Paul Wernle · 18 of 30

Chapter XIII. Jesus Brought to the Gentiles. · Part 3

Every single congregation was always to consider itself a member of the whole body—the Church of the Christian brotherhood, and never as a self-existent unit. Did not the apostles, the prophets, and the teachers, belong to the whole Church? Jerusalem was the Mother Church of all these congregations. The most palpable external sign of this connection was the collection for the poor at Jerusalem, which St Paul set on foot and carried through with a truly amazing energy, in spite of his often strained relations with the heads of that Church. But this was by no means all. Either the apostle himself or his fellow-workers brought each congregation news of the other congregations as they travelled about from place to place, thus awakening feelings of shame, resentment, emulation, and ambition. Each congregation felt that it was observed, and possibly also criticised, by all other congregations throughout the whole world. Besides this, there was the link formed by united prayer for the apostle and with him for congregations in distress. And finally, the exercise of a generous hospitality was regarded as a duty towards all missionaries and brethren on their travels, and they in their turn again strengthened the feelings of union between each and all. In this manner St. Paul created an organization so closely pieced together that no single link could fall out of the chain, but that each felt that it was kept in its place by the united efforts of all the rest; and in so doing he afforded Christian love a wide and varied sphere wherein to realize itself.

But its chief domain was after all that which lay nearest home—the individual congregation. Just like Jesus, St. Paul esteemed that love highest which did not go forth in search of distant and extraordinary deeds, but proved its strength in the ordinary and everyday life. A man might give all that he had to the poor and yet be without the right kind of love. It is this prosaic, everyday love—no sentimental enthusiasm—that St. Paul commends to the Corinthians, in the celebrated chapter, as the greatest thing in the world, as that which abideth forever when speaking with tongues, prophecy, and knowledge have passed away; yea, which is even greater than faith and hope. There is indeed nothing simpler than to exercise patience and goodness, and not to boast or envy, not to offend against good manners nor seek one’s own, and not to bear a grudge; and therefore of course nothing harder. By all that he did and said St. Paul strove that the Christians should pursue this simple ideal. And yet what difficulties were placed in his path by this very system of separate congregations! Parties and factions seemed forever to be forming, and celebrated teachers to be founding schools. The strong looked down with contempt upon the weak, and these in their turn condemned the strong. There were lawsuits about property which brought the brethren into evil repute amongst their heathen neighbours. The apostle intervened in each case with a peremptory yet friendly admonition to live in unity and practise mutual concession, modesty and humility. He came in course of time to attach the highest value to this congregational life as the most important school for the training of the individual. Here frequent occasions occur for the individual to forget himself, to become of no reputation, to retain the self-mastery by concession and patient endurance, to allow freedom of conscience to be ruled by love, and to further a brother’s best interests in all things. But then the consequence of this is that each no longer has to fight his own battle, but feels himself supported, comforted and strengthened by the whole community. St. Paul revives the old picture of the body and the members, where each member is of importance for the body, and gives it a new and magnificent application and meaning. When one member suffers all suffer; when one is honoured all are glad; it is a duty to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Who can complain any longer that love has been narrowed? Surely it is Jesus Himself who imparts to this brotherhood this unexampled capacity for active love? St. Paul merely caught up this love that issued from Jesus, assigned to it a narrower sphere, and then multiplied it in the congregations which he founded.

St. Paul’s third and last task, the regulation of public worship, is almost entirely a part of the second. For Jesus there was naturally no such thing as a Christian public worship, for the simple reason that He founded no Church. He taught His disciples to pray both by themselves and together; and it is at least the beginning of such worship that one liturgical prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, is ascribed to Him. The necessity of a special separate Christian form of worship made itself felt in the first congregation, otherwise there had been no continuance of the corporate life of the Church. Its two principal component parts—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are signs of this very corporate life, intended to mark, the one the reception of the member into the community, the other the public meetings of the brethren. We must be careful to remember this when we come to examine St Paul’s regulations.

