That this Epistle refers primarily to the Unity of the Church, and that all the questions which are discussed in it have some relation to that subject, no interpreter, perhaps, has doubted. The effort has been to ascertain how the particular circumstances of the Church in Corinth bore upon the general argument; and what that argument has to do with the allusions to Wisdom, and the Wisdom of the world, which occur so often in the earlier chapters.
These allusions give rise to the memorable declaration of the Apostle, that he had determined to know nothing among the Corinthians but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Hence the inference has been easy and natural that the Corinthian passion for wisdom, by whomsoever promoted, was at least a great moving cause of their disunion; that the only way of making them one was to make them humble; that the only way of making them humble was to hold up to them Christ dying on the cross. How this would operate is a question which causes practical and serious diversities of opinion. The pious Romanist would urge that the contemplation of the act of crucifixion, assisted probably by some sensible image, has a special power of lowering the pride of intellect and the conceits which divide men from each other; the pious Protestant says that rather the belief in Christ as a perfect Saviour, out of wrath and sin, from which a man has in vain sought deliverance by efforts of his own, is that which empties him of his self-sufficiency. The second suspects the first of regarding Christ outwardly and carnally. The first suspects the second of regarding Christ merely as the doer of a certain work which is to be stated in the form of a proposition, The Protestant complains that one part of Christ’s work is to raise us above those visible idolatries which the Romanist associates with his cross. The Romanist replies that there can be no practical fellowship among Christians, no message to the poor, until you are able to present the actual Crucifixion more distinctly and objectively. The history of Christendom appears to sustain both objections; it equally, I believe, refutes the uncharitableness which assumes that he who bows before a crucifix, or he who dwells upon the cross as a message of peace addressed to the burdened conscience which has been crushed under self-willed or prescribed contrivances for obtaining it, may not be a spiritual worshipper. Thus one of the great instances and causes of the division of the Church meets one on the very threshold of the classical book on its unity; seems to be suggested by that book itself.
If I sought to remove this perplexity by applying the explanation which St. Paul gives of his conversion and of his preaching to the Gentiles, Romanists and Protestants would be, perhaps, equally offended. They would say, “On whatever occasions the Apostle may have seen it right to speak of Christ as revealed in him, this is certainly not such an occasion. The teachers of wisdom whom he found, those who were drawing away the Corinthians from the simplicity of the Gospel, no doubt used this language habitually. They were mystics; men disposed to substitute inward principles and apprehensions for outward facts. The preacher of Christ and Him crucified, was setting himself in direct antagonism to them and their refined conceits. He was affirming a fact, calling upon the Corinthians to acknowledge that, first of all, whatever interior illuminations might be vouchsafed to them afterwards.”
The words of the Epistle, and all we know of the history, give great plausibility to this statement. Apollos was, we know, an Alexandrian teacher. Though we may not suppose, as some have done, that he was consciously a rival of St. Paul,—one who openly taught the Corinthians that he was the possessor of a deeper and more advanced lore than that which had been communicated by their spiritual father—there can be little doubt from the language of the Epistle that this was the effect which he produced upon men already prepared to rally round a new leader, and eager to find pretexts for self-glorification. And, this being admitted, the opinion of the soundest and most intelligent critics that Apollos had been a pupil in the school of Philo, and that therefore the higher lore which he imparted would have especial reference to the Divine Word speaking inwardly to the heart and reason, may be accepted without hesitation. Such an hypothesis explains the character of at least one of the parties to which the Apostle alludes, is in consistency with the circumstances of Corinth, throws light upon a number of passages which without it are obscure.
In the teaching of an Alexandrian, educated as all thoughtful deep-minded Alexandrian Jews were, the Wisdom or the Word would be expressions continually recurring. One mighty in the Scriptures, like Apollos, would trace the use and application of them through the Proverbs, through all the Prophets, would probably discover hints of them in the forms and ceremonies of the law, even in the history of the early Patriarchs. Whatever impression he produced on those of his hearers who had frequented the synagogue,—and that we may easily suppose would have been considerable,—such discourses, nay, the mere repetition of language so identified with Greek feelings, so much denoting the very object of Greek inquiry, would come with the most startling force to those few cultivated members of the Church who had listened to arguments in the Porch or the Academy. With their Greek vivacity and passion they would at once attach themselves to the eloquent man as to one who spoke the very thing which their previous habits, perhaps their previous struggles of mind, had led them to desire; who showed them that it could be reconciled with the language of the sacred book, now no more merely a book for the Hebrew and the circumcised, —who pointed out evident links of association between it and the most interior part of the New Testament revelation. Many of those who only belonged to the crowd, and would never have been admitted into the halls of philosophy, but who were still Greeks, who had been used to exercise their faculties of observation and criticism in judging of theatrical compositions, who had travelled and picked up a number of scattered thoughts and speculations, all whose powers of reflection had been awakened to fresh life and directed to the highest objects by the Gospel, would claim their privilege also to follow the teacher when he spoke of mysteries which, as Corinthians, they had desired to know, into which, as Christians, they might claim to be initiated.
It seems to me beyond all question that the Apollos party in the Corinthian Church was formed in this way, and that this was the character which it must have habitually assumed. And I am far from denying—the language of the first four or five chapters almost justifies us in affirming—that this was the party against which the others whereof St. Paul speaks were protesting. A school which exalted spiritual intuitions, an internal guide, as the Alexandrian school was wont to do, and which appealed, as they did, to the Old Testament, would naturally call forth the opposition of those Jewish Christians who had been brought up under the Pharisees, and who had received Jesus as fulfiling the Law and the Prophets, taken in their obvious historical sense. These would call themselves after the name of Peter, if not at first, yet as soon as they had evoked a third party which set up the New Testament as the express and definite message of salvation to the Gentiles—at once against their literal Judaism, and against the spiritual Judaism of the Alexandrians. The name of Paul would be equally a plea for saying: The Old Covenant, to which you followers of Cephas seem to be leading us back, is abrogated; we are not under the Law: Christ has come to fulfil the promises to the Gentiles—most of all, to bestow the Spirit upon us. Why then do you followers of Apollos take us back to the ideas and allegories of the old time? That there should be a fourth class pretending to despise all human and secondary teaching, to cast aside the wisdom of Apollos, the dogmatism of the Cephasites, even the liberty of Paul, and to adhere simply to the words of Christ himself, we might easily conclude, if we had not a clear intimation of the fact in the Epistle itself.
It being admitted then that the primary danger to the Corinthians at this time lay in the Apollos school, and that the formal development of the others may have been owing to the rise of this, the question to be considered is, how St. Paul met that danger, and how far his manner of treating it was effectual for healing the schisms in the Church generally.
There is no question about the preaching of Christ crucified; that, we are all agreed, was his method; his words are too distinct and emphatic to be gainsaid. But as there is a dispute what these words denote, what the preaching of Christ crucified in his sense of it was, we had better seek for some statement of his own on the subject which may carry us beyond the mere phrase. I find one in the first chapter: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness: but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the Wisdom of God, and the Power of God.” All will agree that this is a cardinal passage, one to which we may well refer as determining the sense of others; one which indirectly introduces the whole doctrine of the Cross. What does St. Paul say in it? We have here the favorite words of the Apollos school; Wisdom and Power. It is the Σοφία of God, the inner Δύναμις of God, which St. Paul purposes to declare to the Corinthians; only he says, God has declared them more perfectly than all my fine discourses can. The Cross of Christ is the manifestation of both. Because the foolishness of God, he goes on in his bold way, is wiser than man, and the weakness of God is stronger than man. You say there is a Word, or Wisdom; a Living Word; Wisdom which is the expression of God Himself. I confess it. And I say that living Word has come forth and spoken. That Word has proved Himself to be living by acting, suffering,—mightiest wonder of all,—by dying; that Word or Wisdom has proved Himself in this act of dying to be the expression of God; for in his death has come forth the very innermost meaning of God’s character, His essential love; yea, and his essential power.
It is a mighty, startling proposition; but herein lay St. Paul’s Gospel. It had pleased God to reveal His Son in him that he might preach Him among the Gentiles, who had struggled with him long, against whom he had been kicking, who had shown Himself to be the master; his spirit had bowed to Him as its Lord; he had asked what he was to do. The answer had come that he was to publish this Lord to all men as their Lord, to tell all men that he was with them, and was claiming their submission. But was he testifying of an unknown teacher; one who had never yet shown what he was, who was only speaking in the secret depths of the individual heart? If it had been so, his message might have been to a few elect spirits, such as Philo talked of; initiated men who forsook the vulgar herd, and pursued the divine Wisdom. But it could not have been to the Gentile, to men, to the world. Only if this Word had revealed Himself by human acts; by acts done on this earth; by acts open, apparent; by bodily, physical, mortal acts, such as the delicate Alexandrian Theosophist did not like to dwell on or meddle with; only then could St. Paul fulfil the commission which he had received; only then could he really set forth that dominion of the spiritual power over the fleshly, of the divine, and mysterious, and inward, over the human, and outward, and tangible, which the Alexandrian boasted of. They must not stand aloof from each other; they must come into conflict, if the strength of each is to be proved.
This preaching of the Cross, as God’s manifestation of His own Wisdom and Righteousness, is neither the Romanist nor the Protestant preaching, as they stand out in opposition to each other. It does not appeal to the senses, or to the intellect primarily; it goes to a region deeper than both. But it does justice both to the Romanist and to the Protestant method; it explains their relation to each other, and why each is by itself unsatisfactory. The sensible image corresponds to the spiritual reality. Christ Himself must be as actually an object to the spiritual organ as the Crucifix is to the outward eye. The forms of sense are therefore the best, nay, if we follow Scripture, the only forms which can express spiritual truths; all attempts to translate them into intellectual propositions weaken their force. But on the other hand, the longing of men for deliverance from mere sensible material things, from idols, is a most genuine longing, one which the true preacher seeks to awaken. It is connected, though it must not be identified, with the longing for deliverance from moral evil. That arises when the man is conscious that he himself is his tormentor, that he has bowed to outward things because he has wandered from some higher centre. The announcement of that spiritual centre,—the preaching of Christ as the power which is attracting him and all creatures to itself, withdrawing them from the material idols which have kept them apart, raising them out of themselves,—fulfils both purposes. It is not a charm, or mesmeric influence, produced upon the outward man; it is not a formal proposition, to be comprehended by the understanding; it is a message to that which is most human, most universal in the man concerning Him in whom only that which is human and universal can be realized, can overcome that which is partial and warring.
We thus are able to understand the course of the Apostle’s thoughts. He finds the Corinthians full of good gifts, deficient in none. But there are divisions among them. They are ranged in parties, under leaders. What does this mean? They are Paulites! What, were they baptized into the name of Paul? He thanks God he baptized very few of them, lest they should think he baptized them into his name. He was sent to preach the Gospel, to exhibit Him who was the Wisdom and Power of God, to tell not the wise, or mighty, but all, the most despised and foolish: “Ye are called of God, Christ is made unto you wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” He had proclaimed a common foundation for them all to rest upon—a human and Divine foundation. And they, instead of resting upon it, are setting up a set of separate teachers, are making Christ a minister of division; as if he came to establish factions, not as the Lord of Man.
