The Circumcision and the Uncircumcision Merged in Christ

“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.” —Galatians vi. 15.

The passage: In Christ Jesus neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

On first reading, this sentence may seem awkwardly built. Why does St. Paul say “in Christ Jesus”? Why not “in the Christian religion,” “in the Christian community,” or “among us, the true disciples of Jesus Christ”? Would not any of these have given his sense more simply?

Commentators have thought so, and have seldom hesitated to put a paraphrase of this kind in place of his words. Let us see what they gain.

“In the Christian religion neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything” would mean that it made no difference to Christian doctrine or practice whether converts were circumcised or not. History does not bear this out. Christian doctrine and practice were greatly affected by earlier ideas and habits, and the influence of Jewish and of Gentile notions can be traced in all the opposing heresies of the early age, and perhaps of every age. Or “in the Christian communities they count for nothing.” Could Paul tell the Galatians this at the end of a letter whose whole aim was to show that notions about circumcision and uncircumcision had torn an infant Church apart and nearly overthrown its faith? Or “among us, the Apostles, they count for nothing.” But they counted for a great deal among the Apostles, and Paul himself says they were meant to, by God’s own command: Peter was sent to the Circumcision, he to the Uncircumcision. They presented the Gospel of the Son of God to the differing needs and feelings of Jews and Greeks, and often followed different courses of conduct precisely because it was the same Gospel, meant for men brought up in the most various circumstances and opinions.

So if we are to state the fact as broadly as Paul does, we cannot use any of these paraphrases. Nor can we prop them up by adding an ought, “they ought not to count among us,” for we have found an important and far-reaching exception, and it involves a principle, perhaps the very one the Galatians were forgetting. Had they understood why Peter had one work and Paul another, they would not have thought heathens must become Jews in order to become Christians. We must go back to the old words and learn patiently what Paul means by saying that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts, but a new creature, rather than thin out and exhaust his thought with our own processing.

I. Paul himself proved that in one sense circumcision counted for much. It was the sign that a nation had been set apart by God to witness to him before the world, and a sign that the fleshly nature leads men to idolatry and slavery. Paul had learned both lessons and was practising them. He went out as a witness of Abraham’s God to the nations, turning them from dumb idols to serve the Living God, and affirming that in him, in his flesh, no good thing dwelt. He went as a conqueror for his land, asserting the exclusive authority of its King more than Joshua or David ever had. And he vindicated the history of his own nation by showing how it helped explain the history of all nations. Each had a calling from God, and each had in its laws and institutions a testimony for a righteous, living and true God, and against divided, evil and visible gods. In this sense both circumcision and uncircumcision had meaning and worth. It was no accident but a divine ordinance that one man was born in Athens, another in Rome, another in Jerusalem, one with memories of Marathon, another beneath the Capitol, another in sight of Mount Zion. Those who believe in one Lord over the whole earth must believe that he fixed the times and the bounds of men’s habitation, and that by all his government of every other people he was fulfilling the purpose for which he separated the sons of Jacob.

II. At this time many facts might lead Gentiles to covet admission to the circumcised nation, and Jews to wish to escape it and take on Roman or Greek feelings and traditions. I leave aside the mere restlessness that makes thoughtless people long for change and imagine unknown evils lighter than their present ones. I speak of the Gentiles most earnest in thought and feeling, who had struggled hardest to grasp the truths hidden beneath their country’s superstitions and to separate wheat from chaff. Consider the attraction of a zealous Pharisee’s account of the simplicity of Jewish worship, of a whole nation’s homage over ages to One of whom they dared form no likeness, of the forms and traditions that kept this worship from being confused with their neighbours’, and of the Sacred Books handed down with such care. Think what that was to a Persian devotee of light, to a Greek whom the philosophers had taught to distrust his country’s fables without giving him a substitute, to a Roman raised to feel he must have an object of adoration, whose sincerity was offended every hour by the tricks and lies of augurs and priests. Can you wonder that many were made proselytes?