In regard to both sacraments St. Paul is no longer a creator. He simply accepts the tradition. The public worship of the Church was likewise in all probability modelled after the pattern of the Jewish synagogues. This much we may safely infer from the use of Aramaic words; only the enthusiasm of the congregations generate, at any rate at first, a far greater freedom and variety of forms. When an exaggerated, and at the same time selfish, form of pietism availed itself at Corinth of this freedom, to the destruction of all decency and order, St. Paul introduced a liturgical form of worship, and thereby also checked the desire of the women for emancipation. And for the same reason he was compelled to turn his attention to the common meals, which at times degenerated into pious drinking bouts, and to issue strict regulations as to the right and wrong way of partaking of the Supper of the Lord. In both cases we see how the good order of the life of the congregation, the edification of all instead of merely a few, the participation of the poorer brethren in the meals—all of them social considerations—were really decisive. It is more important that all should profit than that one or two should be caught up into the seventh heaven for a few moments. His digression on love, while treating of ceremonial regulations, is his grandest and completest statement of this truth.

So far all is simple. The Church must have its outward symbols and its means of edification, and these things must be so regulated that they really conduce to the Church’s benefit. And though we have here much that is new and that goes beyond what Jesus taught, yet the purely moral character of His Gospel is left inviolate. But through St. Paul a new value comes to be attached to acts of worship which cannot be harmonized with the teaching of Christ. At Corinth Christians suffered themselves to be baptized a second time for their deceased relations, and St. Paul refers to this in his defence of the resurrection. That is a heathen conception of baptism which turns it into an ‘opus operatum,’ and as such a guarantee for blessedness. Whilst in this case St. Paul simply accepts the superstitious view without saying any thing, he is himself actually the cause of it in the case of the Lord’s Supper. To please his Greek converts he compares it to the Greek and Jewish sacrificial feasts. He is the first to contrast the holy food there consecrated with all other that is profane, and bids us see in the sickness and death of many Christians the judgment upon their profane participation in the holy meal. Now, that was an accommodation to Greek superstition which led to the establishment of a religion of a lower, less spiritual, nature as a direct consequence. But the mere fact that an extraordinary value is attached to ceremonial acts is in itself fatal. The conception of what constitutes a Christian is here enlarged in a very ominous fashion.

The apostle, however, knew full well that besides participation in acts of ritual there is an altogether different manner in which Christians can have communion with God. Like Jesus, he exhorts his hearers and readers to offer up prayer and thanksgiving, to place their trust in God, to commit all their cares to Him, to accept everything, even affliction and suffering, as from His hand, to fear Him and to long for Him. The prayer of thanksgiving is above all else the sign of a genuine Christian for him: he that thus prays stands in a right relation to God. And the true sacrifice that is well pleasing to God is not any participation in worship, but the devotion of body and soul to His service. All those superstitious statements to which allusion has been made are in St. Paul’s hands means to an end: in the one case, that of baptism, to prove the Christian hope; in the other, that of the Lord’s Supper, to secure decency and good order in the congregation. It is not for St. Paul himself, but for the future history of his congregation, that the seeds of mischief have been sown. Henceforth participation in divine worship takes its place side by side with trust in God, and two kinds of religion, of communion with God, begin to compete with each other.

Let us now review once more the whole of the Christian claim, as it is presented by St Paul, and compare it with that made in the first instance by Jesus, and we shall perceive that a great forward movement has taken place, and on the whole, it has preserved the direction imparted to it by Jesus. The Christian ideal has become richer, more varied and comprehensive, but it has not essentially changed, and it has not deteriorated. This we can best realize when we read all the passages in which St. Paul briefly summarizes the essentials of the new religion. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of God’s commandments is every thing. In Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails aught, but faith working through love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, faith, gentleness, purity. But now remaineth faith, love, hope; but love is the greatest of these.

