over your faith," says St. Paul, "but we are helpers of your joy." It
is implied in this that joy is the very end and element of the
Christian life, and that it is the minister's duty to be at war with
all that restrains it, and to co-operate in all that leads to it.
Here, one would say, is something in which all can agree: all human
souls long for joy, however much they may differ about the spheres of
law and liberty. But have not most Christian people, and most
Christian congregations, something here to accuse themselves of? Do
not many of us bear false witness against the Gospel on this very
point? Who that came into most churches, and looked at the
uninterested faces, and hearkened to the listless singing, would feel
that the soul of the religion, so languidly honoured, was mere
joy--joy unspeakable, if we trust the Apostles, and full of glory? It
is ingratitude which makes us forget this. We begin to grow blind to
the great things which lie at the basis of our faith; the love of God
in Jesus Christ--that love in which He died for us upon the
tree--begins to lose its newness and its wonder; we speak of it
without apprehension and without feeling; it does not make our hearts
burn within us any more; we have no joy in it. Yet we may be sure of
this--that we can have no joy without it. And he is our best friend,
the truest minister of God to us, who helps us to the place where the
love of God is poured out in our hearts in its omnipotence, and we
renew our joy in it. In doing so, it may be necessary for the minister
to cause pain by the way. There is no joy, nor any possibility of it,
where evil is tolerated. There is no joy where sin has been taken
under the patronage of those who call themselves by Christ's name.
There is no joy where pride is in arms in the soul, and is reinforced
by suspicion, by obstinacy, even by jealousy and hate, all waiting to
dispute the authority of the preacher of repentance. When these evil
spirits are overcome, and cast out, which may only be after a painful
conflict, joy will have its opportunity again,--joy, whose right it is
to reign in the Christian soul and the Christian community. Of all
evangelistic forces, this joy is the most potent; and for that, above
all other reasons, it should be cherished wherever Christian people
wish to work the work of their Lord.
After this little digression on the freedom of the faith, and on joy as
the element of the Christian life, Paul returns to his defence. "To
spare you I forbore to come; for I made up my own mind on this, not to
come to you a second time in sorrow." Why was he so determined about
this? He explains in the second verse. It is because all his joy is
bound up in the Corinthians, so that if he grieves them he has no one
left to gladden him except those whom he has grieved--in other words, he
has no joy at all. And he not only made up his mind definitely on this;
he wrote also in exactly this sense: he did not wish, when he came, to
have sorrow from those from whom he ought to have joy. In that desire to
spare himself, as well as them, he counted on their sympathy; he was
sure that his own joy was the joy of every one of them, and that they
would appreciate his motives in not fulfilling a promise, the fulfilment
of which in the circumstances would only have brought grief both to them
and him. The delay has given them time to put right what was amiss in
their Church, and has ensured a joyful time to them all when his visit
is actually accomplished.
There are some grammatical and historical difficulties here which claim
attention. The most discussed is that of the first verse: what is the
precise meaning of τὸ μὴ πάλιν ἐν λύπῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐλθεῖν? There is no
doubt that this is the correct order of the words, and just as little, I
think, that the natural meaning is that Paul had once visited Corinth in
grief, and was resolved not to repeat such a visit. So the words are
taken by Meyer, Hofmann, Schmiedel, and others. The visit in question
cannot have been that on occasion of which the Church was founded; and
as the connexion between this passage and the last chapter of the First
Epistle is as close as can be conceived (see the Introduction), it
cannot have fallen between the two: the only other supposition is, that
it took place before the First Epistle was written. This is the opinion
of Lightfoot, Meyer, and Weiss; and it is not fatal to it that no such
visit is mentioned elsewhere--_e.g._, in the book of Acts. Still, the
interpretation is not essential; and if we can get over chap. xiii. 2,
it is quite possible to agree with Heinrici that Paul had only been in
Corinth once, and that what he means in ver. 1 here is: "I determined
not to carry out my purpose of revisiting you, in sorrow."
There is a difficulty of another sort in ver. 2. One's first thought
is to read καὶ τίς ὁ εὐφραίνων με κ.τ.λ., as a real singular, with a
reference, intelligible though indefinite, to the notorious but
penitent sinner of Corinth. "I vex you, I grant it; but where does my
joy come from--the joy without which I am resolved not to visit
you--except from one who is vexed by me?" The bad man's repentance had
made Paul glad, and there is a worthy considerateness in this
indefinite way of designating him. This interpretation has commended
itself to so sound a judge as Bengel, and though more recent scholars
reject it with practical unanimity, it is difficult to be sure that it
is wrong. The alternative is to generalise the τίς, and make the
question mean: "If I vex you, where can I find joy? All my joy is in
you, and to see you grieved leaves me absolutely joyless."
A third difficulty is the reference of ἔγραψα τοῦτο αὐτὸ in ver. 3.
Language very similar is found in ver. 9 (εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ καὶ ἔγραψα),
and again in chap. vii. 8-12 (ἐλύπησα ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἐπιστολῇ). It is very
natural to think here of our First Epistle. It served the purpose
contemplated by the letter here described; it told of Paul's change
of purpose; it warned the Corinthians to rectify what was amiss, and
so to order their affairs that he might come, not with a rod, but in
love and in the spirit of meekness; or, as he says here, not to have
sorrow, but, what he was entitled to, joy from his visit. All that is
alleged against this is that our First Epistle does not suit the
description given of the writing in ver. 4: "out of much affliction
and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears." But when those
parts of the First Epistle are read, in which St. Paul is not
answering questions submitted to him by the Church, but writing out of
his heart upon its spiritual condition, this will appear a dubious
assertion. What a pain must have been at his heart, when such
passionate words broke from him as these: "Is Christ divided? Was Paul
crucified for you?--What is Apollos, and what is Paul?--With me it is
a very little thing to be judged by you.--Though ye have ten thousand
instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ
Jesus I begot you through the Gospel.--I will know, not the speech of
them that are puffed up, but the power." Not to speak of the fifth and
sixth chapters, words like these justify us in supposing that the
First Epistle may be, and in all probability is, meant.[13]
Putting these details aside, as of mainly historical interest, let us
look rather at the spirit of this passage. It reveals, more clearly
perhaps than any passage in the New Testament, the essential
qualification of the Christian minister--a heart pledged to his
brethren in the love of Christ. That is the only possible basis of an
authority which can plead its own and its Master's cause against the
aberrations of spiritual liberty, and there is always both room and
need for it in the Church. Certainly it is the hardest of all
authorities to win, and the costliest to maintain, and therefore
substitutes for it are innumerable. The poorest are those that are
merely official, where a minister appeals to his standing as a member
of a separate order, and expects men to reverence that. If this was
once possible in Christendom, if it is still possible where men
secretly wish to shunt their spiritual responsibilities upon others,
it is not possible where emancipation has been grasped either in an
anarchic or in a Christian spirit. Let the great idea of liberty, and
of all that is cognate with liberty, once dawn upon their souls, and
men will never sink again to the recognition of anything as an
authority that does not attest itself in a purely spiritual way.
"Orders" will mean nothing to them but an arrogant unreality, which in
the name of all that is free and Christian they are bound to contemn.
It will be the same, too, with any authority which has merely an
intellectual basis. A professional education, even in theology, gives
no man authority to meddle with another in his character as a
Christian. The University and the Divinity Schools can confer no
competence here. Nothing that distinguishes a man from his fellows,
nothing in virtue of which he takes a place of superiority apart: on
the contrary, that love only which makes him entirely one with them in
Jesus Christ, can ever entitle him to interpose. If their joy is his
joy; if to grieve them, even for their good, is his grief; if the
cloud and sunshine of their lives cast their darkness and their light
immediately upon him; if he shrinks from the faintest approach to
self-assertion, yet would sacrifice anything to perfect their joy in
the Lord,--then he is in the true apostolical succession; and whatever
authority may rightly be exercised, where the freedom of the spirit is
the law, may rightly be exercised by him. What is required of
Christian workers in every degree--of ministers and teachers, of
parents and friends, of all Christian people with the cause of Christ
at heart--is a greater expenditure of soul on their work. Here is a
whole paragraph of St. Paul, made up almost entirely of "grief" and
"joy"; what depth of feeling lies behind it! If this is alien to us in
our work for Christ, we need not wonder that our work does not tell.