And yet One who knew, and could not speak falsely, said: “Woe unto you, for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of Hell than yourselves.” The convert often discovered painfully that he had not gained what he expected: there was no charm in the worship, the traditions, or even the Sacred Books to keep him from evil or raise him from death to life. He might be an idolater in the temple of Jehovah, and the Being he worshipped might become a more concentrated form of evil and falsehood than those he had left.

On the other side, a Jew who noticed this, or the moral degradation of his countrymen, or the self-seeking of their religious leaders, or the utter contrast between the world around him and what he read in the Holy Writings, might easily doubt whether his national restraints were curses rather than blessings. They kept him from fellowship with other men and made him uncharitable toward them, without raising him above their level. Such a man would be struck by the cultivation of the Greek cities, and by the fields of speculation Greeks had crossed if not conquered, which a Jew seemed forbidden to enter. The triumphs of the Romans, a people so much younger than his own, would dazzle him, and might seem God’s own declaration that another city was to have the honours and the eternity he had attributed in childhood to the city of David. Many a Jew, probably, was led by such thoughts gradually to forget, or suddenly to throw off, the habits and faith of his home and to join the customs and idolatries of others. We can then imagine his bitterness against those he had left, his zeal for a time for what he had adopted, and yet his secret pain and alienation, his efforts to make himself easy, his discontent with a world that had looked so promising from a distance, and his growing consciousness that he could not be a heathen though he had ceased to be a Jew.

What did all these experiences point to? To the same truth that the whole history of Jews and Gentiles had been pointing to, and that the decay and hopelessness of both at this crisis pointed to. They were ordained, as the history and the helplessness were ordained, to show that unless there were some spring of life near them, lost sight of or not yet discovered, all institutions, disciplines, traditions, philosophies, schemes of government, and protests against idolatry would be unable to raise men or stop them sinking lower. What Paul went about preaching was that such a spring did lie near both Jews and Gentiles, that it had been revealed, that its fountain was in God himself, that every man’s heart was made to receive it and be nourished by it, and that nothing else could renew individuals or society. In Jesus Christ the Son of God, he proclaimed, there is life for Jew and Gentile. He is the ground of human fellowship and of each man’s righteousness, wisdom and power. He has come to claim us as members of his body, as children of God in him, and to infuse a quickening, uniting Spirit into the lifeless carcase of Judaism and the scattered fragments of Heathenism. What you do not have in circumcision you have in him whom it was meant to teach you of; what you do not have in uncircumcision, in all your Gentile habits and traditions, you have in him to whom they too bear witness. He is the living root of humanity, the source of all its energies, apart from whom it is a name and not a reality, a fiction for a number of loose atoms. In him the different lines of human history meet, for from him they began, and in him the discipline of each man and nation finds its purpose and interpretation. In him circumcision counts for nothing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

III. I have already indicated what I take these last words to mean, and I will not go far into the questions they raise. It has been asked whether Paul means by κτίσις a new individual creature, as our translators seem to think, or a new creation: whether he speaks of Christ’s coming as affecting a given Jew or Gentile, or the whole mass of humanity, or even the whole universe of God. If the word has one of these meanings, I believe it has the other; I do not think we can separate them. He who can be and is the renewer of one man can be and is the only renewer of the race and the only regenerator of society. What Nathanael, the strict Jew, wanted as he prayed under his fig-tree was to find the Son of God and King of Israel; he was the one needed to satisfy the deepest cravings and sorrows of his heart. What Cornelius, the Roman centurion, needed as he fasted and prayed at the ninth hour was the revelation of the same Son of God and King of Men, to restore what was decayed and dead in himself and in the mighty Empire he belonged to. No forms or institutions can renew a man; he must find the ground they stand on. No forms or institutions can renew a society; it must feel its way to the living ground from which their worth and strength come. Men and societies are always sighing for something new and going hither and thither for it. They are also always crying for what is old, and will put up with abuses and corruptions to keep it. Each instinct is true. They want to be made new by digging down to the deepest and oldest root. From there comes the renovation and purification they could not find on the surface, and the everlasting stability that walls and battlements cannot give.

