Paul Wernle · 16 of 30

Chapter XIII. Jesus Brought to the Gentiles. · Part 1

ST PAUL knew that he was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles. External circumstances favoured this conviction. He himself was a Jew of the dispersion, a seasoned traveller accustomed from his earliest years to the life of the Greek towns. The pride that he took in his peculiar and independent position must have caused his work amongst the distant Gentiles to appear especially desirable to him, unhindered as it would be by the tradition of the early apostles. Next may be mentioned the opposition of the Jews, which he knew only too well from his own past. And besides it was advisable for the renegade—such he appeared to his friends—to depart to a safe distance. Such circumstances and such considerations no doubt contributed largely to aid St. Paul in forming his decision; but the really decisive cause was the clearly-felt impulse that urged him to go forth from the very moment of his call. He was under a necessity—he had to go to the Gentiles.

A tremendous task was laid upon him, to announce Jesus as the Saviour of the heathen. Yet the way had been paved—stepping-stones at least were not entirely wanting. First of all, Paul had a companion, Barnabas, who gave him the benefit of his riper knowledge and past experience. In the next place, the separation between Jew and Gentile was not absolutely complete. Little communities of Jews were scattered far and wide in all the larger Mediterranean towns; their synagogues attracted a number of Gentiles who became members of the community in a variety of ways, or were at least on terms of friendship with it. The first thing that St Paul did, therefore, was to visit the Jewish houses and synagogues in order by this means to obtain access to the proselytes and Gentiles. It was thus possible to take for granted that many of the Gentiles would be acquainted with the Jewish presuppositions of the Gospel—especially with the Old Testament. The entirely Jewish character of St. Paul’s mission and theology is of course sufficiently explained by his own Jewish education, but becomes still more intelligible to us when we remember that the surroundings in which he worked had already been interpenetrated by Jewish influences.

In spite, however, of this Jewish preparation the attempt to bring Jesus to the Greeks was something entirely new. How was it to be done?

Several ways might be tried. One had already been attempted: the preaching of the twelve. It consisted of two simple parts: the promise and the threat, together with the demand. First the message: The judgment and the kingdom are close at hand: the Messiah is coming, Jesus the crucified and risen Lord; He is coming as judge of the world. Thereby fear and hope are aroused; and then the exhortation: Do God’s will as Jesus taught it, and attach yourself to those who expect Jesus as their Lord. Why should the Gentiles refuse to give ear to this simple appeal?

St. Paul rejected this method with the exception of the first part, the announcement of the judgment. It is not that the presuppositions were too Jewish for him. He never experienced any difficulty in explaining the conception of the Messiah. But for himself this description of Christianity as a scheme of a promise and a claim upon conduct was altogether inadequate. Christianity was entirely a religion of redemption for him. He knew what that meant—to wish to do God’s will and not to be able to do it. All the weakness, the powerlessness and perversity of men when left to themselves, had become intelligible to him through his own failures, and at the same time he had experienced the rescue from this state, the uplifting power—God’s grace. Now, with such an experience the scheme of salvation put forward by the earlier missionaries—it was that of Jesus Himself—could never satisfy him. Jesus the Redeemer, not the lawgiver, that was his watchword. It was a great piece of good fortune for Christianity. As a mere teacher of true religion Jesus would only have taken His place in the ranks of the Greek moral philosophers by the side of Socrates or Pythagoras. As such He would doubtless have commanded respect and admiration, but never the faith which gives birth to a religion. Paul saved Christianity from the fate of stagnation as a school of ethics in the universal Greek rationalism.

An entirely different method of bringing Jesus to the Greeks was indicated by the great example of the Jewish-Alexandrine religious philosophy. Jesus needed but to occupy the position of Moses, as indeed He did later on. The Jews of Alexandria looked upon religion as a philosophy, with all its branches—cosmology, psychology, ethics, etc. But as distinguished from the Greek philosophy, they looked upon their own as a revealed philosophy resting upon the oracles of the Old Testament, to which all the wisdom of the Greeks was related either as borrowed or as a preparatory stage. For they either ascribed to the Spirit of God only the sacred writings of the Jews, in which case the Greeks must have stolen from them, or they allowed a certain activity of the divine reason in the Greek thinkers and poets, but proclaimed at the same time the superiority of the absolute revelation which had been granted to Moses.