And if this is true generally, it is especially true when the work we
have to do is that of rebuking sin. There are few things which try
men, and show what spirit they are of, more searchingly than this. We
like to be on God's side, and to show our zeal for Him, and we are far
too ready to put all our bad passions at His service. But these are a
gift which He declines. Our wrath does not work His righteousness--a
lesson that even good men, of a kind, are very slow to learn. To
denounce sin, and to declaim about it, is the easiest and cheapest
thing in the world: one could not do less where sin is concerned,
unless he did nothing at all. Yet how common denunciation is. It seems
almost to be taken for granted as the natural and praiseworthy mode of
dealing with evil. People assail the faults of the community, or even
of their brethren in the Church, with violence, with temper, with the
tone, often, of injured innocence. They think that when they do so
they are doing God service; but surely we should have learned by this
time that nothing could be so unlike God, so unfaithful and
preposterous as a testimony for Him. God Himself overcomes evil with
good; Christ vanquishes the sin of the world by taking the burden of
it on Himself; and if we wish to have part in the same work, there is
only the same method open to us. Depend upon it, we shall not make
others weep for that for which we have not wept; we shall not make
that touch the hearts of others which has not first touched our own.
That is the law which God has established in the world; He submitted
to it Himself in the person of His Son, and He requires us to submit
to it. Paul was certainly a very fiery man; he could explode, or flame
up, with far more effect than most people; yet it was not there that
his great strength lay. It was in the passionate tenderness that
checked that vehement temper, and made the once haughty spirit say
what he says here: "Out of much affliction and anguish of heart, I
wrote unto you with many tears, not that you might be grieved, but
that you might know the love which I have more abundantly toward you."
In words like these the very spirit speaks which is God's power to
subdue and save the sinful.
It is worth dwelling upon this, because it is so fundamental, and yet so
slowly learned. Even Christian ministers, who ought to know the mind of
Christ, almost universally, at least in the beginning of their work,
when they preach about evil, lapse into the scolding tone. It is of no
use whatever in the pulpit, and of just as little in the Sunday-school
class, in the home, or in any relation in which we seek to exercise
moral authority. The one basis for that authority is love; and the
characteristic of love in the presence of evil is not that it becomes
angry, or insolent, or disdainful, but that it takes the burden and the
shame of the evil to itself. The hard, proud heart is impotent; the mere
official is impotent, whether he call himself priest or pastor; all hope
and help lie in those who have learned of the Lamb of God who bore the
sin of the world. It is soul-travail like His, attesting love like His;
that wins all the victories in which He can rejoice.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] The R.V. "forbare to come" has the same vagueness as οὐκέτι
ἦλθον, which may mean (1) "I came not as yet"--so A.V.; or (2) "I came
not again"; or (3) "I came no more."
[13] To suppose the reference to be to an epistle carried by Titus and
now lost, is to suppose what is incapable of proof or disproof. To
take ἔγραψα as "epistolary" aorist, and translate "I write," is
grammatically, but only grammatically, possible. The supposed
reference to chaps, x. i-xiii. 10 as a separate epistle is noticed in
the Introduction.
VI
_CHURCH DISCIPLINE_
"But if any hath caused sorrow, he hath caused sorrow, not to me,
but in part (that I press not too heavily) to you all. Sufficient
to such a one is this punishment which was _inflicted_ by the
many; so that contrariwise ye should rather forgive him and
comfort him, lest by any means such a one should be swallowed up
with his overmuch sorrow. Wherefore I beseech you to confirm your
love toward him. For to this end also did I write, that I might
know the proof of you, whether ye are obedient in all things. But
to whom ye forgive anything, I _forgive_ also: for what I also
have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, for your sakes _have I
forgiven it_ in the person of Christ; that no advantage may be
gained over us by Satan: for we are not ignorant of his
devices."--2 COR. ii. 5-11 (R.V.).
The foregoing paragraph of the Epistle has said a great deal about
sorrow, the sorrow felt by St. Paul on the one hand, and the sorrow he
was reluctant to cause the Corinthians on the other. In the passage
before us reference is evidently made to the person who was ultimately
responsible for all this trouble. If much in it is indefinite to us,
and only leaves a doubtful impression, it was clear enough for those
to whom it was originally addressed; and that very indefiniteness has
its lesson. There are some things to which it is sufficient, and more
than sufficient, to allude; least said is best said. And even when
plain-speaking has been indispensable, a stage arrives at which there
is no more to be gained by it; if the subject _must_ be referred to,
the utmost generality of reference is best. Here the Apostle
discusses the case of a person who had done something extremely bad;
but with the sinner's repentance assured, it is both characteristic
and worthy of him that neither here nor in chap. vii. does he mention
the name either of offender or offence. It is perhaps too much to
expect students of his writings, who wish to trace out in detail all
the events of his life, and to give the utmost possible definiteness
to all its situations, to be content with this obscurity; but students
of his spirit--Christian people reading the Bible for practical
profit--do not need to perplex themselves as to this penitent man's
identity. He may have been the person mentioned in 1 Cor. v. who had
married his stepmother; he may have been some one who had been guilty
of a personal insult to the Apostle: the main point is that he was a
sinner whom the discipline of the Church had saved.[14]
The Apostle had been expressing himself about his sorrow with great
vehemence, and he is careful in his very first words to make it plain
that the offence which had caused such sorrow was no personal matter.
It concerned the Church as well as him. "If any one hath caused
sorrow, he hath not caused sorrow to me, but in part to you all." To
say more than this would be to exaggerate (ἐπιβαρεῖν).[15] The Church,
in point of fact, had not been moved either as universally or as
profoundly as it should have been by the offence of this wicked man.
The penalty imposed upon him, whatever it may have been, had not been
imposed by a unanimous vote, but only by a majority; there were some
who sympathised with him, and would have been less severe.[16] Still,
it had brought conviction of his sin to the offender; he could not
brazen it out against such consenting condemnation as there was; he
was overwhelmed with penitential grief. This is why the Apostle says,
"Sufficient to such a one is this punishment which was inflicted by
the majority." It has served the purpose of all disciplinary
treatment; and having done so, must now be superseded by an opposite
line of action. "Contrariwise ye should rather forgive him and comfort
him, lest by any means such a one should be swallowed up with his
overmuch sorrow." In St. Paul's sentence "such a one" comes last, with
the emphasis of compassion upon it. He had been "such a one," to begin
with, as it was a pain and a shame even to think about; he is "such a
one," now, as the angels in heaven are rejoicing over; "such a one" as
the Apostle, having the spirit of Him who received sinners, regards
with profoundest pity and yearning; "such a one" as the Church ought
to meet with pardoning and restoring love, lest grief sink into
despair, and the sinner cut himself off from hope. To prevent such a
deplorable result, the Corinthians are by some formal action (κυρῶσαι:
cf. Gal. iii. 15) to forgive him, and receive him again as a brother;
and in their forgiveness and welcome he is to find the pledge of the
great love of God.
This whole passage is of interest from the light which it throws upon
the discipline of the Church; or, to use less technical and more
correct language, the Christian treatment of the erring.
It shows us, for one thing, the aim of all discipline: it is, in the
last resort, the restoration of the fallen. The Church has, of course,
an interest of its own to guard; it is bound to protest against all
that is inconsistent with its character; it is bound to expel
scandals. But the Church's protest, its condemnation, its
excommunication even, are not ends in themselves; they are means to
that which is really an end in itself, a priceless good which
justifies every extreme of moral severity, the winning again of the
sinner through repentance. The judgment of the Church is the
instrument of God's love, and the moment it is accepted in the sinful
soul it begins to work as a redemptive force. The humiliation it
inflicts is that which God exalts; the sorrow, that which He comforts.
But when a scandal comes to light in a Christian congregation--when
one of its members is discovered in a fault gross, palpable, and
offensive--what is the significance of that movement of feeling which
inevitably takes place? In how many has it the character of goodness
and of severity, of condemnation and of compassion, of love and fear,
of pity and shame, the only character that has any virtue in it to
tell for the sinner's recovery? If you ask nine people out of ten what
a scandal is, they will tell you it is something which makes talk; and
the talk in nine cases out of ten will be malignant, affected, more
interesting to the talkers than any story of virtue or piety--scandal
itself, in short, far more truly than its theme. Does anybody imagine
that gossip is one of the forces that waken conscience, and work for
the redemption of our fallen brethren? If this is all we can do, in
the name of all that is Christian let us keep silence. Every word
spoken about a brother's sin, that is not prompted by a Christian
conscience, that does not vibrate with the love of a Christian heart,
is itself a sin against the mercy and the judgment of Christ.
We see here not only the end of Church discipline, but the force of
which it disposes for the attainment of its end. That force is neither
more nor less than the conscience of the Christian people who
constitute the Church: discipline is, in principle, the reaction of
that force against all immorality. In special cases, forms may be
necessary for its exercise, and in the forms in which it is exercised
variations may be found expedient, according to time, place, or degree
of moral progress; the congregation as a body, or a representative
committee of it, or its ordained ministers, may be its most suitable
executors; but that on which all alike have to depend for making their
proceedings effective to any Christian intent is the vigour of
Christian conscience, and the intensity of Christian love, in the
community as a whole. Where these are wanting, or exist only in an
insignificant degree, disciplinary proceedings are reduced to a mere
form; they are legal, not evangelical; and to be legal in such matters
is not only hypocritical, but insolent. Instead of rendering a real
Christian service to offenders, which by awakening conscience will
lead to penitence and restoration, discipline under such conditions is
equally cruel and unjust.
