As Philippi was the city in which St. Paul made his first assault upon Europe, it must always have a special interest for the western reader. There is much in the recollection that the neighborhood was the scene for the last struggle for the old Roman republic,—that there the great obstacle was removed to the establishment of that empire with which the Christian kingdom was to measure its strength,—which increases this interest. It is deepened and brought into direct connection with the life of the Apostle by the narrative in the sixteenth chapter of the Acts. All the incidents in that chapter have much more than a mere sentimental worth. They are memorable points in church-history. The prayer by the river-side is the only direct allusion to Jewish worship in the narrative, and it suggests thoughts of a different kind from those which we derive from the ordinary references to the synagogue. Nothing in the words determine whether Lydia was a Jew by birth, or a proselyte. But the words, “she worshipped God,” are probably decisive that she was not a heathen. The damsel with the spirit of divination is another of those instances which we meet with everywhere, of the prevalence of magic and enchantment, in all parts of the Empire, and of the trading purposes to which it was turned. The grief of Paul at her apparent addiction to his doctrine is a proof how naturally the Apostolic teaching respecting the Spirit presented itself as the characteristically Christian teaching, how quickly the counterfeit doctrine claimed affinity with it, how much St. Paul felt it was his main duty to exhibit one as the great contrast to the other. Then comes the interference of the Roman magistrates with this teaching; an interference caused, as it would always be, not by any dislike to it for its own sake, but from the disposition which the Romans felt to indulge all the superstitions of their subjects, and to protect so recognized and popular a business as that of the diviner. Still the complaint takes a Roman form. The customs of the city were invaded. The colonists who claimed Roman privileges could not endure the innovations and interferences of Jews. The story of the prison and the earthquake will only be explained away by those who think that the whole growth and progress of the Church was not supernatural, and that an attestation of the divine presence with those who were speaking the truth, is a departure from the order of the divine proceedings, not a vindication of it. How that outward manifestation awakened the conscience of the jailor, how the thought of deliverance, or salvation, for the first time dawned upon him, how the Apostles at once spoke to him of the Lord of his conscience, and the Deliverer of it, we have known from our childhood, and yet the words are not the least exhausted, but should be studied again and again in connection with the whole apostolical message. Nor ought we, by any means, to forget the Apostle’s vindication of his rights as a Roman citizen, and his determination to assert the law against the temporary administrators of it. His reverence for Roman law, as a part of God’s order in the world, is conspicuous everywhere. We shall misunderstand his character and his work if we do not take account of it.
Though these events are very important in themselves, they are not as obviously connected with the Epistle to the Philippians as the experiences of the Apostle in Ephesus are with the Epistle to the Church in that city. It would seem as if the Philippians had been more staggered by the Apostle’s imprisonment and the probable death that was awaiting him, than by any events which had happened, or were happening, in their own neighborhood. Various thoughts would have been suggested to them by his tribulation, thoughts that might have unsettled the minds of men much longer established in the faith than they were. Their shepherd was stricken; he was in the hands of the Emperor; but his own countrymen had been the cause of his betaking himself to Rome. He was apparently silenced by God’s own decree. Many members of the Church, who were Jews, denounced him, denied that he was a true preacher of Christ, affirmed that he believed another doctrine from that of the older Apostles. Such words, reaching to the chamber where the soldier watched him, were heard also in every Church which he had founded, and must have been repeated by the Judaizers in Macedonia. One knows a little how such hints affect the minds of people living in quietness; of what tumults, of what infidelity, they are the parents. Suppose them coming to converts who were suffering themselves from Jewish and Gentile adversaries, who had among them (strange as it may seem to those who think the early Church must have been pure because it was persecuted) careless inconsistent livers; and we appear to have most of the circumstances to which St. Paul refers in this letter.
Disunion was the peril of the Philippians as it was of the Corinthians; but a disunion arising less, it would appear, from intellectual causes and the spirit of faction, than from despondency. Against that tendency the whole letter seems to be directed. It is a perpetual summons to trust and hope and joy, which tribulations need not damp, to which they might be the most effectual ministers. It is evidently a leading maxim of the Apostle, which comes forth in every epistle, that trust and hope and joy are not solitary feelings, that they belong to a community, that they are nourished by mutual intercourse, that they are sustained by a common Spirit, that they have no meaning if they do not point to a common object. The specially eucharistical character of this epistle which goes through it from the beginning to the end, is always connected with exhortations to fellowship, to oneness of spirit and soul, to common work, to common sympathy. And these are not mere exhortations to do what is right and avoid what is wrong: they are grounded upon the fact, that they are united to each other, united to the Apostle himself, however far he may be away from them, in a bond which nothing can break, one which he is as able to realize in his prayers and thanksgivings while he is imprisoned at Rome, as if he were with them at Philippi. What better thing can he give thanks for than that they are brought into the same fellowship with him? What better thing can he ask for them than that they may enter into the full meaning of this fellowship? All other blessings are included in that; clearness of mind, freedom from causes of offence and from giving offence, the walking in Christ’s clear light, the expectation of his perfect day.
