I have examined carefully two of Paul’s Epistles that even the school of Bauer admits are genuine. Different as they are in aim and occasion, I think we have found in both the marks of one common design. Neither is written to establish a formal doctrine of justification by faith. Both set forth Christ as the common foundation on which Jew and Gentile can stand, the bond of human society, the root of human righteousness. In examining the other ten Epistles for the same tokens I will be much less detailed, so that the purpose of these lectures is not lost in details, and so that I do not seem to offer a commentary rather than help you read the New Testament yourself.
The Second Epistle to the Corinthians is clearly connected to the First, yet the two are so different in character and subject that many regard the external links as the only proof they were sent to the same people. Still, few can miss that at least one thread from the first letter runs through the second: the question of the honor due to ministers of the Gospel, which arose there from the false honor the Corinthians paid them. In the second letter the subject becomes more personal, more bound up with the conflicts, griefs, ecstasies, and humiliations in the Apostle’s own mind; but it concerns the Corinthian Church, and the order of all Christian society, no less.
At the end of the last letter Paul had spoken of visiting Corinth. He had not done so. Some in the Church suspected he made such promises carelessly. He denies it: he had postponed the visit deliberately, not thoughtlessly, believing it better for them that he not come at once. He wanted them to use their own judgment about the man he had declared excommunicate, and did not wish to oppress that man or them by his presence. So he sent Titus instead. He was delighted by Titus’s news of how they received his letter, the impression it made, their zeal to clear themselves of the guilt he had said they shared. He thinks they have done all that was required in punishing the offender; now he is content, even eager, that they forgive him. Their forgiveness would be his, as their punishment had been his.
Paul dwells on this part of Titus’s report with his usual warmth, his satisfaction matching the severity of his earlier rebukes. Clearly Titus made other reports that pleased him less. With delicacy and courtesy, but some irony, Paul hints that the Corinthians had promised a collection for suffering members of other churches which they had not yet made; that the Macedonians, with less means and less pretension, had done more; and that it would be well for their honor, and his, if his boasting of them were not proved false.
It is also clear that the jealousies and suspicions against Paul, stirred up by rival parties, were not removed by his letter but took a new form because of it. “He can write powerfully at a distance,” his opponents said, “but how feeble he is among us.” The plainness of his Gospel, his refusal to dress it up for refined intellectual tastes, still gave offense. Many called him only half an apostle, without the outward marks a commission gives, without the credentials the men of the circumcision had, or the eloquence of Apollos. The old leaven was at work. False apostles, mere traders in a Gospel, who would have been second-rate sophists among the heathen, were building their own reputation by undermining Paul. Vanity, party-spirit, and self-exaltation were still painfully marked in the Church. Where these exist, however much genuine sorrow there may be over one offense, even real amendment, there cannot be the deep repentance that comes from knowing the evil each man carries in himself. The old sensual corruptions and intellectual conceits would show themselves again.
Given these outward circumstances, Paul, even without other motive, might naturally have discoursed on his own position and powers, or on the position and powers of an apostle in general. But something in himself compelled him more strongly to speak of this, and kept him from treating it in a dry, teaching manner. He says at the start of the letter—which more than usual guides all its contents—that he wants them to know the conflict that came upon him in Asia, how he was distressed beyond measure and despaired even of life. He rejoices in that conflict because it showed him the death that is in himself and the life that is in Christ; because it taught him to trust not himself but Him who raises the dead. He rejoices in it too because he believes the comfort he received will help others as well: as he shared their sorrows, they will share his thanksgiving.
This certainty—that what he suffered was for others, that he was entering into human grief and joy as Christ did—gives him a sense of his ministry that all his earlier experience had not. In the depths of his own being he had been learning what a Gospel of life he had to preach, and how close to every man lies the death from which it offers deliverance. It is awful to consider the power of his words, what mysteries he proclaims, and how the knowledge of them may harden the hearts it does not purify. The mere trader in the divine word has no sense of the fearfulness of this calling; but one determined to speak it sincerely as God’s message must feel his own insufficiency.
Even announcing this determination sounds almost like a boast, as if he wished to commend himself to the Corinthians. But that is not his meaning. He needs no letters of recommendation to them or from them. He wants his letters graved in their hearts, so that they themselves are his epistle. For this is the character of the New Testament ministry, and its contrast with the Old: it is written not on stone but in the heart. It does not stand outside a man as a ministry of law and terror, but comes to his very self as an effective ministry of righteousness. It is not God shown under a veil, but His unveiled face in Christ made manifest to the creature made in His image.
