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.

When you first read this sentence, you are inclined perhaps to think that there is something awkward or unusual in the construction of it. Why should St. Paul say, “in Jesus Christ”?—why not, “in the Christian religion,”—“in the Christian community,” or, at all events, “among us, the true disciples of Jesus Christ”? Would not either one of these forms of expression have conveyed the sense of the Apostle much more simply?

Commentators have thought so, and they have seldom scrupled to substitute some paraphrase of this kind for the actual words. Let us see what they have gained by the change.

“In the Christian religion neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision.” That means, I suppose, that it made no difference to the doctrines or practice of Christianity, whether those who embraced it were circumcised or uncircumcised. But history does not bear out this assertion at all. The doctrines and practice of Christians were affected very greatly by their previous conceptions and habits of life. One can trace the influence of Jewish notions and of Gentile notions in all the opposing heresies of the early age, perhaps in all the heresies of every age.—Or “in the Christian communities neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision.” What! could St. Paul tell the Galatians this, at the end of a letter the whole object of which had been to show that notions about circumcision and uncircumcision had availed to rend asunder an infant Church, even to subvert its faith?—Or “among us, the Apostles, they avail nothing.” But they did avail very much among the Apostles; and what is more, we have St. Paul’s authority for saying that they were meant to avail, that they availed through God’s own command. Peter, he says, has been sent to the Circumcision, I to the Uncircumcision. They were to present, and they did present, the Gospel of the Son of God to the different wants and feelings of Jews and Greeks; they often followed a different course of conduct, precisely because they had the same Gospel, and were bound to show that it was intended for men brought up in the most various circumstances and opinions.

If then we are to assert the fact broadly, as St. Paul does, “Neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision,” we cannot resort to any of these paraphrases. Nay, we cannot help out their weakness by introducing an ought,—by saying, “they ought not to avail anything among us.” For we have discovered at least one important and wide-spreading exception to that proposition. That exception involves a principle, perhaps the very principle which the Galatians had been forgetting. If they had understood why St. Peter had one work and St. Paul another, they would not have supposed that it was necessary for heathens to become Jews that they might become Christians. We must go back therefore to the old words; we must be content to learn patiently what he intends by saying that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature, instead of subjecting his thoughts to an attenuating and exhausting process of ours.

I. St. Paul was a proof that, in one sense of the words, circumcision availed much. It was the sign that a Nation was separated by God to be the witness of Him to the world. It was a sign that the fleshly nature led men to be idolaters and slaves. St. Paul had learned both lessons, and was practising them. He had gone forth a witness of the God of Abraham to the nations. He was turning them from dumb idols to serve the Living God. He was affirming that in him, that is, in his flesh, dwelt no good thing. He went forth as a conqueror for his land, asserting the exclusive authority of its King more than Joshua or David had ever done. And he vindicated the truth of the history of his own nation, by showing how it helped to explain the history of all nations. Each one had a calling from God, each one had in its national laws and institutions a testimony in behalf of a righteous, living, and true God; each one had in these institutions and laws a testimony against divided and evil and visible Gods. In this sense then it might be said that both circumcision and uncircumcision had a meaning and a worth. It was not an accident but a Divine ordinance that one man was born in Athens, another in Rome, another in Jerusalem; that one man grew up with recollections of Marathon, another under the shadow of the Capitol, another in sight of Mount Zion. Those who believe that there is one Lord over the whole earth, must believe that He ordered the times before appointed and the bounds of men’s habitation; they must believe that He was fulfilling the purpose for which He separated the Sons of Jacob, by all the acts of His government over every other people.

