Acts of the Apostles
ROMANS I. 1—4.
The passage: The gospel of God, promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, is about His Son Jesus Christ our Lord — descended from David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead.
Most readers notice how large a place the life and travels of St. Paul occupy in the Acts of the Apostles. They think this natural in a writer known as Paul’s companion, for whom the twelve so prominent in the Gospels might well shrink to nothing beside the teacher of the Gentiles with whom he lived and suffered. But some ask: does this weight given to a man whom our Lord did not mark out on earth as a herald of His kingdom contradict the book’s title and clash with the rest of the New Testament? Does it show that there was a separate Pauline element in the Church, at odds with the authority, if not the doctrine, of the older Apostles — so that later editors, or Luke’s own leaning toward compromise, brought in the earlier part of the book to soften the later? Such questions have occurred to readers in every age, and in our own day they have taken formal shape and deserve serious attention.
I think I have already partly dealt with these questions. I have plainly admitted the difference between St. Luke and St. Matthew as Evangelists and examined what it consists in, so far as comparing the two documents allows. The difference is not that Matthew affirms less clearly than Luke that Jesus is the Son of God and King of men. It is that one shows His Sonship chiefly in acknowledging a divine Father, the other in the gift of a divine Spirit to men; that one sees Christ’s kingdom as fulfilling a particular dispensation, the other as the form of a universal one. In Matthew a Hebrew character appears, with a human character shining through it; in Luke the aim is to present the Gospel-kingdom as the one originally designed for mankind. Yet we have also found Luke — not once, but continuously through his whole Gospel, and especially in the long series of discourses after the Transfiguration — tying every word about the future to Jerusalem, to Jesus’ claim to be King over that city, and to that claim’s rejection by its rulers.
If these points hold, and this was the steady tenor of Luke’s first treatise, then I find nothing out of place, no sign of patchwork, in what follows. The new treatise opens with the Ascension, which Luke seems to regard as the necessary sequel to the Resurrection and the proof of Christ’s claim to universal rule; its witnesses are the Apostles He chose; they complete the number He had fixed, answering to the twelve tribes; they are met at a great Jewish festival gathering men from across the Roman and Parthian empires; the Spirit’s descent is declared the witness of Jesus’ Sonship and kingdom, shown by enabling Galilæans to speak of God’s wonderful works so that each hearer understood in his native dialect. The society that held this early pledge of universality is yet confined for a time to the city of its birth, and proves its human character there by no one counting his goods his own; then it spreads. Circumstances apparently accidental lead to acts of discipline and fuller organization; a deacon discovers, even before an apostle, that the temple and the customs of Moses would not last forever, becomes the first martyr, and his death spreads the kingdom into Samaria and soon into Syria. A Hebrew of the Hebrews rages against the church for breaking the barrier between Jews and the outside world, then learns by revelation that he is a sinner as much as the Gentiles and that Gentiles share in Christ as he does; yet another apostle, not Luke’s friend and teacher, is the first to preach to the Gentiles, taught not to call common what God had cleansed. Saul spends a long time at Antioch — among Jews sprinkled with some Greeks, where believers first came to be called Christians — learning what his work was, until he is directly appointed to it. From then on the book’s main subject is how he declared a universal kingdom to Roman governors in Cyprus, to Lycaonian savages, to Asiatic Greeks, to Macedonians, to Athenian philosophers, to the worshippers of Aphrodite at Corinth and of Diana at Ephesus. It is filled out by his journey to Jerusalem to defend the Gentiles’ right to the new covenant without submitting to the old form, by another journey in which he declared Christ had sent him to the Gentiles and so drew on himself the zealots’ plot and the high priest’s condemnation, and by his examinations before Gentile governors until he came a prisoner to the capital of the world.
I cannot imagine a more orderly and coherent history, one whose every part is explained more naturally by the governing idea we have traced in the writer’s mind. I have not denied but eagerly asserted that his being Paul’s companion fitted him to write it. Only I cannot find that his personal friendship drew him one step from his purpose. If he meant to describe how a human kingdom, lying hidden at the root of the Jewish kingdom, unfolded by God’s will through human agents and against human opposition — how men were prepared to help establish it by divine arrangements they could not control and barely understood — this is just the narrative we should expect: one that gives no honor to individual men, that shows their errors and weaknesses, and that shows how mighty they became when they confessed a calling and were content to fulfil it.