It is plain also, from the nature of the force which it employs, that
discipline is a function of the Church which is in incessant exercise,
and is not called into action only on special occasions. To limit it
to what are technically known as cases of discipline--the formal
treatment of offenders by a Church court, or by any person or persons
acting in an official character--is to ignore its real nature, and to
give its exercise in these cases a significance to which it has no
claim. The offences against the Christian standard which can be
legally impeached even in Church courts are not one in ten thousand of
those against which the Christian conscience ought energetically to
protest; and it is the vigour with which the ceaseless reaction
against evil in every shape is instinctively maintained which measures
the effectiveness of all formal proceedings, and makes them means of
grace to the guilty. The officials of a Church may deal in their
official place with offences against soberness, purity, or honesty;
they are bound to deal with them, whether they like it or not; but
their success will depend upon the completeness with which they, and
those whom they represent, have renounced not only the vices which
they are judging, but all that is out of keeping with the mind and
spirit of Christ. The drunkard, the sensualist, the thief, know
perfectly well that drunkenness, sensuality, and theft are not the
only sins which mar the soul. They know that there are other vices,
just as real if not so glaring, which are equally fatal to the life of
Christ in man, and as completely disqualify men for acting in Christ's
name. They are conscious that it is not a _bona fide_ transaction when
their sins are impeached by men whose consciences endure with
equanimity the reign of meanness, duplicity, pride, hypocrisy,
self-complacency. They are aware that God is not present where these
are dominant, and that God's power to judge and save can never come
through such channels. Hence the exercise of discipline in these legal
forms is often resented, and often ineffective; and instead of
complaining about what is obviously inevitable, the one thing at which
all should aim who wish to protect the Church from scandals is to
cultivate the common conscience, and bring it to such a degree of
purity and vigour, that its spontaneous resentment of evil will enable
the Church practically to dispense with legal forms. This Christian
community at Corinth had a thousand faults; in many points we are
tempted to find in it rather a warning than an example; but I think we
may take this as a signal proof that it was really sound at heart: its
condemnation of this guilty man fell upon his conscience as the
sentence of God, and brought him in tears to the feet of Christ. No
legal proceedings could have done that: nothing could have done it but
a real and passionate sympathy with the holiness and the love of
Christ. Such sympathy is the one subduing, reconciling, redeeming
power in our hands; and Paul might well rejoice, after all his
affliction and anguish of heart, when he found it so unmistakably at
work in Corinth. Not so much formal as instinctive, though not
shrinking on occasion from formal proceedings; not malignant, yet
closing itself inexorably against evil; not indulgent to badness, but
with goodness like Christ's, waiting to be gracious,--this Christian
virtue really holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and opens and
shuts with the authority of Christ Himself. We need it in all our
Churches to-day, as much as it was needed in Corinth; we need it that
special acts of discipline may be effective; we need it still more
that they may be unnecessary. Pray for it as for a gift that
comprehends every other--the power to represent Christ, and work His
work, in the recovery and restoration of the fallen.
In vv. 9-11, the same subject is continued, but with a slightly
different aspect exposed. Paul had obviously taken the initiative in
this matter, though the bulk of the Church, at his prompting, had
acted in a right spirit. Their conduct was in harmony with his motive
in writing to them,[17] which had really been to make proof of their
obedience in all points. But he has already disclaimed either the
right or the wish to lord it over them in their liberty as believers;
and here, again, he represents himself rather as following them in
their treatment of the offender, than as pointing out the way. "Now to
whom ye forgive anything, I also forgive"--so great is my confidence
in you: "for what I also have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything,
for your sakes have I forgiven it in the presence of Christ." When he
says "if I _have_ forgiven anything," he does not mean that his
forgiveness is dubious, or in suspense; what he does is to deprecate
the thought that his forgiveness is the main thing, or that he had
been the person principally offended. When he says "_for your sakes_
have I forgiven it," the words are explained by what follows: to have
refused his forgiveness in the circumstances would have been to
perpetuate a state of matters which could only have injured the
Church. When he adds that his forgiveness is bestowed "in the presence
of Christ," he gives the assurance that it is no complaisance or
formality, but a real acceptance of the offender to peace and
friendship again.[18] And we should not overlook the fact that in this
association of Christ, of the Corinthians, and of himself, in the work
of forgiveness and restoration, Paul is really encompassing a
desponding soul with all the grace of earth and heaven. Surely he will
not let his grief become despair, when all around him and above him
there is a present and convincing witness that, though God is
intolerant of sin, He is the refuge of the penitent.
The gracious and conciliatory tone of these verses seems to me worthy of
special admiration; and I can only express my astonishment that to some
they have appeared insincere, a vain attempt to cover a defeat with the
semblance of victory, a surrender to the opposition at Corinth, the
painfulness of which is ill-disguised by the pretence of agreement with
them. The exposition just given renders the refutation of such a view
unnecessary. We ought rather to regard with reverence and affection the
man who knew how to combine, so strikingly, unflinching principle and
the deepest tenderness and consideration for others; we ought to propose
his modesty, his sensitiveness to the feelings even of opponents, his
sympathy with those who had no sympathy with him, as examples for our
imitation. Paul had been deeply moved by what had taken place at
Corinth, possibly he had been deeply injured; but even so his personal
interest is kept in the background; for the obedient loyalty which he
wishes to prove is not so much _his_ interest as theirs to whom he
writes. He cares only for others. He cares for the poor soul who has
forfeited his place in the community; he cares for the good name of the
Church; he cares for the honour of Jesus Christ; and he exerts all his
power with these interests in view. If it needs rigour, he can be
rigorous; if it needs passion, he can be passionate; if it needs
consideration, graciousness, a conciliatory temper, a willingness to
keep out of sight, he can be depended upon for all these virtues. If
they were only affected, Paul would deserve the praise of a great
diplomatist; but it is far easier to believe them real, and see in them
the signs of a great minister of Christ.
The last verse puts the aim of his proceedings in another light: all
this, he says, I do, "that no advantage may be gained over us by
Satan: for we are not ignorant of his devices." The important words in
the last clause are of the same root; it is as if Paul had said:
"Satan is very knowing, and is always on the alert to get the better
of us; but we are not without knowledge of his knowing ways." It was
the Apostle's acquaintance with the wiles of the devil which made him
eager to see the restoration of the penitent sinner duly carried
through. This implies one or two practical truths, with which, by way
of application, this exposition may close.
(1) A scandal in the Church gives the devil an opportunity. When one
who has named the name of Jesus, and vowed loyal obedience to Him,
falls into open sin, it is a chance offered to the enemy which he is
not slow to improve. He uses it to discredit the very name of Christ:
to turn that which ought to be to the world the symbol of the purest
goodness into a synonym of hypocrisy. Christ has committed His honour,
if not His character, to our keeping; and every lapse into vice gives
Satan an advantage over Him.
(2) The devil finds his gain in the incompetence of the Church to deal
with evil in the Spirit of Christ. It is a fine thing for him if he
can drive the convicted sinner to despair, and persuade him that there
is no more forgiveness with God. It is a fine thing if he can prompt
those who love little, because they know little of God's love, to show
themselves rigid, implacable, irreconcilable, even to the penitent. If
he can deform the likeness of Christ into a morose Pharisaism, what an
incalculable gain it is! If the disciples of Him who received sinners
look askance on those who have lapsed, and chill the hope of
restoration with cold suspicion and reserve, there will be joy over
it, not in heaven, but in hell. And not only this, but the opposite is
a device of the devil, of which we ought not to be ignorant. There is
hardly a sin that some one has not an interest in extenuating. Even
the incestuous person in Corinth had his defenders: there were some
who were puffed up, and gloried in what he had done as an assertion of
Christian liberty. The devil takes advantage of the scandals that
occur in the Church to bribe and debauch men's consciences; indulgent
words are spoken, which are not the voice of Christ's awful mercy, but
of a miserable self-pity; the strongest and holiest thing in the
world, the redeeming love of God, is adulterated and even confounded
with the weakest and basest thing, the bad man's immoral forgiveness
of himself. And not to mention anything else under this head, could
any one imagine what would please and suit the devil better than the
absolutely unfeeling but extremely interesting gossip which resounds
over every exposure of sin?