The man who formulates his claim under these main headings understood Jesus better, grasped His meaning more fully, than any other that came after him. And this sympathetic comprehension of that which was essential in Christianity, enabled him to carry the teaching of Jesus from the Jews to the Gentiles, retaining the human and the eternal, while rejecting the merely national. This brilliant definition of the ideal is at the same time the best criticism of all that is imperfect in St. Paul’s work. A great man deserves to be measured by his aims rather than by his achievements. He who would understand St Paul aright should seek to find him at the height of his ideal, and then he will discover that he is not very far distant from Jesus. But to present the claim of Jesus to the Gentiles and to maintain it in its entirety was indeed a very great achievement on the part of St. Paul. His work was assailed by two great enemies, which sought to compel him to descend from the height of his ideal and adapt himself to the imperfections of the uncultured masses: they were, on the one hand, the gross vices, on the other the enthusiasm of his heathen converts. The sinful life that was so often continued after conversion, the instances of incest and fornication, the lawsuits, the factions all seemed to cry with one accord: lower your standard, at least temporarily. On the other hand, the ascetic aberrations of some, the spiritualistic follies of others, the pride of the ‘strong,’ the striving to shake off all control and to cease from all work, appeared to be so many indications of the necessity of a law to check this want of discipline and sobriety. It is amazing to notice with what firmness and clearness St. Paul continues to travel along the path indicated to him by Jesus. As a wise educator he took circumstances into account and remembered that “le mieux est souvent l’ennemi du bien.” He insisted on the appointment of Christian judges in order to put an end to the hateful spectacle of law suits between Christians in heathen courts. He excommunicated the immoral members of the Corinthian church and summoned them to repentance in order to cleanse the congregations of the worst stains. When he enumerates the different vices, he seems to say that certain deadly sins exclude a man more than others from the kingdom of God. As a preliminary measure against the enthusiasts he appoints a definite order of service. These examples might be multiplied, but nowhere do we find a single one which does not come under the category of purely educational and provisional measures. As to what constitutes a Christian, St. Paul’s answer is always that of Jesus. He recognizes no subordinate form of Christianity for the masses. He ever reverts—often immediately after making some concession—to Jesus’ whole claim on conduct and on character; the ideal ever remains above the real and yet ever within reach. He that is in Christ Jesus is a new creature: the old is passed away; all things have become new. And in spite of all the danger presented by enthusiasm the Christian stands secure in the freedom with which Christ has made him free.

St. Paul had begun his missionary labours with the preaching of the judgment. He ends as he began. The preaching of the ideal and the lofty Christian claim both call for this conclusion. Whether a man is pressing forward towards the ideal, or lagging behind, is by no means a matter of indifference. It is a question of life and death. The return of Jesus, which all Christians await, will bring with it the judgment, when all, apostles and congregations alike, will have to render an account of the result of their lives, and receive praise or blame in equity and truth.

With a mighty loud voice, just as one of the old Christian prophets, St. Paul cries out to his converts, “Maranatha, the Lord is at hand. Redeem the time. Your salvation is nearer than at first. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Be ye not, brethren, in the darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief in the night. Let us not sleep, but let us be sober. Let us put away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light.” That is the language of Jesus Himself. Just as in the claim that he makes, so in this message of the judgment, St. Paul has suffered himself to be inspired by his Master. And this is yet one other proof, that in spite of the ecclesiastical transformation which he effected, he wished to bring to the Gentiles Jesus and His Gospel alone.

For us, of course, he has left great and important questions without an answer. What is the meaning of faith and grace and church, if in the last resort it is the word of judgment that decides the faith even of Christians? When St. Paul invited the Gentiles to enter the Christian community he promised them that the road to salvation should be simple and easy. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” When he disputed with the Judaizing party he persistently maintained the position that the believer was sure of his salvation and safe from the wrath that was to come. The Christian’s joy and glory consisted, he declared, in the absence of all fear, and the assurance of God’s everlasting love. That is why the Christian knows himself to be called and elected from all eternity. But the preaching of the judgment, with its alternating notes of fear and hope, and the uncertainty of salvation which it causes to arise in every soul, contradicts the high value attached by St Paul to the Church as well as to the individual’s faith in his election.