Why should the Apostle’s imprisonment discourage them? It is the means of making his gospel known in the very palace of the Cæsars. Why should the different opinions about him discourage them? Christ’s name was heard, even from those who most disliked his imprisoned servant, who would have been most willing to add affliction to his bonds. Was not that a reason for rejoicing to him and to them? Why were they to be cast down because his death might be at hand? To him to live here in the flesh was to draw life from Christ, to die was to have the gain of a fuller, richer life. He could not tell which was the best. But he did not doubt that that would be granted to him which was most profitable for them. He had little doubt that he should see them again face to face.
But what if he did not? Let them live as fellow-heirs of the inheritance which the Gospel told them of; let them stand fast in one spirit; let them struggle with one soul for the faith of the Gospel; being in nothing shaken by their adversaries; (their peace—a peace all the sweeter and more honorable because they were permitted not only to believe in Christ but to suffer for Him—would be the witness of the deliverance which God had wrought for them, and would contrast with the miserable condition of those who could never be at peace, who could only cast up mire and dirt,) and then they would be one with the Apostle, near or at a distance, fighting the battle which he was fighting. But whence was this unity to come? How could they, a set of men with so many individual temperaments, so many diverse interests, have in very deed that one mind which he had demanded of them? That one mind was given them. They were members of Christ, that is to say, of Him who being in the form of God, did not eagerly grasp at equality with God, but emptied Himself and became of no reputation, and having taken upon Him the form of a servant, and having become in the likeness of men, and having been found in fashion as a man, still further humbled Himself, having become obedient unto death, yea the death of the cross. And it was this humbled, crucified Man whom God had highly exalted, whose name was above every name, that in the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things heavenly and earthly and subterranean, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is the Christ, to the glory of God the Father.
Here we find the central doctrine of the Epistle to the Philippians, as it is of all the other epistles. It is presented in the form and aspect most suited to their necessities. But it is the same truth of the humble Jesus and the exalted Christ,—of the Son who is one with the Father, and makes himself so one with man that His mind is shown to be the very mind which belongs to man,—the only mind which can make us humble, the only mind which can keep us at one, the only mind which can make us sharers of His glory who has created us to know Him and be like Him. On this ground St. Paul bases all his after exhortations. He asks for obedience, for an obedience which did not depend on his presence or absence. He asks them to work out their salvation, salvation from all those strifes and divisions which were keeping them apart from Christ and each other, with the fear and trembling of men who know that God Himself is working in them both the will and the energetic action for His good pleasure. On this ground he can bid them do all things without murmurings and disputings. He can bid them be the blameless children of God in the midst of a crooked and distorted generation, among whom they might shine as world-lights, holding up the word of life to those who were most sunk in death; so proving that the Apostle had not run in vain or labored in vain, but had sent forth those who could hand on the torch when he ceased to run and to labor. Even if he were poured out as an offering for their sakes, he could joy and rejoice with them. Why should not they joy and rejoice with him?
Here, as everywhere, the personal mixes with the general and the universal. No sense of the spiritual fellowship and unity which he has with the Philippians in the spirit, leads him to forget his and their friends, Timothy and Epaphroditus, through whom he had communicated with them, who felt for them and suffered with them as he did. It is needless to remark, for one epistle proves it just as much as another, how all individual griefs, sicknesses, losses of estate or reputation, mingle in the Apostle’s most elevated discourses, and do not lower them in the least. Here they come in with wonderful appropriateness as exhibiting the mind of Him who was the sufferer with each, who is exalted to be the Lord of all.