Paul wrote to men who had confessed Christ the Son of God to be the Living Vine of which they were branches. By entering the Church and being baptized into the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they had understood that they confessed themselves members of his body. They had proclaimed this confession true for themselves and for all men, Jews as well as Gentiles, since they invited all to make it. “Therefore,” he says, “you ought to know, your profession obliges you to know, that you are a new creation in Christ Jesus, belonging to a body he has regenerated, and are yourselves regenerated. This is your glory, and you can have no other. To say that circumcision has any power, or uncircumcision any power, denies the privilege of your baptism. It is the same as saying, We do not think Christ has come to make us sons of God in him; we think this is yet to be done by some other power than his; or we think there is a better or higher state than he has raised us to, to which some outward institution or form may raise us.” So you see that while Paul set at naught the pretensions of the Judaizers, who told baptized Gentiles they must be circumcised, he did not deny the Jew’s privilege or advantage, or wish him to scorn the schoolmaster who had brought him to Christ, or encourage him to throw aside any part of the discipline belonging to his personal life and his nation’s history. And while he set at naught the Gentile’s pretension to blend the notions and habits of his earlier life with belief in the great Reconciler, the one Lord and King of Men, he did not deny that the Gentile’s education had a worth of its own, that God had used it, and that his servants were to use it and recognize his hand in it. Peter had a right to go to the Circumcision and act in all respects as a rigorous Jew. Paul had a right to become as without law to the Gentile. The reason for both is that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but a new creature.

IV. It might seem, my brethren, that since this Epistle turns on the relations between the two bodies in the infant Church, it should be interpreted solely by its circumstances. So far as I could, I have done so. I have looked at the condition of Jews and Gentiles when the letter was written, and tried to find the force of the Apostle’s words from it, without wilfully straying to connect them with later times. But I could not confine them to the Apostolic age however I tried. The more I spoke of what seemed peculiar and temporary, the more I had to bring in what is universal and permanent. The head of a religion, the chief of a society, the founder of a set of institutions may be great for one generation or many and then sink into nothing, because whatever depends on human faith is exposed to that faith’s accidents and fluctuations. But if Jesus Christ was the root and ground of human society in the days of Claudius and Nero, he is so now. Nothing in the circumstances of the enfeebled, exhausted, faith-deserted age to which he was first proclaimed gives it any advantage over ours.

I have a right, then, to apply the Apostle’s doctrine to ourselves. The difficulty is not finding cases within its range but avoiding being overwhelmed by them. I will mention one, by no means the most interesting or important, because the text itself suggests it and because it occupies Englishmen at this moment. For many years our countrymen have been considering their political relation to the countrymen of St. Paul, who without being a nation have kept through the ages the tokens of nationality, and living among other peoples are as distinct from them as when they had a city and temple of their own. We have asked whether it is our duty to exclude them from some civil privileges, at least from any share in government. Many persons, wise and excellent, say this exclusion is the very sign and badge of our Christianity, and that if it ceases we shall treat the Jews’ rejection of Jesus in the first age, and their descendants’ ever since, as a light error that our enlightenment can overlook. Secondly, they say that by effacing the distinction between us and the Jew, and making nothing of our New Covenant, we lose the special blessing we inherited from the Old, and lead the Jew to think our God does not care for nations and punish them as the God of his fathers did. We may keep our individual faith, they say, but England will be as atheistic as France was. Such, these critics add indignantly, is the result of statesmen’s worship of expediency and Churchmen’s indifference.

