St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians Part 9

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In this great conception of church unity there are several points to which special attention must be given.

i.

The Church is one, first of all, because a common inward life, the Spirit, from a common source, Christ, flows in her veins and makes her to be one body. What is this 'unity of Spirit?' says Chrysostom. 'As in a body it is spirit which holds all together, and makes that to be a unity which consists of different limbs, so it is in the Church. For the Spirit was given for this purpose that He might unify those who differ in race and variety of habits.' This inward life is no doubt, as we shall see, imparted, maintained and perfected through outward means or inst.i.tutions--baptism, the eucharist, human offices and ministries; but none the less it is the inward life which makes the Church one. So that her unity is like the unity of a family or a race, a unity of blood and life which exists in spite of all outward differences: and not like such a unity as is produced by outward government, as, for example, Armenians, Syrians, Kurds, and Turks make up the unity of the Turkish empire, or Englishmen and Frenchmen the Dominion of {152} Canada. The unity of the Christian Church is thus a unity which ought to express itself in 'the bond of peace,' but which does not consist in that, any more than the unity of a family consists in the affection and sympathy which yet brothers ought to have one to another. This Pauline idea of church unity--which is the idea also of the New Testament as a whole--constantly finds expression in early Christian writings, but one particular expression of it may be cited.

Hilary of Poitiers, in argument with the Arians, is confronted with the position that the phrase 'I and my Father are one' means only one in will, not one in nature, like the phrase used of the Church, 'one heart and soul.' He refutes the argument by urging that, in the latter case also, what is referred to is not a unity of wills but of nature: believers are 'one thing through a new birth into the same (new) nature.' 'Ye are all one,' says St. Paul, 'in Christ Jesus.' 'The apostle teaches that this unity of the faithful comes from the nature of the sacraments.... What then can concord of minds have to do with a case where men are already made one by being clothed with one Christ through the nature of one baptism?[9]' This pa.s.sage gives {153} a striking view of what ultimately const.i.tutes church unity.

It is necessary to call attention to this position because the great Roman church, which occupies so large a s.p.a.ce in the whole area of the church, and impresses its ideas so powerfully upon men's imagination, has perverted this idea of church unity by a one-sided emphasis on unity of government. I find a typical modern Roman statement in Dr.

Hunter's _Outlines of Dogmatic Theology_[10]: 'The Church has a principle of oneness which joins the members together, and distinguishes the society from a mere aggregate of unconnected units.

The members are a.s.sociated in order that, believing the revelation that G.o.d has given, and using the means of grace which He has provided, under the direction of the governors who have their authority from Him, they may attain the end of their being, the salvation of their souls.

In other words, the unity which the Church must have includes the unity of faith, unity of worship, and unity of government.' Here we have church unity described as an outward a.s.sociation of individuals to attain a certain end by submitting to a common authority in matters of belief and worship. The {154} unity of spiritual life which St. Paul and St. Hilary put distinctly first, becomes secondary or subordinate.

It is not even specified among the three chief elements of unity. But it makes the greatest possible difference whether you say 'the Church is one because all baptized persons share a common life in Christ, and ought therefore to behave as "one body,"' or 'the Church is one by submitting to a common authority in belief, worship, and government.'

The second is the Roman, the first is the apostolic statement.

ii.

Once more, St. Paul's idea of the unity of the Church forbids us to conceive of it as complete in this world. Each particular church with its own organization has a certain relative completeness, but it gains all its meaning and life through fellowship in the body of Christ--the whole society of men who, having Christ for their head, live in the unity of a life derived from Him. The head of the body is out of sight. So also are the members of the body who 'are fallen asleep' but are still 'in Jesus[11].' It is, so to speak--and increasingly as history goes {155} on--only the lower limbs of the body who are on the earth at any particular moment. And they find their centre of unity at no lower point than Christ, the unseen head. This idea is vigorously expressed by St. Augustine[12]: 'Since the whole Church is made up of the head and the body, the head is our Saviour Himself, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, who now, after He has risen from the dead, sits at the right hand of G.o.d; but the body is the Church--not this church or that, but the Church scattered over all the world; nor is it that only which exists among men now living; but they also belong to it who were before us and are to be after us to the end of the world. For the whole Church, made up of all the faithful, because all the faithful are members of Christ, has its head situate in the heavens which governs this body: though it is separated from their sight, yet it is bound to them by love."