But the allusion to St. Paul’s sorrow for the sickness of his friend, immediately gives way to the burden of the whole letter, “Rejoice in the Lord.” He has said it often to them; he must say it again. For there are dogs, evil-workers, counterfeit supporters of circumcision, who were hindering them from this joy. The true circumcision meant that they were to cut off the flesh, that their spirits might rise up and be renewed to life and freedom and joy in Christ. Paul had as many fleshly privileges as any man could have—all outward distinctions that severed him from his kind and gave him a right to boast of his national election. But he had counted all these loss and dung for the sake of Christ. For the righteousness which was in Him, the righteousness which comes upon faith, to which a man rises through faith, the righteousness which is of God Himself, he had cast away all that righteousness which is merely subjection and conformity to the law. He aspired to know Christ Himself, the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His sufferings. He was formed in the image of His death; he longed to attain the image of the resurrection. He had not attained it, he was always pressing after it. Forgetting the things that were behind, he was always reaching upwards, desirous to lose himself, to be found in Christ, to attain the mark of the high calling of God in Christ. This was the highest object which the most perfect or initiated man could propose to himself. And yet it was the common object for the whole Church. All might have this mind. And if any felt that they were otherwise minded, they might trust God to reveal it to them. —
He had told them what he was striving after. Let them strive for the same object. Let them think what he and those who most felt with him were desiring and aiming at. He knew sadly that there were others who had other aims,—low, grovelling, earthly aims, and who would too surely attain what they sought, the perdition of their moral being. But oh, let them remember that their citizenship was in the heavens, that Christ the Deliverer is there; that instead of subjecting our spirits to our bodies, we are to wait till He transforms the body of our humiliation into the likeness of the body of His glory, by that power whereby He is able to subdue even all things unto Himself.
Again and again the Apostle turns to individual cases and circumstances, gently alluding to any troubles or jealousies or divisions of which he had heard, while he brings the law which he has been working out to bear upon them. But as the great object of the Epistle is encouragement, the removal of despondency, he seizes the occasion to tell the Philippians what delight they had given him by the love-tokens which they had sent him again and again; the offerings which they had made, that were so acceptable to him because he was sure they were acceptable to God. He shows them how all things that were kind and gentle and venerable and lovely, whether they were exhibited imperfectly by weak human beings, or fully, in the acts and manifestations of God, were dear to him, were the occupation of his thoughts, the food of his spirit. He would have them think on these things. And then the main exhortation of the Epistle would be obeyed; they would rejoice in the Lord. And the blessed effect of their inward joy would appear to all men in their evenness and moderation. They would feel that the Lord was near them. They would have no vexing cares. In prayer and supplication, never separated from thanksgiving, their requests would be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all our reason would guard their hearts and their thoughts in Christ Jesus.
Epistle to the Colossians
THE Acts of the Apostles give us no help in understanding the condition of the Church at Colosse. As St. Paul says that he had never seen the Christians there or in Laodicea, it was not likely that St. Luke would speak to us of either. All our information must be obtained from the Epistle itself. It raises a question which has been much discussed in the last few years, and which is connected with the theory of Bauer respecting the Pauline epistles.
As our countryman Hammond discovered Gnosticism everywhere in the first age of the Church, and supposed that the Apostolical Epistles were mainly written to expose the dangers of it, so modern schools have been inclined to deny that there are any traces of it before the second century, and therefore to dispute the genuineness of the epistles which apparently allude to it. There is, of course, the other alternative of explaining away all such allusions as suggested by the fancy of a particular commentator. In very many cases this course is an easy one. Hammond undoubtedly strained a number of passages into consent with his theory. But the Epistle to the Colossians contains hints which cannot be got rid of. Any one acquainted with the phenomena of Gnosticism in the second century, would naturally, almost inevitably, conclude that the Apostle must be pointing at some of its doctrines and habits. And the sentences which contain these allusions cannot have slipped into the Epistle. They are part of its very substance. Exclude them, and the object of it becomes scarcely intelligible.
But does it follow from this admission, that the writer of this Epistle was acquainted with Valentinians or Carpocratians, that he makes any, even the slightest, allusion to the different forms which the Gnostical doctrine assumed when persons arose who resolutely and systematically sought to combine the Gospel with the doctrines of the Magians, or of the Alexandrian sages? I do not think that it is possible to detect any such allusion. If one reads the Epistle simply, the inference from it would be; “no great schemes concerning divine emanations have as yet been directly blended with the lessons of the Apostles, though there is as clearly the possibility of all such schemes, though the seeds of a hundred heresies have been deposited in the soil, and the produce of them is beginning to show itself above ground.”