I readily admit that the name “Acts of the Apostles” describes the book poorly. If we look for biographies of the eleven whom Luke, as much as any Evangelist, says our Lord called to sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes, we are wholly disappointed. For the countries they traveled to, how they preached, and how they died, we must rely on vague church tradition; the Scriptural historian is silent. He says little even of those our Lord most favored. Andrew appears only in the list in the first chapter. The martyrdom of James the brother of John gets a single sentence. The beloved disciple is mentioned only with Peter healing the impotent man, once before the Sanhedrim, and once in Samaria.
These omissions are, I think, the clearest possible proof of a purpose that never for a moment aims to satisfy a reader’s curiosity. Whatever concerns the growth of the universal society out of the Jewish one is noted carefully and minutely. Human agents’ works are mentioned only so far as they illustrate this subject. The highest honor an apostle could receive was to be shown as living and dying only for the kingdom of God, caring nothing whether his name was written in brass or wholly forgotten, provided he did his given work.
This second treatise of Luke is invaluable as an introduction to the Epistles — not because it supplies life-details we could not gather from the writers themselves (their letters are their best biographies), but because it removes an impression about them that we fall into naturally and that badly darkens their meaning. We assume they are meant to set out the Christian religion, and by that we usually mean a doctrine about the state after death and how a man may secure a blessed one for himself. Assuming this is the great subject of the Epistles, we ask earnestly why documents meant to guide our thought and conduct present views so different — how one apostle can say faith saves and another ask, “Can faith save?” These words seem to baffle us on the very point we most want clarity about. A man possessed by the one truth, feeling it the staff of his life and the Church’s ground, indignantly rejects the other, and no canonical authority reconciles him to it. Milder men feel there is truth in both and cannot cast either away, though only at certain seasons do the ingenious explanations of divines really take hold of them. Bolder thinkers in a critical age readily accept the simpler solution: that men who said such different things were heads of opposing schools or factions, each holding its own theory of how the rewards of a future life were to be secured.
Now, without weighing these suggestions yet, we must say that if we take Luke’s plain words for our guide — still more the whole context of his history — we shall not accept the popular account as fairly stating what any of these apostles thought of his divine office. The book we call the Acts, as far as we have considered it, is the history of a kingdom actually set up in this world — not confined to it, of course, but by its very nature joining the visible to the invisible, the temporary to the eternal, the earthly to the heavenly, the human to the divine — yet no more about the future than about the present. Every apostle’s preaching, as Luke reports it, points the same way. When Peter speaks on the day of Pentecost, he declares that Jesus, whom the rulers had crucified, was both Lord and Christ, risen from the dead because death could not hold Him; and those pricked to the heart were not told of some distant punishment or bliss, but to repent and be baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost, and to save themselves from that untoward generation. So too, addressing those amazed at the healing of the lame man, Peter says all the prophets foretold these days, that God is fulfilling the covenant with Abraham that in him all families of the earth should be blessed, and that God raised up His Son Jesus to bless them by turning each of them from his sins — a present blessing, an immediate deliverance, with future ones spoken of only as flowing from this. The joy and singleness of heart of the first community at Jerusalem sprang, on Luke’s account, from feeling they were now brothers of one another and of a common Lord, not from dreams about another world. Their thanksgiving when the house was shaken sprang from their conviction that Jesus was the King David spoke of, against whom the Gentiles raged in vain, and whose kingdom they were to attest by acts and words of healing — the language of joy in a deliverance already accomplished, not of some good hoped for or evil to be escaped after death. Stephen, his face shining like an angel’s, might be expected to dwell on what awaited him, but his defence is a history of God’s kingdom gradually shown on earth and his countrymen’s resistance to it; and the sight that cheers him before he sleeps is of Christ standing at God’s right hand, a Conqueror and King. The great joy Philip brings the