(3) But, lastly, the devil finds his advantage in the dissensions of
Christians. What an opportunity he would have had in Corinth, had
strained relations continued between the Apostle and the Church! What
opportunities he has everywhere, when tempers are on edge, and every
movement means friction, and every proposal rouses suspicion! The last
prayer Christ prayed for His Church was that they might all be one: to
be one in Him is the final security against the devices of Satan. What
a frightful commentary the history of the Church is on this prayer!
What frightful illustrations it furnishes of the devil's gain out of
the saints' quarrels! There are plenty of subjects, of course, even in
Church life, on which we may naturally and legitimately differ; but we
ought to know better than to let the differences enter into our souls.
At bottom, we should be all one; it is giving ourselves away to the
enemy, if we do not, at all costs, "keep the unity of the Spirit in
the bond of peace."
FOOTNOTES:
[14] On the identity of the person referred to, see Introduction, p. 2
f.
[15] This meaning of ἐπιβαρεῖν, taken as intransitive, is rather
vague, but I believe substantially correct. If the word is to be taken
as virtually transitive, the object must be the partisans of the
offender. It would "bear hardly" on them, to assume that _they_ had
been grieved by what Paul considered an offence. They had not been
grieved. That is why he excludes them from πάντας ὑμᾶς by ἀπὸ μέρους.
[16] This suits with either idea as to the identity of the man. (1) If
he were the incestuous person of 1 Cor. v., the minority would consist
of those who abused the Christian idea of liberty, and were "puffed
up" (1 Cor. v. 2) over this sin as an illustration of it. (2) If he
were one who had personally insulted Paul, the minority would probably
consist of the Judaistic opponents of the Apostle.
[17] This is the force of the καὶ before ἔγραψα in ver. 9.
[18] In spite of the Vulgate, which has _in persona Christi_; of
Luther, who gives _an Christi Statt_; and of the English versions,
Authorised and Revised, which both give "in the person of Christ"
(though the R.V. puts _presence_ in the margin), there seems no room
to doubt that "in the presence of Christ" is the true meaning. The
same words in chap. iv, 6 are admittedly different in import; and in
the only passages where ἐν προσώπῳ occurs with a genitive, it means
"in presence of." These are Prov. viii. 30, where ἐν προσώπῳ αὐτοῦ is
= לפניו; and Sir. xxxii. 6, where "Thou shalt not appear _before the
Lord_ empty" is ἐν π. Κυρίου.
VII
_CHRIST'S CAPTIVE_
"Now when I came to Troas for the Gospel of Christ, and when a
door was opened unto me in the Lord, I had no relief for my
spirit, because I found not Titus my brother: but taking my leave
of them, I went forth into Macedonia. But thanks be unto God,
which always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest
through us the savour of His knowledge in every place. For we are
a sweet savour of Christ unto God, in them that are being saved,
and in them that are perishing; to the one a savour from death
unto death; to the other a savour from life unto life. And who is
sufficient for these things? For we are not as the many,
corrupting the Word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in
the sight of God, speak we in Christ."--2 COR. ii. 12-17 (R.V.).
In this passage the Apostle returns from what is virtually, if not
formally, a digression, to the narrative which begins in chap. i. 8
f., and is continued in i. 15 f. At the same time he makes a
transition to a new subject, really though not very explicitly
connected with what goes before--namely, his independent and divinely
granted authority as an apostle. In the last verses of chap, ii., and
in chap. iii. 1-4, this is treated generally, but with reference in
particular to the success of his ministry. He then goes on to contrast
the older and the Christian dispensation, and the character of their
respective ministries, and terminates the section with a noble
statement of the spirit and principles with which he fulfilled his
apostolic calling (chap. iv. 1-6).
Before leaving Ephesus, Paul had apparently made an appointment to meet
Titus, on his return from Corinth, at Troas. He went thither himself to
preach the Gospel, and found an excellent opportunity for doing so; but
the non-arrival of his brother kept him in such a state of unrest[19]
that he was unable to make that use of it which he would otherwise have
done. This seems a singular confession, but there is no reason to
suppose that it was made with a bad conscience. Paul was probably
grieved that he had not the heart to go in at the door which had been
opened to him in the Lord, but he did not feel guilty. It was not
selfishness which made him turn away, but the anxiety of a true pastor
about other souls which God had committed to his care. "I had no relief
_for my spirit_," he says; and the spirit, in his language, even though
it be a constituent of man's nature, is that in him which is akin to the
divine, and receptive of it. That very element in the Apostle, in virtue
of which he could act for God at all, was already preoccupied, and
though the people were there, ready to be evangelised, it was beyond his
power to evangelise them. His spirit was absorbed and possessed by hopes
and fears and prayers for the Corinthians; and as the human spirit, even
when in contact with the divine, is finite, and only capable of so much
and no more, he was obliged to let slip an occasion which he would
otherwise have gladly seized. He probably felt with all missionaries
that it is as important to secure as to win converts; and if the
Corinthians were capable of reflection, they might reflect with shame on
the loss which their sin had entailed on the people of Troas. The
disorders of their wilful community had engrossed the Apostle's spirit,
and robbed their fellow-men across the sea of an apostolic ministry.
They could not but feel how genuine was the Apostle's love, when he had
made such a sacrifice to it; but such a sacrifice ought never to have
been required.
When Paul could bear the suspense no longer, he said good-bye to the
people of Troas, crossed the Thracian Sea, and advanced into Macedonia
to meet Titus. He did meet him, and heard from him a full report of
the state of matters at Corinth (chap. vii. 5 ff.); but here he does
not take time to say so. He breaks out into a jubilant thanksgiving,
occasioned primarily no doubt by the joyful tidings he had just
received, but widening characteristically, and instantaneously, to
cover all his apostolic work. It is as though he felt God's goodness
to him to be all of a piece, and could not be sensitive to it in any
particular instance without having the consciousness rise within him
that he lived and moved and had his being in it. "Now to God be
thanks, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ."
The peculiar and difficult word in this thanksgiving is θριαμβεύοντι.
The sense which first strikes one as suitable is that which is given
in the Authorised Version: "God which always _causeth us to triumph_."
Practically Paul had been engaged in a conflict with the Corinthians,
and for a time it had seemed not improbable that he might be beaten;
but God had caused him to triumph in Christ--that is, acting in
Christ's interests, in matters in which Christ's name and honour were
at stake, the victory (as always) had remained with him; and for this
he thanks God. This interpretation is still maintained by so excellent
a scholar as Schmiedel, and the use of θριαμβεύειν in this transitive
sense is defended by the analogy of μαθητεύειν in Matt. xxviii. 19.
But appropriate as this interpretation is, there is one apparently fatal
objection to it. There is no doubt that θριαμβεύειν is here used
transitively, but we have not to guess, by analogy, what it must mean
when so used; there are other examples which fix this unambiguously. One
is found elsewhere in St. Paul himself (Col. ii. 15), where θριαμβεύσας
αὐτοὺς indubitably means "having triumphed over them." In accordance
with this, which is only one out of many instances,[20] the Revisers
have displaced the old rendering here, and substituted for it, "Thanks
be to God, which always _leadeth us in triumph_." The triumph here is
God's, not the Apostle's; Paul is not the soldier who wins the battle,
and shouts for victory, as he marches in the triumphal procession; he is
the captive who is led in the Conqueror's train, and in whom men see the
trophy of the Conqueror's power. When he says that God always leads him
in triumph _in Christ_, the meaning is not perfectly obvious. He may
intend to define, as it were, the area over which God's victory extends.
In everything which is covered by the name and authority of Christ, God
triumphantly asserts His power over the Apostle. Or, again, the words
may signify that it is through Christ that God's victorious power is put
forth. These two meanings, of course, are not inconsistent; and
practically they coincide.
It cannot be denied, I think, if this is taken quite rigorously, that
there is a certain air of irrelevance about it. It does not seem to be
to the purpose of the passage to say that God always triumphs over Paul
and those for whom He speaks, or even that He always leads them in
triumph. It is this feeling, indeed, which mainly influences those who
keep to the rendering of the Authorised Version, and regard Paul as the
victor. But the meaning of θριαμβεύοντι is not really open to doubt, and
the semblance of irrelevance disappears if we remember that we are
dealing with a figure, and a figure which the Apostle himself does not
press. Of course in an ordinary triumph, such as the triumph of Claudius
over Caractacus, of which St. Paul may easily have heard, the captives
had no share in the victory; it was not only a victory over them, but a
victory against them. But when God wins a victory over man, and leads
his captive in triumph, the captive too has an interest in what happens;
it is the beginning of all triumphs, in any true sense, for him. If we
apply this to the case before us, we shall see that the true meaning is
not irrelevant. Paul had once been the enemy of God in Christ; he had
fought against Him in his own soul, and in the Church which he
persecuted and wasted. The battle had been long and strong; but not far
from Damascus it had terminated in a decisive victory for God. There the
mighty man fell, and the weapons of his warfare perished. His pride, his
self-righteousness, his sense of superiority to others and of competence
to attain to the righteousness of God, collapsed for ever, and he rose
from the earth to be the slave of Jesus Christ. That was the beginning
of God's triumph over him; from that hour God led him in triumph in
Christ. But it was the beginning also of all that made the Apostle's
life itself a triumph, not a career of hopeless internal strife, such as
it had been, but of unbroken Christian victory. This, indeed, is not
involved _in the mere word_ θριαμβεύοντι, but it is the real _thing_
which was present to the Apostle's mind when he used the word. When we
recognise this, we see that the charge of irrelevance does not really
apply; while nothing could be more characteristic of the Apostle than to
hide himself and his success in this way behind God's triumph over him
and through him.