It is quite possible that the Alexandrine Apollos gave utterance to similar thoughts about Jesus in his teaching regarding the ‘divine wisdom,’ as his countrymen did about Moses. But such a mixture of religion and philosophy appeared to St. Paul pure perversity. Once more his own personal experience was the decisive factor in the judgment which he formed. There had been a time when, as teacher of the law, he had boasted of the wisdom of his religion, and looked proudly down upon the blind heathen that were ignorant as children. But the collapse of his zeal for the law implied at the same time the fall of his pride in his wisdom. The foolishness of the Cross as opposed to all the wisdom of the learned, be they Jews or Gentiles, that was his new motto. First brought low in so wonderful a manner, and then exalted as he had been, he seemed to see, at least when he began his work, the essence of all religion in the paradoxical, and rejoiced in the thought that the world had not recognized God through its wisdom, whilst the foolish and the lowly had accepted Jesus as their Redeemer, when He had been presented to them. This, too, was fortunate for early Christianity. Before it had been drawn into the philosophical evolution of the succeeding age, it was able to stand forth in all its sovereignty as a religion. All religion is a paradox. Jesus is not to be counted on the side of the philosophers. His religion can only be treated as an intellectual system, to its own loss and damage. The sole reason that arrested its entire decay was that, thanks to St. Paul, it came to the Greeks at the time of its growth as a power of life, and not as a system of philosophy. Jesus no lawgiver, no teacher of philosophy—that is the kernel of Paul’s preaching, as it was in later times of the Reformers. Hereby alone Paul proves himself to be the foremost interpreter of Jesus, in spite of his deviations from the message of the twelve.

How does Paul preach Jesus the Redeemer to the Greek world?

As for Jesus and the twelve so also for St. Paul, the eschatological message stands in the forefront. The day of judgment is at hand, when each single individual, whether living or dead, shall have to appear before God’s throne and give an account of all that he has done. Reward and punishment are meted out by God with perfect justice—to the one destruction and death: salvation, everlasting life in the kingdom of God to the other. The expressions which St. Paul uses are often different to those which we meet with in the message of Jesus. The Jewish conceptions—hell, Paradise, even the kingdom of God—recede into the background. Instead of judgment Paul always uses the word ‘wrath’; instead of ‘kingdom of God’ he prefers ‘salvation’; and instead of ‘hell,’ ‘death.’

The influence of Jesus is felt in the emphasis that is laid upon the individual, and in the entire abolition of all the privileges of Israel. It is individual men and women that appear before God, not peoples; and moral character is the only issue at stake. As before, an especially earnest appeal is founded upon the nearness of the approaching end: it is still time; soon it may be “too late.” “The night is far spent, the day is at hand.”

The question may be raised whether St. Paul provided sanctions for his eschatological message to the heathen. Prophecy has at no time been greatly disturbed to seek for sanctions. Does it not rest upon God’s word, upon the foretelling of His messengers?

The approach of the final catastrophe was a certain fact both for the apostle and for the Jews, proved out of the Old Testament; and Paul might reasonably presuppose among all proselytes of the synagogues some knowledge of the prophecies contained in the Scriptures. Nevertheless he spared no trouble in trying to give reasons for the positions that he advanced, and met the Greeks as well as he could on their own ground. The conceptions of requital after death, of torments for the wicked, and of rewards for the righteous in the divine blessedness, were spread far and wide amongst the Greeks by means of Orphic sects and philosophical schools. When Paul announced to each individual the near approach of the day of the revelation of the just judgment of God, and prophesied tribulation and sorrow for all evildoers, and honour, glory and immortality to all the righteous, he was calling up long familiar pictures in the minds of his hearers: the only new element was contained in the message concerning the day on which all should appear before the judgment-seat of God. The apostle, however, was not content even with this. He proved how the beginning of the judgment was revealed even here and now in the moral ruin of the servants of sin. And in so doing he met the demand of those who required a visible pledge for this message of a future hope.

Even though the announcement of the judgment thus appeared to the Greeks as a message that could be grasped at once—in fact, as one with which they were almost familiar—the preaching of the resurrection was, it must be admitted, a stone of stumbling to them from the very first. Many Corinthians looked upon his conception of the restoration of the earthly body as an utter absurdity. Rather than believe such nonsense they would abandon the thought of any resurrection whatever. St. Paul finds himself compelled to draw up an elaborate defence of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which does in fact so far meet the objections of the Greeks that it removes the chief ground of offence, the quickening of the old body. In this apology he makes use of the conceptions of the new spiritual body, while at the same time he routs his adversaries that deny the resurrection by means of popular arguments. This is the most instructive point in the whole proceeding. St Paul is fighting for the old Jewish dogma of the resurrection—which differs entirely from the Greek hope in immortality; and while doing so he deprives it of that which constitutes its essence, by surrendering the belief in the quickening of the mortal body in order thereby to gain over the Greeks. Whether these concessions met with any success amongst the Greeks we do not know; at any rate it was only the old Jewish dogma of the resurrection which gained a permanent footing in the Churches founded by St Paul. We have, however, a striking instance in this explanation of an eschatological doctrine of the way in which the apostle showed his readiness to become a Greek unto the Greeks. Immediately after delivering his eschatological message St. Paul proceeds to paint the corrupt state of his audience, the full extent of which has only been realized by the near approach of the judgment day. Their corruption consists in idolatry and in impurity. Insisting on the degradation implied by these sins, he thus passes on at the same time to preach the faith in the one God and to awaken their consciences.