Chapter II
This Gospel Paul had resolved to preach as broadly, as simply as possible. He had set forth Christ, and Him crucified, to all. He would not have their faith stand in his words or wisdom, but in God’s power. But was he then not preaching a mystery? Was he not preaching the wisdom of God? Assuredly this was a very profound mystery, one which the learned rabbis of the Jews, and the Roman rulers of the earth, were equally unable to penetrate, or they would not have crucified the King of Men, the Lord of Glory. It was a mystery which it required a Divine light to reveal. Eye had not seen, ear had not heard, the things which God had prepared for them that love him. But God had revealed them by His Spirit. None can make us know God but the Spirit of God; even as none can know what is in a man but the spirit of man. And this spiritual revelation the mere psychical or natural man does not receive; there must be a spiritual organ to receive a spiritual communication.
Here St. Paul touches the very heart of the Alexandrian teaching. Does he refute it? No! he adopts the very principle, nay, the very terms of it. You say there is a mystery to be known. Certainly. By the initiated? Certainly. By the spiritual organ, not the mere ψυχή? Certainly. You say the spiritual man is above other men? Certainly.—Where then do we differ? Only when you would make the mystery not an eternal, universal reality, but some apprehension of particular men. Only when you make the initiated a peculiar set of wise or spiritual men, and not those who are content to give up their wisdom that they may be taught to see what is true for them and for all. Only when you make the spiritual organ not an open eye to receive God’s light which flows forth for all; but a peculiar organ in which peculiar men may glory. Only when the spiritual man, in fact, becomes the carnal, the natural, psychical man; for that he does become when he glorifies his individual soul; his separate wisdom above the wisdom; the Divine wisdom which is for MAN.
St. Paul applies the words, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he might instruct Him?” to this case. Who can measure God’s acts and thoughts by the standard of his own narrow soul? What an utter contradiction is implied in the partial, the individual, comprehending the Universal! But is the knowledge of God therefore impossible? Has it been a dream of the Philo school, of all the philosophers with whom that school had sympathy, that they proposed this to themselves as the end of their seeking? “No,” he answers; “we have the mind of Christ. We are not tied to the measures and standards of the individual soul. The mind which formed all things, by which all things consist, is with us. Christ is in us; we may know Him if we will give up ourselves.”
Chapter III
He proceeds to strike a very hard blow at the Alexandrian conceit, even while he recognizes one of the Alexandrian distinctions. “I have fed you,” he says, “with milk, and not with meat.” “Oh!” they exclaim, “then you accept our division of the novices and the adepts, of those who must receive truth in sensual forms, and those who can receive it in its pure essence.” Stay a moment.—It is to you the adepts, the aspirants after celestial illumination, to you who could not bear the vulgar herd of ordinary men, who thought you had a special discernment of spiritual mysteries—it is to you I have administered this food of children. It is what you want. It is the only thing you can bear; for I must tell you plainly. You are not what you fancy yourselves. You are not spiritual men. You are emphatically carnal men; for division is the sign of carnality. Self-exaltation is the sign of carnality. As long as you are setting up earthly teachers you must be carnal men. What are those teachers? What are they sent to do? They are messengers who are to build you up as a Church upon the only foundation upon which human beings can stand. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Here is the great doctrine of the Epistle; here is the condemnation of Paulites, Apollosites, Cephasites. Here is the justification of all three. Here is the ground of Church unity. The foundation is laid. Christ is at the root of humanity. The preaching of Apollos, the preaching of Paul, can but declare things as they are, cannot change facts in the least. We may proclaim—it is our calling to proclaim—the great Law and Order of the Universe. He or I may proclaim it best. God will judge of that. We may put very precious things on this foundation, or very worthless things. Whatever we have put upon it will be tried by fire. We shall be tried by fire. But the foundation will remain. And you will remain. For you, and not our notions, are the building which God is erecting on this foundation. You are the temple of God. If we defile that temple God will destroy us. And therefore, if you have a right view of your own glory, you will give up glorying altogether in your wisdom and in your party-leaders. All things are yours,—life, death, things present, things to come; Apollos, Cephas, Paul, all nature, all men. For you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Chapter IV
“What are we,” he goes on, “Apollos and I, whom you have been making into heads of parties, and so destroyers of Christ’s Church? Servants of Christ, existing to testify of Him as the great Master; stewards of the mysteries of God, appointed to make the whole household sharers in the deep truths which lie beneath us all. We are stewards for you; but you are not judges whether we discharge our office faithfully or not. God will judge us. His Light will burst in upon us, and that revelation will show what every one of us is, and what he has been doing. You cannot judge us; we cannot judge ourselves. Our consciences may not reproach us with unfaithfulness, but that is not our justification. Give up therefore this miserable attempt to exercise a power which you are not endowed with, which is dividing you from each other, which is setting up each against the other.” Here the Apostle lays bare their deepest wound. He does it gently, lovingly, even with humor; but he cuts fearlessly; his ridicule wonderfully combines inward affection and outward courtesy with sharpness and severity. You Corinthians have become wise, great men, judges and kings. Would we could share your exaltation! Would we could sit with you on your high judgment-throne! But that is not our vocation. We apostles must be God’s outcast, the offscouring of the earth. This is what God has appointed for us. I sometimes think he means to use us as the Romans use the criminals in the amphitheatre, whom they bring out when the best part of the amusement is over, merely that the wild beasts may devour them. St. Paul feels that he has said bitter words; such a contrast between the self-conceited pupils and those whom they pretend to make their guides, must have been felt by all of them who were not quite besotted with intellectual or spiritual pride. But he claims the right of a father to speak to his children; whatever other instructors they may have, that is his title. He does not want the dignity of a sophist or a leader. That he disclaims as inconsistent with the Gospel he has preached; with the very existence of the Church: the other he claims because he has preached the Gospel, because the Church has need of paternal government, and cannot dispense with the most strict exercise of it.
Chapter V
An instance occurs immediately in which the Apostle, though absent, asserts, and uses this power. The passage is as important as any in the Epistle, important for its own sake, and for the elucidation of the general subject. This Church, which was so proud of its spiritual illumination, had among its members, one who had committed fornication with his father’s wife. Nothing had been done to remove the offender from the communion of the Church. St. Paul pronounces his sentence in a dreadful formula. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the members of the Church being gathered together, and he being in Spirit present among them, with the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, he decrees that a man who has committed a crime of this kind be delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
This is undoubtedly the formula of excommunication. Modern Protestants know not what to make of such a decree. It cannot mean exactly what it says. It must be merely a phrase to express the exclusion of a man from the fellowship of believers. Romanists say, What is there in the anathemas of which you accuse the middle ages, in the curses which Irish priests pronounce at the altar, that goes beyond this? To the first, I answer, Certainly, the phrase means exclusion from the fellowship of the Church; but what does that mean? St. Paul might have said, Do not let him partake of the Eucharist, or, Have no familiar intercourse with him. Why talk about Satan, and delivering to Satan, if the words signify nothing? Are they words to play with? The Corinthians were all too fond of rhetoric; St. Paul had solemnly pronounced it unsuitable to the herald of a great Truth. Was this just the moment to forget his rule? I apprehend we cannot evade the conclusion, that he looked upon the Gospel as the proclamation of a deliverance from devil-worship, devil-service: that he looked upon the Church as a body of men united in the confession of Him who had come to destroy the works of the devil. Any act which implied a distinct renunciation of Christ the righteous Lord, a distinct assertion of fleshly self-will, implied also the choice of the devil as a master; it was an act of surrender to him. And this surrender may be of such a broad obvious kind as to make it the duty of the Church to deal with its member as if he were that which he chose to be. For his own sake this was necessary. To treat him as an outcast was the best way of really keeping him in the unity of the Church. Let him be delivered to Satan for the punishment of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. I cannot dilute or explain away words which seem to me to contain the very essence of Christian philosophy and Christian benevolence. If priests had studied them and laid them to heart, how impossible it would have been for them to sport with curses as they have done! For the truth must be spoken plainly. Whatever they have pretended, their deliverance of a man to Satan has not been the last awful reluctant declaration, that a man who has wilfully chosen an evil master shall feel the bondage that he may loathe it, and so turn to his true Lord that he may find here, or hereafter, the emancipation which he came upon earth and went down into hell, to effect. The priest’s malediction has, in innumerable cases, been an invocation or prayer to the devil as the real and only God whom he worshipped, to punish the enemies whom he hated, and of whom he wished to rid himself.
The law of excommunication, as far as it regards the sufferer, is clearly expounded in these remarkable sentences. The ground of excommunication, as it regards the Church, is exhibited in the next verses: “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” “Ye are unleavened.” Here are texts of mighty subjects: the history of the Church is nothing but the expansion and illustration of them. The glorying of the Corinthians, as we have seen already, did not imply a high estimate of their position as Churchmen; they exulted in their individual wisdom; right views and high intuitions were boasted of by one man or one party as an exclusive property. To set before the Church, as a Church, its sanctity, its dignity, is the Apostle’s method of correcting this tendency. Ye are a holy body; a body from which the leaven has been cast out. The pure Paschal Lamb has been sacrificed for you. In Him you are perfectly pure and holy. Impurity comes in with separation; with men choosing to have a way of their own, choosing to break loose from the law and principle of the divine fellowship. That is the leaven; the leaven of self-will, self-pleasing, which Christ seeks to cast out, and which when we come as a united body to the feast we seek to have cast out. Where this selfish principle has reached a head, has put itself forth in some flagrant overt act, like that of the man who has committed fornication with his father’s wife, the holiness of the body must be asserted by the excision of the particular member: a doctrine involved in the very existence of a Church, but which may be put forward with such prominence as to destroy the truth from which it springs. Excommunication may be contemplated apart from communion. It may be fancied that a Church is a set of persons possessing certain special qualifications of faith or holiness, and that all are to be prevented from participating in its ordinances who cannot prove that they possess these qualifications. Thus excommunication will become the rule, and the reason on which St. Paul bases it is no longer tenable; nay, is directly set at nought. The body is not pure in itself from its relation to Christ; but pure from the apprehensions, graces, gifts, of those who belong to it. Hence an opening to all the pride, spirit of judging, hypocrisy and immorality which St. Paul saw with such trembling at Corinth.
In the next sentences of the chapter he strikes at another form of these evils. He had bidden them avoid fornicators, covetous men, extortioners, idolaters. The exhortation might be, no doubt had been, misunderstood and turned to mischief. They had not actually stood aloof from such persons; they could not; all intercourse with society would have been at an end if they had, all power of benefiting it. But they could judge and despise the heathens even while they mixed among them; they could count themselves pure, at least in comparison with them. Did they? then let them see that they were pure. What had they to do with judging the heathen? Who gave them such a commission? How did they know how much evil entered into the fornication or extortion of an idolater? But they were witnesses and protestants for the existence of a righteous society in which men loved their neighbors, and therefore could not defile or hurt them. Let them keep that body to its office. God will judge the outlying world.