Further, the true meaning of the word, and the true connexion of ideas
just explained, remind us that the only triumphs we can ever have,
deserving the name, must begin with God's triumph over us. This is the
one possible source of joy untroubled. We may be as selfish as we
please, and as successful in our selfishness; we may distance all our
rivals in the race for the world's prizes; we may appropriate and
engross pleasure, wealth, knowledge, influence; and after all there
will be one thing we must do without--the power and the happiness of
thanking God. No one will ever be able to thank God because he has
succeeded in pleasing himself, be the mode of his self-pleasing as
respectable as you will; and he who has not thanked God with a whole
heart, without misgiving and without reserve, does not know what joy
is. Such thanksgiving and its joy have one condition: they rise up
spontaneously in the soul when it allows God to triumph over it. When
God appears to us in Jesus Christ, when in the omnipotence of His love
and purity and truth He makes war upon our pride and falsehood and
lusts, and prevails against them, and brings us low, then we are
admitted to the secret of this apparently perplexing passage; we know
how natural it is to cry, "Thanks be unto God who in His victory over
us giveth us the victory! Thanks be to Him who always leadeth us in
triumph!" It is out of an experience like this that Paul speaks; it is
the key to his whole life, and it has been illustrated anew by what
has just happened at Corinth.
But to return to the Epistle. God is described by the Apostle not only
as triumphing over them (_i.e._, himself and his colleagues) in
Christ, but as making manifest through them the savour of His
knowledge in every place. It has been questioned whether "His"
knowledge is the knowledge of God or of Christ. Grammatically, the
question can hardly be answered; but, as we see from chap. iv. 6, the
two things which it proposes to distinguish are really one; what is
manifested in the apostolic ministry is the knowledge of God as He is
revealed in Christ. But why does Paul use the expression "_the savour_
of His knowledge"? It was suggested probably by the figure of the
triumph, which was present to his mind in all the detail of its
circumstances. Incense smoked on every altar as the victor passed
through the streets of Rome; the fragrant steam floated over the
procession, a silent proclamation of victory and joy. But Paul would
not have appropriated this feature of the triumph, and applied it to
his ministry, unless he had felt that there was a real point of
comparison, that the knowledge of Christ which he diffused among men,
wherever he went, was in very truth a fragrant thing.[21] True, he was
not a free man; he had been subdued by God, and made the slave of
Jesus Christ; as the Lord of glory went forth conquering and to
conquer, over Syria and Asia and Macedonia and Greece, He led him as a
captive in the triumphal march of His grace; he was the trophy of
Christ's victory; every one who saw him saw that necessity was laid
upon Him; but what a gracious necessity it was! "The _love_ of Christ
constraineth us." The captives who were dragged in chains behind a
Roman chariot also made manifest the knowledge of their conqueror;
they declared to all the spectators his power and his pitilessness;
there was nothing in that knowledge to suggest the idea of a fragrance
like incense. But as Paul moved through the world, all who had eyes to
see saw in him not only the power but the sweetness of God's redeeming
love. The mighty Victor made manifest through Him, not only His might,
but His charm, not only His greatness, but His grace. It was a good
thing, men felt, to be subdued and led in triumph like Paul; it was to
move in an atmosphere perfumed by the love of Christ, as the air
around the Roman triumph was perfumed with incense. The Apostle is so
sensible of this that he weaves it into his sentence as an
indispensable part of his thought; it is not merely the knowledge of
God which is made manifest through him as he is led in triumph, but
that knowledge as a fragrant, gracious thing, speaking to every one of
victory and goodness and joy.
The very word "savour," in connexion with the "knowledge" of God in
Christ, is full of meaning. It has its most direct application, of
course, to preaching. When we proclaim the Gospel, do we always succeed
in manifesting it as a savour? Or is not the savour--the sweetness, the
winsomeness, the charm and attractiveness of it--the very thing that is
most easily left out? Do we not catch it sometimes in the words of
others, and wonder that it eludes our own? We miss what is most
characteristic in the knowledge of God if we miss this. We leave out
that very element in the Evangel which makes it evangelic, and gives it
its power to subdue and enchain the souls of men. But it is not to
preachers only that the word "savour" speaks; it is of the widest
possible application. Whereever Christ is leading a single soul in
triumph, the fragrance of the Gospel should go forth; rather, it does go
forth, in proportion as His triumph is complete. There is sure to be
that in the life which will reveal the graciousness as well as the
omnipotence of the Saviour. And it is this virtue which God uses as His
main witness, as His chief instrument, to evangelise the world. In every
relation of life it should tell. Nothing is so insuppressible, nothing
so pervasive, as a fragrance. The lowliest life which Christ is really
leading in triumph will speak infallibly and persuasively for Him. In a
Christian brother or sister, brothers and sisters will find a new
strength and tenderness, something that goes deeper than natural
affection, and can stand severer shocks; they will catch the fragrance
which declares that the Lord in His triumphant grace is there. And so in
all situations, or, as the Apostle has it, "in every place." And if we
are conscious that we fall in this matter, and that the fragrance of the
knowledge of Christ is something to which our life gives no testimony,
let us be sure that the explanation of it is to be found in self-will.
There is something in us which has not yet made complete surrender to
Him, and not till He leads us unresistingly in triumph will the sweet
savour go forth.
At this point the Apostle's thought is arrested by the issues of his
ministry, though he carries the figure of the fragrance, with a little
pressure, through to the end. In God's sight, he says, or so far as
God is concerned, we are a sweet savour of Christ, a perfume redolent
of Christ, in which He cannot but take pleasure. In other words,
Christ proclaimed in the Gospel, and the ministries and lives which
proclaim Him, are always a joy to God. They are a joy to Him, whatever
men may think of them, alike in them that are being saved and in them
that are perishing. To those who are being saved, they are a savour
"from life to life"; to those who are perishing, a savour "from death
to death." Here, as everywhere, St. Paul contemplates these exclusive
opposites as the sole issues of man's life, and of the Gospel
ministry. He makes no attempt to subordinate one to the other, no
suggestion that the way of death may ultimately lead to life, much
less that it must do so. The whole solemnity of the situation, which
is faced in the cry "And who is sufficient for these things?" depends
on the finality of the contrast between life and death. These are the
goals set before men, and those who are being saved and those who are
perishing are respectively on their way to one or the other. Who _is_
sufficient for the calling of the Gospel ministry, when such are the
alternatives involved in it? Who is sufficient, in love, in wisdom, in
humility, in awful earnestness, for the duties of a calling the issues
of which are life or death for ever?
There is considerable difficulty in the sixteenth verse, partly
dogmatic, partly textual. Commentators so opposite in their bias as
Chrysostom and Calvin have pondered and remarked upon the opposite
effects here ascribed to the Gospel. It is easy to find analogies to
these in nature. The same heat which hardens clay melts iron. The same
sunlight which gladdens the healthy eye tortures that which is
diseased. The same honey which is sweet to the sound palate is
nauseous to the sick; and so on. But such analogies do not explain
anything, and one can hardly see what is meant by calling them
illustrations. It remains finally inexplicable that the Gospel, which
appeals to some with winning irresistible power, subduing and leading
them in triumph, should excite in others a passion of antipathy which
nothing else could provoke. This remains inexplicable, because it is
irrational. Nothing that can be pointed to in the universe is the
least like a bad heart closing itself against the love of Christ, like
a bad man's will stiffening into absolute rigidity against the will of
God. The preaching of the Gospel may be the occasion of such awful
results, but it is not their cause. The God whom it proclaims is the
God of grace; it is never His will that any should perish--always that
all should be saved. But He can save only by subduing; His grace must
exercise a sovereign power in us, which through righteousness will
lead to life everlasting (Rom. v. 21). And when this exercise of power
is resisted, when we match our self-will against the gracious saving
will of God, our pride, our passions, our mere sloth, against the
soul-constraining love of Christ; when we prevail in the war which
God's mercy wages with our wickedness,--then the Gospel itself may be
said to have ministered to our ruin; it was ordained to life, and we
have made it a sentence of death. Yet even so, it is the joy and glory
of God; it is a sweet savour to Him, fragrant of Christ and His love.