It is especially over the worship of idols that St Paul waxes wroth. He shows no understanding for any religion but his own. He is just a Jew counting all Gentiles as fallen away from the true religion. The two theories which underlie his criticism are both Jewish—the image theory and the demon theory. Either the heathen are fools because they worship mere images, things of nought, dumb idols, the works of men’s hands instead of the God that hath no form; or else they are the poor slaves of demons, bewitched and under a spell, driven to this worship by some wild and wicked impulse. Nowhere, however, do we find him criticising any single one of these different rites from what he has himself observed. He has judged idolatry en bloc before he knows what it is, and he does not want to know what it is.

The explanation of the monotheistic faith which is to take the place of this idolatrous worship is likewise based upon Jewish presuppositions, nor could one have expected St. Paul to do otherwise. He could have found no suitable proof in the person of Jesus. At first the whole of nature is interpreted as a revelation of God. In His works God has manifested His power and His divinity to all men. But then St Paul proceeds to utter that hard saying about the falling away of the heathen from the original revelation and the uselessness of all that philosophy attempts to do. The Jews alone have kept God’s primary revelation. It has been preserved and set forth in the sacred Scriptures. And indeed the Old Testament was the indispensable handbook to any monotheistic form of belief at a time when all higher knowledge of the Greek thinkers and poets was precluded. “The wisdom of the world” meant “foolishness unto God.” And yet even a Paul who wishes to set himself in uncompromising opposition against the whole of the heathen world, even he cannot escape the influence of Hellenism entirely. The doctrine of the ‘nous’ that can behold the invisible essence of God in His works, the conception of truth, the definition of God as the Being of whom, through whom, and in whom all things are, prove that—albeit, of course, unconsciously—St. Paul had submitted to the purifying influence of Greek speculation upon Jewish thought.

Moral degradation, impurity, was closely connected with this intellectual corruption—the worship of idols, heathen rites, magic ceremonies, and sexual excesses were all mutually interdependent. Many of those who listened to St. Paul, especially at Corinth, were the scum and offscouring of the depraved masses of the great cities where the apostle taught. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, usurers, drunkards, revilers—all these the apostle enumerates in order to continue “and such were some of you.” Even the blackest pessimism did not paint the situation in too dark colours. We have more than sufficient documentary evidence for the prevalence of unnatural vices in this period. St. Paul therefore could say to those to whom he preached that they were a “massa perditionis” without meeting with much contradiction. But in order to gain a hearing he appeals at the same time to reason and conscience, which he does not believe to be quite extinct even in the most bestial of men. Even without any knowledge of the Old Testament they have the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile excusing or else accusing one another. This recognition of the divine in man, which goes so far as to acknowledge that there are uncircumcized heathen that keep the law, is all the more surprising by the side of the apostle’s pessimistic estimate of the Gentile world as a whole.

But after all, in thus appealing to the conscience St Paul is aiming merely at the awakening of the feeling of sin, and his optimistic utterances are made to serve his preaching of the judgment that is to come. They are of importance for us, because St. Paul is here again clearly borrowing from Greek rationalism through intermediate Jewish sources. The Jews had taken over from the Stoic popular philosophy the use of the words “Reason, Conscience, Nature,” and at the same time that conception of men as beings normally endowed with moral faculties and standards of conduct, of which these words are the expression. All differences of time and place sink into comparative insignificance by the side of this the common property of all normally developed moral human beings in the civilized world. This rationalism is one of the most important causes of the rapid spread of Christianity, and St. Paul is the first to make use of it.

The introductory stage of St. Paul’s missionary work was thus formed of two parts—the eschatological message and the description of the degradation of the heathen world. We are not yet in the temple of Christianity itself, but only in the porch. The Jewish element still almost entirely dominates the preaching of St. Paul. His estimates are still influenced by Jewish prophecy, by the Jewish Scriptures, and by Jewish views of the Gentiles. But as a matter of fact lines of communication already lead over to the Greek world, even though they are mostly derived by St. Paul directly from the Jews. His eschatology reminds the Greeks of nearly related doctrines, and they have more that is akin to the monotheistic faith than the apostle is ready to believe. But he himself makes earnest appeals to their moral knowledge. Christianity and Hellenism begin to amalgamate in the preaching of the apostle who was in so many ways opposed to everything that was Greek.