Chapter VI
Every Greek characteristic reappeared, as it was sure to do, in the Church; the love of litigation could not be absent. No more formal contradiction of the nature and profession of a Church could well be exhibited in the sight of the heathens than that of brother going to law with brother. Whence came it? From the same cause as the parties, and the glorification of individual gifts. The feeling of brotherhood was not realized among them; they would not understand the functions of a Spiritual body; they were merely acting like a set of atoms accidentally associated. To make them conscious of the greatness of their position as a body, is here, as always, the means of crushing their conceit as individuals. What, he says, you must go to heathens to judge little matters about property! Do you not know that the saints shall judge the world? How could St. Paul take it for granted that they knew this? Had he told them so in any part of his preaching which we do not possess? Had it been a matter of special revelation to him and them? I apprehend that he could not have given this form to the question if he had not meant them to understand that such a function was implied in the very nature of a spiritual society. “The spiritual man,” he had said, “judgeth all things; but he himself is judged of no man.” When we are raised to a higher ground we have power of overlooking and comparing that which lies below. When we really see all things in God’s light, and are partakers of his mind—the fleshly temper which bewilders our perceptions and makes our decisions partial, being overcome,—then we must exercise in its fullest measure that wonderful discernment with portions of which the humble and meek who forget themselves are endued here.
The want of this power of judging arose in the case of the Corinthians from no intellectual defect—strictly so called. They came behind in no gift. It came from intellectual pride. And yet see how that pride punished itself; what practical feebleness, what confessed incapacity was the fruit of it. They actually could not find persons competent to pronounce judgment in little disputes of property which arose among their own members. What! they with their great illumination, their high intuitions, had not a class of men endued with this inferior species of sagacity! The sarcasm is bitter; the Corinthian must have felt it. But what an insight is given us into the mind of the Apostle and his view of the Church! The high gifts and the low were equally bestowed by the eternal Spirit. Prudence dwells with wisdom. A power of dealing with the pettiest details of life is just as much a divine endowment, just as necessary to a divine society, as the apprehension of spiritual truths.
The existence of these lawsuits did not, however, reveal merely the ignorance of the Corinthians; it showed a positive moral defect. How was it that they could not bear wrongs one from another? How was it that they committed wrongs one against another? Did they not know that the Gospel was a message of deliverance, of purgation from moral evils? Did they not know that these were the hinderances—the absolutely fatal hinderances—to their living in God’s kingdom, to their enjoying its treasures? No! this simple truth was just the one which they had not entered into, which had need to be repeated in their ears. They were too fine, too spiritual, to think about gross outward evils or detestable habits of mind and character. They were carried into a higher region; all high and divine mysteries were unfolded to their gaze. And in the mean time, while they were entertaining themselves with these, they were quite forgetting that low grovelling sensualism in which they had once been plunged; they were forgetting that all the temptations and motives to it were just as strong in them now as they had ever been. They had been washed, they had been sanctified; while they claimed their relation to Christ, their membership in him, all these moral corruptions, inward and outward, were as far from them as the east from the west. But they were never far from the fleshly heart, from the mere earthly nature. They were continually creeping about each of them, ready to start up and assert their dominion. See how covetousness, envy, strife, were invading them! “What!” some one of the Paulites would exclaim, “are you—the preacher of Christian liberty, of faith which raises us above law—become a mere moralist? are you going to tell us of this thing and that which we must not touch, or taste, or handle, lest we should be defiled?” I am going to do no such thing, he says. I tell you, as I have told you before, all things are lawful to me. God has given us the earth to enjoy. He has given us the appetites and senses wherewith to enjoy it. But he has not given us the earth to be our master. He has not given us our appetites and senses to be our masters. And therefore if these are acquiring power over me, they are destroying that liberty which God has given me. The belly, and the meats which feed the belly, are both good; but I am not to be a servant to either. God will destroy them, and means me to live on. A plain statement, very commonplace and vulgar doubtless, in the judgments of many of the Apollos as well of the Pauline party; but also exceedingly needful for both. It is a distinction everlastingly fresh and vital, one which finds new applications for itself, and bitter experiences to confirm the application, every day and hour of our lives. It is the text to the great subject of Christian liberty upon which St. Paul will speak more at large hereafter. Perhaps we shall find that he offers some most valuable illustrations of the principle at once in reference to a subject of which he had already spoken, and to some topics respecting which the Corinthians had consulted him.
Every one, I suppose, has at times been troubled by the question, Why did the Apostles and Elders at Jerusalem, in the rules which they drew up for the guidance of the Gentile converts, mix up the prohibition of a moral evil with positive precepts which were intended only for a certain period and a particular state of society? Various answers have been given; three which are of great weight. The first is, that fornication was so closely connected with idolatry, and became in certain festivals and services so much a part of religion, that the prohibition of contact with idolatrous offerings was a protection against the moral transgression, and, at the same time, pointed out the inward root of it. The second is, that men brought under a spiritual government, and exempted from the ordinances of the old law, had need to be reminded of the sacredness of law as such; to be taught that there was an authority which it behoved them to obey, even if they could not discover the reason of its commands. The third is, that the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the Christian Church made it a sin on the part of the Gentiles to do acts, innocent in themselves, which would have scandalized those who had been bred under the old Covenant. All these suggestions are, I think, entitled to great consideration, and are full of instruction for later times. But I do not know that we shall profit by them as we might, if we assume that the difficulties which occur to us did not also occur to the churches which received the Apostolical rescript; and if we do not expect from St. Paul himself an examination of the difficulty, and a resolution of it which will correct and comprehend our imperfect experiments.
All things, he had said, are lawful to me—God has provided meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; all we have to do is to judge carefully in each case when and how his gifts interfere with spiritual liberty. But he perceives at once, from his knowledge of the Corinthians, and of the actual abuses which had arisen in the Church, how this doctrine would be misinterpreted. Fornication might be brought, as it has been so often brought, under the same category with mere excesses; it might be regarded as governed by the same rule of personal expediency as the use of meats. No! he says. The fact that we are members of Christ, that we belong to him who has raised and redeemed our bodies, gives this offence quite a different character. The Gospel does what the Law cannot do. It could prohibit adultery; the violation of a relation and ordinance. It was bound to do this. But those evils which affect society most grievously through the moral injury which they do to the conscience of the wrong-doers, but which do not directly break any formal and recognized bonds, these it may frown at, but cannot reach. Most fatal consequences would follow (as the Puritan legislation in North America has sufficiently proved to us) if it attempted with its rough hand to deal with them. Only in the acknowledgment of a spiritual relation to Christ, and of a spiritual relation to each other in Him, only in the belief that our bodies are the Temples of the Holy Ghost, lies any effectual protection against this evil.
Chapter VII
The transition is easy from these hints and warning to certain questions which the Corinthians had asked him respecting marriage and the comparative advantages of it generally, and, in particular cases, over single life. Every one is struck by the unusual cautiousness and diffidence of St. Paul, when he approaches these topics. If we compare the letter of Gregory the Great to Augustine in Bede, in answer to inquiries not altogether dissimilar, respecting the Anglo-Saxon converts, we see at once how immeasurably more decisive and minute the Pope is than the Apostle. The effect of St. Paul’s phrases, “I speak by permission, not commandment”—“I speak, not the Lord,” on his readers has been curious. Out of mere reverence to Scripture, a great many seem disposed to disbelieve the Apostle, and to deny the distinction which he himself makes. They are afraid that they shall not know what they may accept as divine, if they once suppose that some words may be from the Master, and some from the servant. Such reverence, however natural, approaches so near to the greatest irreverence, nay, disbelief, that one must at least try to get some better in exchange for it. But this is not all. I cannot help thinking that not a few are inclined to value these passages, in which the Apostle speaks with hesitation, above the others. They fancy that when the Lord speaks the rules are general, such as commonplace people are to follow; that the Apostle’s hints are for the refined, the saintly, those who are aiming at a specially elevated standard. Now I have no doubt that there is a truth latent in this notion, but that it is most grievously distorted, nay, utterly inverted. I do not think that we can find any better way of separating the precept which is announced as divine, from the suggestion which St. Paul deliberately calls “his,” than by regarding the one as of universal obligation; the other as appertaining to local circumstances and individual temperaments. Those principles which the teacher, sent forth by Christ and endued with the Spirit, feels and knows to be grounded in the Being of God and in his relations to humanity, these he propounds absolutely, unreservedly, without the slightest hesitation, “they are the Lord’s.” All that pertains to the nature and permanence of marriage, all prohibition of separation at the mere pleasure of the party, or from any notion of religious advantage, are of this kind. These ride not only over private judgment, but over the authority of Apostles, Bishops, Churches, Councils; they have to enunciate them; they cannot alter them or dispense with them in the least. But when the teacher is consulted about that which may be right for one and wrong for another, he ought to tremble, not because he does not think he has the Spirit of God, but because he may blunder in the application of a truth which the Spirit has enabled him to realize, and because he will certainly do mischief if that which he means for a part is applied for a whole—if the rules for one age or locality are imposed upon another. It is not merely the case of conscience itself which calls for a special wisdom to decide it. Another and more terrible difficulty arises from the morbid feeling of the patient, that universal principles are nothing in comparison of his or her idiosyncrasy. Any one who will deal with that first, who will find or enact a law to provide for it, is likely to be esteemed a sympathetic friend and guide, and to be made an absolute authority. Hence there is an opening at once for spiritual quackery,—and for a spiritual despotism, whenever the special receipts and prescriptions are collected and organized and put forth for the direction of all diseased people.
The more I think of this chapter, the more it seems to me in this point of view one of the most important in the New Testament; not for what it pronounces so much as for this very distinction between that which is to be and is not to be pronounced; for the sacredness which it puts upon the universal; for the uncertainty in which it leaves the particular, with just so much of hint and suggestion as may assist the conscience, not overwhelm or torment it; with just so much notice of peculiar circumstances and necessities as make us feel that the inhabitants of each country and times have a distinct personal responsibility in the application of great universal laws to their own condition—that they may profit by the experience of others differently circumstanced, but must not be bound by it. These lessons St. Paul teaches, and they will be found, I suspect, of infinitely more value in the study of Church History, and in the emergencies of our own lives, than the direct Yes! or No! which the Corinthian querists desired to extract from him, and which readers of the present day also wish that he had uttered.