If we admit this to be the case—and I only wish the reader to admit it if the evidence of the Epistle itself seems to be in favor of the opinion—we can do justice to both Hammond and Bauer, and to another class of commentators different from either, who, like our Bishop Davenant, have sought and found in this Epistle the confutation of different Romish errors of doctrine and practice. Those who endeavor to apply the Apostle’s teaching to his own times, are on the whole, I think, the safer, though they may be the drier guides. Yet it is impossible not to recognize a freshness and vitality in the others which seem to prove them right even when history would lead us to think them wrong. We only begin to distrust their suggestions when we find that they tie the words of Scripture to a particular case, and hinder us from applying it to other cases in which we are, in our own day, perhaps more profoundly interested. By fairly taking the Epistle to mean what it says—not reading into it the information which we derive from later sources, and yet profiting by all the experience we possess in judging of the habits and tendencies which are likely to appear in persons and societies, and to be called forth by similar circumstances,—we may, I suspect, discover in the Church at Colosse, modes of thinking and acting which will help us to understand the conditions of the Church in the second century, as well as in the middle ages, and yet which may, in some respects, have a more remarkable bearing upon our own time than either upon the one or the other. Above all, I think we shall be convinced of the thoroughly genuine and Pauline character of the Epistle; of its perfect harmony with those which we have considered already; of its possessing those distinct and local signs which we have never yet found wanting in any of the apostolical letters, and the absence of which would almost as much oblige us to reject it as the most flagrant contradictions of other parts of the New Testament.
The sophist must certainly have been a very skilful man who could contrive to throw into his imitation of St. Paul,—not his forms of speech, not the introductions to his letters, not allusions to this or that person,—but the very mind and heart of the Apostle, his passionate vehemence, the involutions of his periods, proceeding from the multitude and variety of his thoughts, along with an order and coherency which makes itself manifest, not in spite of that involution, but by means of it. His ingenuity is still more remarkable, because he does not take the outside of the Apostle’s mind and writings as the subject for his copy. He does not introduce phrases about justification, by which systematizers in that day, or later days, would have identified St. Paul, and convinced themselves that the document which contained them could have come from no other hand. But he at once seizes, with an intuition which does not usually belong to a thoroughly dishonest man, or to one who is interpolating for a purpose, that which we have discovered to be the very characteristic principle of the Apostle in all his letters, that which he enunciates in the letter to the Galatians, as the explanation of his conversion and of his mission to the Gentiles. “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me that I might preach Him among the Gentiles:”—these words have been the key-note to his other epistles. There is none, to the different parts of which they give more sense and unity than to that which we are now considering.
The passages down to the fourteenth verse of the first chapter remind us of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The tone of thought and language is so like that a careless reader might easily suppose that he was merely about to hear a repetition of the lessons which he had been learning there. But if he reads the passage again, he will perceive omissions in it, which will at once convince him that the object is different. There are the same thanksgivings to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for faith and love of the infant Church, for the hope that is laid up for them in the heavens; the same acknowledgment of the fruitful and life-giving power which dwells in the word of the truth of the Gospel, the power which had proved its reality in others and in them; the same prayer for them, that they might be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that they might bring forth the fruit of good works, that they might grow in the knowledge of God, that they might have inward might for endurance and long-suffering, that they might give thanks to the Father, who had called them and fitted them for the inheritance of the saints in light, who had delivered them out of the power of darkness, and translated them into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom they had their redemption, the forgiveness of sins. But that which constituted the peculiarity of the Epistle to the Ephesians, its beginning from the blessings which God had bestowed on them in Christ before the foundation of the world, is not to be met with here. And, as that commencement gave the character and tone to the whole epistle, we should commit the greatest possible mistake if we confounded this with it, because there were thoughts in the Apostle’s mind which belonged as much to the condition of one Church as of the other.
The passage which follows brings us, I think, into the heart of this epistle, to the very subject of it, “Who is the image of the God, the unseen God: First-born of all creation. Because in Him were created all things in the heavens and upon the earth; the things seen and the things unseen, whether thrones, or lordships, or principalities, or powers; all things through Him and with a view to him were created. And He is before all, and all things in Him consist. And He is the head of the body, the original, first-begotten out of the dead, that He might become in all things Himself the first (or forerunner). Because in Him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things unto Him, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, being heretofore alienated and enemies in mind by evil works, yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and blameless and unreproved, if at least ye remain in the faith grounded and settled, and are not moved away from the hope of the Gospel which ye have heard, that which has been preached in all the creation which is under the heaven, of which I Paul have become the minister.”