II. There were many facts at this time which may have led Gentiles to covet the privilege of being admitted within the pale of the circumcised nation, and Jews to wish that they could escape from it, and surround themselves with Roman or Greek feelings and traditions. I omit the mere restlessness which tempts unthinking people to long for a change of circumstances, to fancy that the evils which they know not of must be less than those which they are experiencing. I speak of the Gentiles who were most earnest in thought and feeling, and had struggled most to realize the truths which were hid beneath their country’s superstitions, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Only consider what an attraction the words of some zealous Pharisee, who told of the simplicity of Jewish worship, of the homage which a whole nation had paid for so many ages to One of Whom they dared to form no likeness,—of the forms and traditions by which they were preserved from confusing this worship with that of the people round about,—of the Sacred Books which had been delivered to them with such watchful care by their ancestors;—only consider what attraction such words may have had for some Persian votary of light, for some Greek who had learnt through the philosophers to distrust his country’s fables without obtaining any substitute for them, for some Roman who had been bred up to feel that he must have an object to adore, and whose sincerity was shocked every hour of the day by the tricks and lies of augurs and priests. Can you wonder that numbers should have been made proselytes by this pharisaical teaching?

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 had oftentimes painfully to discover that he did not gain what he expected to gain; that there was no charm in the worship, the traditions, even the Sacred Books, to keep him from evil, to raise him from death to life; that he might be an idolater in the temple of Jehovah; nay, that the Being he worshipped might be turned into a more concentrated form of evil and falsehood than those which he had abandoned.

On the other hand, how naturally might a Jew who noticed this fact,—or the fearful moral degradation of his countrymen generally, or the low, self-seeking habits of their religious leaders, or the utter contrast between the world around him and what he read of in the Holy Writings,—be led to doubt whether the restraints of his national position were not curses rather than blessings, whether they did not keep him from fellowship with other men, and make him uncharitable towards them, without raising him at all to a higher level than they had attained. How would a man into whose mind such thoughts had once entered, be struck with the cultivation of the Greek cities, with the various fields of speculation which Greeks had traversed if not conquered, and which a Jew seemed forbidden to enter. How must the triumphs of a people so much younger than his own, as the Romans were, have dazzled his imagination; how easily may they have seemed to him God’s own authentic declaration that another city was to have the honours and the eternity which in his childhood he had attributed to the city of David. If we suppose, and it is probably no mere supposition, that many a Jew was led by considerations of this kind gradually to forget, if not suddenly to throw off, the habits and faith of his home, and to become identified with the customs and idolatries of other nations, we do not want evidence to convince us what bitterness there will have been against those whom he had left, what fervour for a time in his zeal for that which he had adopted, yet what secret pain and alienation, what continual efforts to make himself easy in his new position, what inward discontent with the world which at a distance looked so promising, what a perpetually increasing consciousness that he could not be a heathen, though he had ceased to be a Jew.

To what did each of these experiences point? They pointed to the same truth to which all the history of Jews and Gentiles had been pointing, to which the decay and hopelessness of both at this crisis were pointing. They must have been ordained, as all that history was ordained, as the weakness and helplessness themselves were ordained, to show men that unless there were some spring of life near to them which they had lost sight of or had not yet discovered, all institutions, all forms of discipline, all traditions, all philosophies, all schemes of life and government, all protests against idolatry, would be helpless to raise them, would be unable to prevent them from sinking lower and lower. What St. Paul went about preaching among Jews and Gentiles was, that such a spring of life did lie near to them both, that it had been revealed, that its fountain was in God Himself, that the heart of every man was created to receive it and be nourished by it, that nothing else could renew individual men or renew society. In Jesus Christ the Son of God, he proclaimed, there is life for Jew and for Gentile. He is the ground of human fellowship, the ground of righteousness and wisdom and power to each man. He has come into the world to claim us as members of His body, as children of God in Him; He has come to infuse into the worn-out, lifeless carcase of Judaism, into the scattered fragments of Heathenism, a quickening, uniting Spirit. That which you have not in circumcision you have in Him of Whom it was meant to teach you; that which you have not in uncircumcision, in all your Gentile habits and traditions, you have in Him of Whom they too are bearing witness. He is the living root of humanity, whence all its energies are derived, apart from which it is a name and not a reality, a mere fictitious expression for a number of loose disjointed atoms; in Him the different lines of the history of the human race find their meeting-point, for from Him they began; in Him the discipline of each man and of each nation finds its purpose and its interpretation; in Him circumcision availeth nothing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