It must always be remembered that a great disease—perhaps the great disease—of the Corinthian Church was the desire in the different classes of its members to have a law and standard of their own. The Apollos party would fain believe that their intuitions gave them a hold of truths which did not belong to the vulgar. The Paulites would claim a liberty which they despised the poor Judaists for being afraid or unable to assert. Those Judaists had their conceit that they were vastly better and safer than those who cast any old ceremony or tradition of the law aside. The Apostle had been combating this tendency through this Epistle; he was not likely all at once to encourage it by laying down a general code of laws respecting marriage for those who wished to keep up an average tone of devotion, and a special code for those who aspired to greater heights in it. Such a design has been imagined in the chapter, but with the least possible excuse from the language of St. Paul himself. There is no question at all of high devotion; the Corinthians were tempted to very low vices; the point which the Apostle considers here is how they may best avoid them. The meaning and sanctity of marriage, as it is exhibited to us in the Old Testament; marriage as a means of spreading the kingdom of God, and as a witness of God’s relation to the chosen nation—the sanctity of marriage in the highest Christian sense, as it is set forth in the Epistle to the Ephesians, is not considered here at all. St. Paul is asked, probably by some mystic of the Apollos school, questions which will be perfectly understood by any reader of middle-age history; he answers as plainly and briefly as he can, without going into detestable and demoralizing minutiæ, or yet affecting any circumlocution and false delicacy, that it is well or honorable for a man not to touch a woman at all, but that the conduct in wedlock, which they supposed holy and exalted, was neither honorable nor safe. The whole paragraph must be taken together, not one part separate from the rest, and the introduction, “as concerning the things which ye wrote unto me,” must not be forgotten; for it explains why such a topic is touched upon at all. Next he has been asked respecting the παρθένοι and χήραι, who had probably undertaken certain offices in the Church, whether they had better marry or remain single. Some of them had apparently a great desire to marry, some of them, perhaps, set it down as a grievous offence or fault. He says he believes they will do their work with less distraction if they are single; but if they find it otherwise let them marry. The object is moral freedom, ability to serve God; let each man and woman keep that object in sight: how it may be attained he cannot pronounce generally, for each one has his own gift and calling; but singleness he finds better for himself, and he suspects they will have some trouble in the flesh if they marry. St. Paul does not put abstinence from marriage in his own case on the plea of its being more favorable to holiness, but simply upon its leaving him more free to do the work in which he is engaged as a missionary. When he speaks of them, his fear for them is evidently from their very low estimate of marriage, which fear is balanced by another that makes him cautious of dissuading them from it. The case, however, to which the words, “They shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you,” are referred, seems a peculiar one. Taking all the clauses of a passage together (which has driven such grave interpreters as Locke into the most incredible outrages upon language and sense), it seems reasonable to suppose that certain young women had been placed under the guardianship of men, probably deacons of the Church, to educate them for a church-office, and that when they arrived at a marriageable age the two parties had been brought into unpleasant and dangerous relations, which had led to the questions, whether the guardians might marry their wards, whether they might marry them to other people, whether they might both maintain their present position. Where the last course can be followed, where the man has thorough self-command, and nothing has been done to wound the delicacy and feelings of the woman, St. Paul, under all the circumstances, recommends it as best, though either of the other alternatives he looks upon as perfectly harmless, and where all the conditions he presumes are not present, as advisable. Of course I may be guessing wrongfully about the peculiar difficulty; other suggestions may meet all the points in the Apostle’s statements better; but I do not think that any careful reader can doubt that it was an urgent necessity of a complicated kind—though one which might with some variations often recur—which demanded his judgment. But the inference I would deduce from the fact, is, that the whole chapter is a manual worth the continual study of the spiritual doctor dubitantium precisely because it teaches him that if he would follow one of the highest and most inspired of guides he must not give himself airs of certainty respecting points where certainty is not to be had, must not fear to show those who are consulting him, that he has doubts, and that he dares not relieve them from the responsibility of judging by taking it upon himself.
Chapters VIII. IX. and X
The chapters which follow ought by no means to be separated. Nor ought we, for the sake of dwelling on the details of them, important as they seem, to overlook the rapid succession of the thoughts in the Apostle’s mind. The question to be discussed has probably been suggested by one of the Paulite school. “Surely that prohibition of eating things sacrificed to idols is a restraint upon the liberty which you have claimed for us! Is the meat offered to idols not good, not a creature of God? Is it made evil by the absurdity of those who use it? What is an idol? Nothing, a mere fiction of the brain! Can a fiction destroy a fact?” Very good reasoning, says St. Paul. A sign of great knowledge. But alas! of too much knowledge! Of that knowledge which has not yet allowed you to make the discovery, We know nothing. An idol is nothing. However many gods and lords there may be, for us members of Christ, united to him, there is but one God, even the Father, and that one Lord by whom are all things. And upon the ground of that knowledge you establish a right to do certain things which give your brethren pain; nay, which would actually be sinful to them if they imitated you. Because you have but one God, and He has withdrawn you from these dividing idols, therefore each must set up his own knowledge against the other! You who call yourselves by the name of Christ are content to grieve, yea mortally to grieve, a brother for whom Christ died!
And this you do because I have preached liberty to you. I have preached it. And now consider how I assert it in my own case. You will not deny, I suppose, that I might, if I pleased, claim to live by the Gospel which I proclaim. The law permits me to do it. Reason permits it. God has appointed it. I might marry, I might support a wife at the expense of the Church. Have I done so? Have I asked payment of you? No, I claim the privilege of not doing it. I assert my right in spite of those legal, those evangelical provisions, to preach the Gospel without being paid for it. That is my reward. The Gospel I must preach whether I wish it or no. I am a steward, and I must dispense what I am entrusted with. But I may have the luxury—the hire—of doing my work gratuitously. In all cases I wish to act upon this principle. The liberty I claim is the liberty of showing deference to the habits, feelings, prejudices of Jews and Gentiles. I do not cast off the law because it is a burden to me, and I crave for independence. I cast it off that I may win Gentiles; that I may assert their share in the divine Communion. That is to be our one object, the diffusion of the Gospel, the establishment of the universal fellowship. But if we have an object steadily before us, we do as the wrestlers do, train ourselves for it; submit to hardships for the sake of it. Wishing for the prize they keep themselves on low diet and to severe exercise. With this prize before me, of making men sharers in God’s love and kingdom, I must do the like. I do not want the freedom to eat this thing or that. I want the freedom which comes when my body is my servant; when I can make it in all things obey my orders. If it obtains the mastery over me, I shall be found good for nothing after I have told others how they may be God’s children and the citizens of his kingdom.
Here are two distinct paradoxes, one growing out of the other. I submit myself to other men because I am free. I bring my body into subjection that I may keep my freedom. He follows out the last in the next chapter, making it bear directly upon some of the leading fallacies of the Corinthians, especially of the party among them which called itself after his name. They supposed that having such great names put upon them, forming an Ecclesia, being called of God, saints, sanctified in Christ Jesus, they had attained a safe position which exempted them from all necessity of that self-restraint which might be very proper for them who were in a lower condition. To remove this impression he reminds them that the condition of belonging to a called body was not a new one. The Old Testament was the history of such a body, of men who had been consecrated to God by a most real baptism; who had the most certain sacraments of His presence and regard. He takes it for granted, as if it were involved in all his teaching, that Christ was with them, and that their manna, and the water from the rock expressed the direct relation in which they stood to Him as their invisible guide and the Lord of Nature. Being in this state, the history continually describes them as murmuring, lustful, cowardly, and as undergoing the sorest punishments. They must lay the lesson to heart. The old book told facts concerning human beings which must be facts for all time. It showed that the state of the election and consecration to God, instead of making it impossible for those who were in it to be faithless, disobedient, godless, brought out their faithlessness, disobedience, godlessness, into the strongest relief. The temptations of the outward world were not less to those whom the invisible God had called than to other men; the temptations of their own fleshly nature were not less. There was indeed always a way out of the temptation. The Protector was at hand; they were compassed about with the signs and pledges of protection. But they would not understand them and use them unless they believed themselves ready at each moment to fall. They would not trust God’s faithfulness unless they distrusted their own. Every one will see that St. Paul strikes not merely at the confidence and self-conceit of the Corinthians, but at that particular tendency of theirs to forget that their privileges belonged to them as members of a society, the tendency to glorify their individual knowledge and saintship. Each Jew who tempted Christ tempted him by forgetting his calling as a Jew, and by presuming upon his own power or upon God’s favor to him. Each Corinthian who tempted Christ would do so precisely from the same forgetfulness, from the same eagerness to claim liberties and privileges for himself. The Jew’s great temptation in the wilderness and in the holy land was idolatry. That summed up and expressed all his temptations. And were the Corinthians free from this danger? Were they not obviously exposed to it? And was not the danger greatest when they thought they were safe, when they believed that all the habits which had once clung to them were at an immeasurable distance from them?
Thus the particular question about eating things offered to idols is again suggested to us by the Apostle’s discourse which had been so large and general. He has not forgotten the topic from which he started, though we may. And now there comes out in connection with it—in still closer and more intimate connection with all he has been saying of the partial, dividing, self-exalting tendencies of his disciples—the communion of Christ’s body and blood.
“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of the Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of the Christ? Because there is one bread, we the many are one body; for we all are partakers of that one bread. Look at Israel after the flesh. Are not those who eat the sacrifices partakers of the altar? What do I then say? That a thing offered to an idol is any thing, or that an idol is any thing? No! But that the things that they sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and not to God; and I do not wish you to have communion with the demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of demons. You cannot communicate at the table of the Lord, and at the table of demons.”
Till now he has not fully answered the objection that the thing offered to idols is nothing, and the idol is nothing. He has detected the state of mind in which the objection originated; he has pointed out the distinction between false liberty and the true. Here he touches deeper ground. All worship is communion. You are brought into communion with the eternal God the Father. In the body and blood of Christ you are united to Him and united to each other. The participation of that body and blood signifies that you are taken out of subjection to lower beings, into direct intercourse with the Lord of all. The bread and wine, which are to you what the manna and water were to the Jews, intimate that you have been brought into a higher fellowship than theirs through your ascended Lord. Now all these things that are offered to idols express the communion of men with beings of a lower order, subjection to mere powers of nature. This is a denial of your privilege—an abdication of the high state which has been given you.
I do not assume, with our translators, that by demons in this place the Apostle means devils. I fully admit that much of Greek, as well as of Roman worship—why should I except Jewish?—was becoming, in the strictest sense, devil-worship, the worship of malevolent beings, of natures opposed to the Divine nature. But I conceive we should weaken, not strengthen, this passage if we imputed that meaning to it. St. Paul’s contrast is evidently between the lower divided powers to whom men were doing homage, the rulers of different portions of nature, and the one eternal God, the Father of Spirits. The incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, had delivered them from these powers, had raised them to the highest glory men could obtain. What a notion of liberty to throw all this aside that they might prove they were not narrow Judaizers!