Samaritans is not by telling what shall be, but by preaching Christ who now gives the Spirit whose power the enchanter tried to imitate and would gladly have bought. The revelation to Paul — who had cried, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” and who in Gamaliel’s school may have wrestled with questions of a world to come — was not of a way to better his state hereafter, but of Jesus the deliverer from present sin and an evil conscience, who had brought reconciliation to Gentile as well as Jew. So when he speaks most solemnly in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia, warning that despisers may wonder and perish, his message is that a work has been done in these days which they would not believe, that God has fulfilled to their children the promise made to the fathers — Jesus raised from the dead not, as we might expect, to prove that they will rise, but to prove He is the only-begotten Son to whom the sure mercies of David are given. To the Lycaonians Paul speaks not of future rewards or punishments but of the God who made the world, has done them good, and now bids them turn from their vanities to serve Him. To the Athenians he speaks of a God in whom they are now living, moving, and being, whose offspring men are, who has overlooked their ignorance but now calls all men to repent. He does add that God has appointed a day to judge the world by the Man He has ordained, assured by raising Him from the dead — a clear claim that a judgment is coming on the earth to which all men, wise and unwise, worshippers of known and unknown gods, are subject. But this is not the kind of information about the future that those bred on Tartarus and Elysium, eager for any new doctrine of either, would have expected. A present God, a present King, a present Judge, was his message here and everywhere.
If you keep this in mind, you will be ready to read the apostles’ letters and find that in them, as in their preaching, the doctrine concerns an actual kingdom that men are invited to join or already belong to. If so, we ought to understand each writer’s position within this kingdom; that may clear away perplexities and contradictions we have tried in vain to remove by other means. Besides the Evangelists, there are, so far as we know, only five contributors to the New Testament canon: St. James the less, his brother St. Jude, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. I take them in that order. I put James first because it is plain, from the 15th and 21st chapters of the Acts, that he held the place all antiquity assigns him: whether because the other Apostles had left Jerusalem or for some cause unknown to us, he became overseer of the Mother-Church of the world. I turn at once to ask what aspect of the Gospel his Epistle shows us.
St. James
I think it has been shown clearly that this Epistle was not written to soften or counter any hard sayings in Paul’s letters: the two were aimed at quite different people, those who read one in the first century were unlikely to read the other, and James’s was probably written earlier. But this does not prove there is no great difference between the mind and aims of the two Apostles. The difference shows on the surface of their letters, and we grasp it better the deeper we go. The question is whether this difference affects the unity of the New Testament books in their witness to Christ and His Church. Is James in his Epistle not speaking of a Son of God? Is that not the leading idea he is bringing out?
James calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ. The name occurs only two or three times in the letter—one of its most remarkable features. He writes to the twelve tribes; whatever we say today about lost ten tribes and restored two, he recognizes no such distinction. He treats the Jewish nation as a whole, as it was first constituted in Jacob’s descendants. But why, you may ask, does this Christian address a nation most of which had rejected Jesus as king? I can only take his words as I find them: he writes to the twelve tribes, and confesses himself the servant of Jesus Christ. That is the fact, whether I understand it or not. Yet I could not understand him taking any other course. He felt his belief in Jesus Christ was the sign of his being a true Israelite; that belief let him appreciate his own position. He wanted his brethren to understand and appreciate theirs—to feel themselves truly twelve tribes, a united nation, and to know how and why they were so. So far from making them careless of their privileges, he wanted them more alive to them.
Do I suppose he was addressing only those not baptized into the holy Name, who did not confess Jesus as the Christ? No. He could not exclude Jewish believers from the twelve tribes even had he wished; they gloried in their national position, and he had taught them to prize it. He could make the best use of their claim to the privileges of the Old Covenant, using it to instruct them in the nature of the new.