III. I have already intimated what I conceive to be the force of these last words, and I shall not go at length into some of the questions which they have suggested. It has been asked, “Does the Apostle mean by κτίσις a new individual creature, as our translators seem to suppose, or a new creation? Is he speaking of the effects of His coming upon a given Jew or a given Gentile, or upon the whole mass of humanity, nay, upon the whole universe of God?” If there is one of these meanings in the word, I believe there must be the other. I do not think it is in our power to separate them. He who can be and is the renewer of any one individual man, can be and is the only renewer of the race, the only regenerator of human society. What Nathanael, the strict Jew, wanted, as he prayed under his fig-tree, was to find the Son of God and the King of Israel. This was He Whom he required to satisfy the inmost cravings and sorrows of his own heart. What Cornelius, the Roman centurion, needed, as he fasted and prayed unto the ninth hour, was the revelation of the same Son of God and King of Men, to restore that which was decayed and dead in himself, and that which was decayed and dead in the mighty Empire to which he belonged. No forms or institutions can renew a man; he must find the ground upon which the forms and institutions stand. No forms or institutions can renew a society; it must feel its way to the living ground upon which they stand, and from which their worth and strength is derived. Both individual men and societies are always sighing for something new, and going hither and thither to obtain it. Both men and societies are always crying for that which is old; yes, enduring abuses and corruptions in order to retain it. Each instinct is a true one. They want to be made new by digging down to the deepest and oldest root; thence comes the renovation and purification which they could not find on the surface; there is the everlasting stability which walls and battlements cannot give.

St. Paul wrote to men who had confessed Christ the Son of God to be the Living Vine of which they were the branches; who had understood, by entering into the Church and being baptized into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, that they were confessing themselves to be members of His body; who had proclaimed this to be a true confession for themselves and for all men, Jews as well as Gentiles, seeing that they invited all to make it. “And therefore,” he says, “you ought to know, your profession obliges you to know, that you are a new creation in Christ Jesus, that you belong to a body which He has regenerated, that you are yourselves regenerated. This, you ought to know, is your glory. You have, and can have, no other. It is denying the privilege of your baptism to say that circumcision has any power, or uncircumcision has any power. It is all one with saying, We do not think that Christ has come into the world to make us Sons of God in Him; we think this is yet to be done by some other power which is not His power; or we think that there is some better or higher state than this, to which He has not raised us, but to which some outward institution or form may raise us.” Hereby you perceive that, while he set at naught the pretensions of the Judaizers, who told baptized Gentiles that they must be circumcised, he did not in the least deny the privilege or advantage of the Jew, or wish him to scorn the schoolmaster who had brought him to Christ; that he did not encourage him in throwing aside any part of the discipline which belonged to his personal life and to the history of his nation. You will perceive, on the other hand, that while he set at naught the pretensions of the Gentile to incorporate the notions and habits of his previous life with his belief in the great Reconciler, the one Lord and King of Men, he did not in the least deny that his education had a worth of its own, that God had made use of it, that His servants were to make use of it and were to recognize His hand in it. St. Peter had a right to go to the Circumcision, and to act in all respects as a rigorous Jew; he had a right to become as without law to the Gentile, for this very reason, that in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availed anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

IV. It might seem, my brethren, as if this Epistle to the Galatians, since it turns so expressly upon the relations between the two bodies which composed the infant Church, ought to be interpreted solely by reference to its circumstances. So far as I have been able, I have taken this course. I have tried to look at the condition of Jews and Gentiles as it was when the letter was written, and to ascertain from that condition the force of the Apostle’s words. I have not wilfully gone aside from the strict force of them for the sake of connecting them with later times. But I could not limit them to the Apostolical age, if I tried ever so much to do so. The more I spoke of what seemed peculiar and temporary, the more I was obliged to introduce that which was universal and permanent. The head of a religion, the chief of a society, the founder of a set of institutions, may be great through one or many generations, and then may sink into nothingness. Whatever depends for its reality upon human faith must be exposed to all the accidents and fluctuations of that faith. But if Jesus Christ was the root and ground of human society in the days of Claudius and Nero, He is the root and ground of human society now. Nothing in the circumstances of the enfeebled, exhausted, faith-deserted age to which He was first proclaimed can give it any superiority over ours, can constitute any difference between it and ours.

