The Foundation and the Building

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”—1 Corinthians iii. 11.

The passage: No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

In the chapter my text comes from, St. Paul calls himself a Master-builder, and he holds that a Master-builder’s office is to lay foundations. The Corinthians generally disagreed. They thought anyone could lay a foundation, and that an architect’s skill showed in what he built on it. A teacher fit for them could not be a mere teacher of elements. Preaching only Jesus Christ and Him crucified might serve among Boeotians or barbarians. But men in a city like theirs, used to hearing the most varied wisdom from pagan professors, were ready for advanced Christian instruction. They were not children, and they demanded the refined culture of men.

This opinion was probably not confined to one of the sects in their Church. It will have appeared in each, in a different form. The followers of Apollos supposed he had brought a lore from Alexandria to fill up the imperfect outline Paul had drawn. Those who used the name of Cephas thought circumcision would admit to the highest privileges those who were only novices by Baptism. And the Pauline school would have indignantly denied that their master merely preached a simple Gospel. Had he not as much Rabbinical knowledge as Peter, and better acquaintance with Greek poets and philosophers than Apollos? Did he not make light of the ceremonies to which they, in their infantile faith, still clung? Had he not been seeking deep principles while they reverenced forms?

Paul would not have disclaimed the praise of seeking principles, if it had not come with disparagement of his fellow-labourers. That was his aim, so he was as offended by the conceit of his admirers as by those who despised him. All three parties were glorifying the peculiarities of manner, education and insight in their teachers. In doing so they missed what was dearest to all three teachers, at least while they were sane and submitting to the Spirit of love and truth. That was the common ground on which all men could stand, which they wanted every hearer to feel after and find. They addressed different hearts and heads, and God had educated their own by different methods. It would have been affectation, even sin, and a sign of learning by rote from a mortal teacher, to throw aside their own habits of thought and speech and take on those of the brother they most honoured. But each, by his own instruction and discipline, had been led to a Foundation far beneath Paul, Cephas and Apollos: a Rock against which the gates of hell could not prevail.

Paul therefore claims this as the work of his life. He did not come to introduce a new order of architecture, or new ornaments for the old ones. His task was homelier, and perhaps harder and less popular. He had to persuade these wise Corinthians that they themselves were the stones of a glorious, divine Temple. God was hewing and shaping them into their places, and none could say he had no place, or that his neighbour had none. If they wanted to know where they stood, to stop interfering with each other (each destroying the rest and so himself), they must give up disputing over the theories of this doctor or that. They must care for something besides opinions, theories and doctors, and ask: “What holds us together? what severs us, one and all, from the bottomless abyss?”

So Paul had to define more carefully, than when he spoke only of his relation to other teachers, in what sense he was a Master-builder. The text limits his statement and also expands it. He half retracts his earlier expression: he could not lay the Foundation. It is laid, as our translators have it; it is lying, as Paul says himself. That implies he did not put it there, nor did any man or body of believers. All teachers can do is say “There it is,” and all believers can do is recognize it. But this narrowing of his office shows its nature and grandeur. Arguing for a set of opinions, proving himself right and others wrong, was the business of the Sophist the Corinthians had known. The Apostle differed from the Sophist in his primary design. He dealt with men, not notions, and with the grounds of human life and society, not the defence of dogmas about them. He came to declare that the foundation of the human Temple is not abstract but living. It is not an opinion or a collection of opinions but a Person, not a man but the Man. That foundation is lying for you and for all: for you, who are naturally discordant, impatient of fellowship and eager for independence, and for all whom you regard as ignorant or irreligious. Christ, the Son of the Living God, of whom Cephas made his great confession; the Word of God, whom Apollos and the Alexandrians declare the Teacher of all; Jesus the crucified, whom I set forth in weakness and death: on Him the social edifice rests, and by Him alone it holds together. No man can lay any other foundation; God has laid this one.

If I spoke rightly some time ago of Paul’s conversion, it consisted in waking from ignorance of this foundation to a clear apprehension of it. He had thought he had something of his own to stand on: a wisdom, righteousness or exclusive privilege belonging to Saul of Tarsus, the Hebrew of the Hebrews. That belief made him hard, narrow and savage. He had to prove to himself, as to others, that he possessed it, in spite of appalling evidence pressed on his conscience and heart that he was not wise or righteous and that God did not favour him. I have often shown from his confessions how that evidence forced itself on him through the very words that gave him his only warrant for self-confidence. His own righteousness and wisdom proved so unreal and despicable that he was drawn to faith in a Righteousness and Wisdom not his own. That Righteousness and Wisdom became truly his when he renounced his own. It was the foundation he could tell the Corinthians was lying for them as much as for him, and which they were denying through their Greek factions as he had denied it through Jewish pride.