St. Paul’s object in thus bringing the Gentile hearers face to face with the near approaching judgment, utterly degraded and fallen away from God as they were, was not to lead them to repentance in the earlier sense of the word, but to faith. To repent meant, with Jesus, to turn round and do God’s will. Paul does not at all believe that his hearers can do that. In spite of all the power that a man possesses of forming moral judgments, it is perfectly useless to appeal to his reason as long as it is held captive by his senses—by the law of sin in the flesh. His own experience had shattered his faith in the victorious power of the will; this, however, was not the only or even the decisive reason for the new demand for faith. As the whole object of his missionary labours is to win over the Gentiles for the Christian Churches, Paul can never grant that any awakening of new moral power would be possible through man’s unaided efforts apart from the Church. He must, on the contrary, be so entirely broken and powerless that no other path of safety remains open to him in the whole world but faith—i.e. entrance into the Christian fellowship. This is the point where Jesus and His apostle are furthest apart from each other. With Jesus, courage, joy, and feeling of strength and entire health; as He Himself does God’s will so He bids others do it, without attaching any ecclesiastical limitation. In Paul’s case we have the description of a weak and heartbroken man who can only gain the victory within the Church and by supernatural grace. Extreme pessimism and the dogma of salvation by faith alone and in the Church—“extra ecclesiam nulla salus”—are correlatives. Jesus knows neither the one nor the other.

Oppressed by the burden of his sin, and trembling at the thought of the judgment, the convert is brought to Jesus his Redeemer—not the Jesus of the Gospels who promised the kingdom of God, revealed God’s will, drove out demons and made God and man at one: this Jesus Paul himself never knew. He would, accordingly, have been obliged to have preached Him on the authority of the early apostles. But in their message He appeared as a prophet and a lawgiver, and that did not suit Paul’s purpose. Jesus the crucified alone, or the crucified and risen Son of God, such is the Redeemer in St. Paul’s preaching. He gives a short title to the whole of his message—the “word of the Cross.” Now the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not really deeds of Jesus, but experiences in which He played a very passive part. From an external point of view they are purely historical facts—paradoxes for the understanding, miracles and mysteries. Paul grants all this. The statement, Jesus the crucified is our Redeemer, is merely folly for the understanding; it is only through faith, that makes its way through all that is repulsive and paradoxical, that it becomes a power unto salvation.

Christianity, says St. Paul to the Corinthians, so clearly that there can be no possibility of a mistake, Christianity is not a philosophy: it is no rational system, but it is something historical, irrational and paradoxical, in which faith either recognizes God’s power or else it does not. True, the facts have their meaning. The Cross implies God’s love, grace, and forgiveness; the Resurrection the beginning of the life to come; but this meaning itself exists for faith alone. It is, of course, in any case painful for us to observe how the rich contents of the life of Christ and, above all, His message—though this, to be sure, we do meet with later on in the apostle’s preaching—are entirely sacrificed to these two facts. But then what does this loss signify when we balance it against the immense simplification and concentration of this preaching of salvation? Simplification is always the mark of great men. In the preaching of St Peter and the other twelve all was presented side by side: the promise, the commandments, the miracles, the cross and the resurrection. It would have been difficult, especially for Greeks, to distinguish the redemptive power of Jesus in all this mass of material, whereas Paul brought them something which was simple and great that roused their enthusiasm (in spite of all paradox). There must surely be something divine when One that was crucified was made the object of such love and such enthusiasm. And when, thereupon, he exclaimed at the end of his address, “This is the way to salvation on the judgment day—faith in the crucified Saviour; here is atonement, grace, peace and certain salvation,” then his words found their way home and faith cried ‘Amen.’