Now it is obvious that this Pauline and Augustinian idea of church unity excludes, instead of suggesting, the Roman method of arguing for the papacy from the necessity that a body must have a head. An a.s.sociation of men in this world, such as the Church on earth {156} is--a 'body of men' in this sense--may be governed in any of the various ways in which human societies are governed, not by any means necessarily by a monarch[13]. In this sense a body need not have a single head; or it can be ruled by a president in a council of equals.

But in St. Paul's sense, the Church as a body must have a head, and that head can be none other than Christ, because, according to his spiritual physiology, from its head the Church receives its continually inflowing life; and because the body is not completely, but only partially, in this world, and the head must be over all the members, and not only over some.

iii.

But if the unity of the Church, as St. Paul expounds it, is before all else a unity of life, it is as well a unity in the truth. It is a unity based on belief in a divine revelation, given in the person of Christ--based on the common confession that Jesus crucified and risen is Christ and Lord[14]. To say that 'Jesus is the Lord' {157} involves further--what is implied in this pa.s.sage of the Epistle to the Ephesians--the confession of the threefold name--the 'one G.o.d and Father,' the 'one Lord' Jesus Christ, the Son of G.o.d, the 'one Spirit'

which is His gift; and there can be no real question that St. Paul's language constantly involves that the Son and Spirit are with the Father really personal, and really divine, included, so to speak, in the one only eternal G.o.dhead. A creed then is at the basis of the Christian life--a creed which finds its best expression and safeguard in the formulated doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. There is no reason to think that St. Paul, if the situation of the later Church could have been made plain to him, would have shrunk from these dogmatic safeguards of the Church's central faith.

But if we grant--what cannot really with any show of reason be denied--that the Church is a visible organization based on a certain revealed truth, which must be accepted by its members, and which admits of being formulated in order to be preserved; still this truth may be advanced and defended mainly by one of two methods--that of external regulative authority, or that of appeal to principles, discussion, controversy, {158} exhortation. And it can hardly be denied that St.

Paul prefers the latter. Sharp appeals to authority are indeed to be found in St. Paul[15], but they are very rare. For example, in none of his epistles against the Judaizers is the authority of the apostolic decision, as to what might and what might not be required of the Gentile Christians 'in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia[16],' brought into requisition; though that decision 'settled the question.' He prefers to prove that 'circ.u.mcision is nothing.' This may be in part accounted for by St. Paul's refusal to admit that his own apostolic authority needed the support of the twelve, and by the limited area to which the decision was addressed; but there is another reason as well. For he plainly, as all his epistles show, prefers to appeal not to authority at all but to the spiritual reason; to expound principles, to argue, to awaken the heart, conscience, and mind of Christians. It must be admitted that there is very little in St. Paul's epistles about differences of doctrinal views among Christians as distinct from differences in practices. Yet there is enough--as in the vigorous pa.s.sage about the 'regarding of one {159} day above another[17]'--to justify the belief that he would not have viewed with any disapproval the existence in the Church of tolerated differences of opinion where they did not touch the basis of the Church's life. Such differences of view are hardly separable from what St. Paul glories in--a unity which is consistent with great variety of gifts and character, and great freedom. It is unity in variety which he has as his ideal, such a unity as is always characteristic of a unity of life, like that of nature or of a free people; or a unity, again, like that of a great Gothic Church, or of the Bible.

It is quite certain that St. Paul would have deprecated that 'short and easy' method of promoting unity which has constant recourse to the external pressure of dogma and authority.

iv.