For this reason Paul tells the Corinthians who complained of his plainness that he is bound to speak with great simplicity. Those who upheld the Old Testament ministry against the New might clothe their speech in symbols, as Moses veiled his face. They could not see to the end of what was being abolished, for the veil was on their hearts—the Old Testament veil which is done away in Christ. When they turn to the Lord, the Ruler of their spirits, the veil is removed and they gain true spiritual liberty. Meanwhile we who have confessed Him, beholding the Lord’s glory with unveiled face, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Lord’s Spirit.
This fully explains what he said before. There must be no craft or trickery in handling God’s word. The New Testament minister must, by showing the truth plainly, commend himself to every man’s conscience in God’s sight. And if, for all our boldness, there is still a veil over the Gospel, the veil is not in it but in the hearts of those who do not believe, whose minds the god of this world has blinded, so that the light of the Gospel of Christ’s glory, who is the image of God, does not reach them. For we do not preach ourselves, but Him, who lights our hearts, in whose face the glory of God is made known to us.
Since he preaches not himself but Christ, they can see why he had to go through such conflicts. It was so that the mere man might be crushed and Christ revealed in full power to hearers and preacher alike. Through this came his own faith in the power of the risen Christ, and his ability to speak of it. The outer man was consumed in these fires while the inner man was renewed day by day. An invisible, eternal glory was working itself out through these afflictions. He knew this whenever his mind was fixed not on the things seen but on the things unseen; for the seen last a moment, the unseen are eternal.
This contrast between the invisible, eternal glory of Christ revealing itself in them and the outward affliction leads to the great passage in the fifth chapter about the earthly tent of this body and the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Plainly no Apostle could have written that chapter who had not just passed through the agony he records; not a sentence of it makes sense if we forget that personal experience or its results described earlier. Read as a mere weighing of the future life against the present, of the world before death against the world after, its whole meaning shrivels. But read as the new Adam in the man struggling with the old, as the man claiming his share in a divine and immortal Lord, confident of new life for body and spirit in Him, confident that this life is for his brethren too, and therefore willing that his present tent should fall to pieces whenever God pleases—though content to groan in it while that is his lot—then we understand why he speaks of walking by faith not sight, of being absent from the body and present with the Lord, of desiring, absent or present, to be acceptable to Him. Then we understand his expectation that all men will be manifested before Christ the Lord of their spirits, each receiving for what was done through the body, good or ill. And we see how he ties this to what he said of his ministry—his zeal, knowing the fear of God, to persuade men; his hope that his word is manifest not only to God but in their consciences. We see why, with this confidence, he cared little whether outside critics thought him mad or sober. The love of Christ pressed him to speak, for he had concluded that if One died for all, then all were dead, and that He died for all, so that the living should live not to themselves but to Him who died for them and rose again. And so we can grasp the great words that follow: if there is this Lord over our spirits, and to speak of Him is our work and to know Him our reward, then from now on we know no man after the flesh; even though we once knew Christ after the flesh, we know Him so no more. He is revealed as the Lord from heaven, the Author of a new creation, so that if any man is in Christ he is a new creature; the old has passed and all has become new. And all things, he says, are of that God who reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. All things must be seen as grounded in Him and proceeding from Him. We are to testify that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and putting in us the word of reconciliation. Here is the object of that ministry he had been explaining.
So he is an ambassador for Christ. Through him God pleads; for Christ’s sake he begs them to be reconciled to God. Able to announce that the reconciliation is done—that He who knew no sin was made sin so that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him—all he need do is beg them not to receive this grace in vain. They have heard of an acceptable time, a day of jubilee: it is now; the day has come. He and his fellow heralds of that day, messengers of the New Testament reconciliation, are bound to give no offense in anything, and in all things to show they are God’s ministers, displaying in themselves the very contrast between power and weakness, glory and shame, death and life, that they preach when they preach Christ’s Cross and Resurrection and tell men to learn from these God’s will and their own condition.
Paul has poured out his heart to the Corinthians, showing them that in his secret battles he fought for them as much as for himself. Now he asks for a return—not a cold, critical appreciation of his eloquence or a comparison with other teachers, but the sympathy of fellow churchmen, if not the affection of children to a father. Many may think his warning not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers is out of place here. But what the first letter tells us of the Corinthians shows both its fitness and its meaning. They were glad to exalt themselves above heathens and judge them, yet they had not shed heathen habits or understood the real glory of Christian fellowship. Nowhere was the old pagan temper plainer than in how they rated their teachers. The most divisive and demoralizing tendencies of old Greece—least compatible with one body of many members—broke out in their comparing of Paul with Apollos, in treating both as sophists rather than divine ambassadors. So the call to come out and be separate from these unbelieving habits naturally follows what he has said and introduces what he is about to say of himself and his work.