This doctrine of communion appeared to St. Paul to be so implied in the very existence of the Church, that he propounds it to the Corinthians as if it were familiar to them, one which they ought certainly to know. But we are not therefore to conclude either that it was not a truth of which they were displaying continual ignorance, or that it was not one of the deepest of all truths. This whole epistle is a lesson in commonplaces. The Corinthians did not like commonplaces. They wanted novelties. They liked to discuss points of opinion, the peculiarities which separated one teacher and school from another. This was their frivolity; this made them incapable of looking at the facts of their own existence; this prevented them from entering into those principles which connect the being of man with the being of God. When St. Paul announces these, he inevitably uses phrases which denote a kind of surprise that they should not be aware of that which was so near to them, and which so intimately concerned them. And the minds of the readers would, in a certain degree, respond to this feeling of his. They would start as if a discovery was made to them of something very awful which they had always known, and yet which flashed upon them with a sense of novelty, such as may sometimes come to a person in watching a sunset or a familiar landscape. “The bread which we eat, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” “Why, certainly. We have always given it that name. And that name meant something, meant a reality, meant what it says! It can actually be applied to a special question, to one of our favorite topics of dispute. It can throw a light upon that, giving it an importance which it never had before, yet making it and making us look so petty and dwarfish. The reason for not eating things offered to idols is, that we are actually taken into fellowship with the Lord God of heaven and earth, actually redeemed out of idol and demon-worship for His service; this is involved in our very position as members of a church, expressed in the feast which denotes that we belong to it: Here is the reason for flying from any contact with that which may draw us back into the earthly slavery from which we have escaped. Here, at the same time, is the full justification of that liberty of using all God’s creatures which Paul had asserted for us, and of which we thought he was going again to deprive us. Whatever I find in the market-place I may eat, asking no questions, for it is God’s good creature; and the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. Whatever is pointed out to me as offered to idols I am not to eat; for the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; and nothing can lawfully be taken from Him and devoted to another. And this I am to do, even though my own conscience may testify that I am offering that thing to God, and not to an idol. For I am not alone in the world. I am the member of a Church. I cannot think only of myself. I must think of every man who belongs to that Church, of every Jew and Gentile who lies without it. If I am the means of corrupting their consciences I am bearing false witness to them: I am misunderstanding and outraging the state into which God has brought me.”
Chapter XI
This chapter opens with a commendation of the Corinthians for their remembrance of St. Paul’s traditions. It would seem as if the Church, generally, had enforced a rule against which certain members of it, especially certain women, had protested. Though these women may not have been numerous, they displayed a tendency which was exhibiting itself in different forms throughout the society. Why may we not eat things offered to idols? was the form of the cry for spiritual independence which affected the name of freedom. There were others as obvious. Why should not a woman be a prophetess just as much as a man? Why should she not claim to be equal with the man? Who could control the operations of the Spirit of God? Who could dare to say to a female “Thou must be silent,” when she believed an inner power was urging her to speak?
Very plausible arguments, very pious, very spiritual. The Corinthian women were quick in acting upon them. What was natural and customary and decorous for ordinary people, was just what they, inspired sisters carried away by a divine afflatus, avoided. And yet with all their inspiration, they fell into the imitation of the models with which they had been most familiar. They had seen the priestesses of Aphrodite with uncovered heads and dishevelled locks; they knew what were the ordinary symptoms of the Pythian furor. These they adapted to Christian usage, and naturalized in Christian assemblies. Would St. Paul, a mere man, dare to control such manifestations? Yes, he is bold enough to do that. Let the sisters of the free spirit call him what names they please, he tells them plainly that they are violating the first maxims and principles of Christian society. For the head of the woman is the man, even as the head of the man is Christ, even as the head of Christ is God. The Church is first of all an order, a divine, eternal order, grounded on the revelation of Christ as the head of man. Whatever interferes with that principle is antichristian, and is simply to be put down. But St. Paul has a further lesson for these highflown prophetesses. He tells them plainly that they are to obey Nature. There is a customary order about the behavior of women which their consciences in ordinary cases tell them is right. That and no other is to be their behavior in the Church, in the spiritual assembly. The way that men and women dress their hair in other places is the way in which they are to dress their hair there. For the Church of God does not supersede any natural law or maxim, not even if it is a local law belonging to the habits and customs of a particular race, but establishes it upon its deepest ground.
This, it seems to me, is the general sense of this passage. If I am asked for the particular sense of that sentence in it which speaks of the woman covering her head because of the angels, I may not be able to answer. I fancy I can discern a meaning in it. But if I tried to put it into words I should probably blunder, and might interfere with a better interpretation which has suggested itself to some one else. I am chiefly anxious, therefore, that the mysteriousness of that clause should not hinder any one from observing the thoroughly human and, if I might say so, anti-mystical, character of the context. At the same time I would not be misunderstood as denying that it also is mystical in the sense which is sometimes given to that word. When St. Paul appeals to nature’s teaching, he does not contradict all that he had said before about the spiritual economy of the Church. That economy according to him vindicates, interprets, sanctifies what might else pass for mere notions and conventions, the creatures of men’s fancy. The principle that the man is the head of the woman had been recognized in all times. It had been liable to great perversions. These had provoked protests and reactions. But it had given birth to a great many customs and practices which had become involved with the very existence of society. The truth that Christ is the head of every man came in to justify that imperfect belief of human beings, to remove the tyrannies to which it had given birth, to make any rude transgression of even the secondary and variable inferences from it a moral offence. I suppose the relation between the women and the angels is in some way involved in that fundamental principle; I suppose it implies such an intercourse between the visible and invisible world as we do not commonly recognize, and as we could not safely recognize unless our belief in Christ’s relation to us were more distinct and serious than it is wont to be. But I hope no one will lose himself in speculations about this question till he has got into his heart that portion of the Apostle’s words which is intended as a correction for spiritual ambition and self-conceit.
St. Paul had expressed his pleasure that the Corinthians generally remembered the traditions he had given them on this subject. He now expresses displeasure that they had entirely departed from the lessons he had received and given to them respecting the Lord’s Supper. The error of which they were guilty was strikingly characteristic of their state of mind, as it has discovered itself in previous chapters. They could not understand a common feast. Each one brought his own supper; it was reduced to a meal for the satisfaction or gratification of the bodily appetite. The heresies and schisms of the Church were the parents of this habit, and were of course kept alive by it. I know nothing more instructive than St. Paul’s method of dealing with this offence. Gross as the violation of decency and reverence was in the eating and the drunkenness, he does not let them suppose that it is merely an excess he is finding fault with. A great principle had been outraged—one in which the very nature of the Church was involved. He speaks first of the rule or order he had laid down. This the Corinthians had altered from carelessness or self-will. But next he makes them see that no ordinance—certainly not such an ordinance—in a Church can be merely an ordinance. There must be a profound significance in it, or it would be empty formalism to observe it. That same selfish, self-willed habit which made them innovate on the sign, made them incapable of apprehending the thing signified. They did not discern the Lord’s body. They set up distinctions of rich and poor, of those who had abundance and those who had need. They shamed the Church of God, the home of both. Not discerning the Lord’s body, is evidently the root of all these errors. The incapacity of perceiving that they were the members of his body, that there was one life for them all, one communion in which all were sharers—this was the dreadful loss and judgment which they incurred, There could be no greater. It was the loss of the blessings which they had won when they gave up their divided idolatrous worship and confessed the one Lord and one Father. Less judgments, flowing from their own ill-doings, weakness, feebleness of body, torpor of body and mind, they should look upon as merciful punishments, warning to them that God was wakening them up to judge themselves—to exercise their spiritual energies which he had given them, and which would enable them to discern Christ as the root of their own life and of the life of all their brethren.
Chapters XII. XIII. XIV
And thus the way is prepared for the wonderful passages which follow,—those which contain the very essence of the epistle which make the ignorance and strife of the Corinthians instruments of bringing forth the revelation of the principle on which the whole Church and on which human society is founded. He does not wish them, he says, to be ignorant περὶ τῶν πνευματικῶν an expression (touching the spiritual) which we are hardly justified in limiting by the term “gifts:” especially if by that term we understand merely the powers which were bestowed upon the Church in that day or in any subsequent one. No doubt he undertakes to explain the nature and purpose of these powers, and to connect them with the nature and purpose of the Church itself. But he begins earlier. While they were Gentiles, unacquainted with the Gospel, they were still under a spiritual influence. They were not mere creatures of sense. They had the instinct and necessity of worship. But they were drawn after dumb idols. Their instincts of worship were turned towards dead things. Wherefore he gives them to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus Anathema, or that no one can call Him Lord but by the Holy Ghost. Why “wherefore?” What has the second proposition to do with the first? This I apprehend. The impulse of the Corinthians was to believe in a Spirit, and to glorify themselves for possessing it, Spiritual powers they reverenced. The new capacity of speaking with tongues was as great an excuse for intellectual pride as any of the gifts which they were conscious of before they were converted had been. St. Paul wishes them to understand first of all, what Spirit had taken hold of them, whither he was leading them. Their secret thought was that He was come to make them independent, to set them above law and order the habit of mind, which as I said before, displayed itself in the women being just as really that of the men. He tells them that the Spirit of God is leading them to confess a Lord, to bow down their spirits to a government, and to confess Jesus the crucified to be the Person who is exercising that government. Supposing then they put Him aside and substitute any mere spiritual power and influence in this place, supposing they claim that kind of liberty which consists in saying what they please and doing what they like, they are not speaking by the spirit of God; and supposing they confess Jesus to be the Lord of all their inmost thoughts and speech, that is the sign and token that they are submitting to the true Spirit. Some might actually have used the words ἀνάθεμα Ἰησοῦς, declaring in a moment of supposed divine ecstasy that the mere acknowledgment of Jesus was a very low kind of Christianity, from which those who had attained to spiritual intuitions were emancipated. One could easily suspect this from what we know of the Everlasting Gospel in the 13th century and of similar movements in different times of the Church. But if the words were uttered by a few, the principle pervaded the hearts of a great many, and nothing, I suspect, may have startled many members of the Church more than to be told that the highest operation of the Spirit was to teach them of the dominion of Jesus over them. Could not all say that they had believed that, ever since they were baptized? Might not they hope now for some higher illumination? No! it was just this truth which they had so imperfectly understood. This was what they wanted that they might be cured of their strifes; this that they might be a Church, a spiritual body. For as we have seen all along, their sense of being high-souled, highly-exalted men interfered altogether with their feeling that they belonged to a body, and therefore—this has been St. Paul’s doctrine throughout—with their spirituality. The psychical man may boast of that which belongs to him as an individual, that which distinguishes him from others, in power or saintship, intellectually or morally—the spiritual man must seek only that which is common, that which he and his brother can have as their joint inheritance.
Here, then, is the principle of the chapter as of the Epistle, “You must be a body in order to know what the Spirit is, in order to receive any benefit from his operations. You must have a Spirit in order that you may be a body, not a mere set of disjecta membra.” The gifts which one had and another had not, had been mistaken for the gift; the living Spirit from whom they came. He begins therefore with laying down the doctrine that these distinctions imply the same Spirit. There were again different offices, each of which had been an excuse for some class difference, some exaltation of one against another. Each of these are declared to be ministries; but they are not referred to the Inspirer, but to the Lord, of whom He testifies. Finally, there are difference of energies. It is not enough for a man, or for a Church, to talk of gifts, or even occupations and services. It must refer all to a divine Energizer. It must believe that God is making gifts, persons, ministries, alive, and not dead, that He is reviving and receiving that Spirit which He has Himself bestowed. Thus we have the great theological mystery set forth as the source of the great human mystery—God the ground of all, Christ the Lord of man, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the perpetual fellow-worker with men.