It follows naturally from what has been just said, that St. Paul should look not so much to ecclesiastical enactments as to a right Christian temper for preserving outward unity. 'Making it your moral effort,' so we may paraphrase his exhortation to the Asiatic Christians, 'by means {160} of the virtues which I have just specified of humility, meekness, long-suffering, and forbearance, to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of Christian peace.' The New Testament view of heresy (a self-willed separatism), or schism, is that it is a violation of charity and peace in the interests of pride and impatience and self-will. It is men like 'Diotrephes who loveth to have the pre-eminence,' who violate it. In fact it is written in history that the ecclesiastical schisms of the past have been due mainly either to the impatience and wilfulness of would-be reformers, from Tertullian downwards, or to the arrogance and love of domination in rival individuals or rival sees.

'Nothing,' says Chrysostom on this pa.s.sage, 'will have power to divide the Church so much as the love of authority, and nothing provokes G.o.d so much as that the Church should be divided. We may have done ten thousand good actions, but if we rend the fulness of the Church, we shall suffer punishment with those who rent His body.'

From this point of view we may find an interesting parallel to this exhortation of St. Paul in a pa.s.sage of Plato's _Laws_, which is, I believe, one of the few pa.s.sages in pre-Christian writings where the virtue of humility is recognized. {161} 'G.o.d, as the old tradition declares, holding in His hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, moves according to His nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end. Justice always follows Him, and is the punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. To that law he who would be happy holds fast, and follows it in all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride, or money, or honour, or beauty, who has a soul hot with folly and guilt and insolence, and thinks that he has no need of a guide and ruler, but is able himself to be the guide of others, he, I say, is left deserted of G.o.d; and being thus deserted, he takes to him others who are like himself, and dances about in wild confusion; and many think that he is a great man, but in a short time he pays a penalty which justice cannot but approve, and is utterly destroyed, and his family and city with him.'

From the point of view of the moral duty of preserving ecclesiastical unity, it is quite clear that the guilt of Christians has been exceedingly great, and also that it has been very widely diffused. The amount of ambition, insolence, and impatience in the Church has, in fact, been so vast that it remains no longer a matter {162} for astonishment that it should have made the havoc that it has made in the divine household, and should have thwarted, as it has thwarted, the divine intention. But the recognition of this fact lays on us the duty of meditating continually on the divine intention, and by all that lies in our power, by prayer and by every other means, to restore the recognition of the divine principle of unity whether in the narrower or the wider circle of church life.

It is not too much to say that the now popular principle of the free voluntary a.s.sociation of Christians in societies organized to suit varying phases of taste, is destructive of the moral discipline intended for us. It was the obligation to belong to one body which was intended as the restraint on the prejudices and eccentricities of race, cla.s.ses and individuals. If Greeks, Italians, and Englishmen are to be content to belong to different churches; if among ourselves we are to have one church for the well-to-do, and another for 'labour'; if any individual who is offended in one church is to be free to go off to another where he or she likes the minister better--where does the need come in for the forbearance and long-suffering and humility on which St. Paul {163} insists as the necessary virtues of the one body? We, Christians but not in one brotherhood, may not be able to agree at present among ourselves as to the proper basis of ecclesiastical unity, but we ought to be able to agree that, somehow or other, Christians are intended by Christ and by the apostle to be one body, and that the wilful violation of outward unity is truly a refusal of the yoke of Christ.

And a great step would have been taken towards rendering the recovery of ecclesiastical unity more easy if those who recognize the obligation of the principle could be brought to perceive that true Catholicism really requires a large measure of toleration and a deliberate reasonableness. At present it is not too much to say that the idea of the obligation of ecclesiastical unity is widely a.s.sociated with an emphasis on ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority such as is utterly alien to the mind of the apostle of Catholicism.

v.