He evidently assumes those he addresses were passing, or likely to pass, through great afflictions—which does not limit the letter to converts. Converts often suffered from their countrymen, but no worse than the whole body of Israelites underwent throughout the empire in the quarter century before the city’s destruction. James addresses these sufferers in paradoxical language: “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” Our translators chose the right word, though often censured for not preferring another; James’s meaning is lost if we suppose the trials were not temptations. Those in them would be tempted to distrust God, to think He had deserted them. Precisely because they would be so tempted, their state was good for them: if an enemy was turning their circumstances to ruin their faith, a friend was using them to awaken it. God, ordering all things for them, was not tempting them to evil—let no one imagine that. He was cultivating their trust and patience. Their own lusts drew them aside; but every good and perfect gift came down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning.
Here begins James’s message to the twelve tribes: the God of Abraham, their fathers’ God, is the source of perfect unmixed good. No evil comes from Him. Every circumstance is to be welcomed as His instrument of good. They are yielding to something opposite to Him if anything leads them wrong. No lesson was more needed by a Jew of that time. If he believed in Jesus, he needed this truth as the only foundation his belief could rest on. If he did not believe, the truth stood, and to acknowledge it was the first step toward confessing Jesus as the Christ.
James continues: “Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures.” Everything is traced to God’s will as the ground of their calling: they had not chosen themselves; He had chosen them. Any Jew who knew his Scriptures would recognize this as the source of their covenant and history, and a believing Jew was bound to refer every privilege to it still more thankfully. But what of the next word—He begat us? The idea of paternity enters here. A believer who understood his baptism would say at once: we have not merely a servant’s calling but the adoption of children. Yet a reader of Isaiah or Malachi would not stumble at such language—“I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me”; “Have we not all one Father?” How can we claim the I AM, in whose sight the angels are not pure, as our Father? That is the question James would have wished to stir in readers of the prophets; and equally he would have wished Church members to feel they had not gained some special privilege for the first time by a new magical operation, but that their highest privilege was to know fully the relation God had gradually revealed to their fathers.
James adds that they were “begotten by the word of truth.” I do not insist this be read as an Alexandrian Jew would, by the great passage in Proverbs chapter 8; I do not insist that the word of truth must mean a person. James may not have meant his own language to raise that question directly—the Old Testament had already raised it. The Jews were full of conscious questioning whether the Word or Wisdom who was with the Lord, whose delights had been with the sons of men, must not be a living bond between men and God, the channel of all spiritual communication. Even in its lowest sense the phrase meant to every Jew that the unseen God, whom he might picture in no image, had held converse with his mind and heart. Whatever more it means, it means nothing less than that God, by communicating with His creature, had brought him out of natural darkness and the worship of visible things into spiritual guidance. The Israelite’s circumcision, his separation from surrounding nations, signified this, and lawgivers and prophets kept explaining it as its intent. It was most needful that the believer in Jesus should not imagine his privilege was different, an outward economy rather than an inward government. James also reminds the Jew that, rightly understood, his privilege made him only a kind of first-fruits of God’s creatures. The covenant to Abraham could not be fulfilled unless in him and his seed all the families of the earth were blessed. What hint could be more valuable to a converted Jew than that his little sect of Nazarenes was only the first-fruits of a vast coming harvest?
Here, as I see it, is the great principle of James’s Epistle, from which all his exhortations and warnings follow. It is a Jewish principle, as I have tried to show—but is it any less an evangelical one? Would James have been a more spiritual teacher had he kept repeating the name Jesus Christ instead of leading his countrymen to study the very nature of His government? Had he taken that course, which his modern critics think most apostolical, I think he would have proved his grasp of the Gospel was more nominal than real. I do not mean the name Jesus Christ lacks precious significance and reality, or that there were not teachers—some carelessly grouped with James—whose special office was to bring out that Name in its fulness, presenting the acts of the Man Christ Jesus as objects of faith, uniting His work on earth to His work in heaven. But their task would have been inadequately done without a James to display first and foremost Him whose mind the divine word uttered, so that Jews might ask how all their old covenant’s prophecies—that God would one day prove Himself their Father—could actually be fulfilled.
Does the apparent confusion of two classes of Jews, so utterly different in feeling and habit, seem strange to today’s reader? I dare say it does, and I do not wonder. But I ask him first to consider whether I am putting this into the letter, or whether its superscription and much of its character do not compel this reading. Next, whether each class did not learn something it much needed through this apparent confusion. Lastly, whether the passages that clearly point to the believer in Jesus are not warnings against evils the Church was inheriting from the Jew—evils it was in danger of preserving and passing on, most criminal in the Church because they were especially treasons against the Man of Sorrows.