The textual difficulty is in the words ἐκ θανάτου εἰς θάνατον, and ἐκ
ζωῆς εἰς ζωήν. These words are rendered in the Revised Version "_from_
death to death," and "_from_ life to life." The Authorised Version,
following the _Textus Receptus_, which omits ἐκ in both clauses,
renders "a savour _of_ death unto death," and "_of_ life unto life." In
spite of the inferior MS. support, the _Textus Receptus_ is preferred by
many modern scholars--_e.g._, Heinrici, Schmiedel, and Hofmann. They
find it impossible to give any precise interpretation to the better
attested reading, and an examination of any exposition which accepts it
goes far to justify them. Thus Professor Beet comments: "_From death for
death_ (comp. Rom. i. 17): a scent proceeding _from_, and thus revealing
the presence of, _death_; and, like malaria from a putrefying corpse,
causing _death_. Paul's labours among some men revealed the eternal
death which day by day cast an ever-deepening shadow upon them [this
answers to ὀσμὴ ἐκ θανάτου]; and by arousing in them increased
opposition to God, promoted the spiritual mortification which had
already begun" [this answers to εἰς θάνατον]. Surely it is safe to say
that nobody in Corinth could ever have guessed this from the words. Yet
this is a favourable specimen of the interpretations given. If it were
possible to take ἐκ θανάτου εἰς θάνατον, and ἐκ ζωῆς εἰς ζωήν, as Baur
took ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν in Rom. i. 17, that would be the simplest way
out of the difficulty, and quite satisfactory. What the Apostle said
would then be this: that the Gospel which he preached, ever good as it
was to God, had the most opposite characters and effects among men,--in
some it was death _from beginning to end_, absolutely and unmitigatedly
deadly in its nature and workings; in others, again, it was life from
beginning to end--life was the uniform sign of its presence, and its
invariable issue. This also is the meaning which we get by omitting ἐκ:
the genitives ζωῆς and θανάτου are then adjectival,--a vital fragrance,
with life as its element and end; a fatal fragrance, the end of which
is death. This has the advantage of being the meaning which occurs to an
ordinary reader; and if the critically approved text, with the repeated
ἐκ, cannot bear this interpretation, I think there is a fair case for
defending the received text on exegetical grounds. Certainly nothing but
the broad impression of the received text will ever enter the general
mind.
The question that rises to the Apostle's lips as he confronts the
solemn situation created by the Gospel is not directly answered. "Who
is sufficient for these things? Who? I say. For we are not as the
many,[22] who corrupt the Word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of
God, in the sight of God, we speak in Christ." Paul is conscious as he
writes that his awful sense of responsibility as a preacher of the
Gospel is not shared by all who exercise the same vocation. To be the
bearer and the representative of a power with issues so tremendous
ought surely to annihilate every thought of self; to let personal
interest intrude is to declare oneself faithless and unworthy. We are
startled to hear from Paul's lips what at first sight seems to be a
charge of just such base self-seeking laid against the majority of
preachers. "We are not as the many, corrupting the Word of God." The
expressive word rendered here "corrupting" has the idea of
self-interest, and especially of petty gain, at its basis. It means
literally to sell in small quantities, to retail for profit. But it
was specially applied to tavern-keeping, and extended to cover all the
devices by which the wine-sellers in ancient times deceived their
customers. Then it was used figuratively, as here; and Lucian, _e.g._,
speaks of philosophers as selling the sciences, and in most cases (ὁι
πολλοί: a curious parallel to St. Paul), like tavern keepers,
"blending, adulterating, and giving bad measure." It is plain that
there are two separable ideas here. One is that of men qualifying the
Gospel, infiltrating their own ideas into the Word of God, tempering
its severity, or perhaps its goodness, veiling its inexorableness,
dealing in compromise. The other is that all such proceedings are
faithless and dishonest, because some private interest underlies them.
It need not be avarice, though it is as likely to be this as anything
else. A man corrupts the Word of God, makes it the stock-in-trade of a
paltry business of his own, in many other ways than by subordinating
it to the need of a livelihood. When he exercises his calling as a
minister for the gratification of his vanity, he does so. When he
preaches not that awful message in which life and death are bound up,
but himself, his cleverness, his learning, his humour, his fine voice
even or fine gestures, he does so. He makes the Word minister to him,
instead of being a minister of the Word; and that is the essence of
the sin. It is the same if ambition be his motive, if he preaches to
win disciples to himself, to gain an ascendency over souls, to become
the head of a party which will bear the impress of his mind. There was
something of this at Corinth; and not only there, but wherever it is
found, such a spirit and such interests will change the character of
the Gospel. It will not be preserved in that integrity, in that
simple, uncompromising, absolute character which it has as revealed in
Christ. Have another interest in it than that of God, and that
interest will inevitably colour it. You will make it what it was not,
and the virtue will depart from it.
In contrast with all such dishonest ministers, the Apostle represents
himself and his friends speaking "as of sincerity." They have no
mixture of motives in their work as evangelists; they have indeed no
independent motives at all: God is leading them in triumph, and
proclaiming His grace through them. It is He who prompts every word
(ὡς ἐκ Θεοῦ). Yet their responsibility and their freedom are intact.
They feel themselves in His presence as they speak, and in that
presence they speak "in Christ." "In Christ" is the Apostle's mark.
Not in himself apart from Christ, where any mixture of motives, any
process of adulteration, would have been possible, but only in that
union with Christ which was the very life of his life, did he carry on
his evangelistic work. This was his final security, and it is still
the only security, that the Gospel can have fair play in the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] The perfect ἔσχηκα seems at first sight out of place, but it is
more expressive than the aorist. It suggests the _continuous_
expectation of relief which was always anew disappointed.
[20] See Grimm's Lexicon _s.v._, or Lightfoot on Col. ii. 15.
[21] In τὴν ὀσμὴν τῆς γνώσεως, γνώσεως is gen. of apposition: the ὀσμὴ
and the γνῶσις are one.
[22] "The many" (ὁι πολλοί) seems to be the true reading. "The rest" (ὁι
λοιποί) would be stronger still in its condemnation. But probably Paul
is not thinking of the Church in general, but of the teachers as a body
who crossed and thwarted him in his chosen field. The transition which
is immediately made to the case of his opponents (τινὲς, iii. 1), and to
the comparison of the old and new covenants, suggests that his Judaistic
adversaries in Corinth (see chap. xi.) are in view.
VIII
_LIVING EPISTLES_
"Are we beginning again to commend ourselves? or need we, as do
some, epistles of commendation to you or from you? Ye are our
epistle, written in our hearts, known and read of all men; being
made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us,
written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not
in tables of stone, but in tables _that are_ hearts of flesh."--2
COR. iii. 1-3 (R.V.).
"Are we beginning again to commend ourselves?" Paul does not mean by
these words to admit that he had been commending himself before: he
means that he has been accused already of doing so, and that there are
those at Corinth who, when they hear such passages of this letter as
that which has just preceded, will be ready to repeat the accusation. In
the First Epistle he had found it necessary to vindicate his apostolic
authority, and especially his interest in the Corinthian Church as its
spiritual father (1 Cor. ix. 1-27, iv. 6-21), and obviously his enemies
at Corinth had tried to turn these personal passages against him. They
did so on the principle _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_. "He is commending
himself," they said, "and self-commendation is an argument which
discredits, instead of supporting, a cause." The Apostle had heard of
these malicious speeches, and in this Epistle makes repeated reference
to them (see chaps, v. 12, x. 18, xiii. 6). He entirely agreed with his
opponents that self-praise was no honour. "Not he who commendeth
himself is approved, but he whom the Lord commendeth." But he denied
point-blank that he was commending himself. In distinguishing as he had
done in chap. ii. 14-17 between himself and his colleagues, who spoke
the Word "as of sincerity, as of God, in the sight of God," and "the
many" who corrupted it, nothing was further from his mind than to plead
his cause, as a suspected person, with the Corinthians. Only malignity
could suppose any such thing, and the indignant question with which the
chapter opens tacitly accuses his adversaries of this hateful vice. It
is pitiful to see a great and generous spirit like Paul compelled thus
to stand upon guard, and watch against the possible misconstruction of
every lightest word. What needless pain it inflicts upon him, what
needless humiliation! How it checks all effusion of feeling, and robs
what should be brotherly intercourse of everything that can make it free
and glad! Further on in the Epistle there will be abundant opportunity
of speaking on this subject at greater length; but it is proper to
remark here that a minister's character is the whole capital he has for
carrying on his business, and that nothing can be more cruel and wicked
than to cast suspicion on it without cause. In most other callings a man
may go on, no matter what his character, provided his balance at the
bank is on the right side; but an evangelist or a pastor who has lost
his character has lost everything. It is humiliating to be subject to
suspicion, painful to be silent under it, degrading to speak. At a later
stage Paul was compelled to go further than he goes here; but let the
indignant emotion of this abrupt question remind us that candour is to
be met with candour, and that the suspicious temper which would fain
malign the good eats like a canker the very heart of those who cherish
it.