In what has been said above we have been attending chiefly to the restraints which St. Paul's idea of church unity appears to set upon what are commonly known as 'ecclesiastical tendencies.' {164} Now it is time to emphasize the other side of the representation. For without a strongly engrained prejudice, there is not, it seems to the present writer, any possibility of doubting that St. Paul meant by 'the Church'

in general, a society visible and organized, represented by a number of visible and organized local societies or churches[18]. The Church is in fact ideal in its spiritual character, but not one bit the less an a.s.sociation of human beings, a society with quite definite limits, ties, and obligations. For, to begin with, the 'one baptism' which conveyed the spiritual gift of incorporation into Christ was also the initiation into an actual brotherhood, with its rules of conduct, worship, and belief: 'we were all baptized into one body[19].' The 'one Spirit' was normally bestowed by the 'laying on of' apostolic 'hands'--that is, the hands of the chief governors of the Christian corporation. This rite followed upon and completed baptism, and its administration had {165} been one of St. Paul's first ministerial acts after he began his preaching at Ephesus[20]. Again, 'the breaking of the bread' or eucharist, according to St. Paul's teaching, both nourished the life of Christ in the Church, as being the communion of His body and blood, and also, in the 'one loaf,' symbolized its outward corporate unity[21].

Thus the bestowal of gifts of grace through outward rites, which belonged to the corporate life of a society, insured that a Christian should be no isolated and independent individual. More than this, the necessary dependence of each individual Christian upon the one organized society is made further evident by the existence of spiritually endowed officers of the society who were as 'the more honourable limbs of the body'--'some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers'--without whom the body would have lacked its divinely-given equipment for ministry and edification.

These were not merely more or less gifted or (as we say) talented individuals who undertook particular sorts of work on their own initiative, or by the invitation of any group of Christian individuals.

We find that the apostles at least were a definite {166} body of men who had received special commission from Christ Himself to govern His Church[22]. The Christian 'prophets' were men of special supernatural endowment, to know and declare G.o.d's will, and foretell His purposes.

They ranked after the apostles in virtue of their prophetic gift[23].

But even they were to be restrained by the exigencies of church order.

'The spirits of the prophets are subject unto the prophets; for G.o.d is not a G.o.d of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.' Next to the prophets, St. Paul specifies the 'evangelists.'

They were no doubt, as their name implies, officers engaged with the apostles in the general work of spreading the gospel, that is of founding and organizing churches. Timothy, who is exhorted to 'do the work of an evangelist[24],' would probably have ranked amongst them; and if so, t.i.tus and other similar companions and delegates of apostles. At any rate, by whatever name they were called, such men belonged to {167} the specially 'gifted' cla.s.s, if we may judge by the case of Timothy. But he, though marked out by prophecy, received his 'gift,' as a church officer, with the laying on of the hands of a whole presbytery, while the hands of the apostle himself were the divine instruments for imparting the gift to him[25]. The 'pastors and teachers'--one cla.s.s of men and not two--are, we may say certainly, identical with the presbyters or 'bishops' as they were called by St.

Paul at Ephesus; and these again were men of spiritual endowment, but also local church officers who had received a definite apostolic appointment[26], and there is no reason to doubt by laying on of hands.

Thus the Church, as St. Paul conceives it, is a body differentiated by varieties of spiritual endowments imparted to definite officers, for the fulfilment of functions necessary to the life and development of the whole body. Thus the outward unity of the {168} society at any particular moment, and the necessary connexion of each individual Christian with it, is secured both by the existence of social sacraments or means of grace, and by the existence of a ministry spiritually endowed and commissioned, to whom individual Christians owed allegiance, and who ranked as the more honourable limbs of that body to which they must belong if they would belong to Christ.

vi.