This passage arises most naturally out of that which has preceded it. There is no break in the sense. The first clause which I have quoted belongs to a previous sentence. And if we attend to the phraseology we shall perceive that all has been moving onward to this declaration of Christ as the image of God, the ground and pattern of the visible and invisible creation, the Head of all powers and governments in the unseen world, the pattern in death as well as in life, the beginning of the old creation and the new, the Head of the Church; its Head, because the whole Divine fulness was actually gathered up in Him; its Head, because He has brought about an actual re-union and reconciliation of the torn fragments of humanity in Himself, and has enabled all particular men—such as the Colossians who had been severed from God by the evil which was in them—to resume their own proper place in God’s order and universe.
But why does he dwell so emphatically upon the unseen God, and upon the things seen and unseen? Why is there such an accumulation of phrases to denote spiritual or angelical powers? Why does he so laboriously connect earth with heaven, the Church on earth, the local Church of the Colossians, the very men to whom he is writing, with the divine Cosmos, which includes so much more than the cosmos which physical science treats of? Why, but because there had arisen in the minds of the members of this particular Church questionings about the relation of the seen to the unseen, doubts whether the invisible God might not be manifesting Himself through a number of different subordinate agencies and ministries to man, doubts whether there was any one Person to whom they were all subjected, any one in whom God had fully revealed Himself, any one in whom man could meet Him and claim fellowship with him, any one in whom the different cycles of the world’s history, as well as the different orders of creation, could really find their common end and interpretation, to whom they could all be referred. It was the very Gospel of which Paul had been made the minister, that such a person, such a centre, such a reconciler, had been revealed. It was the most natural of all doubts to ask whether this news could be true, the most comprehensive of all denials to say that it was false. All idolatry, just so far as it was idolatry,—just so far as it was the assertion of a multitude of centres, not of one great divine and human centre,—was contending with this belief. Each particular form of that idolatry was the resisting power in some particular direction to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, because it was that which kept a certain set of men, with certain traditions, apart from other men. Judaism in like manner, when it set itself up as an exclusive religion, was of course at war with St. Paul’s assertion. It put itself upon the Ethnic ground, while he maintained that the Jew was called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. But was it not quite certain that as other tendencies of Heathenism and Judaism re-appeared in the Christian Church, and received a new character and impression from its doctrine, this, which was the characteristic and common denial of both, would in some form or other re-appear also? What the forms would be, a wise man might possibly guess, but could not predict. He would be nearly sure that the old idolatries must come forth in a more spiritualized character, that vulgar sensual forms would be translated into abstract forms and essences, that a number of half-gods and secondary principles would be interposed between the creature and the Creator. He might have been convinced that Jews and Gentiles would each contribute their aid in framing a new demonology, that the material and the spiritual would be curiously and strangely combined in it, that the different dogmas of Heathen mythology and philosophy would assert their predominance in the Churches of the lands with which they had had in past times most affinity. But with these and a multitude of more remote combinations and results, the teacher of the first age had no need directly to meddle. He did a much mightier service to the world if he pointed out the root of these tendencies, the mode in which they would try to fashion the new revelation into their likeness, and make it testify in their favor—above all, the only cure for them.
This cure lies first in that full declaration of Christ as the one centre of humanity, and the one manifestation of God which we have heard already, a Gospel not to be argued for or proved otherwise than as it proved itself by meeting and reconciling those partial theories which were set up in opposition to it, as well as those intuitions and anticipations of the human spirit to each of which one of these theories had corresponded. Secondly, it consisted in the special application of this Gospel to the inferences which doctors or disciples had drawn from these theories, and to the practices which they had founded upon them; in showing that if accomplished what they were awkwardly and unsatisfactorily attempting.