Consider these questions. James says that, since God had begotten them by the Word of truth, they should be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, and receive with meekness the engrafted Word able to save their souls; but they must be doers, not hearers only. A mere hearer is like a man who sees the form of his creation in a mirror, then goes away and forgets what manner of man he is. All this flows from the truth that a divine Lord and Teacher was near, whose voice they were drowning with their own words and passions, who was ready to implant the seed of a new life, after whose image they were formed, and by obeying whose commands they proved their kinship with Him and His authority. Every Jew instructed in the law, who entered into the Psalms and Prophets, acknowledged such an invisible government. This prepared them to acknowledge the divine Teacher who spoke with human lips yet directly to the inner mind. And a believer in Jesus could little understand his position if he merely confessed a teacher born at Bethlehem and dead on Calvary, and did not own Him as the secret ruler of his heart.
Being convinced the believer in Jesus was the true Jew, James practised all the religious observances his position in Jerusalem allowed. The Acts and the passages in Josephus leave no doubt he was, in the Jewish sense, the most religious man of the city. Yet here he says that if a man seems religious but does not bridle his tongue, his religion is vain, and that pure and undefiled religion before God is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Believing or unbelieving Jews could scarcely receive a more remarkable testimony from such a source. The unbelieving, tempted always to make devotion consist of observances, were told those observances themselves meant there was an invisible Ruler conversing with and governing the heart. The others, inclined to use their descent from Abraham as a reason for separating from Gentile brethren, were led straight to the inward principle and practical result that alone gave their privileges value.
Then comes a passage that directly mentions the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. What prompts this apparent departure? This faith, he says, is not to be held with respect of persons. If a man came into their assembly with a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby dress, and they honoured the well-dressed man—“Sit here in a good place”—and told the poor man, “Stand there, or sit under my footstool,” would they not be partial and judges of evil thoughts? Such things had happened in Christian assemblies, and had drawn the notice and contempt of unbelieving onlookers—themselves great worshippers of Mammon—who saw the contradiction at once among the Nazarenes. James admits and proclaims the contradiction for both classes. He grants it is far grosser in those who confess Him who was called the Carpenter’s Son, who took the form of a servant, than in anyone else. So he shows by a new argument how Jesus fulfilled the law. Why should believers not treat any poor man as beneath them? Because Christ came to embody, and to let them embody, the royal law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” A royal law indeed—the law in the king’s own heart—which, if they would not obey, left them under another law, one that must be kept at every point, a law of slavery; whereas they might obey the law of liberty, by which they would be judged, if they did not prefer the other. What a fine way of teaching a Jew the meaning of his own Deuteronomy—and how the Christian’s sin becomes a lesson on how the Jew needed Christ, that the law might not be destroyed but fulfilled.
The famous argument about faith and works follows naturally. “What doth it profit though a man say he hath faith and have not works? can faith save him?” We think this a Christian temptation; it was emphatically a Jewish one too. James’s example makes it clear: “Thou believest there is one God”—thou thinkest thyself unlike other men, worshipping no idols. Excellent. But the devils also believe and tremble. Faith in a God who tempts us for our good, from whom comes every good gift, who begat us of His own will—that James had put forward as the pillar of life: trust in a living Being who would work in them to do right. But faith merely that there is one God, or that there is a Christ, or that Jesus is the Christ—faith not in a living Being but about one—could that save anyone, raise him from sin, make him better? No; like the devils he would believe and tremble, utterly separated from the Being he confessed, receiving no energy from Him. Abraham believed God—not merely that there is one God—and so offered Isaac, because God worked with him, and by works his faith was made perfect. As the body without breath is dead, needing a quickening influence to move, so faith that does not attach to a living person and receive a vital breath from Him is dead. Faith, in James’s view, is not itself the quickening principle; that must be what responds to faith—God’s power working in the man who trusts Him.