At times this idea of the value of the Church seems to dominate St. Paul to the exclusion of every other. Even in the extreme case of incest at Corinth lie hopes that the man’s soul will be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. If God punishes the thoughtless participation in the Lord’s Supper with sickness and with death, then this punishment is merely a means of chastening lest we be condemned together with the world. He that has built badly upon the foundation of Jesus Christ shall nevertheless be saved “yet so as by fire.” God’s faithfulness is so great that He must complete what He has begun. The meaning of statements such as these appears to be none other than that all Christians should be saved even though, it is true, under different degrees of blessedness. And this is just where St. Paul’s extremely high estimate of the external ecclesiastical organization finds its expression. But passages which point in a contrary direction are not wanting. If Israel be the type of the people of God, and if its fate have any typical meaning, then it is clear that church membership does not confer any certainty of salvation. Is it not written that God was not well pleased with many of those that passed through the sea and they were overthrown in the wilderness? The message of the judgment, therefore, when it is addressed to Christians, always takes the possibility of their failing to obtain salvation into account. Like the preaching of Jesus itself, it is meant to be taken seriously.

The contradiction in which St. Paul stands with himself is a necessary one, and arises from his historical position. On the one hand he has to gain converts for the Church, and must exalt it as the only road to salvation, and therefore separates mankind into those within and those without the Church, as the saved and the lost. On the other hand, as a true disciple of Jesus, he is bound to destroy all confidence in the Church—even the Christian Church—and place the individual in the presence of eternity and God’s judgment before everyone that does not do the right. Hence this hesitation and contradiction. St. Paul is an ecclesiastic and a Christian with a living personal faith. All the later teachers of the Church who were at once apologists of the ecclesiastical institutions and disciples of the Gospel, have followed in the apostle’s contradictory footsteps.

Yet this ‘yea’ and ‘nay’ cannot be St. Paul’s last word. Salvation as he understands it is only attained where the individual has reached the certainty that he is God’s child personally and that nothing can separate him from God’s love. This certainty is as far removed from confidence in church membership, as it is from the alternating fear and hope inspired by the thought of the day of judgment. It is something purely personal, something that the individual must experience for himself and that none other can give him, because it is only true for himself.

It is experienced as he gazes upon the Cross, the revelation of God’s love; as he places his trust in God’s faithfulness, of which he has made trial in the course of his own life, and as he listens for the voice of God’s Spirit which testifies to our spirit that we are the children of God. It was the final aim of all St Paul’s missionary labours that each convert won over by him should reach the goal to which Jesus had brought the disciples in the Lord’s Prayer, wherein they receive all things as from God’s hand and are safe for time and for eternity in His fatherly love.

St. Paul brought Jesus to the Gentiles as their Redeemer who uplifts them to the new life with God. He attained that which Jesus Himself desired, but in his own, even somewhat abnormal, manner.

In the first place, his aim is so to bring home to his hearers their sinfulness and powerlessness and their liability to the judgment, that every road to safety by their own efforts is cut off and only the way of faith remains open to them. This may be called St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of faith.

In the next place, he does not present Jesus the Redeemer in all His life and suffering as the object of faith, but only the Cross and Resurrection of the Son of God. This is St. Paul’s methodistic presentment of the Cross.

The form which St. Paul’s missionary preaching took was the result, in the first instance, of his own personal experience. He himself became a Christian in an altogether abnormal fashion after having been a Rabbi and a persecutor. But the really decisive factor was after all his extraordinarily powerful ecclesiastical interest which impelled him so to narrow the way to salvation that it led through the Church alone, whose mark was faith in the crucified Son of God. But though the methods were changed, the Gospel itself remained as yet the same. Nay, rather, the new machinery proved really effective in bringing Jesus to the heathen. In his representation of the promise, the ideal and the aim of redemption, St. Paul is simply Jesus’ disciple, and indeed the profoundest and most powerful of all.

But St. Paul is likewise the first to have entered into the forms, ideas, and conceptions of the Greeks at innumerable points of his missionary labours. He did not merely bodily transplant the Gospel from one place to another. He saw that the new plant took root and acclimatized itself. There are far more points of contact between the Greeks and St. Paul’s practice than between them and his theology, which is embedded rather in Jewish ideas. But the great achievement is this, that the same man took up that which was Greek and that which was Jewish fused the two elements and then entirely subordinated them to a third, the Christian, in Jesus as he understood Him. For it is not the amalgamation of Hellenism and Judaism, but the conquest of both for Jesus, that assigns St. Paul his high place in the world’s history.