One of the first inferences from the belief that wonderful mysteries concerning the invisible world had been discovered to men by Christ’s appearance among them, when it was not accompanied with that full belief respecting His person and His reconciliation to which the Apostle urged them, was that they had something to do in order to complete that which He had left undone. He had gone through great tribulations and sufferings for the world, no doubt. They must go through tribulations and sufferings in order that they might attain the spiritual blessings, that they might be inheritors of the spiritual kingdom, which He had prepared for them. We need not stop to speak of the different perplexities which this opinion has caused in different ages of the Church. The student of ecclesiastical history finds them re-appearing at every step. But was there no truth in this doctrine which needed to be disengaged from some of its perilous adjuncts? Had not St. Paul said, that through much tribulation we must enter into the kingdom of God? What was the meaning of the sufferings which he was himself called to undergo? He meets the question at once: “I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I am filling up that which was lacking in the tribulations of Christ in my flesh for His body, which is the Church.” Every one feels what bold language this is; how easily it may be quoted for the support of some of the greatest and most dangerous superstitions; in denial of Christ’s finished sacrifice. But if the great object of the Apostle in the epistle where these words occur, is to declare the completeness and all-sufficiency of Christ against those who were setting Him aside and trying to bring in certain acts or exercises of their own, as a means of attaining heights of knowledge or excellence to which He had not brought them, we have a right to assume that these words, like all which accompany them, are used for the correction of that error. And they do I conceive correct it most effectually and in the most practical manner. For if we suppose the Apostle to mean by the sufferings of Christ, those which He endured upon the cross,—even, I say, if this should be the meaning (though it certainly does not seem to me the most simple or natural meaning), the words, “For His body’s sake which is the Church,” would at once strike at the root of the notion, that he was enduring tribulations in order to procure some higher rewards for himself. He could only say in that case, that he was entering into the meaning and mystery of his Master’s sufferings; that, as He gave up Himself for the Church, that he might sanctify it and present it pure and glorious, so the Apostle was permitted to suffer in his slight measure and degree, in the same spirit and for the same end, an end most contrary to that which the Colossians dreamt of when they thought of supplying the deficiencies of Christ’s work. But if we read the words, “the sufferings and tribulations of the Christ in my flesh,” we get a sense which I believe is more in accordance with the whole passage; which avoids the possible misconstruction that there might be in the other; which equally justifies the truth that was latent in the error of the Colossians; which even more effectually confounds their error. He does not claim even the sufferings as his own. They are the sufferings of the Christ in him,—the pain and sorrow which he must go on feeling in His servant, as He felt them upon earth in that flesh which He took, from the strifes and contradictions of the world which He came to redeem, from that struggle with the powers of evil in which He and all His disciples were engaged. And this conflict of the Christ within him, was “for the sake of His Body the Church of which I have been made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which has been given me to fulfil the word of God,—the mystery which has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but has now been manifested to His saints; to whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery in the Gentiles, which is Christ in you the hope of glory; whom we proclaim, warning every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ. For which end also I am laboring, striving according to His energy that is energizing in me mightily.”
I think that this passage confirms the view which I have taken of the other, though that is a very small part of its value and meaning. Nearly every word points at one of those habits of mind to which the Colossians were liable, yet, without rudely attacking it, nay, while vindicating it and giving it its proper direction. The teachers who had appeared in Colosse must have spoken much of an unfathomable mystery or abyss, of a divine fulness, out of which a number of partial illuminations and manifestations had proceeded, of a perfectness or thorough initiation, which belonged to certain men who had purified themselves from the sensuality of the crowd, and had risen above the childish wisdom of the novitiate. Each of these thoughts, though pregnant with so much of Pantheism, of vagueness, of self-glorification, the Apostle appropriates and redeems. There is a mystery which was hid from ages and generations. But it has now been made manifest. He is sent forth to declare it in its fulness. He is to counsel and teach every man, that he may present every man perfect and thoroughly initiated in Christ Jesus. How can that be possible? how can the wise and the foolish be so levelled? Because the mystery which he has found in himself, which he is to declare to them, was “Christ in them the hope of glory.” As it was Christ in Paul who was suffering and striving for the Church—the object of his instruction, of his suffering, of his Gospel, was to make each Gentile, each man, know that Christ was in him, the very Christ who was in his brother; therefore, that he was not to exalt himself above his brother, was not to dream of high mystical flights and raptures by which he might scale heaven, but in toiling, suffering, teaching was to enter into the loving mind of his Lord.
In the next paragraph, which forms the beginning of our second chapter, other expressions occur which more obviously, though not more really, belong to the Gnostical temperament, than those of which I have already spoken. Spiritual understanding, wisdom, knowledge, perception of mysteries, were the privileges which the Colossians had learnt to think the highest of all. Each teacher would be great in proportion as he could make pretension to these. They would be spoken of as the rewards of mortification of the flesh. The spiritual, initiated man might hope to converse with angels, to be admitted into intuitions of the most secret and divine treasures. Above all, the philosophized Jewish Christian, fresh from the school of Alexandria, would speak of his great advantages in this respect,—how his circumcision was the divine and appointed instrument of bringing him out of his fleshly nature into spiritual apprehensions. He would tell the Gentile that baptism might serve him as a purification from outward defilements, and an induction into some of the lower heights of knowledge and spirituality. We may easily believe that there were also Gentile teachers who believed that baptism was the beginning of a system of purification, by which they might hope to attain a vision as clear as any child of Abraham. There can be no reason to doubt that the one dwelt on the circumcision of Christ, the other on His baptism, and that they attached a mystical signification to both, fixing upon them, probably, as great crises in His life, when the divine became more entirely blended in Him with the human, or when the spiritual nature actually displaced and expelled the earthly.