Furthermore, this preaching, paradoxical as it was, contained elements that were extremely congenial to the Greek mind. The crucified Lord is the Son of God, who according to St. Paul descended from heaven. However incomprehensible the death of a heavenly being must have appeared to the Greeks in this statement—for the ideas of divinity and of death are incompatible—they were perfectly familiar with the title ‘Son of God’ and with the idea of the descent of such an one from heaven. And as in addition to this Jesus’ resurrection follows on the third day after His death and is then in turn succeeded by the Ascension to heaven, the divine nature is restored to its rights and a portion at least of the difficulty is removed. St. Paul’s christology appeared therefore to the Greeks simply as the revelation of a new myth, like those with which they were already familiar, only surpassing them all in grandeur and power. In spite of the apostle’s firm belief in the parousia, the emphasis in his christology is laid so entirely on past historical events, that for the hearers at any rate it is not the expected Messiah but the Son of God who has already come down from heaven, that becomes the centre of their faith. But the real stumbling-block still remained—Christ’s death. St. Paul attempted to familiarize the Greeks with the idea by means of the conception of sacrifice. However Jewish his methods might be, his arguments after all contained elements common to the universal religious experience of mankind—sacrifice, vicarious atonement, and expiation. The greater part of his hearers especially, belonging as they did to classes that were morally degraded, were only too ready to accept the atoning death of Jesus which promised them remission of their punishment. In spite of all, however, there was paradox enough to cause amazement and surprise.

When once this first step had been taken, when faith had been aroused and the enthusiastic confession had fallen from the convert’s lips—“Jesus is the Lord” (the apostle uses this title and not ‘Messiah’ amongst the Greeks)—St. Paul immediately proceeded to gather the disciples together into an organzied community. No Christian could have fought his way through the great dark night of idolatry and immorality as an isolated unit: the community—St. Paul calls it Church, using a Jewish word—was here the necessary condition for all permanent life. Here, again, many points of contact were presented by the Greek system of guilds and confraternities, of which the Jews had already made some use.

At the present day we are scarcely in a position to decide whether Paul exclusively followed Jewish patterns, or whether in some points he modelled his organizations directly upon the Greek type. As in addition he was bound to take over the characteristic rites of the Jewish Christian Church, and many of its forms and customs, he in any case created something that was entirely new to the world in which he lived. Through this amalgamation of Jewish, Greek, and Christian elements arose the Christian Church of the Gentiles, which throughout its future history remained ever open to receive new impressions, as a direct consequence of its origin from different sources. Baptism in the name of Jesus the Crucified was the form of entrance. Then followed very numerous meetings, for meals partaken in common, for divine worship, and also for the support of the poor brethren in the different localities as well as at Jerusalem. They were true communities of brethren, closely knit together for social, ceremonial and legal purposes, which gave their individual members a sense of strength and comfort, and often stood to them in the place of the family. St. Paul attached an almost exaggerated importance to the value of these communities. They were to be nothing more or less than mediators of the Spirit of God or of Jesus to the individual. Though the aim and object of his preaching had been the conversion of the individual, he conceived the power of the new life to be exclusively confined to the Church. Here and here alone is the sphere of the Spirit’s miraculous operations—the speaking with tongues, the healing of the sick and prophecy, and at the same time the renewal of the life, the power to start afresh. Only he who is a member of Christ’s body—that is, who actually belongs to the Christian fellowship—experiences the Redeemer’s influence that absorbs all that is sinful and earthly and implants that which is good and pure. St. Paul was sober-minded enough to recognize that these Christian communities were very far indeed from being his ideal the body of Jesus the temple of God. If in spite of this he clung fast hold to his belief in the power of the Church, he relied upon the fact that in spite of everything, many in the community shone like stars in the world in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation. For it was the beautiful time of the early spring, when the Church and the fellowship of them that believed entirely coincided, and did not, as now, stand in opposition to each other; when the influence of Jesus—that is, the Spirit—imparted itself so mightily to the whole community through the apostle, his fellow workers, and the first converts, that each individual was subject to it. This influence of Jesus did at first of course often find expression in excited behaviour and wildly enthusiastic actions, and it was only after repeated humiliations of one kind and another that it assumed a quiet and practically useful character. But without something of this enthusiasm, there had been no courage to lay the new foundation, and to separate from the world. The soul of Jesus, confined before within the secluded Jewish sects, now created for itself a second time a body, and this time one that was a great deal better suited to its power and glad joy. And that cannot be done without some stormy experiences. But the communities in which the Spirit finds a habitation are destined to alter the current of the world’s history.

Scarcely have the Gentiles become members of the Christian community than Paul tries to discover something for them to do. His aim is now to train these masses of men, who had hitherto been for the most part without any kind of discipline, to work for the realization of the Christian ideal. He who had up till now only given and promised, now summons them to do the will of God in the strength of that which they have received. Words of Jesus, texts of the Old Testament, claims of the conscience, rules of Christian custom and discipline, reflections prompted by consideration for the outside heathen world, are all to become one combined motive for moral regeneration.

A very important question here arises: Did St. Paul keep faithfully to the ideal of Jesus, subordinating everything else to it?