It is sometimes thought the latter part of this Epistle is almost painfully personal—so much of the Corinthians’ suspicions, of false apostles, of Paul’s revelations, of his sufferings and humiliations. If this part were cut off from the rest and not read through it, we could not account for these allusions; we might think the man had got the better of the ambassador. But once we learn how essentially the man and the ambassador are one—how they can never be separated unless the office is badly filled or the man becomes merely selfish—then the confession of personal grievances, the “folly,” the boasting, the shame, are not only glimpses of a character we would be glad to meet elsewhere, but, in the strictest sense, revelations of the relation between God and His creatures and of the close bonds between man and man, such as we look for in our Bible and find very imperfectly outside it.
I mentioned Titus’s reports. The transition to them is not forced; they have been woven into the fabric of Paul’s own life, mingling with the pains and comforts he has already shared. He dwells first on the pleasant news, moves gradually to the less encouraging, and comes last to what is most shameful to his disciples and most bitter to himself. The subject of the Epistle is never lost. The minister’s keen delight in any sign of good in his children, and his tender awareness of their weaknesses, illustrate the doctrine already unfolded. Only when he reaches the Corinthians’ injustice to him personally do we get the full account of that conflict he had described earlier only in general terms, giving us its results rather than its particulars.
Paul had been charged with claiming a power in his letters that he could not back up in person, since measured against the other teachers he was found inferior. This charge seems to have come from teachers who traded on the honored name of Apollos and drew followers by imitating his style. Paul refuses any comparison with them. Neither he nor they are the standard by which an apostle’s work is judged; God’s calling is. He went where he was sent. If these men have another Gospel or another Spirit to give, so be it; otherwise there is no excuse for undervaluing him. Whether or not he is skilled in speech, he has told them what they needed to know; he at least preached to them free of charge; others supported him, not they. If he has used his authority before, it was for their benefit, not their harm, and he will use it still. He will not let them be the prey of deceivers, even if they wish to be. He bound them to Christ, and will not hand them over to those who pretend to be ministers of light while doing the work of the evil spirit.
Do they want visible, tangible proofs of apostleship? What would satisfy them? Circumcised men, children of Abraham? He is that. Men who have suffered? He has suffered as much as any. These are all empty things, and he is unwilling to speak of them; it is folly to speak of them. But if they demand such tokens, there they are.
Or perhaps they want men who have had mysterious revelations. He is not afraid to speak of those either, for they do not glorify him as an individual; it was only as a man in Christ that they were granted him. And bitter humiliations followed them, teaching him not to glory in what was not his own. So the infirmities, contempts, and hardships that mark his fellowship with humanity are as precious signs of Christ’s mercy as those revelations.
He has laid himself bare before them, become a fool for their sakes, and now he will come to them a third time in the same spirit—not to lord it over them, not to plunder them, not to apologize, but to build up their Church, and for that end, if need be, to censure without sparing those who corrupt and divide it. They ask for proof that Christ speaks in him; they shall have it. He will come in his own weakness but in the might of Christ, and speak to them of their own earthly weakness and their own divine might. “Try yourselves,” he cries, “whether you are in the faith. Bring yourselves to the proof. Do you not know your own selves that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you are reprobate?” Our translators used this word well here: “prove yourselves” answers to “reprobate,” as δοκιμάζετε answers to ἀδόκιμοι. Thus we reach the true meaning of reprobate—that which has been tested and found worthless, not that which is cast aside untested. Yet the Latin word does not carry the whole Greek meaning. The ἀδόκιμος is one who has lost the power to test and prove himself; that is the sign he has been proved worthless. If they do not know themselves, do not know that Christ is in them, they deserve the name, for they have lost the capacity to grasp the truth. Paul hopes to show them that in this sense he is not reprobate—though so far as the word means loss of all standing with them, he is willing to deserve it if he may do them good. He has no power against the truth, only as a witness for it. He is glad to be weak if they may be strong. All he wants is to establish and unite them. He writes from a distance so that he need not use, when present, the power given him for building up and not for tearing down. He tells them to rejoice, be strong, be of one mind, be at peace, and assures them that the God of love and peace will be with them.