If we read the next chapter of the Epistle with even these rude hints in our minds, we may understand better the emphasis with which St. Paul dwells on his prayer, that their hearts may be comforted, being knit together in love, into all the riches of the full assurance of understanding: so intimating that only while working together as members of a body in the power of love could they attain those intellectual gifts which were the excuses for their self-exaltation. We can see why he desires for them the acknowledgment of the mystery of the Christ of God, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden, those treasures which they were fancying they could grasp at by their high thoughts and exercises. As usual, he does not speak of the disturbers who had come into the Church till he had spoken first of its order and its constitution in Christ. This he can behold and rejoice in, though he has never seen them with his bodily eyes. He does not wish to make them something different from what they are, but to have them rooted and built up in Christ, strengthened in the faith, abounding in thanksgiving for the inheritance upon which they had entered. Certain plausible men, with plausible speeches, were bidding them seek, as if it were far off, that blessing which had been brought nigh to them, that state in which they were living and moving and having their being. They were told that certain philosophical speculations, or the following of certain human traditions, or the practice of certain external rites, might by degrees bring them into the fulness of the Godhead. But all that fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Christ, and they had that fulness in Him, and they were partakers of His circumcision, a circumcision made without hands; and they had put off the body of the flesh in Him, they had been buried with Him in baptism; they had been raised up together in Him through the faith of the energy of God who had raised Him from the dead. Thus the completeness of Christ’s revelation, and work, and the complete redemption and constitution of their society in Him, became the great apostolical witnesses against the Gnostical tendency, and against the outward machinery of which it was availing itself. God had already brought them into the state into which they were trying to climb. The knowledge which they wanted was the knowledge of that state. They had the circumcision of Christ; let them claim their deliverance from fleshly lusts which he had won for them. They had the baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection; let them act as if they were dead with Him and risen with Him.
“For,” he goes on, “you being dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He hath quickened together with Him, having forgiven us all transgressions, having wiped out the handwriting that was against us in decrees, which was contrary to us, and He took it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” This language is not new to us. In one respect or another it has been brought before us in every epistle. But here it has a peculiar application. The want of the belief that their transgressions were pardoned, the belief that they were still under institutions which were to effect this pardon for them, not under institutions which were witnesses that they had received it, was a perpetual excuse for all Gnostical speculations, for all Gnostical asceticism. To say then that Christ had nailed these decrees as well as their sins to His cross, that in that cross the reconciliation of the Godhead with man was satisfactory and effectual, was to strike at the root of the new teaching, to kill it utterly. Still it was necessary to go into the particulars, that they might understand how the Apostle’s doctrine met their case. When he speaks of Christ as having spoiled the principalities and the powers, of His displaying them openly, of His triumphing over them, we are at once led into the heart of those aspirations after acquaintance with intermediate powers and agencies which were another symptom of this Church’s distemper. What need had they of such aspirations if the Lord who had taken their flesh was higher than all these, if he had proved His dominion over them? But along with these aspirations came minute and wearisome prescriptions about meat and drink, about feasts and new moons and sabbaths; all which were an excuse for hard judgments and for lordship and tyranny in particular teachers. With this came a mock humility, and the service of demons and angels, and a pompous contempt of visible things, and an inflation supposed to be spiritual but really proceeding from the mind of the flesh. Let them understand that shadows had passed away, and that a substance had succeeded them. Let them know that they were not to look up to angels, but to hold to the Head of angels, to Him in whom the whole body was knit together in joints and bands, by whom it was supplied with continual nourishment so as to be capable of a perpetual and divine growth. They were dead with Christ from the elements of the world. Why then did they act as if they were still living under its rules? why did they lay down rules for each other against touching and tasting and handling? These things belonged to the earthly and the perishable; they belonged to human commands and maxims. They had an appearance of wisdom. Will-worship, mock-humiliation, contempt of the body, were all plausible promising methods of attaining higher ends. But they had no real worth, they were suggested by the flesh, and they did not satisfy the flesh.