The next passage, on governing the tongue, agrees with all this. “What an unevangelical subject for an Apostle,” some Pauline partisan says with lips or heart. Yes—if the dominion over the inner man, the government of heart and will that James connects with governing the tongue, belongs to mere legal doctrine, then James is essentially legal. But to some, light on this subject seems most spiritual, taking them out of the circle of laws that merely restrain conduct and carrying them to the springs of all divine life. Here especially James sets forth the law of social life, whether in nation or Church, under new economy or old. The same unbelief in God’s actual government of the inner man, the same bitter envying and strife of heart, was destroying Jerusalem and threatening the Christian community then and in all days. All good things come from above; but the craft that set them plotting against each other was not from above but earthly, sensual, devilish. Yet the other wisdom was given them, though they might pervert it—the wisdom first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.
This part ends with the law of peace, kept by obeying the divine Spirit of peace. The next opens: “From whence then come wars and fightings among you?” Surely from the lusts in your members warring against that Spirit of peace. Submission to Him is the secret of all quietness; resistance, of all discord within and without. All pride, self-glorying, and planning for the future spring from the same unwillingness to submit to the inner Ruler, the same unbelief that He is working in us to do right and withstand wrong.
The last passage, our fifth chapter, refers directly to a judgment the Apostle believed was approaching. The hour was coming when the proud rich man would answer for the labourer’s wages he had fraudulently kept back, when his gold and silver would be found cankered, and their rust would witness against the hoarders and eat their flesh like fire. To Mammon-worshipping Jews, whether professing faith in Jesus or rejecting Him, the words applied equally. James was no respecter of persons; he exempted neither them nor their heathen persecutors, but wished each to take the lesson home—and each could also strengthen himself with “Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.” If they acknowledged Christ come in the flesh, they could not rest until it was shown to all that He was the King. If they had not, but still looked for a great king and judge, let them wait—only asking whether any but such a judge as this, One who had cared and suffered for men, could be the deliverer they wanted, or one they could bear to look upon. The patience of Job, of the prophets, of all before them, was recorded for their encouragement. They might be patient as these were, checking restlessness and waiting for deliverance, and they would not be disappointed—deliverance was coming. But if they were weary, discontented, hopeless—Jews, Christians, why was that?
Such, I think, is the tenor of this Epistle, which some would have us believe was written to discourage faith and teach conformity to an outward law. It is, I take it, one of the most wonderful exhortations to trust in an inward spiritual teacher, law-giver, and life-giver. It is the Sermon on the Mount re-delivered after the Spirit had descended who could make men perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. Had its writer not acknowledged a Son of God and Son of Man who had set up His kingdom among men, his Epistle would be a string of incoherent sentences, useless for any moral purpose. That faith turns it into a living whole, one of the most practical discourses any age could meditate on.
St. Jude
We know almost nothing about St. Jude. He called himself the brother of James. Placed at the start of a short letter, that description shows he wanted to claim a bond with James that was more than mere kinship. In any case, he must have been writing to people who knew his name and held it in a reverence they felt for no other Apostle, perhaps for no other man. Although his opening address is general in form, and although his warnings belong to every age, we may fairly assume he meant them especially for the church at Jerusalem, and we must assume they applied to things he actually saw happening in his own time. Anyone who imagines that words so direct, personal, and terrible were merely composed in a study for the benefit of later generations, and were not meant to warn his own contemporaries of a coming judgment and a coming apostasy, has given up belief in the writer’s sincerity—and, I fear, in his own. But if that is so, and we do not intend to strike this letter from the canon (and it is hard to see why anyone would later forge a document so clearly tied to that time), then we must abandon any idea of the primitive Church’s purity that clashes with this: that the Church was shaken to its center by the upheavals before the fall of Jerusalem; that there was not merely decline but real apostasy in individuals and churches; and that the judgment on Jerusalem was an even sharper test for those who had received the Gospel than for those who had denied it. All our Lord’s words led us to expect this. If the plain language of the Epistle to the Hebrews means anything, it must have been so. St. Jude’s letter, coming from a source utterly unlike the one from which the Epistle to the Hebrews is thought to come, gives the clearest confirmation of all its warnings.