This principle being laid down, he goes on to say that the manifestation of this power in each man, the particular talent or energy which he exhibits, is not the result of accident, but of a law. It is πρὸς τὸ συμφέρον, with a view to the common benefit. Through the Spirit he says comes the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of powers or miracles, distinctions of tongues, interpretation of tongues. The author of these, the gifts which require patient cultivation, which grow by exercise, just as much as any which manifest themselves suddenly, he says, is the Spirit; the end of them the good of the society. In fact, there is no power described by the Apostle which is merely marvellous in the vulgar sense of the word; none which might not be divested of all marvel, and exercised, as we should say, professionally. The object of the Apostle is clearly not to explain the particular phenomena of his own age, but to show how those phenomena illustrate the constitution of the Church and of humanity.
Fully to appreciate the description which follows, and to recover the impression of which familiarity deprives us, we should compare it with the view of society which is given in the Leviathan of Hobbes. That clear-sighted man perceived at once the truth of St. Paul’s image. He saw that the body and the members must be the type of that distinctness and that unity which are implied in a polity. The body politic, he saw, was no idle or fantastic expression. But then he regards the body as natural; society as wholly artificial. It was manufactured, as nearly as might be, with many awkward deviations, after the pattern which nature furnishes. One may say that the whole difference between the world’s order—of which Hobbes exhibits the true and complete representation, and the Christian order which is developed by the Apostle, lies in this difference. And it is very important that we should press this observation upon ourselves and upon others. We are apt to think that St. Paul is presenting to us the image of a peculiarly beautiful and seraphic social condition. How glorious, we say to ourselves, the time when the foot shall not say to the hand, I have no need of thee, when, if one member suffers, all the members shall suffer! Very glorious assuredly the time when people shall understand what their condition is, and shall not struggle against it. That is as seraphical a vision as one can have. But St. Paul tells that the foot cannot now, or at any time, dispense with the hand; that if one member suffer, all the members must suffer here and always. We cannot make our separate human body otherwise than God has made it; it is under a law—the one which experience every day makes known to us. We cannot make the whole human body otherwise than God has made it; and if the revelation of Christ is not an imposture, this is the constitution of that body. The particular Church of Corinth, with its rivalries, heresies, questions about idol-sacrificing, abuses of the Communion, exaltation of gifts, through all these contradictions, is taught what its own law and order is; we are to learn ours from it. Nothing can be so perverse as to suppose that we are reading of some celestial paradisaical people, while St. Paul is pointing out at every turn their ignorance and wilfulness. We must say plainly that this state was theirs because it is also ours, or that St. Paul was not a true teacher of them or of us.
The first object of the 12th chapter is certainly to explain the law under which the whole society existed; the second to explain how the gifts and offices of the particular members of the society were determined by that law and illustrated it. Every thing depends upon the observance of this method. If the spiritual gifts and graces of individuals are thought of first, if the body is supposed to be made up of a certain set of limbs which had been previously endowed with a separate life, the Christian society acquires as artificial a character as the Hobbes society; his idea, and not St. Paul’s, is the explanation of a Church. Christ in that case becomes just what the Corinthians considered Him, the king or leader whom they had chosen in preference to some other, not the corner-stone which can alone bind living and spiritual beings together. I drop unawares into St. Peter’s illustration, one which he derived from the Old Testament. So closely are his and St. Paul’s connected, so admirably is each adapted to some side or portion of human life, that one inevitably suggests the other. The human body, however, is the great illustration of all to which every other must be referred and by which it must be tested. The stones of the temple become “living” stones by a kind of violence before they can represent the members of a human society. The members of a body must necessarily be considered as alive; and their life necessarily implies unity. Only in the scattered distracted condition in which Ezekiel saw them in his vision, can we conceive of them as utterly dead; no one has perished in itself till it has lost that which unites it with the rest. One does not know how to state these simple propositions simply enough. The least effort to make them abstract weakens them. We stumble back into St. Paul’s phraseology when we have quitted it, as the only full explanation of our own explanations. And yet one perceives at each moment how we have been forgetting this truth, not in daily practice only, but in our most elaborate ecclesiastical and theological theories. Each one of them contrives by some ingenious sophism or other to evade the straightforward question, “Because the hand or the eye or the foot says, I am not of the body, is it not of the body?”Each one tries to make out that hand, eye, or foot, has a right to say it is not of the body, nay, that it has no right to say it is, that it ought to be modest and diffident before it claims such an honor. Each eye is to look hard that it may try to find out whether there is no salvation for itself; each hand is to stretch itself out that it may catch at this salvation or at some shadow of it; each foot is to try if it cannot move on by itself in the way to salvation. And the eye is blind and the hand is withered and the foot is paralyzed, because it is urged to a vain and impossible experiment, because it is not told of its relation to Him in whom the whole body is fitly joined together, and who supplies the nourishment to each joint. And so each particular gift is wonderfully over-valued, and is made an excuse for extravagant idolatry, while yet no gift serves its proper purpose, while none has the freedom and strength which it would derive from the support and fellowship of the rest, while none awakens the thankfulness which is due to the Almighty Giver.
The enumeration of gifts by the Apostle at the conclusion of this chapter has, I suppose, puzzled many readers; human beings are so strangely mixed up with their endowments. “God hath set certain in the Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then powers (or miracles), then gifts of healing, helps, governments, varieties of tongues.” But this order is intelligible when one considers the sentence immediately preceding, and the purpose of the whole chapter. Apostles, prophets, teachers, as far as their offices are concerned, are merely ministerial to the whole body in the same sense as gifts of speaking or of healing are. The human treasure is put in the highest place. A man is a greater gift to the Church than all which he does. Paul is more than any words which Paul is able to speak or any wonders he is able to enact. Nevertheless the man is as much placed in the Church, is as much bestowed upon it, as the energies which are wrought by his means. And the man and the gifts alike stand in a certain fixed relation. There is nothing fortuitous in the arrangements of this society. The teacher is subordinate to the prophet, the prophet to the apostle. All those influences which may strike some as overpowering inspirations that they cannot control, are really subject to them. They are spiritual gifts, and therefore they belong to an order. That which is unspiritual, fleshly, idolatrous, is always trying to be strange and startling. I scarcely need point out how much the errors of the Corinthians demanded the assertion of this principle, or how much it is demanded by ourselves. It would seem as if we had begun to think that every thing which is spiritual must be irregular, fortuitous, anomalous. When once we are brought to live habitually in the opposite faith, the trade of the wonderment-maker will be obsolete and hopeless; all will know the worth of his wares, and will treat them with the scorn which they deserve. That time will not come till we desire earnestly the best gifts, till we count all arts of healing, all capacities of government, as divine trusts, the most divine when they are most regularly and scientifically exercised; until we enter upon that more excellent way which the Apostle after this exhibition of the worth of gifts points out to us.
Chapter XIII
It is almost needless to observe that this chapter cannot be separated from the last. The subordination of gifts to the divine principle which binds the whole Church together,—to the gift of God,—is the subject of it. This is the answer to the argument which Socinus deduced from it against the personality of the Holy Spirit: “The Apostle can indulge in a long personification of charity; why must he or our Lord mean more when they attribute acts, qualities, sympathies, to the Comforter or the Spirit of truth?” I admit that if there is a prosopopœia in one case, there may be in the other. But there really is in neither. The Apostle speaks of charity suffering long and being kind, because he cannot separate charity from Him who is Charity. He regards Love as the essence of God, not as His attribute. And if you say, “Does he mean then by Charity in this chapter divine Charity, and not human?” I answer, he must mean one if he means the other. The only charity which fully answers to this description is the charity of God Himself. Separate man from God, and it remains wholly and incommunicably in Him. It is a contradiction to suppose charity incommunicable. Its nature implies a desire for fellowship and participation. The very words which represent charity here represent it in exercise, yes, and in exercise towards those who are resisting it, towards those who are unworthy of it. If you must have the belief of a charity—and I know you must—which is absolute and original, not merely in relation to any creature, and yet which seeks for such a relation, longs for it, establishes it, then believe in a Father. If you must believe in love manifesting itself—and I know you must—meeting the disobedient and rebellious creature, embracing it, adopting it, then believe in an only-begotten Son. If you must—and I know you must—speak of that love as not presented to the creature only but as working in it, then believe in the Holy Spirit of Love. And so you have the charity of this chapter presented in its fulness and all-sufficiency, and yet with every possible allowance for the imperfect and insufficient results which it produces when it is brought into connection and conflict with a will, or a number of wills, not in submission to it. This Charity is still the ground of all unity to the Church. The acknowledgment of it as working in the Church, as working upon ourselves, is that superlative or more excellent way by which man rises into a belief in God and into communion with Him. It appertains to the eternal and to the universal; while gifts and powers belong to the temporal; while even prophecies belong to a partial region. They may be of yesterday or to-day; they may indicate a period of partial illumination, of childlike apprehension. But there is that which is abiding and eternal. Faith is so, for it attaches itself to the eternal God; Hope is so, for it looks to the full revelation of the Eternal God; Love is so in the highest sense of all, because God Himself, the object of Faith and Hope, is Charity.
Chapter XIV
We have heard of that which is above all gifts, and also of that which gives a value to all gifts, and enables us to ascertain their relative importance. Speaking with tongues had seemed to the Corinthians the most precious of all powers, because the outward exhibitions of it were the most surprising; preaching (or prophesying) the most insignificant, as being the most commonplace. St. Paul necessarily reverses the order. If Love is the end, that which conduces to the good of the whole body must be better than that which is confined to the individual. In order to maintain this distinction, it is necessary for him to explain both the nature and purpose of the gift of tongues. His explanation is altogether inconsistent with many of the notions which have been current among us. We are often told that this gift was specially convenient, and even necessary for those who had to preach the Gospel in different countries. No hint is given of the kind in the New Testament. In this, the classical passage on the subject, our translators have been so much puzzled how to reconcile the Apostle’s language with their own previous conception, that they have very unrighteously thrust in the word “unknown” in order to make him more intelligible. He seems to tell us that the gift of tongues was not primarily an intellectual gift, that it was the sign of a communication between God’s Spirit and that spirit of man in us to which he had alluded in a former passage; that it was therefore the witness of the divinest Christian mystery, of that union of man with God which was implied in the acts of Christ, and made effectual by those acts, of that union of man with man which was implied and realized in the existence of a Church. It was the main error, as we have seen, of the Corinthians, that they confounded this spirit of man with individual soul, glorifying separate powers and qualities at the expense of that which was universal. Here was the climax of their falsehood. This gift of tongues itself was made a pretext for their individualizing tendencies. They exulted in the divine communication of words because no one could understand them. They liked to think that something was given to one here and there in the Church, with which the rest had nothing to do. It is this tendency which St. Paul is combating here. He does not disparage that which had been the great and significant witness that the Church had been begun upon earth, that there was a real fellowship between earth and heaven. But with his usual courage, he sets at nought even that sign when he sees that its meaning has been wholly subverted. He tells them that they are to desire to prophesy because that is useful, and that they are “not to forbid to speak with tongues.” Not to forbid to speak with tongues! What a strange and audacious sentence. How could they forbid that which was the effect of a divine inspiration? This is the subject which he especially considers in the latter part of the chapter. The high-flown Corinthians were far above all vulgar thoughts of usefulness. They were equally indifferent to so vulgar a thing as Order. St. Paul, the inspired Apostle, will have usefulness and order, because he is certain that the Spirit is a Spirit of order, and that all manifestations of the Spirit are given to profit withal. Those inspirations must be undervalued which are not beneficial to the body; those must be suppressed, and can be suppressed, which interfere with its quietness and order. If any question his decision on this point, he does not reason with them; he simply puts them down; “What, came the word of God out from you? Or came it unto you only? If any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things which I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant.”