I have a right therefore to apply the Apostle’s doctrine to ourselves. The difficulty is not to find cases which fall within the range of it, but not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of them. I will allude to one—by no means the most interesting and important, because it is suggested by the very words of the text, and because it is occupying Englishmen at this moment. Our countrymen have been for many years considering in what political relation they stand to the countrymen of St. Paul, who, without being a nation, have preserved through so many ages the tokens of nationality, who, dwelling amidst the other peoples of the earth, are as distinct from them as they were when they had a city and temple of their own. We have asked ourselves whether it is or it is not a duty to exclude them from some of our civil privileges, at least from any share in our government. Many persons, no less wise than excellent, have said that this exclusion is the very sign and badge of our Christianity, so that, if it cease, we shall treat the rejection of Jesus by the Jews in the first age, and His rejection by their descendants ever since, as a light error, which, with our enlightenment, we can afford to overlook. And secondly, they say that while we thus efface the distinction between us and the Jew,—while we make nothing of our New Covenant,—we lose the special blessing which we have inherited from the Old, we lead the Jew to suppose that our God is not a God Who cares for nations and punishes them, as the God of his fathers did; we may retain, they say, our individual faith, but England we shall permit to be as atheistic as France was. Such, these critics add with indignation, is the result to which the worship of expediency by statesmen, and the indifference of Churchmen, are bringing us.

Were these to be the consequences of the removal of Jewish disabilities, which is now to all appearance close at hand, I conceive no denunciation of that measure could be too loud, no warnings too terrible. For we need, it seems to me, a very much stronger feeling than we possess at present respecting the sin which St. Paul charges upon the Jews of his day, the sin into which he had himself fallen;—we need to appreciate more deeply the withering effects of that sin upon the race, because it is a sin to which we also are liable. We need a much stronger feeling of our national functions and national responsibilities than we have at present,—of God as the Lord God of England no less than He was of Israel. For the tendency of our religious teaching has been to individualize all our thoughts, and so to put us out of sympathy with the language and principles of the Old Scriptures.

But if the Jew in past times—if the Jew of this time—has denied Jesus to be the Christ, just because He would not allow that One had come Who broke down the distinction between the Circumcision and the Uncircumcision, Who had in Himself made of the twain one new Man, may we not be bearing a stronger testimony against that denial,—a stronger testimony for the special truth which it contradicts,—by showing that we can abolish distinctions which under the old economy could not have been abolished? Is not this a lesson to the Jew respecting the new creation in Jesus Christ? Is it not a lesson to ourselves? And may not the impossibility of preserving a feeble—a very feeble—assertion that the right to legislate depends upon the faith of a Christian, be one step to the fuller manifestation of the truth that Christ’s dominion over us and over all men does not rest upon our opinion about His dominion; of the truth that He is King, if half-a-dozen members of either House of Parliament, or if all the members of both Houses disown His authority?

With respect to the other question; I fear, my brethren, that the notion of the exclusion of the Jews being the distinguishing mark of our Christian nationality, may have helped to make us forget that we are called upon to give some other evidence— evidence of an entirely different kind—that we are a Christian nation, in our own land and in every portion of the earth which we govern. The responsibility—the tremendous responsibility—rests upon us, of showing that we confess, in very deed, the rule of a Righteous King and Saviour, of One Who has taken away that which separated the families of the earth, and has made them one in Himself. By every righteous act which we do at home or abroad, we signify that we are His subjects; by every unrighteous act we proclaim ourselves rebels against Him. Just so far as we make the people of the earth, whether they bear the name of Christian, whether they cling to the old Covenant, whether they are idolaters, understand that there is a universal fellowship for them in Jesus Christ; just so far we are undermining their superstitions, their unbelief, their worship of divided Gods; just so far we are fulfilling the function of a Christian nation.

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