St. Paul is not here thinking of the unity of the Church otherwise than at a particular moment. But if one turns one's attention to its continuous unity down the ages, again it must be recognized that one main link of unity has been in fact the apostolic succession of the ministry; that is the permanence in the Church of a spiritually-endowed 'stewardship of divine mysteries' received continually by the original method of the laying on of hands in succession from apostolic men. The necessity for each individual Christian to remain in relation to these commissioned stewards if he wishes to continue to be of the divine household, has kept men together in one body. And any one who looks at St. Paul's method of imparting spiritual authority {169} and office to Timothy and t.i.tus, and directing them in their turn to hand it on by ordaining others, can scarcely doubt that he contemplated the inst.i.tution in the Church of a permanent ministry deriving its authority from above.

How, in fact, did the later church ministry connect itself with that which we find existing in the apostolic age? The apostolic ministry divides itself broadly into the general and the local. There are 'ministers' or 'stewards' who are officers of the church catholic and have a general commission. Such general commission belonged, of course, to the apostles, though mutual delimitations were arranged among themselves and though St. James, who ranked with the apostles, was settled at Jerusalem. It belonged also, more or less, to 'evangelists' and other 'apostolic men,' who, however, might be temporarily located in particular churches and districts, like Timothy in Ephesus, and t.i.tus in Crete. It belonged also to the prophets, who would have been recognized as men inspired of G.o.d in all the churches, and who in the subapostolic age are found in some districts exercising functions like those of the apostles in the first age. The local officers, on the other hand, were the presbyters, who are called also bishops, and the {170} deacons. With this earliest state of things in our mind, we shall perceive that where an apostle or apostolic man was permanently resident in one particular church, a threefold ministry, like that of later church history already existed. So it was at Jerusalem where the presbyters and deacons were presided over by St.

James. So it was in Crete under t.i.tus, and in Ephesus under Timothy.

So it was a few decades later in all the churches of Asia as organized by St. John. In other parts of the world the exact method by which the ministry developed is a matter of much dispute. But it seems to the present writer most probable that everywhere the threefold ministry came into existence by (1) a change of arrangement, and (2) a change of name. (1) The change of arrangement was the establishment in each local church of a prophet, or one, like Timothy or t.i.tus, who had been ordained to quasi-apostolic office by an apostle or man of apostolic rank; such a change taking place first at the greatest centres, and then in lesser cities. (2) The change of name was the appropriation to this now localized ruler of the t.i.tle of bishop or 'overseer' which had hitherto appertained more or less to the presbyters generally.

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But in any case it is certain that the developement of the ministry occurred on the principle of the apostolic succession. Those who were to be ministers were the elect of the church in which they were to minister: but they were authoritatively ordained to their office from above, and by succession from the apostolic men. And such a principle of ministerial authority appears to be not only historical, but also most rational. For a continuous corporate unity was to be maintained in a society which, as being catholic, must lack all such natural links of connexion as are afforded by a common language or common race. And how could such continuous corporate unity have been so well secured as by a succession of persons whose function should be to maintain a tradition, and whose ministerial authority should make them necessary centres of the unity?

[1] And not as Dr. Robertson (Smith's _Dict. of Bible_, ed. ii. vol. i.

pt. ii. p. 951) suggests, to introduce a prayer to G.o.d, which is resumed in iii. 14. The 'For this cause' which is repeated in iii. 14 is not nearly so significant as 'the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles,' which is taken up again in iv. 1.

[2] I have interpreted this word in the light of what is said in verse 16.

[3] t.i.t. iii. 5.

[4] Ps. lxviii. 18 (Delitzsch).

[5] I do not think St. Paul need refer to the descent into Hades. 'The lower parts of the earth,' Is. xliv. 23, may also refer not to Hades (see Delitzsch _in loco_) but to 'the earth beneath.'

[6] The 'filling all things' is, in the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, the characteristic action of the exalted Christ and the result of the reconciliation and atonement won. Cf. 1 Cor. xv. 24-28, 'That G.o.d may be all in all.'

[7] See Delitzsch's and Perowne's notes.

[8] Calvin, _in loc._