There is a passage in this chapter which has caused some perplexity. In one sentence Paul seems to affirm that the gift of tongues is not for them that believe, but for them that believe not; the opposite being the case with prophesying or preaching. Presently after he seems to say that preaching or prophesying will be specially useful to any unbeliever who comes into their congregations, whereas, if such a person hears them speaking with tongues, he will only suppose they are mad. The difficulty arises, I think, from a misunderstanding of the first proposition. The gift of tongues was beneficial to themselves while they believed not; that is to say, it was the token to them of a spiritual communication which before they had not supposed to be possible. Afterwards, when they had believed in the presence of a Spirit, when they had perceived that it was implied in all their fellowship and all their worship, this sign was of little worth. To crave for it was a proof that they had not believed that which it imported. If this is the force of that assertion it certainly is not the least at variance with the other, which is so evidently reasonable, and must have been confirmed by the experience of the whole Christian Church.
Chapter XV
The connection between this chapter and those which precede it, is not at once obvious. But we shall soon detect it if we consider the question which gives rise to the discussion. “How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Some among them said there was no resurrection of the dead, for the same reason that some among them said they were of Paul or of Apollos, that some among them exalted their own wisdom, that some of them asserted their right to eat things offered to idols, and in all respects to do what they liked, that some of them wished women to speak in the churches, that some treated the Communion as an ordinary feast, that some valued gifts which glorified them above gifts which were useful to the Church. These notions of some expressed that which was the failing of all, the inclination to value the individual above the body, tongues and prophecies above charity. To deny a bodily resurrection, to maintain that the only resurrection was the rising to a higher spiritual state, was a natural consequence or accompaniment of such notions and feelings. The old Greek reverence, for the soul, and contempt of the body, was reviving under the shadow of Christian ordinances, and fashioning Christian doctrines into conformity with itself. Whatever was common and human was therefore despicable; whatever was peculiar and distinguishing was therefore glorious. The body was the case of death from which the winged soul, according to the doctrine of older philosophers, was to emerge in the hour of dissolution. The Christians could antedate the period of deliverance; the spirit was already winged, already regenerate. They were buried with Christ by baptism into death; they were risen by faith in the operation of God who had raised Him from the dead. They looked back upon that to which their ancestors looked forward; they could place the superiority of the new doctrine upon that ground. But while they did so, they were, in fact, adhering to the psychical principle of the old heathenism, and parting with the hope for the future which heathenism, however faintly, had authorized.
St. Paul, in pursuance of the method which he had always prescribed to himself, begins with them again from the beginning. Those who are full of conceit of their manhood must be treated as babes, and fed with milk. He declares to them the Gospel which he had preached to them; the simple common Gospel that Christ had died for their sins and risen again the third day. He dwells distinctly on these events, as events, apart from the meaning which he may afterwards discover in them. He insists that they were in accordance with the scriptures. The written word of God demanded them. They were no parts of a philosophical or theological theory. And this, he says, was his good news. He had nothing better to tell them than that the Son of God and the Son of Man had gone into death and risen out of death. Here was their salvation out of sin and death if they believed that He had done this, and done it for them. If no such acts had been accomplished, no such victories had been won, they were still in their old slavery; they had not been redeemed at all.
Plain and historical enough surely. St. Paul would seem to be speaking of mere transactions external to the man to whom they are proclaimed and who believes them. But I am afraid we cannot acquit him of mysticism, if a belief in Christ as the root and ground of humanity is mysticism, so quickly. The whole of the argument which follows rests upon this mystical ground, and is good for nothing if it be taken from him. If we do not rise, then Christ is not risen, and then our preaching is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Daring assertion! Christ cannot have risen if we are not to rise! For all that He is the Son of God, St. Paul affirms this. Either He did not rise from the dead, or, in that rising, He exhibited the law of the race with which He was united. If He was not the firstborn among many brethren it was a lie that He had left the grave at all. Not one part of the message He had delivered, but the whole of it was a delusion. It was not the resurrection of the body which was gone. That resurrection of the soul which they vaunted of was just as imaginary.
And then those that have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. The whole past world is nothing but one dark horrible vision of human souls born into a world of sorrow, enduring it for threescore years and ten, and then dying out of it. If in this life only, he adds boldly, we have hope in Christ, we are more wretched than any men; for all have had dreams of another life, of heroes who have escaped the prison-house and entered into a higher state, even of a hero or champion who might bring them into one. The privilege of exalted Christians, it would seem, is not to have this hope. Christ has died and risen that they may be content with the threescore years and ten, and be content that mankind should perish if they can obtain a temporary felicity. That St. Paul meant this, and not that he was more miserable in this life than Festus, or Berenice, or Agrippa, whom he wished to be both almost and altogether such as he was, except his bonds, I think there can be no doubt. He goes on with those memorable words: “But now is Christ raised out of the dead, the first-fruits of those that are asleep. For since through man death, through man also resurrection of the dead. For as in the Adam all die, so also in the Christ all shall be made alive.” We have here an assertion as broad as that which we found in the 5th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and exactly corresponding to it. There it was said, that “as through one transgression, or the transgression of one—unto all men—unto condemnation, so also, through one just act, (or the just act of one)—unto all men unto justification of life.” There is no limitation in either case; there can be none, unless the whole contrast which the passage brings out is lost. The law of death for the race is said to be manifested in Adam, the law of life for the race in the Christ. The Resurrection has proved the law of life to be stronger than the law of death. The Resurrection has not been to confirm the hopes of a few believers; not to assure those who came in after days how much better their condition is than that of their fathers. He is the first-fruits of those that have slept. All the men of the past world are concerned in his victory. It is a victory over their tyrant. It breaks their chains. Theologians have tried hard to make this free gospel to humanity accord with their narrow conception of its present state and future destiny. But the words are too strong for them. In trying to make a salvation for themselves they exclude themselves; they leave no foundation upon which they can stand when they have to fight, not with a school-death, but an actual death.
But every man, St. Paul says, is to rise in his own order, Christ the first-fruits, afterwards those who are of Christ in his presence, οἱ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ. I quote the words those who are of Christ, because it seems to me that our translators have committed two faults in rendering them, which though not apparently very important, and perhaps difficult to avoid, have proved serious hinderances to the Christian student. The words, “They that are Christ’s,” have been taken to mean faithful or godly people who belong to Christ, so distinguished from the unfaithful or ungodly who are none of His. Of course this sense may be in words, but no one would at once deduce it from the Greek. Christ first; then His attendants, companions, or (to follow the teaching of the previous chapters) the members of His body. Who those are must be ascertained by considerations independent of this verse; that can by itself exclude none. The other error is a far more extensive one, and affects numberless passages besides this. Ought παρουσία ever to be rendered “coming?” Does not the word “appearing” or “presence” convey the sense much more nearly? Is there any one instance of its use to which those renderings would not be suitable? is there any one which is not somewhat perverted and darkened by mixing with it the idea of locomotion?
I wish my readers carefully to examine this question for themselves. I have not much doubt about the result. But I will speak of the passage before us. If we adopt the rendering of our version, Christ is said to be the first-fruits of an harvest. And yet he is said to have risen ages before any one ear or grain is gathered in. All who were then dead or to die for generations after would at some indefinitely distant day rise out of graves in which they had seen the grossest corruption, in accordance with the precedent, and in obedience to the law, which He established, who saw no corruption. If the other meaning is taken, Christ’s appearance or manifestation is the resurrection and deliverance of man out of his deathly Adam conditions. The true Lord of his life, the source of all that has been living in his spirit and body, awakens and renovates him. He comes into that true state which all through his life on earth he has been conscious of, though it has been choked and hidden by so many perverse accidents that he could very imperfectly realize it. I need hardly say that such a view of Christ’s παρουσία (presence) to each man does not interfere with the belief of that gathering together of all men in Him, which the Apostle refers to elsewhere. One truth sustains the other. I do not want people to think less of a general appearing of Christ. I wish them to see how general, how universal the effect of His appearing must be. If we look upon Him as the one living Head and Root of humanity, we cannot suppose any unity or gathering together of the elements whereof humanity consists except in Him. Life involves union, as Death is only another name for dispersion. If Christ’s Incarnation and Death and Resurrection and Ascension, and His after judgments on Jerusalem, declared Him to be the Man, the Centre of Humanity, then it is surely consistent that ever after He should be appearing or declaring Himself in this character; that the death of every individual, as much as the judgment of every nation, should be such an appearance or declaration; and that there should be a final and more perfect appearing which should gather up the threads of the history of the universe, and satisfy all the purposes of its Creator.
“And then,” says St. Paul, “the end,” τὸ τέλος, the point to which all Christ’s acts have been tending, the accomplishment of the design which has been implied in them all. It is not, I conceive, necessary to think merely of that final gathering which is, as I said before, assumed in St. Paul’s words, when we hear of this τέλος. In the history of each period of the world, in the history of each man, we may believe that a purpose is carried out, a divine intention realized—one that is expressed by the words, “The Son who has been carrying on the long battle in that period—with that man—and beneath whose feet at last his enemies have been put, then presents the fruit of His victory to the Father, subjects Himself to Him who put all things under Him, so that God is all in all.” The vision of a kingdom of God, an eternal kingdom, for which the kingdom of Christ is a preparation,—the kingdom where principles are in conflict, where the world and the flesh and the devil are still contending for the prize of man and of the earth, and often appear to be contending successfully—is one which comes out very clearly in certain passages of St. Paul’s writings; but for the fulness of which we must turn to the writings of the beloved disciple. If any one supposes that that kingdom is one in which the Son will disappear, lost in the brightness of the Eternal Glory, St. John will be the best protector from so gloomy an anticipation. The Son revealing the Father, the Father revealing the Son; the perpetual strife of opposite truths reconciled in the perfect Unity of the Spirit; this is that great τέλος, that satisfying vision, to which those that have suffered with Christ may hope to awake, not surely to one where He who has been their only strength in all their warfare is no longer distinctly and personally present.