In the following chapter, St. Paul still adheres to the mode of thinking, and in a degree to the phraseology, of those against whom he is warning the Colossians. The new teachers would have continually exhorted them to raise their minds to the things on high, not to dwell in the things that are upon the earth. They would have bid them put to death their members that were directed to the things upon the earth,—all their earthly and fleshly appetites. St. Paul makes no dishonest appropriation of their phrases, while he turns them to another use. He extracts the true and living sense out of them, he shows how the result which they were setting before themselves could not be obtained by their means; he shows what a much higher result might be attained by the faith which they were setting at nought and denying. They were to seek the things that were above, because they had been raised up with Christ, and because He was sitting at the right hand of God. They were to think of the things that were above, not of those upon the earth, because they were dead, and their life was hid with Christ in God, and because when Christ their life was manifested, then would they be manifested with Him in glory. On the other hand, the members which they were to put to death were not their bodies, but the things which were destroying their bodies as much as their spirits; fornication, uncleanness, grovelling passions, evil concupiscence and the covetousness which is idolatry, for which things’ sake, he tells them as he told the Ephesians, comes the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience, in which things they walked while they lived in them. But now they had put off these, anger, wrath, malice, evil speaking, filthy communication out of their mouth. We see how much the Apostle rises above the Gnostical doctors in his estimate of what men redeemed by Christ and united to him may attain; not certain visions or glimpses of a spiritual world, not converse with æons or archangels, but the very knowledge and nature of God Himself. We see how much he dives below the depths of the Gnostical teachers when he speaks of the vices from which men are to be delivered; how he strikes at the root while they were playing on the surface. And yet he is the plain practical man, they are the speculators. It is common homely morality to which he is leading his disciples, a morality which the others very commonly despised and only seldom attained. The Apostle uses the broad rude language, “Do not lie one to another,” knowing perfectly well that the members of the Christian Church in that day, as in all subsequent days, were exceedingly apt to lie, and that high notions of their own spirituality were no protection against that infirmity. The protection against it was just that which he had been setting before them throughout his letter; “Lie not one to another; having stripped off from yourselves the old man with his deeds, and having clothed yourself with the new man, him that is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him, where there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ all and in all.”
I do not know whether there is a nobler passage in all St. Paul’s epistles than this, one that proves more clearly how the plainest law of individual morality is involved with the great principle of human brotherhood, or how that is grounded upon the divine and glorified humanity of Christ. Nor is there a passage which, taken in connection with the one that follows, more clearly shows how needful it is that we should claim our rights as men that have been regenerated, in order that we may rise continually to newness of life. They had put on the new man, “therefore put on, as elect of God holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, gentleness, humility”—(that very humility which the Gnostical teachers were mimicking with their humble airs), “moderation, long-suffering—forbearing one another and forgiving one another, if any hath a complaint against any, as also the Lord hath forgiven you, And above all this clothing, that love which is the bond of perfection.” The last word shows us how thoroughly St. Paul recollects the business of his Epistle even when he is most carried away by his inspiration. How to make an initiated or perfect man who should be above all others, was the Gnostical problem; St. Paul solves it by saying, “the love which makes you submit to all others, which binds you to all others, is the secret of perfection.”
Upon this foundation he grounds here, as in the Epistle to the Ephesians, the whole edifice of social life of which the Gnostics took so little account. But first he begins with the spiritual life of which they did take account, and for the cultivation of which they had so many rules and contrivances. St. Paul has only a few, but they are very comprehensive. “You have been called in one body into the peace of Christ; let that rule in your hearts. Be thankful. Let Christ’s word dwell in you richly. Teach and exhort one another. Sing and make melody in your hearts to God. Whatever you do, do all in the name of Christ, thanking God and the Father in Him.” Instead of the self-exalting life, you have the life of men who are submitting themselves to a blessed power of good which is striving to bless them. Instead of the individual life you have the life of mutual instruction, edification, encouragement. Instead of the ambitious life of the would-be sage or saint, you have the musical life of the churchman who feels himself one of a family, who can do nothing but in the Name of Him who is the Head of it.
And then comes these vulgar outward family duties, so obstructive to all spiritual contemplation in the judgment of the Gnostic, such precious elements in the unselfish spiritual kingdom, according to St. Paul. They are not specially different from those we have gone through in the Epistle to the Ephesians; but they serve a different purpose here, like the exhortations to prayer for himself that God would open a door to him to speak the mystery of Christ, like all the special greetings from friends and to friends, like the greeting with his own hand and the prayer to remember his bonds, they are all testimonies that the highest and divinest faith is the least abstract, the most human and homely and personal.