If these were the consequences of removing Jewish disabilities, which now seems close at hand, no denunciation of the measure could be too loud and no warning too terrible. We need a much stronger feeling than we have about the sin Paul charges on the Jews of his day, the sin into which he himself had fallen. We need to appreciate more deeply its withering effects on the race, because we too are liable to it. We need a much stronger sense of our national functions and responsibilities, and of God as the Lord God of England no less than of Israel, for the tendency of our religious teaching has been to individualize all our thoughts and so put us out of sympathy with the language and principles of the Old Scriptures.

But the Jew, past and present, has denied that Jesus is the Christ just because he would not allow that One had come who broke down the distinction between Circumcision and Uncircumcision and made of the twain one new Man. May we not then bear a stronger testimony against that denial, and for the truth it contradicts, by showing that we can abolish distinctions that under the old economy could not have been abolished? Is this not a lesson to the Jew about the new creation in Jesus Christ? Is it not a lesson to ourselves? And may not the impossibility of keeping up a very feeble assertion, that the right to legislate depends on a Christian’s faith, be a step toward the fuller manifestation of the truth that Christ’s dominion over us and all men does not rest on our opinion of it? He is King even if half a dozen members of either House of Parliament, or all the members of both, disown his authority.

As to the other question, I fear that treating the exclusion of Jews as the distinguishing mark of our Christian nationality may have made us forget that we are called to give evidence of an entirely different kind that we are a Christian nation, in our own land and in every part of the earth we govern. The tremendous responsibility rests on us of showing that we truly confess the rule of a Righteous King and Saviour, who has taken away what separated the families of the earth and made them one in himself. By every righteous act at home or abroad we signify that we are his subjects, and by every unrighteous act we proclaim ourselves rebels. Just so far as we make the peoples of the earth, whether they bear the Christian name, cling to the old Covenant, or are idolaters, understand that there is a universal fellowship for them in Jesus Christ, we undermine their superstitions, their unbelief, their worship of divided gods, and fulfil the function of a Christian nation.

If we forget that we are members of such a nation, sharing its blessings, with its sins and punishments ours, I cannot believe we shall fulfil our personal duties, worship God in our families, or reverence him in our hearts. I dread that Atheism as much as those earnest people who fear the admission of Jews to Parliament will produce it. Their prophecies make me tremble, for I feel in myself the tendencies that might help fulfil them. Those tendencies must be in our statesmen too, for they represent us, and our weaknesses and corruptions must affect their thoughts and acts. They often, I am sure, sacrifice to opinion and chance what should be laid on God’s altar. But I cannot help thinking that some acts we censure as policy are really the abandonment of a long-cherished policy to irresistible indications of God’s will. They work hard to preserve some maxim or law we tell them is indispensable to the Church’s stability, as the shipmen of Tarshish rowed hard against wind and tide rather than cast out Jonah, when it was as necessary for his work as for their safety that he be cast out. No doubt, when we refuse to regard changes of opinion or action as submissions to the Divine Will expressed in events, and proclaim them mere submissions to expediency, our rulers and people are likely to feel them as such. They cannot be expected to be more devout than those whose business is to trace the Divine hand everywhere. The removal of restrictions will destroy our faith if our faith has consisted in restrictions. So it is a solemn duty to proclaim, now and always, that our national faith is positive, not negative. It may be right to prevent English constituencies from choosing Jews as representatives, or right to concede the privilege; the best men may differ on that. But woe to England if her belief in the Son of God, the Prince of all the kings of the earth, turns on the decision! Woe to each of us if we are not labouring to teach our countrymen the lesson we first learnt through our own experience! Woe to us if we are not testifying day by day that in Christ Jesus excluding unbelievers from civil privileges counts for nothing, and admitting them counts for nothing, and that we ourselves are to be new creatures in him, putting off the old, false, corrupt nature and putting on that which is made after God in righteousness and true holiness! If we speak truth each with his neighbour, we shall know that we are members one of another, and that he who is the Truth is our Living and Eternal Head.