Brethren, in this coming Lent we shall hear much of repentance and conversion. Some will ask what we have to repent of, and what conversion we should desire for ourselves or our brethren. Today’s Epistle may have suggested an answer to the first question to someone here. The Apostle says we are nothing without charity. Have we it in the sense he seems to give the word? If not, that is a reason for repentance, and conversion from uncharitableness would be a great conversion. But much stands in the way of any practical result. In his dialect charity does not mean giving all our goods to feed the poor. It can hardly have meant mere tolerance of each other’s opinions. Some consciences may reproach them for lacking that disposition, and others may fear they have too much of it. Surely repentance, if it is so serious a duty, must be aimed at some serious and radical evil. And conversion, if it means what it meant in Paul’s history, must be a change from some more fixed and definable wrong than not being tender enough toward our neighbours’ acts or conclusions.

Yes, we may be inwardly rebuked for over-severity yesterday and over-indulgence today, and console ourselves that there is no strict rule on how far to maintain our positions or concede them. But suppose we have been troubling ourselves about opinions, ours or our neighbours’. Suppose we have been comparing theirs with ours when we needed an actual foundation for our lives. Is that not something to repent of? And if we have made ourselves the rule and measure of other men while professing a common ground for them and us, is that not something to repent of? Look at what has come of it. Onlookers say we are always debating this or that dogma and forgetting practical duty and ordinary morality. Have they not a warrant for that charge, so far as we are concerned? But when they go on to say this temper comes from our faith in Christ, and that with less of that faith our works would be better, do we not know in our hearts that they are blaming our faith for what is really the result of our unbelief? We have held opinions about Him, made much of them, and judged others for lacking them. But we have not rested on the foundation laid for us. Our own judgment of our religion’s superiority to other religions has been the rock on which we built what we call our Christianity. It may be a judgment about the credibility of one set of traditions, or about the Bible’s superiority to the Koran or to any idolatrous Shasters. But if there is nothing deeper than this judgment, no one it owns as its support and as bearing up the pillars of the Universe, then surely we have not yet accepted the Apostle’s doctrine or confessed Jesus Christ as he confessed Him.

To be converted from that kind of confession, which is only another name for asserting our own wisdom and superiority to Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics, to a confession that gives up every claim to wisdom and solemnly asserts that we are in no way better than they: this would be a conversion like St. Paul’s. It might make us witnesses of Christ as he was. I believe it must come, as it did to him, through the exposure to our own hearts of the utter fallacy and vanity of the pretences that led us to dream we are not as other men are. It must expose the dream that we could have any foundation for life or death that is not a foundation for every human being.

But these exposures will bring us, as they brought Paul, to acknowledge that the foundation laid for us all is a moral one. The Person on whom we and Society stand is a Righteous Person, who speaks to a spirit in us that hungers and thirsts after Righteousness. His demand is not that we think certain things or hold certain opinions, but that we be righteous as He is, so that we may do righteous acts as He did them. By His own divine Spirit He promises to fulfil that demand for us and in us.

So we may begin to see how the Epistle for today connects with the Lenten call to repent and be converted. The Charity set forth there is the Charity of God Himself, which was in Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is the one foundation for human Society and human acts, and there can be no other, then Charity is that one foundation too. It cannot be limited to care for the poor: ostentatious benevolence to the poor may break its law, and an apparent severity may sometimes fulfil it. But it does involve a care for the poor such as Christ had, shown when for our sakes He became poor. Nor can it be limited to respect for other men’s opinions. What looks like such respect may mean that everyone had better keep his own notion because there is no common truth, no foundation for all. What looks like zeal against opinions may be fervent Charity to men. But Charity does involve obeying Christ’s command not to judge, lest we be judged. It involves sympathy with all men: enduring their perplexities and questionings, sharing their temptations, feeling their sins, as He did perfectly. It must enter all the details of daily life, because it must penetrate the man himself who deals with those details. It can never be an ornamental accessory to a human being’s existence. It must be the very law under which God has placed him, obedience to which is the condition of his freedom.

This, brethren, is what frightens us and makes us tremble. Belief in a power bent on our destruction produces occasional terrors, hysterical convulsions, but they do not last. The very conscience to which those who excite such terrors appeal rises up and witnesses against them. But the thought of being under a law of love, with Him as the foundation of our existence who has perfectly fulfilled that law, may well appall us. We have been continual rebels against this law and have refused to stand on this foundation. Once that terror takes hold of a man, the word Conversion becomes a word of meaning, promise and power. He does not stop to ask whether converting grace was exerted on him some day in the past. He wants it now. His sense of resisting perfect goodness, and his certainty that this resistance must be misery, force from him the cry, “Turn me, O almighty Love, and I shall be turned.” The answer to that prayer, which God Himself has inspired, is the conversion of his heart and spirit. It turns him from self-willed confidence to a child’s dependence, and from wanting all men to think as he thinks to wanting all to stand on the foundation laid for all. He is sure it is laid for all and not for him alone, because turning to God has meant abandoning all selfish rights and privileges. So he will pray also, “Oh grant that all men may come to the knowledge of Thy truth and live.” For we know that to be Thy Eternal Will, shown in Thy only Begotten Son, and to be fulfilled at last by the power of that Spirit who can subdue all things, even this rebellious, unloving heart of mine, to Himself.