Death, says St. Paul, is the last enemy that is destroyed or put down. Is put down, or is to be put down? The next sentence, which has caused so much trouble to interpreters, contains, I think, the answer. “Why are they then baptized for the dead?” Whether our translators found the exact equivalent to ὑπέρ or not, I cannot believe they were very far wrong. Every explanation of the passage that has been derived from supposed usages in the Church,—usages probably antedated to serve the convenience of the commentators,—itself requires an explanation from some principle. The words in the 6th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans must account for the practice, if it existed; they account for St. Paul’s language here, if it did not exist. The Christians were baptized for the dead. Baptism was a witness that they were planted in the likeness of Christ’s death, and should be of His resurrection. It declared them to be dead with Christ, to carry about death with them through all their pilgrimage; but a death which was no longer solitary, individualizing, antihuman. It was a human death, a common death, the death of Christ, which united them to each other, not cut them off from each other. And it was a death which had been overcome. Not only the promise of a Resurrection, but the fact of a Resurrection, was contained in the baptism. It spoke of death trampled upon already as well as of death to be trampled on hereafter, in the case of each person who put on Christ. According to St. Paul’s general argument, if it imported either it must import the other. And then what a mockery was baptism for all who adopted the Corinthians’ notion of a merely spiritual and past resurrection!
And if that notion is true, he goes on, “why are we also in peril every hour?” He touches here upon a very grave and fertile question in ethics, the importance of which later ages have fully appreciated. Apparently he decides it for the Bossuet school, against the Fenelon. The former could easily extract from his words the moral, “We want the promise of rewards to enable us to bear up against the world’s opposition; the mere love of God is not of itself sufficient. If we were left to that, the motives to ‘eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,’ would be irresistible.” The conclusion, I think, is one-sided and hasty, though not without a useful admonition to the mere mystical dreamer, who turns his faith in the love of God into an excuse for acquiescence with all which contradicts that Love on earth. How could you trust it, if you supposed it was working out no result, was triumphing over no enemies, was finding miseries and curses and leaving them? Eating and drinking is a refuge, the only one to be found, from the dreariness of such a faith. But it was not the thought of a selfish prize which kept the Apostle from giving the reins to his appetites. He was too practical and honest not to prefer a present gratification to the mere dream of a reversionary one. The thought that God would not disappoint those who believed in Him, that He would prove Himself mightier than sin and death and hell, made him ready to fight with beasts or men at Ephesus, and to die daily,—as he swore by that gladness and triumph which he had, and which they might share with him in Christ their common Lord, that he did. And to this hope and confidence he called them to awake. They were substituting theories about the resurrection, refinements which could stand the shock of no trial, for trust in God and the knowledge of Him. They were encouraging each other in these bad habits. They were fostered by their sects and clubs. Let them seek that higher blessing which it was a shame for members of a Church to want.
“But some one will say, How are the dead raised up? And with what kind of body do they come? Fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. And what thou sowest is not the body that is to become, but the naked grain, it may chance of wheat or of some of the other grains. But God giveth it a body as He will, and to each seed its own proper body.”
The question of the doubter is here twofold. What is the manner of resurrection? And what kind of body can those have who seem to have cast aside what has been called body here? Both questions were precisely such as would have occurred to Greeks who had heard that the body, in the judgment of the philosopher, was merely a carcase, the prison-house of a nobler principle, and that he looked for an absorption of the particular life into some general essence. Yet St. Paul treats them with unusual contempt. He wishes the Corinthians to feel how little earnest reflection upon facts was implied in their fine speculations. If they would but consider quietly for a few moments the things with which they were most familiar, how much they might learn which the wisest doctor could not tell them. They expect a resurrection for the seed which they put into the ground. They look for it to come up some day, do they not? They expect the seed of wheat to bring forth wheat, of rye to bring forth rye. But it lies in the ground; it dies. And, when it comes up again, is it the least like that which was deposited? Yet it is identical with that. They have no doubt about it. God has given the seed a body—a new body—and yet it is its own body, though so changed from the seed. Does not this analogy go through nature? Is it only seeds that are different from each other, or only the bodies which seeds produce? Is not the flesh of men different from the flesh of beasts, the flesh of beasts from that of birds, theirs from that of fishes? Are the heavenly bodies like the bodies upon earth? Can you compare the one with the other? Nay, is not there a difference in degree, though not in kind, in the glory of those heavenly bodies? Is not one star more conspicuous than another? The preservation of the type, and the distinction of forms is in accordance with the law which we trace through all God’s works. What wonder then if out of a perishable seed there rises that which is imperishable, out of an insignificant seed that which is glorious, out of a feeble seed that which is mighty; in the case of man out of a psychical body, a spiritual body? “For,” he goes on, “there is a psychical body, and there is a spiritual.” Then he cites Genesis. It is written, “The first Adam became a living soul,” adding his own comment, “the last Adam became a quickening spirit.”
Here is St. Paul’s satisfactory explanation of his own argument. Here is that which connects it with the previous words, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” And here is the confutation of the vulgar gloss which has been put upon the passage I have been dwelling on, when it has been supposed to intimate that the sowing of the seed in the ground is the type of putting the mortal remains of a man into the earth. How can any one read these glorious sentences in which the Apostle travels, from earth to heaven, and heaven to earth, and then suppose that the basis of them is a petty accidental resemblance, a kind of pun, which one would blush to meet with in the poorest rhetorician! No; the seed is not sown when the man ceases to dwell in this world. That which he inherits from his parents, that which belongs to him as the child of Adam, that which has gone already through a death-process in his mother’s womb, that which he bears with him through all his pilgrimage, that is it which is sown in corruption, in dishonor, in weakness; that is it to which the quickening life of the second Adam comes, which this life penetrates and purifies that it may be raised in incorruption, in glory, in power. All the former part of the chapter is at variance with itself upon any other hypothesis, still more, I think, that which remains of it. The spiritual body, he says, does not come first, but the psychical. The first man is out of the earth earthy, the second man (Lachmann omits the ὁ κύριος, perhaps rightly) out of heaven. As is the earthy, such also are the earthy, and as is the heavenly, such also are the heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly.
The twofold condition of man is set forth in these verses just as St. Paul sets it forth everywhere else, only with a new application. The divine root, the Christ, is the true ground of all life, redemption, resurrection, for the man himself, for his soul and his body. The old Adam is the root of the curse and of the death. To bear the image of the earthly is to bear the image of death. To bear the image of Christ the heavenly one, is to have life and resurrection. “For,” he proceeds, “this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood are not able to inherit the kingdom of God, neither shall corruption inherit incorruption.” Surely if there were no other text in the Bible, this might settle the question whether that which we give earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, that which is corruption, if any thing in the world is corruption, is that body which is to be made like Christ’s glorious body, which is to inherit His incorruption. If flesh and blood did indeed constitute that body the contemplation of which threw the Psalmist into a rapture—if when the blood ceases to flow, and the flesh becomes torpid, all its marvellous powers and energies are dried up and exhausted—we might go to the charnel-house to look for the only proof that the voice which once spoke to us may speak again, that the light which beamed from the countenance may not be for ever quenched in darkness. But if every word that ever cheered us came from the Divine Word, if every smile was a witness of His presence in whom is the fulness of joy, why may not the body as well as the spirit be now dwelling in that kingdom into which flesh and blood can never enter?
“Behold,” says the Apostle, “I declare to you a mystery.” The words which follow are susceptible of two directly opposite meanings. Our translators say, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” According to Lachmann’s punctuation it would be, “We shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.” I do not think that there can be a reasonable doubt in any man’s mind, however, who reads the following verse, that the old construction is the true one, and that Lachmann has sacrificed the peculiarity of St. Paul’s style, as well as his consistency, for the sake of preserving what may possibly be a more regular construction. For to what does “the moment, the twinkling of an eye, the last trump,” refer, if the preceding words are “we shall not be changed?” Or what becomes of the following clause, in which it is said that “the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed?”
One cannot, for an instant, suspect Lachmann of any thing but a kind of philological wilfulness in departing from the common mode of stopping the sentence. But there are certainly some who might find it theologically convenient to make the Apostle speak according to his fashion. If there could be the peremptory assertion, “we shall all sleep,” how much strength would the theories of those acquire who make it a fundamental article of their creed, that there shall be thousands of years during which the remains of dead bodies lie in their graves, and during which disembodied souls slumber in a kind of forgetfulness, and that then at the sound of the archangel’s trumpet every morsel of dust and corruption will attach itself again to the creature which it oppressed during his sojourn on earth? But this, though a very great, and, I think, a very frightful, marvel, is exceedingly unlike the Apostle’s idea of a mystery. That renovation and resurrection which he has been speaking of, he tells us has its parallels throughout all nature; this, by the confession of those who speak most of it, is absolutely unparalleled. Every law which man has ever recognized or believed in is outraged by it. But what law is violated, what law is not fulfilled, by that unseen transformation in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, which finishes the long wrestling of the body with its case of death, which announces the triumph of the second Adam? What St. Paul would seem to be telling the Corinthians here is that those who were dead, those who had fallen asleep before Christ’s coming in the flesh, would just as much share in the glorious resurrection which He had obtained for them as those who were alive then. Their flesh and blood would not inherit the kingdom of God any more than the flesh and blood of their successors. The corruption of the one would as little inherit incorruption as the corruption of the other. But the bodies of one as much as the bodies of the other, would hear the voice of the Son of Man. That voice of the archangel which on Sinai had proclaimed the law of death, would proclaim through all God’s universe, in full clear notes, that death was swallowed up in victory, that the last enemy had been vanquished. That voice which all the invisible world would hear and would echo, could be repeated even here, in this visible world, by the inspired Apostle. “Where, O Death, is thy sting? Where, O Grave, is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; the strength of sin is the Law. Thanks be to God that giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Chapter XVI
This doctrine of the resurrection is so living and practical a one, that it is in as close contact with all earthly and common things as it is with the heavenly world. “Therefore, my beloved brethren,” he says, “be firm, unmoved, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” And so he proceeds to speak of the collections which were to be made on the first day of the week, of his own journeys, of his desire to come and winter with them, of Timothy and Apollos, and the house of Stephanas, of the friends that were greeting them at a distance, of their greetings to each other. Those men who were exalting the soul, and tearing and rending the Church for the sake of their fine notions, could not touch the common earth, could only dwell in the clouds. But he who believed that the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, had dwelt upon earth and hallowed it and redeemed it, that He was the Head of the whole body, the quickening Spirit of each of its members, he felt that nothing was too glorious for humanity, nothing mean for him who was the minister of it and of its Lord. He could say, as he had said in the sterner parts of his epistle, “If any one loves not the Lord,”—if he sets up his own pride and fancies against Him,—“let him be Anathema;” he must be so. But he could say in the very same spirit, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.”