From the serious tone the Apostle passes suddenly to the ironical. "Or
need we, as do some, epistles of commendation to you or from you?" The
"some" of this verse are probably the same as "the many" of chap. ii.
17. Persons had come to Corinth in the character of Christian
teachers, bringing with them recommendatory letters which secured
their standing when they arrived. An example of what is meant can be
seen in Acts xvii. 27. There we are told that when Apollos, who had
been working in Ephesus, was minded to pass over into Achaia, the
Ephesian brethren encouraged him, and wrote to the disciples to
receive him--that is, they gave him an epistle of commendation, which
secured him recognition and welcome in Corinth. A similar case is
found in Rom. xvi. 1, where the Apostle uses the very word which we
have here: "I commend unto you Phœbe our sister, who is a servant of
the Church that is at Cenchreæ: that ye receive her in the Lord,
worthily of the saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever matter
she may have need of you: for she herself also hath been a succourer
of many, and of mine own self." This was Phœbe's introduction, or
epistle of commendation, to the Church of Rome. The Corinthians were
evidently in the habit both of receiving such letters from other
Churches, and of granting them on their own account; and Paul asks
them ironically if they think he ought to bring one, or when he leaves
them to apply for one. Is _that_ the relation which ought to obtain
between him and them? The "some," to whom he refers, had no doubt come
from Jerusalem: it is they who are referred to in chap. xi. 22 ff. But
it does not follow that their recommendatory letters had been signed
by Peter, James, and John; and just as little that those letters
justified them in their hostility to Paul. No doubt there were
many--many myriads, the Book of Acts says--at Jerusalem, whose
conception of the Gospel was very different from his, and who were
glad to counteract him whenever they could; but there were many also,
including the three who seemed to be pillars, who had a thoroughly
good understanding with him, and who had no responsibility for the
"some" and their doings. The epistles which the "some" brought were
plainly such as the Corinthians themselves could grant, and it is a
complete misinterpretation to suppose that they were a commission
granted by the Twelve for the persecution of Paul.
The giving of recommendatory letters is a subject of considerable
practical interest. When they are merely formal, as in our
certificates of Church membership, they come to mean very little. It
is an unhappy state of affairs perhaps, but no one would take a
certificate of Church membership by itself as a satisfactory
recommendation. And when we go past the merely formal, difficult
questions arise. Many people have an estimate of their own character
and competence, in which it is impossible for others to share, and yet
they apply without misgiving to their friends, and especially to their
minister or their employer, to grant them "epistles of commendation."
We are bound to be generous in these things, but we are bound also to
be honest. The rule which ought to guide us, especially in all that
belongs to the Church and its work, is the interest of the cause, and
not of the worker. To flatter is to do a wrong, not only to the person
flattered, but to the cause in which you are trying to employ him.
There is no more ludicrous reading in the world than a bundle of
certificates, or testimonials, as they are called. As a rule, they
certify nothing but the total absence of judgment and conscience in
the people who have granted them. If you do not know whether a person
is qualified for any given situation or not, you do not need to say
anything about it. If you know he is not, and he asks you to say that
he is, no personal consideration must keep you from kindly but firmly
declining. I am not preaching suspicion, or reserve, or anything
ungenerous, but justice and truth. It is wicked to betray a great
interest by bespeaking it for incompetent hands; it is cruel to put
any one into a place for which he is unfit. Where you are confident
that the man and the work will be well matched, be as generous as you
please; but never forget that the work is to be considered in the
first place, and the man only in the second.
Paul has been serious, and ironical, in the first verse; in ver. 2 he
becomes serious again, and remains so. "_You_," he says, answering his
ironical question, "_you_ are our epistle." Epistle, of course, is to
be taken in the sense of the preceding verse. "_You_ are the
commendatory letter which _I_ show, when I am asked for my
credentials." But to whom does he show it? In the first instance, to
the captious Corinthians themselves. The tone of chap. ix. in the
First Epistle is struck here again: "Wherever I may need
recommendations, it is certainly not at Corinth." "If I be not an
apostle to others, yet doubtless I am to you: the seal of mine
apostleship are ye in the Lord." Had they been a Christian community
when he first visited them, they might have asked who he was; but they
owed their Christianity to him; he was their father in Christ; to put
him to the question in this superior, suspicious style was unnatural,
unfilial ingratitude. They themselves were the living evidence of the
very thing which they threw doubt upon--the apostleship of Paul.
This bold utterance may well excite misgivings in those who preach
constantly, yet see no result of their work. It is common to disparage
success, the success of visible acknowledged conversions, of bad men
openly renouncing badness, bearing witness against themselves, and
embracing a new life. It is common to glorify the ministry which works
on, patient and uncomplaining, in one monotonous round, ever sowing, but
never reaping, ever casting the net, but never drawing in the fish, ever
marking time, but never advancing. Paul frankly and repeatedly appeals
to his success in evangelistic work as the final and sufficient proof
that God had called him, and had given him authority as an apostle; and
search as we will, we shall not find any test so good and unequivocal as
this success. Paul had seen the Lord; he was qualified to be a witness
of the Resurrection; but these, at the very most, were his own affair,
till the witness he bore had proved its power in the hearts and
consciences of others. How to provide, to train, and to test the men who
are to be the ministers of the Christian Church is a matter of the very
utmost consequence, to which sufficient attention has not yet been
given. Congregations which choose their own pastor are often compelled
to take a man quite untried, and to judge him more or less on
superficial grounds. They can easily find out whether he is a competent
scholar; they can see for themselves what are his gifts of speech, his
virtues or defects of manner; they can get such an impression as
sensible people always get, by seeing and hearing a man, of the general
earnestness or lack of earnestness in his character. But often they feel
that more is wanted. It is not exactly more in the way of character; the
members of a Church have no right to expect that their minister will be
a truer Christian than they themselves are. A special inquisition into
his conversion, or his religious experience, is mere hypocrisy; if the
Church is not sufficiently in earnest to guard herself against insincere
members, she must take the risk of insincere ministers. What is wanted
is what the Apostle indicates here--that intimation of God's concurrence
which is given through success in evangelistic work. No other intimation
of God's concurrence is infallible--no call by a congregation, no
ordination by a presbytery or by a bishop. Theological education is
easily provided, and easily tested; but it will not be so easy to
introduce the reforms which are needed in this direction. Great masses
of Christian people, however, are becoming alive to the necessity for
them; and when the pressure is more strongly felt, the way for action
will be discovered. Only those who can appeal to what they have done in
the Gospel can be known to have the qualifications of Gospel ministers;
and in due time the fact will be frankly recognised.
The conversion and new life of the Corinthians were Paul's certificate
as an apostle. They were a certificate known, he says, and read by all
men. Often there is a certain awkwardness in the presenting of
credentials. It embarrasses a man when he has to put his hand into his
breast pocket, and take out his character, and submit it for
inspection. Paul was saved this embarrassment. There was a fine
unsought publicity about his testimonials. Everybody knew what the
Corinthians had been, everybody knew what they were; and the man to
whom the change was due needed no other recommendation to a Christian
society. Whoever looked at them saw plainly that they were an epistle
of Christ; the mind of Christ could be read upon them, and it had been
written by the intervention of Paul's hand. This is an interesting
though a well-worn conception of the Christian character. Every life
has a meaning, we say; every face is a record; but the text goes
further. The life of the Christian is an epistle; it has not only a
meaning, but an address; it is a message from Christ to the world. Is
Christ's message to men legible on our lives? When those who are
without look at us, do they see the hand of Christ quite unmistakably?
Does it ever occur to anybody that there is something in our life
which is not of the world, but which is a message to the world from
Christ? Did you ever, startled by the unusual brightness of a true
Christian's life, ask as it were involuntarily, "Whose image and
superscription is this?" and feel as you asked it that these features,
these characters, could only have been traced by one hand, and that
they proclaimed to all the grace and power of Jesus Christ? Christ
wishes so to write upon us that men may see what He does for man. He
wishes to engrave His image on our nature, that all spectators may
feel that it has a message for them, and may crave the same favour. A
congregation which is not in its very existence and in all its works
and ways a legible epistle, an unmistakable message from Christ to
man, does not answer to this New Testament ideal.
Paul claims no part here but that of Christ's instrument. The Lord, so
to speak, dictated the letter, and he wrote it. The contents of it
were prescribed by Christ, and through the Apostle's ministry became
visible and legible in the Corinthians. More important is it to notice
with what the writing was done: "not with ink," says St. Paul, "but
with the Spirit of the living God." At first sight this contrast seems
formal and fantastic; nobody, we think, could ever dream of making
either of these things do the work of the other, so that it seems
perfectly gratuitous in Paul to say, "not with ink, but with the
Spirit." Yet ink is sometimes made to bear a great deal of
responsibility. The characters of the τινὲς ("some") in ver. i, were
only written in ink; they had nothing, Paul implies, to recommend them
but these documents in black and white. That was hardly sufficient to
guarantee their authority, or their competence as ministers in the
Christian dispensation. But do not Churches yet accept their ministers
with the same inadequate testimonials? A distinguished career at the
University, or in the Divinity Schools, proves that a man can write
with ink, under favourable circumstances; it does not prove more than
that; it does not prove that he will be spiritually effective, and
everything else is irrelevant. I do not say this to disparage the
professional training of ministers; on the contrary, the standard of
training ought to be higher than it is in all the Churches: I only
wish to insist that nothing which can be represented in ink, no
learning, no literary gifts, no critical acquaintance with the
Scriptures even, can write upon human nature the Epistle of Christ. To
do that needs "the Spirit of the living God." We feel, the moment we
come upon those words, that the Apostle is anticipating; he has in
view already the contrast he is going to develop between the old
dispensation and the new, and the irresistible inward power by which
the new is characterised. Others might boast of qualifications to
preach which could be certified in due documentary form, but he
carried in him wherever he went a power which was its own witness, and
which overruled and dispensed with every other. Let all of us who
teach or preach concentrate our interest here. It is in "the Spirit of
the living God," not in any acquirements of our own, still less in any
recommendations of others, that our serviceableness as ministers of
Christ lies. We cannot write His epistle without it. We cannot see,
let us be as diligent and indefatigable in our work as we please, the
image of Christ gradually come out in those to whom we minister.
Parents, teachers, preachers, this is the one thing needful for us
all. "Tarry," said Jesus to the first evangelists, "tarry in the city
of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high"; it is of no
use to begin without that.
This idea of the "epistle" has taken such a hold of the Apostle's
mind, and he finds it so suggestive whichever way he turns it, that he
really tries to say too much about it in one sentence. The crowding of
his ideas is confusing. One learned critic enumerates three points in
which the figure becomes inconsistent with itself, and another can
only defend the Apostle by saying that this figurative letter might
well have qualities which would be self-contradictory in a real one.
This kind of criticism smells a little of ink, and the only real
difficulty in the sentence has never misled any one who read it with
sympathy. It is this--that St. Paul speaks of the letter as written in
two different places. "Ye are our epistle," he says at the beginning,
"written _in our hearts_"; but at the end he says, "written not on
tables of stone, but on tables that are hearts of flesh"--meaning
evidently _on the hearts of the Corinthians_. Of course this last is
the sense which coheres with the figure. Paul's ministry wrote the
Epistle of Christ upon the Corinthians, or, if we prefer it, wrought
such a change in their hearts that they became an epistle of Christ,
an epistle to which he appealed in proof of his apostolic calling. In
expressing himself as he does about this, he is again anticipating the
coming contrast of Law and Gospel. Nobody would think of writing a
_letter_ on tables of stone, and he only says "not on stone tables"
because he has in his mind the difference between the Mosaic and the
Christian dispensation. It is quite out of place to refer to Ezek. xi.
19, xxxvi. 26, and to drag in the contrast between hard and tender
hearts. What Paul means is that the Epistle of Christ is not written
on dead matter, but on human nature, and that too at its finest and
deepest. When we remember the sense of depth and inwardness which
attaches to the heart in Scripture, it is not forcing the words to
find in them the suggestion that the Gospel works no merely outward
change. It is not written on the surface, but in the soul. The Spirit
of the living God finds access for itself to the secret places of the
human spirit; the most hidden recesses of our nature are open to it,
and the very heart is made new. To be able to write _there_ for
Christ, to point not to anything dead, but to living men and women,
not to anything superficial, but to a change that has reached the very
core of man's being, and works its way out from thence, is the
testimonial which guarantees the evangelist; it is the divine
attestation that he is in the true apostolical succession.[23]
What, then, does Paul mean by the other clause, "ye are our epistle,
written on _our_ hearts?" I do not think we can get much more than an
emotional certainty about this expression. When a man has been an
intensely interested spectator, still more an intensely interested
actor, in any great affair, he might say afterwards that the whole
thing and all its circumstances were engraved upon his heart. I
imagine that is what St. Paul means here. The conversion of the
Corinthians made them an epistle of Christ; in making them believers
through St. Paul's ministry, Christ wrote on _their_ hearts what was
really an epistle to the world; and the whole transaction, in which
Paul's feelings had been deeply engaged, stood written on _his_ heart
for ever. Interpretations that go beyond this do not seem to me to be
justified by the words. Thus Heinrici and Meyer say, "We have in our
own consciousness the certainty of being recommended to you by
yourselves and to others by you"; and they elucidate this by saying,
"The Apostle's _own good consciousness_ was, as it were, _the tablet_
on which this living epistle of the Corinthians stood, and _that_ had
to be left unassailed even by the most malevolent." A sense so
pragmatical and pedantic, even if one can grasp it at all, is surely
out of place, and many readers will fail to discover it in the text.
What the words do convey is the warm love of the Apostle, who had
exercised his ministry among the Corinthians with all the passion of
his nature, and who still bore on his ardent heart the fresh
impression of his work and its results.
Amid all these details let us take care not to lose the one great
lesson of the passage. Christian people owe a testimony to Christ. His
name has been pronounced over them, and all who look at them ought to
see His nature. We should discern in the heart and in the behaviour of
Christians the handwriting, let us say the characters, not of avarice,
of suspicion, of envy, of lust, of falsehood, of pride, but of Christ.
It is to us He has committed Himself; we are the certification to men
of what He does for man; His character is in our care. The true
epistles of Christ to the world are not those which are expounded in
pulpits; they are not even the gospels in which Christ Himself lives
and moves before us; they are living men and women, on the tables of
whose hearts the Spirit of the living God, ministered by a true
evangelist, has engraved the likeness of Christ Himself. It is not the
written Word on which Christianity ultimately depends; it is not the
sacraments, nor so-called necessary institutions: it is this inward,
spiritual, Divine writing which is the guarantee of all else.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] The true reading of the last words in ver. 3 is doubtful. The
Received Text has ἐν πλαξὶ καρδίας σαρκίναις. This is as old as
Irenæus and Origen, and is found in many versions. Almost all MSS.
give the reading which is translated in the Revised Version: ἐν πλαξὶ
καρδίαις σαρκίναις(א, A, B, C, D, etc.); and this is adopted by most
of the purely critical editors. Some, however, and many exegetes,
suspect a primitive error, affecting all MSS. and versions. Schmiedel
would omit καρδίαις or καρδίας, as a marginal note, suggested by Prov.
vii. 3, Jer. xvii. 1; Westcott and Hort, on the other hand, think that
πλαξὶ may be a primitive interpolation. No certainty is possible; but
considering Old Testament usage, one would expect Paul to write ἐν
πλαξὶ καρδίας almost unconsciously.
IX
_THE TWO COVENANTS_
"And such confidence have we through Christ to God-ward: not that
we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as from
ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God; who also made us
sufficient as ministers of a new covenant; not of the letter, but
of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
But if the ministration of death, written, _and_ engraven on
stones, came with glory, so that the children of Israel could not
look stedfastly upon the face of Moses for the glory of his face;
which _glory_ was passing away: how shall not rather the
ministration of the spirit be with glory? For if the ministration
of condemnation is glory, much rather doth the ministration of
righteousness exceed in glory. For verily that which hath been
made glorious hath not been made glorious in this respect, by
reason of the glory that surpasseth. For if that which passeth
away _was_ with glory, much more that which remaineth _is_ in
glory."--2 COR. iii. 4-11 (R.V.).
The confidence referred to in the opening of this passage is that
which underlies the triumphant sentences at the end of the second
chapter. The tone of those sentences was open to misinterpretation,
and Paul guards himself against this on two sides. To begin with, his
motive in so expressing himself was quite pure: he had no thought of
commending himself to the Corinthians. And, again, the ground of his
confidence was not in himself. The courage which he had to speak as he
did he had t
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